Katherine Henry

Self-Protection and Liberal Citizenship
April 15, 2005

From Locke to Mill to Berlin, theorists of liberalism have envisioned citizenship as a zone of Constitutional and legal protections. But the principle that Mill calls “self- protection,” Henry argues, turns out to be inherently unstable: the greater the value a society places on self- protection, the more vulnerable it will imagine its citizens to be.

In this talk, Henry examines the tendency of self- protection, as an ideal, to enhance the stature of the unprotected self and, eventually, to promote a vision of a public sphere in which participants are admonished to be keenly aware of precisely how vulnerable they are. Her texts are taken from three different moments in the history of liberalism: Richardson’s Clarissa, Wendell Phillips’s prefatory letter to Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, and an 1885 editorial from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.

Katherine Henry is assistant professor of English at Temple University. She has published articles on abolitionist rhetoric, and is currently completing a book entitled Self- Protection, Self-Exposure: Romantic Eloquence and the Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Reform.