Susan Neiman Wants Her Left Back

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on January 5, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.

Susan Neiman’s latest book in French is a translation of Left Is Not Woke, published in March 2023. Of American origin and living in Germany for several years, the philosopher presents herself from the outset as being left-wing and more particularly of a social, liberal left, whose political matrix dates back to the 1950s-1960s in the United States. It is rare for criticism of the Woke to come from a left-wing perspective, and we can only welcome this initiative at a time when any opposition or contradiction is almost systematically labeled as far-right, even before it has had a chance to be expressed.

In The Left Is Not Woke, Susan Neiman considers the relationships between tribalism and universalism, justice and power, and the fate reserved for the notion of progress. While these questions can indeed shed light on certain current interrogations in France—and elsewhere—the fact remains that the notions addressed, in particular through the words “the left” and “the Woke,” do not cover the same cultural, social and/or political realities in the U.S. and in France, or even within the European Union itself. A few additional definitions, illustrated with comparative or contrasting examples, would have been welcome to enable the average reader to understand their differences in use in the face of dissimilar social realities and national histories on both continents.

From the word Woke Neiman points us to an origin dating back to 1931, which made stay woke a watchword for every black person, enjoining them to watch over their own safety in the face of injustice; it could have signaled their affiliation with the great awakened, the wide awakes who supported the election of Lincoln, the future Republican president, in 1860 and campaigned for the abolition of slavery. If we ignore a few other musical avatars, it was in 2014 that the expression was taken up as a slogan by activists of Black Lives Matter, following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, the word Woke has become the variable-referent label for a radical left political ideology centered on social justice and critical race theory.

Neiman denounces this thinking Woke responsible for the distortion of the values ​​of a social, humanist and universalist left in favor of a radical and differentialist ideology, and this, in three areas: the necessary collective concern for marginalized people, diverted into a “forest of individualized traumas” and, we would say, essentialized; a concern for concrete restorative justice transformed into the sole attention to inequalities of power; and a requirement for confrontation with the past, which has come to consider history as an irremissible criminal totality.

But which left is she talking about? It does not seem that the French left is in the firing line, as it is not mentioned as such in the book. The generalizing references to France or the French surprisingly come from authors like Joseph de Maistre, or from Rokhaya Diallo’s prose in the New York Times. Neiman also tells us that “it is not as a historian” that she speaks of the left, but that what interests her “is an ideal.”

Since there is no left international, to our knowledge, it is perhaps the German left parties that Neiman is targeting: she would indeed reproach them at the very end of the translated work for not having been able to create a “popular front.” The use of this expression with a precise historical reference, France in 1936, is very surprising in a context where the “worst of wars” is mentioned, namely the Second World War.” Had the left-wing parties been willing to form a united front, as thinkers from Einstein to Trotsky urged, the world could have been spared the worst war.

If the left parties had succeeded in forming a popular front, as great minds, whether Einstein or Trotsky, advised, the world might have avoided the bloodiest war it has ever known.

The referential and political diversion is, at the very least, astonishing. However, the translator uses “popular front” twice in a row instead of the expected translation, a “united front.” It was the Congress of the Communist International in 1922 that defined the expression “united front,” later adopted by Trotsky; the English text by Neiman is very clear on this subject.

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Explanations of Left-Wokism

In any case, let us see what explanations the author gives for the three renunciations of which the left is guilty in her eyes.

The heart of my point here is this: so-called left voices have renounced the philosophical ideas that justify calling oneself left. They have renounced the commitment to universalism over tribalism, the firm distinction between justice and power, and the belief in the possibility of progress, all of which are interrelated ideas.

The first of these concerned the abandonment of its universalist commitment in favor of “tribalism”, a typically American term which refers to “communitarianism” in France and to ” communitarianism ” in the United Kingdom. Tribalism is for Susan Neiman another name for identity politics which leads to communitarianism but also to clashes between tribes, and it “connotes the idea of ​​barbarism.” “Tribalism refers to the civil breakdown that occurs when people, whoever they are, judge that there is a fundamental human difference: what separates us and ours from everyone else.” It is then that she points out the tribalist turn of the American left, unexpected and dangerous according to her, because “if the demands of minorities are considered not as human rights, but as rights of particular groups, what prevents a majority from putting forward its own?” The movements that originally supported the left were resolutely indifferent to skin color, to “race,” and fought together for a universality of human rights. Tribalism is on the contrary self-centered and totalitarian, characteristics common to all identity politics, left as well as right. Hence the spread of an ethic of withdrawal into oneself, imbued with self-victimization and self-essentialization, which characterizes certain movements dedicated to social justice and places the identity recognition of minorities at the forefront, even going so far as to impose itself on the Internet. Braunstein would not have hesitated to compare it metaphorically to a religion.

