Postwar French thought shifted from three Hs to three masters of suspicion

Evidence

Vincent Descombes, in his critical survey of postwar French thought, makes the following suggestion: ‘We can see in the recent evolution of philosophy in France the passage of the generation of the “three Hs”, as one said after 1945, to the generation of the three “masters of suspicion”, as one will say in 1960. The three Hs are Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and the three masters of suspicion are Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.’ The shift, roughly speaking, is that from the constitutive role which Husserlian phenomenology - a crucial influence on the major Parisian figures of the immediate postwar era, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty - assigns to the subject, and the constituted status to which it is demoted by ‘68 thought’, whether the constituting role is now assumed by the forces and relations of production, the unconscious, or the will to power. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 296

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides the standard mapping of generation shifts in French philosophy.
• XREF: connects to: Modern thought was decentered by Marx, psychoanalysis, and Saussurean linguistics — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 147; In 1960s French thought, spatial analysis was dismissed as reactionary while history was revolutionary — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1924

Broader Connections

• Modern thought was decentered by Marx, psychoanalysis, and Saussurean linguistics #qualifies (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 147