LAUSR

Aldon Morris’ recent book The Scholar Denied (Morris 2015) masterfully demonstrates the importance of W. E. B. Du Bois in early American Sociology, despite its contested status during all his life. It is interesting to note that unlike many American social scientists, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was partly trained in Berlin from 1892 to 1894, in an environment where racism and segregation did not exist as such if compared to the USA at the end of nineteenth century: there were no segregated hotels, restaurants, or rest rooms in imperial Germany. This, of course, was decades before the state regulated Nazi rules that took place in Germany from 1933 to 1945. My point is to argue that two main figures were absent from the founding of American sociology and in its later recognition: W. E. B. Du Bois and Karl Marx. Not only were Du Bois and Marx neglected in the U.S. sociological tradition, but both theoreticians were nowhere to be found in many sociology books published before the 1970s in the USA. Given the limited space allowed, I present only three examples. In a hefty, posthumous book from 1933 co-written by Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) and simply titled Introductory Sociology (Angell et al. 1933), the name of Marx appears in only one chapter in these 516 pages: in a long enumeration that alludes to, among others, “revolutionists like Karl Marx” (321). Further references appear in pp. 331–335, with a negative quote from Harold Laski, “Marx found communism a chaos and left it a movement” (331). In this selected bibliography with hundreds of references, it is the 1887 edition of Marx’s Capital that is included, incomplete, only detailing the place of publication (“London”) with, oddly, no mention of the publisher’s name (499). This implies that the version by Marx quoted in Cooley’s bibliography was then 46 years old. There are no other references to either Marx or Du Bois in Cooley’s Introductory Sociology, even though at some point the discussion in the chapter about social class mentions the situation of “Negroes” (289).