The Possible Form of an Interlocution: W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904–1905

The Possible Form of an Interlocution

W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence, 1904–1905

I am quite sure to come back to your country as soon as possible and especially to the South, because I am absolutely convinced that the "color-line" problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.

—Max Weber to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 17, 1904

And above all consider one thing: the day of the colored races dawns. It is insanity to delay this development; it is wisdom to promote what it promises us in light and hope for the future.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, "Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten"

Part 2: The Terms of Discussion

A question has been set afoot. Part 1 of this essay (found in CR: The New Centennial Review vol. 6, no. 3) followed its tracks across a handful of months of correspondence and discourse. Yet, the more fundamental question is how should we think about this relation. Whence this correspondence? How did it come about? How should we understand its character? How is the essay "Die Negerfrage" situated therein? Should the whole matter properly be understood as an interlocution? Beyond the matter of the circumstantial, if we may pose an epistemic question, why did it not continue? Or, better, in what mode might it be understood to have, in truth, occurred at all, or to have continued?

How should we make sense of this moment from the standpoint of our contemporary situation? Does it matter as more than an antiquarian investigation?

The answer to the latter form of our question, in brief, is yes.

The possible terms of an interlocution here name the organization of the contradictory premises and divisions within the common of the epistemic horizon, according to which the past of contemporary intellectual formations was configured. And it remains that contemporary conceptions of problematic across the spectrum of disciplines and practices are announced as inscriptions on this palimpsest. Yet, further, for a certain attempt at thinking our historical present, the legacies of Du Bois and Weber should and must be understood and thought together as exemplary, perhaps, of our common intellectual antecedent. The configured archival seam of this interlocution, then, leaves the traces of a passage by which the sedimentation of theoretical disposition and the scholastic formation of research project can be remarked (if not yet fully desedimented) to yield a deeper, richer, more variegated sense of our own present and future intellectual inhabitation. As such, it names a necessary task for theoretical labor in our own time.

I. The Virtues of Scholasticism

It can be shown that previous discourse on this relation has been unable to propose such a thought. Several brief scholastic and critical annotations may assist us in reopening the question.

A. The Limits of Contemporary Scholarship

Throughout his two volume biography, David Levering Lewis rather systematically characterizes the relation of Du Bois and Weber in a manner that obscures what is most in need of understanding: the terms of possible interlocution between these two figures. First, in part, the difficulty arises because Lewis continually places his interpretation of Du Bois in this relation, both as person and in terms of thought, under the titular heading of the premises of the biographer's own understanding of the thought of Weber. He presents the relation of Du Bois to Weber more or less under the heading of a tutelary order. Weber would be the tutor, Du Bois, the pupil. And this representation is maintained by the biographer, despite the fact that it is constructed on the basis of an engagement with the documentary record on this point that...