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Alexander Livingston
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1
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of Cornell University.
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To my parents.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Political Uses of William James 24
Conclusion 153
Notes 165
Works Cited 205
Index 227
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ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
L
“ ife,” writes William James, “is in the transitions as much as the terms
connected” (WPE 43). So much more so the life of a book. The years
spent writing this book have been ones of transitions, moving across bor-
ders and between institutions. Along the way, teachers, colleagues, and
friends have generously helped connect the terms.
My first debt is owed to Kai Nielsen at Concordia University who intro-
duced me to pragmatism and has remained a model of politically engaged
and intellectually serious scholarship. In good pragmatic spirit, Kai taught
me that philosophers ought to know something about the world and steered
me towards graduate school in political science. I had the good fortune to
study with exceptional teachers at the University of Toronto. First among
these is Simone Chambers, who courageously supervised an unconven-
tional dissertation on William James and political theory. Simone trusted
my intellectual hunches and eventually taught me to trust myself. Ryan
Balot’s work on democratic courage and Peggy Kohn’s studies of empire
both left a deep impact on my intellectual formation. Melissa Williams
created a wonderful interdisciplinary community at the Center for Ethics,
where a fellowship allowed me to finish the dissertation on time.
Two communities of scholars proved especially influential in giving
this book its final form. Jane Bennett generously agreed to host me as
a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her support and in-
tellectual adventurousness have been constant sources of inspiration. Bill
Connolly and Sam Chambers both pushed me to think about pluralism
in new ways. Their feedback and guidance helped me see the bigger pic-
ture. I completed this book at Cornell University, nurtured by the intellec-
tual support and provocation of colleagues, students, and friends. Thanks
x
to Richard Bensel, Jason Frank, Jill Frank, Isaac Kramnick, Aziz Rana,
Diane Rubenstein, and Anna Marie Smith for their friendship and for
keeping things exciting in Ithaca. A workshop on an early version of the
manuscript hosted by the Department of Government in the fall of 2013
marked a turning point for the project. My colleagues, along with Colin
Koopman and George Shulman, read the entire manuscript and provided
me with the critical insights I needed to pull it all together. Last but not
least, I want to thank the graduate students I have had the good fortune to
learn from at Cornell. The curiosity, intelligence, and creativity of students
in my seminars on pluralism and pragmatism continually remind me of
what a joy the life of the mind can be.
Numerous scholars, colleagues, and friends have graciously commented
on parts of this manuscript or shared their insights in conversations with
me over the years. The book is wiser for their contributions, although
its shortcomings remain strictly my own. I would like to thank Ermine
Algier, Willy Blomme, Marcus Boon, Steve Bush, James Campbell,
Terrell Carver, Paul Croce, Jennifer Culbert, Adam Culver, Stefan Dolgert,
Kathy Ferguson, Kennan Ferguson, Nathan Gies, Loren Goldman, Alex
Gourevitch, David Gutterman, Bonnie Honig, Dustin Howes, Murad Idris,
Duncan Ivison, Nicolas Jabko, Desmond Jagmohan, Isaac Kamola, Nick
Kompridis, James Kloppenberg, Robert Lacey, Patchen Markell, Tracy
McNulty, Andrew Murphy, Emily Nacol, Davide Panagia, Melvin Rogers,
Adam Sheingate, James Tully, Chip Turner, Drew Walker and Hannah
Wells. Two scholars are owed special thanks for their support throughout
this process. David Rondel and Colin Koopman have been regular interloc-
utors on all things pragmatism for many years. This book would not have
been possible without their acumen and encouragement. Another group
of scholars and friends due special recognition are Kiran Banerjee, Inder
Marwah, Mihaela Mihai, Jakeet Singh, and Serdar Tekin. They have been
putting up with James and me graciously since graduate school. Inder, in
particular, has done a yeoman’s service in reading too many drafts over too
many years. I owe him big time.
The chapters of this book have benefited from the critical feedback
they received at various conferences and workshops. Thanks are due to
hosts and audiences at University de Coimbra, Cornell University, Goethe
University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Montreal, Northwestern
University, University of Oregon, and York University, as well as audi-
ences at the American Political Science Association, the Western Political
Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Canadian
Political Science Association, and the American Academy of Religion
x | Acknowledgments
xi
Acknowledgments | xi
xii
xiii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Edited Works
Books by William James
Essays by William James
Introduction
I. James’s Nachlass
Introduction | 3
4
political theory and seldom engaged the works of major figures in the his-
tory of political thought.
Second is the contested history of interpretation surrounding the po-
litical meaning of American pragmatism. The contemporary perception
of pragmatism as a distinctively American and democratic philosophy is
intertwined with an ideological history of canon construction in the de-
cades following James’s death. Canons are always made up retrospectively
to give shape to the past for purposes of the present. The thinkers cele-
brated as the founding figures of classical pragmatism—Charles Sanders
Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—shared overlapping philosoph-
ical methods along with deep disagreements. James traced the origins of
pragmatism back to the influence of Peirce, but at the same time defined
it as merely “a new name for some old ways of thinking,” with roots in
British empiricism and similarities to the “anti-intellectualism” of Henri
Bergson’s philosophy of lived duration and Giovanni Papini’s magical na-
tionalism.18 Peirce famously renamed his own position “pragmaticism” in
response to James’s popularization of pragmatism, declaring that it had
become time to find a word “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.”19
And Dewey shied away from both the scientism of Peirce and the nominal-
ism of James to articulate his naturalized Hegelianism as “instrumental-
ism.”20 These divisions, and many others, are obscured by the posthumous
canonization of these three thinkers as the holy trinity of a national tradi-
tion of liberal democratic philosophy. For example, the opposition between
James as a “fundamental” liberal or as the unwitting intellectual vanguard
of the coming century’s totalitarian terror, figures the meaning of pragma-
tism within the terms of political struggles that bear little resemblance to
the arguments over US imperialism that concerned James. Acknowledging
the anachronism of both Kallen’s and Eastman’s posthumous conscrip-
tions of James as exemplar of American liberalism or its antithesis is not
to dismiss these interpretations as inconsequential, however. It is rather a
reminder that any study of James’s political thought must constantly nego-
tiate the politicized reception history that frames both past narratives and
current perceptions in subtle, enduring ways.
Third is the long shadow cast by the towering figure of John Dewey.
In an enormous corpus of work that spans the late nineteenth century to
the middle decades of the twentieth century, Dewey explored the social
and political implications of pragmatism’s liberation of inquiry from
its eternal search for first principles, fixed forms, or timeless founda-
tions. Dewey’s vision of philosophy as the methodological application of
social intelligence to common problems led to major contributions in the
Introduction | 5
6
Alice James once described her brother William as “just like a blob of
mercury—you can’t put a mental finger on him” (LWJ 1:289). This descrip-
tion of James’s mercurial nature has proven particularly true for schol-
ars seeking to characterize his political commitments. James has been
described alternately as a libertarian, a republican, a radical democrat, a
conservative, a socialist, an anarchist, and simply an adherent of “the gen-
teel democratic liberalism characteristic of his class and his era.”26 Some
of these labels are James’s own; others are inventions of his readers. Of
the various ideological labels that James himself came to embrace during
the final decade of his life, the one this book takes as the most revealing
for approaching his political thought is his self-identification as an anar-
chist. “I am becoming more and more an indiv[id]ualist and anarchist,” he
confesses to William Dean Howells in the autumn of 1900, “and believe
Introduction | 7
8
Introduction | 9
10
will seem “a mere mess of anarchy and confusion” (P 62). Or, as he writes
of the contrast between pragmatism and rationalist intellectualism later in
Pragmatism:
Introduction | 11
12
This book brings the study of pragmatism into conversation with the
emergence of empire studies in the history of political thought.46 This
body of literature has redefined understandings of the canon of Western
political thought by exploring how modern political languages were articu-
lated in light of European experiences of contact and domination with non-
European peoples. Despite this burgeoning field, little work has been done
to bring the study of American political thought into a discussion with
political theory’s turn to empire.47 This omission is not simply unfortunate.
The avoidance of American empire is itself symptomatic of the willful
amnesia that continues to surround the imperial history of the world’s only
remaining superpower. Amy Kaplan raised a challenge to American stud-
ies nearly twenty years ago, which the field of political theory has yet to
grapple with: “The absence of the United States in the postcolonial study
of culture and imperialism curiously reproduces American exceptionalism
Introduction | 13
14
from without.”48 This book aims to begin to correct this omission in the
study of American political thought by bridging discussions of the histo-
ries of American philosophy, political thought, and empire that have typi-
cally been conducted in isolation from one another.49
American political thought’s omission of empire is particularly note-
worthy in relation to the period of Pacific expansion that sets the stage for
reconsidering James’s confrontation with empire as a way of life. Scholars
of American political thought have long insulated the Gilded Age’s ex-
periments in overseas imperialism as a unique, exceptional episode in
American political history when the nation broke away from its histor-
ical self-conception as an anti-imperial power under pressure from the
era’s unique cultural crises.50 In a classical statement of this view from
1951, historian Richard Hofstadter characterized the annexation of the
Philippines as “a major historical departure for the American people, a
breach in their traditions and a shock to their established values.”51 This
view of imperialism as an anomaly in the course of American political
development has been overturned by subsequent generations of scholars
who have reframed the United States’ annexation and counterinsurgency
campaign in the Philippines within a longer history of the expansion of
American military and economic power across the globe, reaching as far
back as the ideological frames and governing practices of settler coloni-
zation in the seventeenth century. The United States’ experiment with in-
direct rule over colonial holdings in the Pacific, seen as an episode in a
longer history, represents the transition to a new stage in the development
of American imperialism rather than its sudden emergence.52 The United
States learned valuable lessons about counterinsurgency, foreign policy,
and international political economy in the laboratory of its Pacific colonies
that informed the development of its practices of informal imperialism
over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.53
Pragmatism is more commonly figured as an ideology of American
imperialism than a source of its critique.54 Pragmatism’s allegedly
Promethean conception of agency and Panglossian vision of history have
been lightning rods for critics as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Vladimir
Lenin, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, and Sheldon Wolin, who
characterize pragmatism as the philosophical expression of an industrial
capitalist civilization that reduces morality and politics to matters of mas-
tery and control.55 These well-rehearsed criticisms have been aimed pri-
marily at Dewey’s instrumentalism, with the presumption that they apply
with equal force to James’s pragmatism. As we will see in the following
Introduction | 15
16
Introduction | 17
18
IV. Synopsis
Introduction | 19
20
Introduction | 21
22
Introduction | 23
24
to his own lonely liberalism that could serve as an intellectual beacon for
orienting a tradition of American politics as it came under increasing scru-
tiny in the early decades of the twentieth century. From 1914 until his
death during the early years of the Cold War, Perry was an unwavering
advocate of liberalism as the nation’s consensual creed. Individualism, tol-
eration, and democratic representation are universal values synonymous
with civilization itself, and the United States is both their historical home
and their guardian within a hostile global order. Against a litany of foreign
threats and tests to America’s liberal faith, ranging from Prussian milita-
rism and Italian fascism to Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism, Perry spoke
out passionately for the need to uphold the liberal creed and, if need be, to
fight and die for it. Thought and Character only touches on these politi-
cal questions tangentially, yet both the book and the portrait of William
James it disseminated to generations of scholars remain entangled with
Perry’s broader project of legitimating American liberalism as a force for
global order.
Perry’s biography was not alone in drawing James into the ideological
terrain of global politics in the first half of the twentieth century. As his-
torian John Diggins has shown, “the notion that the brilliant pioneer of
pragmatic thought [James] influenced Fascism was widely entertained in
the twenties.”4 Through his association with figures like Henri Bergson
and admirers like Giovanni Papini and Georges Sorel, James’s pragma-
tism was seen to share an elective affinity with both the philosophy and
reactionary politics of European anti-intellectualism. No less a figure than
Benito Mussolini would endorse the association, telling journalists that
he counted James among the intellectual influences of fascism alongside
Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Sorel. As Max Eastman and Horace Kallen’s
disagreement about the political significance of pragmatism examined in
the Introduction suggests, this perception of pragmatism as a philosophy
of reaction was not limited to the twenties alone.5 The urgency with which
Perry responds to pragmatism’s critics in Thought and Character unin-
tentionally illustrates the biography’s broader political significance. The
book posthumously “conscripts” James to the era’s ideological battles by
retrojecting him into a Whiggish history of American liberalism, one that
Perry’s own study participates in actively constructing.6
This chapter aims to unsettle elements of the received portrait
of James’s political thought that we have inherited from Perry’s au-
thoritative account. The argument proceeds in three sections. The first
section reconstructs the account of James’s political sentiments from
until his retirement in 1946. Perry came to prominence within the field of
philosophy as an advocate of “new realism.” New realists continued along
the intellectual path of James’s radical empiricism to refute the idealist
claim that objects cannot be known independent of ideas. James’s mentor-
ship left a profound impact on Perry, evident in the familial language he
used to describe their relationship. “To specify my indebtedness to James
is as impossible as it would be to enumerate the traits which I have inte-
grated from my parents.”8 As historian of philosophy Bruce Kuklick ob-
serves, Perry’s judgment of James’s greatness lay in his “anticipation” of
Perry’s own realism.9 A similar perception of “anticipation” shapes Perry’s
account of James’s political sentiments.
Like many of James’s students, Perry became a close acquaintance of
the James family. After William’s death in 1910 the family turned to Perry
to assist in the publication of his literary remains. In 1912 Perry published
an envelope of essays James deposited in the Philosophical Library at
Harvard’s Emerson Hall as Essays in Radical Empiricism. When James’s
son, Henry, sought to remove his father’s sizable library from the fam-
ily’s Irving Street home following the death of his mother, Alice James,
Perry again played an important role. Henry consulted with Perry to select
notable books to be donated as a gift to Harvard. Together with A. A.
Roback from the Department of Psychology and librarian Benjamin Rand,
Perry assisted in disposing of James’s remaining library.10 Given his fa-
miliarity with both James’s philosophy and his literary estate, Perry was
uniquely positioned to write an authoritative life-and-letters biography.
Henry James’s 1920 volume, The Letters of William James, contained
selections from his father’s diaries, letters, and marginalia to present his
generous personality to a general audience. It included only “the most in-
teresting” letters held by the James family that pertained to the project of
composing a vivid picture of his father’s personality, excluding any ma-
terial Henry deemed “wholly technical or polemic” (LWJ 1:viii). Perry’s
envisioned volume aimed to complement this biographical collection with
a wider selection of letters demonstrating James’s intellectual development
and influence over time. For over half a decade Perry wrote hundreds of
letters to scholars across the globe in search of correspondence to or from
William James.11 The culmination of these years of research, The Thought
and Character of William James, appeared in 1935, containing over five
hundred previously unpublished letters and weighing in at over sixteen
hundred pages in length. The book organizes the material into a broad
narrative of James’s intellectual maturation and his place in the intellec-
tual conversations of his times over the course of ninety-one chapters of
exegesis and commentary. Perry claims to have taken a light hand in ed-
iting the volume so as to be sure that the collected materials might best
serve as “a vehicle for James himself.”12
The book has rightly been described as a “monumental” contribution.13
It was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1936, thereby cementing Perry’s status
as a world authority on James. A concise single-volume version, issued in
1947, remains a standard teaching text. Many of Perry’s original claims
and arguments have become conventional wisdom to generations of schol-
ars: the influence of Henry James Sr.’s unconventional educational philos-
ophy on William’s personality and philosophical development, his life-
long struggle to reconcile modern science with religious insight, and the
characterization of James’s personal life as an interplay of his morbid and
benign traits. “For James scholars, rereading Ralph Barton Perry’s The
Thought and Character of William James is like reading Shakespeare and
finding the originals of now conventional sayings,” observes one scholar
of American philosophy.14 This experience is particularly striking when
rereading Perry’s presentation of James’s political development. In two
consecutive chapters titled “Social and Political Sentiments” and “James
the Reformer,” Perry portrays James’s “general ethical creed” as the ex-
pression of his personal temperament.15
“Social and Political Sentiments” opens by restating the conclusion of
the book’s previous chapter on James’s moral philosophy. “Though there
are two well-marked principles in James’s moral philosophy, that of mili-
tant self-assertion and that of humanity, it is, as we have seen, the second
which is the more fundamental in both theory and practice.”16 The principle
of militant self-assertion refers to what Perry characterizes throughout the
book as the romantic side of William James. This is the James who insists
on the value of courage, struggle, and risk as the strenuous experiences
that give life its meaning. From his early essays on hero worship to his
later fascination with martial experience, the romantic James was persis-
tently fascinated by experiences of extreme physical and psychic exertion.
Perry psychologizes James’s advocacy of the strenuous life as a symptom
of his mental breakdown as a young man and his ensuing lifelong strug-
gle with depression. “James’s preaching of the martial spirit reflected his
need rather than his achievement.”17 In contrast to the principle of militant
self-assertion that he associates with James’s “morbid traits,” Perry identi-
fies the principle of humanity with James’s “benign traits” of compassion
and sociability. This principle refers to the sympathetic side of James’s
thinking and his generous toleration of difference. Where his morbid
traits tempted James to romanticize war and suffering, his benign traits
of public lectures on the subject of temperance from the 1880s, Perry pres-
ents a brief history of James’s early involvement in public issues rang-
ing from his role in Harvard’s curriculum reform to his advocacy of the
mind cure movement. For example, James spoke before a committee of the
Massachusetts legislature in 1898 against proposed legislation that would
exclude mind cure practitioners from medical licensing in the state. But,
like Godkin and his fellow mugwumps, the “issue which stirred James
most deeply and exacted from him the greatest expenditure of time and
effort was that of imperialism.”31 First in response to the Venezuela Crisis
of 1895, and again in reaction the Spanish-American War of 1898, James
stood his ground as a man of reflection against the tide of popular passions
driving national policy. He saw imperialism as “an outlet for blind passion
masked by a profession of benevolence,” and it fell to intellectual men like
himself to stand up against the majority’s irrational appetite for war and
excitement.32
Along with these mugwump commitments, James’s anti-imperialism
was informed by his temperamental principle of humanity. His politics
grew out of a sympathetic identification with the suffering of Filipinos
on the other side of the world. As James explains in the Boston Evening
Transcript in 1899, “We have treated [the Filipinos] as if they were a
painted picture, an amount of mere matter in our way. They are too remote
from us ever to be realized as they exist in their inwardness” (PQ 160).33
James sought to reveal the Filipino in his full inwardness to the American
public through his newspaper editorials and by circulating witness reports
of the violence in Manila (see DF).
For all of his indignation at the injustice of empire, however, James’s
anti-imperialism was only a brief distraction from his more serious philo-
sophical pursuits, on Perry’s account. “James’s period of reform and evan-
gelism,” as Perry characterizes James’s life between 1892 and 1902, was
the expression of intellectual exhaustion and melancholic depression that
preceded his return to serious scholarship.34 On the basis of this psycho-
logical profile Perry disregards the persistence of political questions and
concerns in James’s subsequent writings to conclude that James’s “active
participation in the anti-imperialist movement” came to a close with a final
address before the Anti-Imperialist League, “Address to the Philippines
Question,” in the fall of 1903 (AQ).35 James’s attention thereafter shifted
from politics back to philosophy, even though his generous temperament
continued to push him to speak up on behalf of “underdogs” and uncon-
ventional points of view.
things that liberalism rejects go, as their obverse, things that liberalism recog-
nizes as requisite to the good life of the masses of men. One begins to doubt
whether, in a world so mixed as this, there ever can exist the unmixed goods
that liberalism requires, or the unmixed evils it rejects.”52 Mixed within the
illiberal elements of Mussolini’s regime is a novel political experiment that
should be allowed to run its course. The dictatorship, after all, may only be
a temporary stage in Italy’s transition to a bolder and stronger liberal order.
Fascism’s success or failure should not stand on its ability to satisfy prepoliti-
cal moral commitments. Rather, its test must lie in its practical consequences.
Similar paeans to fascism’s experimental politics appeared prominently in the
New Republic during the late 1920s, celebrating Italy’s political innovation and
its power to unite the nation behind a common purpose. Charles Beard and
Herbert Croly, to name only two prominent voices of American progressivism,
shared Kallen’s willingness to overlook the illiberalism of Mussolini’s regime
and reserve judgment until Italy’s political experiment had run its course.53
Along with this perception of Mussolini’s rule as distinctively prag-
matic, it was also seen as distinctively pragmatist. In 1926, the London
Sunday Times asked Mussolini what philosophies most influenced him in
the development of fascism. The dictator replied:
conclude that the dictator “was clearly far more aware of William James’s
name than his teachings.”56
Despite challenges to Mussolini’s claims to pragmatism, they found a
receptive audience in the discipline of political science. American political
scientists turned to those elements of James’s thinking Perry described as
militant or morbid—his emphasis on strenuousness, energy, willing, and
action—as clues for understanding fascism’s political philosophy. Writing
in the American Political Science Review in 1928, William Kilbourne
Stewart argued that reading James helped Mussolini clarify and focus
the practical and action-oriented nature of his thinking. Mussolini’s re-
jection of the doctrinal quality of liberalism is an application of James’s
“polemic against absolutism in thinking.”57 Such comparisons were not
restricted to those American liberals, like Stewart, who expressed en-
thusiasm for Mussolini’s new politics. William Y. Elliott, Perry’s col-
league at Harvard in the Department of Government, drew a similar con-
clusion. Elliott was “among American political thinkers” of the period
“the most active critic of Mussolini’s Italy.”58 Like Stewart, Elliott saw
James’s pragmatism as an element of the philosophy behind fascism, but
he took this association to be an indictment of pragmatism’s relativism
and lack of moral orientation rather than an endorsement of Mussolini’s
practical politics. James’s distrust of rationalism and the justification of
faith serve as the philosophical grounds for fascism’s celebration of na-
tional myth and its Machiavellian logic that the ends justify the means.
