The Shadows of the Past and the Work of the Future

Frederick Douglass's Temporal Theory of Democracy

Bibliographic Data

ID6402111
AuthorsNathan Pippenger (0000-0003-3354-9609, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume83
Issue2
Pages219-241
Publication date2021-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Review of Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0034670520000996
OpenAlexW3126215115
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited27

Throughout his career, Frederick Douglass linked the achievement of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy to Americans’ perception of their collective past and future. In so doing, I argue, Douglass developed a distinctive, temporal account of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, temporal continuity lent force and content to demands for equality—demands which would succeed only if the whole demos cultivated a specific orientation to its collective past, present, and future. Douglass offers a productive contrast to contemporary democratic theory, which often misses the importance of temporality suggested by his account and thereby risks surrendering its powerful egalitarian resources. Moreover, temporality provides a new lens on what many interpreters see as an episode of inconsistency in Douglass's thought: his brief, quickly abandoned contemplation of colonization proposals in the spring of 1861. Ultimately, Douglass turned to temporality in order to decide whether democracy for African Americans required affiliation with, or disaffiliation from, the United States

Contemplation · Democracy · Economics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Order (exchange · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Temporality · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

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