The Sociological Insight of W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois discussed key aspects of the new field of sociology in his early writings. This article presents Du Bois’ conception of the developing field and his sociological perspective based on nine of his key original sociological writings. Rather than generating theoretical formulations and studying abstract concepts, Du Bois insisted that sociology be an empirical science adhering to the methods utilized by the physical sciences. Sociology's major objectives are to study the “deeds of men” and to provide a science of human action. Sociological research seeks the discovery of “truth” which can form the basis of social policy. Noting that the regularity of human behavior is evidence of laws and acknowledging that human behavior is also subject to chance factors, sociology must seek to determine the limits of each. Du Bois’ research methods, based on methodological triangulation, were formulated to provide the “truths” which he eagerly sought. Du Bois was convinced that these truths were worth knowing and that sociology had the promise of becoming one of the “greatest sciences.” Attention directed toward Du Bois’ key sociological writings within sociology curricula will introduce current and future readers to the groundbreaking sociological work of the pioneer sociologist.     

Du Bois and the Sociology of Religion: Rediscovering a Founding Figure*

In his popular introductory sociology text, Stark identifies W. E. B. Du Bois and Albion Small as important cornerstones of the U.S. sociological tradition. While the work of the “Chicago School” is well known in sociological circles, Du Bois’ sociological legacy is not. The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996) is a classic empirical sociological study that is rarely included in discussions of the development of scientific sociology. Likewise, The Negro Church ([1903b] 2003) represents one of the first empirically based sociological studies of a religious institution. Sociologists of religion routinely discuss the contributions of Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel while virtually ignoring Du Bois. This is ironic because Du Bois’ work on religion was based on ethnographic data, field interviews, surveys, and census data. This article provides an overview of Du Bois’ sociological study of the Black Church in the United States by identifying some of the main themes developed in The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996), The Souls of Black Folk ([1903a] 1994), and The Negro Church ([1903b] 2003). These studies reveal that Du Bois was a pioneer in the areas of evaluation research, public sociology, service learning, and congregational studies.     

W. E. B. Du Bois as Interactionist: Reflections on the Canonical Incorporation of a Marginalized Scholar

Recent scholarship explores the relevance and canonical status of W. E. B. Du Bois in sociological theory; yet less is said about his contributions to symbolic interactionism. This paper interrogates the emerging meaning of W. E. B. Du Bois for sociology, and the nature of his canonical incorporation. We explore the less “official” dimensions of Du Boisian theory, and in particular two of his contributions to symbolic interactionism: double consciousness and autoethnography. In the last part of the paper, we suggest that Du Bois's incorporation into the sociological canon can be viewed as a process of “centering,” and argue that this form of sponsoring of Du Bois's work can elevate some interpretations of Du Bois to the detriment of others.     

A CLASSIC FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE VEIL: Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk

Why has W.E.B. Du Bois not mattered more in sociology? In addition to being on the short list of the 20th century's most influential public intellectuals, Du Bois made substantial, if under recognized, intellectual contributions as a sociologist and social theorist. Among his nearly 2000 published writings, The Philadelphia Negro and Souls of Black Folk have all the qualities of classic works. Yet, neither has been officially canonized by sociology. The exclusion of Du Bois can be explained with tolerable plausibility by reference to his two key concepts in Souls of Black Folk: the veil and the double-self. One can only wonder what might have been significantly different about sociology, especially its theories of the Self and of field studies of race, had William James's most important student been allowed to matter.     

W. E. B. Du Bois at the center: from science,civil rights movement,to Black Lives Matter

I am honoured to present the 2016 British Journal of Sociology Annual Lecture at the London School of Economics. My lecture is based on ideas derived from my new book, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. In this essay I make three arguments. First, W.E.B. Du Bois and his Atlanta School of Sociology pioneered scientific sociology in the United States. Second, Du Bois pioneered a public sociology that creatively combined sociology and activism. Finally, Du Bois pioneered a politically engaged social science relevant for contemporary political struggles including the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.     

