The Path Leads from Marxist Elimination of Opponents for Pseudo-Objectivity, to Frankfurt Castigation of Superficial Positivism to Postmodern Repudiation of Objectivity

So the path leads from Marxist elimination of opponents for alleged pseudo-objectivity, to Frankfurt castigation of superficial positivism equated with the amassing of surface facts, to postmodernist repudiation of the very aspiration to objectivity, and its replacement by hermeneutics: this is the one line of logical development which strikes me, whether or not it really corresponds to the participants’ own view of their intellectual ancestry, or to the actual historical links. That remains to be explored and documented. . . .

The point is that the great epistemological tradition in Western philosophy (now claimed to be overcome), stretching from Descartes to Hume and Kant and beyond, formulated the problem of knowledge, not in terms of a kind of egalitarian hermeneuticism, or of hermeneutic egalitarianism, but, rather, in terms of a discriminating cognitive Elitism. It did indeed hold all men and minds, but not all cultures and systems of meaning, to be equal. All minds were endowed with the potential of attaining a unique objective truth, but only on condition of employing the correct method and forswearing the seduction of cultural indoctrination.

--Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2003), 37.