The Shadows of the Past and the Work of the Future: Frederick Douglass's Temporal Theory of Democracy

Abstract

AbstractThroughout his career, Frederick Douglass linked the achievement of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy to Americans’ perception of their collective past and future. In so doing, I argue, Douglass developed a distinctive, temporal account of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, temporal continuity lent force and content to demands for equality—demands which would succeed only if the whole demos cultivated a specific orientation to its collective past, present, and future. Douglass offers a productive contrast to contemporary democratic theory, which often misses the importance of temporality suggested by his account and thereby risks surrendering its powerful egalitarian resources. Moreover, temporality provides a new lens on what many interpreters see as an episode of inconsistency in Douglass's thought: his brief, quickly abandoned contemplation of colonization proposals in the spring of 1861. Ultimately, Douglass turned to temporality in order to decide whether democracy for African Americans required affiliation with, or disaffiliation from, the United States.