As Elliott explained in Political Science Quarterly, “Although they have
not always so named it, and although only its protagonists attribute to
the movement a profound underlying idea, Fascism has come to mean to
the popular imagination just this application of pragmatism to politics.”59
Machiavelli, Papini, and Sorel are all more properly described as ideolog-
ical influences on Mussolini than James, Elliott admits, but the antiliberal
political philosophy that results from this hodgepodge of influences is
one consistent with the entire ethos of pragmatism, from James’s anti-
intellectualism, to Dewey’s instrumentalism, to the pluralism of Harold
Laski.60 Elliott restated this sweeping indictment of pragmatism in his
1928 book, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and
the Constitutional State. Many of Elliott’s readers found the comparisons
with Mussolini and Dewey overblown, if not preposterous, but the book
remains illustrative of the peculiar association James’s pragmatism came
to share with European anti-intellectualism throughout the decade.61
Behind the mythology of James’s influence on Mussolini lies the reality
of pragmatism’s European reception. Elliott’s exaggerated portrayal of a
The most interesting, and in fact, genuinely edifying part of my trip has
been meeting this little cénacle, who have taken my own writings, entre
autres, au grand serieux, but now are carrying on their philosophical mis-
sion in anything but a technically serious way, in as much as Leonardo (of
which I have hitherto only known a few odd numbers) is devoted to good &
lively literary form. (C 11:27; emphasis in original)
is good and what means shall be adopted for its realization. William James
was a liberal in precisely this sense. That he would have had the least sym-
pathy with either Bolshevism or Fascism is unthinkable.82
James stood on the liberal side of history. He valued energy and mili-
tancy, like Mussolini, but only in the service of liberal values. What makes
fascism dangerous is not the passion and militancy it brings into politics,
but rather its failure to harness this energy to moral ends. Militant self-
assertion undomesticated by moral principle leaves Papini and Mussolini
oscillating back and forth between a gospel of action that fetishizes vi-
olence as an end in itself and a gospel of subjection to the authoritarian
state. Fighting fascism, Perry concludes, will require something more
than calm heads and reasoned arguments. It will require harnessing mili-
tancy to a genuinely universal moral cause. Perry finds just such a bulwark
against reactionary immoralism in a militant commitment to America’s
ethical creed.
both the embodiment and the champions of our democratic creed. Nothing
short of this will prove democracy.”102
The meaning of this democratic creed is articulated in three chap-
ters on American political culture that conclude the book. Perry defines
democracy as both a form of government and, more importantly, a senti-
ment shared by the American people. The American political tempera-
ment is defined by a feeling of compassion. Unlike the cultivated hardness
of the Nietzschean superman, compassion is an “instinctive and inalien-
able” motive, but one cultivated and intensified by Christianity in America.
Compassion motivates Americans to care for one another as precious and
irreplaceable individuals. “The essential truth which it speaks is this: that
in the last analysis the units of life are individual, sentient beings.”103 It is
compassion for individuals before groups or clans that makes Americans
a genuinely cosmopolitan people. Alongside compassion, Perry includes
feelings of emulation, self- respect, and fraternity as elements of the
American temperament. Where compassion draws Americans to respect
individuals as individuals, these other passions balance natural individual-
ism with a sense of social responsibility and community. Together, they
make for a love of esteem, a willingness to grant respect to our fellow men,
and a desire for “fair play” and rules of justice that apply equally to all.104
The temperamental sources of America’s democratic creed dovetail
with the nation’s exceptional history of political development. Present
Conflict provides a thumbnail sketch of Perry’s account of the historical
sources of the American creed that he develops in greater detail in the
1940s. Like Perrington would argue in his history of political thought a
decade later, Perry argues that America inherited a sense of spiritual indi-
vidualism from the Puritans. This individualistic and self-reliant streak of
American culture was tempered by a second source, the social and politi-
cal bonds formed in the process of expansion across the frontier. The hard-
ship of carving out a new nation in the wilderness gave Americans their
“active, restless, and inventive” character, as well as the political virtues of
common regard.105 The twin forces of religion and the frontier together ex-
plain the American propensity to combine a strenuous love of daring with
a moral respect for individual freedom.
These twin historical origins give shape, too, to the nation’s philosoph-
ical tendencies. Perry charts a history of the influence of British, French,
and German philosophy on the intellectual life of the United States, from
Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinism to the influence of British Hegelianism
at the beginning of the twentieth century to argue that the only truly
American expression of philosophy to have taken shape from the historical
experience of both the Puritan and the frontier is the pragmatism of James
and Dewey. Pragmatism’s commitments to pluralism, democracy, human-
ity, and faith define “the general spirit in which Americans of this day are
moved to undertake their duties.”106 Nietzsche’s vision of a society of rank
is the highest expression of the German spirit; pragmatism’s generous hu-
manism expresses what is greatest and worth fighting for in the nation’s
“popular creed.”107
The parallels between the portrayals of American political culture in
1918 and of James’s personal political sentiments almost two decades later
in Thought and Character are striking. Both are moved first and foremost
by a principle of humanity. The temperamental sociability and sympathy
that explain James’s political commitments in Thought and Character are
prefigured in Present Conflict as a national temperament of compassion
and fraternity. Like James’s generous sentiments, American political cul-
ture is one that extends its sympathies beyond its borders to friends and
allies across the globe, without succumbing to the parochial prejudices of
nationalism. And like James’s individualistic creed, Americans uphold a
credal commitment to liberty, toleration, and democracy as universal com-
mitments that demand both loyalty and sacrifice. Americans are tempera-
mentally pragmatists in philosophy, and pragmatist philosophy is uniquely
American.
What placing these two texts side-by-side demonstrates is that the rough
contours of the ethical creed Perry claims to find in James’s political senti-
ments are already sketched out in great detail in his account of American
political culture nearly two decades earlier. James is presented, as the ex-
emplary voice of a liberal temperament that is national before it is personal.
Also revealing in the comparison is the consistency of Perry’s argumenta-
tive tropes over time. Like James’s own pragmatism, Perry’s liberalism is
perpetually seeking to “reconcile and mediate” seemingly contradictory
goods: militarism and pacifism, the gospel of humanity and the gospel of
action, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, Puritanism and democracy. The
perpetual conflict between these dichotomous goods in American public
life prefigures the psychic conflict between the benign and morbid he finds
in James’s life and thought. And so too does their reconciliation: the goods
of action must be made to serve the goods of morality, the morbid made to
serve the benign, the militant made to serve the humanitarian.
It should be noted, moreover, that what precedes this portrait of American
culture in the second half of Present Conflict is a repeated discussion of
the unsettling parallels between pragmatism and Nietzsche’s aesthetici-
zation of the will. Perry goes to great effort in the first part of the book
and Christian Science Monitor. In the midst of this flurry of writing and
organizing, Perry composed three major works on American political phi-
losophy and its democratic creed. Like Present Conflict, these books con-
stituted another chapter of Perry’s war effort. Shall Not Perish from the
Earth (1940), Our Side Is Right (1942), and Puritanism and Democracy
(1944) each reiterate warnings of the crisis facing American liberalism
and the need “to revive and reaffirm our common creed.”112 Just as James
showed how these competing values could be united in the militant com-
mitment to liberal inclusiveness, these hortatory histories of philosophy
aim to demonstrate the objective and universal value of America’s credal
commitments.
These works develop the historical claims of Present Conflict into
a bold account of American liberalism as the synthesis of two national
sources: Puritanism and political democracy. Puritanism gives America
its belief in high moral standards of right and wrong, good and evil, and
its love of the moral truths of human equality embodied in the Declaration
of Independence. Puritanism alone becomes stingy and theocratic, how-
ever. Its figuration of original sin and human corruption leads to a mo-
rality of prohibitions and denial, rather than affirmation and toleration.
It is for this reason that Puritanism needs correction from the optimistic
rationalism of the Revolution’s democratic ideals. Puritanism without de-
mocracy is morbid; democracy without Puritanism is benign. Together,
Puritanism and democracy gave shape to the individualism, toleration, and
cosmopolitanism that characterize the America’s tradition of “Christian
democracy.”113 Humanitarianism, individualism, and political democracy
took root in American soil, and yet they are the fruit of “man’s allegiance
to universal culture.”114 It is in the service of this universal culture that
America fights to establish “a just and humane international order” work-
ing in the service of “universalistic individualism.”115
This final productive decade represents the culmination of Perry’s life-
long defense of the liberal creed. The values he calls the American public
to fight for are precisely the same ones he found in James’s political sen-
timents: educated political judgment, tolerance of diversity, individual
rights, the promise of democratic progress, and a faith in America as the
guardian of these universal values in a hostile international order. Passages
and examples from James appear throughout these writings, but James is
depicted in Perry’s post–Thought and Character writings as an exemplar
of this American tradition rather than an original source.116 The political
sentiments he identified in James’s unpublished works are extended into
statements of a deeper American political ethos rooted in history, and
in need of champions today as the nation faces yet another time of crisis.
Indeed, Perry’s histories of the American creed present it as one under
almost continual crisis since the time of Godkin, who Perry now character-
izes as “the exponent of American orthodoxy in its pristine purity.”117 A
nation in perpetual crisis is perpetually in need of political educators like
Godkin, James, Wilson, and Perry himself to guide public opinion.
James returns to the center of Perry’s narrative of what it means to be
an American in his postwar Characteristically American (1949). James’s
thought and personality remain the “most perfect philosophical expres-
sion of American individualism,” and the competing tendencies within his
thought remain those tensions and puzzles at the heart of the American
creed.118 How can an admiration for heroism and action be united in the
end with tenderness and love of humanity? James’s Americanness, Perry
explains, consists in his ability to unite these two impulses in “that strange
blend of attributes which gives him what nobility he has: his sense of his
own limitations and of almost insuperable resistance, coupled with fidel-
ity to the good as he sees it, and with a willingness to risk a failure whose
magnitude corresponds to the greatness of the undertaking. This is the
heart of William James’s philosophical attitude and the essence of that cast
of mind which is characteristically American.”119
II. Bigness
“As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness & greatness in all their
forms,” James announces in a 1899 letter to Sarah Whyman Whitman,
and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to in-
dividual, stealing in through the crannies of this world like so many soft
rootlets or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rendering the hardest
monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you
deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life
displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first
and foremost, against big success and big results, and in favor of the eternal
forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuc-
cessful way, underdogs always, till history comes after they are long dead,
and puts them on the top. (C 8:546)
The occasion for this confession was reading George Edward Woodberry’s
essay “Democracy,” a neo-Platonist exposition of the foundations of popu-
lar rule.8 Woodberry argues that the idea of democracy is premised on the
unity of men’s souls. It alone is the regime that gives each the power to
develop their soul’s potential in harmony with all men. So understood the
democratic state is no mere artifice of convention or contract. The state
is the highest expression of the unity of all men’s souls “jointly making
one sum.”9 Woodberry’s essay “is very fine indeed,” James explains, but
is ultimately “too abstract” (C 8:545–46). Too abstract, that is, for the way
Woodberry’s craving to find a spiritual foundation to democracy as its only
sure grounds obscures the importance of the experience and actions of con-
crete individuals.10 As James approvingly cites a piece of colloquial wisdom
elsewhere, “ ‘There is very little difference between one man and another;
but what little there is, is very important’ ” (II 191; emphasis in original.
See also GME; TD). Such a contrast between abstraction and experience
is familiar from James’s philosophical writings. However, the cri de coeur
in this letter equates philosophy’s reduction of individual freedom with a
social and institutional phenomenon he calls “bigness.” What exactly is
bigness? And what does this association of philosophy, politics, and the
experience of modern institutional life reveal about the conditions of free
individuality?
Bigness was a familiar idiom of Gilded Age social criticism, used to
denote the consolidation of money and power in the nation’s emerging cor-
porate economy.11 As Alan Trachtenberg explains in his classical cultural
history of the Gilded Age, the era’s defining feature was “a significant in-
crease in the influence of business in America, corresponding to the emer-
gence of the modern business form of ownership.”12 This “incorporation of
America” involved not only the restructuring of firms from small artisan
units to national combinations with near-monopolistic control over mar-
kets, but also the emergence of “a changed, more tightly structured society
with new structures of control.”13 These transformations signaled ominous
changes for the very idea of American democracy. The consolidation of
unprecedented economic power in the hands of trust corporations signaled
the eclipse of the Jeffersonian ideal of the autonomous yeoman citizen by
the rise of a new mode of corporate capitalism.14
These dramatic transformations of the nation’s political economy played
no small role in the imperial ambitions that would come to concern James.
Writing in the North American Review in 1898, journalist Charles A. Conant
argued that the nation’s rapidly accumulating surplus capital could lead to
economic crisis unless new foreign markets were opened for investment.
The most promising sites of investment for the nation’s stagnating capital
were “countries which have not felt the pulse of modern progress.”15 Conant
called for “a broad national policy” of investment in naval power to expand
national interests across the globe in order to open markets in Asia and
Africa to American capital.16 Conant’s argument outlines the strategic logic
of the open door diplomacy proposed by Secretary of State John Hay the
following year. The United States’ competition with European powers for
control over Asian markets shaped an imperial vision of the nation’s ex-
panding naval power as a tool to secure privileged access to foreign econo-
mies and impose tariff structures consonant with the interest of American
creditors.17 Bigness’s emerging nexus of finance capital, military power, and
expanding global hegemony found a bullish champion in Massachusetts
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge envisaged the coordination of military
and economy power as part of the United States’ “large policy.” Drawing
on the imagery of trust consolidation to describe the position of the United
States on the global stage, Lodge writes:
Stillness, harmony sincerity have fled the world, and instead we have “live”
churches, big hideous national destinies, political parities, newspapers,
trade combines. Principles, sincerity, honesty, delicacy all overwhelmed. It
is time to organize an opposition. The resounding idol of mere empty “big-
ness” and “success” is killing every genuine quality and ideal. Was there
ever such a national infamy as this filippine business which we are enact-
ing? And the loathsome greasy cant of McKinley & Co. which we swallow
with it as its sauce! (C 8:499; see also PhD 70, TD 97)
It seems to me that the great disease of our country now is the unwilling-
ness of people to do anything that has no chance of succeeding. The or-
ganization of great machines for slick-success is the discovery of our age;
and, with us, the individual, as soon as he realized that the machine will
be irresistible, acquiesces silently, instead of making an impotent row. One
acquiescence leads to another, until acquiescence itself becomes organized.
The impotent row-maker becomes in the eye of public opinion, an ass and a
nuisance. We get to live under the organization of corruption, and since all
needful functions go on, we next treat reform as a purely literary ideal: We
defend our rotten system. Acquiescence becomes active partnership. (C
10:339)
The individual is made grist for the mill of the “great machines” of incor-
porated America. The impersonality of modern institutions is experienced
as a fate-like power, alien to the will of the lone individual. And yet, this
experience of powerlessness obscures the role individual choices and deci-
sions play in creating, sustaining, and even desiring the “great machines
of slick success” that disempower them. Individuals facilitate the power of
bigness through their passivity and complacency.
The opposition between passive obedience and active resistance that
frames James’s polemics on bigness gives credence to Coon’s views that
the basic problem of politics for James is a popular crisis of confidence,
not unlike that crisis of the will that he faced as a young man. In “The
Philippine Question,” James writes of a popular atmosphere of “resigna-
tion to the torrent of events” surrounding the military campaign to sup-
press Filipino insurgents in the winter of 1899. American spectators of
their state’s violence abroad simply acquiesce with a “mixture of inner
unhappiness with fatalistic resignation” (PQ 159). The passivity and res-
ignation that perpetuate complicity in these injustices represent only one
side of James’s lament, however. James’s letters and articles additionally
point toward a false image of activity as another face of this “active part-
nership” with empire. The source of the “moral flabbiness” he decries in
his letter to Wells cited above is not resignation alone. The experience of
bigness provokes both dejection and cravings for intimacy and control.
The moral passivity on display is “understandable in onlooking citizens
only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship
People never realize how much the idols they worship are idols of the
tribe, imitated ideals, caught from suggestion, & followed because we are
ashamed to feel isolated. The idol of the American nation to day is what
is called “big success.” To be big, a success must be immediate and fla-
grant; and as the immediate test of success is always market-value, it has
come about that the only success that strikes our national imagination as
big is the making of a fortune… . If the other people had been simpler, we
should have been so too; If none of us had been so rich, we all would have
been happier; but of the spirit of the age, the idol of the tribe, we are both
accomplices and victims. We have blindly followed the vulgar herd and
drawn others to follow us instead of setting an example of distinction. (DN
106; emphasis in original)
What is meant by coming “to feel at home” in a new place, or with new
people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our quarters in a new
room, we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what
doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be
found in cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have learned the
range of all these possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears. And
so it does with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any
essentially new manifestations from their character. (SR 67–68)
If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of
revival, or expansion of the human mind, display in common we shall find,
I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being,
“The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you pos-
sess.” (SR 73; emphasis in original)
of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed” (DD 136). Living without cer-
tainty demands a rare sort of courage.
art, classics and romantics” (P 12). Reiterating his earlier argument con-
cerning the need to satisfy both sorts of cravings, James admits that neither
set of temperamental commitments alone will satisfy most in the audience.
“Most of us have a hankering for good things on both sides of the line” (P
14). In the face of this divide and the need to find a way to satisfy both sets
of demands, pragmatism’s method of looking to the practical consequences
of these disagreements promises to serve as “a mediator and reconciler” of
this perpetual clash (P 43).
The subsequent lectures demonstrate the uses of the pragmatic method
to resolve (or better: dissolve) a series of eternal philosophical disputes in
a manner that combines the best of both the tender-minded and the tough-
minded while guarding against the excesses of each. The argument builds
across the first three lectures to confront “the most central of all philo-
sophical problems” in the fourth lecture: the problem of the one and the
many (P 64). James call it the most “pregnant” of philosophical problems:
“I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a
decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions
than if you give him any other name ending in ist” (P 64). Monism names
a metaphysics that embodies the craving for authority. This is a world ulti-
mately of order and fixity, where contingency has been tamed. Against the
monistic idealist’s claim that the world is ultimately one stands the skepti-
cal materialist James calls the “pluralist.” This is a philosophy that satis-
fies the craving for difference with its insistence that the ultimately many-
ness of the world is never gathered up into a final unity or system. Where
monism speaks to the tender-minded craving for meaning in the cosmos,
pluralism is a skeptical philosophy for people who want the hard facts.
James applies the pragmatic method to this conflict between spiritual
and material metaphysics to ask what practical consequences each may
hold in conduct. Each side’s claim to ultimate unity or ultimate pluralism
of reality is found to be underdetermined. It is only from the perspec-
tive of human purposes that we can consider the oneness or manyness
of the world, making the future, not the past, the ultimate arbiter of their
debate. Seen from the agent perspective, different contexts reveal different
degrees of manyness and oneness in experience. Consequences, lines of
influence, generic kinds, purposes of action, and narratives are the active
conjunctions that bind the world together in many ways, but so too are
there always boundaries and limits to these connections. “The world is
one just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connection. It is
many just so far as any definite connection fails to obtain” (P 76). To the
extent that the world is ultimately more unified than disjointed, it is as a
I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual
reasoning they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical
feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must somehow at any cost
be true. Oneness overcomes moral separateness at any rate. In the passion
of love we have the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all
sentient life. This mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic
utterances, acknowledges their authority, and assigns to intellectual consid-
erations a secondary place. (P 76; emphasis in original)
Like the urge to conform to the “vulgar herd” in James’s lecture notes and
the craving to feel at home in “Sentiment,” monism appeals to the crav-
ing for order and the anxiety with uncertainty that afflict the modern self.
These mystical experiences of oneness with a force greater than the self
satisfy a longing for an authority that transcends the separateness of indi-
viduals. Monism promises a feeling of being at home in the universe for
those willing to abandon the goods of pluralism in its pursuit.
James psychologizes this craving and defends its claim on the human
heart. “We all have some ear for this monistic music; it elevates and reas-
sures” (P 76). What monism promises is a moral holiday from the burdens
of action and the anxiety of change. To take a moral holiday is “to treat
the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust
its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our
finite responsibility” (P 41). James again points to the fear and anxiety of
contingency that drives men to embrace monism. Trust in the ultimate
rationality of the cosmos or in the optimistic course of history releases
individuals of the burdens of responsibility. Monism promises a peaceful
experience of the cosmos safe from contingency and surprise.
The practical consequences of taking such a moral holiday are not
action but rather “quietism” and “indifferentism” to the fate of the world
(P 133). These may be worthy occasional delicacies from the responsibil-
ity of life, but the monist makes a mistake in supposing that its vision of
totality can sustain them. No simple act of wishing or willing can deny
that haunting sense of futurity and surprise that erupts into experience.
“Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us cor-
rect our present formulas,” James writes in the preface to The Meaning of
Truth (MT 4). The fragility of monism’s promise of order and meaning in
the face of the whirling contingency of modern experience can lead just
as soon to anxious reaction as to quiet resignation. Monism’s promise of
absolute unity and order “is shattered if, along with all the union, there has
to be granted the slightest modicum, the most incipient nascency, the most
residual trace, of a separation that is not ‘overcome’” (P 79).
Monism tries to soothe fears of contingency but ultimately only exas-
perates them. On the one hand, anxiety and fear in the face of modern
contingency motivate a compensatory attachment to monism. On the other
hand, this same contingency perpetually threatens to unmask monism as
just that, a fantastic compensation for the feeling of moral separateness.
The craving to escape from time can turn just as easily into a rage against
contingency as monists become increasingly dogmatic and authoritarian
in order to cling to their fragile fantasy. It is against the failure of monism
to satisfy the very craving it promises to fulfill that James’s meliorist plu-
ralism proposes a vision of being at home in the universe that seeks to
affirm contingency rather than to vengefully domesticate it.
James discusses the failure of monism to fulfill its promise of a
moral holiday in detail in A Pluralist Universe. Moving from the con-
trast between pluralism as scientific materialism and idealism as reli-
gious monism, which frames the argument of Pragmatism, A Pluralistic
Universe focuses on the contrast between Hegelian monism and James’s
own meliorist pluralism as two contending spiritual responses to the
unsettling experience of modernity. “The vaster vistas which scientific
evolutionism has opened, and the rising tide of social democratic ideals,
have changed the type of our imagination, and the older monarchical
there may never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never
get collected, that some part of it may remain outside of the largest com-
bination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the each-
form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form
commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the self evident thing. (PU 20;
emphasis in original)
A pluralistic universe is one where the boundaries between things are leaky
and porous rather than final and fixed. Connections actually made exist
within a sea of possibilities excluded. This is a world of becoming, where
process always exceeds product and chance occurrences are inexhaustible.
James borrows a Hegelianism to describe such a world as one of “the bad
infinite”: an ongoing dialectic with no final synthesis or Aufhebung (PU
51). Experience always remains open to the shock of further experience.
Even God Himself, on the pluralist view, is a finite being in a contingent
cosmos that even He cannot master or control (PU 137–49).
James invites his audience to think of the distinctions between monism
and pluralism in pragmatic terms: What practical habits of conduct follow
from each? The difference between foreignness and intimacy translates
into one of habits of trust and habits of wariness (PU 19). Habits of trust
are tendencies to act spontaneously, even courageously, in the faith that
one’s actions will contribute to ameliorating the future trajectory of a
world still in the making. Habits of wariness are tendencies to hesitate
and to settle for what is given in fear of the unknown consequences that
change or surprise might bring. Monism’s claim to intimacy needs to be
judged in terms of its ability to produce such habits of trust. The fusing of
the self with a power greater than the self, whether God or Reason or the
Absolute, promises an experience of harmony in the universe. Portraying
the greater order of this cosmos as a mighty One that includes the individ-
ual among its intimate parts, monism overcomes the anxious feeling of
the moral separateness of individuals. The self shares an intimate kinship
with the Absolute. Your own actions and beliefs contribute in some way to
its greater realization. Like he did with monism’s mystical abandonment
of intellect to authority in Pragmatism, James foregrounds the dangers of
monism’s promise of a moral holiday. A monistic universe allows us “to
let the world wag on its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands
than ours and are none of your business” (P 41). What makes this holiday a
distinctively moral one is the suspension of responsibility that the promise
of an ordered and perfect cosmos solicits.
