The Spirit vs. the Souls
122 pages
English

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122 pages
English

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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.


During the first third of the twentieth century, six candidates of the Republican Party won the White House. Woodrow Wilson, who served as president between 1913-1921, was the only Democrat to interrupt the GOP sequence of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Underscoring the party’s dominance back then, each victorious Republican received over 50 percent of the popular vote in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1920, 1924, and 1928. By contrast, Wilson failed to receive a majority in either the 1912 or 1916 elections. For the next 36 years, from 1933 until 1969, four Democrats—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson—occupied the Oval Office, and there was just one Republican: Dwight Eisenhower. Like Wilson, Eisenhower broke one party control of the executive branch for an eight-year period (1953-1961). Unlike Wilson, Eisenhower garnered impressive popular vote majorities twice—54.9 percent in 1952 and 57.4 in 1956. Eisenhower’s first election flipped the White House from the Democrats to the Republicans, but Kennedy returned it to the Democratic side eight years later. From then on, the presidential pendulum has continued to swing regularly back and forth between the two parties: to the Republicans with the 1968 election of Richard Nixon, to the Democrats in 1976 when Jimmy Carter prevailed, to Ronald Reagan and the GOP in 1980, to the Democrats and Bill Clinton in 1992, to the Republicans and George W. Bush in 2000, to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in 2008, and back to the Republican side in 2016 with Donald Trump as the party’s standard bearer. Since the election of 1952, there have been nine party changes in the presidency, considerably greater frequency than the electoral shifts that took place for nearly seven decades during the previous century, which featured 52 years of Republican presidents and 48 years for the Democrats. A newfound volatility has replaced relative stability in the nation’s highest office. Except for the 12-year stretch of Reagan and the senior George Bush from 1981 to 1993, the White House has bounced from one major party to the other after eight years following seven post-World War II elections: in 1960, 1968, 1976, 1992, 2000, 2008, 2016. In 1980, the change occurred more quickly, after just a single term. What’s behind this form of partisan change after such pronounced continuity, including 20 consecutive years of Democratic administrations (from 1933 to 1953)? Have Americans become politically jumpy, prone to electoral anxiety that results in favoring one party and then the other with noteworthy regularity? Are some voters, conditioned by the media to change channels or websites on impulse, more inclined of late to switch allegiances out of civic boredom or frustration? Are there other causes?
Viewed in context, Constitutional, procedural, and cultural reasons play significant roles in shaping the environment for electing a president that’s developed since the middle of the twentieth century. They intersect with each other and produce a very different political and electoral landscape from the previous five decades. That new landscape, in turn, yields different kinds of people who win the White House and become the world’s most powerful person. Let’s be specific. The Twenty-Second Amendment, establishing a two-term limit for a White House occupant, was proposed by Congress on March 21, 1947 and formally ratified by the requisite number of states on February 27, 1951. Interpreted by many observers as revenge by Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate rather than reform, the amendment, in part, was intended to prevent a popular political figure, such as Franklin Roosevelt, from winning more than two presidential elections. (Between 1931 and 1995, over six decades, the GOP controlled both chambers of Congress only four years: 1947-1949 and 1953-1955.) The amendment serves as a formal, mandated check on the chief official of the executive branch. It also dictates that after two winning White House campaigns the victor must, by law, retreat to the political sidelines. A definite, legally fixed end date means, among other things, that a president becomes, in effect, a lame duck in chief during a second term. Until the limit came into effect, the country’s foremost political leader could exert influence with more robust force and meaning. The door remained ajar, at least potentially, to future dealings between the White House and Capitol Hill. As it is now, members of the House and Senate are looking ahead to their own elections—and self-preservation—and a president often has to rely more on personal persuasion than institutional clout to accomplish what might be on the administration’s to-do list. To a certain extent, the balance of power shifts in the second term, with Congress the principal beneficiary. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn cogently summarized the situation in a 2006 New York Times commentary when they wrote: “A second-term president will, in effect, automatically be fired within four years. Inevitably his influence over Congress, and even his authority over the sprawling executive branch, weaken. His party leadership frays as presidential hopefuls carve out their own constituencies for the next election. Whether the president is trying to tamp down scandal or push legislation, he loses his ability to set the agenda.” They go on to observe that a second-termer also loses “accountability to the people,” which is “at the heart of a democratic system.” In everyday life, if we know someone will be leaving a position at a particular time, our internal calculus for dealing with the person changes from what we would do if we had no knowledge of an exact departure date. That’s human nature. And that person’s proposal for a new initiative might get buried or a decision related to an action could be delayed until the clock runs out, with the possibility of a different dynamic to consider. The public’s attitude to a political figure who’s mandated to leave office is that change is definitely on the horizon. Granted, the two-term tradition began with George Washington, but tradition is vastly different from a Constitutional amendment. Before Franklin Roosevelt won four successive campaigns—1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944—Ulysses S. Grant in the nineteenth century and Wilson early in the twentieth tried to convince their parties (Grant as a Republican and Wilson as a Democrat) that they deserved a third term. As it happened, neither succeeded, and debate about another four years in office roiled the 1940 race. Popular campaign buttons that year read “I’m against the 3rd term: Washington Wouldn’t, Grant Couldn’t, Roosevelt Shouldn’t,” “Out! Stealing Third!” and “No Third Term-ites!”
Still, the barrier even to contemplate more time than eight years is a factor in the minds of voters as they evaluate presidential candidates. There have been efforts (by both Democrats and Republicans) to repeal the amendment, but they haven’t received broad support. Should they? Would more time of executive leadership result in sustained continuity of governance or concentrate power in the hands of one person in ways that jeopardize the democratic equilibrium? (excerpted from chapter 1)


