W.E.B. Du Bois — Double Consciousness and the Psychological Wage
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Among the extra-European receptions there is a case that stands apart, because it is neither translation nor school formation, but something rarer: the application of a Hegelian figure of thought to an experience for which Hegel himself had no concept.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) studied from 1892 to 1894 at the University of Berlin, in the circle of Gustav Schmoller and the Historical School, and returned with a formation that had no equal in American social science. Whether he read Hegel in seminar is disputed; that he brought the pattern of thought back with him, his work demonstrates. Two of his formulations belong in a history of reception, and they lie thirty-two years apart.
Double Consciousness (1903)
The Souls of Black Folk opens with a determination that has since been quoted countless times and rarely read to its end:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Up to this point the passage reads as a description of suffering, and that is how it is usually cited. The decisive sentence comes afterward, and it changes everything:
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.
Du Bois does not want to dissolve the duality, but to sublate it — in the strict sense of the word: negate, preserve, elevate. He wants neither to Africanize America nor, as he puts it, to bleach his own soul in a flood of white Americanism. He wants a person to be able to be both, without being punished for it.
Here a figure of thought is applied to an object it was not made for. In Hegel, the consciousness that sees itself through foreign eyes is a transitional moment on the path to recognition; the master-servant configuration dissolves as the servant comes to himself through labor. In Du Bois, the doubling is a permanent condition, imposed from outside and not to be overcome through labor — the veil, as he says, is not passed through but assigned. And yet the resolution demanded is not a return to either of the two sides, but a unity that retains both.
What carries epistemologically here. The veil has two sides. It bars the person affected from an unbroken relation to himself — he always also sees himself as others see him. But precisely thereby it grants him what Du Bois calls “second-sight”: he knows the perspective of others, because he must live within it, and he additionally knows his own. The one who dominates need not know the perspective of the dominated; the dominated must know that of the one who dominates.
This is, three-quarters of a century before feminist standpoint theory, its core idea — and at the same time it is the most precise application of the master-servant structure to an experience Hegel did not have in view. Volume II will take up the line that leads from here, through Lukács, to Hartsock.
The Psychological Wage (1935)
Black Reconstruction in America poses a quite different question, and the answer is the sharpest class-analytic formulation of what would later be called “privilege.”
Du Bois begins from a puzzle: according to theory, white and Black workers in the South should have had common interests and should have allied. They did not — and so thoroughly not that “probably there are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply.” Why?
The answer:
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.
And the balance Du Bois draws from this is the actual point: “The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low” — the whites out of fear of being replaced by Black labor, the Blacks through the threat of white labor.
The structure of the argument deserves attention, because it gets lost in later theory. Privilege here is not a possession of the individual, but an instrument of domination — a bonus paid out to split the dominated, and one that pays off for the payer, because it depresses the wages of both groups. Whoever asks who benefits from discrimination finds an answer in Du Bois; later privilege theory can no longer even pose the question.
The seventeenth chapter of the same book, “The Propaganda of History,” draws the methodological consequence and examines historiography itself as an instrument of domination — using textbooks that exonerated the South and spared the North. For a history of reception this is an uncomfortable reminder: how an epoch is portrayed is itself part of what was fought over within it.
Systematic Placement
Du Bois belongs in this account for three reasons, and none of them is completeness.
First, he shows what a figure of thought can achieve when it encounters an object it was not designed for. In his hands the master-servant structure is not illustrated but changed: it now describes a doubling that cannot be overcome through labor, and demands a sublation that retains both sides.
Second, he supplies the connecting link between two traditions that are usually treated separately. Standpoint theory, which Volume II will address, appeals to Lukács and, through him, to Hegel; it could equally have appealed to Du Bois, who developed the same structure on different material thirty years before Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness.
Third, he is witness to the fact that the later narrowing was no necessary feature of the matter itself. In his hands privilege is functionally defined — it has a payer, a purpose, and an effect. What became of it is the history of reception, and Volume III will tell it.[1]
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: McClurg, 1903, chap. I (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”); idem: Black Reconstruction in America, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935, chap. II (“The White Worker”) and chap. XVII (“The Propaganda of History”). On his time as a student in Berlin, see his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940). The renewal of the argument in David Roediger: The Wages of Whiteness, London: Verso, 1991. ↩︎