The Search for World Democracy

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Space

Adam Dahl (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

272 Seiten

2026
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
9780226846774 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. April 2026)
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An incisive conceptual history of global democracy in the transnational political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois.

The Search for World Democracy traces the language of “world democracy” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s oeuvre, stretching from his early sociological writings to his later work on world peace and anticolonialism with and against the United Nations. Drawing on original archival research, several lesser-known writings, and most centrally Du Bois’s unpublished 1937 manuscript A World Search for Democracy, Adam Dahl places his unique approach to democratic theory within the transatlantic debates about the transformation of European imperial order in the twentieth century. Dahl shows how Du Bois’s vision of the spatial scale of democracy situated struggles for popular control, decolonization, industrial democracy, and racial enfranchisement in their shifting, multidimensional geographic contexts. Less a specific model of global governance than a radical politics of space and scale, Du Bois’s idea of world democracy challenges the boundaries between domestic and international politics by linking local sites of democratic struggle within and against the global color line. The Search for World Democracy shows how, for Du Bois, the radical transformation of the United States into a multiracial democracy would require an equally dramatic transformation of the imperial lineages of world politics.

Adam Dahl is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also the author of Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought.

Preface

1. “No True Inter-Nation”: Imagining World Democracy
2. “The Fourth Dimension of Color”: Interracial Utopianism in the Age of Empire
3. “Unusual Returns”: Transnational Whiteness and the Dividends of Empire
4. “The Voice of Colonial Peoples”: Constructing a Global Majority
5. “The Habit of Democracy Must Encircle the Earth”: Constellations of Democratic Peace
Conclusion: Democracy Out of Empire

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	3.4.2026
Zusatzinfo	2 halftones
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	9780226846774 / 9780226846774
Zustand	Neuware