W. E. B. Du Bois,double consciousness and the ‘spirit’ of recognition

Introduction

Born before the invention of the electric light bulb, William Edward Burghart Du Bois (1868–1963) would go on to make an astonishing contribution to the social and political sciences. By the time of his death, at which point satellites were orbiting the earth, his scholarly and wider intellectual repertoire ought to have secured his reputation as ‘one of the most imaginative, perceptive, and prolific founders of the sociological discipline’ (Zuckerman, 2004, p. 3). A number of contributions over the last two decades have addressed why this did not happen. Most have focused on his omission from the ‘canon’ and so especially sought to reposition Du Bois as a ‘founding figure’ of sociology (Bell, Grosholz, & Stewart, 1996; Gates, 2007; Gates & Oliver, 1999; Kendhammer, 2007; Lemert, 1994; Morris, 2015; Young, Watts, Marable, Lemert, & Higginbotham, 2007; Zuckerman, 2004).

This approach has heralded some important symbolic advances. For example, in 2006 a group of sociologists led a successful campaign to rename the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) highest award, the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, after Du Bois (Morris, 2007). Elsewhere, Burawoy’s (2005, p. 417) intervention on applied social science named Du Bois ‘as perhaps the greatest public sociologist of the twentieth century’. The most exhaustive recent attempt to relocate Du Bois within a conventional canon of sociology has probably been Morris’s (2015) widely acclaimed A Scholar Denied. Crediting Levering Lewis’s (1993, 2001) two Pulitzer Prize winning biographies for this upsurge, Morris (2015, p. 1) has even claimed that we are now ‘in the age of Du Bois’. ¹

While not insignificant, these advances and associated optimism might also be read in the context of Bhambra’s (2014, p. 485) characterisation of its parameters, insofar as ‘[s]imple inclusion without reconstruction based on an acknowledgement of the difference that inclusion makes is … inadequate’. That is to say, Du Bois’ recognition in some quarters has not so far come with a willingness to revise an overwhelming white sociological canon that prevails throughout the mainstream configuration of US and European sociology. This is sustained by the active omission of a broader range of sociological work that could remake the very activity of sociology as a disciplinary pursuit. The continuing ‘sociological segregation’, as Back and Tate (2015, para. 4:8) put it in their discussion of both Du Bois and Stuart Hall, ‘weakens the field as a whole, not only for those to whom it offers a racially unequal place at the table of ideas’.

Morris (2015) nonetheless provides a detailed and compelling treatment which, like the work of Zuckerman (2004), takes the entire sweep of Du Bois’ oeuvre and orients it, very persuasively, to his omission from core features of American sociology in particular. Such comprehensive approaches are surely warranted, but this article argues that it would also be valuable to engage in a much more focused delineation of specific features of Du Bois’ corpus.

Here perhaps historians have led the way. For example, Axel Schäfer (2001) provides a fascinating account of Du Bois’ participation in the period known as ‘American progressivism’ (1982–1909), and reinterprets a relatively early period of Du Bois’ life and work. Elsewhere, Ellis’s (1992) study of Du Bois during the First World War, concentrating especially on the controversies over Du Bois’ insistence on the need to ‘close ranks’ in support of the US war effort, focuses on The Crisis magazine which Du Bois edited. Kendhammer (2007) too, engaging more explicitly with social theory, offers a historical treatment of the later period of Du Bois’ life and work, especially his pan-Africanism, and considers the extent to which this might represent a non-linear strand throughout his work.

Kendhammer (2007) is especially interesting in his discussion of the ‘periodization’ of Du Bois: e.g. early-liberal, middle-radical, later-pan-Africanist, and it would be worthwhile to explore a similar approach in Du Bois’ social theory – not to repeat the impulse of historians, but to double down on a section of writing in a manner pursued by scholars of other canonical thinkers (not unlike the discussion of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts or Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis). The objective of this article therefore is to give fuller exposure to parts of Du Bois that are otherwise obscured in approaches to his entire corpus which insist on a single ‘normative and conceptual logic’ (Reed, 1985, p. 432).

To this end the article provides a detailed consideration of Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness, and specifically its relationship to thinking about ‘recognition’ as it is found in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It is fitting that this is proposed here in The Sociological Review given that TSR is the only UK sociology journal to have published a paper penned by Du Bois (1911) himself (to mark the first Universal Races Congress held in London) (see Bhambra, 2016). It is further worth registering that whilst Du Bois continues to be resurrected in the American literature on sociology, with some exceptions this is less the case on this side of the Atlantic; an omission that should not go unnoticed.

