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 {{a|book review|''Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race Gender and Identity'' — {{author|Helen Pluckrose}} and {{author|James Lindsay}}}}
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-An important, brave book in our extreme times, {{author|Helen Pluckrose}} and {{author|James Lindsay}} take on the intellectual foundations of the current strain of militant leftist thought. Call it what you will: — critical theory, social justice theory, applied (''post''?) postmodernism, Theory with a capital “T” or just stark raving bonkers wokeness, — it defies easy categorisation by deliberate design, but you know it when you see it, and {{br|Cynical Theories}} pins it down, articulates it, examines it and reveals it for the canker that it is.
+An important, brave book in our polarised times, in {{br|Cynical Theories}} {{author|Helen Pluckrose}} and {{author|James Lindsay}} take on the intellectual foundations of the current strain of militant leftist thought. Brave because of the repurcussions that tend to rain down on the heads of those who transgress its principles, even inadvertently — it's bracing even writing s favourable book review. Call it what you will: — critical theory, social justice theory, applied (''post''?) postmodernism, Theory with a capital “T” or just stark raving bonkers wokeness, — it defies easy categorisation by deliberate design, but you know it when you see it, and {{br|Cynical Theories}} pins it down, articulates it, examines it and reveals it for what it is: a collection of related disciplines, in each case motivated by a justified concern for real inequity, that have been monstrously contorted into an oppressive ideology.
-This is hardly the first book to try this, of course — {{author|Steven Pinker}}’s {{br|Enlightenment Now}} and {{author|Douglas Murray}}’s magnificently scathing {{br|The Madness of Crowds}} have been in the same furrow, but Pluckrose benefits from not being ''politically'' disaligned with the Theorists — she is from the left, whereas Murray certainly is not — and Critical Theories is more patient and thorough in tracing the history of the current crop of ideas.
+Theory has escaped theory, and transformed into doctrinaire activism.
+Pluckrose and Lindsay are not the first to make this point, of course — {{author|Douglas Murray}}’s magnificently scathing {{br|The Madness of Crowds}} has ploughed the same furrow, but unlike Murray, Pluckrose is ''politically'' aligned with the Theorists, so harder to write off. And where {{br|The Madness of Crowds}} slings (well-aimed) thunderbolts, {{br|Critical Theories} is measured, patient and thorough in its examination and dismemberment of the various strains of Theory.
+It is very easy, and theorists are prone to to do it, to confuse a robust criticism of of the theory itself with a rejection of its underlying concern with inequities perpetrated on marginalised people. To reject Theory is not to be in itself to be racist, but when the rejecting person hails from the political right it is is tempting to to conflate these ideas. Pluckrose and Lindsay of very clear about this particularly in the the effective conclusion to their book. Mind you, at it's more extreme lengths, Theory would categorise any white or male person is irredeemably sexist and racist anyway, so it's not like the Privileged have much of a choice.
 It’s a fascinating review of modern philosophy in itself — there are a small number of ''vastly'' influential thinkers, from the original French post-structuralists like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan in the first wave of postmodernism through to Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks and Candace West through which almost all the Theory literature flows. For an ideology so inimical to illegitimate power expressed through the medium of language that is quite an irony. But then ironies abound far and wide.