Baudrillard, Dialectics and Political Economy

Abstract

For around a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Jean Baudrillard was regarded as a leading figure in the world of cultural studies, whose work was also of general significance in philosophy and social theory. Today Baudrillard is distinctly unfashionable and his recent work appears deliberately to avoid claiming to be more than a series of random jottings and dislocated thoughts. For example, in the recent survey by Gary Gutting of twentieth-century French philosophy (Gutting 2001), Baudrillard’s name does not appear.