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Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition) Hardcover – August 19, 2011

by Stephen R. C. Hicks (Author)

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Tracing postmodernism from its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant to their development in thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty, philosopher Stephen Hicks provides a provocative account of why postmodernism has been the most vigorous intellectual movement of the late 20th century. Why do skeptical and relativistic arguments have such power in the contemporary intellectual world? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant portion of the political Left - the same Left that traditionally promoted reason, science, equality for all, and optimism - now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism? Explaining Postmodernism is intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy. This expanded edition includes two additional essays by Stephen Hicks, *Free Speech and Postmodernism* and *From Modern to Postmodern Art: Why Art Became Ugly*.

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278 pages
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English
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Ockham's Razor
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August 19, 2011
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0983258406
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978-0983258407
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By the end of Explaining Postmodernism, the reader may remain ill at ease with postmodernist malaise, but Hicks s lucid account will demystify the subject. * Curtis Hancock, Ph.D., Review of Metaphysics --Review of Metaphysics

With clarity, concision, and an engaging style, Hicks exposes the historical roots and philosophical assumptions of the postmodernist phenomenon. More than that, he raises key questions about the legacy of postmodernism and its implications for our intellectual attitudes and cultural life. * Steven M. Sanders, Ph.D., Reason Papers --Reason Papers

Refreshingly, Hicks does not take it as given that the poststructuralist viewpoints have been demonstrated to be in error. Rather, he seeks to trace them to a powerful ressentiment directed against the partisan of the Enlightenment and of capitalist achievement, and to provide the Enlightenment thinker with openings for serious intellectual engagement. * Marcus Verhaegh, Ph.D., The Independent Review --The Independent Review

About the Author

Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks (born 1960) is professor of philosophy at Rockford University, where he is also Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of *Nietzsche and the Nazis* (Ockham's Razor, 2006, 2010), *Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault* (Scholargy Publishing, 2004; expanded edition, 2011), and co-editor of *The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis* (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998). Hicks earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1991 and his B.A. (Honours) from the University of Guelph, Canada in 1981.

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ockham's Razor; Expanded edition (August 19, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 278 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0983258406
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0983258407
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.54 pounds

Best Sellers Rank: #68,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #95 in Modern Philosophy (Books)

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Stephen R. C. Hicks

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Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks (born 1960) is professor of philosophy at Rockford University, where he is also Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of *Nietzsche and the Nazis* (Ockham's Razor, 2006, 2010), *Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault* (Scholargy Publishing, 2004), and co-editor of *The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis* (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998). Hicks earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1991 and his B.A. (Honours) from the University of Guelph, Canada in 1981.

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A Superb, Important Book

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2016

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This is a superb, important book, one which I have begun recommending to friends and colleagues. It is a history of postmodernism that connects its relationship to history, the history of philosophy, leftist politics and even the ugliness of contemporary art. The overarching thesis is that “the failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” From the Anglo/French Enlightenment the left turned to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger. By the mid 20th century it was clear that socialism was a grand failure, leaving the world awash in millions of dead bodies. Such straightforward Enlightenment tools as reason, logic and factual evidence made that clear. The result was that hard leftists such as Foucault and softish hard leftists like Derrida and Rorty (all born in very close proximity to one another) set out to destroy those Enlightenment tools, arguing that language does not reflect reality, facts are really fiction, there is no such thing as ‘human nature’, all comes down to questions of ‘power’, and so on. These strategies were ultimately designed to protect socialism from common sense criticism. This has not advanced socialism to any appreciable degree, but it has roiled our colleges and universities and served as a countercultural infrastructure for a vast machine of indoctrination, one that seeks to win a succession of tiny battles when it is clear that the larger war has long been lost.

Hicks’s conclusions are this stark but his arguments are detailed. He sees this as fundamentally a failure of epistemology that has been exploited endlessly. Kant’s ultimate subjectivism and his separation of subject and object have been decisive in opening the door both to postmodernism and to romanticism. Hicks does not pursue the latter; that would require another book, but one which I would very much like to see him write.

The book is one of the most lucid and accessible studies of the history of philosophy that I have ever encountered and it is particularly acute in its ability to connect the dots and trace the intellectual lineages and etiologies. If you want to see how the defense of affirmative action, speech codes, and global warming activism ultimately connects with Rousseau, Kant and Marx, et al, this is the book with which you should begin.

This expanded edition adds two relevant essays: “Free Speech and Postmodernism” and “From Modern to Postmodern Art: Why Art Became Ugly.” The latter is particularly incisive.

Highly recommended.

228 people found this helpful

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Obert

Tour de force

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2017

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Hicks writes a beautifully distilled insight into what postmodernism is, why it exists, and why it is dangerous, applied in the wrong dose in the wrong place (as it frequently is in this day and age).

I had never understood the connection between Marxism and postmodernism, but Hick's makes the connection abundantly clear. If postmodernism does, indeed, make the claim that there 'is no truth' and that there 'is no reality' then how does this fit in with the idea of Marx? As Hick's demonstrates, if postmodernists indeed drank their coolade, one would find that their political affiliations were, at the very least, randomly distributed among the ideologies of our time. This is not the case, postmodernists are almost exclusively leftwing, and Hicks tells us exactly why, in a very compelling way.

