Andrew Colgan’s Pocket Guide to Postmodernism is a very short book attempting something extraordinarily large. In barely more than sixty pages of main text, it traces several centuries of Western philosophy, the rise and failure of socialist political movements, the development of the New Left, and the emergence of postmodern thought. Its aim is not merely to define postmodernism. Colgan wants to explain why it appeared, why its leading thinkers took the positions they did, and why ideas about truth, language, power, identity, equality, and oppression became politically connected.
The book is best understood as a condensed presentation of Stephen R. C. Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism. The Atlas Society describes Colgan’s guide as a summary and interpretation of Hicks, while Hicks’s original Explaining Postmodernism supplies the broader argument on which the pocket guide is based. That relationship matters because Colgan is not offering a neutral survey of the many ways scholars define postmodernism. He is presenting a particular genealogy developed within an explicitly pro-Enlightenment, Objectivist intellectual framework.
Hicks’s thesis, quoted near the beginning of Colgan’s book, provides its entire architecture: “The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.” The first half of the book therefore tells a philosophical story about the erosion of confidence in reason and objective knowledge. The second tells a political story about collectivism, Marxism, the practical failures of socialist regimes, and the search for new intellectual strategies on the radical Left.
That architecture makes Pocket Guide to Postmodernism unusually clear. It also creates its deepest problem. Complex philosophers who disagreed substantially with one another are arranged into a relatively straight historical line, and contested interpretations become stages in a causal sequence. The result is highly effective as an introduction to Hicks’s critique of postmodernism, but much less reliable if treated as a balanced introduction to postmodern philosophy itself.
What Colgan Means by Postmodernism
Colgan begins by treating postmodernism as a broad intellectual movement that developed after confidence in modernism had supposedly been undermined. He places deconstruction, post-structuralism, critical theory, some forms of feminism, and related schools within its orbit, while identifying figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and others as representatives or major influences. The movement is presented not as a single formal organization but as a cluster of approaches sharing recognizable philosophical tendencies.
The most important of those tendencies is skepticism toward objective truth. Colgan repeatedly contrasts the modern belief that human beings can discover reality through perception, reason, logic, and science with what he presents as the postmodern belief that knowledge is constructed from particular perspectives. Once objective access to reality is denied or radically weakened, claims about truth can be interpreted as claims produced by social position, language, culture, or power.
This is where power becomes central to Colgan’s definition. If no individual or group can appeal to objective standards independent of perspective, then competing descriptions of the world begin to look less like attempts to discover what is true and more like attempts to make one interpretation prevail over another. Colgan therefore emphasizes postmodern discussions of discourse, social construction, dominant narratives, and “othering.” Political and intellectual life becomes a struggle over which groups possess the authority to define reality.
He connects that epistemology to a social theory built around group identity. Individuals are increasingly understood, in Colgan’s account, through categories such as race, sex, class, ethnicity, or sexuality rather than primarily as autonomous persons. Different groups do not merely possess different interests; their experiences and perspectives may be treated as fundamentally different forms of knowledge. Because power is distributed unequally, one group’s supposedly neutral account of reality can then be interpreted as the ideology of those who dominate.
Colgan illustrates this pattern through contemporary disputes over Western civilization, gender relations, economic inequality, colonialism, science, law, and cultural achievement. The examples are not intended as a comprehensive description of every postmodern thinker. They are meant to establish the pattern he believes appears repeatedly: claims that once sounded like questions of truth, progress, merit, or justice are reinterpreted as conflicts between groups situated differently within structures of power.
The chapter’s most important organizing device is a table comparing premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism. Premodern thought is associated with supernaturalism, faith, inherited hierarchy, and collective obligations. Modernism is associated with natural reality, perception and reason, individual autonomy, liberal capitalism, and the Enlightenment. Postmodernism is associated with anti-realism, social subjectivity, social construction, collectivism, egalitarianism, and socialism. The table gives readers an immediate map of Colgan’s worldview, but it also reveals how aggressively the book simplifies intellectual history into competing packages.
A second diagram makes the positive side of that worldview even clearer. Colgan’s “Enlightenment Vision” begins with reason. Reason supports both individualism and science; individualism supports liberalism and capitalism, while science supports engineering and medicine. These in turn lead toward freedom, wealth, material improvement, and health, which collectively support happiness and progress. The diagram does not merely summarize history. It tells readers what the book believes must be defended.
Colgan then asks readers to reinterpret familiar controversies through this modernist-postmodernist opposition. Is the Western literary canon evidence of excellence or domination? Was Columbus primarily an explorer or an agent of imperial destruction? Is the United States fundamentally a liberal achievement or an oppressive social system? Should citizens be judged as individuals or primarily through group identities? Does capitalism increase prosperity or institutionalize exploitation? Does science describe reality or reproduce the assumptions of dominant cultures?
The chapter therefore performs two jobs at once. It gives the reader a working definition of postmodernism and establishes the evaluative standard against which the rest of the book will judge it. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s overview of postmodernism makes clear how contested the label actually is: the thinkers commonly grouped under it differ substantially in method, subject matter, and philosophical commitment. Colgan knows that postmodernism is diverse, but his explanatory project depends on treating those differences as variations within a sufficiently unified intellectual pattern.
Kant and the Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason
Having described postmodernism, Colgan turns backward to explain where he believes its philosophical foundations originated. His story begins with the Enlightenment, which he presents as a movement away from supernatural authority and inherited tradition toward reason, observation, individual judgment, and scientific inquiry. Bacon, Newton, Locke, and other early modern figures represent the growing confidence that human beings can discover how the world works rather than waiting for truths to be revealed by religious or political authorities.
That shift had profound moral and political implications. If individuals can reason for themselves, they need not remain permanently subordinate to priests, monarchs, aristocratic traditions, or inherited social roles. Intellectual independence and political individualism therefore reinforce one another in Colgan’s account. Science, liberalism, capitalism, technological development, and personal autonomy emerge as connected products of the same Enlightenment orientation.
Yet the success of reason also provoked philosophical resistance. Colgan identifies Immanuel Kant as the most consequential Counter-Enlightenment figure because Kant challenged what Colgan portrays as the straightforward realist assumption that perception and reason give the mind access to reality as it exists independently of us. Kant distinguished between phenomena, the world as experienced through the conditions of human cognition, and things in themselves, which are not known in the same way.
For Colgan, that distinction introduces a devastating gap. Human beings never encounter reality without the senses and conceptual structures through which experience becomes possible. If the mind contributes essential features to experience, Colgan argues, then what we know may reflect the structure of our consciousness rather than the structure of reality itself. The older idea that the mind discovers an independently existing world is replaced by the idea that the mind partly constructs the world that appears to it.
Colgan develops this criticism through familiar philosophical problems about perception. Sense organs necessarily possess particular characteristics. A human eye, ear, or nervous system therefore cannot function as a completely transparent window onto reality. The information we receive has already been conditioned by the means through which we receive it. Kant’s philosophy, as Colgan interprets it, turns this biological fact into a broader epistemological principle: the form of cognition constrains what can be known.
