'The Social Theory of Du Bois\r'

'Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim be widely recognized as the trinity of sociological theory. musical composition these third sociologists were trailblazing friendly theoreticians who enhanced the study of military personnel behavior and its relationship to social institutions, other, more modern scholars were just as innovative †peerlessness of those scholars cosmos W. E. B. Du Bois. W. E. B. Du Bois was a political and literary giant of the twentieth century, publishing over twenty books and thousand of essays and articles through push through his life. W. E. B Du Bois is arguably one of the close to imaginative, perceptive, and fecund founders of the sociological discip debate. In addition to leading the Pan-African drive and being an activist for civil rights for African the Statesns, Du Bois was a pioneer of urban sociology, an innovator of rural sociology, a leader in criminology, the first-year American sociologist of religion, and most notably the fi rst great social theorist of race. The performance of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) has recently be follow recognized for its crucial contrisolelyions to sociological theory.\r\nAlthough Du Bois himself was overwhelmingly concerned with the scientific location of â€Å"value free” sociological research, later social theorists have found his purviews on race to aim one of the first instances of the articulation of standpoint theory. This supposititious perspective is some(prenominal)thing merely value free, because of the self-conscious efforts of the researcher to look at the social humans from the reward point of minority groups. Feminists, multi heathenists, and even postmodernists have produce to recognize the importance of the sear point of understand found in Du Boiss recreate.\r\nThey have also comply to appreciate Du Bois for his focus on local knowledge and practices. W. E. B. Du Bois was an important American thinker. Poet, philosopher, economic hist orian, sociologist, and social critic, Du Bois’ work resists easy classification. Du Bois is more than a philosopher; he is, for some, a great social leader. His extensive efforts all pull toward a common coating, the equality of colored people. His philosophical system is significant nowadays because it addresses what many would argue is the authoritative world hassle of colour domination.\r\nSo yearn as anti-Semite(a) bloodless-hot privilege exists, and suppresses the dreams and the freedoms of homophile beings, so large will Du Bois be applicable as a thinker, for he, more than almost any other, employed thought in the serve of exposing this privilege, and worked to preclude it in the service of a greater humanity. Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a creative work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum theme Black Reconstruction in America challenged the predominate orthodoxy that abusives were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era.\r\nHe wrote the first scientific treatise in the field of sociology; and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains insightful essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACPs journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally appealing to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent stop activist and advocated nuclear disarmament.\r\nThe unite States Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death. primaeval in his c atomic number 18er Du Bois claimed that the â€Å"race idea” was the primaeval thought of all history and that the primary â€Å" paradox of the twentieth century was the problem of the colour line. ” Du Bois viewed the goal of African Americans not as one of integrating or absorption into white America, but one of advancing â€Å"Pan-Negroism. ” Critical of the excessive materialism of white America, Du Bois believed that black culture could temper the self-interested pursuit of profit.\r\nDu Bois called on blacks to organize and unite around their race, and although he was not opposed to segregation per se, he did herald to sack up that discrimination stifled the development of â€Å"separate but equal” facilities and institutions. The opinions of the blur and copy consciousness worry an important place in Du Boiss theory on race. Du Bois discusses both in his work The Souls of Black Folk. The Veil is an imaginary barrier that separates whites and blacks. Du Bois hoped his work would allow whites to coup doeil behind the Veil, so they could begin to understand the black experience in America.\r\nPerhaps the most important component of the black experience in America was living with what Du Bois called stunt man c onsciousness. Blacks argon simultaneously both inside and outside of the dominant white companionship and live with a feeling of â€Å"twoness. ” By toilsome to cultivate and preserve a racial identity, blacks come into conflict with trying to fit into white society. fit to Du Bois, the tension of being both black and American can manifest itself in pathologies within the black community and discrimination in white America.\r\n whatever turns out to be the best general fib of Du Bois’ philosophy, it seems the significance of his thought only if really parades up in the specific details of his works themselves, especially in The Souls of Black Folk. It is here that he first develops his central philosophical concept, the concept of double consciousness, and spells out its full implications. The aim of Souls of Black Folk is to scan the spirit of black people in the United States: to show their humanity and the predicament that has confronted their humanity.