Here too, however, the promise of intimacy as an anchor in the flux
of experience is one monism cannot deliver on. James asks his audience
to consider: In what sense is there any sort of shared identity between
the concrete perspective of the individual and that of an abstraction like
the Absolute? “As such, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves
nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or success,
friends or enemies, victories or defeats” (PU 27; emphasis in original). All
the challenges and trials that constitute the meaning of human experience
clash of temperaments and the cravings he examines are not the particu-
larities of professional philosophers. They are features of their own lives.
They too feel these cravings for authority, they long for calm and ease, and
they too feel these reactive attitudes of resentment and denial in the face
of contingency. To see how James’s account of contingency and cravings
inform his broader social criticism, we turn in the following chapter to his
exploration of these political consequences of the cravings to master con-
tingency through the strenuous life.
fighting, masterful virtues.”3 Empire’s new frontier holds the promise for
a generation of rugged men to live the strenuous life and resist the nation’s
luxurious decline.
Roosevelt’s dichotomy between the man of ease and the man of the
strenuous life offers a vivid illustration of two seemingly contradictory
reactions to the experience of modernity James examined in philosophical
terms in Pragmatism: namely, the conformist withdrawal of resignation
and the heroic fantasy of sovereign mastery. James surely felt urges toward
both responses, but we miss an important insight when we narrow James’s
fascination to the clinical terms of his own morbidity. Continuing the con-
textual and social approach of the previous chapter, this chapter examines
the strenuous life as both a cultural idiom of Gilded Age political thought
and central ballast for the ideology of American empire. At this intersec-
tion of culture and empire, we find a peculiar melancholia affecting Gilded
Age republican political thought.4
Gilded Age republicanism, likes its classical predecessor, considered
civic virtue as the foundations of political freedom. The stability of the
civitas rests on the character of its citizens. Similarly, it viewed moral cor-
ruption as a grave political threat. Where Gilded Age neorepublicanism
breaks from its Roman and revolutionary predecessors is in its expressiv-
ist conception of civic regeneration. The corrupting decadence of a con-
sumer society was to be kept in check by the raw experience of frontier
regeneration. The wild, violent frontier became a mythic site for renewing
civic virtue from the corrupting force of civilization. What makes this
republicanism melancholic, however, was the physical absence of the un-
settled frontier as a site of renewal. In its place, Gilded Age republicans
reimagined the globe as an imperial frontier. This imaginative projection
of a mythic frontier beyond the continent would make the strenuous life of
empire the bulwark against civic decline.
John Dewey captures the melancholic character of Gilded Age po-
litical thought in a passing remark about James himself, no friend of
imperialism. James’s emphasis on willing, action, and faith “summed
up an age, a pioneer age, when it was passing from the scene.”5 Dewey
correctly observes the way James’s thought was rooted in a particu-
lar historical context; however he, like many commentators since him,
comes close to reducing James’s philosophy to the discourse of a par-
ticular stage in the nation’s historical development. James repeated the
melancholic and gendered terms of Gilded Age republicanism; but he
did so with a difference. Theodore Roosevelt, his former student, mar-
shaled the language of the strenuous life in order to satisfy the longing
The “continuous touch” with the wild’s archaic power lays at the heart of
the United States’ exceptional political development. The European set-
tler undergoes a psychic and moral transformation in the New World as
he seeks to adapt to its harsh conditions. He is required to become more
savage to survive the environment and master it with his own strength.
As Turner explains this transformation, “The wilderness masters the colo-
nist.”12 Wilderness regeneration is the condition for cultivating the virtues
the frontier, Strong’s popular 1885 Our Country offers a prediction of what
awaits America in “this new stage of history” once civilization’s world-
historical transition from east to west is complete. Strong’s jeremiad syn-
thesizes Christian eschatology with social Darwinism to warn of a loom-
ing crisis of overpopulation and food scarcity that will result in “the final
competition of the races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled.”24
To survive this coming race apocalypse, the United States must assert
itself by extending out west across the Pacific, south through the Americas,
and finally east again into Africa. It will not be arms and technology that
decide the outcome but rather a competition of “vitality and civilization”
in the coming struggle for survival of the fittest.25 The American Anglo-
Saxon is uniquely fit to win this battle because of his economic power,
“instinct for colonizing,” and the intensity of his mental constitution.26 It is
nothing short of a duty for the United States to rule over the planet in the
name of a Christian commonwealth and uplift the uncivilized races.
Strong’s argument stresses the moral contribution Anglo-Saxon empire
would make to humanity, yet his jeremiad is a rebuke of the corrupting
domestic tendencies at work in the United States.27 The arrival of new im-
migrants on the nation’s shores is taxing the Christian mores and energetic
personality needed to survive the struggle of the races. Catholicism and
Mormonism; the vice of intemperance; the crowded, polyglot tenements
of the nation’s sprawling cities; imported socialist and anarchist ideas; and
the worship of wealth are all “dangerous and destructive elements” sap-
ping America’s spiritual strength.28 Americans must return to the Christian
gospel and the church itself must “rise to a higher level of sacrifice” if the
nation is to be protected from decline.29 Strong compares the immigration
“crisis” to the outbreak of the Civil War and asks his readers whether they
are ready to sacrifice their own money and power to protect the Anglo-
Saxon race as their forefathers did for the Union.
These multiple threads of republican melancholia—anxieties of over-
civilization, regeneration through violence, suspicion of commerce, fears
of race contamination, and celebration of martial violence and self-sacrifice
as sources of personal and civic renewal—are exemplified in the strenu-
ousness of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s celebrity in his early career as
a writer and junior politician was due in no small part to how he presented
himself to the public as the very example of manly renewal through the
strenuous life.30 According to the vivid mythology Roosevelt constructed
around his own biography, his physical weakness as a child made him an
object of ridicule and harassment. His life changed when, on the advice of
his family doctor that he would only be able to develop his spirit by first
James read the text of Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech and pub-
lished a rejoinder, “Governor Roosevelt’s Oration,” in the Boston Evening
Transcript.38 The speech’s impassioned rhetoric struck him as the work
of the same sort of immaturity he witnessed in Roosevelt when he was
a student in James’s comparative anatomy class at Harvard two decades
earlier.39 “Although in middle life, as the years age, and in a situation of
responsibility concrete enough,” James writes of the governor, “he is still
mentally in the Sturm and Drang period of early adolescence” (GRO 163).
Roosevelt’s celebration of martial experience as an end in itself is politi-
cally irresponsible for it must celebrate the courage and virility of Jefferson
Davis no less than that of Lincoln and Grant. James calls Roosevelt’s cel-
ebration of regeneration through warfare “abstract” for its inattention to
the lives and perspectives of the Filipinos suffering under its pursuit. The
governor “swamps everything together in one flood of abstract bellicose
emotion” (GRO 164).
James faults Roosevelt for allowing emotion to distort the issue, but
the problem was neither its emotional nature nor the craving for stren-
uous experience. James, too, was an advocate of the strenuous life. On
“the battle-field of human history,” he pronounced in his 1891 essay
“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” it is “the strenuous type
of character” who will triumph over the easygoing personality (MPML
161). James shared Roosevelt’s keen sense of the value of courage, ex-
citement, and passion as essential to living the good life.40 Writing to
Frances Rollins Morse the following year, James admits sympathy for
the urge “to celebrate mere vital excitement” as “a protest against hum-
drum solemnity.” But to elevate this experience to “an ideal and a duty,”
as he found Oliver Wendell Holmes’s celebrations of the regenerative
power of soldierly life to do, was “to pervert it altogether” (C 9:184).
The question James’s anti-imperialism poses is not how to purge passion
from political life. It is rather that of how to harness it and redirect it
against violence and war.
Cotkin calls “the noisy ranting of Roosevelt and his jingoist supporters”
that provoked James to understand the political stakes of his conception of
the strenuous life in a new light.41 This section examines James’s biograph-
ical and scientific statements on willing and effort to set the stage for the
examination of his anti-imperialist rescripting of the strenuous life in the
remainder of the chapter.
A twenty-eight-year-old James suffered a life-altering mental and physi-
cal collapse upon returning to Cambridge from his studies abroad in 1870.
The episode left him housebound, with severe eyestrain and other ailments
that would continue to plague him throughout his life. James later con-
ceived of this experience of “soul-sickness” as a crisis of philosophical
confidence.42 At its core were questions of free will and whether or not
the deterministic sciences were correct in their description of nature as a
closed system. In a diary entry from April, James declares to have found a
philosophical resolution to his psychic and physical ailments through read-
ing the works of Charles Renouvier:
the will as a divine spark or ontological kernel of the self, Principles charts
a semiotic of willing in terms of the interplay of habit and effort.45
Living beings are “bundles of habits” (PP 1:109). Habits are learned
structures of action that a body performs in response to cues from its
environment. As learned, they represent a latent level of intelligent
decision-making that agents are constantly exercising. This intelligence
is latent in the sense that habits are seldom consciously chosen or willed.
The defining feature of habitual conduct is that it is exercised with fluid-
ity and ease precisely because it is not consciously calculated. “Which
valve of my double door opens first? Which way does my door swing?
etc. I cannot tell the answer; yet my hand never makes a mistake” (PP
1:120). As this example suggests, conduct is the result of the coordinated
activity of bodily systems, functions, and parts working together. The
complexity of such an operation attests to the latent intelligence that is
always operative in habit. Habits are a sort of memory through which
past lessons and solved problems carry into the present in the felicity of
unreflective action.
The force of habit explains much of human conduct. Even social
roles, institutions, and forms of hierarchy are reproduced in the habits
individuals passively adopt. “Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of
society, its most precious conservative agent” (PP 1:125. See GR, TD
91–93). This conservative agency comes to a limit when the self is faced
with either a novel situation or feels the imposition of conflicting de-
mands. In these moments of impasse, the will must focus in on only
one among competing possibilities. “The essential achievement of the
will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to ATTEND to a difficult
object and hold it fast before the mind” (PP 2:1166). This is not the will
as an original source or font. James says that willing involves attention
and effort to signal that the will is itself always responding to disposi-
tions and incipient actions that seek to find discharge. He describes it
alternatively as a “permission” that allows a drive to find discharge,
or as a quota of energy we can attach to a certain idea to allow it to
trump its competitors in becoming an external act (PP 1:122).46 If the
motor function that results from this cathexis helps the body adapt to
its environment, it becomes repeated and with time becomes learned as
a new habit. In the same diary entry from 1870 where he describes his
choice to will, James prescribes himself the task of developing this sort
of habitual second nature as part of his recovery. The entry continues,
“Principiis obsta—Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate
initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I
will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in Anschauungen, but in ac-
cumulated acts of thought lies salvation” (LWJ 1:148). Habituation is a
tapestry woven through a lifetime of willed effort.
Habit proceeds in a mood of ease; willing is essentially a feeling of
tenseness.47 Those moments where we feel intense resistance to overcome
are those where our actions are most conscious and so those instances
where we feel that we are making our most authentic contributions to
the world. Unlike the functional but feelingless routines of habit, willing
is an affect of power that signals our own creative capacity to overcome
the world’s resistance. James locates a minor drama of psychic heroism
in this agonism between habit and will, between numbness and feeling.
The twin cravings for order and diversity described in “The Sentiment of
Rationality” mirror these twin pressures of habit and will. When the crav-
ing for order and ease is satisfied, we sink into “a sort of anaesthetic state”
(SR 58). We need this numb feeling of ease as a source of fluency in our
thinking, to economize psychic energy and focus on particular tasks. But
so too, then, do we want the feeling of energy that comes with challenge.
Where fluency numbs the sensorium, conflict and resistance intensify it.
James gives the example of breathing to illustrate this point:
This dialectic of habit and will informs James’s view that conflict can be
a good of moral life to be encouraged rather than a problem to be solved.
Experiences of distress, friction, and conflict summon forth the power of
will that allow individuals to break through habit’s torpid crust. James
calls such experiences “seriousness,” “which means the willingness to live
with energy, though energy brings pain” (SR 73). Genuine individuality
resides in such experiences of serious living; or, as he will call it later,
in the strenuous life. Through the experience of willing, the self is most
keenly in touch with its own powers and potential. Borrowing a term from
Stanley Cavell, we can describe the strenuous life as an episode of moral
perfectionism, a form of self-fulfillment where the self transcends its own
boundaries to be truer to unrealized possibilities.48 What Cavell calls the
drama of perfectionism lies in the tensions between habit and will, be-
tween a self achieved and a self yet to come. The self finds the power to
motivate morality in the vital feeling of constriction and confidence.
In his introduction to an edited volume of James’s writings, Horace
Kallen presents James’s “own personal struggle and salvation” as represen-
tative of the broader moral and intellectual struggles of American society
during his lifetime. Just as James found the courage to will his own ther-
apy, Gilded Age America found relief from the devitalizing stagnancy of a
European genteel tradition through the salvation of its pioneer spirit. “For
the pioneer and his faith in his adventure dominated what was living in the
America wherein James had come to the fullness of his power.”49 James’s
psychology was deeply tied to the melancholic longing for freedom and
renewal that defined the Gilded Age. But where figures like Holmes and
Roosevelt saw pioneer mastery as the source of regeneration from decline,
James sought to inflect this melancholia into a distinctively moral experi-
ence of strenuousness. Talks to Teachers and The Varieties of Religious
Experience, two books written in the aftermath of the annexation, stress
effort rather than conquest to pacify the urge for renewal and put it to work
for anti-imperial purposes.
together as two examples of how self-discipline and ascetic control can re-
lease incredible powers of will.53 Both represent a vision of masculine self-
control at odds with the conformist docility of success culture. “Does not,
for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes
so large a portion of the ‘spirit’ of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy
and unmanliness? … Are there not hereabouts some points of application
for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?” (VRE 291). Like James’s
gendering of success as a “bitch-goddess” discussed in the previous chap-
ter, what is at stake in the eclipse of individuality is a practice of freedom
that is distinctively masculine.
Varieties presents the soldier and the saint as two antitheses to big-
ness’s luxurious emasculation. It states this equivalence, however, pre-
cisely to resist the republican turn to violent renewal. James attempts
to draw this cleavage by illustrating the proximity between saintliness
proper and its “corruption by excess” (VRE 271). The impulsive consti-
tution of the saint can go to extremes where it is not properly balanced
by the inhibitions of reflection. As Reinhold Niebuhr warns of applying
religious insight to political life: “Religion draws the bow of life so taut
that it either snaps the string (defeatism) or overshoots the mark (fanati-
cism and asceticism).”54 Defeatism snaps the string when religious faith
abandons the affairs of this world for the promise of the next. Fanaticism
breaks the bow when it attempts to remake the profane in the image of
the sacred. James describes this fanatic excess as an idolatry that shows
devotion through acts of self-sacrifice and punishment of the deity’s ene-
mies. It is this fanaticism that “churches with imperialistic policies” have
conspired to cultivate into a source of persecution and religious hatred
(VRE 274). “The saintly temper is a moral temper,” James observes, “and
a moral temper has often to be cruel” (VRE 279). Religious violence is
the result of institutions that have harnessed this agonistic dimension of
saintly devotion and put it to work in the service of antagonistic dogma-
tism. Saintliness proper, by contrast, is some balanced mix of fanatical
yeses and theopathic nos. Saintliness displays a fragile equilibrium of
the moral and the energetic, the habitual and the willful. James calls this
balance “intellect.” Varieties never defines the normative terms of saint-
liness or lays out the appropriate principles worthy of devotion. Instead,
the book collects examples of what such a balance might mean through
a historical survey of the saintly virtues of charity, purity, love of God,
and asceticism.
No set of rules or a doctrinal creed can define who is or is not a saint.
The saint is exemplary and is known by his practical effects on others.
Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead
of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and
are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the
midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of
the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but
for them would lie forever dormant. (VRE 285)
The saint performs a kind of heroic masculinity that, as James puts it,
animates and impregnates the world with possibilities. This is an active
and voluntarist self, but the moral animation he performs is not one of
molding others to his measure. The passage’s sexual language suggests
that the moral force of the saint depends on his relationship to an audi-
ence. It is through this relationship of example and reception that the
saint works a kind of moral provocation. The other must receive him
as an incitation to self-transformation. The soldier, by contrast, simply
demands conformity and destroys. The saint treats others as morally
worthy of respect, regardless of their actual station or moral conduct, and
so “they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed
them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation”
(VRE 285).
The saint is a force of prefigurative provocation rather than authoritative
instruction. A comparison with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of great
men is helpful here.55 Like great men, saints are “lenses through which we
read our own minds.”56 To say that we can read our own minds is not to
say that the saint offers us a diagnosis of our moral condition, like a psy-
choanalyst would of our real but inaccessible unconscious. This kind of
naming does not emancipate but rather stultifies individuality by imposing
new labels on the self. “True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate,
and add new sense.”57 The saint’s new sense, then, is not a lesson plan to
digest. It is a provocation to self-reflection that brings the individual back
to his self-reliant judgment.
the edifying lectures and educational programs, the good cheer, the order-
liness, and “perpetually running soda-water fountains” that Chautauqua
has to offer (WMLS 152). It is an image of perfect peace and equality, a life
of relaxation without poverty or crime. “You have, in short, a foretaste of
what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and
no dark corners” (WMLS 152). When he describes Chautauqua’s “atmos-
phere of success,” James is underlining the class-character of this event for
his audience. This is a bourgeois enclosure captured by the idea that the
good life is a matter of commercial stability and leisure alone.
As he departs from Chautauqua, James is overwhelmed by an intense
hunger for violence. “Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial
and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set
the balance right again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-
rate, this goodness too uninspiring” (WMLS 152). James is disgusted with
“the atrocious harmlessness of all things” at Chautauqua. It offers nothing
to “the brute animal in man” but the mawkish excitement of a soda foun-
tain. As James’s sense of contempt swells, he comes to see in Chautauqua
something more than the stifling decorum of a small group of middle-class
campers. It becomes a horrifying image of the banality of “all the ideals
for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, human-
ity, and order” (WMLS 153).
Here is the melancholic rhetoric of luxurious decline. A commercial
society grows flabby in its narcissistic obsessions, and the correction is a
purging experience of violence to “set the balance right.” James, however,
does not advocate violence. He sets himself the hermeneutical task of un-
derstanding why men like him feel this pull toward violent regeneration.
Where does this feeling come from and what does it signify? The essay
frames this question as a philosophical puzzle, but in doing so James him-
self performs a process of self-critical examination for his audience. He
introspectively turns on his own experience of antimodernist resentment in
order to provoke his readers to reflect cautiously on their own judgments.
The source of James’s discontent with Chautauqua stems from its lack
of “moral style.” What is missing is the “element of precipitousness, so to
call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger” (WMLS 153).
The pursuit of safety and comfort has led the Chautauquans to create for
themselves a hermetically sealed “middle class paradise” where there is
no opportunity for “human nature in extremis” (WMLS 152, 154). Life
at Chautauqua is lived as if in a state of permanent habit. The banality of
leisure life assures its residents that they will never be challenged or pro-
voked in their settled convictions, and so never have to actively interrogate
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing—the marriage,
namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, cour-
age, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—And whatever or
wherever that life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage
to take place. (WMLS 166)
the act and imposes certain obligations on an actor, the legitimacy of faith
can only ever be decided retrospectively. It is a commitment that could
prove wrongheaded, but it is only through a risky pursuit in action that its
validity is put to the test. James pursues the question of how to conceptual-
ize the experience of being moved by such a faith in his studies in psychol-
ogy and in his moral writings, most famously in “The Will to Believe.”
This same phenomenology of acting on faith lies at the heart of the ideal
of civic courage that James puts forward in his oration in particular and
in his anti-imperialism more generally. While Saint-Gaudens’s monument
positions Shaw high above his men like the very image of a commanding
ideal, James’s depiction of Shaw is more ordinary and profane. The oration
upset the event’s celebration of martial hero worship by presenting Shaw’s
moral conviction as a faith that stuttered forth in the course of his short
and tragic life.
In describing Shaw’s conviction as “stuttering,” I mean to highlight the
ways that faith always involves a dimension of hesitation and self-doubt
that is overlooked when conviction is figured as acting on command. I
borrow this notion of the stutter from Gilles Deleuze, a fellow traveler
of Jamesian pragmatism, to flesh out James’s conception.10 To stutter (de
arriver à bégayer) is a manner of speaking that builds relations between
words in a fashion that disrupts their natural flow and connection. It is a
glitch or skip that breaks up the continuity of a process. Deleuze portrays
the stutter as a literary “device” or “formula” for putting words in varia-
tions that modulate a language and release untapped possibilities for ex-
pression that the rules of syntax preclude. By portraying conviction as a
stutter, this chapter means to highlight the ways that practical reason can
become punctuated by variations of hesitation and self-doubt that trans-
form the ethical quality of conduct. A stuttering conviction, unlike both
relativism and moral absolutism, can be at once principled and reflexive,
held passionately but not blindly.
Michael Oakeshott once recommended that political theory would do
well to stop thinking of moral principles as fixed criteria and instead think
of them as the “prevailing winds which agents take account of in sailing
their several courses.”11 James’s account of stuttering conviction makes a
similar recommendation, but insists on taking a greater recognition of the
morally relevant degrees of turbulence along these streams. A stuttering
hesitation does not need to mean a refusal to act. It is rather an ebb in the
ongoing flow of action. This is an image of conviction as a process, with
both a history of emergence in experience and a potential source of con-
flict with other commitments in a concrete present as they give way to a
creative future. The trope of the stutter captures both these dimensions
of James’s conceptions of faith. It is a commitment that emerges in the
course of lived experience, rather than an obligation that follows from a
philosophical justification. Furthermore, it is a way of cautiously relating
to oneself as always open to potential correction and surprise. Grasping
James’s radically empiricist conception of conviction decenters the intel-
lectualist demand that the strength of one’s convictions must be correlated
to the depth of their foundations. At the same time, as we will see in the
following chapter, James’s presentation of Shaw as an exemplar of stutter-
ing conviction and moral courage illustrates again both the power and the
problems of a social criticism rooted in the reworking of national idioms
of masculinity, strenuousness, and the nation-state.
In 1891 James published what Gerald Myers describes as “his only sys-
tematic essay in ethics,” “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.”12
The essay’s declared aim is nothing less than a demonstration of the im-
possibility of “an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance”
(MPML 141). Denying the possibility of a philosophical morality is not an
argument for moral skepticism, however. Both skepticism and philosophy
are two sides of the same coin in so far as they both share monism’s intel-
lectualist prejudice that says morality must be either a system of absolute
values or nothing at all. Morality and moral reflection become meaningful
only where properly understood as aspects of the social reality of human
experience. In seeking to prove or disprove moral claims in advance of ex-
perience itself, both philosophy and skepticism fall victim to what James
calls “absolutism.”
