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Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - And Why this Harms Everybody Hardcover – 10 Sept. 2020

by Helen Pluckrose (Author), James Lindsay (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 4,456 ratings
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BOOK OF THE YEAR in The Times, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma behind these ideas, from its origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognisable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media pile-ons, as by its assertions, which are all too often taken as read: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As they warn, the unchecked proliferation of these beliefs present a threat to liberal democracy.

While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalised communities it claims to champion.

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  1. Print length
    352 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Swift Press
  4. Publication date
    10 Sept. 2020
  5. Dimensions
    16 x 3.2 x 24 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    1800750048
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1800750043
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  1. Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others.
    Highlighted by 3,141 Kindle readers
  2. A critical theory is chiefly concerned with revealing hidden biases and underexamined assumptions, usually by pointing out what have been termed “problematics,” which are ways in which society and the systems that it operates upon are going wrong.
    Highlighted by 3,114 Kindle readers
  3. In practice, deconstructive approaches to language therefore look very much like nitpicking at words in order to deliberately miss the point.
    Highlighted by 2,481 Kindle readers
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From the Publisher

ayann hirsi ali

Cynical Theories Swift Press

steven pinker

Product description

Review

Book of the Year – The Times

Book of the Year – Sunday Times

Book of the Year – Financial Times

'Brilliant' – Daily Telegraph

‘Exposes the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movements that appear to be engulfing our culture’– Steven Pinker

'If you want to know the philosophy behind cancel culture and why it is so creepy, get this book. Then, give it to your friends and family' – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

About the Author

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and speaker. She is the editor of Areo Magazine and the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe, which highlighted problems in social justice scholarship, she is today an exile from the humanities, where she researched late medieval and early modern religious writing by and for women. She lives in England and can be found on Twitter @HPluckrose.



James Lindsay is a mathematician with a background in physics and founder of New Discourses (newdiscourses.com). He is interested in the psychology of religion, authoritarianism, and extremism. His books include Everybody Is Wrong about God, Life in Light of Death, and How to Have Impossible Conversations. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philosophers’ Magazine, Scientific American, and Time. He led the Grievance Studies Affair probe that made international headlines in 2018, including the front page of the New York Times. He lives in Tennessee and can be found on Twitter @ConceptualJames.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Swift Press (10 Sept. 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1800750048
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1800750043
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16 x 3.2 x 24 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 4,456 ratings

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  1. James Lindsay

    James Lindsay

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    James Lindsay is an author, internationally recognized speaker, and the founder and president of New Discourses. He is best known for his relentless criticism of "Woke" ideology, the now-famous Grievance Studies Affair, and his bestselling books including Race Marxism and Cynical Theories, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. In addition to writing and speaking, Lindsay is the voice of the New Discourses Podcast and has been a guest on prominent media outlets including The Joe Rogan Experience, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and NPR.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Helen Pluckrose

    Helen Pluckrose

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Helen Pluckrose is a liberal humanist writer and commentator with a background in late medieval women's religious writing. She now focuses primarily on postmodernism and Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism and their negative effects on the humanities and the political left. Helen took part in the "Grievance Studies Affair" with James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. She is the editor-in-chief of Areo, a digital magazine focused on politics, culture, science and art.

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4,456 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book insightful and well-researched. It provides a detailed academic overview of contentious topics while conveying the authors' opinions. Readers describe it as an accessible, worthwhile read that is fair and informative.

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51 customers mention ‘Insight’48 positive3 negative

Customers find the book insightful and well-researched. It provides a detailed academic overview of contentious, divisive, and offensive social issues. The book helps clarify postmodern thought in relation to Social Justice Theory, making it an invaluable contribution to the genre. Readers find it interesting and easy to understand, whether they are caught up in a political discussion or not.

"This book gives a detailed insight into the origins of the many 'woke' ideas plaguing our societies at the moment...." Read more

"...provided me with the tools to help understand this esoteric discipline called critical theory, its roots in Postmodernism and how it manifests in..." Read more

"...It is a common sense, reasoned reply to the shrill and absurd cries we see in the likes of 'White Fragility'...." Read more

"A superbly written book. It does help if you have a background in Cultural Studies but its also very accessible to the lay reader...." Read more

27 customers mention ‘Value for money’27 positive0 negative

Customers find the book accessible, incisive, and worthwhile. They describe it as informative, fair, and engaging.

"...A valuable resource." Read more

"This is the book which decent, mature, liberal, humane and rationale people have been waiting for...." Read more

"...hell mythologies This book reveals the extent of the malaise, well worth a read" Read more

"...It is not a light read but well worth the effort...." Read more

A Much Needed Book
5 out of 5 stars
A Much Needed Book
Well argued reasonable ideas that we can now understand, and push back on the equally strong but cynical ideas. Helen and James deserve a lot of applause for this achievement. Now that we have this book, we can finally articulate what we knew, but could not express. This is a book that everyone can understand,and therefor use, wether you are caught up in a problem at work, your school or on the street. Good luck everyone, we all have the same goal- nobody wants social injustice, but the methods to be used should still be questioned. This book is really, really good to argue with the resentful postmodern revolutionary social justice warrior type. Change arise, with incremental progress, not by toppling everything all at once.
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Top reviews from United Kingdom