\r\nDu Bois asserts that â€Å"the color line” divides people in the States, causes massive harm to its inhabitants, and ruins its let pretensions to democracy. He shows, in particular, how a hide out has come to be put over African-Americans, so that others do not see them as they are; African-Americans are obscured in America; they cannot be seen clearly, but only through the lens of race prejudice. African-Americans feel this noncitizen perception upon them but at the same condemnation feel themselves as themselves, as their let with their have legitimate feelings and imposts. This dual self-perception is known as â€Å"double consciousness. Du Bois’ aim in Souls is to explain this concept in more specific detail and to show how it adversely affects African-Americans. In the background of Souls is always also the righteous import of its message, to the effect that the insertion of a veil on human beings is wrong and must be condemned on the grounds that it divide s what otherwise would be a unique and coherent identity. Souls thus aims to make the endorser understand, in effect, that African-Americans have a distinct cultural identity, one that must be acknowledged, respected, and enabled to flourish.\r\nDu Bois’ other major philosophical concept is that of â€Å"second sight. ” This is a concept he develops most precisely in Darkwater, a work, as we have seen, in which Du Bois forms his approach and takes up a stauncher stance against white culture. Du Bois holds that due to their double consciousness, African-Americans possess a privileged epistemological perspective. both inside the white world and outside of it, African-Americans are able to understand the white world, while in so far perceiving it from a different perspective, namely that of an outsider as well.\r\nThe white person in America, by contrast, contains but a single consciousness and perspective, for he or she is a member of a dominant culture, with its own racial and cultural norms asserted as sacrosanct. The white person looks out from themselves and sees only their own world reflected back upon themâ€a kind of blindness or singular sight possesses them. Luckily, as Du Bois makes clear, the dual perspective of African-Americans can be used to grasp the bosom of whiteness and to expose it, in the multiple senses of the countersign â€Å"expose. That is to say, second sight allows an African-American to bring the white view out into the undecided, to lay it bare, and to let it contract for the problematic and wrong-headed concept that it is. The destruction of â€Å"whiteness” in this way leaves whites open to the experience of African-Americans, as a privileged perspective, and hence it also leaves African-Americans with a discover in the culture through which they could enter with their legitimate, and legitimating, perspectives.\r\n by and by in life, Du Bois turned to communism as the fashion to achieve equality . Du Bois came to believe that the economic condition of Africans and African-Americans was one of the primary modes of their oppression, and that a more equitable diffusion of wealth, as advanced by Marx, was the remedy to the situation. ( tin J. Macionis: Sociology fourteenth edition) Du Bois was not simply a retainer of Marx, however. He also added keen insights to the communist tradition himself.\r\nOne of his contributions is his insistence that communism contains no transparent means of liberating Africans and African-Americans, but that it ought to focus its attentions here and work toward this end. â€Å"The darker races,” to use Du Bois’ language, amount to the majority of the world’s proletariat. In Black Folk, Then and instantaneously, Du Bois writes: â€Å"the dark workers of Asia, Africa, the islands of the sea, and siemens and Central America…these are the one who are supporting a superstructure of wealth, luxury, and extravagance. It is the advance of these people that is the rise of the world” (Black Folk,).\r\nA further contribution Du Bois makes is to show how Utopian politics such as communism is possible in the first place. Building on Engle’s claim that freedom lies in the realization of indispensability, as Maynard Solomon argues (Solomon, â€Å"Introduction” 258), (because in grasping necessity we accurately perceive what areas of life are open to free action), Du Bois insists on the power of dreams. Admitting our bound disposition (bound to our bellies, bound to material conditions), even stressing it, he til now emphasizes our range of powers within these constraints.\r\nAlthough difficult to characterize in general terms, Du Bois’ philosophy amounts to a programmatic shift absent from abstraction and toward engaged, social criticism. In affecting this change in philosophy, especially on behalf of African-Americans and pertaining to the issue of race, Du Bois adds concr ete significance and urgent application to American Pragmatism, as Cornel West maintains, a philosophy that is most social criticism, not about grasping absolute timeless truth.\r\nAbove all, however, Du Bois’ philosophy is significant today because it addresses what many would argue is the real world problem of white domination. So long as racist white privilege exists, and suppresses the dreams and the freedoms of human beings, so long will Du Bois be relevant as a thinker, for he, more than almost any other, employed thought in the service of exposing this privilege, and worked to eliminate it in the service of a greater humanity.\r\nReferences: Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Folk, Then and Now (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1975). Du Bois, W. E. B. Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (Mineola, N. Y. Dover Publications, 1999). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois\r\nhttp://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072824301/student_view0/chapter10/chapter _summary.html Sociology: 14th edition (John J Macionis; Prentice Hall, 2011)\r\n'