The previous chapters examined Althusser's and Badiou's attempts to refound the science of history. For the former, this took the form of an innovative programme in the mid-1960s drawing on French philosophy of science to theorise epistemological breaks. For the latter, this results in a complex meta-ontological system which appropriates mathematical set theory in order to establish a new theory of the subject as a rational process. In both cases the animating commitment to breaking free of the Hegelian dialectic, and to thinking events discontinuously, takes them towards self-referential rationalisms. This Platonic trajectory eventually led Althusser to renounce his project as a theoreticist deviation laden with speciously scientific pretensions, and it continues to allow Badiou to act as an influential intellectual on the left issuing judgements on political events, forms of organisation, and the ends of political practice. Although tied genealogically to these thinkers, Quentin Meillassoux's philosophy might not, however, seem propitious for advancing this theme. In that Meillassoux's most famous book, After Finitude, has become a landmark text of the speculative realism on account of its desire to free thought from the correlation between mind and world, it seems to take us some distance from illuminating further the political consequences of post-Althusserian sciences of history. A certain Marxist provenance to Meillassoux's text may have been identified in its repetition of Lenin's injunction in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to think the independence of the world from cognition and the way it consummates Althusser's desire for a ‘materialist, rationalist empiri-cism’ (Brown 2009; 2011). Surely, however, Meillassoux's attempt to gain rational ingress on the contingency of nature's laws takes us away from anything resembling a science of history, never mind an object lesson in the political pitfalls of post-Althusserian rationalism?

This chapter does not seek to downplay the cosmic scope of After Finitude but argues that the overly scientistic reception of Meillas-soux's philosophy (see for example Squibb 2010) has obscured its political intentions and consequences.