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Real-world developments often spur new paradigms, research and movements. In the 1960s and early 70s, decolonization, new social movements, student protests and economic stagnation gave birth to postmodernism and critical theory. Today, we are entering a post-progressive era in which sixty years of cultural left intellectual hegemony is in question. Populism, polarization, progressive illiberalism and the fraying of social capital have produced an intellectual crisis and loss of confidence in our progressive-dominated meaning-making institutions. Traditional leftists, classical liberals and conservatives have all rendered pointed critiques of the cultural left. The post-progressive epoch calls for a new sociology of knowledge which problematizes the taken-for-granted assumptions of the progressive episteme. We inhabit a knowledge-production system whose description and analysis of social reality is to a significant degree socially constructed by a left-liberal weltanschaung. Post-progressivism argues for a critical approach to progressive social science’s ‘critical’ claims. That is, a meta-critical stance which deconstructs critical theory concepts such as systemic racism, sexism and heteronormativity, asking questions about the motivations behind their construction and the power dynamics they give rise to. The boundaries of these progressive concepts have been stretched in increasingly expansive and moralized ways, narrowing viewpoint diversity while refracting social reality through a distorted lens. Today’s social science only partially captures social reality. Consequently, this calls for a post-progressive research program to critically study our dominant ideology of woke while embarking on countercultural empirical research to recover omitted topics and perspectives, rebalancing social scientific knowledge. In the lecture, Professor Kaufmann offers proof of concept: a post-progressive meta-critical account of 2010s expansion in the meaning of racism.

Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham where he directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science(Link is external). He is the author of The Third Awokening(Link is external) (Bombardier May 14, 2024) / Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution(Link is external) (Forum Press, July 4), Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities(Link is external) (Penguin 2018/ Abrams 2019), Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile Books 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Harvard 2004), The Orange Order (Oxford, 2007) and one other book. He has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, Newsweek, National Review, New Statesman, Financial Times and other outlets.