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Book Reviews: American Politics

tive "genius for liberty," from which enslaved peoples and their descendants were necessarily excluded. Especially problematic for this logic of exclusion (the dream of expatriation was its political expression) was the presence of free blacks, who regarded America as their home and resisted efforts to resettle them elsewhere. Their response was to universalize the meaning of equality, which they claimed applied to "all men" and included social equality (equality of material condition as well as political rights); a conception of citizenship based on the historical fact of being in America rather than on racial determinants; and an activist role for government in promoting and defending equality in these senses. Such universalizing was only encouraged by the disastrous conditions legitimated by the separate-butequal compromise between white supremacists and white and black egalitarians, leading ultimately to Booker T. Washington's idea of America as a "composite nation" grounded on full social equality for blacks and whites. Here, again, the authors show that with respect to linguistic innovation, white egalitarians followed leads invented in the black public sphere, with eventual federal support from the Roosevelt and Truman administrations leading ultimately to Brown v. Board of Education. By the 1960s, the rhetorical strategies pioneered by African-American publics were characteristic of much of mainstream American political discourse. The backlash of recent decades stems from the fact that white egalitarian sentiment did not reflect the sensibilities of most whites, leading to a failure actually to achieve equality. This, in turn, led to divisiveness in the African-American public sphere, elements of which rejected the idea of America as a composite nation founded on equality, described America as inherently racist, identified being black solely with being a victim of racism, and put forward separatist ideologies. Such an approach, Condit and Lucaites suggest, turns its back on what is most valuable about America, namely, its commitment to the pursuit of multiple ends and to balancing diverse identities and histories in the context of a political community that is seen as an evolving discursive construction responsive to its members' changing opinions and needs. Rather than mime white supremacists by insisting that America is a "white man's country," African-Americans should build on their already considerable achievement and continue to craft an America conceived as the project of integrating differences without eliminating them, with equal participation and recognition as the watchwords. Crafting Equality is one of those books that dramatically reorient one's view of the nature of American political life and cause one to appreciate anew the meanings of America's political vocabulary. That said, there is nevertheless something suspiciously anodyne about its picture of the basic character of American political passions. The idea that the American public is firmly committed to democracy and equality is believable if one restricts oneself to the explicitly political discourses surveyed here; but a very different, much scarier, and arguably more penetrating view of the American national psyche would emerge from a consideration of, say, American fiction from Charles Brockden Brown through Melville to Don DeLillo. More fundamentally, Crafting Equality rests on an understanding of political discourse that is untouched by some of the most powerful contemporary inquiries into the relationship between language and the political, such as those stemming from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Condit and Lucaites are committed to an understanding of political speech drawn from the ancient Greek rhetorician Isocrates, for whom discourse is seen as an instrument used to produce, fabricate, or (as they put it) "craft" a polity as a work shaped according to discursively established images. While this conception is salutary—inasmuch as it enables the authors to understand meaning as an emergent effect of collective conversation, rather than as a reified, statically given constant—it also leads them to embrace the idea of the polity as a work of art. Condit and Lucaites dismiss Derrida as "dangerously nihilistic" (p. ix), but Derrrida's colleagues Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe might have alerted them to the nihilistic dimensions of the aesthetidzation of politics, which the latter show to be deeply antipolitical in character. To be sure, Condit and Lucaites's original and persuasive interpretation of the Anglo-African character of American equality stands independently of this productivist conception of political discourse. But their willingness to dismiss Continental thought of extraordinary insight and force owing to the prejudice that its lack of "pragmatism" renders it alien to their subject marks their book as American in another, presumably unintended, sense.