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Reconstructing American individualis...

Princeton University.

Reconstructing American individualism: Race and the ethics of citizenship.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Reconstructing American individualism: Race and the ethics of citizenship.
Author:	Turner, Jack, III.
Description:	188 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Stephen Macedo.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-01, Section: A, page: 0335.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International68-01A.
Subject:	American Studies.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3250038

Reconstructing American individualism: Race and the ethics of citizenship.
Turner, Jack, III.

Reconstructing American individualism: Race and the ethics of citizenship. - 188 p.

Adviser: Stephen Macedo.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2006.

What is the proper orientation of democratic citizens toward racial injustice? How should Americans respond to the historical legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and the persistence of racial inequality? This dissertation addresses these questions through an immanent critique of American individualism. The central tenet of American individualism is that the success or failure of an individual is his or her responsibility, and his or hers alone. Historically, American individualism has been hostile to government efforts to reconstruct American democracy along racially egalitarian lines. Individualists tend to underestimate the constraining effects of history and social structure on freedom; they also deny that individuals are morally responsible for the legacies of past injustice or for impersonal social forces. These qualities of American individualism make it unfriendly to the quest to overcome the social structural elements of racial injustice. Yet through a fresh interpretation of four American individualists who confronted the racial injustice of their time---Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin---I show that there is an alternative tradition of American individualism which encourages citizens to take responsibility for structural injustice and to act politically against it. If individuals are interested in being self-reliant, this alternative tradition suggests, they must acknowledge their complicity in structural injustice and work to overcome that complicity. Evaluating the promise of this alternative tradition for the contemporary struggle for racial justice, I also engage Alexis de Tocqueville, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Rawls, and Judith Shklar.Subjects--Topical Terms:

212409
American Studies.

Reconstructing American individualism: Race and the ethics of citizenship.
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520 # $a What is the proper orientation of democratic citizens toward racial injustice? How should Americans respond to the historical legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and the persistence of racial inequality? This dissertation addresses these questions through an immanent critique of American individualism. The central tenet of American individualism is that the success or failure of an individual is his or her responsibility, and his or hers alone. Historically, American individualism has been hostile to government efforts to reconstruct American democracy along racially egalitarian lines. Individualists tend to underestimate the constraining effects of history and social structure on freedom; they also deny that individuals are morally responsible for the legacies of past injustice or for impersonal social forces. These qualities of American individualism make it unfriendly to the quest to overcome the social structural elements of racial injustice. Yet through a fresh interpretation of four American individualists who confronted the racial injustice of their time---Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin---I show that there is an alternative tradition of American individualism which encourages citizens to take responsibility for structural injustice and to act politically against it. If individuals are interested in being self-reliant, this alternative tradition suggests, they must acknowledge their complicity in structural injustice and work to overcome that complicity. Evaluating the promise of this alternative tradition for the contemporary struggle for racial justice, I also engage Alexis de Tocqueville, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Rawls, and Judith Shklar.
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