A Hegelian Du Bois?

While the article is especially interested in the Hegelian ethics related to ‘double consciousness’ as a set of sociological processes, understanding the motive for this is key. The article rejects the view that Du Bois straightforwardly adopted a Hegelian approach in a manner that minimises how this aspect of Du Bois’ work also reflected remarkable intellectual originality. The tendency is contained in a variety of commentaries on Du Bois. Adell (1994, p. 8), for example, has insisted that double consciousness largely ‘emerges from the philosophy of Hegel as it is articulated in the Phenomenology of Spirit’, arguing ‘the title of Du Bois’s text itself, The Souls of Black Folk, remarks and reiterates the two concepts – soul and folk – (Volk) that are central, not only to Herder’s aesthetics, but to that of Hegel as well’ (1994, p. 23). The tendency I observe, however, is not new. Williamson’s (1978) influential essay ‘W.E.B. Du Bois as a Hegelian’ perhaps set the tone, and we could also here include Siemerling (2001, p. 325), who, drawing on Zamir’s (1995) longer work, seeks to read Souls ‘through the context of Du Bois’ appropriation of Hegel’. This train of thought has endured in some contemporary work, including Shaw’s (2013, p. 12) more recent book simply titled W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk, in which she boldly asserts that Du Bois was ‘at all times’ a philosopher in the Hegelian vein, and that in this respect Souls in particular is an example of ‘old fashioned metaphysics’ (2013, p. 130).

This is not to deny that Du Bois was informed by Hegel’s conception of consciousness. On the contrary. This article concurs with a variety of agenda-setting scholars as varied as Mostern (1996), Zamir (1995), Gilroy (1993), Levering Lewis (1993), Gooding-Williams (1987) and Rampersad (1976), each of whom explicitly argues that Du Bois was working with Hegel’s conception of consciousness and synthesising this with his own sociological imagination. As we will see, this is a different activity to seeking ‘vindicationist’ approaches tracing Du Bois’ alleged debts to European ‘greats’ (Reed, 1997, p. 12). Yet even those authors who register Du Bois’ creative and constructive engagement with Hegel do not dwell on this in ways that show the variety of possible continuities and discontinuities.

There are, moreover, compelling contextual and intellectual rationales to revisit the relationship between Hegelian metaphysics and Du Boisian social theory. This article is nearly entirely focused on the intellectual reasons, but the contextual factors are not insignificant and so are touched on here. They include how Du Bois’ substantive encounter with Hegel first occurred during his time in Berlin, especially under the instruction of the members of the German Historical School, not least his university sponsor Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1913). This is not the same as the circumstantial encounters between Max Weber and Du Bois summarily dismissed as relatively inconsequential by Morris (2015). It instead emerges during a period of ‘American progressivism’ where Du Bois along with many other US students and scholars travelled to German institutions. It was a period that Du Bois himself later credited as encouraging him to ‘understand the real meaning of scientific research and the dim outline of methods of employing its technique and its results in the new social sciences for the settlement of the Negro problems in America’ (Du Bois, 1968, p. 160). According to Schäfer (2001, p. 926), the German Historical School’s conception of social ethics as ‘anchored values in social interaction and participation … had radical implications for his thinking on race’. Approaching the same issue from a slightly different perspective, specifically the ways in which Du Bois contributes to an ‘early black modernism’, Gilroy (1993, p. 133) offers a similar assessment, arguing that:

It is deeply ironic then that the obsession with black exceptionalism which endows The Souls with much of its intellectual drive is itself the obvious product of the author’s journeying outside the United States. It gives voice to an understanding of the relationship between race, nationality and culture which, even if Du Bois acquired it in the United States (and this is debatable), was considerably refined in Germany through an engagement with Hegel and the neo-Hegelian thought that was popular in Berlin while he was studying there. (Gilroy, 1993, pp. 133–134)

