We Have Never Been Woke
About
Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite is a 2024 book by the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton University Press). It argues that the highly educated professionals al-Gharbi calls Symbolic Capitalists — people who work with ideas, images, and data — advance their own status through the language of social justice while presiding over material arrangements that keep inequality in place. The title’s play on Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern signals the thesis: the class’s professed egalitarianism and its actual behaviour have always diverged, so its ‘wokeness’ is better understood as the idiom of an intra-elite status competition than as a programme that redistributes power. Al-Gharbi grounds the claim in data on who the symbolic professions employ, where they live, and how their commitments track cycles of ‘elite overproduction’ — periods when society mints more credentialed aspirants than there are elite slots to hold them.
In the wiki
- Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements — the book is the empirical spine of al-Gharbi’s conversation with Tyler Cowen, where he lays out the symbolic-capitalist thesis, the ‘Great Awokening’ cycle, and the coalition instability between symbolic capitalists and the non-elite constituencies they claim to speak for.
See also
- Musa al-Gharbi — the author
- Symbolic Capitalists — the book’s central concept