The essay proposes a thought experiment to demonstrate the implausi-
bility of any philosophical justification of absolute value. Imagine a world
devoid of sentient life. In this “absolutely material world,” there may exist
chemical and material objects but no spectator or divinity to watch over
or judge them. James asks you now to consider whether “there be any
sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another”
(MPML 145). Such a proposition would make little sense precisely because
we would have to ask the further question, better for whom? Without an
interested agent who can be affected for better or worse in this world, it
makes no sense to pass evaluative judgments about its content. Now com-
pare this insentient world with a second world of a different material and
chemical makeup, but still devoid of conscious life. Can you judge one
of these worlds as better than the other? The philosophers weighing this
question may have their own private interests in preferring one to the other,
but these interests are distortions of the experiment because they introduce
precisely what the question is meant to exclude—namely, some agent’s
value-laden point of view. The inability to make evaluative judgments in
either context demonstrates the impossibility of finding moral values inde-
pendent of human experience. “Goodness, badness, and obligation must be
realized somewhere in order to really exist. … Their only habitat can be a
mind that feels them” (MPML 145; emphasis in original).
After demonstrating the inability to speak about moral phenomena out-
side of experience, James extends the thought experiment to illustrate the
essentially social character of experience itself. Add just one conscious
thinker to the material world. The conscious self who inhabits this uni-
verse of “moral solitude” may reasonably introduce judgments of better
and worse or good and bad (MPML 146). Some ideals may strike his fancy
more strongly than others, but the only source of moral challenge he will
face is that of maintaining a logical order among his chosen ideals. The
moral life of this solitary inhabitant is entirely concerned with the spec-
ulative pursuit of consistency and the strategic pursuit of maximization.
He will never experience a genuinely moral dilemma or face a tragic de-
cision between competing values as all values are commensurate to him.
Now introduce a second inhabitant to this universe with her own ideals
and desires. The possible consequences that might follow are many. One
possibility is that each thinker studiously avoids the others and keeps their
private evaluations of good and bad to themselves. Where the “same object
is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view which one
or that one of the thinkers takes,” moral values multiply in such a way that
the pursuit of moral unity becomes impossible (MPML 146). Each party
has their own tastes with no common standard that applies to both. The
earlier moral universe becomes split into a “moral dualism” (MPML 146).
Add yet more agents, and you now have “pluralism” in which “individual
minds are the measure of all things, and in which no ‘objective’ truth, but
only a multitude of subjective opinions, can be found” (MPML 147).
In this world, should one party ever meet another and come to learn
about their conflicting evolutions, the result will not likely be the happy
admission that all ideals are relative in the end. Because each seeks only
a rational interpretation of his or her experience of value, both sides will
claim that their own order of values is somehow more authoritative or
accurate than those of their fellow inhabitants. To his ideals “the others
ought to yield, so that system and subordination may reign” (MPML 147;
emphasis in original). At this point in the experiment, James enjoins his
readers to see that invoking the language of rational obligation to correct
the other’s ideals is bound to fail. Just as there are no values independent
of sentient beings who judge things valuable, there are no obligations apart
from those vitally felt by individuals in a pluralistic universe. This is again
not to say that moral argument and obligation are impossible, but that any
obligation must arise from the values one does hold rather than be imposed
like a command from above.
there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there
is a claim” (MPML 148). Where values are plural and incommensurate, so
too are the obligations that actors expect and demand from one another.
There is no reason to presume that one experience of value is any more
authoritative than any other within this Babel of competing claims and
obligations. Actors are faced with the burden of making a decision in the
absence of any transcendent moral point of view. Any decision will be a
partial one, but a decision must be made if action is to go on. As Isaiah
Berlin echoed James’s pluralistic conclusion some decades later, “We are
doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”14
Philosophy’s refusal to acknowledge that essentially indeterminate
quality of moral experience is a testament to the craving for certainty that
James analyzed earlier in “The Sentiment of Rationality.” Like the abso-
lute idealism that James diagnosed as the fruit of such a craving in met-
aphysics, its consequence in ethics is a drive to moral absolutism. Moral
absolutism is the monistic thesis that all moral values can be known with
an unflinching certainty, and that a plurality of values can in the final
instance be reconciled into a logical, coherent system. Moreover, abso-
lutism views value disagreements as factual errors in representing the
one true order of the moral system. James’s thought experiment gives
his readers reasons to reject this thesis on genealogical grounds, but his
more powerful argument is pragmatic. Moral absolutism holds dangerous
consequences for politics.
“When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical appli-
cation to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscien-
tious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted
than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear” (WTB 23).15 As we saw in
chapter 2, James saw such absolutism at work in the paternalistic discourse
of national “duties” in the Philippines. Under the influence of moral abso-
lutism, the architects of American imperialism approached their colonial
subjects as objects of moral correction rather than as individuals with their
own reasonable desires, values, and ideals. “Roosevelt and the McKinley
party make one understand the French revolution, so long an enigma to
our English imaginative power,” he writes of the abstract and absolutist
rhetoric of Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech. “How could such bald ab-
stractions as Reason and Rights of Man, spelt with capitals, and ignoring
all the concrete facts of human nature, ever have let loose such a torrent of
slaughter?” (GRO 164; see also PT 156, PA 161–62).
James’s critique of absolutism again moves in temperamental terms to
explain the psychic sources of dogmatism rather than to debunk absolutism
on epistemic grounds. Where “we are all such absolutists by instinct,” the
moral problem is not the fact of abstraction, but the psychic drive toward
abstractionism (WTB 22).16 A moral philosophy that would guard against
the temptations of abstractionism would be one that could satisfy such a
craving while also tending to the craving for particularity, contingency,
and change. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” offers no such
full moral philosophy. Indeed, the essay is a warning against the very urge
to articulate any such moral system. What positive conclusion James does
draw, however, is that the most desirable moral ideals would be those that
“prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number
of other ideals are destroyed” (MPML 155; emphasis in original). An em-
pirical moral philosophy so conceived would be less a doctrine than a
manner of orienting oneself toward a world of competing and conflicting
moral ideals.17 Attending to the ideal while not losing sight of its tragic
“pinch” means embracing principles contingently, being ready to revise
them without loosening a grip on their passionate meaning in the present
moment. James’s thought experiment nudges his readers in the direction of
such an empiricist temperament by collecting a series of reminders about
the inevitable trace of subjectivity submerged in claims to moral abstrac-
tion. His pluralism presents a Darwinian account of life as a project of
experimental problem-solving where our moral terms are tools like any
other whose value resides in their ability to help us cope with a dynamic
environment. The political result is a skeptical politics that promotes tol-
eration as an inhibition against cruelty. “Hands off,” goes James’s ethical
motto, “neither the whole of truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any
single observer” (OCB 149). To bring about a society where each member
tolerates the practical and speculative differences of their neighbors would
constitute “empiricism’s glory” (WTB 33).
retrospectively. If he has the faith that he can make it, he will be “nerved”
to give it his all. But if he hesitates and waits for further evidence, his fate
is sealed.
“The Will to Believe”—or the will to make-believe, as one of James’s
interlocutors dubbed it—has been charged with everything from wishful
thinking, to irrationalism, to sacrilege for its conclusion that the existence
or nonexistence of God is itself such a question that can be decided by
the believer’s leap.21 The most politically damning criticism of the essay,
however, is that leveled by Bertrand Russell. Russell’s 1909 essay, simply
titled “Pragmatism,” presents James’s notion of truth as a characteristi-
cally American statement of the will to power.22 To say that questions of
truth can be reduced to a willful decision is to hand philosophy over to
“the worship of force,” leaving “ironclads and Maxim guns” as the sole
arbiters of moral and political disagreement. In its flight from foundation,
Russell concludes, pragmatism reinstates precisely the will to truth it seeks
to escape: “Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the
surface of the planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels
confident in progress, and unaware of non-human limitations to human
power.”23
For Russell, acting on faith must either fall into an irrational form of
decisionism or become recuperated as a deliberative conclusion.24 This
framing of the text and the lack of a third option, one where decision is not
simply the triumph of an invincible will but a conclusion that is punctuated
with doubt, finitude, and indeterminacy, begs the question of Russell’s in-
tellectualist ultimatum. It is precisely this third option, however, a space
between decision and deliberation, or better, a stuttering incipiency of their
imbrication, that James articulates so insightfully in his essay. That said,
the essay’s choice of the Alpine climber to illustrate this point does James
a disservice and invites Russell’s intellectualist oversimplification. The
mountaineer exists in what is described in “The Moral Philosopher and
the Moral Life” as a universe of moral solitude. He is alone in his decision,
unencumbered by the consequences his actions might hold for others, and
isolated from the surprising encounter with other bodies and ideals. The
example’s force stems from its ability to satisfy the philosophical desire for
a clean instance of willing rather than a messy, pluralist one.25 A pluriverse
too can be a place of forced and momentous decisions. Attending to how
faith works in an encumbered context starts to blur the opposition between
intellect and action that James’s imagination of the Alps facilitates.
The heroic character of the mountaineer’s decision gives credence
to Russell’s description of pragmatism as a characteristically American
“The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their pictur-
esqueness,” James observes as he begins his speech about the life and
death of Robert Gould Shaw (RGS 64). Similar to the depiction of the
strenuous Hungarian workers in “What Makes Life Significant?,” James’s
oration places Shaw’s heroism within the common competencies of ordi-
nary individuals. He was not a hero who stood above his time. The story
of Shaw’s life and death is that of a compromised individual who wrestled
with his own faith as much as he wrestled with the duty of his office. “The
very lack of external complication in the history of these soldiers is what
makes them represent with such typical purity the profound meaning of
the Union cause” (RGS 66). Neither weak-willed evasion of the strenuous
life nor a heroic act of decision, the life and death of Robert Gould Shaw
serves as an exemplar of moral courage’s double gesture of modest hesita-
tion and daring self assertion.
The faith that James portrays stuttering forth in Shaw’s short life is a com-
mitment to democratic equality. He fought for “our American religion …
the faith that a man requires no master to take care of him, and that
common people can work out their salvation well enough together if left
to try” (RGS 66–67). This national religion is a faith because the demo-
cratic equality it professes is not something established by philosophical
deduction or objective evidence. It is instead a claim that has to be enacted
to become true. To call this faith “democratic” means that the claims of
equality need to be politically made through world-building action rather
than philosophically found in the leisure of armchair reflection. This con-
structive dimension of equality is clearly relevant to the mission of the
that the feeling of confidence in one’s faith (the me) always bears traces of
the embodied self’s relations with others (the not-me).33
James draws out conviction’s stutter by foregrounding its emergence in
lived experience. It is no knock-down argument or divine revelation that
sways Shaw’s decision. It is instead the horizontal experience of living,
training, eating, and fighting alongside the not-me of black soldiers that
makes a democratic faith take hold in his actions. The momentous quality
of Shaw’s decision to fight with the Fifty-fourth to the bitter end did not
take place in a moment like the mountaineer’s sudden leap or Principles’
heroic mode of decision. The disarticulation of a web of prejudicial habits
by the claims of a new faith is a slow process whereby willing and hes-
itation fold over each other in an experimental way. Like the modes of
decision on the spectrum between rational scrutiny and heroic will, con-
victions emerge neither from sufficient evidence alone nor from a forced
moment of decision. James narrates the stuttering emergence of conviction
as a “back door and not a front door process” that begins with a “subtle
brain-born feeling of discord” as a new faith clashes with one’s received
practices (PP 2:1266; MPML 144). The encounter with these soldiers and
bearing witness to their own faith puts a principle to work on Shaw and his
own received habits of racial ambivalence.
This horizontal and worldly dimension of conviction then works in
transaction with the vertical dimension whereby something abstract, like
a democratic faith in the equal capabilities of all persons, becomes more
concrete as it sinks into embodied patterns of habit and feeling. “Life is
one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiv-
ing cases, and opposite conclusions promoted by our instinctive perception
of them as individual facts” (PP 2:1266). The mind struggles between the
new and the old in order to coordinate words and deeds. But this process
is not intellectual alone. It also goes on across multiple registers of feeling
as they incipiently develop new ways of enacting convictions below the
explicit register of consciousness.
James’s oration takes this back-door perspective on the question of
pragmatism’s place for principles so as to shift the issue from the front-
door question of what principles command actions to the pluralist one
of how an experimental circuit of ideas, feelings, and actions occasion
creative change. In reframing the issue in these terms, however, James
risks making too little out of Shaw’s convictions. If Shaw’s faith is not
a first principle but rather a feeling that strikes him as a consequence
of his environment, then little place is left for agency on this account.
“Conclusions grow on us like fungus,” warns Nietzsche, “one morning
they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and
grey. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the
plants that grow in him!”34 Is James’s Shaw merely the soil of a faith or
an agent who cultivates a political sensibility?
To answer this question, we can return to Saint-Gaudens’s memorial
itself. Shaw is seated on horseback high above his men, ready to issue
commands down to passive soldiers below. But on James’s account, it is
not that Shaw exercises sovereign power of command; rather, he finds
himself being worked on by the encounter with others. The monument’s
depiction of Shaw riding calmly amid the steady march of the men also
captures the sense of the entanglement and interdependence that James’s
oration foregrounds. Shaw appears carried along by the movement of
the soldiers as they march for their equality, and yet his calm demeanor
suggests that he is not simply passively swept away by the event.35 When
seen from this perspective, the memorial’s positional distinction of Shaw
from the men is not a statement of hierarchy. It is instead a portrayal of
the ways that faith comes to move an individual, while ultimate responsi-
bility for moral deliberation remains with the self. Here faiths and bodies
encounter each other along a horizontal dimension and the vertical rela-
tionship of sovereign command is made to stammer or break up.
The influence of such encounters on the self undermines the eques-
trian pose’s image of sovereign agency. James finds an alternative
image of the willful self in the shadow of this posture that is at once
more precarious and agentic. The contours of Shaw’s lonely courage
emerge from the depiction of his stammering indecision and stutter-
ing conviction as two moments of practical reason. James writes in
the preface to The Will to Believe that the aim of his doctrine of faith
is to teach “courage weighted by responsibility” (TWTB 8). Courage
means confronting risk, most profoundly risk to life and limb, in the
service of ideals one holds dear. James’s depiction of Shaw points to
two elements of what a strenuous embrace of risk could mean. The
first is that Shaw staked his life on a faith that he was aware was just
that—a contingent and revisable faith. James returns to the contin-
gency of faith with his depiction of Shaw’s emerging conviction in
order to call his readers to the courage to trust their convictions in
the acknowledgment of their essential contestability. This is a cour-
age directed inward toward the risks of choosing a self rather than
outward toward the threat of bullets and bombs (RGS 72–73). Moral
courage demands something more than the willingness to confront
death in the service of the community, as Douglass seems to suggest.
By the end of his life, James came to describe his doctrine of the will
to believe in terms of the slow process of climbing the rungs of a ladder
rather than making one dramatic leap. He writes in the conclusion of A
Pluralistic Universe, “A conception of the world arises in you somehow,
no matter how. Is it true or not? you ask.”
Climbing the faith ladder rung-by-rung captures the gradual and hesitant
experience of coming to will a belief as your own. Belief is the result of
experimentation with something that comes to you, “somehow, no matter
how.” It is not the depth of the belief’s foundation that explains the fidelity
with which it is held. It is rather the experience of tarrying with the belief,
of letting it stutter forth in practice, that the blind something of impulse
transforms into a passionate faith in action.
James’s reconceptualization of conviction as a faith rather than a com-
mand offers a response to critics like Menand, who charge pragmatism’s
account of belief with failing to motivate passionate action and sacrifice.
At the same time, James’s example of Shaw as the beacon of this stutter-
ing faith may provide something less than a compelling image of sacri-
ficial commitment. Within the hagiography of Civil War memory, Shaw
appears decidedly less moving an icon of political conviction than another
figure more commonly associated with personal sacrifice for the sake of
moral principle: John Brown.36 Like Shaw, Brown fought and died for the
abolition of slavery. But Brown never stuttered. He saw himself as a holy
soldier on a prophetic mission to destroy the blight of slavery. His moral
absolutism, moreover, had no qualms about using violent means for moral
ends, even if that meant plunging the entire nation into civil war. What
gave him this strength, as Henry David Thoreau famously eulogized him,
was the way Brown wore his moral principles as “a kind of armor” against
the world.37 Neither humiliation, nor blows, nor arguments could sway him
in his moral mission.
Thoreau’s hagiography of Brown’s moral heroism raises a deep chal-
lenge to the kind of stuttering James defends. In conclusion, I want to sug-
gest, contra Thoreau, that a different lesson can be drawn from the death of
John Brown, not about the necessity of principles but rather about the inev-
itably tragic quality of acting on faith. This is a lesson that James’s former
student W. E. B. Du Bois draws in his 1909 biography, John Brown.38 Du
Bois’s Brown is a prophetic figure, sent as God’s chosen messenger to do
justice with the sword to a nation of sinners. He did not make arguments
for the justice of his cause. Rather, “he himself was an argument.” Du Bois
reconstructs Brown’s early life, his bloody campaign in Kansas, and his
capture at Harpers Ferry, and comes to the conclusion that “John Brown
was right.” Brown was right because he saw that morality must triumph
over might. And he was also right because, as Du Bois repeats throughout
the biography, the “price of repression” is always greater than the cost of
liberty, even if that cost must be paid in blood.39
Du Bois raises up Brown as an exemplar without denying the profound
limits of his example.40 This is nowhere more evident than in his discussion
of Frederick Douglass’s refusal to follow Brown in his attack on Harpers
Ferry. Douglass thought the plan suicidal and sure to fail. He “believed in
John Brown but not in his plan.” A disagreement about strategies is not
especially morally telling, given that Douglass too believed that only the
armed force of the federal government could break the grip of slavery.
But as Du Bois presents their disagreement, it was about more than strat-
egy alone. It was about perspective. Douglass was of a different tempera-
ment than Brown, but more importantly, “he knew, as only a Negro slave
can know, the tremendous might and organization of the slave power.”
Escaped slaves like Douglass had just begun to enjoy their hard-won free-
dom and were not about to sacrifice this for the sake of a risky plan. It was
from this perspective that Douglass knew that it would be black slaves and
freemen who would bear the brunt of the slaveholders’ violent retributions.
He could not help “but feel that he [Brown] was about to rivet the fetters
more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.”41
In recounting their disagreement, Du Bois does not come down squarely
in favor of either man. The conclusion he draws from this difficult weigh-
ing of principles and consequences is that both men were right. Brown was
right that radical action had to take place and that further reflection would
only lead to greater oppression; Douglass was right to be wary of Brown’s
zealotry and his blindness to the consequences of his deeds. On the page
following the climactic chapter on Brown’s capture at Harpers Ferry, Du
Bois poses the question to his readers: How would you respond to the ap-
pearance of a moral zealot like Brown in your midst?
Must we follow out the drear, dread logic of surrounding facts, as did the
South, even if they crucify a clean and pure soul, simply because consistent
allegiance to our cherished, chosen ideal demands it? If we do, the shame
will brand our latest history. Shall we hesitate and waver before his clear
white logic, now helping, how fearing to help, now believing, now doubt-
ing? Yes, this we must do so long as the doubt and hesitation are genuine;
but we must not lie. If we are human, we must thus hesitate until we know
the right. How shall we know? This is the Riddle of the Sphinx.42
Du Bois calls this a riddle to underscore how moral principles alone do not
exhaust burdens of political action. On Du Bois’s account, Brown’s passion
goes hand in hand with a willful blindness to the conditions of pluralism
in which he acts. This is why his action is necessarily a tragic one: not be-
cause it ends poorly for the antagonist, but because it displays the ways that
doing good seem to always also involve doing wrong.
In a thoughtful reflection on Du Bois’s John Brown, Lawrie Balfour
argues that the book does not aim to either justify or denounce Brown;
rather, it seeks to remind its readers of the tragic nature of political action.
In Du Bois’s hands, “the lesson of Brown’s violence is not an answer but
a question,” she explains.43 Bearing witness to conviction’s tragic “pinch,”
as James calls it in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” hedges
against the evasions of moral responsibility that sustain white supremacy.
But so too is it a way of reminding his audience of the unavoidable, and
perhaps even impossible, dimensions of risk and courage that justice de-
mands of them. Du Bois addresses the biography to the racial entangle-
ments of a present audience in order to teach Americans how to fold both a
moment of hesitation and a sense of tragedy into their convictions without
sapping their courage to strike against injustice.
It is a similar lesson in stuttering James sought to teach with his ora-
tion before the audience seated in the Boston Music Hall that afternoon in
1897. Standing before the assembled audience of military dignitaries, poli-
ticians, and soldiers, James’s refusal to present Shaw as a war hero upset
the nationalist moralism that the Decoration Day celebration presumed.
James puts himself at risk in contesting the notion that martial valor is the
essence of civic virtue. But in his frank speech, he also trusts his audience
to meet his leap halfway by hearing his call to stammer in their convic-
tions, that is, to hear the danger of violence and conflict that resides in
such a public celebration of moral righteousness. Rhetoric scholar Paul
Stob describes James’s performance as an act of “confrontational ther-
apy” with his audience: “[H]e wanted to separate them from what they
thought they know about the 54th—i.e., what they thought they know
about themselves.”44
A stuttering countenance of both risk and trust is not merely an eth-
ical posture, although it is also that. It is a practice of political engage-
ment in the surprising and unpredictable conditions of a pluralistic
universe. Attending to how political convictions come to stutter, stam-
mer, murmur, and quiver cuts across the forced dichotomies of princi-
ple or project, contingency or conviction, pluralism and partisanship,
that frame much discussion of pragmatism and political theory. In their
place, James opens up new ways to see how hesitation and political de-
cision can felicitously fold over one another, and how agency resides
in more subtle and imperceptible connections with others than the lan-
guage of sovereign decision presumes.
Santayana makes note of this episode for the striking naiveté of James’s
distraught reaction. “Why was William James so much upset by an event
that the victims of it could take so calmly?” he asks. “Because he held a
false moralistic view of history, attributing events to the conscious ideals
and free will of individuals.”2
127
the all-too-human fear of uncertainty and craving for order lurking within
pragmatism’s political rhetoric of democratic faith. Like monism’s posit-
ing of an édition de luxe above experience that remains untarnished by
the “the various finite editions” of the order below, “full of false readings,
distorted and mutilated each in its own way,” exceptionalism’s shining ab-
straction on the hill called “America” bears little resemblance to the brutal
and violent imperialist history of the United States of America (P 124).
Abstractions speak to human cravings and existential wants to give order
to experience and provide a sense of “feeling at home.” But being at home
in a pluralistic universe, James argues, is an experience of belonging to
time, not timeless abstractions. Experience’s persistent interruption of our
authoritative abstractions reveals their broken promise and, in doing so,
as we have seen in the previous chapters, frustrates emotional longings
for order. It is not surprising, then, that the practical meaning of abstrac-
tions in practice is an oscillating one, swinging between bellicose rage and
dejected resignation or national optimism and political despair. A false,
moralistic view of history, like that James espoused with his rhetoric of
democratic faith, is a disavowal of the very contingency his pragmatism
aspires to embrace.
Faith, however, need not be lodged in monistic abstractions or fantastic
myths. As James’s political maturation from this episode of catastrophic
awakening to empire in 1898–1899 illustrates, a democratic faith inspired
by a pluralistic sensibility can be tragic without being pessimistic and in-
spiring without being optimistic. Pluralism’s tragic sensibility resists the
seductions of American optimism and its blinding abstractions to allow
history to appear in all its thickness, as James might say (PU 64). James’s
term for this alternative to both optimism and pessimism is meliorism.
