Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?

Author(s): James T. Kloppenberg

Source:

The Journal of American History,

Vol. 83, No. 1 (Jun., 1996), pp. 100-138

Published by: Organization of American Historians

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The Journal of American History.

http://www.jstor.org

Pragmatism: An

Old

Name for

Some

New Ways of Thinking?

James T. Kloppenberg

William

James

was stuck.

Facing the publication of Pragmatism in

1907,

he

had

to decide whether to

stress the novelty

of his

philosophy or its

continuity with

earlier ideas.

James joked that pragmatism would launch

"something quite like

the

protestant reformation" and predicted that it would be "the

philosophy of

the future."

Yet

he

also believed that he and

his

fellow pragmatists

were building

on a

foundation laid

by philosophers from Socrates to the British

empiricists. To

soften

the

blow

he

was about to deliver, James dedicated

Pragmatism to the

memory

of the

venerated

John

Stuart

Mill

and

added

the

subtitle

A

New Name

for

Some

Old

Ways of Thinking, hoping

that such a

pedigree might

restrain those

inclined

to denounce

his

progeny.

As

my inversion of James's

subtitle suggests,

a

historian

seeking

to

analyze and explain the current revival of

pragmatism

confronts

the same

question James

faced: Have

contemporary pragmatists

resur-

rected

the

ideas

of

earlier thinkers

or

rejected everything

but the name?'

The return of

pragmatism

is

something

of

a surprise. When

David

A.

Hollinger

recounted the

career

of

pragmatism

in

the Journal of American

History

in

1980,

he

noted that

pragmatism

had all but

vanished from

American

historiography

during

the

decades.

In

1950, Hollinger recalled,

Henry

Steele

Commager

had

proclaimed pragmatism

"almost

the official

philosophy

of

America"; by 1980,

in

Hollinger's judgment, commentators on

American culture

had

learned

to

get along just

fine

without

it. "If

pragmatism

has a

future,"

Hollinger concluded,

"it will

probably

look

very

different from its

past,

and

the

two

may

not

even share

a

name." Yet

pragmatism today

is not

only

alive

and

James T.

Kloppenberg

is associate

professor

of

history

at

Brandeis

University.

For

stimulating

conversation

and

criticism,

I

am

grateful

to Susan

Armeny,

Thomas

Bender, Casey Blake,

David

Depew, John Diggins,

Richard

Fox,

Giles

Gunn,

Peter

Hansen,

David

Hollinger,

Hans

Joas, James

Livingston, Timothy Peltason,

Am6lie

Oksenberg Rorty, Dorothy Ross,

Charlene Haddock

Seigfried,

Richard

Shusterman,

David

Thelen,

Robert

Westbrook,

and

Joan

Williams.

I

am

particularly

indebted

to Richard

J.

Bernstein and Richard

Rorty

for

their

generosity.

'

William

James to

Henry James,

May 4,

1907,

in The Letters

of

William James,

ed.

Henry

James (2

vols.,

New

York, 1920),

II, 279;

William

James to

Theodore Flournoy, Jan. 2, 1907,

in

Ralph

Barton

Perry,

The

Thought

and Character

of

William

James: As

Revealed

in Unpublished

Correspondence and Notes,

Together

with

His Published

Writings

(2 vols.,

Boston,

1935), II,

452-53. James traced pragmatism

to its

ancient roots

in William

James,

Pragmatism:

A New

Name for

Some

Old Ways of

Thinking

(1907; Cambridge,

Mass., 1978),

30-31.

Ibid., 3.

100

The Journal

of

American History

June 1996

Pragmatism: An Old

Name for

Some New

Ways of

Thinking? 101

well,

it

is

ubiquitous.2

References to

pragmatism occur

with

dizzying

frequency

from

philosophy to

social

science, from the

study

of

literature to that of

ethnicity,

from feminism to

legal theory.

As

Hollinger

predicted,

much

of this

pragmatism

looks

very different from the

original version.

Some

postmodernists

are

attracted

to

pragmatism because it offers

a

devastating critique

of

all philosophical

founda-

tions and

justifies

a

wide-ranging linguistic

skepticism against

all claims of

objectiv-

ity,

consensus, and

truth. So

conceived, as a

species of

postmodernism

rather than

as an

updated

version of

the quest

for

truth

that James identified

with Socrates

and

Mill, pragmatism

has indeed become an

old

name

for new

ways

of thinking.

In

this

essay

I

advance three

arguments:

First, the

early pragmatists

emphasized

'experience,"

whereas

some

contemporary

philosophers

and critics who

have taken

"the

linguistic

turn" are

uneasy

with that

concept.

Second,

the

early pragmatists

believed their

philosophical ideas had

particular

ethical

and

political

consequences,

whereas

some

contemporary

thinkers who

call themselves

pragmatists consider it

merely

a

method of

analysis.

Third, the current

controversy about

pragmatism

matters

profoundly

to

historians. At

stake

is

not

merely

the

historical

meaning

of

early-twentieth-century

pragmatism, important as that

issue

is

for

intellectual

history.

Looming

even

larger

for

historians

in

contemporary

debates

about

pragma-

tism

are

implicit

questions

about our practice

of

historical

scholarship. Two rival

camps

are

struggling

over

the

legacy

of

pragmatism.

Early-twentieth-century prag-

matists envisioned a

modernist discourse of

democratic

deliberation

in which

communities

of

inquiry

tested

hypotheses

in

order to solve

problems;

such

contem-

porary

pragmatists

as

RichardJ. Bernstein

and

Hilary

Putnam

sustain that tradition.

Other

contemporaries

such

as Richard

Rorty

and

Stanley

Fish

present

pragmatism

as a

postmodernist

discourse

of

critical

commentary

that denies

that we

can

escape

the

conventions and

contingencies

of

language

in

order to connect

with

a world

of

experience

outside

texts,

let alone

solve

problems

in

that world.

Connecting

with

experience

is

precisely

what we historians

attempt

to do. These controversies

over

pragmatism

old

and new are thus

tied

directly

to the

legitimacy

of our

practice

in

studying

the

past

and to the

claims of our

community

of

inquiry about

the

significance of the

past

for

the

present.

Experience

and

Language

The

early pragmatists

sought

to

reorient

philosophy

away

from

interminable

and

fruitless

debates

by

insisting

that ideas should

be tested

in

practice.

As

part

of

their

overall commitment to

problem solving, their

conception of experience linked

the

philosophies

of

William

James

and John

Dewey,

the

pragmatists who most

powerfully

influenced

American culture

during

the first

half

of the

twentieth

2

David A.

Hollinger,

"The Problem

of

Pragmatism

in

American

History,"Journal of American

History,

67

(June

1980), 88,

107. Five

years later

Hollinger

cheerfully

admitted that his

obituary

had been

premature.

See

David

A.

Hollinger, In the

American

Province:

Studies in the

History

and

Historiography of Ideas

(Bloomington,

1985),

23,

25,

43. A

splendid

survey is

Richard J.

Bernstein,

"The

Resurgence of

Pragmatism,"

Social

Research,

59

(Winter 1992),

813-40.

102

The

Journal of American

History

June 1996

century.3 What

did James and

Dewey mean by

experience?

Both rejected the

dualisms-the

separation

of

the

mind from the

body, and of

the subject from

the

object-that had

divided

idealists from

empiricists since

Rene Descartes and

John

Locke.

They

were

equally

scornful

of

nineteenth-century

idealists' infatuation

with

introspection

and

positivists' reduction of all

philosophical questions to

matter

and motion. Instead

they preferred

other

metaphors such as

"field"

or

"stream"

or

''circuit" to

suggest the

continuity and

meaningfulness of

consciousness that

had eluded both

empiricists and

rationalists; their

"radical

empiricism" rested on

their

revised

concept

of

consciousness. Immediate

experience as

James and Dewey

conceived of it is

always

relational (it never exists in

the abstract

or

in

isolation

from a world

containing both other

persons and

concrete realities, as

did Descartes's

rationalist

cogito), creative (it

never merely

registers sense data

passively, as did

Locke's

empiricist tabula

rasa),

and imbued with

historically specific

cultural values

(it

is

never

"human" or universal,

but always

personal and

particular). Pragmatists

distrusted all forms of

foundationalism,

all

attempts

to

establish

philosophy

on

unchanging

a

priori

postulates. Rather than

grounding values

in

the bedrock

of

timeless

absolutes, they urged

us to

evaluate all of our

beliefs

-philosophical,

scientific,

religious, ethical, and political

-

before the test

they

considered the most

demanding

of all: our

experience as social and

historical beings.4

The

early

pragmatists' conception

of

testing the truth of ideas

in

experience

ignited

a fire

storm

of

controversy

that

continues

to rage.

Philosophers

such

as

Bertrand Russell,

George

Santayana,

Josiah

Royce,

and Arthur

Lovejoy immediately

targeted

James.

Cultural critics such as

Randolph

Bourne,

Van

Wyck

Brooks,

and

Lewis Mumford and

partisans

of natural

law

such

as

(the

erstwhile

pragmatist)

Walter

Lippmann

and Mortimer Adler later

went

after

Dewey,

as did

Marxists

such

as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

All

these critics

charged

pragmatists

with

elevating

expedient, novel,

narrowly

individualistic,

instrumental,

and tech-

nocratic considerations

above truth and

goodness

as revealed

by

philosophy, art,

or

theology.5

3 In this essay

I

will concentrate on

William James and John Dewey instead

of Charles Sanders Peirce for

two reasons. First, Peirce explained

in

1904 that he "invented" pragmatism "to

express a certain maxim of

logic . . . for the analysis of concepts"

rather than "sensation" and grounded it

on "an elaborate study of the

nature of signs." For the precise reason

why Peirce's ideas have influenced analytic philosophers

and semioticians,

his work is less pertinent here. See

H. S. Thayer, Meaning and

Action:

A Critical

History of

Pragmatism

(Indianapolis, 1981), 493-94. Second,

discussing the recent torrent of work on

Peirce is beyond the scope of

this

essay.

For

a fine

introduction,

see James Hoopes, ed., Peirce on Signs:

Writings

on Semiotic

by

Charles

Sanders Peirce

(Chapel Hill, 1991);

on Peirce's

tortured

life see

Joseph Brent,

Charles Sanders Peirce:

A

Life

(Bloomington, 1993); and on his philosophy

of science, see C. F. Delaney, Science,

Knowledge, and Mind: A

Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce

(Notre Dame, 1993).

4

On

James's concept

of

immediate

experience, see James M. Edie, William

James and Phenomenology

(Bloomington, 1987); more comprehensive

are Perry, Thought and Character of

William James; and Gerald

E.

Myers,

William

James:

His

Life

and Thought (New Haven, 1986). On Dewey's

life

and thought,

see

Robert

B.

Westbrook, John Dewey and American

Democracy (Ithaca, 1991); on qualitative

issues

in

Dewey's philosophy,

see James

Gouinlock, John Dewey's

Philosophy of Value (New York, 1972).

s

A

compilation of these criticisms

is in John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of

Pragmatism: Modernism and

the Crisis ofKnowledge andAuthority (Chicago,

1994). James Hoopes, Robert Westbrook,

and

I

are

unpersuaded

by Diggins's interpretation

of

pragmatism.

For our

explanations

and

Diggins's

response,

see

James

Hoopes,

"Peirce's Community of Signs: The Path

Untaken in American Social Thought," Intellectual

History Newsletter,

17 (1995), 3-6; James

T.

