ABSTRACT
Baudrillard was born in Reims in northeastern France. His grandparents were peasant farmers and his parents worked in civil service jobs. At the University of Nanterre, he studied sociology under Henri LEFEBVRE. He taught sociology at Nanterre from 1966 until his retirement in 1987. His earliest work was written from the perspective of a Marxist sociologist, but in subsequent studies his intellectual mentors often came to be the objects of his critiques, including Lefebvre, MARX, and Sartre. Baudrillard’s early engagement with Marxist theory was later abandoned after he embraced poststructuralist ideas in the 1970s. Baudrillard was also a student of the theories of Roland BARTHES and the mass media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Baudrillard’s first book, The System of Objects (published in French in 1968), is a semiotic analysis of culture that was influenced by Barthes’s poststructuralist ideas.
