## 1. Du Bois's Life and Major Publications




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| 1868 | Born, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Great Barrington,
Massachusetts, February 23. |
| 1884 | Graduates from Great Barrington High School. |
| 1885 | Enters Fisk University, Nashville Tennessee, with sophomore
standing. |
| 1888 | Receives BA from Fisk. Delivers commencement oration on Otto von
Bismarck. Enters Harvard College as a junior. |
| 1889-90 | Takes philosophy courses with William James, George Santayana,
and F.G. Peabody. |
| 1890 | Graduates from Harvard College with a BA, *cum laude*, in
philosophy. Delivers commencement oration on Jefferson Davis. |
| 1892 | Awarded a grant from the Slater Fund to study at Friedrich
Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he works closely with Gustav von
Schmoller, leader of the younger German Historical School. |
| 1893 | Slater Fund Grant extended for one year. |
| 1894 | Denied further aid from the Slater fund. Unable to fulfill
residency requirements for obtaining a doctoral degree from Friedrich
Wilhelm University, returns to Great Barrington. Takes an appointment
to teach Classics at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. |
| 1895 | Awarded a PhD in History from Harvard, he is the first black to
receive a PhD from Harvard. |
| 1896 | Published his doctoral dissertation, *The Suppression of the
African Slave-Trade to the United States of America,
1638-1870*, as the first volume of Harvard's
Historical Monograph Series. Hired by the University of Pennsylvania
to conduct a sociological study of the black population of
Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. |
| 1897 | Joins fellow black intellectuals to found the American Negro
Academy, an organization devoted to promoting black scholarly
achievement. Appointed professor of history and economics at Atlanta
University, where he begins to edit the *Atlanta University
Studies* (1898-1914). |
| 1899 | Publishes *The Philadelphia Negro.* |
| 1903 | Publishes *The Souls of Black Folk*. |
| 1909 | Publishes *John Brown*, a biography. |
| 1910 | Appointed director of research and publications for the NAACP.
Begins to edit *The Crisis*, an official publication of the
NAACP. |
| 1911 | Publishes *Quest of the Silver Fleece*, his first
novel. |
| 1915 | Publishes *The Negro.* |
| 1919 | Organizes first Pan-African Conference in Paris. |
| 1920 | Publishes *Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil* |
| 1919 | Attends the second, Pan-African Conference in London. |
| 1924 | Publishes *The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making
of America*. |
| 1928 | Publishes a second novel, *Dark Princess: A
Romance*. |
| 1934 | Resigns as editor of *The Crisis* and from the NAACP.
Appointed Editor-in-Chief of *The Encyclopedia of the
Negro.* |
| 1935 | Publishes *Black Reconstruction.* |
| 1939 | Publishes *Black Folk, Then and Now*, a revision of
*The Negro.* |
| 1940 | Publishes *Dusk of Dawn*, an autobiography. Founds and
begins to edit *Phylon*, a quarterly journal examining issues
of race and culture. |
| 1944 | Named the first black member of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters. Publishes "My Evolving Program for Negro
Freedom" in *What the Negro Wants*, ed. Rayford
Logan. |
| 1945 | Attends the fifth Pan-African conference in Manchester, England.
Publishes*Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace.* In protest
of conferences held in segregated hotels, resigns his membership in
the American Association of University Professors. |
| 1947 | Edits and writes the introduction to "An Appeal to the
World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the
Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and
an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress." Publishes *The
World and Africa.* |
| 1951 | Indicted under the McCormick Act for being an
"unregistered foreign agent." Acquitted after a five-day
trial. |
| 1952 | Publishes *In Battle for Peace,* an account of the
trial. |
| 1957 | Publishes *The Ordeal of Mansart*, the first volume of
the *Black Flame* trilogy of historical novels. |
| 1959 | Publishes *Mansart Builds a School*, the second volume of
the *Black Flame* trilogy. |
| 1961 | Publishes *Worlds of Color*, the third volume of the
*Black Flame* trilogy. Accepts Kwame Nkrumah's invitation
to move to Ghana. |
| 1963 | Becomes a citizen of Ghana. Dies in Accra, Ghana, August 27, on
the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Roy Wilkins
announces Du Bois's death at the March, remarking "that at
the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling
you to gather here today in this cause. If you want to read something
that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume *The Souls of Black
Folk* by Du Bois, published in 1903." |
| 1968 | Posthumous publication of *The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du
Bois*. |


## 2. Social Philosophy, The Negro Problem, and Race



Over the course of his career, Du Bois's social philosophy
comprised contributions to social ontology, social theory, the
philosophy of the human and social sciences, and the diagnosis of
social
 problems.[1]
 His analysis of the nature of a social problem and, specifically, his
diagnosis of the Negro problem; his social constructionist accounts of
race and racial differences; his ongoing reflection on the methods,
purposes, and sometimes moral significance of social inquiry; and his
elaboration of the claim that the concept of race, operating as a
mechanism of power, structures relations of social domination, all
played a critical role in what he ultimately came to call his
"evolving program for Negro freedom" (1944, 31). The
present section bears on Du Bois's analysis of the Negro problem
and his contributions to the philosophy of race. Section 3, below,
focuses on his contributions to the philosophy of the social
sciences.


### 2.1 What is the Negro Problem?



Du Bois considers the Negro Problem both objectively and
subjectively--both from the standpoint of science and from the
standpoint of lived experience.


#### 2.1.1 The Negro Problem Objectively Considered



In "The Study of the Negro Problems" (1898), one of his
earliest publications, Du Bois responded to then contemporary
discussions of America's "Negro problem" by
conceptualizing the problem as an object of social scientific inquiry.
Sociology studies social phenomena, and the social phenomena that
interest Du Bois are the cluster of social problems affecting American
Negroes (the Negro is not a problem, in his view, although problems
affect the Negro [see Gordon, 2000]). In the perspective of sociology,
the Negro problem *just is* a cluster of social problems (1898,
 77-78).[2]
 But what is a social
 problem?[3]



Du Bois answers this question by defining a social problem as
"the failure of an organized social group to realize its group
ideals, through the inability to adapt a certain desired line of
action to given conditions of life" (1898, 78). One example is
the failure to enact the ideal of a luxurious home life due to
prevailing marriage customs. Another is the failure to enact the ideal
of economic and social development due to crime and lawlessness.



The historical evolution of the social problems that Du Bois
identifies as Negro problems has been a "baffling adjustment of
action and condition which is the essence of progress" (1898,
 82).[4]
 Turning to the present, Du Bois characterizes the then current (circa
1898) Negro problems as so many failures to enact the ideal of
incorporating the Negro masses into the group life of the American
people. Du Bois attributes these failures to two causes: white racial
prejudice towards Negroes and Negro cultural backwardness. Racial
prejudice is the conviction "that people of Negro blood should
not be admitted into the group life of the nation no matter what their
condition may be" (1898, 82). Cultural backwardness is economic
disadvantage, ignorance, and deficiency with regard to the art of
organized social life. Each of these causes accounts for one of two
distinct classes of Negro problems (1898,
 82-3).[5]



Du Bois's social ontology and causal explanation of Negro
problems lay the basis for his research agenda. The study of the Negro
as a *social group* focuses on Negro problems that have arisen
independently of racial prejudice in the Negro's social
environment. In turn, the study of the Negro's *social
environment* considers Negro problems that have resulted from
racial prejudice. Du Bois's program for studying the Negro as a
social group includes historical study, statistical investigation,
anthropological measurement, and sociological
 interpretation.[6]


#### 2.1.2 The Negro Problem Subjectively Considered



In Du Bois's view, the Negro Problem is a subjectively lived and
felt social condition, not only an object of social scientific
inquiry. In "Strivings of the Negro People" (1897b) and
*The Souls of Black Folk* (1903a), Du Bois adduces the concept
of double-consciousness to characterize the subjectively lived and
felt experience of the Negro problem. Ascribing double consciousness
specifically to the Negro, Du Bois characterizes it as a "sense
of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring
one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity" (1903a, 3). In Du Bois's view,
double-consciousness obtains when blacks see themselves through the
pitying and contemptuous eyes of the racially prejudiced whites whose
racial prejudice is one of the causes of the Negro problem.



The concept of double-consciousness is the most extensively discussed
concept in the humanities and social sciences secondary literature on
Du Bois, and it has received substantial attention from philosophers.
The present, brief discussion of the concept is intended simply to
situate it within the larger context of Du Bois's social
philosophy. For a more detailed account of Du Bois's
understanding of double consciousness and a survey of contemporary
philosophical disputes about the content and significance of the
concept, see the entry on
 double consciousness.


### 2.2 What is a Negro? What is a Race? What is Whiteness?



In "The Study of the Negro Problems," Du Bois predicates
his analysis of Negro problems on his analysis of social problems
*as such*; in another early essay, "The Conservation of
Races" (1897a), he similarly predicates his answer to the
question, "What is a Negro?" on an answer to a more
fundamental question, "What is a race?" Du Bois turns to
the human sciences to say what a race is, but also to account for the
existence of spiritually distinct races. Du Bois's
historical-sociological *definition* of race overlaps his
historical-sociological *explanation* of the existence of
spiritually distinct races. To put the point more precisely, and in an
idiom that is familiar to contemporary philosophers, Du Bois holds
that the same sorts of historical and social factors construct race
both constitutively and
 causally.[7]



We begin by analyzing Du Bois's explanation of the
distinctiveness of distinct races. We then turn to his definition of
race, which he introduces to counter the objection that, because
spiritually distinct races cannot be identified *as races* from
the perspective of the natural sciences, they cannot be identified as
races at all. After considering contemporary philosophers'
ongoing debates about Du Bois's definition of race in
"Conservation," we turn to Du Bois's later
treatments of race and the notion of whiteness in *Dusk of
Dawn* (1940), *Black Reconstruction* (1935), and "The
Souls of White Folk" (in *Darkwater* (1920)).


