In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.

在共和主义政治哲学中，公民身份是通过参与政体的公共生活而构成的一种身份。在其传统表述中，共和公民身份是一种排他性和等级制的定义政体成员资格的方式，因为有资格参与政体公共生活的活动领域受到高度限制。我认为，美国黑人废奴主义者弗雷德里克·道格拉斯 (Frederick Douglass) 对参与政体公共生活的意义进行了详尽阐述，从而提出了一种激进的共和公民身份概念。根据道格拉斯关于共和公民身份的概念，为政体做出贡献并因此成为公民的意思是，以竞争和塑造政体价值观的方式行事。我们不仅通过传统上设想的公共话语或像反抗这样的宏大政治行为，而且还通过社会互动的日常形式来竞争和塑造政体的价值观。在美国内战前的政治思想中，道格拉斯将他对共和公民身份的激进包容性描述作为他的立场的概念基础，即在 1850 年代，被奴役和名义上自由的美国黑人已经是美国公民，政体应该承认他们是这样的人. 被奴役的美国黑人参与的日常抵抗——他们的种植园政治——对道格拉斯来说是一种典型的公民构成活动，因为它涉及合作和对抗的模式，这些模式使人们认识到相互的脆弱性，并体现了一个人很重要的断言.