This book is not what I expected.

When I initially opened the cover and was confronted by the statement that, “Except as occasional targets, they {‘leftist’ ideas of universalism, justice and belief in the possibility of progress} are hard to find in contemporary discourse. This has led a number of my friends in several countries to conclude, morosely, that they no longer belong to the left. Despite lifetimes of commitment to social justice, they’re estranged by developments on what’s called the woke left, or the far left, or the radical left.” I assumed this was the tired Sam Harris style grift whereby a centrist liberal declares themselves the real left and, glancing at progressive liberals, declares them the far left, ignoring entirely the existence of communists, socialists and anarchists.

That’s not this book though. Instead the book is far stranger than that. This isn’t to say that the book is good. It is perhaps the second-worst work of pop-philosophy I’ve ever read (the worst being the absolutely execrable How To Be Perfect by TV producer Michael Schur). Where it differs, and how it ultimately exceeds the worst-of-the worst is in the clear breadth of Neiman’s reading. However this makes some of the remarkable exclusions in the text even more baffling. Things I could pass off as ignorance on the part of Schur are burdened with significance in Neiman’s book.

Now, since I’ve said the book is not a typical right-reframing of the Overton window a-la Sam Harris or his sad ilk the question should be raised as to what exactly the book is. And this book actually has a laser-sharp focus which is elided by its unfortunate, and overly-broad, title. This book is an attempt by Neiman to accuse Michel Foucault of smuggling Naziism into leftist philosophy. There is a secondary objective of this book – and that is to reestablish the primacy of Immanuel Kant as the champion of progress and to defend him from accusations of racism.

This comes together in her essay when Neiman makes the absurd proposition that Enlightenment philosophers can be distinguished from “practitioners of theory” in that these later “practitioners of theory” write in impenetrable jargon while the enlightenment philosophers “wrote clearly, without jargon, in the interest of reaching the widest number of readers. (Even Kant, the most difficult of Enlightenment philosophers , wrote fifteen perfectly intelligible essays for a general audience.)”

As somebody who has read both Discipline and Punish and the Critique of Pure Reason about the only thing I can say about such a claim is ‘LOL; LMAO.’

However this is ultimately a bit of a misleading passage for what follows as it becomes clear that Neiman has read both Foucault and a sufficient number of his critics to recognize that he wrote essays that were quite clear and accessible to a general audience. Rather she’s concerned that Foucault’s work depends on a method whereby it “hypnotizes” the audience rather than depending on rational argumentation.

For the first half of the book Neiman cannot mention Foucault (and she mentions Foucault quite a lot) without also bringing up the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and although she’s never quite bold enough to say so openly it really does seem like what Neiman wants her audience to believe about Foucault is that he was some sort of secret Nazi. She certainly doesn’t hesitate to call the concept of Power-knowledge reactionary.

But I do believe a lot of the disconnect in Neiman’s very unsympathetic reading of Foucault boils down to the old idealist / materialist split. For Neiman there are three fundamental elements to the left wing project, three precepts, that she believes Foucault’s work violates:

1. Universalism
2. Justice
3. Progress

Now with progress, Neiman has a very careful and specific definition which she applies. Unfortunately she reserves defining this term to the conclusion of the book which is a poor structural choice as her failure to properly define progress at the outset significantly weakens her argument.

“It’s a matter of changing direction: Rather than thinking of progress as directed to a particular goal it can be useful to think of progress from a problematic situation to one that is less constrained.” Now this is very close to Beauvoir’s idea from The Ethics of Ambiguity regarding the movement toward an open future as the objective of a Left-wing ethic. It’s a real shame that Neiman never thinks to cite Beauvoir. Although Kantians ignoring Beauvoir’s ethic is something of a perennial complaint of mine it’s remarkable how this specific Kantian manages to arrive at some of Beauvoir’s conclusions without giving her predecessor even the most cursory recognition. However what Neiman fails to do at all is demonstrate how Foucault violates this revised precept of progress.

Certainly Foucault is critical of readings of history as progressive. His project examines how power changes form in relationship to changing epistemologies and how politics acts as a form of open warfare between parties. But Neiman takes from Foucault’s historicism that his writing makes it “hard to avoid concluding that any attempt to improve things will only make them worse.” This is a wild reading of Foucault to say the least.

At one of her most charitable episodes Neiman compares Foucault’s critique to that of Rousseau but argues that after Rousseau constructed his critique he spent the rest of his life trying to fix the world.

