From the “Death of Man” to Human Rights

An assault on humanism was one of French structuralism’s hallmarks, an orientation that in many respects set the tone for the more radical, post-structuralist doctrines that followed. For Levi-Strauss “human rights” were integrally related to the ideology of Western humanism, and therefore ethically untenable. During the 1960s, among many French intellectuals cultural relativism came to supplant the liberal virtue of “tolerance”—a precept that remained tied to norms mandating a fundamental respect for human integrity. The parallels between the core ideas of Counter-Enlightenment and post-war French thought have been shrewdly analyzed in a recent study of Joseph de Maistre’s intellectual legacy. Undoubtedly, in American academic culture the figure who has had the most far-ranging and pervasive influence on the development of “postmodernism” is Michel Foucault. There remains the issue of the widespread and influential American academic reception of French theory, much of which has proceeded under the banner of “postmodernism.”