Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a concept which escapes encyclopaedic definition, to the extent that mischievous commentators have described postmodernists as a club of individuals tacitly colluding in a refusal to collectively define what postmodernism is about. This should strike a cord with economists who have also been accused at one point or another of leaving central notions such as market, firm, competition, or equilibrium ill-defined, with good grounds for doing so (cf. Popper, Open Society II: 18-19).
On the level of economic phenomena, debates have centred on whether or not one can consistently speak of postmodernity as a separate historiographic period. Advocates of postmodernity in this epochal sense assume that profound changes in the constitution of contemporary society have brought an end to the modern period, the close of which has variously been located from the last quarter of the 19th century to the last quarter of the 20th century. On the conceptual level, the work of several prominent economists, including John Maynard Keynes and Gary Becker for example, has been argued to resonate with postmodernist themes. Broader strands of research in economics have begun to display key postmodernist features, most notably as a result of critical examination of the notion of the rationally unified individual. A small self-consciously postmodernist literature draws from economics, literary criticism, and continental philosophical traditions in its analysis of economic phenomena.
Preprint: 2008-Klaes-Pomo-preprint.pdf
This article is taken from the author’s original manuscript and has not been reviewed or edited. The definitive published version of this extract may be found in the complete New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics in print and online, available at www.dictionaryofeconomics.com.
Bibliographic details of definite published version:
Klaes, M. 2008. Postmodernism. In Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume eds. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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