Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman (born in Atlanta in 1955) is an American philosopher whose work combines scholarly rigour with essays for general readers. Her main concerns are moral philosophy, the legacy of the Enlightenment, politics and metaphysics. She has lived in Berlin for decades, and that experience runs through much of her thinking about memory and responsibility.

She studied at Harvard, where she earned her doctorate under John Rawls and Stanley Cavell, and spent several years at the Free University of Berlin between 1982 and 1988. She taught at Yale and Tel Aviv University, and from 2000 she directed the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. In Evil in Modern Thought (2002), her best-known book, she reads modern philosophy as a series of responses to evil, whether innocent suffering or deliberate cruelty. For her, that problem challenges the intelligibility of the world and sits at the root of much philosophical inquiry.

In later books such as Moral Clarity (2008) and Why Grow Up? (2014), she defends an Enlightenment ethics, close to Kant and Rousseau, that depends neither on religious authority nor on authoritarian ideology, along with a notion of maturity built on independent judgement. In Left Is Not Woke (2023) she argues that universalism is the historic mark of the left, and that identity politics weakens it by placing the group above shared reason. Her books have drawn both praise and sharp criticism, and her influence reaches public debate in Germany and the United States.