Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks

The age in which we live, as understood by leading intellectuals, is not the modern, it is the postmodern. The age of modernity is the age of reason, and the postmodern intellectuals, being historically and philosophically opposed to modernity, speak about targeting the arrogance of reason. They want to attack the idea that we can comprehend reality only by applying reason.

Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks Postmodern

Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks Postmodern

What is the historical origin of the ideas which allow the intellectuals to attack reason, reject modernity and embrace postmodernity? What are the political, social, and cultural outcomes that the intellectuals want to achieve by embracing postmodernity? In Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Stephen Hicks provides lucid answers to such questions about the postmodernist movement, which now dominates academia and exercises critical intellectual influence on political, social, and cultural issues.

Most post-Enlightenment era philosophers view the Enlightenment with suspicion, or at least a vague unease. Postmodernism represents the climax of the ideas of the counter-Enlightenment philosophers; it is another attempt to defeat the Enlightenment ideas by denying reason, values and reality. To fuel unrest and confusion in capitalist societies, the postmodernists propose a toolkit of grievances—minorities’ issues, feminism, racism, income equality, free education and healthcare, higher minimum wage, animal rights, environmentalism, and the like.

Hicks explains that there is a clear change of guard in the intellectual scene, and the “names of the postmodern vanguard are now familiar: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty.” He describes these intellectuals as the leading strategists, whose efforts have set the direction and tone of postmodernist movement.

Modernist philosophy, which has existed for several centuries, came to maturity in the Enlightenment. Hicks writes: “The Enlightenment philosophes quite rightly saw themselves as radical. The pre-modern Medieval worldview and the modern Enlightenment worldview were coherent, comprehensive—and entirely opposed—accounts of reality and the place of human beings within it.”

When postmodernism rejects modernism, it is essentially rejecting the Enlightenment ideas. Explaining the fundamental way in which postmodernism attacks the Enlightenment’s essential philosophical themes, Hicks says: “Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment world depends upon. And so it ends up attacking all of the consequences of the Enlightenment philosophy, from capitalism and liberal forms of government to science and technology.”

The postmodernists aim to re-shape the entire world in the same way as the Enlightenment project. For the achievement of such an ambition, individuals, across many generations, must be engaged for formulating the arguments and developing the intellectual strategies.

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Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks

Book Review: Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks

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