CHRISTOPHER FLOOD is Head of European Studies at the University of Surrey. He is the author of Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (1996) and has co-edited Political Ideologies in Contemporary France (1997). - NICK HEWLETT is Reader in the School of Languages and Chair of the Centre for European Research at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Modern French Politics: Analysing Conflict and Consensus since 1956 (1998) and has a number of articles and chapters in such journals as Contemporary French Civilization and Modern and Contemporary France.

• Notes on the Contributors Structure and Change in Contemporary French Intellectual Life; C.Flood & N.Hewlett The Grandeur and Twilight of French Philosophical Radicalism; R.Wolin It's Time for a Change: Mutations of Presence in Contemporary French Critical Theory; S.Hand History Writing: From Annales to the Institut D'histoire du Temps présent: C.Flood & H.Frey French Linguistics and Enonciation : Meanings, Utterances and Representational Gaps; J.Durand Social Anthropological Perspectives in French Intellectual Life; L.Spaas Sociology: Four Players in the Field; L.Bell Between Conformity and Heterodoxy: Market, State and Society in French Economics; F.Nectoux Political Science and the Empirical Tradition; N.Hewlett An Anti-American in Paris: Lacan and French Freudianism; G.Lock Beyond Theory? The Empowering of Feminist Philosophy; M.Cross Film Theory and the New Historicism; J.Forbes Index

'France has produced some of the world's most challenging and exciting thinkers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Some are already well known outside France. But they are just the tip of the iceberg, and this book dazzlingly exposes the whole iceberg. It presents the major ideas and their exponents across the Human and Social Sciences in a series of essays by leading authorities in their field. Every chapter is illuminating and some of them are frankly brilliant.' - Professor Michael Kelly, Chair of the School of Modern Languages, University of Southampton