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Damn Great Empires!
Damn Great Empires!
William James and the Politics of Pragmatism
Alexander Livingston
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© Oxford University Press 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Livingston, Alexander, author.
Title: Damn great empires! : William James and the politics of pragmatism / Alexander Livingston.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016001445 (print) | LCCN 2016014049 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190237158 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190237165 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190237172 (Updf)
Subjects: LCSH: James, William, 1842–1910—Political and social views. | United States—Territorial expansion—History—19th century. | Philippines—Annexation to the United States. | Imperialism—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC B945.J24 L58 2016 (print) | LCC B945.J24 (ebook) | DDC 320.092—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001445
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Publication of this book was supported by The Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.
To my parents.
My political philosophy evidently belongs to the future; certainly not to the past or present.
William James to Theodora Sedgwick, December 25th, 1899 (C 9:108)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Political Uses of William James 24
Chapter 2 Cravings and Consequences 53
Chapter 3 Taming the Strenuous Life 77
Chapter 4 Stuttering Conviction 103
Chapter 5 Tragedy, History, and Democratic Faith 126
Conclusion 153
Notes 165
Works Cited 205
Index 227
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Life,” 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 borders 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 introduced 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 unconventional 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 intellectual 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 picture. I completed this book at Cornell University, nurtured by the intellectual support and provocation of colleagues, students, and friends. Thanks
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 interlocutors 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 audiences 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
conferences. Additional thanks are owed to the conversations about pragmatism I have been lucky to take part in through the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, where I have enjoyed playing the part of the disciplinary outsider.
Research support was made available through a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as from the Society for the Humanities and the Department of Government at Cornell University. This book would not have been possible without the diligent work of librarians and archivists at Olin Library and the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University; Houghton Library, Pusey Library, and Robbins Library at Harvard University; Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto; the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at University of Massachusetts Amherst; and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Thanks to Nolan Bennett and Vijay Phulwani for their research assistance in preparing the final manuscript for publication.
Angela Chnapko at Oxford University Press guided the book through the editorial process skillfully. Her patience and enthusiasm have been a great boon in working through revisions. I am indebted to the detailed comments on the manuscript Angela procured for the Press from two very attentive and critical reviewers, one of whom—Jeanne Morefield—I know to thank in person. An earlier version of chapter 4 previously appeared as “Stuttering Conviction: Commitment and Hesitation in James’s Oration to Robert Gould Shaw,” Contemporary Political Theory 12, no. 4 (2013): 255–76. I thank the journal for permission to republish portions of the article here in revised form.
Lastly, I thank my family. My deepest gratitude is to Merike AndreBarrett. Merike has been there through all the transitions, and there would have been no terms to connect without her love, humor, and constant companionship. I thank her for all the adventures so far and for the ones still to come. I dedicate this book to my loving parents, Barbara Landy-Livingston and Paul Livingston, who were my first teachers and remain my best ones.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
All in-text citations refer to The Works of William James published by Harvard University Press unless otherwise noted. Citations refer to abbreviation, followed by volume number (citing multivolume works), with pages cited following the colon. For example: (PP 2:345).
Edited Works
C The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004).
ECR Essays, Comments, and Reviews, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
EP Essays in Philosophy, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
EPs Essays in Psychology, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
ERM Essays in Religion and Morality, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
LWJ The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920).
M Manuscript Lectures, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Books by William James
ERE Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976 [1912]).
MT The Meaning of Truth, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1909]).
P Pragmatism, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907]).
PP The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 [1890]).
PU A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1907]).
SPP Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1911]).
TT Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1899]).
TWTB The Will to Believe, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1897]).
VRE The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1903]).
Essays by William James
AQ “Address on the Philippines Question” [1903], in ECR.
AS “The Absolute and the Strenuous Life” [1906], in MT.
DD “The Dilemma of Determinism” [1884], in TWTB.
DF “Diary of French Naval Officer: Observations at Manila” [1900], in ECR.
DN “Drafts and Notes for Addresses to Graduate Clubs” [1902–1906], in M.
EC “Address at the Emerson Centenary” [1903], in ERM.
