W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life of Critical Engagement - Lecture 3 - Decolonizing the Canon

In the third of four lectures on W.E.B. Du Bois, Michael Burawoy puts Du Bois into dialogue with Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and examines the radical consequences for the social sciences.

Sociology is a peculiar discipline in that its foundations lie in the work of “canonical” intellectuals, most prominently Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Du Bois presents a counter-point to the canon and a lightning rod for “decolonization” that is sweeping through US academia and beyond. It is possible to discern four academic responses to “decolonization”: restoration of the canon by insisting on the old foundations with concessionary additions at the periphery; rejection of the very idea of a canon as problematic; revolution in which an entirely new canon is born; reconstruction in which we rebuild the foundations through the introduction of a new candidate.

For nearly 50 years Michael Burawoy taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been an ethnographer of workplaces in the US, Zambia, Hungary and Russia. In various books, including The Color of Class on the Copper Mines (1972), Manufacturing Consent (1979), The Politics of Production (1985), The Radiant Past (with Janos Lukács) (1992), Public Sociology (2021), he has advanced theories of advanced capitalism, state socialism and postcolonialism, while developing the distinctive methodology of The Extended Case Method (2009).