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Hell to Pay: Aristotle and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Democracy in ‘Of the Ruling of Men’

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Notes

  1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960, ed. H. Aptheker, Amherst, MA, 2001, p. 93.

  2. Ibid., pp. 88–9. Another passage evokes the ideal of Socrates, as John Stuart Mill presents it in Utilitarianism. Du Bois advises his audience: ‘To increase abiding satisfaction for the mass of our people, and for all people, someone must sacrifice something of his own happiness … But with the death of your happiness may easily come increased happiness and satisfaction and fulfilment for other people … If this is not sufficient incentive, never try it--remain hogs’ (pp. 107–8). Compare Mill, Utilitarianism, London, 1864, p. 14: ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.’

  3. See M. Dawson, Black Visions, Chicago, 2001, pp. 15–18, who divides Du Bois’s political ideology into two phases: ‘radical egalitarianism’ (pre-1930) and ‘disillusioned liberalism’ (post-1930); for developments in Du Bois’s thinking on education, see also D. P. Alridge, The Educational Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History, New York, 2008.

  4. On the diverse literary, philosophical, and political influences in Darkwater, see A. Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cambridge, MA, 1976, pp. 170–73. On classical material in Darkwater, see also Hawkins in this collection.

  5. C. Nordhoff, Politics for Young Americans, New York, 1875. Du Bois cites Nordhoff on the obligation of a minority to make itself into a majority: see W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater:Voices from Within the Veil, New York, 1920, p. 151. In his application to Harvard University, Du Bois included Nordhoff in his list of readings in ‘Political Science’: W. E. B. Du Bois, Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961, ed. H. Aptheker, Amherst, MA, 1988, p. 11.

  6. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 159.

  7. Du Bois, Against Racism (n. 5 above), pp. 6–10.

  8. W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature Edited by Others, ed. H. Aptheker, Millwood, NY, 1982, pp. 12–13. On this address, see also Hanses in this collection.

  9. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. H. L. Gates Jr. and T. H. Oliver, New York, 1999, p. 74. On the significance of this passage for Du Bois’s classicism, see the introduction to this collection.

  10. R. Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, Cambridge, MA, 2009, pp. 27–8; E. A. Hairston, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization and the African American Reclamation of the West, Knoxville, 2013, pp. 177–8; S. J. Shaw, W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk, Chapel Hill, 2013, pp. 3, 44, 46–7, 169. T. Armstrong, The Logic of Slavery, Cambridge, 2012, addresses Du Bois’s engagement with Aristotle’s theories of slavery (discussed further below).

  11. For a list of Du Bois’s courses in Berlin, see I. H. Solbrig, ‘American Slavery in Eighteenth-Century German Literature: The Case of Herder’s “Neger-Idyllen”’, Monatshefte, 82, 1990, p. 38 n. 2. See W. Dilthey, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1900–1905, ed. G. Gebhardt and H.-U. Lessing, Wilhelm Dilthey Gesammelte Schriften, 23, Göttingen, 2000, for the version of the lectures that Dilthey gave in 1900–1903 as well as the 1905 edition of the supplementary text he produced for his students; see especially pp. 39–40 and 245–7 on Aristotle’s Politics. One of the two books that Du Bois checked out from the university library was the first volume of Dilthey’s Einleitung in dieGeisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1883. Here, Dilthey discusses Politics as well as other works of Aristotle (pp. 288–95). For Du Bois’s library records, see H. Beck, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois as a Study Abroad Student in Germany, 1892–1894’, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 2, 1996, p. 47 n. 4.

  12. G. Schmoller, Die soziale Frage, cited and translated in K. A. Appiah, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, Cambridge, MA, 2014, p. 34 n. 20. For the influence of Schmoller and other German scholars on Du Bois’s thinking on race and politics, see ibid., pp. 29–37.

  13. See the introduction to C. Horn and A. Neschke-Hentschke, Politischer Aristotelismus: Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Politik von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, 2008, pp. 1–2.

  14. L. Hardwick, ‘Fuzzy Connections: Classical Texts and Modern Poetry in English’, in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern, ed. J. Parker and T. Matthews, Oxford, 2011, p. 41. Stephen Hinds argues that distinguishing between chance convergences and intentional allusions on the part of the author is (even when desirable) often impossible: see S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 25–34.

  15. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 134.

  16. Greek text from Aristotle, Politica, ed. W. D. Ross, Oxford, 1957. Translations are adapted throughout from Aristotle, Politics, transl. R. F. Stalley and E. Barker, Oxford, 1995. Dilthey, Einleitung (n. 11 above), p. 88 quotes Aristotle’s definition of an association in Politics.

  17. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), pp. 136–8.

  18. Ibid., p. 144. Du Bois seems to treat ‘women’ as a single group in this essay, regardless of race; in other writings, however, he pays particular attention to the oppression of black women in America (e.g., ‘The Servant in the House’, discussed further below). See also Aigbedion in this collection and L. Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois, New York, 2011, pp. 97–115.

  19. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), pp. 138–9.

  20. Ibid., p. 139.

  21. Ibid., p. 139.

  22. Ibid., p. 142.

  23. Ibid., p. 142.

  24. Gooding-Williams, Shadow of Du Bois (n. 10 above), p. 27 shows how Du Bois applies Aristotle’s categorization of constitutions to groups within a polity (i.e., the black community in the United States).

  25. Ibid., pp. 4–5, 9–14 on how Du Bois equates politics and ruling, and on the limitations of this equation, although on p. 20 he suggests that Du Bois develops a broader understanding of ‘rule’ by the time of Darkwater. Conversely, Shaw, Du Bois (n. 10 above), pp. 62–74 argues that the Talented Tenth is a potentially radical concept.

  26. Gooding-Williams, Shadow of Du Bois (n. 10 above), p. 57.

  27. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 143.

  28. For this sense of ‘revising’, I follow H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, Oxford, 1989, pp. xxiv–xxv. On revising as a key aspect of Du Bois’s classicism, and of black classicism more generally, see Rankine's contribution and the introductory essay in this collection.

  29. J. Waldron, The Dignity of Legislation, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 92–123.

  30. J. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, Princeton, 2008, pp. 110–11; M. Schofield, ‘Aristotle and the Democratization of Politics’, in Episteme etc.: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Barnes, ed. B. Morison and K. Ierodiakonou, Oxford, 2011, p. 294; J. L. Wilson, ‘Deliberation, Democracy, and the Rule of Reason in Aristotle’s “Politics”’, The American Political Science Review, 105, 2011, pp. 259–74 (263–4).

  31. Waldron, Dignity (n. 29 above), p. 106.

  32. R. Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy, Oxford, 2002, p. 405. Aristotle notes that not every large group will be superior to a few good men (3.1281b15–21).

  33. Schofield, ‘Democratization’ (n. 30 above), pp. 295–6. See also J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People, Princeton, 1989, p. 163: a guiding principle of Athenian politics was that ‘what “everybody knows” – or everybody believed – was deemed likely to be right’. D. Cammack, ‘Aristotle on the Virtue of the Multitude’, Political Theory, 41, 2013, pp. 175–202 (184–90) argues that Aristotle is more concerned with collective ethical virtue than with collective knowledge or intellectual virtue.

  34. M. Lane, ‘Claims to Rule: The Case of the Multitude’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics, ed. M. Deslauriers and P. Destrée, 2013, pp. 252–9 and Cammack, ‘Virtue’ (n. 33 above), pp. 181–4 argue that the Athenians had no institution like a modern ‘potluck’ in which diners contributed different dishes; they offer different accounts of the kinds of common meals that Aristotle might have had in mind.

  35. Lane, ‘Claims to Rule’ (n. 34 above), pp. 259–60.

  36. Cammack, ‘Virtue’ (n. 33 above), p. 187.

  37. Ibid., pp. 180–81; Lane, ‘Claims to Rule’ (n. 34 above), pp. 250–51.

  38. Lane, ‘Claims to Rule’ (n. 34 above), pp. 250–51.

  39. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), pp. 142–3.

  40. Ibid., p. 143.

  41. Waldron, Dignity (n. 29 above), p. 116.

  42. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), pp. 143–4.

  43. Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction (n. 18 above), p. 114 argues that Du Bois points to ‘the possibilities that are opened when the lives of those Americans against whom American citizenship has been (and is) defined are taken to be representative of democratic citizenship in general'.

  44. J. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule, Princeton, 1998, pp. 298–300.

  45. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 146. Du Bois has little faith that exposure to the diverse perspectives of our fellow human beings is what makes us change our minds: ‘We do not really associate with each other, we associate with our ideas of each other’ (p. 148). According to Du Bois, women’s closest relatives are most likely to doubt their intelligence, and ‘it is those people who live in closest contact with black folk who have most unhesitatingly asserted the impossibility of living beside Negroes’. Still, he argues that human beings must overcome these prejudices, and that they have historically been able to do so (p. 149).

  46. Ibid., p. 145.

  47. Ibid., p. 147: universal suffrage would ‘interfere with some of the present prerogatives of men and probably for some time to come annoy them considerably … It would mean today that black men in the South would have to be treated with consideration, have their wishes respected and their manhood rights recognized’.

  48. Ibid.

  49. A. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, Berkeley, 2015, pp. 31–45 reviews these critiques and decides against them; he emphasizes Du Bois’s sociological investigations of structural and institutional forces arrayed against African Americans. P. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature, Madison, 2006, p. 31, observes that African American authors who engage with classical literature often face charges of elitism. E. Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, 2010, pp. 213–19, offers a fascinating account of the central role of Aristotle’s Politics in debates over education, elitism, and imperialism in 1950s Trinidad and Tobago.

  50. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 140.

  51. See also Politics 1.1260a9–20 on the natural slave’s reason; what the slave lacks is the deliberative faculty (τὸ βουλευτικόν, 1.1260a12). On the specific limitations of the natural slave’s ability to deliberate, see M. Heath, ‘Aristotle on Natural Slavery’, Phronesis, 53, 2008, pp. 244–53. While Heath concentrates mostly on the relation of master and enslaved, he points out that the majority of natural slaves are not enslaved to anyone: for Aristotle, all non-Greeks are natural slaves, and so by definition non-Greeks who live on their own have no natural rulers. See ibid., p. 245 and p. 265; Aristotle, Politics 1.1252b5–9. Dilthey treated Aristotle’s account of slavery in his lectures: see Dilthey, Allgemeine Geschichte (n. 11 above), p. 246.

  52. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 112.

  53. Ibid. Later in this same essay, Du Bois argues that technology should replace domestic labour and suggests that the ‘frantic effort to preserve the last vestiges of slavery’ impeded scientific progress in this area (p. 119). Aristotle had also observed that, if tools could accomplish their tasks on their own, there would be no need for slaves: see Politics 1.1253b33–1254a1. Armstrong, Logic of Slavery (n. 10 above), pp. 70–99, studies the metaphorical and conceptual equations of the slave and the machine or tool; he suggests that Du Bois ‘ultimately leaves in place the operative relationship informing the slavery-technology complex, siding with the ideal of intellectual “mastery”, the accomplishments of the college-educated, and seeing slavery and the tool bound together’ (p. 90).

  54. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 120.

  55. Armstrong, Logic of Slavery (n. 10 above), p. 87. M. Malamud, African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition, and Activism, New York, 2016, pp. 128–31, shows how proslavery writers in 19th-century America (and one abolitionist: Senator Charles Sumner) used Aristotle’s Politics to support their arguments.

  56. Du Bois, Darkwater (n. 5 above), p. 120.

  57. Ibid., p. 148.

  58. Ibid., p. 149.

  59. Ibid., pp. 147–8.

  60. Ibid., p. 144.

  61. Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction (n. 18 above), p. 6. On critique of the United States as central to the project of African-American classicism, see the introduction to this collection.

Acknowledgements

I received valuable comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewers for the journal, and also from audiences at the University of New Hampshire, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the 2016 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. I am also grateful to Mathias Hanses for his generous reading and re-reading of this essay.

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    Harriet Fertik

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Fertik, H. Hell to Pay: Aristotle and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Democracy in ‘Of the Ruling of Men’. Int class trad 26, 72–85 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0480-z

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