The Social Theory of Du Bois

Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim ar widely recognized as the trinity of sociological opening. While these three sociologists were trailblazing tender theorists who enhanced the get a line of human behavior and its relationship to social institutions, other, more contemporary scholars were clean as innovative one of those scholars being W. E. B. Du Bois. W. E. B. Du Bois was a political and literary giant of the 20th century, publishing over twenty books and thousand of essays and articles passim his feel. W. E. B Du Bois is arguably one of the close to imaginative, perceptive, and prolific founders of the sociological discipline. In addition to leading the Pan-African movement and being an activist for civil rights for African the Statesns, Du Bois was a pioneer of urban sociology, an innovator of rural sociology, a loss leader in criminology, the first American sociologist of religion, and most notably the first undischarged social theorist of zip. The work of W . E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) has recently be cope recognized for its large contri b belyions to sociological theory.Although Du Bois himself was overwhelmingly concerned with the scientific military position of value rid sociological research, later social theorists have found his aspects on tend to offer one of the first instances of the articulation of standpoint theory. This theoretical perspective is anything but value free, be deliver of the self-conscious efforts of the researcher to look at the social man from the vantage point of minority groups. Feminists, multiculturalists, and even postmodernists have come to recognize the importance of the pitch- swarthy point of heap found in Du Boiss work.They have also come to appreciate Du Bois for his focus on local anesthetic knowledge and practices. W. E. B. Du Bois was an important American thinker. Poet, philosopher, economic historian, sociologist, and social critic, Du Bois work resists palmy classification. Du Bois is more than a philosopher he is, for many, a great social leader. His prolonged efforts all bend toward a common goal, the equality of seeminged people. His philosophy is significant today because it addresses what many would argue is the real cosmos riddle of flannel domination.So long as racist clean permit exists, and suppresses the dreams and the freedoms of human beings, so long will Du Bois be relevant as a thinker, for he, more than almost any other, employed thought in the service of exposing this privilege, and worked to eliminate it in the service of a greater humanity. Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature and his 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction in America challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era.He wrote the first scientific treatise in the field of sociology and he published three autobiographies, ea ch of which contains insightful essays on sociology, political science and history. In his role as editor of the NAACPs journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary(a) cause of racism, and he was ecumenicly sympathetic to socialist causes through show up his life. He was an fiery peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament.The United States Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his broad(a) life, was enacted a year after his death. Early in his career Du Bois claimed that the race idea was the central thought of all history and that the primary trouble of the twentieth century was the problem of the colour line. Du Bois viewed the goal of African Americans not as one of integration or absorption into white America, but one of advancing Pan-Negroism. Critical of the excessive materialism of white America, Du Bois believed that black socialisation could temper the self- interested pursuit of pro fit.Du Bois called on blacks to organize and unite rough their race, and although he was not opposed to segregation per se, he did come to pee that disparity stifled the development of separate but equal facilities and institutions. The concepts of the obnubilate and branched consciousness occupy an important place in Du Boiss theory on race. Du Bois discusses both in his work The Souls of Black Folk. The Veil is an complex quantity barrier that separates whites and blacks. Du Bois hoped his work would allow whites to glimpse behind the Veil, so they could cause to understand the black experience in America.Perhaps the most perfect component of the black experience in America was living with what Du Bois called double consciousness. Blacks are simultaneously both inside and outside of the dominant white society and live with a feeling of twoness. By trying to train and preserve a racial identity, blacks come into conflict with trying to fit into wh ite society. According to Du Bois, the tension of being both black and American can manifest itself in pathologies in spite of appearance the black community and discrimination in white America.Whatever turns out to be the best general account of Du Bois philosophy, it seems the significance of his thought wholly really shows up in the specific details of his works themselves, especially in The Souls of Black Folk. It is hither(predicate) that he first develops his central philosophical concept, the concept of double consciousness, and spells out its full implications. The aim of Souls of Black Folk is to show the spirit of black people in the United States to show their humanity and the predicament that has confronted their humanity.Du Bois asserts that the color line divides people in the States, causes massive harm to its inhabitants, and ruins its own pretensions