African American Intellectual Heritage

Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship

Christopher A. McAuley

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268106034
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite the extensive scholarship on Max Weber (1864–1920) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), very little of it examines the contact between the two founding figures of Western sociology. Drawing on their correspondence from 1904 to 1906, and comparing the sociological work that they produced during this period and afterward, The Spirit vs. the Souls: Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship examines for the first time the ideas that Weber and Du Bois shared on topics such as sociological investigation, race, empire, unfree labor, capitalism, and socialism. What emerges from this examination is that their ideas on these matters clashed far more than they converged, contrary to the tone of their letters and to the interpretations of the few scholars who have commented on the correspondence between Weber and Du Bois.

Christopher McAuley provides close readings of key texts by the two scholars, including Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, to demonstrate their different views on a number of issues, including the economic benefits of unfree labor in capitalism. The book addresses the distinctly different treatment of the two figures's political sympathies in past scholarship, especially that which discredits some of Du Bois's openly antiracist academic work while failing to consider the markedly imperialist-serving content of some of Weber's. McAuley argues for the acknowledgment and demarginalization of Du Bois's contributions to the scholarly world that academics have generally accorded to Weber. This book will interest students and scholars of black studies, history, and sociology for whom Du Bois and Weber are central figures.

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, 1877–1934, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 106–7; 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 Bois’s literary executor, and David Levering Lewis, Du Bois’s preeminent biographer, maintain mistakenly that Du Bois’s and Weber’s North American encounter took place at Atlanta University when, according to Lewis, Weber “came to the campus to participate in the conference on crime during his American visit in 1904.” 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, “I 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,—the few minutes in St. Louis not counting in this respect. I hope to be allowed to do so another time.” 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 Weber’s impressions of the Webers’ 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), 295–96. The English translation of Weber’s address in St. Louis was published as “The Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Science,” Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1906), vol. 7, 725–46. A version of his paper appears as “Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and introd. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 363–85.

4. See Nahum D. Chandler, “The Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904–1905,” CR: The New Centennial Review 7, no. 1 (2007): 213–72.

5. Weber to Du Bois, 8 November 1904, in Du Bois Papers, reel 3, Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts–Amherst. 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 Weber–Du Bois correspondence.

6. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten,” in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1982). Joseph Fracchia’s English translation of Du Bois’s essay first appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (2006). Nahum Dimitri Chandler has included it in a collection of Du Bois’s 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 Bois–Weber correspondence, Chandler notes, “In 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.” Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “The Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904–1905,” 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 Massachusetts–Amherst.

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 Massachusetts–Amherst.

12. Max Weber and Dr. Alfred Ploetz, “Max Weber, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, and W. E. B. Du Bois” (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 “continuous” as opposed to singular or sporadic. Hence his inclusion of the Carthaginian, Roman, and North American plantation systems under the heading, “Capitalistic Development of the Manor,” in General Economic History, 79–84. Some years earlier, Weber was even more emphatic about placing unfree labor within capitalism and took issue with those scholars who did not: “Slave 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 ‘capitalist enterprise’ 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 capital—the exploitation of other people’s labour on a contractual basis—and 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 ‘golden ages.’” The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, trans. R. I. Frank (London: New Left Books, [1909] 1976), 50–51. 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. Bhambra’s observation that “colonialism 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.” Rethinking Modernity: Post-Colonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 16. I thank Cecilia Green for recommending Bhambra’s work to me.

15. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, [1904–5] 2002), 20.

16. Gabriel Kolko made this point in his “Max Weber on America: Theory and Evidence,” 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, 1638–1870 (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: “Another testament to slavery’s 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.” The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 118.

19. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in W. E. ...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ONE The Free vs. the Bound
• TWO Fields of Study
• THREE The Fruits of Merchant’s Capital
• FOUR Leaders and the Led
• FIVE Unequal Treatment
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index