SN: I would really want to sit down with somebody who thinks Foucault was progressive and hear one reason, other than the fact that he was openly gay at a time when that was very unusual. Whether it’s schools or mad houses or prisons or other institutions, Foucault argued that what you think is progress is actually a much more subtle form of domination and control. And so every time you try to take a step forward you wind up in spite of yourself doing something that is more devastating. The reason why he’s worse than de Maistre or Burke is that he has a much more powerful argument.

This is the context in which the philosopher Susan Neiman, in her new book Left Is Not Woke, launches an assessment of woke thinking. A self-declared “leftist and socialist,” Neiman offers readers a philosophical defense of the Enlightenment values of universalism and reason. In doing so, she exposes the ways in which identity politics and the valorization of victimhood have led today’s leftists to adopt beliefs that they once furiously opposed, such as dividing people into groups and suppressing free speech. Since many of today’s progressives either deny the existence of wokeness outright or downplay it through references to the dictionary, we should not be surprised that Neiman’s intelligent treatise has been met with incredulity, denial, and insults. Samuel Huneke lauds the fashionable view of many postcolonial thinkers that “reason is an imposition of European power on a global scale.” Perhaps that’s why his review of my Left Is Not Woke exhibits less reason than rage, blinding him to the fact that most of his objections are answered in the book itself.SN: Well, it does! In any case, even the woke often presume it. You can’t grow up in this culture without absorbing it. I once got talking about evolutionary psychology with my son, who’s a documentary filmmaker and very woke but a sophisticated thinker. And he told me: “Well, that’s just science!” Susan Neiman’s aim in Left Is Not Woke is to remind the left of the importance of universalist values. Her clarity of thought and expression, coupled with her beautiful prose, means that this must-read book should be read by everyone concerned with equality and justice.” Left-of-center critics of wokeness, meanwhile, tend to have a narrower target in mind. Mainstream liberals sometimes use it to denote an extreme or illiberal turn in progressive political culture since the Obama years, while some socialists deploy it to deride the superficial moralism of virtue-signaling corporations. Still, such critiques often fail to make clear where progressive politics ends and the “woke” variety begins. The book thus sets out to defend the Enlightenment against “standard contemporary readings,” which are more accurately just called critical readings. For much of the last century, the Enlightenment—a loose movement of European intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries who emphasized individual reason over tradition and religion—occupied a privileged place in the origin stories of liberalism. It was the moment when human rights and democracy became thinkable to Europeans as organizing political principles. None of this is to say that Neiman’s critique is directed entirely at straw men, or that it does not speak to genuine pathologies within the left. Her suggestion that many putative progressives indulge in ethnic “tribalism” (defined as an outlook that sees “the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else”) and racial essentialism are sadly well-founded.

It’s always a pleasure to debate an esteemed colleague, and I thank the editors at Los Angeles Review of Books for facilitating this conversation.In her response, Neiman accuses me of being “blind[ed]” by “rage.” In truth, I was mostly bemused while reading her book. I was perplexed as to why her work depicts today’s progressives with such unvarnished disdain and wondered if she thinks this is an effective rhetorical strategy to unite the Left. To this day, I do not understand what is to be gained by comparing contemporary leftists with Nazis; it is a comparison more often found in right-wing polemic.