In the long aftermath of May '68, an event which many French intellectuals came to think of as a ‘failed revolt’, the question of power – what it is, how it functions, who has it and who does not – was the principal concern of the majority of France's leading intellectuals. Along with the interrelated questions concerning the possibility of resistance and (more concretely) the possibility of political action itself, power was the uppermost concern of Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Jean Baudrillard (albeit ambivalently), Pierre Bourdieu, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hélène Cixous, Régis Debray, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-François Lyotard, Nicos Poulantzas, Jacques Rancière and Paul Virilio. Very far from homogeneous in their political and philosophical allegiances, though most would own to a Left-orientation, providing it was clear that didn't mean they were Marxists (or, in the case of Althusser and Althusserians like Balibar and Rancière, they would own to a Left-orientation providing it was understood that meant they were a very particular type of Marxist), there is a surprising degree of consistency across the quite diverse body of work produced by these writers in the decade after May '68 concerning the question of power.

There was, for instance, broad acceptance of the idea that power is not a simple matter of coercion or repression, the domination of one group of people by another.