of a goal whose realization is uncertain, recognizing the anti-utopianism of social constraint – the politician propelled by a mission without guarantees of success. There is a utopian perfection to every occupation – the machine operator, the window cleaner, the domestic worker, the artist, the doctor, the farmer, the manager – whose very unattainability drives commitment. That commitment gives meaning, even to the most mundane activities. As Weber said, it was also true of the scientist. Driven by the puzzles of a research program – puzzles that have meaning only to the cognoscenti – scientists never know whether or when insight will strike. Passionate devotion is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. It is as if breakthroughs lie in the hands of the Calvinist God outside the control of the humble scientist. This devotion to an elusive goal is no less irrational than the pursuit of profit for profit’s sake. In both cases any breakthrough, whether new technology or new discovery, is sure to be superseded and forgotten. The only satisfaction is of a job well done, a puzzle solved, a momentary elation, perhaps some honorific recognition. As Weber wrote, not only the intrinsic uncertainty of puzzle-solving but the very institutions of science often favor mediocrity over originality, and are often subject to hostile political regulation. The odds are against us; all we can do is to infuse meaning into our science.
When Weber is at his most bleak after Germany’s defeat in World War I, he is driven to assert a utopian moment in uncharacteristically strong terms: “man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible” ([1919] 1994: 128). The darkest days, the most pessimistic times, call out for utopian thinking. When anti-utopia is veering toward dystopia, then the antidote to despair is to remind ourselves how the world has been otherwise in the past and, therefore, how the world could be otherwise in the future.
Reconstructing the Canon
W. E. B. Du Bois would never be satisfied with Weber’s bleak prognosis. Making the best of a bad situation was for him a dystopia, personified by his political enemy, Booker T. Washington. Born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a largely white community and absorbed its Protestant ways. Sponsored by the local community, he went to Fisk University, and from there went to Harvard, where he received a second undergraduate degree and then became the first African American to receive a PhD for his study of the suppression of the slave trade in the US (Du Bois [1896] 2007). He also studied at the University of Berlin, 1892–94, where he witnessed and engaged with the birth of sociology.
Within professional sociology he became known for The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a detailed ethnographic study of African Americans in Philadelphia, often seen as the foundation stone of US urban sociology. Although there’s no evidence that he had read Durkheim, it reads like an exemplification of the latter’s abnormal division of labor, only applied to a racially divided society: on the one side, inequality of opportunity and unequal power, and on the other side a state of anomie resulting from the recent emancipation from slavery and then migration from the South. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903: 5), a collection of lyrical essays on the abysmal conditions in the South, Du Bois famously presents the idea of double consciousness: “This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. … The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” The striving is to be a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture.” The essays are an appeal to the common humanity of Black and white, the forging of a common consciousness through education and religion. The solution to the racial division of labor lies in the cultivation and recognition of African American leaders like himself, the so-called talented tenth. At this point Du Bois has a Durkheimian diagnosis and solution to the racial division of labor, but one without a socialist vision. That is yet to come.
Indeed, as Du Bois became disillusioned by the reception of his ideas, as his work at Atlanta University was largely ignored, as racism became more intractable both in society and in science, as he became more involved in the struggle for racial equality in the Niagara Movement (that prefigured the NAACP that he co-founded), and as he became more influenced by socialist ideas of the time, he became less Durkheimian and more Marxian. In writing the biography of John Brown, leader of an anti-slavery insurrection that prefigured the Civil War, he emphasized a history made from below, so different from his earlier conciliatory politics of assimilation. The mantra of Du Bois’s (1909) John Brown was: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. In other words, the loss of life in fighting slavery is small compared to the atrocities inflicted on slaves.
Darkwater (1920), another collection of remarkable essays, departed from the moral appeals of The Souls of Black Folk. Now addressing African Americans, he turns to the souls of white folk and the barbarism they perpetuate in the name of white supremacy, locally and globally. Du Bois now developed a theory of racial capitalism to place the 1917 race riot in East St. Louis in world historical perspective – that was the anti-utopian sociology. At the same time, he advanced a utopian idea of industrial democracy. Moving beyond his early campaign for extending suffrage based on voting qualifications, he advanced a notion of participatory democracy based on the unique and divergent experiences of different groups. Genuine democracy would also require its own economic foundations – freedom from exhausting and demeaning labor. Accordingly, Du Bois proposed the elimination of menial service labor, following the sort of mechanization that had taken place in industry. He wrote of the struggle for women’s emancipation led by such heroic African American figures as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Phillis Wheatley, prefiguring the notions of intersectionality that would arrive fifty years later. The reformism of the early years has given way to a radicalism – both in the attention paid to entrenched racial capitalism and in the exploration of alternatives.
In Du Bois’s writings utopian and anti-utopian themes reinforced each other in a deepening spiral, reaching a climax in his 1935 masterpiece Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. This was a radical rewriting of the history of both the Civil War and the post-war Reconstruction. Famously, he argued that victory for the North was made possible by fugitive slaves joining the Federal army as it was becoming war-weary. Harking back to Marx and his writings on the American Civil War, Du Bois called the desertion from slavery a “general strike,” thereby associating slaves with a revolutionary working class. Reconstruction after the Civil War ended when the North abandoned its support for Black emancipation, restoring the power of the Southern planter class that set about imposing new forms of forced labor along with Jim Crow segregation.
But Reconstruction itself was far from the unmitigated disaster painted by historians. In Du Bois’s detailed account, the play of political forces harbored possibilities of an inter-racial, radical democracy, albeit varying from state to state depending on historical legacies, racial demographics, and class structure. It was only in the 1960s that historians began to accept the essential truth of Du Bois’s redemption of the place of African Americans in US history. In Du Bois’s view, Reconstruction was the last opportunity to transcend race before the consolidation of racial capitalism. As he was writing Black Reconstruction during the Depression, Du Bois abandoned the pursuit of immediate integration of African Americans and instead advocated the development of Black autonomy through independent cooperatives, the basis of a cooperative commonwealth. This occasioned another break with the more staid NAACP, which did not waver from a narrow interpretation of “integration.”
In the post-war period, as matters looked bleak at home, Du Bois would turn his attention to possibilities abroad. On the one hand, there was his longstanding leadership role in the Pan-African movement that had become ever more real with the major Pan-African Conference of 1945, attended by future leaders of African independence movements. In The World and Africa (1947) he developed Marx’s idea of the fetishism of commodities, underlining how invisibly interconnected were the plundering of Africa and the accumulation of wealth in the capitalist West. His global vision took him in another direction – to become an important advocate in the International Peace Movement that was supported by the Soviet Union and opposed by the US state. His defense of the Soviet Union harks back to his first visit in 1926, but his support