Meliorism, like pragmatism, is not a theory but an orientation. It “treats
salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility,
which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the
actual conditions of salvation become” (P 137). Unlike optimism, meliorism
takes faith as a hypothesis to test through experience rather than fidelity
to abstract ideals. Meliorist faith takes progress as possible without deny-
ing the tragedy and loss that progress always entails. Unlike pessimism,
it acknowledges the finitude of human powers to transform reality with-
out denying the need to struggle at their boundaries. Where a democratic
faith bound to allegiance in mythic abstraction blinds actors to reality,
a pluralistic meliorism invites a different orientation towards history and
action. A meliorist faith is a hope for the future lodged in pluralism’s dif-
ficult double-gesture of bearing witness to experiences of suffering, evil,
political questions about race and power in American life, issues and con-
cerns that James and the rest of the pragmatists were largely deaf to.”10
Some readers will find this turn to Du Bois counterintuitive. Dewey’s volu-
minous writings on democratic faith surely provide a more obvious touch-
stone for understanding the politics of pragmatism.11 As I have argued
throughout this book, however, we err when we interpret James’s political
thought as merely an immature predecessor to Dewey’s democratic theory.
Taking Du Bois as a comparison case opens another perspective on the
politics of pragmatism that is occluded by the habitual turn to more famil-
iar examples.
Three important contributions follow from bringing Du Bois rather than
Dewey into the discussion here. The first is that the tragic and conflictual
dimensions of experience, so central to James’s notion of meliorism, are
foregrounded by Du Bois’s doubled-perspective, whereas they are muted
in Dewey’s democratic theory at best, or, worse, absent altogether.12 The
second is that Du Bois at once continues James’s critique of American
imperialism while profoundly deepening it by demonstrating the entan-
glement of empire, history, and race. Third, the tragic faith I reconstruct
through Du Bois raises important challenges for contemporary pragma-
tists and neopragmatists who champion the discourse of democratic faith.
A tragic conception of faith that negotiates the boundaries of hope and de-
spair has been eclipsed by a conception of faith in democracy that comes
dangerously close to the exceptionalist mythos that both James and Du
Bois would warn pragmatists against.
House.28 James most likely encountered Swift’s writings through his 1899
Imperialism and Liberty.29 James cites two lengthy passages from Swift’s
1905 Human Submission to convey his “dissatisfaction” with idealistic op-
timism, a dissatisfaction that James himself confesses to “sympathize with
a good deal” (P 21). The chapter of Human Submission James draws from is
a full-throated indictment of religious optimism. Swift takes aim at James’s
Hegelian colleague, Josiah Royce, with his charge that any philosophy that
seeks to give meaning to suffering works to justify the social injustices at its
source. Against the monistic optimism of the ivory tower, Swift marshals
a catalogue of starvations, suicides, and murders committed by workers
and artisans left destitute and hopeless by their exploitation at the hands
of American capitalists. James cites just two of them. The first is the clerk
John Corcoran, who “to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid” after
an illness that cost him his job left him unable to feed his family (P 22). The
second is the case of a Bohemian laborer in Cleveland who shot his children
before taking his own life. Such horrendous events “cannot be glozed [sic]
over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being,
helplessly existing in their monumental vacuity,” argues Swift (cited in P
22). Monism’s optimistic and ahistorical catalogue of oughts, duties, and
proofs of God’s existence cannot grasp the visceral reality of this suffering.
And worse still, it perversely justifies this suffering as a necessary element
of an essentially just world. Better to be rid of religion, Swift concludes,
than endure the disgrace of rationalizing injustice.
James cites Swift as an example of the tough-m inded temperament
that perpetually clashes with tender-m inded optimism, inviting the con-
clusion that pragmatism will reconcile and mediate this dispute. But
what would it mean to resolve this problem? While the economic and
political conditions that lead these men to such desperate conclusions
can be transformed, the fact of their suffering and death cannot.30 A
transformed economy would not redeem their deaths, let alone recon-
cile or mediate them. The acknowledgment of human suffering as a
limit case for any form of rationalistic optimism is a persistent trope in
James’s writings. Recall that James himself considered suicide in the
depths of his psychic collapse, and this experience of despair left a per-
manent scar on his philosophical thinking.31 Philosophy must do more
than respond to human aspirations and cravings. It also needs to respond
to the depths of human misery and the experiences of powerlessness that
drive persons to take their own lives. In an 1895 essay, “Is Life Worth
Living?,” James writes that in philosophy, as in life, we must remem-
ber that “we are of one substance” with “the whole army of suicides”
who declare life to be not worth living. “The plainest intellectual integ-
rity,—nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget
their case” (LWL 38). James’s deepest and most evocative account of
this fact is found in The Varieties of Religious Experience’s portrait of
the sick s oul. Like Pragmatism, Varieties is structured around the clash
of two temperaments, the optimistic healthy-m inded and the pessimistic
sick-souled. James presents their clash as one that can, in principle, find
reconciled expression in a higher temperament he calls the “twice-born
soul.” The twice-born soul does not resolve human suffering and limita-
tion, however. She affirms experiences of suffering and evil as a source
of strength. Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, a twice-born soul that
bears witness to the limits of human power as a condition of her faith
is a meliorist.
James introduces the healthy-minded temperament in Varieties’ fourth
lecture. The healthy-minded temperament “looks on all things and sees
that they are good” (VRE 78). He feels a sense of inspiring delight at the
very presence of the world with “no element of morbid compunction or
crisis” (VRE 74). James proposes the example of Walt Whitman as the “the
supreme contemporary” of this optimistic faith. Like the “indiscriminate
hurrahing for the Universe” of Leaves of Grass, the healthy-minded soul
sees everything as good and nothing as evil (EC 114). “Evil is a disease;
and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only
adds to the original complaint.” The best cure for this affliction is simply
to turn a blind eye toward the reality of evil “and forget that you ever had
relations with sin” (VRE 109). Healthy-minded optimism is constitutively
blind to the reality of evil.
Optimistic blindness may inspire a sense of religious surrender or com-
fort, but, like a monist’s moral holiday, it provides only a false comfort.
Optimism can only be sustained through willful blindness.
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the
slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded
are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recog-
nize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer
and cleaner and better than the world that really is. (VRE 80–81)
of the sick soul are primarily drawn from the texts of St. Augustine,
Tolstoy, and other European writers. James celebrates the vitalizing power
of “American action” against the torpid passivity of “European introspec-
tion.”34 There is some truth to this claim in terms of how James organizes
his examples, but we would be remiss to conclude, along with Zamir and
pragmatism’s realist critics, that James himself sides with a characteris-
tically American optimism. The conclusion he draws from his compari-
son is in fact just the opposite. The most complete religions are “those in
which the pessimistic elements are the best developed” (VRE 138). Action,
conflict, effort, chance—all the elements of a pluralistic universe James
embraces—are impossible without risk, danger, loss, suffering, and pain.
James must reject optimism as the more shallow of the two temperaments
for its inability to account for the suffering and risk that make life worth
living. These “evil facts,” he argues, “may after all be the best key to life’s
significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels
of truth” (VRE 136).
Varieties progresses in a dialectical manner, from healthy-minded sim-
plicity to its antithesis in sick-souled division, to find a higher synthesis in
the eighth lecture: “The Divided Self and the Process of Its Unification.”
Overcoming the paralyzing powerlessness of the sick soul amounts to
nothing less than an experience of rebirth as a new self. This “twice-born”
soul, who has felt the horrific depths of sick-souled division and yet has
reconstituted herself as a new and more powerful soul, is the protagonist of
Varieties’ middle chapters. James writes of this experience of reunification:
One has tasted the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes
again. The happiness that comes, when any does come … is not the simple
ignorance of evil, but something vastly more complex, including natural
evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block
and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The
process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and
the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems like a second birth, a
deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before. (VRE 131)
The result of this struggle with the existence of evil is not a simple-minded
return to an optimistic temperament. “They had drunk too deeply of the
cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste,” James writes of this twice-born
soul, “and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep” (VRE 155).
This is a chiaroscuro of the cosmos where evil exists alongside good, but
no longer as a crushing existential weight. The reborn soul continues to
does it deny such possibilities either. Pragmatism invites the reader to em-
brace contingency, rather than the monism of optimism or pessimism, as
a source of faith. James’s name for this “attitude in human affairs” is mel-
iorism. “Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It
treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability
the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become” (P 137).
The language of probability here is meant to suggest that judgments con-
cerning the future course of events can be made even in the absence of
certainty. What matters are the “actual conditions of salvation” we attend
to. These conditions may be logical or empirical, but the most important
of them is the reader’s own will to believe. Actions and omissions alike
constitute “one moment in the world’s salvation” (P 137). We each “add
our fiat to the fiat of the creator” and through these acts redirect the future
course of the world (P 140; emphasis in original).
Crucially, the open and uncertain character of a pluralistic universe
that makes action possible also demands humility in the face of the un-
known. No actor is sovereign to rule over such a universe. We add our fiat
to that of the creator, along with the diversity of acts, values, and interests
of our fellow inhabitants of this pluralistic world. Two important conse-
quences follow from this. The first is the limited conception of mastery
it implies. No one fiat is a necessary trump on any other, even the fiat
of God Himself. The second is an acknowledgment of the tragic nature
of salvation. Each fiat realized may contribute to the world’s salvation,
but each world saved is at the cost of alternative possible worlds lost. As
James put this point in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” the
tragedy of the moral life is that some part of the ideal must inevitably
be “butchered” (MPML 154). The meliorist self, like the twice-born soul
who overcomes the experience of evil without denying its reality, can
acknowledge the tragic consequences of action and still affirm it. James
imagines someone asking the meliorist: “Doesn’t the very ‘seriousness’
that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses are part of
it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something per-
manently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?” (P
141). Yes, the meliorist affirms, “[w]hen the cup is poured off, the dregs
are left behind for ever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet
enough to accept” (P 142).
James gives substance to meliorism’s tragic remainders and what it
means to “accept” them in the following quotation. He offers a Greek epi-
gram as an admirable example of the “acceptance of loss as unatoned for,
even though the lost element might be oneself.”
Du Bois sent a copy of The Souls of Black Folk to James when it was
first published in April 1903. The book struck Du Bois’s former teacher
as something of a revelation. In a letter to Sarah Whyman Whitman that
summer, James described it as “a very remarkable literary production—as
mournful as it is remarkable” (C 10:261; see also C 3:242). The impact Du
Bois’s book made on James is clear from his sudden decision to lend his
name to the struggle against lynching in two widely circulated editorials
published that July. James denounced the “epidemic” of lynch mobs and
the collusion of courts and police in perpetuating white terror (EL 173). He
writes that nothing shy of lynching the mob leaders themselves is needed
to forestall a future where “we shall have negro burning in a few years
on Cambridge commons and the Boston public garden” (SN 173). These
strong remarks suggest that reading Souls awoke James to the reality of
American white supremacy. That James, a man who lived through the Civil
War, Reconstruction, and the rise of Southern redemption, could have re-
mained oblivious until this moment of the living legacy of white terror over
black bodies in the United States illustrates the very challenge of melior-
ism’s double gesture that Du Bois tackles in Souls. For Du Bois, a faith in
the future progress of American democracy too often came at the cost of a
strange amnesia concerning the nation’s past—an amnesia that could make
James’s awakening to white supremacy a surprising realization in 1903, no
less than his shocking discovery of American imperialism half a decade
earlier. Recovering faith in the democratic struggle against white suprem-
acy, Du Bois argues, demands confronting the peculiar fusion of this am-
nesiac evasion of history with the idealism of American exceptionalism.36
This recovery of memory against amnesia is announced on the book’s
opening page. The “Forethought” presents Souls as an exercise in recov-
ering “truth hidden” and things “buried.” First among these is what Du
Bois provocatively calls “the strange meaning of being black here in the
dawning of the Twentieth Century.” The reason this experience must be
unburied is that it remains hidden, forgotten, under the weight of an excep-
tionalist myth of the nation’s perpetual progress. “I have seen a land right
merry with the sun,” Du Bois writes of this myth, “where children sing,
the rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton for harvest. And there in
the King’s Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the
traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go.” This veiled figure is the American
Negro, barred like Moses in Kadesh from progress into this land of plent-
itude. The fourteen essays making up Souls are essays in recovery of the
memory of this veiled figure as the grounds for a faith in a future different
from the past. A counter-memory of the past that shatters the amnesia of
the nation’s optimistic and monistic history prepares the way for a genuine
future where both races can travel this road together. “Three centuries’
thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and
how behold a century new for the duty and the deed,” Du Bois writes of
the challenge facing American democracy at the dawn of the new century.
“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”37
The depiction of the problem of the color line as that of donning and es-
caping the veil discloses Du Bois’s central claim about the “strange mean-
ing” of black experience. The veil separating the black self and the white
world is the experience of double consciousness. The black self at once
participates in the white world and is excluded from it. Du Bois describes
the experience of this paradoxical form of inclusive exclusion as one of
self-estrangement, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the
eyes of others, of measuring one’s self by the tape of a world that looks
on in amused contempt and pity.”38 This is an experience of a divided self,
of a consciousness at war with itself. “One ever feels his two-ness—an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps
it from being torn asunder.” This history of the Negro in America is “the
history of this strife,” he explains, “this longing to attain self-conscious
manhood, to merge his double self into a better and true self.” A healing
reconciliation of this divided consciousness would not be the overcoming
of one’s blackness through integrating into the white world, nor the ex-
punging of white consciousness from the black soul. Double consciousness
longs for reconciliation in a proud hyphenization that would “make it pos-
sible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed
and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity
closed roughly in his face.”39 Escape from under the veil segregating these
worlds demands an affirmation, both individually and collectively, and
from both sides of the color line, of the Negro as “a co-worker in the king-
dom of culture.”40
The concept of double consciousness was not unfamiliar in the dis-
course of clinical psychology at the turn of the century. As we have seen
above, it was one that James deployed in Varieties and Principles (see PP
1:200–218; PP 2:200). There has been much ink spilled concerning the
possible influence of James’s psychology on Du Bois’s famous account of
black experience.41 Scholars like Zamir and Adolph Reed Jr. argue that
such comparisons obscure more than they reveal about Du Bois’s concept
of double consciousness; namely, his sociological account of black experi-
ence as a form of alienation. “James’ discussions of double consciousness
or of the divided self in the realms of hysteria or religious experience favor
medicalized diagnoses and remedial strategies that naturalize society in
their stress on the return to healthy equilibrium,” writes Zamir, arguing
against claims for a tight theoretical parallel between their two views of
consciousness. “Du Bois’s psychology, by contrast, is committed to a po-
litical understanding of alienation and a social and historical location of
the self.”42 James differentiates healthy and sick-souled temperaments in
Varieties, in terms of their innate sensitivity to what he calls “the misery
line.” Temperamental sensitivity is a contingent feature of an individual’s
psychological profile without a clear physiological or biological source. As
James puts this point in a pithy aside, “There are men who seem to have
started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit”
(VRE 115). For Du Bois, by contrast, double consciousness is the reflection
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a power of
hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of
despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is
faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of bound-
less justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning
Conclusion
To conclude this study, I want to return to the essay James once described
as “the perception on which my whole individualistic philosophy is based”
(C 8:522). “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” was published along-
side his report on Chautauqua in the appendix to Talks to Teachers. The
essay is a wandering reflection on a curious fact apropos of experience;
namely, “the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feel-
ings of creatures and peoples different from ourselves” (OCB 132). Each
individual is a spectator to the inner lives of others, blind to their personal
values, interpretations, and desires. This blindness is the root cause of a
sense of moral superiority that leads individuals to take their perspectives
as universal and so discount or discredit those of others. It is just this hubris
born of blindness that James finds in the imperialist discourse of civilizing
the Filipinos. Awakening to the partiality of one’s particular perspectives
is necessary “if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals
and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as
obdurate as so far as it has been gallant and spirited” (TT 4–5).
The felicity with which James moves between psychology, philosophy,
and anti-imperialism in this essay is representative of the persistently po-
litical character of his thinking examined in this book. By taking James’s
Nachlass writings on imperialism as something greater than either a tem-
porary distraction from his scholarly pursuits or a biographical record of
his gentle soul, these chapters have sought to shed new light on the politi-
cal consequences of his pragmatism as both a diagnosis and a response to
empire as a way of life. Pragmatism, James’s novel philosophy of inquiry
that asks us to reconsider theoretical disputes in terms of their practical
154
consequences for conduct, aims to “unstiffen” and “limber up” the habits
of thought that keep women and men captive to reified intellectual catego-
ries, dogmas, and authoritative certainties. These rigid habits of thought
are not simply bad habits or epistemic vices. They are psychological and
existential reactions to the jarring experience of contingency that defined
Gilded Age America in particular and modernity more broadly. In other
words, they are symptoms of disorientation in a postfoundational world.
Modern agents desperately grasp for authority and fixity in a pluralistic
world where all that was solid has melted into air, to borrow Marx and
Engels’s felicitous phrase.1
We have seen how these reactive cravings for authority lost can lead
to two seemingly contradictory postures of agency, each with dangerous
consequences for politics. On the one hand was the pessimistic resignation
of contemporaries like Henry Adams, who, in The Education of Henry
Adams, narrated his own life from a third-person perspective to represent
the fractured consciousness of a self decentered and determined by the me-
chanical spirit of an industrial age.2 On the other hand was the melancholic
reaction to loss that longed to reassert a sense of authority through acts of
heroism that violently impose order on a seemingly disordered world. This
was the pioneer fantasy of Roosevelt’s strenuous life. Pragmatic pluralism
embodies a different response to the experience of modernity’s whirl of
contingency. Neither resignation nor reaction, pragmatism embraces the
open nature of a pluralistic cosmos, along with the acknowledgment of
one’s limitation to ever transcend or master it. Acknowledging contest-
ability, finitude, and contingency cuts against monism’s persistent drive to
suppress disagreement and diversity.
We can call this lesson the negative consequence of pragmatism’s inter-
vention into empire as a way of life. It is important to note, however, that
consciousness of one’s blindness or cravings alone is not the same as their
satiation. As Freud remarked of his talking cure, self-knowledge is a neces-
sary preliminary of treating the neurotic. Self-knowledge alone, however,
is as efficacious in relieving the analysand’s symptoms as reading a menu
is at satisfying the hunger of someone suffering from famine.3 The value
of this reflexive self-knowledge lies in orienting the course of the therapy
to follow; or, to return to James’s language, in reorienting citizens to the
ongoing practices of resisting the persistent seductions of monism and ab-
stractionism. Knowledge is the fruit of action. The prioritization of action
sutures pragmatism’s negative implication for politics to a positive one, as
James suggests when he refers to mobilizing a “gallant and spirited” resis-
tance to empire. It is through meliorist action that injustice is confronted
and the world remade. Neither pessimistic resignation in the face of evil
nor optimistic blindness to the claims of the oppressed, pragmatic me-
liorism is an attitude of orientation that draws moral strength from loss
of final foundations without succumbing to the fantasies of mastery and
control that this modernism often inspires. The orientation of the meliorist
agent is a bicameral one, perpetually working the intervals between the
need for assertion and humility, for acknowledging finitude while acting
on faith. Such an orientation toward both self and world is demanding. It
countenances courageous action without the comfort that comes from the
certainty of the righteousness of one’s cause. Meliorism calls for faith in
the future without illusion about the inevitability of tragedy and the fact
that even final victory cannot atone for losses incurred along the way.
Scholars who raise the question of James’s contribution to the history
of political thought often find themselves like the outside spectators de-
scribed in “On a Certain Blindness” who miss “the inward significance
of the situation” in their clumsy attempt to summarize his perspective
in the terms of their own concepts and categories (OCB 134). We saw
the dangers of just such an interpretive approach in Perry’s influential
portrait of James’s political sentiments. Conscripting James’s anti-im-
perialism to the terms of interwar crisis of American liberalism, Perry
presented James as the unwitting embodiment of his own muscular
Wilsonian liberalism. Anachronistic projections of the present onto the
past, like blindness, are unavoidable to some degree. We do well to
become reflexive about the interpretive baggage that we as readers bring
to a text rather than try—a nd necessarily fail—to bracket our own situ-
ated perspective. Approaching James’s political vision from the terms of
it’s “interior doing,” as I described this book’s interpretive approach in
the Introduction, asks us to reposition our own point of view to examine
elements of James’s thought that go obscured or unnoticed when we ap-
proach his works along the well-worn path of pragmatism’s canonized
narrative. Saying this is not to deny that such a perspective, too, is still
one interpretative lens among many. Indeed, this book has placed James
in dialogue with a pluralist tradition, including the likes of Nietzsche,
Bergson, Freud, and Deleuze, in order to draw out aspects of his politi-
cal vision that are too easily passed over by more familiar interpretive
lenses. James reminds his readers in “Blindness,” “neither the whole
truth, nor the whole good, is revealed to any single observer, although
each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar
positions in which he stands” (OCB 149). Whatever partial superior-
ity of insight is to be found in this book’s self-consciously pluralistic
Conclusion | 155
156
perspective on James and the politics of pragmatism must lie in its prac-
tical consequences. What, then, is the “cash value” of reconsidering
James’s political thought today?
Bonnie Honig writes that “one way to assess the merits of a politi-
cal-theoretic position is by inhabiting it for long enough to see the world
through its perspective and assess that world.”4 This book has tried to
imaginatively occupy James’s political vision in just this way. Seeing
empire as a way of life through the lens of James’s pragmatism discloses
the ways imperial politics take root in seemingly everyday habits of
thought and action in modern times. Along with these insights, we have
also encountered blind spots at the limits of James’s vision. One of these
blind spots concerns the issue of gender and his masculine conception of
strenuous action. Another was the dissonance between James’s concern
for colonialized peoples abroad and his general disinterest in the plight
of people of color within the United States. I return to these topics in this
conclusion to consider the ways James’s vision was not simply blind to
particular topics like gender and race but rather myopic in its individual-
ism. By bringing agency and action into the foreground of political life,
James’s vision can be seen as obscuring the importance of institutions
and structures at work in the background. As M. C. Otto wrote in a 1943
article, “On a Certain Blindness of William James,” James “treated cer-
tain important social facts as he might have brushed against strangers in
a crowd.”5
We do not need to reach far for evidence of this myopic attention con-
cerning economic and institutional factors in politics. Simply consider
James’s diagnosis of imperialism in “Blindness.” It is the habit of imaging
one’s personal perspective and value as universal rather than particular
that “lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers
over subject-peoples make” (WMSL 150). Is James’s insistence on stating
political questions solely in “psychological and moral terms” evidence that
“he could not think economically or historically,” as many critics have
concluded?6 Or does this myopic focus on the experience of agents provide
a powerful perspective on politics that cut across well-worn dualisms like
structure and agency or morality and power?
