Memorialized on Marx’s tombstone in London’s Highgate Cemetery is one of the most famous lines he ever wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” It was a mission statement. Marx did not want merely to understand and critique bourgeois society; he wished that his work might play some part in its revolutionary overthrow. Elsewhere, he wrote that history repeats itself as farce.

In the age of the U.S.-led Western order that grew out of the Second World War, the academic discipline of sociology has periodically spawned ideological subdisciplines from its margins. They are programmatic like Marxism and unfailingly employ the vocabulary of the activist left, but they increasingly tend towards ideas that Marx himself would have regarded as deeply reactionary. None more so—as Adam Kirsch ably demonstrates in this short book—than the enterprise known as “settler colonialism studies.”

Kirsch has done an excellent job compiling and marshaling quotations from settler colonial theorists so that the reader can judge them by their own words. “Making sense,” says Sai Englert of Leiden University, of “how settler colonial processes connect to others—such as capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, nationalism—must also mean setting out to think through how these structures of domination can be dismantled.” Leigh Patel of the University of Pittsburgh explains her unorthodox teaching methods thus: “Protests, marches and sit-ins are forms of pedagogy . . . not carried out for the sake of awarding grades but rather, in the interest of shifting mindsets and material realities.” A popular online resource cited by Kirsch, meanwhile, explains that “settler colonialism includes interlocking forms of oppression, including racism, white supremacy, heteropatriachy, and capitalism.”