On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past

This chapter constructs a conceptual grammar for untimely democracy by pairing Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk . Jefferson’s vision of an ever-progressing polity rests on his principle of generational autonomy: the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit for such a model. For Jefferson, blackness signifies a future haunted by bondage; thus Africans can have no place in American democracy. Jefferson’s future is what Du Bois terms the “present-past.” With this phrase, Du Bois reorders linear time—positioning the past after, not before, the present—and posits intergenerational responsibility as a democratic value alongside equality and liberty. And yet, even as he advocates a temporal double consciousness that blurs past and present, Du Bois worries that emphasizing slavery’s seemingly eternal return might paralyze political action.

Autonomy · Democracy · Genealogy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · State (computer science) · Value (mathematics) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society