Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)
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What is the central argument of Melvin Rogers’ book *The Darkened Light of Faith*?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of New Books and Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talese, and I'm Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figter, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Melvin Rogers. Melvin is professor of political science at Brown University. He specializes in political theory with emphasis on democracy, citizenship, and the American and African-American intellectual tradition of social thought. His new book has just been published with Princeton University Press. Its title is The Darkened Light of Faith, Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African-American Political Thought. Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, is notoriously fiery.
No doubt, part of what's gripping about it is a tension within it. Douglass begins by, I think, sincerely praising the founders and their philosophical principles. But then he turns to a devastating critique of the hypocrisy of the United States. Underlying Douglass's argument is a commitment to the democratic project that the United States represents, but a commitment that one imagines could be sustained only with extraordinary effort. What prevented Douglass from embracing an understandable, warranted pessimism that the democratic experiment in the United States had failed or had never really been taken up? Now, in the darkened light of faith, Melvin Rogers takes his reader on a journey through the efforts of African-American philosophers, social critics, commentators, and artists to make sense of the United States.
Now, as usual, there's a lot to talk about. But let's begin, as we normally do, with our guest. Hi, Melvin. Hey, Bob. Thanks for having me. How's it going today? It's going well.
It's going well.
Glad to hear that. You know, we usually start with the author himself. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, Melvin?
Sure. Well, as you said at the outset, I'm a professor of political science at Brown University, where I teach political theory. And I'm also associate director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics here at Brown. So I suppose I'll say a word about the sort of intellectual side of myself. So I am animated by trying to sort of understand how to make sense of Black people's commitments to the United States and how reflecting on that reveals something about the sort of interior of democracy. This preoccupation didn't start with thinking about African Americans. It started with thinking about pragmatism, in particular, the philosophy of John Dewey and the sort of importance of uncertainty and fragility that I sort of detected in his philosophy.
And at the end of the first book that I wrote, which was on John Dewey, I found myself thinking, well, sort of Dewey gives us a philosophical account of uncertainty and fragility, but who has really lived it in the United States? There's a variety of people I could turn to, but I turned to the tradition of African-American political thought. And that tradition in some ways, along with the tradition of pragmatism has sustained me ever since.
Fantastic. So can we begin with the title of the book? So The Darkened Light of Faith really captures what I see as a central thread of the argument of the book, which connects up with what you had just said about yourself. And that thread is perhaps sort of also typified in Du Bois' contrast between being hopeless and being unhopeful. Can you tell us a little bit about the title? Yeah,
sure. So the title itself is the product of an exchange with a dear, dear friend and colleague in philosophy, Chris LeBron, who is at John Hopkins. And he and I were talking about the book, and we've been talking about the book over a number of years. And I was hovering around the themes of faith and darkness. And after a couple of back and forth with him, this title emerged. But behind it was on the one side, I didn't want an uninteresting title. I wanted something that had a kind of literary feel to it and that sort of tried to capture
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the central argument of Melvin Rogers’ book *The Darkened Light of Faith*?
0:01–16:09
2
How does Rogers connect Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth‑of‑July speech to his own analysis?
16:09–33:28
3
Why did Rogers choose the title *The Darkened Light of Faith* and what does it signify?
33:28–1:00:08
4
What role does David Walker’s 1829 *Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World* play in the book’s argument?
1:00:08–1:07:06
Speakers
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