Review: Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories”

“…it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the authors might have profitably started with an opening chapter dedicated to early American identity politics as well as postmodernism.”

A number of the best studies of Theory are written by fervent critics of the development of Theory. These range from the more general to more specific critiques of literary theory; Higher Superstition by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt is an example of the former, while Literature Lost by John M. Ellis represents an instance of the latter.

This new volume belongs to the first of these categories, and it is evidently an attempt to provide an alternative to a classic in the category, namely Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book Intellectual Impostures. Interestingly, like that earlier study, this new volume emerged out of an academic sting. Sokal famously submitted a hoax academic paper to the journal Social Text, which was duly peer-reviewed and published in its 1996 spring/summer issue. Cynical Theories stems from the so-called “Sokal Squared” hoax. Along with academic Peter Boghossian, the authors of Cynical Theories submitted a slew of fake academic articles to a number of academic publishers, the inevitable outcome of which was that a number of the pieces were accepted and published after peer review.

Rather than simply publish the papers, which no doubt would have offered a rather amusing collection, Pluckrose and Lindsay chose to use their notoriety to publish an extended critical study of Theory. The volume is an outstanding critical guide to several decades of Theory as well as postmodernism and what the authors call “Social Justice scholarship and thought.” The book’s structuring and more sweeping chapters deal with a) postmodernism in its purest form (Chapter 1), b) the separate types of Theory, including Social Justice thought, which emerged out of postmodernism (Chapter 2), and c) how “liberalism without identity politics” remains the best means of intellectual orientation today (Chapter 10). The other chapters first hone in on postcolonialism, queer theory, critical race theory, and feminism and gender studies (along with intersectionality); the study then turns to disability and fat studies, before a full exploration of the scholarship of “Social Justice” (not to be confused with social justice) and an account of how that theory impacts the world outside of academia.