American philosopher and cultural critic whose work sits at the intersection of aesthetics, historiography, and communist political theory. Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova and founding director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique, a Paris-based seminar and publishing project that trains graduate students in a materialist — rather than Frankfurt-School — version of "critical theory." He is a translator and longtime interlocutor of Jacques Rancière, whose The Politics of Aesthetics he rendered into English, and his early books (Radical History & the Politics of Art, 2014; Counter-History of the Present, 2017) argue that cultural production and historical narrative are themselves sites of political struggle, not epiphenomena of "real" politics elsewhere.
Rockhill is best known outside specialist circles for a sustained polemic against what he calls "Western Marxism." In a series of essays for CounterPunch, Monthly Review, and The Philosophical Salon, he argues that the prestige traditions of 20th-century radical theory in Europe and North America — the The Frankfurt School (above all Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), French post-structuralism (Michel Foucault), and the academic Marxism of figures like Fredric Jameson — did not simply fail to make revolution; they were materially integrated into a Cold War intellectual ecosystem funded by the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, one whose effect was to domesticate radical thought into a depoliticized, aesthetic, and pessimistic "critique" compatible with liberal capitalism. Against this he counterposes what he calls "radical Marxism": the tradition of actually-existing socialist states, anti-colonial revolutions, and organized communist parties — V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, W.E.B. Du Bois — which, he argues, Western academics were trained to ignore or condescend to.
The argument is deliberately provocative and has drawn sharp pushback — critics note that "the CIA funded Encounter" is not the same as "Adorno worked for the CIA," and that Rockhill sometimes flattens sophisticated thinkers into propaganda assets. He is also writing against an American academic left whose background music is liberal and professional-managerial, so some of the heat is a feature, not a bug. Whether or not one buys the strong version of his thesis, he is a useful counter-node in any map of 20th-century left thought: the figure who insists that the question "which Marxism, in service of which politics?" cannot be dissolved into the question "which Marxism is most theoretically refined?"