REJOINDERS TO ROGERS SMITH

In responding to Smith's first criticism—his reservations concerning the contrast I draw between politics-as-rule and politics-as-action-in-concert—I begin with a conceptual point and then turn to the theme of leadership. I also respond briefly to Smith's claims regarding my treatment of Frederick Douglass.

The conceptual point is that the distinction between politics-as-action-in-concert and politics-as-rule cuts across the distinction between the many and the few, and, similarly, across the distinction between non-elites and elites, where the latter are groups distinguished by their superior intellectual, social, or economic status. As Hannah Arendt ([Reference Arendt1963] 1965) reminds us, the thesis that politics is action-in-concert hardly entails a rejection of the claim “that the political way of life has never been and will never be the way of life of the many” (pp. 279–280). I stress this point in my book (Gooding-Williams Reference Gooding-Williams2009, p. 31) and here, again, because I think that it is lost in both Smith's and Shelby's comments, which seem to mistakenly treat the rule/action-in-concert distinction as by definition corresponding to the distinction between elites and non-elites, or to that between the few and the many. In the book, moreover, I explicitly highlight the example of Frederick Douglass's description of plantation politics, which depicts neither the many, e.g., the slave masses, nor a “talented tenth” that has been “raised up” to direct the many along the path to freedom. (Gooding-Williams Reference Gooding-Williams2009, p. 187) Rather it depicts the politics of a few—of six individuals—who pledge themselves to one another and to acting in concert, but who do not undertake to rule or otherwise to guide the slave masses who do not take part in their conspiracy.

A second, related point concerns the theme of leadership. To my mind, the critical political philosophical challenge that this theme poses is not to decide between the romantic belief that politics can be routinely conducted via fully egalitarian, democratic collective action and the hard-headed, realistic Machiavellian belief that politics is never without leaders. Rather it is, in fine, to consider some alternative options for conceptualizing leadership, and to ask what concepts of leadership, given our democratic political commitments, we should endorse and want to see practiced.Footnote ¹ The Arendt-inspired distinction I elaborate in the book—between leadership-as-rule and leadership-as-initiative-taking—is doubtlessly too stark and insufficiently nuanced to do all the theoretical work that needs to be done here, but it is a valuable start. What is more, further analysis along these lines is essential to advancing Smith's welcome insistence that we think carefully about how to check and channel leaders so that they act more constructively and responsively. To that end, my book may be read as helping to loosen the grip of the politics-as-rule notion on our understanding of Black politics, and so as helping to enlarge the conceptual space for considering possibilities available to constructive and responsive Black political leadership, and to Black political agency more generally.

To finish with Smith's first criticism, I wish to say, initially, that while he may be right to interpret Shakespeare's Henry V as the Machiavellian ruler par excellence, I think that he would be hard pressed textually to justify the claim that Douglass ([Reference Douglass and Smith1855] 2003) means to invoke some such interpretation when he describes his cabal as a “band of brothers”; and further, that with respect to Douglass's newspaper what is critically important to the argument of my book is that My Bondage and My Freedom ([Reference Douglass and Smith1855] 2003) depicts the newspaper as a collaborative enterprise—again, I think, in order to enlarge our sense of the possibilities available to Black political agency. Part of Douglass's point, I take it, is precisely not to present himself as a Black version of the sublime and heroic William Lloyd Garrison.

Regarding Smith's second criticism, I agree that we should not “rule out” of political conversation and contestation individuals who promote a foundationalist approach to Black politics. Contrary to Smith's suggestion, the point of the “no-foundations” approach I defend is not to rid Black politics of such conversational contributions. Rather it is to encourage theorists who, like Tommie Shelby, argue that there is a set of interests common to all Blacks, qua Black, to regard and represent their arguments as first-order contributions to the fray of political debate and contestation, not as second- or otherwise higher-order contributions that, standing above the fray, prepolitically, or apolitically, can conclusively pre-commit Black politics to a particular interpretation of mutating and ambiguous interests and ideals about which there is always already political disagreement. And there is nothing in the no-foundations approach, I should add, that precludes cross-racial coalition building.

