A growing recognition of the excesses of the cultural left has created an opening in contemporary intellectual life. This moment requires a new research agenda, a post-progressive movement in the social sciences and humanities.
The ideals of progress and social justice had noble origins. By the 1960s, the exclusionary nature of western institutions, including universities, had become apparent. There was a need to overturn practices that had marginalized women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.
The left-wing movement that came to be known as progressivism played a vital role in rectifying this exclusion. Yet as it began to achieve its goals, it shifted to new ones: from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes, from greater inclusiveness to a hypersensitivity to ever-more-elusive forms of emotional harm, from the opening of new perspectives to the enforcement of rigid orthodoxies.
These shifts became institutionalized in policies such as racial and sexual preferences, mandatory diversity training, speech codes, and editorial policies that privilege the avoidance of perceived harm over scholarly and scientific rigour. And they were accompanied by a change in the norms of academic discourse, from vigorous debate to censorship, deplatforming, mobbing, and moralistic denunciation.
The unfortunate result of this progressivist overreach has been a decline of trust in cultural and academic institutions and growing political polarization, including a populist backlash.
These problems have prompted a rethink among many scholars. The challengers, who include conservatives, classical leftists and liberals, and eclectic pragmatists, retain the ideals of social progress, but yearn for a new glasnost—an intellectual openness—in the production and transmission of knowledge.
Accordingly, a group of concerned scholars and writers recently met at the University of Buckingham to advance new thinking about the humanities and social sciences. We call for an intellectual agenda with two thrusts.
Heterodox Social Science: Progressive dogmas have increasingly constricted the social sciences, including an obsession with race, gender, sexual orientation and identity, and an insistence that bias and oppression are the only acceptable explanations (to the exclusion of culture, history, and demographics). At the same time, deeper questions about human nature, and explanations that are consilient with the natural sciences, have been marginalized. We call for a new social science to free up inquiry, fill in blind spots, and render a richer and more accurate account of our social world. This does not require that every conceivable question be researched, only that those that are researched be treated with scientific objectivity and openness to multiple hypotheses.
Critical Woke Studies: In the second two decades of the 21st century, academic and cultural institutions were suddenly seized by a radical ideology known as Critical Social Justice, Intersectionality, the Identity Synthesis, the Successor Ideology, or most commonly, Wokeness. This takeover took many by surprise and remains unexplained. We hold that the wokeness revolution was not compelled by new discoveries or moral imperatives but is a contingent historical episode that needs to be studied, just as scholars have sought to explain the rise of nationalism, communism, neoliberalism, and populism.
Many questions have already been raised. Is wokeness a unique development of the 2010s, or do its roots lie earlier, in the 1960s or 1970s? Is it a recurring historical phenomenon, appearing in many periods, or something new? Do people adopt it out of self-interest and status competition, or from true belief and quasi-religious conviction? Did it emerge spontaneously, or was it the goal of a campaign of deliberate infiltration? Was it downstream of law, or of culture? We call for a range of scholars and scientists, diverse in methods and viewpoints, to shed light on this consequential development.
A post-progressive social science could be pursued in new universities and centres, among dissident scholars in the academic mainstream, in think tanks, or, best of all, in a future academia rededicated to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and civil discourse. We hope that sympathetic scholars, publishers, editors, funders, and professional associations will join us in forging a new, intellectually and politically inclusive social science.
Eric Kaufmann, University of Buckingham, conference organizer
Jonathan Anomaly, researcher
April Bleske-Rechek, University of Wisconsin
Cory Clark, University of Pennsylvania
Luke Conway, Grove City College
Frank Furedi, University of Kent (Emeritus)
Zach Goldberg, Florida State University
Matthew Goodwin, University of Buckingham
Jamin Haberstadt, University of Otago
J.D. Haltigan, University of Buckingham
Joshua Katz, American Enterprise Institute
Lee Jussim, Rutgers University
Lawrence Krauss, Origins Project Foundation
Claire Lehmann, Quillette Magazine
Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas
Kevin McCaffree, University of North Texas and Theory and Society journal
Richard McNally, Harvard University
Francesca Minerva, Journal of Controversial Ideas
Pamela Paresky, Harvard University
Neema Parvini, University of Buckingham
Lawrence Patihis, University of Portsmouth
Zachary Patterson, Concordia University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Wilfred Reilly, Kentucky State University
Christopher Rufo, Manhattan Institute
Gad Saad, Concordia University
Sally Satel, American Enterprise Institute
Jukka Savolainen, Wayne State University
Zvi Shalem, researcher
Michael Shermer, Skeptic Magazine
James Tooley, Vice Chancellor, University of Buckingham
Jan van de Beek, University of Buckingham
Colin Wright, Manhattan Institute Wesley Yang, writer
Note: The above does not imply endorsement by an individual’s institution, apart from the University of Buckingham.