As discussed below, much of this was expressed through an engagement with Hegelian metaphysics concerning the nature of spirit. As Du Bois would later put it, ‘Black blood with us in America is a matter of spirit and not simply of flesh’ (Du Bois, 1928/1974, p. 19). As we will come to consider, and as described by Sundstrum (1999, p. 5), ‘spirit, for DuBois, is created out of cultural and political strivings. Black spirit, shwarzegeist, is derived from common experience of being black in America and continuously exposed to antiblack American “racial” politics.’ We might at this point also note Du Bois’ argument in The Souls of Black Folks (1903/1999, p. 370), that ‘there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes’, arguably reflects a Hegelian influence. Rather more boldly, in the first of his two Pulitzer Prize winning biographies, Levering Lewis (1993) has put it as follows:

Du Bois found in Hegelian World-Spirit, dialectically actualizating itself through history, a profoundly appealing concept. … Surely this was an idea Du Bois would eventually reformulate more poetically. (pp. 139–140)

This notwithstanding, and beyond the contextual association, neither Levering Lewis (1993) nor to my mind any author cited above, or elsewhere, explores this in any sustained or textually detailed fashion. Nor do these authors sufficiently consider that we might reverse the interaction and ask what might be learned from reading Hegelian metaphysics through Du Boisian social theory. In so doing, this also shows the limitations of Hegelian reasoning that in important ways Du Bois was correcting. So it is a type of dialectical dialogue that is being pursued here, rather than a genealogy.

The article carries this argument forward by outlining a distinct and original delineation of double consciousness into a set of constituent parts. These, it is argued, emerge as an outcome and a resource in relation to the need to maintain a sense of self in response to misrecognition. Double consciousness for these reasons is presented as a sociological concept that has a wider normative quality, one that captures the dual character of unrecognised minority subjectivities and their transformative potential, alongside the conditions of impaired civic status that are allocated to minorities.

Delineating double consciousness

In his chapter ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’ in Souls (1903/1999), Du Bois argues that the fate of American consciousness is dependent upon the unfolding relationships and the dialogue or interaction between minority and majority subjectivities; as two separate but entwined forms of consciousness. It is, moreover, these dialectics which will, for Du Bois, determine the course of American history. Du Bois introduces his account of double consciousness in the following passage from ‘Strivings’, and since this is the main text that I wish to focus upon in the proceeding discussion, it is worth quoting at length:

… the Negro is … born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields to him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spat upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Du Bois, 1903/1999, pp. 10–11) ²

On the surface, this passage has as its fundamental theme a duality in African-American life. Fuelled largely – but not exclusively - by racism, this duality is a kind of paradox which stems from being intimately part of a polity while excluded from its public culture, or, as Du Bois puts it, ‘being an outcast and stranger in mine own house’ (pp. 10–11). Yet further scrutiny reveals four different issues, loosely grouped into two sets, which encompass more. Since there are a range of issues signalled in his description of double consciousness, and because this range attempts to mediate between agency and structure, individual and society, and between minority and majority subjectivities, there has on occasions been a tendency to conflate, reduce or confuse the role of one to the other.

In the opening half of the passage, Du Bois outlines his reading of the self, specifically the significance of (1a) the internalisation by African-Americans of the contempt white America has for them, and (1b) the creation of an additional perspective in the form of a ‘gifted second sight’ to which experiencing this gives rise. In the second half of the passage he identifies how societal incongruencies emerge from (2a) conceiving of African-Americans as having fewer civic rights but no less the duties or responsibilities of an ideal of American citizenship, and (2b) diverging sets of unreconciled ideals or ‘strivings’ held by African-Americans which are objected to by white society, specifically emerging from an ‘enduring hyphenation’ signalled in his notion of ‘twoness’. In sum, these four interacting constructs give rise to a condition of double consciousness as Du Bois understood it. The function of descriptive metaphors such as the ‘veil’ cut across and straddle these interacting issues, and are therefore discussed when they appear relevant.

A pragmatist provenance?

Before I relate this to a Hegelian story, a parallel observation concerns whether or not it should indeed be anchored in a ‘pragmatist’ milieu. To some extent, this is precisely the move West (1989, p. 148) makes in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, and in which he argues that ‘Du Bois provides American pragmatism with what it sorely lacks’. Specifically, West maintains, Du Bois went beyond figures like William James ‘who did not see social structures, only individuals’, John Dewey who did see social structures ‘yet primarily through an American lens’, and Sidney Hook ‘whose cold war sentiments’ gave him ‘tunnel vision’ (West, 1989, p. 148). Du Bois in contrast goes beyond them all in ‘the scope and depth of his vision: creative powers reside among the wretched of the earth even in their subjugation, and the fragile structures of democracy in the world depend, in large part, on how these powers are ultimately exercised’ (p. 148).

