ABSTRACT
Postmodernism was, as Jonathan Friedman (1994) remarked, the contemporary version of the age-old tendency of intellectuals to turn against the very means of their own knowledge (Lovejoy & Boas, 1935). Tragically this nihilistic cynicism contributed to the intellectual justification for neoliberalism. In rejecting the potential of knowledge as the humanising force for a moral world, postmodern’s self-referential, indeed its navel-gazing indulgence, disingenuously presented as ‘playfulness’, allowed the Left to undermine its own progressivism.
