How postmodermism gutted the left

Stephen Hicks points out a review of leftist radical Todd Gitlin’s "new book on how postmodernism gutted the Left." Gitlin's book bewails that as if it's a bad thing.

His new book, a collection of essays titled The Intellectuals and the Flag, hopes to inspire a "new start for intellectual life on the left" because "Marxism and postmodernism ... are exhausted."

That last point at least is indisputably true.

Gitlin [says the reviewer] is surefooted in identifying the problem. The left, he argues, took a wrong turn when it abandoned knowledge as its guiding light on the grounds that knowledge, as argued by theorists like Michael Foucault and Edward Said, was merely a masked form of power...

Hicks of course argues that the left had "already suffered a brain-stroke," which is why it had to turn to such nonsense, hence the thesis of his excellent Explaining Postmodernism -- "Thesis: The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary." If you don't already have a copy of Hicks's book, already into its fifth printing, then now's the time.

LINKS: Post-Postmodernism - Fred Siegel, Blueprint magazine
Explaining Postmodermism - Stephen Hicks, Amazon

TAGS: Postmodermism, Philosophy, Socialism, Objectivism