Whether this characterisation of James, Dewey and Hook is necessarily fair, what is interesting is that despite West’s (1989) positioning of Du Bois as a solution to these shortcomings, his ultimate appraisal of Du Bois is that he ‘falls short of the mark’ (West, 1996, p. 55). The reasons for this are as much biographical as intellectual. As a ‘black New England Victorian seduced by the Enlightenment ethos and enchanted with the American dream’, in West’s reading Du Bois remained anchored in ‘the prevailing presuppositions and prejudices of modern Euro-American civilisation’ (1996, p. 55).

This is a remarkably partial reading, and not for the first time, then, Du Bois is simultaneously located both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ an unfolding history of America. But I would suggest that it is better to position Du Bois as such in terms of the vestiges of American pragmatist thought; so outside looking in, rather than inside, looking out. I am not alone in this view. Indeed, it is perhaps the argument that Rampersad (1976), Gooding-Williams (1987), Outlaw (2001) and Gilroy (1993) advance, the last arguing that ‘this way of positioning Du Bois’s work can lead to the novelty and power of his critique of modernity being overlooked’ (Gilroy, 1993, p. 137). No less than that, maintains Gilroy, in the pragmatist appropriation, ‘Du Bois’s studiously constructed projection of doubleness gets lost’, specifically through ‘a needless affirmation of American intellectual ethnocentrism’ (p. 137).

There are a corresponding set of arguments here about the etymology of the concept of double consciousness and pragmatism. The previous and subsequent discussion squarely locates this, following authors such as Zamir (1995), in relation to the phenomenology studied in Berlin and then with George Santayana at Harvard. Again this is not a mechanistic adoption since Du Bois’ reading diverges from the prevailing American appropriation that services a teleological story about American context: ‘His use of Hegel can be read against the widespread adoption of Hegel in support of American nationalism and manifest destiny in America in the nineteenth century, from the voluminous productions of the St. Louis Hegelians to the essays of the young John Dewey’ (Zamir, 1995, p. 113). Bell et al. (1996, p. 89) meanwhile variously point to Emerson’s (1843) essay on The Transcendentalist which includes the term ‘double consciousness’ (as well as Goethe’s reference to ‘two souls’ in Faust) and William James’s (1890) Principles of Psychology in which a patient is assessed to have ‘double consciousness’. While I am in no doubt that a Hegelian influence is undeniable, and less sure of the others, perhaps they all bore down on Du Bois in subtler ways. Others are less persuaded, as Levering Lewis (1993, p. 96) puts it, as an African-American of his time Du Bois experienced ‘a psychic purgatory fully capable by itself of nurturing a concept of divided consciousness, whatever the Jamieson influences’.

‘A self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness …’

Turning back then to his famous allegory of the master and the slave, Hegel outlines a series of conflicts and their dialectical relationship to different forms of consciousness. In examining reciprocal relations of power, he attempts to ‘lift the veil’ and reveal processes mediating the transformation of a consciousness from dependence to one of self-consciousness and independence. It is worth clarifying at the outset that his is not an empirical account of power-relations in actual slave societies. Hegel’s master–slave dialectic should instead be understood as an abstracted ‘state of nature’ argument conceived as a corrective to Hobbes (Davis, 1975). By this it is meant that through the master–slave dialectic (MSD), Hegel is trying to trying to show the way a Hobbesian war of ‘all against all’ is unable to maintain the very individuality or independence upon which it is premised. This is perhaps best captured in Binder’s (1989, p. 1435) interpretation of the MSD as an attempt to show that ‘freedom [has] to be conceived as some form of association rather than independence; and that it [has] to be mediated by politics rather than defended from politics’. Besides stressing the primacy of the political, Binder positions the MSD as ‘an intellectual foundation for modern communitarian conceptions of freedom in its devastating critique of the ideal of independence’ (1989, p. 1437).

It perhaps also needs to be stated that what we are interested in, in this section, is not principally the vignette about slavery or the social implications of its history and politics per se. It is accepted at the outset that Hegel and Du Bois would speak past each other on the specificities of empirical cases. The point of this dialogue is to show that features of the MSD also bear fruit in Du Boisian thought, but that Du Bois addresses a key problematic contained within. The ethical basis this provides in terms of its potential normative implications for Du Boisian conceptions of consciousness is that we cannot receive recognition outside of a political community characterised by reciprocal or mutual recognition. That is, the obligations are rendered under conditions of Sittlichkeit ⁴ or ethical life, ‘by virtue of being members of one of the ongoing bonded communities of common life and common freedom’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 864).

Following the initial conflict then, Hegel sees the dialectic as a representation of how the fate and consciousness of the two parties are no longer independent but, albeit unequally, interdependent in that they have become inextricably linked in a process that necessitates some form of resolution; that they effectively have to sink or swim together. Taylor (1975, p. 155) shares this interpretation when he stresses that the process of coming to self-consciousness is a ‘dualistic’ one. For both Taylor and Kojeve the slave must recover their self-consciousness not only for their own survival, but also to resolve the existential impasse of the master. Similarly, the master must recognise the fact that their fate is now directly dependent upon the development of the consciousness of the slave. The anticipated independence of the master becomes not only a dependence upon the slave for their present form of self-consciousness, but, more importantly, rests upon the possibility of the future development of that consciousness to a state of true self-consciousness or independence. Specifically, it is the movement from a self-consciousness in itself to the transformative potential of a self-consciousness for itself, or from one’s historically ascribed identity to one’s politically self-constructed identity.

There is of course a teleological prescription in some of these readings but what is of interest is the way in which something valuable can be stated, as it was by Du Bois, without it necessitating a teleological course, and this is no less true with the leap that Hegel makes from individual to group psyches. In common with a tradition amongst philosophers to begin with the rational self, Hegel also starts with the self but, as we have seen, argues that this cannot exist in a self-substantiating process, and so therefore communalises it. Thus in contrast to Hobbes who argued that in leaving a ‘state of nature’ we lose freedom, Hegel shows that the social and the political is the condition of freedom in which self is a social or communal self. As it is argued below, however, the sorts of recognition that Du Bois espouses do not follow from this alone. That is to say, the case for mutual recognition does not on its own establish the legitimacy of inclusion for Du Bois.

Du Bois merges ideas of difference with citizenship, centred around modernist notions of hyphenated identities, in making a universalistic ethical move in arguing for the equal but differentiated inclusion of different groups on the basis of their common membership of a polity. This is retuned to below, but what is required at this stage is a closer inspection of the internal logic of Hegel’s dialectic, where it is revealed that during his initial discussion of the development of consciousness, Hegel fails to distinguish between what appear to be three separate constructs in the MSD.

In this article these multiple dialectics might roughly divide between (a) the present-focused as a logical interaction or binary, which distinguishes between the existence and non-existence of an interaction between two parties, and (b) the empirical possibilities to emerge from the power retained by the master who, in the final analysis, possesses an autonomy that the slave lacks. These possibilities shape the future of this relationship and the ways in which it might continue (reciprocity being one possibility, coercion another). The nature of the relationship as it exists and changes may then be described by tracing (c) the moral dialectic, which seeks to engage – through the master’s authoritative paternalism – the slave’s reciprocal complicity in the dialectic, serving to externalise and normalise the ethical constraints of this relationship. In what one might cite as an unreasoned inference, Hegel utilises the two constructs of the dialectic, outlined as (a) and (c), which herald a mutual dependency for attaining status (however uneven that may be) between the master and the slave, before – through a sleight of hand – moving to tie the very development of consciousness ⁵ onto this struggle for status recognition. My view is that Du Bois picks up on how Hegel circumvents a step in his allegory (b) which pertains to the empirical possibilities that, should the slave refuse to acquiesce with the master’s dominance, the master can coerce the slave as a subordinate and thwart the reciprocity required to make the dialectic function on the basis of recognition alone.

Regardless, therefore, of the appropriate recognition granted to the master by the slave, the slave is dependent upon the master for their coming to self-consciousness, whilst the master retains the agency to minimise their own dependence upon the slave. Thus, from a Du Boisian perspective it becomes clear that Hegel ignores the extent to which coercion can be either a competitor or partner of recognition. In light of this, it might be more helpful to speak of master–slave dialectics in the plural, rather than the singular, and to suggest that there are actually three different interactions taking place in this allegory. This appears to be a more promising insight than the initial reading offered by Taylor and Kojeve, specifically because it can be employed to probe the intricacies of forms of consciousness developed in the present-focused and moral dialectic outlined by Hegel, in order to distinguish between these and the empirical dialectic of majority–minority relations that so occupied Du Bois.

