A number of years back I had a student who, after spending a few weeks studying Marx and Gramsci, decided to see if she could have one day without any participation in the capitalist economic system. She wrote an account of her efforts, which became increasingly far-fetched and humorous, yet she was also clearly pained by her inability to avoid complicity in the unequal system. Once we become aware of past and current injustices, one of the most common responses is to try and purify ourselves by existing in complete opposition to them. I am lucky to have students who are radical enough to embrace this strategy, and with whom I can debate. They take my cautionary lectures about the pernicious political effects of chasing purity as the tale of a radical lost, a person too old to have the energy to hold up the banner of true resistance. Now I can take George Shulman's American Prophecy off my shelf and hand it to them. I cannot imagine a better example of commitment to radical political change, combined with an acknowledgment that the tools one hates in the hands of one's political adversaries are sometimes the very tools one needs.

Prophecy, Shulman argues, is a central aspect of American political thought and life, for both good and ill. Jerry Falwell offered prophetic utterances about the “true” causes of terrorism in 2001, but Martin Luther King, Jr., also employed a similar position as outside truth teller. Shulman begins by acknowledging the deep ambiguity of prophecy in the American tradition: “To take prophecy whole is to discover how its political value is inseparable from what we find dangerous about it” (pp. xiv–xv). In tracing the importance of prophecy in relationship to racial supremacy in the United States, Shulman is able to add the elements of politics that are conspicuously absent from most canonical American political thought (with the exception of Tocqueville). Focusing on prophecy yields insight into the role of authority, narrative, and identification in political orders: aspects of power that virtually all of us intuitively know to be political yet are usually occluded.

One of Shulman's aims is to demonstrate through his readings of Thoreau, Dr. King, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison how the liberal tradition in the United States is really “Schmittian decision in American drag: A liberal regime reconstitutes sovereignty and normative citizenship by enforcing a radical and sexual frontier” (p. 240). In this project, he is of course not alone, and he repeatedly displays and states his debts to Michael Rogin and Sacvan Bercovitch. What sets this book apart is the fervent attention and conscientiousness that Shulman pays to how one should respond to this historical fact. Participating in the prophetic tradition that he describes, Shulman presses his readers to consider the subtle variations in Thoreau's, King's, Baldwin's and Morrison's responses to racial subordination. Why is it that some of these responses open more political possibilities than others? How do these possibilities foreclose other ones?

Shulman wants us to see how we still need prophets of race and redemption, but not just any prophets. We need to reject those who give us too easy an answer as to how we should live, or even worse, those who say they can or have resolved the traumas of the past: “Likewise, human beings must ‘redeem’ the past because they cannot escape or change it: They must fashion a fruitful relationship to the past, or they live by amnesia, resentment, and repetition” (p. 252). Because American democracy has been corrupted by racial, gender, and class subordination from its very inception, it is badly in need of redemption. Because this subordination is such an integral part of the mechanisms of American democracy, only those figures who stand outside of the regime can serve to reveal its true nature. This revelation is the first step toward redemption. The folly is to assume that all of this history that has created the present world can be redeemed at once, with one figure, sacrifice, or truth. Instead, redemption needs to be a long-standing project that belongs to all of us. Although he does not make this point specifically, since most of this book was written well before the election of Barack Obama, Shulman's argument makes it clear why the claim that the last election proves that racial subordination has ended is idolatrous at best.

Because the author sees the high political stakes of his themes, his readings of these texts are vibrant. The textual interpretations have a wound-up energy to them; you actually feel tension as you watch Shulman explain Thoreau's defense of John Brown. It is wonderful to see textual readings done with this kind of passion. It is the hallmark of Shulman's excitement about exploring how to respond to racial subordination that I found myself pulling the texts he was writing about off the shelves.

The unexpected hero of Shulman's journey is James Baldwin. I found this chapter the most clear and compelling. The author's writing here achieves poetic crispness, perhaps because Baldwin is the figure who embodies the kind of prophecy Shulman wants all of us to engage in. Unlike King, who wants a fixed black identity to be included within American democracy and thereby redeem it, Baldwin does not see the overcoming of differences through a beloved community. Instead, he likens the different races coexisting in the United States to a form of marriage, relating love and politics in a different way. Love is not just about acceptance but also about having oneself revealed through a “disagreeable mirror,” thus propelling growth. Marriage is not about creating a stagnant union, but rather continual engagement, mutual commitment to work with difficulties even if they can never be completely overcome, and most of all, an ability to see the best in a person without falling into the proclivity of idealization.

Shulman revitalizes Thoreau, King, Baldwin, and Morrison for his readers. But he also does the unexpected service of demonstrating exactly why Jacques Ranciere is relevant for understanding the American democratic tradition. He demonstrates how Baldwin's themes resonate with Ranciere's Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy (1999), giving flesh to what can at times seem a dizzyingly abstract discussion of democracy in this work. Ranciere's notion of “the part that has no part” springs to life in Shulman's discussion of Baldwin.

Although at times Shulman can stretch the prophetic tradition so far that one wonders if it might be snapping, we can forgive him since his discussion helps remind us of the prophetic role that political theory has invoked ever since Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Thinking of political theory's vocation in the terms of prophecy may help us judge whether we are serving a role in politics, understood as “a structure of rule and struggle against that rule” (p. 166).