What the Woke Canon Gets Right—and Wrong

What the Woke Canon Gets Right—and Wrong

Reading Foucault, Said, Galtung, Crenshaw, and Butler exposes liberalism's real weak points, along with the strongest ways to defend it.

Sam Kahn

Nov 03, 2026

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Michel Foucault, 1977. (Photo by Jacques Pavlovsky/Sygma.)

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For almost six months (!), I’ve been facilitating a reading group—Intellectual Bootcamp—through Persuasion Institute. We meet every week or every other week, read usually an article or a few chapters of a text, and in so doing develop a surprisingly-good mental roadmap of the leading political and theoretical concerns of our time.

It’s good stuff!—and you should consider joining the group! It’s designed to be intellectually rigorous and welcoming at the same time, and a really great hardcore group has developed who regularly come to the meetings. In this time we’ve read Gilles Deleuze, Christopher Lasch, Neil Postman, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Johan Galtung, Judith Butler, Francis Fukuyama, Yascha Mounk, Samuel Huntington, David Graeber, Martin Gurri, Nick Bostrom, Mark Fisher, among others. Future sessions will focus on computers and technology, media ecology, the evolution of the state, the meaning of the West, among other topics. We meet by Zoom, Fridays from noon to 1:30pm EST. Information for our next session is

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Against Strong Gods

Sam Kahn

·

September 22, 2025

Read full story

What I want to talk about here is a little module that we’ve been doing for the past couple of months, tracing out the intellectual origins of “wokeness.” Much of this territory is covered in Yascha Mounk’s

The Identity Trap,

and our “curriculum” has been largely parallel to that book, but there is something uniquely special about reading these seminal texts in the original. The group self-selects as liberal, and there is an—I would say unanimous—antipathy to some of the consequences of wokeness.

But an interesting thing happens when we make ourselves go back and read Foucault, Said, Butler, Galtung, Crenshaw: they all, in their different ways, make a lot of sense and, taken together, offer a vigorous intellectual critique of liberalism. For those who constitute their political identity as “liberal,” it becomes not at all easy to find the terrain to defend: the position that admits the obviously-valid elements of the progressive critique while beating back the parts that are almost self-evidently pernicious. What I want to do is to map out some of this terrain—to describe the places where liberalism appears most vulnerable and the progressive critique most trenchant, and to think through the most effective arguments liberals can muster in response.

Our genealogy

starts with five thinkers. The first is the French intellectual Michel Foucault, and what Mounk

calls

his “deep skepticism about objective truth.” There is an obvious appeal to Foucault’s writing, in his tracing of the totalizing systems of power and control that emerge in the modern era often under the banner of “humanitarianism,” and in his analysis of the webs of power that purportedly “free” and “independent” actors are constantly caught in, with power relations structuring social experience all the way down.

Second is the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, deeply influenced by Foucault, who was, however, repelled by Foucault’s near-nihilism and moved in a direction that was more engagé. In his classic 1978 work

Orientalism,

Said analyzed the ways in which the discourse of Orientalism—Oriental Studies departments, as well as centuries’ worth of Western literary and cultural tropes—constituted a language of power and conquest. “Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed to me otherwise,” Said

wrote

, arguing that cultural projects served for centuries as a form of imperial propaganda with “Colonial rule … justified in advance by orientalism rather than after the fact.”

Third, there’s the Norwegian polymath Johan Galtung, who provided another critical brick in the woke edifice. His argument, as laid out in the 1969 essay “

Violence, Peace, and Peace Research

,” is that the usual definition of violence as an agent acting upon a victim is woefully inadequate to depict the real scale of human suffering. Violence, he argued, is an extension of power relations and of inequality, and it is the incessant, ubiquitous unfolding of inequality—whether disparate health outcomes for different socioeconomic groups, or the unwillingness of states to bring vital resources to support the poor—that accounts for violence on the vast scale. “Structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters,” Galtung wrote in a sweeping indictment of the social status quo.

Fourth, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw

advanced

the argument of “intersectionality” in 1989, decades before the term caught on in general usage. She started with a pair of crazy-making cases in which black women were clearly discriminated against but were unable to attain legal standing either as blacks or as women. The legal system evidently failed to account for situations in which prejudice occurs across multiple dimensions at once. She concluded that real justice would have to involve an inversion of the current order of the power structure. “It seems that placing those who currently are marginalized in the center is the most effective way to resist efforts to compartmentalize experiences and undermine potential collective action,” she wrote.

Finally, the queer philosopher Judith Butler, writing—interestingly—in

Theatre Journal

in 1988,

argued

that gender is a “performative act,” that is “instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as … constitut[ing] the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” Butler’s argument, actually, was not confined to gender and sexuality, but involved a profound challenge to the bedrock liberal notion of personal identity. “I am suggesting that this self is not only irretrievably ‘outside,’ constituted in social discourse, but that the ascription of interiority is itself a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication,” Butler wrote.

So here’s the

thing about those five thinkers: they all have a point.

Foucault brilliantly analyzes the ways in which modern power structures rest on a notion of “individualization”—and how the coercive apparatus becomes internalized by all the participants of a regime and acted out even without direct action from a state. But even more than that, Foucault broke through many of the pleasant fictions by which we sustain our social existence and found the world in a state of “agonism” (permanent conflict) in which we cannot even trust ourselves, with our thoughts and behaviors apt to be shaped by those forces that are most invested in our submission.

After reading Said, meanwhile, it becomes difficult to view Western treatments of the “East” in the same way. Within weeks of reading Said, I found

The Mummy, 300, Gladiator, Indiana Jones

to be hopelessly ruined by their orientalist tropes. And Said’s argument is of course more far-reaching than that—it’s about how cultural entities are, in fact, politically constituted, with a way of serving brute force and actively participating in imperial enterprises.

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