If nationalism is over, we shall miss it. Revolution may be the project of a vanguard party acting on behalf of its masses. Resistance to capitalist globalization may be pursued by a multifarious and inchoate multitude. But imagining democracy requires thinking of "the people" as active and coherent and oneself as both a member and an agent.

During the course of his impressively long life, W. E. B. Du Bois occupied a bewildering range of positions, both on the domestic front of African American politics and on the international front of the anticolonial politics of the emergent Third World.