Seizing Citizenship

Seizing Citizenship offers a philosophical analysis of Frederick Douglass's declaration, in the lead up to the U.S. Civil War, that enslaved Black Americans were already American citizens. Philip Yaure's analysis, which draws upon Douglass's autobiographies, speeches, journalism, and correspondence, demonstrates that Douglass based this declaration of Black Americans' citizenship on a radical rethinking of republican political philosophy. Douglass, in contrast to other republican philosophers, thought of republican politics as one in which we make ourselves citizens of a polity by deepening, rather than trying to overcome, our vulnerability to one another.