Helen Pluckrose: The Evolution of Postmodern Thought
In October, we held a conference in London, speaking from the Gladstone Library in the National Liberal Club in order to Speak Truth to Social Justice. Among the speakers and panelists that day was Helen Pluckrose. Her objective in this talk was to explain what is meant by the term "Social Justice" by the movement that pushes most vocally for it in today's society and to show how it is understood as a movement of radical identity politics, political correctness, and postmodern epistemology.
In her talk, she develops the definition of "Social Justice" as it is used in the academic literature in this tradition, explains its connections to identity politics and the political correctness movement, and then shows the relevance of the original postmodernists to this Theory in some detail. She does this to elegantly describe the progression of these ideas from Theory to activism to the streets by describing how these ideas originated, evolved, and were built upon by successive generations of Theorists leading up to those who have become famous names even outside of the scholarly world today: for examples, Peggy McIntosh, Barbara Applebaum, and Robin DiAngelo. She wraps up by explaining how this newest generation of Theorists simplified the highly abstract ideas of their predecessors and made it far clearer and easier to understand so that it could, as we now see all around us, eventually go mainstream.
Join her for an engaging talk on the intellectual history and development of what we now call Critical Social Justice.
The audio version of this presentation is available on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher.