Cornel West, Robert George and the uses of fruitful disagreement

Notice what the pair share, because it matters for the assessment. Both are Christians who believe that truth is a real thing, discoverable by argument, and that a person who abandons the search has damaged his soul. Both hold endowed chairs, institutional protection, and an income independent of whether the other man's audience approves of them. West calls George "brother"; George says of West that what he loves is that "even when he is wrong — that he's honest". The bond is not a triumph over difference so much as a shared prior commitment underneath it. That is a narrower finding than the one usually advertised.

The training was harder-edged than the public manner#

West was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 2 June 1953 and raised in Sacramento, where his mother taught school and later became a principal and his father was a civilian contractor for the Defense Department. His grandfather was a Baptist minister. He entered Harvard at seventeen and left three years later with a magna cum laude degree — in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, not philosophy, a detail that has quietly shaped everything since.

The philosophy came at Princeton, where he took his MA and, in 1980, a doctorate, the first African American to do so in that department. His dissertation, "Ethics, Historicism and the Marxist Tradition", was supervised by Sheldon Wolin and Raymond Geuss: two of the least sentimental political theorists of the age, a fact his critics rarely factor in.

The career after that reads like a man circling the same three institutions. Union Theological Seminary as a young assistant professor; Yale Divinity School, 1984 to 1987; Princeton from 1988, directing African American studies; Harvard from 1994, where in 1998 he became the first Alphonse Fletcher University Professor; Princeton again from 2002; Union again from 2012; Harvard again from 2016, as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, a post without tenure; and Union again from 2021, where he remains. In May 2024, between campaign appearances, he gave the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh — six of them, titled after tempo markings, from "Philosophic Prelude" to "A Love Supreme (A Way Through)".

What "evasion" means, and why the 1989 book is the serious work#

The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism appeared from the University of Wisconsin Press in 1989, in Frank Lentricchia's Wisconsin Project on American Writers series. It is the book on which West's standing as a philosopher rests, and it is routinely mentioned rather than read.

The word "evasion" in the title is not an accusation. West uses it descriptively, almost admiringly. His claim is that the distinctively American philosophical tradition, running from Emerson through Peirce, James and Dewey to Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, W. E. B. Du Bois and finally Richard Rorty, is defined by what it declines to do. It declines to make epistemology the first question. It refuses the project — Cartesian in origin, analytic in its twentieth-century form — of securing knowledge against scepticism before anything else may be said. "The evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy," West writes in the introduction, "from Emerson to Rorty — results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism." Pragmatism sidesteps the foundational problem rather than solving it, and the sidestep is the achievement: it frees philosophy to address what West calls distinct social and cultural crises.

Two things follow, and West is careful about both. The first is that a tradition built on evasion inherits a weakness: decline to argue about foundations and you have no independent standpoint from which to criticise your own society's self-understanding. Rorty's cheerful ethnocentrism, in West's reading, is the honest terminus of that road; our recent piece on Rorty and the search for common ground sets out the same difficulty from the other side. The second is West's remedy, which he calls prophetic pragmatism: a pragmatism that keeps Dewey's experimentalism and historical sense but supplies the missing element from outside philosophy altogether — from the black church, from the socialist tradition, from the moral vocabulary of prophecy. Truth remains fallible and revisable. Commitment does not wait on certainty.

This is a more disciplined position than its reputation suggests, and also where the criticism bites hardest. A pragmatist who imports his normative standards from a religious tradition has arguably reintroduced the foundations he spent three hundred pages evading. West's answer is that prophecy is vocation rather than foundation — a way of standing, not a claim to have proved the ground one stands on. Whether that distinction holds is a real question, and West has not, in thirty-seven years, written the book that settles it.

It is also the hinge on which the George friendship turns. If truth is worth seeking but no one has finished seeking it, then your opponent is a fellow searcher and worth listening to. That proposition is the whole argument of Truth Matters, and West had it in place by 1989.

The nihilism argument was never a culture-of-poverty argument#

Race Matters was published by Beacon Press on 1 April 1993: eight essays, 159 pages, and the book that made West famous. Its opening chapter, "Nihilism in Black America", is the most misread thing he has written.

West's nihilism is not Nietzsche's. It is not a doctrine at all but a condition: "Like alcoholism and drug addiction," he writes, "nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse." The provocation is in the ranking. "The major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat — that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning."

Read in a hurry, that sentence sounds like Daniel Patrick Moynihan with better prose, and a great many readers of 1993 read it in a hurry. It was taken up on the right as licence to talk about culture instead of structure, and attacked on the left as victim-blaming with a Harvard imprimatur. Adolph Reed's demolition, "What Are the Drums Saying, Booker? The Curious Role of the Black Public Intellectual", appeared in The Village Voice on 11 April 1995 and put it with maximum economy: West's substance was "left in form, right in essence", derived from Moynihan, and packaged in sonorous platitudes for white audiences who wanted a black interpreter.

The reading is wrong on the text. West's causal account is emphatically structural: nihilism in black America is produced, he argues, by the saturation of market forces and market moralities, which corrode the churches, families and civic institutions that had previously supplied what he calls cultural armour. The pathology is downstream of capitalism, not upstream of it. What West adds is the claim that the damage, once done, does not repair itself when the material conditions improve, because self-regard is not a commodity that can be redistributed. His prescription — a "politics of conversion" organised around a "love ethic" — follows from that. "Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care."

