Book Review: The Drum Major Instinct: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Theory of Political Service, by Justin Rose

• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Mario Feit
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719896035
• Date: 01 August 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews
539
The Drum Major Instinct: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Theory of Political Service, by Justin
Rose. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2019, 132 pp.
Reviewed by: Mario Feit, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719896035
Justin Rose’s book The Drum Major Instinct: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Theory
of Political Service is motivated by two objectives. First, Rose seeks to fill a
void in the existing political theory scholarship on Martin Luther King Jr.
While service is critical to King, and while he does have a theory of service,
King “never explicitly defined the concept.” The scholarly literature has a
corresponding lacuna: “there has been no comprehensive study of how King
politicized the Christian conception of service and how . . . it is linked to . . .
his overall theoretical framework” (6). The second and more important rea-
son why Rose explicates King’s theory of service involves the political stakes
of understanding it properly. Rose illustrates this with the federal Martin
Luther King Jr. holiday, which has been cast as a “national day of service”
(3). The notion of service championed here consists in “apolitical and volun-
tary action,” which is conducive to the maintenance of a neoliberal racial,
economic, and political order; it does nothing to challenge or change any
“structures of injustice” (4). Indeed, Rose rightly protests that “King’s legacy
is purposely deployed to promote the neoliberal idea that America has over-
come its struggles with racism, poverty, and militarism, thereby discouraging
contemporary Americans from engaging in the work necessary to combat
these forms of structural injustice” (4). Rose’s scholarly contribution is thus
simultaneously a timely political intervention.
Rose explains in chapter 1 that King’s theory of service rests on three
assumptions about what it means to lead a good life: “a fully three-dimen-
sional life requires love of oneself (length) be complemented by...