Ugly progress: W. E. B. Du Bois’s sociology of the future

Abstract

The work of W. E. B. Du Bois is a powerful but unjustly neglected resource for sociological enquiry. Powerful insofar that it cuts against the grain of sociology as it exists today, offering a distinctive set of tools that allow the social world to be approached, conceptualised and studied in new ways. Unjustly neglected insofar that the explicit and implicit racism of sociology has positioned Du Bois as a peripheral figure. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the task of recuperating Du Bois’s hidden potency by considering his theory of social time. I argue that Du Bois’s essay ‘Of the Meaning of Progress’ presents an incisive critique of the triumphalist conception of progress that was dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the diffuse desire for a better future common in sociology today. Du Bois rejects the idea that history moves in a necessary and ameliorative fashion towards an ever better world. Instead, drawing on the black experience of slavery and racial violence, Du Bois proposes a notion of ugly progress: a looping conception of time that involves shuffling between the disappointments of the past and utopian hopes for the future. To conclude, I suggest the ugly conception of progress offers a fresh perspective on how marginalised figures from the past, such as Du Bois himself, should be positioned within the discipline of sociology.