W.E.B. Du Bois and the women of hull-house, 1895–1899

An important aspect of W.E.B. Du Bois’s professional socialization is documented; specifically, Du Bois’s professional interactions with women sociologists who practiced in social settlements, notably Jane Addams, Katherine Bement Davis, Florence Kelley, and Isabel Eaton. These women, and their research in Hull-House Maps and Papers, were facilitators and role models for Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, in which Isabel Eaton was a significant collaborator. Addams, Kelley, and their friends joined Du Bois to cofound the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an exemplar of applied sociology and Du Bois’s shared interests with the early Hull-House women. These early sociologists changed American thought and social policy and today provide a rich heritage for contemporary professionals in sociology.     

St. Clair Drake,the Chicago School,and the Emergence of a New Urban Black Perspective

St. Clair Drake was responsible for a major shift in the way urban sociologists studied cities. While educated by Chicago school scholars in sociology and anthropology, such as Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Drake was one of many Black doctoral students who veered from the dominant perspective of his White teachers on race. His skills in ethnographic research were indebted not only to Park and Burgess, but also to the work of Black scholars who came before him, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. His unique personal approach to cities and their racial problems transitioned into a more global focus on the Black diaspora, colonialism and the history of African people, and cultures which connected him to a world of social action.     

W.E.B. DU BOIS,THE BLACK CHURCH,AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF RELIGION

During his early sociological period (1896–1914), Du Bois published several empirically-based studies on the Black Church. Many topics were addressed that are relevant to the contemporary study of the Black Church and the sociology of religion. Du Bois utilized methodological triangulation to empirically ground his studies of the Black Church. Census, survey, and ethnographic data were integrated to provide a comprehensive picture of the role of the Black Church in the African American community. He addressed the social construction of African American religious identity and provided an early functional analysis of the Black Church. The association between religion and social class was recognized, and Du Bois was a pioneer in the area of congregational studies addressing such issues as church expenditures and membership patterns and generating surveys of children's religious beliefs and ministerial effectiveness. Extensive data were collected on Black Church membership in large cities and small communities. These data make it possible to reconstruct the Black Church religious economy in these areas. Du Bois' sociological work on religion provides a link to the discipline's past and a bridge to its future.     

“With Whom no White Scholar can Compare”: Academic Interpretations of the Relationship between W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber

Max Weber (1864–1920) is considered one of the canonical founders of sociology, while W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), author of The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Black Reconstruction (1935), has only recently been included in the sociological canon. We provide a historical review of what we know of their relationship in order to first ask, what did Du Bois say about Weber, and second, what did Weber say about Du Bois? We then analyze the extant scholarly discourse of published English-language academic journal articles that substantively mention both Weber and Du Bois in order to address a third question: what did other scholars say about their relationship? We provide an analysis of the variation of scholars’ perceptions on the relationship between Du Bois and Weber to illumine the dominant assumptions about founding figures and the origin story of American sociology writ large. We argue that three mechanisms of white group interests configured the marginalization of Du Bois from both mainstream and sub-disciplinary sociological theory: (1) reduction or “knowing that we do no know and not caring to know” (when knowledge is perceived as irrelevant to white group interests), (2) deportation or “not wanting to know” (when knowledge is systematically exiled), and (3) appropriation or “not knowing that we do not know”) (when dominant knowledge usurps or assimilates challenges to that knowledge).     

Toward a DuBoisian theorization of school curricula

After a near century of mainstream academic exclusion, recent efforts in sociology have centered Du Bois as a foundational figure. However, these efforts have overlooked his contributions to theorizing K-12 and college/university formal curricula. Moreover, curricula, teaching, and learning scholarship, already marginalized within mainstream sociology of education, have typically overlooked Du Bois’ theorizations, thus reproducing his marginalization. As a correction, this article centers Du Bois as a key figure in critical curricula theory. Specifically, Du Bois theorized that schools institutionalize formal curricula imbued with race-class ideologies and that said ideologies shape peoples’ subjectivities, identities, and consciousness of social processes. However, Du Bois also theorized how Black schools can serve as meso-level sites for challenging hegemonic ideologies and producing transformative ideologies. In articulating these processes, Du Bois identifies how ideological propaganda, organizational structures, and interpretations of temporal processes maintain and perpetuate racism and capitalism. This article concludes with suggestions for future research in educational sociology that incorporates these insights.     

