Alex Perez offers a sympathetic and elegant account of Eagleton's thesis. I'm still not sure though why he thinks that anti-essentialism and post-modernism are either synonymous or can be usefully linked. He's right though to attribute this view to Eagleton and if its granted, the comparison between a mono-perspectival (God's eye) view and non-critical (anything goes) view is a reasonable and useful one.

BUT no anti-essentialist worth her salt thinks that one view is as good as another. The dominance of successive historical world pictures should show that.Human communities create comprehensible meaning and those meanings are changed by further, innovative human intervention. This (his misreading of anti-essentialism notwithstanding) sounds something like the interpretation of Eagleton that Perez offers. I don't think though that Eagleton would feel vindicated by this interpretations. To Eagleton (a critic deeply embedded in Marxism) human communities are always entangled in ideologies that they are unaware of. This, to Eagleton, invalidates the meanings they produce. Because he can't envisage that meaning is inevitably a product of power he turns back to theism and relativism and berates them for failing to produce a convincing alternative. Why should there be one? Ideology should simply stand for 'bad' rather than 'undetectable' idea. After all if an ideology is all-pervasive how can it be discussed? We social democrats must simply hope to win the argument over the way our societies and ambitions should look, while realising that nothing innate to human society or 'self' will aid us in that argument.

I agree with other contributors that this is a very interesting discussion, which is to Salon's and Laura Miller's credit!