Alex Drusda

ABSTRACT This article challenges the reception of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as a text consigned to his “early liberal” period, distinct from a later period in which he incorporates Marxist analysis. This periodization of Du Bois’s corpus risks obscuring a longstanding focus in Du Bois’s work: the alienation of Black life. In Souls, alienation consists not only in the alienated double-consciousness Black Americans suffer, but also in a material “double life” that grounds this consciousness. Insofar as it attributes theoretical priority to the objective conditions of racial capitalism, Du Bois’s early account of alienation bears striking similarities to Marx’s theory of alienation. By appreciating Du Bois’s emphasis on objective, socioeconomic conditions, it becomes apparent that core, philosophical insights of Souls persist throughout Du Bois’s corpus and prefigure his later embrace of Marxism.

While the Hegelian struggle for recognition is often taken to be the systematic point at which rational humanity differentiates itself from mere animality, Hegel more thoroughly expounds on the relationship between rational and nonrational animals in his Encyclopedia: humans diverge from nonrational animals through a process of habituation. While one might assume that Hegel takes this power of habituation to be sufficient for rationality, this assumption is complicated by Hegel’s attribution of habituation to non-human animals as well. Against readings of the Encyclopedia that separate human and non-human animal habituation, I argue that a coherent interpretation must treat habituation as the same power in human and non-human animal life. My interpretation demonstrates Hegel’s proximity to Matthew Boyle’s transformative conception of rationality, which portrays rationality as a unique realization of animality. Hegel takes the realization of rational animal life to be thoroughly habitual, contra the instinctual basis of nonrational animal life.