Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk 120 Years Later: An Emancipatory Political Philosophy

This article begins by showing Max Weber's interest in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and comparing it with the virtual ignorance of Du Bois's work as a whole in the sociology scholarship produced in Spanish. It then describes Du Bois's conception of the then-called "Negro problem" as a "social problem" (as Marx did with the "Jewish problem"), and is followed by an outline of Du Bois's new political philosophy, which elevated the black masses to the status of "black people" and demanded that they ought to be full equal to white people because they have a "shared political identity". The text ends by discussing the rhetoric deployed by Du Bois by appealing to black and white American patterns of thought and emotion.