Abstract

The Enlightenment Era was the crucible for the crystallization of core assumptions in emerging modernist society. Celebrated were the self-determining, transparent individual, the primacy of rationality, linear logic, due process safeguards, abstract and formal rights, the benefits of capitalism and its offerings, and the new potentials of unshackled man/ woman. It was not until the late 1960s and the 1970s that the modernist edifice began to be challenged at its ontological and epistemological foundations. By the 1990s, a postmodern epistemic shift spawned a number of critical perspectives in criminology. An earlier fatalistic form of postmodernism rooted in one reading of Derrida’s anti-foundationalism and/or in one reactive-negative reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic was to give ground to an affirmative postmodernism rooted in Nietzsche.