Elif Batuman writes:

Perhaps the greatest intellectual leap Roudinesco requires of her anglophone readers is to entertain, at least temporarily, the notion of ‘continental’ philosophy as a means to combat social ills. Because all our problems are caused by fascism and reification, they can be cured through the practice of the kind of philosophy represented by the generation of postwar Freudo-Marxist philosophes engagés, and characterised by a categorical refusal ‘to serve the project to normalise the human being’. Her six chapters are not overviews or introductions to the philosophers in question. Roudinesco concentrates on one text per philosopher, and it is a strength of the book that she often chooses relatively little-known texts by these much discussed writers.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton | Hardback 208 pp. |ISBN: 9780231143004