The Abolitionist Imagination

Readers of this book will not learn much about American abolitionists but will enter a bracing conversation about moral commitments, extremists, and moderation. It is set in motion by Andrew Delbanco's title piece, originally given as a Tocqueville Lecture at Harvard University's Center for American Political Studies. Commentaries by John Stauffer, Manisha Sinha, Darryl Pinckney, and Wilfred M. McClay follow. Delbanco sees abolitionists as exemplary of “a persistent impulse in American life” and a “tradition of imprecatory prophets” whose moral absolutism and refusal to compromise remains within our culture and politics (pp. 3, 9). (Whether this tradition is peculiar to the United States is not well considered.) Thus, his essay pays less attention to abolitionists than to later appropriations of their memory and to contemporary responses to their moral intransigence. Enter Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, whom Delbanco presents as deeply disturbed by slavery. (Delbanco's critics, notably Stauffer, question this in Hawthorne's case.) These fundamentally good men, Delbanco claims, were nonetheless equally disturbed by the abolitionists' principled unwillingness to see shades of gray

Compromise · Conversation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

• On Liberty and Union

  Scott M Reznick•American Political Thought•2017

  Add to list

• The Essential Dignity of Man as Man”

  Nicholas Buccola•American Political Thought•2015

  Add to list