Conclusion | 157
158
Conclusion | 159
160
If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and
decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obliga-
tions, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdo-
ing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civi-
lized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention
by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of
the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, how-
ever reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the
exercise of an international police power.25
Conclusion | 161
162
President George W. Bush presented the United States’ history in the
Philippines as an example of the nation’s long legacy of benevolent police
power. Just as the United States “liberated the Philippines from colonial
rule,” so too would he lead the way to bringing democracy to the peoples
of Iraq and Afghanistan.31 And along with the recovery of the Philippines
as a usable past for legitimating American unilateralism in the Middle East
came a surprising rediscovery of Kipling.32
“Imperialism used to be the white man’s burden. This gave it a bad rep-
utation,” explains Michael Ignatieff in the pages of the New York Times
Magazine in the run-up to the United States’ invasion of Iraq. “But impe-
rialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically
incorrect.”33 The use of American military and financial power to sta-
bilize and democratize sovereign states is a form of imperialism differ-
ent from the unjust colonial imperialism of Kipling’s time. “Empire lite,”
Ignatieff’s neologism for the century’s allegedly new era of humanitarian
intervention, describes “a global hegemony whose grace notes are free
markets, human rights, and democracy.”34 The burden of courageously
and wisely exercising global power as a force for good still falls upon the
shoulders of the United States. Contemporaneous with Ignatieff’s call to
take on the white man’s burden in a new form was the appearance of Max
Boot’s award-winning Savage Wars of Peace, a book that drew its title
directly from Kipling’s poem. For Boot, the history of the United States’
“small wars” from the Philippines to Vietnam prove that US military
power, when used with strenuous resolve, can be both an international
force of good for others as well as a vehicle of securing national self-in-
terests. “America should not be afraid to fight ‘savage wars of peace’ if
necessary to enlarge the ‘empire of liberty,’ ” he writes in the book’s con-
cluding line. “It has to be done.”35 Historian Niall Ferguson tacks closest
to the spirit of Kipling in Empire and Colossus by presenting the United
States as positioned to inherit the British history of civilizational imperi-
alism if the nation is willing to accept the moral burdens it entails. Both
books conclude with the invocation of Kipling as a call to arms for a new
era of liberal imperialism. “I believe the world needs an effective liberal
empire,” Ferguson writes in the conclusion of Colossus, “and that the
United States is the best candidate for the job.”36 And in an added flour-
ish, Ferguson’s neo-imperialist rhetoric borrows the prophetic idioms of
earlier imperialists like Roosevelt and Josiah Strong when he warns that
the choice facing the United States is to stiffen their spines and heroically
accept the burden of empire lest their nation succumb to decline from
within.37
Conclusion | 163
164
practice often do, fails to acknowledge the ways our actions are inex-
tricably part of a world still in the making. Like the “bigness” James
railed against, the hegemonic consolidation of modern imperialism can
become cause for passive acquiescence in the face of a power too big
to resist or the source of an optimistic idolatry that celebrates it as a
vehicle of freedom. But so too might we interrogate the ways our crav-
ings, anxieties, and even our false hopes serve to perpetuate the violent
expansion of America’s informal empire. A myopic political gaze places
the ethical at the center of the political, and in doing so discloses the
persistent possibility for futures different from the past lying before us
in the living present, if we will to believe.
NOTES
Introduction
1. George H. Sabine to Harold Stoke, March 31, 1942, Box 7, Folder “Lectures Away
from Cornell,” George H. Sabine Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Cornell University Library, Cornell University. The second invited speaker was Walter
Lippmann.
2. Henry W. Stoke to Horace Kallen, April 30, 1942, Series IV, Folder 728, Reel 40,
Frame 599, Horace Myers Kallen Papers, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.
3. On Kallen’s self-perception as a philosophical heir to James see Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001), 388; Richard J.
Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Malden: Polity Press, 2010), 64.
4. Horace Kallen to Henry W. Stoke, May 4, 1942, Series IV, Folder 728, Reel 40,
Frame 600, Kallen Papers.
5. William James to Francois Pillon, June 15, 1898: “I am going to a great popu-
lar meeting in Boston to-day where a lot of my friends are to protest against the new
‘Imperialism’” (C 8:373). James’s shifting opinions on the war between his initial re-
sponse to the explosion of the USS Maine in February 1898 and his full denunciation
of American imperialism by the summer of that year are reconstructed in Ralph Barton
Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935),
2:304–12.
6. James’s relationship to E. L. Godkin and mugwump anti-imperialism is discussed
in chapter 1. His encounter with Crosby’s Tolstoian anarchism is discussed in n. 27
below. Maxim Gorky visited the United States in 1906 under the invitation of Mark
Twain and William Dean Howells to raise financial and military support for revolu-
tionary agitation against Czar Nicholas II. James wrote Gorky a letter apologizing for
being unable to meet him in person during his visit and lauding his essay, “The City of
Mammon: My Impression of America,” which shared much of James’s contempt for
what he derisively described as “success.” James tells Gorky that, despite the ugliness
of American life, he must not “mind the immediate present” too greatly. Writers like
himself truly belong to “a higher nation, the cosmopolitan communion of liberal minds,
of ‘les intellectuels,’ which is organizing itself more and more, and out of which the
166
essential lines of the future will be drawn” (C 11:270; see also AQ 86). Gorky, in turn,
described James as “a wonderful old man, but he is also an American. Oh, to hell with
them.” Cited in C 11:271n1. See James’s exchange with Forbes in C 10:378, 515–16; C
11:374–75, 476–77, 564. Peter W. Stanley, “William Cameron Forbes: Proconsul in the
Philippines,” Pacific Historical Review 35, no. 3 (1966): 285–301. In addition to his
discussions with Forbes, James also had some limited contact with soldiers serving in
the Philippines. During his medical stay in Rome during the summer and fall of 1900,
James reports meeting a student who had served “in an Illinois regiment.” From this en-
counter James claims to have learned that “nothing is printed in America as it happens”
in the conflict and that the greatest military weakness of the Filipino insurgents was
their tendency to fire their rifles above the heads of American infantry (C 9:367; empha-
sis in original). James is presumably referring to this fact when he tells Sarah Wyman
Whitman, “My consolation for all things is in the way in which the Filipinos and the
Boers keep up the fighting. If the former could only learn to take a lower aim, I should
still be more contented” (C 9:397).
7. On the New England Anti-Imperialist League and its evolution into the American
Anti-Imperialist League, see Christopher Lasch, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines,
and the Inequality of Man,” Journal of Southern History 24, no. 3 (1958): 319–31; E.
B. Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic
or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman,
1972); Richard Seymour, American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-
Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 35–58; Michael Patrick Cullinane,
Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, 1898–1909 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012). James’s office in the League is recorded in its annual reports. George S. Boutwell,
Report of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-
Imperialist League, 1904); Moorfield Storey, Report of the Seventh Annual Meeting of
the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist League, 1905); Report of the
Eighth Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist
League, 1906); Report of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League
(Boston: The Anti-Imperialist League, 1907); Report of the Tenth Annual Meeting of
the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist League, 1908); Report of the
Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist
League, 1909). James’s role in the Filipino Progress Association is discussed in C
10:539; and Christopher McKnight Nichols, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of
a Global Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 69.
8. F. O. Matthiessen describes “The Moral Equivalent of War” as James’s “most far
reaching political essay.” The James Family: A Group Biography (New York: Vintage,
1980), 636. The essay’s composition is discussed in ERM 250–63.
9. John Dewey, “William James in Nineteen Twenty-Six,” in The Later Works,
1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 2, 1925–1927 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984), 158.
10. Sabine to Harold Stoke, March 31, 1942, Box 7, Folder “Lectures Away from
Cornell,” Sabine Papers. Perry’s biography and its influence on the reception of James’s
political thought is discussed in c hapter 1.
166 | Notes
167
11. Max Eastman to Harold M. Stoke, October 17, 1942, Box 7, Folder “Lectures
Away from Cornell,” Sabine Papers.
12. Discussed in chapter 1.
13. Horace M. Kallen, “Remembering William James,” in In Commemoration of
William James, 1842–1942, ed. Horace Kallen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1942), 12, 23, 20. See John Dewey’s similar claims about the political significance of
James’s pluralism made on the occasion of his centenary: “We may justly find in them
[James’s writings on pluralism and monism] a forefeeling for the conditions which have
culminated in the life-and-death struggle for supremacy of democratic and totalitarian
faiths. The source and spirit of his pluralism assuredly becomes more understandable
when his arguments in its behalf are placed in the context that is made so vivid and so
engrossing by this present crisis.” Dewey, “William James and the World Today,” in
The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 15, 1942–1948 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 4.
14. Kenneth Colgrove, “Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association,” American Political Science Review 37, no. 1 (1943): 102–27.
15. James’s anti-imperialism is depicted as of little significance in most major
studies of his life and thought. See, e.g., Matthiessen, James Family, 622–46; Gay Wilson
Allen, William James (New York: Viking, 1967); Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William
James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 167–75; Howard M. Feinstein,
Becoming William James, new ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Menand,
Metaphysical Club, 379; Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism (New York: Mariner Books, 2006), 382–85; Linda Simon, Genuine
Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998), 301–5; Paul Fisher,
House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York: Henry Holt, 2008).
An important exception is Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 422–45. On James as apolitical see Max C. Otto,
“On a Certain Blindness in William James,” Ethics 53, no. 3 (1943): 184–91; Richard
Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press,
1955), 134–35; Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Mass.
1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977): 306–14; Ross Posnock, The
Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991); John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism:
Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994); Loren Goldman, “Another Side of William James: On Radical Approaches
to a ‘Liberal’ Philosopher,” William James Studies 8 (2012): 34–64.
16. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 60.
17. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism
in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 147.
18. On Peirce as originator of the pragmatic method see PC 258–59 (see also P
28). “A New Name for Some Old Way of Thinking” is the subtitle James chose for
his 1907 Pragmatism. James’s intellectual relationship with Bergson is examined in
Horace M. Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories
Notes | 167
168
168 | Notes
169
2006), 115–41. Along with James’s anti-imperialism, his pragmatism is similarly decen-
tered by readings that focus on the political implications of his pragmatism. For criticism
of these pluralist reading of James as one-sided see Jonathan McKenzie, “Pragmatism,
Pluralism, Politics: William James’s Tragic Sense of Life,” Theory & Event 12, no. 1
(2009), https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/summary/v012/12.1.mckenzie.
html (accessed March 6, 2016).
25. William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the
Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, new ed. (Brooklyn: IG
Publishing, 2006).
26. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 149. For these various descriptors see West,
American Evasion of Philosophy, 60; Daniel S. Malachuk, “‘Loyal to a Dream Country’:
Republicanism and the Pragmatism of William James and Richard Rorty,” Journal
of American Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 89–113; Miller, Democratic Temperament; C.
Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), 273; Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel
Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1988), 128; Deborah J. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation’: Anarchism and
the Radicalization of William James,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996):
70–99.
27. James discusses Swift’s 1905 Human Submission in the first lecture of
Pragmatism. Swift’s 1899 Imperialism and Liberty and 1906 Marriage and Race
Death were both included in the James family’s 1926 gift of William’s remaining
books to Harvard University. “Books and Pamphlets Selected from the Library of
William James and Presented to Harvard College Library by His Family. 1923,”
William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard
University. The gift and James’s library are discussed in greater detail in Chapter
1 note 10. James’s encounter with Swift is discussed in chapter 5. Crosby was a
fellow member of the Anti-Imperialist League and sent James a copy of his Plain
Talks in Psalm and Parable in 1901 (C 9:551; see also C 9:557). See Ernest Howard
Crosby, Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899); Perry E.
Gianakos, “Ernest Howard Crosby: A Forgotten Tolstoyan Anti-M ilitarist and Anti-
Imperialist,” American Studies 13, no. 1 (1972): 11–29. James was an avid reader of
Tolstoy, particularly after 1896, but it is not clear whether or not he read his political
works. His references to Tolstoy in Talks to Teacher, Varieties, and correspondence
typically concern his admiration for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, although
he also mentions purchasing Leo Wiener’s translation of The Complete Works of
Count Tolstoy while preparing his pragmatism lectures in 1906 (C 3:330; see also
C 8:178–79). Both volumes of Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix are included in the
list of books included in the 1923 gift to Harvard held at Houghton Library. James
carried on a short correspondence with James Gibbons Huneker, a friend of Emma
Goldman’s, concerning his book Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909), which con-
cludes with a very sympathetic critique of Stirner’s anti-authoritarianism as an ad-
mirable, albeit extreme, sentiment consonant with the best of both Emerson and
Nietzsche (C 12:208–9). In the context of this exchange James mentions, “I read a life
of Stirner a few years ago, by some conscientious German” (C 12:209). This refer-
ence is to the biography written by the German anarchist individualist John Henry
Notes | 169
170
MacKay, Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk (Max Stirner: His Life and Works)
(Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1898). It is improbable that James met with Kropotkin
during either his 1897 or 1901 visits to Harvard, although he reports reading Memoires
of a Revolutionist shortly after the anarchist prince’s second visit. On Kropotkin’s
Harvard visits see George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince:
A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (London: T. V. Boardman, 1949), 274–84;
Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 91–92;
Deborah J. Coon, “Courtship with Anarchy: The Socio-Political Foundations of William
James’s Pragmatism” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), viii. What
these connections suggest is that James’s contact with anarchism was facilitated pri-
marily through the circulation of print media in a transatlantic public sphere. James’s
remaining papers include fragments of catalogues from French antimilitarist publish-
ing houses (e.g., Bibliotheque Pacifiste Internationale), containing works by Bakunin,
Kropotkin, and other anarchist writers, with volumes of interest circled. “Clippings,
1903–1910 and undated,” Folders 2 and 3, William James Additional Papers, 1903–
1910, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University.
28. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 77; Coon, “Courtship with
Anarchy.”
29. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 86. Compare Stephen S. Bush,
“Religion against Domination: The Politics of William James’s Individualism,” Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 3 (2015): 13–15.
30. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 87. Coon’s interpretation of the
political significance of pragmatism is examined in chapter 2.
31. Ibid., 94.
32. George Cotkin, William James: Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 154.
33. Ibid., 17.
34. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 169.
35. Colin Koopman, “William James’s Politics of Personal Freedom,” Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 182.
36. “It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental
life which I am so anxious to press on the attention” (PP 1:246). William J. Gavin,
William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1992).
37. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17–20.
38. Peter Sloterdijk takes no account of either James or pragmatism in his classic
study of modern cynicism, but his depiction of Diogenes’ cheeky politics bears some
resemblance to the anti-imperial pragmatism I outline here. Particularly notable is
Sloterdijk’s emphasis on Diogenes’ impertinent undoing of Platonic aspiration for a phil-
osophical “high theory” by embracing a “low theory” that emphasizes the body, disorder,
and excess. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 102. Compare James: “Whether materialistically
or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter
with which the world apparently is filled… . As compared with all these rationalizing
pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a
170 | Notes
171
turbid, muddled, gothic sort of affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial
nobility” (PU 26).
39. Richard Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” in Truth and Progress
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
40. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, in The Middle Works, 1899–1924,
ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 12, 1920 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1982), 134–35. Compare Melvin Rogers’s stress on the importance of situating Dewey
within a Darwinian, rather than Baconian, enlightenment tradition. See his The
Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 59–103. See James’s discussion of Darwin in GME.
41. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” Revue internationale de
philosophie 53, no. 207 (1999): 7.
42. Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,” in Democracy
and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 270.
43. In drawing a distinction between James and Dewey I do not mean to deny that
Dewey, in some moments, shared James’s acute sense of the psychological hunger for
order as a problem for politics. Describing the experience of industrial modernization
in 1935, he writes, “The fact of change has been so continual and so intense that it
overwhelms our minds. We are bewildered by the spectacle of its rapidity, scope, and
intensity. It is not surprising that men have protected themselves from the impact of
such vast change by resorting to what psycho-analysis has taught us to call rationaliza-
tions, in other words, protective fantasies.” Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, in
The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 11, 1935–1937 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 41–42. This more psychologically attuned side
of Dewey’s pragmatism is helpfully brought to the foreground in Rogers, Undiscovered
Dewey. As the title of Rogers’s book suggests, however, his is not the received view that
continues to obscure our understanding of James’s political thought. Dewey’s allusion to
the language of rationalization and fantasies points to the importance of psychoanalysis
for articulating some the psychological aspects of pragmatism’s critique of empire as we
will see further in c hapters 3 and 5.
44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 434.
45. “To pluralize is, in short, to learn ways to exist as human beings who engage the
world rather than always trying (and always failing) to conquer it.” Ferguson, William
James, xxv.
46. Founding texts of modern empire studies in the history of political thought in-
clude Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance
to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); James Tully, Strange
Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain,
Britain and France C.1500–C .1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Uday
Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); David Armitage, The Ideological
Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sankar
Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003);
Notes | 171
172
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
47. Jennifer Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism,” Annual Review
of Political Science 13 (2010): 217. I say this with the intention of distinguishing the
field of American studies, which has a rich and vast literature on American impe-
rialism, from the field of political theory. Notable exceptions to political theory’s
blindness to American empire include James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key,
vol. 2, Imperialism and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010); Jeanne Morefield, Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-
American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014).
48. Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Abscence of Empire in the Study
of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and
Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 17. On American imperial am-
nesia more broadly see Michael P. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes
in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 134–68;
Kevin Bruyneel, “The Trouble with Amnesia: Collective Memory and Colonial Injustice
in the United States,” in Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and
Chage, ed. Gerald Berk, Dennis Galvan, and Victoria Hattam (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Morefield, Empires without Imperialism.
49. Important exceptions to this omission of empire in the history of American phi-
losophy include Scott L. Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American
Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Cornel West, Democracy
Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Books, 2004);
Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community
in the Age of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Erin McKenna and
Scott L. Pratt, American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
50. For a helpful discussion of historiography’s insulation of American imperialism,
see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and
the Phillipines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14–18. My brief
overview of the development of the scholarship draws from Kramer.
51. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage,
2008), 147.
52. Inter alia William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,
50th anniversary ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Walter LaFeber, The New
Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898, 35th anniv. ed. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998); Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the
United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt,
2010); V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism (London: Verso, 2005); David
C. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International
Relations, 1789–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); Aziz Rana, The
Two Faces of American Freedom; Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History
of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton:
172 | Notes
173
Notes | 173
174
65. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures (Peru,
IL: Open Court, 1987), 70.
66. “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the
problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing
with the problems of men.” John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy,” in
The Middle Works: 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 10, 1916–1917 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 46.
67. Notice how this definition of public philosophy avoids the elitist connotations as-
sociated with the notion of a public intellectual that Cotkin presumes when he describes
James as a public philosopher: “To be a public philosopher meant accepting responsibil-
ity for addressing public problems and for applying insights gained from one’s technical
work to public issues.” Cotkin, William James, 4.
68. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 1:9; emphasis in original.
69. The intellectual affinities between genealogy—Tully’s primary point of ref-
erence in articulating his notion of public philosophy—and pragmatism are helpfully
examined in Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of
Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
70. James M. Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from
Emerson to Ellison (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 186.
71. I borrow this expression “slack in the order” from William E. Connolly, Politics
and Ambiguity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
72. Peirce famously borrows the term from Immanuel Kant. In “What Pragmatism
Is” Peirce explains why he could not abide by the names “practicism” or “practicalism”
for his new doctrine, with the moral connotation of praktish in the Kantian system, pre-
ferring instead Kant’s category of the pragmatisch, “expressing relation to some definite
human purpose.” Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 274.
73. Arthur Lovejoy, “Thirteen Pragmatisms,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods 5, no. 1 (1908): 5–12.
74. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons
of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 323–40; James T.
Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking,” in The
Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris
Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); John Pettegrew, ed., A Pragmatist’s
Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2000).
75. Colin Koopman introduces the notion of a pragmatist “third wave” in Pragmatism
as Transition. For a critical rejoinder to Koopman’s argumentative retelling, see Gregory
Fernando Pappas, “The Narrative and Identity of Pragmatism in America: The History
of a Disfunctional Family?,” The Pluralist 9, no. 2 (2014): 65–83. On the “new” prag-
matism see Cheryl Misak, New Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
76. Richard J. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism: The Conflict of Narratives,”
in Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J.
SaatkampJr. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 66.
77. Gallie W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Meeting of the Aristotelian
Society 56 (1956): 167–98; William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd
ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
174 | Notes
175
78. Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry and the Conversation of Mankind,”
in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1991). Compare Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 389–94.
79. Bernstein, Pragmatic Turn, 31.
80. For a different vision of the history of Jamesian pragmatism in the twentieth
century see James T. Kloppenberg, “James’s Pragmatism and American Culture, 1907–
2007,” in 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy, ed.
John J. Stuhr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Throntveit, William James
and the Quest for an Ethical Republic, 139–60.
81. Ferguson, William James, xxiii.
Chapter 1
1. The influence of Perry’s biography is evident from the diversity of scholars across
ideological, disciplinary, and methodological divisions that take it as authoritative in
their respective accounts of James. See inter alia Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism;
Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought
and Character since the 1880’s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 91–107;
Herbert Marcuse, “Some Implications of Modern Technology,” in The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum,
1982); Beisner, Twelve against Empire; West, The American Evasion of Philosophy,
54–68; James Campbell, The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic
Social Thought (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 10–22; Robert
J. Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2007), 45–81. Earlier anthologies containing some of these writings
include the posthumous Memories and Studies, edited by James’s son Henry in 1911; and
the 1925 work by Horace M. Kallen, The Philosophy of William James: Selected from
His Chief Works (New York: Modern Library, 1953), 234–68.
2. This is not to say that Perry’s portrait is without its critics. Horace Kallen penned
an early critical review in “Remarks on R. B. Perry’s Portrait of William James,”
Philosophical Review 46, no. 1 (1937): 68–79. More damning of Perry’s hagiographic
depiction of James is Garrison and Madden, “William James—Warts and All.”
3. Ralph Barton Perry, “Realism in Retrospect,” in Contemporary American
Philosophy: Personal Statements, ed. George P. Adams and Wm. Pepperell Montague,
vol. 2 (New York: Russel & Russell, 1930), 206.
4. John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975), 221. While this chapter focuses on both the imagined
and real connections between American pragmatism and Italian fascism, certain fas-
cist intellectuals in Germany drew similar conclusions concerning the elective affinity
between James’s philosophy of action and the ideology of the Third Reich. Hans Joas,
Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 107–11.
5. Inter alia William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of
Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1941), 400–415, 544–
48. W. T. Stace, The Destiny of Western Man (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942),
194–98; Donald Cary Williams, “William James and the Facts of Knowledge,” in In
Commemoration of William James.
Notes | 175
176
6. I borrow this notion of historical conscription from Duncan Bell. Bell argues
that liberalism’s ideological struggles in the 1930s worked through “posthumous con-
scription” of political thinkers into a growing canon of liberalism. As an example of
this process Bell illustrates the construction of John Locke’s place in the liberal tradi-
tion during this era. Prior to World War I, British and American historians of political
thought typically defined liberalism as a nineteenth-century ideology represented by
Jeremy Bentham to the exclusion of an earlier tradition of Whig constitutionalism repre-
sented by Locke, whose political writings were widely seen as theoretically defective or
obsolete. Bell shows how this was changed by the 1930s when Locke came to displace
Bentham as the leading figure in a tradition of liberal thought defined by individualism,
religious freedom, and contract. Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” Political Theory
42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715. I argue that Perry’s histories of political philosophy should be
read as parallel efforts of ideological canon construction.
