The Spirit vs. the Souls: Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship

Introduction

In a letter to W. E. B. Du Bois dated 30 March 1905, Max Weber praised his American counterpart for his splendid work, The Souls of Black Folk,¹ and insisted that it "ought to be translated in German.² Weber presumably read the work after having met Du Bois for a few minutes at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair where the German scholar presented a paper on the origins and effects of capitalist agriculture in the eastern and western regions of Germany.³ It is also likely that in the course of their conversation in St. Louis Du Bois reminded Weber that their paths had already crossed in the early 1890s at the University of Berlin and in the meetings of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association of Social Policy) of which they were both members.⁴ At the time Weber was lecturing on Roman, German, and commercial law, and Du Bois was a doctoral student in economics. This initial exchange led to Weber’s solicitation from Du Bois of an investigation about the relations between the (so-called) ‘race problem’ and the (so-called) ‘class problem’ in the United States, about which, Weber continued in his letter, it is impossible to have any conversation with white people of the South without feeling the connection between the two.⁵ Du Bois obliged, and the article, Die Neger Frage in den Vereinigten Staaten," appeared in the journal that Weber coedited with Werner Sombart, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, in 1906.⁶ Moreover, in the five letters that Weber sent to Du Bois between November 1904 and May 1905,⁷ he recorded having found a German publisher (Siebeck) for The Souls of Black Folk;⁸ his willingness to write an introduction to the translation,⁹ his intention to write a short review of the recent publications about the race problem in America for which he asked Du Bois for recommendations,¹⁰ and, most striking, his remark that he, too, was absolutely convinced that the ‘colour-line’ problem will be the paramount problem of the time to come, here and everywhere in the world.¹¹ Five years later, Weber lauded Du Bois in the highest terms in an exchange with Dr. Alfred Ploetz on the theme of race and its influence on the social evolution of past and current societies: "I wish to state that the most important sociological scholar anywhere in the Southern States in America, with whom no scholar can compare, is a Negro—Burckhardt [sic] Du Bois."¹² In short, by all indications, theirs should have been a fruitful scholarly friendship, and one that could have been rich in insights on the events leading up to and immediately after World War I. Such, however, was not the case. After the last letter of their exchange in 1905, their communication abruptly ended. Among a number of goals, I seek in this work to offer some reasons as to why Du Bois and Weber never resumed contact after that year.

However, my primary objective in The Spirit vs. the Souls is to present a comparative analysis of the scholarly concerns and political positions of Max Weber and W. E. B. Du Bois. I have chosen to compare these two scholars and public intellectuals mainly for two reasons: they present two contrasting perspectives on the rise of European and European American economic development; and as a result of these differences, they took vastly different political positions on both domestic and international issues. With regard to the first theme, whereas Weber minimized the role of unfree (i.e., forced, non-wage-earning) black labor in the history and maintenance of Western capitalism, Du Bois saw it as fundamental. And in the second instance, whereas Du Bois was a vociferous opponent of European imperialism and of all other expressions of racial supremacy, Weber was a staunch advocate of German overseas imperialism.

These differences in perspective on the origins and labor regimes of capitalism, and on how to remedy or profit from them, pivoted as much on methodology as conceptualization. While Weber drew his conclusions about modern capitalism from comparisons of its ideological and material components primarily with those of the ancient Mediterranean, medieval Europe, and India and China, Du Bois largely drew his, first, from surveys of ancient and medieval Africa and, second, from those of Europe’s colonization of the Americas, beginning in the sixteenth century, and subsequently other parts of the world, and its sustained investment in the human trade of Africans until the nineteenth century. These were certainly not hard and fast lines of social inquiry, for Du Bois was as comfortable writing about ancient and medieval Europe as Weber was about American politics in the early twentieth century. Still, their general differences in geographic and demographic concentrations reflected significant differences regarding, among other matters, the place of unfree labor in modern capitalism and of religious dictates in determining which labor regimes would be employed in Europe’s overseas colonies. As Du Bois chronicled in a number of works, for the Africans, Amerindians, and Asians who were incorporated into European empires (both formal and informal), wage-earning labor was not the typical form of work that they were forced or encouraged to perform, contrary to Weber’s (and not his alone) assertion that wage labor was one of the hallmarks of modern capitalism.¹³ Yet, and this is the problem, Weber did not have non-European workers in mind when he was conceptualizing the components of modern capitalism.

