An Emancipation of the Mind
Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
"[A] bracingly original book." —Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal
How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders’ oligarchy in the Civil War.
This is a story about a dangerous idea—one which ignited revolutions in America, France, and Haiti; burst across Europe in the revolutions of 1848; and returned to inflame a new generation of intellectuals to lead the abolition movement—the idea that all men are created equal.
In their struggle against the slaveholding oligarchy of their time, America’s antislavery leaders found their way back to the rationalist, secularist, and essentially atheist inspiration for the first American Revolution. Frederick Douglass’s unusual interest in radical German philosophers and Abraham Lincoln’s buried allusions to the same thinkers are but a few of the clues that underlie this propulsive philosophical detective story. With fresh takes on forgotten thinkers like Theodore Parker, the excommunicated Unitarian minister who is the original source of some of Lincoln’s most famous lines, and a feisty band of German refugees, philosopher and historian Matthew Stewart tells a vivid and piercing story of the battle between America’s philosophical radicals and the conservative counterrevolution that swept the American republic in the first decades of its existence and persists in new forms up to the present day. In exposing the role of Christian nationalism and the collusion between northern economic elites and slaveholding oligarchs, An Emancipation of the Mind demands a significant revision in our understanding of the origins and meaning of the struggle over slavery in America—and offers a fresh perspective on struggles between democracy and elite power today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enthralling and muscular study, historian and philosopher Stewart (The 9.9 Percent) examines the German radicals who inspired a generation of antislavery leaders in 19th-century America. Tracing how the secularist, rational, and atheistic philosophies of Ludwig Feuerbach, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Friedrich Strauss traveled across the ocean and found a home with leading lights of the abolitionist movement (including Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker), Stewart contends that this radical philosophical vision, which had somewhat influenced the American Revolution, had in the years since "dissipated under the growing pressure of a counterrevolutionary slaveholding oligarchy." After the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, however, a cadre of well-educated, German-speaking "hard-liners" (around 10,000 people in total) immigrated to the U.S., carrying with them ideas that revitalized American revolutionary principles—especially the notion that all men are created equal, which Stewart argues came into direct conflict with the slaveholders' coopted branch of American Christianity that explicitly promoted racial hierarchy. Stewart brings this intellectual battle into the present, forcefully rebutting what he considers insidious recent historiography that paints Lincoln as a "Bible-believing Christian" and boldly stating that the slaveholders' Christian nationalism "clearly anticipates the fascist and neo-fascist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." It's a vital reassessment of what underpins American democracy.