Colin W
5.0 out of 5 stars A Valuable Insight
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 December 2023
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This book gives a detailed insight into the origins of the many 'woke' ideas plaguing our societies at the moment. These origins are in the largely worthless ideas of the French postmodern philosophers of the 1960s and 70s. These were people such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others. They expressed their ideas in incomprehensible prose. These ideas have morphed over time into the anti-science and frequently preposterous nonsense of modern wokeism.
The book requires concentration due to the abstruse nature of the subject matter but really gives a detailed and accurate history of the background. A valuable resource.
12 people found this helpful
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J. Burchett
5.0 out of 5 stars At last a book to help me understand the roots of Social Justice (upper-case)
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 October 2020
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I first really noticed the culture war back in 2014 when I saw a news story that Rosetta Stone Dr. Matt Taylor broke down while making a humiliating apology over some offence taken at his attire. The scientist's grave offence was to wear a shirt featuring scantily clad women during a news conference where he was giving an update that his team had managed to land a probe on the Comet Rosetta Stone. This was the first time such a landing had been done in the history of mankind. My immediate thought was that surely the man deserves to wear whatever he wants to given the magnitude of the achievement. Not according to the outraged mob on Twitter apparently. Something was defiantly up with the culture.

Since then we have been forced to hear continual harping about awful neologisms such as: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining etc. The list of things that were to cause offence became longer as the volume of toxic discourse increased exponentially.

I disliked (to put it mildly) the use of these terms and their associated ideas because I knew on some level that they were linked and their use was a symptom of an unhealthy public discourse. Living in a largely Woke community of friends and acquaintances in London I lost friends on social media and in real life because I refused to tow the line and label anyone who didn't think a particular was a racist or a homophobe or didn't agree with a particular cause or other. On a much wider scale the very social fabric of society was being torn up in the name of Social Justice (upper-case) with social media throwing fuel on this fire by a violent shattering our shared epistemology.

When I attempted to delve further into the philosophical ideas underpinning these ideas things became very confusing. I turned to YouTube and saw videos by people explaining things like Marxism, Neo-Marxism, Postmodernism and so on but nothing I saw really itched the scratch to help understand what was going on apart from vague notions of these topics. What was missing was a substantial underlying map that brought these ideas together in a coherent and understandable way that was written in a way most people could understand.

This book has resolved this issue and has provided me with the tools to help understand this esoteric discipline called critical theory, its roots in Postmodernism and how it manifests in the various arenas of political life. What I most like is that the book makes clear that there are, by and large, no bad faith actors required. People are by and large acting on their moral and ethical intuitions to improve life. But that crucially social justice (lower-case) brought about by a functioning liberal democracy is a better way to achieve improvements than by ideological Social Justice (upper-case) that is essentially a religion, has no capacity for self-correction, and is ultimately a hugely destructive dead end as are the vast majority, if not all, of cults and ideologies historically.

James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose have done a great service to humanity with this masterpiece and it should be required reading for everyone but especially those in public office.
90 people found this helpful
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Academic UK
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent clear view of the dangers of 'Critical theories'.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 September 2021
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This is the book which decent, mature, liberal, humane and rationale people have been waiting for. It is the antidote to some of the illiberal, immature ideas that have been seeping out of our University campuses and into mainstream thought. It is a common sense, reasoned reply to the shrill and absurd cries we see in the likes of 'White Fragility'. It is also an act of courage which we can all take inspiration from.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay provide a background and history to the development of Postmodern thought and its transmission from scholarly discourse into activism. Particularly, they highlight the rejection by Postmodern thinkers of objective 'truth', scientific method, individualism and shared human values. They then follow how this activist version has led some of the illiberal, unevidenced, authoritarian and uncharitable ideas we see being posited through Critical Theory, particularly applied to gender, race and sexual identity. The activity of these are seen in the (ironically named) Social Justice Movement. The book provides a welcome alternative to this ideology.

If you are concerned about the rise of Identity Politics and Critical Theory in our Universities, schools and work places, then read this book.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Maru
5.0 out of 5 stars Único en su tipo.
Reviewed in Mexico on 11 August 2022
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Es un excelente estudio sobre el origen del movimiento SocialJustice.
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MARCAO
5.0 out of 5 stars The author goes way beyond issues about what is politically incorrect
Reviewed in Brazil on 25 September 2021
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Great book despite on some parts it depicts a dense reading for someone without a background on Social Sciences. I would definitively recommend it!
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Emil Jensen
5.0 out of 5 stars Critica di sinistra all'ideologia "woke" ed alla c.d. "Social Justice"
Reviewed in Italy on 29 June 2024
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Molto bello: affronta in maniera critica e con un approccio di sinistra le tematiche legate alle cc.dd. ideologie "woke" o "Social Justice", come il neocolonialismo, il femminismo, il razzismo, la "cancel culture", l'obesità e la teoria del "gender".

Mi aspettavo qualcosa di fatto bene ma pur sempre un libro divulgativo, adatto al grande pubblico. In effetti, pur avvertendosi un certo sforzo per renderlo fruibile ad un pubblico più vasto, il libro resta piuttosto tecnico in molti contenuti - cosa che io ho apprezzato (ma che non facilita la lettura di tutti i passaggi).

Nel complesso un libro che mi è piaciuto moltissimo e che sono lieto di suggerire a quanti desiderino capire meglio certe tendenze culturali ed i paradossi che hanno generato.
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Jose M.
5.0 out of 5 stars A great book
Reviewed in Spain on 5 March 2023
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which deconstructs(!) the various facets of wokenism and sheds light into the absurdity and reactionary character of many aspects of so-called postmodern critical "theory"
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Fletch
5.0 out of 5 stars very good
Reviewed in the Netherlands on 7 August 2022
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Defiantly worth a read.
Puts Social Justice into perspective and provides solid reasons to object to its insidious approach.
Recommended.
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