I first became aware of Cornel West some ten years ago. I was living in Atlanta, Georgia and, being an inveterate nerd, was watching Book TV on C-SPAN2 while the interviewed Professor West about the publication of The Cornel West Reader. Naturally, I went out and bought the book and began diligently reading it.

Later, I found a copy of the old, out of print book, The Ethical Dimension of Marxist Thought and then Democracy Matters.

As an idea, he deeply appealed to my desire to be/fascination with/jealousy of the figure of the public intellectual. In this case, the public intellectual as a philosopher. While he’s rarely a rigorous philosopher (particularly these days), like say a John Rawls, but neither is he some Ayn Rand figure.

Probably the closest equivalent is Slavoj Zizek. A scholarly figure, with strong academic credentials, but whose place as a public intellectual depends more on his output for popular consumption than on his output for the specialist community. But isn’t that what a public intellectual does?

Like Zizek, West is always in danger of becoming a caricature of himself. His affectations – the afro, bushy goatee, glasses, and insistence on always wearing one of his identical three piece black suits (Einstein famously filled his closets with identical copies of the same suit, as well) – always border on caricature, but so long as he maintained some vestige of his reputation for rigorous scholarship and kept his tendency towards outlandish hyperbole in check, he never tipped over.

Has that changed? Is he tipping over now?