WORK
The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
Appiah's 2018 examination of the five
great identity categories — creed, country, color, class, culture — demonstrating that each is more complex, contested, and fluid than the politics of identity typically acknowledges.
Published in 2018 by Liveright,
The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity is Appiah's most accessible book and his most direct engagement with contemporary identity politics. Across five chapters, he examines the five major categories through which modern people understand themselves and each other: creed (religion), country (nation), color (race), class, and
culture. In each case, he demonstrates that the category is more complex, more contested, and more fluid than either its defenders or its critics typically acknowledge. The 'lies' in the title are not malicious deceptions but simplifications —
the inevitable shortcuts identity categories impose on complex realities. The book argues that these simplifications are simultaneously useful and dangerous: useful because they enable solidarity and shared action, dangerous because they become rigid, exclusionary, and blind to the actual complexity of the people they purport to describe. In the AI age, the book's framework illuminates why professional identity — a category not explicitly in Appiah's five — is being destabilized