Purveyors of Truth

For many of today’s students, the ideas of Adorno, Foucault, Barthes, and the rest are practically indigestible; the long hours required to understand these thinkers are drudgery. But for a brief period in the twentieth century, the act of reading them was downright religious, the air in the seminar room electric, the stakes high. As Philipp Felsch writes in this mini-history of radical theory in Germany from the 1960s through the 1980s: “Now that the intellectual energies of ’68 have long since decayed to a feeble smouldering, it is hard to imagine the fascination of a genre that captivated generations of readers.”