From there perhaps a propensity—even a requirement—to highlight minorities in art and culture in general to compensate for their victimization. The same is true in the world of publishing where manuscripts are dissected by readers supposed to detect and reformulate—or delete—the slightest element that could offend the sensibilities of a reader from a minority. From which it follows that what is considered to be cultural appropriation is prohibited, even censored. One can then imagine the pangs of choosing a narrative voice for a writer: from the abstraction that it was when narratology was still serving literary aesthetics, it would seem that it can now only be assumed by a representative of the tribe of the—fictional—character, who himself must be a clone of that of the author—the return of Procrustes—but this does not mean that it seems necessary to go as far as Susan Neiman on this point and to summon the dark echoes of Godwin’s law.

On the other hand, the thought Woke who advocates a tribal vision of culture is not far from that of the Nazis who insisted that German music be played exclusively by Aryans, nor from that of Samuel Huntington defending what he calls “Western culture” against the threats of destruction coming from other civilizations. To censor cultural appropriation is to sabotage the power of culture.

For the philosopher, the “watchword [of universalism] was international solidarity.” The key ideas that identity politics claims are, on the other hand, “ethnic identity and gender identity,” which aim to essentialize multiple statuses of sacrificial victim in a neo-liberal context. From identitarianism to fascism, however, there seems to be only one step: Susan Neiman jointly cites writings by Joseph de Maistre, Eichmann, and Carl Schmitt5 for which “members of the species Homo sapiens are not all human beings” before focusing on Foucault and his anti-Enlightenment positions: “Our task at present, he said, is to free ourselves from humanism,” which would imply the death of the human, as he explained in Words and things. It is nevertheless difficult to fully adhere to this presentation of all the authors which selects the worst of their writings.

Other critics of Enlightenment universalism have criticized it for its Eurocentrism and tacit adherence to colonial doctrines. Neiman rightly points out that Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and others like Kant “were the first to banish Eurocentrism and encourage Europeans to analyze themselves from the point of view of others …Enlightenment philosophers urged readers to be cautious and skeptical when they came across empirical descriptions of non-European peoples.” Similarly, she returns to “Kant’s scathing diatribe against colonialism” and his condemnation of slavery: “Kant’s categorical imperative, which is the fundamental expression of the moral law, stipulates that no one should be treated as a means. This excludes slavery and all forms of oppression.” Finally, she insists on the usefulness of universalist thought at all times and in all places: “[The thinkers of the Enlightenment] laid the theoretical foundation of universalism on which the fight against all forms of racism should be based, as well as the conviction that cultural pluralism is not an alternative to universalism, but its extension.”

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Modernity

It is to Foucault, because of his opposition to modernity and the Enlightenment, that Neiman attributes the responsibility for the second renunciation: the abandonment of the notion of social justice in favor of internal struggles for power. Her critique of Foucault is extensive and calls into question his analysis of power and its mechanisms through his major works. She gives a broad portrait of him while highlighting the possible contradictions between his less nuanced writings and their dithyrambic reception:

Never has a single analytical framework saturated the field of colonial studies as completely as Foucault’s. His books exalted the marginalized of society: the outlaws and the mad. He himself committed himself to the oppressed, whether they were Frenchmen condemned to prison or Chileans victims of dictatorship.

She nevertheless concludes that “Everything argued for him to become the beacon of left-wing thought, at least the great philosopher read by a non-professional audience.” By denouncing power as “the sole driving force,” Foucault challenged “reason” as defined by the Enlightenment, and he was joined by Heidegger and Adorno in making it “a form of dominating, calculating and rapacious monster determined to subjugate.” Neiman then reaffirms without ambiguity that “instrumental rationality is only part of the field of reason. The most important function of reason is to affirm the force of ideals while warning against any equivalence between reason and power: “Reason does indeed have the power to change reality, but to consider it exclusively as a form of power is to ignore the difference between violence and persuasion, and between persuasion and manipulation.” Her treatment of universalism and reason rightly puts the ideas and values ​​of the Enlightenment back in their proper place.

