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. The implication that I would quote a younger commentator’s ideas without attribution is a serious one. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. Left Is Not Woke is an urgent and powerful intervention into one of the most pressing struggles of our time. One could therefore assume that the term ‘woke’ describes nothing more than the perennial fears of conservatives for a future of human liberation – that ‘woke’ is, in fact, simply the latest shorthand encompassing general leftist principles.

I doubt if one in a hundred contemporary activists could identify Schmitt, who was a Nazi apologist and has been seen as an inspiration for autocrats in the postwar world. Having read Neiman’s book, I do not understand how these examples represent a rejection of universalism or even, more generally, whether these individuals are intended to be “woke” or not. In fact, she does not name a single “woke” philosopher, public intellectual or prominent advocate that is indebted to their thought.

Traditionally, it was the right that focused on the first, the left that emphasized the second’ (8). Comparing him with Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who, according to Neiman, shared with Foucault “a deep skepticism toward any idea of progress,” she suggests that by rejecting the Enlightenment, the contemporary Left has embraced the intellectual tenets of fascism. Reading Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre led her to study philosophy, first as a night student at City College of New York and later at Harvard University, where she earned her Ph. the conclusion that, because the historical record is rife with crimes against humanity, then all history is criminal.

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. A generation schooled with these voices in their heads, raised in a broader culture shaped by the ruthless ideas of neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology, has set about changing the world.That is to say, there is a glaring elision at the heart of Left Is Not Woke , namely any discussion of the tendency by some members of the Left to adopt an exclusionary class reductionist position, embracing nihilism, “zero-sum” thinking, or “might makes right” rhetoric. 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. Or, as the Conservative MP Suella Braverman suggested recently at the National Conservatism conference (this time without irony), “The defining feature of this country’s relationship with slavery is not that we practised it, but that we led the way in abolishing it”. The Declaration of Independence, penned by the one of greatest American Enlightenment philosophers, may have held out the promise of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but at the time of its signing, hundreds of thousands of humans were held in bondage in our country.