Kloppenberg,

"The Authority of Evidence and

the

Boundaries

of

Interpretation,"

Pragmatism:

An Old

Name

for

Some

New

Ways

of Thinking?

103

Much as

such criticism stung,

it

sharpened

James's

and

Dewey's

formulations

of their ideas.

Some of their

best

writing,

notably

James's

The

Meaning

of

Truth

(1909)

and

Dewey's

Experience

and

Nature

(1925),

came

in

response

to

their

critics.

Their clarifications

reveal

why

some

contemporary

postmodernists'

enthusiasm

and

some

contemporary

traditionalists'

scorn

are misdirected

at James

and

Dewey.

In

Pragmatism

James

had tried to head

off some

misunderstandings

in

advance.

Looking

back

at his

argument,

it is

difficult

to

see how

anyone

could

accuse

him

of identifying

truth with

whatever

it

is convenient

to believe.

He specified

"our

duty

to

agree

with

reality"

and

expressed

exasperation

at

his critics' "favorite

formula

for

describing"

pragmatists

-"persons

who

think

that

by saying

whatever

you

find it pleasant

to say

and

calling

it truth

you

fulfil every

pragmatistic

require-

ment."

To the contrary,

James protested:

"Pent

in,

as the

pragmatist

more

than

anyone

else sees

himself to

be,

between

the whole body

of funded truths squeezed

from

the

past

and

the coercions

of the world

of sense about him,

who

so well

as

he

feels the immense

pressure

of

objective

control under which

our minds perform

their

operations?"6

When

his critics continued

to accuse him

of

counseling

his

readers

to

believe

any

fiction

they

might

find

expedient,

James

responded

by

writing

The

Meaning

of

Truth.

There

he

specified

the circumstances

in which

one might

invoke

the

pragmatic

test

of truth

and clarified

the

conditions necessary

for

verifying

any

proposition

pragmatically.

First,

and

fundamentally,

it must correspond

to

what

is

known

from experience

about

the

natural world.

The

following apparently

unambiguous

sentence

has escaped

the attention

of James's

critics

-and

some of

his

contemporary

champions:

"The notion

of a

reality

independent

of .

. .

us,

taken

from

ordinary

social

experience,

lies at the base

of the

pragmatist

definition

of truth."

Calling

himself an

"epistemological

realist,"

James

explained

that

he

simply

took

for

granted

the existence

of that

independent

reality

and did

not

consider

its

independent

existence philosophically

interesting

or

important.

Second,

to

be

judged

pragmatically

true,

a

proposition

must

be

consistent

with

the

individu-

al's

stock of

existing

beliefs,

beliefs

that

had withstood

the severe

test of

experience.

That,

James

felt sure,

would

rule out simpleminded

wishful

thinking.

Finally,

a

statement

may

be

considered

pragmatically

true

if

it

fulfills those two

conditions

and

yields

satisfaction.

Religious

faith

represented

to James

a

perfect

illustration

of the

appropriate

terrain

for

testing

truth

claims

pragmatically:

in the

absence

of

irrefutable

evidence,

James

judged

relevant

the

consequences

of faith

for

believers.7

17

(1995),

3-6;

James

T.

Kloppenberg,

"The

Authority

of Evidence and

the

Boundaries of

Interpretation,"

ibid., 7-15;

Robert Westbrook,

"The Authority

of

Pragmatism,"

ibid., 16-24;

and

John

Patrick

Diggins,

"Pragmatism

and

the

Historians,"

ibid.,

25-30.

On

critics who valued

the

capacities

of

creative

individuals

above

pragmatists'

concerns

with communities

of

discourse

and

social

justice,

see

Casey

Nelson

Blake,

Beloved

Community:

The Cultural

Criticism

of Randolph

Bourne,

Van

Wyck

Brooks,

Waldo Frank,

and Lewis

Mumford

(Chapel

Hill,

1990).

On Walter Lippmann

and

Mortimer

Adler,

see Edward

A. Purcell

Jr.,

The

Crisis

of

Democratic

Theory:

Scientific

Naturalism

andthe

Problem

of

Value (Lexington,

Ky.,

1973).

On

Theodor

Adorno

and Max

Horkheimer,

see

Martin Jay,

The

Dialectical

Imagination:

A History

of

the

Frankfurt

School

and

the

Institute

of Social Research,

1923-1950

(Boston,

1973).

6James,

Pragmatism,

111-12.

7

William James,

The

Meaning

of

Truth

(1909;

Cambridge,

Mass., 1975),

117, 106,

126-28.

104 The

Journal of American History June

1996

Dewey,

whose

prodding had

helped spur James to refine his position,

likewise

argued throughout

his

long

career that we should conceive of all our

knowledge

as

hypotheses to be tested in

experience.

At the core of James's and

Dewey's pragmatism was experience

conceived, not

as

introspection, but as the

intersection of the conscious self with the world.

They

conceived of knowing subjects

as embodiments of reason, emotion, and

values,

and

they emphasized the

inadequacy

of

philosophers' attempts to freeze,

split

apart,

and

compartmentalize

the

dynamic continuities and multiple

dimensions

of life

as we live it. They

conceived of individuals as always enmeshed in

social

conditions, yet selecting what

to attend to from the multiplicity of

conscious

experience, and making history

by making choices. They conceived of

experience

as

intrinsically and irreducibly

meaningful, and they insisted that its

meanings

were

not

predetermined

or

deducible

from

any all-encompassing pattern.

They

argued

that

meanings emerge

as cultures

test their values

in

practice

and that we

encounter expressions of those

meanings

in

the historical record.

Language was

thus

crucial for

understanding the experience of others, but for

James

and

Dewey language

was

only

one

important part

of a

richer, broader

range

that

included

interpersonal,

aesthetic, spiritual, religious, and

other

prelinguistic

or

nonlinguistic

forms of

experience.

Moreover, they

realized that

language

not

only

feeds

the

imagination but

also

places

constraints on

understanding by

specifying

a

particular range

of

meanings.

In

Pragmatism,

James

wrote,

"All

truth

thus

gets

verbally

built

out,

stored

up,

and

made

available

for

everyone. Hence,

we must

talk

consistently, just

as we must

think consistently." Although

James

appreciated

what

is

now characterized as

the

arbitrariness

of

signifiers,

he

drew

the

following

noteworthy conclusion: "Names

are

arbitrary, but

once

understood

they

must

be

kept

to. We mustn't now call

Abel 'Cain'

or

Cain

'Abel.'

If

we

do,

we

ungear

ourselves from the whole

book

of

Genesis,

and

from

all its connexions with

the

universe of

speech and fact down

to the

present

time."

We

cannot test

every

proposition ourselves

or

enter the immediate

experience

of others. Yet

we

never-

theless have access

to

verifiable

historical

knowledge,

even

if

only

indirectly

and

through language.

"As true as

past

time

itself was,

so true

was

Julius

Caesar,

so

true were antediluvian

monsters,

all

in

their

proper

dates

and

settings.

That

past

time itself

was,

is

guaranteed by

its coherence with

everything

that's

present.

True

as the

present

is the

past

was also."8

When

dealing

with

verifiable

data,

whether

about

Caesars

or

about

ceratopsians,

we

place

each

datum

in

the

web

of evidence

we humans have

been spinning

for centuries. Even when

considering

unverifiable

narratives such as

Genesis, we

risk

losing

the coherence that makes

communication

possible

unless

we

preserve

meanings

within

our

web

of cultural

memory.

Dewey

shared that

appreciation

of the

importance

of

symbols

and the

indispens-

ability

of common

understandings.

"All

discourse,

oral

or

written,"

he conceded

in

Experience

and

Nature, "says

things

that

surprise

the

one

that

says

them." But

that makes communication

difficult,

not

impossible.

Conversation understood

as

8

James,

Pragmatism,

102-3.

Pragmatism:

An

Old Name for

Some

New

Ways

of

Thinking?

lOS

. .....

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106 The Journal of American History June 1996

one to another, but meanings may be shared by means of signs"; eventually such

sharing

converts "a

conjoining activity into a community of interest and endeavor."

Dewey acknowledged the challenge of such communication: "mutual interest in

shared meanings" does not emerge "all at once or completely." LikeJames, however,

Dewey emphasized that such communication can yield provisional understandings

of the

past,

its

meanings for the present, and its role

in

the formulation of shared

social

aspirations.

For

Dewey, dialogue between individuals

in

community, with

its "direct give and take," provided the model for such communication: "the

winged words

of

conversation

in

immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking

in

the fixed and frozen words of written speech."9

Dewey realized that the concept of experience caused difficulties for many

analytic philosophers, who defined philosophy as the study of language and logic,

but

despite

their

criticism,

he

clung

to it to the end of

his

life.

Dewey toyed

with

exchanging

the

word "experience" for "culture" as late as 1951, but

in

the end

he

refused: "we need a cautionary and directive word,

like

experience, to remind

us that the world which is lived, suffered and enjoyed as well as logically thought

of, has

the

last word

in

all human inquiries and surmises."

10

In short, the pragmatic

sensibility

of

James and Dewey was a profoundly historical sensibility.

Listing some

of

the thinkers who aligned themselves with James and Dewey

suggests

their enormous

impact. Sociologists

such as

George

Herbert

Mead, legal

theorists such as

Oliver Wendell

Holmes

Jr.

and Louis

D.

Brandeis,

economists

such as Richard

T.

Ely, political

theorists such as

Herbert Croly, theologians

such

as Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr,

founders

of the

National

Association

for the

Advancement of

Colored People

such as W.

E. B. Du Bois

and William

English Walling,

and feminists such as

Jane

Addams and

Jessie

Taft

all derived

from

pragmatism

a

conception

of

experience

and a

way

of

thinking

about abstract

and

concrete

problems

that oriented

them to

historical

analysis

and

away

from inherited

dogmas.

Those who looked to

philosophy

and social

science

for

solid, permanent principles

found

pragmatism disappointing

and unattractive.

But

many

of those

who shared

the

belief

of

James

and

Dewey

that

the

shift

from

absolutes

to

the test of

experience might encourage independent thinking

and

democratic

decision

making

endorsed

pragmatism

because

it unsettled traditional

ways

of

thinking

without

sinking

into

the

morass

of

subjectivism

that swallowed

some

turn-of-the-century rebels,

such

as

Friedrich

Nietzsche.

The

steadying

lifeline

of

experience prevented pragmatists

from

sliding

into

fantasy, cynicism,

or

self-

indulgence.

As the

ripples pragmatism

sent across American

thought

extended wider and

wider

during

the

early

twentieth

century, they

met -and

eventually

were

sub-

merged by

-more

powerful

waves

coming

from other

directions.

Among

the most

important

of

these was

enthusiasm

for the

certainty widely

attributed

to the

natural

sciences,

which

stood

in

sharp

contrast

to the

pragmatists' forthright

admission

9

John

Dewey, Experience and Nature,

in

John Dewey,

The

Later

Works,

1925-1953,

ed. Jo Ann Boydston

(17 vols., Carbondale, 1981-1990), I,

152; John Dewey, The

Public

and Its Problems,

ibid., II, 330-31.

10

Dewey, Experience and Nature,

appendix 2 (1951), 372.

Pragmatism:

An

Old

Name for

Some

New

Ways

of

Thinking?

107

of

uncertainty.

Behaviorists

in

psychology,

sociology,

and

political

science

adopted

Dewey's enthusiasm

for

testing

hypotheses

but

jettisoned

his

concern with

the

qualitative

dimensions of

experience

and

inquiry

in

the

human

sciences.