EL “Epidemic of Lynching” [1903], in ECR.
GME “Great Men and Their Environment” [1880], in TWTB.
GR “The Gospel of Relaxation” [1899], in TT.
GRO “Governor Roosevelt’s Oration” [1899], in ECR.
HS “The Hidden Self” [1890], in EPs.
List of Abbreviations
II “The Importance of Individuals” [1890], in TWTB.
LWL “Is Life Worth Living?” [1895], in TWTB.
MEW “On the Moral Equivalent of War” [1910], in ERM.
MPML “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” [1891], in TWTB.
OCB “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” [1899], in TT.
PA “The Philippines Again” [1899], in ECR.
PB “Remarks at the Peace Banquet” [1904], in ERM.
PC “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” [1898], in P.
PhD “The PhD Octopus” [1903], in ECR.
PMI “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy” [1906], in EP.
PN “The Problem of the Negro” [1909], in ECR.
PQ “The Philippine Question” [1899], in ECR.
PT “The Philippine Tangle” [1899], in ECR.
RGS “Robert Gould Shaw: An Oration” [1897], in ERM.
SDM “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” [1878], in EP.
SN “A Strong Note of Warning Regarding the Lynching Epidemic” [1903], in ECR.
SR “The Sentiment of Rationality” [1882/1897], in TWTB.
SV “The Social Value of the College Bred” [1907], in ECR.
TD “Thomas Davidson: Individualist” [1905], in ECR.
TEC “Two English Critics” [1908], in MT.
TH “True Harvard” [1903], in ECR.
WMLS “What Makes Life Significant?” [1899], in TT.
WPE “A World of Pure Experience” [1904], in ERE.
WTB “The Will to Believe” [1897], in TWTB.
Damn Great Empires!
Introduction
I. James’s Nachlass
To mark the centenary of the great American philosopher William James (1842–1910), the American Political Science Association proposed to hold a panel at its thirty- eighth annual meeting in 1943 on the topic of pragmatism and politics. The prodigious scholarship of thinkers such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead had placed pragmatism— the experimental and collaborative philosophy of inquiry that James popularized in the early 1900s— at the intellectual center of progressive political thought in the early decades of the twentieth century. The panel, titled “Pragmatism and the Current Political Situation,” aimed to bring together prominent political scientists to discuss the insights James’s writings could offer on contemporary world politics. The organizers were caught by surprise, however, when the invited speakers declined to participate. As historian of political thought George Sabine explained his reluctance: “The great difficulty is that so far as I can see James had no political philosophy.”1
In response to Sabine’s swift rejection, the conference’s program director, Henry W. Stoke, reached out to Horace Kallen to inquire whether or not a panel on James and political science was intellectually viable.2 Kallen had studied under James at Harvard University and considered himself something of a philosophical heir to his former teacher, having been tasked to prepare James’s posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy. 3 Kallen’s response was not simply supportive; it was enthusiastic. James “might be treated as a fundamental philosopher of liberalism in American life and thought,” Kallen declared. The American Political Science Association would do well to reconsider his political legacy in
relation to the “revival of liberalism” currently taking place. Kallen directed Stokes to the rich material in James’s Nachlass, where he “has said enough things having political connections.”4
This Nachlass Kallen mentions is a reference to the collection of notes, correspondence, occasional essays, and editorials James composed in the final decade of his life in reaction to the Spanish-American War and its imperial aftermath. As US infantry landed in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in June 1898, James— by this time a famed psychologist and renowned professor— set foot into the inaugural meeting of the New England Anti-Imperialist League at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.5 Over the following months, James would undergo a sort of political awakening that transformed the celebrated scholar into a prominent voice of American anti-imperialism. The American public read his stinging indictments of militarism and jingoism in newspapers such as the Boston Evening Transcript, the Springfield Republican, and the New York Evening Post. His hatred of empire would bring him to correspond with a transnational community of political actors and thinkers, ranging from Boston’s blueblooded mugwumps to Tolstoian labor radicals, and from the Russian radical Maxim Gorky to William Cameron Forbes, commissioner of commerce and police of the American colonial government in the Philippines.6 As James confesses in one of his many epistolary salvos against imperialism, “I want all great empires, including our own, to come to grief” (C 9:264– 65). In 1903 James was named vice president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Anti-Imperialist League, the national successor to the New England Anti-Imperialist League, a position he held until his death in 1910. From 1905 to 1907 James held the additional role of vice president of the Filipino Progress Association, the purpose of which was to lobby for Filipino interests in the transition from military to civilian rule.7 And in the essay he would repeatedly revise over the last four years of his life, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” he squarely confronts the problem of American militarism and the need to control its destructive power on the global stage.8
