I am happy to announce that a Tenth Anniversary Printing of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault is now available.
Ten years lead me to reflect on the book’s history. I wrote it while on sabbatical for the 1999-2000 academic year. Initially I met with difficulties in getting it published. I received several form-letter rejections from publishers.
I also got three rejections based on evaluations by anonymous reviewers who dismissed the book as wrong, worthless, or worse — although those negative evaluations in each case were balanced by strongly positive comments by second reviewers. Usually, though, it takes only one negative to convince an editor to say No.
The book was eventually publishing by a small firm in Phoenix in 2004. Sales were good, leading to more printings. The book received many positive, thoughtful reviews in academic journals, some reviewers naturally taking exception to my interpretations of controversial thinkers like Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger. And the book has stayed in print continuously for the ten years, gone through several editions, and been translated into several foreign languages. More translations are in the works.
A good story, all in all. (One might almost say it’s been a grand narrative, but that would be to risk further pomo enmity.) I’m looking forward to seeing what the next ten years bring.
I’ve mentioned it before, but a liberal friend (in the modern newspeak sense) with whom I’d engaged in vigorous sparring in the past read it and pronounced it “a remarkable book”. Said it helped spotlight large residues of postmodern thinking in himself and prodded a conscious commitment to Enlightenment values.
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It is typical in Dr. Stephen Hicks that he treats his topic cautiously & specifically, he is careful to limit himself to the subject to be discussed. This is why his reader doesn’t find digression of whatever kind it may be, an aspect which it is too rare to be found in the contemporary writing in general. One can say that it is due to this aspect of Dr. Hicks’ writing that his reader finds it interesting as well as useful. Once one reads this book, s/he wishes if it would be possible to translate it into his/ her native language.
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If you haven’t – check out Dr. Patricia Santy’s blog (currently dormant after the 2012 presidential election), “drsanity,” you should! (Just Google it.) Pat Santy was the flight surgeon on duty when the space shuttle Challenger went down (see her book about the event and her first-hand experience dealing with trauamtic shock, highlighted on her home page).
Santy uses Stephen’s book as a recurrent reference point in her political-phlosophical-cultural analysis of the Left, including certain of his diagrams, situating strategies the Left to preserve its anti-Capitalist goals against all tests against reality.
Pat Santy began blogging for about a decade after another psychiatrist turned pundit, Charles Krauthammer, idenitifed Bush Derangement Syndrome or BDS.
A book lenght harvesting of her shrew analyses is sorely needed.
But meanwhile, there is her vast blog of persuasive analysis remains online, applying psychoanatlypic insights gleaned from her experience as Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Michigan’s School of Medicine.
In an interview conducted by the late but honest Marxist, Norm Geras (University of Birmingham), Santy identified her political influcnes as Thomas Jeffersonn and Ayn Rand. She also said that politically mixed-marriages are possible – her husband is a Democrat!
Santy’s deep insight is that the Left is riven by such maladies as denial, diversion, and projection – psychotic defenses, in short – while the Right is susceptible to neurotic ones like depression (ie, in 2009, Republicans were almost utterly convinced that “conservatism is dead”). She sides with the emotionally hobbled Right and agianst the dangerously crippled Left, whose contact with reality is seriously impaired is not often absent.
CONGRATULATIONS, Stephen Hicks!
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