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The Practice of Global Citizenship . By Luis Cabrera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 328p. $95.00 cloth, $31.99 paper.

fruits of one’s labor. Yet freedom depends on the existence of laws that constrain human behavior. Government exists to prevent individuals from infringing on one another’s rights, but it also has a role to play in the amelioration of mind and character. Free societies possess freedom of conscience in matters of religious faith, but they also promulgate a civil religion that provides a common set of beliefs that give society meaning and purpose. Buccola argues that Douglass’s rejection of anarchism is further evidence that his political theory is essentially liberal. Douglass rejected William Lloyd Garrison’s utopian anarchism and its underlying assumption that all government power is illegitimate because it violates human freedom in favor of limited government. Douglass was sufficiently imbued with the idea that human nature is in tension between good and evil. Consequently, he considered anarchism unrealistic and force necessary in order to counteract evil. As a natural-rights thinker, he did not believe that everyone’s natural rights were protected in an anarchical state of nature. Following the Declaration of Independence, he believed that government was necessary to secure natural rights. The author also considers Douglass a liberal because he insisted that democracy was the best form of government. Douglass came to this conclusion because, while he believed that human nature was divided between good and evil, the former was more prevalent than the latter. He also surmised that no class or sex was more virtuous than the other. The masses were just as capable of governing as the social elite; women were just as capable of self-government as men. Equality was both the underlying support for and outcome of democracy. As a corollary to this point, he promoted a right to self-governance, including universal suffrage, and he believed that only democracy upheld this right. Buccola ignores the implications of Douglass’s comments on racial equality in monarchical England. Why, for example, was a nondemocratic state like England truer to the principle of racial equality than republican America? Douglass recognized the importance of political institutions and political culture to the quality of political and social life. Was it the case that whatever the deficiencies of British political institutions, their policy outcomes were determined by culture rather than political forms? If so, is equality only supported by democracy? Some attention to these important questions would help to illuminate the degree to which Douglass, in particular, and liberalism, more generally, are closed to the search for political regimes beyond the scope of democracy. Likewise, Buccola does not question Douglass’s tendency to engage in Whig history. Douglass’s narrative often lacks attention to complexity, moral ambiguity, and atypical exceptions. At times, he is too confident that one side has a monopoly on good and the other on evil. He was convinced that history has a predetermined side and that we can know with certainty who was on the right and wrong sides of history. He supported the use of deadly force against those who advocated slavery, yet he opposed the death penalty. He considered John Brown—whom he compared favorably to Socrates and Jesus—to be America’s “noblest” hero and the ideal reformer. In The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: From 1817–1882 ( [1892], 2003), Douglass describes his impressions of Brown after visiting the Brown home: “I never felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this man’s house” (p. 194). Here, we get a glimpse of Douglass’s pseudospirituality and radical politics. Buccola acknowledges Douglass’s view that the “Reformer is a high priest of our civil religion” who is morally bound by the “sacred civic text,” the Declaration of Independence (p. 105). Douglass’s idealistic and even utopian sentiments provide an opportunity to comment on liberalism’s substitution of political religion for traditional religion and violence for constitutional deliberation. Yet Buccola provides little analysis of these problems. All in all, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass is a thoughtful and well-organized analysis of an important American political thinker. It touches a variety of theoretical issues that reach back to the founding era and are also relevant to contemporary politics. Buccola points out that both Supreme Court Justices Marshall and Thomas, though divergent in their political ideologies, demonstrate great admiration for Douglass. This book helps explain why individuals of competing political views would trace the origins of their principles to the same source. By identifying Douglass’s synthesis of competing varieties of liberalism, Buccola sheds light on the meaning of an important American thinker’s political theory and its place in the development of liberalism and American politics.