The Identity Trap
A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
‘A fascinating account of the intellectual origins of identity politics' Financial Times, Books of the Year
The origins, consequences and limitations of an ideology that has quickly become highly influential around the world.
For much of their history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. It is no surprise then that many who passionately believe in social justice have come to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity if they are to resist injustice.
But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minorities has transformed into an obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology - which Yascha Mounk terms the 'identity synthesis' - seeks to put each citizen's matrix of identities at the heart of social, cultural and political life. This, he argues, is The Identity Trap.
Mounk traces the intellectual origin of these ideas. He tells the story of how they were able to win tremendous power over the past decade. And he makes a nuanced case why their application to areas from education to public policy is proving to be deeply counterproductive. In his passionate plea for universalism and humanism, he argues that the proponents of identitarian ideas will, though they may be full of good intentions, make it harder to achieve progress towards genuine equality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this poorly argued polemic, political scientist Mounk (The Great Experiment) offers an intellectual history of "identity synthesis"—a term of his own devising, which is hard to distinguish from the more familiar "identity politics"—and warns of its dangers. After tracing the intellectual legacy of several 20th-century theorists—with a focus on Michel Foucault and postmodernism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and postcolonialism, and Derrick Bell and critical race theory—Mounk explains that these thinkers' ideas were synthesized into an antiliberal, censorious, segregationist dogma on college campuses and online in the early 2000s. This "ideology" went mainstream in the mid-2010s, especially in medicine and education, where institutions began to adopt theoretical frameworks under which it was believed the best way to achieve equity for students and patients was not to treat everyone equally, but to offer "preferential treatment" and exclusionary experiences (like Black affinity groups in educational settings) to members of marginalized groups. Mounk cautions against this mindset (citing antiwhite workplace sensitivity trainings and unjustified cancelings over "cultural appropriation," among other things), and recommends that the political left-of-center return to a liberalism characterized by freedom of expression and equal treatment of all. Throughout, though, evidence and examples are not thoroughly explained; instead, Mounk crafts bulleted lists of "key takeaways" that sidestep complication and essentially render his central argument as one being waged against a gargantuan straw man. Readers will not be convinced.