He also traces the roots of postmodernism all the way back to the enlightenment era, and he systematically charts how the age of reason sewed the seeds of unreason that was to follow in the later centuries with Nietche and Hegel et al.

Hicks presents his thesis with beautiful, easy to understand explanations that burn with logic and common sense. I was riveted from start to finish. I have long wondered why it is that we hold the assumptions about the world that we do and this work provides one large piece to that puzzle, and has opened up a whole new world of enquiry for me.

My only (very small) criticism is that he observes correctly that the postmodernists (and their Marxist cousins) have shifted their support from failed communist ideology to causes like environmentalism. This is true, but it does not then follow that all environment issues are therefore invalid (as Hicks seems to come close to implying).

78 people found this helpful

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Outstanding book

Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2017

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Reading Stephen Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism left me wondering whether (some) people haven't become too smart for their own good, yet also reminded me of the adage that a smart person is not the same as a wise person.

In this book, Mr. Hicks traces postmodernism back to its intellectual roots. For those unfamiliar with the subject, postmodernism is the twentieth-century philosophical movement, still dominant and pervasive in academia today and with tentacles reaching deeply into our wider societies, that contends that man is unable to make objective notions about truth, reason and human nature, and that any such claims must be the product of his socio-economic, historical, cultural, gender and ethnic circumstances. The foundation of this school of thought, Hicks argues, was laid two hundred years ago by Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason was an effort to protect his Christian faith from attack by early Enlightenment philosophy. In an exquisite historical and intellectual overview of German philosophy, Hicks follows the bloodline from Kant to Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and ultimately to Martin Heidegger, who was in turn a key influence on the twentieth-century postmodernists.

The author proceeds to do the same with socialism, which started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a contemporary of Kant, and worked its way through the ages in the writings of Hegel, Herder, Marx, Fichte, Spengler and Junger, all of whom provided fertilizer for the writings of Heidegger. In case you were wondering why this list includes "Men of the Right", that's because Hicks identifies the collectivist Left and Right, correctly in my opinion, as merely two sides of the same coin. The difference is that national socialism was left entirely discredited in 1945, while its equally ugly twin brother wasn't until at least 1956, when the Soviets crushed any illusion about their true intentions one might still have had at that point in time.

It would seem paradoxical for postmodernism to marry socialism: After all, the former denies any claim to impartial knowledge or absolute truth, so one would expect its adherents to be found all over the political spectrum. Nevertheless, the two strains ultimately came together in the twentieth century, when all the great postmodernist thinkers, Derrida and Foucault included, were hardcore socialists at the same time.

Hicks argues that the crisis of socialism lay at the root of this phenomenon. While Marx had argued that the rise of capitalism would inevitably lead to an ever greater schism between the rich and poor in society, in reality the opposite was true and the middle classes were prospering. In fact, by the mid-twentieth century the middle classes were living lives of which the kings and emperors of yesteryear could only have dreamed. At the same time, it became patently obvious to any impartial observer that life behind the Iron Curtain was an absolute nightmare. The house of cards came thundering down when the Soviets invaded Hungary in '56 to crush the popular uprising against the socialist rulers in that country.

Socialism had always been the product of reason and logic, starting from the idea that the Marxist revolution would inevitably follow in every capitalist society and ending with the illusion that smart technocrats could engineer their nations into workers' paradises. When all that got shattered, postmodernism proved the refuge for the disillusioned socialists. It became, in Hicks' words, "a symptom of the far Left’s crisis of faith," and "a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism."

Some of the reviewers of Explaining Postmodernism have been predictable in their criticism: The author is an Objectivist (gasp!) who wrote a book critical of the Left, while not, in fact, "explaining postmodernism". These detractors ought to be ignored, because Hicks explains it all very well and correctly identifies it to be a phenomenon of the Left. This observation is by no means revolutionary (if you'll pardon the expression).

Nevertheless, the book is not without its flaws. It becomes clear pretty quickly that Hicks has little use for religion. He starts from the premise that the early Enlightenment thinkers, with their emphasis on reason and logic and rejection of religious superstition, had it right, and provided the foundations of our modern democracy and ordered liberty. Hicks shows to have a blind spot here. Because Christianity is not on his radar, he never ponders the question whether it serves a function in a modern democratic, capitalist and free society, let alone whether the latter can even survive without the moral foundation provided by the former. Thinkers such as Tocqueville, a keen student of democracy, argued it couldn't. Given that the Enlightenment grew more radical and anti-religious with every new generation of thinkers, it's fair to ask whether it, and the modern societies it spawned in the West, weren't top-heavy from the beginning. (No, I don't necessarily have the answer to that.)

