NOTES
Introduction
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903; repr. (New York: Vinatge/The Library of America, 1990).
2. Max Weber to W. E. B. Du Bois, 30 March 1905, in The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 1: Selections, 1877â1934, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 106â7; emphasis in original. Lawrence Scaff has also included this letter and four others in an appendix to his Max Weber in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
3. Both Herbert Aptheker, Du Boisâs literary executor, and David Levering Lewis, Du Boisâs preeminent biographer, maintain mistakenly that Du Boisâs and Weberâs North American encounter took place at Atlanta University when, according to Lewis, Weber âcame to the campus to participate in the conference on crime during his American visit in 1904.â David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993), 225. In fact, in his first correspondence with Du Bois, dated 8 November 1904, which he sent from New York City, Weber refers to where and how they met and provides the reason he was unable to visit him in Atlanta. Weber wrote, âI learned from you at St. Louis that you hoped to be back at Atlanta after the 20th of October. Unfortunately my wife could not stand the climate of the South and so I failed to see your University and to make your acquaintance,âthe few minutes in St. Louis not counting in this respect. I hope to be allowed to do so another time.â See Scaff, Max Weber in America, appendix 2, 255. Weber was sure not to mention to Du Bois that he and Marianne did manage to make it to Tuskegee Institute but were unable to meet Booker T. Washington, who was away from the university at the time of their visit. For Marianne Weberâs impressions of the Webersâ visit to Tuskegee, see her biography of her husband, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. and ed. Harry Zohn (New York: John Wiley & Sons, [1926] 1975), 295â96. The English translation of Weberâs address in St. Louis was published as âThe Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Science,â Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1906), vol. 7, 725â46. A version of his paper appears as âCapitalism and Rural Society in Germany,â in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and introd. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 363â85.
4. See Nahum D. Chandler, âThe Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904â1905,â CR: The New Centennial Review 7, no. 1 (2007): 213â72.
5. Weber to Du Bois, 8 November 1904, in Du Bois Papers, reel 3, Du Bois Library, University of MassachusettsâAmherst. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the archivists of the Du Bois Papers for having found, photocopied, and sent what they have of the WeberâDu Bois correspondence.
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, âDie Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten,â in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1982). Joseph Fracchiaâs English translation of Du Boisâs essay first appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (2006). Nahum Dimitri Chandler has included it in a collection of Du Boisâs essays, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays, ed. Nahum Dimitri Chandler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
7. Commenting on the totality of the Du BoisâWeber correspondence, Chandler notes, âIn all we have more or less direct evidence, from the extant correspondence, that there were at least nine letters exchanged between Du Bois and Weber from November 1904 to May 1905. Six of those letters have survived, in whole, in part, or perhaps in draft form: we know of five from Weber, all of which have been maintained among the papers of Du Bois; and, so far, we have only an incomplete one from Du Bois, also among his papers.â Nahum Dimitri Chandler, âThe Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904â1905,â CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (2006): 196.
8. Weber to Du Bois, 1 May 1905, in Du Bois Papers, reel 3, Du Bois Library, University of MassachusettsâAmherst.
9. Weber to Du Bois, in Aptheker, The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 1, 106.
10. Ibid.
11. Weber to Du Bois, 17 November 1904, in Du Bois Papers, reel 3, Du Bois Library, University of MassachusettsâAmherst.
12. Max Weber and Dr. Alfred Ploetz, âMax Weber, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, and W. E. B. Du Boisâ (Max Weber on Race and Society II), Sociological Analysis 34, no. 4 (Winter 1973): 312. I thank Jill Briggs for bringing this exchange to my attention.
13. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 164; and Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Franklin H. Knight (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, [1927] 1950), 277. However, in fairness to Weber, we must point out that despite drawing attention to the advantages of wage labor over slavery, he did not categorically exclude either slavery or other forms of unfree labor from the ranks of capitalist enterprises, provided that their operations were âcontinuousâ as opposed to singular or sporadic. Hence his inclusion of the Carthaginian, Roman, and North American plantation systems under the heading, âCapitalistic Development of the Manor,â in General Economic History, 79â84. Some years earlier, Weber was even more emphatic about placing unfree labor within capitalism and took issue with those scholars who did not: âSlave agriculture, when the slaves are normal objects of exchange (it makes no difference whether particular labourers have been actually purchased or not), and the land worked is privately owned or leased, is of course capitalist from the economic point of view. . . . Today the concept of âcapitalist enterpriseâ is generally based on . . . the large firm run with free wage-labour, because it is this form which is responsible for the characteristic social problems of modern capitalism. From this point of view it has been argued that capitalist economy did not play a dominant role in Antiquity, and did not in fact exist. However, to accept this premise is to limit needlessly the concept of capitalist economy to a single form of valorization of capitalâthe exploitation of other peopleâs labour on a contractual basisâand thus to introduce social factors. Instead we should take into account only economic factors. Where we find that property is an object of trade and is utilized by individuals for profit-making enterprise in a market economy, there we have capitalism. If this be accepted, then it becomes perfectly clear that capitalism shaped whole periods of Antiquity, and indeed precisely those periods we call âgolden ages.ââ The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, trans. R. I. Frank (London: New Left Books, [1909] 1976), 50â51. Still, Weber was of the opinion that, generally speaking, wage labor is the most extensive labor regime of modern capitalism just as some form of unfree labor was the common labor regime of ancient capitalism.
14. And it confirms Gurminder K. Bhambraâs observation that âcolonialism is crucial to the scenes of inquiry that are the contemporary social sciences and yet, for the most part, it is largely outside their field of vision.â Rethinking Modernity: Post-Colonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 16. I thank Cecilia Green for recommending Bhambraâs work to me.
15. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, [1904â5] 2002), 20.
16. Gabriel Kolko made this point in his âMax Weber on America: Theory and Evidence,â in Studies in the Philosophy of History: Selected Essays from History and Theory, ed. George H. Nadel (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
17. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638â1870 (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, [1896] 1973), 31.
18. And as Patrick Manning recently remarked, this imbalance between the numbers of enslaved and wage-earning workers in the Atlantic world still held true more than a century later: âAnother testament to slaveryâs significance on a worldwide scale can be obtained by comparing the enslaved workforce to that of the emerging system of industrial wage labor. At the end of the eighteenth century, some six million persons of African descent lived in the Americas, with more than four million of them in slavery. Add to these an African population of at least four million in slavery and those in slavery in the Old World diaspora and one sees that this huge slave workforce dwarfed the number of industrial laborers earning wages in Europe and North America, who totaled at most a few hundred thousand at this time.â The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 118.
19. W. E. B. Du Bois, âThe Conservation of Races,â in W. E. ...