By now it is commonplace to assert that ours is a postmodern era. But what—and when—exactly is postmodernity? Is it simply the period following “modernity”? Or does it refer to a specific event, for example the breakdown of faith in progress following World War II and the Holocaust? Is it, rather, a Zeitgeist? Jean-François Lyotard characterized the postmodern condition as one of skepticism toward metanarratives. Many would add the death of God, announced by Friedrich Nietzsche to herald the loss of the supersensory realm to modern minds. To critics on the right, postmodernism is synonymous with moral and epistemological relativism. Common among these accounts is an attention to the disorientation and meaninglessness that mark our world, characteristics that are, perhaps, mirrored in the term itself.

Amid this cacophony of competing definitions, Bruce Ackerman’s 2024 book, The Postmodern Predicament, promises to diagnose and present solutions for the unique problems of our era. The titular predicament, as Ackerman sees it, is that in our postmodern lives we inhabit a variety of “spheres,” each of which competes for our attention and sets contradictory standards for our performance (p. 4). Due to human finitude and limitations on waking time, it is not possible to satisfy the performance expectations of every sphere: to perform well at work, one might have to sacrifice valuable time spent with family or shirk her duties as a citizen. This inter-spherical dilemma is manifest in the fundamental issue of contemporary politics: the alienation of ordinary people from democratic engagement (pp. 228–29). Ackerman contends that such disengagement is an existential threat insofar as fulfilling one’s citizenship obligations is a precondition for self-determination (p. 43).

Throughout the book, Ackerman provides vivid depictions of how various nineteenth-century inventions and institutions—the police, department stores, the public ballot, modern medicine, public education, and the telephone, among others—set the tone for life in the twentiethy and twenty-first centuries. He argues that “the legitimation of strangerhood” is a “defining feature of modernity” (p. 33), describing the manner in which a series of economic, political, and social revolutions displaced the pre-modern, tight-knit community, where an individual’s social position was as fixed as her physical location: few people came and went, and interactions with strangers were rare and tightly controlled. His conceit that we present ourselves differently in the proliferating contexts we navigate in contemporary life is intuitive and fruitful, especially if applied to the internet, with its capacity to connect ordinary individuals with an unprecedently large body of strangers who all too often fail to adhere to the norms of responsible, authentic discourse that govern their more intimate relationships.

To call this inter-spherical predicament a uniquely postmodern one is questionable, though. Consider the oldest orienting division of political theory: that between the oikos and the polis, which has long been recognized to present individuals with potentially incommensurable standards of duty. Aristotle states in the Politics that the fundamental distinction between these two spheres was that the household was marked by a form of one-man rule that would be considered despotic in the city, defined as it was by the expectation that citizens rule and be ruled in turn. And after Hegel, Antigone and other works of Greek tragedy have been read as parables about the failure of individuals to navigate the private, ethical obligations of household and religion as opposed to the public demands of city life. But such dilemmas are lost in Ackerman’s depiction of a pre-modern past where individuals did not consider how to meaningfully orient their lives because of their social and physical immobility.

Part of the problem may come from Ackerman’s own ambiguous terminology, slipping as he does between the phrases “modernist predicament” and “postmodern predicament” on the same page (p. 30), for example, without explaining the difference between the two. The reader is left to guess what denotes the shift in terms. One candidate is the internet era, characterized by heightened interaction with strangers in dislocated, often parasocial relationships. Indeed, Ackerman at one point describes the “postmodern predicament” as the fact that contemporary human beings jointly inhabit virtual and physical worlds (p. 14). He cautions that essential elements of face-to-face relationships are lost in virtual encounters (pp. 15–16), but never actually explains what these are or how they are lost. Ackerman’s only extended treatment of the internet comes in his chapter on Nudge (2008), where he worries it will exacerbate technocratic thinking and control.

To this reader’s mind, Ackerman’s main concern is not postmodernity or the internet, but social justice, which he seeks to inform with the existentialist perspectives of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who, he contends, were jointly committed to engage with problems of the “here and now” (p. 128). Ackerman argues that the ongoing debate about social justice has lost sight of the practical concerns of existentialist philosophy, mired as it is in the transcendental thought experiments of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. These parts of the book display limited textual engagement with their source material, resulting in oversimplifications. While Ackerman’s critique that Rawls’s model shirks “real-world dialogic engagement” is a fair one (p. 190), he ignores Habermas’s commitment to such engagement throughout his philosophical career. A similar oversight is present in Ackerman’s treatment of Heidegger, who, he claims, “considers it a big mistake for anybody to reflect about anything,” favoring instead an “intuitive relationship to the here and now” (p. 200). Especially in his later lectures and essays, Heidegger emphasized the importance of reflection in establishing a “free relationship” to the unique problems of modernity. To let the thinker speak for himself: “most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking—not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking.”Footnote ¹

Ultimately, Ackerman rejects each existential thinker’s rejection: of modernity, of political action, or of Western culture, respectively (pp. 139, 147, 158). But he gives little guidance as to what exactly we ought to accept and why. If the main problems of the contemporary world are obstacles to our meaningful association with other individuals in the “here and now,” one would suppose that Ackerman’s solution would be real-world engagement to bridge these divides. Instead, he proposes universal pre-kindergarten education and a “citizenship inheritance” of $150,000 for every American after age 18, funded by taxes on the ultra-rich. Ackerman’s most promising suggestion for reinvigorating democratic citizenship is “Deliberation Day,” a national holiday in which citizens would be encouraged to engage in dialogue on a public internet forum in the lead-up to national elections. But for all its practical merits, this proposal is somewhat ironic given Ackerman’s early, unexplained pronouncement that something essential is lost in virtual relationships. While Ackerman’s book offers myriad insights into the problems of contemporary life, there is an uneasy mismatch between the spiritual problems he diagnoses, the existential thinkers he consults, and the material solutions he offers. It is not clear that he needed to draw on the twentieth-century existential tradition at all, given that he ultimately arrives at proposals similar to those of the embattled American progressive movement, which treats social injustice as the paramount political problem and money as the solution.