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  • Democracy Hesitant: Sociological Knowledge Production, Policy, and the Public Sphere
  • Stephen Knadler (bio)
The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States, David Paul Haney, Temple University Press, 2008.
America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology, Cynthia H. Tolentino. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

This division of the world between experts and non-experts also contains an image of the public sphere.

Ulrich Beck, Risk Society

To explain [society] we must assume Law and Chance working in conjunction–Chance being the Scientific side of inexplicable Will. Sociology, then, is the Science that seeks the limits of Chance in human conduct.

W. E. B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant”

In his posthumously published autobiography subtitled “A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century” (1968), W. E. B. Du Bois recalls how he discovered his method and purpose as a sociologist while writing The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Hired in 1896 as an “assistant” instructor by the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania which “demurred” from having a full-time colored lecturer, Du Bois took upon himself the task of “visit[ing]” and “talk[ing]” with over 5,000 people in order to write the 1,500-page [End Page 135] volume that would provide “scientific sanction” to the political reform agenda of the Philadelphia College Settlement Association (124). The CSA, started by well-known reformers such as Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, and Vita Scudder, among others, had as its goal the introduction of graduates from women’s colleges into the neighborhood for postgraduate training in social work and had blamed the city’s corruption on the “semi-criminal vote of the Negro Seventh Ward” (194; Levering Lewis 187). In beginning his career as a sociologist, Du Bois thus found himself struggling as a member of a new minority professional class with how to locate himself. Inhabiting a liminal space between female social work and the manly rigor of academic professionalism, between a white world of managerial policy and black politics demanding social justice and civil rights, Du Bois also stood in an awkward position as a regional and class outsider chosen to act as participant observer speaking on behalf of a people who resented his presence. As Du Bois writes: “The colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms. They had a natural dislike to being studied like a strange species. I met again and in different guise those curious cross-currents and inner social whirlings. They set me to groping. I concluded that I did not know so much as I might about my own people” (125). Although it was a “hard job,” in the end, Du Bois writes, however, “I had learned far more from Philadelphia Negroes than I had taught them concerning the Negro Problem” (125).

This Du Boisian recollection in post-civil rights untranquility and expatriation raises the question: what did Du Bois learn from the “Philadelphia Negroes” and how might it inform our own contemporary investigations into the history and work of sociological knowledge production, and, as importantly, literature’s vexed relation to it. Writing during the 1960s when a new class of professionals would call for a renewed public sociology, it is ironic that Du Bois concludes his anecdote by pronouncing that what he learned and hoped to restore for collective memory is a “systematic” and “scientific” study of race. As Du Bois elaborates, “We live in a day when in spite of the brilliant accomplishments of a remarkable century, there is currently much flippant criticism of scientific work; when the truth-seeker is too often pictured as devoid of human sympathy, and careless of human ideals. We are still prone in spite of all our culture to sneer at the heroism of the laboratory while we cheer the swagger of the street broil. At such times true lovers of humanity can only hold higher the pure ideals of science” (127). In many ways, Du Bois’s comments anticipate in order to preempt our own postmodern skepticism about disembodied scientific objectivity, even as it looks back on the “brilliant accomplishments” of the twentieth century which saw the rise of...

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