Cornel West b. 1953

Cornel West is an American philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual whose work brings together pragmatism, the African-American intellectual tradition, and prophetic Christianity. Race Matters, written in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, became a touchstone of late-twentieth-century American racial discourse, while The American Evasion of Philosophy reread the pragmatist tradition from Emerson to Du Bois as a prophetic philosophy of resistance and hope. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Union Theological Seminary, and has been a tireless public voice on questions of justice, democracy, and the moral life.

Cornel Ronald West was born at Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June 1953, the son of a civilian Air Force administrator and an elementary-school teacher; he was raised in Sacramento and reared in the Black Baptist tradition. He took his bachelor's at Harvard magna cum laude in 1973 in three years, then his master's and in 1980 his doctorate at Princeton under Richard Rorty, with a dissertation on ethics and Marxism. He has held appointments at Union Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity, the University of Paris, Princeton, and Harvard; since 2021 he is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair in Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union, and in 2024 he ran for President of the United States as an independent.

His books include Prophesy Deliverance! (1982), Prophetic Fragments (1988), The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991), the bestselling Race Matters (1993), Keeping Faith (1993), Democracy Matters (2004), the memoir Brother West (2009), and Black Prophetic Fire (2014).

West reconstructs American pragmatism as a tradition of prophetic criticism running from Emerson and Dewey to DuBois and the Black church, and combines it with a non-Marxist socialism and a Christian existential commitment to the suffering of ordinary people. His public-intellectual career has joined Ivy League scholarship to hip-hop albums, sermons, and protest, making him one of the most recognisable voices in American philosophy and Black thought.