Neiman sets her sights on Foucault as an exemplar of this turn away from Enlightenment reason, arguing that he pioneered a worldview held today by “the woke left. I have attempted to reconcile the claim that the New York Times is “woke” with its active participation in the most recent “anti-woke” moral panic about trans people; its continued obsession with highlighting minor cases of petty theft and downplaying systemic wage theft; its history of sympathetic profiles of right-wing extremists ranging from Adolf Hitler in 1922 to the leader of the overtly white supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party in 2016; or its recent opinion piece excusing the public murder of a homeless man on the New York subway. Much of the content in her book is taken directly from the 2022 talk, with some interesting exceptions. It should not be surprising, I suppose, though it certainly is more astonishing, that Neiman likewise fails to unambiguously define what she means by “left. But it is unclear to me why Neiman believes in an origin story that ties “woke” to Nazi intellectuals, rather than elsewhere, especially when there are other prime candidates.

Struggling to define her terms, Neiman also struggles to clearly articulate the (imagined) position of her (imagined) “woke” interlocutors, who become the straw men one suspects she really wants them to be. Neiman’s digression to “woke” victimhood leads to another critique, the one time she substantially engages with another philosopher: a critique of Miranda Fricker’s work on standpoint epistemology. Foucault’s critique of modernity, while it has long been criticized for robbing individuals of agency and leading to cynicism or even despair, was not merely an academic one.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. Personally, I think it best to view the term “woke” in light of how it functions as a speech act: as a “snarl word” (to use the technical term S. She has written extensively on the philosophical history of evil, maintaining idealism in a rough world, the legacy of slavery and the holocaust, and why we should grow up. This reactionary tendency has led to some prominent class-first leftists advocating anti-LGBT+ and racist policies, constructing red-brown alliances with right-wing groups that advocate the same purity logic reviled by Neiman, and descending into “ironic” traditionalism, hierarchicalism, tribalism and nihilism. Dennis Altman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

She begins with a quote from Fricker discussing feminist thought: “Feminists [took the idea that] … a life led at the sharp end of any given set of power relations provides for critical understanding”. In her reading, sociobiology suggests inequalities of class and gender are inherent in our DNA, rather than socially constructed. The challenges we face are daunting, made all the more so by entrenched norms and powerful interests with a stake in maintaining the status quo. 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.The “woke insistence on a tribal understanding of culture,” Neiman tells us, “is not far enough from a Nazi insistence that German music should only be played by Aryans. Richard Wolin’s 2023 book, Heidegger in Ruins , stands as an illustrative example, deftly tying together the evidence of Heidegger’s malign influence on some parts of leftist thinking; Neiman’s book does not. There is much in here also to be enjoyed, including critical remarks about Heidegger and sociobiology (although also much could be contested).