The argument then expands beyond sensory experience. Concepts such as necessity, causality, universality, space, and time cannot simply be copied from individual observations. Kant treats some of these structures as conditions through which experience becomes intelligible. Colgan interprets that move as replacing discovery with imposition. Instead of the mind conforming itself to reality, reality as experienced increasingly appears to conform to the mind.
This becomes crucial when Colgan discusses truth. A traditional correspondence theory says that a belief is true when it accurately describes reality. But if reality “in itself” cannot be reached independently of the structures of cognition, then correspondence appears impossible to verify directly. Colgan argues that later thinkers therefore become tempted to replace correspondence with coherence: an account is treated as true because its elements fit consistently together, not because it can ultimately be compared with reality independent of consciousness.
The chapter also addresses induction and universals. David Hume had already raised problems about whether repeated observations logically justify universal conclusions. Seeing many events of one type occur in the same way does not provide deductive certainty that every future event will behave identically. Kant’s response attempted to explain how necessary structures could make coherent experience and science possible. Colgan, however, sees the resulting framework as another stage in separating conceptual certainty from independently known reality.
The chapter ends by suggesting that nineteenth-century philosophy inherited Kant’s basic problem and developed it in different directions. One branch, associated especially with Hegel, moves toward ambitious metaphysical systems in which contradiction, historical development, and the relation between thought and reality take increasingly unusual forms. Another broad branch moves toward irrationalism, pessimism, subjectivity, feeling, will, or faith in thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
A diagram makes this post-Kantian split visually explicit. What appears initially to be one technical argument about the limits of human cognition becomes, in Colgan’s narrative, the starting point for a much larger breakdown. Rational philosophy no longer develops primarily by refining the Enlightenment project. Instead, thinkers increasingly question whether reality is accessible, whether logic possesses universal authority, and whether reason should remain the privileged route to knowledge.
This is the first decisive step in the book’s overarching argument. Postmodernism does not suddenly emerge in the universities of the late twentieth century. It becomes possible because generations of philosophers have already weakened the intellectual authority of realism and reason.
How Reason “Collapses” in Twentieth-Century Philosophy
Chapter 3 extends that genealogy into the twentieth century. Colgan now divides the story into two broad philosophical streams: Continental philosophy in Europe and analytic or scientifically oriented philosophy in Britain and North America. Although these traditions developed very differently, he argues that both eventually weakened confidence in objective knowledge enough to prepare the intellectual environment in which postmodernism could flourish.
The key move is one of convergence. Continental philosophy allegedly attacks reason more directly, while Anglo-American philosophy reaches skepticism through increasingly technical questions about proof, language, logic, and scientific knowledge. By Colgan’s account, two roads beginning far apart arrive at the same problem: philosophy can no longer confidently explain how human beings know reality.
Heidegger and Continental Philosophy
Martin Heidegger is the major figure in Colgan’s Continental story. Heidegger inherits themes from German idealism, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and earlier attacks on rationalist metaphysics, but Colgan emphasizes those features that seem to destabilize traditional logic and objectivity. Ordinary conceptual thought, on this reading, does not give straightforward access to Being. Language, inherited categories, and the structures of Western metaphysics may actually obscure what philosophy is trying to understand.
Colgan places particular emphasis on Heidegger’s willingness to treat moods and existential states as philosophically revealing. Anxiety, dread, boredom, and the confrontation with death are not merely psychological experiences; they can disclose features of human existence that abstract reasoning misses. To Colgan, this marks another retreat from the Enlightenment hierarchy in which reason corrects emotion. Feeling increasingly becomes a route to truths that conceptual thought supposedly cannot reach.
He also connects Heidegger to the weakening of classical logical standards. Where a rationalist tradition treats contradiction as evidence that something in an argument must be wrong, Colgan sees post-Kantian German philosophy as becoming more comfortable with contradiction, paradox, or the idea that reality itself may resist ordinary logical categories. Hegel’s dialectical legacy and Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics appear, in this presentation, as stages in dismantling the intellectual assumptions on which objective reasoning depends.
From Heidegger, Colgan draws a set of themes that he sees reappearing later in French thought: suspicion of concepts, distrust of reason, hostility to traditional subject-object metaphysics, emphasis on language, and rejection of the idea that philosophy possesses a neutral standpoint from which reality can be described. Foucault and Derrida enter the story as inheritors of a philosophical landscape already transformed by that earlier Continental rebellion.
The compression is dramatic. Heidegger’s own project cannot simply be reduced to “reason is subjective,” and his influence on later thinkers was complex. But within Colgan’s explanatory structure, the function of Heidegger is clear: he demonstrates how a major twentieth-century philosophical tradition could move away from Enlightenment confidence without returning to religious premodernism.
Russell, Logical Positivism, Kuhn, and Rorty
Colgan then turns to a less obvious route toward the same destination. Anglo-American philosophy retained much stronger commitments to science, logic, and clarity than the Continental tradition, and many of its leading thinkers were hostile to metaphysical speculation. Yet Colgan argues that the attempt to make philosophy rigorously scientific eventually exposed fundamental doubts that it could not resolve.
Bertrand Russell plays an important transitional role. One of the book’s tables extracts questions from The Problems of Philosophy: can philosophy prove the existence of an external world, causation, induction, or objective morality? The table supplies largely negative answers and concludes that philosophy cannot ultimately provide truth or wisdom in the robust sense Colgan wants. The purpose of the table is not to summarize the full complexity of Russell’s work. It is to dramatize how even a philosopher deeply committed to logic could end up unable to prove assumptions that ordinary scientific realism appears to require.
Logical positivism intensifies the difficulty. The positivists attempted to eliminate meaningless metaphysical disputes by tying meaningful claims closely to empirical verification and logical analysis. Logic and mathematics could be treated as formal or conventional systems, while empirical statements remained dependent on observation. Colgan sees a danger here: if logical truths are secured by definitions and scientific claims remain provisional, philosophy appears unable to connect necessary truth with independently existing reality.
The further development of analytic philosophy deepens the problem in Colgan’s account. Quine undermines a sharp division between analytic truths and synthetic truths. Feyerabend challenges fixed methodological rules in science. Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions introduces paradigms through which scientists interpret evidence, raising the possibility that observations themselves are conditioned by theoretical frameworks.
Kuhn is particularly important because Colgan treats paradigms as another bridge toward relativism. If different scientific communities work within frameworks that determine which questions, concepts, and standards matter, then scientific knowledge can begin to look historically and socially situated rather than simply cumulative. Chemistry replaces alchemy, one astronomical model displaces another, and scientific revolutions change not only answers but sometimes the conceptual terms in which questions are asked.
Richard Rorty pushes the story closer to explicit postmodernism. Rorty rejects the idea that knowledge consists in mental representations accurately mirroring an independently structured reality. Language is not a transparent medium giving us direct access to the world; it is part of human social practice. Colgan therefore sees Rorty as confirming that the modern epistemological project has reached exhaustion.
By the end of Chapter 3, the first half of Hicks and Colgan’s thesis is complete. Continental philosophy has challenged reason from one direction, while Anglo-American philosophy has supposedly dissolved certainty from another. Once philosophy can no longer establish objective foundations, postmodern skepticism becomes intellectually possible.
