The new issue of Axess has an article by Richard Wolin that is basically a diatribe about "postmodernists" and "postructuralists"; adjectives that appear to cover anyone Wolin disagrees with, whether on the left or right, authoritarian or anarchistic, conservative or progressive. As with his books that I have read, I don't dispute the most of the facts--what year someone published something--he cites, but his interpretations verge on the incoherent and just plain silly.

For example, consider this particular morsel:

During the 1960s the poststructuralists sought to supplement Marx with more radical critiques of “civilization” set forth by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

I'll leave Nietzsche for others, but as far as Heidegger is concerned, his critique of civilization, is under explored territory. He did, in two decades, work his way up the hierarchy of a centuries old German university, from graduate student, through chair of the philosophy, to getting elected rector by the faculty. Only when offered a position at the University of Berlin did he finally decide that too much civilization did not agree with him. Examining the works set forth by Heidegger, I find that, after searching the text of his most popular work, in Being and Time the word civilization, with or without the quotes, appears exactly zero times. That leaves one wondering of what those poststructuralists were supplementing. Searching his other works available to me, his most popular works, and those also available to the poststucturalist supplementers, I do occasionally come across instances of terms such as Greek civilization and Roman civilization, and yes, occasionally the word itself in quotes. But nothing substantial enough to be pass for a critique of "civilization". Perhaps to a historian like Wolin, every text is about "civilization", and facts, such as what a philosopher actually wrote about, shouldn't stand in the way of a good polemic.  ¶ 10:48 PM