New Philosophers

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New Philosophers

The New Philosophers (French nouveaux philosophes) is a term referring to French philosophers

French philosophy

French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced both the analytic philosophy and continental philosophy traditions in philosophy for centuries, from Ren? Descartes through Voltaire and Henri Bergson to 20th century Existentialism and Post-structuralism....
who broke with Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism holds at its core a Marxist analysis of Critique of capitalism and a theory of social change....
in the early 1970s. They include André Glucksmann

André Glucksmann

Andr? Glucksmann is a prominent French philosopher and writer, and leading member of the French new philosophers....
, Alain Finkielkraut

Alain Finkielkraut

Alain Finkielkraut, born in Paris on June 30 1949, is a France essayist, and son of a Jewish Polish artisan manufacturing fine leather goods who was deported to Auschwitz....
, Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri L?vy is a French people public intellectual and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" movement in 1976....
, Jean-Marie Benoist, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau or Jean-Paul Dollé. They criticized post-structuralists, and Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre , commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialism philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism....
, as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th century philosophy Germans philosophy and classical philology. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor and aphorism....
and Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was an influential Germany Philosophy. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century....
.

term was forged by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy

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Encyclopedia

The New Philosophers (French nouveaux philosophes) is a term referring to French philosophers

French philosophy

Marxism

André Glucksmann

Andr? Glucksmann is a prominent French philosopher and writer, and leading member of the French new philosophers....
, Alain Finkielkraut

Alain Finkielkraut

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri L?vy is a French people public intellectual and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" movement in 1976....
, Jean-Marie Benoist, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau or Jean-Paul Dollé. They criticized post-structuralists, and Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

Friedrich Nietzsche

Martin Heidegger

Origin

The term was forged by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri L?vy is a French people public intellectual and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" movement in 1976....
in 1976, who titled an issue of the weekly review Les Nouvelles Littéraires the "Nouveaux philosophes.". The issue included a number of articles and essays meant to introduce and create excitement about about young intellectuals including Lévy, Benoist, Michel Guérin, Jambet, and Lardreau.

Basic Characteristics

Most of the New Philosophers had a previous history of Maoism

Maoism

Maoism, variably and officially known as Mao Zedong Thought , is a variant of Marxism derived from the teachings of the late People's Republic of China leader Mao Zedong , widely applied as the political and military guiding ideology in the Communist Party of China from Mao's ascendancy to its leadership until the inception of Deng Xi...
or other leftist activity, but had come into fierce opposition to Marxism. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russians novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labour camp system, and for these efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974....
's writings on The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a massive narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a GULAG labor camp....
and other crimes of the Soviet Union had a profound effect of disenchantment on these former leftists. The mark of the New Philosophers was to cast a general doubt on the tendency to argue from 'the left', by attributing too much inherent power-worship in the whole tradition, or at least what it borrowed from Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German people philosopher, and with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators of German idealism....
and Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosophy, political economy, historian, sociologist, humanism, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism....
. (This challenged the [French] stereotype that an intellectual

Intellectual

An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intelligence and Critical thinking, either in their profession or for the benefit of personal pursuits....
was necessarily a left-wing intellectual.) One of their most important concepts was that "Master Thinkers" like Marx and Rabelais

François Rabelais

Fran?ois Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor and Renaissance humanism. He was regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, dirty jokes and bawdy songs....
had created the foundations for systems of oppresion. Glucksmann's book by the same name, Les Maîtres Penseurs, argued that knowledge, expertise, and philosophy form the core of domination. Their radical social critique extended so far as to implicate Reason itself as the origin of authoritarianism.

Major influences

The writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were an inspiration for the New Philosophers. Other important influences include Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosophy, historian, intellectual, Critical theory and sociologist. He held a chair at the Coll?ge de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley....
and Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

Jacques-Marie-?mile Lacan was a France psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory....
.

Style

The New Philosophers had extensive media

Mass media

Mass media is a term used to denote a section of the media specifically envisioned and designed to reach a mainstream such as the population of a nation state....
coverage in France, Italy, and other countries. They appeared on television and in nonacademic magazines including Lui

Lui

Lui is a French adult entertainment magazine created in November 1963 by Daniel Filipacchi, a fashion photographer turned publisher.The objective was to be bring some charm ?? la fran?aise? to the market of man-only magazines, following the success of Playboy in the USA, launched just a decade before....
, Paris-Match, and Playboy, giving them popular recognition in France and abroad.

Criticisms of the New Philosophers

The New Philosophers as a group were hard to characterize, as one might expect from their indeterminate name. The fact that their identity was based on a negative quality (i.e., rejecting Marxism and other systems of authoritarian power) meant that they were very disparate. In 1978, Michael Ryan wrote that "The 'new philosophers' could be said to exist in name only. The homogeneity of the movement rests on a mutual espousal of heterogeneity." Another similar criticism levels the charge that the New Philosophers are "a brand name... an extremely heterogeneous group of about ten intellectuals who are held together more from without than from within... they do not serve as representatives of any clearly defined political movement or force."

They were criticized as superficial and ideological by intellectuals such as Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosophy of the late 20th century. From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art....
(who called them "TV buffoons"), Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet was a France historian who began teaching at the ?cole des hautes ?tudes en sciences sociales in 1969.Vidal-Naquet was a specialist in the study of Ancient Greece, but was also interested in contemporary history, particularly the Algerian War , during which he opposed the use of torture by the French Army...
, Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard was a France Philosophy and Literary theory. He is well-known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition....
and Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greeks-France philosopher, economist and psychoanalyst. Author of the The Imaginary Institution of Society, co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and 'philosopher of autonomy'....
.

Other

Recently their criticism has found a new target in multiculturalism

Multiculturalism

The term multiculturalism generally refer to an applied ideology of Race , culture and Ethnic group diversity within the demographics of a specified place, usually at the scale of an organization such as a school, business, neighborhood, city or nation....
. Fiery polemic on the subject by proponents like Pascal Bruckner

Pascal Bruckner

Pascal Bruckner is a France writer. He is part of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank....
and Paul Cliteur has kindled international debate.

Their sobriquet is possibly a reference to the philosophers of the future that Nietzsche anticipated in his work Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil , subtitled "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future" , is a book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1886....
.