Submitted by: Orville Lee oil120@nwu.edu As someone who works in both contemporary social theory and 19th century German history, I could not agree more with Jeremy Telman's opinion that Kenneth Barkin has little appreciation for post-structuralist theory and what it might contribute to German historiography. Perhaps the most significant problem with Barkin's article is that he uses the terms "postmodern" and "postmodernism" as a sort of monolithic intellectual position that is essentially "French." Moreover, "poststructuralism" is lumped in with this straw-position. The inadequacy of such a formulation is evident when one considers that the work of a philosopher as "German" as Habermas, the quintessential "modernist," is often categorized as "poststructuralist" along with the genealogical inquiries of Foucault, the quintessential "postmodernist." (see, for example, Robert Wuthnow, _Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis_ [1987]) Barkin's basic misunderstanding of the theoretical context in which poststructuralist analyses are situated is no more evident than when he argues that a "postmodern historical tour of German history" would focus on the "private," the "female," the "periphery," the _Alltag_, and the "other." (Barkin, _German Studies Review_, 18, 2 [1995]: 244). These particular emphases (and I would add the concept social class and the paired concepts domination/resistance) are more typical of the work of *social historians* and not postmodernism/poststructuralism, which on the whole stakes out a theoretical critique of the unreflexive acceptance of precisely these concepts that are inherited (in part) from social history. Although Barkin claims that postmodernism cannot be reduced to simple formulations, he undertakes just such a reduction: first, via selective quotes of Barthes, Ricoeur, and Hayden White (torn out of theoretical context); second, by producing a political geography of "postmodern" ideas that leads back into the heart of central Europe (as if philosophical problems and the intellectual efforts to resolve them, like human beings, have passports which establish the exclusivity of their national origin); and third, by an altogether arbitrary assertion that the type of "intellectual gymnastics" that suits the French cannot be applied to twentieth-century German history (i.e., Zivilisation versus Kultur once again). One could only wish that Barkin had consulted (for instance) the recent debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler (now published with additional essays as_Feminist Contentions_ [Routledge, 1995]); or the work of Joan Scott and her debate with Linda Gordon in the context of feminist historiography in order that the more important issues and dilemmas inhering poststructuralist theory and a poststructuralist historiography could be constructively addressed regarding German history (identity, subjectivity and objectivity, the normative foundations of critique, the social construction of reality versus structural determinism, etc.); or read with a bit more hermeneutic sympathy. (see Scott and Gordon in _Signs_, 15, 4 [1980] and Scott, "The evidence of experience," _Critical Inquiry_ 17, 4 [1991]) Instead, Barkin appears to have been more interested in wielding the label of postmodernism as a club against intellectual competitors. His article, and numerous others like it (see, for example, Lawrence Stone, "Notes: history and post-modernism," _Past and Present_, 131 [1991]) only confirm Pierre Bourdieu's argument that "in academic debate, symbolic murders take the form of snide comments, essentialist denunciations (akin to racism) couched in classificatory terms: so and so is a Marxist, so and so is a 'theorist' or a 'functionalist,' etc. Suffice to say here that manichean thought is related to manichean struggles." ("Viva la crise! for heterodoxy in social science," _Theory and Society_, 17 [1988]: 778). Orville Lee Department of Sociology Northwestern University 1810 Chicago Avenue Evanston, IL 60208-1330 USA .