Postmodernism Unbound?

Review of Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s new book Cynical Theories proposes to outline the relationship between the “postmodernism” of the 1960s and what they’ve called elsewhere the “grievance studies” of contemporary academia. In so doing, it aims to explain the perspective of “woke” activism. The authors think such activism is based on a “complex spiritual worldview” similar to “tribal animism” or “hippie spiritualism” or “sophisticated global religions.” This worldview is “very peculiar” — so peculiar that it “even speaks its own language.” Due to what they see as its dogmatism and lack of contact with reality, it “at best [has] a chilling effect on the culture of free expression” and “at worst . . . is a malicious form of bullying.”

The authors guarantee us that they are “fluent in both the language and the culture of Social Justice scholarship and activism.” They “plan to guide [their] readers through this alien world, charting the evolution of these ideas from their origins 50 years ago right up to the present day.” And it doesn’t end there: in their final chapter they make a case for a return to liberalism, back from what they see as the illiberalism of the woke.

This is a big set of big tasks: it requires doing philosophy, political theory…