The Second Birth of Christopher Lasch in France: Roots and Mechanisms of a Postmortem Success

How a US intellectual, Marxist sociologist, and history professor, who died in the mid-1990s, eventually became famous in the French public debate of ideas, mainly during the 2010s—nearly 20 years after his death—via a dual form of promotion undertaken and conducted by a “tory anarchist” philosopher, Jean-Claude Michéa, who is a specialist in the works of George Orwell, Marcel Mauss, and Karl Marx. Michéa is nowadays considered the main representative essayist of an atypical “anti-modern socialism,” or “conservative socialism,” a complex ideology in which philosophical illiberalism plays a key role. This is a story of an intellectual throwback to the origins of an astonishing and unexpected rediscovery (or, more precisely, discovery, in this French case), which principally took place in the south of France and began during the end of the 20th century.