Abstract

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are political philosophers in Lyon and Nantes, respectively. They have jointly directed the Collège de philosophie since 1975 and have recently collaborated in a study titled From Human Rights to the Republican Idea. In La pensée 68, which was published in Paris last October, they seek to settle scores with some of the most influential French thinkers of the past twenty years. Their book purports to deal with the intellectual heritage of the sixties in France. Its central thesis claims that humanism remains the philosophical question of our times and that, from this perspective, the sixties must be revisited with a great many apologies