The Patriot Philosopher and I took up seven questions:
1.) Can you tell us about your academic background. What compelled you toward this path in life? Did you always want to be or envision yourself as a public intellectual?
2.) In your influential work, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, you offer a unique account of what you refer to as ‘Machiavellian postmodernism.’ I find this account to be the most cogent explanation of postmodernism. Can you give an account of Machiavellian postmodernism?
3.) As an analytic philosopher, I was always told that the postmodernists were soundly defeated by the Sokal Hoax and that these nonsensical and pernicious ideas had been banished to the margins of lit crit and sociology departments never to be taken seriously. I fear that the analytics were wrong in celebrating too early, and that the present ‘woke’ take over of academia (and society at large) has shown itself to be a great win for the postmodernists. Have the postmodernists won? Is Gramsci’s long march through the institutions complete?
4.) Folks like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, etc., have been championing free speech, reasoned debate, and the tenets of classical liberalism as the antidote to pernicious, far Left wokeism. That being said, how do you persuade someone in a debate or engage someone in a mutually reciprocal discussion when these folks have already been convinced that dialogue, truth, logic, evidence, validity, argumentation, polite civil discourse, etc. are all just expressions of power and systems of oppressions?
5.) What does the present woke/intersectional moment mean for free speech and the future of liberalism in general in the coming future?
6.) Recently Catholic ‘post-liberal’ thinker, Patrick Deneen, at Notre Dame, along with other ‘integralist’ types (Vermeule, Pappen, Amari) have argued that the foundational presuppositions of classical liberalism have logically taken us to woke far-left intolerance in academia and beyond. Do you agree? What’s the classical liberal response?
7.) What predictions and prescriptions do you have for the 2020s with respect to America and the West?