From Rousseau to the state of nature, to evolutionary psychology, and to sociobiology, the question of the naturalization of violence is raised, and of its origin in man. The theories of “the war of all against all,” Hobbesian, and of the “varnish,” of the primatologist F. de Waal, then lead to a reflection on the respective parts of nature and culture in the human being. To conclude this debate and begin the transition with the following part on progress, the author questions again the positions of the left:

A more critical left might have wondered how the ideology of evolutionary psychology had re-emerged from the ashes of sociobiology to reach such a consensus at the end of the Cold War. It was indeed a vision of human nature linked to a cycle of endless competition that met the needs of a world that was oppressive, following Margaret Thatcher’s formula: there is no alternative to neoliberalism.

Progress

The belief in the possibility of progress is also a legacy of the Enlightenment, expressed differently by philosophers; progress is conditioned by reforms, social advances, measures such as the abolition of the death penalty, based on a humanism founded on “the free action of human beings cooperating together.” To achieve this fundamental freedom of choice and conscience, Susan Neiman first emphasizes the need to counter the influence of religious dogmatism on the belief in the possibility of moral progress:

Moral progress is possible only if human nature is better than the Church taught. By hammering home the idea that it is not and that social conditions are natural facts, the Church and the State were sending a message that progress is impossible.

But to act morally, Kant said, one must have hope, because it is hope that opens the doors to a meliorist utopia, without, however, predicting its realization: “hope is not an epistemological position, but a moral position.” This is certainly where progress and progressivism diverge, and the critique of militancy Woke comes back in force, and very timely, in conclusion:

It is clear that woke activists are hungry for justice, solidarity and progress. It is in the name of these ideas that they fight against discrimination. True, but they do not understand that the theories they have adopted undermine their objectives. Without universalism, no argument against racism holds. All that remains is an aggregate of tribes vying for power.

And in doing so, these tribes forget that the history of human progress is the history of the values ​​that have driven it and of the hard-won freedom that has gradually made it possible to fight against inequalities and injustices. “By definition, progress is not what we experience today. It is not what has been achieved, but what should be achieved—if possible tomorrow,” the author reminds us. To know where we are going, we need to understand where we come from: “Universalism depends on an abstraction, on the ability to perceive the common humanity present at the heart of the historical and cultural variations that have also given birth to what we are.”

It is then urgent, says Neiman, to no longer confuse left-wing ideals with a “woke method” based on “cancel culture, emphasis on purity, refusal of nuances, tendency towards binarism,” which ends up “contaminating the whole of political speech.” One could add that the virus Woke of inclusive neo-feminist writing also manages to interfere in texts which theoretically combat it: as proof, this absurd, even burlesque, appearance of the midpoint, on several occasions, in the French translation of The Left Is Not Woke, the use of which cannot, obviously, be attributed to the author—English, like German, does not resort to this lure, which is as grotesque as it is superfluous.6. As an amused counterpoint, let us quote this observation by Susan Neiman, with its dramatic irony: “Language is so often violated that even those who are sensitive to it only notice it when the violation is flagrant.” Translator, traditor…

Universalism, justice

Universalism, justice, and progress are the sure values ​​defended by this work, which, based on an erudite philosophical discussion of their ethical and historical foundations, allows us to escape the usual litany of Woke claims. For the non-philosophical reader, some passages will be difficult, others will suffer from a lack of definitions or examples, others from liberties of translation that are difficult to justify, but everyone will find material to understand—and some to regret—the fracturing of the left on either side of the Herring pond since the end of the 20th century.

Susan Neiman, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard under John Rawls and Stanley Cavell, and then pursued graduate studies at the Free University of Berlin. An associate professor of philosophy, she taught at Yale University from 1989 to 1996 and at Tel Aviv University from 1996 to 2000. She was the director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam for 23 years. She is the author of numerous books, essays, and press articles.

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Cover by Jared Gould using the cover of The Left Is Not Woke & book shelf background by Ryan on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 340078556