Jean Baudrillard
pp. 289-307
in: Terrell Carver, James Martin (eds), Palgrave advances in continental political thought, Berlin, Springer, 2006Abstract
Many who cling to Enlightenment projects, like that of deliberative democracy, individual rights, or even identity politics, dismiss Baudrillard as a minor figure on the contemporary intellectual landscape. These judgements cannot be more wrong. In the hurly-burly of globalisation during the Cold War, very few others saw as clearly as Baudrillard the radical changes that were unfolding along with 24/7 mass media coverage, world wide webs of production and consumption, and the emergence of the multitudinous mass in the circulation of transnational capitalism's goods and services. A postmodern analyst who is not always comfortable with this categorisation, Baudrillard and his project merits as much, if not more serious consideration, as the work of far more conventional thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls or Jean-François Lyotard.
