Contents

• Introduction : To be human, modern and American
• I. Autobiographical prelude. The making of an American radical democrat of African descent
• On my intellectual vocation
• Sing a song
• II. Modernity and its discontents. The ignoble paradox of modernity
• Race and modernity
• Black strivings in a twilight civilization
• The new cultural politics of difference
• III. American pragmatism. Why pragmatism?
• On prophetic pragmatism
• Pragmatism and the sense of the tragic
• The limits of neopragmatism
• Nietzsche’s prefiguration of postmodern American philosophy
• IV. Progressive Marxist theory. The indispensability yet insufficiency of Marxist theory - - Fredric Jameson’s American Marxism
• Race and social theory
• V. Radical democratic politics. The role of law in progressive politics
• The political intellectual
• A world of ideas
• The dilemma of the black intellectual
• American progressivism reoriented
• Parents and national survival
• On the 1980s
• Michael Harrington, democratic socialist