From the archive! A conversation between Cornel West and Robert George.

When they came to the Hauenstein Center in 2014, West and George were both professors of philosophy at Princeton. Beyond that, the two shared, and still share, quite little in common. West was and is a progressive political philosopher, race theorist, and democratic socialist. George is a conservative Catholic philosopher of jurisprudence and natural law.

We hosted the two at the Hauenstein Center because they had established a reputation at Princeton as unlikely friends. They team-taught a class in which they read with students the works of St Augustine, Alexis de Tocqueville, WEB Du Bois, and others. We asked the two to come out and essentially model the kind of dialogue and debate that they have in class: we wanted them to show us how two politically opposed thinkers could examine a host of issues, maintain disagreement about most of them, but still in the end learn from one another.