"

Philosophers

turned

increasingly

toward the

models

provided

by

mathematics

and

physical

science,

a trend

already

underway before

European

emigres

began

arriving

in

the

United

States

in

the

1930s.

The

emigres'

quest

for

precision

and

their

impatience

with

pragmatism

combined

to

transform

American

philosophy

departments

by

elevating

the

study

of

language

and

logic

and

marginalizingJames's

and

Dewey's

concerns with

epistemology,

ethics,

and

political

philosophy.

A

discipline

scurrying

to

master the

logical positivism of

Rudolf

Carnap,

which

sought

to

rid

philosophy

of

all

questions

that could

not be

answered

through

scientific

verification, had

little

interest

in

the

early

pragmatists'

attachment to

immediate

experience

and their

democratic

reformist

sensibilities.

Dewey

had

described the

writings

that

launched

the

analytic

philosophy

movement,

which

sought

to

reduce

philosophy

to

propositional

logic,

as "an

affront

to

the

common-sense

world of

action,

appreciation,

and affection."

The work of

the

British

philosophers

Bertrand

Russell

and G. E.

Moore,

Dewey

wrote,

threatened to

"land

philosophy

in

a

formalism

like

unto

scholasticism."

James had

urged

Russell to

"say

good-bye

to

mathematical logic

if

you

wish to

preserve

your

relations

with concrete

realities!"

But

many

midcentury

American

philosophers

preferred

Carnap

and Russell to

"common

sense"

and "concrete

realities";

they shared

Russell's

long-standing

con-

tempt

for

pragmatism.

The

new

breed

of

analytic

philosophers

shunned

history,

shifted

toward technical

discourse,

and

judged

meaningless

all

propositions

that

could not

be

verified

by

scientific

procedures.James

wrote

about

religious

experience

and

Dewey

about

aesthetics,

ethics,

and

politics

in

the

hope

of

helping

philosophy

escape

such

a

narrowly

restricted role.'2

Developments

within

the

pragmatist

camp

also

made

it

increasingly vulnerable

to such

attacks.

In

the

1930s

and

1940s

some

champions

of

pragmatism

tried to

popularize

the

ideas

of

James

and

Dewey

by

simplifying

them for

mass

consump-

tion. Whereas

James

and

Dewey

had

urged

their

readers to think

critically

about

their

own

experience

and to take

responsibility

for

shaping

their

culture,

such

writers as

Will

Durant,

Irwin

Edman,

Horace

Kallen,

Max

Otto,

Harry

Overstreet,

John Herman

Randall,

and

Thomas

Vernor Smith made

available versions of

pragmatism

that

simply endorsed the

rough-and-ready

democratic sentiments

of

most

middle-class

Americans.

Such efforts

did

little to

bolster

the

prestige

of

"

On

the

triumph of

scientism in

American social

science,

see

Dorothy

Ross,

The

Origins

of

American

Social

Science

(Cambridge,

Eng.,

1991),

390-470.

12

On the

relation

between

scientism

and

the

transformation

of

philosphy, see

Daniel J.

Wilson,

Science,

Community, and

the

Transformation

of

American

Philosophy,

1860-1930

(Chicago, 1990);

and

Laurence C.

Smith,

Behaviorism and

Logical

Positivism:

A

Reassessment

of

the Alliance

(Stanford,

1986).

For

Dewey's

judgment

of

Bertrand

Russell

and G. E.

Moore,

see

John

Dewey,

Essays in

Experimental

Logic,

in

John

Dewey,

The Middle

Works,

1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann

Boydston (15

vols.,

Carbondale,

1976-1983), X,

357-58.

William

James

to

Bertrand

Russell, Oct.

4, 1908,

inJames,

Meaning of

Truth,

299-300. Russell's

jibe

appeard

in

Bertrand

Russell,

"Dewey's New

Logic,"

in

The

Philosophy

ofJohn

Dewey,

ed. Paul A.

Schilpp

(1939; New

York, 1951),

135-56. On

this

volume, see

Westbrook, John

Dewey and

American

Democracy,

496-500.

108 The Journal

of American History June

1996

pragmatism among professional philosophers or other American intellectuals aspir-

ing

to scientific

precision rather than democratic deliberation.'3

After Dewey died

in

1952, his ideas faded quickly into the background. Even

though one of the most prominent thinkers of the post-World War II period,

Reinhold Niebuhr, shared many of Dewey's, and especially James's, ideas, his

critique

of

Dewey's optimism helped discredit pragmatism as too sunny minded

for

serious intellectuals. As Richard Rorty has put it, pragmatism was crushed

between

"the

upper

and the nether millstones":

a

revived interest

in

theology

or

existentialism for some, the "hard-edged empiricism" of Carnap for others. For

reasons reflecting changes within philosophy and in the broader culture, then,

American intellectuals during the 1950s and 1960s either forgot about pragmatism

or, as Hollinger put it, learned to get along without it. That is no longer true.

Explaining

the

resurgence

of

pragmatism requires sketching

the

complex cultural

changes that cleared the ground and made possible its return.

14

First the claims to objectivity of the natural sciences, which had intimidated

humanists while they inspired philosophers and social scientists, were rocked by

the

historicist analysis

of

Thomas Kuhn, whose significance

in

this transformation

is difficult

to

overestimate. Many

of the schemes

for

social engineering

hatched

by

enthusiasts

for

science led

to

results that

ranged

from

disappointing (the

War

on

Poverty) to disastrous (the war

in

Vietnam), as both the findings of researchers

and their

application

to

social problems

were shown to

be grounded

in

questionable

assumptions and, despite

the scientists' notion of

value

neutrality, susceptible

to

appropriation

for

ideological purposes."1

Then

social scientists

began

to

admit what

pragmatists and such practitioners

of the

Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences)

as

Wilhelm

Dilthey

had

known since the nineteenth

century:

Because human

experi-

ence is

meaningful, understanding

not

only expression

but

also

behavior

requires

interpreting

the

complex

and

shifting systems

of

symbols through

which individuals

encounter the world and with which

they try

to

cope

with

it.

Meanings

and

intentions change

over time

and across cultures;

as

that

realization

spread, hopes

of

finding

a universal

logic

or a

general

science

of

social

organization

faded.

In

their

place emerged hermeneutics,

which relies

on methods

of

interpretation

to

achieve

understanding

of

historical

experience

and

forgoes

efforts

to

generate

rules

of

transhistorical

human

behavior.

13

George

Cotkin, "Middle-Ground

Pragmatists:

The Popularization

of Philosophy

in American

Culture,"

Journal of

the History of Ideas,

55 (April 1994),

2

83-302. On

Will Durant, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The

Making

of Middlebrow

Culture

(Chapel

Hill, 1992).

14

See

Richard Wightman

Fox, Reinhold

Niebuhr:

A

Biography

(New

York, 1985); and

Daniel

F.

Rice,

Reinhold

Niebuhr

andJohn

Dewey: An American

Odyssey (Albany, 1993).

Richard

Rorty, "Pragmatism

without

Method," in

Richard Rorty, Philosophical

Papers,

vol. I:

Objectivity,

Relativism, and

Truth (New

York, 1991),

64. On

the shift of American philosophy departments

away

from pragmatism and toward

analytic

philosophy

and logical

positivism,

see Hilary Putnam, Reason,

Truth, and

History (New York, 1981), 103-26;

Bernstein,

"Resurgence

of Pragmatism,"

815-17; and a

fine overview, David

Depew, "Philosophy,"

in

Encyclopedia

of the

United

States in the Twentieth Century, ed.

Stanley

Kutler

(4

vols.,

New

York, 1996), IV, 1635-63.

1I

Thomas

S. Kuhn, The

Structure of Scientific

Revolutions (Chicago,

1962);

Paul Hoyningen-Huene,

Recon-

structing Scientific

Revolutions:

Thomas S.

Kuhn's

Philosophy

of Science, trans.

Alexander T. Levine

(Chicago,

1993). On the

uses of social science

in

public

policy, see`Ellen

Herman, The Romance

of American

Psychology:

Political

Culture in the Age

of Experts (Berkeley,

1995).

Pragmatism:

An Old

Name for

Some New

Ways of

Thinking?

109

Marching behind

the

banner

of hermeneutics

came an

influential

band

of

scholars

who

challenged

the ideal

of

scientific

objectivity

in

the human

sciences:

Peter

Winch,

Clifford

Geertz,

Charles Taylor,

Anthony

Giddens,

Paul Ricoeur,

Michel Foucault,

Jacques

Derrida,

Hans-Georg

Gadamer,

andJUrgen

Habermas

-

a

new

litany of

saints proclaiming

variations

on a revolutionary

gospel

of interpreta-

tion. They spoke

a

different

language

than

did those

natural scientists,

philosophers,

and social

scientists who sought

to

escape

the clutter

of history. Instead

of

timeless

principles

and truth,

they

referred to revolutionary

paradigm

shifts,

incommensura-

ble

forms of

life,

the

complexities

of thick

description,

competing

communities

of discourse, archaeologies

of

knowledge,

the universal

undecidability

of texts,

the

inescapability

of

prejudices,

and

the colonization

of life worlds

by an

omnivorous

technostructure.

16

Although among

these

thinkers

only

Habermas

explicitly

placed

himself within

the

pragmatic

tradition,

Americans familiar

with James

and Dewey

noted

the

similarities

between

recent historicist

critiques

of

the

sciences and social

sciences

and

those

of the

early

pragmatists.

As

the

work

of these

thinkers,

many

of

whom

were

often

grouped

together

(unhelpfully

and

even

misleadingly)

under

the

rubric

"postmodernist,"

became

increasingly

influential,

many

scholars began

to move

away

from the

model

of the natural

sciences and

toward

forms of

analysis

more

congenial

to hermeneutics and

history,

most

notably

toward pragmatism."7

Despite

the undeniable importance

of those broad

changes

in

American thought,

the

resurgence

of

pragmatism

is largely

due

to the

remarkable

work

done

by

the

Trojan

horse of

analytic

philosophy,

Richard Rorty.

Rorty's

historicism has had

such

explosive

force

because

he attacked the citadel

of

philosophy

from within.

Troubling

as was his

insistence that

philosophy

could

never attain

the scientific

status

analytic

philosophers

yearned

for,

even

more

unnerving

was

Rorty's equally

blunt

judgment

that

the

grail

of

objective

knowledge

would

likewise

continue

to

elude the natural sciences and

the social

sciences.

Rorty

first

established

his

creden-

tials

with

papers

discussing

standard

topics

in the

analytic

tradition.

But

in

his

introduction

to

The

Linguistic

Turn

(1967),

he

suggested

that the conflicts

within

analytic

philosophy

(between

J.

L. Austin's

ordinary-language

philosophy

and

Carnap's logical

positivism,

for

example)

were so fundamental

that

they

could

not be

resolved, thus subtly

challenging

the idea of progress

in

problem

solving

that

analytic philosophers

took for

granted.'8

Over

the

next decade

Rorty

broadened

his focus and

sharpened

his

critique.

Echoing arguments

made

byJames

and

Dewey

but

presenting

them

in

the discourse

of

analytic philosophy,

he insisted

in

Philosophy

and

the Mirror

of

Nature

(1979)

that

problems

such

as

mind-body

dualism,

the

correspondence

theory

of

truth,

16

See

Richard

J.

Bernstein,

The Restructuring

of

Social and

Political

Theory (New

York, 1976);

Fred

R.

Dallmayr

and

Thomas

A. McCarthy,

eds.,

Understanding and Social

Inquiry (Notre Dame, 1977);

and

Quentin

Skinner,

ed.,

The Return

of

Grand

Theory

in the

Human Sciences (Cambridge,

Eng., 1985).

