This is the first and best intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957-1972) and author of The Society of the Spectacle, perhaps the seminal book of the May 1968 uprising in France. Anselm Jappe offers a powerful corrective to the continual attempts to incorporate Debord's theoretical work into French theory. Jappe focuses, to the contrary, on Debord's debt to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, to Karl Korsch and Georg Lukacs, and more generally to left-Marxist currents of council communism.