Locke’s Legacy, Kallen’s Memory

This chapter explores Alain Locke's legacy and Horace Kallen's perspective on their friendship. It reveals Kallen's version of Locke's story: Locke as the “first black ‘cultural pluralist’” and “authentic Zionist.” It is unclear whether Locke would have accepted either of these designations. Yet Kallen's recollections, expressed only a few months before his death, point back to his description of the origins of cultural pluralism, that the term emerged from his youthful conversations with his student and then friend Locke at Harvard and Oxford. By recasting Locke as a reincarnated pluralist, Kallen presented his friend's intellectual development as the mirror image of his own, from Spinozistic monism to racialized pluralism to modern, rooted cosmopolitanism. By lauding Locke's contribution to the development of cultural pluralism, Kallen validated his overcoming the Eurocentrism of his youth. Locke's advancement of Black culture became a means to a Kallenist end.