Reason to hope

Abstract

Drucilla Cornell’s legacy defies easy summary. Thrown out of Stanford for protesting the Vietnam War, by the age of 20 she was organizing sweatshop workers for the United Auto Workers. Union organizing led her to law school (her only post-graduate degree is in law) and eventually a job as a law professor. Meanwhile, a defining encounter with Hegel at the age of 15 launched her intellectual trajectory, which would be followed by various schools of post-Hegelian thought (the Frankfurt School, Derridian deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, among others), feminisms both practical and theoretical, Rawlsian liberalism and, in her final work, African and Afro-Caribbean philosophy (I am leaving aside her plays and book on Clint Eastwood). Ecumenicism of this breadth can be a sign of shallow thinking. In her case, however, she had a sustained engagement with each tradition of thought, aimed at coaxing its essence from its native vocabulary in the faith that productive dialog is possible between radically different, and even opposed, intellectual traditions. In this reminiscence and memorial piece, I remember Drucilla as a teacher, mentor and friend.