Abstract
“The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it,” said William James.1 It was 1900, he was approaching the height of his philosophical powers, and he was expressing his deepest personal belief and wish. For James, a moral life, great or small, meant a life of cosmic consequence, lived in a universe where neither course—personal or cosmological—is fully set. It meant a life of improving (or at least improvable) relations with the overlapping fields of experience that contain but do not quite define it. It meant a life in which the feeling of effort that does define it can be trusted as evidence of our real effect on and relevance to the universe. A life in pursuit of a legacy is therefore great for its mortal as well as its immortal fruits. The struggle itself affirms the meaningfulness of our presence in this world, and any spur it provides to the struggles of others is an extension of that most genuinely personal element of our existence, our will.
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Notes
The now-classic analysis of the pragmatist hydra that cast its shadow over several late twentieth-century disciplines is James T. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 100–138;
see also Kloppenberg, “James’s Pragmatism and American Culture, 1907–2007,” in John J. Stuhr, ed., 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 7–40.
Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113–132, esp. 123 ff. A more recent essay on the varieties of progressivism and progressive historiography (and one less skeptical of “progressivism” as a category of analysis) is
Robert D. Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (January 2002): 68–92.
The basic themes characterizing much progressive discourse are examined in Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (New York: Harlan Davidson, 1983).
See John Dewey to WJ, May 10, 1891, and March 20, 1903, Correspondence 7: 163–164, and 10:215;
John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” (1930), in Jo Ann Boydston et al., eds., The Later Works of John Dewey 1925–1953, 17 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–1990), 5: 157–158; and Dewey to H. Robet, May 2, 1911, quoted in
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 44.
Kloppenberg emphasizes James’s importance to Dewey’s turn away from idealism more than some other students of his early years; see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 66–67, and
Michael Buxton, “The Influence of William James on John Dewey’s Early Work,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (July–September 1984): 451–463.
John Dewey, “The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy” (1916), in Jo Ann Boydston et al. eds., The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924. 15 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1983, hereafter MW), 10: 137–138.
A recent and excellent exposition of Dewey’s moral philosophy and democratic vision is Melvin L. Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Indispensable to an understanding of Dewey’s intertwined metaphysical, ethical, and political concerns are Westbrook’s John Dewey and American Democracy and Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory.
See also Jennifer Welchman, Dewey’s Ethical Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995);
Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
John J. Stuhr, “Dewey’s Social and Political Philosophy,” in Larry Hickman, ed., Reading Dewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 82–99;
William R. Caspari, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); and
Gregory Fernando Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
The lullest explication of Dewey’s pragmatist theory and methods of education is John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), quoted at 131, 142.
On Dewey’s educational philosophy and methods see James W. Garrison, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education: An Introduction and Recontextualization for Our Times (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and
Arthur G. Wirth, John Dewey as Educator: His Design for Work in Education, 1894–1904 (New York: Wiley, 1966).
Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, April 11, 1902, Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College, microfilm edition, reel 4. Works addressing Addams’s relationship with James and Dewey include Anne Firor Scott, Introduction to the John Harvard Library edition of Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, ed. Scott (1902; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), lii, lvi, lxi;
Daniel Levine, Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 95–96;
Allen Freeman Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 140–141;
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001), 313;
Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams, a Writer’s Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 82–89, 171–172, 221, 226; and
Victoria Bissell Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 4, 87, 130, 285, 292, 296.
Jane Addams, “A Toast to John Dewey,” Survey 68 (November 15, 1929): 204–205.
See, for example, Jane Addams, “A Function of the Social Settlement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 13 (May 1899): 323–355, which invokes Dewey’s definition of knowledge as problem-solving, and also cites James’s pragmatic principle from his 1898 address to the Philosophical Union at Berkeley as inspiration. The article appears in slightly altered form as Chapter 18 of Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910).
Exemplary of such empirical methods is the now little-studied volume by Jane Addams et al., Hull-House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois:A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 133;
Richard Cullen Rath, “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Journal of American History 84 (September 1997): 461–495. On Du Bois’s early thought and its debts to pragmatism see,
besides Rath, Nancy Muller Milligan, “W. E. B. Du Bois’s American Pragmatism,” Journal of American Culture 8 (Summer 1985): 31–37;
Cornel West, American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 138–149; and
Ross Posnock, “The Distinction of Du Bois: Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Politics,” American Literary History 7 (Autumn 1995): 500–524.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 4.
Randolph Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, January 16, 1913, in Eric J. Sandeen, ed., The Letters of Randolph Bourne: A Comprehensive Edition (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1981), 66.
Studies noting Bourne’s attraction to pragmatism include Louis Filler, Randolph Bourne (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Allairs, 1943);
Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Norton, 1965);
Sherman Paul, Randolph Bourne (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966);
Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984);
Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Prank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and
Leslie J. Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
See especially Randolph Bourne, Education and Living (New York: Century, 1917), a compilation and revision of articles written for The New Republic promoting the public school as “a foundation upon which a really sell-conscious society could build almost anything it chose,” an argument described by Bourne as “the product of an enthusiasm for the educational philosophy of John Dewey” (v–vi).
Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America” (1916), in Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (1977; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 248–264.
Randolph Bourne, Youth and Life (Boston: Houghton Milffin, 1913), 244–245.
On the new Progressive Party, the Roosevelt campaign, and the centrality to both of social workers generally and Addams specifically, see Sidney M. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), esp. 154–156.
Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 22–23, 24, 27. Addams was no technocrat seeking to impose her expertise on the benighted masses. Pondering measures to meet government’s “iundamental obligation of adapting the legal order to the changed conditions of national life,” she insisted that one such condition was the necessity of public debate over policy. The progressive platform she envisioned would not only endorse a series of democratic experiments, but fonction as such an experiment itself, its authors ready “to throw their measures into the life of the nation for corroboration” (29–30).
Jane Addams, “The Progressive Party and the Negro,” Crisis 5 (November 1912): 31.
Levine, Addams and the Liberal Tradition, 190–191, 195–196; Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, August 16, 1912, Addams Papers; Addams, “Pragmatism in Politics,” Survey 29 (October 1912): 11–12, esp. 12.
Most recently and persuasively Melvin I. Urolsky Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2009).
Louis. D. Brandeis, “True Americanism,” (1915), in Solomon Goldman, ed., Brandeis on Zionism: A Collection of Addresses and Statements by Louis D. Brandeis (Washington, DC: Zionist Organization of America, 1942), 5.
Philippa Strum, Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993);
David W. Levy, “Brandeis, the Reformer,” Brandeis Law Journal 45 (Summer 2007): 711–732.
Louis D. Brandeis, “The New Haven—An Unregulated Monopoly” (1912), in Brandeis, Business—A Profession (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1914), 279–305;
Brandeis, “A Curse of Bigness” (1913), in Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It (New York: Stokes, 1914), 162–188.
Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 45, 417;
Allon Gal, Brandeis of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 10, 60–61, 150; Urolsky, Louis D. Brandeis, 109.
Louis D. Brandeis interview reprinted in Philippa Strum, ed., Brandeis on Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 35.
Brandeis debuted this approach in Muller v. Oregon (1908), arguing successfully before the Supreme Court for the constitutionality of an Oregon minimum-hours law for working women. Brandeis submitted 95 pages of research showing that strenuous workdays endangered women’s health, compromised their child-bearing and child-rearing roles, and generally threatened the nation’s welfare. Louis D. Brandeis, with Josephine Goldmark, Women in Industry (New York: National Consumers’ League, 1908), esp. 47.
Whitney v. California, 274 US 357 (1927) at 377 (Brandeis, J., concurring); Philippa Strum, “Brandeis: The Public Activist and Freedom of Speech,” Brandeis Law Journal 45 (Summer 2007): 659–709, esp. 696 ff.
On Wilson’s intellectual development generally and the influences and resonances of pragmatism specifically, see Trygve Throntveit, “‘Common Counsel’: Woodrow Wilson’s Pragmatic Progressivism, 1885–1913,” in John M. Cooper Jr., ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace (Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD: The Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 25–56; and
Throntveit, “The Higher Education of Woodrow Wilson,” in James Axtell, ed., The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: From College to Nation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 407–443.
Other important treatments of Wilson’s intellectual development include John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978);
Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875–1910 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and
Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Wilson’s political thought is uselully placed in biographical context by Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947); and
John Milton Cooper Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009). A recent biography that, while in most respects excellent, distractingly frames the stages of Wilson’s life in biblical terms bearing little relevance to his intellectual development is
A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013).
Woodrow Wilson, speech of September 2, 1912, in Arthur S. Link et al., eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–94; hereafter PWW), 25: 75.
See Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885). The book was Wilson’s doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University.
Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People, ed. William Bayard Hale (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913), 166.
As Martin Sklar points out, Wilson also renounced his party’s opposition to the Supreme Court’s “Rule of Reason” decisions of 1911, affirming not only the necessity of elastic policy, but the general principle of judicial review as a check on potentially bad or outdated laws. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: The Market, the Law, and Politics, 1890–1916 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 418.
Louis D. Brandeis, “Suggestions for Letter of Governor Wilson on Trusts,” encl. Brandeis to Wilson, September 30, 1912, PWW 25: 289–290, 291–294.
Detailed accounts of Wilson’s major New Freedom initiatives—the Underwood-Simmons Tarift Act of 1913, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1913, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914—are found in Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), Chapters 6–7 and 13. An excellent summary and analysis is W. Elliot Brownlee, “Wilson’s Reform of Economic Structure: Progressive Liberalism and the Corporation,” in Cooper, ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 57–89.
For a fuller discussion of Wilson’s pragmatist legacy for the modern American administrative state, see Trygve Throntveit, “Philosophical Pragmatism and the Constitutional Watershed of 1912,” Political Science Quarterly 128 (Winter 2013–2014): 617–651.
For an excellent analysis of Wilson’s failings in this regard and an account of one pragmatist’s effort to combat racial injustice, see James T. Campbell, “‘A Last Great Crusade for Humanity’: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Pan-African Congress,” in Bruce J. Schulman, ed., Making the American Century: Essays on the Political Culture of Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 71–91.
Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 311–317. The most complete treatments of Croly’s life and thought are David W. Levy, Herbert Croly of The New Republic: Life and Thought of an American Progressive (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); and
Edward A. Stettner, Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993).
See also Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961).
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909). This and the following summaries of Croly’s main arguments in Promise draw on Levy, Herbert Croly, 96–131. The Jamesian interpretation of Croly’s work is my own.
Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913). For the influence of James’s pragmatism on the book, see Lippmann to Graham Wallas, July 31 and October 30, 1912, Walter Lippmann Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, microfilm edition, reel 32; cf. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 317–318. Lippmann frequently expressed his admiration of and debt to James, but see especially
Walter Lippmann, “An Open Mind: William James,” Everybody’s 23 (December 1910), 800–801. On Lippmann and pragmatism generally, see Forcey, Crossroads of Liberalism, especially Chapters 3 and 5; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, Part 2; and
David A. Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History,” Journal of American History 67 (June 1980): 88–107, esp. 103–104.
Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, ed. William E. Leuchtenburg (1914; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 142, 144, 160. Insightful analyses of this book and the ideas that inspired it include Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 318–320; and David A. Hollinger, “Science and Anarchy: Walter Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery,” American Quarterly (Winter 1977): 463–475.
For Wilson’s reading of The New Republic (hereafter NR), see Ray Stannard Baker to Walter Lippmann, October 25, 1928, Baker Papers, reel 79. The close relations of the editors to House and Newton Baker are established in Levy, Herbert Croly, 232–233, 243, 244–249; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), Chapters 9–12; and
Trygve Throntveit, “Related States: Pragmatism, Progressivism, and Internationalism in American Thought and Politics, 1880–1920,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, May 2008, Chapters 5–7.
Walter Lippmann, “Appeal to the President,” NR 6 (April 22, 1916): 303–305, copy in the Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress, microfilm edition, reel 513; Woodrow Wilson, in colloquy with anti-preparedness leaders, May 8, 1916, PWW 36: 641–646, esp. 645. For Lippmann’s audience with the president, see Lippmann to Wallas, April 21, 1916, Lippmann Papers, reel 32. On page 304 of his copy of Lippmann’s “Appeal,” Wilson made two dark vertical lines in the margin next to the passage cited, his typical marker of interest and approval (after Wilson’s graduate-school years written marginalia disappear almost entirely from his preserved reading material).
