Remember postmodernism? When I was a student in the 1990s and 2000s, the very French philosophies of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were all the intellectual rage. Everything was about subverting established paradigms and ways of thinking, showing complexity in things that seemed to be simple. In the early years of Love of All Wisdom – around 2010 – it was still influential enough that I often wrote critiques of postmodernism, especially about how it stood in the way of political change.

Much like the standpoint theory that animates the Social Justice movement, postmodernism was most popular and developed within left-wing academic humanities departments, and it was also skeptical of traditional liberal ideals like free speech. For that reason, many commentators, left and right, see the Social Justice movement as having its own roots in postmodernism. But this is a mistake.

On the left, Yascha Mounk sees Social Justice’s identity politics as rooted in postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak. (Some such thinkers were considered poststructuralist, postcolonialist or some other different “post” term, but the various posts had enough in common to be easily spoken of as “postmodern” at the time, and those commonalities are what’s important here.) On the right, Rod Dreher, with a reader of his called “PomoProf”, takes a line of reasoning that homogenized the two movements. They quote a 1993 essay about how for postmodernists “the aim of higher education should be not the pursuit of truth, which is both an illusion and an instrument of oppression, but social transformation…”

I think that all of that was very much the idea in the air in the 1990s, when Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault held sway and the humanities were very much under the spell of those theories, which reduced truth to power claims. But in the intervening years, there arose among leftists the rallying cry “Speak truth to power”: the most anti-postmodern cry possible, one that defends truth against the power to which Derrida and Foucault reduce it. In the left-wing intellectual circles I circulate in now, I hear Derrida’s and Foucault’s names less and less. And I think that lack of influence is tied to ideas circulating in the wider popular sphere.

That is: there is a huge difference in the way the movements talk about knowledge, especially knowledge of power relations. Possibly the most influential essay among the Social Justice movement, the one that brought the concept of “privilege” to widespread attention, is “White Privilege and Male Privilege” by Peggy McIntosh, a 1988 article which is often excerpted as “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh’s essay has been given to many American undergraduates as part of their orientations since at least the late 1990s, and was cited in my 2024 “racial and cultural literacy” training). And while it did circulate in postmodernism’s 1990s heyday, the underlying idea of this essay given to students is very different from the postmodern power talk that prevailed in those days among the faculty. That is, McIntosh expressed standpoint theory: a paradigm that contrasts strongly with postmodernism.

Consider a key and representative passage with which McIntosh opens the essay: “Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended.” “Male privilege” here is treated as a real, true, objective thing, in a way that does not contradict anything else in the rest of the essay (as it would in the work of a Foucauldian). On McIntosh’s account, male privilege exists whether or not anybody recognizes that it exists, and that point is important because typically men do not recognize that it exists – but women do. Moreover, the point is not an accident; women’s experience systematically allows them to see this truth in a way that men’s experience does not. It is not that men could not understand the truth of male privilege, but that they must learn about it from women, like someone learning a foreign language as an adult.

That leads us to one feature of the Social Justice movement, I think, that goes deeply neglected in most discussions of it. That is: it is not relativist. Nothing could be further from Social Justice than the idea that privileged and marginalized groups have different ideas that are incommensurable with each other. For standpoint theorists the views of the marginalized, qua marginalized, are intrinsically better, truer, than those of the privileged. That is to say that they are commensurable: they are explicitly put on the same scale, with one coming out higher in every way.

Such a view would be completely anathema to Foucault and Derrida. Foucault rejects any idea of objective truth, and Derrida objects to all binaries. In that regard, standpoint theory is exactly the opposite of both of these. The heart of standpoint theory, that which it cannot exist without, is the binaries – and they are taken as a guide to objective truth. From Lukács and Kojève through the 2010s Social Justice activists, the core idea of standpoint theory has always been that the world is fundamentally divided into two groups – a privileged group and a marginalized group – and that the nature of being marginalized is such that it gives you a better grasp of the objective truth of the situation.

For all my misgivings about standpoint theory and Social Justice, I have admired that they have ideals, coming out of a cynical 2000s age that seemed entirely lacking in them. They were interested in something nobler and more important than the usual grubby American obsession with money-making pursuits; unlike the postmodernists, they were trying to change the world for the better, as they saw it. Perhaps the most prominent change they accomplished – the acceptance of transgender identity – was indeed for the better. I don’t think postmodernists ever accomplished anything comparable, in part because they had the sort of philosophy that made accomplishing anything difficult.

Yet for all that, I have nevertheless come to miss postmodernism. Next time I’ll say more about why.