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Postmodernism and Political Theory
Often invoked but seldom carefully defined, postmodernism has frequently amounted to a derogatory umbrella term covering a number of contemporary thinkers who can trace their intellectual lineage to Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of the modern condition and the value modernity places on truth, order, and rationality. Those who have been called “postmodernists” include Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. Readers familiar with their writings will know both that these thinkers disagree in fundamental respects and that only some of them accept the label while others explicitly reject it. Foucault, for example, maintains in an interview in Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1987, 33–34) that he does not understand what is meant by the term “modernity,” let alone by ...
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