The Crisis in the Foundations of Social Sciences: Impact of Post-modernism

For over two centuries, social sciences operated on a confident belief: through reason, observation, and rigorous method, scholars could uncover universal truths about how societies work. Then came post-modernism. By the late twentieth century, a wave of thinkers dismantled the pillars that sociology, political science, and anthropology had stood on, arguing that so-called objective knowledge was neither neutral nor universal. This philosophical storm did not merely add new theories to the shelf. It cracked the very foundations of the disciplines, triggering what many now call a crisis of knowledge in the social sciences.

The Enlightenment inheritance that post-modernism attacked 🔗

To understand the crisis, one has to first understand what was being challenged. Social sciences are largely products of the Enlightenment, built on ideals of reason, progress, and the belief that human society could be studied with the same objectivity as the natural world. Scholars have long noted that the social sciences are still predominantly modernist disciplines, and therefore recent challenges to Enlightenment thinking carry with them the potential to transform these fields radically.

Modernist sociology, from Marx to Durkheim to Weber, sought to explain social order and change through systematic frameworks. The assumption was simple but powerful: there is a knowable social reality, and trained researchers can describe it accurately. Post-modernism rejected this premise at its root.

What exactly is the “crisis”? 🔗

The crisis refers to a loss of confidence in three foundational ideas: objective truth, universal narratives, and scientific progress. Academic surveys of the field show that for both critics and defenders, post-modernism became associated with a belief in a crisis of representation, the abandonment of correspondence theories of truth, universal reason, and unitary schemas of progress inherited from the Enlightenment.

Lyotard and the death of grand narratives 🔗

If one text captures the crisis, it is Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979. In this work Lyotard introduced the term ‘postmodernism’ into philosophy and social sciences with the now-famous formulation that defines postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.

Metanarratives, or grand narratives, are the overarching stories that modernity used to legitimize itself. Marxism promised liberation through class struggle. Liberalism promised progress through rational markets and democratic reason. Enlightenment science promised emancipation through cumulative knowledge. Each claimed to explain everything, from why societies change to where history is heading.

Lyotard argued these stories had lost credibility. Philosophers summarising his position note that he saw the two most important metanarratives of the past as the story of history progressing towards social enlightenment and emancipation, and the story of knowledge progressing towards totalisation. Modernity was the age of metanarrative legitimation, while postmodernity was the age in which metanarratives had become bankrupt.

From big stories to small narratives 🔗

Post-modernism replaces grand narratives with what Lyotard called a plurality of language-games and mini-narratives. Knowledge becomes local, contextual, and fragmented. An Adivasi community’s understanding of land, a feminist critique of labour, a Dalit reading of history, or a queer interpretation of the family are no longer treated as footnotes to a larger “scientific” explanation. They stand on their own terms.

This pluralism has a liberating dimension, but it also destabilises the entire project of social science. If every narrative is valid within its own context, how can any sociologist claim their explanation is better than another? Critics point out that The Postmodern Condition has often been interpreted as an excuse for unbounded relativism, which for many has become a hallmark of postmodern thought.

Foucault and the entanglement of power and knowledge 🔗

While Lyotard questioned grand stories, Michel Foucault went after a deeper target: the idea that knowledge could ever be separated from power. His concept of power-knowledge is one of the most disruptive contributions to social theory in the last fifty years.

Foucault rejected the idea that truth is discovered through neutral inquiry. As commentators explain, in his understanding power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge, while power also reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its anonymous intentions. Power creates and recreates its own fields of exercise through knowledge. A fundamental goal in many of Foucault’s works was to show how that which has traditionally been considered absolute, universal, and true is in fact historically contingent.

Truth as a regime, not a discovery 🔗

Consider how categories like “criminal,” “mentally ill,” “normal,” or even “citizen” came into being. Foucault argued that sciences such as psychiatry, biology, medicine, economics, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, ethnology, pedagogy, and criminology have all categorized behaviours as rational, irrational, normal, abnormal, human, and inhuman. These categories are not neutral descriptions of reality. They are products of institutions with the power to classify, and they in turn produce new forms of control.

For the social sciences, this was a body blow. Sociology had long prided itself on being the science that exposes ideology. Foucault suggested that sociology itself is a form of power-knowledge, shaping the very subjects it claims to study. His philosophical work asked what, in the apparently necessary, might be contingent, with the focus of his questioning being the modern human sciences, biological, psychological, and social.