This final decade of James’s life was a political one. This period is better remembered, however, for the intellectual works that launched him to international fame as the voice of a bold, new movement in philosophy. Between the outbreak of the war and his death, the philosophical ideas James had been articulating in the previous decades exploded into a series of major works that would fundamentally transform the landscape of American scholarship and intellectual culture in the twentieth century: The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907),
A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909), and the posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). These works did more than simply redefine the terms of professional philosophy in the United States; they articulated an entire “phase of American life- experience,” as John Dewey memorably describes James’s philosophy.9
Under the shadow of James’s monumental contributions to the fields of philosophy, psychology, and religious studies, his anti-imperialist Nachlass appears as a minor fragment in his broader corpus. Sabine’s view remains received wisdom— that these works did not bear “any really close relationship to [James’s] philosophy.” Echoing the judgment of Ralph Barton Perry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1935 biography, The Thought and Character of William James, Sabine confidently asserts that James’s antiimperialism was merely the consequence of his sensitive temperament given free rein during a period of doctor-prescribed bed rest that just happened to overlap with the outbreak of the war.10 His anti-imperialism, it would seem, was a feverish outburst rather than a considered reflection on his times.
After months of correspondence Sabine agreed, reluctantly, to participate on the panel, only after being assured that he could present a paper on the political significance of pragmatism broadly rather than James’s political philosophy in particular. The other speaker scheduled to participate on the panel was Max Eastman. A former revolutionary socialist turned vociferous anti-communist, Eastman’s proposed paper represents a very different response to the question of the political significance of James’s pragmatism. Eastman had attended James’s pragmatism lectures at Columbia University in 1907 while writing his dissertation under Dewey’s supervision. Despite this intellectual pedigree Eastman no longer counted himself a believer in pragmatism, and his proposed paper, “Pragmatism and the Totalitarian Will to Believe,” would try to explain why. As Eastman explains to Stoke in a letter outlining his proposed talk, the paper would examine the seeming contradiction between Dewey’s “clear-headed” opposition to “every kind of totalitarian infiltration into the United States” and the fact that “pragmatism in its exaltation of impulse does seem somewhat akin to the totalitarian rejection of the intellect.” James, he wagers, would likely have shared Dewey’s political opposition to totalitarianism, “although I am not so sure.”11
Eastman was not alone during this period in seeing pragmatism as sharing some sort of elective affinity with the totalitarianism of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Il Duce himself had cited James’s doctrine of the will
to believe to a British journalist a decade earlier as one of the sources for fascism’s consequentialist philosophy of action.12 Sabine and Eastman’s respective judgments of the politics of James’s pragmatism— either as apolitical or as unwittingly laying the intellectual groundwork for the terrors of modern totalitarianism— shed light on Kallen’s enthusiastic support for a panel that would commemorate James as a “fundamental” figure of American liberalism. At a commemorative event held at the New School for Social Research in November 1941, Kallen delivered a paper titled “Remembering William James.” “To me,” Kallen pronounces, “the singularity of William James remains his call to arms in the immemorial war of freedom for every man, of which the present crisis is but the present phase.” In response to the slander of scholars like Eastman who would make James a “scapegoat” for the rise of modern totalitarianism, Kallen reminds his audience of the essentially liberal spirit of James’s thought. Pragmatism, after all, was dedicated to none other than John Stuart Mill. James was ultimately a “metaphysical democrat” who forever remained attentive to the dangers philosophical dogmatism and absolutism posed to the pursuit of individual freedom.13 A nation at war would do well to recall James as a model of the courage demanded by liberalism’s fighting creed. The proposed panel, “Pragmatism and the Current Political Situation,” never took place. The American Political Science Association canceled their 1943 meeting in response to the federal government’s request that citizens limit nonessential transportation as the nation mobilized for war.14 I include this short