17

On

these

changes

in

philosophy

and

political

theory,

seeJohn Rajchman

and Cornel

West,

eds., Post-Analytic

Philosophy (New

York,

1985);

and David

Held,

ed., Political

Theory Today (Stanford,

1991).

18

Richard

Rorty,

ed., The

Linguistic

Turn: Recent

Essays

in

Philosophical

Method

(Chicago,

1967).

110

The Journal of American History

June

1996

theories of

knowledge and theories of

language, and

ultimately the entire concep-

tion of a

systematic philosophy

devoted to finding foundations

for objective knowl-

edge all

rested on misconceptions.

He urged his fellow

philosophers to move "from

epistemology to hermeneutics"

and to practice "philosophy

without mirrors,"

embracing

interpretation and

surrendering the vain hope that

their writings might

accurately

reflect the

world as

it

really

is.

Systematic

philosophers, such as John

Locke, Immanuel

Kant, and Rudolf

Carnap, who sought a

science of knowledge

that would disclose

objective truth, should

give way

to

"edifying philosophers,"

such

asJames

and

Dewey,

who

would contribute to the

"conversation of the West"

without

promising results

philosophy would never be able to

deliver. Although

others

had

begun

to

offer variations on

this theme of

"historicist undoing," to

use Ian

Hacking's phrase for it,

Rorty's assault seemed

especially dramatic because

it held

out no alternative solutions.19

In

Consequences ofPragmatism

(1982), Rorty defended his

heretical historicism.

We must admit that "there is

nothing deep

down

inside us

except

what

we

have

put

there

ourselves";

our most cherished

standards and

practices

are

merely

conventions.

Science, Rorty

concluded

with the

provocative

bluntness

that has

become

his

trademark,

is

only

"one

genre

of

literature";

all efforts to find

solid,

unchanging knowledge are futile.20

Rorty

himself

realized

that there was little

in

these

claims

that was

completely

new. But

because enthusiasm for science had

overshadowed

the historicism of

earlier

pragmatists,

and

because

Anglo-American

philosophers

in

particular had marched down a road marked "truth"

only

to

find

James and Dewey waiting there

for

them, Rorty's

revival

of

pragmatism

seemed

revolutionary.

Against

critics who assailed

him

as a

relativist, Rorty responded

that

the

notion

of

relativism itself becomes incoherent when we

appreciate

the

contingent

status

of

all

our

knowledge.

From his

perspective,

there is

nothing

for

"truth" to

be

relative to

except

our

tradition,

our

purposes,

and

our

linguistic

conventions.

When

we have

come to

that

realization,

a calm

acceptance

of

our

condition

becomes

possible. While

pragmatism

cannot

offer

objectivity,

neither

does

it threaten the

survival

of

civilization.

Revolutionary

as his

message was, Rorty's

mood

was down-

right upbeat.

He

proclaimed pragmatism

"the

chief

glory

of

our

country's

intellec-

tual

tradition" and noted that

James

and

Dewey, although

asking

us

to

surrender

19

Richard Rorty, Philosophy andthe Mirror of Nature

(Princeton, 1979). See Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading

Rorty:

Critical

Responses

to

Philosophy

and the Mirror

of Nature

(Cambridge, Mass., 1990);

and

Herman

J.

Saatkamp, ed., Rorty and Pragmatism (Nashville, 1995).

Ian Hacking, "Two Kinds of 'New Historicism'

for

Philosophers," in History and. .

.:

Histories within

the Human Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S.

Roth

(Charlottesville, 1995), 296-318.

The

very useful

words "historicism" and "historicist" continue to baffle

some historians, probably due to

their

almost opposite

meanings

in the

work of

the

philosopher

of science

Karl

Popper and in contemporary critical discourse. Popper

used "historicism" to designate (and denigrate) any theory

(such as Marxism) that purports to predict

the future course of human

events

according

to

ostensibly

scientific

laws. More recent commentators understand historicism

as "the theory that social and cultural phenomena are

historically determined and that each period in history

has its own values that are not directly applicable to

other

epochs.

In

philosophy that implies

that

philosophical

issues find their place, importance, and definition

in a specific cultural milieu. That is certainly Rorty's

opinion." Ibid., 298.

20

Rorty, Philosophy and

the

Mirror of Nature, 392;

Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays,

1972-1980 (Minneapolis, 1982), xl,

xliii.

Pragmatism:

An

Old

Name for Some New

Ways

of

Thinking?

111

all commitments

and

all

communities.

Courtesy Cambridge

University

Press.

cth

neurotic

Cartesian

quest

for

certainty,

"nevertheless

wrote,

as Nietzsche

and

Heidegger

did

not,

"in

a

spirit

of

social

hope.""

Surprisingly, given

the

ardent

opposition

to dualism that

Rorty

shares

with

Jines

and

Dewey,

on

the

concept

of

experience

he has

substituted a

new

dichotomy

Nt

those

James

and

Dewey

attacked.

Demonstrating

the distance

between

his

view

and theirs has

become

considerably

easier thanks

to the

appearance

of

Rorty's

-

_.

c_

^

*

*h"

"Dewey

between

Hegel

and Darwin"

(1994).

There

Rorty

acknowledges

the difference

between

the

historical

Dewey

and his

"hypothetical

Dewey,"

a

philosopher

who

would

have

been "a

pragmatist

without

being

a radical

empiricist,"

without,

in

other

words,

Dewey's

crucial commitment

to

experience.

The

central

&tinction,

Rorty

now

concedes,

lies

in

Dewey's (and

James's)

continuing

emphasis

en

experience,

which

Rorty

finds

quaint

but

unhelpful.

He ties

it to their

purported

belief

in

itpanpsychism,"

a

word for the

supposed

ability

of minds to

commune

with

other

minds that

Rorty

has resurrected

from

the lexicon

of

James's

critics

*

poke

fun

at those who

consider

experience

important.

According

to

Rorty,

contemporary

philosophers

"tend

to talk

about sentences

a lot

but to

say

very

21

Rorty,

Consequences of

Pragmatism,

xviii,

160, 161.

112

The

Journal

of American

History

June

1996

little

about

ideas

or

experiences."

James's

and

Dewey's

talk about

the

relation

between

ideas

and experiences,

in

Rorty's judgment,

"runs

together

sentences

with

experiences

-

linguistic

entities

with introspective

entities."

They

"should

have

dropped

the

term

experience

rather

than

redefined

it."

"My

alternative

Dewey,"

he concludes wistfully,

"would have

said,

we can construe

'thinking'

as

simply

the

use

of

sentences."22

Seeing

the linguistic

turn

as a

step

forward rather

than

a dead

end,

Rorty

dogmatically

refuses to accept

any philosophy

in which

something

other than

language,

namely,

experience

-

understood

not as

introspection

but

as the

intersection

between

the conscious

self

and

the

world

-plays

an

important

part.

As

Rorty

now admits,

James

and Dewey

had

a

very

different

conception

of

philosophy,

and that

difference

continues

to

manifest

itself

in

the contrasting

versions

of

pragmatism

in

contemporary

scholarship.

Given

historians'

strong

com-

mitments

to

referentiality

in

writing

history,

to

the

possibility

of

connecting

the

arguments

we construct

to the

lives we

write about,

and

to testing

those arguments

within

our

scholarly

community,

the

early pragmatists'

emphasis

on

experience

will

remain

for

historians

an attractive

alternative

to

Rorty's

narrow

interest

in sentences.

Rorty's

move away

from James

and

Dewey's

view of

experience

and toward

a

new

cultural

ideal

in

which

poets

and

novelists

would

replace

philosophers

first

became

clear

in his

elegant,

widely

read

Contingency,

Irony,

and Solidarity

(1989).

His shift has

coincided

with the

new

tendency

of some

literary

critics to characterize

themselves

as

pragmatists.

Just

as dissatisfaction

with

prevailing

orthodoxies

has

sparked

novel

approaches

in

philosophy

and the

social sciences,

so many

students

of literature

have

deserted

the New

Criticism

and

structuralism

and turned

toward

pragmatism.

Reversing

the

common

tendency,

stemming

from

the

writings

of

Randolph

Bourne and

Van Wyck

Brooks and

reaching

fruition

in

Lewis

Mumford's

The

Golden

Day (1925),

to contrast

the pragmatists'

supposedly

arid fetish

with

technique

with the

transcendentalists'

celebration

of

imagination,

some

critics

now

invoke

a

refashioned

pragmatism

in

their

constructions

of a

rich,

home-grown

literary

heritage.

For

example,

Richard

Poirier

argues

in

Poetry

and

Pragmatism

(1992)

for a continuous

tradition

of

"linguistic

skepticism"

running

from Ralph

Waldo

Emerson

through

William

James

to

the modernist

poets

Robert

Frost,

Gertrude Stein,

Wallace

Stevens,

and

T. S. Eliot.

Those

poets

share,

according

to

Poirier,

"a

liberating

and

creative

suspicion

as to

the

dependability

of words

and

syntax,

especially

as it relates

to

matters

of

belief."23

22

Richard

Rorty,

"Dewey

between

Hegel

and

Darwin,"

in Modernist

Impulses

in the

Human

Sciences,

1870-

1930,

ed. Dorothy

Ross

(Baltimore,

1994),

46-68.

In

this essay

Rorty

acknowledges

his debt

to

intellectual

historians

for

demonstrating

the difference

between

the

historical

Dewey

and his "hypothetical

version"

but

then

contends

that

the

ideas

of

Dewey's

generation

no longer

make

sense.

23

Richard

Poirier,

Poetry

and Pragmatism

(Cambridge,

Mass., 1992),

5.

On

pragmatism

as the

antithesis

of

literary

theory

and

a rationale

for

critics to focus

on recovering

authors'

intentions,

see

Steven

Knapp

and

Walter

Benn

Michaels,

"Against

Theory,"

Critical Inquiry,

8

(Summer

1982),

723-42.

For

the claim

that

we

must supplement

pragmatism

with

other

value

orientations

(such

as Marxism)

because

the

pragmatic

method

"cannot

help us

do

the social

work

of transformation,"

see Frank Lentricchia,

Criticism

and Social

Change

(Chicago,

1983),

4. Stanley

Fish argues

that

we create

the meaning

of

texts

when

we

interpret

them; trying

to

catch

what

Fish

means

by

pragmatism

is thus

like

trying

to

catch

a fly

with

a fish

net.

See,

for

example,

Stanley

Fish,

Doing

What

Comes

Naturally

(Durham,

1989).

On

one version

of Fish's

pragmatism,

see

the

examination

of

legal

theory

below.

Pragmatism:

An

Old Name

for

Some New

Ways of

Thinking?

113

Poirier

enlists James

to provide

an

American

alternative to

varieties of

post-

structuralism

imported

from

France

and

fashionable

among

contemporary

critics.

He

quotes

a

phrase fromJames's The

Principles

ofPsychology

on "the

re-instatement

of the

vague

to

its

proper place

in

our

mental

life" -a

phrase

consistent

with

James's

portrait

of

the

depth

and richness of

immediate

experience

-

then

draws

an

etymological

line

from

"vague"

to

"extravagance"

and then to

"superfluity."

This tenuous

link

prompts

him

to

assert that

for James,

as for

Emerson,

thinking

involves

punning,

so

that "gains and losses

of

meaning

are in

a

continuous

and

generative

interaction."

