Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-261) and index.
Contents:
"That strange, mysterious, and indescribable": the fugitive legacy of Douglass's political thought. "To become a colored man": proposing Black powers to the Black public sphere -- "A chapter of political philosophy applicable to the American people": human nature, human dignity, human rights -- "One method for expressing opposite emotions": Douglass's fugitive rhetoric -- "Assault compels defense": Douglass on Black emigration and violence -- "A living root, not a twig broken off": Douglass's constitutionalism and the paradox of democracy's foundations -- "Somebody's child": awakening, resistance, and vulnerability in My Bondage and My Freedom -- "Nothing less than a radical revolution": Douglass's struggle for a democracy without race -- "That strange, mysterious, and indescribable": the fugitive legacy of Douglass's political thought.
Summary:
"The Powers of Dignity uncovers and analyzes the distinctively Black political philosophy that Frederick Douglass forged from his experience as an enslaved and later nominally free black man. Because he unwaveringly viewed politics and democracy from the standpoint of a racialized black subject, his philosophy both challenges and potentially transforms the Anglo-Continental tradition of political thought"-- Provided by publisher. "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." -- Publisher's description
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.