Thinkers Timeline

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a Belgian-French anthropologist, one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. He was born in Brussels to a French Jewish family and grew up in Paris. He studied philosophy and law at the Sorbonne before becoming interested in ethnography. In 1935 he joined a French university mission to Brazil, spending several years conducting fieldwork among indigenous peoples of the Brazilian interior. Fleeing Nazi-occupied France, he spent the war years in New York, where contact with the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson transformed his intellectual approach. He returned to France after the war and published a series of major works — The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1958), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964-1971) — that established structural anthropology as one of the dominant intellectual movements of mid-twentieth-century France and Europe. He was elected to the prestigious Collège de France and became one of the key figures in the broader structuralist movement that shaped French intellectual life from the 1950s onwards. He died in 2009 at the age of one hundred, the last great figure of the classical period of French intellectual life.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French philosopher, novelist, and feminist thinker. She was born in Paris and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she came second in the national philosophy examination, beaten only by Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her lifelong intellectual partner and companion. She spent most of her adult life in Paris, writing philosophy, fiction, essays, and memoirs. Her most important philosophical work is The Second Sex, published in 1949, which is one of the founding texts of modern feminist philosophy. In it she argued that women are not born inferior but are made to be subordinate through social processes, cultural norms, and internalised beliefs. She was a committed political activist throughout her life, supporting Algerian independence, signing a petition supporting the right to abortion in France at a time when this was dangerous to do, and consistently speaking out on behalf of those without power. She lived by her philosophy: her own life, including her refusal to marry and her insistence on her independence as a thinker, was a demonstration of what she argued was possible.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, and political thinker from Martinique, an island in the Caribbean that was, and still is, a French territory. He was born into a poor family but won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he became one of the most brilliant students of his generation. In Paris in the 1930s, he and other Black students from Africa and the Caribbean came together to talk about their shared experience of being treated as inferior by French colonial culture. From these conversations came the Negritude movement: a literary and political project that celebrated African and Black culture, history, and identity as something to be proud of, not ashamed of. Césaire returned to Martinique and became its most important political figure, serving as mayor of the capital Fort-de-France for nearly fifty years and as a member of the French parliament. He is best known for two works: his poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and his political essay Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1950. He died in 2008 at the age of 94, still celebrated as Martinique's greatest son.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French-Algerian novelist, playwright, and philosopher. He was born in Mondovi in French colonial Algeria into a poor working-class family: his father was killed in the First World War when Camus was less than a year old and his mother was partially deaf and nearly illiterate. He grew up in poverty in Algiers, where he was a gifted student whose high school teacher, Louis Germain, helped him win a scholarship that changed the course of his life. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers but contracted tuberculosis, which prevented him from taking his final examinations and recurred throughout his life. He worked as a journalist in Algeria and then in Paris, became involved in the French Resistance during the German occupation, and published his most important works in the 1940s: the novel The Stranger, the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the plague novel La Peste, and the philosophical essay The Rebel. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, when he was forty-three years old. He died in a car accident in 1960. He was forty-six.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He was born on 15 October 1926 in Poitiers, France, into a middle-class family. His father was a surgeon. He was expected to follow his father into medicine but chose philosophy instead. This caused serious tension at home. As a young man, he struggled with depression and attempted suicide at least once while a student. He studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the late 1940s, where his classmates included future major thinkers like Louis Althusser. After university, he worked in Sweden, Poland, Germany, and Tunisia before returning to France. He completed his doctorate in 1961. The thesis, published as Madness and Civilization, was the first of his major books. He held teaching positions at several French universities and in 1970 was elected to the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic institution in France. His yearly lectures there, now published in full, drew large audiences. He wrote a series of major books including The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976-1984). He was openly gay in a time when this was still unusual for a public intellectual. He was politically active, involved in campaigns around prison reform, gay rights, and opposition to French immigration policy. He died of AIDS on 25 June 1984 in Paris, aged 57. He was one of the first major public figures to die of the disease.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, poet, and peace activist. He is one of the most important Buddhist teachers of the modern world. Many readers in the West first met Buddhist ideas through his books. He was born in 1926 in central Vietnam, in what was then a French colony. He became a monk at the age of 16. He took the religious name Thich Nhat Hanh. 'Thich' is the religious surname taken by all Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns, after the family name of the Buddha. He studied Buddhism in Vietnam and later studied comparative religion at Princeton University in the United States. During the Vietnam War (1955-1975), he founded a movement called Engaged Buddhism. Monks, nuns, and lay people worked to help villagers caught in the war. They rebuilt destroyed villages, set up schools, and cared for refugees. They refused to take sides between the Communist North and the American-backed South. Both sides treated this as betrayal. In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh travelled to America to ask the United States to end the war. He met Martin Luther King Jr., who later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Vietnamese government refused to let him return home. He lived in exile for 39 years. He founded a monastery in southern France called Plum Village in 1982. From there he wrote over 100 books and travelled the world teaching mindfulness. In 2018 he returned to Vietnam to die in the temple where he had become a monk. He died there in 2022, aged 95.

