Abstract
William James is not generally considered a political theorist. The main reason is that he was not one. His habitual wariness of systematics and frequent disgust at the bluster, gamesmanship, and corruption of many who aspired and rose to public office made the combination of theory and politics doubly unpalatable to him. Yet James was hardly apolitical. His moral philosophy is pregnant with political implications, and his biography punctuated by energetic interventions in public affairs. As a favored student, Walter Lippmann, recalled in the 1910s, James always believed that “the epistemological problem” his pragmatism addressed had “tremendous consequences” for politics. And as a less favored student, Theodore Roosevelt, discovered in the 1890s, James was not afraid to condemn demagogues whose “naked abstractions” and “bellicose emotion” squelched empirical, deliberative examination of public policies for fear of casting doubt on the virtue of Americans and their institutions.1
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Notes
Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, October 30, 1912, Walter Lippmann Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, microfilm edition, reel 32; WJ, “Governor Roosevelt’s Oration” (1899), ECR, 163–164. On Lippmann’s close relationship with James during the former’s undergraduate days at Harvard, see Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), xv, 16–18, 66; and
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 317–318.
The last decade-plus has seen an efflorescence of works on what has come to be called “modern American conservatism,” a multifaceted phenomenon unified (if that term can even be used) by the elevation of personal liberty and responsibility over social action and obligation in the scales of moral value and political purpose. Despite James’s concern to establish the metaphysical fact of individual freedom, the ethical and political implications he draws from it are incongruous and sometimes antithetical to those that animate modern conservatism. Important resources include Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001);
Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Norton, 2008);
Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008);
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009); and
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Tree Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
A representative sampling of the vast literature on revolutionary and early national republicanism in America would include Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967);
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969);
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975);
Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);
Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (January, 1986): 3–19;
Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (January, 1986): 20–34;
James T. Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 9–33;
Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11–38; and
Michael Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).
WJ to Ralph Barton Perry, July 17, 1909, Correspondence 12: 291; WJ, “Thomas Davidson: Knight-Errant of the Intellectual Life” (1905), MS, 103.
Outstanding students of James’s contributions to political thought who nevertheless ignore its implications for institutional design include Andrew F. Smith, Francesca Bordogna, and Colin Koopman. See Andrew F. Smith, “William James and the Politics of Moral conflict,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 40 (Winter 2004): 135–151;
Smith, “Communication and Conviction: A Jamesian Contribution to Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 21.4 (2007): 259–274;
Francesca Bordogna, “Inner Division and Uncertain Contours: William James and the Politics of the Modern Self,” British Journal for the History of Science 40 (December 2007): 505–536;
Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy Science, and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008);
Colin Koopman, “William James’s Politics of Personal Freedom,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.2 (2005), 175–186; and
Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
See Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), esp. Chapter 1. Although Strauss’s belief in the existence of a single, identifiable good and right political order is practically antithetical to James’s thought, his distinction between purely speculative political theory and a more practical, public-spirited political philosophy emerging from the exigencies of political practice, and aimed at improving rather than anatomizing political life, is surprisingly congruent with James’s ethically republican ideal.
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 60; compare West’s laudatory comments on the “heroic moral action” James’s writings can inspire (151, 227).
Other portrayals of James as detached from politics include Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977);
George R. Garrison and Edward H. Madden, “William James—Warts and All,” American Quarterly 29 (Summer 1977): 207–221;
James Campbell, “William James and the Ethics of Fulfillment,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17 (Summer, 1981): 224–240;
Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Ross Posnock, “The Politics of Pragmatism and the Fortunes of the Public Intellectual,” American Literary History 3 (Autumn 1991). Louis Menand, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the early pragmatists and their influence in American life, pays almost no attention to James’s politics, other than to suggest that his brand of pragmatism held little promise of or inspiration to comprehensive social reform.
Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001), 371–375.
WJ to Sarah Wyman Whitman, June 7, 1899, Correspondence 8: 546.
Deborah J. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation’: Anarchism and the Radicalization of William James,” Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 70–99. Coon elucidates an important aspect of James’s political thought, one which usefully supplements Kloppenberg’s depiction of James as a forerunner of the more social-democratic strains of American progressivism. Coon gives too little attention, however, to the context-specific nature of James’s professions of “anarchism” (which waned considerably in the last decade of his life), to his consistent qualifications of the term, and to his frequent tendency to apply it to his thinking about politics rather than the political process itself. Compare the discussion of James’s qualified anti-imperialism and respect for the power of mass politics in
George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), Chapter 6. On James’s affinities with Marxism, see
Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, and Wallace Stevens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); and
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
WJ to Carl Stumpf, August, 6, 1901, quoted in TC 2:199–200; Pragmatism, 28. The lengthy quotations in Pragmatism (28–32) are from Morrison I. Swift, Human Submission (Philadelphia: Liberty Press, 1905). At no point did James let anarchism off the pragmatic hook. In a volume on Theories of Anarchy and of Law, which he read enthusiastically, James underlined a passage in which a moral and religious “anarchist,” who hoped to end the discursive exile of unfamiliar ideals and faiths, asked a thoroughgoing social revolutionary how the practical questions of everyday life were answered in an anarchistic community. In the margin, James wrote “pragm.”—that is, “pragmatism”—an indication that he, too, wondered how rigorously political anarchists had examined the consequences of their ideas. James’s copy of
Henry Brewster, The Theories of Anarchy and of Law: A Midnight Debate (London, 1887), 109–110, is cited in Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 84; the book is preserved in the William James Collection at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Contrary to the reading offered here, Coon construes James’s marginal note as his answer to the query about how anarchists answer questions, and thus as an equation of pragmatism with anarchism.
