W. E. B. Du Bois, German Social Thought, and the Racial Divide in American Progressivism, 1892–1909

Axel R. Schäfer

Despite the recent rediscovery in American scholarship of the transatlantic dimension of Progressive Era thought and reform, few scholars have so far examined the transatlantic context of the notorious blind spot of progressivism, namely, racial equality and civil rights. This essay analyzes the significance of the social ideas of the German historical school of economics and of their reformulation in American progressivism in the early racial thought of W. E. B. Du Bois.1	1
Although most historians recognize that the conceptual underpinnings of Du Bois's early thought on race were drawn from European and Euro-American sources, the transforming intellectual dimension of his Berlin years is often buried under the charge that Du Bois's German sojourn primarily reinforced his authoritarian romanticism, elitist Hegelianism, and patrician Calvinism.2 Du Bois's identification with European high culture and Victorian morality, David Levering Lewis argues, caused him to remain "in the iron grip of an ideology of culture in which human progress was measured in terms of manners, the arts, great literature, and great ideals," which militated against his reformist aspirations. Though Lewis also points out the emancipatory potential of Du Bois's translation of German social thought and the radical subtext of many of his early works, he asserts that Hegelian metaphysics and Herderian conceptions of race imparted to Du Bois the conservative notion of distinct, hierarchical, and fixed racial attributes. According to this line of reasoning, Du Bois only abandoned Victorian moralism, patrician attitudes, and racial essentialism when the brutal facts of racial oppression in Jim Crow America required a more militant and radical stance.3	2
This essay advances a different interpretation of Du Bois's student days in Germany. It argues that the German historical school of economics, which became a crucial conduit for European social science methodology and thought for a generation of progressive reformers and scholars, suggested to Du Bois a theory of social ethics that had radical implications for his thinking on race. The German economists' conception of social ethics anchored values in social interaction and participation, not in man's nature as a rational, autonomous being motivated by self-interest. In the words of Michael Sandel, historicists saw community as a mode of self-understanding that partly constituted the agent's identity.4	3
Building upon the historicist concept of social ethics, Du Bois subordinated the belief in biologically fixed racial characteristics to the assertion of the complementarity of races and the unfolding of the black civilizational gift through social interaction and civic participation. Like many of his progressive wayfarers, he began to subscribe to a philosophy that encouraged individuals to see their own condition, not as a fixed given, but as historically constructed; to question the epistemological, ontological, and ethical foundations of nineteenth-century liberalism; to cultivate moral character as a motivating force of social action; and to pursue new avenues for public participation through noncommercial institutions. On that basis, Du Bois stressed education and cultural refinement as the path to racial equality and justice, deemphasizing both Booker T. Washington's bootstrap ideology and the liberal rights discourse.5	. . .