The Lowest Freedom
Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Publishing:21st Apr '26
£22.00
This title is due to be published on 21st April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Black thinkers grappled with the material limits of freedom. They insisted that emancipation without economic self-determination would reproduce the inequalities of slavery, arguing that true freedom required not only civil rights and suffrage but also defending the rights of workers and curbing the power of capital. They concluded that free Black life could not flourish in conditions of labor exploitation and economic deprivation.
The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow. Justin Leroy argues that figures such as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Ida B. Wells developed a critique of racial capitalism that remains underappreciated. Their theories spanned the eras of slavery and freedom, connecting the North and the South, by illuminating the political economy of racial domination and the interwoven relationship between race and capitalism. By situating their work within broader debates about land, labor, and capital, Leroy provides a new framework for understanding how freedom was theorized, contested, and ultimately constrained in the aftermath of slavery. Bridging Black studies, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism, The Lowest Freedom offers a reinterpretation of African American political thought that places the struggle for economic justice at its core.
Justin Leroy has produced an indispensable and dazzling book that will forever change our understanding of modern intellectual history. He reintroduces us to nineteenth-century Black thinkers whose incisive critique of the political economy of slavery and capitalism rivals that of the leading economists of their times—and ours. Indeed, they anticipated by two centuries the question we are asking ourselves today: Is genuine abolition possible under racial capitalism? For the answer, read this book. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Justin Leroy's The Lowest Freedom is a landmark book in both the historical literature on the nineteenth-century United States and thinking about racial capitalism more generally. The next generation of scholars and perhaps even the next generation after that will use it as a trailhead and a point from which to orient their own work. -- Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Through its unique excavations of the Black radical tradition’s critiques of US freedom, The Lowest Freedom provides a radical rethinking of Black freedom and racial capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States. -- Zach Sell, author of Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital
ISBN: 9780231223560
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages