The traditional protagonists of the Age of Revolution cast their pursuit of freedom as struggle against slavery.Footnote ¹ They spoke metaphorically. Yet this was also an age of revolt against chattel slavery: the Haitian Revolution was the forceful epicenter of a wider struggle across the Americas that achieved abolition in its time, but still continues to this day in pursuit of the dreams of those who yearned to be free of the master’s yoke. John Christman’s compelling point of departure in Reconceiving Freedom from the Shadows of Slavery is that political philosophers and theorists have much to learn about the nature of freedom from those who were actually enslaved and fought to be free.

Taking his philosophical cue primarily from formerly enslaved Black American abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Christman claims that the fundamental form of freedom that the enslaved sought was the ability to pursue a meaningful life. When Frederick Douglass declared, in My Bondage and My Freedom, that it was slavery itself, and not its “mere incidents,” that he hated, he did not simply mean that he hated being subject to the arbitrary will of others; he meant that hated that, in his dominated condition, he was deprived of the ability to make a life that mattered to him on his own terms.Footnote ²

In part I (chapters 1 and 2), Christman lays out his project’s method. Reconceiving Liberty is a project of nonideal theory in the sense that it seeks to articulate a conception of liberty grounded in people’s concrete interests, in the actual conditions in which they are situated. To grasp what freedom meant for the enslaved requires understanding what it was like to be enslaved. For example, Douglass’s assertion that the enslaved are justified in stealing to feed themselves and their families is based on the claim that people who are starving do not have an interest in broader norms of social cooperation. Yet the purpose of this methodological commitment is not to temper liberty’s ambitions. Rather, when we take the actual situation of the enslaved seriously, we see that they are oriented toward not only freedom from domination and arbitrary interference, but a positive conception of freedom that includes the basic conditions conducive to human flourishing. Sustenance, for example, is a precondition of cultivating and exercising the capabilities through which we live meaningful lives.

Christman identifies three oppressive elements through which slavery sustained itself. First, the violence of the slave system debilitated the enslaved, depriving them of the basic conditions of physical security necessary to be the author of one’s own life. Second, slavery’s trafficking of humans as chattels resulted in social disorientation and dislocation, because it continually tore apart familial and other social bonds among the enslaved. Third, slavery justifies these inhuman practices by dehumanizing the enslaved by appeal to racial hierarchies. Together, these elements of the slave system deprive the enslaved of the capacity to live a meaningful life. Physical violence and deprivation make each day primarily a question of survival; the loss of family and friends attenuates the shared narratives through which actions gain meaning; to be dehumanized in the eyes of one’s oppressors is to be told that you do not matter. Liberty, when defined against the core of what slavery deprives the enslaved, is not only freedom from domination or arbitrary interference; it is the power to live a life that matters.

In part II (chapters 3–7), Christman develops the specific conception of positive liberty that he sees as counterpoised to this unfreedom paradigmatically instantiated by slavery. We live lives that matter to us through socially rooted practical identities that ascribe meaning to our actions. Our power to do so depends upon three ways in which we must be free that correspond to the three fundamental unfreedoms of slavery. Whereas slavery’s violence debilitates the enslaved, free persons can cultivate the human capacities requisite for flourishing. Whereas slavery’s attenuation of familial bonds results in social dislocation, free persons are embedded in communities that empower them to take up a socially meaningful existence. And whereas slavery dehumanizes the enslaved, free persons are recognized as possessing the ability for self-governance by their wider society. Positive liberty, for Christman, is the power for each of us, as individuals, to lead lives according to socially defined values that we autonomously endorse.

In part III (chapter 8 and Conclusion), Christman reminds us that his account circumvents traditional problems ascribed to positive liberty. Positive liberty, on Christman’s account, is not the actualization of a predetermined authentic self. Rather, authenticity is the product of an autonomously elaborated yet socially situated practical identity: we make, rather than find, our free selves. Christman’s account of freedom is pluralist and anti-perfectionist. Freedom, in Christman’s sense, is also not identical to justice: one can have the power to pursue a meaningful life even in unjust circumstances. Circumstances that induce adaptive preferences, for instance, are unjust, but do not necessarily render one unfree. Freedom is best understood as a necessary condition of justice. Yet freedom in this sense is a vital normative concept for politics today, as the same conditions of unfreedom that inspired the enslaved to fight to live meaningful lives afflict persons subject to mass incarceration, exclusionary immigration policies, and human trafficking. Reconceiving Freedom makes an incisive and systematic contribution to the philosophical understanding of what it means to be free.

At the same time, Reconceiving Freedom does not fully deliver upon its methodological promise. Christman frames his project as a dialogue with the enslaved as theorists of freedom, yet the substantive engagement with enslaved theorists is at times superficial. Christman’s primary interlocutors as he develops his conception of positive liberty in part II are contemporary academic philosophers and theorists like Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, and Axel Honneth. This is a missed opportunity, as thinkers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs do have much more to say about the connection between freedom and meaningful action. For example, at the end of chapter 21 in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass observes that many enslaved people would not opt to escape north like he did, because to do so would be to remove themselves from the familial social bonds that give their lives meaning. Harriet Jacobs’s decision to remain hidden as a fugitive slave in a tiny crawlspace in her grandmother’s house for seven years to remain in proximity to her family is a vivid illustration that choosing not to escape north as Douglass did was not necessarily to give up on pursuing liberation.Footnote ³ Christman’s own framework invites us to make sense of this point in terms of freedom: the desire to be free is not only a desire to extricate oneself from oppression, but a desire to live under conditions conducive to a meaningful life. A deeper engagement with the political philosophy produced by enslaved Black Americans could have yielded an even richer reimagination of freedom rooted in our history and suited for our present age.