7. Ralph Barton Perry, “First Personal,” The Atlantic, October 1946, 107.
8. Perry, “Realism in Retrospect,” 189.
9. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, 340. See also Kuklick, A History of
Philosophy in America, 1700–2000 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 201–7.
10. The family’s 1923 gift included some 1,450 volumes donated to Harvard
University. While a small selection of these volumes were put aside in the university’s
Treasure Room under Perry’s supervision, the majority of the books were absorbed into
the university’s circulating collection at Widener and Robbins Libraries. For a partial
list of books included in this initial gift see “List of Books and Pamphlets Selected
from the Library of William James and Presented to Harvard College by His Family,
1923,” James Papers. Additional volumes of James’s library have been donated to the
university since since this initial gift. According to A. A. Roback, the Harvard hold-
ings represent less than one-fifth of an estimated ten thousand books James owned.
Included in the gift is a collection of works on spiritualism, mental healing, demonology,
and the occult drawn from what Henry James described as “the largest collection ever
assembled of crank literature in New England at the turn of the century.” Roback ac-
knowledges James’s large collection of “crank” literature and notes its partial omission
from the Harvard University collection “may be due to the special bias of the men who
were in charge of the selection of James’s books for the purpose, Professor R. B. Perry
and Benjamin Rand.” William James: His Marginalia, Personality, & Contribution
(Cambridge, MA: Sci-A rt Publishers, 1942), 62. What additional books on politics and
political thought that may have been included in this omitted collection of literature is
unknown. Perry sold off hundreds of volumes from the Harvard collection after 1923
that he deemed unimportant. A partial list of these sales is recorded in “William James’s
Sources,” James Papers. Eugene Taylor attempted to reconstruct the transmission his-
tory of James’s library only to conclude that the collection is currently “scattered,” with
the majority of the library either distributed to friends, sold to collectors, remaining
in the James family, or simply thrown away. See Thibaud Trochu, “Investigations into
the William James Collection at Harvard: An Interview with Eugene Taylor,” William
James Studies 3, no. 1 (2008): http://williamjamesstudies.org/investigations-into-
the-william-james-collection-at-harvard-an-interview-with-eugene-taylor/ (accessed
October 31, 2015). The most comprehensive record of books known to be owned or read
176 | Notes
177
by James is the electronic guide recently assembled by Philip J. Kowlaski, The Guide
To William James’s Readings (2014): http://williamjamesstudies.org/guide-to-william-
jamess-reading/ (accessed October 31, 2015). Perry’s role in the disposal of James’s re-
maining books is discussed in “Correspondence with Henry James. 1923–1940. And
undated,” Abraham Aaron Roback Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library,
Harvard University.
11. “Correspondence: Thought and Character of William James,” Boxes 1–3, Papers
of Ralph Barton Perry, Harvard University Archives. Perry posted advertisements in
periodicals like the New Republic to procure materials for the volume. For example,
“Wanted: Letters of William James,” New Republic, November 27, 1929, 19.
12. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1935), 1:vii.
13. Sidney Hook, “William James,” The Nation, December 11, 1935, 684.
14. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Introduction,” in The Thought and Character of
William James (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), ix.
15. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:300.
16. Ibid., 2:280.
17. Ibid., 2:271.
18. Ibid., 2:267.
19. Ibid., 2:277.
20. Ibid., 2:281.
21. Ibid., 2:281, 287.
22. Ibid., 2:290.
23. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage,
1966), 145–96. On mugwump social criticism more generally see David M. Tucker,
Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1998); Beisner, Twelve against Empire; John Sproat, The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in
the Gilded Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Schirmer, Republic or Empire.
24. Cotkin offers a more ambivalent judgment of James’s relationship to the mug-
wumps. Cotkin, William James, 127–32. For an account that emphasizes the radically
democratic dimensions of James’s anti-imperialism when seen in a global, rather than
national, context see Daniel B. Schirmer, “William James and the New Age,” in Beyond
Liberalism: The New Left Views American History, ed. Irwin Unger (Waltham: Xerox
College Publishing, 1971), 133–40.
25. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:297, 290.
26. Ibid., 2:290.
27. The distance seperating James’s anti-imperialism from the isolationist discourse
he could have learned from Godkin is examined in Nichols, Promise and Peril, 68–112.
It is notable that Perry’s reading of Godkin as prefiguring both his and James’s muscular
liberalism passes over Godkin’s isolationism.
28. Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 14. See also Myles Beaupre, “‘What Are
the Philippines Going to Do to Us?’ E. L. Godkin on Democracy, Empire and Anti-
Imperialism,” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012): 711–27.
29. Cited in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:291.
30. Ibid., 2:300.
Notes | 177
178
31. Ibid., 2:306.
32. Ibid., 2:310.
33. Cited in ibid., 2:311.
34. Ibid., 2:208; see also 2:325.
35. Ibid., 2:312. Cotkin challenges the suspect psychological theory that underpins
Perry’s attempt to clearly demarcate these discrete political and philosophical periods of
James’s thinking. William James, 123–27.
36. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:302.
37. Ibid., 2:317.
38. Ibid., 2:315.
39. Ibid., 2:319.
40. Ibid., 2:252. As Perry reiterates this point in the book’s conclusion, “James was
a moralist in the good old-fashioned sense of one who believes that right is right and
wrong is wrong, and he enrolled himself under the first to combat the second … In
short, unlike a later and faltering generation, James united liberalism, tolerance, and
humanity with a resolve that these principles should, so help him God, prevail.” Ibid.,
2:702–3.
41. Ibid., 2:316, 316.
42. Ibid., 2:579.
43. Inter alia, Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against
Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 180–202; Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis
of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1973); Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American
Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1043–73; John Gunnell,
Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy
(College Bark: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Marc Stears, Demanding
Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 21–55.
44. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current
Unrest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 82.
45. John Dewey, Individualism Old and New, in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed.
Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 5, 1929–1930 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1986), 70. On radical liberalism see Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, 45.
46. Alan Cassels, “Fascism for Export: Italy and the United States in the Twenties,”
American Historical Review 69 (1964): 707–12; Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic
Theory, 117–38; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism. A more expansive literature exists
discussing Mussolini’s American reception among political and financial elites who
embraced the fascist regime, alternatively, as an island of market stability in the rocky
waters of revolutionary Europe or as a moderate fascist ally to tame the extreme fas-
cism of Nazi Germany. David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–
1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Peter R. D’Agostino,
Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gian Giacome Migone, The
United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe, trans. Molly
Tambor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The following discussion of
Mussolini’s cultural and intellectual reception in the United States draws on Diggins’s
178 | Notes
179
seminal study. See too John P. Diggins, “Fliration with Fascism: American Pragmatic
Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy,” American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (1966): 487–506.
47. Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” in Fascism: Doctrine and
Institutions (Rome: Ardita, 1935), 24–25.
48. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 58–73, 226.
49. Ibid., 231.
50. Ibid., 220–39.
51. Horace M. Kallen, “Fascism: For the Italians,” New Republic 49 (January 12,
1927): 211.
52. Ibid.
53. E.g., Charles Beard, “Making the Fascist State,” New Republic (January 23,
1929): 277–78; Unattributed, “An Apology for Fascism,” New Republic 49 (January
12, 1927): 207–9. Diggins persuasively argues that this editorial was almost certainly
written by Herbert Croly. Diggins, “Fliration with Fascism,” 497n442. Progressive
intellectuals made similar claims about the experimental nature of the Soviet Union
during these years. See Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 120–21. For example,
John Dewey favorably judged Bolshevism as a road to participatory democracy in his
“Impressions of Soviet Russia” in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston,
vol. 3, 1927–1928 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). See also David
C. Engerman, “John Dewey and the Soviet Union: Pragmatism Meets Revolution,”
Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 1 (2006): 33–63.
54. Sunday Times April 11, 1926. Cited in Perry, The Thought and Character of
William James, 2:575.
55. Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Behind Fascism Stands a Philosophy” New York
Times Magazine, Sept 26, 1926, 2–3, 18. Clipping in Series I, Folder 42, Reel 1, Frame
223, Kallen Papers. See also Horace Kallen to Sarah Martha Watson, May 1, 1942,
Series 4, Folder 728, Reel 40, Frame 597, Kallen Papers.
56. Kallen, “Fascism,” 212. For Kallen’s notes from his interview with Mussolini see
Series 1, Folder 42, Reel 1, Frames 229–31, Kallen Papers.
57. William Kilborne Stewart, “The Mentors of Mussolini,” American Political
Science Review 22, no. 4 (1928): 862.
58. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 238; Schmitz, The United States and Fascist
Italy, 69.
59. William Yandell Elliott, “Mussolini, Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics,”
Political Science Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1926): 164.
60. In a retrospective essay on The Pragmatic Revolt, Elliott admits that James him-
self “remained essentially a passionate individualist in his pluralism” and that Pragmatic
Revolt used him “to typify the revolt against reason in the name of satisfying total emo-
tional urges” that characterized fascism. “The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Twenty
Years in Retrospect,” Review of Politics 2, no. 1 (1940): 3.
61. The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and the Constitutional
State, new ed. (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968). John Gunnell discusses the response to
Elliott’s book in American political science in The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 112–14 and Imagining the American Polity, 170–71.
62. E.g., Jack J. Roth, “The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo,” Journal
of Modern History 39, no. 1 (1967): 30–45; Anthony James Gregor, Young Mussolini
Notes | 179
180
180 | Notes
181
Political Thought in National Context, ed. Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampshire-Monk
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
78. Consolato generale di S. M. il Re d’Italia to Ralph Barton Perry, May 11, 1933,
“Correspondence: Thought and Character of William James,” Box 1, Folder M, Perry
Papers.
79. Giuseppe Prezzolini to Ralph Barton Perry, December 8, 1932, “Correspon
dence: Thought and Character of William James,” Box 2, Folder PQ, Perry Papers.
80. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:575.
81. Ibid.; emphasis added.
82. Ibid., 2:578.
83. “Realism in Retrospect,” 206.
84. Ibid., 208.
85. Gunnell, Descent of Political Theory, 131. This paragraph follows the recon-
struction of the material in Gunnell and Bell, “What Is Liberalism?”
86. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Political Thought: An
Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1927), 1:397.
87. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, rev. ed. (New York: Henry
Holt, 1950), 11–19. See Perry’s description of the funeral oration as illustrating “the in-
evitable pressure in the direction of liberal government.” Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral
Economy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 157.
88. Ball, “Discordant Voices,” 110.
89. E.g., Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 904–9.
90. Ralph Barton Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical
Background of the World War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1918), 5; emphasis in
original.
91. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, 443–44; John Garry Clifford,
The Citizen Soldier: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913– 1920
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972); John Patrick Finnegan, Against the
Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917
(Westport: Greenwood, 1974), 57–72.
92. Ralph Barton Perry, “Impressions of a Plattsburg Recruit,” New Republic (1915):
231. Perry subsequently published an expanded version as The Plattsburg Movement: A
Chapter in America’s Participation in the World War (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921).
93. The Free Man and the Soldier: Essays on the Reconciliation of Liberty and
Discipline (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 6.
94. Ibid., 61.
95. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and
His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Ratner-Rosenhagen addresses
Perry’s reading of Nietzsche at 141–43.
96. Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals, 2.
97. Ibid., 165.
98. Ibid., 170.
99. Ibid., 171.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., 5, 543.
Notes | 181
182
Chapter 2
1. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:320–32.
This biographical narrative took hold shortly after James’s death through his son Henry
James’s account of his life and thought (LWJ 1:140–64). Sarin Marchetti discusses
the problems with Perry’s biographical reduction of James’s thought in Ethics and
Philosophical Critique in William James (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 43–47.
2. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:674.
3. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 108–57. On pragmatism, uncertainty, and
the cultural crises of American modernity see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Posnock,
The Trial of Curiosity, 27–53, 105–38; James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political
Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994), 158–224; Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William
182 | Notes
183
James, Vol. 1, The Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–8 0 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 73–148; Giles Gunn, Beyond
Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2001), 51– 110; James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and
Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001),
117–82; Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science,
and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 21–58.
4. Cotkin, William James, 102. See also Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation
of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, new ed. (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2007), 140–45; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and
the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
5. Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith, 47. Other examples of this
action-oriented reading include Myers, William James, 404–15; Koopman, “William
James’s Politics of Personal Freedom”; Miller, Democratic Temperament, 10–32;
Megan Rust Mustain, Overcoming Cynicism: William James and the Metaphysics
of Engagement (New York: Continuum, 2011); Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical
Critique in William James, 214–47. Miller acknowledges the Janus-faced challenge of
political action in his reading of James but his tendency to interpret James’s thought
through an Arendtian lens often makes for a one-sided emphasis on the action as a pre-
cious miracle to be protected from institutional and instrumental encroachment.
6. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 97; emphasis in original.
7. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in The Later Works: 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann
Boydston, vol. 4, 1929 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 7. In the
terms of contemporary political theory, Connolly has referred to this compensatory pro-
jection of certainty as “ontological narcissism.” See his Identity\Difference: Democratic
Negotiations of Political Paradox, expanded ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), 30.
8. On Woodberry’s neo- Platonism see R. B. Hovey, “George Edward
Woodberry: Genteel Exile,” New England Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1950): 506–26; Martha
Hale Shackford, “George Edward Woodberry as Critic,” New England Quarterly 24 no.
4 (1951): 510–27.
9. George Edward Woodberry, Heart of Man (London: MacMillan, 1901), 227.
10. James expresses similar skepticism about monism in political philosophy in
his remarks on the British radical Edward Carpenter. In his 1883 Towards Democracy,
a lyric poem modeled on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Carpenter provides a phil-
osophical justification of radical democracy as the erotic reconciliation of self and
society. Democracy is the ecstatic release from the stratification of class through “a
flash of loving recognition, a closeness to nature and the loving comradeship of men.”
Carpenter drew on Whitman’s poetry, Hindu mysticism, and socialist millennialism to
demonstrate the existence of a monistic cosmic consciousness that united all individuals
as one. James discusses Towards Democracy approvingly in The Varieties of Religious
Experience; elsewhere he describe it as “one of my favourite books” (C 9:557; see VRE
256). At the same time, James looked warily on Carpenter’s project of transcending
the moral separateness of individuals through an experience of mystical unity. Like
monism in general, Carpenter’s radical mysticism abandons individuality before an
Notes | 183
184
experience of authority. “I used to think that that authority [of mystical states] was a
staggerer to all forms of pluralistic belief,” James writes of Carpenter, “but I now feel
less respectful—mysticism is authoritative as to more unity than which at first appears
but is always ‘passing to the limit’ to erect it into an absolute philosophical author-
ity, as excluding the ‘other’ completely” (C 10:548; emphasis in original). Whatever
more unity there may be between individuals is something to be actively built through
the meliorist effort of individuals in action, not philosophically found through appeal
to otherworldly experience. Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (London: Swan
Sonnenschein, 1905). Carpenter quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter:
A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008), 72. See also Michael Robertson,
Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 167–88. James’s encounter with Carpenter’s democratic mysticism is discussed
further in Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries, 189–218; Gandhi, Affective
Communities, 115–41; Alexander Livingston, “Excited Subjects: William James and
the Politics of Radical Empiricism,” Theory & Event 15, no. 4 (2012): http://muse.jhu.
edu/journals/t heory_ a nd_event/summary/v015/15.4.livingston.html (accessed March
6, 2016).
11. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 188– 237; Horace H.
Robbins, “‘Bigness,’ the Sherman Act, and Antitrust Policy,” Virginia Law Review 39,
no. 7 (1953): 907–48; Walter Adams and James W. Brock, The Bigness Complex:
Industry, Labor, and Government in the American Economy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1986). For an anti-imperial text that appeals to the language of bigness
in a polemical spirit similar to James see H. C. Potter, “National Bigness or Greatness:
Which?,” North American Review 168, no. 509 (1899): 433–44.
12. Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 4. See also Martin J. Sklar, The
Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law,
and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
13. Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 3–4.
14. Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution,
1850–1940.
15. Charles A. Conant, “The Economic Basis of ‘Imperialism,’” North American
Review 167, no. 502 (1898): 338.
16. Ibid., 339.
17. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 18–89; Hendrickson, Union,
Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941,
261–89; Hoffmann, American Umpire, 179–96. I return to this point in greater detail in
the Conclusion.
18. Henry Cabot Lodge, “Our Blundering Foreign Policy,” Forum 19 (1895): 17. See
Immerman, Empire for Liberty, 128–62; Nichols, Promise and Peril, 22–67. See also
James’s remarks on Lodge in C 9:211.
19. James’s reference to McKinley’s prayer refers to the president’s claim to have
found spiritual guidance in his decision to champion annexation. “And one night late
it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came: (1) That we could not
give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonourable; (2) that we could
not turn them over to France and Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—
that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to
184 | Notes
185
themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy
and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and (4) that there was nothing left for
us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize
them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for
whom Christ also died.” Cited in General James F. Rusling, “Interview with President
McKinley,” Christian Advocate (1903): 137.
20. Marcuse, “Some Implications of Modern Technology”; Posnock, The Trial of
Curiosity, 3–24; Lisi Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 114–22.
21. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 87.
22. Ibid.
23. Originally published as H. G. Wells, “Two Studies in Disappointment,” in
Harper’s Weekly 50 (September 8, 1906): 1279–84; republished in H. G. Wells, The
Future in America: A Search after Realities (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906),
167–84.
24. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American
Political Thought since the Revolution (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1991),
219–24.
25. Russell Herman Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1915), 18.
26. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review 148, no. 391 (1889): 662.
27. One source for James’s critique of success was the essayist Gilbert Chesterton
(C 11:267). In Heretics, the “admirable collection of essays” that James cites in
Pragmatism’s opening page, Chesterton argues that a life dedicated to pecuniary gain
is an empty one, forever longing after an impossible satisfaction for more (P 9). “Every
man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success must end in mere mediocrity.”
“Heretics,” in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, ed. David Dooley, vol. 1 (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 100.
28. This manuscript served as the basis for James’s most conventionally mugwump
and elitist speech, SV. Compare also TH.
29. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
30. On prophetic idioms in American social criticism see Cornel West, Prophecy
Deliverance! An Afro- American Revolutionary Christianity, anniversary ed.
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002); Michael Walzer, Interpretation and
Social Criticism, reprint ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 67–94;
Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad; Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations
in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 29–67; George
Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
31. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992).
32. Originally published in Mind in 1879. Subsequently revised and republished
in The Will to Believe in 1897. All citations are from the later, revised version. The
significance of James’s revisions and the publication history of the amended version are
discussed in Richardson, William James, 199–211.
33. Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James, 4.
Notes | 185
186
Chapter 3
1. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in Letters and Speeches, ed. Louis
Auchincloss (New York: Library of America, 2004), 764.
2. Ibid., 755.
3. Ibid., 755, 758.
4. For classical studies of American republican fears of luxury and corruption see
Bernard Baylin, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed.
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American
Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2nd paperback ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). The continuities and innovations in these
republican anxieties of decline are helpfully explored in George M. Fredrickson, The
Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper
& Row, 1965); Lears, No Place of Grace; Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America;
Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom. The relationship of pragmatism to republi-
canism is discussed in James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Malachuk, “‘Loyal to a Dream Country’”; Throntveit, William
James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic; Bush, “Religion against Domination.”
This chapter focuses on republican political thought in Gilded Age America without
seeking to make a claim in the historical debate concerning the relative priority of re-
publicanism and liberalism in American political development. The binary terms of this
debate often overshadowed nuances and innovations within the development of
American republicanism. Alex Gourevitch forcefully demonstrates the importance
of such overlooked innovations in his recent study of labor republicanism, From Slavery
to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
186 | Notes
187
Notes | 187
188
11. Frederick Jackson Turner, “On the Significance of the Frontier,” in Rereading
Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and
Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 32.
12. Ibid., 33.
13. Ibid., 60.
14. Lears, No Place of Grace; Russell L. Hanson and W. Richard Merriman, “Henry
Adams and the Decline of the Republican Tradition,” in A Political Companion to
Henry Adams, ed. Natalie Fuhrer Taylor (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky,
2010), 17–42.
15. Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History
(New York: Vintage, 1955), 7.
16. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War, 217– 38; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic
Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Norton, 1994),
758–66; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–
1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 30–31.
17. “The Soldier’s Faith,” in The Fundamental Holmes: A Free Speech Chronicle
and Reader, ed. Ronald Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29.
18. Ibid., 33, 29.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,”
in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 79.
21. On the influence of Mahan’s theory of sea power on American conceptions
of imperialism see Julius William Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of
Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959);
Immerman, Empire for Liberty, 128–62; Nichols, Promise and Peril, 25–38; James
Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary Imperialism,” Proceedings of the British Academy
155 (2009): 3–29.
22. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660–1783
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1918); The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution
and Empire: 1793–1812, 2 vols. (New York: Greenwood, 1968).
23. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 83.
24. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis
(New York: Baker & Taylor, 1885), 175.
25. Ibid., 175, 176.
26. Ibid., 173.
27. Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 268–70.
28. Strong, Our Country, 216.
29. Ibid., 217.
30. See the classical statement of this view in Richard Hofstadter, The American
Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1948), 231.
31. Quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), 60. For discussion of this passage see Kim Townsend,
Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996),
257–58; Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006),
91; Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 36. In his Autobiography Roosevelt offers a different
account of his turn toward self-making that is even more explicitly gendered. There,
188 | Notes
189
the turning moment in young Teddy’s life was the humiliation of not being able to
fight back against two older boys who bullied him at Moosehead Lake. “The experi-
ence taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me. I made
my mind up that I must try to learn so that I would not again be put in such a helpless
position; and having become quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the
natural prowess to hold my own, I decided that I would try to supply its place by train-
ing.” Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography, in The Rough Riders: an Autobiography, ed.
Louis Auchincloss (New York: Library of America, 2004), 281. It is an experience of
violence, or better yet his failure to truly become wild in the fight and to protect him-
self from the other boys, that begins Roosevelt’s lifelong quest for personal and civic
regeneration.
32. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” 757.
33. Theodore Roosevelt, “National Duties,” in Letters and Speeches, 767.
34. Ibid., 768.
35. Ibid., 775.
36. Ibid., 765.
37. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” 757. On the persistent connection between fem-
inization, decadence, and the Orient in Western political discourse, see Edward W. Said,
Orientalism (New York: Vintage , 1979).
38. James additionally asked his wife Alice to send a clipping of his response from
the Transcript to Governor Roosevelt (C 8:518). It is not clear whether this letter was ever
sent or received.
39. Townsend, Manhood at Harvard, 243–44.
40. As Perry puts this point, “As a fighter for ideals Roosevelt was a man after
James’s own heart; while the roughness of his methods—his lack of taste, sympathy,
and discrimination—was profoundly offensive.” Perry, The Thought and Character of
William James, 2:314. Perry’s credal reading of James puts the emphasis on the shared
commitment to ideals. My reading emphasizes the shared affective orientation toward
the fight.
41. Cotkin, William James, 121.
42. Classically in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:320–32.
More recent studies have challenged the narrative of philosophical crisis by emphasizing
other factors such as James’s anguish over the sudden death of his love interest, Minnie
Temple, as well as the vicissitudes of his Oedipal relationship with his father. Allen,
William James, 162–70; Feinstein, Becoming William James; Simon, Genuine Reality,
97–123; Richardson, William James, 108–22.
