This short book contains a preface, eight essays, and fifty-nine pages of notes. Earlier versions of the preface and some of the essays have already been published elsewhere. The topic is the “contemporary intellectual controversy” between those who uphold a theory dubbed traditional or classical objectivism and those described variously as progressives, relativists, deconstructionists, constructivists, or postmodernists. (In order to save space I will usually call this group relativists or postmodernists).

Objectivism affirms the possibility of truth, reason, and knowledge in philosophy, science, and history. Postmodernism denies, in one way or another, either the existence or the possibility of truth, reason, and knowledge. The author, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, sides with the postmodernists, mainly, I think, because she believes they are in the swim; thus she states that those who support postmodernism include “prize-winning theoretical biologists, esteemed neurophysiologists, accomplished computer engineers, and established historians and philosophers of science,” as well as the dozens of American academics referred to in her notes.

In the first chapter, “The Unquiet Judge,” Smith tries to rebut the accusation that relativist views on truth etc. entail political and social quietism. Her arguments are as follows. First she equates quietism with positivist support of the status quo (a move borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, from Marxism, which interestingly enough employs the expression objectivesupport in this context); then she points out that objectivists (not a misprint) can be right-wing as well as left-wing; and then she bluntly asserts that objectivism is “empty and obscurantist.” These propositions