A Radical Revolution in Thought

Abstract

While the image of the slave as the antithesis of the freeman is central to republican freedom, it is striking that slaves themselves have not contributed to how this condition is understood. I draw on the long-overlooked work of Frederick Douglass to show how this results in a one-sided conception of both freedom and slavery, which leaves republicanism unable to provide equal and robust protection for historically outcast people. Douglass argued that republican freedom under law is always dependent on a more fundamental ‘radical revolution in thought’, in which the entire system of social norms and practices are reworked together by members of all constituent social groups—women and men, black and white, rich and poor—so that it reflects a genuinely collaborative achievement. Only then can we begin the republican project of establishing a contestatory freedom as non-domination that today’s republicans take for granted.