Jim Vernon

Now that she has retired from public life, philosophers can begin to understand the cultural phenomenon that was Cindy Sheehan, the generally recognized (and self-professed) “‘Face’ of the American anti-war movement.”1 Why did the Iraq War produce domestic resistance led by someone whose moral credentials consisted solely in being a mother? Why was the cartoon-cowboy masculinity of the war president opposed by the equally hyperbolic familial femininity of the “eternally grieving mother of Casey Sheehan”? In what follows, I seek to comprehend the emergence of both the Iraq War and the “face” of its opposition through the most notorious account..

In this article, I explicate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s account of emancipatory history and activism by examining the influence of G. W. F. Hegel’s account of world-historical individuals on his thought. Both thinkers, I argue, affirm that history’s spiritual destiny works through individuals who are driven by the contingencies of their subjective character and given situation to undertake particular actions, and yet who nevertheless freely and decisively break the new from the old by forsaking subjective satisfaction to spur events forward to a more rational state of affairs. This synthetic unity of abstract freedom and concrete embodiment reflects the ‘civil war’ between the universal and infinite essence, and particular and finite passions, that King and Hegel identify as equally constitutive of human will. Through an examination of King’s account of Rosa Parks’ pivotal arrest, I develop the consequences of this ‘Hegelian’ view for our understanding of political action and historical progress.