Seizing Citizenship: Frederick Douglass’s Abolitionst Republicanism

Oxford New Histories of Philosophy
Forthcoming at Oxford University Press

In the years leading up to the American Civil War, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass maintained that Black Americans, whether enslaved or nominally free, were already American citizens whom the polity ought to recognize as such. Through a systematic analysis of his political writings from the 1840s through the 1890s, Seizing Citizenship demonstrates that Douglass’s declaration of Black Americans’s citizenship is the locus of a profound innovation in republican political philosophy. Douglass reimagines the republican concept of citizenship, on which persons are citizens because they contribute to the polity, to cast the everyday resistance of Black Americans against slavery and white supremacy as activity that constitutes them as American citizens. Douglass advances an abolitionist republicanism, on which persons seize standing as free citizens of a free polity through struggle to dismantle the oppressive institutions that dominate and exploit them. Douglass’s is a republican politics that strives not to overcome our vulnerability to one another, but instead to deepen such vulnerability on terms conducive to our shared emancipation and collective flourishing.