An intellectual historian and political theorist at Cambridge University has written with the following thoughts on "The Myth of the Postmodern University" from a UK perspective:
"1. It is certainly the case that in US history departments postmodernism has had a significant impact - although i think you may exaggerate the degree to which this has shaped historical scholarship (after all, history is subject to balkanization like many other fields, and some subfields have been more badly hit than others - ie, cultural history versus economic history). In the UK, which has a very lively history community, there has been far less postmodernist influence, indeed postmodernism is pretty marginal to the field as a whole. (The early 1990s saw a postmodernist scare which has largely subsided).
"2. In Classics, on the other hand, postmodernism seems to have made significant inroads. This is unsurprising given the emphasis on textual interpretation.
"3. There is no such thing as 'political science' in this country - at least if you understand political science to be a fairly coherent discipline - divided into equally coherent subfields - which takes its claim to social scientific authority (with the emphasis on science) seriously. Historically, and still today, the study of politics here draws as much on philosophy, history, and sociology, as on economics and the natural sciences. This means that po-mo, though far from dominant, has had a greater impact here than in the US - and also, that rational choice, quantitative methods, and so forth, are far more marginal in the UK than
they are in the US. Having studied politics at Cambridge, the University of London, and Columbia, the difference between the two sides of the Atlantic is very significant. Very few scholars here would describe themselves as 'political scientists' - indeed i cannot think of a single department which adopts this name; it is not irrelevant that we have departments of Government, Politics, or Political studies instead of Political Science. Philosophy (including legal and political theory) may well be 'Anglo-American,' but the study of politics is not. (Having said this, certain UK departments, notably Oxford, LSE, and Essex, appear to me modeling themselves increasingly on the US template; as far as i am concerned this is a retrograde step).
"Another issue may well be to do with the definition of postmodernism. In my own field (intellectual history/history of political thought) po-mo has had some impact, but it is not clear at all that you could call it a post-modernist zone. Both Quentin Skinner and John Pocock, for example, have registered the impact of Foucault on their work, as well as the many insights of the so-called 'linguistic turn' (which seems to trace its roots to the later Wittgenstein). Both have been central to the development of the discipline; but both have also simultaneously
distanced themselves from Derrida and his acolytes. They are prepared to
go so far, but no further. So, where does postmodernism reside?"
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In answer to the last query: postmodernism, for purposes of this discussion, resides in generalized skepticism about meaning, truth, and knowledge. Foucault is sometimes party to this, sometimes not. Much of Foucault's corpus is of a piece with the Weberian project of analyzing the "iron cage" of the modern world, though Foucault locates the features of the cage in places Weber had not thought about (e.g., in the concepts of "normality" promulgated by the human sciences). Foucault's notion of a genealogical inquiry is, insofar as it is borrowed from Nietzsche, the idea that from the present meaning or significance of some institution or practice (e.g., the prison, the insane asylum, the hospital), we can not draw reliable inferences about where it came from, about its origins--indeed, its origins might be multivarious and have meanings far different from the institution or practice as we find it today. Foucault sometimes supplements the Nietzschean idea of genealogy with postmodern skepticism about historical knowledge of origins, but this is an unfortunate and, in my view, not entirely consistent, overlay, with which one might dispense. My sense is that it is Foucault the Weberian and genealogist, not Foucault the postmodern skeptic, who has been significant for thinkers like Skinner. But I am happy to stand corrected by those better informed about Skinner's work.
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