Poirier

compares

the

writings

of

Emerson

and James with

those of

Frost, Stein,

Stevens,

and

Eliot,

whom

they

resemble

in

their use

of

metaphor

and their

"allusiveness and

elusiveness

of

phrasing."

Poirier

characterizes

James's

language

as "no

less

'superfluous"'

than

the

language

of modernist

poets,

"subject

to

the same

degree

of

metaphorical

proliferation,

slippage,

and excess."

James's

language

slides

"out

of

bounds,

toward the

margin,

until it

becomes loose

and

vague."

AlthoughJames conceded the

limits

imposed

on

clarity

by

the

ineffable

in

experience

and the

unstable

in

language, as

his classic

The

Varieties

ofReligzous

Experience

makes

abundantly

clear,

in his

writings

he

sought

to

move

beyond

the

vague,

rather

than

to

revel in

it.24

James

sharpened

his

thinking against

the hard

edges

of

the world he

encountered

in

experience,

and

his

own

writing reflected

his

preoccupation

with clarity and

precision.

In

a letter to

his former

student

Gertrude

Stein, written

shortly

before

his

death,

James

explained

why

he

had

not

yet

finished

reading

a novel she

had

sent

him: "As a rule

reading

fiction is

as

hard

for me

as

trying

to

hit a

target

by

hurling

feathers

at it.

I

need

resistance

to

cerebrate!" James's

pragmatism also

reflects his

awareness

of

the resistance

to

vagueness offered

by

the

world

beyond

his

own fertile

imagination.

In

the

absence

of

any

"resistance"

in

"external

reality,"

writing

can

become

an

exercise

in

creativity-

or

an excuse

for

unrestrained self-

indulgence.

James also

insisted

on

respecting

the conventional

meanings

of

words

lest

we

become

"ungeared"

from

our

cultural tradition and

unable

to

communicate

with

each other. When

critics

align

his

pragmatism

with a

"linguistic

skepticism"

that

encourages

creative

(mis)readings by

"strong poets"

-

critic

Harold Bloom's

description

of

critics

who

interpret

texts

unconstrained

by

conventional

understand-

ings

-they

depart

from

James's

vision.

24

Poirier,

Poetry and Pragmatism,

44, 46, 92, 131.

Compare James's own

cautionary words about

language,

which

might

seem

to

confirm

Poirier's

view:

"Good and

evil

reconciled

in

a

laugh! Don't

you

see the

difference,

don't

you

see

the

identity?" James asked.

"By George,

nothing

but

othing!

That

sounds like

nonsense, but

it

is pure onsense!"

James published

these epigrams,

however, to show how

words that struck him as

brilliant

when

he

wrote them-under

the

influence of nitrous

oxide-dissolved

into

meaninglessness

when the

nitrous

oxide

wore

off.

In

such extravagant

language,

James

said,

"reason and silliness

united."

See

William

James, The

Will

to

Believe and Other

Essays

in

Popular Philosophy

(1897; Cambridge,

Mass., 1979), 219-20;

see

also

William

James,

The

Principles of

Psychology (2 vols.,

1890; Cambridge,

Mass., 1981), I, 254-55.

For

an

interpretation

that stresses the

instability of James's writings

but emphasizes

what James hoped to

accomplish

thereby, see William

Joseph Gavin,

William

James and

the

Reinstatement of the

Vague

(Philadelphia, 1992).

25

William

James to Gertrude

Stein, May 25, 1910, William James

Papers

(Houghton Library,

Harvard

University,

Cambridge, Mass.).

On

William

James's

letters to his brother

Henry

that

contrast

the

writing

of

fiction

with

his

own

struggles against

the

"resistance"

of

"facts" and

the

ideas of "other

philosophers,"

see

R.

W. B. Lewis, TheJameses: A

Family

Narrative

(New

York, 1991), 409-10.

Poirier, Poetry and

Pragmatism,

114 The Journal of American

History

June 1996

Two of the most prominent late-twentieth-century

pragmatists, RichardJ. Bern-

stein and Hilary Putnam, have challenged versions

of pragmatism, including Rorty's

and Poirier's, that emphasize language and

dismiss the concept of experience.

Their work, less known outside philosophy

than Rorty's, is of particular interest

to

historians.

For

three decades, since the appearance

of his first book,John Dewey

(1966), Bernstein has worked to forge links

between recent continental European

philosophy and the American tradition of pragmatism.

In Praxis andAction (1971),

he traced the

pragmatist philosophy of activity

to its roots in Aristotle's philosophy

and

contrasted the promise of that orientation

with the danger that analytic

philosophy might sink into scholasticism

under the weight of "its own demand

for

ever-increasing technical mastery."

Dewey, by contrast, was alert to "the moral

and

social

consequences"

of

his

ideas, which

demanded a community of inquiry

devoted to the "shared values of

openness

and fairness."

From

the beginning,

Bernstein's

pragmatism

was

grounded

in

a

Deweyan conception

of

experience

and

its consequences for social organization:

"it is only by mutual criticism that we

can

advance our knowledge and reconstruction

of human experience.

"26

The

twin

pillars

of Bernstein's

pragmatism

have been

a

community

of

inquiry

and social action.

In

The

Restructuring

of

Social and Political

Theory (1976),

Bernstein

exposed

the

reductionism of

mainstream

social

science

and

looked for

alternatives

in

hermeneutics, phenomenology,

and

Habermas's

critical

theory.

In

Beyond

Objectivism

and

Relativism (1983),

he identified the "Cartesian

anxiety"

that had dominated and

debilitated

modern Western

thought:

"Either there

is

some

support

for

our

being,

a

fixed

foundation

for our

knowledge,

or we cannot

escape the

forces of darkness that

envelop

us

with

madness,

with intellectual

and

moral chaos."

As an alternative Bernstein

invoked the ideas of

Hans-Georg

Gadamer,

Hannah

Arendt, Habermas,

and

Rorty, arguing

that these thinkers

pointed

toward "the central

themes

of

dialogue, conversation,

undistorted

commu-

nication, [and]

communal

judgment"

that become

possible

"when

individuals

confront each

other as

equals

and

participants."

Bernstein

advanced

a characteristi-

cally Deweyan

conclusion

on

the

consequences

of these ideas: we must

aim

"toward

the

goal

of

cultivating

the

types

of

dialogical

communities" in which

practical

judgment

and

practical

discourse "become

concretely

embodied

in

our

everyday

practices,"

whether those

practices

involve

organizing

a

neighborhood

to build a

playground or organizing

a

group

of students

to

investigate

a historical

controversy

and test alternative

interpretations against

the available

evidence.

Pragmatism,

166-67.

For an alternative

view, see

David

Bromwich,

"Recent Work

in Literary Criticism," Social Research,

53

(Autumn

1986), 447.

Too often,

Bromwich

writes

(with

Fredric Jameson and Terry

Eagleton

in mind), critics

who indulge

their own impulses

as readers

obliterate

the

past,

minimizing "the differentness

of the

past,"

a

consciousness

of which

"performs

a critical

function." Historical

materials

"are not altogether

tractable:

they

will

not do everything

we

want them to."

When

recounting

changes

in

literary

criticism, Poirier

underscores

Bromwich's

point by

shifting

from the "linguistic

skepticism"

he

endorses

in

theory

to

a

commonsense reliance on shared

meanings

of words.

See Poirier,

Poetry and

Pragmatism,

171-93.

26

RichardJ. Bernstein,

John

Dewey (New

York, 1966);

RichardJ.

Bernstein,

Praxis andAction:

Contemporary

Philosophies

of Human

Activity

(Philadelphia,

1971), 319,

314.

Pragmatism:

An

Old Name

for

Some

New Ways

of

Thinking?

115

for

Bernstein,

originates

in

reflection on

experience

and

culminates

in

altered

expe-

rience.27

Putnam

established

himself by

contributing to

debates in

mathematical

logic

and

philosophy of

mind, but

like

Rorty he

has

become

increasingly

disenchanted

during the last two

decades

with much of

what passes for

professional

philosophy

in

the

United

States.

Without

denying the

importance

of logic,

formal

studies,

or

semantics,

Putnam has

nevertheless

described

such

work as

"peripheral"

and

a

reflection of the

"scientistic

character of

logical

positivism"

that

likewise

infects

much

analytic

philosophy.

"Contemporary

analytic

metaphysics,"

he

writes

acidly,

"has no

connection with

anything but

the

'intuitions' of a

handful

of

philosophers."

He is

equally

scornful of

the nihilism he

sees

in

Derrida's

deconstruction.

"Analytic

philosophers

basically

see

philosophy as a

science,

only

less

developed,

vaguer

and

newer, while

Derrida

basically

sees

philosophy

as

literature,

as

art.

I

don't think

either is

correct."

Putnam

interprets

Rorty's

occasional

expressions of

enthusiasm

for

Derrida as the

lingering effects of

Rorty's

disappointment with the

failure of

analytic

philosophy

to

deliver

the

certainty

it

promised.28

In

Realism

with a

Human

Face

(1990),

Putnam

sought

to

clarify his

differences

from

Rorty by

listing

five

principles

that

he-along with

the

early

pragmatists-

endorses,

but that

he

expected

Rorty

to reject.

First,

our

standards of

warranted

assertibility

are

historical;

second,

they

reflect

our

interests and

values;

and

third,

they

are

always

subject

to

reform,

as

are all our

standards.

Rorty accepted

those

but

challenged

Putnam's two

other

principles:

first,

that

"in

ordinary

circumstances,

there

is

usually

a

fact of the

matter as to

whether the

statements

people

make

are

warranted or

not";

and

second,

"whether a

statement is

warranted

or

not is

independent

of

whether the

majority

of one's

cultural

peers

would

say

it

is

warranted

or

unwarranted." From

Rorty's

perspective,

warrant

is

a

sociological

question,

so

we should evade

pointless

debates about relativism

by

moving

"everything

over

from

epistemology and

metaphysics to cultural

politics,

from claims

to

knowledge

and

appeals

to

self-evidence to

suggestions about what we should

try."

This

way

of

framing

the

issue illustrates

Rorty's

characteristic

style

of

argument,

which he

candidly

describes as

trying

to

make his

opponent

look

bad. When

Rorty

traces

this

disagreement

to Putnam's

purported

"appeals

to

self-evidence,"

he

does

just

that: Putnam's

formulation,

however,

does not

depend

on

self-evidence

any

more

than James's

or

Dewey's

ideas of

experience

depended

on

"introspection";

it de-

pends

instead on evidence

derived from

experience.29

Their

second

principal

difference,

Rorty points

out,

stems from

Putnam's "dislike

of,

and

my

enthusiasm

for,

a

picture

of

human

beings

as

just

complicated

animals."

27

Bernstein,

Restructuring of

Social and

Political Theory;

Richard J.

Bernstein,

Beyond

Objectivism

and

Relativism:

Science,

Hermeneutics,

and Praxis

(Philadelphia,

1983), 18,

223.

28

Putnam, Reason,

Truth, and

History, 126;

Hilary

Putnam,

Renewing

Philosophy

(Cambridge, Mass.,

1992), 197;

interview with

Putnam

in

Giovanna

Borradori,

The American

Philosopher,

trans.

Rosanna Crocitto

(Chicago,

1994), 60-61, 66.

29

Hilary

Putnam, Realism with a

Human Face

(Cambridge,

Mass.,

1990), 21;

Richard Rorty,

"Putnam and

the Relativist

Menace," Journal

of

Philosophy, 90

(Sept.

1993), 449, 457.

116

The Journal of American History

June 1996

Putnam has argued that

"one of our fundamental

self-conceptualizations" as

humans

"is

that

we are

thinkers,

and

that as thinkers

we are committed to there

being

some kind

of

truth."