The closest Bourne came to offering an alternative strategy to war was in claiming that he and other “realistic pacifists” had supported armed neutrality as a means of negating the threat of submarine warfare, keeping shipping lanes to the Allies open, and thus forcing Germany to accept peace talks mediated by an impartial United States; see Randolph Bourne, “The Collapse of American Strategy” (1917), War and the Intellectuals: Essays, 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 22–35. That armed neutrality could have kept submarine attacks to a politically acceptable level, or that the shoot-on-sight approach armed merchant ships would be forced to adopt would not have led to war with Germany anyway, were doubtful propositions. Moreover, the chances of the United States mediating peace as a nonbelligerent depended upon one of two scenarios, neither of which seemed likely at the time: Either both sides would have to accept mediation offers they had hitherto repeatedly rebuffed, or they would have to fight to a draw—no independently victorious side would have been willing to let an outsider negotiate the terms of its triumph.
Randolph Bourne, “Conscience and Intelligence in War,” Dial 63 (September 13, 1917): 194; Bourne, “The War Intellectuals” (1917), Radical Will, 316; Bourne, “A War Diary” (1917), Radical Will, 330. The reference to James’s “free speculation” is from Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” Radical Will, 346.
See, for example, Lippmann to House, October 17, 1917, enclosed in House to Wilson, October 17, 1917, PWW 44: 392–394; Croly to Wilson, October 19, 1917, PWW 44: 408–410; John Dewey, “In Explanation of Our Lapse,” NR 13 (November 3, 1917): 17; and the several public statements by Croly and Lippmann, including NR 11 (May 12, 1917): 32; NR 11 (June 2, 1917): 119; NR 11 (July 21, 1917); 316; NR 12 (September 29, 1917): 228; “War Propaganda,” NR 12 (October 6, 1917): 255–257; “The Bigelow Incident,” NR 13 (November 10, 1917): 35–37; “The President’s Commission at Bisbee,” NR 13 (December 8, 1917): 140–141; “Lynching: an American Kultur?” NR 14 (April 13, 1918): 311–312; “America Tested by War,” NR 15 (June 22, 1918): 220–221; and “Mob Violence and War Psychology,” NR 16 (August 3, 1918): 5–7.
For decades beginning in the late 1950s Wilson’s address was interpreted as an anti-communist “counter-manifesto” to bolshevism; see Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), Chapter 9; and
N. Gordon Levin Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). Challenging these interpretations, Knock points out that Lenin’s proclamations in the spring of 1917 echoed Wilson’s “Peace without Victory” address, and that all the Fourteen Points, “save the very one on Russia,” were either territorial adjustments long pondered by the Inquiry or reiterations of pronouncements Wilson made long before the triumph of bolshevism in Russia. Knock, To End All Wars, 138, 145.
On this matter see Trygve Throntveit, “The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination,” Diplomatic History 35 (June 2011): 445–481.
Walter Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915; New York: Macmillan, 1932), 212–217. Lippmann had sent an advance copy of the 1917 edition to Secretary of War Baker, who responded, “I wish you would send one to the President. We were talking about it the other day and he was interested to see a copy.” Lippmann obliged, and Wilson’s copy is preserved in his personal library at the Library of Congress. Wilson thanked Lippmann for the book, assuring him, “I shall take the greatest pleasure in looking it through and shall expect a great deal of profit from doing so.” See Baker to Lippmann, January 29, 1917, and Lippmann to Baker, January 31, 1917, Lippmann Papers, reel 2; Wilson to Lippmann, February 3, 1917, PWW 41: 113.
Walter Lippmann, “The World Conflict in Its Relation to American Democracy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 72 (July 1917): 1–10, copy in Wilson Papers, reel 90. The article was forwarded to Wilson by Baker. See Baker to Wilson, August 13, 1917, PWW 43: 454, and editorial note 1 under the same date.
Walter Lippmann, “Memorandum for the Secretary of War,” n.d., encl. in Baker to Wilson, August 20, 1917, PWW 43: 532–534; the pope’s appeal is printed in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917, Supplement 2: The World War, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1932), 1: 162–164. For Wilson’s reading of Lippmann’s draft see Wilson to Baker, August 22, 1917, PWW 44: 27; compare Wilson’s own draft, printed under Wilson to House, with enclosure, August 23, 1917, PWW 44: 33–36. Examples of Lippmann’s Inquiry analyses of the prospects for postwar international organization include Walter Lippmann, “League of Nations,” n.d., Doc. 741, 2, Inquiry Documents (Special Reports and Studies), RG-256.2, National Archives, College Park, MD, film M-1107, reel 35; and Lippman, “Draft of a Reply to the Proposals of the Central Powers,” December 31, 1917, Doc. 688, Inquiry Documents (Special Reports and Studies), RG-256.2, National Archives, College Park, MD, film M-1107, reel 34, page 2.
The following paragraph is based on Cromwell A. Riches, The Unanimity Rule and the League of Nations (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1933), Chapter 1; and
David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons 1928). See also Knock, To End All Wars, Chapter 11.
See, for example, Woodrow Wilson, address in the Indianapolis Coliseum, September 4, 1919, PWW 63: 27. The best treatment of the fight over American League Membership is John M. Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
For an alternative interpretation emphasizing Wilson’s “pre-bureaucratic” insistence on controlling foreign affairs, see Charles E. Neu, “Woodrow Wilson and His Foreign Policy Advisers,” in William N. Tilchin and Charles E. Neu, eds., Artists of Power: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Their Enduring Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 77–94.
See NR 19 (May 24, 1919): cover, 100–106; NR 19 (June 7, 1919): 170; and Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, June 9, 1919, Lippmann Papers Series, reel 2. Cf. “Agitation for a League of Nations without Criticism,” NR 18 (March 15, 1919): 200–202, in which Article 10 is described as “dangerous” because “ambiguous,” for an example of the editors’ position at a middle stage between disappointment and denunciation. John Dewey explained his provisional opposition to League membership, as well as his hope that America would join once its people were ready for genuine participation, in a letter to his children dated May 13, 1919, in John and Alice Chipman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 166–169.
See Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 189; and
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The League of Nations,” Crisis 18 (May 1919): 10–11.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979);
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982);
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
Rorty, “Afterward: Buds That Never Opened,” in Walter Rauschenbusch et al., Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 347, cited in Jacob Goodson, “Prophetic Pragmatism or Pragmatic Prophetic Reasoning?” (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author).
Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Robert Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31–55;
Habermas, Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), esp. 2, 8–11, 88–89, 228–230, 254.
Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Maiden, MA: Polity, 2010), Chapter 8.
Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical and Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1976), esp. 220–223;
Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), esp. 72, 78.
Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15 (November 1987): 538–563, esp. 550.
Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 35.
Richard J. Bernstein, “Community in the Pragmatic Tradition,” in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 149.
Pragmatist sympathizers who fault Dewey for evading the problem of irreconcilable ideals include Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Michael Brint and William Weaver, eds., Pragmatism in Law and Society (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 217–247, esp. 230–234; and
Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), Chapter 5. An impressive riposte to such critics is Rogers, Undiscovered Dewey, Chapter 4.
Robert B. Talisse, Democracy after Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics (New York: Routledge, 2005);
cf. Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge, 2000). Talisse joins Misak in championing a Peircean version of deliberative democratic theory, arguing that Peirce’s account of inquiry and belief reveals a basic human interest in reason-giving and truth-seeking that all parties to political debate are obliged to acknowledge. Yet these writers fail to accommodate (or convincingly deny) the protean, contextual character of reasonableness and the pluralistic character of truth; nor is it clear why a hegemonic norm of inquiry modeled on Peirce’s anthropology of belief is any less exclusionary than one inspired by Dewey’s anthropology of human flourishing.
For a concise and persuasive Jamesian response that has informed the present analysis, see Andrew F. Smith, “Communication and Conviction: A Jamesian Contribution to Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 21.4 (2007): 259–274.
See also Zach Vanderveen, “Pragmatism and Democratic Deliberation: Beyond Minimalist Accounts of Deliberation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 21.4 (2007): 243–258, who finds answers to Talisse’s criticisms in Dewey’s own writings.
Andrew Smith also sees James’s writings as affirming the potential for intersubjective judgments to resolve, provisionally but usefully, the subjective disagreements that often impede collective action, so long as they are analyzed pragmatically. See Smith, “Communication and Conviction,” 265. By contrast, Kennan Ferguson has argued that James’s pragmatism is largely irrelevant to the political benefits of his pluralist metaphysics, which (Ferguson claims) “in their political, social, and ethical implications, lead away from the confusion of the self with the world, indeed from the conception of selves and world as unified.” In fact, James’s pluralism asserts the mutually constitutive relationship of self and world, a relationship that his pragmatist analysis of those terms reveals and also helps us to manipulate, in order to enhance unity or diversity according to the purpose at hand. See Ferguson, William James: Politics in the Pluriverse (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), xxv.
