Daniel Bensaïd once remarked that the age of the “master thinker” in European Marxism, represented by figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre or Georg Lukács, had passed: “And this is rather a good thing — a sign of the democratization of intellectual life and theoretical debate.” Yet Bensaïd himself clearly stands out as one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the past generation.

Before his death in 2010, Bensaïd published an extraordinary sequence of books and essays exploring the main political and theoretical questions facing Marxism today. He did so in a French intellectual context where bitter hostility to Marxist ideas had become the norm, often expressed by veterans of 1968 who, unlike Bensaïd, had reneged on their previous commitments.

Some of Bensaïd’s work has been translated into English, notably Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique and his memoir, An Impatient Life. However, most of his writings remain inaccessible to those who cannot read French. This essay gives a brief overview of the main themes articulated by Bensaïd as he sought to renovate Marxist theory so that it could process the defeats and disappointments of the last century and supply us with an intellectual road map for the present.