Book Review: A Political Companion to James Baldwin, edited by Susan J. McWilliams

AuthorChris Lebron
Published date01 June 2020
Date01 June 2020
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719876626
Subject MatterBook Reviews
410 Political Theory 48(3)
unearths a wonderful discovery—Montaigne is the first philosopher to use
the term “public reason” (150). In the final chapter, he discusses Montaigne’s
conception of politics: people must not accord their personal passions such
“excessive passion” that they lose attachment to “the common cause” and
“the interest of all and of the state” (156). Though he does not spend much
time on this crucial element of what gets combatants over a threshold and
moving away from hardened intolerance, Thompson’s conclusion recognizes
its essential importance. Driven by values and passions, people respond to the
shifting world by affirming particular group interests and identities.
Montaigne’s brilliant inventiveness helped people rethink and re-experience
who they were and how they could respond to a radically changed early mod-
ern world of religious diversity. Thompson’s spirited and masterful reinter-
pretation of Montaigne’s achievement provides invaluable tools for thinking
through the contemporary work of an always-shifting politics of tolerance.
A Political Companion to James Baldwin, edited by Susan J. McWilliams. Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 2017, 396 pp.
Reviewed by: Chris Lebron, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719876626
We turn to those we perceive as heroic when dark times seem to prevail. I
mean this in a mundane sense. We turn to those persons whose vision and
perspicacity in facing evil meet our desire to do the same but who rise above
our capacities and everyday actions. In the wake of the movement for black
lives, itself a response to a reign of police terror over black bodies; #MeToo,
itself a response to the reign of patriarchal terror over women’s bodies; and,
finally, Donald Trump—the most explicitly and shamelessly racist president
in recent American history—it makes sense we’ve been reaching. We have
here the crossroads of race, gender, and sexuality, and what often feels like
the final collapse of American virtue. It’s little wonder, then, that American
essayist, novelist, and public intellectual James Baldwin—one of our time-
less witnesses and prophets of the American racial condition—has often been
cast as a guide in recent years.
It is maybe a bit more grabbing that Baldwin has found an increasingly
prominent place in professional political theory and philosophy. Disciplinary
practitioners tend to shy away from writers who themselves shy away from
assertive systematic argumentation, as Baldwin did. Yet, it is also a discipline
that is being prompted to confront a world for which many of our tried and
true texts have an anemic vocabulary. John Rawls has no purchase on our

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT