Reading Ellison through Herder: Language, Integration, and Democracy

Abstract

This article contributes to recent work treating Ralph Ellison as a major democratic theorist by reading his political thought through a heretofore overlooked, and apparently remote, interpretive lens: the linguistic and cultural theories of Johann Gottfried von Herder. Ellison’s controversial endorsement of an integrationist vision of American nationhood was, I show, rooted in an underlying theory of language whose premises were essentially Herderian. Yet Ellison also creatively expanded on those ideas, notably through his concept of the “democratic vernacular,” which analyzed the relationship between language, culture, and politics to explain how democracy and integration might progress in the United States, despite the racism of its political system and amid the deep pluralism of its culture. By reworking Herderian themes for radically diverse contexts, Ellison’s thought furnishes resources to democratic theorists confronting a range of urgent normative issues related to cultural diversity.