Book Review: A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois, edited by Nick Bromell

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718799420
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Author: Elvira Basevich
• Date: 01 October 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

766 Political Theory 47(5)

that inaugurate Douglass’s 1845 narrative, Spires recommends that we place

this classic work into dialogue with the 1843 National Convention of Colored

Citizens, at which Douglass engaged in debate with the black abolitionist Henry

Highland Garnet. See Spires, “Teaching Douglass’s 1845 Narrative through the

Colored Conventions,” in #TeachingC19, a section of the website of C19: The

Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, https://www.c19society.org/copy-

of-teachingc19-1 (accessed February 21, 2019).

5. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of

Emerson and Whitman (1941; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), ix.

A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois, edited by Nick Bromell. Lexington, KY:

University of Kentucky Press, 2018, 376 pp.

Reviewed by: Elvira Basevich, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718799420

W.E.B. Du Bois is a singular figure of the twentieth century. Nick Bromell’s

A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois introduces readers to the breadth

and complexity of his political thought. Faithful to Du Bois’s own interdis-

ciplinary methodology, the volume includes philosophers, social scientists,

and literary scholars. Although its quality is uneven, on the whole, it offers

original essays—those authored by Charles Mills, Lewis Gordon, Melvin

Rogers, and Alexander Livingston especially stand out—that not only pro-

vide a plausible reconstruction of the normative framework of Du Bois’s

political philosophy, but also discuss how his democratic politics addresses

the historical legacy of racial injustice, as well as the ethical significance of

racial belonging and aesthetic production. Understandably, some essays

only gesture toward Du Bois’s challenge to dominant paradigms of political

philosophy and theory. The volume nonetheless offers fertile ground for

future scholarship.

In the first section, “Du Bois and Political Philosophy,” Mills and Gordon

argue that Du Bois is a modern political philosopher who theorizes the central

themes of modernity, including the nature of free and equal citizenship and

the obstacles to the institutional recognition of black moral equality. They

situate Du Bois in the tradition of Afro-modern political thought and Africana

philosophy. Drawing on his larger project of developing an immanent cri-

tique of liberalism, Mills argues that for Du Bois racism is a defining, rather

than an anomalous, feature of modern liberal societies, yet Du Bois enlists

universal liberal principles to dismantle racial caste and to “undertake a dera-

cializing reconstruction of liberalism” (33). Mills asserts that Du Bois is a