43. On this point PP restates an insight from James’s first major scholarly publica-
tion, SDM. See also GME, 165–70.
44. Nancy Bentley provocatively reads Principles as a literary text in the genre of
the Bildungsroman, where the transition from the early chapters on physiology to the late
“Will” chapter models a journey of self-creation. Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas:
American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870– 1920 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
45. I draw this distinction between a semiotic of willing and a theory of the will from
Richard E. Flathman, Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political
Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 158–66.
Notes | 189
190
190 | Notes
191
Notes | 191
192
Chapter 4
1. Major General David Hunter raised an earlier unit of black soldiers, the First
South Carolina, in May 1862 without authorization. The unit was disbanded under di-
rection of the federal government. The first authorized unit to fight for the Union was
the First Kansas Colored later that same year. My account of the history of the Fifty-
fourth is drawn from Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War
Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992);
Peter Burchard, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965); Martin Henry Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald
Yacovone, eds., Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts
Regiment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); David W. Blight, Race
and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2002), 171–210, 300–337.
2. The angel is a foreboding icon: Holding out both the olive branch and poppies, it
symbolizes both peace and death.
3. On the history and meaning of the monument see Robert Gould Shaw, The
Monument to Robert Gould Shaw, Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897); Lois Goldreich Marcus, “The ‘Shaw Memorial’
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens: A History Painting in Bronze,” Winterthur Portfolio 14,
no. 1 (1979): 1–23; Stephen J. Whitfield, “‘Sacred in History and in Art’: The Shaw
Memorial,” New England Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1987): 3–27; Kirk Savage, Standing
Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Blight, Race and Reunion. The monu-
ment is unique for many reasons, not the least of them being that it is the only Civil War
monument to depict African American soldiers in uniform. Saint-Gaudens spent over a
decade working on the monument in an attempt to depict the face of each soldier in his
unique individuality rather than a homogenous group. The result is a work of art that
skillfully combines the diversity of the men and the singularity of their mission. Art his-
torian Kirk Savage describes the monument as conveying a sense of uniformity enriched
“by a kind of contrapuntal rhythm of diversity” (Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves,
201). Albert Boime, by contrast, argues that the monument figures the African American
men as united in inferior animality compared to the serene white colonel riding above.
The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
4. For a discussion of the ambiguous significance of Shaw’s martyrdom to the Gilded
Age’s masculinist obsession with moral and civic decline see Fredrickson, The Inner
Civil War, 152–55. Frederickson mistakenly aligns James’s conception of strenuousness
with the rhetoric of republican melancholia without sufficient attention to the ways that
James is appropriating this language for different moral purposes, as demonstrated in
the previous chapter. Compare, for instance, James’s depiction of Shaw’s strenuousness
to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s invocation of Shaw as an example of the soldier’s faith.
192 | Notes
193
Notes | 193
194
194 | Notes
195
30. Connolly coins this neologism to describes the confluence of Deleuze’s and
James’s influence on his own conception of deep pluralism: “I am indeed a Jamesleuzian.
I find this combination to both provide me with preliminary bearings and to support the
commitment to cultural pluralism that each already evinces. In a world where the glob-
alization of capital multiplies the number and types of minorities, the pursuit of deep
pluralism would become more feasible if more advocates of each faith acknowledged
without resentment the legitimacy of its contestability in the eyes of others.” William
E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2008), 133.
31. Connolly, Pluralism, 25.
32. On James’s relational conception of self see John J. McDermott, “The Promethean
Self and Community in the Philosophy of William James,” in Streams of Experience:
Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 44–58; Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries;
Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 57– 84; Livingston, “Excited
Subjects.”
33. Brian Massumi captures this complicated relationship of feeling, relation-
ality, and faith when he remarks that, for James, “participation precedes cognition.”
Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2011), 32.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,
trans. Maudemaire Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), §382.
35. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 203.
36. Eyal J. Naveh, Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America from
Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: New York University
Press, 1990), 22–49; R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long
Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2014).
37. Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Collected Essays
and Poems, ed. E. H. Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2001), 401.
38. I expand on this reading of John Brown in greater detail in Alexander Livingston,
“The Cost of Liberty: Sacrifice and Survival in Du Bois’s John Brown,” in A Political
Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Nick Bromell (Lexington: University Press of
Kansas, forthcoming).
39. W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown, ed. John David Smith (New York: International
Publishers, 1997), xxv, 172, 173, 172.
40. William E. Cain, “Violence, Revolution, and the Cost of Freedom: John Brown
and W. E. B. Du Bois,” boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990); Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives!,
79–105.
41. Du Bois, John Brown, 175, 175, 149.
42. Ibid., 172.
43. Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E.
B. Du Bois (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 68.
44. Stob, “Lonely Courage, Commemorative Confrontation, and Communal
Therapy,” 262.
Notes | 195
196
Chapter 5
1. George Santayana, Persons and Places, vol. 2, The Middle Span (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 167.
2. Ibid., 169–70.
3. Ibid., 170.
4. Russell, “Pragmatism.”
5. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 152n112.
6. On forgetting empire as a constitutive element of the American exceptionalist
narrative see Michael P. Rogin, “‘Make My Day!’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial
Politics [and] the Sequel,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism.
7. Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 51–52.
8. More troubling than this omission are James’s private remarks concerning the
African American veterans in attendance at the oration: “The thing that struck me most
in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of which there were perhaps about
thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey faces, the heavy animal look
entirely absent, and in its place the wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen” (C 3:9).
James uses similarly racist language in reference to African Americans elsewhere in
his correspondence (C 7:87; 8:262; 10:223; 11:197). See too PN. James’s views on race
and racism are discussed in Garrison and Madden, “William James—Warts and All,”
215–17; Myers, William James, 596; Harvey Cormier, “William James on Nation and
Race,” in Pragmatism, Nation, and Race; Throntveit, William James and the Quest
for an Ethical Republic, 130–31. On pragmatism and race more generally see Nancy
Fraser, “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics
of Culture,” in The Revival of Pragmatism; Bill E. Lawson and Donald F. Koch, eds.,
Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004);
Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006); Glaude, In a Shade of Blue; Terrance
MacMullan, Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2009); Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism.
9. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 138– 50; Nancy Ladd Muller,
“Du Boisian Pragmatism and ‘The Problem of the Twentieth Century,’” Critique of
Anthropology 12, no. 3 (1992): 319–37; George L. Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance
in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996),
33–42; Richard Cullen Rath, “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E.
B. Du Bois,” Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (1997): 461–95; Ross Posnock, Color
and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Paul C. Taylor, “What’s the Use of Calling Du
Bois a Pragmatist?,” Metaphilosophy 35, nos. 1–2 (2004): 99–114; Jonathon S. Kahn,
Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009). See critical rejoinders in Robert Gooding-Williams, “Evading
Narrative Myth, Evading Prophetic Pragmatism: Cornel West’s ‘The American Evasion
of Philosophy,’” Massachusetts Review 32, no. 4 (1991): 517–42; Shamoon Zamir, Dark
Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995); Diggins, “Pragmatism and Its Limits.”
10. Kahn, Divine Discontent, 27; emphasis in original. Kahn overstates the case
when he depicts James as silent on questions of politics.
196 | Notes
197
11. For a reading of Dewey on faith that shares many parallels with the account
of meliorist faith I develop here see Melvin L. Rogers, “The Fact of Sacrifice and the
Necessity of Faith: Dewey and the Ethics of Democracy,” Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society 47, no. 3 (2011): 274–300.
12. For the former perspective see Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan
Democracy,” in Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990); Raymond Boisvert, “The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Deweyan
Pragmatism,” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey
Haskins and David I. Seiple (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Cornel
West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993),
107–18. This conventional perception of Deweyan pragmatism as insensitive to trag-
edy and conflict are challenged in provocative ways in Campbell, The Community
Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought, 91–109; Glaude, In a Shade
of Blue, 17–46; Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey.
13. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Introduction,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience
(New York: Collier, 1961), 7, 8.
14. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 279–303.
15. Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005), 8.
16. Ibid., 8, 260–69. See Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, 78–81, 390–92.
17. Following the norms of writing on pragmatism and democratic faith, I use the
terms “faith” and “hope” interchangeably in this section. On pragmatism and democratic
hope see inter alia Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin,
1999); Patrick Shade, Habits of Hope: A Pragmatic Theory (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2001); John J. Stuhr, Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of
Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003); Richard J. Bernstein, “Pragmatism’s Common
Faith,” in Pragmatism and Religion, ed. Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2003); Westbrook, Democratic Hope; Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The
Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007); Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith; Stephen M. Fishman and
Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Judith M. Green, Pragmatism and Social
Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008); Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition.
18. George Shulman, “Hope and American Politics,” Raritan 21, no. 3 (2002): 4.
19. Hesiod, The Works and Days; Theogony; the Shield of Herakles, trans. Richard
Lattimore (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1991), lines 57–58.
20. Ibid., line 95.
21. For a historical survey of responses to the myth, as well as the conceptual and
aesthetic consequences of Erasmus’s interpellation of the myth from that of Pandora’s jar
to a box, see Dora Panofsky and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects
of a Mythical Symbol (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1991). In Aeschylus’s tell-
ing of Prometheus’s transgression, the birth of hope is not the punishment but rather
the offense for which Zeus punishes him. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. James
Scully and C. J. Herington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), lines 373–78.
Notes | 197
198
198 | Notes
199
Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 281; Rath, “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric
Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois.”
40. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 11.
41. Du Bois approvingly cites the essay in which James originally published his views
on double consciousness, HS, in his Harvard convocation address, “Jefferson Davis as a
Representative of Civilization,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering-Lewis
(New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 19. For strong statements of the influence of Principles
on Du Bois’s development of double consciousness see Arnold Rampersad, “Slavery
and the Literary Imagination: Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” in Slavery and the
Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 117; Dickson D. Bruce, “W. E. B. Du Bois and
the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature 64, no. 2 (1992): 570–71; James
Campbell, “Du Bois and James,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28, no. 3
(1992): 569–81; Taylor, William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin, 75; Posnock,
Color and Culture, 64–68. Rath makes a more attenuated version of this claim in “Echo
and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois,” 478.
42. Zamir, Dark Voices, 116–17. See also Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and
American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 99–105. On alienation and double consciousness see Thomas C. Holt, “The
Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–
1940,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1990): 301–23.
43. Given the influence of Marxism on Du Bois’s conception of race and racism in
later works like Dusk of Dawn, there is some controversy as to how the Du Bois of Souls
understood the nature of power and whether or not the analysis of the causes of double-
consciousness are consistent throughout this text. For a reading of Souls that draws out
both the idealist and materialist dimensions of the young Du Bois’s analysis of white
supremacy, see George Ciccariello-Maher, “A Critique of Du Boisian Reason: Kanye
West and the Fruitfulness of Double-Consciousness,” Journal of Black Studies 39, no.
3 (2009): 371–401.
44. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 10.
45. Ross Posnock, “Going Astray, Going Forward: Du Boisian Pragmatism and Its
Lineage,” in The Revival of Pragmatism, 176–77.
46. The Souls of Black Folk, 10.
47. Shannon Mariotti, “On the Passing of the First-Born Son: Emerson’s ‘Focal
Distancing,’ Du Bois’ ‘Second Sight,’ and Disruptive Particularity,” Political Theory 37,
no. 3 (2009): 362; Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern
Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 78.
48. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 131.
49. Ibid., 12.
50. Ibid., 133.
51. W. E. B. Du Bois to William James, June 12, 1906, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers,
Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Libraries. Given that William James both reports reading Souls in 1903 and writing
a letter to Du Bois that June, it is most likely that the date of 1906 attributed to this
letter by early archivists is incorrect. See C 2:242–43; 9:261. According to the editors
of James’s Correspondence, the whereabouts of this letter from James to Du Bois are
Notes | 199
200
“unknown” (C 9:604). See James’s additional notes on lynching from that same year in
“Clippings, 1903–1910 and undated,” Folder 3, and “Notes, 1910 and undated,” James
Additional Papers.
52. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 133.
53. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 1–2, 497–99.
54. Christina Zwang, “Du Bois on Trauma: Psychoanalysis and the Would-Be Black
Savant,” Cultural Critique 51 (2002): 1–39.
55. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 155.
56. I borrow this expression “antimnemonic orientation” from Balfour, Democracy’s
Reconstruction, 11.
57. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 162.
58. See the careful analysis of these pairings and their significance for Souls’s argu-
ment in Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois.
59. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 11.
60. Ibid., 157.
61. Ibid., 120.
62. Ibid., 162.
63. The role of democratic rhetoric in Souls is examined in great detail in Melvin
L. Rogers, “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The
Souls of Black Folk,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (2012): 188–203.
64. Ibid., 162, 163.
65. Ibid., 163.
66. Ibid., 164.
67. In light of so-called pragmatism of the Obama presidency’s foreign policy in
comparison to the right Wilsonian idealism that preceded it, scholars have been eager
to construct a philosophical lineage for the Obama presidency rooted in American prag-
matism. Central to these investigations of the supposed philosophy behind the pres-
idency has been an attention to Obama’s rhetoric of hope. Bart Schultz, “Obama’s
Political Philosophy: Pragmatism, Politics, and the Univeristy of Chicago,” Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 39, no. 2 (2009): 127– 73; James T. Kloppenberg, Reading
Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011); Rogers M. Smith, “The Constitutional Philosophy of Barack
Obama: Democratic Pragmatism and Religious Commitment,” Social Science Quarterly
93, no. 5 (2012): 1251–71.
68. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth- Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6.
69. Achieving Our Country, 1. In a thoughtful essay, Simon Stow situates Rorty’s
“inspirational” politics within the tradition of American poetry that views the role of lit-
erature itself as a foundation of the American republic. Stow demonstrates how Rorty’s
own selective readings of American poets like Whitman, along with his famously
“strong” readings of Dewey, Heidegger, and others, is a feature of the pluralism of this
literary tradition itself as “a historical tradition of subversive counter readings” in the
service of crafting “a compelling narrative of hope about America’s future.” “‘To Him
Continents Arrive as Contributions’: Richard Rorty, European Theory, and the Poetry of
American Politics,” Zeitschrift für Äesthetik und Allgemine Kunstwissenschaft (Journal
for Aesthetics and Art Theory) 11 (2011): 114–15. One persistent feature of this tradition,
Stow argues, is its avoidance of race. Christopher Voparil similarly identifies the literary
200 | Notes
201
character of Rorty’s politics in Achieving Our Country. See his Richard Rorty: Politics
and Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 155–82.
70. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 101.
71. Rorty’s use of genre to frame his appeal to democratic hope as melodrama is crit-
ically scrutinized in Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), 107–22. Examining the politics of genre in the post-9/11 reconsolida-
tion of the national security state, Elisabeth R. Anker argues that melodramatic genre
conventions prove particularly useful for the legitimation of American state power
Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014).
72. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free
Press, 1998), 722.
73. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993),
101; Shulman, “Hope and American Politics.”
Conclusion
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin,
1985), 83.
2. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, in Democracy, Esther, Mont
Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams, and Poems, ed. E. Samuels
and J. N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983).
3. Sigmund Freud, “Wild Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Stachey, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957), 224.
4. Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton:
Princeton Univerity Press, 2009), 137.
5. Otto, “On a Certain Blindness in William James,” 188.
6. Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, 264.
7. Rudyard Kipling, The Complete Verse (London: Kyle Cathie, 1990), 261.
8. Quoted in Rusling, “Interview with President McKinley,” 137.
9. “Take up the White Man’s burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years.”
Kipling, The Complete Verse, 262.
10. Judith Plotz, “How ‘The White Man’s Burden’ Lost Its Scare-Quotes; or Kipling
and the New American Empire,” in Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalization and
Postcolonialism, ed. Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 38.
11. Roosevelt, “National Duties,” 775.
12. Albert J. Beveridge, “The March of the Flag,” in The Meaning of the Times and
Other Speeches (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1908), 48.
13. Patrick Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Aftermath,”
English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 50, no. 2 (2007); Plotz, “How ‘The White
Notes | 201
202
Man’s Burden’ Lost Its Scare-Quotes.” Du Bois, too, penned a parody of Kipling’s essay
that underscored the essentially racist character of its depiction of masculine freedom.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Burden of Black Women,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed.
David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).
14. “A Collection of Newspaper Clippings Related to the Philippine Question,
1899–1903,” Film W 11316, Harvard College Library, Harvard University.
15. John Atkinson Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1935); Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1907); Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Collected Works, vol. 22
(Moscow: Progress, 1964), 185–304.
16. Hobson, Imperialism, 71.
17. Both lines of justification were often invoked together, as in the speeches by
Beveridge and Roosevelt cited above.
18. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, trans. P. S. Falla
(New York: Random House, 1980), 86–92. See also Harry Magdoff, Imperialism with-
out Colonies (New York: Monthly Review, 2003); Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary
Imperialism,” 6–10.
19. The classic statement of this interpretation of United States foreign policy is
Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 19–89.
20. Lodge, “Our Blundering Foreign Policy,” 17.
21. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International
Relations, 1789–1941, 266–68; Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism, 153–63.
22. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, 119–29. John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire
(New York: Scribner, 2004), 69–74; Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2:133; Rana,
The Two Faces of American Freedom, 285–90.
23. This is not to deny that the Monroe Doctrine was frequently invoked to justify
the deployment of military force in Latin America and South America over the course
of the nineteenth century. Greg Grandin counts 5,980 cases of American warships being
sent into Latin American ports between 1869 and 1897. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop:
Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 20. For the clas-
sic study of the United States’ influence in Latin America see Eduardo Galeano, Open
Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric
Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
24. Theodore Roosevelt, “Message of the President of the United States,
Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Third Session of
the Fifty-Eighth Congress,” in Presidential Addresses and State Papers, vol. 3, April 7,
1904 to May 9, 1905 (New York: Review of Reviews Company, 1910), 172, 173.
25. Ibid., Ibid., 176.
26. Ibid., 177.
27. Ibid.
28. Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism (Malden: Blackwell,
2001), 118–22.
29. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2:263.
30. For neoconservative invocations of the Philippines see Max Boot, The Savage
Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, rev. ed. (New York:
Basic, 2014), 99–128; Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on
202 | Notes
203
the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005), 131–84. For liberal variations of this
construction of imperial memory see Michael Ignatieff, “Why Are We in Iraq?; (and
Liberia? And Afganistan?),” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2003,38–43,
71–72, 85; Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (New York:
Vintage, 2003).
31. “Remarks to a Joint Session of the Philippine Congress in Quezon City,
Philippines. October 18, 2003,” http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-2003-10-27/pdf/
WCPD-2003-10-27-Pg1427.pdf (accessed October 25, 2015). See discussion in Judis,
The Folly of Empire, 1–3.
32. John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Robert W. McChesney, “Kipling,
the ‘White Man’s Burden,’ and U.S. Imperialism,” in Pox Americana: Exposing the
American Empire, ed. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2004); Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and
Its Aftermath”; Matthew Connelly, “The New Imperialists,” in Lessons of Empire:
Imperial Histories and American Power, ed. Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and
Kevin W. Moore (New York: Free Press, 2006), 26; Plotz, “How ‘The White Man’s
Burden’ Lost Its Scare-Quotes.”
33. Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-Building Lite,” New York Times Magazine, July 28,
2002, 26–31, 54–59.
34. “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 22–27, 50–54.
35. Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American
Power, 369.
36. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin,
2004), 301. Compare Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the
Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic, 2003), 364–67.
37. These unironic celebrations of Kipling might be dismissed as an artifact of
the overzealous idealism that marked the United States’ unilateral foreign policy
during the years of the Bush presidency. The so-called pragmatic foreign policy
of the Obama presidency, by contrast, has closed this chapter of imperial foreign
policy in favor of a return to diplomatic multilateralism. What such a conclusion
mistakes, as James Tully demonstrates, is the continuity between military unilater-
alism and diplomatic multilateralism in sustaining the web of informal imperialism.
Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2:134–47; Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary
Imperialism,” 21–28.
38. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 88.
39. Jeanne Morefield uses the term “deflection” to characterize the rhetorical sepa-
ration of illiberal practices of imperialism from the liberal principles celebrated by the
likes of Ferguson and Ignatieff. Morefield, Empires without Imperialism.
40. Schirmer, “William James and the New Age”; Ferguson, William James, 39–47.
Notes | 203
204
205
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INDEX
228 | Index
229
agency and, 20, 55, 67–68, 70, 128, 152 on philosophy’s “quest for
authority and, 51, 53–56, 66–67, 75, certainty,” 56
152, 154 political philosophy and, 6–7, 101, 131
conviction and, 121 pragmatism and the philosophy of, 1,
faith and, 120, 128, 141 5–6, 11, 18–19, 36, 47, 131
God and, 135 on “problem of authority,” 12
modernity and, 13 as public intellectual, 6
monism and, 55–56, 63, 69, 71–72, Diggins, John, 25, 34, 40
74, 141 Dominican Republic, 160
moral philosophy and, 111 Douglass, Frederick, 116, 120, 123–24
Nietzsche on, 67, 75–76, 155 Dreyfus Affair, 62
pluralism and, 67, 72–74, 130, 141, 154 Du Bois, W.E.B.
pragmatism and, 10, 13, 20, 129, 141 on African Americans’ spiritual
strenuousness and, 75 songs, 147–49
Conwell, Russell H., 62 on American amnesia toward history
Coon, Deborah of white supremacy, 143, 149–51
on James and political agency, 68 anti-imperialism and, 131
on James’s anarchism, 8–9, 54, 76 on “double consciousness” and race,
on James’s critique of “bigness,” 22, 131, 143–49, 199n41
60–61, 63 James as professor of, 142
Corcoran, John, 136 on Jim Crow era, 146
Cotkin, George, 8–9, 86–87, 174n67 on John Brown, 123–24
Croce, Paul Jerome, 38, 65 meliorism’s tragic consequences
Croly, Herbert, 34–35, 40 examined by, 130, 145–47, 149–50
Crosby, Ernest Howard, 8, 169n27 pragmatism and, 130–31
Czolgosz, Leon, 8 on the problem of the color
line, 143–44
Darien (Georgia), Civil War sacking
of, 116–17 Eastman, Max, 3–6, 25
Darwin, Charles, 53 The Education of Henry Adams (Henry
Davis, Jefferson, 86 Adams), 154
Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 106, 155, 195n30 Edwards, Jonathan, 46
“Democracy” (Woodberry), 57 Elliott, William Y., 36–37, 40
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 13 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 94, 139
Democratic Temperament (Miller), 6 empire. See imperialism
Deneen, Patrick, 131–34 Empire (Ferguson), 162
Dewey, John. See also specific works The Enlightenment, 11
anti-authoritarianism and, 11 Essays in Radical Empiricism
on change and craving for (James), 3, 27
authority, 171n43 exemplarity, 21, 79, 93–94
civil religion in America and, 151
on the frontier, 101 faith. See also agency; meliorism;
instrumentalism and, 5, 14, 36 strenuousness; the will
on James, 4, 15, 78, 101, 167n13 action and, 105–7, 112–13, 116–17, 119,
on liberalism, 34 123, 155
Mussolini compared to, 36 afterlife and, 93
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