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He is best known for a way of reading texts called deconstruction. He was born on 15 July 1930 in El-Biar, a small town near Algiers, in what was then French Algeria. His family was Sephardic Jewish. They had lived in Algeria for many generations. French was the language spoken at home. In 1942, when Derrida was twelve, his life changed. The Vichy government in France had passed anti-Jewish laws. These laws reached Algeria too. On the first day of school that year, he was told he could not come back. He was sent away because he was Jewish. He did not attend school for a whole year. He later said this moment marked him for life. After the war, he returned to school. He read hungrily. He discovered Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Sartre. In 1949 he moved to Paris. After two tries, he got into the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. This is France's top university for philosophy. He met great teachers and students there. He also met his future wife, Marguerite. He published his first major books in 1967. There were three of them in one year: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. These books made him famous, first in France and then around the world. He taught in Paris and at many universities in the United States. He wrote more than forty books in total. He died on 9 October 2004 of pancreatic cancer, aged 74.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was a French sociologist whose work on class, culture, and power made him one of the most influential social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in the village of Denguin in the Béarn region of south-western France, close to the Pyrenees mountains. His family was not wealthy. His father had left school young and worked as a postal employee and then as a small farmer. His mother was a country woman from a similar background. Bourdieu was a clever pupil, and his teachers helped him move up through the French education system — first to the lycée in Pau, then to the elite preparatory classes in Paris, and finally to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy alongside Jacques Derrida and other future major thinkers. His country origins in a Paris of educated elites shaped his whole life and work. He always felt partly out of place in elite circles, and this experience of not quite belonging gave him a special eye for how social distinction actually works. After finishing his studies, he was sent to Algeria as a French army conscript in 1955, during the war for Algerian independence. The experience changed him. He saw colonial oppression first-hand, stayed on to do fieldwork as a sociologist-anthropologist after his military service, and produced his first books about Algerian society under French rule. He returned to France in 1960 and began building the distinctive approach that would occupy the rest of his career. He held posts at Lille and Paris before becoming professor at the Collège de France in 1981 — the highest academic position in France. He founded the Centre for European Sociology and a research journal, both of which became centres of major work. His books include Distinction (1979) on taste and class, Homo Academicus (1984) on the sociology of academia, The Rules of Art (1992) on the literary field, and many others. In his last years he became increasingly politically active, particularly in opposition to what he called neoliberal policies across Europe. He died in Paris in 2002 at the age of seventy-one. His influence on sociology, education, cultural studies, and political theory has continued to grow since his death.

Thomas Piketty is a French economist. He was born in 1971 near Paris. He studied mathematics and economics, and earned his doctorate at just 22 years old. For a few years he taught in the United States, but he chose to return to France, partly because he felt American economics relied too heavily on abstract mathematics and too little on history and real data. Back in France, Piketty helped build the Paris School of Economics and became one of its leading professors. He also helped create the World Inequality Lab, a research centre that gathers data on income and wealth from around the world. Piketty became world-famous in 2013 and 2014 with a long book called 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'. It was an unexpected bestseller, unusual for a serious economics book, and it made inequality one of the biggest topics in public debate. Since then he has written more large books, including 'Capital and Ideology' (2019) and 'A Brief History of Equality' (2022). He continues to teach and research in Paris and is known for arguing, in newspapers and public talks, for strong policies against inequality. He is a working economist whose ideas and proposals are actively debated, admired by some and strongly criticised by others.

Esther Duflo is a French-American economist. In 2019 she became, at age 46, the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She was also only the second woman ever to win it. She was born on 25 October 1972 in Paris, France. Her mother was a paediatrician who travelled to countries like Rwanda and Haiti as a doctor for child victims of war and poverty. Her father was a professor of mathematics. Her mother often returned with stories of suffering children. These stories shaped Esther deeply. She was a strong student. She studied history and economics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She spent a year teaching in Moscow, where she also studied Russia's economic reforms. After a master's degree in Paris, she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States for her doctorate in economics. She earned her PhD in 1999. MIT hired her at once. In 2003, with her colleagues Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, she co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL. The lab's mission was to use scientific experiments to test which anti-poverty programs actually work. J-PAL has grown into a global research network. By 2020, more than 400 million people had been affected by programs the lab has tested. She married Abhijit Banerjee in 2015. They share two children. They also shared the 2019 Nobel Prize. She is now President of the Paris School of Economics in addition to her MIT professorship. She is one of the most influential economists in the world.