Abolitionist Hypocrisy

This paper begins with the premise that, post-Trump, we are living through the end of a major structural element of liberalism: that the entry fee of political participation is a moral transparency between self and public. No... [ view full abstract ]

This paper begins with the premise that, post-Trump, we are living through the end of a major structural element of liberalism: that the entry fee of political participation is a moral transparency between self and public. No secret sins, no hidden hypocrisies. This paper returns to the rise of this role for hypocrisy, which I argue elsewhere comes out of the disestablishment of state churches and has held since Jefferson’s election in 1800. This paper examines a moment in which the stakes of hypocrisy were high—after John Brown’s raid of Harpers Ferry in 1859—to understand the advent and meaning of the politics of hypocrisy, focusing specifically on white abolitionists’ reactions to the raid (including by Henry David Thoreau and Lydia Maria Child) and how their reactions figure in today’s scholarship.