Brandon Terry's two new books on Martin Luther King Jr.'s political philosophy are out this week!
In To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (available from Harvard University Press with all profits going to Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative), co-editors Tommie Shelby (Harvard) and Brandon Terry convene a phenomenal group of scholars, including Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and others for careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings. These thoughtful engagements range across questions of labor and welfare rights, voting rights, 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 work, they discover an array of compelling challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the intellectual and political legacy of this towering figure. The book is available for sale directly from the press, and for pre-order on Amazon.
For more on this project see these interviews: the Harvard Gazette and Under the Radar with Callie Crossley.
The second project, Fifty Years Since MLK (MIT Press), is a special book-length issue of Boston Review that Terry guest edited. In essays written especially for a wider public, Sam Moyn, Aziz Rana, and others turn to King and the tragic year of 1968 -- with Vietnam, Nixon, riots, and assassinations -- to understand our contemporary crisis of democracy and chart a new, progressive path forward. In the lead essay, "MLK Now" (available for free online) Terry makes the case for King's surprisingly radical political philosophy and try to show its indispensability for incisive political thought and action today. In the print volume, available for pre-sale from Boston Review's website, he debates these arguments with some of the greatest scholars of our time, including Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Bernard Harcourt, and Elizabeth Hinton.