If ‘relativism’ means anything at all, it means a great many things. It is certainly not, though often regarded that way, a one-line ‘claim’ or ‘thesis’: for example, ‘man is the measure of all things’, ‘nothing is absolutely right or wrong’, ‘all opinions are equally valid’, and so forth. Nor is it, I think, a permanent feature of a fixed logical landscape, a single perilous chasm into which incautious thinkers from Protagoras' time to our own have ‘slid’ unawares or ‘fallen’ catastrophically. Indeed, it may be that relativism, at least in our own era, is nothing at all – a phantom position, a set of tenets without palpable adherents, an urban legend without certifiable occurrence but fearful report of which is circulated continuously. That would not mean, of course, that the idea was without consequence. On the contrary, no matter how protean or elusive relativism may be as a doctrine, it has evident power as a charge or anxiety, even in otherwise dissident intellectual quarters, even among theorists otherwise known for conceptual daring. It is this phenomenon that I mean to explore here: not relativism per se, if such exists, but the curious operations of its invocation in contemporary intellectual discourse and something of how it came to be that way.

The historical angle will be significant here, as indicated by my title, intended to evoke a relativism that is both ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ modern but still also ‘modern’ – or, as I shall elaborate below, Modernist. The point here is not so much that the views so named are perennial, though that, too, could be maintained.