  Among critics wishing to situate Du Bois within a well-defined, western philosophical tradition, the main tendencies have been to characterize Du Bois either as a pragmatist (see West, 1989, Taylor, 2004b, and Kahn, 2009) or as an Hegelian of sorts. Much of the literature following this second line of interpretation has considered Du Bois’s writings, and especially Souls, in the perspective of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (see, e.g., Gooding-Williams, 1987 and 1991; Zamir, 1995; and, most recently, Shaw, 2013). In this connection, Paul Taylor (2004b) has persuasively argued that we need not choose between an Hegelian Du Bois and a pragmatist Du Bois. More recently, Nahum Chandler has proposed to read Du Bois neither as an Hegelian, nor as a pragmatist, but in parallel to several of his European contemporaries, including Husserl, Weber, Durkheim, Boas and Freud (Chandler, 2014).