Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

• Author: Verhaegh, Marcus
• Position: Book Review

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault By Stephen R. C. Hicks Tempe, Ariz.: Scholargy, 2004. Pp. v, 230. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paperback.

In Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen R. C. Hicks seeks to explain the nature of contemporary anticapitalist movements, giving particular attention to their potential origin in modern thought. He attempts to demonstrate the way in which "postmodern" ideas have more illustrious roots in the Western intellectual tradition than one might expect--to the detriment of that tradition. As the subtitle suggests, he marks Rousseau as a notably significant historical origin in this regard. However, he rightly takes his more interesting thesis to lie in his placement of Kant as the father of the "Counter-Enlightenment" and so of "postmodernism."

This is of course a very postmodern way of looking at Kant, once we understand the term relative to Hicks's placement of Derrida in the postmodernist camp. However, one should not get the impression that Hicks wanders into thickets of poststructuralist philosophical poesy or the like. His account aims to present cut-and-dried thinking--which is overrun only occasionally by bursts of vaguely Russellian rhetoric aimed at the Teutonic intellectual tradition, along with a few similarly more-florid musings on Nietzsche and Duchamp.

Explaining Postmodernism builds up to the analysis of contemporary strategies of the left that deviate from the orthodox Marxist and other class-centered modes of thought. Hicks seeks to trace these postmodern strategies to a line of intellectual history that comes to the fore with Rousseau, blossoms with Kant--and here Hicks shows some admiration for Kant's deftness in turning the received Enlightenment tradition on its head--and then continues with Herder, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Foucault, and Derrida. Central to his analysis is the claim that the left, feeling itself to have utterly failed to achieve its goals at the level of the real means of production, responded with a denial of reality. Hicks views this denial of reality as licensed by the idealist elements in Kant's thinking, as subsequently developed in Foucauldian antihumanist relativism and in Derridean textocentrism.

One can see how this line of argument might have some traction: many Derrideans, for example, do tend to reduce social life to the interaction of poetically manipulable signs and marks that have no fixed mooring in the...