Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Our concern in this chapter and the next is with post-modernism’s attack on reason. Postmodernism emerged as a social force among intellectuals because in the humanities the Counter-Enlightenment defeated the Enlightenment. The weakness of the Enlightenment account of reason was its fatal flaw. Postmodern-ism’s extreme skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism are the results of a two-centuries-long epistemological battle. That battle is the story of pro-reason intellectuals trying to defend realist accounts of perception, concepts, logic, but gradually giving ground and abandoning the field while the anti-reason intellectuals advanced in the sophistication of their arguments and developed increasingly non-rational alternatives. Postmodernism is the end result of the Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason.