Rousseau rebuts the Lockean assumptions about human nature claiming that acquisitiveness and ambition have artificially created the quest for possessions which ought to be abolished to return the human spirit to its true moral ground of existence. Marx expanded Rousseau’s philosophy into economic communism putting the state ahead of the individual. The devastation of Stalin’s regime and failure of the western proletariat uprising to materialise reoriented the Marxian critique in western academia as Critical Theory. This theory seeks to emancipate humanity from the ‘false conscious alienation’ enslaving us in the enterprise by dismantling and reconstructing its traditional cultural, social and civic institutions one manifestation of which is Critical Race Theory. Wokism has its origins in Critical Theory and is dominated by Critical Race Theory.

1. 1.

   Rousseau (1978a, pp. 343–4).

2. 2.

   Ibid, p. 344.

3. 3.

   Ibid, p. 348.

4. 4.

   Ibid, p. 353. Property here means all forms of wealth.

5. 5.

   Ibid, p. 365.

6. 6.

   Ibid, p. 360. Emphasis added.

7. 7.

   Ibid. Emphasis added.

8. 8.

   Ibid, pp. 360–1. Emphasis added.

9. 9.

   Ibid, pp. 361, 4. Emphasis added.

10. 10.

    See Rousseau (1978b).

11. 11.

    The French Revolution started 6 years after the 8 year American Revolution concluded.

12. 12.

    Marx immortalised the same statement in theCritique of the Gotha Programme, first published much later in 1875.

13. 13.

    For a short cut to Marx’s political thought see Marx and Engels (1982), originally published in 1848. A more mature revelation of Marx’s economic philosophy is in his iconic workDas Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels in the same collection, originally published in 1867.

14. 14.

    See Conway (1987, Part IV).

15. 15.

    For example, see Feuer (1975).

16. 16.

    Adapted from Marx (1976, p. 53).

17. 17.

    Burke and Stets (2009, pp. 40–1).

18. 18.

    Fromm (1967, p. 57). John Ralston Saul has a different take on this ‘human penchant’. He argues our attachment to images of worship stem from fear about the unknown counterbalanced by magic and ritual. His target is religion although he extends it into the secular domain in Chapter 18, ‘The Victory of Idolatry’, of his book:Voltaire’s Bastards, The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, (Australia, Maryborough: Penguin Books, 1993). Sigmund Freud would probably call alienation ‘projection’ whereby we are assumed to use our work to sublimate our frustrated libidinal drives. See Stafford-Clark (1973, pp. 109–116). Only Continental philosophers take Freud seriously these days.

19. 19.

    See Marcuse (1986).

20. 20.

    For a highly readable, brief but concise outline of CRT see: Delgado and Stefancic (2017). No mention in it of the ‘evil of whiteness’, an aberration sponsored by later activists.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Highton, VIC, Australia

   Lindsay Dawson

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