WJ to William M. Salter, April 8 and 21, 1898, Correspondence 8: 355, 360; WJ, “Address on the Philippine Question” (1903), ECR, 83–84. “I cried hard,” James recalled of hearing the news that Aguinaldo’s request was denied, “the only time I’ve cried in many a long year.”
WJ to Josephine Shaw Lowell, December 6, 1903, Correspondence, 10: 339. Christopher Nichols argues that James’s anti-imperialism was both internationalist and isolationist;
see Christopher McKnight Nichols, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), Chapter 2.
For the alternative view, see John P. Diggins’s ironically titled The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
James did harbor a prejudice against organized religion for most of his life, failing to appreciate the demonstrated capacity of congregations and even large ecclesiastical organizations to advance social aims through collective action. But it was the intellectual imperialism and moral abstraction he associated with “Church Christianity” that bothered him. Even when mocking “the nitroglycerine of the gospels and epistles,” however, James recognized that the “Church-machine,” at least in some cases, “makes for all sorts of graces and decencies, and is not incompatible with a high type of Churchman, high, that is, on the side of moral and worldly virtue.” (WJ to Pauline Goldmark, January 22, 1908, and July 2, 1908, Correspondence 11: 525 and 12: 44.) Near the end of his life he embraced Henry Start’s idea of a post-Christian church that would preach a gospel of partnership between believers and God, and dedicate itself to promoting the earthly freedom of all human beings.
(WJ to F. C. S. Schiller, January 5, 1910, Correspondence 12: 410.) James seems also to have found comfort and invigoration in the experience of worshipful congregation; as he wrote in 1906, it was a way “to tromper mon ennui.” By 1907 he and his wife Alice were “getting to be great church-goers.”
(WJ to Alice Howe Gibbens James, January 14, 1906, Correspondence 5: 144;
WJ to Margaret Mary James, January 20, 1907 Correspondence 11: 307.)
WJ to Wincenty Lutoslawski, August 10, 1900, Correspondence 9: 266;
WJ to Pauline Goldmark, July 2, 1908, Correspondence 12: 43.
WJ to William M. Salter, September 11, 1899 LWJ 2: 101. Niebuhr’s widely misunderstood critique of what he called the “liberal” faith in humanity’s worldly redemption is best articulated in Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1932), and
Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1944). As both books reveal, Niebuhr warned of the dangers of social politics in order to enhance rather than deny the potential for positive social change; see
Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); and
K. Healan Gaston, “‘A Bad Kind of Magic’: The Niebuhr Brothers on ‘Utilitarian Christianity’ and the Defense of Democracy,” Harvard Theological Review 107.1 (2014): 1–30.
This commitment to the adjudication of competing claims is perhaps the deepest and most important similarity between James and John Dewey, whose moral and political philosophy is also founded on it: See Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 5–6, 29–62. James directly refuted the charge of solipsism in several places; see, for example, “Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic?” (1905), ERE, 234–240.
WJ to Ralph Barton Perry, July 17, 1909, Correspondence 12: 291.
WJ to Elizabeth Glendower Evans, April 24, 1899, Correspondence 8: 521–522.
WJ to William M. Salter, January 5, 1899, Correspondence 8: 480.
WJ to Frederick George Bromberg, June 30, 1884, Correspondence 5: 505.
WJ to Frederick George Bromberg, June 30, 1884, Correspondence 5: 505.
WJ to Grace Norton, July 6, 1900, and to Henry Pickering Bowditch, November 12, 1900, Correspondence 9: 249–250, 357.
WJ to Theodore Flournoy, December 7, 1896, The Letters of William James and Theodore Flournoy, ed. Robert C. LeClair (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 62.
For careful analyses of this tension in James’s thought, see Joshua I. Miller, Democratic Temperament: The Legacy of William James (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 25–26, 53.
See, for example, Miller, Democratic Temperament, 24. Somewhat bizarrely in 1968 Robert L. Beisner grouped James with 11 other “mugwumps” and “dissident Republicans” who opposed many of America’s imperialist adventures from 1898 onward because, in Beisner’s opinion, they saw jingoism and economic expansion as part of a syndrome of mass democracy that threatened enlightened government by the well-born elite to which they belonged. In contrast, Jonathan M. Hansen has argued persuasively that James’s anti-imperialism was in fact inspired by a broad rather than a narrow vision of the civic nation, while Leslie Butler has shown how the impulse to reinvigorate rather than resist popular government lay behind James’s domestic and foreign political views, and behind those of others whom Beisner portrayed as fundamentally conservative liberals. See Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); Hansen, Lost Promise of Patriotism, esp. Chapter 1; and
Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), esp. Chapter 6.
Ibid., 276. When James introduced his (now somewhat notorious) list of modern phenomena repugnant to the military mind, he was careful to put the words in the mouths of war’s apologists, and emphasize the suppositional character of their argument: “Its ‘horrors’ are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of coeducation and zoophily, of ‘consumer’s leagues’ and ‘associated charities,’ of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more!” As James clarified in his own voice several lines later, he thought these fears exhibited a view of war that could only be considered “mystical” in its indifference to the mundane universe of fact and logic: “war must come, reason or no reason, for the justifications pleaded are invariably fictitious” (WJ, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 276–277, emphasis added). For a spirited feminist critique, see Jane Roland Martin, “Martial Virtues or Capital Vices? William James’s Moral Equivalent of War Revisited,” Journal of Thought 22 (Fall 1987): 32–44. For a thoughtful response, see Miller, Democratic Temperament, 33 ff.
WJ to E. L. Godkin, December 24, 1895, Correspondence 8: 109;
WJ to Josephine Shaw Lowell, December 6, 1903, Correspondence 10: 339.
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Throntveit, T. (2014). Citizen James. 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_5
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