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How old-fashioned is tabula rasa liberalism really?
Nothing Cremieux and co. are saying would be a shock to liberals of many centuries (well, maybe their Oriental simping). Even when civil rights and egalitarianism became an issue a lot of people may have been for legal equality but not a pretense of blank slateism, especially if it's enforced at the cost of their own rights to sovereignty and freedom of association. They definitely considered gender blank slateism to be nonsense.
While tabula rasa liberalism has some roots in thought experiments about the state of nature that go back to early liberalism, most people didn't actually live by the sort of thorough-going refusal to accept innate group differences and the existence of an underlying human nature in practice until very, very recently.
And that "wokeness" follows that ideology because it cannot live up to its promises but has shown that that ideology is a useful way to erode certain liberal principles (like freedom of association) to create a more powerful state that theoretically could.
At least two hundred years old and arguably closer to two thousand depending on how broadly you want to define it.
"wokeness" follows from Marx. A vangaurd party seizing the means of cultural production rather than material production, to establish a dictatorship of the vanguard party.
The the belief in the absolute power of the state/society is where leftism parts ways with old-fashioned liberalism.
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I think it has a very long history actually, and that is that of the "left wing" from Jacobins to the Soviets to the Woke. The idea that we are all born equal and that society should be changed to not make us unequal is longstanding, however insane it may be and however unpopular with the usually pragmatic masses.
The only times when it was fashionable to accept such differences was when racism could be used as a justification to create a State that would make us equal as new men through eugenics or other mechanisms. Rousseau's ghost haunts Liberalism, locked in an eternal battle with Hobbes. Rules of Nature.
It's Hlinka's simulation, the rest of us are just living in it.
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As far as I know, the Soviets did not insist that all people are born with equal capacities, such as equal intelligence. They of course engaged in anti-colonial activity in the third world, and for all I know maybe as part of this activity at some point they claimed that all races have equal intelligence, but even if they did I'm pretty sure it wasn't a key part of their worldview like it is for today's woke.
It depends which Soviets at which time. But they did all nominally believe throughout that if man wasn't equal he should be engineered so. That's what communism is as a state of affairs, after all. Even pragmatic concessions like NEP or Stalin's Nationalism were a means to that end.
You could only believe that this isn't a key part of the ideology if you did not read Marx or Lenin. The latter's revolutionary coalition relied very much on this, and everything down to the removal of titles, the broad feminist reforms or even the common use of "comrade" as address were motivated ideologically by Rousseauan ideas. Sometimes directly.
Need I remind you that Lysenko got to parade around his nonsense because genetics was seen as reactionary precisely because it implies innate differences that couldn't be changed? Well that and competition rather than cooperation.
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