Guy Debord

By: Mark Kingwell

GUY DEBORD (1931-94) was a founder and key intellectual figure in the Situationist International, an avant-garde Marxist collective influential in postwar France, especially during the 1968 uprising in Paris. Debord’s book The Society of the […]

Read This Post

Sidney Hook

By: Mark Kingwell

American philosopher SIDNEY HOOK (1902-89) enacted the key dilemmas of twentieth-century politics. Born in Brooklyn to Austrian Jewish parents, he attended City College of New York, the same “Harvard of the Proletariat” that would educate […]

Read This Post

Harpo Marx

By: Mark Kingwell

ARTHUR ADOLPH “HARPO” MARX (1888-1964) was a philosopher of silence. Though it started as a way to distinguish him from his voluble brothers, especially front man Groucho, his assumed muteness became a career-long existential conundrum […]

Read This Post

Louis Althusser

By: Mark Kingwell

Like Camus and Derrida, LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) came from Algeria. Unlike them, he murdered his wife — taking his philosophy of anti-humanism a little too far, as the clunky grad-seminar joke has it. (In court […]

Read This Post