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Robert Gooding-Williams. In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. 368 pp. $35.00.
What if we rethink The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois as a work of political philosophy in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes or John Rawls? What if Du Bois's contributions to political philosophy were as substantive as his innovations in sociology or the civil rights movement? The latest by Robert Gooding- Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, sets out to explore these questions as boldly as its opening declaration portends: "The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is Du Bois's outstanding contribution to modern political philosophy" (1). From there, Gooding-Williams offers a sustained and rigorous-if at times exhausting-philosophical scrutiny of Du Bois's most celebrated book. He argues that Du Bois promoted a "politics of expressive self-realization" that contrasts with 1) his contemporary Booker T. Washington's accomodationist, assimilation-throughsubmission approach to racial uplift, and more surprisingly, 2) Frederick Douglass's politics of radical reconstruction-a politics developed in the lesser-read second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.
In the Shadow of Du Bois focuses on the early work of Du Bois, probing the black sociologist's intellectual debt to German social and political thought-a debt accrued during his doctoral training at Berlin University in the early 1890s. The Souls of Black Folk, Gooding-Williams claims, weaves a "unified, political philosophical argument" through its varied series of essays, most of which were previously composed for different occasions (25). The move to read Souls as philosophical literature seems a bit odd at first: Souls...