Black Interactionist Thought and the Lived-Experience Approach to Symbolic Interactionism

Du Bois is often regarded as an important scholar for his contributions to the development of sociology. However, less is known about his work in developing interactionist thought. This essay is an introduction to this special issue, and a small attempt to acknowledge the work of scholars of color within the interactionist tradition. The Du Bosian approach to sociology has for too long been dismissed out of hand. Scholars pursuing new areas of inquiry, topics outside the bounds of “mainstream sociology,” are often met with fierce resistance—even today. Instead of building these scholars up, through mentorship and aid, so-called “accomplished” scholars see fit to tear down the work of those not like them. The Du Bosian perspective celebrates the plurality of voices, advocates for mentorship, and sees sociological inquiry as rooted in the real needs and concerns of those so marginalized. As this collection of articles illustrates, even when conforming to scientific standards work in this tradition has a political dimension as it lays bare the inequities in society—even, at times, drawing government interference with their work. This issue also calls upon professional sociologists to reflect on the ways they reproduce these patterns within the discipline and higher education.     

Deferred Legacy! The Continued Marginalization of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory

Between 1895 and 1917 the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory made substantial contributions to the discipline of sociology, including the establishment of the first American school of sociology, institutionalization of method triangulation, institutionalization of the insider researcher, and institutionalization of the public acknowledgment of one's research. Despite these contributions that predate the Chicago School, the W. E. B. Du Bois led laboratory remains in the margins of American sociological discourse. This paper examines the contributions of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, offers explanations for the school's more than 100-year marginalization and examines its legacy in the discipline.     

Art as Propaganda: Bringing Du Bois into the Sociology of Art

We examine WEB Du Bois's writings about the arts in the NAACP journal The Crisis from 1910–1934 in order to construct a Du Boisian social theory of the arts. The key elements of this theoretical framework are: artists, money, freedom, organization, truth, beauty, and propaganda. The most surprising element is propaganda, which for Du Bois meant that art needs to address racial politics. There is a strong sense in Du Bois's writings that art can and should have socially transformative effects. Comparing Du Bois's work to current theories from the sociology of art, we find that Du Bois emphasizes the role of art in social change, while current work treats art primarily as a tool for social reproduction. We argue for expanding the theoretical toolbox of the sociology of the arts through greater consideration of Du Bois's propaganda concept.     

Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily influential figure in the sociology of music. For over three decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and theoretical interventions in the field of study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in particular, has been profound, his ideas directly informing our understandings of how musical preferences reflect and reproduce inequalities between social classes. But, recently his legacy has been under question and newer approaches to the music/society problematic have emerged. These have made important claims about the nature of the sociological enterprise when confronted with the specificity of cultural works, as well as how social change impacts on our relations with musical forms. This paper takes stock of the impact of Bourdieu’s ideas on the sociology of music, the debates sparked in their wake and the attempt at something like a “post‐Bourdieusian” sociology more faithful to music’s material properties. It will ask to what extent Bourdieu’s claims about social stratification and music consumption are still relevant and whether they are sophisticated enough to deal with the specific ways that we interact with musical forms.     

Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology

On the basis of a close reading of two early articles by Patrick Geddes, which form the basis of his later approach to sociology, it is argued that Geddes should be reclaimed by sociologists from the geographers and the town planners, as the founder of a distinctive environmental sociology in Britain at around the turn of the last century. Certain of Geddes’ arguments are seen to be comparable with those of Durkheim, in particular, and Marx to a somewhat lesser extent. Moreover, his work contains a distinctively sociological account of the ‘structuring’ of social (and environmental) reality via the creative agency of human beings actively working in a variety of environments. Geddes’ naïve optimism may make him as much Utopian as sociological, but does not invalidate his contribution to the development of a classical environmental sociology.     

