In Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (hereafter PSS) Pauline Rosenau seeks merely to present, not to evaluate, the implications for the social sciences of the chief tenets of postmodernism. Beginning with a glossary of postmodernist jargon, she describes the social scientific consequences of such grandiose postmodernist themes as the death of the author; the death of the subject; the end of history; the rejection of ordinary notions of time and space; the rejection of representation; and the rejection of truth, objectivity, reason, logic and scientific method.
Rosenau groups postmodernists into two main camps: the tamer 'affirmatives' and the more radical 'skeptics', with whom she begins. The skeptics, who are to be found above all on the Continent, are uncompromising pessimists:
They argue that the destructive character of modernity makes the post-modern age one of 'radical, unsurpassable uncertainty', characterized by all that is grim, cruel, alienating, hopeless, tired, and ambiguous. In this period no social or political 'project' is worthy of commitment. Ahead lies overpopulation, genocide, atomic destruction, the apocalypse, environmental devastation, the explosion of the sun and the end of the solar system in 4.5 billion years, the death of the universe through entropy. (PSS, p. 15)
The affirmatives, who are primarily Anglo-American, do not contest the skeptical critique of modernity, but they offer an alternative to it:
They are either open to positive political action (struggle and resistance) or content with the recognition of visionary, celebratory personal nondogmatic projects that range from New Age religion to New Wave life-styles and include a whole spectrum of post-modern social movements. Most affirmatives seek a philosophical and ontological intellectual practice that is nondogmatic, tentative, and nonideological. These post-modernists do not, however, shy away from affirming an ethic, making normative choices, and striving to build issue-specific political coalitions. (PSS, Rosenau acknowledges that postmodernist views constitute a spectrum rather than any clearcut divide, but she proposes her division in order to keep separate what would otherwise be contradictory views espoused by postmodernists taken as a whole.
Rosenau is especially helpful in showing the impact on social scientists of tenets originally formulated by literary critics and philosophers. For example, she translates the postmodernist trinity of author, text and reader into the social scientific one of agent,