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Borrowing the term ‘overdetermination’ from the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, Resnick and Wolff show how entering a discourse with any privileged concept such as class does not mandate causal explanations in which class then is said to determine (either directly or even in a mediated but distinguishable form) other social processes and events. In economics, of course, economic determinism is less a function of the reduction of the social world to effects of class but much more a similar reduction to the effects of individual economic agency.

Are unsuitable because troubling essences for much existing modernist social thought, and this is why for some critics of postmodernism, the assault on theoretical humanism is viewed as making theorizing itself simply impossible. Yet, of course, postmodern critique shows precisely how one can incorporate the ideas that human subjectivity is complex, uncertain, and irreducible and that this same subjectivity is as much effect as it is cause in scenarios of historical movement. We note, by the way, that the attack on humanism is one that implicates many critics of the notion of homo economicus along with its mostly neoclassical purveyors.

The tendencies to be sensitive to difference and alterity, to question expertise and authority, especially in the name of the state or science, to value conversation and discourse, to desire ecological conservation rather than economic transformation, to refuse the prerogatives usually according to supposedly inexorable technological progress, to criticize the fiction of the self as an independent, unified entity, and to see the murderous flaws in grandiose, global schemes for human liberation, are all thought to be dimensions of postmodernism in its critical moments.