Alain Locke's Philosophy of Democracy

by Christopher Buck

About: Alain Locke has been acknowledged as “the most influential African American intellectual born between W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.” This paper presents Alain Locke’s philosophy of democracy, in nine dimensions. Baha’i values synergized Locke’s philosophy of democracy or, at the very least, now serve as a useful heuristic for understanding and appreciating certain aspects of Locke’s philosophy of democracy. Locke’s grand (though not systematic) theory of democracy sequenced local, moral, political, economic, and cultural stages of democracy as they arced through history, with racial, social, spiritual, and world democracy completing the trajectory. Adjunct notions of natural, practical, progressive, creative, intellectual, equalitarian democracy crystallized the paradigm.