The social construction of reality 🔗

Running alongside these French thinkers is a parallel current that reshaped sociology: social constructionism. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality argued that the “reality” we take for granted is continuously produced through human interaction, language, and institutions.

Post-modernism radicalised this insight. Sociological overviews observe that because all knowledge exists in a historically and culturally relativistic context, the notion of a singular “truth” does not exist for social constructionists. Since sociology and social psychology had historically sought the “truth” behind human behaviour, social constructionism carried markedly different implications for how sociologists should conduct their work, manifesting in a shift toward recounting individual experiences rather than building grand theories of human behaviour from the 1960s onward.

Implications for Indian social research 🔗

This shift matters deeply for studying societies like ours. Caste, gender, religion, and community were long analysed through modernist lenses borrowed from the West. Post-modern and post-colonial critiques, influenced by Foucault and extended by thinkers like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, questioned whether Western social science categories even fit Indian realities. As theorists note, when deployed by thinkers in the postcolonial world, postmodernism has helped apply a critical gaze to the way that knowledge is constructed within the modern milieu and has encouraged an intellectual current of eschewing colonial essentialist understandings and the rigid universalist truth claims of positivism.

The census category of “caste,” the colonial production of “tribe,” or the legal category of “Hindu” are all examples of classifications that post-modern analysis treats as historically produced, not naturally given.

The anti-foundational turn 🔗

All of this adds up to what philosophers call the anti-foundational turn. Foundationalism is the idea that knowledge rests on some bedrock, whether observation, reason, or experience. Post-modernism denies there is any such bedrock.

The foundations of postmodernism are located in the philosophical currents of anti-foundationalism, anti-essentialism, anti-representationalism, and anti-dualism, with scepticism underlining much of postmodern thought in that the validity of the roots of discourse is challenged, as one global social theory resource describes it.

For disciplines built on the idea that careful method yields reliable knowledge, this is a profound philosophical crisis. If there is no firm ground, what exactly is a sociologist or political scientist doing when they conduct research?

Critiques of the post-modern critique 🔗

Post-modernism has not gone unchallenged. Three major objections recur in the literature.

The self-refutation problem 🔗

If all universal claims are suspect, then the claim that “all universal claims are suspect” is itself a universal claim. Commentators highlight this tension, noting the claim of incoherence where post-modernism denies truth and objectivity while simultaneously making truth claims, along with a moral relativism that fails to take a principled ethical stand. Jürgen Habermas, one of the sharpest critics, argued that post-modern thinkers were caught in a performative contradiction.

The loss of critical leverage 🔗

If every narrative is equally valid, how does one criticise injustice? Feminists, Marxists, and human rights advocates worry that extreme relativism removes the ground needed to say that patriarchy, caste oppression, or authoritarianism are wrong. Some defenders of science, including sociologists like Steve Bruce, reject the postmodern concept of relativism and the idea that all truths carry equal weight.

The reality check 🔗

Climate change, pandemics, and material inequalities do not care about discursive framings. Bridges collapse, viruses spread, and wages remain unpaid regardless of which narrative one favours. Critics argue that post-modernism risks underestimating the continuing power of science and evidence in shaping the world.

Why this crisis still matters 🔗

The post-modern critique has not destroyed social science, but it has permanently changed how good research is conducted. Today, researchers are more reflexive about their own positionality. Ethnographers acknowledge that their interpretations are shaped by who they are. Policy analysts examine how categories like “poor,” “backward,” or “developed” are constructed. Historians question whose voices were silenced in the archives.

The crisis, in other words, has become productive. It forces social scientists to hold two ideas at once: that knowledge is always situated and shaped by power, and that rigorous inquiry is still worth pursuing. Navigating this tension is arguably the central methodological challenge of contemporary social research.

What do you think? If all knowledge is shaped by power and context, is it still meaningful to speak of objective social research, or is “objectivity” simply a useful fiction we cannot do without? And in the Indian context, how should researchers balance universal frameworks of analysis with the culturally specific narratives that post-modernism insists on taking seriously?

References

1. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-349-22183-7
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/postmodernism
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition
4. https://iep.utm.edu/lyotard/
5. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Metanarrative
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-knowledge
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
8. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/
9. https://www.simplypsychology.org/social-constructionism.html
10. https://globalsocialtheory.org/topics/postmodernism/
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism