“But one may as well anticipate Surprises”: Anna Julia Cooper and Durkheimian Theory

• In Event: Theorists and Theories in the History of Sociology and Social Thought

Abstract

Black feminist theorist, Anna Julia Cooper is best known for her work, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, published in the United States in 1892. Thirty-three years later, Cooper successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne, at the age of sixty-seven. Sociological scholarship has yet to examine how Cooper’s dissertation, L’Attitude de la France à l’Égard de l’Esclavage Pendant la Revolution, and her response to a prompt on social equality posed by Célestin Bouglé, Émile Durkheim’s collaborator and Cooper’s dissertation examiner, reveal Cooper’s engagement with Durkheimian theories of social solidarity, moral rules, and social equality. In her dissertation, Cooper theorized how France’s colonial investment in slavery thwarted its stability and progress toward social equality by stoking racism and class divisions in Haiti, degrading the moral fabric of the colonies and the metropole. Responding to Bouglé’s prompt on the social conditions of egalitarianism, Cooper levied a critique of positivist and colonialist social theorizing, calling on social scientists to treat social equality not as an outcome that could be observed and measured in select Occidental societies, but as an inherent “urge cell” of all people. As Cooper’s work is deservedly included in classical theory syllabi alongside Durkheim, this paper aims to contribute to the history of sociological thought by charting Cooper’s engagement with the Durkheimian School, uncovering its influence on her argument for how racial capitalism distorted social solidarity and morality, driving social inequalities, which ultimately sparked revolution and the breakdown of French colonial power in Haiti. Moreover, interpreting Cooper’s response to Bouglé clarifies her stance on how social thinkers should study equality as a social fact, situating Cooper’s work in debates around positivism and the role of sociology as a science that animated the discipline during the interwar period.

Author

• Jane Pryma, Boston University