The Epistemological Shift in Political Theory: From Universalism to Particularism

For much of the modern era, political theory carried a quiet confidence: that with enough reason, the right method, and a grand enough framework, we could explain almost everything about society. Marxism promised to decode history through class struggle. Liberalism placed its faith in universal rights and rational progress. Then, in the late twentieth century, a different intellectual mood took hold. Theorists began to ask an uncomfortable question: what if these sweeping explanations were not neutral truths, but stories told from particular positions of power? This question sits at the heart of what scholars call the epistemological shift in political theory-a movement away from grand universal claims and towards the particular, the local, and the marginalised.

What is an epistemological shift? 🔗

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge: how we know what we know, what counts as valid knowledge, and who gets to decide. An epistemological shift, then, is a fundamental change in how a discipline understands knowledge itself-not just new answers, but new rules for what questions are even worth asking.

In political theory, this shift is closely tied to the rise of postmodernism. Modern political thought, rooted in the Enlightenment, treated reason as a universal force capable of revealing objective truths about politics and society. Postmodern theory challenged this directly. It questioned whether any single framework could ever fully capture the messy reality of human life. As one scholarly account puts it, the differences between modern and postmodern conceptions of knowledge rest on three tensions: truth versus perspective, certainty versus uncertainty, and universality versus particularity.

This is not a small disagreement about facts. It is a disagreement about the very foundations of knowledge. And it has reshaped how political theorists study power, identity, history, and emancipation.

The methodological tenets postmodernism rejected 🔗

To understand the shift, we first need to understand what came before it. Modernist social and political theory rested on several methodological assumptions. Postmodern theory rejected each of them.

Holism 🔗

Holism is the idea that society can be understood as a single, integrated whole, and that one overarching theory can explain how all its parts fit together. Classical Marxism, for example, sought to explain politics, economics, culture, and history through one unifying logic. Postmodern theorists argued that society is far too fragmented for any such totalising view. Reality, in this reading, is plural rather than unified.

Essentialism 🔗

Essentialism holds that groups and concepts have fixed, universal “essences”-that there is, for instance, a single essential nature shared by all workers, all women, or all citizens. Postmodern thought treats these categories as constructed rather than natural. Identities, in this view, are shaped by language, history, and power, and they vary across context. There is no timeless essence waiting to be discovered.

Reductionism 🔗

Reductionism attempts to explain complex phenomena by reducing them to a single underlying cause-class, for example, or rational self-interest. Postmodern theory insists instead on the relevance of multiple factors. Gender, caste, religion, region, language, and culture all interact in ways that cannot be boiled down to one master variable. This emphasis on plurality of causes is central to the shift towards particularism.

The incredulity towards metanarratives 🔗

If one phrase captures this entire shift, it comes from the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition, he famously defined the postmodern as an suspicion of what he called “grand narratives”-the sweeping, rational accounts that modern societies told about themselves.

What exactly is a metanarrative? It is an overarching story that claims to explain everything, usually in the name of progress or human emancipation. The Enlightenment belief in reason, the Marxist account of class revolution, and the liberal story of inevitable progress are all examples. According to Lyotard, postmodernity is characterised precisely by a mistrust of these grand narratives such as Progress, Enlightenment, Emancipation, and Marxism that had been central to modernity.

In place of these grand stories, postmodernism turns to what Lyotard called petits récits, or “little narratives”-small, local, context-specific accounts of the world. The postmodern mindset, on this view, rejects claims to universal truth and accepts a plurality of truths that are context-dependent, relative, and subjective. Knowledge is no longer something universal and fixed; it is situated, partial, and tied to particular communities and experiences.

Lyotard’s deeper point was political. He argued that no theory can be totalising, and that any attempt to enforce a single universal framework on everyone risks becoming repressive. Grand narratives, in claiming to speak for all of humanity, tend to silence the perspectives that do not fit.

From universalism to particularism 🔗

This brings us to the core of the shift: the move from universalism to particularism.

Universalism assumes that certain truths, values, and rights apply to all people everywhere, regardless of culture or context. It is the foundation of ideas like universal human rights and the notion of a single rational subject common to all humanity. Particularism takes the opposite starting point. It argues that knowledge, values, and political claims are always rooted in specific contexts-specific groups, histories, and locations.

This tension is not merely academic. Scholars working on identity politics argue that the constant oscillation between particularism and universalism is constitutive of democracy itself. Existing political institutions, on this reading, are not the product of neutral reasonable agreement but the accumulated result of historical power struggles. The standards of “reasonable” debate often privilege dominant groups, which is why marginalised communities frequently have to disrupt those standards to be heard.

The shift towards particularism therefore changes what emancipation means. Rather than seeking one universal revolution that liberates all of humanity at once, particularist theory focuses on the emancipation of specific groups-the historically silenced, the colonised, the marginalised. The goal is not systemic transformation under a single banner, but the recovery of many distinct voices that grand theories had ignored.

