Civic Action and Liberal Education in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

A Constitution Day Lecture from Dr. Thomas Merrill (American University)

Frederick Douglass’s confrontation with Covey the slavebreaker in his Narrative of the Life and other autobiographies provides a model for daring and intelligent civic action in the American tradition.  However, it is less often noticed that Douglass’s action is accompanied, in his speech above the Chesapeake, by unavoidable human questions: what kind of cosmos do we live in? What is the truth about divinity? Is the cosmos supportive of or indifferent to civic action? For this reason, Douglass’s Narrative is not simply a text of civic education but also one of liberal education. In this lecture Merrill will use the Narrative of the Life to reflect on the relationship of civic action and education to the tradition of liberal education—a timely question in light of today’s movement to revitalize civic education in America’s college and universities.

Thomas Merrill is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He is the author of Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2015), which won the Delba Winthrop Prize for Best Recent Work in Political Philosophy. He is also the co-editor of three edited volumes, including The Political Thought of the Civil War (University Press of Kansas, 2018) and has held fellowships from Harvard, Princeton, and the American Enterprise Institute. He is an editor of the journal American Political Thought and director of the Lincoln Scholars Program at American University.