<p><i>The Souls of Black Folk</i> is Du Bois&amp;#x2019;s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, &amp;#x201C;What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?&amp;#x201D; Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois&amp;#x2019;s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois&amp;#x2019;s interpretation of black politics.</p> <p>For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing &amp;#x201C;self-realization&amp;#x201D; that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois&amp;#x2019;s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller&amp;#x2019;s social thought, the German debate over the <i>Geisteswissenschaften</i>, and William Wordsworth&amp;#x2019;s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs <i>Souls&amp;#x2019;</i> defense of this &amp;#x201C;politics of expressive self-realization,&amp;#x201D; and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in <i>My Bondage and My Freedom</i>. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois&amp;#x2019;s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to <i>Bondage</i> and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from <i>Souls</i>, Gooding-Williams lets <i>Souls</i> serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.</p>