That conclusion is much stronger than the historical material automatically warrants, but its function inside the book is precise. Colgan has now created the philosophical conditions required for the second half of his argument. The next question is why this skepticism becomes associated so strongly, in his account, with collectivist and radical-Left politics.
From Epistemology to Collectivist Politics
Chapter 4 begins with a genuine problem in the book’s own logic. Skepticism, subjectivism, or anti-realism does not automatically imply socialism, egalitarianism, identity politics, or any other particular political program. If objective values cannot be rationally established, a skeptic could move toward almost any political position or perhaps toward none at all.
Colgan therefore needs a second genealogy. While Chapters 1 through 3 trace the erosion of Enlightenment epistemology, Chapter 4 traces the development of political collectivism. The eventual claim will be that these two histories converge: radical collectivist politics acquires a postmodern epistemology at the moment when its earlier rational and economic arguments have failed.
Marx and the Socialist Challenge to Capitalism
Karl Marx provides the central modern socialist framework. Colgan summarizes classical Marxism around the claim that capitalism contains structural exploitation because owners control productive property while workers sell their labor. Capitalists compete for profit, accumulate wealth, and exercise power over those who depend on wages. Economic inequality is therefore not an accidental imperfection but a consequence of the system.
Socialism promises to eliminate the hierarchy by replacing private control of productive resources with collective ownership. In the Marxist story as Colgan presents it, capitalism also carries the seeds of its own destruction. Competition should intensify, wealth should become increasingly concentrated, workers should become increasingly alienated and impoverished, and class conflict should eventually generate revolutionary transformation.
Colgan then contrasts those expectations with the arguments of market-oriented economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Instead of treating private property and markets as sources of inevitable collapse, these thinkers emphasized information, incentives, decentralized coordination, entrepreneurship, and the difficulties of economic calculation under central planning.
The twentieth century becomes Colgan’s empirical test. Capitalist societies, he argues, did not follow the simple trajectory toward universal proletarian misery predicted in the version of Marxism he presents. Middle classes expanded, productivity increased, living standards rose, and workers in market economies acquired forms of prosperity that revolutionary theory had not expected. Socialist economies, meanwhile, repeatedly struggled with scarcity, inefficiency, repression, and political centralization.
Those claims will become central in Chapter 5. At this stage, however, Marx’s role is primarily genealogical. He provides a political philosophy explicitly hostile to liberal capitalism while still appealing to history, economics, science, and reason. Classical Marxism is not yet postmodern. Indeed, Colgan stresses that Marx claimed scientific legitimacy. That difference is essential because the later argument depends on explaining why socialists would abandon those earlier modernist standards.
Rousseau, Hegel, and the Logic of Collectivism
Colgan broadens the genealogy by moving backward from Marx to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau matters because the collectivist challenge to Enlightenment individualism, in Colgan’s account, begins before industrial socialism. Rousseau criticizes civilization, luxury, property, artificial inequality, and the corrupting effects of social comparison while imagining a more natural human condition prior to elaborate modern institutions.
Colgan interprets Rousseau’s state of nature as an attack on the assumption that civilization automatically equals progress. Agriculture, property, commerce, and culture may create abundance, but they also create hierarchy, vanity, dependency, and rivalry. Once property exists, some possess more than others, political power protects inequality, and the human desire for recognition becomes entangled with domination.
The political solution is Rousseau’s general will. Individuals become members of a political community whose collective good cannot simply be reduced to their private preferences. Colgan treats this as a decisive movement away from liberal individualism because the individual may legitimately be compelled to obey a collective moral purpose understood as higher than personal interest.
The French Revolution then becomes part of the book’s historical illustration of where such politics can lead. Colgan emphasizes the Jacobin Terror and the willingness to sacrifice particular people in the name of a supposedly universal revolutionary good. Rousseau’s influence is therefore interpreted less through the complexity of republican political theory and more through the danger that collective sovereignty can subordinate individuals.
German thinkers extend that political trajectory. Johann Gottfried Herder emphasizes distinctive peoples and cultures; Johann Gottlieb Fichte links education and national identity; Hegel describes individuals as participants in larger historical and ethical structures. Colgan sees in them a growing willingness to define human beings through collective belonging rather than through universal individual autonomy.
Hegel receives special attention because freedom in Hegelian political philosophy is not simply the absence of restraint. Individuals become genuinely free within ethical and social institutions through which rational life is realized. Colgan interprets this as dangerous because it allows the state or historical community to claim an authority greater than the particular person.
From these thinkers, the guide extracts recurring collectivist themes: hostility or suspicion toward radical individualism, willingness to use education politically, preference for strong communal institutions, moral elevation of collective identity, and readiness to subordinate personal choice to historical, national, class, or social purposes. Different thinkers embody these themes differently, but the guide treats them as a recognizable anti-liberal family.
Left and Right Collectivism in the Twentieth Century
Colgan’s next move is deliberately provocative. Collectivism, he argues, does not belong exclusively to the political Left. Twentieth-century nationalist and fascist movements also rejected liberal individualism, free-market capitalism, cosmopolitanism, and the idea that society should primarily protect the independent choices of individuals.
German figures such as Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck appear in this part of the narrative. Colgan emphasizes currents of anti-capitalism, nationalism, cultural pessimism, militarism, and hostility toward liberal Western modernity that fed into the intellectual environment in which National Socialism emerged.
His comparison does not require claiming that fascism and Marxism are identical. Their doctrines, class theories, racial ideas, international orientations, and political goals differ profoundly. Colgan’s narrower point is that both can be understood as forms of collectivism opposed to liberal capitalism and willing to subordinate individuals to supposedly higher collective purposes.
World War II radically changes this landscape. Fascism and National Socialism are defeated and morally discredited. Soviet communism survives, expands its geopolitical power, and becomes the principal ideological rival of Western liberal capitalism. By the middle of the twentieth century, collectivism remains politically powerful, but its surviving revolutionary center lies predominantly on the socialist Left.
That sets up the book’s next question. If socialism is now the major anti-capitalist alternative, what happens when socialism itself begins to fail according to its own stated standards?
The Crisis of Socialism and the New Left’s Change of Strategy
Chapter 5 is the political counterpart to the earlier discussion of Kant. Just as Kant supposedly creates the philosophical problem that eventually makes postmodern skepticism possible, the practical crisis of socialism creates the political problem that allegedly makes postmodernism necessary. This is the hinge on which the second half of the entire book turns.
Colgan’s argument is not merely that communist governments committed atrocities or managed economies badly. He claims that repeated failures created an intellectual crisis for socialist thinkers whose political commitments survived even when the empirical and economic arguments originally offered for socialism became harder to sustain.
Failed Predictions, Repression, and 1956
Colgan begins by returning to the expectations attributed to classical Marxism. Capitalism should become increasingly unstable, wealth should concentrate into fewer hands, workers should become more desperate, and class polarization should create revolutionary conditions. Instead, he argues, many capitalist societies produced expanding middle classes, rising consumption, greater social mobility, and political institutions capable of incorporating workers without revolutionary overthrow.
