more radical than Weber, Du Bois, like Weber, recognized that electoral democracy did little to rectify social injustice. Indeed, as he himself experienced, despite its claims to universality, the “democratic” state could deepen injustices. Condemned to be an enemy of the US state, Du Bois confronted its repressive character. For almost a decade he was stripped of his passport, denying him travel abroad. During this period he became closer to members of the Communist Party, actively campaigning for wider civil rights. In the end, he would thumb his nose at the US state, join the Communist Party and leave for newly independent Ghana, where he lived as a citizen for the last three years of his life. He died in 1963 on the eve of the civil rights March on Washington.
How should we place Du Bois in the canon of sociology? In his The Scholar Denied (2015) Aldon Morris argues that Du Bois was the true progenitor of urban sociology in the US – his Atlanta School predated and outclassed the so-called Chicago School that had claimed foundational status. Racism excluded him from the major sociology departments and limited his access to resources, yet he was still able to build a thriving school of sociology at Atlanta University, making major contributions to professional sociology. While other African Americans were able to make careers in academia, such as E. Franklin Frazier and Charles S. Johnson, they did so by going along with the dominant tropes that Du Bois rejected. Nor were they so politically active as public figures. Du Bois had a critical disposition that he expressed in public interventions, making him too radical for the social science of the period.
So it would turn out, ironically, that the racism he studied was also the racism that made academia so inhospitable, that drove him into the public sphere, where, for twenty-four years, he became editor of The Crisis, one of the great political and cultural magazines of the twentieth century. That gave him a platform for public engagement: whether it was his work documenting and opposing lynching, his key role in the formation of NAACP, his critical engagement with the Harlem Renaissance, his devoted organization of Pan-Africanism, or his opposition to both Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey. He was able to speak out in another register with his two novels, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and Dark Princess (1928), playing off utopian and anti-utopian themes. From “scholar denied” he became “scholar unbound,” lucidly illuminated in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940).
Max Weber insisted on a watertight separation of science and politics – the two were governed by opposed logics and confined to divergent arenas. Perhaps Weber’s views reflected a period when the university was embattled, when science was still a vulnerable, fledgling pursuit. Although Weber practiced public sociology – including the public lectures he gave at the invitation of students at the University of Munich that were the foundation of his two essays on science and politics – it had no place in his theorization of politics, where he tended to dismiss publics as misguided. The idea of civil society supporting a public sphere was only thinly developed in his work. Du Bois, by contrast, transcended the division between science and politics in both theory and practice. He gave public sociology pride of place in his vision of sociology, not antagonistic to professional, critical, and policy sociologies but as the driving force behind them. This was yet another reason why he was spurned by the professional cadres, and why today his inclusion within the canon redefines the very meaning of sociology.
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