| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Keith Jenkins. Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity. New York: Routledge. 1999. Pp. x, 232.

Postmodernism is definitely beginning to feel old hat. These days in Paris, it is the critical sociology developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, among others—increasingly in political opposition to neo-liberal economics—that is making the intellectual running. Richard Rorty, the most influential popularizer of postmodernism in the English-speaking world, has turned of late against his pupils, criticizing them for an obsession with cultural politics that has blinded them to the growth in social and economic inequality over the past twenty years. 1

Maybe because postmodernism seems to have reached Anglophone historians comparatively late, the debate over its historiographic implications has had a bit more life to it. Certainly Keith Jenkins has done his best to keep it going in a series of books of which this is the latest. Jenkins is an enthusiast for postmodernism. He says "we are lucky, we late twentieth-century lesser mortals, to witness" the deeds of "Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, et al.," whom he compares to the "intellectual giants" of the Western tradition such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. . . .

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