Book Review: A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Neil Roberts

• Author: Gregory Laski
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Date: 01 October 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719839369
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

760 Political Theory 47(5)

In sum, what Laski too often implies was a choice between progress and

stasis, with his writers landing ultimately on stasis, was really more of a

commitment to holding both in tension with each other. They believed that

such commitment was intrinsic to what Douglass called struggle, as when he

observed in the 1857 speech referred to above that: “The whole history of

the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her

august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . . . If there is no struggle

there is no progress. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never

did and it never will” (emphasis added).

One wishes that Laski had brought this dialectic more to the foreground.

Yet, as I hope my account of his reading of Souls indicates—and as his

excellent chapters on reparations discourse, Hopkins, and Chesnutt will

show to readers who turn to them—his book makes an important contribu-

tion on its own terms. If its argument seems to waver between its common-

sense and controversial versions, that may be because the present-past is

such an elusive temporality, one that seems to flicker on and off, yet is unde-

niably there—in the texts he reads and in democratic theory as these texts

formulate it. By making his case for the value of the present-past as “stasis,”

he provokes a deep consideration of temporality in both democratic theory

and black political thought.

Note

1. Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches,

Debates, and Interviews Volume 3: 1855-63, John W. Blassingame, ed. (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 204.

A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Neil Roberts. Lexington:

University of Kentucky Press, 2018, 490 pp.

Reviewed by: Gregory Laski, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs,

CO, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591719839369

Walt Whitman famously declared himself the poet of American democracy in

Leaves of Grass (1855), but Frederick Douglass, Whitman’s contemporary,

deserves equal if not greater claim to the designation of the “prose poet of

America’s and perhaps of a universal body politic.”1 As David W. Blight

makes clear in his recent biography, Douglass, whose life spanned nearly the

entirety of the nineteenth century, contained multitudes, for which scholars in

the diverse fields who attend to him are only now beginning to account. In A