For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured the turmoil of World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the sixties, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud. Elisabeth Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves an account of their thought through their individual life stories and her own reminiscences. Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of the theme of sanity and madness-a theme which Althusser lived out in a notorious personal drama. And in dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Roudinesco shows that Sartre fundamentally altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis.

Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers" of the late 1970s and 1980s and their allies in the French culture wars, who denounced the work-and sometimes the private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes the attempt to tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general, with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intensely, cleverly, and persuasively defending the philosophy of rebellion advanced by the philosophers she cherishes, Philosophers in Turmoil takes readers into the turbulent core of French thought in the twentieth century.