Abstract

As a public intellectual, the earliest period in Cornel West’s academic career can be traced to his relationship with James H. Cone, just as much as Cone’s earliest development of black theology can be traced to his relationship with West. Essentially, when considering the mutual influences of Cone on West and West on Cone, this lays bare how both attend to social justice as that which is liberational-theological and based on prophetic commitments. Not only is this relationship essential to allowing Cone to re-imagine the task of Black theology in the late-1970s in terms of a scope that re-considered Marxist social analysis, but this relationship also proved informative for West’s conceptualization of “the prophetic” in the early 1980s, as that which fundamentally grounds a broader prophetic tradition and what it means to social justice through liberational theologizing. It is this prophetic tradition, for Cone and West alike, that attunes and is attuned by the meaning and meaningfulness of a Black intellectual life, predicated on the meaning and meaningfulness of the activism, religiosity, and the public sphere. While Cone and West both occupy important roles in what the prophetic tradition is methodologically, both significantly influence one another, through their respective prophetic commitments to liberational-theological social justice.