Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—And Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay.

This book had little chance of succeeding. It is too ambitious, trying at once to be a history of postmodern thought, an account of its influence on contemporary political and legal discourse, a refutation of its philosophical underpinnings, and a defense of the liberalism it challenges. Its authors also made their names provoking and antagonizing the corners of the political and academic worlds they target here. Most readers will pick up this book already loving or hating it. 

I went into it with my own bias: there is, I think, is a lot wrong with what the book calls ‘Theory’ and what they identify as its contemporary political offsprings, but I’ve found Lindsay especially to be strident and superficial in the online polemics for which he is now mostly known. I expected a book that I would sometimes agree with, but which would be drearily reliant on caricatures and stereotypes. Perhaps because Pluckrose’s more moderate demeanor prevailed, the book is more fair minded than I expected, and reasonably if unevenly well documented and substantive in its arguments.

The first part of the book is a history of postmodernism, or at least that part of it found in the writings of a handful of philosophers and literary theorists of the 1970s and 80s. Pluckrose and Lindsay work heroically to find some order in this unruly topic as they survey the musings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Frederick Jameson, and others. I was in college and graduate school during these authors’ heydays, so this part of the book was fun, in the way those nostalgic PBS shows featuring second tier bands reviving songs you’d forgotten can be fun. 

The important work of this first part is to establish the interpretive frame the authors hope to use to make sense of the subsequence fortunes of what they call Theory. This frame makes use of two ‘Principles’ and four ‘Themes’. The two principles are Radical Skepticism and belief in all encompassing Systems of Power and Hierarchies. The themes are the blurring of boundaries, the power of language, cultural relativism, and the loss of the individual and the universal. The idea is that all subsequent developments of Theory reflect the interplay of these two Principles and four Themes, and our authors hope in the end to expose the deep tensions in these ideas that are manifest in Theory’s current ‘activist’ carnation. Predictably, this framework is only intermittently useful or plausible, but it’s also mostly beside the point. The action here is in the history the book covers. Alas, there are significant lacunae in its telling.  

The authors acknowledge the divide between the original postmodernists and the more traditional philosophical left, but they fail to capture the real significance of neo-Marxism, and Jurgen Habermas in particular, to their story. Habermas was a harsh critic of the postmodernists, whom he taunted as ‘young conservatives.’ Habermas’ argued that these would be radicals left no room for the normative principles needed to responsibly critique and ultimately transform real world institutions. In his scathing reviews of Foucault and especially Derrida, Habermas explored much more capably the very tensions in the postmodern thought that Cynical Theories takes itself to be exposing.

Missing almost entirely from Lindsay and Pluckrose’s history is the influential rethinking of liberalism in the work of John Rawls and especially  Richard Rorty. Essential to this part of the story is the end of the Cold War and how the unexpected and rapid unraveling of the Eastern Bloc made the political irrelevance of Theory glaringly obvious. I remember seeing Rorty announce at a conference that Reagan was right when he said the USSR was an evil empire—the look of horror on Avital Ronell’s face captured in a moment Theory’s inability to say anything of practical use about the political world that had emerged by the 1990s. Almost over night, thinking deeply about liberal democracy had become much more interesting than deconstructing Nietzsche’s marginalia or tracing the genealogy of physical education in public schools.

The rise of political liberalism to almost complete dominance in mainstream political theory and philosophy points to a problem with the book’s account of the spread of ‘applied’ postmodernism. The story Pluckrose and Lindsay want to tell is that the applied turn was a natural development of the original theories that just kept plugging along. I think it’s more likely that Theory took root in specialized and politically oriented academic disciplines because they were the only ones who would have it as the 90s wound on. More moderate (and influential) thinkers—including Habermas—chose to work within the liberal tradition. While their work dominated political theory, it was increasingly ignored by faculty in specialized and activist departments, who continued to find rhetorical resources in what was left of deconstruction and Foucaultian genealogy. They were not worrying too much about the underlying philosophical cogency of the original sources.

In any case, making sense of this ‘applied move’ and the rise of the Social Justice Movement is the focus of the second part of the book, which is very uneven as the strain of fitting a vast array of scholars into their framework is palpable—Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, and Disability and Fat Studies all get a moment. At times the authors do a decent job explaining the work of the theorists who set up shop in the rapidly proliferating speciality studies, though at others they flail badly in trying to snare in their net thinkers who don’t belong in this book at all. They do capture well the seemingly unlimited number of topics that can be made political by being prefixed with ‘critical’. 

