Point 3 of the Atlantic Charter, with its seeming commitment to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’, and apparent underpinning by the United States, struck an immediate chord in many of the African colonial territories. In Smyth's somewhat over-exuberant estimation, it ‘swept like a grass fire through Africa’. At a stroke, it legitimised what had hitherto been only isolated African demands for self-government, demands which the colonial powers had simply dismissed as radical and immoderate, and laid bare the pretensions of the repeated claim in Allied and French wartime propaganda that the war was being fought for the freedom, or benefit, of all. That claim would now come under particularly close scrutiny as many Africans, particularly in British West Africa, began to ask in turn: ‘What does it mean for us?’ All the more so when Prime Minister Churchill immediately sought to deny the application of Point 3 to the African colonial territories; a denial that made of Africa a clear exception that many Africans would increasingly come to see as having been determined by racial considerations alone.

Increasingly, therefore, as the end of the war hove into sight, self-determination began to emerge as the central question of African political life with, in many colonial territories, corresponding hopes and expectations of what might be achieved in the post-war settlement to come – and, in many cases, though not all, Point 3 would come to represent the political and moral authority upon which demands for self-determination would be based. At the very least, it would serve as the petard upon which the moral authority of colonialism might legitimately be hoist. As Emerson and Kilson therefore pointed out, by the end of the war, there was ‘a substantial body of people no longer content to tolerate the existing colonial situation nor modestly to suggest that they might be accorded some participation in colonial political management’.

How that question would come to be manifested on the ground would ultimately depend on two primary, albeit symbiotic, factors: The general philosophy and approach of the colonial power to colonial governance and the particular circumstances of the individual colonial territories.

In Volume 1 of The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the political, intellectual and cultural context in which the ideas underlying the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) were conceived and nurtured, and the principles and politics upon which the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was founded and functioned, were delineated. Without an appreciation of that context and of the nature of the OAU polity, it would be hardly possible to make sense of the political account of the ACHPR process or to grasp how the ACHPR should be understood. The essential, dominating, core of that context was a deep existential resentment against Western universalism and accordingly an attendant desire for a hitherto disregarded African perspective to be projected across the spectrum of the commanding heights of that Western universalism. It was a desire that would be symbiotically asserted not only in intellectual and cultural spheres of activity but also in the praxis of African political leaders in national, regional and international forums and declarations. Most especially at the UN and its agencies in opposition to the international post-war settlement, which, it was argued, had to be recalibrated so as to incorporate, for the first time, African interests and priorities.

Volume 1 also looked at the African states’ engagement with human rights domestically and on the international stage. Domestically, it was clear that the human rights declarations and commitments incorporated into African independence constitutions had evoked little enthusiasm at the time or any great expectation that they would prove effective, and, unsurprisingly, post-independence, they were therefore either ignored or simply removed. Indeed, African political leaders made little secret of their contempt for human rights, which, they argued, had little relevance to the circumstances of the newly independent African states or the traditional African way of life. They therefore not only refused to contemplate any constraint on their almost unrestrained authority but also, in most cases, amended constitutions so as to augment further that authority. It was also clear that, with few exceptions, a ‘modern’ civil society that might serve to temper or blunt the political power of African leaders or demand a human rights regime was as yet still in the process of formation.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was published when the centrism of Cold War liberalism was supplanting the radical, multiethnic working-class collectivism characteristic of the liberal-left Popular Front and New Deal. In 1949, amid sharpening conflicts with the US’s recent ally the Soviet Union, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s spatial trope of the “vital center” redefined the US political landscape to situate, as constitutive of a new liberalism, the extremist affirmation of American national values and institutions against conflated radicalisms of right and left. While Invisible Man is often read as aligned with vital center liberalism – and as declaring African American commitment to its ethos – this chapter recovers the more idiosyncratic and radical theorization of power, institutions, and social change in the novel. Like Schlesinger, Ellison uses a spatial trope – the depths or underground – to anchor a political intervention. Motivated by the threat of nuclear apocalypse, Ellison uses that trope to critique sociopolitical institutions whose actions betray the underlying egalitarian and collective ideals they proclaim. Ellison applies this critique to Marxian and Black nationalist movements, as well as to mainstream American economic and political institutions, thus crafting a singular reformulation of political radicalism for the postwar era.

This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

The massive cultural and social changes brought about by World War II and its aftermath enabled what came to be known as the “sexual revolution.” This chapter highlights some key novels and literary movements that responded to and helped shape the postwar discourse of sexual freedom. It attends first to battles over literary censorship in the first half of the 1960s, focusing on celebrated obscenity trials of the work of Henry Miller and William Burroughs. The chapter then turns to novelistic engagements with queer liberation, discussing the work of James Baldwin, Edmund White, Rita Mae Brown, and Leslie Feinberg, among others. Using these literary examples, it demonstrates how tensions between individualism and collectivism that are longstanding in the American political project play out in and are transformed by ideas of sexual liberation.

This chapter examines the meanings of moderation in the American political tradition, beginning with George Washington’s Farewell Address, continuing with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and ending with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.

This chapter explores the spirit of moderation starting from the famous definition of the spirit of liberty given by Judge Learned Hand. It builds upon the ideas of Desiderius Erasmus who had a moderate temperament.

This chapter sketches the history of movement conservatism’s impact on American literature from the 1950s to the present. Midcentury conservatives, in their war against an intelligentsia that they perceived as dominated by liberal voices, evolved a model of counter-expertise that continues to inform right-wing intellectual practice today. This model was influenced by midcentury disciplinary conflicts between literature and the social sciences, with conservatives affirming a literary model of truth against the rationalism of social scientific discourse. Focusing on writers who published in the book review section of National Review, this chapter shows how the idea of conservative counter-expertise attracted critics and fiction writers such as Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Garry Wills. However, the conservative critique of the liberal intelligentsia was in the process of turning into a critique of expertise as such; this critique pushed many of these writers away from the magazine and helped fashion the version of the left/eight divide that defines American politics today.

After reading the previous letters, Lauren and Rob remained unconvinced about the benefits of moderation. Here is a short note I received from them that I take the liberty of reproducing here in full.

You wrote about moderation as an alternative to ideology and antidote to fanaticism. We know now what moderates are against, but the question remains: what do they stand for? Do they have a real and coherent vision of what a good society might look like, or are they simply against any radical ideas and plans broadly defined? Do their agendas have any fixed points or lodestars? Or it is rather the case that they change constantly and have no such fixed points? If so, can then moderation be viewed as a real virtue rather than a merely circumstantial strategy?

This letter comments on the affinities between prudence and moderation. It starts from the definition of prudence given by the sixteenth-century Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián in his classic book, The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence (1647), and then examines the different faces of prudence as illustrated by Titian’s famous Allegory of Prudence.