Le Système de Leibniz was published during the heady anni mirabiles of late 1960s French thought. It appeared in 1968, the same year as Roland Barthes’s short essay ‘The Death of the Author’, one year after Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, and two years after Foucault’s The Order of Things. Like Derrida’s and Deleuze’s volumes Le Système was written as a major doctoral thesis (French doctoral candidates submit a major and a minor thesis), the fruit of research under the supervision of Jean Hyppolite at the Ecole Normale Suprérieure, Rue d’Ulm. Like those other works it stands both as a rich and sinuous study in its own right and also as a radical declaration of philosophical intent from a philosopher elaborating the shapes of thought that will accompany him through his subsequent writings.

The importance of the work can be summarised under three headings. First, it…