Postmodernism
Postlethwayt, Malachy. 1758. In Honour to the Administration:
The Importance of the African Expedition Considered. London:
printed by C. Say.
Rodrigues, Lúcia Lima, and Russell Craig. 2004. Mercantilist
and English Influences on the Portuguese School of
Commerce, 1759–1844. Atlantic Economic Journal 32 (4):
329–345.
Lúcia Lima Rodrigues
Russell Craig
POSTMODERNISM
Ever since its ideas first took hold in the 1980s, postmod-
ern theory has had a significant influence on the social sci-
ences. At the time, social theory imported certain
theoretical concepts from literary criticism, including
deconstruction and other discourse-based theories of tex-
tual interpretation. It is best, however, to refer to a post-
modern “turn” within contemporary social science,
because many academics influenced by these intellectual
trends abjure the term postmodernism. Nevertheless, many
contemporary social scientists acknowledge a debt to
deconstructive methods of textual interpretation and to
deconstruction’s (or poststructuralism’s) rejection of teleo-
logical theories (or “grand narratives”) and the concept of
a coherent, fixed human subject.
Judith Butler’s writings on the unstable and “con-
structed” nature of both sex and gender identities played
a crucial role in transmitting postmodern concepts into
social theory and the social sciences. Yet Butler herself
rejects the term postmodernist, claiming only to deploy
deconstructive techniques to better discern the “discursive
construction” of identity. Postmodern conceptions of the
“hybrid,” “plural,” and “inconstant” nature of “identity”
have had their greatest influence in the areas of cultural,
gender, and postcolonial studies, though they have also
influenced anthropology (e.g., James Clifford) and inter-
national relations theory (e.g., James Der Derrian).
Many people working in these areas reject behavioral,
structural, and hermeneutic interpretations of the rela-
tionship between individuals, groups, and social structure,
favoring instead analyses of the “decentered,” “local,” and
“fragmented” nature of social phenomena. Postmodern
social theory rejects traditional social science’s goal of dis-
cerning causal relationships among social phenomena. It
also rejects social science aspirations to discern superior or
“parsimonious” interpretations of human behavior. In the
postmodern conception, no “readerly” interpretation of a
“text” can be more “truthful” than another. In fact some
postmodernists refer to the concept of “truth” as “terroris-
I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F T H E S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , 2 N D E D I T I O N
tic,” for the “truth” can only defend itself by repressive
“exclusion.”
Postmodernism represents both a sensibility in regard
to social science research and a normative critique of
modernity. According to postmodernism, the Enlighten-
ment’s search for rational understanding that could amelio-
rate the human condition engendered ideological or false
“grand narratives” of history, which are based on “essential-
ist,” “universal,” and “fixed” conceptions of human nature.
Drawing upon Jean-Francois Lyotard’s analysis in The
Postmodern Condition (1984), postmodernists reject the
Enlightenment’s search for “totalizing” theories that offer
“universal” narratives of human motivation and experience.
Building on the work of Michel Foucault, postmodern the-
ory claims that these “grand narratives” underpinned the
Enlightenment’s efforts to “normalize” human beings
through the bureaucratic and repressive institutions of
“governance” (e.g., both state and nonstate organizations,
such as the asylum and the hospital) that “categorize”
human beings.
POSTMODERNISM AND
DECONSTRUCTION
According to postmodernists, social theories that claim to
“represent” reality fail to comprehend that humans have
no unmediated access to “reality.” Human conceptions of
reality are, unavoidably, a product of subjective interpre-
tation. Modern media and technology deny people the
ability to discern the original author or to distinguish the
original from the imitation. In 1936 Walter Benjamin
argued that in an age of “mechanical reproduction” it is
nearly impossible to distinguish the original from a copy.
Following this lead, postmodern theorists such as Jean
Baudrillard have contended that reality itself is a simu-
lacrum (a copy of a copy). In a world of corporate image
production and virtual realities, one cannot determine
what is authentic or inauthentic, real or fake. When com-
puters allow people to “live” in cyberspace, the very con-
cepts of reality, time, and space are contestable and
destabilized. Thus attempts to interpret the “essence” or
true nature of social phenomena deny the reality that the
world is a constantly shifting image.
Postmodern social theory draws heavily upon Jacques
Derrida’s and deconstruction’s critique of structuralism.
Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology and Louis
Althusser’s structural Marxism (which investigated the
structural role that class played within capitalist econom-
ics and ideology) dominated French intellectual life in the
1960s. Both of these theorists drew upon the early twen-
tieth-century structural linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure.
Saussure held that the meaning of a particular speech or
language (la parole) is structured by the underlying struc-
ture of grammar (la langue, the structured relationship
395
Postmodernism
between signifier and signified that yields the meaning of
a sign). But Derrida in Marges de la philosophie (1972)
held that the relationship between signifier and signified is
inherently unstable. For Derrida, “meaning” includes
both identity (what is) and différance (what is not). Thus
postmodernists argue that any attempt to “fix” meaning
will yield repressive attempts to eliminate the ineluctable
“other” of human reality.
To avoid eliminating the play of différance, postmod-
ern-influenced social science rejects the “binary opposi-
tions” that allegedly ground Western philosophy:
subject-object, man-woman, reality-appearance, reason-
emotion, and speech-writing. In this view, the very effort
of representation and causal analysis excludes and devalues
the “inferior” part of the binary term that is traditionally
denigrated as being irrational or emotional. This rejection
of binary oppositions as repressive and “norming” has had
a profound influence on contemporary feminist and crit-
ical race theory, which warn against “essentializing” iden-
tities of gender and race. These studies of identity focus
upon the “socially constructed,” hybrid, and ever-shifting
nature of individual and group identity.
Given the absence of a stable referential relation
between subject and object, postmodernists argue that
social theory should focus upon the way subjects are “con-
structed” by discourse itself. The postmodern conception
of how the subject is a product of language and thought
draws heavily upon philosophical traditions deriving from
Friedrich Nietzsche. In addition, Martin Heidegger’s cri-
tique of Western philosophy’s ineluctable search for a
fixed conception of “Being,” and of its attempt to domi-
nate nature in the name of the “human,” informs post-
modern analysis. Postmodern social science frequently
draws upon Foucault’s conception of power-knowledge
discourses to examine how subjects are “produced” by dis-
course. While Foucault’s earlier “archaeological” work on
how epistemes (or systems of thought) “norm” and
“exclude” has influenced postmodern analysis, it is his
later genealogical analysis of power as “productive” and
“enabling” (rather than as primarily coercive) that has
most influenced postmodernism’s critique of “agency.” As
Butler holds, the conception of a coherent, rational,
human individual who exercises conscious agency ignores
the reality that human identities are continually being
reconfigured through performative “self-inscriptions” of
dominant norms and discourses.
LACLAU AND MOUFFE AND “NEW
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS”
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (1985) represents a highly influential
poststructuralist critique of the use of “grand narrative” in
the social sciences. Rejecting a “determinist” Marxism that
396 I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F T H E S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , 2 N D E D I T I O N
drew from the workers’ structural position in production
of the teleological necessity of a “revolutionary conscious-
ness,” Laclau and Mouffe asserted the “discursive”—and
open—nature of social consciousness. In the determinist
Marxist view, both social democracy and authoritarian
communism believed that capitalism’s interdependent
division of labor would inevitably yield (whether through
gradual self-organization or via a revolutionary external
agent) a self-emancipating working-class movement for
democratic control of the interdependent capitalist mode
of production. In contrast to the Marxist tradition, Laclau
and Mouffe held that one cannot—and should not—
mechanistically determine a subject’s “objective, true con-
sciousness” from the subject’s alleged “structural” position
in society. Rather, consciousness itself is discursively pro-
duced and represents a contested arena for politics.
In this view, much of the emancipatory impulse for
democracy has come from the “new” social movements of
racial, gender, and sexual identity. The consciousness of
these identity-based groups cannot be deduced from their
“objective” social role in society. Thus social theorists had
to abandon privileging the “old” movement of the work-
ing class and construct a new, plural, and democratic the-
ory that would unite (without homogenizing) the
liberatory discourses of the new social movements. Laclau
and Mouffe’s work has had a great influence on both
social movement theory and postcolonial studies.
