The Left Is Not Woke review
In “The left is not woke” philosopher Susan Neiman attempts to provide a critique from the left of a movement she broadly defines at the beginning of the book but never really successfully circumscribes. I must admit the title gave me a tint of repulsion and interest at the same time. I came across it by perusing through her bibliography after reading a recent article of hers in the New York Review of Books (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/09/24/is-morality-universal-the-diversity-of-morals-lukes/) about the notion of pluralism in morals. The article was muddy in some ways but what struck out to me was that for once someone was trying to reconcile cultural plurality and a progressive vision of multiculturalism with a wider yearning for an established sense of universalism in morality, and I want to say ethics might be a better word as morality tends to have a connotation more beholden to tradition and petty conventions even though there is a distinguished tradition in philosophy that self identifies with the word morality. In the article Neiman at some point, in what may seem as a piqued or slightly annoyed way, defends “the enlightenment”, and I think the scare quotes are warranted, against recent attacks from a critical theory angle which aims to re contextualize the philosophical output of this period and its general trend towards positing reason as the ultimate arbiter and source of authority as a fundamentally more problematic than it sounds. This appealed to me because of a general unease I had with the critical theory/post-modern ethos I had encountered while in university even as I had always identified as a progressive, a left wing anarchist even, which you would suppose, would embrace all the more confident strains of left coded thought. I was not surprised therefore to see amongst her output a book tackling the spooky word “woke”.
And here is the first general problem with the discourse surrounding these kinds of attempts at theorizing around this word. It has been turned into a boogeyman of the right, a rallying cry for various “thinkers”, once again the scare quotes are more than justified. And forgive me for using this word but polarization has made examining these critiques seriously as a kind of betrayal. I want to be clear, I am not against being extreme, it is perfectly reasonable to react to the rise of the far right with an even more militant confident and militant left. But polarization also means we end up reflexively endorsing opinions and various strains of ideologies even though they might very well contradict other important parts of what we try to consistently define as a progressive left. Examining the critiques of the right seriously should not be seen as traitorous as long as it stems from a real attempt to clarify notions and identify contradictions within the zeitgeist. The other problem with polarization is turning a descriptive clustering process to identify the current leftist ideology with a prescriptive one. In less jargon (invented by yours truly) I mean the tendency to assume what is coded left is what is genuinely leftist. Thinking of it as a data scientist we tend to cluster ideas, that is delineate thoughts by their proximity to each other, to think of them as forming a coherent bag and in the spectrum hypothesis proximity is one dimensional and sometimes this might map onto a nice line that, and this is the key point, has ideological consistency, such as the case for how much redistribution is done through taxes. The problem with polarization is thinking the way we intuitively cluster these ideas maps well to this hypothesis for one but more importantly is coherent according to a set of principles and is not a purely descriptive statistical clustering: people with these kinds of thoughts tend to also hold these kinds of opinions. When we assume this bag is well defined and needs to be defended we fall into a trap. In summary woke is a term tainted by its second coming on the right, even though it originated on the left it has been reclaimed. The other problem is thinking that everything it describes is genuinely leftist simply because leftists often end up being woke as well, which is the result of a purely descriptive process, something experimental political science students research, something we could call alignment. And in a battle alignment means teams and you don’t betray your team with doubt. The most indicative example of that is the review of the book by the Los Angeles Review of Books, a decidedly left wing publication (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critically-cringe-on-susan-neimans-left-is-not-woke/). In it Neiman is panned for ungenerous readings of Foucault and generally straw manning: who even is the woke, what is its cannon etc. But more importantly the tone suggests a sort of treason on her part. This is the reaction most get for examining the concept of woke as invented on the right, “how dare you use their language.”
The second problem with examining the concept of woke, and the LARB touches on this is that it tries to tackle something ineffable, a zeitgeist. We can trace the origins of the ideas she tackles in the postmodern, French theory craze in universities in the late 80s but its contemporary drip into mainstream popular social media inflected culture is harder to analyze. After all how to analyze the emergence of safe spaces, cultural sensitivity training, rainbow capitalism (which is just marketing at the end of the day but that is another story), cancel culture and other things branded as woke, mostly by the right once again, in a systematic and rigorous way. This is where the straw man critique of her book comes in and while mostly valid is it also generally an ungenerous reading of her, echoing the first critique which is made of her. I’ve encountered few writers that were good at providing their own framework to analyze what feels like a zeitgeist, like an ethos. It is after all something that is harder to bound, to ground and to pin down for analysis. One example I greatly admire is Isaiah Berlin’s innovation in what he called the history of ideas. He decided to approach these currents of thoughts by a genealogical approach to texts that is congenial, leisurely and vaguely principled, mixing exegesis of the texts he thought important with biographical details. This however doesn’t tackle the diverse modern environment in idea dissemination through social media moderation strategies, advertisement or corporate culture. Neiman does some critical readings of texts by authors she views as foundational but the critique is generally shallow, she briefly quotes a couple, dismisses Foucault’s discipline and punish off-hand by saying one mostly remembers from the book the detailed description of torture at its beginning (which if ungenerous is sort of astute.) In the strongest part of the book she tries to link Carl Schmidt to Foucault and Heidegger in generally muddy critique of postmodernism as illiberal. Point taken but it doesn’t go very var. In other parts she vigorously defends the enlightenment against modern critical readings which tends to cast, according to her, the whole movement as Eurocentric, racist, sexist etc. She provides a few compelling examples of direct quotes from some of the texts from that period as defying those isms, point taken once again but she doesn’t either provide the examples you suspect the modern criticism were based on. For every exculpating evidence she presents I suspect one could find a counterpoint. In all it seems like a reflexive annoyance on her part from the way critical theorists approach the texts specialize in. I’m all for a good rant. She never tries to seriously tackle the zeitgeist or ethos aspect of the “woke movement” which is after all what the book was supposed to be about and that is where the books fails. In this she could have taken inspiration from the field that is probably most apt at it, namely anthropology. Of course that is kind of disingenuous, she is not a trained anthropologist and wouldn’t know how to conduct a proper ethnography If there is one good thing this book outlines is the need for this kind of mixed approach into what I’d brand zeitgeist studies, a mix of exegesis and critical reading of texts deemed foundational as well as their more pop spectral manifestations (something ironically very postmodern, almost woke) conjoined, and this is the important part with an ethnographic study of how these thoughts permeate in real world interactions, in distinct subcultures and close knit groups. Ideally we could pair this quantitative political science studies to try to understand how people self report or affiliate according to these various strains of ideology.
This seems ambitious but fundamentally important, whenever we talk about the rise of Fascism or the Woke era we juggle with different things about how a time and place feels and both the texts and the experiences on the ground matter. I have yet to see a satisfying left wing examination of what binds together positional epistemology (e.g. the belief that personal experiential knowledge transcends the abstract kind and that people without specific experience shouldn’t talk about some domains), cancel culture, outrage at cultural appropriation, safe spaces etc; binds them genealogically in their textual forms and more concretely in their social manifestations. I suspect these are mostly campus related and here serious ethnographic work would be welcome. Some would say the point in common is a fight for justice, against discrimination etc, forgive me for the straw man, I am not anthropologist, but this seems trite. Alas “The left is not woke” doesn’t provide many answers, discarding all attempts as capitulation to right wing thought doesn’t really help either.