As the many commemorative events on 4 April 2018, the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.'s tragic assassination, made very clear that King's legacy is more important than ever. As the United States veers towards chaos rather than community, with meanness and angry divisiveness, fanned by an emboldened racism, spreading like climate change enabled wildfires, it does seem that politics needs something weightier than simple calls for civility and reasonableness in public debate – calls that can too easily be co-opted to mask the frightening political realities. To be sure, Dr King was a very civil and reasonable individual. But he took the fight for social justice into a ‘war without violence’, calling for confrontation and sacrifice to draw out the poisonous bigotry that needed to be overcome on the road to the ‘beloved community’ where justice is indeed the public face of love. Testifying through active, courageous non-violent protest – and civil disobedience – to the evils of racism, poverty, materialism and militarism was not uncivil or unreasonable, but it was a deeper spiritual commitment than the public reason of the public sphere of liberalism. Democracy demands deeds and disruptions, as well as deliberations. As Brandon Terry sums it up: ‘When leveraged against oppression and resentment, leavened with a spirit of love and forgiveness, and articulated through a willingness to take on more suffering than one's opponent, nonviolent coercion may be justified’ (p. 305).

To Shape a New World is therefore a very timely book, one that rethinks and presents King in all his uncompromising integrity. And it does so with a keen critical eye trained on how academic philosophy has failed King. Jonathan L. Walton's Afterword to this volume, ‘Dignity as a Weapon of Love’, nicely captures some of the leading points that recommend it:

To help right this wrong, this book, featuring a very distinguished group of academics including such figures as Martha Nussbaum, Danielle Allen, Bernard Boxill and Cornel West, aims to challenge this academic asphyxiation of philosophy by taking King seriously as a philosopher and public intellectual. King, in the words of the contributing editors, was ‘a systematic thinker’ who produced ‘well-considered and wide-ranging treatments of many important philosophical and political issues, including labor and welfare rights, economic inequality, poverty, love, just war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, violence, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice – not to mention his more familiar writings on citizenship, racial equality, voting rights, civil disobedience, and nonviolence’ (p. 2). The editors, and it seems the entire cast of contributors, hope to get beyond all the ritual celebration and shallow reading of King to come to a better appreciation of his profound philosophical originality and importance, recognizing that these were inseparable from his activism.

These are certainly worthy objectives, and the book succeeds brilliantly on very many counts. Surely, academic philosophy would be a better, richer and less diversity-challenged discipline if more of its devotees took this type of approach. Of course, it would have been nice if the list of contributors had actually included a non-academic activist philosopher, someone with a profile more like King's own, but at least many of those featured here are activists as well as academics, and that is something. Collectively, they clearly are working hard to shape a new world in ways that go beyond publishing articles for other academics, however uncooperative the world at present may be with their efforts. They are vividly aware of the dangers of the ‘paralysis of analysis’ of which King warned. And collectively, they represent philosophy in a new key, a more inclusive approach that could help address the mounting public suspicion of higher education as elitist and irrelevant.

The book is divided into four sections: ‘Traditions’, ‘Ideals’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Conscience’. Understandably, there is a good deal of overlap from section to section, with the authors forever returning to the key themes of dignity, integrity, conscience, love, justice and non-violence. Some of the contributions, such as Paul Taylor's ‘Moral Perfectionism’, are strikingly creative in their readings of King:

Drawing on works from Emerson to Cavell, Taylor develops these thoughts by casting King as a type of moral perfectionist, though ‘the core perfectionist commitments’ here are ‘the centrality of character, the importance of self-criticism, the lived experience of despair and self-loathing, the attempt to leverage self-loathing into productive growth, and the importance of unending striving in a world of dynamic practices and corruptible institutions’ (p. 45).

Taylor's reading captures King's personalism but also his political orientation and the recurring themes of tragedy, sacrifice and despair that so often marked his life, especially towards the end. It is a most helpful corrective to the pervasive dilution of King's views evident in all the street-namings and service days, oratorical competitions and debate clubs, which largely offer an anodyne alternative to serious engagement with King's call.

Taylor's reading adds something that more theological-deontological readings tend to underplay, though they too have their crucial insights. But the looming philosophical presence in this book is Gandhi, whose picture alone King had hanging in his dining room, and who makes only a fleeting appearance in Taylor's essay. Nearly all of the contributors comment on King's debt to Gandhi, and the excellent pieces by Karuna Mantena, ‘Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics’, and Martha Nussbaum, ‘From Anger to Love: Self-Purification and Political Resistance’, are expressly focused on the Gandhian influence on King. Mantena notes the important legacy of Gandhian non-violent activism in the United States that King inherited, for example from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, members of which helped found the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, in the early 1940s (see <http://humstatic.uchicago.edu/mahimahi/media/ckp/CKP-1942.mp4>). And she rightly stresses how the popular distinction between principled and strategic (or tactical) non-violence fits very uneasily with these figures:

