Book Review: To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718758948
• Author: Andrew J. Douglas
• Date: 01 October 2018
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 821

4. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace

Jovanovich, 1973 [new edition with added prefaces]), 56.

5. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in Responsibility and Judgment,

ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 202.

6. Ibid., 203.

7. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock.”

8. See Civil Disobedience.

To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King,

Jr. edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2018.

Reviewed by: Andrew J. Douglas, Department of Political Science, Morehouse College,

Atlanta, GA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718758948

What began several summers ago as a private faculty seminar at the Radcliffe

Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has blossomed into an

accessible and richly generative collection of essays on the political thought of

Martin Luther King Jr. To Shape a New World, edited by Tommie Shelby and

Brandon M. Terry, will elevate King’s status as a political theorist and stimulate

further thinking about what this means, both for King exegesis and for the self-

understanding of the discipline. For too long, Shelby and Terry write in their

introduction, “philosophers, historians of political thought, and political theo-

rists” have tended to “neglect King’s well-considered and wide-ranging treat-

ments of many important philosophical and political issues, including labor and

welfare rights, economic inequality, poverty, love, just war theory, virtue eth-

ics, political theology, violence, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and

social justice—not to mention his more familiar writings on citizenship, racial

equality, voting rights, civil disobedience, and nonviolence” (2). To Shape a

New World addresses each of these issues, in multiple and often insightful

ways, via fifteen original essays and an afterword written by a cadre of promi-

nent US-based scholars in the fields of philosophy and political science. For a

volume of such size and breadth, for a collection of essays cast from such a

range of authorial perspectives and methodological approaches, the book is

sufficiently coherent. But its signal strength as a collection is that, in various

ways and as its title indicates, the book works to shape new and future thinking

about a set of philosophical and political questions that are as unsettled and

unsettling now as they were a half-century ago.