Abstract

This paper critically examines the methodology of Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke (2024), which offers an ambitious sociological account of ‘wokeness’ as a performative ideology deployed by elite symbolic capitalists to consolidate their privilege under the guise of progressive politics. I argue that Al-Gharbi’s account is traversed by an unresolved tension between his methodological commitments that ultimately constrains the critical reach of his analysis. Drawing on both classical and contemporary authors of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, particularly Horkheimer, Adorno, Jaeggi, and Celikates, I show that Al-Gharbi’s exclusive reliance on material-economic explanations leaves the normative and transformative capacity of ‘woke’ concepts undertheorized. Subsequently, I argue that Al-Gharbi’s descriptive account of ‘wokeness’ can be framed as a description of first-order ‘woke’ practices that subsequently calls for reconstruction through a second-order self-critique. Relying on Celikates, I conclude that doing so rehabilitates the emancipatory potential of ‘woke’ concepts while exposing their conservative social entanglement, grounding a discourse that moves beyond mere demystification toward a genuinely critical account of ‘wokeness’.