For her part, Nussbaum develops the comparison with Gandhi in significant measure by praising King over Gandhi, explaining how ‘in the two areas in which he departs from Gandhi – his qualifications about violence in self-defense and his refusal of a total Stoicism about emotions – he appears to me to have the more philosophically defensible position’ (p. 126). Gandhi, whose ‘views about war are not sensible’ (p. 118) and who ‘urged complete detachment from emotions, prominently focusing on erotic love and even sexual desire’ (p. 123), may have been more philosophically explicit about some matters, but he tended towards the inhuman. King, by contrast ‘does not offer general prescriptions for the whole course of a person's life’ (p. 123), but instead ‘focused on emotions that could disrupt the political movement, arguing that demonstrations and marches are a way of channeling repressed emotions – “resentments and latent frustrations” – that might otherwise lead to violence’ (p. 123). And King, unlike Gandhi, does not eschew ‘powerful aesthetic means of arousing sentiments of love and hope’ (p. 123).

For Nussbaum, King's talk of self-purification and ‘channeling’ suggests an approach along the lines of what she labels ‘Transition Anger’ – anger that ‘has the protest part of anger without the payback part’ (p. 109). Yes, King certainly championed agape as an act of will, and the opposite of hatred, and he wanted to see hatred extirpated. One can hate the unjust deed without hating the doer of the deed. But hatred and anger are not the same thing, and he was a bit clearer on how the negative, retributive side of the emotion of anger, the urge for ‘payback’, could be overcome and anger channelled into a positive force, a creative force for change. Anger motivates protest, but it need not support payback or retribution or hatred. This, as Nussbaum insightfully notes, makes for some gender trouble: ‘Taking on anger means taking on a central plank in the normative platform of American masculinity’ (p. 126). King ‘for the most part succeeded brilliantly in representing himself as neither unmanly nor a predator’ (p. 126). Such valuable lessons have yet to be learned by all the angry white payback-seeking male predators populating the current political landscape in the English-speaking world.

Nussbaum's reading might seem to be in part an effort to nudge interpreters in the direction of a more political liberal take on King, by comparison with Gandhi's comprehensive conception of the non-violent life. But it is difficult to make out just how far – clearly, not too far – one can go in this direction, as Ronald Sundstrom's excellent contribution brings out:

Nussbaum seems less forthright about this, though she celebrates King as a ‘savvy strategist’ well aware of his cultural contexts, and she herself identifies as a political liberal. But Sundstrom is on target in emphasizing how problematic King is for political liberalism:

Sundstrom, along with other contributors to this work, highlights the vital significance of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology and political/Christian realism to King's world-view, an influence that rivalled that of Gandhi. But against a common misconception, he rightly observes that:

Intriguingly, Taylor also struggles with these tensions, and suggests how some might be tempted to push King in the political liberal direction by emphasizing how ‘his arguments about what's right, whatever their roots, can get traction with people in the public sphere, people for whom his faith claims, rooted in a comprehensive conception of the good, happen not to resonate’ (p. 49). But in the end he admits that religious ‘commitments are vital to King's work’. King stresses this in

The pull of this question – namely, how can political liberals adapt or repurpose or somehow deploy King's philosophy of non-violence – is felt across the volume as a whole, as a kind of spectre in the background, despite the term ‘political liberalism’ not even making it into the index. Walton invokes it via Richard Rorty on religion being a ‘conversation stopper’ (p. 342), but he (rightly) agrees with Taylor on King as a counterexample. The many attempts to portray the unity of King's causes inevitably hint at it, as a possible, lurking critical rejoinder. Michelle Moody-Adams insightfully observes that

And Cornel West, with his moving prophetic voice, urges that:

The condition of spiritual blackout of this scope calls less for a contrary (and domestic) overlapping liberal consensus and more for a comprehensive global condemnation, since the injustice at home does not stay at home, as King well knew – consider his open opposition to the war the United States was waging in Vietnam, and to other imperialist wars (helpfully analysed here by Lionel McPherson in ‘The costs of Violence: Militarism, Geopolitics, and Accountability’). As King's talented protégé Bernard LaFayette, himself trained in non-violence by one of King's mentors, the Revd James Lawson, has long insisted, Kingian non-violence as a way of life certainly calls for courage and community, sacrifice and suffering, and a determined effort to avoid the scars to the spirit – not least one's own – when adopting a hateful attitude towards others. And as Mantena stresses, part of the beauty of non-violence is the way that, despite being a form of coercion, it unbalances the opposition, how it ‘yields rather than attacks, and the opponents find their own force is set against themselves’ (p. 98). Thus, ‘the moral appeal at the heart of nonviolent persuasion is very different from gestures of moderation and compromise. Nonviolence frames critique and dissent in relation to demanding and expansive ideals, ideals that resonate in such a way that everyone can invest in them and evaluate their conduct by them’ (p. 99). Everyone on earth. As King famously put it, in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

There is a great deal more of value in this work; all of the contributions are worth reading, and they range across many other important topics, everything from integration to civic republicanism to whether King should be called a socialist (according to Shelby, no – see p. 200). But the themes addressed above are as important as any, and if taken seriously would help overcome the reductive images of King the Dreamer and patron saint of community service days.

