TY - JOUR
AU - Wallace, Maurice
AB - ALH Online Review, Series XXXIX 1401 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 288 pp. Reviewed by Maurice Wallace, Rutgers University-New Brunswick In a way, Nick Bromell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass is an impossible project. And it is not lost on Bromell that it is. While he aims to establish Douglass, perhaps the most public African American voice of the nineteenth century, as “first and foremost a Black political philosopher” (196), Bromell is clear that “the philosophical lexicon,” to say nothing of the prevailing paradigms of nineteenth- century political thought, was “inadequate to the task” (188) of representing a coherent systematization of the democratic sense of the Black in and after bondage. Still, Bromell’s admission that the conventional categories of political ideas, from Lockean natural-rights liberalism and Jamesian pragmatism to Emersonian individualism and early Black nationalism, hardly suffice to apprehend Douglass’s political philosophy does not keep Bromell from proposing a systematic theory of Douglass’s political logics all the same, even if, unavoidably, they are explored at their categorial limit. More specifically, The Powers of Dignity takes its cue from a reflection on Douglass’s famous dissent with the Constitutional impiety of Garrisonian abolitionism as Bromell 
TI - Nick Bromell, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajad098
DA - 2023-08-16
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/nick-bromell-the-powers-of-dignity-the-black-political-philosophy-of-dPuLSC80LM
SP - 1401
EP - 1404
VL - 35
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -