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Please join the Graduate Student Political Theory Workshop as they host Lawrence Svabek, a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Departments of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.

For decades scholars have treated Du Bois’s involvement in and theorization of cooperative democracy as a footnote in his broader democratic theory. This article recovers Du Bois’s cooperative theory to demonstrate that, far from representing a narrow project of racial uplift, it responded to Du Bois’s evolving understanding of democratic decay. During the height of the New Deal Era, Du Bois increasingly doubted the possibility of using state power to restructure the economy and build an industrial democracy. I make this turn in thought legible through a reconstruction of Du Bois’s problem space and by reading his well-known Black Reconstruction in America alongside lesser-known essays and speeches. The pessimism of the New Deal period inspired Du Bois to turn decisively to cooperative democracy as a project that could habituate African Americans to new modes of action and establish the material and ideological conditions for political democracy to thrive. By retrieving this vision of revitalized democracy, contemporary audiences can better understand the roots of democratic decay. I conclude by considering the limitations of Du Bois’s vision, reminding us of the costs of moving beyond the state, while conserving the mission that we must work together to sustain a democratic way of life.

Larry Svabek is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Departments of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity. His research is situated in the history of political thought with specific interests in African American political thought, political economy, and the study of slavery and its afterlives. By recovering the ideological challenges of emancipation and Reconstruction in the United States, Larry’s work sheds new light on political problems that continue to haunt American society in the twenty-first century. In his first book-length project, A Promised State: Reconstruction and the Roots of the African American Progressive Tradition, Larry explores the development and demise of a progressive theory of state action during Reconstruction. His second project, tentatively titled Reclaiming the Land: African American and Indigenous Solidarities in a White Republic, assesses a political problem raised in pursuit of full citizenship: how can marginalized and dominated groups claim the rights and privileges of citizenship when those have been the very tools of exclusion and domination? Larry holds a BA (with Honors) in Political Science, Economics, and Critical Theory from Northwestern University and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.