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Philosophical and political questions about the legitimacy of uncivil disobedience have been a core preoccupation of African American political thought since its inception. Additionally, a systematic misreading of black protest movements, particularly the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, has been a fundamental referent for philosophical defenses of a right to civil disobedience. This essay takes Candice Delmas’s defense of uncivil disobedience as a point of departure to reflect on how African American political thought challenges dominant liberal understandings of dissent, and to consider the conceptions of political obligation that should accompany accounts of principled lawbreaking.

This chapter discusses the Two Foundings of America. It covers the two foundational strands in American political thought; federalism vs. anti-federalism; connecting American political thought with American political development; the search for American exceptionalism; Publius’ new federalism; and iterations of the Two Foundings. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the paradox of partisanship. In 1950, the American Political Science Association put out a major report arguing for a “more responsible two-party system.” The two parties—the Democratic Party and the Republican Party—were then largely indistinguishable coalitions of parochial local parties, and the political scientists argued that too little, rather than too much polarization, was the problem. This sets up a paradox: Some party division is necessary, but too much can be deadly. Various traditions in American political thought have tried to resolve this paradox. Antipartisans have urged consensus above all. Responsible partisans have urged competition above all. Meanwhile, bipartisans have urged compromise above all. Consensus is impossible. However, both compromise and competition are essential to democracy. Only the neglected multiparty tradition can solve the paradox with the right balance of competition and compromise.

This chapter argues that the integration of baseball had a direct relationship with a core American foreign policy objective: manipulating international perception of American race relations. Hence, it explores the relationship between Cold War repression and racial integration after the articulation of the Truman Doctrine. By examining the historical context of Jackie Robinson's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), this chapter examines the processes through which the U.S. government resolved to alter international opinions of American race relations rather than provide substantive changes to the segregated racial order in the early days of the Cold War, as well as the transformations in American political thought that allowed for those changes.

The recent trend of state legalization of marijuana (for medical and recreational purposes) has renewed long-standing debates about federalism and prohibition. Over fierce dissents arguing federal suppression of in-state marijuana exceeded the enumerated powers of the Constitution, in 2005 the Supreme Court case of Gonzales v. Raich upheld the exercise of federal power, setting the states and Washington on a collision course. Using the marijuana case to briefly illustrate the relevant legal controversies, such as the non-commandeering doctrine, this chapter frames the subsequent chapters on prohibition. It briefly previews the book’s major arguments and shows how reconstructing these debates helps us better understand American Political Thought, American Political Development, and legal debates on extrajudicial constitutional interpretation and popular constitutionalism.

Before national prohibition could be implemented, completing the evolution from voluntary temperance to nationwide policy, its defenders had to reconcile the restriction of alcohol with some of the key ideological elements of American political thought. This meant that, although John Stuart Mill had long ago derided the "Maine Law" establishing prohibition, prohibitionists justified the suppression of alcohol as compatible with freedom as understood within both liberalism and progressivism. Prohibition, far from being a narrow movement imposed by rural fundamentalists, drew on a wide base of support from a variety of reform movements, including urban anti-poverty opponents, black intellectuals seeking moral uplift and the enforcement of Reconstruction, and women’s and Christian (especially Protestant) activists, to say nothing of reinforcement from business and the commitment to white supremacy anchoring Southern politics.

Chapter 2 shows how Frederick Douglass issued two claims across two antebellum narratives. In his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he both challenged the diminished legal and moral authority of black Americans and analyzed what of the plantation had oppressed him. Yet after his political ideas and ties developed in the following decade, Douglass wrote his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom not as mere narrative but as denunciation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass’s story alongside moral criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs in Bondage implicated readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation. This claim depended on Douglass’s renewed authority to analyze his life and on an analysis that revealed how the conditions of slavery implicate abolitionists and readers. Douglass’s book reached outward to demand his audience join him in solidarity for racial justice.