My sense is that Weber was well aware of the complications that the inclusion of Europe’s overseas colonies would present to his arguments linking specific religious doctrines to equally specific economic activities and capitalism to wage labor. This would explain why Weber was at pains to avoid or to minimize any references to European colonialism in his religious studies or in his encyclopedic Economy and Society.¹⁴ For example, he asserts in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that colonial booty capitalism was precisely the kind of economic enterprise that Protestants generally and Puritans in particular morally shunned and suggests that this was one of the reasons, if not the reason, that the capitalistic order was more advanced in New England than in other British North American colonies. It is further undoubted, Weber wrote, that capitalism remained far less developed in some of the neighboring colonies, the later Southern States of the United States of America, in spite of the fact that these latter were founded by large capitalists for business motives, while the New England colonies were founded by preachers and seminary graduates with the help of small bourgeois craftsmen and yeomen, for religious reasons. In this case the causal relation is certainly the reverse of that suggested by the materialistic standpoint.¹⁵

Not exactly, if we both correct and add some of the material or economic details that Weber left out of his synopsis of colonial North American history. What his account fails to mention is that some of the pious men in New England were not content with farming, crafts, or shop keeping, but also had their sights set on business motives. And one of the few arenas in which they could satisfy their desire for profit was in the carrying trade between their region and the southern colonies and the British Caribbean. Common to both trade networks was New England’s supply of slaves, among other commodities, to these southern ports in exchange for tobacco, sugar, and sugar by-products. Thus if capitalism was more developed in New England than in other North American colonies, it was in no small measure thanks to the region’s involvement in booty capitalism, contrary to what Weber implies about the particular avenues of Puritan economic enterprise. It was only by ignoring New England’s economic links to the large-scale slave societies on the mainland and in the Caribbean that Weber could argue that Puritans uniformly engaged in upstanding commerce.¹⁶

If Du Bois and Weber had maintained contact after the former’s years at the University of Berlin, Du Bois might have convinced Weber to qualify his original assertion about Puritan economic pursuits. In his doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, completed just a few years before the publication of the first part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and published in 1896, Du Bois had noted how the Puritans of Massachusetts initially opposed manstealing, except in the cases of warfare, self-pawnship, or purchase by foreign suppliers, only to indulge in it as the prospect grew of the sizable profits that could be made from it: The temptation of trade slowly forced the colony from this high moral ground. New England ships were early found in the West Indian slave trade, and the more the carrying trade developed, the more did the profits of this branch of it attract Puritan captains. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the slave trade was openly recognized as legitimate commerce.¹⁷

With the historical facts demonstrating that Puritans became slavers just like other Europeans, irrespective of faith, Du Bois would have been forced to object to what Weber was suggesting about Puritan economic activity on at least three grounds: (1) to have any validity, it requires the jettisoning of the social contexts in which Puritans and other Protestants did not act in ways that conformed to their own tenets and Weber’s theory; (2) it attempts to make into a general pattern these selected contexts, thereby obscuring the fact that they were selected; and (3) it privileges wage over unfree labor at a time when the number of unfree workers engaged in commercial agriculture and mining was many times greater than the number of wage earners engaged in commodity production.¹⁸ Taken together, Du Bois would probably have concluded that Weber’s theory of Protestant economic action applied primarily to certain intra-European relationships, not to those between Protestants and Africans, Amerindians, and Asians.

I suspect that Du Bois would have agreed with the line of reasoning that I attribute to him if for no other reason than the fact that the collective black experience demanded it. However much Du Bois may have early subscribed to romantic pairings of specific populations with specific modes of thought and conduct as he expressed them in, for example, his address, The Conservation of Races, he knew that the very achievements for which he praised certain European peoples did not include their treatment of people of African descent either at home or abroad. If the English nation stood for constitutional liberty and commercial freedom; the German nation for science and philosophy; [and] the Romance nations stood for literature and art,¹⁹ these were not the institutions and practices that they exported to the colonies or extended to colonized peoples. The people who counted as people in all European colonial territories and in the settler republics that emerged from them, such as the United States, were legally free white men (and, to a lesser extent, people of European descent generally), certainly not the bulk of the indigenous or imported unfree populations. Unlike Weber, Du Bois could not simply disregard these populations because they challenged a questionable theory but instead proposed a theory of capitalism with imperialism, unfree labor, and racism as its mainsprings.

From this perspective, I believe that Du Bois would have ultimately agreed with Kieran Allen that Weber was a sociologist of empire, not only for his advocacy of German imperialism, but for his silence on the subject in his discussions of the development of capitalism in Europe and in his studies of India and China. Remarking on the content of Weber’s Religion of India, Allen notes that the most glaring omission from a book which discusses the lack of capitalist development is the impact of colonialism. Nowhere does Weber examine how the colonization of India by Britain might have retarded India’s development.²⁰ Rather than reflect scholarly neutrality on the subject, let alone objectivity, Du Bois would have read Weber’s skirting of the imperial dimensions of capitalism and, by extension, the role of unfree labor in its inception and maintenance as scholarly bias pure and simple. On these grounds, Du Bois would have had no choice but to interpret The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as well as its companion studies, The Religion of China and The Religion of India, as primarily explorations in ideal types and only marginally as works of historical sociology.