Prologue

  1. Consequences of Change
  2. Perils of Power
  3. Paralysis of Polarization
  4. Conundrums of Communications
  5. Reveries of Reform
  6. Presidency in Progress

Epilogue

A Chronology of the Modern American Presidency

For Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 31 août 2019
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9780268106034
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,2250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE SPIRIT VS. THE SOULS
A FRICAN A MERICAN I NTELLECTUAL H ERITAGE S ERIES
Paul Spickard and Patrick Miller
Series Editors

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019021670
ISBN: 978-0-268-10601-0 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-268-10604-1 (WebPDF) ISBN: 978-0-268-10603-4 (Epub)
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at undpress@nd.edu .
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
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Having been at this project for so long, I naturally have many people to thank for having been sounding boards, readers, critics, and supporters. Unfortunately, I am bound to forget some of them on the list below and to them I offer my sincerest apologies and assurances that their absence is not meant as a slight in any way. Those whom I have not forgotten are Bipan Ahdi, Sheila Aminmadani, Ingrid Banks, Paul Barba, Stephanie Batiste, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Jill Briggs, Manolo Callahan, Michael P. Carter, Nahum Chandler, Rodney Coates, Reg Daniel, Douglass Daniels, Micaela Diaz-Sanchez, Teresa Figueroa, Greg Feitt, John Foran, Aramintha Grant, Cecilia Green, Charles Hale, Tiffany Hale, Mary Hancock, Mark Jay, Gaye Johnson, Terence Keel, Jasmine Kelekay, Savvoula Kolonia, George Lipsitz, Charles H. Long, Ilana Luna, Margaret Matson, Pamela S. McAuley, Rani McLean, Cecilia Mendez-Gastelumendi, Claudine Michel, Katherine Morales, Nicolas Pascal, Natalie Pierre, Mathias Rosenthal, Holly Roose, Elisabeth Schaefer-Wunsche, Paul Spickard, Jeffrey Stewart, Roberto Strongman, Christina Syriani, Kerry Tomlinson, Vilna Bashi Treitler, Carolina Valle, Howard Winant, and Jasmine Yarish.
Slick, this one is dedicated to you, as promised. Chloe has claims on the next one.
Introduction
In a letter to W. E. B. Du Bois dated 30 March 1905, Max Weber praised his American counterpart for his “splendid work,” The Souls of Black Folk , 1 and insisted that it “ought to be translated in German .” 2 Weber presumably read the work after having met Du Bois for a “few minutes” at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair where the German scholar presented a paper on the origins and effects of capitalist agriculture in the eastern and western regions of Germany. 3 It is also likely that in the course of their conversation in St. Louis Du Bois reminded Weber that their paths had already crossed in the early 1890s at the University of Berlin and in the meetings of the Verein f ü r Sozialpolitik (Association of Social Policy) of which they were both members. 4 At the time Weber was lecturing on Roman, German, and commercial law, and Du Bois was a doctoral student in economics. This initial exchange led to Weber’s solicitation from Du Bois of an “investigation about the relations between the (so-called) ‘race problem’ and the (so-called) ‘class problem’” in the United States, about which, Weber continued in his letter, “it is impossible to have any conversation with white people of the South without feeling the connection” between the two. 5 Du Bois obliged, and the article, “Die Neger Frage in den Vereinigten Staaten,” appeared in the journal that Weber coedited with Werner Sombart, Archiv f ü r Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik , in 1906. 6 Moreover, in the five letters that Weber sent to Du Bois between November 1904 and May 1905, 7 he recorded having found a German publisher (Siebeck) for The Souls of Black Folk ; 8 his willingness to write an introduction to the translation, 9 his intention to write a “short review of the recent publications about the race problem in America” for which he asked Du Bois for recommendations, 10 and, most striking, his remark that he, too, was “absolutely convinced that the ‘colour-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.” 11 Five years later, Weber lauded Du Bois in the highest terms in an exchange with Dr. Alfred Ploetz on the theme of race and its influence on the social evolution of past and current societies: “I wish to state that the most important sociological scholar anywhere in the Southern States in America, with whom no scholar can compare, is a Negro—Burckhardt [ sic ] Du Bois.” 12 In short, by all indications, theirs should have been a fruitful scholarly friendship, and one that could have been rich in insights on the events leading up to and immediately after World War I. Such, however, was not the case. After the last letter of their exchange in 1905, their communication abruptly ended. Among a number of goals, I seek in this work to offer some reasons as to why Du Bois and Weber never resumed contact after that year.
