Nonfiction:
Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, 1982
Prophetic Fragments, 1988
The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, 1989
Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, 1991 (with Bell Hooks)
The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, 1991
Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, 1993 (2 volumes)
Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, 1993
Race Matters, 1993
Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, 1995 (with Michael Lerner; revised as Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America, 1996)
The Future of the Race, 1996 (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)
Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America, 1997 (Kelvin Shawn Sealey, editor)
The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform, 1998 (with Roberto Mangabeira Unger)
The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America’s Beleaguered Moms and Dads, 1998 (with Sylvia Ann Hewlett)
The Cornel West Reader, 1999
The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country, 2000 (with Gates)
Cornel West: A Critical Reader, 2001 (George Yancy, editor)
Edited Texts:
Theology in America: Detroit II Conference Papers, 1982 (with Caridad Guidote and Margaret Coakley)
Post-Analytic Philosophy, 1985 (with John Rajchman)
Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, 1991
White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, 1994 (with James Snead and Colin MacCabe)
Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 1996 (with Jack Salzman and David Lionel Smith)
Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, 1997 (with Jack Salzman)
The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, 1999 (with Quinton Hosford Dixie)
Taking Parenting Public: The Case for a New Social Movement, 2002 (with Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Nancy Rankin)
Cornel Ronald West, the son of civilian Air Force administrator Clifton L. West, Jr., and his wife, Irene Bias West, a schoolteacher, had, before his fortieth birthday, established himself firmly among the leading public intellectuals in the United States. Both in his writing and in public appearances that are marked by his riveting charisma, West provokes thought, reaction, and controversy.
Cornel West
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, West was graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1973. Princeton University awarded him the master’s degree in 1975 and the Ph.D. in 1980. He began his teaching career as an assistant professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, with which he was affiliated from 1977 to 1983 and again in 1988. Between 1984 and 1987 West taught at the Yale University Divinity School. He was professor of religion and director of African American studies at Princeton University from 1989 to 1994, then professor of religion and African American studies at Harvard from 1994. In 2002 he returned to Princeton as the Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion as part of a highly publicized exodus from the Harvard African American studies department precipitated by differences between the faculty and the university’s president.
West is noted for the development of a form of pragmatism he has labeled “prophetic pragmatism.” Much affected by his association at Princeton with Richard Rorty, perhaps the most significant living pragmatic philosopher in the United States, West, in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, has taken Rorty’s approach further than Rorty was able or willing to do. Realizing that Rorty, generally praised for his antifoundationalism, his rejection of human cruelty, and his support of pluralism, is conservative in his calculatedly ethnocentric views, West cautions obliquely that Rorty’s views and his new pragmatism are not without pitfalls. West’s work, deeply rooted in both Christianity and Marxism, out of which grows his vigorous moral philosophy, establishes a new kind of morality, much of it based upon traditional ideas that have endured for centuries. In Race Matters, for example, West calls for people of different ethnicities to arrive at a meeting of the minds and to bring about change through coalescing their ideas rather than through polar opposition.
His earlier Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity and Prophetic Fragments both created a new context within which to view black liberation theology. In these works and in Race Matters, West postulates theories regarding the redistribution of wealth for the common good, a Marxist notion that has made West highly controversial. The titles of the individual essays in Race Matters suggest the scope of West’s interests: “Nihilism in Black America,” “The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning,” “The Crisis of Black Leadership,” “Demystifying the New Black Conservatism,” “Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity,” “On Black-Jewish Relations,” “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” and “Malcolm X and Black Rage.” Not only do the titles of these essays illustrate West’s range, but they suggest as well the direction of his future work. The essays in Race Matters are marked by keen, clear-cut reasoning. West is ever the skillful logician capable of applying the fundamental processes of pure reason to current problems relating to race. If one has any quibble with this tactic, which serves West extremely well, it might be that the underlying foundation of much of his logic is deductive rather than inductive. Reasoning from such a base often results in a dogmatic absolutism rather than in a liberating relativism.
In his collaboration with Michael Lerner, Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, West examines the tensions between blacks and Jews. The authors postulate building accords that will eradicate such tensions. In the 1996 revised edition of this book, newly titled Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America, the authors introduce a valuable new perspective into their original work.
West’s writing consistently addresses with impressive intellectual vigor matters relating to racism, sexism, socialism, Eurocentrism, and multiculturalism. His collaboration with Bell Hooks (who deliberately uses all lowercase letters in the spelling of her name), Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, deals with these topics and comments cogently on black culture in America today. West and Hooks not only raise questions rooted in philosophy, sociology, economics, and theology, but also address matters of fashion and the arts within the black community. In this book they demonstrate their genuine compassion for the downtrodden and reveal their concern for improving the lots of such people.
Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America examines the intellectual life of African Americans in the United States. It focuses on politics and government as they affect the lives of blacks and seems at times prophetic, given the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King police brutality trial and the outcome of the 1995 O. J. Simpson trial.