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Whether we turn to Du Bois’s early reformist scholarship, his middle-period radicalism, or his late-life embrace of revolutionary politics, a certain dismissiveness pervades Du Bois studies. The general thought is that Du Bois was either a reformist or a radical or a revolutionary socialist. However, it is inconceivable that he could have occupied all three political positions throughout the course of his long life because it defies the adage of “radicalism in youth and conservatism in old age by reversing its order.”²¹ Du Bois’s upending of the order of conventional political development is one of the main reasons studying his life and work remains important and instructive. Another reason why studying Du Bois’s life and work continues to be crucial is because, in the long run, years of one-dimensional interpretations of his thought have led to his erasure both in the academy and in activist communities. For instance, Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, although often overlooked in the history of sociology, was, upon its publication in 1899, an utterly unprecedented and undeniably innovative work in urban sociology, industrial sociology, historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of race, and sociology of culture. Elijah Anderson asserted in his introduction to a reprint edition of The Philadelphia Negro: “W. E. B. Du Bois is a founding father of American sociology, but, unfortunately, neither this masterpiece nor much of Du Bois’s other work has been given proper recognition.” In fact, Anderson continued, “it is possible to advance through a graduate program in sociology in this country without ever hearing about Du Bois.”²²

Anderson’s weighted words here help to highlight why an introduction to Du Bois’s thought that surveys its full range and reach is desperately needed. Beyond his contributions to sociology or history or politics, among other academic disciplines, Du Bois’s life and work continue to offer us much of practical value because we continue to search for solutions to many of the problems he spent a lifetime studying and critiquing. For example, Du Bois’s writings on racism in the twentieth century remain relevant in the twenty-first century because we continue to be plagued by various forms of racism, whether we turn to the police brutality that triggered the Black Lives Matter Movement or the issues surrounding immigration in the US or Europe (e.g., Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic). His contributions to the critique of patriarchy prefigure the current discourse on “male feminism” and offer a powerful model to contemporary men seeking feminist-inspired forms of masculinity. His analysis of colonialism and its interconnectedness with racism (i.e., racial colonialism) continues to have great import for adequately understanding the ongoing struggles of formerly colonized continents such as Africa, Asia, and the Americas (i.e., North, Central, and South America). Lastly, Du Bois’s often overlooked late-life work, especially Black Reconstruction, provides us with quintessential critiques of capitalism and global imperialism, and highlights the continuing overlap between racism, capitalism, and colonialism.

Du Bois: A Critical Introduction will probe the contradictions in Du Bois’s thought that were integral to his evolution from reformist social scientist to radical intellectual-activist to revolutionary democratic socialist. As will be seen, Du Bois began his intellectual and political life committed to racial and economic reform, often displaying the influence of the bourgeois academics, social democrats, race liberals, and moderate Pan-Africanists he studied with and idolized at the time. During his reformist phase, he was committed to using egalitarian and legislative methods to achieve democratic social transformation. Throughout this period, Du Bois saw little or no revolutionary potential in the working class, especially the black working class. As a result, his early thought lacked a thorough understanding of, or commitment to, working-class folk as agents of their own emancipation. Dedicated to his “Talented Tenth” leadership strategy, Du Bois’s early elitism led him to search for top-down solutions to social and political problems. His elitism gradually gave way to vanguardism – the belief that a small group of the most class-conscious, intellectually advanced, and politically sophisticated should lead the working class in their struggle against racism, colonialism, and capitalism. In the long run, this vanguardism caused him to misread many political situations, such as backing Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

Over time, Du Bois shifted his political position from social reform to social revolution, and desperately searched for bottom-up solutions to social and political problems. In this regard, his intellectual and political evolution holds many lessons we could learn from and use today in our efforts to make sense of our epoch: from the contentious centrality of race, gender, and class in US politics, to popular revolutions across the Global South (i.e., formerly colonized or “Third World” countries), to recent worker uprisings in the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Du Bois began his career a dedicated elitist but, after many missteps, evolved into a committed radical democratic socialist by his later years. He came to understand the carnage of world wars, race riots, lynchings, racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of women, colonialism, and imperialism as serious indictments of the triumphalist narratives of spreading democracy that Europe and the United States have propagated for centuries. It was Du Bois’s search for solutions to the problems of racism, sexism, colonialism, and capitalism that forced him to gradually move beyond reformism and embrace radicalism, and eventually revolution. Ultimately, Du Bois’s legacy is his incredible evolution from bourgeois social scientist to revolutionary internationalist. His legacy is also bound up in what his trajectory teaches us about oppressed peoples’ awesome ability to transcend and try new things when deeply committed to transforming themselves and the world.

Perhaps more than anything else, Du Bois’s indefatigable commitment to self-change and social change in the twentieth century provides us with a paradigm for transforming ourselves and the twenty-first century. As David Levering Lewis noted, “In the course of his long, turbulent career … W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism – scholarship, propaganda, integration, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, Third World solidarity.” Lewis importantly continued, “First had come culture and education for the elites; then the ballot for the masses; then economic democracy; and finally all these solutions in the service of global racial parity and economic justice.”²³ Lewis helps to highlight both the aspirations and contradictions at the heart of this book.

Du Bois’s dedication to racial justice, gender justice, decolonization, and an end to economic exploitation was an aspiration that brought numerous struggles, and at times caused contradictions and many mistakes, in determining the most appropriate course of action. Undoubtedly, his late-life enthusiastic commitment to the oppressed as agents of their own emancipation in many instances made him impetuous, and led him to misjudge calamitous political episodes such as the errors and horrors of Stalinism and Maoism. However, for those deeply interested in or committed to democratic social transformation, Du Bois’s thought remains important precisely because he was right about some things and downright wrong about others, and frequently admitted it. In the end, it is Du Bois’s trajectory from reformist to radical to revolutionary and his principled commitment to democratic social transformation, “rather than the solutions he proposed, that are instructive” – because Du Bois, Lewis shared, “was an intellectual in the purest sense of the word – a thinker whose obligation was to be dissatisfied continually with his own thoughts and those of others.”²⁴ Du Bois’s life and work, when objectively engaged and fully understood, provides us with a framework for not only identifying problems but developing viable solutions to them. Whether we turn to the resurgence of global racism and xenophobia, misogyny and gender injustice, the neocolonial conditions of the wretched of the earth and the Global South, the constantly changing character of capitalism and the misinterpretation of Marxism, or the seemingly never-ending imperialist wars, W. E. B. Du Bois’s discourse offers us both extraordinary insights and cautionary tales.

To access the lessons Du Bois’s legacy may teach us, we must ask a set of crucial questions: Why is it imperative for us to know who Du Bois was and what he contributed to contemporary thought? Even more – and methodologically speaking – why is it important to not only know what but how, in his own innovative intellectual history-making manner, Du Bois contributed when he contributed to contemporary thought? The real answers to these questions lie not so much in who Du Bois was, but more in the intellectual and political legacy he left behind. That is to say, the answers lie in the lasting contributions his discourse has historically made and is currently making to our critical comprehension of the ways the social inequalities and injustices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have informed and morphed into the social inequalities and injustices of the twenty-first century. Let us begin, then, with Du Bois’s early social science in the interest of social reform in his seminal study The Philadelphia Negro.