Alain Locke on the Theoretical Foundations for a Just and Successful Peace

Book excerpt: Alain Locke is most known for his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. However, he received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1918, and produced a very large corpus of philosophical work. His work shows him to have been a sophisticated philosopher who thought through practical and theoretical problems regarding the nature of cosmopolitanism, democracy, race, value, religion, art, and education. Although Locke's philosophical work has been discussed in parts, there has been no theorizing about how his different philosophical commitments fit together. In this book Corey L. Barnes begins to systematize Locke's philosophical thought, showing how his democratic theory, philosophy of race, and value theory are connected to and undergirded by a commitment to cosmopolitanism. In so doing, Barnes unearths aspects of Locke's thought-for example, his economic thinking-that have not been accorded attention and reimagines parts of his work about which have been theorized, all while bringing Locke into current debates about each subject.