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In 1969, the influent French philosopher Alain Badiou published a book called The concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics. A recent reprint gives the opportunity to trace back and analyze its main arguments. This paper essentially aims to present and explain Badiou’s arguments against the representationalist vision of models in empirical sciences and for a materialist interpretation of formal systems coupled with semantic models in mathematics. Now that the practices of scientific modeling and simulation have extensively spread across all scientific disciplines and their mutual frontiers, it is stimulating to revisit such a critic of the misleading representational power of models and simulations. However, the question is asked whether such a critique is still relevant against current complex modeling and simulation systems. Finally, it is suggested that what is rejected in such an epistemology is some kind of pluralism. This strict rejection can be one of the explaining factors that have led most current epistemologists of models to regenerate pragmatist analyses instead of the Marxist “praxist ” ones.