Abstract

I argue that the second chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk has been underappreciated as a work of political philosophy, as Du Bois offers us in it a way of understanding what a government is and how to evaluate when a government is good. I relate Du Bois’s account of governmental leadership in that chapter to his critique of Booker T. Washington as a nongovernmental leader in chapter 3 of Souls. While doing this, I also pay attention to Du Bois’s account of democratic debate in chapter 3.