It is fitting that when Cornel R. West ’74 came to Harvard last Saturday to discuss his new book, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, he spoke not in the halls of Sever or Emerson, but at the pulpit of First Parish Church.

When you see him in his finely tailored all black three-piece suit, thrusting his arm and clenched fist out at the packed crowd in a sign of Black Power, his voice wavering like an erratic EKG printout, reaching a crescendo mid-sentence and then trailing off so that he whispers the last word, syllable by syllable—“hu-man-i-ty”—it is then that you realize that Cornel West is not your ordinary professor.

This Princeton University Professor of Religion is a preacher, and his congregation today realizes that. They chime in to his words with the occasional “that’s right!” or “tell ‘em!” that you would expect more of a Sunday afternoon homily than a Saturday night book discussion sponsored by the Harvard Book Store.

West’s gospel today is of the secular sort. He preaches that democracy is “in crisis” and that “we need to be reminded of the intellectual and political resources available in the democratic tradition that we can build on in order to deal” with those threats.

He blends together old-school academia and new-school pop culture, invoking Socrates, Herman Melville and Snoop Dogg to advocate critical examination first of one self, and eventually of one’s government.

“Let’s engage in Socratic questions for a certain intellectual integrity and moral consistency,” he sermonizes. “It’s a matter of deciding ‘Is this the person I want to be?’” He ends the sentence with what, only five minutes into the speech, has become his trademark: he draws out the last syllables of the sentence, making his plea seem even more urgent.

We must follow Socrates’ exhortation in Plato’s Apology that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” he says, because only through self-examination can we recognize in what ways we need to improve our democratic society. An examination of the problems with our democratic society, and an argument for how to overcome them, constitutes the bulk of Democracy Matters.

But along the way West, ever the controversial figure, especially since his bitter public dispute in 2002 with University President Lawrence H. Summers resulted in West’s departure from Harvard for Princeton, manages to ruffle a few feathers along the way, as he talks about the “niggerization of America,” the “evangelical nihilistic arrogance of the Bush administration,” and even devotes a full 11 pages to retelling his side of the Summers affair.

WHY DEMOCRACY MATTERS

West outlines the threats to democracy as free market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and the dogma of increasing authoritarianism. Free market fundamentalism he defines as “fetishizing unregulated markets,” which provides an excuse to rationalize rising wealth inequalities. Under the heading of “aggressive militarism” he includes everything from America’s invasion of Iraq to domestic violence. And by the “dogma of increasing authoritarianism” he means a mindset that has allowed the United States to, according to West, violate the rights of prisoners of war captured abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan and to racially profile Arab-Americans at home.

West invokes Melville in a call for Americans to critically question what he views as the hijacking of democracy by anti-democratic and oppressive forces.

“If you’re well adapted to a status quo that is oppressive, something is wrong,” he pleads from behind the pulpit.

He argues that material success and personal power have become the highest values in American culture today, above even liberty. Americans have begun to define themselves in terms of these materialistic values, and this has harmed society by deflating it of more altruistic values. America, to West, has succumbed to nihilism.

It is his hatred of nihilism that drives the book and leads to his call for Socratic self-examination. Indeed, in an interview after the speech he defines nihilism as “a gangster way of life. It is amoral, it is obsessed with might and force. It’s both a mindset and a mode of behavior. It’s unprincipled and it’s dangerous.”

West takes particular issue with the Bush administration specifically—hence the “evangelical nihilistic arrogance” charge—and with America’s prosecution of the war on terror more generally. He uses the term “niggerization of America” to describe a country that in the wake of September 11, 2001 shares the black experience of being widely hated by others. West says America has responded to international terror with a hatred that blacks have historically not employed when struggling against American terror and hate directed against them.