Neiman responds: “Do those who make this claim imagine there was no colonialism before the Enlightenment? 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. At one point, Neiman imagines a dialogue with a “woke” interlocutor: “But the Enlightenment was the ideology of colonialism!

But when she defines the core ideals of “the left”—“a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress”—they sound much more like classical liberal values than those of a red-blooded Marxist. Neiman’s insistence on the importance of universalism is particularly apposite in the current emotional responses to the Gaza conflict. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (2021); John McWhorter released Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America (2021).I doubt if one in a hundred contemporary activists could identify Schmitt, who was a Nazi apologist and has been seen as an inspiration for autocrats in the postwar world.

Slow Fire, a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in Berlin at the time, won the PEN prize for a first work of non-fiction in 1992. mean that the book is largely indistinguishable from similar titles flooding the “anti-woke” market such as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories (2020). Neiman wishes to minimise the role of Kant’s “occasional racist comments” in light of his larger commitment to condemning Eurocentrism and colonialism. Had the reviewer read more carefully, he might have noticed the fulsome acknowledgement made to the youngest commentator, Samuel Zeitlin, whose suggestions were most helpful, and perhaps concluded that borrowing without acknowledgement is not the sort of thing I do. In her book she defends Hannah Arendt’s use of the term “crimes against humanity” to describe the Holocaust, an expression journalist Michael Gawenda has found objectionable because it elides the particular experience of Jews.The confusion arises because woke is fuelled by traditionally leftwing emotions: the wish to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, to address historic crimes. There is much in here also to be enjoyed, including critical remarks about Heidegger and sociobiology (although also much could be contested). Certainly, its focus on the proletariat over the bourgeoisie appears to undermine its universalism, but do its origins in the Enlightenment save it from thereby being labelled “woke”?

It is all well and good to avoid “scholarly investigation”, but even non-scholarly books list a few examples of the very object of criticism now and again. The fictitious right-wing media persona Titania McGrath published Woke: A Guide to Social Justice (2019); current US Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy authored Woke, Inc. Her discussion of the Enlightenment and its claims to universalism is genuinely interesting, even if she is too willing to glide over the deep contradictions in America’s favourite Enlightenment figures. One of the world's leading philosophical voices, Neiman makes this case by tracing the malign influence of two titans of twentieth-century thought, Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, whose work undermined ideas of justice and progress and portrayed social life as an eternal struggle of us against them.I imagine they must exist – the church of self-identified leftism is so broad, after all, that some “woke” people somewhere must surely be doing this too, and not just all the centrist and right-wing thinkers and organisations she explicitly names throughout her book. Scholarly investigation would complicate the claims I make about Foucault or Schmitt or evolutionary psychology”. Having condemned identity as the basis for a decent politics, Neiman seems determined to link Foucault’s ideas to his sexuality. That version of Enlightenment reason was not a value-neutral heuristic, but rather an imposition of European power on a global scale. She argues persuasively that if we do not believe that progress is possible, we cannot construct a meaningful politics for the left, one that creates greater equality and fairness for all.