The following article seeks to shed light on W. E. DuBois as a historicist and cultural critic of the Progressive Age with reference to his seminal collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It investigates the manner in which DuBois redeploys and retools the Hegelian methodology of dialectical thinking and Hegelian themes like those of World History and the master-slave-dialectic into a radical critique of the excesses of both the Gilded and Progressive Age. Taking its bearing from historicist and cultural materialist approaches, the article attempts to establish parallels between DuBois and Matthew Arnold in the central place that they accorded to culture as a problem-solving mechanism for the resolution of the problems facing end-of-the-nineteenth-century industrial Western societies across the Atlantic.

Keywords: DuBois, World history, Culture, Hegel, Arnold, Freedom, Progressive age.