vignette from behind the scenes of an academic conference three- quarters of a century ago to illustrate some of the persistent interpretive challenges facing this book’s central thesis: namely, that William James was an important and innovative theorist of politics. Four challenges in particular stand out. The first is the common denial that James had any substantial concern with politics. Sabine’s summary dismissal of the idea that James could be considered a political philosopher has found innumerable restatements over the ensuing years. James’s involvement in the anti-imperialist movement is frequently overlooked in major studies of his life and thought. Where it is acknowledged, it is typically decentered as a chapter of his personal life unrelated to his philosophy.15 “In regards to politics,” writes Cornel West in his influential study of the development of the pragmatist tradition, “James had nothing profound or even provocative to say.”16 James’s editorials, essays, and letters on empire that Kallen claims as a rich source for James’s political thought have been characterized as “few, scattered, and more on the order of desultory meditations than systematic arguments.”17 James penned no recognizable treatise on
political theory and seldom engaged the works of major figures in the history of political thought.
Second is the contested history of interpretation surrounding the political 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 decades following James’s death. Canons are always made up retrospectively to give shape to the past for purposes of the present. The thinkers celebrated as the founding figures of classical pragmatism— Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey— shared overlapping philosophical 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 nationalism.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 nominalism of James to articulate his naturalized Hegelianism as “instrumentalism.”20 These divisions, and many others, are obscured by the posthumous canonization of these three thinkers as the holy trinity of a national tradition 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 pragmatism 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 conscriptions 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 negotiate 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 foundations. Dewey’s vision of philosophy as the methodological application of social intelligence to common problems led to major contributions in the
development of American political thought in works including German Philosophy and Politics (1915), The Public and Its Problems (1927), Individualism Old and New (1930), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and Freedom and Culture (1939), to name only a few. Furthermore, Dewey’s reconstruction of philosophy brought the method of intelligence out of the academy and into the public sphere in his role as a public intellectual. Given both the intellectual scope and historical influence of Dewey’s political thought, it is unsurprising that pragmatism has become synonymous with Deweyan democracy in contemporary political theory.21 Accordingly, political theorists have tended to view James’s political thought—when they recognize it at all— as amounting to little more than an incomplete and immature statement of Dewey’s democratic theory.22
Fourth, and perhaps most challenging, concerns how we ought to understand the relationship between James’s pragmatism as a philosophical method, articulated in popular works and public lectures, and his writings on politics, which are brief, fragmentary, and typically unpublished. Sabine and generations of scholars since have simply denied any intellectual link connecting James’s writing on empire to his philosophy and psychology. Kallen and Eastman in their own ways look beyond James’s encounter with American empire to find the purported politics of James’s thought in the inferred implications of his pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism. Readings of James as the intellectual forerunner of Dewey’s democratic theory similarly ignore these writings to draw out the untapped implications of his ethics and theory of truth. This displacement of James’s anti-imperialist Nachlass is continued in recent works that aim to rehabilitate James as a resource for political theory. Joshua Miller’s Democratic Temperament approaches James’s work as “implicitly related to politics” to shed light on the paradoxes and possibilities of liberal democracy at the close of the twentieth century. To make explicit what remains implicit in pragmatism, Miller proposes to “translate” James’s philosophy “into the language of democratic politics” rather than consider it as political in its own terms.23 Similarly, William Connolly and Kennan Ferguson have brought renewed attention to James’s pluralism for the “intimate connection” it draws “between character, history, and philosophy,” so as to open the way to the power of ideas to actively reshape and redirect ethical energies that rationalist approaches to morality disparage to their detriment.24 To the extent James’s writings on imperialism figure into such approaches, and they seldom do, they serve as illustrations of the practical political meaning of his pluralist philosophy.