#### 2.2.1 Explaining Race



In explaining and defining race, Du Bois participates in a
turn-of-the-century conversation in German philosophy about the
subjects and methods that distinguish the human from the natural
sciences--that is, the *Geisteswissenschaften* from the
*Naturwissenschaften*. Responding to Auguste Comte's and
J.S. Mill's efforts to reform the human sciences on the model of
the natural sciences, German scholars addressed a variety of questions
as to the human sciences' cognitive aims, possible
methodological autonomy, and dependence on psychology. When Du Bois
arrived in Berlin in 1892, the conversation was well underway and had
already benefitted from the significant contributions of Wilhelm
Dilthey and Wilhelm Wundt several years earlier. During the 1890s
there were further contributions, in particular the writings of Georg
Simmel, Wilhelm Windelband, and Heinrich Rickert. Although Du Bois
initially presented "The Conservation of Races" as an
address to the American Negro Academy, the essay was a significant
addition to the German debate, for it marks Du Bois's turn from
the *Naturwissenschaften* to the *Geisteswissenschaften*
to explain the differences between races and to conceptualize racial
 identities.[8]



Although Du Bois's essay acknowledges, as the "final word
of science, so far," that physical differences distinguish
"at least two, perhaps three, great families of human
beings--the whites and Negroes, possibly the yellow race"
(1897a, 52), it more importantly maintains that that there exist
eight, spiritually distinct races. It also maintains that each
spiritually distinct race, as such, is *causally constructed*
by historical and social factors, for it asserts that each spiritually
distinct race causally owes its spiritual distinctiveness (its
peculiar message, which dictates its particular historical role) to
such factors--specifically, to the common histories, laws,
religions, habits of thought, and conscious strivings that have caused
it to be the cohesive, spiritually distinct race it is (1897,
54-56).



Du Bois also holds that the spiritual distinctiveness of a
socio-historical race cannot be explained in terms of physical,
biological facts. Like Wilhelm Dilthey, whose *Introduction to the
Human Sciences* (1883) had appeared a decade before Du Bois heard
him lecture in Berlin, he expressly questions the possibility of
causal explanations that reduce spiritual facts and differences to
biological facts and
 differences.[9]
 Thus, Du Bois rejects the physio-biological reductionism
characteristic of nineteenth century racial science: the thesis that
physical racial differences causally explain the spiritual and
cultural differences between racial groups. Spiritual differences have
historical and social causes (law, religion, and so on), which Du Bois
takes to be causally independent of biological racial facts (1897a,
 54-55).[10]


#### 2.2.2 Defining Race



Having sketched a preliminary account of the "subtle
forces" that have causally divided human beings into spiritually
distinct races, Du Bois writes that, while these races "perhaps
transcend scientific definition, nevertheless, [they] are clearly
defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist" (1897a,
53).



That spiritually distinct groups may not be readily identified as
races if one adopts the perspective of the natural sciences does not
entail that they cannot be identified as races at all. Reminiscent of
Dilthey, again, Du Bois holds that the natural sciences and the human
sciences have distinct subject matters (physical facts, on the one
hand, spiritual facts on the other), and suggests that the former,
because they conceptualize human beings exclusively in physical terms,
cannot conceptualize them in terms of social and historical facts, and
thus cannot conceptualize them in terms of the social and historical
facts that define spiritually distinct groups as races (Du
Bois's reason for claiming that social and historical facts
"transcend scientific definition"). If, however, one
adopts the perspective of the human sciences; if, in other words, one
adopts the conceptual "eyes" of the historian and the
sociologist, then one sees these social and historical facts standing
"clearly defined" to one's point of view. From this
point of view, Du Bois proposes, it is possible to identify
spiritually distinct races *as
 races*,[11]
 and thus to state a definition of race--or, in other words, to
specify the historical and social factors that constitute a group of
human beings *as a race*.



> 
> What, then, is race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of
> common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and
> impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together
> for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived
> ideals of life (1897a, 53).
> 



Here, Du Bois's distinguishes between the factors that generally
(usually) characterize a race and the factors that must
*always* characterize a race; that is, the factors that
constitute a group of people as a race. Du Bois's definition
proposes that a group of human beings counts as a spiritually distinct
race if, and only if, the members of the group have a common history,
common traditions and impulses, and common (voluntary and involuntary)
strivings; counting as members of a spiritually distinct race does not
require a common blood or a common language, however, although the
members of a spiritually distinct race may indeed speak the same
language or have the same blood coursing through their veins (see
Lott, 1992-93; Gooding-Williams, 1996 and 2009; and Sundstrom,
2003). Du Bois's definition asserts that each spiritually
distinct race is, as such, *constitutively constructed* by the
historical and social factors the definition specifies as making a
race a race.



It has not escaped notice that the list of historical and social
factors that Du Bois identifies as causally constructing (as
explaining) the existence and cohesiveness of spiritually distinct
races--common histories, laws, religions, habits of thought, and
conscious strivings--echoes the list of factors he identifies as
constitutively constructing (as defining) a group of human beings as a
spiritually distinct race--common history, traditions, impulses,
and strivings (see Gooding-Williams, 2009, 51). To be sure, the lists
are not identical. Still, we can reasonably assume that Du Bois means
them to capture the same content, supposing that the traditions and
impulses indicated in the second list include legal and religious
traditions as well as persistent habits of thought. Du Bois holds not
only that historical and social factors constitutively and causally
construct spiritually distinct races, but, likewise, that the *same
kinds* of historical and social factors constitutively and
causally construct spiritually distinct races.



What, then, is a Negro? To be a Negro, Du Bois replies, is 1) to be a
member of one of three biologically distinct races, and 2) to be a
member of one of eight constitutively and causally constructed
spiritually distinct races. The Negro is spiritually distinguished
from other spiritually distinct races by its distinctive message, the
content of which, Du Bois argues, is not yet fully articulated (1897,
55-56).


#### 2.2.3 Debating Du Bois's Explanation and Definition of Race



Contemporary philosophers have devoted considerable attention to Du
Bois's explanation and definition of race in "The
Conservation of Races;" indeed, they have given more attention
to Du Bois's definition than to his treatment of any other
philosophical issue. Nearly all that attention can be traced to Kwame
Anthony Appiah's engagement with Du Bois in "The
Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race" (Appiah,
1985), an expanded version of which Appiah published as the second
chapter ("Illusions of Race") of *In My Father's
House* (Appiah, 1992).



Appiah's critique of Du Bois (see Appiah, 1985 and Appiah,
 1992[12])
 argues for three, key claims: 1) that Du Bois's definition of
race fails to state criteria that serve to individuate his eight,
spiritually distinct races; 2) that, notwithstanding Du Bois's
intention to conceptualize race in socio-historical terms, the
criteria he in fact uses to individuate spiritually distinct races
comprise a physical, biological component--specifically, the idea
of a common ancestry; and 3) that, notwithstanding his ongoing,
post-"Conservation" efforts to substitute "a
sociohistorical conception of race for the biological one," the
logic of his argument "leads naturally to the final repudiation
of race as a term of difference" (Appiah, 1985, 34-35).
Appiah endorses this conclusion, stating that "[t]he truth is
that there are no races," and that "the notion [of race]
that Du Bois required, and that underlies the most hateful racisms of
the modern era, refers to nothing in the world at all" (Appiah,
1992, 45).



For the most part, philosophical criticism of Appiah's reading
of Du Bois has targeted his analysis of Du Bois's definition and
his antirealism about race. In an early response to Appiah, Lucius
Outlaw (1996, 28) argues that Du Bois's definition of race is
the articulation of a cluster concept, and not, as Appiah presumes,
the statement of a set of conditions individually necessary and
jointly sufficient to constitute a group of people as a
 race.[13]
 In addition, Outlaw (1996, 21-22, 28) defends, and attributes
to Du Bois, a version of racial realism, according to which biological
ancestry and physical characteristics play a role in defining
race.



Other critics of Appiah's reading of Du Bois have been less
inclined than Outlaw to defend or to attribute to Du Bois a definition
of race involving biological characteristics; rather they have tended
to argue that, Appiah's arguments to the contrary, Du Bois
succeeded in advancing a plausible, non-biological, socio-historical
definition of race. Paul Taylor (2000), for example, takes issue with
Appiah's claim that Du Bois's appeal to "common
history" as a criterion of individuation is circular, arguing
that Appiah misconstrues Du Bois's understanding of what it
means for two individuals to have a history in
 common.[14]
 Ronald Sundstrom (2003) also defends Du Bois's socio-historical
definition, arguing that, on a metaphysical pluralist reading, it can
do the work of individuation that Appiah says it cannot do. For Taylor
and Sundstrom, Du Bois was a racial realist who cogently defended the
thesis that race is a social kind.



More recently, Chike Jeffers and Robert Bernasconi have productively
re-oriented the philosophical discussion of "Conservation"
away from debates stemming from Appiah's interpretation of the
 essay.[15]
 On Bernasconi's account, these debates have tended to
anachronism, and so tended to overlook the context-specific intentions
animating Du Bois's essay. In Jeffers's view, the
Appiah-inspired debates have missed a key distinction shaping Du
Bois's social constructionism.



According to Bernasconi, recent philosophical discussions of Du
Bois's explanation and definition of race "have tended to
distort its meaning by imposing an alien question on it" (2009,
519). Rather than read "The Conservation of Races" in
light of contemporary arguments about racial eliminativism (about
whether, in Appiah's words, race should be repudiated as a term
of difference) and the proper referent of the concept of race,
Bernasconi places Du Bois's essay in its immediate political and
historical setting. Specifically, he emphasizes Du Bois's
engagements with the thought of Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander
Crummell and Frederick Douglass and argues that the intended point of
the essay was "to give hope to blacks at a time when scientists
were questioning their future on the basis of suspicions about the
impact of race mixing on their capacity to survive the struggle for
existence" (2009,
 536).[16]
 With Bernasconi's intervention, debate about Du Bois's
1897 essay has turned to the metaphilosophical question of the
relative value of anachronistic (presentist) and antiquarian
(historicist) approaches to the study of the history of African
American philosophy (see, e.g., Taylor, 2013 and Gooding-Williams,
2017).



According to Jeffers (2013), the Appiah-inspired discussion of Du Bois
has ignored the distinction Du Bois draws between political and
cultural versions of the thesis that race is constitutively
 constructed.[17]
 The political version of the thesis, which Du Bois rejects, Jeffers
argues, holds that "'racialized
subordination'...constitutes its [race's] very
existence" (2013,
 413).[18]
 The cultural version, which Du Bois endorses, Jeffers argues, holds
that the cultural factors mentioned in Du Bois's definition
(traditions, ideals of life, and so on) constitutively construct races
as "distinct *cultures*" (2013, 411). Jeffers
describes the cultural version of socio-historical constructionism
that he attributes to Du Bois as Du Bois's "cultural
theory of
 race."[19]



Jeffers advances criticisms of Du Bois's definition of race and,
unlike most other philosopher commentators, of his causal explanation
of the existence of spiritually and culturally distinct races.
Regarding the latter, he questions the reliability of Du Bois's
general, historical account of the genesis of the social factors to
which Du Bois attributes the existence of these races (Jeffers, 2013,
417). Regarding the former, he adduces an important conceptual point:
namely, that Du Bois neglects to justify the assumption that the
historical and social facts that define and distinguish the
spiritually distinct groups that the historian and the sociologist
identify as races should be thought to constitute (constitutively to
construct) those groups *as races.* Perhaps they serve simply
to constitute them as cultural entities, or, as Du Bois himself
sometimes writes, as nations (Jeffers, 2013, 416). Absent that
assumption, neither the historian nor the sociologist is entitled to
identify the clearly defined, spiritually distinct groups he or she
observes *as races*. And, absent that assumption, Du Bois is
hardly entitled to present the definition that he bases on what the
historian and the sociologist observe as answering the question,
"What, then, is a
 race?"[20]



Notwithstanding his criticisms of Du Bois, Jeffers, following Outlaw
(1996), endorses and defends Du Bois's "strong commitment
to the preservation and cultivation of black cultural
difference" (Jeffers, 2013,
 419).[21]
 Jeffers has also shown that Du Bois maintains that commitment
throughout his intellectual career (Jeffers, 2017).


#### 2.2.4 Rethinking Race



Philosophers interested in Du Bois's thinking about race in
writings he essayed after the publication of "The Conservation
of Races" have tended to focus on *Dusk of Dawn* (1940).
In this connection, both Paul Taylor (2000, 2004a, 2004b, and 2014)
and Robert Gooding-Williams (2014) have elaborated detailed accounts
of the notion of race that Du Bois sketches in the book he subtitled
"An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept." In a
related vein, Joel Olson (2004), Shannon Sullivan (2006), Terrance
Macmullen (2009), Robert Gooding-Williams (2021), and Ella Myers
(2022) have examined Du Bois's conceptualization of whiteness,
giving particular attention to the the development of Du Bois's
thought during the interwar period--roughly from the 1920
publication of "The Souls of White Folk" (see chapter 2 of
*Darkwater* (1920)) through the publication of *Dusk of
Dawn* twenty years later. Olson reads *Dusk of Dawn* as
advancing an argument Du Bois initiates in *Black
Reconstruction* (1935), and Sullivan and Macmullen read it as
advancing an argument that Du Bois initiates in "The Souls of
White Folk." Gooding-Williams focuses on exclusively on
"The Souls of White Folk." Myers provides the most
comprehensive scholarly treatment to-date of Du Bois's
conceptualization of whiteness during the interwar period, with
detailed, individual chapters on"The Souls of White Folk,"
*Black Reconstruction*, and *Dusk of Dawn*.


##### 2.2.4.1 Riding Jim Crow in Georgia



In chapter 6 of *Dusk of Dawn*, entitled "The White
World," Du Bois imagines a dialogue between himself and a
fictional interlocutor, Roger Van Dieman. Near the conclusion of the
exchange, Du Bois says that "[r]ace is a cultural, sometimes an
historical fact," to which Van Dieman responds "But what
is this group [the black race] and how do you differentiate it"
(1940, 77). Du Bois rejoins his interlocutor, remarking that he
recognizes "it [the black race] quite easily and with full legal
sanction; the black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in
Georgia" (1940, 77).



Here, Du Bois seems to reject biological concepts of race, and while
he asserts that race is a cultural and sometimes an historical fact,
his reference to the Jim Crow car suggests that he is no longer
conceptualizing the Negro or any race as a group united by a distinct
spiritual message. But if the cultural and sometimes historical fact
of race is neither a biological nor a spiritual fact, what sort of
fact is it?



On Taylor's account, Du Bois means to answer this question by
proposing that race is an *institutional fact*. Following John
Searle (1995), Taylor understands institutional facts, like marriage
and money, to be ontologically subjective and epistemologically
objective (2000, 110; 2004a, 109; 2004b, 91). Realizing that
"collective intentionality can bring certain facts into
being" (2000, 110), Taylor's Du Bois understood race to be
constitutively constituted by human mental states (2004,
 109).[22]


##### 2.2.4.2 Du Bois, Genealogy, Race



Gooding-Williams interprets *Dusk of Dawn* as defending a
genealogical concept of race. Taking Du Bois's subtitle as
indicative of his larger philosophical aims, he argues that Du
Bois's essay toward the autobiography of a race concept is a
mode of conceptual analysis that historicizes the concept of race. Due
to the affinity of Du Bois's philosophical strategy to Friedrich
Nietzsche's approach to the analysis of concepts,
Gooding-Williams describes that strategy as
"genealogical."



Nietzsche thought that making sense of the concept of punishment must
be a matter of unpacking the dense, synthesis of meanings (purposes,
functions) that, over time, have been willfully interpreted into and
forcibly imposed on specific procedures for inflicting harm
(Nietzsche, 1998, 50-54). More generally, he understood that
conceptual analysis can take the form of genealogy--that is, of
historical inquiry that separates the distinct meanings that have been
joined together and even conflated through episode after episode of
reinterpreting one and the same, more or less stable set of phenomena
(procedures, complexes of habits, feeling, ways of perceiving, and so
 forth).[23]
 In sum, Nietzsche held that historically formed concepts, like our
notion of punishment, "are like ropes held together by the
intertwining of strands, rather than by a single strand running
through the whole thing" (Clark, 1994, 22). To analyze such
concepts, he argued, "is not to find necessary and sufficient
conditions for their use but to disentangle the various strands that
have become so tightly woven together by the process of historical
development that they seem inseparable" (Clark, 1994, 22)



On Gooding-Williams's account, Du Bois 1) treats differences in
the color of men as the more or less stable set of phenomena
undergirding the concept of race, and 2) characterizes the concept of
race as an intricate web of manifold and often conflicting
interpretations of those differences formed over the course of his
lifetime. Autobiography, a narrative form of historical inquiry, is
the vehicle through which Du Bois genealogically analyzes that web of
interpretations, for to reconstruct the story of his life is, in his
view, to disentangle these interpretations, one from the other, in
order to show that and how they have been exemplified in his life
(Gooding-Williams, 2014,
 166-167).[24]



Thus, Du Bois worries that what he has called a "race
concept" is not, strictly speaking, a concept, for he sees that
it is not the sort of concept that can be defined by specifying a set
of non-contradictory and hence logically coherent conditions for its
proper application. Contradiction can inhabit the race concept,
because Du Bois, like Nietzsche, allows that historically formed
concepts may comprise discordant interpretations of the meaning of one
and the same set of phenomena. The race concept is
"illogical," but is not for that reason without the
efficacy characteristic of "forces," "facts,"
and "tendencies" (Du Bois, 1940, 67). Indeed, the efficacy
of the concept is such that, internal inconsistencies notwithstanding,
it has dominated Du Bois's life. Du Bois's exemplification
of the race concept is his subjection to it. Reminiscent, again, of
Nietzsche, he holds that historically formed concepts can function as
mechanisms of power and control (Gooding-Williams, 2014,
 167).[25]


##### 2.2.4.3 The Power, Moral Psychology, and Gratifications of Whiteness



According to Joel Olson (2004), Du Bois's understanding of
whiteness belongs to the political theory of race he begins to sketch
in *Black Reconstruction*. Specifically, Du Bois conceptualizes
whiteness as a privileged position of social standing that has 1)
afforded white workers a public and psychological wage compensating
them for their low economic wages; and 2) formed the basis of a
cross-class, political alliance uniting white workers and capitalists
against black workers (black slaves included). More generally, he
maintains that whiteness has historically functioned as a mechanism of
power for recruiting white workers to police and reinforce the
economic exploitation of black workers. On Olson's account, Du
Bois explains the "splendid failure" of Reconstruction and
the genesis of the American racial order through his analysis of the
cross-class political alliance of white workers and capitalists
(Olson, 16, 30).



In *Dusk of Dawn*, Du Bois further develops his understanding
of whiteness by interpreting racial oppression as, in Olson's
words, "a political problem of dark and white worlds arrayed
against each other, with the white world determined to subordinate the
dark one" (Olson, 22). Placing the conceptual opposition between
white and dark (or non-white) worlds at the center of his analysis, Du
Bois especially emphasizes the role whiteness plays in legitimizing
the "domination of white Europe over black Africa and yellow
Asia" (Du Bois, 1940, 48; see, also, Du Bois, 1940, 85-87;
and Olson 26, 155, fn.60).



According to Gooding-Williams (2021), "The Souls of White
Folk" can be read as Du Bois's central contribution to the
moral psychology of white supremacy; that is, as his account of the
affective, motivational, and cognitive dispositions that constitute
white supremacism as a morally vicious character
trait--including, e.g., the dispositions passionately to hate
black folk; to slander and murder black folk; and to believe that
white folk are inherently better than black
 folk.[26]
 In "The White World" chapter of *Dusk of Dawn,* Du
Bois complicates this earlier psychological portrait of the white
supremacist, stressing the deeply ingrained persistence of her or his
racist behavior. Du Bois argues, for example, that "the present
attitude and action of the white world...is a matter of
conditioned reflexes; of long followed habits, customs and folkways;
of subconscious trains of reasoning and unconscious nervous
reflexes" (Du Bois, 1940, 87). Productively building on Du
Bois's moral psychology, Shannon Sullivan (2006) and Terrance
Macmullen (2009) have recently brought Du Bois into conversation with
John Dewey to develop pragmatist, habit-centered accounts of the
workings of white privilege.



Considering Du Bois's middle-period (roughly 1920-1940) oeuvre
as a whole, Ella Myers has recently and persuasively argued that Du
Bois analyzes whiteness in multiple registers (material,
psychological, affective, libidinal and spiritual)--thus, not
exclusively in the political theoretical and moral psychological terms
that Olson, Gooding-Williams, Sullivan and McMulllen highlight. On
Myers account, we can fruitfully read Du Bois as arguing that
whiteness affords white citizens any number of
"gratifictions," including but not restricted to
racialized self-esteem, the pleasures derived from anti-black
violence, and a sense of entitlement lived as a sort of existential
faith (Myers 2022).


## 3. The Science of Human Action and Social Reform



In "A Program for a Sociological Society" (ca. 1897), an
early essay belonging to the same period as "The Study of the
Negro Problems" and "The Conservation of Races," Du
Bois places the emergence of the science of sociology in historical
perspective. Prior to the industrial revolution, he argues, there was
but one science that studied the phenomenon of human action: namely,
political economy. Political economy focused on the production,
distribution, and exchange of goods under stable social conditions,
but gave no attention to the intensification of problems of crime,
disease, poverty, prostitution, and ignorance that came with
"the new concentration of industrys [sic], crowded into centers
of population." Sociology addresses these problems, demanding a
"wider inquiry into the causes and scope of human action."
More generally, "[s]ociology is...the name given to that
vast field of inquiry into human action as manifested in modern
organized life."



But what is the point of sociological inquiry--that is, of a
sociological science of human action? Du Bois distinguishes between
the immediate and the mediate aims of scientific inquiry; that is,
between the aims of science itself and the uses of scientific results
by "merchants, physicians, men of letters, and
philanthropists"--indeed, by "all men" (Du Bois
1897, 89; see also Du Bois, ca.1897, 1-10). For Du Bois, the
immediate aim of science is knowledge; the mediate aims may vary, but
social reform is the mediate aim upon which Du Bois focuses throughout
his career (see Green and Driver, 312-313; Lewis, 1993,
225-26; Reed, 47; and, especially, Bright, 5-7). But how
can scientific knowledge advance social reform? Du Bois sketches at
least three distinct answers to this question, each of which
corresponds to a different conception of the object of social
scientific
 knowledge.[27]
 Knowledge of social laws and regularities can help the reformer to
settle on effective plans of action; knowledge of the scope and limits
of chance can help her to hedge her bets--that is, to guard
against the possibility that her plans of action will fail; finally,
knowledge of moral facts can help the reformer to caution her fellow
citizens against the disaster and sorrow that await them should they
persist in an immoral course of action.


### 3.1 Social Laws and Regularities



In an early statement (Du Bois, ca. 1897), Du Bois maintains that the
organization of modern society is a function of social laws and
regularities that sociology identifies through detailed, statistical
research that "generalizes[s]" a "mass of
facts," showing how various social phenomena, including, e.g.,
the "degree of poverty, the prevalence of suicide, [and] the
extent and kinds of crime," tend "to a certain rhythm and
regularity which we call the social group" (ca. 1897, 4).
Knowledge of these social rhythms, regularities and, sometimes, laws
(sociology studies "human action which by its regularity gives
evidence of the presence of laws") is the "first
step" in modern social reform (ca. 1897, 3, 8). Such knowledge
can contribute to social reform, Du Bois's examples suggest, for
it enables the reformer to explain causally the conditions she wishes
to transform and rationally to chart plans to alter those conditions:
e.g., the death rate of children in the slums, the treatment of
prisoners, and pauperism (ca. 1897,
 9-11).[28]
 Such knowledge, presumably, empowers Du Bois in his capacity as a
social reformer to explain the existence of the Negro problem and
rationally to identify means to eradicate the Negro problem (see 2.1
above and 4.1.1 below).


### 3.2 The Scope and Limits of Chance



In "Sociology Hesitant" (ca. 1905), perhaps his most
theoretically rich contribution to the philosophy of the human
sciences, Du Bois takes issue with Comte's and Spencer's
collectivist
 holism[29]--the
 thesis that society is a concrete whole (for Du Bois, a
"mystical whole") formed of discrete units--and he
again defends the view that society comprises the "deeds of
men," as well as the "law, rule, and rythm" [sic]
governing those deeds (ca. 1905, 274). For Du Bois, sociology is the
science of human action, not the science of society as such, or the
science of society as a whole.



Why, Du Bois asks, did Comte "hesitate so strangely"
before the prospect of treating human action as the proper object of
sociological inquiry? The answer, Du Bois claims, is the "Great
Assumption...that in the deeds of men there lies along with
rhythm and rule...something incalculable"--an
assumption in light of which the prospect of launching a science that
"would discover and formulate the exact laws of human
action...seemed to be and was preposterous" (ca. 1905,
274). Comte wavered before what Du Bois calls "Paradox:"
on one hand, "The evident rhythm of human action;" on the
other, "The evident incalculability of human action" (ca.
1905, 275). Where Comte wavers, however, Du Bois sallies forth,
writing "[w]hy not...flatly face the Paradox? frankly state
the Hypothesis of Law and the Assumption of Chance and seek to
determine by study and measurement the limits of each" (ca.
1905, 276).



Human conduct is subject to the "primary" rhythms of
physical law, as well as to the "secondary" rhythms of
social regularities; social regularities exhibit "nearly"
the same uniformity as physical law, and they are also "liable
to stoppage and change" (ca. 1905, 278). Aspiring to unite the
*Geisteswissenschaften* and the
*Naturwissenschaften*--"the science of man and
physical science"--Du Bois characterizes sociology as
"assuming the data of physics and studying within these that
realm where determinate force is acted on by human wills, by
indeterminate force" (ca. 1905, 277-278).



Physical laws and social regularities alike limit the scope of chance,
which is to say that they limit the scope of
"indeterminate" force, or "undetermined"
choice, or, as Du Bois likewise puts the point, of "free"
and "inexplicable" will (ca. 1905, 276-278). In
presupposing chance, sociology presupposes free will.
Sociology's attempt to measure chance and free will is its
attempt to measure the degree to which physical and social
regularities limit and constrain the range of choice and action that
is "undetermined by and independent of actions gone
before"(ca. 1905, 278).



Some forty years after Du Bois wrote "Sociology Hesitant,"
he appears to allude to the earlier, then unpublished essay; indeed,
he reflects at length on the argument of the essay, suggesting that it
marked the beginning of a shift in his "whole attitude towards
the social sciences" (1944, 56):



> 
> 
> Then, too, for what Law was I searching? In accord with what
> unchangeable scientific law was the world of interracial discord
> around me working? I fell back upon my Royce and James and deserted
> Schmoller and Weber. I saw the action of physical law in the actions
> of men; but I saw more than that: I saw rhythms and tendencies;
> coincidence and probabilities; and I saw that, which for want of
> another word, I must in accord with strict tenets of Science, call
> Chance. I went forward to build a sociology, which I conceived as the
> attempt to measure the element of Chance in human conduct. This was
> the Jamesian pragmatism, applied not simply to ethics, but to all
> human action, beyond what seemed to me, increasingly, the distinct
> limits of physical law.
> 
> 
> 
> My work assumed from now on a certain tingling challenge of risk; what
> the "Captain of Industry" of that day was experiencing in
> "kick," from money changing, railway consolidation and
> corporation floating, I was, in what appeared to me on a large scale,
> essaying in the relations of men of daily life (1944,
>  57-58).[30]
> 
> 
> 



Du Bois's references to Weber, Schmoller, Royce, James, and
Jamesian pragmatism tie his earlier critique of Comte to an engagement
with what James dubbed "the dilemma of determinism"
(James, 1884). Weber was methodologically agnostic with regard to the
dispute between metaphysical determinists and indeterminists, arguing
that neither position entailed consequences bearing on the research
practices of the historical and cultural sciences, and taking
Schmoller to task for his profession of faith in metaphysical
determinism (see Weber, 1905a, 197-196, 278; Ringer, 1997,
57-58, 91). Thus, Du Bois breaks with both his German teachers
in insisting that chance--again, incalculable actions (and
choices) undetermined by and independent of actions gone
before--exists in the world and in explicitly endorsing
"the assumption of chance" as a principle of sociological
 method.[31]
 Du Bois's contention that the individual is free to the extent
that her choices escape explanation in terms of physical and social
laws and regularities echoes Royce's argument that, because
"the individual as such is never the mere result of law,"
no causal explanation can "predetermine" what she
"uniquely wills" (Royce, 1899, 467-468). Du Bois
misleads, however, when he retrospectively suggests that the argument
of "Sociology Hesitant" aligned him with James.



To be sure, Du Bois's language and analysis *owe a debt*
to James's "The Dilemma of Determinism" (1884) and,
in particular, to James's conceptualization of the will's
independence (its ability to choose courses of action not fixed
"by parts of the universe already laid down" (1884, 150))
in terms of the concept of chance--a debt Du Bois acknowledges
when he describes his view as "Jamesian pragmatism." James
explains the ethical implications of his indeterminism when he takes
issue with Schopenhauer, "who enforces his determinism by the
argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is
possible under given circumstances" (1879, 13). Schopenhauer
forgets, James argues, that "in these critical ethical moments,
what consciously *seems* to be in question is the very
complexion of the character" (1879, 13). As a sociologist, Du
Bois's purports to have applied Jamesian pragmatism beyond the
sphere of ethics, to "all human action," but it is
precisely here that he breaks with James; for notwithstanding his
defense of indeterminism, James is skeptical of the possibility of
measuring the degree to which the will is free (James, 1890, 572). In
addition, James insists that the science of psychology must
methodologically reject the assumption of chance. Psychology
"abstracts from free-will without necessarily denying its
existence" (James, 1892,
 457).[32]



Du Bois was no less interested in determining (again, "by study
and measurement") the limits of law than he was in determining
the limits of chance. Law, he believed, marked the limit of chance,
and chance, he believed, marked the limit of law. Knowledge of social
laws and regularities can contribute to social reform by enabling the
social reformer causally to explain social problems and rationally to
chart plans to solve those problems. Knowledge of the element of
chance--or, more exactly, of the scope and limits of chance in
organized, modern social life--can contribute to social reform by
enabling the reformer to gauge the extent to which implementing his
ideas would entail experimenting with ("essaying") plans
of action that, due to the play of chance, carry a significant risk of
failure--plans that he could not confidently endorse, despite his
knowledge of the social laws and regularities shaping modern social
life. Just as knowledge of the scope and limits of chance could
provide the "Captain of Industry" who speculates in
currency and trades in floated, corporate stock a reason to modify his
investment decisions, so too could it provide the reformer a reason to
modify his plans of action and similarly to meet the "tingling
challenge of
 risk."[33]


### 3.3 Historical Inquiry and Moral Knowledge



In "The Propaganda of History," the final chapter of
*Black Reconstruction* (1935), Du Bois maintains that
"scientific" historiography--that is, historiography
that "set[s] down" the record of "human
action" with "accuracy and faithfulness of
detail"--can serve the ends of social reform; it can be
used, he writes, "as a measuring rod and guidepost for the
future of nations" (Du Bois, 1935, 584). Du Bois's
argument for this claim proceeds through a defense of four theses: 1)
that the study of history, so far as it belongs to the science of
human action, cannot model itself exclusively on the natural sciences;
2) that accuracy in chronicling and explaining human action requires
that the historian rely on the method of interpretive
understanding--what Max Weber called *Verstehen*; 3) that,
contra Weber, accurate, empirically sound historiography reports moral
knowledge; and 4) that the knowledge of morality and moral
responsibility yielded by the scientific study of human history (by
accurate historiography) can contribute to social reform, for the
philosopher and the prophet can use that knowledge to guide mankind in
the solution of social problems (1935, 591).



Du Bois criticizes histories that discuss slavery with moral
"impartially," depicting America as helpless and the south
as blameless, while explaining the difference in development, North
and South, as "a sort of working out of cosmic social and
economic law" (1935, 585). An example of this sort of history is
Charles and Mary Beard's *The Rise of American
Civilization*, which treats the clash between north and south as
if it were a clash between winds and waters. In the Beard's
"sweeping mechanistic interpretation" of history, Du Bois
writes, "there is no room for the real plot of the story, for
the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working
class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy; for the
triumph of sheer moral courage and sacrifice in the abolition crusade;
and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their
fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy. Can all this
be omitted and half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself
scientific?" (1935, 585).



At issue here, again, as in "The Conservation of Races"
and "Sociology Hesitant," is the relation between the
human sciences and the natural sciences*.* For the Du Bois of
*Black Reconstruction*, historians who model their inquiry
exclusively on the natural sciences (historians like the Beards) seek
to identify the causal uniformities ("cosmic" laws)
governing human events, which events they conceptualize by analogy to
the behavior of the winds, waters and other forces of nature. The
problem here, Du Bois believes, is not with the effort to identify the
causal uniformities governing human events. Rather it is with the
tendency in that effort to neglect the human meaning of human events,
and thus to treat those events as inhuman, natural forces that lend
themselves to a purely "mechanistic" explanation--by
which Du Bois means explanation in terms that make no reference to the
meanings that the human subjects who participate in those events
attach to them.



If history is to be a science of human action and not to pretend to be
a science of nature, then, Du Bois believes, it must take account of
the subjective meanings of actions and events. Du Bois implies that
the historian cannot truly tell the story of "the mightiest
effort of the mightiest century" (the struggle of enslaved
blacks to achieve democracy) without taking account of the
"psychology" of the agents whose actions sustained that
effort--for to take psychology into account is to take subjective
meaning into account (1935, 586). More generally, Du Bois insists that
the historian of slavery ask: "Just what did [slavery] mean to
the owner and the owned"(1935, 585).



To understand slavery, knowing what it meant to the owned is no less
important than knowing what it meant to the owners. In demanding that
the historian of slavery attend to the slaves' stories about
slavery in order to know what slavery meant to the slaves, Du Bois
presupposes the fundamental, methodological tenet that the
historian's primary charge is what Max Weber called
*Verstehen,* or "interpretive understanding,"
*not* mechanical explanation. According to Weber, the sciences
of human action, including history and sociology, "speak of
'action' insofar as the acting individual attaches
subjective meaning to his behavior--be it overt or covert"
(1922, 38, 41). One of the aims of *Verstehen*, he argues, is
rationally to make sense of the motivation prompting an action by
placing that action "in an intelligible and more inclusive
context of meaning"--as when, for example, we interpret a
woodchopper's chopping of wood as an act undertaken to secure a
wage; or, alternatively, to provide a supply of firewood for the
woodchopper's use (1922, 42).



Du Bois stresses the importance of interpretive understanding because
he is committed to the view that moral judgment is a critical
component of historiography. Thus, while Du Bois methodologically
aligns himself with Weber in stressing the importance of interpretive
understanding to the scientific study of history, he methodologically
rejects Weber's claim that "concern on the part of history
to judge of historical actions as responsible before the conscience of
history...would suspend its character as empirical science"
(Weber, 1905b,
 123).[34]



Unlike Weber, Du Bois is a moral realist who believes that historical
inquiry can afford us knowledge of moral facts--knowledge, that
is, of the proper distribution of moral responsibility and of the
extent to which actions are right or wrong. But to obtain that
knowledge, historians must understand human action in terms of
subjective meanings, for they require some such understanding of human
action to render intelligible their application of the vocabulary of
moral evaluation--for Du Bois, a vocabulary that includes the
language of "guilt," of "moral courage and
sacrifice," and of "the degraded black millions." Du
Bois argues that a necessary condition of the possibility of acquiring
knowledge of moral facts through the historian's practice of the
science of human action is a *Verstehen*-centered approach to
that practice--or, more exactly, an approach that explains human
actions in terms of subjects' motives. Du Bois sketches a
similar line of argument, five years later, in *Dusk of Dawn*
(1940, 70).



For Du Bois, the function of the historian, "posing" as a
scientist of human action, is "to make clear the facts...to
know, as far as possible...the things that actually happened in
the world" without regard to her personal desires and wishes
(1935, 591). But the function of the philosopher and the prophet, he
argues, is "to interpret these facts" --that is, to
consider them in the perspective of our desire to guide mankind to
undertake the social reforms needed to address social problems (1935,
591).



A prophet, a Jeremiah, for example, might well adduce facts of moral
wrongdoing and guilt to alert his fellow citizens that their actions
risk God's wrath. And a philosopher, a philosopher of history,
for example, might adduce those facts in order to instruct them as to
the meaning, writ large, of the plot that the historian has
chronicled--precisely as Du Bois instructs his fellow citizens
that the story of slavery and reconstruction he has chronicled (in his
capacity as an historian) exhibits "the clear mistake and
guilt" that characterizes the "plot" of Aristotelian
tragedy (1935, 585, 595). In both cases, the point would be the same:
namely, to use moral knowledge to warn one's fellow citizens of
the fateful consequences (God's wrath, tragedy) that await them
lest they refuse to heed the lessons of the past and
change--reform--their ways.


## 4. Political Philosophy



Du Bois's political philosophy belongs to the Afro-modern
tradition of political thought, an impressively rich body of non-ideal
political theory that is bound together by certain thematic
preoccupations--e.g., the political and social organization of
white supremacy, the nature and effects of racial ideology, and the
possibilities of black emancipation-- and that includes the
writings of Ottabah Cugoano, David Walker, Edward Blyden, Martin
Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Alexander Crummell (Gooding-Williams,
2009). Du Bois's most famous book, *The Souls of Black
Folk* (1903a), is his earliest contribution to that tradition. Du
Bois's subsequent contributions to political philosophy and
political theory appear in several different places and have been
variously taken up by contemporary
 scholars.[35]


### 4.1 Early Du Bois: The Period of *The Souls of Black Folk*



*Souls* is Du Bois's still influential answer to the
question, "What kind of politics should African Americans
conduct to counter white supremacy?" Historically rooted in the
segregationist era of Jim Crow, *Souls* authority has reached
well beyond its origins, so much so that its compelling ideas and
arguments continue to be taken up by contemporary theorists of black
politics.


#### 4.1.1 Uplift and Political Expressivism



In *Souls*, Du Bois contends that a politics fit to respond to
the American, Jim Crow version of racial apartheid must satisfy two
conditions. The first relates to Du Bois's description of
African Americans as "masses:" to wit, to his
characterization of African Americans as an aggregate of uncultured,
pre-modern slaves or former slaves. The second relates to his
description of African Americans as a "folk:" that is, to
his characterization of African Americans as a group united by a
collectively shared ethos, or spirit.



For Du Bois, a politics suitable to counter Jim Crow had to uplift the
black masses--to assimilate them to the constitutive norms of
modernity--and to heed the ethos of the black folk. In short, it
had to be a politics that embraced and promoted the core values of
modern life while expressing the spiritual identity of the folk. Du
Bois envisions black elites--the so-called "talented
tenth" (1903b)--as deploying a politics of expressive
modernization to uplift the black masses. Elite control of black
politics can be authoritative and effective, he argues, only if it
expresses a collective spirit that unites black people.



The young Du Bois's political philosophy rests on the social
philosophy he outlines in "The Conservation of Races" and
"The Study of Negro Problems." In arguing that talented
tenth elites could enjoy political legitimacy and efficacy only if
their actions expressed a distinctive message that spiritually
distinguished the Negro from other spiritually distinct races and that
united all African Americans, he presupposes his earlier answer to the
question, "What is a Negro?" In arguing that talented
tenth elites needed to attack racial prejudice and cultural
backwardness alike in order to uplift and modernize the black masses,
he presupposes his earlier, causal analysis of Negro problems
(Gooding-Williams, 2009, chapter 1).


#### 4.1.2 The Du Bois-Washington Debate



Du Bois's extended critique of Booker T. Washington's
political thought (see *Souls*, chapter 3) likewise presupposes
his earlier, causal analysis of Negro problems. Du Bois's
argument immediately drew attention, for when Du Bois published
*Souls* Washington had securely established himself "as
an educational statesman, the primary spokesman of black America, and
the leader of a large network of disciples--the 'Tuskegee
Machine'--who edited newspapers, owned businesses, and
directed schools modeled on Tuskegee"(Blight and
Gooding-Williams, 1997, 16).



Washington held that if blacks endeavored to help themselves--to
discipline their bodies, to cultivate entrepreneurial virtues (e.g.
thrift, spirit of industry, and economy), and to acquire the knowledge
of a trade--they would thrive in the capitalist market and, due
to their business success, bring an end to Jim Crow and win the
franchise. In short, he believed that black self-help efforts were
sufficient to engender business success, and that business success was
sufficient to persuade whites to extend to blacks the civil and
political rights they required for incorporation into the mainstream
of American society (Washington,
 1901).[36]



Contra Washington, Du Bois argued that self-help efforts, while
necessary for black social progress, were not sufficient. Assuming
that both racial prejudice and cultural backwardness cause Negro
problems, Du Bois claims that a self-help politics that attends to the
backwardness of the Negro group itself without attacking racial
prejudice is doomed to fail. Washington had argued that there was no
need to attack prejudice for the present, because self-help efforts
that contended with entrepreneurial-economic backwardness (for Du
Bois, a form of cultural backwardness) would suffice to defeat it. Du
Bois rejects this argument on the grounds that the persistent,
prejudice-sustained denial of rights to blacks undermines their
self-help efforts and prospects for business success.
Washington's program amounts to a partial, one-sided attack on
the Negro problems. In Du Bois's view, black uplift and social
progress required that black political elites attack both prongs of
the Negro problem--racial prejudice no less than backwardness. It
also required institutions of higher learning to train these elites.
Thus, Du Bois takes Washington to task for promoting an educational
philosophy that emphasized vocational education at the expense of
higher, liberal arts education (Du Bois, 1903a, chapter 3).


#### 4.1.3 Political Leadership and Double-Consciousness



In *Souls*, Du Bois sketches a biographical portrait of his
mentor, Alexander Crummell, and a fictional portrait of a tragic hero,
John Jones, to show how double-consciousness can compromise black
elite political
 leadership.[37]
 Specifically, Du Bois represents double-consciousness as a form of
alienation that estranges black elites from their followers, thereby
eroding their ability to promote ends expressing the collectively
shared spirit of the black folk and undermining their legitimacy and
efficacy as leaders (Du Bois, 1903a, chapters 1, 12-13;
Gooding-Williams, 2009, chapter 3).


#### 4.1.4 The Post-Jim Crow Inheritance of the Early Du Bois



The early Du Bois's defense of a black elite-led politics of
expressive modernization has exerted considerable influence on
post-Jim Crow political philosophical appraisals of black American
politics. Indeed, it is all but impossible to grasp the point of those
appraisals without taking account of their engagements, both explicit
and implicit, with key elements of Du Bois's early political
thought. For extended discussion of the issues central to the post-Jim
Crow inheritance of Du Bois's early political thought, see,
especially, Reed, 1999 and Gooding-Williams, 2009, chapter 6.


### 4.2 Du Bois's Political Thought After *The Souls of Black Folk*



As Lawrie Balfour has argued, Du Bois wrote "prolifically"
on a broad array of topics, so that his writings can usefully be read
as an extended series of essayistic, experimental efforts to address
the various issues that engaged him (2011, 17-18). The reception
of Du Bois by contemporary political theorists attests to the
extraordinary, topical scope of his political thought, especially as
it evolved after the publication of *Souls.*


#### 4.2.1 Du Bois's Elitism



In several post-*Souls* writings, Du Bois returns to the theme
of black political leadership. In *Dusk of Dawn,* for example,
he reaffirms his belief that "the Talented Tenth" should
determine "the present field and demand for racial action and
the method by which the masses may be guided along this line"
(1940, 159). And several years later, after critically reflecting on
his earlier thinking about group leadership, he proposes a "new
idea for a Talented Tenth" (1948, 168). Whether or not Du Bois
ultimately rejected his earlier conception of elite black leadership
(Du Bois, 1903b) is an issue of scholarly dispute. Joy James holds
that Du Bois eventually repudiates the idea of a black intelligentsia
vanguard (James, 1997). Cornel West contends that Du Bois's
later revisions of his concept of the talented tenth were
"piecemeal" (West, 1996, 71). Adolph Reed, by way of a
meticulous reading of Du Bois's later writings and speeches,
argues that Du Bois advanced an elite-centered notion of black
politics throughout his intellectual and activist career (Reed, 1997).
Tommie Shelby and Paul Taylor provide especially nuanced
reconstructions of Du Bois's evolving understanding of black
political leadership (Shelby, 2007, chapter 2; Taylor, 2010,
907-910.). More recently, Arash Davari has thoughtfully taken
issue with both Reed and Gooding-Williams, arguing that, already in
*Souls* and *The Philadelphia Negro* (1899), Du Bois
establishes the basis for non-elitist conception of democratic
political leadership (Davari, 2018).


#### 4.2.2 Marx, Du Bois, and Black Radicalism



An important and still underappreciated strand of Du Bois's
post-*Souls* political thought is his engagement with Marxist
social and political theory. The key text here is *Black
Reconstruction* (1935), Du Bois's monumental critique of the
Dunning School's interpretation of
 Reconstruction.[38]
 Like Joel Olson (2004; see 2.2.4.3 above), Cedric Robinson (1983) and
Anthony Bogues (2003) have argued that *Black Reconstruction*
should be read as historical and political theory, not simply as
revisionist historiography. On Robinson's reading, Du Bois
developed "a theory of history, which by its emphasis on mass
action was both a critique of the ideologies of American socialist
movements and a revision of Marx's theory of revolution and
class struggle" (Robinson, 277). Bogues agrees that Du Bois
breaks with Marx and Marxist orthodoxy, and adds that, like other
black radical theorists, Du Bois reorients the radical critique of
modernity away from "issues of political obligation, sovereign
self and citizenship...to questions of domination, oppression,
and politics as a practice of freedom" (Bogues, 93). Building on
Du Bois and on Robinson's engagement with Du Bois, the
historian, Walter Johnson (2016) has argued that the history of
slavery and racial capitalism provides a standpoint from which
"to rethink our idea of justice" (Johnson, 29). Although
he gives scant attention to *Black Reconstruction* in
partiular, Charles Mills has made a strong case for categorizing Du
Bois as a "black radical liberal," where black radical
liberalism "is a liberalism informed by the realities of
*racial capitalism* and self-consciously oriented accordingly
by the need to rethink white liberal theory in the light"
(Mills, 2018, 32).



The most illuminating recent discussions of *Black
Reconstruction'*s theoretical engagement with the Marxist
tradition focus on particular chapters of Du Bois's *magnum
opus*, including Gayatri Spivak's consideration of Du
Bois's idea of the general strike in connection to "the
European phenomenon of the general strike and its use by
Marxism" (Spivak, 2014, pp.9, 13; Du Bois, 1935, chapter 4);
Allison Power's argument that Du Bois adapts Marx's
notions of transsubstantiation and commodity fetishism to analyze the
tragedy of the life of Andrew Johnson as well as regressive
interpretations of the American Constitution as embodying eternal,
immutable law (Powers, 2014; Du Bois, 1935, chapters 8 and 9); and,
finally, Andrew Douglas's proposal that Du Bois develops a
*political* theory of racial capitalism that prioritizes
politics over both economics and ethics (Douglas, 2019; Du Bois, 1935,
chapters 7 and 14).


#### 4.2.3 Feminist Theory and Du Bois



Feminist theorists' appraisals of Du Bois's political
thought have been mixed, ranging from criticisms of his masculinist
failure to regard black women as intellectuals and race leaders (e.g.
Carby, 1998 and James, 1997) to praise for his advocacy of
women's equality and his contributions to our understanding of
the oppression of black women (e.g., James, 1997 and Griffin,
2000).



