ABSTRACT
The crisis of modernism was signalled by the popularity of the turkey trot, and confirmed by the senseless slaughter of the First World War. The turkey trot and The Rites of Spring provide the context for the postmodern and the turn to language. The postmodern Utopian hope has ontological importance: it protects the integrity of unique beings in their existential otherness, by promoting the dynamic realisation of freedom with others. The postmodern liberal Utopia is described by two spheres, of ‘private irony’ and ‘public solidarity’. The world of the postmodern ironist is the world of the self reconciled to fundamental political indeterminacy. Deconstruction is a jurisprudence because at its centre lies a determination to readdress the question of justice. For the same reason it is also an ethics. Alan Hunt has presented postmodernism as a natural evolution from critical legal studies, founded on a shared ‘profound disenchantment with modernity’.
