<P>Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities(1978) may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls fornothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries (the RedBrigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang) hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions,but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media societymeaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses thislast outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invokedby Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronicmedia society, all the masses can do--and all they will do--is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow ofthe Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europeafter the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968.Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It isjust the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions.</P>