Left Is Not Woke

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She criticizes the “vehemence of woke arguments about the importance of pronouns,” for instance, without pointing to a single example of such vehemence (nor does she note the rising violence that LGBTQ+ people face in their daily lives). Neiman devotes a chapter to each of these components of wokeness, laying out their ideological forebears and then skilfully dismantling their logic. her assertion, “[M]any of the theoretical assumptions that support the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual movement they despise”. For example, how are we to handle cases when apparent tribalism can be a covert case of universalism and vice versa?

John Locke, undoubtedly one of the most influential political philosophers in European history, owned shares in slave-trading companies and leveraged Enlightenment “reason” to defend the practice. What these groups do share is the certainty that if we have any hope of confronting the future—of even surviving into the future—we need new ways of thinking. Neiman is an accomplished philosopher, so I assumed she would include the evidence to support this genealogy linking Schmitt and Heidegger to the “woke”. Indeed she stresses the numbers of white Americans who rallied behind the Black Lives Matter protests of several years ago, which would seem to disprove her central assertion.

To be fair, Neiman does name one “woke” group: the New York Times : “While it [the New York Times ] still embodies the mainstream neoliberal consensus it always represented, since 2019 it has been increasingly, demonstratively woke”. While Neiman is a serious scholar, her latest book, Left Is Not Woke, is a cringe-inducing screed against a group she terms “the woke”—without ever telling us whom, exactly, she is talking about.

That this same “reason” has been used to defend slavery, imperialism, war, and ethnic cleansing is waved aside. Left is Not Woke is a frustrating book, rich in philosophical inquiry but with a strange lack of specifics that might clarify exactly who are the leftists she is criticising.Reactionary American politicians invoke the word ‘woke’ as frequently today as they evoked ‘communist’ a generation or two ago, and in much the same manner – as a catchall for everything conservatives find blasphemous or even just distasteful. mean that the book is largely indistinguishable from similar titles flooding the “anti-woke” market such as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories (2020).

If any of them read philosophy they were far more influenced by John Locke’s view that only through agriculture could the right to property develop.It is interesting to note Kant condemned the expropriation of land from Indigenous owners but his writings did nothing to check colonial settlers. This discussion of sociobiology is somewhat mystifying, as she makes no direct connection between it and “woke” politics.

ACT UP made change by engaging in direct protest—like throwing ashes of the AIDS dead on the White House lawn or storming the National Institutes of Health—that not only confronted mendacious politicians and doctors but also aimed to change the very language with which Americans discussed HIV, homosexuality, and the realm of political possibility. Of these two issues, the second can easily be remedied in the second edition which the book amply deserves. She argues persuasively that if we do not believe that progress is possible, we cannot construct a meaningful politics for the left, one that creates greater equality and fairness for all. Foucault contended that, starting around the 18th century, modern societies began to insert themselves into every nook and cranny of life. Had the reviewer read more carefully, he might have noticed the fulsome acknowledgement made to the youngest commentator, Samuel Zeitlin, whose suggestions were most helpful, and perhaps concluded that borrowing without acknowledgement is not the sort of thing I do.Such confusion between normative and descriptive claims (another legacy of Foucault) are hard to swallow for Neiman, for whom ‘there’s no deeper difference between left and right than the idea that progress is possible.