Page "Left-wing politics" Paragraph 37

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal wrote a nonsensical article entitled " Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity ".

The journal Social Text published the paper in its Spring / Summer 1996 issue, whereupon Sokal publicly revealed his hoax.

While this action was interpreted as an attack upon leftism, Sokal, who was a committed supporter of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua during the 1980s, intended it as a critique from within the Left.

He said he was concerned about what he saw as the increasing prevalence on the left of " a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking ... that denies the existence of objective realities ".

He called into question the usefulness of such theories to the wider left movement saying he " never understood how deconstruction was meant to help the working class.