Of these two issues, the second can easily be remedied in the second edition which the book amply deserves. Elsewhere she has written movingly about the way in which German guilt about the Holocaust blocks the capacity to feel empathy for Palestinians now dying in Gaza. Without these ideas, Neiman argues, they will continue to undermine their own goals and drift, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right. They share, she claims, a commitment to “universalism, a hard distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress”. One assumes she would applaud the tentative attempts of the Biden administration to modify the worst excesses of American capitalism, but while she inveighs against neo-liberalism, she ignores contemporary mainstream politics, wanting instead to seek out the philosophic roots of what she sees as the current failings of many on the left.

And his conception of normative power has had a profound influence on generations of activists on both sides of the Atlantic, for whom his analysis provides a language and a strategy for confronting those in power, those who might tell you that your demands are unreasonable and dismiss your actions as irrational. By criticizing the Enlightenment, she insists, such scholars have created a reality in which “reason itself is now identified with oppression. 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. Without these ideas, the woke will continue to undermine their own goals and drift, inexorably and unintentionally, towards the right.The intellectual roots and resources of wokeism conflict with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. Neiman wishes to minimise the role of Kant’s “occasional racist comments” in light of his larger commitment to condemning Eurocentrism and colonialism.

Without universalism, there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power’ (108). That this same “reason” has been used to defend slavery, imperialism, war, and ethnic cleansing is waved aside. She criticizes the “vehemence of woke arguments about the importance of pronouns,” for instance, without pointing to a single example of such vehemence (nor does she note the rising violence that LGBTQ+ people face in their daily lives). Immanuel Kant, for instance, one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers, contended in 1775 that “the Negro […] is lazy, soft and trifling.At times, Neiman does express sympathy for contemporary progressives, recognizing their “best of intentions” and acknowledging shared goals.