Perhaps it is because Theory is trying to muddy these neat conceptual waters that Neiman has such a problem with it? Left Is Not Woke is an urgent and powerful intervention into one of the most pressing struggles of our time.

For Neiman, “woke” bears striking similarities to: the current Republican Party, the Trump administration, the UK government under then-PM Liz Truss, and the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, amongst others, for their focus on superficial trappings of identity rather than material substance, or, as Neiman says, “diversifying power structures without asking what the power is used for can simply lead to stronger systems of oppression”. It functions within language not as a descriptor with a clear delineation between what is and what is not , but as a reflection of the attitudes of the speaker. 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). Her argument that, in contrast to this view, humans are capable of acting out of more than self-interest is important, but hardly radical. her assertion, “[M]any of the theoretical assumptions that support the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual movement they despise”.

While Neiman struggles with setting out any substantive content of wokeness, she believes that “it does have some direction”. She challenges this malignant ideological offshoot against the principles of universalism, which has its roots in the enlightenment, and which has framed the quest for social justice for hundreds of years. Neiman’s core thesis involves a genealogical claim: the alleged roots of “woke” are firmly grounded in “outright Nazis” like Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger: in Schmitt’s rejection of universalism and justice, and in Heidegger’s anti-modernism and “appeals to peasant virtues”. It was the moment when human rights and democracy became thinkable to Europeans as organizing political principles.

Some on the left have been attracted to rightist thinkers by their critiques of liberalism, especially in the light of a growing awareness of the hypocrisy that undergirds much of Western history, wherein the same powers can proclaim human rights and commit the worst atrocities. But while conservatives have certainly had the biggest bullhorns in this battle against wokeness, the most coherent voices against the vaguely defined ideology that goes under this label have actually come from the left itself.And the “woke” with whom she disagrees “do not realize how heavily they are weighed down by the theoretical views they hold. If there are still holes in your knowledge of “woke” culture, you can turn to Joanna Williams’ How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason (2022); Ralph Calabrese’s Toxic Femininity: Why Woke Women are Trying to Disable Our Youth, Minorities, and Civilization (2021); Kevin Donnelly’s The Dictionary of Woke: How Orwellian Language Control and Group Think Are Destroying Western Societies (2022); Stephen Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (2023); and D. The confusion arises because woke is fuelled by traditionally leftwing emotions: the wish to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, to address historic crimes. This is a wonderfully written, if somewhat polemical, brief review of political currents in contemporary culture.

By turning its back on the Enlightenment, Neiman insists, the modern Left has fallen into “tribalism,” defending political claims on grounds of identity rather than universal rights or aspirations. Now into the fray comes one of the foremost popularisers of Enlightenment thought, Susan Neiman, with her succinct and compelling Left Is Not Woke, a book that arises from a 2022 lecture she gave at the University of Cambridge (a video of which can be found online). I don’t suppose Neiman is in any way suggesting that Nazis and American white supremacists are “woke”, but once again the book would have benefited immensely from the inclusion of examples of “woke” thinkers who had succumbed to the reactionary tendencies of tribalism she frequently names and shames on the right.I am of the opinion that the use of the term “woke” obscures rather than clarifies: whatever unifies Wall Street, a BBC production of Jane Austen, and Jaguar Land Rover workers is far too diffuse to pick out anything of interest. It is interesting to note Kant condemned the expropriation of land from Indigenous owners but his writings did nothing to check colonial settlers. Neiman received a copy of all the responses to her Cambridge talk, with some of Buxton’s comments incorporated into Neiman’s text, albeit without crediting Buxton. And thus do white supremacist politicians today decry ‘wokeness’ as a form of ‘indoctrination’ as they work to purge public school textbooks of any mention of slavery, the civil rights movement and the mere existence of gay and lesbian people, while promoting bland hagiographies of the noble Founding Fathers and their God-ordained vision for America.

Susan Neiman's provocative book is an impassioned defense against the corrosive particularisms that have eroded solidarity on the left. All these genealogical roots are held together, so Neiman alleges, by a rejection of “Enlightenment” values. And by unearthing how progress has often been accompanied by new forms of violence and control, he supposedly rejects the very notion of progress, leading the modern Left into hopelessness. One of the more interesting critiques of the phenomenon in question, although it does not employ the term ‘woke,’ is Todd McGowan’s Universalism and Identity Politics (2020), which explicitly links identity politics with the existential emptiness that is left behind after capitalism has hollowed out communities and left people without the resources of group identity.She insinuates that “the woke” believe “only tribal interests are genuine” but fails to identify a source for this claim. I believe many of them do, to varying degrees, and would have been interesting real-world case-studies for Neiman.