Post-Modern Stoics? The Revival of Stoicism in the Late 20th Century

Giorgi Vachnadze, published on TheCollector (an online art-and-culture magazine), Sep 27, 2026. T4: a general-audience magazine essay with no citations to the philosophers' own texts or to secondary scholarship — the only work it names directly is Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The author holds an MA in philosophy and the individual attributions match what each thinker is independently known for elsewhere in this spoke (michel-foucault's care of the self, stoicism's doctrine of what is and isn't in our control), which is why the piece is ingested rather than dropped — but nothing here should be treated as settling a scholarly dispute; a primary text or the SEP would be the upgrade. The article frames Stoicism itself as unusually "deviant" among ancient schools, citing Plotinus's judgment that it barely counted as Greek philosophy at all.

Six readings of one school

• Foucault read the Stoic care of the self as both private and political at once: the same practice that makes a life better also trains parrhesia — courageous, truthful speech — which can serve as care for oneself and one's circle, or as open revolt against an unjust order. The article's photo of Foucault next to Sartre at a 1971 anti-racism protest illustrates the point that self-care and public resistance were, for him, the same gesture.
• Sartre moved the other way over his career. He first thought Stoicism could underwrite an authentic life despite its "abstract" notion of freedom, then later judged most of it an ideology of disengagement, passivity and bad faith. His specific objection: the Stoic split between what is and isn't within our control is false to experience, because things that look outside our control can still demand that we act on them.
• Deleuze built much of his own ontology on Stoic materialism, and some readers treat Stoicism as the only ethics he thought fully adequate. He draws an "ethics without a morality" from it — a pragmatism immanent to events rather than derived from transcendent rules — and adds an experimental layer of his own: exercises meant to intensify positive affect and loosen the subject's hold on itself. Critics quoted in the piece call his Stoicism "updated" past recognition; his own reply, given as a quotation, is that a concept is a brick that can build a courthouse of reason or be thrown through its window.
• Kristeva engages Stoicism mainly through its philosophy of language: signs coordinate with mental impressions rather than pointing straight at things. She and Deleuze both call those impressions "events," and the choice to assent to or withhold assent from an event is, on this reading, the site of freedom — inside a cosmos still pictured as deterministic and god-ordered. She links this to psychology directly: clear reasoning is what lowers rumination and anxiety.
• Agamben, working under Foucault's influence, is ambivalent. He reads Stoic providence as an early apparatus of governmentality — "an ancient paradigm of governance" that helped reshape sovereignty — which is a critical, biopolitical reading close to his own homo sacer work. But he also turns to Stoicism for a theory of language's own limits, treating Stoic practice as a way of using language to correct language, which he takes as therapeutic.
• Hadot is the odd one out: a historian of ancient philosophy rather than a system-builder, usually paired with Foucault because both studied spiritual exercises — techniques of the self meant to produce a lived experience, not a doctrine to assent to. He drew the comparison partly from the later Wittgenstein's language-games. The article also credits Stoicism as a major influence on modern cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and treats Hadot's reading of ancient practice as the clearest statement of why that lineage holds.

FAQ points the article makes explicitly

• Modern Stoicism (self-help, resilience literature) keeps the ethics and drops the ancient physics and cosmology that grounded it — a secularized subset of the original system.
• Stoicism is named as a primary historical influence on CBT.
• The standing criticism of Stoic practice, repeated by more than one thinker above, is that it can tip into emotional suppression, passivity and detachment — Sartre's charge in its most direct form.

Related

stoicism · michel-foucault · jean-paul-sartre · gilles-deleuze · julia-kristeva · giorgio-agamben · pierre-hadot