ABSTRACT
The postmodern attack on Enlightenment reason and the modern ideals of continual progress and individual liberation from superstition, convention and false belief, has been astonishingly successful. One of the earliest critics of postmodernism in American society was the sociologist Daniel Bell. Bell’s early assessment of postmodernism took place before the term gained the wide and usage it has. Bell’s discussion of postmodernism as the diffusion of modernist values within society and as a crisis within high art, both of which he linked to the changes in the structure of capitalism, succeeded in raising many of the issues later critics of the postmodern phenomena would explore. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas is another thinker who criticizes postmodernism for what he believes are its neo-conservative tendencies, although he bases his criticisms on the philosophical precepts of postmodern thinking more than the political backgrounds of individual theorists. Many feminist theorists have also been highly critical of postmodernist thought.
