With its universal validity claims. Enlightenment thinking exhibits the imperialist and patriarchal arrogance of an ethnocentrism. At work in the modernist portrayals of postmodernism as the external other of truth, clarity, and political responsibility, is the colonizing appropriation of the other as a fixed reality which is at once an other and yet entirely knowable. The "clarity" of Enlightenment hides the power play behind its assumed transparency. In contrast to modernist portrayals of postmodernity as a period in a unilinear progression, the latter needs to be understood as the other within modernity that cannot be reduced to the same. Postmodernism situates difference and alterity within the modem. To the extent that sociology is defined in terms of a modernist fundamentalism, it is poised to colonize. So is a critical sociology that assumes a marxist identity but limits the definition of that identity to an Enlightenment legacy. Postmodern criticisms are indispensable for a decolonized, ethically and politically responsible critical sociology.
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