When socialist revolutions occurred, they often did so under conditions very different from those Marx’s industrial analysis appeared to predict. Russia was still heavily agrarian when the Bolsheviks seized power. Lenin therefore relied on a disciplined revolutionary vanguard rather than waiting for mature capitalism to produce a spontaneous proletarian revolution. Mao’s China pushed the revolutionary model even further toward an overwhelmingly peasant society.
For Colgan, this matters because the political practice of socialism begins diverging from its theoretical expectations almost immediately. Instead of workers collectively taking control through spontaneous class consciousness, centralized parties claim to act on their behalf. Political elites acquire extraordinary powers on the grounds that they understand the historical interests of the people better than ordinary citizens do.
The economic results become part of the indictment. Colgan describes shortages, inefficient allocation, weak productivity, and the redirection of enormous resources toward political and military goals. These failures are accompanied by coercion, censorship, imprisonment, forced labor, famine, purges, and mass killing under Stalinist and other communist governments.
One of the book’s tables uses R. J. Rummel’s research on “democide” to contrast deaths caused by governments under democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian political systems. The table’s rhetorical function is unmistakable: Colgan wants to show that totalitarian states killed vastly more of their own citizens than democratic governments did, making political freedom not merely a matter of prosperity but of survival.
The crisis becomes especially acute in 1956. Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin exposed crimes that many sympathizers in the West had ignored, denied, or rationalized. In the same year, Soviet forces violently suppressed the Hungarian uprising. The U.S. Office of the Historian’s account of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the 1956 crisis illustrates why the moment had such profound international consequences for the communist movement.
For Colgan, 1956 is both historical event and intellectual turning point. Once Stalinist crimes can no longer be dismissed as capitalist propaganda, socialists face an increasingly difficult choice. They can abandon socialism, redefine what counts as socialism, or alter the standards by which capitalism and socialism are judged.
From Need to Equality, Identity, Environment, and Marcuse
Colgan argues that much of the postwar Left chose adaptation rather than abandonment. One response was to insist that Soviet-style regimes were not examples of “true socialism.” That distinction could have legitimate theoretical grounds, since socialist traditions were always diverse, but in Colgan’s narrative it also becomes a way to insulate the ideal from unfavorable empirical evidence.
A second change concerns the moral standard used to criticize capitalism. Earlier socialist rhetoric often focused on absolute material deprivation: capitalism supposedly failed because workers lacked what they needed to live decently. Rising living standards complicated that argument. If even comparatively poor citizens in capitalist societies acquired better housing, food, health, consumer goods, and opportunities over time, then poverty could increasingly be described in relative terms.
Equality therefore becomes more important than simple need. The existence of wealth at the top can be criticized even when living conditions at the bottom improve. Colgan interprets this as a shift from asking whether people possess enough to asking why some possess substantially more than others. Large corporations and concentrations of wealth become central targets even when economic growth has raised general living standards.
Environmental criticism provides another route. Industrial capitalism can be attacked not only for failing to produce enough wealth but for producing too much of the wrong kind. Pollution, resource consumption, technology, consumerism, and ecological damage allow abundance itself to become morally suspect. Where older Marxism celebrated productive development as the foundation for a future socialist society, some later radical movements become skeptical of industrial growth.
Identity also becomes more prominent. If the industrial working class is not becoming revolutionary, political energy may be found among racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, colonized peoples, students, or other marginalized groups. Class struggle does not disappear, but the category of oppression expands.
Herbert Marcuse occupies a pivotal position in Colgan’s story. Marcuse argues that prosperous advanced industrial societies can incorporate people so effectively that material comfort itself becomes a source of political conformity. Consumer abundance pacifies opposition by encouraging people to identify their needs with the existing social order. The worker who owns a car, television, or home may be materially better off while becoming, from Marcuse’s perspective, less able to imagine radical transformation.
This allows Colgan to explain how prosperity can cease to count as a decisive argument for capitalism. If rising consumption can itself be interpreted as ideological domination, then the old empirical comparison between capitalist abundance and socialist scarcity loses some political force. Critics can argue that the system’s success at producing goods is part of the problem.
The book’s “Evolution of Socialist Strategies” diagram summarizes this entire history as a branching sequence. Classical Marxism waits either for workers to revolt or for capitalism to collapse economically. When those expectations fail, revolutionary movements turn toward intellectual vanguards, Leninist or Maoist strategies, changed moral standards, environmentalism, identity-based politics, altered epistemology, or direct violence. Postmodernism appears in the chart as one of the intellectual responses available after older socialist strategies cease to work.
The chart is perhaps the clearest visual expression of Hicks and Colgan’s political thesis. Postmodernism does not appear merely because philosophers independently became interested in language, interpretation, or skepticism. It appears in the same historical space in which the radical Left must find a way to preserve its political commitments after the earlier Marxist case has been badly damaged.
Postmodernism as Strategy
The final chapter brings the philosophical and political halves of the argument together. Colgan now asks whether postmodern epistemology is simply the unintended endpoint of centuries of philosophical skepticism or whether it also serves a political purpose. Language becomes the central battlefield because, once objective foundations are denied, persuasion can replace demonstration.
Deconstruction illustrates the point in Colgan’s account. Words do not possess meaning by standing in a simple one-to-one relationship with independently given reality. Their meanings depend on relationships with other words, differences within linguistic systems, inherited conceptual oppositions, and contexts that can shift. Colgan interprets this instability as undermining the possibility of fixed meanings and thereby weakening the authority of arguments that appeal to supposedly neutral facts.
Rorty appears as a more moderate version of the same transformation. If language is a human tool rather than a mirror of nature, people cannot step outside every vocabulary and compare their descriptions with reality from a completely neutral position. They inherit and create languages through which they pursue purposes, make distinctions, and organize social life.
Colgan then gives this epistemology a political interpretation. In ancient political philosophy, Thrasymachus famously identifies justice with the interest of the stronger. Colgan’s postmodern variation reverses the moral direction: if language and truth claims normally serve existing power, then groups without power can use rhetorical disruption to challenge the dominant order. Language becomes a means of struggle rather than a transparent vehicle for describing reality.
That argument leads to the contradiction Colgan considers most revealing. If truth is relative, why should postmodernism itself be accepted as true? If all cultures possess equally valid perspectives, why is Western culture treated as uniquely oppressive? If moral values are social constructions, why should egalitarianism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, or liberation possess universal moral authority? If tolerance is a central virtue, why tolerate movements accused of perpetuating domination?
The book considers several possible answers. Perhaps postmodernists genuinely believe the relativist epistemology and simply fail to notice its tension with their politics. Perhaps political commitments come first and philosophical relativism is adopted instrumentally because it helps undermine rival claims. Or perhaps the contradiction itself reflects a deeper psychological condition in which consistency matters less than resentment against existing hierarchies.
The Sokal affair becomes evidence for Colgan’s suspicion about the use of scientific language. Physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical article using fashionable theoretical vocabulary to the journal Social Text, which published it before Sokal revealed the hoax. Colgan treats the episode as an illustration of what can happen when ideological agreement and sophisticated rhetoric are allowed to substitute for disciplinary rigor.
Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment supplies the psychological model for the darker version of the thesis. Slave morality, in Nietzsche’s genealogy, transforms weakness into moral superiority by condemning the qualities associated with strength, confidence, achievement, independence, or success. Colgan suggests that some postmodern attacks on wealth, reason, beauty, knowledge, civilization, and individual achievement can be understood through a similar inversion.
He extends the theme into art. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Dadaist provocations, and Robert Rauschenberg’s destruction or transformation of existing artistic work become symbols of an aesthetic culture increasingly willing to treat negation itself as creative achievement. The point is less an art-historical argument than a rhetorical one: Colgan sees parallel acts of dismantling inherited standards across philosophy, politics, and culture.
Shakespeare’s Iago becomes the chapter’s final metaphor. Iago destroys not primarily through physical power but by manipulating interpretation, suggestion, suspicion, and language. Colgan similarly portrays postmodernism as a strategy capable of weakening a civilization by undermining confidence in the standards through which people distinguish truth from falsehood and achievement from oppression.
The book does not conclude by recommending a return to premodern hierarchy or religious authority. Colgan instead calls for a renewed Enlightenment: confidence in a knowable reality, reason, science, individual liberty, equal rights, free speech, material progress, and institutions capable of correcting mistakes without abandoning objectivity. Postmodernism is therefore presented not simply as an intellectual error but as a threat to the epistemological conditions on which liberal civilization depends.
The Book’s Two-Part Causal Thesis
The most important contribution of Pocket Guide to Postmodernism is not any individual interpretation of Kant, Marx, Heidegger, or Foucault. It is the attempt to join two different historical stories into one causal explanation.
The philosophical chain runs approximately as follows. Enlightenment thinkers build confidence in reason, objective reality, science, and individual judgment. Kant limits knowledge to reality as structured through human cognition. Later German thinkers radicalize the resulting gap between consciousness and reality. Continental philosophy turns toward irrationalism, language, historicity, and critiques of metaphysics, while Anglo-American philosophy discovers its own limits through skepticism, logical positivism, paradigms, and anti-foundationalism. By the late twentieth century, the intellectual foundations of objective knowledge have supposedly been sufficiently weakened for postmodern relativism to become plausible.
The political chain begins elsewhere. Rousseau challenges civilization, property, inequality, and individualism. Marx transforms the collectivist challenge into a theory of capitalism, class exploitation, and historical revolution. Socialist movements gain enormous political influence, but twentieth-century communist experiments repeatedly produce economic failure and political repression. Capitalist societies prove more resilient and prosperous than Marxist expectations suggested.
At that point, the chains converge. Radical socialists remain committed to overturning liberal capitalism but can no longer rely as confidently on economic prediction, proletarian revolution, or the practical record of socialist regimes. A philosophy that questions objective standards of truth and shifts attention toward discourse, power, identity, and competing perspectives becomes politically useful. Socialism no longer needs to defeat capitalism exclusively on capitalism’s preferred terrain of productivity, prosperity, individual rights, or empirical comparison because those standards themselves can be criticized as expressions of a particular historical order.
The socialist-strategy flowchart makes that convergence unusually explicit. Postmodernism is not depicted as the inevitable result of Marxism, nor is Marxism depicted as the sole precursor to every postmodern idea. Instead, postmodernism appears as one strategic branch emerging after repeated failures of earlier revolutionary expectations.
This is a more interesting thesis than the caricature that “postmodernists are Marxists who stopped believing in truth.” Colgan is proposing a theory of intellectual selection. Certain philosophical tools become attractive because they solve political problems that earlier frameworks cannot solve. Ideas survive not only because thinkers believe them to be theoretically correct but because they make particular forms of criticism possible.
The difficulty lies in proving the transition. Intellectual influence, temporal succession, political sympathy, and strategic usefulness are not the same thing as causal motivation. To show that socialism’s failure made postmodernism “necessary,” the book would need stronger evidence that postmodern thinkers adopted particular epistemological positions because those positions rescued political commitments threatened by socialist failure.
Colgan often establishes correlation more successfully than causation. Many important twentieth-century French thinkers were politically on the Left. Several passed through Marxist organizations or environments. The crisis of orthodox communism profoundly affected European intellectual life. Postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers frequently criticized capitalism, hierarchy, institutions, normalization, colonialism, and conventional forms of authority.
Those facts make the question legitimate. They do not by themselves establish the answer. The usefulness of Colgan’s thesis lies partly in forcing readers to ask how philosophical arguments interact with political commitments; its weakness is the tendency to treat a plausible interaction as a demonstrated historical mechanism.
How Convincing Is the Philosophical Genealogy?
Colgan’s genealogy works rhetorically because each thinker appears to pass a problem to the next. Kant limits knowledge, Hegel and Heidegger deepen the break with ordinary rationalism, twentieth-century philosophy loses confidence in foundations, and postmodernists inherit the consequences. The sequence is easy to understand because it reduces a very complicated history to a few decisive movements.
The danger is that philosophers are judged primarily according to what later thinkers can be made to inherit from them. That can obscure what each philosopher was trying to solve, which distinctions mattered inside the original system, and whether the alleged successor actually accepted the earlier argument. The result is often intellectually suggestive but historically too neat.
Kant: Critique of Reason or Defense of Its Limits?
Kant is the most important test because the entire philosophical genealogy depends heavily on him. If Kant genuinely destroys the possibility of objective knowledge, then Colgan’s later story possesses a strong beginning. If Kant instead limits reason partly in order to explain how objective knowledge is possible, the genealogy becomes much less straightforward.
Colgan is right about an essential feature of Kant: cognition does not simply copy reality as though the mind were a passive camera. Human experience is structured through forms and categories that make an ordered world intelligible. Kant also distinguishes appearances from things as they are independently of the conditions under which human beings experience them.
The disagreement concerns what follows. Colgan interprets that framework as severing the knower from reality. If we know only appearances shaped through human cognitive structures, he argues, we cannot know things as they really are. Later subjectivism and relativism can then emerge from the gap.
Yet contemporary scholarship on Kant’s transcendental idealism presents a much more complicated picture. Kant’s project is not simply an argument that consciousness traps people inside subjective representations. He is trying to explain how objectively valid experience is possible at all, how mathematics and natural science can possess necessity, and why shared rational structures allow human beings to make claims about an empirical world that are more than private impressions.
This distinction matters enormously. Saying that human knowledge operates through conditions of cognition does not automatically mean every individual constructs a different reality. Kant’s categories are not personal preferences that vary arbitrarily from one observer to another. They function as universal conditions of human experience within his system.
There is a legitimate argument about whether Kant ultimately succeeds. Philosophers have disagreed for more than two centuries about the status of things in themselves, the relation between transcendental idealism and empirical realism, and whether Kant preserves or destabilizes traditional realism. What is much harder to justify is treating Colgan’s anti-realist interpretation as though it were simply what Kant proved.