Secondly, the roots of postmodernism can arguably be traced back to the first days of the Enlightenment, not just to the later "counter-Enlightenment philosophy" of Kant. Thomas Hobbes, who is not even mentioned in the book until footnote 67, contended that, since human life in the beginning was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", man started forming societies governed by the rule of law out of sheer self-interest. It happened in reaction to his fear of violent death. In other words, to Hobbes the social contract was conventional, not natural. This marks the first departure from the natural law doctrines found in classical philosophy and Christianity.

But the greatness of an outstanding book like Explaining Postmodernism lies in its invitation for us to conduct a civil and rational argument about what postmodernism is and where it originated, devoid of the ad hominems, reductio ad Hitlerum, cries of "racism" and other base cannon fodder employed to win 'debates' in our postmodern world these days. Stephen Hicks has done us a great service here. I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in the topic.

61 people found this helpful

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Mr. G. Lawrence

We Are in the Grip of a Creeping Totalitarianism...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 18, 2021

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...and its roots go back a long way. I doubt it is possible to write a better book which more comprehensively understands and explains the current cultural insanity in Western societies - starting with the universities but spreading among corporations and institutions. (This "cultural insanity" is a combination of post-modernism, radical feminism, and neo-Marxism realising it had to "remodel" itself after the collapse of communism by way of attacking logic itself, and reason, and attaching itself to "identity politics" with its psychology of oppression and victimhood.) This book, brilliantly and clearly, explains the thinking processes, starting all the way back with Rousseau and Kant, and the political and historical processes, from Marx to past the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's clear that the truth of the situation is that capitalism is a massive success - despite its shortcomings and need for constant accountability and reform - and that women and people of all races have far better opportunities than they have ever had in history; and the only way you can deny the validity of the data is by deciding you have to attack validity itself, and start making wild claims, e.g. black right-wing intellectuals are "multiculturally white". You obviously need to tread on free speech, if you want to occupy the moral high ground while condemning the opinions of others by saying they should not even have a platform. You need to cultivate the paranoia which leads you to detect racism everywhere, rather than in a few, and fewer, places. And you need to condemn radicalism on the right while cultivating radicalism on the left - rather than being sane and condemning the Black Lives Matter movement for believing in tearing down society, as well as the "Proud Boys" for being bigoted idiots. Then, like in Orwell's 1984, doublethink becomes the norm - or as we sane people would sometimes refer to it, hypocrisy, e.g. the co-founder of BLM, a self-declared anticapitalist Marxist, now using donations to BLM to build up her own personal real estate assets. What becomes the norm after that? They get enough power to set up their own militant pseudo-police and they start coming for you in the night and sending you off to "re-education camps". And if you want to properly understand how it all started and how it works, read this book before they decide it should be banned in the interests of political correctness. And the next time somebody tries preaching to you about diversity and inclusivity and equity, ask them how many Conservative professors they have in their college or university.

5 people found this helpful

Jacob Naur

Perhaps it is down to something like this: After the Entlightenment no real progress was ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 21, 2018

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This one really cleared things up for me.

I see now that from the Enlightenment onwards philosophy is basically just some sort of literature: Clever boys playing with words. What a con job.

Perhaps it is down to something like this: After the Entlightenment no real progress was to be gained in philosophy, but rather in science and technology.

So the strain of "philosophy" we got after the Enlightenment is more art and beauty - more meditations along the lines of ancient mysticism - than real work on understanding reality and thus contributing to progress. Wonderful book by Hicks and what a con job by Kant going forward.

Thanks for clearing my mind from this useless mud that is postmodernism.

In my view - and supported by this book - philosophy as a serious enterprise stopped around Kant. Reading "philosophy" after Kant should now be considered a pastime like knitting or going for a walk a long a beautiful beach: It is important enough, but mostly just for fun and to get a nice aesthetic experience, which we all like now and then.

21 people found this helpful

Oberon

Explains Postmodernism Very Well

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 13, 2018

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This is a great book. I've learnt so much from it because it charts the historical path to postmodernism very well, and I've gained so much from learning about the various philosophers and the development of their thoughts. Furthermore, it really helps me to understand some of the puzzling modern phenomena; the shutting down of debates, free-speech and civil discourse, the political correctness, the me/feelings-centredness, the victimhood mentality, the drive to control speech, etc., etc. Some things in postmodernism are also very helpful, but, for me, it really helps to be aware of its dangers and excesses. Great book and well worth reading.

13 people found this helpful

Dr. P. Cramer

Truly excellent book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2018

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This book gives a clear thorough account of counter enlightenment philosophy and and its modern incarnation, post modernism. It makes clear the irrational profoundly authoritarian origins of a great deal of New Left politics and academic humanities 'grievance studies' currently fashionable in the West's universities. I am reminded of Russell's comment that'People would rather die than think. In fact they do'.Counter enlightenment philosophy was in part an attempt to preserve theistic religion from the corrosive impact of reason and history. Postmodernism, as Hicks makes clear, is an attempt to to do the same for the those whose religion is far left politics.

9 people found this helpful

Patrick Moore

Devastating treatise

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 15, 2019

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Vaccination against postmodernism neo Marxism. When I reached the end of the book I wanted another couple hundred pages. Not many books have that affect on me. Five stars.

8 people found this helpful

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