But consider two points of criticism. First, as indicated earlier, there is a lot missing in this account of King's philosophical views, and greater attention to many of the figures in his circle and those carrying on his legacy would have deepened the account of him. Many important influences are invoked, from Rousseau to Rawls, DuBois to Malcom X, Thoreau to Tolstoy, Kant to Hegel, Nietzsche to Niebuhr, and of course Gandhi, but some of the most influential members of King's inner circle are strangely neglected – James Bevel, Bernard LaFayette, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Lawson, Jesse Jackson, Dorothy Cotton, Diane Nash, even Coretta Scott King, receive at best only occasional and mostly passing or no mention, despite their profound influence on King. Arguably, Coretta Scott King was the one who really pushed him in the Gandhian direction, and it is telling that both she and their son Dexter became vegetarians, thinking that King himself had not consistently paid his debt to Gandhi. Gandhi, by the way, came to civil disobedience via his vegetarianism. As Peter Singer has reminded us, when Gandhi first came to England and sought help from the vegetarian society there, he befriended the extraordinary Henry Salt, the socialist author of both Animal Rights in Relation to Social Progress and The Life of Henry David Thoreau, the work that introduced Gandhi to Thoreau on civil disobedience.

Furthermore, no serious mention whatsoever – beyond an exculpatory footnote on page 353 – is made of Stanley David Levison – like Vincent Harding, one of King's closest confidants, who ghosted many of his speeches and was a constant source of advice. Levison, it is now clear, was a major target of the FBI because of his earlier involvement with the Communist Party, and the FBI files on him, now publicly available, show that the agency sought to discredit King in part by linking him to Levison. Others in the labour movement, such figures as Moe Foner and Timuel Black, also had vital relationships to King and the movement, but make no appearance here. SEIU local 1199, one of King's favourites, makes no appearance here. Anti-violence activist Father Michael Pfleger, of the Faith Community of St Sabina, who delivered the keynote at the MLK50 commemoration at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (the site of King's assassination), makes no appearance here. And the list goes on, suggesting that perhaps too many of the contributors here may themselves have suffered some degree of asphyxiation from academic philosophy. The editors allow that they invited the contributors to focus on some key works by King (pp. 6–7), but that form of textualism can be more limiting than they seem to recognize. The book can leave one feeling that this is King largely without the community that mattered to him the most, the lives that infused his works.

Second, and perhaps less surprisingly, every single reference or allusion to utilitarianism is perfunctory, tangential or dismissive. True, King himself classified utilitarianism with Nietzsche as a godless threat to his world-view, and reproduced much of the stock schizophrenia about John Stuart Mill's arguments. But surely some of the various forms of utilitarianism, theological and non-theological, can make a case for universal benevolence that would go much further in the direction of undergirding King's agape than the Kantian or rights-based attempts to appropriate his views, which mostly rely on a question-begging account of dignity (a notion that, as Walton brings out, King uses in multiple ways – see p. 348). Strangely, there is no direct confrontation here with the racist legacy of Kantian and Idealist views, or how problematic they are for King's purposes even in their comprehensive forms. Civic republicanism also gets off very lightly. The resistance to the lack of inclusion and diversity in academic philosophy on display here seems, alas, rather limited.

No doubt King did not did not really grasp or anticipate the degree to which certain forms of utilitarianism could support such movements as that for effective altruism, which he would have embraced, or animal liberation, which Gandhi and members of his own family embraced. And there is no evidence that he was at all familiar with the work of Henry Sidgwick, despite sharing a taste for some of Sidgwick's favourite poets, Clough and Tennyson, with their familiar yearnings for their lost or challenged faith. King, like Sidgwick, would sometimes quote Tennyson's In Memoriam: ‘Behold, we know not anything; | I can but trust that good shall fall | At last – far off – at last, to all, | And every winter change to spring.’ That Sidgwick's angst about the wages of virtue not proving to be ‘dust’ is something that would have resonated with King can scarcely be doubted. The dualism of practical reason, the conflict between one's own Good and the Good of all, found expression in King's work as surely as it did in Sidgwick's. And when it came to unhopeful hoping that reason would not destroy unreasonable ethical ideals before they had done their good work, King had nothing on Sidgwick.

But interpretations and reconstructions of King in utilitarian terms will have to wait for another book. To Shape a New World is a helpful start, but the arc of King's moral universe remains long.