‘Enduring hyphenation’

Expressions of double consciousness are neither mutually exclusive nor one and the same. By definition they must interact, but are suitably distinctive to be discussed separately. What they all have in common is the sense of an unresolved – but not irresolvable – conflict, anchored in a process of structural and psychic misrecognition. Thus, although formed in a specific context and concerned with the conditions of particular peoples, it is clear that in many ways Du Boisian conceptions of consciousness are relevant to the contention that socio-cultural self-esteem emerges from forms of group recognition, alongside personal recognition. The relationship between personal and group recognition that is alluded to in Du Bois’ account is characterised by the idea that the ‘inner strife’ affecting African-Americans’ individually is informed by the mastery or dominance possessed by white Americans in depreciating their African-American counterparts. This is described well in the following passage as:

… that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this, he stands helpless, dismayed and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain. (Du Bois, 1903/1999, p. 15)

In this sense, the subject group are more disenfranchised than alienated so that, as Holt’s (1990, p. 304) reading suggests, ‘it is not so much cultural difference but cultural disfranchisement that shapes their struggle’. This means that institutions and social practices attribute minority status to some inherent qualities in the minority group, as if those qualities were the reason rather than the rationalisation for not taking their sensibilities into account. This leads Du Bois to raise the following question: how can one achieve a mature self-consciousness and an integrity or wholeness of self in an alienating environment? If, in the eyes of another, your humanity is perceived as lacking self-evidential qualities, how do you go about showing its existence? The solution that Du Bois points to is not one of abandoning the double self but is, instead, to merge the ‘double self into a better and truer self’ – one that does not deny experience and history but seeks to build on it. As Levering Lewis (1993, p. 281) argues:

The genius of The Souls of Black Folk was that it transcended this dialectic in the most obvious way – by affirming it in a permanent tension. Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation.

This is a kind of approach in which minorities can espouse a hyphenated identity, contribute and participate equally but not necessarily uniformly. This would not only produce a better America but the ‘better and truer self’ Du Bois thought possible. At the same time, and although Du Bois implies the eventual resolution of this paradox of a divided self in time, much of what he writes simultaneously suggests that African-Americans should accept – and embrace – this contradiction arising from double consciousness. This is because ‘living in two worlds at once’ cultivates powers to see what the majority are blind to and so, through ‘second sight’, adds something to the equation of diversity in the way Parekh (2000) would later describe as an expansion of horizons of thought and human fulfilment.

Conclusion: An existential impasse writ large?

The purpose of this article has been to unpick and explore Du Boisian ideas of minority consciousness and double consciousness, to elaborate why they are of value and worth redeeming, and explore where they sit in relation to Hegelian phenomenology. In finding and correcting flaws in the master–slave dialectic, Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness might lead us to reverse the interaction and ask what might be learned from reading Hegelian metaphysics through Du Boisian social theory.

At a time when writers are justifiably rediscovering Du Bois and challenging prevailing disciplinary hegemonies through his work, amongst others, the article has also argued that there is virtue in trying to double down on a section of his writing in a manner pursued by scholars of other canonical thinkers (not unlike the discussion of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts or Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis). The objective of this article therefore is to give fuller exposure to parts of Du Bois that are otherwise obscured in approaches to his entire corpus which insist on a single ‘normative and conceptual logic’ (Reed, 1985, p. 432).

Focusing on his writing on double consciousness, the article has argued that Du Bois’ concept is premised upon the idea that a consciousness for itself is characterised by an active mobilisation, one that is striving to be recognised, but which turns inward and becomes a double consciousness when it is benignly ignored or malignly coerced. Double consciousness thus captures the dual character of unrecognised minority subjectivities and their transformative potential, alongside the conditions of impaired civic status that are allocated to racial minorities.

What is being advocated is both a deepening of cultural particularities and a broadening of these insights. Sociologically, this might be characterised as a schema which becomes progressively ‘thicker’ in capturing (a) the contexts in which minority subjectivity is formed, (b) the nature and form of this subjectivity in and for itself, alongside (c) the transformative potential it heralds for society as a whole. This includes an examination of both the conflicting accounts evident in the construction of the self, and the grounds on which minorities who are subject to exclusion can strive for recognition in ways that remake the whole.