The most recommended books on identity politics

We are living in a time when ideology, myth, superstition, and ignorance seem to have more influence than ever in shaping our future.

This excellent and important book by Shawn Otto explains the forces (political and economic) at work that are aimed at undermining the role that knowledge and rational empirical evidence might play in making rational public policy decisions. This includes the effort to weaken the role that science might ideally play in helping us to address real-world challenges.

As one who studies and seeks to assess disaster preparedness, response, and mitigation, I have come to believe this “war” on science holds the potential to give birth to ever greater and more expensive (especially in terms of human costs) disasters.  

Profit and Pleasure is the most provocative Marxist intervention in queer theory.

Hennessy charges that queer theory’s focus on representation, identity, and subjectivity works to render the structures of capitalism invisible. Postindustrial capitalism produces “gender-flexible” and sexually diverse subjects to meet the demands of today’s globalized commodity system.

Queer theory, instead of addressing this development, has aided in our commodification by repressing the connections between the multiplication of identities and economic exploitation, connections that capitalism works to conceal. Queer theory needs to extend beyond the cultural purview of identity politics to address contemporary capitalism directly.

Campbell and Manning are sociologists who trace how a new moral culture of victimhood has given rise to political correctness. The new moral culture combines the properties of the old culture of honor and the old culture of dignity in a uniquely toxic way. The new victimhood culture borrows from honor culture its extreme sensitivity to insult, but borrows from the culture of dignity the tendency to call upon authorities and institutions to resolve disputes, rather than deal with them on a personal level. The victimhood culture is what has spawned the repressive campus environment of micro-aggressions, deplatforming, and bias response teams.

This book is a feminist memoir that focuses on the passionate experience of being politically connected with others, and juxtaposes that with the divisiveness and the unfortunate polarization of identity politics.

She also makes a strong case for a nuanced reading of political situations, showing how simplistic knee-jerk litmus testing becomes toxic within any movement, no matter how righteous the cause.

This is NOT yet another diatribe against "wokeness." It is, instead, a thoughtful, nuanced analysis of the intellectual foundations of what the author calls "the identity synthesis" (and others call "identity politics," or other names). Not only is it fascinating in its own right; it is also a model of the nearly-lost art of intellectual critique. It is clear where Mounk's sympathies lie, but he is does his best to present his opponents' views in the most respectful, dispassionate way possible, before he points out the limitations and contradictions of their thinking. Readers who enjoyed this book should also enjoy Mounk's podcast and blog.

Kronman is particularly good at describing the “tough” reasoning skills that underlie the thinking styles that have produced modern science and modern democracies. An example of these tough skills is what he calls the “ethic of depersonalization”: expressing arguments in a form available to all—a form not dependent on our emotions or personal experience. Identity politics, in contrast, gives weight to immutable demographic characteristics in ongoing political conversations.  It thus reverses centuries of progress in the intellectual march toward open, ecumenical inquiry, where personal characteristics do not trump rational argument.

Ellis chronicles the history of how the university turned from an institution of open inquiry into a political monoculture that requires those in it to adhere to a particular ideology. Ellis is particularly good at showing how the strengths of the traditional university were turned into weaknesses and allowed it to be captured by the adherents of identity politics. Old-style independent scholars are hard to organize, Ellis points out, because they are just that—independent. But these truly independent scholars were no match for the politically organized groups that wanted to use the university to advance a political agenda.

I reread this book this past year because (unfortunately) it remains relevant.

Our campuses have become hyper-politicized, ideologically monolithic places of oppression and cancellation rather than places where diverse individuals with diverse perspectives come together to figure out their way to the truth.

Johnston absolutely nails the campus scene in this satire, capturing the sheer craziness of the ideologues (both students and faculty) who run the show, generating plenty of laughs—painful laughs, but laughs—along the way. One reads this book and, while laughing, wants to weep about the state of today’s campuses.

Lilla’s goal in this book is to show how identity politics threatens the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. He argues that the party has thrown citizenship—the “we” in political conversation—out the window in favor of “personal identities in terms of the inner homunculus, a unique little thing composed of parts tinted by race, sex, and gender,” and that this will be electorally disastrous for the Democrats. But Lilla’s arguments show that it is disastrous for our national conversation as well. When we give personal identity weight in an argument (Lilla is superb at eviscerating the shopworn phrase “speaking as an X”) we turn the intellectual clock back to premodern times when arguments were settled by power and force.