However, my primary objective in The Spirit vs. the Souls is to present a comparative analysis of the scholarly concerns and political positions of Max Weber and W. E. B. Du Bois. I have chosen to compare these two scholars and public intellectuals mainly for two reasons: they present two contrasting perspectives on the rise of European and European American economic development; and as a result of these differences, they took vastly different political positions on both domestic and international issues. With regard to the first theme, whereas Weber minimized the role of unfree (i.e., forced, non-wage-earning) black labor in the history and maintenance of Western capitalism, Du Bois saw it as fundamental. And in the second instance, whereas Du Bois was a vociferous opponent of European imperialism and of all other expressions of racial supremacy, Weber was a staunch advocate of German overseas imperialism.
These differences in perspective on the origins and labor regimes of capitalism, and on how to remedy or profit from them, pivoted as much on methodology as conceptualization. While Weber drew his conclusions about modern capitalism from comparisons of its ideological and material components primarily with those of the ancient Mediterranean, medieval Europe, and India and China, Du Bois largely drew his, first, from surveys of ancient and medieval Africa and, second, from those of Europe’s colonization of the Americas, beginning in the sixteenth century , and subsequently other parts of the world, and its sustained investment in the human trade of Africans until the nineteenth century. These were certainly not hard and fast lines of social inquiry, for Du Bois was as comfortable writing about ancient and medieval Europe as Weber was about American politics in the early twentieth century. Still, their general differences in geographic and demographic concentrations reflected significant differences regarding, among other matters, the place of unfree labor in modern capitalism and of religious dictates in determining which labor regimes would be employed in Europe’s overseas colonies. As Du Bois chronicled in a number of works, for the Africans, Amerindians, and Asians who were incorporated into European empires (both formal and “informal”), wage-earning labor was not the typical form of work that they were forced or “encouraged” to perform, contrary to Weber’s (and not his alone) assertion that wage labor was one of the hallmarks of modern capitalism. 13 Yet, and this is the problem, Weber did not have non-European workers in mind when he was conceptualizing the components of modern capitalism.
My sense is that Weber was well aware of the complications that the inclusion of Europe’s overseas colonies would present to his arguments linking specific religious doctrines to equally specific economic activities and capitalism to wage labor. This would explain why Weber was at pains to avoid or to minimize any references to European colonialism in his religious studies or in his encyclopedic Economy and Society . 14 For example, he asserts in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that “colonial booty capitalism” was precisely the kind of economic enterprise that Protestants generally and Puritans in particular morally shunned and suggests that this was one of the reasons, if not the reason, that the “capitalistic order” was more advanced in New England than in other British North American colonies. “It is further undoubted,” Weber wrote, “that capitalism remained far less developed in some of the neighboring colonies, the later Southern States of the United States of America, in spite of the fact that these latter were founded by large capitalists for business motives, while the New England colonies were founded by preachers and seminary graduates with the help of small bourgeois craftsmen and yeomen, for religious reasons. In this case the causal relation is certainly the reverse of that suggested by the materialistic standpoint.” 15

Not exactly, if we both correct and add some of the material or economic details that Weber left out of his synopsis of colonial North American history. What his account fails to mention is that some of the pious men in New England were not content with farming, crafts, or shop keeping, but also had their sights set on “business motives.” And one of the few arenas in which they could satisfy their desire for profit was in the carrying trade between their region and the southern colonies and the British Caribbean. Common to both trade networks was New England’s supply of slaves, among other commodities, to these southern ports in exchange for tobacco, sugar, and sugar by-products. T

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