Democracy's Reconstruction Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois

by Balfour, Lawrie

• ISBN13: 9780195377293
• ISBN10: 019537729X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-03-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In Democracy's Reconstruction , the latest addition to Cathy Cohen and Fredrick Harris's Transgressing Boundaries series, noted political theorist Lawrie Balfour challenges a longstanding tendency in political theory: the disciplinary division that separates political theory proper from the study of black politics. Political theory rarely engages with black political thinkers, despite the fact that the problem of racial inequality is central to the entire enterprise of American political theory. To address this lacuna, she focuses on the political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly his longstanding concern with the relationship between slavery's legacy and the prospects for democracy in the era he lived in. Balfour utilizes Du Bois as an intellectual resource, applying his method of addressing contemporary problems via the historical prism of slavery to address some of the fundamental racial divides and inequalities in contemporary America. By establishing his theoretical method to study these historical connections, she positions Du Bois's work in the political theory canon--similar to the status it already has in history, sociology, philosophy, and literature.

Author Biography

Lawrie Balfour is Associate Professor of Politics at University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
List of Abbreviations of Books by W. E. B. Du Bois	p. xiii
Politics in the Present-Past	p. 1
Unreconstructed Democracy and the Claim of Reparations	p. 23
Resurrecting John Brown	p. 47
Practicing Critical Race Autobiography	p. 71
Representative Women: Slavery and the Gendered Ground of Citizenship	p. 97
Black World, White Nation: Remapping Political Theory	p. 115
Acknowledgments	p. 141
Notes	p. 143
Index of Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois	p. 189
Index	p. 191
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