Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

The failure of Left politics to achieve that vision was merely the last straw. To the postmodern mind, the cruel lessons of the modern world are that reality is inaccessible, that nothing can be known, that human potential is nothing, and that ethical and political ideals have come to nothing. The psychological response to the loss of everything is anger and despair. But the postmodern thinkers also find themselves surrounded by an Enlightenment world that does not understand. The post-modernists find themselves confronting a world dominated by liberalism and capitalism, by science and technology, by people who still believe in reality, in reason, and in the greatness of human potential. The world that they said was impossible and destructive has both come to be and is flourishing. The heirs of the Enlightenment are running the world, and they have marginalized the post-modernists to the academy. Ressentiment is then added to anger and despair. Some retreat into quietism, and some retreat to a private world of aesthetic play and self-creation. Others, however, lash out with the intent to destroy. But again postmodernism’s only weapons are words.[319]