Jean Baudrillard, the eminent sociologist and philosopher who died on Tuesday, is almost the last representative of the great generation of French philosophers, born in the 1920s and 1930s, to have defined postmodernism as an intellectual field.

This generation has suffered several significant casualties in the last decade or so: Gilles Deleuze died in 1995, Jean-François Lyotard in 1998, and Jacques Derrida in 2004. The intellectual formation of each of these philosophers was shaped above all by the political hopes and disappointments that were inseparable aspects of the experience of 1968. Certainly, like that of his deceased contemporaries, Baudrillard’s philosophy was defined in the late 1960s and 1970s by a disillusionment in Marxism, which had come to seem fatally tainted to him because of its association with the intellectual and political deformations of Stalinism. The depressive atmosphere that prevailed after the left’s defeat in 1968 created the preconditions for his brilliant but politically pessimistic critique of consumer society. The euphoria of the 1960s was at the same time preserved in the fantastically playful qualities of his philosophical prose, which can be summarised as a kind of social-science fiction.

Baudrillard embodied some of the most positive qualities of the European intellectual in the second half of the last century, as in his restless appetite for making provocative political interventions in the public sphere, in a philosophical rather than journalistic form; and he embodied some of its most negative qualities, as in his restless appetite for making provocative political interventions in the public sphere, in a journalistic rather than philosophical form. His infamous prophecy, in an article for the Guardian in February 1991, that the Gulf War would not take place, exemplifies this contradiction. Understood as part of his sustained philosophical attempt, since the mid-1970s, to understand the role played by simulation, as opposed to imitation, in fundamentally reconfiguring the relationship of the real and the unreal in contemporary society, it demonstrated his almost forensic capacity for detecting the complicated deceptions of capitalism in the epoch of consumption. Read as a merely journalistic gesture, it dramatised his closeness to those cartoonish postmodernists that claim, absurdly, that reality itself has, so to speak, virtually disappeared.

Baudrillard’s death raises timely and important questions about the intellectual culture of the early 21st century. Simply put, what comes after postmodernism?