Socrates in a Different Key

• Author: Joel Alden Schlosser
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912912451352
• Published date: 01 September 2013
• Date: 01 September 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

66(3) 487 –499

© 2012 University of Utah

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1065912912451352

prq.sagepub.com

Regular Article

In his recent book Democracy Matters, Cornel West

(2004, 79) names James Baldwin as the “black American

Socrates.” “A blues-inflected, jazz-saturated democrat,”

Baldwin, in West’s words, exercises “a powerful and

poignant self-examination—always on the brink of

despair, yet holding on to a tragicomic hope,” bespeak-

ing “a rare intellectual integrity and personal anguish.”

Like Socrates, Baldwin infects others with perplexity,

forcing his readers to grapple with the difficulties of

“trying to be a decent human being and thinking person

in the face of the pervasive mendacity and hypocrisy of

the American empire” (80).

Taking its cue from West, this essay explores how

James Baldwin’s essays and fiction continue and modify

a kind of Socratic examination transposed to the context

of racial domination and white supremacy. Recent work

in political theory on Baldwin has paid particular atten-

tion to the usefulness of his work for democratic theory,

emphasizing how Baldwin’s essays can inform a “public

discourse” about issues such as inequality, citizenship,

power, identity, democratic authority, and the uses of his-

tory (Balfour 2001, 135).1 For these scholars, Baldwin’s

writings lay “a critical groundwork,” in Lawrie Balfour’s

(2001, 135) words, for engaging these concerns while

also, as George Shulman (2008, 27) has put it, urging the

cultivation of “practices of citizenship that defeat ideal-

ization but not aspiration.” Denying the possibility of

realizing American democracy without confronting the

history of oppression interwoven in the very fabric of the

republic, Baldwin voices the claims of African American

critics stretching from Douglass through Du Bois and

West. Baldwin thus builds on the strand of African

American political thought that aims to confront the his-

tory of race and white supremacy as the indispensable

condition of any plausible vision of American democracy

by providing theoretical resources for challenging power

inequalities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class.2

Elaborating Baldwin’s work as a practice akin to

Socrates’s, this essay links these concerns of African

American political thought to Socrates’s influential

model of the questioning philosopher or social critic ded-

icated to improving his or her fellow citizens through the

collective pursuit of knowledge.3 Recently, “Socrates”

has come to serve as a trope for self-examination and the

kind of “critical” or “philosophic” citizenship propounded

by many as needful in twenty-first century liberal democ-

racies;4 I argue that Baldwin takes up this Socrates in his

original key by articulating and undertaking a practice of

examination: the interrogation of self and world to recog-

nize the delusions and blindness that contribute to persist

structures of oppression. Baldwin thus insists on the

destructive reality of the “racial contract,” as Charles

Mills (1997, 18, 88) has put it, in its epistemological

form, rejecting the ideological coercion propagated by a

451352PRQ66310.1177/1065912912451352P

olitical Research Quarterly XX(X)Schlosser

1Deep Springs College, Dyer, NV, USA

Corresponding Author:

Joel Alden Schlosser, Deep Springs College, HC 72 Box 45001, Dyer,

NV 89010, USA.

Email: schlosser@deepsprings.edu

Socrates in a Different Key:

James Baldwin and Race in America

Joel Alden Schlosser1

Abstract

This essay interprets Baldwin as continuing the Socratic practice of self-examination and social criticism while also

shifting his Socratic undertaking by charting the limits of examination created by the harsh effects of race and slavery

in the United States. The author argues that Baldwin’s Socratic practice inflects not only his essays—the center of

previous analyses—but also his fictions. By transposing Socrates to issues of race in twentieth-century America and

confronting the incoherent effects of a racialized society, James Baldwin thus carries forward and transforms a pivotal

figure in the history of political thought.

Keywords

James Baldwin, Socrates, race and politics, democracy, contemporary United States