Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Pierre Victor—then the leader of the French Maoists with whom Michel Foucault was associated—hearkened back to the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror and declared the following in the pages of La Cause du peuple, the Maoist newspaper: To overthrow the authority of the bourgeois class, the humiliated population has reason to institute a brief period of terror and to assault bodily a handful of contemptible, hateful individuals. It is difficult to attack the authority of a class without a few heads belonging to members of this class being paraded on the end of a stake.[291]

See Beck 1969, Berlin 1980, Williams 1999, and Dahlstrom 2000 for the historical and philosophical range of “Counter-Enlightenment” as used here.