Possible Form of an Interlocution

Nahum Dimitri Chandler is Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Annotations: On the Early Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and “Beyond This Narrow Now”: Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois, both also published by Duke University Press.

“Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s insightful archival readings make outstanding contributions to the literature on W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber, illuminating their interlocution beyond the untenable but widespread idea of a ‘tutelary relation’ of the latter to the former. This book does not merely promise to make an original contribution to the study of the emergence of the modern sociological paradigm; it also helps to construct the historical genealogy of a set of problems lively discussed in contemporary social and political theory.” - Sandro Mezzadra, Professor of Political Theory in the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna “With breathtaking vision and life-giving attention to archival discoveries too, Nahum D. Chandler radically illuminates a little-known history of interlocution between two of the modern world’s most influential thinkers and that interlocution’s vital global importance for future-oriented social theories of relation, difference, and possibility itself. Now more than ever, Chandler’s brilliant parsing of futural horizons of social thought provides necessary sustenance for readers hungry for both hope and change.” - Leslie A. Adelson, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies Emerita, Cornell University

• Note on Citations ixAn Opening Occasion—Preface xiiiAcknowledgments xxiPart I. The Letters and the Essay1. The Correspondence Between W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber, 1904–1905 12. The Essay: W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten” (1906) 173. The Place of “Die Negerfrage” in the Work of W.E.B. Du Bois, ca. 1905 22Part II. The Terms of Discussion1. The Virtues of Scholasticism: Annotations of the Twentieth-Century Discourse on W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber 342. The Scholasticism of the Virtual: A Problematization for Twenty-First-Century Discourse on W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber 43Part III. Coda—Or, Available Light and the Terms of DiscourseAppendix. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten” (The Negro Question in the United States) (1906) / Joseph Fracchia, Translator 87Notes 141References 167Index