Gregory Fernando Pappas, “The Narrative and Identity of Pragmatism in America: The History of a Dysfunctional Family?” The Pluralist 9 (Summer, 2014): 65–83, esp. 71, 72, 75–78.
To be fair, as Pappas notes (70), Bernstein has criticized Rorty, Brandom, and other neopragmatists for disregarding experience entirely. The recent works by Bernstein and Koopman examined by Pappas are Richard J. Bernstein, “The Pragmatic Century,” in Sheila Greeve Davaney and Warren G. Frisina, eds., The Pragmatic Century: Conversations with Richard J. Bernstein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 1–14;
Bernstein, “The New Pragmatists,” Graduate Faculty Philosophical Journal 28.2 (2007): 3–38;
Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn; and Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
On Dewey’s embrace of philosophical naturalism, and his reluctance, relative to James, to acknowledge the reality of human experiences inexplicable by the theories or methods of natural science, see Richard M. Gale, “John Dewey’s Naturalization of William James,” in Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49–68.
On this tension in the history of democratic theory (explained under the rubric of “non-instrumentalist” and “instrumentalist” grounds for democracy), see Tom Christiano, “Democracy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008), ed. Edward N. Zalata, Sections 2 and 5, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/democracy/
MacGilvray offers a similar hybrid defense of democracy and vision for its operation. See Eric MacGilvray, “Democratic Doubts: Pragmatism and the Epistemic Defense of Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 22.1 (2014): 105–123. By identifying “truth and equality” as the two moral anchors of democracy, however, MacGilvray provides no guide for choosing between them when they conflict, as he rightly insists they will. James’s work, by contrast, suggests that the primary moral ends of democratic deliberation are freedom and unity, which as he understands them depend on one another. Thus the difficult choice to “let everyone’s voice be heard” on the one hand, or “to sacrifice inclusiveness for the sake of making wiser or better decisions” on the other (106), can be made with an eye toward which course, at the particular moment in question, will foster the optimal participation of the greatest number of individuals in the deliberative process over time, which in turn will enhance the collective capacity to promote freedom and reconcile conflicts over time.
Colin Koopman, “William James’s Politics of Personal Freedom,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.2 (2005): 175–186, quoted 180. On Niebuhr, see the discussion in Goodson, “Prophetic Pragmatism or Pragmatic Prophetic Reason,” as well as the following works cited therein:
Reinhold Niebuhr, “Introduction,” in WJ, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902; New York: Collier, 1961), 5–8; and
Daniel Malotky, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Paradox: Paralysis, Pragmatism, and Violence (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).
In this vein (and in the best treatise to date on the programmatic implications of pragmatism for politics) Charles Anderson has argued that a “pragmatic liberalism” would require all “enterprises”—state, social, economic, and cultural—to accept greater accountability and a wider range of obligations to all communities affected by their practices. Similarly, Christopher Ansell proposes a regulative ideal of “pragmatist democracy” that emphasizes the responsibility of state agencies to facilitate collaborative inquiry, policy formulation, and governance among public stakeholders. Jamesians might also endorse many of the programmatic implications of Roberto Unger’s “radicalized pragmatism,” including Unger’s proposal for a hybrid (and revisable) system uniting localized control over commerce and governance with centralized efforts to disrupt oppressive social institutions. On the other hand, neither Unger’s call for the state to liberate oppressed groups whose own efforts to liberate themselves have failed, nor his insistence on the right of such groups to opt out of the political process and govern themselves independently, resonate with James’s call for a culture-wide commitment to freedom that is predicated on citizens’ awareness of their interdependence. To embed provisions for rescue and retreat at the center of a political system would seem to encourage paternalism and disengagement, respectively, rather than collective deliberation and collaborative experimentation—a danger perhaps endemic to Unger’s greater emphasis on the “divinization of humanity” than on the “humanization of society.” See Charles W. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
Christopher K. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011);
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. Chapters 8–13;
Unger, The Religion of the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 120.
Accordingly, José Medina has identified James as a guide for approximating objectivity and seeking justice in our social judgments and practice without denigrating or eradicating difference, while Larry Hickman, for similar reasons, views James’s pragmatism as the appropriate public philosophy for a “post-postmodern” culture. See José Medina, “James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity” in Stuhr, ed., 100 Years of Pragmatism, 124–143; and Larry Hickman, Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
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Throntveit, T. (2014). Legacies and Prospects. In: William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137068620_6
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