Abstraction and Universality in Political Theory: The intervention of Black Liberation Theologian James H. Cone

Research introduces the thought of radical Black Liberation Theologian James H. Cone into secular discussions of political metaphysics, such as political ontology, as well as into the growing field of political theology emerging from both post-secular and continental philosophy. Cone’s thought remedies the easy familiarity of an established European canon of political philosophy, injecting black radicalism into discussions of political metaphysics. Having produced a robust theological project, Cone can be read as a guide for approaching questions of the metaphysical, the ontological, and the theological from within concrete political struggle. His thought, therefore, challenges the familiar association between an abstract mode of thought and the pursuit of fundamental questions, establishing direct access between worldly political struggle and our deepest metaphysical questions. As a CAS Fellow I will continue to produce publications which address widespread political thought from the perspective of Cone’s theology. Alongside insisting on particular worldly locations of struggle as privileged sites from which to think the metaphysical, Cone’s reading of Christianity’s most central doctrines presents a fundamental destabilisation of a core Christian paradigm pertaining to universality and abstraction, a paradigm that has been inherited into, and concealed within, secular political thought. Research addresses and reveals this concealment.