In Our Only Star and Compass, Peter C. Myers reexamines the role of Locke in liberal political philosophy. Myers considers Locke's philosophy in relation both to contemporary liberalism and to the great works of classical and modern political philosophy.

For Frederick Douglass, the iconic nineteenth-century slave and abolitionist, the foundations for his arguments in support of racial equality rested on natural rights and natural law-and the bold proclamation of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. But because many Americans never observed this principle--and in Douglass's day even renounced it--he made it his life's work to move the nation toward this vision of a more noble liberalism. Peter Myers now considers that effort and the natural rights arguments by which Douglass confronted race in America.

Myers...