{{short description|American philosopher, essayist, and cultural commentator (born 1955)}} {{Infobox philosopher | region = Western philosophy | era = 20th-/21st-century philosophy | image = Susan Neiman.jpg | name = Susan Neiman | birth_date = {{birth date and age|1955|03|27|mf=y}} | birth_place = Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. | school_tradition = Analytic | main_interests = Morality{{·}}History of philosophy{{·}}Political philosophy{{·}}Philosophy of religion | notable_ideas = "Left is not woke" | alma_mater = Harvard University }} '''Susan Neiman''' ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|n|aɪ|m|ən}}; born March 27, 1955) is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.<ref>[https://www.einsteinforum.de/about/director/?lang=en Susan Neiman's page at the Einstein Forum]</ref>
==Biography== Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman dropped out of high school to join the anti-Vietnam War movement. Later she studied philosophy at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. During graduate school, she spent several years of study at the Free University of Berlin between 1982 and 1988.<ref>Neimann, Susan. 2020. Learning from the Germans. With a foreword. Picador.</ref> ''Slow Fire'', a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in 1980s Berlin, was published in 1992. From 1989 to 1996, she was an assistant and associate professor of philosophy at Yale University, and from 1996 to 2000 she was an associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 2000 she assumed her current position at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She is the mother of three adult children.
Neiman has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a Research Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, and a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is currently a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. Her books have won prizes from PEN, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Academy of Religion. Her shorter pieces have appeared in ''The New York Review of Books'', ''The New York Times'', ''The Boston Globe'', ''The Globe and Mail'', and ''Dissent''. In Germany, she has written for ''Die Zeit'', ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', and ''Freitag'', among other publications.<ref>{{Cite news |date=2013-11-26 |title=How can we end the male domination of philosophy? |url=http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/nov/26/modern-philosophy-sexism-needs-more-women |access-date=2022-12-02 |newspaper=The Guardian |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Waldman |first=Katy |date=2013-09-09 |title=What Is Philosophy's Problem With Women? |url=https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/philosophy-has-a-woman-problem-lets-try-to-figure-out-why.html |access-date=2022-12-02 |magazine=Slate Magazine|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |date=2012-10-29 |title=In the Humanities, Men Dominate the Fields of Philosophy and History |url=https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-the-humanities-men-dominate-the-fields-of-philosophy-and-history/ |access-date=2022-12-02 |newspaper=The Chronicle of Higher Education |language=en}}</ref>
==Major works==
=== ''Evil in Modern Thought'' === ''Evil in Modern Thought'' writes the history of modern philosophy as a series of responses to the existence of evil – that which, whether in the form of innocent suffering or human action intentionally causing it, "threatens our sense of the sense of the world".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Neiman |first1=Susan |title=Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy |date=2002 |publisher=Princeton University Press |location=Princeton |pages=2}}</ref> Neiman argues that the problem of evil provides a better framework than epistemology for understanding the history of philosophy because it includes a wider range of texts, forms a link between metaphysics and ethics, and is more faithful to philosophers' stated concerns. Indeed, Neiman believes that evil, by challenging the intelligibility of the world as a whole, lies at the root of all philosophical inquiry.
The book explores the period from the early Enlightenment to the late 20th century through discussions of philosophers who often figure in traditional histories of philosophy, such as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, as well ones who do not, such as Pierre Bayle, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt. Neiman groups thinkers around two basic distinctions: one between those who believe in a guiding order beyond appearances and those who think that sensory experience is all we have for orientation; and another between those who believe we must try to understand evil and those who maintain that doing so would be immoral on the grounds that any explanation of evil would be tantamount to its justification.
=== ''Moral Clarity'' === In ''Moral Clarity'', Neiman argues that all human beings have moral needs but that secular culture, particularly on the political left, is reluctant or unable to satisfy them, and as a consequence has ceded the moral domain to religion and traditional conservatives. She attributes this failing not to a lack of values but to a lack of a "standpoint from which those values make sense."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Neiman |first1=Susan |title=Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists|date=2008 |publisher=Harcourt Brace & Co |location=New York |pages=17}}</ref> The book explores the reasons why this is so and offers a framework for moral thinking based on Enlightenment ideas, particularly those of Kant and Rousseau, which rely neither on divine authority nor on authoritarian ideology.
=== ''Why Grow Up?'' === In ''Why Grow Up'', Neiman challenges the infantilism that she believes is widespread in modern society. She suggests that the "forces that shape our world" encourage consumerism, apathy, cynicism, and the fetishization of beauty and youth in order to keep citizens passive and compliant.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Neiman |first1=Susan |title=Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age|date=2015 |publisher=Farrar, Straus & Giroux |location=New York |pages=193}}</ref> She thinks these are propped up by a conception of adulthood in which being an adult is synonymous with drudgery, resignation, and inevitable decline. Neiman makes the case for an ideal of adulthood that involves exercising judgement, understanding one's own culture through immersion in others, actively shaping society, and seeking orientation in the face of uncertainty. As in ''Moral Clarity'', Neiman draws on the work of Kant, Rousseau, Arendt, and other philosophers to argue for a concept of maturity in which thinking critically does not mean abandoning one's ideals.
=== ''Learning from the Germans'' === {{main|Learning from the Germans}} Her 2019 book ''Learning from the Germans'' examines German efforts to atone for Nazi atrocities and identifies lessons for how the U.S. might come to terms with its legacy of slavery and racism. The book brings together historical and philosophical analysis; interviews with politicians, activists, and contemporary witnesses in Germany and the United States; and Neiman's own first-person observations as a white woman growing up in the South and a Jewish woman who has lived for almost three decades in Berlin. After the book appeared, developments in Germany led Neiman to change some of her views.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Neiman |first=Susan |date=2023-10-19 |title=Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/10/19/historical-reckoning-gone-haywire-germany-susan-neiman/ |access-date=2025-11-11 |work=The New York Review of Books |language=en |volume=70 |issue=16 |issn=0028-7504}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Neiman |first=Susan |date=2023-11-03 |title=Germany on Edge |url=https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/11/03/germany-on-edge-israel-palestine/ |access-date=2025-11-11 |website=The New York Review of Books |language=en}}</ref>
=== ''Left Is Not Woke'' === In ''Left Is Not Woke'', Neiman examines the assumptions behind "woke" politics and argues that they are at odds with what the left has always stood for: "universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress".<ref>{{cite book |last=Neiman |first=Susan |title=Left Is Not Woke |location=Cambridge |publisher=Polity |year=2023 |isbn=978-1509558308 |page=6}}</ref> She is particularly concerned that "tribalism" will undermine the left's political goals and leave it without the tools to oppose the far right, whose outlook has always been tribalist.<ref>{{cite magazine |author-link=Fintan O'Toole |last=O'Toole |first=Fintan |title=Defying Tribalism |magazine=New York Review of Books |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/02/defying-tribalism-left-is-not-woke-neiman/ |url-access=limited |date=November 2, 2023}}</ref> Neiman traces woke thinking back to Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and the thinkers they influenced, although she also finds similar views articulated by the character of Thrasymachus in Plato's ''Republic''.
