Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody is a nonfiction book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, published in August 2020.

[10] Douglas Murray wrote an admiring review of Cynical Theories for The Times, saying "I have rarely read such a good summary of how postmodernism evolved from the 1960s onwards."

"[11] Joanna Williams, writing from her post as a commentator on Spiked, said that the authors provide "a huge service in translating the language of today’s activists and explaining to readers not steeped in critical theory or postmodernism how the world looks from the perspective of those who are," and that it "successfully draws out how, over the course of six decades, the burgeoning popularity of critical theory within university humanities and social-science faculties shifted postmodernism from a minority academic pursuit to an all-encompassing political framework."

"[12] Ryan Whittaker wrote on The Manchester Review that "Despite its flaws, Cynical Theories is an important, interesting, accessible, and extensively cited work of non-fiction.

He cited the conclusion "refreshing" in that they offered no "counter-revolutionary strategy" or "demand that Theory be suppressed," but rather only call for the support of "reason, debate, tolerance, democracy and the rule of law."

"[15] Nigel Warburton, writing for The Spectator, praises the early chapters on postmodernism and calls the first part of the book "a plausible and interesting story about the origins of the phenomena they describe.

Like Roger Scruton in his book Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, they have done their homework, and can't fairly be accused of a superficial understanding of the thinkers they engage with, though they probably underestimate the seriousness and depth of Foucault's analysis of power."

Thompson stated that Lindsay and Pluckrose, by overstating their case and aiming their weapons at humanities and universities, cannot pass themselves off as objective contributors to a search for truth, and betrayed that they themselves were combatants in the culture wars.

Reading amidst the "dispute over the 2020 [American presidential] election results", Rich shifted away from his "initial instinct" to "pile on" the "social justice perspective".

[23] Park MacDougald, writing from his post as Life & Arts editor of the conservative Washington Examiner, commented that "the specific form of “reified postmodernism” now promoted by our elites has very little to do with, say, Derrida’s interest in the aporias of language".

They are narratives, and it is impossible to understand which ones get accepted [...] without thinking about “systems of power and hierarchies.” [note 5] MacDougald concluded, "I sympathize with Pluckrose and Lindsay’s frustration at how the woke Left uses a bastardized version of postmodernism to justify petty intellectual tyranny [...] But it is a mistake simply to dismiss the postmodernists for deviating from the true faith of evidence-based liberalism.