The dispute appears even among critics broadly sympathetic to Hicks’s larger project. Steven M. Sanders’s philosophical review of Explaining Postmodernism praises aspects of Hicks’s clarity and ambition while acknowledging serious controversy surrounding the interpretation of Kant. The disagreement is therefore not a minor objection raised only by defenders of postmodernism; it concerns the historical foundation of Hicks and Colgan’s entire genealogy.
Colgan’s account remains valuable if stated more modestly. Kant undeniably transforms debates about mind, reality, objectivity, and the limits of reason, and later thinkers could radicalize problems opened by that transformation. But “Kant made postmodernism possible” is a historical interpretation, not a neutral summary of Kantian philosophy.
Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Rorty
The same problem becomes more pronounced when the book moves into twentieth-century Continental thought. Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Rorty share certain family resemblances: skepticism toward traditional foundationalism, suspicion of timeless philosophical systems, attention to language and historical context, and rejection of the simple idea that knowledge is a transparent mirror of reality. Those similarities justify comparison.
They do not justify treating the thinkers as interchangeable versions of one doctrine. Heidegger is primarily concerned with Being, temporality, human existence, and the history of Western metaphysics. Derrida develops deconstruction through close engagements with texts, conceptual hierarchies, presence, difference, and the instability generated within philosophical systems themselves. Foucault studies historically specific forms of knowledge, discipline, institutions, government, subject formation, and power. Lyotard analyzes legitimation, knowledge, and the declining credibility of grand narratives. Rorty develops an American neo-pragmatism skeptical of representational epistemology.
The differences become especially important when Colgan translates all of them into the language of relativism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Derrida shows that deconstruction is more complicated than the proposition that words have no meaning. Derrida’s work examines how conceptual oppositions depend on exclusions, tensions, and differences that prevent final closure. Meaning can be unstable or context-dependent without becoming completely arbitrary.
Foucault creates a similar problem for Colgan’s summary. Foucault’s analyses of power and knowledge do not reduce neatly to the slogan that truth is nothing but power. Foucault investigates how institutions, disciplines, practices, and historically specific regimes of knowledge help produce the categories through which subjects and objects are understood. Power affects what can be said, studied, normalized, punished, or treated as authoritative, but that is a more specific claim than saying factual reality disappears.
Lyotard is particularly awkward for the political genealogy. His famous suspicion of “grand narratives” certainly attacks modern projects that claim universal historical legitimacy. Yet Lyotard’s own political development included a break with Marxism. Marxism itself became one of the totalizing explanatory narratives he learned to distrust. That does not prove postmodernism had nothing to do with socialist politics, but it complicates the idea that postmodernism simply functions as a strategy for saving socialism.
Rorty comes closest to confirming some of Colgan’s concerns because he explicitly rejects the traditional project of grounding knowledge in a correspondence relation between representations and reality. He treats vocabularies as human tools embedded in practices rather than as mirrors of nature. Yet Rorty’s place within pragmatic theories of truth still cannot be reduced to the claim that any belief is as good as any other belief. Practical consequences, shared justification, inquiry, criticism, and social conversation continue to matter even after foundational certainty is abandoned.
Colgan therefore identifies a genuine twentieth-century movement away from classical foundationalist epistemology. His overreach lies in treating that movement as sufficiently uniform to support one political explanation. Anti-foundationalism, historicism, pragmatism, deconstruction, genealogy, and postmodernism overlap, but they are not synonyms.
Kuhn and the Problem of Scientific Relativism
Thomas Kuhn is another revealing case because The Structure of Scientific Revolutions unquestionably challenged a simple picture of science as the steady accumulation of neutral facts. Scientific communities operate within paradigms that determine important problems, legitimate methods, exemplary solutions, and standards of explanation. Revolutions can transform those frameworks so deeply that competing paradigms are not always judged through a single timeless vocabulary.
That idea can sound relativistic. If evidence is interpreted within paradigms and standards themselves change historically, how can one say that science moves closer to truth rather than merely replacing one worldview with another?
Colgan emphasizes that danger, but scholarship on Kuhn also stresses his resistance to extreme relativism. Kuhn did not claim that scientific theories are chosen arbitrarily or that astronomy and astrology become equally valid because standards are historically situated. Empirical success, problem-solving ability, predictive power, coherence, and scientific judgment continue to constrain theory choice.
Kuhn therefore weakens a naïve image of perfectly neutral science without reducing science to political preference. Colgan is justified in showing how Kuhn could be appropriated by stronger relativists, but intellectual influence must again be distinguished from what the original philosopher actually argued.
Is Postmodernism Really a Strategy of the Socialist Left?
The political argument can be separated into three claims of increasing difficulty. First, many thinkers associated with postmodernism or post-structuralism were politically on the Left. Second, the crisis of Marxism and Soviet communism shaped the intellectual world from which those thinkers emerged. Third, postmodern epistemology was adopted because it provided the radical Left with a replacement strategy after socialism failed.
The first claim is broadly defensible. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and many of their contemporaries operated in intellectual environments deeply influenced by Marxism, anti-colonialism, revolutionary politics, and critiques of capitalism. Their political relationships to Marxism differed substantially, but radical-Left concerns were undeniably part of the landscape.
The second claim is also important. The revelations about Stalinism, the suppression of Hungary, the Sino-Soviet split, the decline of orthodox Communist Party authority, decolonization, the events of 1968, and dissatisfaction with established Marxist organizations helped transform European radical politics. Anyone trying to understand French intellectual life after World War II would be making a mistake by treating that political crisis as irrelevant.
The third claim is much harder. It requires more than showing that postmodern thinkers were Left-wing or that Marxism was in crisis. One would need to demonstrate that characteristic philosophical positions were selected because they performed the political work of preserving socialist commitments after older socialist arguments failed.
Some individual biographies actually complicate that story. Lyotard did not move from Marxist certainty to postmodernism in order simply to protect Marxism. His skepticism toward grand narratives included skepticism toward Marxism’s own philosophy of history. Foucault likewise repeatedly changed his political alignments and often resisted the explanatory authority of orthodox Marxism. The relation between post-structuralism and Marxism therefore contains rupture as well as continuity.
Postmodern thought can also undermine socialist claims as easily as capitalist ones. Classical Marxism relies on sweeping assertions about class structure, historical development, human emancipation, economic exploitation, and the direction of social change. A radical skepticism about grand historical narratives, universal human subjects, and deterministic theories of history threatens Marxism’s foundations rather than automatically strengthening them.
The distinction between political outcome and philosophical intention is equally important. A theory may later be useful to activists for reasons its original author did not anticipate. Foucault’s concepts can be applied to contemporary disputes over identity or institutional power without proving that he invented those concepts to produce those political applications. Derrida’s deconstruction can influence political criticism without establishing that deconstruction was originally created as a tactical substitute for failed economic Marxism.
Colgan is strongest when he describes an intellectual ecology rather than a conspiracy or conscious plan. Once faith in orthodox socialism weakens, radical politics searches for other forms of critique. Class becomes one axis among several; culture becomes more important; institutions and discourse receive closer attention; universal claims are examined for concealed exclusions; marginalized identities become politically significant. Postmodern or post-structuralist theories can flourish in that environment because they offer tools suited to those questions.
