This Philosopher Believed that Beauty Could Save Democracy

In “Democracy and Beauty,” Robert Gooding-Williams explores the arguments and intellectual legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois.

May 29, 2025 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

According to the new book “Democracy and Beauty,” W.E.B. Du Bois argued that beauty could support democracy by shaking us out of our established habits of mind. (Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress)

Review by Becca Rothfeld

In the poem “Socrates and Alcibiades,” the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin asks why the famed Athenian philosopher fell in love not with a fellow genius, but with a handsome youth. Although he was renowned for his looks, Alcibiades was notoriously rash and silly. Shouldn’t Socrates, of all people, rise above such temptations? Shouldn’t he prefer sagacity to charm? On the contrary, Hölderlin concludes, “the wise, in the end, often bow to what is beautiful.” There is a broader lesson in this poetic parable: Beauty, the verse suggests, can be more powerful than argument.

The philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams, a professor at Yale, attributes a similar view to the 20th-century sociologist and thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. In “Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Gooding-Williams argues that beauty “is a political force capable of advancing the struggle against white supremacy.” He makes his case by presenting a clear and convincing, if somewhat dry, account of Du Bois’s views on democracy, racism and, finally, beauty.

He begins by glossing Du Bois’s notion of the crowd and the mob. The crowd, Gooding-Williams explains, opens us to the unfamiliar through our encounters with strangers. The mob, on the other hand, is “marked by a tendency to constrain an otherwise ‘infinite’ human nature” by suppressing difference. Du Bois envisioned democracy not only as a system of governance but as a form of life, one that cultivated crowds and deplored mobs.

This distinction accounts for the “democracy” of Gooding-Williams’s title, but what about “beauty”? While thinkers like the Enlightenment-era German giant Immanuel Kant regarded beauty as a source of pleasure and placidity, Du Bois understood it as a disruptive force. It is, Gooding-Williams writes, that which casts the world “in an unfamiliar, astonishing light.”

The most philosophically exciting parts of “Democracy and Beauty” lay out the surprising ways that disruptive beauty can promote the sort of democracy that fosters crowds. American racism is rooted, as Du Bois memorably put it, in “a vicious habit of mind” that is immune to reasoned rebuttal. Racism, he wrote, “is not based on science, else it would be held as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to be withdrawn in the face of facts.” But Gooding-Williams notes that beauty can achieve what debate cannot, precisely because it is equipped to disrupt and unsettle. The argument does not rest on the familiar (and vigorously disputed) claim that art (and, in particular, fiction) cultivates empathy, but rather on the fresh suggestion that beauty can reveal the visceral repugnance of white supremacy by jolting its adherents out of their preconceptions.

But the benefits of aesthetic enjoyment also go in the other direction, since beauty (natural beauty especially) can instill hope in oppressed groups. In its novelty, it vouchsafes the possibility of what Gooding-Williams describes as “a future different from the past, a future that is not simply a recurrence of the same old ugliness.” It can therefore function as an antidote to the disease of “pessimistic despair,” which Du Bois especially reviled. “Pessimism is cowardice,” he wrote in the 1920 book “Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil.” “The man who cannot frankly acknowledge the ‘Jim-­ Crow’ car as a fact and yet live and hope is simply afraid either of himself or of the world. There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the ‘Jim-­ Crow’ car of the southern United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and moonlight on Montego Bay in far Jamaica. And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied.” The gorgeous natural vista reminds us that we need not reconcile ourselves to unnatural injustice.

Of course, there are many possible objections to Du Bois’s views, and Gooding-Williams cannot respond to all of them in detail. In general, he is more interested in exegesis than in evaluation. Is Du Bois right about beauty or democracy or, for that matter, white supremacy? What of more recent philosophers who claim that racism is not “a vicious habit of mind” but a consequence of unjust institutional arrangements? “Democracy and Beauty” does not defend Du Bois’s conception of white supremacy against competing accounts, and it will not satisfy or sway those who are committed to a more structural approach. But the patience and care with which Gooding-Williams explains Du Bois’s position will impress, if not persuade, his critics.

Yet if beauty is what shocks us out of our habits of thought, then “Democracy and Beauty,” for all its intellectual and stylistic virtues, was never destined to change many minds. To its credit, it is neither riddled with jargon nor given to the hollow faddishness that cheapens so much contemporary scholarship, and it tackles a question of enduring relevance. But there is no denying that Gooding-Williams’s language is unadorned, and that the ideas he elaborates are difficult. And while he does sometimes apply Du Bois’s theories to contemporary affairs — for instance, in brief forays into contemporary art about Black life — he largely leaves this exercise in relevance-mongering to the reader.

Above all, Gooding-Williams tries to change minds by way of argument, not aesthetic dazzlements, and he knows better than anyone that this method has its limitations. Du Bois made excellent arguments, as “Democracy and Beauty” demonstrates, but his prose was also elegantly embroidered. “First and before all,” he writes in one striking passage, “we cannot forget that this world is beautiful. Grant all its ugliness and sin — the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I —­ notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied.”

Reading prose so vivid, who could deny it?

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”