Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

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

Bromell, Nick

Hardcover

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismBlack American Studies

ISBN10: 1478010223
ISBN13: 9781478010227
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Feb 19 2021
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.21
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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