The Postmodern Challenge

The Enlightenment, it is argued, has lost its intellectual force; a scientific view of society, no longer seems incontestable; and modernism is dead. Possible successors are neoliberalism, the back-to-basics conservative backlash associated with, in very different ways, Margaret Thatcher and Allan Bloom, or postmodernism, an inchoate eclectic intellectual movement that denies the imperial claims of overarching ideologies. But is it possible to distinguish clearly between modernism, a broad church by any measure, and its supposed rivals.