It is no coincidence that liberalism, rationalism, and empiricism go together under the banner of the “Enlightenment” or that, together, they have decreased human suffering so much through technological improvements, effective infrastructure, and medical and other scientific advances, as well as by upholding human rights. These concepts are

Others might say that progress is a myth because Nazism, the Holocaust, and genocidal communism all occurred less than a century ago—and after the Enlightenment. This would be reasonable if the argument were that everything that came after the Enlightenment was liberal. In fact, these phenomena show what happens when totalitarianism is allowed to

While liberal feminists had wanted the freedom to reject gender roles and access the same opportunities as men, and radical feminists had wanted to dismantle gender entirely as an oppressive social construct, intersectional feminists saw gender as both culturally constructed and as something that people could experience as real and expect to have

The absence, misrepresentation, or underrepresentation of such groups is understood to “erase” minorities and “deny their validity to exist,” while upholding white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, or fatphobia.

Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another. Liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively; Theory sees knowledges as completely created by humans—stories we tell ourselves, largely in the unwitting service of maintaining our own

So, while the liberal mind-set rejects the arrogant colonial claim that reason and science belong to white Westerners, the postmodern one accepts it, but regards reason and science themselves as just one way of knowing and as oppressive—an oppression they attempt to redress by applying the core tenets of postmodernism.

Because liberalism sought to remove social expectations from identity categories—black people being expected to do menial jobs, women being expected to prioritize domestic and parenting roles, and so on—and make all rights, freedoms, and opportunities available to all people regardless of their identity, there was a strong focus on the individual

8 SOCIAL JUSTICE SCHOLARSHIP AND THOUGHT

The online Encyclopedia Britannica defines postmodernism as a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.