That is an argument about the moral psychology of subordination, and it has better company than West's critics allowed. It sits close to Elizabeth Anderson's relational egalitarianism, which also begins from how people stand in relation to one another rather than from the distribution of goods. The difference is genre. Anderson writes a theory; West writes a sermon. The genre cost him.

The quarrels, and what each was actually about#

There have been many, and they are not all the same kind of thing.

The first was with Lawrence Summers: a private meeting in Harvard's president's office at which, in West's telling, Summers raised missed classes, grade inflation, a rap recording and West's work on Bill Bradley's 2000 campaign. West replied that he had missed one class, to give a keynote at a Harvard-sponsored AIDS conference, and noted that Summers had not been in touch during his treatment for prostate cancer. He left for Princeton in 2002 and told NPR that Summers was "the Ariel Sharon of higher education", a line five Princeton colleagues publicly deplored. Underneath the personalities sat a genuine dispute about what a university professorship is for.

The second was with Michael Eric Dyson, once West's student and defender, in "The Ghost of Cornel West", published by The New Republic on 19 April 2015. Dyson's charge was bibliographic before it was personal: West "hasn't published without aid of a co-writer a single scholarly book since Keeping Faith, which appeared in 1993", and his later output is "a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits". The essay ran to some nine thousand words and did not survive its own excess; the bibliographic point survives it.

The third was with Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Guardian of 17 December 2017. West's thesis was that Coates had produced a politics with no class or empire in it. "Coates fetishizes white supremacy," he wrote. "He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable." Coates left Twitter rather than answer. Robin D. G. Kelley, writing in Boston Review, thought both men had a case and the format had none.

Harvard came round again in 2021. A faculty committee recommended West's reappointment and an immediate tenure review; the administration offered reappointment and an endowed but untenured chair. After a public campaign, Harvard reversed itself and agreed to consider tenure. West went anyway. "You can't impose and force people to respect you," he told the Crimson. His resignation letter of 30 June 2021 described watching "a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvard administration's hostility to the Palestinian cause", and called the business "an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths". Harvard did not respond.

Then the 2024 presidential campaign: announced for the People's Party on 5 June 2023, moved to the Greens nine days later, relaunched as an independent bid on 5 October, then as the Justice for All Party from February 2024, with Melina Abdullah as running mate. He reached the ballot in fifteen states and took 82,644 votes, 0.05 per cent of the total. The objection from the left was not that he was wrong about Gaza or about Wall Street but that the arithmetic was indefensible; Bhaskar Sunkara and D. D. Guttenplan both urged him to contest the Democratic primary instead. More damagingly, the Associated Press documented Republican-linked operatives assisting his ballot access, and the Democratic National Committee filed complaints over unreported in-kind support in North Carolina and Arizona. West replied that no party owns voters. He is right about that, and it does not dispose of the charge.

The case against him, stated at full strength#

It runs as follows. West's philosophical production effectively stopped in 1989; what has come since is occasional writing, co-authored trade books, transcribed lectures and an enormous quantity of television. The prophetic idiom is unfalsifiable, converting every disagreement into a test of the opponent's soul, which is why so many of his quarrels end in accusations of cowardice rather than in arguments. And Reed's structural point stands independently of the personal one: the black public intellectual, as a role, presumes and reinforces political demobilisation, supplying commentary where organisation is wanted.

The defence is not that these charges are false but that they answer the wrong question. The philosopher as public and prophetic figure is an old office with a serious pedigree, and measuring it by refereed-article counts assumes precisely what is at issue. West's 1989 book argues that American philosophy's best tradition is one that refuses professional self-enclosure; convicting him of insufficient professional output concedes his thesis while pretending to refute it. The Gifford Lectures, the least populist platform in the anglophone world, were offered to him in 2024, and he filled six of them.

What the friendship shows, and what it does not#

It shows that two people can hold incompatible views about abortion, marriage, capitalism and American power and still trust each other's honesty. That is a real finding, and in the present climate not a trivial one.

The larger claim usually made for it does not hold. West and George agree that truth exists, that it is worth seeking, that seeking it is a duty, and that the seeker's character is at stake in the search — a substantial shared metaphysics, which most American political antagonists do not share. They also agree in despising careerism, which is easier when neither can be sacked. Take away the tenure, the endowed chairs, the common Christian grammar, and it is unclear what transfers. Alasdair MacIntyre's argument that modern moral debate is interminable because the parties draw on incommensurable fragments of vanished traditions is not refuted by two men who happen to share a tradition. Nor does the example meet Chantal Mouffe's objection that the demand for civility pushes real conflict outside the arena rather than resolving it within.

West himself is less sentimental about this than his admirers. In his Al Jazeera conversation earlier this year he was as scathing about American politics as he has ever been. The stage at Auburn does not represent a settlement he has reached with his opponents. It represents a conviction, held since 1989, that a fallibilist can still be a militant — that you can believe your own certainty is unavailable and act anyway. Whether a polity can be built on that, rather than a friendship, is the thing nobody on the stage will be able to demonstrate.

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