Mass history and the recovery of the silenced 🔗

One of the clearest expressions of this turn is the shift from elite history to what is sometimes called mass history or “history from below.” Traditional historiography focused on rulers, elites, treaties, and great men. The new approach asks instead about the experiences of ordinary people-peasants, workers, and the dispossessed-whose lives rarely entered the official record.

This is not simply about adding more characters to the same story. It reflects the deeper epistemological claim that knowledge produced from below is just as valid as knowledge produced by elites, and that the perspective of the powerful is not a neutral universal truth but one partial account among many.

Subaltern studies and the Indian contribution 🔗

Few intellectual movements illustrate this shift better than Subaltern Studies, which emerged in the early 1980s under the leadership of the historian Ranajit Guha. The first volumes appeared from 1982 onwards, published as essays on South Asian history and society, and the project quickly grew into one of the most influential currents in postcolonial scholarship.

The word “subaltern” refers to those of inferior rank-the masses, including peasants, labourers, and other marginalised groups. Guha argued that the masses were not merely passive followers of elite leaders. They reacted not only against British rule but also against the elitist brand of Indian nationalism, and they possessed a genuine political consciousness of their own. As Dipesh Chakrabarty, a leading member of the collective, explained, the declared aim was to produce historical analyses in which subaltern groups were treated as the subjects of history rather than its objects.

This was a direct challenge to both colonial and nationalist historiography, which had presented Indian history as something shaped almost entirely by elites. By giving autonomy to the peasant and subaltern domain, the project pluralised the discourses of power and refused to fit Indian experience into borrowed European templates.

The critique from within 🔗

Importantly, Subaltern Studies did not remain a settled doctrine-it generated its own internal critique, which deepened the epistemological shift further. The literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who translated Derrida and introduced a selection of the group’s essays, raised a difficult problem. She argued that the historian’s very attempt to represent subaltern resistance was itself an act of discursive power-an assumption of the right to speak “for” the oppressed rather than a transparent window into their actual experience.

This critique captures the self-questioning spirit of the epistemological shift. Even the project of recovering marginalised voices must ask who is doing the recovering, and whose interpretation gets imposed in the process.

Why globalisation matters here 🔗

This shift did not happen in a vacuum. It is closely linked to the broader changes brought about by globalisation. As economies, cultures, and communications became increasingly interconnected in the late twentieth century, the diversity of human experience became harder to ignore and harder to fit into any single framework.

Lyotard himself connected the decline of grand narratives to the transformation of knowledge in a society reshaped by computers and new technologies. In a globalised world, people became increasingly aware of the many different ways that cultures understand and interpret reality. This awareness encouraged a more critical stance towards any one culture’s claim to universal truth, and a greater appreciation for the plurality of human experiences.

Globalisation, in other words, created both the conditions and the need for new theoretical frameworks. The old universalist models, often rooted in European experience, struggled to address the social and political dynamics of a world that was visibly plural, fragmented, and unequal.

Strengths and criticisms of the shift 🔗

The epistemological shift has genuine strengths. It makes room for voices that grand theories had ignored. It encourages humility about the limits of any single framework. And it takes seriously the idea that knowledge is shaped by power and position.

Yet it also faces serious criticism. By rejecting objective truth, postmodern thought risks sliding into relativism, where all perspectives are treated as equally valid or invalid. Critics also argue that its focus on discourse and identity can distract from material inequalities such as class exploitation, and that its emphasis on fragmentation may overstate social disintegration while ignoring persistent structures like capitalism and patriarchy. There is also a political worry: if every group pursues only its own particular emancipation, the shared solidarity needed for large-scale change may dissolve.

These debates remain unresolved, which is precisely what makes the topic so alive in contemporary political theory. The shift from universalism to particularism is less a finished destination than an ongoing argument about how we can know, represent, and change the political world.

What do you think? If every claim to universal truth carries the risk of silencing someone, can political theory ever build a shared vision of justice-or must it always remain a collection of particular, local struggles? And when scholars recover the voice of the marginalised, how can they be sure they are speaking with them rather than simply for them?

References

1. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137318237_2
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Postmodern-Condition
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative
4. https://revisesociology.com/2023/02/20/jean-francois-lyotard-the-postmodern-condition/
5. https://www.illiberalism.org/epistemic-troubles-identity-politics-between-particularism-and-universalism/
6. https://www.academia.edu/10013154/Chakrabarty_and_Subaltern_Studies_2010_
7. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2020/02/17/subaltern-studies/
8. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/modules/hi323/lectures/ranajit_guha_and_subaltern_studies_sakar_2016.pdf
9. https://hubsociology.com/modernism-to-postmodernism-and-the-postmodern/