However this appears to be Neiman treating both of these writers as their texts alone. Certainly Foucault’s academic work remained diagnostic rather than prescriptive but it could be argued just as easily that Rousseau’s diagnosis was incomplete when he abandoned it in favour of spinning off a bunch of proposals that history demonstrated failed to lead to mass liberation. Meanwhile Foucault worked hard toward prison abolition.

Neiman briefly addresses Foucault’s abolitionism but only to suggest that Foucault’s motivations for doing so were amoral and that this means these activist activities somehow didn’t count. She loves going on about the supposed moral void of Foucault’s work, citing Chomsky calling him evil, citing Améry calling him problematic. But she fails to contend with the idea that Foucault limited his academic work pretty specifically to epistemology and never pretended to be writing an ethic; not everything has to be an ethic to be useful.

Despite Neiman’s relatively nuanced perspective on progress she still falls into the broad progressivist trap of seeing an arc of history bending inexorably toward justice, saying of the Kennedy administration’s record on civil rights in the United States that, “A world where all citizens have equal rights to eat, ride and study where they want to is better than a world where they do not, and no amount of dialectical sophistication would lead a black Southerner who lived through segregation to deny it.” There are, of course, two issues with such valorizations of incremental progress. The first is that Neiman is choosing to look at a specific change in a specific historical moment and to weigh it ethically as being “more good than what immediately preceded it” but in doing so fails to contend with the possibility of reversals throughout the history prior. This is unsurprising. Neiman believes that focusing “too much” on history blocks the path to progress.

The other problem is that Neiman seems unable to believe that anyone would write a philosophical text that explicitly avoids ethical statements and keeps trying to read an ethic back into Foucault where there is none. When she succeeds she calls this ethic perverse. When she fails she decries him as amoral. Using these two positions she characterizes the extra-academic actions Foucault took which have an ethical dimension as being perverse and amoral even when he was actively fighting for liberation.

On progress Neiman frequently raises and explores the question of the State of Nature. Much of this is to defend enlightenment thinkers from accusations of racism or colonialism. Neiman is careful to cite African philosophers regularly and I will say makes a convincing argument that she is on the right side of history when it comes to black liberation. This makes her blind spots concerning Indigenous North Americans all the more bizarre. Neiman insists on talking about “tribalism” and “tribes” throughout the book, saying that she prefers the word because it conjures the idea of barbarism. She openly admits that somebody (possibly a sensitivity reader) told her she shouldn’t say that but she did it anyway. And yet, for all of this, there are only two citations to anthropologists: David Graeber, who she is dismissive of, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who she treats as having tried to test Rousseau’s state of nature hypotheses.

She certainly fails to address the writings of anyone of the ilk of Pierre Clastres – whose work helped to scientifically repudiate the racist idea of a progression from savagery to civilization. In fact between her vehement defense of Kant against charges of racism and her insistence of tribalism, I described the first half of this book, excluding the critique of Foucault thus: someone called Kant racist and she called them a tribalist and then that same someone said that’s racist and she got so mad she wrote a whole book about it. Of course Neiman cites no Indigenous sources.

Before departing from the topic of the state of nature I will say that some of the best material in this book is a thorough, vicious and insightful critique of Richard Dawkins and of Evolutionary Psychology. She easily recognizes the misogyny at the heart of evo-psych and she pulls no punches. More strangely she claims that evo-psych is broadly accepted as settled science by left and right alike (this is news to me) and she makes a weak attempt to tie this abortion of pseudoscience back to Foucault. Foucault was, of course, quite hostile to the idea of human nature as such. This makes attempts to blame him for some of the worst of the “just human nature” crowd rather absurd. To her marginal credit it seems even Neiman recognizes she’s stretching here and so we end up with a third of a chapter mostly about how Foucault is a secret Nazi that diverges into a good critique of a contemporary reactionary movement without much connection to the rest of her thesis.

On justice she believes Foucault to be of an accord with Schmitt that there is none. She’s aghast at Foucault’s account of juridicalism and is deeply discomforted by the contents of Discipline and Punish. But there’s an odd dance Neiman often does in her critique of that book whereby she will complain about some position Foucault took there, then will generalize it to the entirety of his being, constructing an essential Foucault, then justify that essential Foucault with quotations from Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.

However it’s worth also noting that Neiman has a view of justice that is both vulgarly-progressive (she believes society has become more just over time) and that is very much in the Kantian idealist mode whereby justice is a noumen of which any given application of justice is a phenomenon reaching (necessarily) imperfectly toward it. As such she excuses contemporary injustice as a work in progress while insisting both that the prison is preferable to the gallows and also that Foucault thought the opposite. She is poorly equipped to handle a materialist view of justice as a historically-bound system of power relations.

