The Frankfurt School and Postmodern Philosophy
6th January 2019
There has been a tremendous pushback in recent years against what are broadly known as “grievance studies”; a loose collection of academic disciplines characterized by their emphasis on oppressive social and political institutions and the marginalized identities they victimize. The philosophical outlook underpinning these disciplines tend to be portrayed in a less ambiguous manner: it is typically described as some combination of Marxist politics with postmodern skepticism, and has been variously termed “cultural Marxism,” postmodern neo-Marxism, the New Left, and so on.
In his book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault, the philosopher Stephen Hicks argues that post-Kantian thinking gradually led to the adoption of ever more skeptical epistemologies. At the same time, a growing number of intellectuals came to align with Marxist and socialist political perspectives. This leads Hicks to the claim that postmodern philosophy is the perpetuation of Marxist politics through other philosophical means. He argues that there is a clear through line where the scientific pretensions of classical Marxism gradually gave way to the irrationalist critiques of the cultural Marxists, and finally converged with the overtly skeptical epistemologies of the postmodernists. Specifically, postmodern skepticism was adopted as a philosophical backdoor to justifying socialism along largely emotive lines. To paraphrase a memorable quote in Hicks’s book, postmodern Leftists came to say feelings were all that mattered and their feelings demanded socialism. Hicks goes on to argue that this epistemological skepticism and cultural Marxist/Socialist politics is the philosophical wellspring of the various identity politics movements ascendant today.