Regarding, finally, Smith's third criticism, I am engaged by his aspiration to take seriously discourses of “good character,” and laud the project of setting out and defending alternatives to what he calls “White middle class morality.” And he is right that I, myself, have not been very concrete in spelling out such alternatives. But that is in part because I worry that the normative appraisal of Black behaviors and attitudes, even if grounded in the sorts of alternatives Smith envisions, will inevitably run in a conservative direction unless positioned against the background of a social theory of ghetto poverty that foregrounds the themes of social and, specifically, racial justice, and that is driven by what in the book, echoing the early Habermas (Reference Habermas1971), I call an “emancipatory interest.”

REJOINDERS TO TOMMIE SHELBY

Like Smith, Tommie Shelby begins his comment on my book by focusing on the notion of politics-as-rule. In contrast to Smith, however, Shelby presses the concern that the application of this notion to Du Bois is inapt.

First, Shelby asserts that “[a] command is not much of a command without the threat of sanctions,” a proposition that I take to be a conceptual claim. In short, I take Shelby to be asserting that a directive that is not backed by sanctions fails fully to satisfy the concept of a command, just as someone who said that “a man is not much of a man if he declines to smoke Marlboros” would be asserting that a human male who declines to smoke Marlboros fails fully to satisfy the concept of a man, and so, strictly speaking, cannot count as a man. But Shelby's conceptual claim is false, for there is no contradiction in claiming, e.g., that an annoyed stranger ordered me to stop scratching an itch, but without the threat of a sanction. What we should say here is not that the stranger's utterance, “You, in the green sweater, stop scratching yourself,” fell short of counting as a command, but that it was in fact a command that, despite the lack of a sanction to back it, I might well have obeyed. And while I know that the issue in question here cannot be settled by an appeal to authority, I feel compelled to add, as I explicitly do in my book, that Max Weber (Reference Weber, Fischoff, Roth and Wittich1968, Reference Weber, Lassman and Spiers1994) also distinguishes between rule per se and coercive rule.

Second, Shelby admits that I note that Du Bois “does not suggest that the black elite should use the threat of force to back up their commands,” but then wonders why, given that concession, I interpret Du Boisian leadership as a form of “governance.” But, of course, I do not interpret Du Boisian leadership as form of governance, if by governance one means what Shelby seems to mean by the term, which is, again, rule, or the issuing of orders, backed by some form of coercion. To be sure, I do indeed claim that Du Bois regarded talented tenth leaders as command-issuing rulers, or governors, because that is precisely what his early writings strongly suggest. In Section One of Chapter One of my book, I adduce extensive textual support for this thesis. For example, I show that Du Bois himself, some thirty-seven years after Souls appeared, retrospectively used the term “rule” to suggest that his dispute with Booker T. Washington was about whether the Black elites who controlled the Black masses should be oligarchs (men of wealth), or aristocrats (men of virtuous character). In sum, it seems to me that the evidence supplied by Du Bois's books and essays, early and otherwise, consistently argues against Shelby's insistence that “the talented tenth is not supposed to be issuing any commands or orders.”

Shelby's third point is that Du Bois rejected charismatic leadership and held a) that Black leaders were to influence their followers primarily through rational persuasion and personal example, and b) that the masses who followed Black leaders were to hold them accountable through “honest and earnest criticism” of their arguments. Here, then, Shelby alludes to what I call “the criticism model of legitimate leadership.” As he acknowledges, however, I also show or, at least, argue in my book that Du Bois must ultimately reject the criticism model, for he believed that the Black masses were too backwards to supply useful criticism to their leaders and, I would now add, reliably to respond to rational persuasion. In addition, I argue that Du Bois's rejection of the criticism model explains his turn to an expressivist model of legitimate leadership. I shall shortly discuss the expressivist model at greater length, but now want simply to stress that it ties legitimate leadership less to personal example than to a distinctive sort of charisma—namely, to the charisma involved in expressing the ethos of the Black folk—and that in suggesting that Du Bois wholly repudiates charismatic leadership, Shelby seriously underestimates the pull of the Protestant notion of the “calling” on his political thought—obviously another point in common between Du Bois and Weber, and a point that I stress in Chapter Three when I discuss Du Bois's interpretation of the life of Alexander Crummell.

