The book that shaped the political culture of the 1990s appeared, in 1992, fast on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Almost simultaneously with The End of History and the Last Man, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard published a slender reply that never so much as mentioned the name of his target. L'illusion de la fin appeared in English two years later as The Illusion of the End, part of Stanford University Press's growing collection of works in postmodernism and French theory. Like many other French theorists of the 1980s, Baudrillard had begun to enjoy a higher profile in the United States than in his native France, where he had severed his tie to “established” theory in a self-liberating 1977 essay titled Oublier Foucault. But in the thirty years that have passed since his American heyday, Baudrillard has generally been remembered only as a curio in the academic postmodernism wars, one whose signal contributions were to inspire The Matrix (he disowned it) and to deny that the Gulf War had really taken place.
Events have finally begun to catch up with Baudrillard's analyses, however. He was a man of the Left, born in Reims in 1929 (he died in 2007) to what was originally a peasant family; his father had become a policeman. He studied under leading Marxist thinkers of the 1960s, particularly Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes.
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