In

Putnam's words, "that

means that there is no

eliminating

the normative," and Rorty is correct to emphasize

the gulf dividing

him

from Putnam on

this

issue. Putnam concedes the

historicist point that our

ways

of

using language

change, but

he

insists that even

so,

"some of

our sentences

are

true,

and-in

spite

of

Rorty's objections

to

saying

that

things

'make'

sentences

true -the

truth

of 'I

had cereal

for

breakfast

this

morning' does depend

on

what

happened

this

morning."30

This conclusion,

which many historians will find congenial,

depends finally on

Putnam'sJamesian conception

of what it is to be human

and his conviction, which

he has

reiterated

again

and again during

the last fifteen

years, that

we

should

characterize the mind as "neither

a

material nor an

immaterial organ but a system

of

capacities,"

which returns us to the

early pragmatists'

theory

of

voluntary

action.

In

two essays written with

Ruth Anna Putnam, Putnam

stresses the "continuing

interactive nature of experience"

as Dewey conceived

of it. Thinking involves

relating

our choices

and

our

actions to

their

consequences,

which

requires reflecting

not merely on

our

words

but

on the

experienced

effects of

our

practical activity.

"We

formulate ends-in-view

on the

basis

of

experience,"

they conclude,

"and

we

appraise

these

on the

basis

of

additional

experience."

For a

pragmatist,

to

be

engaged

in

that

practice

is

"to

be

committed

to the existence

of

truth.

Democracy

is a social condition of such

practice, and therein

lies its justification."31

For Putnam, as

for Bernstein, all inquiry presupposes

values

such as mutual

understanding

and

cooperation,

which

in

turn

require

free

and

open exchanges

of ideas

among equals

who

are

committed

to the value

of the

practice.

All of

these

are

deeply, irreducibly

normative

notions,

and

they require

a

conception

of human

thinking

and

agency

different

from

Rorty's

view. At

the conclusion of

Reason,

Truth,

and

History (1981),

Putnam stated this crucial

argument clearly

and force-

fully:

"The notion

of

truth

itself

depends

for

its

content

on our

standards

of

rational

acceptability,

and

these

in

turn

rest on

and

presuppose

our

values."32

Rorty's dualisms

cannot accommodate

the

early

pragmatists' conception

of

artistic

or

religious experience.

Rorty

shares

Dewey's

conception

of

the

liberating

social value

of

art,

which

engages

the

imagination by

destabilizing

the established

order

and

suggesting

imagined

alternatives.

But

for

Dewey,

as

forJames,

aesthetic

30

Rorty, "Putnam

and the Relativist

Menace," 458;

Hilary Putnam, "Why Reason

Can't Be Naturalized,"

in Hilary Putnam,

Philosophical Papers,

vol. III: Realism

and Reason (New

York, 1983), 229-47. See

also

Richard Rorty, "Putnam

on Truth," Philosophy

and Phenomenological

Research, 52

(June 1992), 415-18;

and

Hilary Putnam,

"Truth, Activation

Vectors, and Possessive

Conditions

for Concepts," ibid., 431-47.

Hilary

Putnam,

"The

Question

of

Realism,"

in

Hilary Putnam,

Words

and Life,

ed.

James

Conant (Cambridge,

Mass.,

1994), 299-302.

31

Putnam,

"Question of Realism,"

305, 292n6. On the

early pragmatists' theory

of

voluntary action

and its

relation to

their conception

of

truth,

see James

T.

Kloppenberg,

Uncertain

Victory:

Social Democracy and

Progressivism in

European and American

Thought, 1870-1920

(New York, 1986),

79-94. Hilary Putnam

and

Ruth Anna Putnam,

"Education

for Democracy,"

in

Putnam,

Words

and Life,

ed. Conant, 227; and

Hilary

Putnam and

Ruth

Anna Putnam,

"Dewey's Logic: Epistemology

as

Hypothesis,"

ibid.,

218.

32

Putnam, Reason,

Truth, and History,

215.

For

a

recent restatement of this

argument, see Putnam,

"Pragmatism and

Moral Objectivity,"

in

Putnam, Words

and Life, ed. Conant,

151-81.

Pragmatism: An Old

Name for Some

New Ways of

Thinking?

117

and

religious

experiences

of

the sort

Dewey

characterized as

"consummatory"

derive

their

explosive

power from qualities

that can

render them

finally inexpressible

in

language.

Rorty admits the

importance of

such fulfilling

experiences-for

him

they

come

from

art, literature,

or

the wild

orchids that have

fascinated him

since

his

childhood

-

but he denies

that such

private enjoyments

have anything

to

do with

philosophy.33 James

and Dewey

disagreed, and the

disagreement

has

important

implications.

Dewey's

aesthetics differed

from the

abstract and formal

theories of

analytic

philosophers

and New Critics.

He

emphasized

aesthetic

experience rather than

the

objects

of art. He

deplored

the

compartmentalization

that

cuts art off from

the rest of

existence,

and

he

denied

the

authority

of

elites to define

and control

what

passes

for art. As

Richard Shusterman

argues

in

Pragmatist

Aesthetics

(1992),

Dewey opposed

the

idea that all artistic

experience requires

interpretation

by

trained

professionals.

Such

linguistic

universalism,

which

Shusterman

accurately

describes

as "the

deepest dogma

of the

linguistic

turn

in

both

analytic

and continen-

tal

philosophy,"

he

judges

"neither

self-evident nor immune to

challenge."

Resur-

recting

the ideas

of

James

and

Dewey,

Shusterman insists that

pragmatism

"more

radically

recognizes uninterpreted

reality,

experience, and

understandings

as

al-

ready

perspectival, prejudiced,

and corrigible

-

in

short, as

non-foundationally

given."

He

recommends hermeneutics

for

use

only

in

particular

circumstances.

Shusterman

insists that

understanding

does not

always "require

linguistic

articula-

tion;

a

proper

reaction,

a shudder or a

tingle,

may

be

enough

to

indicate that

one has understood.

Some

of

the

things

we

experience

and understand"

-notably

aesthetic

and

somatic

experiences

-

"are

never

captured

in

language."34

Rorty,

locked

inside the tight

boundaries of

textualism,

appreciates such nondis-

cursive

experience

but denies

it

any philosophical

significance.

Dewey, by

contrast,

wrote that "a

universe

of

experience

is

a

precondition

of a universe of discourse.

Without

its

controlling

presence,

there is no

way

to

determine the

relevancy,

weight,

or coherence of

any

designated

distinction

or

relation. The universe

of

experience

surrounds and

regulates

the universe of

discourse

but

never

appears

as

such within

the

latter.

"

35

Linguistic

pragmatists

such

as

Rorty

and

other

contempo-

rary

thinkers who

privilege

language

and distrust

experience

not

only disagree

with

Dewey

but also

thereby

dismiss

much of what

historians value

in

their efforts

to understand the

past

as

it

was

lived.

In

James's introduction to

the

lectures

eventually published

as The

Varieties

of

Religious

Experience,

he

urged

his listeners to think

about

especially rich,

powerful,

`

See

Richard

Rorty, "Trotsky

and

the

Wild

Orchids,"

Common

Knowledge,

1

(Winter 1992),

140-53.

34 Richard

Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty,

Rethinking Art (Oxford, Eng., 1992),

22, 32,

62, 76, 120-34. See

also David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman,

and Richard Shusterman, eds., The

Interpretive

Turn:

Philosophy,

Science, Culture (Ithaca, 1991). On the difference

between nineteenth-

and

twentieth-century

hermeneutics, and the

reasons why historians should recover the

former, see Michael Ermarth, "The Transformation

of

Hermeneutics:

19th-Century Ancients and 20th-Century

Moderns," Monist,

64

(April 1981), 176-94.

John

Dewey,

Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938),

in

Dewey,

Later

Works, ed. Boydston, XII,

74. See

also

the

thoughtful

discussion

in

Richard Shusterman, "Dewey on

Experience: Foundation

or

Reconstruction?,"

Philosophical Forum,

26 (Winter 1994), 127-48.

118

The Journal of

American History

June 1996

and

sometimes

unforgettable experiences that he

described as "entirely

unparalleled

by anything

in verbal

thought."

Giles

Gunn,

in his

fine

book

Thinking

across

the

Amertcan Grain (1992), quotes at length

a passage that expresses

"much of

the

heritage of

pragmatism that Rorty has

found problematic." The

meaning of

such

intense

experiences,

in

James's words,

"seems to well up from out

of their

very centre,

in

a

way impossible verbally to

describe." On

reflection

,James

observed,

our

experience

of

every

moment of life

seems to

expand

in

the

way a

revolving

disk

painted

with a

spiral pattern appears at once to

grow continuously

from

within

itself and

yet

to remain the

same size.

Such "self-sustaining

in

the

midst

of

self-removal, which

characterizes all

reality and fact, is something

absolutely

foreign

to the

nature of

language, and even

to the nature of logic,

commonly

so-called,"

which

explainsJames's

aversion to the

emerging philosophical obsessions

with

language

and mathematical

logic

and his

stubborn

fascination

with

reli-

gious experience.

Something

forever

exceeds, escapes

from

statement,

withdraws from

definition,

must

be

glimpsed

and

felt,

not

told. No

one

knows this

like

your genuine

professor of

philosophy. For what glimmers

and twinkles like a bird's wing

in

the sunshine it is his

business

to

snatch and

fix.

And

every

time

he

fires his

volley

of

new

vocables

out

of his

philosophic

shot-gun,

whatever surface-flush

of success he

may feel,

he

secretly

kens

at the

same

time the finer hollowness

and irrelevance.

Whereas

philosophers

who have made the

linguistic

turn

might

scoff at

James's

insistence on

the inadequacies of language to

capture and pin down

the

magic

of

experience,

historians have

good

reasons to

pay

attention.36

Indeed,

for

historians the greater temptation

may be

to treat

experience

uncriti-

cally,

as a court

of

last

appeal, slighting

the role of

language

and communication.

Despite

the

incapacity

of

language to

encompass fully

the realms of

religious,

aesthetic,

emotional,

and

somatic

experience,

we nevertheless

usually

have access

to

the

experience

of other

persons,

and communicate

our

own

experience

to

others,

principally through language.

Although

lived

experience may

exceed

the

boundaries

of

discourse,

our

expression

of it

usually,

and

our

discussion

of it

always,

cannot.

Moreover, extralinguistic experiences

have most often

been

used

to authorize the

dogmatic

assertions of

foundational

principles

that

pragmatists

old and new distrust.

Traditionally

appearing

as

religious

truths

proclaimed

by

believers,

more

recently

such

foundational

principles

have

been

asserted

by

those

who claim that their

race, class, gender,

or

other

characteristic

gives

them immediate

experience

and

thus

insights inaccessible,

perhaps

even

incomprehensible,

to those

outside the

charmed-or

maligned-circle.37

How do

we assess

and

adjudicate

such

competing

claims, grounded

in

appeals

to

experience?

The

early pragmatists'

36

Giles

Gunn, Thinking across

the

American Grain: Ideology, Intellect,

and the

New Pragmatism

(Chicago,

1992), 112-13. For James's draft of the

opening of his Gifford lectures in Edinburgh, the basis for

The Varieties

of Religious Experience,

see

Perry, Thought

and Character

of William James, II, 328-29.

31

For an incisive discussion from an

implicitly pragmatist perspective, see David A. Hollinger,

Postethnic

America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New

York, 1995).

Pragmatism: An Old

Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?