The difficulty comes when “suited to those questions” becomes “invented to rescue socialism.” The latter requires evidence of motive and causation that Pocket Guide to Postmodernism does not provide in sufficient depth.
The book nevertheless identifies a tension that deserves serious consideration. Certain radical political movements make very strong moral assertions while simultaneously drawing on traditions suspicious of universal foundations. If objective moral truth is treated as impossible, the authority of claims about justice, equality, liberation, or oppression requires another explanation. Colgan is right to ask how those positions coexist.
The answer need not be hypocrisy or cynical strategy. A thinker can reject absolute metaphysical foundations while defending moral commitments through pragmatism, democratic agreement, human vulnerability, historical argument, institutional consequences, or other non-foundational approaches. Whether those alternatives succeed is a philosophical question. Colgan too quickly treats the absence of his preferred foundation as evidence that no coherent foundation remains.
Evidence, Framing, and What the Pocket Guide Leaves Out
The book’s institutional setting is relevant because its argument is openly evaluative. The Atlas Society identifies itself with Objectivism and with values such as reason, individualism, achievement, ethical self-interest, and political liberty. Colgan’s critique should therefore be read as part of a broader defense of Enlightenment rationalism and liberal individualism rather than as an ideologically neutral encyclopedia entry.
That need not count against the book. Every intellectual history is written from assumptions about what questions matter and which distinctions are significant. The problem arises only if readers mistake a strongly interpretive genealogy for the uncontested structure of the subject.
Colgan’s dependence on Hicks further narrows the frame. The guide is exceptionally successful at condensing Explaining Postmodernism, but that means it inherits the source book’s controversial decisions. Kant becomes the major epistemological turning point; Rousseau becomes a crucial political ancestor; later German philosophy becomes increasingly anti-rational; the New Left reacts to socialism’s failures; and postmodernism emerges where those developments meet.
Compression intensifies selection. A pocket guide cannot provide extensive primary-text interpretation of Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Rorty, Marx, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kuhn, and Marcuse while also covering several centuries of political history. Colgan therefore chooses representative claims and quotations that make the causal line visible. The trade-off is that readers rarely encounter the strongest counterinterpretation before the narrative moves onward.
The Rummel table illustrates the evidential problem. Its purpose is to show that totalitarian regimes have been extraordinarily dangerous to the populations under their control, a conclusion supported broadly by the history of twentieth-century dictatorship. But numerical estimates of state killing are methodologically difficult, and R. J. Rummel’s work on democide has itself received scholarly criticism. A careful reader should therefore distinguish the well-established reality of enormous mass killing under totalitarian governments from the precision of one particular comparative dataset.
The Sokal affair presents a different evidential limitation. Sokal successfully exposed poor editorial judgment and the susceptibility of at least one intellectual environment to impressive-sounding scientific rhetoric aligned with fashionable theory. The hoax remains a legitimate warning about obscurantism and interdisciplinary overreach. What it cannot establish by itself is that postmodern philosophy in general has no substantive arguments or that every critic of scientific objectivity misunderstands science.
Colgan also tends to move rapidly between philosophical claims and cultural manifestations. A technical argument about epistemology may be followed by a controversy over gender, race, art, capitalism, or free speech. Those connections can be illuminating, but they sometimes make influence appear more direct than it is. Similar political vocabulary can emerge from different theoretical traditions, and activists who use terms such as “discourse,” “oppression,” or “social construction” need not share the complete philosophical commitments attributed to canonical postmodern thinkers.
One revealing minor detail appears on the title page itself, which describes Hicks’s book as Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau and Foucault. The correct title is from Rousseau to Foucault. The error is only a copyediting mistake and has no bearing on the book’s argument, but it reinforces that this is a compact popular guide rather than a scholarly critical edition.
More significant are the thinkers and distinctions that receive little room. There is limited treatment of why postwar philosophers found traditional metaphysics unsatisfactory beyond the claim that earlier epistemology had collapsed. The historical experiences that made universal narratives politically suspect—world war, fascism, colonialism, bureaucratic domination, and the failures of revolutionary states—appear primarily when they support the book’s anti-collectivist interpretation rather than as possible independent reasons for philosophical change.
The result is asymmetric. Enlightenment liberalism is generally represented through its aspirations toward freedom, science, prosperity, and universal rights, while postmodernism and collectivism are often represented through their most destructive implications. Colonialism, racism, empire, exclusions from citizenship, and the use of supposedly universal categories to justify unequal institutions receive less attention as internal problems within modernity.
A more balanced account would not require abandoning Colgan’s defense of reason. It would require admitting that critics of modernity sometimes responded to genuine failures rather than simply resenting achievement or searching for rhetorical weapons. Postmodern arguments can be wrong or exaggerated while still originating in problems worth taking seriously.
Style, Structure, and the Pocket-Guide Format
As a piece of explanatory writing, Pocket Guide to Postmodernism is highly efficient. Colgan consistently asks readers to see relationships rather than memorize isolated philosophers. Each chapter produces the problem that the next chapter is designed to solve, which gives an abstract intellectual history unusual momentum.
The diagrams are especially effective. The comparison between premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism gives readers a conceptual map before the historical argument begins. The Enlightenment Vision chart shows exactly what Colgan believes hangs together: reason, science, individualism, capitalism, freedom, prosperity, health, and progress.
Later diagrams perform the same function for the negative genealogy. The post-Kantian table divides nineteenth-century philosophy into branches moving away from straightforward realism. The Russell table dramatizes the inability of modern philosophy to prove several foundational assumptions. The socialist-strategy flowchart transforms decades of political history into a sequence of failed approaches and ideological adaptations.
That visual discipline explains why the book is memorable. Readers can finish it with a clear picture of the argument, which is far more than can be said for many introductions to philosophical movements. Colgan rarely loses the reader in terminology for its own sake, and he repeatedly translates difficult ideas into ordinary questions about what people can know, how societies should be organized, and why intellectual movements change.
The same structural clarity also creates the book’s most persistent distortion. A diagram needs categories, arrows, and endpoints. Intellectual history is usually messier. A thinker can influence another thinker who rejects half of the original system; political movements can borrow language without sharing philosophical assumptions; the same philosophical criticism can support incompatible politics; and developments presented as sequential can occur simultaneously for unrelated reasons.
Colgan’s rhetoric reinforces the simplification. Postmodern thinkers are frequently described through adversarial language involving destruction, domination, manipulation, contradiction, or resentment, while Enlightenment values are associated with discovery, freedom, achievement, prosperity, and progress. The moral orientation is never difficult to detect.
That directness makes the book engaging, but it sometimes means conclusions arrive before opposing interpretations have received equal development. A skeptical reader may feel that the historical narrative has been arranged to produce a verdict already contained in the opening contrast between modernism and postmodernism.
The best way to read the pocket-guide format is therefore as a map rather than a territory. The book can show a reader what Hicks and Colgan think the decisive connections are. Those connections then need to be tested against the philosophers themselves and against histories written from different perspectives.