Simmel,rationalisation and the sociology of money

Simmel was born in 1858. Raised in the centre of the Jewish business culture of Berlin. Simmel studied history and philosophy, becoming a Privatdozent in 1885. Although he published numerous books and artickes, simmel was excluded from influential university positions as a result of the pervasive anti-Semitism of the period and it was bot until 1914 that Simmel was finally promoted to a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg. Like Durkheim. Simmel was both the object of anti-Semitic prejudice and a fervent supporter of the nationalist cause in the First World War. Simmel died in 1918 if cancer of the liver.¹ This basic and naïve factual biography of Simmel in many respects provides many of the themes in Simmel's sociology. First, his sociology is held to be the brilliant reflection of the glittering, cospospolitan world of pre-war Berlin and that his commentary on that world took the form of impressionism his sociological essays are snapshots sub specie aeternitatis”? simmel's perspective has been regarded as an example of the nature of modern society as contained in Robert Musil's The Man's Without Qualities. That is a social existence without roots, commitments or purpose.³ Secondly, Simmel was and remained a social outsider despite his good connections with Berlin's cultural elite. His writing has been as a result characterised as perspectivism and an aestheticication of reality. As an indication of this, Simmel's influence has in the past often rested on such minor contributions as‘The Stranger’⁴ Thridly, because Simmel failed to secure an influential location within the German university system, there was no development of the Simmelian school of sociology at all comparable to Durkheimain sociology. Decades of sociological interpretation of Simmel's work have still left Simmel as a theoretical enigma on the ambitus of the sociological tradition. His sociology has been categorised as interactionist, formal and conflict sociology.⁵ In more recent years there has been a renewal of interest in Simmel which has begun to show a greater appreciation of the unity and stature of his sociology. This renewal has been brought about by the cominentaries of Levine. Frisby, Robertson, and Holzner. ⁶ More importantly, the translation of Simmel's The Philosophy of Money⁷ by Bottomore and Frisby provides a new opportunity for a systematic evaluation of Simmel's sociology of modern culture. The main burden of this paper is that existing commentaries have failed to focus on the central theme of‘alienation’and‘rationalisation’in The Philosophy of Money which provided the major theoretical backing for on the one hand, Weber's analysis capitalism as the iron cage and on the other Lukács so-called rediscovery of the alienation theme in the young Marx.     

Charles A. Ellwood and the End of Sociology

Charles A. Ellwood was one of the larger than life figures of early American sociology. Into the 1930s he was recognized as the ‘father’ of sociological social psychology. His work theoretically and methodologically paved the way for Symbolic Interactionism. He also saw sociology as a means to an end, that is, to make the world a better place. True sociology could only be thought of in that light. By the 1920s however, sociology was changing. The advent of scientism and statistics amplified factions within the disipline. William F. Ogburn and his students began to push sociology away from the ideas of people such as Ellwood, Ross, Small and many of the early American sociologists. By 1930 a full scale battle was ensuing which Ellwood would lose. The following is an account of Ellwood’s fight with scientism through his publications and correspondence.     

Six Rules of Qualitative Research: A Post-Romantic Argument

Qualitative sociology too easily succumbs to a ‘Romantic’ impulse. In a sociological context, the Romantic seeks to understand raw ‘experience’, usually by the use of unstructured interviews. Such work can lack analytic rigour, failing to distinguish the sociologist from the journalist. Following Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, the approach adopted here emphasizes the forms of representation and contexts which inform practical reasoning. It recommends a non-Romantic sociology–an aspiration curiously shared by Durkheim–and suggests some ways to pursue it.     

Victor Branford and the building of British sociology

Victor Branford was a central figure in the institutional development of British sociology in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. He is, however, a neglected figure and little is known about his life and his work in sociology. This article presents a biographical account of Victor Branford and outlines his sociological ideas. Particular attention is given to the part played by Branford and his second wife, Sybella Gurney, in the establishment of the Sociological Society and The Sociological Review. Writing between 1903 and 1930, he set out a distinctive view of the nature of sociology and an account of modernity, which he saw as underpinning a conception of a third way in politics that goes beyond capitalism and socialism. He tied this view, set out in the years after the First World War, to a conception of the public role of sociology in which the sociologist was to be a leading element in the building of social citizenship through social reconstruction.     

Black Violence and Crime in the 21st Century

Abstract

Although a number of perspectives have been represented as frameworks for analyzing crime and violence perpetuated by African Americans, no analysis can replace a socio-historical perspective. By carefully studying the works of W.E.B. Du Bois a sharper analysis of black crime and violence can be clearly delineated.