This book traces a provocative line from Emerson's work on race, reform, and identity to work by three influential African-American thinkers - W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cornel West - each of whom offers subtle engagement with both the tradition of written protest and the critique of liberalism Emerson shaped.

Emerson has been cast in recent debate as either an antinomian or an ideologue - as either subversive of institutional controls or indebted to capitalism. Here, Anita Haya Patterson contributes a more nuanced view, probing Emerson's record and its cultural and historical matrix to document a fundamental rhetoric of contradiction - a strategic aligning of opposed political concepts - that enabled him to both affirm and critique elements of the liberal democratic model.

A work of striking originality and breadth, From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest will make invigorating reading for scholars and students of American Studies, American political philosophy, and African-American Studies.