POSTMODERNISM AND ITS
CRITICS: THE SEARCH FOR NORMS
The postmodern turn in social science has generated con-
siderable controversy, some of it finding its way into the
mass media. Most visible has been the neoconservative cri-
tique that postmodernist analysis dominates the humani-
ties and social sciences, imparting to students a dangerous,
nihilist critique of American democracy. Ironically, this
critique conflates postmodernism with Marxism, despite
postmodernism’s hostility to macrostructural and teleo-
logical forms of social analysis, including Marxism. Some
left-leaning social theorists concur with the postmodern
analysis that the marketing of images and lifestyles partly
supplants the production and sale of physical goods in late
capitalism. But these analysts of late capitalism (such as
the geographer David Harvey and the cultural theorist
Frederic Jameson), in contrast to postmodernists, offer
macrostructural and analytic explanations for the emer-
gence of these phenomena. They locate the production of
images-as-commodities within the global corporate con-
glomerates of the “infotainment,” media, and publishing
industries.
The postmodern rejection of the realist conception
that economic and social institutions constrain the
choices of individuals has occurred at a time of rapidly

increasing global violence and economic and material
inequality, and some critics have pointed out the ironic ele-
ment in the timing of this development. Postmodernists
often explain their critique of fixed, “linear” conceptions of
time and space by metaphorical references to chaos theory’s
rejection of periodicity and to the finding of quantum
mechanics that mass, force, and acceleration cannot be
independently determined. This postmodernist rejection
of even an “unrepresentative” realist conception of an
external reality independent of theoretical interpretation
helped engender the “Sokal affair.” Alan Sokal, a physicist
(and materialist Marxist) at New York University, submit-
ted a paper to the postmodern journal Social Text in 1996.
The article cleverly deployed postmodern concepts while
making alleged scientific references that any physics under-
graduate could readily deem to be ludicrous. After the
essay was published, Sokal revealed that it was a hoax
aimed at revealing postmodernism’s ignorance of both sci-
ence and the nature of material reality. The story made the
front page of the New York Times.
Some leftist theorists note that the postmodern turn
arose at the very moment that conservative political dom-
inance decreased the prestige of leftist theory and practice.
A crude “sociology of knowledge” of the postmodern turn
might contend that, absent mass social movements con-
tending for state power, left-wing academics retreat into
the realm of pure theory. The rejoinder to this might be
that postmodernism’s insistence on the relevance of the
particular, local, and hybrid has had a salutary effect on
limiting the imperial claims of “grand narratives.” Either
way, analytic attempts of macrostructural and historically
oriented social theorists to discern the interaction between
social agency and social structure are likely to remain a
major theme within social science. And the postmodern
concern with the fate of marginalized groups would seem
to push the discussion ethically beyond postmodernism’s
emphasis on the local and particular. The quasi-universal
concepts of citizenship and global human rights may not
have an irrefutable, a priori basis in a fixed human nature,
but if human beings cannot develop shared understand-
ings and values that bridge their differences, it is unlikely
that the emancipatory, democratic project embraced by
many postmodern theorists will ever be realized.
SEE ALSO Critical Theory; Enlightenment; Ethics;
Foucault, Michel; Hegemony; Knowledge; Modernism;
Multiculturalism; Paradigm; Positivism; Power;
Relativism; Social Constructs; Universalism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Best, Steven, and Douglass Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory:
Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford.
Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late
Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F T H E S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , 2 N D E D I T I O N
Postnationalism
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Der Derian, James, and Michael J. Shapiro. 1989.
International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of
World Politics. Lexington, MA: Lexington.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon.
Laclau, Ernseto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.
London: Verso.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Rosenau, Pauline Marie. 1992. Post-Modernism and the Social
Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Joseph M. Schwartz
POSTNATIONALISM
The term postnationalism refers to the critique of the con-
cept of the nation as the central organizing principle of
modern political identity and government. According to
postnationalism, the category of the nation is no longer
sufficient to describe the fundamentals of political iden-
tity or state government. In a postnational context it
becomes necessary to move beyond the idea that a homo-
geneous national identity is the natural integrating factor
of modern political community. Further, postnationalism
questions the idea that the sovereign nation-state is indis-
pensable to the order of international affairs and the func-
tioning of the domestic rule of law.
THE CRITIQUE OF NATIONALISM
Postnationalism arose out of the critique of nationalism. It
was only at the end of the eighteenth century that citizen-
ship and national identity came together, in the figure of
nationalism, for the functional purpose of providing a
principle of integration that could serve to mobilize the
transition from royal sovereignty to popular sovereignty.
Nationalism provided the solution to the twin problems
of secular legitimation and complex integration in the
wake of religious schism and republican revolution.
While citizenship describes a purely legal relation
within a political community, in modern times the ten-
dency has been to tie it to an identity that points beyond
397