Critical Review: What the Book Gets Right and Where It Overreaches
The fairest evaluation of Pocket Guide to Postmodernism depends on what readers expect it to be. As a concise guide to Stephen Hicks’s argument, it succeeds remarkably well. As a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism, it is substantially less successful.
Its greatest achievement is explanatory architecture. Many readers encounter postmodernism as a disconnected collection of terms—deconstruction, social construction, discourse, power, relativism, identity, language games, anti-foundationalism—without understanding why anyone might think those ideas belong together. Colgan supplies a coherent answer. Whether or not one ultimately accepts it, the reader knows exactly what the proposed connection is.
The book also refuses to treat philosophical ideas as isolated academic exercises. It asks how theories of knowledge influence politics and how political experiences influence which theories seem attractive. That is a valuable instinct. Intellectual history becomes much richer when epistemology, ethics, institutions, economic systems, and political commitments are allowed to interact.
Its defense of reason is similarly serious rather than cosmetic. Colgan recognizes that arguments over objectivity are not merely technical disputes among professors. Legal judgments, scientific inquiry, journalism, historical interpretation, political debate, and everyday disagreement all depend on assumptions about whether evidence can constrain belief. A society that completely abandons the possibility of publicly accessible standards would indeed face profound problems.
The book is also right that some versions of relativist rhetoric can become self-undermining. A claim that every truth is merely relative cannot easily exempt itself from relativization. A critique that treats all universal values as disguised exercises of power must explain why its own values deserve authority. Political movements that invoke skepticism selectively—doubting inconvenient evidence while expressing certainty about their own moral conclusions—deserve criticism.
Colgan is also persuasive when warning that prosperity does not automatically end ideological conflict. A political philosophy can redefine its standards when conditions change. Rising wealth may shift debate from absolute deprivation toward inequality, environmental cost, cultural recognition, or political power. Those developments are real phenomena even if one rejects Colgan’s explanation for them.
The book’s deepest weakness is that its causal history frequently outruns its evidence. Kant becomes responsible for a break between mind and reality that many Kant scholars would describe very differently. Heidegger becomes primarily a transmitter of irrationalism. Kuhn becomes a step toward scientific relativism despite his resistance to crude relativist conclusions. Derrida becomes associated with the dissolution of meaning, Foucault with truth as power, and Lyotard with a post-Marxist strategy even when their individual projects resist those reductions.
This problem is not merely a matter of missing detail. The thesis depends on the details. If Kant is not best understood as abandoning objectivity, the philosophical genealogy changes. If post-structuralism partly emerges through rejection of Marxist grand narratives rather than an attempt to rescue socialism, the political genealogy changes. If anti-foundationalism does not entail arbitrary relativism, the bridge between postmodern philosophy and political opportunism becomes weaker.
The book’s treatment of motive is therefore its riskiest move. It is one thing to say that a philosophical method is politically useful. It is another to say that the method was adopted because it was politically useful. The latter claim requires evidence about intellectual intention, historical transmission, and conscious or unconscious selection that a pocket guide cannot establish merely through ideological sequence.
The psychological explanation through Nietzschean resentment is even more difficult. Resentment may certainly influence political behavior, and people sometimes rationalize envy or failure through moral condemnation of successful rivals. But once a disagreement is explained primarily by the opponent’s psychology, philosophical engagement can become unnecessary. The critic no longer has to prove that the argument is false because the argument has been diagnosed as a symptom.
That danger applies in both directions. A postmodernist can dismiss a defender of liberal capitalism as merely reproducing structures of privilege. An Objectivist can dismiss a critic of capitalism as motivated by resentment against achievement. Both moves may occasionally describe something real, but neither substitutes for demonstrating that the underlying claim is wrong.
Colgan’s account of socialism is more persuasive when it concerns concrete historical outcomes than when it attempts to turn those outcomes into a comprehensive explanation of later philosophy. The catastrophic repression and economic failures of multiple communist regimes are undeniable and deserve to shape any evaluation of twentieth-century socialism. Marxist predictions and revolutionary strategies also encountered developments they had not adequately anticipated.
Yet socialism’s failure does not automatically explain postmodernism. Intellectual movements do not need to belong to the same political project simply because they emerge from the wreckage of earlier ones. One can reject Soviet communism, capitalism, classical Marxism, Enlightenment foundationalism, and postmodern relativism simultaneously. The philosophical landscape contains more possibilities than the book’s binary structure usually allows.
The book’s treatment of liberal modernity is correspondingly generous. The Enlightenment absolutely deserves credit for traditions of scientific inquiry, religious toleration, constitutionalism, individual rights, and challenges to inherited hierarchy. But modern Western societies also produced imperial domination, racial pseudoscience, exclusionary citizenship, exploitative institutions, and bureaucratic forms of coercion while invoking supposedly universal standards. Critics did not invent those contradictions.
A stronger defense of the Enlightenment would confront those failures directly and argue that reason, universal rights, and open institutions contain resources for correcting them. That case is more persuasive than implying that major critiques of Western modernity primarily arise from hostility to reason or achievement.
As intellectual history, then, Pocket Guide to Postmodernism is too schematic to be definitive. As polemical intellectual cartography, it is excellent. It gives readers a strong map, identifies real tensions, poses worthwhile questions, and makes an ambitious causal theory unusually easy to grasp.
That distinction should determine the final verdict. Readers who encounter the book as “what postmodernists believe” will receive an incomplete and often slanted picture. Readers who encounter it as “how Stephen Hicks and Andrew Colgan explain postmodernism” will receive a concise, lucid, and intellectually provocative argument worth examining.
Is Pocket Guide to Postmodernism Worth Reading?
Pocket Guide to Postmodernism is worth reading, particularly for someone who wants to understand the Hicks/Objectivist critique without beginning with a longer philosophical study. Colgan writes clearly, organizes an enormous amount of material into a memorable sequence, and demonstrates why arguments about knowledge can have consequences far beyond philosophy departments.
It should not be the only book a reader uses to understand postmodernism. The safest way to read it is alongside independent treatments of the thinkers it criticizes, especially where the argument depends heavily on Kant, Kuhn, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, or Rorty. Doing so does not make Colgan’s questions disappear. It makes them sharper.
The book’s most durable question is ultimately more valuable than its most sweeping answer. Philosophical theories do not develop in political isolation, and political movements do not operate without assumptions about truth, evidence, human nature, morality, and power. Asking how those levels interact is essential.
Colgan’s mistake is to make the interaction too linear. The failure of socialist regimes profoundly affected twentieth-century intellectual life, and the crisis of philosophical foundationalism profoundly affected theories of knowledge. But turning those two histories into a single explanation of postmodernism requires stronger evidence and more differentiation than a pocket guide supplies.
Read on those terms, the book succeeds. It is not a neutral map of postmodernism, and it is not the final word on its philosophical ancestry. It is a compact, forceful statement of one major critique: that abandoning confidence in reason and objective standards leaves intellectual and political life dangerously vulnerable to power, rhetoric, and ideological convenience. Even readers who reject much of Colgan’s genealogy can benefit from confronting that challenge carefully rather than dismissing it.
Last Updated on October 5, 2026 by Aseem Gupta