Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism—the forms in which it was familiar to most readers of the time—its inherently difficult vocabulary had attained a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistibly appealing to a new generation of students and their teachers. The junior faculty recruited to staff the expanded universities of the time were themselves in most cases graduates of the Sixties, raised in the fashions and debates of those years. But whereas European universities of the previous decade were preoccupied with grand theories of various sorts—society, the state, language, history, revolution—what trickled down to the next generation was above all a preoccupation with Theory as such. Seminars in ‘Cultural Theory’, or ‘General Theory’ displaced the conventional disciplinary boundaries that had still dominated even radical academic debate a few years before. ‘Difficulty’ became the measure of intellectual seriousness. In their disabused commentary on the heritage of ‘’68 Thought’, the French writers Luc Ferry and Alain Renault tartly concluded that ‘the greatest achievement of the thinkers of the Sixties was to convince their audience that incomprehensibility was the sign of greatness.’ With a ready-made audience in the universities, newly lionised theorists like Lacan and Derrida elevated the vagaries and paradoxes of language into full-fledged philosophies, infinitely flexible templates for textu...