Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—And Why this Harms Everybody: By Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

BOOK REVIEW

Open a recent book on curriculum, attend a conference on teaching, or do a web search for pedagogical theory and you will find yourself at the intersection of each with social justice initiatives in kind. The reach of social justice theory and corresponding political activity is undeniable, yet critiques of recent critical theory are more challenging to locate. While the presence of social justice theory’s influence in contemporary scholarship is self-evident, the impact and ends of these ideas remain questionable.

In Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay trace the development of social justice as inquiry. The authors pin the origins of social justice on a timeline 2 centuries past. They consider John Rawls’s just-society thought experiments as the thesis of grievance theory. The authors chronicle a shift beginning in the mid-20th century from a Rawlsian thought experiment to a field of scholarship. The postmodernist takes hold of social justice and creates Social Justice. As posited by the authors, the capitalized letters invoke social justice as a proper noun, which “refers to a very specific doctrinal interpretation of the meaning of social justice” (Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020, p. 14).