The result is a half-educated punditry, whose authority derives not from grand and deep literary or philosophical achievements of their own, but from a type of intellectual agility that allows them to meet a semi-distracted, multitasking public halfway.

Instead the market for a new breed of topical and spontaneous journalistic commentary, for media-savvy ways of thinking, has arisen. In the old days the French university system, with the so-called “grandes écoles” leading the way, was a training ground for intellectual mandarins but in an age of mass education, the situation has changed dramatically. It holds that ours is no longer a world in which great minds count, or count as they once did.

One common explanation centers on what one might call the altered nature of the conditions of intellectual production. What happened? When did French masters disappear? Why is Paris no longer the capital of advanced thought? The decline-or the change: there are those who feel relieved by the absence of les maîtres-penseurs-is undeniable.

The universal intellectua-a French contrivance dating back to the days of Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola-seemed alive and well. In the far-flung intellectual hinterlands-that is, for those who were not fortunate enough to live in Paris and its environs-the conviction developed that the latest tome by Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Althusser, or Lacan would provide, for better or for worse, the direction that was desperately sought to re-orient and resurrect a postcolonial world that was careening wildly out of control. In this respect the ascendancy of French theory was owed not least to the postwar emergence of an increasingly global intellectual public, and the echo effect was considerable. It was widely held that the treatises that the French mandarins produced were of world-historical scope and import-that their works clarified and gave shape to the great philosophical and historical and political questions of the day. Within a small quadrant of the Latin Quarter in Paris, an intellectual elite labored to produce magisterial works that lesser minds all over the world received eagerly, gratefully-and by and large uncritically. O nce upon a time, it seemed an incontestable fact that the life of the mind radiated from the Left Bank outward.

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