Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher

Alain Locke was for many years a much neglected philosopher, whose importance not only for African American culture but also for the fields of value theory, critical race theory, and aesthetics was generally overlooked, eclipsed by the towering figure of his older and more famous contemporary, W. E. B. DuBois. In recent years there has been a revival of philosophical interest in Locke, largely through the tireless efforts of Leonard Harris, who edited a collection of Locke's critical texts and a collection of essays on Locke's philosophy, which Harris described as critical pragmatism. It was Harris who first told me about Locke and urged me to read him, and I remain grateful for his doing so. The more I read Locke and the more I learned about his seminal role in the Harlem Renaissance and the development of African America artistic culture and race theory, the more I was amazed that there was no biography devoted to him. Like many others, I urged Harris to provide one as an essential part of establishing Locke's intellectual importance and sustaining his legacy. It is a very welcome event for both American philosophy and cultural studies that Harris, together with Charles Molesworth, has finally provided us with a most substantial and carefully researched intellectual biography of Locke.

Harris is a philosopher while Molesworth is a professor of English literature, and this interdisciplinary combination works well here and is, moreover, exceedingly suitable to its topic. For Locke himself effectively straddled the fields of philosophy and literature, teaching for most of his career as a philosophy professor at Howard University, but steadily churning out more literary criticism (along with music and art criticism) than texts of academic philosophy. Locke occasionally described his philosophical genius in terms of being a midwife to cultural and artistic progress, and this biography carefully traces Locke's career as a philosopher of culture and as a cultural critic, but also as someone for whom culture also had a primary personal meaning—the duty of self-culture, a melioristic drive for continual education and cultivation.

The book's narrative structure is straightforward and chronological, consisting of twelve chapters. It begins with a thorough exploration of Locke's background and early life in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1885, the only child of a well-educated Negro couple who themselves were well-educated freeborn blacks. They instilled in their son Allan (who later, through his taste for dandyism, changed his name to the French Alain) a love of learning and ambition for self-improvement. Locke was a small and sickly child who suffered from a heart condition brought about by a case of rheumatic fever, and he was apparently spoiled by his mother, who remained very close to Locke and often traveled with him in his adult years. This chapter includes Locke's early academic success at Central High School in Philadelphia, and the book then moves to chapters on his studies at Harvard, his further studies in Oxford and Berlin, and then his career as an American academic and cultural critic. There are two chapters on his academic life at Howard, a chapter on his role in the Harlem Renaissance and editing of the influential anthology The New Negro, a chapter on the impact of that book and the movement it helped generate. These are followed by chapters that discuss his substantial work as an art critic focusing on African American achievement and as an agent for stimulating new African American artistic creation. The final chapters describe Locke's work as a theorist of education and democracy (where his theories of race, already noted in earlier chapters, are given further treatment) and then recount his final years of activity, concluding with a chapter on his legacy that brings us up to contemporary times.

The book convincingly demonstrates how Locke's intellectual career in philosophy was always primarily concerned with three major topics that he closely...