Earlier this year, famously, the physicist and political leftist Alan Sokal submitted a fully footnoted, jargon-filled essay of pure nonsense to the editors of the academic journal Social Text, arguing that physical reality was merely a social construct. He didn’t believe a word of it, but he was trying to make a point. The editors published the essay, Mr. Sokal announced his hoax, and all hell broke loose.

For many, the hoax did in fact reveal—as Mr. Sokal intended—the vacuousness of academic theory and the absurd incoherence of the language in which it is perpetrated. For others, however, the hoax was an unforgivable act of disloyalty that undermined a political project of great importance, especially in the university: the effort to “interrogate” knowledge and “unmask” the hidden power relations that determine the bourgeois definition of the “truth.” This is what academic theory&mdas ...

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