Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Postmodernist reactions to the prospects of a brutal post-modern social world then fall into three main categories, depending on whether Foucault’s, Derrida’s, or Rorty’s variant is given primacy. Foucault, following Nietzsche more closely in having reduced knowledge to an expression of social power, urges us to play the brutal power politics game—though contrary to Nietzsche he urges that we play it on behalf of the traditionally disempowered.[116] Derrida, having followed Heidegger more closely and purified him, deconstructs language and retreats into it as a vehicle of aesthetic play, insulating himself from the fray. Rorty, having abandoned objectivity, hopes that we will seek “inter-subjective agreement” among the “members of our own tribe,”[117] and, feeling loyal to his American left-liberal roots, requests that we be nice to each other while doing so.[118] The postmodern options, in short, are to plunge into the fray, or withdraw and