But Shelby suggests—and this is his fourth point—that my account of Du Bois's expressivist turn is flawed, for it depends on a mistaken interpretation of the democratic criticism model. And he proposes that my interpretation of the democratic criticism model is mistaken, because “the very idea of leadership is incompatible with leaders being guided by those who follow them.” Here again, I believe that Shelby's conceptual claim is false, not least of all because the very idea of democratic leadership requires that leaders be guided by those who follow them. This, in any case, is what I take Du Bois to be arguing in the passage that Shelby quotes from Souls. Shelby's reconstruction of the criticism model can be persuasive only if, like Shelby, one neglects to take seriously enough Du Bois's ([Reference Du Bois, Blight and Gooding-Williams1903] 1997) presentation of the model as a model of democratic criticism expressing “the soul of democracy” (p. 65; emphasis mine). But if we do take Du Bois's presentation seriously, concentrating on his suggestion that “[h]onest and earnest criticism” is to stem from those “whose interests are most nearly touched” ([Reference Du Bois, Blight and Gooding-Williams1903] 1997, p. 64; emphasis mine), then it is difficult to avoid the interpretation that Du Bois holds democratic leadership to be legitimate only if it is guided by the interests of the led—that is, by the interests of the demos, or the common people—and that he takes criticism to be important because criticism is the medium through which the demos articulates and clarifies its interests. Thus, Du Bois believes that if the rulers and leaders of a democracy cease to be guided and instructed by the criticism of those they rule and lead, then, for all intents and purposes, they flout the interests of those they rule and lead, thereby undermining their legitimacy.

Shelby's fifth point is that Du Bois's expressivist turn is, in any case, unnecessary, for Du Bois adequately defends “the legitimacy of the Black elite's claim to lead” by establishing that it is fit and, indeed, best suited to lead. And Du Bois establishes this view, Shelby argues, by pointing to the Black elite's “education and achievement,” insisting that “they are, educationally best prepared to lead, historically … have shown themselves to be excellent leaders, and through their example … show that blacks are capable of self-development.”

But Du Bois, I believe, thought that he needed more than this—that is, more than an appeal to the talented tenth's fitness to lead—adequately to establish the legitimacy of its leadership. And that is because Du Bois draws a distinction that Shelby neglects to appreciate: namely, between being a suitable, or fit, leader and being a legitimate leader. Du Bois draws that distinction, for even with his turn to an expressivist model his thinking remains deeply democratic in spirit. In my book, I put the point this way:

Now a corollary to my account of Du Bois's two models of legitimate leadership is precisely that Du Bois would reject the strictly meritocratic—that is, suitability- or fitness-based—model of legitimate leadership that Shelby endorses. He would reject it, for it is not democratic, and he would judge that it is not democratic because it predicates legitimacy not on deference to the demos but on criteria of merit, like education and achievement. To be sure, I do not deny that Du Bois held that there were criteria for suitable leadership, but I do deny that he believed that suitability per se was a sufficient condition of political legitimacy. And, to be honest, it is not obvious to me that he believed it was a necessary condition. For Du Bois, the turn to political expressivism was required to salvage the possibility of democratic authority, or legitimacy, notwithstanding his rejection of the criticism model.

