ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the strategic approach to the Kantian problematic called “neomodernism.” The strategy is manifest in the work of Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux, most notably, as well as in a number of other established critical pedagogical theories. The term “neomodernist” signifies the contradictory attempt to retain the possibility of moral legitimacy on the one hand (in keeping with the modernist, emancipatory ideal), while rejecting the legitimizing apparatus, the Kantian architectonic through which that legitimacy is established, on the other. Theorists who adopt this approach rely on a variety of philosophical alternatives to Kant’s conception of practical reason; these include Freire’s liberation theology, Dewey’s pragmatism, Vygotsky’s developmental theory and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, among other resources. The chapter shows that in each of these cases the theorist is surreptitiously relying on Kantian metaphysics even while openly rejecting it, and that this ambivalence renders each of their theories unsound.
