In honor of Martin Luther King Day, Jon Hanson of Harvard Law School has reposted a 2007 essay that argues that King was a situationist — meaning not a Guy Debord-style Situationist with a capital S, but someone who recognized that human behavior is heavily molded by social institutions and social contexts:

Judging those who are disadvantaged by the content of their character is not, taken alone, much of a solution. It may, in fact, be part of the problem. As Kathleen Hanson (my wife) and I recently argued, the problem “is, not in neglecting character, but in attributing to ‘character’ what should be attributed to [a person’s] situation and, in turn, to our system and ourselves.” Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, far more effectively: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Last week in The Chronicle, Christopher Phelps assessed recent scholarship on King and interviewed Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

(Video: Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Ala., on March 25, 1965.)