Woke And The Left: A Dangerous Conflation With Susan Neiman

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Woke And The Left: A Dangerous Conflation With Susan Neiman

Politics &
Economics

Two leading voices examine the future of the Left, its relationship with ‘wokeism', and the need to stay true to fundamental values

Philosopher Susan Neiman and cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams came to Intelligence Squared for a challenging conversation on the themes of Neiman’s new book Left is Not Woke. Neiman set out what she sees as the dangerous consequences of conflating ‘wokeism’ with the Left, arguing that this confusion threatens the core principles that have guided progressive movements for centuries.

Neiman dissected what she sees as the malign influence of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, two titans of twentieth-century thought, whose work portrays social life as an eternal struggle of us against them, and, in her view, undermines basic notions of justice and progress. As she argued, a generation inculcated with these concepts and raised in a broader culture shaped by the ruthless ideas of neoliberalism and evolutionary psychology has set about changing the world. But is it time to think again? Neiman will caution that those who espouse ‘woke’ values risk undermining their own goals and drifting, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right. In other words, they are in danger of becoming the very thing they despise.

Praise for Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke.

‘In these bleak times, Susan Neiman’s book arrives as a breath of fresh air. Calmly but fiercely defending the principles of universalism and progress that once defined the left, she gives us a counter to the narrow tribalism that threatens to derail progressive politics.’ – Vivek Chibber, New York University

‘Philosophy, for Susan Neiman, is a martial art. Her sharp argument that woke is not left because left is universalist while woke is progressive-styled tribalism will stir a much-needed debate.’ – Ivan Krastev, Chair, Centre for Liberal Strategies

‘The problem [according to Neiman] is that “those who have learned in college to distrust every claim to truth will hesitate to acknowledge falsehood.”’ – John McWhorter, New York Times

Speakers

Speaker

Susan Neiman

American writer and philosopher, whose new book is Left Is Not Woke

American writer and philosopher. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. Slow Fire, a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in Berlin in the 1980s, won the PEN prize for a first work of non-fiction in 1992. From 1989 to 1995 she was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University, and from 1996 to 2000 she was associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 2000 she became director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. Neiman’s books have been translated into many languages. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften. Her new book is Left Is Not Woke.

Chair

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Author, critic and contributing writer at The Atlantic

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visiting Professor of Humanities and Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. His upcoming book is Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness.

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