First, most of the protagonists as well as the opponents seem to think that there is something called postmodernist theory or theories which only are to be validated or rejected in the forth-coming research. Secondly, several contributors presuppose that historicism and hermeneutics are identical. I think that both of these assumptions are not true but certainly apt to lead us to a more confrontational and even hostile debate. But the point is that postmodernism cannot be analyzed exhaustively as a method or a bunch of research techniques. In reading carefully Michael Geyer's reply to his critics we can detect a further step which to me seem to be a more adequate notion of this academic phenomenon.
Postmodernism is a situation.
It is a situation which evokes and has been evoked by the decreasing credibility of the modernization theory, in its all variations. Historicism is politically as well as methodologically unacceptable. Historicism and hermeneutics. I am happy that Thomas Schmitz brought up the hermeneutic underpinnings of the recent German historical scholarship. To be sure, the Bielefeld school never rejected hermeneutics as a sort of pillar of historical working in general.