Over his long career, Frederick Douglass produced what is surely one of the largest bodies of work of any American political thinker. The Yale University Press edition of his papers, still in progress, already encompasses multiple volumes and has not yet reached his journalism (comprising a fourth series, of which volume 1 is due in 2022). In The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass, Nick Bromell does not attempt a comprehensive overview of Douglass's entire corpus, but nonetheless illuminates many aspects of it through an interpretive reconstruction of his philosophical outlook. The book proceeds from a revealing remark that Douglass made in 1867: “From this little bit of experience—slave experience—I have elaborated quite a lengthy chapter of political philosophy, applicable to the American people” (quoted on 2). Of course, in some ways this claim is obvious: How could the experience of slavery have left Douglass's political thought untouched? But Bromell shows, in admirable detail, precisely how the experience of enslavement shaped Douglass's views on, for example, morality, epistemology, and what it means to be human, with important consequences for his interventions in the major public debates of his day. The resulting book vindicates Bromell's choice of interpretive frame.

Bromell identifies the “key words” of Douglass's political philosophy as “powers,” “consciousness,” and “dignity” (82). Forced by the discursive circumstances of nineteenth-century America to “argue for his own humanness” (39), Douglass came to define humanness in terms of “certain moral and intellectual powers” that “lie ‘latent’ within us until we start to exercise them,” at which point we become “conscious” of them and “feel a sense of self-worth or dignity, which we expect others to acknowledge,” the refusal of which “we feel . . . as an injustice” (82). As a slave, Douglass had been subject to the most extreme attempts to obstruct the development of his powers and, by extension, his sense of himself as a moral agent. As Bromell observes, this dehumanization aims to thwart the emergence of a political worldview: for without a “sense of self-worth, or dignity, one would feel the pain of one's oppression but not its injustice” (133–34).

Bromell links this appreciation of injustice, which stems from humans’ latent powers and felt need for recognition by others, to the development of Douglass's standpoint epistemology: to understand oneself as a victim of injustice against such a vast apparatus of dehumanization, “one must believe that one's own perspective on the world has as much value and validity as anyone else's” (136). Early in his career, some of Douglass's allies in the abolitionist movement had condescendingly advised him to speak only of slavery's graphic realities, and to let them handle the philosophical argumentation. But Douglass knew the distinctiveness of his perspective, which revealed aspects of slavery that could not be seen from the standpoint of white abolitionists. At the same time, however, Douglass was consistent in refusing to privilege absolutely any single perspective on a question. “Standpoint epistemology,” Bromell contends, “goes hand in hand with an ethics of intersubjectivity”; it furnishes “a democratic mode of managing different, conflicting, and even opposite views of matters that might trouble a democratic polity” (108–9). Hence, we can grasp related aspects of Douglass's thought, such as his “willingness to hold opposites in tension (rather than choosing one)” and his “predilection for . . . chiasmus” (57). (Bromell, a professor of English, offers many illuminating close readings of Douglass, but the discussion of chiasmus in chapter 3, which interweaves rhetorical and philosophical analysis, is an especially bravura example.)

I call attention to Bromell's discipline because, as he writes, “interdisciplinarity is so very hard to do,” and he acknowledges that colleagues in “the fields of political theory” may want “more engagement with the traditions of political philosophy” (11). Guilty as charged. During the discussion of the relational nature of individual selfhood in chapter 6, I searched in vain for references to Charles Taylor, who has written so influentially on that very topic. A seeming elision of “assimilation” and “integration” (197) made me wish that Bromell had engaged with Elizabeth Anderson's compelling work distinguishing those two ideas. While Bromell detects the influence of Emerson and the language of the Old Testament in Douglass's “prophetic” mode of address (192–93), he does not link it to Michael Walzer's ideal of the connected social critic, who speaks in a popular vernacular to exhort fellow members of the community to live up to their professed ideals. Obviously no author is required to cite the works their readers might have wished them to cite, but what is notable about all these missing authors is that they all have defended, in some form, an ideal of national solidarity among democratic citizens. So, too, did Douglass, although in my view Bromell slightly downplays that aspect of his thought.

As Bromell notes, Douglass was a moral cosmopolitan who believed in the interconnectedness of humanity. But he was not simply a cosmopolitan; as a democratic thinker, he identified strongly with the American nation and hoped to effect its transformation into a genuine demos. As I have recently argued in this journal (Spring 2021), Douglass believed that such a transformation required Americans to recognize themselves as the collective inheritors of an unjust past and the collective authors of a shared future, one oriented around a corresponding agenda of democratic repair. The coherence of this view depended absolutely on understanding the American people as a group that persists over time; in this way, Douglass's “distinctive democratic temporality” (200), which Bromell discusses at some length, is linked to his multiracial democratic nationalism, which Bromell largely does not. As a result, the book mischaracterizes the temporal dimensions of Douglass's thinking, including by asserting that he never “reconciled” his “two seemingly opposite views of time”: one with its “extreme form of presentism” that “absorbs both past and future,” and the other with its “strong anticipation of progress” and corresponding sense of futurity (203). Yet their reconciliation lies precisely in his theory of democratic peoplehood, in which the demos is defined by reference to this continuous past-into-future, and is understood to exist so long as the possibility of a democratic future remains. While Bromell asserts that at moments of great “despair,” Douglass “seemed to deny the usefulness of the temporal category we call the ‘future’” (200), his brief contemplation of emigration to Haiti (just before Fort Sumter in spring 1861) demonstrates the opposite—for in Haiti lay the possibility of a democratic future of which he despaired in the United States. Moreover, the Haiti episode shows that, pace Bromell, Douglass did not in every case reject plans for black emigration which were “motivated by pessimistic despondence” (90). His position was more complicated, and owed much to his conception of American peoplehood.

Of course, such disagreements are inevitable when studying a thinker whose oeuvre is so large, and whose work poses so many interpretive difficulties (188–89). The scope of the challenge underscores why this book—gracefully written, wide-ranging, and compelling—makes a laudable contribution to Douglass scholarship. Scholars in political theory, literature, African American studies, and related fields will benefit from Nick Bromell's excellent monograph.