By Rupert Lewis, Contributor 
Garvey
MARCUS GARVEY is listed among 50 major political thinkers in western political thought in a recently published book in the series Routledge Key Guides.
The 2003 publication entitled Fifty Major Political Thinkers was jointly prepared by Ian Adams, Honorary Fellow at the University of Durham and R.W. Dyson, Director of the Centre for the History of Political Thought at the University of Durham. The textbook is geared to the British and American university markets.
The 50 thinkers span a period of over two thousand years, starting with Plato (427-347 BCE (Before the Christian Era) and Artistotle (384-322 BCE), and including the names of well-known philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Nicolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and twentieth century French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and the Americans John Rawls and Robert Nozick.
The compilers state "The nature of political activity and how it may best be conducted is one of the perennial questions of human existence. In the West these matters have been the subject of philosophical discussion for more than 2000 years, and the discussion is one to which many more than 50 thinkers have contributed. In choosing our 50 we have confined ourselves to Western political thought (with the exception of Mohandas Gandhi, whose ideas were influenced by the West)."
In answering the question what makes a thinker major, the compilers argue the following: "Power of reasoning, originality, extent of influence and so on. Choices are inevitably based on a balance of these things.
"However, for more recent centuries we have introduced a further criterion: that of representativeness. In the politics of the last two centuries there have been many movements which embody important political ideas.
"Sometimes such movements produce several thinkers of similar stature; or perhaps they produced no great thinker at all, yet the movement itself is important. Hence the decision was made to include some thinkers who are more representative than outstanding. The decision applies to movements such as anarchism, feminism, ecologism, black emancipation."
BLACK EMANCIPATION
The entry on Garvey is entitled Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) and Black Emancipation and places him in the context of the struggles of African-Americans in the United States for civil and human rights that bore fruit in the 1960s in important federal civil rights legislation. The entry understands the broader Pan-African dimension of Garvey's struggles to include the liberation of Africa and the social, political and economic advancement of people of African descent in the Diaspora.
The authors note that Garvey is associated with the 'Back to Africa' movement but point out that this is misleading as "he did not see the fundamental solution to black Americans' particular problems in terms of some future mass exodus to a free Africa, although undoubtedly many of his followers did think in these terms (especially in the Caribbean)."
The authors reject the view that Garvey was fascist, pointing to the 1920 Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World which states that "All peoples have rights of self-determination and all individuals have absolute civil rights." While placing Garvey within the integration vs separatism framework, they note that "Garvey remains an inspiration for both integrationists and separatists alike."
The significance of the entry on Garvey is that there is re-thinking in academic circles about what constitutes Western political thought and its boundaries are being slowly extended. There is recognition that the people who have contributed to Western political thought are not only white males but people of African descent, women, the ecological movement etc.
There is a redefinition of what it means to be Western that is most evident in global popular culture with the considerable impact of black music and black styles of existing. But there is still resistance among Western philosophical gatekeepers of thought regarding the admission of individuals of African descent in the modern world into the pantheon of reason and thought.
The beginning of the recognition of Garvey as a figure in Western political thought is timely as we mark the 116th anniversary of his birth today, August 17, 2003. With the external recognition being given to Garvey it may be that more of his own people will begin to appreciate what an enormous intellectual legacy he has left the world and that his writings will have a prominent place in our curricula.
Professor Rupert Lewis is a lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI.
