West’s politics are performative, and are not tied to the printed word. Is he at times a bit theatrical, sometimes appearing self-indulgent? That seems a minor, if not irrelevant, criticism compared to his ongoing attempts to fuse theory with action, and reach into history in order to reclaim those elements of public memory long forgotten. And lest we should forget, he is not the lonely intellectual preaching from the Olympian heights of Princeton University. What is notable about his work is that he is one of the few public intellectuals in the United States who embraces the assumption that domination is not simply about economic structures but also about beliefs, rhetoric, and the pedagogical. He understands that the symbolic and pedagogical are powerful weapons to be used in creating alternative understandings of both the present and the future. He recognizes that such tools are crucial in creating the agents necessary to produce the collective struggles for a more democratic future to unfold. He works with social movements and does so as an intellectual not a prophet or an isolated academic scholar. He is an intellectual because he believes in the power of ideas not the rewards given to those in the academy who become servants of power. And he believes that such power is collective not individual, the product of social movements and ongoing struggles not the abstract rhetoric of isolated and often irrelevant academics. Moreover, he does not think within a single discipline and understands that there is no closure in history.