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From the bestseliing author of Race
Matters,
a bold and eloquent call for the deepening of democracy both
at home and abroad in this threatening post-9/11 age of imperial
overreach and fundamentalist rage
In his major bestseller, Race Matters, philosopher Cornel
West burst onto the national scene with his searing analysis
of the scars of racism in American democracy. Race Matters has become a contemporary classic, still in print after ten
years, having sold more than four hundred thousand copies.
A mesmerizing speaker with a host of fervidly devoted fans,
West gives as many as one hundred public lectures a year
and appears regularly on radio and television. Praised by
The New York Times for his “ferocious moral vision” and
hailed by Newsweek as “an elegant prophet with attitude,” he
bridges the gap between black and white opinion about the
country’s problems.
In Democracy Matters, West returns
to the analysis of the arrested development of democracy-both
in America and in
the crisis-ridden Middle East. In a strikingly original diagnosis,
he argues that if America is to become a better steward of
democratization around the world, we must first wake up to
the long history of imperialist corruption that has plagued
our own democracy. Both our failure to foster peace in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the crisis of Islamist anti-Americanism
stem largely from hypocrisies in our dealings with the world.
Racism and imperial expansionism have gone hand in hand in
our country’s inexorable drive toward hegemony, and our current
militarism is only the latest expression of that drive. Even
as we are shocked by Islamic fundamentalism, our own brand
of fundamentalism, which West dubs Constantinian Christianity,
has joined forces with imperialist corporate and political
elites in an unholy alliance, and four decades after the
murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insidious racism still
inflicts debilitating psychic pain on so many of our citizens.
But there is a deep democratic tradition
in America of impassioned commitment to the fight against
imperialist corruptions-the
last great expression of which was the civil rights movement
led by Dr. King-and West brings forth the powerful voices
of that great democratizing tradition in a brilliant and
deeply moving call for the revival of our better democratic
nature. His impassioned and provocative argument for the
revitalization of America’s
democracy will reshape the terms of the raging national debate
about America’s role in today's
troubled world.
Cornel West is a University Professor
of Religion at Princeton University. He is a recipient of
the American Book Award and has received more than twenty
honorary degrees. Race Matters has been in print since 1993
and has sold more than four hundred thousand copies. His
other books include The American Evasion of Philosophy.
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