Principled Positions is a new collection of essays taking us back to the question of value, which has often been derided by postmodern theorists. It aims to retain the insights of postmodern theory, but to recover modernism's sense of value.

Postmodernism has often been celebrated as liberating, even democratising, in its refusal to acknowledge the dictates of hierarchy and certainty. In cultural terms this has allowed outmoded canons of taste and conservative categories of high and low culture to be challenged and abolished; but it has also banished the vocabulary of evaluation, distinction and merit. In the postmodern cultural continuum, there is no such thing as good (or bad) art or politics.

The deconstruction of all 'principled positions' creates a value vacuum which, in turn, leads to a state of ethical and political paralysis. The contributors to Principled Positions ponder these dilemmas and try to build bridges between the modernist absolutes of truth, value and justice and the anti-totalising spirit of postmodernism.