The Illusion of a Left Without Woke

Can an intellectual tradition dissociate itself from the very ideas it has helped to develop? That is the question running through “Left Is Not Woke,” one of the most widely discussed political essays of recent years. In it, Susan Neiman argues that the woke phenomenon does not represent the culmination of the Left, but rather its negation. The thesis is undeniably attractive. It allows the moral legacy of the Enlightenment Left to be preserved while attributing the excesses of identity politics to a deviation foreign to its own tradition. The question, however, is whether this historical reconstruction withstands scrutiny when examined in light of the history of ideas.

The success of the book is not difficult to understand. At a time when many progressive intellectuals have become increasingly uncomfortable with the excesses of identity activism, Neiman offers an intellectually elegant way out. She seeks to recover a Left grounded in universalism, equality, and justice, contrasting that legacy with a politics that has replaced the citizen with identity, rational debate with cancellation, and the ideal of emancipation with permanent competition among groups seeking recognition. Her argument has resonated precisely because it articulates the unease of a significant part of the Left that no longer recognizes itself in either the language or the practices of woke politics.

This diagnosis is undoubtedly the book’s greatest strength. Neiman reminds us that the Enlightenment tradition always aspired to expand the sphere of what human beings hold in common. Equality was not understood as depending upon race, sex, or cultural background but upon the equal dignity shared by every human person. From that perspective, identity politics marks a profound rupture. Where there once existed a common political subject, there now emerge multiple communities defined by specific grievances. Politics ceases to be ordered toward the common good and becomes an endless struggle for differential recognition.

It is therefore unsurprising that the book has received praise from a wide range of intellectual traditions. Philosophers associated with the French republican tradition, such as Roger-Pol Droit, have welcomed Neiman’s defence of Enlightenment universalism, while noting certain weaknesses in the overall construction of her argument. Likewise, liberal and social-democratic commentators have praised her attempt to recover a Left once again capable of speaking about citizenship, responsibility, and a shared political project. The book has been widely read as a serious effort to rescue a political tradition that seemed to have been eclipsed by the culture wars.

The sharpest criticism, by contrast, has come from scholars associated with post-structuralism, Critical Race Theory, queer theory, and intersectional approaches. From these perspectives, Neiman is accused of employing an overly broad notion of “woke,” reducing highly diverse movements to a single category and reconstructing an Enlightenment Left that was never as coherent as she suggests. For these authors, identity politics does not represent a deviation from the egalitarian project but rather its necessary extension to groups that had historically been excluded. The disagreement is therefore not merely political. It reflects fundamentally different understandings of justice, equality, and even of the very subject of emancipation.

It is precisely when Neiman moves from diagnosis to genealogy, however, that her argument, in my view, begins to lose some of its persuasive force.

She presents woke ideology as a rupture with the historical tradition of the Left. That interpretation makes it possible to preserve the moral prestige of the Left while distancing it from the excesses of identity politics. Yet, historically, it is not entirely convincing. This is not because the entire Left is woke—such a claim would be both inaccurate and unfair—but because identity politics can scarcely be understood apart from the intellectual evolution of a significant part of the Left during the second half of the twentieth century.

Ideas do not emerge spontaneously. They have a history. They develop gradually, shift their emphasis, adopt new vocabularies and, at times, produce consequences their original proponents never intended. This, arguably, is precisely what happened with the rise of woke ideology.

From the decades following the Second World War onward, an important current within the Left progressively shifted the centre of its intellectual attention. Economic questions ceased to occupy the exclusive focus they once had, giving way first to culture, then to language, and finally to identity. Social conflict was no longer understood primarily as class struggle but increasingly as a network of relations of domination extending into the family, education, sexuality, language, religion, and virtually every institution shaping common life.

A number of thinkers and intellectual movements played decisive roles in this transformation. Antonio Gramsci argued that cultural hegemony was as important as economic power. Various representatives of the Frankfurt School broadened social criticism beyond economic structures to encompass cultural and institutional life. Michel Foucault interpreted power as an omnipresent web of relationships permeating every dimension of society. Jacques Derrida transformed deconstruction into a method for reading all discourses. Judith Butler applied this logic to sexual identity, while Kimberlé Crenshaw developed intersectionality as a framework for understanding the convergence of multiple forms of discrimination.

Woke activism did not invent these categories. It inherited them. It simplified them. And it transformed them into a political and cultural programme.

For that reason, it is difficult to accept that woke ideology entered the Left as an external body or an unforeseen accident. It appears instead as the late fruit of an intellectual process unfolding over several decades. It does not represent the whole history of the Left, but neither can it be entirely separated from one of its most influential intellectual trajectories.

It is here, precisely, that the principal limitation of Neiman’s book becomes apparent. She describes the illness with remarkable clarity, but reconstructs its genealogy only partially. Woke ideology did not descend upon the Left like an unexpected storm. It grew within part of its own intellectual garden. To acknowledge this is not to deny the existence of other traditions within the Left—social democratic, republican, humanist, or Labour—that resisted this trajectory. It is simply to recognize that ideas have consequences and that political traditions must also account for the developments that emerge from within their own intellectual inheritance.

From the standpoint of classical philosophical anthropology and political philosophy, the issue is deeper still. The fundamental problem with identity politics is not merely that it has abandoned Enlightenment universalism. More profoundly, it has replaced the person with identity as the primary category of political life. Once individuals are no longer understood first and foremost in terms of their shared human nature but rather through their membership in particular groups, the common good inevitably recedes. Politics then risks becoming little more than the permanent administration of competing grievances.

The decisive question, therefore, is no longer whether the Left is or is not woke. The more important question is whether the West can recover a political culture grounded once again in the person, citizenship and the common good after decades spent travelling the path of identity-based fragmentation.

Susan Neiman has rendered an important service by forcing that question back into public debate. Yet answering it requires looking further back than her own book is willing to do.