"William Franke’s voice, at a time when wokeism is on the defensive, is unique in the present concert of woke theory. Provocatively, he compares wokeism with René Girard’s theory of scapegoating as the definitive act of self-sacrifice. Wokeness reflects the pathos of our contemporary social struggles, which leads us to important questions about the coherence of our societies."
—Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Professor of Philosophy, Gulf University, Kuwait, editor of Tracking Global Wokeism (2025)

"Franke writes as an intellectual reflecting on the lived experience of ideological oppression. His analysis is profoundly personal and philosophical, exploring intellectual submission's psychological and spiritual dimensions. Franke’s book, like Milosz's The Captive Mind and Orwell's 1984, is a cautionary narrative about the fragility of freedom and the resilience required to resist the allure of oppressive systems."
—Andrzej Wierciński, Distinguished Professor, Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw

"Social Identities and Social Justice doesn’t just critique wokeism as a social revolution that has become an intolerant religion. It tries to redeem it from an “apophatic” perspective that goes beyond “positive, divisive, sectorial identifications.” Franke’s argument is clear and brilliant throughout the book."
—Montserrat Herrero, Professor of Philosophy, University of Navarra

The revolutionary upheaval currently sweeping across Western democracies on parade under the banner term “woke” calls for rethinking the foundations of ethics and politics. The social justice movement challenges us to fundamentally reconceive our being with one another in society and to re-embrace our profoundest traditions. Focus on identities, however, has become divisive and vexatious. In Social Identities and Social Justice, William Franke indicates a way to exit from the current impasse empoisoning politics in Western democracies by thinking the concept of identity through to its grounds in the non-identity (or undelimited human potential) that all share and that unites rather than divides us. The traditions of negative theology (admission of ignorance of God) and apophasis (self-critical unsaying of one’s own certainties) are leveraged for outlining a truly relational approach to public discourse. We must open our concepts of mutually exclusive identities towards their infinite truth rooted in our unlimited interconnectedness. Doing so, we open our ideas beyond their finite content and open ourselves to building a world together.