Even compared to recent—and excellent—publications on black political thought, Stephen H. Marshall's The City on the Hill from Below stands out. Marshall's first book is notable for its range and sagacity. He examines how David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin invoke and reinterpret the best-known metaphor for American exceptionalism: the “City on the Hill.” In contrast to authors like George Schulman (American Prophecy [2008]), who treat “the prophetic” as a genre of speech, notable for its “romantic registers of voice,” Marshall deftly reappraises the prophetic tradition in black political thought as an explicitly critical-theoretical enterprise. The Exodus narrative is often said to define black prophetic thinking; black Americans appropriated it to claim a sense of “people-hood” and, thus, to envision a “black nation” (Eddie Glaude, Exodus! [2000]). On this reading, Old Testament sources take center stage and black prophetic texts function as jeremiads—laments that bear witness to past (and continued) wrongs and exhortations to reform and renewal. In contrast, Marshall focuses on the New Testament sources of the black prophetic tradition, with particular attention given to John Winthrop's reformulation of the Christian ethic of care as an “order of love.”

Marshall's keenest insight is to treat each thinker as a theorist of “political evil,” who plumbed the pathological effects of Winthrop's vision. Although political evil can be understood as unjustifiable harm resulting from the “normal operations” of a polity, Marshall argues that for black prophetic thinkers, political evil is not merely a “susceptibility of the political rooted … in ordinary vice” (p. 21). Instead, following Augustine, he advances an account of political evil as “criminal solidarity,” resulting from “the institutionalization of Winthrop-inspired practices of mercy.”

Marshall's characterization of Augustine is worth quoting at length: “Augustine suggested that the choice of criminal solidarity was the constitutive act of human community…. [He] argued that individuals not only would countenance the crime of others if sufficiently invested in or erotically attached to them; they would also sacrifice their highest good as long as they could sustain their connection to their beloved. Augustine suggests that inordinate desire for recognition by those we desire is so basic to human life that obvious and greater goods will be continually sacrificed in order to maintain this solidarity…. Augustine demonstrates how Christian religiosity is at once a peculiarly effective form of modern political solidarity and a peculiarly ferocious incarnation of the problem of political evil” (p. 21). On Marshall's reading, thinkers in the black prophetic tradition follow Augustine and theorize slavery, white supremacy, black ignorance, and dishonor as manifestations of political evil.

The author raises smart, political-theoretical questions of each thinker, provides historical context when necessary, and sets each text into productive conversation with canonical and contemporary political theory. He treats Walker as a “founder” of black prophetic theory, notable for “having inaugurated the transformation of prophetic exhortation from a theologico-political rhetoric of insurgency into a literary genre of systematic reflection and critique” (p. 27). Writing three decades after Walker and with the very real possibility of Civil War on the horizon, Frederick Douglass departed from Walker's impassioned account of “the gravity of [American and European] crimes” against black people, Christianity, and the ideals of republican government and focused instead on the clear contrast between the corrupting effects of the pathological “will to mastery” sustaining “slave power” and the proper (and achievable) “telos of the American republic” (p. 60, emphasis added). Confronting the failure of Reconstruction to deliver on its promise of a second and truer founding, Du Bois condemned “the dream of material prosperity,” which supplanted the egalitarian objectives of Reconstruction with a vision of Mammon as “the ethico-political norm” governing the post-Reconstruction South. Warning of the “creeping danger of disintegrative racial violence” (p. 129), Baldwin rehabilitated the “order of love” prescribed by Winthrop and argued, provocatively, “that erotic love, rather than Christian charity, self interest or unreflective patriotism, must be the principle of action” (p. 130).

I can hardly do justice to Marshall's richly textured account of each thinker's role in the development of the tradition of black prophetic theory. I will focus on Walker's chapter for Marshall's reading of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, which is nothing short of commanding. Indeed, upon reading this chapter, political theorists will be convinced that Walker is indispensable not just to our study of black political thought but also to political theory in general. Marshall argues that while religious faith animates Walker's Appeal, the text demands careful attention to the political-theoretical sources cited by Walker, including references to the Haitian revolution, the Roman historian Sallust, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Moreover, Marshall rightly notes the structural similarities of the Appeal to the US Constitution—it contains a “Preamble” and four “Articles.” He argues “that Walker aligns his aims with the aims of the founders of political community more generally” (p. 30).

Marshall thus raises unexpected questions of the Appeal about the “regime Walker envisions,” the case for and the conditions preventing black membership in the polity, and the laws and principles that ought to guide a new, multiracial, and egalitarian political order. Walker theorized slavery and white supremacy as “constitutive practices within a system of political evil,” whose results were a corrupted Christianity; a black population (both slave and free) immobilized by abjection, ignorance, and treachery; and an American body politic so “contaminated” by slavery that “[white] citizens' desires and expectations have been distorted and disfigured by avarice [so that] they become blind to the evils they commit in pursuit of inordinate desires” (p. 35).

Of course, Marshall is not the first to attend to the politics of the Appeal. Indeed, like many texts in the black intellectual tradition, the Appeal can be (and has been) understood as an expression of black solidarity or nationalism. However, Marshall persuasively argues that Walker examined and sought to undermine the forces constituting the white republic—avarice, “a self congratulatory American civil religion,” and black ignorance—and to articulate the path to free, black political subjectivity. At the same time, Marshall points to important continuities between Winthrop's “City upon a Hill” and Walker's critical engagement with it. Both portray “sacrifice and its sentimental effects” as the foundation of a lasting political community. Moreover, Marshall is troubled by the hints in the Appeal of the same “political evil” that had bedeviled Winthrop's “order of love.” Marshall argues that because Walker tends to feminize the treachery of some slaves, he “masks certain features of the experience of enslavement. Within the institution of slavery, all slaves—men and women—were vulnerable to sexual violation. By using a gendered trope to embody the effects of enslavement, Walker hides this equal vulnerability … and privileges masculine ideals as the aim of black politics” (p. 55). The result is that women are rendered unfit for citizenship in Walker's account.

It is de rigueur in an academic review to conclude by identifying critical weaknesses of a text. But I do not believe this book has any major weaknesses. The City on the Hill from Below is a remarkable first book that contributes novel insights for the study of black political thought, chief among them that “Christian solidarity [is] a foundational mode of racial solidarity in the New World” (p. 22). This argument, as well as the claim that black prophetic thinkers understand white supremacy as an “evil” form of Christian political community, stands in contrast to those wherein black political thinkers conceive of “race” as a “worldview” justifying slavery, peonage, social exclusion and political subjugation. As Marshall interprets them, prophetic thinkers creatively deploy the rhetorical richness of the city-on-the hill image without reducing it to a trope. In doing so, Marshall demonstrates that attending to the ways in which people envision the limits and the possibilities of social and political existence is just as useful for understanding how black political thinkers theorize race and “race thinking” as is ideology.

Marshall thus follows Lawrie Balfour, Robert Gooding-Williams, and others in opening the black and “Western” political thought canon to unexpected thinkers, texts, and speech acts. By addressing so many important thinkers and themes, the book represents a significant contribution to the study of black political thought and political theory more generally.