To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. Audiobook (Free)

Martin Luther King Jr. could be America’s most revered politics amount, commemorated in statues, festivities, and street titles around the world. Within the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, the person and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the importance of King’s writings and politics thought continues to be underappreciated.

In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write the marginalization of King’s ideas reflects a going to Shape a New World: Essays over the Political School of thought of Martin Luther Ruler Jr. romantic, consensus history that renders the civil privileges motion inherently conservative-an effort not at radical reform but at ‘living up to’ enduring ideals laid down by the country’s founders. Upon this view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of common (white) heroes, but produced little original thought. This failure to activate deeply and truthfully with King’s writings enables him to be conscripted into political projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious form of ‘color blindness’ that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome.

Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting privileges, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King’s exciting and learned function, the authors discover a range of compelling difficulties to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of the towering figure.