Finally, Shelby denies that “the black elite had actual authority over the masses,” for if it did then “were the black masses to rebel against elite leadership, this would not just be folly but wrong.” In other words, Shelby doubts that Du Bois regards his aristoi as enjoying the authority to rule, for that would entail that their followers have a duty to obey them, which, Shelby suggests, Du Bois nowhere implies. But the text of Souls argues against Shelby's doubt with respect to each of the models of legitimacy it entertains.

First, with respect to the criticism model, Du Bois ([Reference Du Bois, Blight and Gooding-Williams1903] 1997) holds that the function of interest-based criticism is to commission leaders—that is, to authorize their leadership (pp. 64–65). And this is to authorize their rule, because, again, Du Bois interprets leadership as rule. In sum, Du Bois envisions the Black demos as authorizing its leaders and rulers—or, in other words, as investing them with the authority to lead and rule and, implicitly, as incurring a duty to follow and obey them so long as the authorized leaders retain their authority by making decisions that reflect the interest-based criticism of their followers.

Second, with respect to the expressivist model, Du Bois's discussion of Alexander Crummell shows that he regards the charismatic authority he attributes to leaders who authentically express the spirit of the Black folk as authority that calls for obedience. I have not the space here to rehearse the reading of the Crummell chapter on which I base this claim in my book, but I will recall the conclusion of my argument—namely, that when Du Bois mentions that he bowed before and submitted to Crummell at Wilberforce, he implies that the older Crummell manifested a prophet's charisma that entitled him to rule and to be obeyed, though a lesser title than he enjoyed as a young man.

REJOINDERS TO CRISTINA BELTRÁN

Cristina Beltrán worries that the no-foundations approach to Black politics may be insufficiently attentive to the tragic dimensions of America's racial history, for it tends to “fetishize the proliferation of the new.” Thus, she echoes George Shulman's (Reference Shulman2010) insistence that the no-foundations approach separates speech and action from antecedent conditions, and so disavows rather than acknowledges “our inescapable embeddedness in the history, language, and hierarchy that at once precede and constitute us,” (p. 6) as well as Linda Zerilli's (Reference Zerilli2010) concern that this approach denies that politics requires the testing of “assumed points of shared culture and identity,” and so inadequately takes “account of how claims to an antecedently given cultural and racial difference might work in the service of political equality” (pp. 7–8).

But Beltrán, Shulman, and Zerilli just get me wrong, I wish to suggest, when they propose that the no-foundations approach must disregard the racial and other histories within which Black politics is embedded, or that it envisions Black politics as proceeding absent any assumptions as to the existence or content of antecedently formed cultural and racial identities. In fact, my position is just the opposite of the one they attribute to me: namely, that we should regard the practice of politics generally, and of Black politics in particular, as entailing the ongoing, never ending testing of received views as to what histories we inhabit, what identities we share, and what forms of oppression constrain us. In my book I put the point most clearly, I think, when I propose that, for Frederick Douglass, “there may be multiple and mutually contestable ways” of doing Black politics (p. 191). Douglass, I argue, “spurs us to regard black politics as the interplay of conflicting purposes and conflicting interpretations of the condition of being black” (p. 191). That condition, I take it, is “antecedently given”; for to borrow a Heideggarian turn of phrase, the social construction of Blackness belongs to the historically embedded, linguistically inflected, and culturally specific “thrownness” of Black politics that Black politics cannot avoid taking up. And in taking up that thrownness, political agents will make political judgments, or claims, that invoke, endorse, and/or rebuke any number of the testable and contestable assumptions about Black racial identity, Black culture, and Black oppression that crisscross, scar, and enliven the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, but always already politically fraught terrain that is Black history. In sum, far from fetishizing the proliferation of the new and denying the historicity and embeddedness of Black politics, the no-foundations approach follows Nietzsche precisely where he overcomes the opposition between “feeling historically” and “feeling unhistorically” in order to conceptualize the projection of new understandings of the possibilities available to Black politics with explicit reference to the reproduction and perpetuation of a past that lives on in the present (Gooding-Williams Reference Gooding-Williams2001, pp. 117–131).