Gabriel Rockhill

Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher and public intellectual. His research, which focuses on a materialist analysis of social totality, has so far centered primarily on three closely related themes: history, politics, and culture

The project

Title: The Institutional Origins of French Theory: The Baltimore Symposium (1966) and Its Transatlantic Foundations

"This research project proposes an archival and institutional investigation into the material origins of 'French Theory' in the United States, focusing on the Baltimore symposium (1966) and its transatlantic foundations. The aim is to move beyond traditional intellectual history to reconstruct, using a cross-referenced analysis of French and American sources, the concrete infrastructures—philanthropic funding (Ford, Rockefeller), institutional modeling (the EPHE/EHESS as the template for the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center), networks of actors, and geopolitical strategies—that made possible the importation, translation, and academic legitimization of so-called “structuralist” French thought within the context of the cultural Cold War. The study thus aims to uncover the political and economic determinants of a phenomenon too often reduced to its theoretical dimensions alone, and to re-establish French Theory as the product of a transatlantic co-production, rooted in a certain form of liberal hegemony."

Hosting Institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025).
• Requiem pour la French Theory, coécrit avec Aymeric Monville (Éditions Delga, 2024, à paraître en anglais chez Monthly Review Press).
• Avec Jennifer Ponce de León, “Imperialism and Emancipation: An Introduction to Losurdo,” International Critical Thought (avril 2026).
• Avec John Bellamy Foster, “Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue,” Monthly Review (le 01 mars, 2025).