Postmodernism has extended far beyond its origins in French literary criticism in the 1960s to provide a major challenge to orthodox intellectual ideas and ways of working. Its influence has so far been felt less in the social sciences than in the arts or humanities, and hardly at all in economics; yet because it is beginning to emerge within disciplines parallel to agricultural economics, such as human geography and rural sociology, it is prudent to attempt some anticipation of the impact of its trenchant critique on agricultural economics. Accordingly, a minimum set of the ideas, attitudes and implications of the phenomenon of postmodernism necessary to orient the unfamiliar are summarised, and related to contemporary concerns. The challenge which it might offer to mainstream economics is also considered, in terms of methodology and of understanding. In relation to rurality, postmodern emphases on the particular, the local and the diverse are examined as potential solutions to contemporary social, economic and environmental problems. Examples are drawn from model‐building, permacultural ethics, GIS and rural tourism to illustrate both the critique and the new approach that it involves. Postmodernism's ambivalence in relation to equality and social and economic justice is raised as a difficulty for a discipline which has traditionally had a focus on (and an ethical concern about) spatial inequalit