Feminist theorists' commentary on Du Bois's political
thought has tended to concentrate on chapter 7 of *Darkwater*
(1920), "The Damnation of Women." Women are damned, Du
Bois proposes, for "only at the sacrifice of intelligence and
the chance to do their best work can the majority of women bear
children" (1920, 78-79). While Farah Griffin interprets
"Damnation" in the perspective of a still persistent
"politics of protection" that threatens the autonomy of
black women, arguing that Du Bois recognized the limits of that
politics (2000, 34-36), Lawrie Balfour reads the essay as
contributing to a "feminist theory of citizenship" (2011,
99-100). Taking issue with Balfour, Shatema Threadcraft argues
that "Damnation" reprises and elaborates
*Souls*' masculinist treatment of manliness as an
appropriate norm of citizenship (2017, 92-94). Considering Du
Bois' depiction of black women in *The Philadelphia
Negro*, as well as in "The Damnation of Women,"
Saidiya Hartman relies on free indirect discourse and critical
fabulation to put into question the validity of the objectifying
sociological perspective from which Du Bois characterizes young black
women's lives (Hartman, 2019).



Considering Du Bois in light of black feminist and more general forms
of contemporary intersectionality theory (which considers
intersections between race, gender *and* class), Ange-Marie
Hancock examines *Souls*, *Darkwater*, and *Dusk of
Dawn* to identify insights in Du Bois's thinking that link
"his political theory with that of today's
intersectionality theorists" (2005, 82). It would be
anachronistic to describe Du Bois as an intersectionality theorist,
Hancock admits, but she still claims that Du Bois anticipates recent
intersectionality theory in arguing "that more than one category
of difference should be attacked simultaneously, and, more
importantly, that the structures of society operate such that these
categories mutually reinforce social stratification for its least
empowered inhabitants" (2005, 79). 


#### 4.2.4 Democratic Theory and Du Bois



How did Du Bois conceptualize democracy?



Du Bois mentions democracy just once in *Souls*, where he
states that the "soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern
society" is "[h]onest and earnest criticism from those
whose interests are most nearly touched,--criticism of writers by
readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those
led" (1903a, 23). Du Bois defines democracy in terms of
criticism when he attacks Booker T. Washington for "hushing
criticism" (1903a, 23). In exploring the implications of Du
Bois's statement for the picture of black politics he defends in
*Souls*, Gooding-Williams raises a question as to whether elite
leadership of backwards, black masses not competent to criticize their
leaders could both satisfy Du Bois's definition of democracy and
successfully promote an uplift agenda (Gooding-Williams, 2009,
chapters 1 and 4.) More recently, Nick Bromell has persuasively argued
that, throughout his career, Du Bois relies on the idea of
"honest and earnest criticism" as a "model of
democratic reasoning," especially in addressing "an
imagined polity of blacks and whites" with the aim, Brommell
argues, of reimagining and reconstructing American democracy (Bromell,
2018, 160, 168).



Du Bois's most thoroughgoing and sustained contributions to
democratic theory can be found in "The African Roots of
War" (1915), "Of The Ruling of Men" (chapter 6 of
Darkwater), and *Black Reconstruction.* 



In "The African Roots of War," Du Bois advances a theory
of "democratic despotism," which he presents as the
solution to a philosophical paradox. "Most philosophers,"
he writes, "see the ship of state launched on the broad,
irresistible tide of democracy, with only delaying eddies here and
there." "Others," however, "looking closer,
are more disturbed. Are we, they ask, reverting to aristocracy and
despotism - the rule of might?" The paradox is not simply
conceptual, but readily observable in the world, for it has
"reconciled the Imperialists and captains of industry to any
amount of 'Democracy'," while allowing "in
America the most rapid advance of democracy to go hand in
hand...with increased aristocracy and hatred toward darker
races." Du Bois's solution is straightforward: "The
paradox is easily explained," he writes, "the white
workingman has been asked to share the spoil of exploiting
'chinks and niggers.'" For Du Bois, the paradox of
modern democracy is explained by the circumstance that democratic
progress within Europe and America for white laborers has entailed the
despotic exploitation in America and elsewhere of "chinks'
and 'niggers'" (Du Bois, 1915, pp.....)



Du Bois's theory of democratic despotism is a theory of
democracy as it *actually exists* in Europe and the United
States--more exactly, of western democracies's entanglement with
empire. Scholars of Du Bois's "international
thought" have given particular attention to his theory of
democratic despotism, arguing that it marks an important shift in his
thinking. According to Ines Valdez, for example, the theory of
democratic despotism completes Du Bois's move away from a
"civilizationist" and "developmentalist"
understanding of the international order, thus initiating his
articulation of a "transnational cosmopolitanism" that
revises Kantian as well as recent neo-Kantian accounts of cosmopoitan
hospitality. (Valdez, 2019, chapter 3). According to Adom Getchew and
Jennifer Pitts, Du Bois's theory transforms his account of the
global color line making clear that western imperialism was a
"colaborative and shared Euro-American enterprise" and
that practices of subordinated inclusion, as well as racialized
exclusion, helped to secure the stability of empire (Getachew and
Pitts, 2022, xx-xxxi).



In "Of the Ruling of Men", Du Bois defends the *ideal*of universal suffrage. In addition, he engages familiar,
Tocquevillian worries about the tyranny of the majority; envisions
democratic decision making in deliberative democratic terms; and
defends not only a broadly inclusive form of political democracy, but
the idea that modern industry should be subject to democratic decision
making--in essence, the idea of democratic socialism. Du
Bois's argument for inclusiveness, for extending the right of
democratic participation to women and blacks, for example, is
essentially *epistemic*: "only the sufferer knows his
suffering and...no state can be strong which excludes from its
expressed wisdom the knowledge possessed by mothers, wives, and
daughters...The same arguments apply to other excluded
groups" (1920, 69; for detailed discussion of Du Bois's
epistemic defense of democracy, see, also, Bright, 2017, 14-15,
Darby, 2020, and Gooding-Williams, 2023). For a consideration of Du
Bois's essay in the perspective of Classical political thought,
see Fertik (2019).



In *Black Reconstruction*, no less than in "Of the Ruling
of Men," Du Bois characterizes democracy in economic as well as
political terms; that is, as the legitimate transfer of political and
economic power from the ruling classes to the working masses. Cornel
West interprets *Black Reconstruction* as promoting a Deweyan
notion of creative democracy (West, 1988). Gooding-Williams (1991)
disputes that interpretation, arguing that it obscures the
connotations of class struggle that attach to Du Bois's account
of black workers' efforts to reconstruct democracy. In *Color
and Democracy* (1946), which Du Bois published just a little more
than a decade after *Black Reconstruction*, he writes that
"[m]ore important than political democracy is industrial
democracy; that is, the voice which the actual worker, whether his
work be manual or mental, has in the organization and conduct of
industry" (1946,
 300).[39]



For the purposes of democratic theory, *Black
Reconstruction*'s most important idea is the idea of
abolition democracy. For Du Bois, 'abolition democracy'
names both a political movement and the ideal that the movement failed
to realize. Du Bois argues that realizing the ideal of abolition
democracy required more than the satisfaction of the moral demand to
emancipate the slaves, but, in Angela Davis's words, the
establishment of "new institutions"--specifically,
institutions that provided the former slaves with the the economic,
political, and educations means that were needed fully to
"incorporate black people into the social order." Drawing
on Hegel's concept of objective spirit, especially as he
develops it in *The Philosophy of Right*, Elvira Basevich
similarly argues that Du Bois saw the freedman and their allies as
advancing a conception of democracy that called for the transformation
of American *Sittlichkeit* (Ethical Life) through the
"reconstitution of the black family, civil society, and the
federal state" (see Du Bois, 98, 151, 169; Davis, 2005,
95-96; and Basevich, 2021, chapter 5).



The ongoing importance of Du Bois's contributions to democratic
theory has been well established by the recent work of Lawrie Balfour
and Tommie Shelby.



In her essays on *Darkwater, Dusk of Dawn,* and other writings,
for example, Balfour subtly brings Du Bois's political thought
into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorists.
To reorient democratic theory in dark times, Balfour argues, we would
do well to think politically with Du Bois. To that end, she examines
the political-theoretical ramifications of Du Bois's literary
choices; his use of history to highlight the implication of
America's slave past in its post-Civil Rights present; his
depiction of African American lives as exemplary representatives of
democratic possibility; and his globally expansive political
imagination, which, Balfour argues, reveals the racial politics of
recent defenses of cosmopolitanism and civic nationalism (Balfour,
2010,
 2011).[40]



In Shelby's view, Du Bois took African-Americans to be the
bearers of a world-historical mission to perfect the ideals of
American democracy. Du Bois endorsed black political solidarity,
Shelby argues, as a temporary and, possibly, long-term strategy for
establishing a multiracial, culturally pluralist American polity that
embodied those ideals. Shelby follows Du Bois in maintaining that
black political solidarity in the pursuit of a racial justice that is
consonant with American democratic and liberal ideals requires a
motivational foundation that unites self-interest, moral principle,
and racial identification (Shelby, 2007, 6-7, 67, 87).


#### 4.2.5 Freud, Du Bois, and the Long Siege



In chapter 1 of *Dusk of Dawn*, Du Bois describes his thought
regarding the causes of the oppression of the darker races as evolving
through three stages--roughly, from thinking that racial
oppression was caused by ignorance; to thinking that it was caused by
ignorance *and* ill-will; to thinking that it was caused by
ignorance *and* ill-will *and* a conjunction of economic
motives and unconscious, irrational acts and reactions. Corresponding
to each stage, Du Bois tells us, was an increasingly complex account
of the political strategies the darker races require to upend racial
oppression. Where ignorance is the problem, science and education is
needed to fight racial injustice; where ill-will is the issue, the
black world must fight for its freedom, relying on truth, boycott,
propaganda and mob frenzy as instruments of sudden and immediate
assault. Where, finally, economic interest and/or unconscious,
irrational motive sustain racial oppression, "not sudden assault
but long siege was indicated; careful planning and subtle campaign
with the education of growing generations and propaganda" (1940,
2-3).



