The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

Description

In The Powers of Dignity Nick Bromell unpacks Frederick Douglass's 1867 claim that he had “elaborated a political philosophy” from his own “slave experience.” Bromell shows that Douglass devised his philosophy because he found that antebellum Americans' liberal-republican understanding of democracy did not provide a sufficient principled basis on which to fight anti-Black racism. To remedy this deficiency, Douglass deployed insights from his distinctively Black experience and developed a Black philosophy of democracy. He began by contesting the founders' racist assumptions about humanity and advancing instead a more robust theory of “the human” as a collection of human “powers.” He asserted further that the conscious exercise of those powers is what confirms human dignity and that human rights and democracy come into being as ways to affirm and protect that dignity. Thus, by emphasizing the powers and the dignity of all citizens, deriving democratic rights from these, and promoting a remarkably activist, power-oriented model of citizenship, Douglass's Black political philosophy aimed to rectify two major failings of US democracy in his time and ours: its complacence and its racism. Acknowledgments vii Introduction. "The Thing Looked Absurd": The Black in Douglass's Political Philosophy 1 1. "To Become a Colored Man": Proposing Black Powers to the Black Public Sphere 17 2. "A Chapter of Political Philosophy Applicable to the American People": Human Nature, Human Dignity, Human Rights 38 3. "One Method for Expressing Opposite Emotions": Douglass's Fugitive Rhetoric 55 4. "Assault Compels Defense": Douglass on Black Emigration and Violence 82 5. "A Living Root, Not a Twig Broken Off": Douglass's Constitutionalism and the Paradox of Democracy's Foundations 101 6. "Somebody's Child": Awakening, Resistance, and Vulnerability in My Bondage and My Freedom 124 7. "Nothing Less Than a Radical Revolution": Douglass's Struggle for a Democracy without Race 159 8. "That Strange, Mysterious, and Indescribable": The Fugitive Legacy of Douglass's Political Thought 188 Notes 207 Bibliography 243 Index 263