I have told you of those seventy-five landholders in Lowndes County--owning $25,000 worth of land, building new and better houses and working steadily and saving. And yet, gentlemen, not a single one of those men under the new constitution of Alabama has the right to vote: they cannot say a word as to the condition of the roads that pass their farmers, the situation of the schools, the choice of teachers, the kind of county officers or the rate of taxation. They are just as absolutely disfranchised as the worst criminal in the penitentiary and as I am in Georgia. You can twist this matter up and down and apologize for it and reason it out--its wrong, and unjust, and economically unsound, and you know it. (Du bois, 1906 "The Economic Future of the Negro," 242)
During the nineteenth century, philosophy, political economy, and moral sciences were overlapping disciplines that remained in fruitful, albeit increasingly fractured, conversation through the first half of the twentieth century. As philosophy became professionalized (as a species of scientific philosophy), it lost all memory of this; John Rawls educated himself into these matters and was the last to have a deep and wide knowledge of the issues. The oldest generation of active economists (who were still required to take history of economics in their graduate education) are the last disappearing store of knowledge about any of this.
One myth about the shared history of philosophy and economics is the idea that the historical overlap between the two is essentially constituted by utilitarianism.* W.E.B. Du Bois was no utilitarian, yet at the start of his career he was a distinguished economist trained in Berlin in the German historical school, then led by Schmoller and Wagner.** The passage above is, as Prasch suggests (320), directed at the economist John Bates Clark -- whose name is still remembered in professional economics because of the very influential medal named after him --, who had argued that economic development had to be prior to expansion of the franchise. Du Bois points to the enduring moral and economic truth: economic activity is embedded in (developing) political frameworks, which play a non-trivial role in generating patterns of economic outcomes.
The widespread habit of studying the Negro from one point of view only, that of his influence on the white inhabitants [of America], is also responsible for much uncritical work. The slaves are generally treated as one inert changeless mass, and most studies of slavery apparently have no conception of a social evolution and development among them. (Du Bois (1898) "The Study of the Negro Problems," 14)
Even so, in his economic and sociological (these fields overlapped through the 1930s) papers, Du Bois is an unabashed advocate of pure research:
Students must be careful to insist that science as such--be it physics, chemistry, psychology, or sociology--has but one simple aim: the discovery of truth. It results lie open for the use of all men--merchants, physicians, men of letters, and philanthropists, but the aim of science itself is simple truth. Any attempt to give it a double aim, to make social reform the immediate instead of the mediate object of a search for truth, will inevitably tend to defeat both objects. The frequent alliance of sociological research with various panaceas and particular schemes of reform, has resulted in closely connecting social investigation with a good deal of groundless assumption and humbug in the popular mind, (Du Bois (1898) "The Study of the Negro Problems," (16-7).
While Du Bois's interest in science and the particular topics he focuses on is undoubtedly motivated by a desire for social reform, he argues that one must leave social improvement at arm's length. He offers two reasons for rejecting the entwinement of science and social reform: (i) science is difficult enough as is, and so it needs specialized focus on the truth; (ii) science in the service of social reform runs the ongoing risk of creating a bad image for science among the larger public (by prematurely promoting silly reform projects). In fact, Du Bois' methodology is extremely sensitive to the social context, and historical development of any social problem:
All social growth means a succession of social problems--they constitute growth, they denote that laborious and often baffling adjustment of action and condition which is the essence of progress, and while a particular fact or circunstance may serve in one country as a rallying point of many intricate questions of adjustment, the absence of that particular fact would not mean the absence of all social problems. Questions of labor, caste, ignorance and race were bound to arise in America; they were simply complicated here and intensified there by the presence of the Negro. (Du Bois (1898), "The Study of the Negro Problems," 6-7)
This is not to say that Du Bois embraces the disinterested ideal for science. Rather, his ideal of science, is informed by human sympathy and the true love of humanity:
We live in a day when in spite of the brilliant accomplishments of a remarkable century, there is current much flippant criticism of scientific work; when the truth-seeker is too often pictures as devoid of human sympathy, and careless of human ideals...At such a time true lovers of humanity can only hold higher the pure ideals of science, and continue to insist that if we would solve a problem we must study it, and there is but one coward on earth, and he is the coward that dare not know. (Du Bois, "The Study of the Negro Problems," (23)
Here, Du Bois is tacitly responding, in part, to Marx's criticism of the inclusive (i.e., beyond the working class) and non-revolutionary social-democracy of Lasalle. For those who wish to recover the possibility of a philosophically sophisticated social science and a scientific philosophy that has a sophisticated understanding of the benefits and dangers of technocracy, it is worth our time to pay attention to Du Bois.
*Within philosophy, Sidgwick and Rawls encouraged this very partial truth (recall, here, and here).
**Today's post was inspired by reading this article by Robert E. Prasch (2008) "W. E. B. DU BOIS'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO U.S. ECONOMICS (1893–1910)."
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