Table of Contents

* Acknowledgments * Introduction: The Authority of Du Bois * Politics, Race, and the Human Sciences * Intimations of Immortality and Double Consciousness * Du Bois's Counter-Sublime * Between the Masses and the Folk * Douglass's Declarations of Independence and Practices of Politics * Inheriting Du Bois and Douglass after Jim Crow * Notes * Index

Promotional Information

Gooding-Williams brings to his rich and original study of twentieth (and twenty-first) century African American thought a philosopher's respect for argument, a historian's appreciation of context and influence, a writer's care for fine and textured readings, and a political theorist's concern with power, identity, and democracy. This is an extraordinary book, one that will elicit gratitude as well as admiration for its thoroughness, intelligence, and measure. -- Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley How should African Americans respond to white supremacy and its legacy? Gooding-Williams offers an impressively learned and probing critical interpretation of Du Bois's highly influential answer to this central question of African American philosophy. This thoroughly original book is not only the most sophisticated philosophical study to date of Du Bois's early thought, but it is also a provocative and noteworthy contribution to the contemporary debate over the content and contours of black politics in the post-segregation era. -- Tommie Shelby, Harvard University

About the Author

Robert Gooding-Williams is Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[A] sustained and in-depth engagement with the legacy of Du Bois's thought, especially as it pertains to questions of black political activism and leadership...[Gooding-Williams] places Du Bois as a generative figure in American political thought alongside the early modern and Enlightenment stable of social-contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. -- Peniel E. Joseph Bookforum 20091201