Prior to 1940, some consideration of each of these causes of
oppression and related strategies of resistance is evident in Du
Bois's writings. Still, *Dusk of Dawn* is remarkable for
the prominence it gives to the role of unconscious and irrational
psychological forces in accounting for the existence and perpetuation
of racial oppression. Du Bois attributes this new emphasis to the
"new psychology" of the "Freudian era." His
"study of psychology under William James" had prepared him
for the Freudian turn, he remarks, and its "meaning and
implications...had begun slowly to penetrate his thought"
(1940, 148).



Contemporary political theorists have, for the most part, tended to
ignore Du Bois's Freud-inspired account of racial oppression. An
exception is Shannon Sullivan, for whom Du Bois suggests "a
powerful psychoanalytic-pragmatist model for surveying the unconscious
operations of white domination" (Sullivan, 2006, 23). A second
exception is Ella Myers, who has begun to build on Du Bois's
arguments to reflect on the visceral and affective registers of
antiblack racism (Myers,
 2017).[41]
 Robert Gooding-Williams (2011) has adapted Du Bois's idea of a
"long siege" against racial oppression--against what
Du Bois also calls "the strongholds of color
caste"--to a critical analysis of some recent discussions
of racial politics (1940, 148).


## 5. Philosophy of Art



Paul Taylor has persuasively sketched a general framework for
understanding Du Bois's philosophy of art. According to Taylor,
Du Bois endorses an expressivist picture of the world, the key to
which "is a determination to think of things as determinate but
provisional expressions of an evolving world." On this view,
"the world unfolds into new forms the way a seed unfolds into a
tree...by clarifying, over time, what was inchoate and implicit:
by actualizing in history what formerly existed only *in
potentia*." Considered in the perspective of Marx's
and Dewey's revisions of Hegel's expressivism,
Taylor's Du Bois envisions ethical life as a
work-in-progress--that is, as an ongoing project of holistic
self-cultivation, of individuals artistically forming themselves by
creatively responding to the histories, languages, and economic
structures that constrain them (Taylor, 2016, 91-93).


### 5.1 High Art and Low Art



Du Bois's articulation of his commitment to the ideal of
holistic self-cultivation is perhaps most explicit when, in amplifying
his criticism of Booker T. Washington, he defends the importance of
liberal arts education (Gooding-Williams, 2009, 133-139).
Explicitly echoing Matthew Arnold, Du Bois advocated liberal arts
education as a means to self-cultivation or, as he sometimes writes,
self-development, through "getting to know...the best that
has been said and thought in the world" (Arnold, 1869, 5).
Self-development through the acquisition of culture is the purpose of
the education elites require to uplift the masses. The Negro college,
Du Bois writes, "must develop men...Above our modern
socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist that
higher individualism which centres of culture protect; there must come
a loftier respect for the sovereign human souls that seeks to know
itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and
self-development" (1903a, 52).



For the Du Bois of *Souls*, the art that sovereign souls
appreciate is high art--or, in other words, art that shares with
the sovereign souls that appreciate it the property of holistic
self-development. In "The Sorrow Songs," the final chapter
of *Souls*, Du Bois represents the group spirit that unites
black Americans as clarifying its distinctive message through the
medium of the folk song. Considered in historical perspective, the
musically embodied spirit of the black folk, as it actualizes itself
through time, in folk song after folk song, acquires a spiritually
comprehensive breadth that overcomes racial prejudice and
provincialism. To these songs, which manifest a developing folk spirit
and that constitute an evolving tradition of black musical art, Du
Bois contrasts a "mass" of spiritually inert minstrel
songs, gospel hymns and coon songs (1903a, 124). In essence, he argues
that, no less than Wagner's operas, which he admired, the
spiritually-inspired black folk song belongs to the canon of high art
from which the low arts of the minstrel song and the like are
excluded.



On this view, Du Bois's early political expressivism is of a
piece with his broadly expressivist philosophy of art, for it asserts
that, to be legitimate and effective, black political leaders must
take their bearing not from the uninspired mass of popular song that
the masses might enjoy, but from the spirit and spiritual message
embodied in the black folk song (Gooding-Williams, 2009,
139-147).


### 5.2 Art, Beauty, and Propaganda



Du Bois's essay, "Criteria of Negro Art" (1925), is
his most important contribution to the philosophy of art. The essay is
Du Bois's clearest statement of his disagreement with the
philosopher and Dean of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke, about the
relation between art and propaganda. Against Locke's view that
genius and talent "must choose art and put aside
propaganda," Du Bois held "that all art is propaganda and
ever must be" (Locke, 1928, par. 1; Du Bois, 1926, par. 29). At
issue in Du Bois's "great debate" with Locke is the
role of the arts "in creating respect for a people suffering
from humiliation and self-loathing" (Harris, 15).



Du Bois claims that artists rely on beauty to communicate truth and
goodness (in all its aspects of justice, honor, and right)--in
the first case to promote universal understanding, and in the second
to gain sympathy and human interest. The "apostle of
Beauty," he writes, "thus becomes the apostle of truth and
right not by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is, but
his freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice" (par. 28).



Considering these claims in the perspective of Du Bois's
expressivism, Taylor plausibly interprets Du Bois as arguing that,
because artists "are dialectically enmeshed in wider webs of
meaning concerning the true and the just, and must create themselves
as individuals by working out their orientation to these
networks," all art is propaganda. On this account, no work of
art can reasonably claim to derive its content from "a distinct
and inviolate domain of aesthetic value," for all art derives
its content from a public domain of ethico-political value to which
the artist must creatively respond. The artist is at once outwardly
and inwardly compelled by the webs of meaning that encumber her, for
while these webs of meaning impose themselves from
"without," the artist suffers them as parameters
constituting her "within" as a subject. The freedom that
the apostle of truth and right can claim in relation to these
parameters is akin to self-legislation--it is the freedom she
enjoys in creatively responding to them, in working out her
relationship to them and, in effect, making them her own (Taylor,
2016, 96-99).



By exercising her freedom, finally, by creating beautiful works of art
that promote the ends of sympathy and universal understanding, the
artist may undertake to widen the ethical and cognitive horizons of
her intended addressees, and thus to expand their capacity for
judgment. In writing a book like *Souls*, for example, Du Bois
undertook to widen his white counterparts' capacities to
sympathize with and evaluate the suffering in the souls of black
Americans (Rogers, 2012, 193-198).



What is the nature of beauty such that it can achieve these ends
through the communication of truth and goodness? Du Bois never states
a clear answer to this
 question.[42]
 But he offers clues to an answer in "Of Beauty and
Death," chapter 9 of *Darkwater.* In that essay, his most
sustained reflection on the nature of beauty, Du Bois contrasts beauty
to "ugliness and hate and ill...with all their
contradiction and illogic;" beauty, he writes, "is
fulfillment. It satisfies. It is always new and strange. It is the
reasonable thing" (1920, 120). Perhaps Du Bois's point is
an expressivist one: that beauty satisfies by clarifying our ideas of
truth (at once consistent and reasonable) and goodness (the opposite
of hate and ill); that is, by embodying those ideas in novel and
unsettling works of art (for further reflection on Du Bois's
aesthetics, see Valdez, 2019, chapter 3 and Gooding-Williams, 2021 and
2023).


## 6. Intellectual History, History of Philosophy, and Du Bois



We conclude this entry by noting that an ongoing feature of scholarly
debate about Du Bois is sometimes contentious disagreement as to his
proper place in intellectual history and/or the history of philosophy.
A brief survey of the variety of interpretive orientations that
usefully have been brought to bear in appraising Du Bois as a
philosopher, or as a thinker, suggests that, in studying his writings,
we might do well to heed Nietzsche's suggestion that the
multiplication of perspectives can often enhance our knowledge of the
subject matter under consideration (Nietzsche, 1887, 85).



The relevant categories tend to be geographic, racial, thematic, or
some combination of the three. Du Bois's philosophical books and
essays have been read as contributions to American thought (Zamir,
1995) and to American political thought (Reed, 1997). More narrowly
*and* more broadly, they have been read as statements of
Afro-American exceptionalist thought (West, 1982); as key constituents
of the black nationalist tradition (Moses, 1978); as important
additions to the black natural law tradition (Lloyd, 2016); as a part
of the history of African American prophetic political critique
(Marshall, 2011); and as critical contributions to Africana and
Afro-Modern thought (Gordon, 2008; Gooding-Williams, 2009). Intending
to correct the tendency evident in these works to position Du Bois as
an American, black American, Africana, and/or Afro-modern thinker,
Appiah (2014) has highlighted the late 19th century, German
intellectual milieu that shaped Du Bois's thinking. Contra
Appiah, Tommy Curry (2014) has argued that we lose sight of the
philosophical substance of Du Bois's thought if, like Appiah, we
scant the influence of other African American writers on his
thinking.



Among critics wishing to situate Du Bois within a well-defined,
western philosophical tradition, the main tendencies have been to
characterize Du Bois either as a pragmatist (see West, 1989, Taylor,
2004b, and Kahn, 2009) or as an Hegelian of sorts. Much of the
literature following this second line of interpretation has considered
Du Bois's writings, and especially *Souls*, in the
perspective of Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* (see,
e.g., Gooding-Williams, 1987 and 1991; Zamir, 1995; and, most
recently, Shaw, 2013). In this connection, Paul Taylor (2004b) has
persuasively argued that we need not choose between an Hegelian Du
Bois and a pragmatist Du Bois. More recently, Nahum Chandler has
proposed to read Du Bois neither as an Hegelian, nor as a pragmatist,
but in parallel to several of his European contemporaries, including
Husserl, Weber, Durkheim, Boas and Freud (Chandler, 2014).



To be sure, it would be false to claim that all of the above-mentioned
interpretive perspectives have yielded genuine insight and
illumination. But more have than have not, a fact that primarily
attests to the range, depth, and fecundity of Du Bois's
philosophical thought.