Neiman also describes a major mid-20th-century shift in historical thinking: heroes stopped being the central subjects of history, and victims became the focus. This change began as a moral correction—giving voice to those previously erased from historical memory and granting them recognition and justice. But over time, the new emphasis on victimhood was distorted. The narrative shifted from honoring real suffering to treating victim status itself as a form of social prestige. The extreme example is Binjamin Wilkomirski, who fabricated a childhood in a concentration camp. Whereas people once invented noble origins, some now seek status through claiming greater suffering than they actually endured.<ref>{{Cite web|title=How to Be Left Without Being Woke|url=https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-to-be-left-without-being-woke|website=www.persuasion.community|access-date=2025-11-27|language=en|first=Susan|last=Neiman}}</ref>
In a review for the ''Los Angeles Review of Books'', the historian Samuel Clowes Huneke characterized ''Left Is Not Woke'' as a "cringe-inducing screed against a group she terms 'the woke'—without ever telling us whom, exactly, she is talking about", and that is "chock full of ad hominem attacks and ungenerous readings".<ref>{{cite web |last=Huneke |first=Samuel Clowes|author-link=Samuel Clowes Huneke|title=Critically Cringe: On Susan Neiman’s “Left Is Not Woke” |url=https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critically-cringe-on-susan-neimans-left-is-not-woke/|work=Los Angeles Review of Books |date=September 17, 2023}}</ref> The book has also received positive reviews, including in Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Political Quarterly.<ref>{{Cite web |title=In Defense of Universalism |url=https://dissentmagazine.org/article/in-defense-of-universalism/ |access-date=2025-11-11 |website=Dissent Magazine}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Huddleston |first=Robert S. |date=2024-01-12 |title=How ‘Woke’ Is the Campus Left? |url=https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-woke-is-the-left |access-date=2025-11-11 |website=The Chronicle of Higher Education |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Review: Left Is Not Woke, by Susan Neiman |url=https://politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/review-left-is-not-woke-by-susan-neiman/ |access-date=2025-11-11 |website=Political Quarterly |language=en}}</ref> In his review for The New York Review of Books, the Irish journalist and essayist Fintan O'Toole writes, "Neiman’s short, punchy, and brilliantly articulated argument is essentially a call for those who regard themselves as being on the left to remember the distinction between skepticism and cynicism. The first is crucial to a progressive critique of untamed capitalism. It demands a constant critical awareness of how power and self-interest wrap themselves in virtue, 'common sense', and high ideals."<ref>{{Cite news |last=O’Toole |first=Fintan |date=2023-11-02 |title=Defying Tribalism |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/02/defying-tribalism-left-is-not-woke-neiman/ |access-date=2025-11-11 |work=The New York Review of Books |language=en |volume=70 |issue=17 |issn=0028-7504}}</ref> The book has been published in 14 languages.
==Awards and honors== In 2014, Neiman was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Gallen.<ref>{{Cite web |last=History |title=Honorary doctorates of the University of St.Gallen (HSG) - List |url=https://www.unisg.ch/en/university/about-us/history/honorary-doctorates/ |access-date=2023-11-11 |website=University of St.Gallen |language=en}}</ref> She delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Michigan in 2010.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Neiman |first=Susan |title=Victims and Heroes: The Tanner Lecture on Human Values |url=https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/n/Neiman_10.pdf |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230427214049/https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/n/Neiman_10.pdf |archive-date=2023-04-27 |access-date=2023-11-11 |website=University of Utah |language=en}}</ref> In 2018, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.amphilsoc.org/blog/election-new-members-2018-spring-meeting|title = Election of New Members at the 2018 Spring Meeting|website=www.amphilsoc.org}}</ref> and received the Lucius D. Clay Medal for her contributions to German-American relations.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.vdac.de/en/federation/lucius-d-clay-medal.html|title=Lucius D. Clay Medal|date=2018-11-30|website=www.vdac.de|language=en|access-date=2019-08-04}}</ref> She served as the Gifford Lecturer for 2021–2022 at the University of Edinburgh.<ref>{{Cite web |title=2021-22 Professor Susan Neiman – Edinburgh Gifford Lectures Blog |url=https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/gifford-lectures/category/2021-22-professor-susan-neiman/ |access-date=2023-11-11 |website=blogs.ed.ac.uk}}</ref> In 2021, she was awarded the August Bebel Prize of the German Social Democratic Party,<ref>{{Cite web |title=Susan Neiman mit August-Bebel-Preis ausgezeichnet |url=https://www.spd.de/aktuelles/detail/news/susan-neiman-mit-august-bebel-preis-ausgezeichnet/21/05/2021 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220523121403/https://www.spd.de/aktuelles/detail/news/susan-neiman-mit-august-bebel-preis-ausgezeichnet/21/05/2021/ |archive-date=2022-05-23 |access-date=2023-11-11 |website=Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) |language=de}}</ref> and in 2023 she received the Order of Merit of Brandenburg.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Einstein Forum – Verdienstorden des Landes Brandenburg an Susan Neiman verliehen |url=https://www.einsteinforum.de/veranstaltungen/verdienstorden-des-landes-brandenburg-an-susan-neiman-verliehen/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231022003105/https://www.einsteinforum.de/veranstaltungen/verdienstorden-des-landes-brandenburg-an-susan-neiman-verliehen/ |archive-date=2023-10-22 |access-date=2023-11-11 |language=de}}</ref> She is also a 2025 Thomas Mann Fellow.
