"Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective offers answers to the questions, what is postmodernism? and what exactly are the characteristics of the modernism that postmodernism supercedes? This comprehensive reader chronicles the western engagement with the nature of knowledge during the past four centuries while providing the historical context for the postmodernist thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty and Hayden White, and the challenges their ideas have posed to our conventional ways of thinking, writing and knowing. From the science of things to the science of human beings to the grand social theorizing associated with Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx and Max Weber, "Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective presents readings from the succession of thinkers whose writings helped define modern sensibilities by analyzing the human capacity for generating knowledge. The volume follows the knowledge-generating project of the modern age as it blossoms in the Enlightenment and bears fruit in the nineteenth century. The writings included reveal the linkages between science, the history of science, hermeneutics, anthropology, sociology, linguistics and philosophy from Francis Bacon's call for experimental engagement with nature in the seventeenth century to Jurgen Habermas' recent analysis of the civil society spawned by the Enlightenment.

Acknowledgments -- Timeline -- Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective -- Introduction -- THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT -- Introduction -- FRANCIS BACON -- The Advancement of Learning/RENE DESCARTES -- Discourse on Method/JOHN LOCKE -- Essay Concerning Human Understanding/ADAM SMITH -- The Wealth of Nations/DAVID HUME -- That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science -- Of the Origin of Justice and Property -- Of Scepticism with Regard to Reason/GORDON S. WOOD -- Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century/IMMANUEL KANT -- What Is Enlightenment?/MARQUIS DE CONDORCET -- Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind/ERNST CASSIRER -- Nature and Natural Science -- NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIAL THEORY -- Introduction/ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE -- Democracy in America/KARL MARX -- Preface to A Contrrbution to the Critique of Political Economy -- The Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 -- The Conmunast Manifesto -- The German Ideology/FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE -- Selected Aphorisms from The Gay Science -- Selected Aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil/MAX WEBER -- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism -- ¿Objectivity" in Social Science and Science Policy/NORMAN BIRNBAUM -- Conflicting Interpretations of the Rise of Capitalism: Marx and Weber -- CHALLENGES TO NINETEENTH.CENTURY THEORY. -- The Emergence of the Culture Concept and the Soceoloy of Science -- Introduction/JOHN DEWEY -- Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry/RUTH BENEDICT -- Patterns of Culture/CLAUDE LVISTRAUSS -- The Savage Mind -- CLIFFORD CEERTZ -- Thick Description. Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture/MAX HORKHEIMER AND THEODOR ADORNO -- Dialectic of the Enlightenment/THOMAS KUHN -- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions/ALASDAIR MACINTYRE -- Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science / 357/PAUL RICOEUR -- The Model of the Text -- POSTMODERNIST THOUGHT -- The De[con]struction of Modernity -- Introducion 385/HAYDEN WHITE -- The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality /395/MICHEL FOUCAULT -- What Is Enlightenment -- The History of Sexuality/JACQUES DERRIDA -- Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences -- Declarations of Independence/RICHARD RORTY -- Private Irony and Liberal Hope -- Science as Solidarity/CORNEL WEST -- A Genealogy of Modern Racism -- RESPONDING TO POSTMODERNISM -- Introduction/DAVID HARVEY -- The Condition ojPostmodernity/JURGEN HABERMAS -- Philosophy as Standin and Interpreter -- CRAIG CALHOUN -- Hahermas and the Public Sphere/SEYLA BENHABIB -- Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism -- Suggestions for Further Reading -- Glossary.