Cornel West loves Jane Austen.

That's right, Cornel West -- the famous public scholar and political polemicist whose many books include Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and The Rich and the Rest of Us -- cares about the novels of a dead, white, privileged British woman of the Regency Era. I first learned this surprising fact at a convention of the Jane Austen Society of North America in Brooklyn, where he gave a talk on "Jane Austen and Power," not power in terms of oppressor and oppressed as I and everyone else in the audience probably expected, but the power to look within and to change, to transform society from the inside. Since then, I got to spend two hours interviewing this most unexpected and fervent of Austen enthusiasts, and began to see her through his eyes, as a radical for personal virtue as the key to social reform. Read all: huffington post