119

concept

of truth is crucial not

only because it acknowledges those

appeals but

because,

in its ethical and

political

dimensions,

it offers a

method

for

evaluating

such claims.

It thus

provides

a

way

of

attempting to negotiate differences

that

might otherwise seem irreconcilable.

That pragmatic method is democracy.

Ethics and Politics

For both James and Dewey democracy

was much more than a form

of government

or a

set

of

legal arrangements.

Dewey urged us to stop "thinking

of democracy

as

something

institutional and external" and to see it as

"a

way

of

personal life,"

to realize that

"democracy

is a moral ideal and so far as it becomes

a fact is a

moral

fact."

In

James's

words,

"democracy

is a

kind

of

religion,"

and

for

pragmatic

reasons

"we are

bound

not to admit its failure." Such "faiths and utopias

are the

noblest exercise

of human

reason,"

and we must

not

surrender them

to cynicism.38

James and Dewey considered

their

pragmatism inseparable

from their commit-

ment to

democracy

as

an

ethical ideal.

Both

believed

that

their

challenge to

inherited philosophical

dualisms

and absolutes,

their

conception

of

truth

as fluid

and

culturally created,

and

their

belief

that all

experience

is

meaningful

were

consistent

only

with

democracy,

specifically

with the

principles

of

social

equality

and

individual autonomy.

The ideals of

equality

and

autonomy appealed

to

James

and

Dewey because

of

their

open-endedness

and

flexibility. They

did not entail

particular conceptions

of the

good

life for all

people

at all

times,

although they

did

rule

out

fixed and

hierarchical social

systems

sustained

by appeals

to

allegedly

universal

truths that all

members

of the

society

must

embrace.

For appeals to universal

truths, James and Dewey substituted a process

of

inquiry

that was

both democratic

and scientific.

Dewey's

enthusiasm for science is often

misinterpreted

as a narrow concern with

technique

to

the

exclusion of ethical

considerations;

to the

contrary,

Dewey

valued

the scientific method

because

it

embodied

an

ethical commitment

to

open-ended inquiry

wherein

human

values

shaped

the selection of

questions,

the formulation of

hypotheses,

and

the

evaluation

of

results.

Dewey

conceived

of the

ideal

scientific

community

as

a

democratically

organized, truth-seeking group

of

independent

thinkers who tested

their results

against pragmatic standards,

but

those standards

always reflected

moral,

rather

than

narrowly technical,

considerations.

This

unifying

thread

connects

all

of

Dewey's writings.

In

The

Study of

Ethics

(1894),

he insisted that

knowing

cannot be

separated

from

valuing.

The

qualitative

and

social dimensions of

experience

make

pure "objectivity"

or

"neutrality" impossi-

ble

for human

beings.

In

The Public

and

Its Problems he cautioned that "the

glorification

of

'pure'

science"

is

but

"a

rationalization

of

an

escape"

because

knowledge

"is

wholly

a

moral matter."

In

Experience

and

Nature

he stressed the

moral and aesthetic dimension

of

experience,

its

qualitative

as well

as

cognitive

38John

Dewey, "Creative Democracy-The Task before Us," in Dewey, Later Works, ed. Boydston, XIV,

228; William James, The Social Value of the College Bred, in William James, Writings, 1902-1910, ed. Bruce

Kuklick (New York, 1987), 1245.

120

The Journal

of

American

History June

1996

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for

Dewey

"nature

signifies

nothing

less than

the

whole

complex

of the results of the interaction of

man,

with

his memories

and

hopes,

Pragmatism:

An Old Name

for Some New

Ways of

Thinking?

121

understanding

and

desire,

with

that

world

to

which

one-sided

philosophy

confines

'nature."

39

Dewey

judged the notion

of

"value-free" inquiry

abhorrent as

well

as incoherent.

An

address

Dewey wrote for a

banquet

celebrating

his

eightieth birthday in

1939 states

clearly and

concisely the connection

between

his

devotion

to

democracy

and

his

philosophical

conceptions

of

experience

and ethics.

Democracy,

Dewey

proclaimed,

is "a

way

of life"

that requires "faith

in

the

capacity of

human

beings

for

intelligent

judgment

and action if

proper [that

is,

democratic] conditions

are

furnished." To those who

judged this faith naive or

utopian,

Dewey insisted

that

it derives

neither from

metaphysics nor from wishful

thinking but from

the

everyday

experience

of

neighbors

and friends

gathering

"to

converse

freely

with

one

another.

Intolerance, abuse,

calling

of

names

because

of differences of

opinion about

religion

or

politics

or

business,

as well

as because

of differences of

race,

color,

wealth

or

degree

of

culture are treason to the democratic

way

of life."

Anything

that

blocks

communication

engenders

"antagonistic

sects and factions"

and

undermines

democ-

racy. Legal

guarantees

-

the focus of

late-twentieth-century

efforts

to assure the

right to

free

expression

-are

inadequate

when "the

give

and take

of

ideas,

facts,

experiences,

is

choked

by

mutual

suspicion, by

abuse, by

fear

and hatred."

For

Dewey

democracy required

more than

securing

individual

rights.

It

required

faith

in

the

possibility

of

resolving disputes

through

uncoerced

deliberation,

"as

cooperative

undertakings,"

instead of

having

one

party suppress

the

other

overtly

through

violence

or

more

subtly

through

ridicule or

intimidation.

If

such

cooperation

is

impossible,

then

deliberative

democracy

as

Dewey

conceived

of

it is

impossible.40

The

emphasis

on difference

in

the

contemporary

United States does

not discredit

Dewey's

pragmatism,

as

some writers unfamiliar with

his

ideas

assume; instead

it echoes

Dewey's

own

view

of

diversity. Achieving

the

cooperation

necessary

for

social

life

requires

"giving

differences

a chance to show

themselves,"

he

insisted.

"The

expression

of

difference

is

not

only

a

right

of the other

persons

but

is

a

means

of

enriching

one's own

life-experience."

Dewey's conception

of

democracy

involved

enriching

the

range

of

choices,

and

expanding

the

possibilities

of

finding

different kinds of

fulfillment,

for all

persons.

Democracy

does not

impose

authority

from

above

but relies instead on

"the

process

of

experience

as end

and as

means,"

as

the source of

authority

and the

means of

choosing

among

and

testing

alternative

directions.

This

process

is

continuous because

its

terminus

cannot

be

designated,

or even

imagined,

in

advance of democratic social

experimentation

to

create "a

freer and more humane

experience

in

which all share and to which

all

contribute."

Dewey

harbored

no secret desire to

bring

all

diversity

to an end

under

the

shelter

of a

snug

but

stifling

consensus: to the

contrary,

a

democracy

without

difference

was a contradiction

in

terms,

because

he

believed

passionately

that

all

individuals,

39

John

Dewey, The Study of

Ethics:

A

Syllabus,

in

John Dewey,

The

Early Works, 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann

Boydston (5 vols., Carbondale, 1967-1972), IV,

339; Dewey,

Public andIts

Problems, 344-45; Dewey,

Experience

and Nature, 74-76; and John Dewey,

Art

as

Experience,

in

Dewey,

Later

Works, ed. Boydston, X, 156.

40

Dewey, "Creative Democracy-The

Task before

Us," 224-30, esp.

226-28.

122

The Journal of

American History

June 1996

in

their

uniqueness, make

different contributions

to

democratic life.

The richer

the mix,

the richer the

culture that results from

the

interaction.4'

Dewey's

commitment

to

pluralism

and diversity, to

the

recognition

and cultiva-

tion of

difference,

and

to the

potential

of communication

to engender

cooperation

and

clarify,

if not

resolve, disputes

illustrates

how

wrongheaded

is

the familiar

charge,

which

Dewey

explicitly

and

repeatedly

denied,

that

his

emphasis

on

a

community

of

inquiry

reveals

the latent

elitism of

pragmatism.

Throughout

the

1920s, against

behaviorists

and empirical

social scientists

who invoked

his pragma-

tism on behalf

of their efforts at social engineering,

he insisted on

expanding

the

"community

of cooperative

effort and truth."

In

Individualism Old and New

(1929) he

elaborated the

argument advanced

in

The

Public and

Its Problems

concerning

the

folly

of

relying

on

elites.

He admitted that

some

communities

of

scientists,

"small

groups

having

a somewhat

technical

ability,"

did

indeed illustrate

how the process

of inquiry

might work,

yet he insisted

that such

groups reveal

only

"a

possibility

in the

present

-

one of

many possibilities

that

are

a

challenge

to

expansion,

and

not a

ground

for retreat

and contraction" from

democracy.

Unfortunately, interpreters

of

Dewey's

ideas sometimes

ignore

such

explicit argu-

ments and

assert that

there must be something

antidemocratic about

communities

of

inquiry,

even those

that

are

open,

expanding,

and

democratically

constituted.42

Although

it has

long

been

common to contrastJames's

individualism to

Dewey's

commitment

to social

action,

their differences

are

subtler.

They

reflect

in

part

the

simple

fact of James's

death

in

1910

and

Dewey's

growing

involvement

in

the

distinctive

political

controversies

of the

following

four

decades,

rather than

any

fundamental

inconsistency

in

their

political

orientations.

Both

conceived of lived

experience as

irreducibly

social

and

meaning-laden;

both

frequently

invoked de-

mocracy

as the social ideal

consistent

with their pragmatism.

James attributed the

"unhealthiness"

of

labor

relations,

for

example,

to "the fact that one-half of our

fellow-countrymen

remain

entirely

blind

to the internal

significance

of the lives

of the

other

half." Instead of

entering imaginatively

into their

ways

of

life-

to

say

nothing

of

entering

into

constructive,

democratic

dialogue

with

them-

"everybody

remains

outside of

everybody

else's

sight."

In

addition to

endorsing

deliberative,

or

discursive, democracy-

defined

by

the creative

potential

of

egalitar-

ian

dialogue,

not

merely

democratic

institutions

or

universal

rights

to

participate

in

political

activity

-James also

championed

what

would now

be

designated

multi-

culturalism.

His

ideal

of

a

democratic

culture, grounded

on

his

conception

of

41

Ibid.,

228-30. On this dimension

of

Dewey's

pragmatism, see also

Hilary Putnam,

"A Reconsideration

of Deweyan Democracy,"

in

Pragmatism

in

Law and

Society, ed. Michael

Brint

and William

Weaver (Boulder,

1991), 217-43.

On the importance

of pluralism to pragmatism,

see

also

Putnam, Words and

Life, ed. Conant,

194-95.

42

John

Dewey, Individualism

Old and

New,

in

Dewey,

Later

Works,

ed.

Boydston, V,

115. The assumption

that knowledge

inevitably

masks

and imposes power

often underlies

such charges of elitism. From

a Deweyan

perspective one

might concede the

point and ask what

alternative is preferable

to stipulating

that democratic

principles

should shape

the

process

of inquiry and

the formation of those

communities that

evaluate knowledge

claims. Particularly

for

scholars,

the refusal to

admit

that there

are

better and worse-more and less democratic-

ways to generate

knowledge

is

self-defeating.

See

the

judicious

review

essay:

Thomas

Bender,

"Social Science,

Objectivity,

and

Pragmatism,"

Annals

of

Scholarship,

9 (Winter-Spring

1992), 183-97.

Pragmatism:

An Old Name for Some

New Ways of Thinking?

123

immediate experience

and his commitment to

pragmatism, "commands

us to

tolerate, respect, and

indulge"

those

"harmlessly

interested and happy

in their

own ways, however unintelligible

these may be

to us." His creed was "Hands

off:

neither the whole of truth

nor the whole of good

is revealed to any single observer."