This book represents a radically different approach to the study of James’s political thought. Following Kallen’s advice to focus on James’s Nachlass, Damn Great Empires! takes James’s anti-imperialism seriously as a lens for rethinking the meaning of his pluralistic pragmatism. More than a minor distraction or an illustration of the untapped political implications of his philosophy, this book takes James’s speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on empire as keys for unlocking the political significance of his writings on truth, religion, and metaphysics. By resituating these works in the intellectual and discursive context of Pacific imperialism and Gilded Age political thought, we come to see James as more than an apolitical scholar, a harbinger of fascism, or a proto-Deweyan democrat. We discover instead an anti-imperialist thinker who was profoundly attuned to the psychological and existential dimensions of politics. The master theme of Dewey’s political thought is democracy as a way of life, a conception of politics as perpetual renewal and reform. James’s political vision, by contrast, reorients political thought towards the problem of empire as a way of life. I borrow this expression from William Appleman Williams to denote the deep roots of imperial expansion in the institutionalized patterns of thought, language, and conduct ingrained in American political culture.25 The originality and importance of James’s political thought lies in its philosophical examination and transformation of the psychic, affective, and cultural roots of American imperialism at a crucial moment in the nation’s rise to global hegemony.
II. Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
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 description of James’s mercurial nature has proven particularly true for scholars 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 genteel 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 anarchist. “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
in small systems of things exclusively” (C 9:362; emphasis in original). Through his involvement in the anti-imperialist movement, James came into contact with anarchist writers and ideas, ranging from now-forgotten American figures like the Boston labor activist Morrison Swift and the Christian pacifist Ernest Howard Crosby, to better-known European anarchist writers like Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Max Stirner.27 “I am getting to be more and more of an anarchist myself in my ideas,” he reports to Pauline Goldmark in 1903, “though when it comes to applying them to life I am helpless” (C 10:191). He expressed “strongest sympathy” for “Tolstoi-anism” as “surely the best life” to one of his anarchist interlocutors, while admitting his admiration for Kropotkin as “the most ideal man” after reading his Memoires of a Revolutionist (C 9:551, 451). And in his most shocking and troubling flirtation with anarchism, James goes so far as to privately celebrate the assassination of President William McKinley at the hands of the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901. He exclaims to Katherine Sands Godkin, “Czolgosz has been our great deliverer! You’ve no idea how it lightens the atmosphere to have that type of being gone!—I mean the McK. type!” (C 10:7).
Historian Deborah Coon has carefully sorted through James’s various confessions and citations regarding anarchism to argue that his angry response to the Venezuela Crisis of 1895 and the “rude political awakening” of the Spanish-American War set him on a course of political radicalization.28 Over the course of the 1900s, James came to affirm “a type of pacifist, communitarian anarchism— strongly individualist, but holding community to be important.”29 This anarchism valued local, decentralized, and autonomous communities, those “small systems” James refers to in his letter to Howells, as the ideal form of association to protect individuals from becoming reduced to “a mere series of interchangeable cogs in a vast military-industrial machine.”30 This emerging radicalism had a profound impact on the development of James’s philosophical thinking. Seen as an extension of his political radicalism, pragmatism’s devastating attacks on dogmatism and absolutism are something more than provocative interventions in scholarly debates concerning epistemology, empiricism, and ethics. They are themselves anarchist tools forged to “serve as a basis of reform and activism in the social and political world as well.”31 George Cotkin has similarly examined how James’s encounter with anarchism and anti-imperialism serves as one important context, among others, for the articulation of his public philosophy. In his vivid reconstruction of the milieu of the Gilded Age’s cultural malaise that afflicted James and his fellow
elites, Cotkin examines the shared contextual sources of both James’s philosophy and his anti-imperialism. “James’s philosophical expressions of pragmatic doctrine,” he writes, “were anchored in a social and political context.”32 Cotkin, like Coon, takes James’s self-description as an anarchist seriously, but is more hesitant to take this flirtations at face value as a statement of ideological commitment. The “anarchist edges” of James’s thinking guard against his subscription to any particular political ideology including Anarchism itself, spelled with a capital “A.”33
Cotkin is right to underscore this distinction between the anarchist edges of James’s philosophy and the anarchist ideology he may or may not have subscribed to. It is these anarchist edges that guard against any easy classification of James’s political thought. The diversity of political labels scholars have sought to attach to James could be grounds to conclude, as one reader does, that “the traces of James’s political preferences are too faint to provide more than a tentative outline of his ideas.”34 A different conclusion one might draw from the capricious ways James’s remarks on politics seems to cut across conventional labels, by contrast, is that there is something unconventional and innovative about his way of thinking about politics. Concepts, James writes in A Pluralistic Universe, are like scissors that arrest the creative flow of experience by “cutting it up into bits” (PU 109). Conceptually arresting the pulsing flow of experience can be a helpful tool of inquiry, but only if we do not succumb to the typical philosophical mistake of taking immobile and neatly arranged categories for the reality itself. “The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails positively to include,” is a symptom of “ ‘vicious intellectualism’ ” (PU 32). To approach experience in its concrete and relational fullness, by contrast, you must “place yourself at the point of view of the thing’s interior doing” (PU 117; emphasis in original). Similarly, attempting to summarize James’s political thought under received labels like “liberal” or “anarchist” risks domesticating the complexity and nuance of his political thinking in order to satisfy intellectualist demands for conceptual clarity and precision. James was neither conventionally political nor apolitical; he was, as Colin Koopman rightly argues, “political in a new key.”35 Resisting the closure of intellectualist thinking requires cultivating a tolerance for ambiguity, messiness, and paradox—what James referred to as “the vague”— as creative elements of experience and, by extension, political thought.36 In the place of categorizing and schematizing James’s thought, this book seeks to study his anti-imperialism from its “interior doing,” so to speak, by removing James from the familiar narratives of the
history of American pragmatism and its well-defined ideological coordinates in order to examine his political thought in a new light.
Seen from the perspective of a contextually sensitive history of political thought, James’s adoption of the title “anarchist” during these years is of interest for what it might reveal about his political vision rather than his personality or preferences. By “vision” I mean the peculiar art of seeing, which Sheldon Wolin interprets as the characteristic of any political theory: an articulated perspective on the world at once descriptive and imaginative, describing it as it is and projecting possibilities as they might be.37 As descriptive, it offers a diagnosis of authority, self, institutions, and history as they shape a concrete present; and as imaginative, theory proposes fanciful possibilities and exaggerations that disturb received patterns of perception and introduce new modes of seeing and acting in the world. As James tells a young scholar, the exercise of “building up an author’s meaning out of separate texts leads nowhere” unless you first grasp “his center of vision, by an act of imagination” (LWJ 2:355; see also PU 117). It is through imaginative reconstruction of the vision embodied in his writings, public and private, political or philosophical, that we can come to occupy James’s political vision as a perspective for rethinking his pragmatism. Taking James’s Nachlass seriously reorients our own view on James and shed new light on elements of his philosophical works that recede into the background from the vantage point of our conventional narratives and ways of seeing pragmatism.
Reading these anarchist confessions in terms of what they reveal about the political vision contained in his philosophy invites a reconsideration of the consequences of pragmatism as a practice of anti- authoritarianism. This is pragmatism, not as a doctrine, but as an anti-intellectualist attitude of orientation. As he presents it in Pragmatism, it is an “attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (P 32). It asks its readers to reimagine themselves as actors in the world, rather than as passive knowers of it, whose doings and sufferings may still hold consequences for a future “still in the making” (P 123). Unlike the Cartesian tradition, which takes the world and ideas as fixed entities to be known, pragmatism presents the world as a contingent horizon to be remade and places each of us as actors within the shared drama of the world’s salvation. James characterizes this “alteration ‘in the seat of authority’ ” from the world as a given to be passively represented by the mind to a project made and remade in action as nothing short of enacting a second Protestant Reformation (P 62). To “papal minds,” he admits, this new way of thinking
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