For these reasons and a number of others that I discuss in the pages that follow, I take issue with those scholars who suggest that the exchange between Weber and Du Bois is an indication that they agreed on many of the issues of the day, both academic and political, which presumably only distance and their respective scholarly and public commitments foreshortened. Foremost among these is Aldon Morris, who emphatically makes this case in his pathbreaking The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology.²¹ While I am certainly inclined to agree with him that Du Bois probably gave Weber more food for thought on social stratification than vice versa, contrary to the direction in which their exchange of ideas is typically presented, I do not take Du Bois’s influence on Weber to consider the cultural rather than biological bases of race membership to mean that Weber became any less Eurocentric or racist as a result. As we will have occasion to review in chapter 3, many of Weber’s characterizations of the Chinese were as patently baseless and racist as his racial-cultural descriptions of Poles, as was his insistence, despite Du Bois’s provision of evidence to the contrary in Die Neger Frage in den Vereinigten Staten, that black people could not operate machinery because they suffered from some vague neurotic condition.²² I cannot see how Du Bois could have taken these slights, both intellectual and political, as indicative of his inclusion in Weber’s fraternity of sociologists. With this sort of hazing, Du Bois would have declined pledging.

I have similar misgivings about Lawrence Scaff’s presentation of the Weber–Du Bois relationship in his justly acclaimed Max Weber in America. Certainly, as Scaff underscores, thanks to the year and a half that Du Bois spent at the University of Berlin, he and Weber studied with many of the same luminaries, shared connected interests in comparative agrarian economies, the dynamics of industrialization and urbanization, exacting methods of social research, and the prospects for structural reform,²³ and were both members of the policy-oriented think tank, the Verein für Sozialpolitik. However, their common scholarly interests and methodological approaches should not blind us to the significant differences in intellectual perspectives and political stances between them. Foremost among these were their respective social standpoints and target audiences. Except perhaps in those cases in which he was commissioned to undertake a study, the subjects and audience of Du Bois’s writings were primarily black Americans, a racial minority less than two generations removed from slavery at the turn of the twentieth century and whose fitness to be citizens was questioned by the vast majority of white Americans as a matter of course. By contrast, Weber wrote from the vantage point of a socioeconomically and culturally secure German Protestant, who felt free to write on an impressive range of subjects for an audience of fellow German academics from a similar social milieu.

A related concern is that some have been or will be tempted to use the Du Bois–Weber exchange to suggest that Weber was far less Eurocentric or racist than others have charged. This temptation is understandable if one subscribes to the view that how a person treats another individual from a different population is a reliable indication of how that first person views the group with which the second person identifies or is identified. However, this assumption is frequently challenged by those instances in which individuals, like our first person, embrace individuals like our second one, less as members of distinct populations and more as exceptional ones who have assimilated their cultural norms. I suspect that Weber had feelings of this sort toward Du Bois in particular and about black people generally: Du Bois was an impressively credentialed Germanophile whose mixed ancestry made him that much more remarkable. From this vantage point, as noteworthy or even extraordinary as were Weber’s solicitation and publication of Du Bois’s article on black America in his journal, his letter exchange with Du Bois, and his praise of Du Bois as a scholar, these gestures do not outweigh his fundamental biases against, in this instance, black people. Furthermore, I cannot imagine that these biases did not affect his scholarly treatment of themes in which black people and other populations of color figured prominently in the modern era.

Another reason that I take issue with uncritical presentations of the Weber–Du Bois dialogue is what they consciously or unconsciously suggest about the reasons for its ending—that Du Bois bears the greater responsibility for its finality as he was the one whose increasing political and intellectual radicalization led him to leave the academy some four years after their last correspondence. While I largely believe that there is some truth to this interpretation the evidence for which I present in the second and third chapters of this study, I take issue with what this line of reasoning assumes about the relationship between public and pure intellectuals, detached and engaged scholarship, and scholarship and propaganda, and its assumption that the termination of the Du Bois–Weber exchange was the result of largely later political differences rather than of scholarly ones at the time. Instead, I take the counterposition that an examination of Weber’s and Du Bois’s scholarship, no less than their political orientations at the time of their reconnection, reveals significant differences of which, I maintain, they were both aware, despite the tone and even content of their letters. This is not to deny that Du Bois became more antiracist and anticapitalist in the years immediately following their last exchange, a stance that would have put him increasingly at odds with Weber’s latent and manifest Eurocentric and racist assumptions, but it is to say that the roots of their future parting of the ways were present while they were in contact. From this perspective, the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Niagara movement to which Weber and Du Bois, respectively, turned their attention, provided them with convenient excuses to end their dialogue without addressing their disagreements.

In the first chapter I explore these differences in an unorthodox way, by imagining how Du Bois and Weber honestly read the work(s) of the other with which they were or would have been familiar, The Souls of Black Folk and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The difficulty of this approach is that I take it without the help of either scholar’s notes or detailed reviews of the other’s writings, for as far as we know they do not exist. In fact, we have no proof that Du Bois ever read Weber’s most popular work, although it is hard to imagine that Weber would not have sent Du Bois some past and present issues of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik, in which the original version of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism appeared in 1904 and 1905, along with the issue in which his article appeared on the socioeconomic conditions of black Americans in 1906.²⁴ Moreover, even if Du Bois had not read Weber’s most popular work, he was certainly familiar with some adulterated version of the argument. Therefore, despite the evidentiary limits of the exercise, I still contend that we know enough about these two men to advance what were or would have been their likely reactions to the content of the other’s work. My interpretation suggests that there was as much contention as admiration in their reciprocal readings.

In the second chapter I explore the influence of the German historical school on Du Bois’s and Weber’s early sociological work and compare their agrarian studies as Weber presented his at the 1904 Congress of Arts and Sciences, where he and Du Bois reconnected, and as Du Bois presented his in Die Neger Frage in den Vereinigten Staaten. In addition to addressing the different policy measures that each proposed, I discuss the reasons that Du Bois pioneered participant observation fieldwork in the course of his agricultural studies, no less than in his groundbreaking urban study, The Philadelphia Negro. I also address here the intellectual challenges both scholars faced as pioneers in sociology in an age when nationalism, racism, imperialism, and romanticism were rampant.

In the third chapter I trace Weber’s and Du Bois’s perspectives on Western economic development. Here I underscore, among other matters, the means by which Weber sought to minimize the returns from unfree labor and imperialism in what we may call Protestant capitalism and to attribute to Jews, Chinese, Indians, and other religious or national populations, engagement in adventurer’s or other forms of political capitalism, which he deemed irrational. I show that Du Bois, in contrast, never tired of reiterating the contributions that unfree black labor made to the development of Western capitalism. In short, whereas Du Bois suggested the multiplier effects of and linkages between imperialism and slavery and key sectors of western and central European economies, Weber declared them inconsequential, except to those individuals or firms who owned specific mines or plantations.

I devote the fourth chapter to a discussion of Weber’s and Du Bois’s divergent political views and positions. In the main, I chronicle here the unforeseen and unconscious consequences of Weber’s brand of nationalism that called for Germany’s overseas expansion for the economic and political gains that could be derived from it. As for Du Bois, I trace his opposing black/pan-African nationalism and socialism to his application of a Marxist-inspired analysis of western European society in the years before World War I, which he put forward in his remarkable essay, The African Roots of War.²⁵ To illustrate their political differences, I compare the two scholars’ writings on Russia, a country about which both wrote extensively, albeit in two different eras and from markedly different perspectives.

In the fifth and final chapter, I explore how the most influential Du Bois and Weber scholars have handled and interpreted their positions on capitalism, social science methodology, and politics. Thus far I have found that both men have been protected by their admirers—Weber from criticism of his Eurocentrism, Du Bois from the charge of elitism—and slighted or dismissed by their detractors—Weber for the reason just named, Du Bois for having engaged in more advocacy or propaganda than objective research. I argue here that what is needed is a more balanced approach to both scholars: one that recognizes their strengths and weaknesses without romanticization or demonization and that does not seek to separate artificially their political positions and scholarship.

CHAPTER ONE

The Free vs. the Bound

In light of their fruitful meeting in St. Louis in 1904, how do we explain the short duration of Du Bois and Weber’s contact thereafter? One easy answer is that they had other immediate preoccupations: for Du Bois, it was political activity in the Niagara movement, a mobilization that aimed as much to contest North American racism as Booker T. Washington’s response to it; for Weber, it was interest in the Russian Revolution of 1905, for which he learned Russian in just three months. These are possible and plausible explanations of the brevity of their contact, but I do not think that they were the primary reasons. Rather, I believe that its roots can be traced to the works that both scholars produced at the time of the break and with which the other was familiar, either directly or indirectly.¹ In Du Bois’s case, this was obviously The Souls of Black Folk and, to a lesser degree, his article Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten (The Black Question in the United States); and in Weber’s, the two essays that he published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1904 and 1905 (which he reworked in early 1920) that constitute The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Although, as I stated in the introduction, I cannot prove my argument by means of conventional evidence, what I propose as a substitute is to read these works as I imagine each man would have read the other’s. Despite the unavoidably hypothetical nature of this exercise, I believe it is one that sheds light on why their amiable contact was so short-lived.

THE TRIALS OF THE SOULS

If we assume that what most appealed to Weber about The Souls of Black Folk were those elements of it that he explored in his own work,