And here is where we must address the glaring omission in the heart of Neiman’s book because she has penned an entire book about “the left” that mentions “Marxists” twice (neither complimentary), Engels once and Marx never at all. She cites Fanon a lot but of him she says, “Fanon was a universalist who sought justice and believe in the possibility of progress.” This is made even more baffling by her vague assertion that ‘the Left’ has abandoned Diderot along with the rest of the enlightenment. Diderot is brought up in her text in close proximity to Fanon.

Now it’s notable that Karl Marx, who Fanon studied with care, was very fond of Diderot. As such there is actually a philosophical lineage that can be drawn directly between Fanon and Diderot. It’s just that, for this to be intelligible, you have to admit that Karl Marx existed.

On universalism Neiman is on the weakest ground. She realizes that the colonial project of civilizing the savage was a product of universalist thought and repeatedly argues, passionately and at length, that colonial powers misappropriated enlightenment thought that was critical of their project. Again there is an idealism here that wants to separate out what a thought is in itself from how it is used. Kant criticized colonialism so the use of his work by colonial powers is irrelevant. He’s not to blame for how his work was used.

It seems like Neiman cannot imagine a molecular justice or progress. She insists the left, to have a meaningful project, must pursue the same outcome (justice and progress) for all people everywhere. What makes this absurd is that she might be much more capable of making this argument if she abandoned Kant even briefly and spoke in Marxist terms. While many contemporary Marxists (such as myself) have read enough Deleuze to recognize the value of the micropolitical and the local on praxis there is a wealth of thoroughly universalist Marxist writing she could have drawn from. I mean Trotsky is right there. As a result Neiman’s deep loyalty to Kant ultimately severely hamstrings her ability to claim that universalism is a good. She’s far too concerned with defending the reputations of Kant (especially Kant), Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Diderot to succeed in creating a persuasive argument for the necessity of universalism on the left.

I think I understand Neiman’s hesitance around Marx though and it’s because I don’t actually believe Foucault was the real target of her critique. Frankly Neiman’s Foucault is a straw man among straw men. Anyone with even a basic grounding in Foucault can either dismantle or brush away most of her criticisms without difficulty. Foucault was amoral? So what? Does that make his epistemology incorrect? But what’s going on here is that Neiman has a deep distrust of historical materialism.

Historical materialism is a demystifying way of looking at the world as a set of contingent material conditions where progress is not assured, where justice is described in non-moral terms and where universality is ultimately impossible. If you accept a view of history as a series of conflicts between classes then the progress toward justice rapidly becomes the playing out of conflicting powers rather than reason fumbling toward a nouminous good. “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror,” Marx said and this was a recognition that the proletarian struggle was not one of seeking progress toward an ideal. It was a threat, “we are coming for you.”

But as much as Neiman is obviously uncomfortable with the lack of idealism in Marx she cannot bring herself to attack him. It becomes clear in her conclusion that, despite some boomerish language, her preferred political project is far too close to socialism to openly attack Marx. As I mentioned before her idea of progress is incredibly close to Beauvoir’s (Marxist) idea of freedom. To openly disavow Marx would be to destroy the basis for her own project.

And I do think Neiman constitutes a leftist, even if one with some troubling unexamined baggage around Indigenous North Americans. So I don’t think she wants to undermine that basis. Instead she has produced this remarkably bad book. She sets up a caricature of Foucault for demolition and, in his place she raises up Kant as the father of the Left. Neiman acts as if Marx never existed and as if his students and friends hardly did either (excepting Fanon whose tie to Marx she elides) and, having erased him from history she rebuilds social democracy from a basis of the categorical imperative.

Neiman’s book is thorough and, on those rare occasions she isn’t talking about Foucault, it’s logical. But the problem is that it seems to have been written from a mirror universe with significant differences from ours. Now I’ve seen enough American radlibs who know the words to liberation but who don’t understand the beat, the sort of people who will say that it’s actually doing fascist work to de-platform a fascist if, in the process of that de-platforming, a marginalized person might come to harm. But it’s absurd to call these failures of education the far-left. That is still composed principally of Marxists and Anarchists who are usually more sensible. And it’s even more absurd to suggest such frivolous appropriations of the language of social justice are the fault of Michel Foucault. Hopefully this book will be forgotten by the history whose interrogation its author fears.