Abstract
In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is worth acknowledging at the outset that not all emancipatory struggles aim at inclusion. Many anti-colonial struggles, for instance, did not envision their goal as integrating colonial subjects more fully into the empire, but as extricating the colonized from the power of the metropole. Yet ideals of inclusion are at times operative even in the context of decolonial political thought (Duong 2021).
Key provisions of Proposition 22 were ruled unconstitutional by a California Superior Court judge in August 2021, but remain in force pending appeal of the ruling (Castellanos v. California).
“[I]n the classical republics, the freedom of citizens presupposed the unfreedom of slaves” (Gourevitch 2015, 14). Emphasis his.
The right to rebellion is the right to compel a polity to acknowledge one’s standing as a citizen qua member of the people. See (Yaure 2020).
We should acknowledge that there is a gendered dimension to Douglass’s picture of emancipatory political agency. The band which talks, plots, and eventually acts in antislavery resistance is after all one of brothers. Gendered political claims do crop up with some frequency in Douglass’s political thought, however. See, for instance, Douglass’s 1855 lecture for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, “The Anti-Slavery Movement” ([1855] 1999, 323-24). Gooding-Williams notes that it isn’t obvious these gendered commitments are part of the substantive architecture of Douglass’s political thought (2009, 318 fn 125). For a demonstration of this point, which draws on the “restorative care” relationships among Douglass and his band of brothers, see (Alfaro 2018).
Douglass withholds details about his successful escape so as not to publicize his strategy to slaveholders.
I am indebted to Emma Rodman for this challenge.
References
Alfaro, A. M. Hancock (2018). “Black Masculinity Achieves Nothing without Restorative Care: An Intersectional Rearticulation of Frederick Douglass.”. A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (pp. 236–248). Lexington: University of Kentucky Press
Carens, J. H. (2013). The Ethics of Immigration. New York: Oxford University Press
Castellanos v California, Cal. Super. Ct. No. RG21088725 (2021). https://urldefense.com/v3https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21046832-castellanos-order__;!!NLFGqXoFfo8MMQ!vtXRHIEnHVFWParFaT_ZFy5nKgu1aT8QZGT8G5xpRDOpqe08zvXeSi47c45ompkmIPNVEAy5Lq3pqWnTVIfn0fgvO8cKTwQ$https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21046832-castellanos-order. Accessed on May 5, 2022
Crenshaw, K. (1995). “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 103–22. New York: The New Press
Delany, M. (2014). The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Bensenville: Lushena Books
Douglass, F. (1987). My Bondage and My Freedom, edited by William L. Andrews. Urbana:University of Illinois Press
Douglass, F. (1999). Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip Foner and Yuval Taylor. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books
Duong, K. (2021). Universal Suffrage as Decolonization. American Political Science Review, 115(2), 412–428. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000994
Golash-Boza, T. (2012). Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States. New York: Routledge
Gooding-Williams, R. (2009). In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press
Gourevitch, A. (2015). From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press
Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press
Jones, M. S. (2018). Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press
Kapust, D. (2004). Skinner, Pettit and Livy: The Conflict of The Orders and the Ambiguity of Republican Liberty. History of Political Thought, 25(3), 377–401
Krause, S. R. (2015). Freedom beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism. London: University of Chicago Press
Maddox, G. (2002). The Limits of Neo-Republican Liberty. History of Political Thought, 23(3), 418–431
Marin, M. G. (2017). Connected by Commitment: Oppression and Our Responsibility to Undermine It. New York, NY: Oxford University Press
McCormick, J. P. (2003). “Machiavelli Against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School’s ‘Guicciardinian Moments.’” Political Theory 31, no. 5 : 615–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591703252159
Myers, P. C. (2008). Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas
Rogers, M. (2020). “Race, Domination, and Republicanism.”. Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies (pp. 59–89). Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Schneir, M. (Ed.). (1994). Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage,
Shelby, T. (2002). “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression? Ethics, 112(2), 231–266. https://doi.org/10.1086/340276
Song, S. (2019). Immigration and Democracy. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press
Yaure, P. (2020). Declaration in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. American Political Thought, 9(4), 513–541. https://doi.org/10.1086/710756
Acknowledgements
For helpful conversations and comments at various stages of this project, I thank Eric Bayruns García, Colin Bradley, César Cabezas, Yarran Hominh, Bernard Jackson, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Michele Moody-Adams, Frederick Neuhouser, Jennifer Pitts, Mark Sanders, Chloe Stowell, Ronald Sundstrom, and Mira Wolf-Bauwens. I also thank audiences at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division 2021 Meeting, Oxford Graduate Conference in Political Theory, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Stanford Graduate Conference in Political Theory, University of Chicago Graduate Conference in Political Theory, and Villanova Political Epistemologies Conference. I am especially grateful for the insights of two anonymous reviewers at Philosophical Studies, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Emma Rodman.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Yaure, P. On Plantation Politics: Citizenship and Antislavery Resistance in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. Philos Stud 180, 871–891 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01877-4
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01877-4