Toward a Connected Classics Profession

WHAT WE NEED: A CONNECTED SOCIETY

In an important posthumous essay, "A Testament of Hope," Martin Luther King, Jr., exhorted readers to lift their sights beyond the legal successes of the Civil Rights movement to a broader effort to bring about "changes in the structure of society." He wrote:

Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.

While King focused in several of his late writings on "the restructuring of the whole of American society," exegetes have mostly focused on what he had to say in other essays about restructuring of the economy away from capitalism. But in "A Testament of Hope" he focused not on the economy but more broadly on restructuring civil society. He wrote: "Integration is meaningless without the sharing of power. When I speak of integration, I don't mean a romantic mixing of colors, I mean a real sharing of power and responsibility. We will eventually achieve this, but it is going to be much more difficult for us than for any other minority."

Where do co-residents of a polity share power and responsibility? In political institutions, yes, but not only there. Co-residents may share power in all the organizations—whether public or private, non-profit or commercial—that constitute civil society. The important if nonglamourous message of "A Testament of Hope" is that the long, hard slog of the Civil Rights movement will entail achieving organizational re-design throughout the whole of civil society. The work will have to embrace schools, colleges and universities, academic disciplines and professional societies, businesses and cultural organizations, and on and on. Civil Rights isn't something that happens "over there" in Congress, the Supreme Court, or state assemblies; it happens here, and here, and here, and everywhere.

Indeed, it is obvious that there is work in front of us. The U.S. is living through a major demographic transition that will upend our earlier approaches to thinking about identity, community, and social relations.¹ The question of whether by, say, 2040, we will indeed live in an egalitarian country where no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where such inequalities as persist do not track ethnic or racial lines, depends on choices we make now.² If we make the wrong choices, we may find that a black/non-black binary has re-asserted itself and that racial privilege is as strong as ever. Yet the present demographic opening offers an opportunity to renew and even perhaps make good on this country's original, if hypocritical, egalitarian commitments and on its modern embrace of them alongside the Civil Rights movement. Many would say that in the face of rapid demographic change what we need to work is the generation of social cohesion. I think we would be better off focusing on equality and power-sharing.

Why focus on equality to define our social goals? Democracies are built on the twin ideals of liberty and equality. Up until the early 19th century, and in the period of the American founding, these ideals were understood to be mutually reinforcing, not in tension with one another. Political contestation following the rise of communism and during the Cold War, however, collapsed the concept of equality into "economic equality," and generated a conventional view that liberty and equality are in tension with one another.³ But a recently growing body of work in political philosophy now seeks again to understand all of the different types of equality—moral, social, political, and economic—and to understand the relations among them. This body of work focuses on the centrality of political equality, or egalitarian empowerment, to human flourishing.⁴ This line of work prioritizes democracy, as the only possible route to justice...