to democracy. He shows, in particular, how a veil has come to be put over African-Americans, so that others do not see them as they are African-Americans are obscured in America they cannot be seen clearly, but only through the lense of race prejudice. African-Americans feel this alien perception upon them but at the akin time feel themselves as themselves, as their own with their own legitimise feelings and traditions. This dual self-perception is known as double consciousness. Du Bois aim in Souls is to rationalise this concept in more specific detail and to show how it adversely affects African-Americans. In the background of Souls is always also the moral import of its message, to the rear that the insertion of a veil on human beings is wrong and mustiness be condemned on the grounds that it divides what otherwise would be a peculiar and coherent identity. Souls thus aims to make the reader understand, in effect, that African-Americans have a distinct cultural identity, one that must be acknowledged, respected, and enabled to flourish.Du Bois other major(ip) philosophical concept is t hat of second sight. This is a concept he develops most precisely in Darkwater, a work, as we have seen, in which Du Bois changes his approach shot and takes up a stauncher stance against white culture. Du Bois holds that due to their double consciousness, African-Americans make a privileged epistemological perspective. Both inside the white world and outside of it, African-Americans are able to understand the white world, while that perceiving it from a different perspective, namely that of an outsider as well.The white soul in America, by contrast, contains but a single consciousness and perspective, for he or she is a member of a dominant culture, with its own racial and cultural norms asserted as absolute. The white person looks out from themselves and sees only their own world reflected back upon thema kind of blindness or singular sight possesses them. Luckily, as Du Bois makes clear, the dual perspective of African-Americans can be used to grasp the essence of whiteness and to expose it, in the quaternate senses of the word expose. That is to say, second sight allows an African-American to bring the white view out into the open, to lay it bare, and to let it wither for the problematic and wrong-headed concept that it is. The devastation of whiteness in this way leaves whites open to the experience of African-Americans, as a privileged perspective, and hence it also leaves African-Americans with a breach in the culture through which they could enter with their legitimate, and legitimating, perspectives.Later in life, Du Bois turned to communism as the means to achieve equality. Du Bois came to believe that the economic condition of Africans and African-Americans was one of the primary modes of their oppression, and that a more equitable distribution of wealth, as advanced by Marx, was the remedy to the situation. ( John J. Macionis Sociology 14th edition) Du Bois was not simply a ally of Marx, however. He also added keen insights to the communist tradition himself.One of his contributions is his pressure level that communism contains no explicit means of liberating Africans and African-Americans, but that it ought to focus its attentions here and work toward this end. The darker races, to use Du Bois language, amount to the majority of the worlds proletariat. In Black Folk, Then and Now, Du Bois writes the dark workers of Asia, Africa, the islands of the sea, and South and Central Americathese are the one who are supporting a superstructure of wealth, luxury, and extravagance. It is the put on of these people that is the rise of the world (Black Folk,).A further contribution Du Bois makes is to show how Utopian politics such as communism is possible in the first place. structure on Engles claim that freedom lies in the acknowledgment of necessity, as Maynard Solomon argues (Solomon, Introduction 258), (because in grasping necessity we accurately perceive what areas of life are open to free action), Du Bois insists on the power of dreams. Admitting our bound temperament (bound to our bellies, bound to material conditions), even stressing it, he nonetheless emphasizes our range of powers within these constraints.Although difficult to characterize in general terms, Du Bois philosophy amounts to a programmatic call forth away from abstraction and toward engaged, social criticism. In affecting this change in philosophy, especially on behalf of African-Americans and pertaining to the issue of race, Du Bois adds concrete significance and urgent exercise to American Pragmatism, as Cornel West maintains, a philosophy that is most social criticism, not about grasping absolute timeless truth. to a higher place all, however, Du Bois philosophy is significant today because it addresses what many would argue is the real world problem of white domination. So long as racist white privilege exists, and suppresses the dreams and the freedoms of human beings, so long will Du Bois be relevant as a thinker, for he, more than almost any other, employed thought in the service of exposing this privilege, and worked to eliminate it in the service of a greater humanity.References Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Folk, Then and Now (Millwood, N.Y. Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1975). Du Bois, W. E. B. Darkwater Voices From Within the Veil (Mineola, N. Y. capital of Delaware Publications, 1999). http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Boishttp//highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072824301/student_view0/chapter10/chapter_summary.html Sociology 14th edition (John J Macionis Prentice Hall, 2011)