Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

It has become an intellectual commonplace to claim that we have entered the era of 'post-modernity'. Three themes are embraced in this claim - the poststructuralist critique by Foucault, Derrida and others of the philosophical heritage of the Enlightenment, the supposed impasse of the High Modern art and its replacement by new artistic forms, and the alleged emergence of 'post-industrial' societies whose structures are beyond the ken of Marx and other theorists of industrial capitalism.

Against Postmodernism takes issue with all these themes. It challenges the idealist irrationalism of poststructuralism. It questions the existence of any radical break separating Post-modern from Modern art. And it denies that recent socio-economic developments represent any fundamental shift from classical patterns of capital accumulation.

Drawing on philosophy and cultural history, Against Postmodernism takes issue with some of the most forthright critics of post-modernism - Jurgen Habermas and Frederic Jameson, for example. But it is most distinctive in that it offers a historical reading of these theories. Post-modernism, Alex Callinicos argues, reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of '68, and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 The Jargon of Postmodernity
• 2 Modernism and Capitalism
• 3 The Aporias of Poststructuralism
• 4 The Limits of Communicative Reason
• 5 So What Else is New?
• Afterword
• Notes

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Callinicos sets out to compare the poststructuralist philosophies of Derrida and Foucault with postmodern architecture and literature, within the setting of world economics. He argues deftly that we are not now living in a postmodern, postindustrial, and post-Marxist world, but that thinking so has provided an appealing disguise for the declining and ever-less-humanistic modernism of our own fin de siecle. The political disillusionment of the middle class since 1968 has motivated an aesthetic withdrawal from reality, an essentially Romantic attitude. Callinicos seeks to counter the transcendentalizing tendencies of contemporary thought by showing that modernism has evolved to serve capitalism, and postmodernism likewise. He writes with zest, using an explicitly Marxist perspective previously established in books such as his Making History (CH, Sep'88). Callinicos's polemic never overpowers the lucid exposition of the ideas of others, a veritable who's who of recent intellectual debate. Endnotes and index are provided. Provocative, informative, interdisciplinary, and topical, this book is recommended as an excellent guide to thinking about our own times. P. Emison University of New Hampshire