While elucidating the underlying connections between these various disciplines, Pluckrose and Lindsay also begin highlighting their many internal tensions and contradictions. These include most notably the odd marriage of epistemic and moral relativism to ideological partisanship, and the substitution of linguistic policing for genuine political advocacy. This could have been an especially tedious part of the book, and the authors are to be commended for rendering the mangled and gimmicky prose of some of the authors they discuss into plain English. As Pluckrose and Lindsay show, for a couple of decades, scholars in these disciplines became increasingly dogmatic, political, and strident, and their work suffered accordingly.

There is a lot missing here too though, and more familiarity with Rorty’s work in the 80s and early 90s in particular might have been used to highlight the sterility of some of the work Pluckrose and Lindsay cover. Though he called himself a pragmatist, Rorty dabbled in the ideas of Derrida and Heidegger, and his work represents a road not taken by postmodernism’s political descendants.

Rorty defended the political utility of a skeptical and relativist pragmatism, but he was also quick to denounce the overly philosophical approach of the new ‘radicals’ and their obsession with policing language in particular. He could have fun with neologism like ‘phallologocentrism’, but Rorty never took that stuff overly seriously, and he never forgot that ultimately the important thing is alleviating suffering and stopping the strong from picking on the weak. What unified his political work was a vision of liberalism that embraced both the traditional left of unionism and social welfare and the new left of feminism and social criticism. Rorty’s liberalism, however, also had room for a patriotic appreciation of the America that had, indeed, fought and won the Cold War, and that remained a source of optimism and hope. As Pluckrose and Lindsay grimly detail, nothing too hopeful made it into the hardening orthodoxies of what they call activist postmodern Theory. 

One might have thought that given its trajectory over the last several decades, postmodernism was headed for the same ultimate fate as Flock of Seagull haircuts and ‘Who Shot JR.?’ bumperstickers. But in the last ten years or so something surprising started to happen: Theory began to become more and more influential outside the bounds of its academic niches, a trend that exploded with the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and other manifestations of the new ‘populism’. Seemingly out of nowhere critical this and critical that became lucrative and ubiquitous. 

Theory is also increasingly powerful in alarming ways. Cynical Theories tells enough of this tale to invoke horror at the injustices Social Justice Warriors have unleashed with their new found political clout. Unfortunately, the book relies excessively on worn out parade cases culled from the Internet, which undermines its effectiveness by suggesting the supposed terror of ‘cancel culture’ is limited to a small number of well publicized cases. More empirically informed work is badly needed here.

How the spinoffs of postmodernism could rise to such prominence is the most interesting question this book may have tried to answer, but unfortunately Pluckrose and Lindsay make little progress. They succeed tolerably well at describing what has been going on. But just why such putatively bad and dangerous ideas found a growing audience outside of academic niches remains a mystery.  

Here too I think  the changing fortunes of liberalism is at the heart of the story. In this case it is the growing dissatisfaction with liberal political philosophy, which is driven in turn by growing doubts about liberalism itself. With the election of Trump in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK standing as a refutation of post-Cold War liberal optimism, there has been a growing market on the left for more radical politics and political thinking (and on the right a growing market for post liberal communitarianian ideas). With the near total disappearance of the traditional socialist left, Theory has rushed in to fill this void and it has captured the attention of those who are increasingly frustrated with liberalism’s perceived failure to address racial and gender disparities and those who are frustrated with mainstream liberal philosophy’s silence on these matters. Cynical Theory hints at all this, but that’s about all.

The final chapter of the book is in some ways the most important, and it’s also the least successful, though it does perform the service of pointing to what is desperately needed. Here Pluckrose and Lindsay try to present and defend science and liberalism from the ravages Theory has wrought, but their discussion is terribly superficial. By reducing liberalism to a tolerant attitude and American standards of free speech, Pluckrose and Lindsay paper over the legitimate criticisms of its persistent failure to address systemic inequalities. By reducing science to a high school level take on the ‘scientific method’, they ignore the well studied sociological and political realities of scientific practice. Like all human activities that capture significant resources, science is subject to legitimate critical scrutiny, a fact Lindsay and Pluckrose cannot accommodate. 

In the end this is a fun but flawed book that acts as invitation for others to write at least five better ones.