Is Postmodernism Neo-Marxist?
What he calls postmodern neo-Marxism is one of Jordan Peterson’s favourite bugbears—even though, by his own admission, the only Marxist work he has read is the Communist Manifesto and in…
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Posts by tag
Postmodernism
53 posts
Aleksandr Dugin and the Perils of Postmodern Ethnonationalism
Millions of ordinary Germans believed in the compelling narrative that Hitler was unifying the true German Volk under one national umbrella. From Austria to Poland, his land-grabs were justified by…
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Postmodernism, Heal Thyself!
During the last half of the twentieth century, in the heart of France, there was a colossal rupture in the fabric of philosophical and intellectual thinking. A new, iconoclastic way…
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Postmodernism in the Classroom
When I (Patty) was a high school senior newly enamoured of critical theory, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay positioning Oscar the Grouch as a victim of oppression by a bourgeois…
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A Modest Defence of Postmodernism
An intellectual war in which postmodernism is both weaponized and assailed seems to have been raging for a long time. But postmodernism’s proponents and demonizers are seldom willing to engage…
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Beyond Postmodern: The Neoliberal Roots of Woke Cancel Culture
Anumber of writers on the left and center-left have recently expressed alarm at cancel culture. In some respects, their concerns match those of conservatives who’ve railed against campus deplatforming, compelled…
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The Afterlife of the Death of the Author
We’re all authors now. Most of us don’t write books—but we blog, we post on Facebook, we tweet, we create TikTok or YouTube videos. Authorship is everywhere, but it’s not…
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The Woke Left’s Self-Contradictory Ideas About Language
Despite the ongoing debates over cancel culture, many people still have not quite grasped what is going on. Most of us can tell that something illiberal and censorious is happening…
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A Spectacular Theory of Today’s Woke Advertising
Many companies have recently switched from aspirational to woke advertising—and a surprising number of them are engaging in self-satire and even self-abnegation as they do so. From Gillette, with its…
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The Two Big Falsehoods of Critical Social Justice
The Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement relies on a specific conception of the world: it does not understand or interpret reality in the same way as the rest of us—especially…
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Has Modernism Ended?
Postmodernism is a notoriously hard to define intellectual and cultural movement that has, over recent decades, become a regular topic of discussion in academic and artistic circles because it rejects…
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Objectivity and the Construction of Knowledge
Photo by Simon Migaj Objectivity is generally understood as a way to observe the world that is not influenced by the situation of the observer, such that the ideas produced reflect…
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Criticizing Postmodern Conservatism: A Response
My books (available here and here) on postmodern conservatism have enjoyed some interest: including, to my surprise, critical interest from conservatives and moderates. The most sustained effort was a recent…
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Postmodern Conservatism: A Conversation
In this open letter posted on our partner platform, Letter, Matt McManus first outlines the central thesis of his recent book, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture and…
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Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence
Postmodernism has taken some heat in recent years. Anyone with the capacity to say I don’t know who has taken a close look at it since it first emerged from…
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The Misconceptions of Anti-Postmodernists
Image by Zdeněk Tobiáš Anti-postmodern commentaries are certainly in vogue these days. Whether penned by conservatives or liberals, they all support the same basic assumption: postmodernism is dangerous. For instance, Robert…
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Chomsky vs. Foucault, Revisited
The year was 1971. Thomas Pynchon had published his first two novels, the Pentagon Papers were published and Richard Nixon was withdrawing troops from the massively unpopular Vietnam War. In…
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The Ten Books Every Leftist Should Know: A Reply to Dennis Prager
In a 4 January column for the Daily Wire, Dennis Prager, talk show host and founder of the partisan YouTube channel Prager U, opines that it is often very difficult…
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