2025/02/18 by Charles H. T. Lesch · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Political Philosophy and Ethics #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0003055424001461
openalex publication_date 2025/02/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article draws from Frederick Douglass’s antebellum and wartime writings to reconstruct his approach to natural rights. Douglass admired many elements of the Enlightenment legacy. Yet in the same motion that he echoes European and American thinkers, he subtly qualifies, corrects, and revises their ideas, sometimes in radical ways. In his depictions of slavery, natural rights cease to be metaphysical abstractions and instead become embodied in our social relations. While they persist in outline, their substance is transformed to account for racialized power and structural violence. In this way, Douglass redefines a number of liberalism’s key moral and political concepts, including freedom, reason, dignity, and moral responsibility. He develops a political theory designed to reinforce the Enlightenment’s bare foundations with social insights of the oppressed: a philosophy of natural rights, told from below.