Religious Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Social Justice Struggle, and the Cross

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a liberal democratic socialist of a civic republican bent who struggled mightily in Gandhian nonviolent fashion to abolish white supremacy and America’s system of racial caste, creatively mediating the historic debate in black political thought between black nationalism and liberal integration, which drew him into struggles against militarism and imperialism. Merely to unpack this sentence would show that King had a fully orbed political philosophy that fits—however artificially—into conventional academic political philosophy. King wrote and spoke about freedom, liberalism, equality, anti-racism, justice, morals, virtue, idealism, realism, Black Power, anti-militarism, natural law, dialectic, sacrifice, nationalism, reconciliation, reparations, and community, and he bitterly rued that he could not openly discuss his democratic socialism. Yet King does not remotely get his due as a political philosopher. As Tommy Shelby and Brandon Terry recount in their excellent too-novel reader, To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,1 the standard textbooks on political philosophy range between rarely mentioning King and never mentioning him

Democracy · Liberalism · Militarism · Nationalism · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies