W. E. B. Du Bois’s engagement with the thought of Karl Marx forms an important aspect of his intellectual biography, yet its contours crystallize explicitly only late in his written work, and its development prior to the 1930s remains insufficiently understood. In order to bring to light the mix of criticisms, reservations, ideals, and inspirations that shape this reception, this article explores its trajectory as exhaustively as the available documentation permits, beginning from Du Bois’s early training in economics as a university student, continuing through his increasing attention to socialism in the early 1900s and his embrace of Soviet communism in the 1920s, and culminating in the 1930s in his teaching of Marx at Atlanta University and the overtly Marxian positions he adopts in Black Reconstruction (1935).
Man erfährt wieder bei dieser Gelegenheit, daß eine vollständige Erfahrung die Theorie in sich enthalten muß. Um desto sichrer sind wir, daß wir uns in einer Mitte begegnen, da wir von so vielen Seiten auf die Sache losgehen.
This paper explores parallels between the morphological thought of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the structuralism of Claude Lévi‐Strauss, and the formalism of Vladimir Propp, with emphasis on the manner in which each of these three thinkers adopts an “epistemological attitude” critical of, and external to, conventional philosophical discourse. The core commonality between them lies in their skepticism about the separability of the ideal from the real, and in the seeking of meaning within the observable constitutive structures of a phenomenon rather than any noumenal essence. The first part of the article examines the way Goethe and Lévi‐Strauss negotiate the relation between abstract thought and concrete observation; the second part turns to the way Lévi‐Strauss and Propp negotiate that question within the context of twentieth‐century social science.
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