==Selected bibliography==
===Books===
*''Left Is Not Woke'', Polity, 2023. *''Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil'', Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. *''Widerstand der Vernunft: Ein Manifest in postfaktischen Zeiten,'' Ecowin, 2017. *''Why Grow Up?'', Penguin, 2014 (part of the series ''Philosophy in Transit''). [Reprinted as ''Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age'', Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015.] *''Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists'', Harcourt, 2008. *''Fremde sehen anders: Zur Lage der Bundesrepublik'', Suhrkamp, 2005. *''Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy'', Princeton University Press, 2002. *''The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant'', Oxford University Press, 1994. *''Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin'', Schocken, 1992.
===Articles and book chapters=== *"Why Trump Is Threatened by South Africa," ''The Nation'', Mar. 14, 2025 *"Fanon the Universalist," ''The New York Review of Books'', Jun. 6, 2024 *"Germany on Edge," ''The New York Review of Books'', Nov. 3, 2023 *"Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire," ''The New York Review of Books'', Oct. 23, 2023 *“Corona as Chance: Overcoming the Tyranny of Self-Interest,” in Kahn and Maduro, eds., ''Democracy in Times of Pandemic'', Cambridge University Press, 2020. *"Understanding the Problem of Evil" in Chignell, ed., ''Evil: Oxford Philosophical Concepts'', Oxford University Press, 2019. *"A Dialogue Between Business and Philosophy" (with Bertrand Collomb) in Rangan, ed., ''Capitalism Beyond Mutuality? Perspectives Integrating Philosophy and Social Science'', Oxford University Press, 2018. *"Amerikanische Träume," in Honneth, Kemper, and Klein, ed., ''Bob Dylan'', Suhrkamp, 2017. *"Ideas of Reason," in Rangan, ed., ''Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business, and Society,'' Oxford University Press, 2015. *"Forgetting Hiroshima, Remembering Auschwitz: Tales of Two Exhibits," ''Thesis Eleven'', 129(1), 2015: 7–26. *"Victims and Heroes," in Matheson, ed., ''The Tanner Lectures on Human Values'', University of Utah Press, 2012. *"Subversive Einstein," in Galison, Holton and Schweber, ed., ''Einstein for the 21st Century'', Princeton University Press, 2008.
==References== {{Reflist|25em}}
==External links== {{wikiquote}} {{commons category}} *[https://www.susan-neiman.com/ Official Website] Provides biography along with publications and appearances. *[https://www.einsteinforum.de/index.php?id=22&L=1 Einstein Forum Profile] *{{C-SPAN|123004}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Neiman, Susan}} Category:1955 births Category:Living people Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Yale University faculty Category:Academic staff of Tel Aviv University Category:Jewish American non-fiction writers Category:21st-century American philosophers Category:American women philosophers Category:Jewish American women writers Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society Category:American women essayists Category:21st-century American Jews Category:21st-century American women