The

political consequence

of James's pragmatism

was "the well-known democratic

respect for the sacredness

of individuality," the

"tolerance of whatever

is not

itself

intolerant."43

The

early pragmatists'

arguments for democracy

helped inspire generations

of

social and

political

activists ranging

from

Progressive

reformers through New

Dealers

to members

of the

civil rights

movement

and

the New Left.

In

the

debates

that

rage among

contemporary

thinkers

concerning

the

political consequences

of

pragmatism,

the

democratic

convictions of James

and Dewey have slipped

out of

focus

because

the

political

ideas of linguistic pragmatists

such

as Rorty have attracted

so

much attention. Because Rorty's version of liberalism

appeals to many

Americans

disillusioned

with

politics

or

cynical

about

its

prospects,

it is

important

to

be

clear

about

the similarities

and the

differences

between

his

ideas and those of the

early

pragmatists. Rorty

has

repeatedly

characterized

the culture

and institutions

of

liberal democracy

as a

precious

achievement

and

endorsed the

social-democratic

program

that has

been

at the

heart of

pragmatic

political

activism since the

days

ofJames and

Dewey,

or

Rauschenbusch

and

Croly. But,

unlikeJames

and

Dewey,

he

denies that

pragmatism

provides any philosophical

foundation for such a

poli-

tics

-

or that we

need

one.

Rorty nevertheless

characterizes pragmatism

as "a philosophy

of

solidarity

rather

than

despair."

He tries to reassure

his

readers

that we need

not

discard

our

beliefs

about

the

natural

world,

or our moral and

political

values, just

because

we realize

we

have made

them,

rather

than found them. Our faith

in

science,

like

our other

faiths, helps

us

get

things done,

and

it

will

continue to

help

us even after

we

have

stopped trying

to

"divinize"

it -likewise our

democratic

faith.

In

the

absence

of

foundations, Rorty

recommends that we

look instead

to

history-but

from

an

idiosyncratic,

even

antihistorical

vantage point.

We

must

accept

"our

inheritance

from,

and

our

conversation

with,

our fellow-humans

as our

only

source

of

guid-

ance."

This is our

defense

against

the

nihilism

that those

who

believe

in

universal

principles

fear will follow

from

pragmatism.

"Our identification

with our commu-

13

William

James,

Talks to Teachers

on

Psychology;

And to Students

on Some of Life's Ideals

(1899; New

York,

1958),

188-89,

169, 19-20.

On James's

tragic sensibility

and Dewey's indomitable democratic

faith,

see

Kloppenberg,

Uncertain Victory,

115-95,

340-415. OnJames's politics,

cf. the contrasting emphases

of

Deborah

J. Coon,

"'One

Moment in the

World's

Salvation': Anarchism and

the Radicalization

of William

James,

"Journal

ofAmerican

History,

83 (June 1996),

70-99;

and George

Cotkin, William

James: Public

Philosopher

(Baltimore,

1990).

On Dewey's

democratic

ideas,

cf.

Westbrook,

John

Dewey and

American Democracy;

and Alan

Ryan,

John

Dewey

and the

High

Tide

of

American Liberalism

(New

York,

1995).

For the

long-standard

view of

the

differences

between James's

and Dewey's outlooks,

see

James

Campbell,

The

Community Reconstructs:

The

Meaning

of Pragmatic

Social Thought

(Urbana,

1992). For

criticism of

Dewey, George

Herbert

Mead, andJames

Tufts for

trying to

moderate class

conflict and

to translate their

Protestantism

and republicanism

into a reformism

supposedly

ill

suited to the industrial era,

see Andrew

Feffer,

The Chicago

Pragmatists

andAmerican

Progressivism

(Ithaca,

1993).

An imaginative

analysis

that credits

Dewey and especially

James

with realizing

that corporate

capitalism

ushered

in

possibilities

for

a

"postmodern

subjectivity"

is

James

Livingston,

Pragmatism

and

the

Political

Economy of

Cultural Revolution,

1850-1940 (Chapel

Hill,

1994).

124

The Journal

of American History

June

1996

nity-our society,

our political tradition,

our intellectual

heritage-is heightened

when we see this

community

as ours rather than

nature's, shaped rather

than

found,

one

among

many which

men have made."

If we were to surrender

our

aspirations

to certainty,

he writes, we "would

regard

the justification of

liberal

society simply

as a matter of historical

comparison with

other attempts

at social

organization." At

first

glance historians

might

find Rorty's argument

intriguing:

He

urges

us to "try not to

want

something

which stands beyond history

and

institutions" because

"a

belief

can

still regulate

action" even

if

we realize it

is

"caused by nothing

deeper than contingent

historical

circumstances." In

Rorty's

"liberal utopia,"

the claim that there

is "'something

that stands beyond

history'

has become unintelligible."44

Rorty urges

us

to discard

attempts

to

provide philosophical

props

to

hold

up

our humanitarian and

democratic

values,

to face

unblinkingly

the

contingency of

our

sense

of self

and

our commitments, and

to

adopt

a

posture

of ironic distance

from

whatever

we now accept as

our

"final vocabulary."

The hero of Rorty's

"liberal

utopia"

can

"slough

off

the

Enlightenment

vocabulary"

of rational foundations

underlying universal

principles and

strive simply to avoid

inflicting pain

on others,

a

taboo Rorty

simply posits

as

self-evident

to

anyone

who has inherited

our

tradition.

Having given

up

his own

adolescent

attempts

to "hold

reality

and

justice

in

a

single vision,"

Rorty

has

become

convinced

that

"an

intricately-textured

collage

of

private

narcissism

and

public pragmatism"

may be

our

best

hope

for

synthesizing

love and

justice.

We

can no

longer

aim

for more than what

Alan

Ryan

calls

"welfare-capitalism-with-a-human

face," Rorty

has written.

Terms such as

"capital-

ist

economy" and

"bourgeois

culture" have

become

meaningless

since

1989;

in

the

absence

of

any contrasting

socialist alternatives,

"we

Western

leftists" should

"banalize

our

vocabulary

of

political

deliberation."

Taking

that advice to

heart,

Rorty

claims

that

our

political

needs boil

down

to

"security"

and

"sympathy"

or,

as

he

put it,

"mere niceness" to

all "featherless

bipeds."

Such

formulations,

evidently

calculated to infuriate Rorty's

earnest

critics,

no

doubt

account

for

much of

his

no-

toriety.45

Rorty contends

that philosophy

can

no

longer

offer

much

guidance

to those

interested

in

ethics and

politics.

For

him

liberal

democratic

cultures

are

simply

"a product

of time

and

chance,"

"an accidental

coincidence,

"

or "a fortunate

happenstance,"

and

the historical

emergence

of the

United States

was "an

admirable

result"

that occurred

"just by good

luck."

Rorty's

devil-may-care

view of

history

as

caprice

and

his

intentionally

banal

ethic

of

"niceness" contrast

strikingly

with

James's stance

in

such

essays

as "The Moral

Philosopher

and

the

Moral Life"

and

Dewey's

historical

analyses

of the

connections

between

theories

of

ethics and

Richard Rorty, "Solidarity

or Objectivity,"

in

Post-Analytic

Philosophy, ed.

Rajchman

and

West,

15-16;

Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism,

166; Richard Rorty,

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

(New York, 1989),

xvi, 53, 189-90.

`

Rorty, Contingency,

Irony, and Solidarity, 53;

Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild

Orchids," 140-53; Rorty,

Philosophical Papers, I, 210;

Richard Rorty,

"The

Intellectuals

at the End of Socialism,"

Yale

Review,

80

(April

1992), 1-16; Richard Rorty,

"Human Rights, Rationality,

and Sentimentality," ibid.,

81

(Oct. 1993),

1-20.

Pragmatism:

An Old Name for Some New

Ways of Thinking?

125

political organization, between

personal responsibility

and social justice.

Rorty

claims that

Dewey's pragmatism

"did

not

tell you

what

purposes

to

have;

its ethics

is situational at best."46

That could be said generally

of James as well. But

as

Robert Westbrook and

I argue, Dewey challenged prevailing

systems of

ethics

and

conventional liberal and

socialist political theories,

but he neither endorsed

the

judgment

of

many

analytic philosophers that ethics

and political philosophy

are

obsolete

nor

accepted

anything like Rorty's advice

that urging sympathy

is the

best

we can do.

James

and Dewey both

believed that demolishing

earlier arguments about

ethics and politics cleared

the way for critical analysis

of personal freedom and

responsibility, rather than

bringing such discourse to

an end. As Dewey put it

in

1940,

in

a statement that

indicates the gulf separating

him from Rorty, "any

theory

of

activity

in

social

and moral matters, liberal

or otherwise,

which

is

not

grounded

in

a

comprehensive

philosophy, seems to

me to be only a projection

of

arbitrary personal preferences.

"

When Rorty writes

that "we do not need philoso-

phy

for

social criticism"

or contends that "Dewey,

like Nietzsche, altered

our

conception of reason

.

. .

in

a way that leaves no room

for the idea that democratic

ideals can be supported

by invoking ahistorical 'demands

of reason,"' he neglects

Dewey's

own

"comprehensive

philosophy."

More accurate

is

Rorty's observation

of the difference

between

his

hypothetical Dewey and

the historical Dewey,

who

cared passionately about

demonstrating the connection

between experience and

the ethical

and

political

ideal of democracy. Historicizing

reason, a project

many

of James's

and

Dewey's

late-twentieth-century admirers

share with

them,

need

not culminate

in

Rorty's

rigid divisions of language

from experience and of

the

private

from the

public

sphere, nor

in

his dismissal

of ethics and politics

as

proper

subjects

for

philosophers,

nor, as

I

will argue

in

my conclusion,

in his

disregard

for

the

careful

and critical study of how and why

our tradition

has taken its

distinctive

shape. Rorty's

position

is

insufficiently pragmatic.

Although

he considers

himself a

partisan of

social democratic reforms and

criticizes academic cultural

politics,

his

liberal

ironism

encourages selfishness,

cynicism, and resignation

by

undercutting

efforts to confront the hard facts of

poverty

and

greed.4

Varieties of

Contemporary

Pragmatism

Numerous

contemporary

thinkers

have invoked

pragmatism

to

bolster

a

wide

range

of

political arguments;

their

contributions

to

debates

about race, gender,

and law

46

Rorty, Contingency, Irony,

and Solidarity, 22, 37, 68; Rorty, "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," 65, 64.

47

John Dewey, "Nature in

Experience,"

in

Dewey, Later Works, ed. Boydston, XIV, 150; Borradori,

American

Philosopher, trans. Crocitto, 117;

Rorty, "Dewey between Hegel and Darwin," 68. On the contrast

between

Rorty's ideas about history, religion,

ethics, and politics and those of other pragmatists,

seejames

T. Kloppenberg,

"Democracy and Disenchantment:

From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty,"

in

Modernist Impulses in

the

Human Sciences, ed. Ross,

69-90; and James T. Kloppenberg, "Knowledge and

Belief

in American

Public

Life," in Knowledge and Belief:

Enlightenment Traditions and

Modern

Religious Thought, ed. William M.

Shea and

Peter

A.

Huff

(New York,

1995), 27-51. On the connection between Dewey's

ideas about ethics

and

his commitment to democracy, see

Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy. See also Richard Rorty,

"Intellectuals in Politics," Dissent,

38 (Fall 1991), 483-90.

126

The

Journal of

American

History

June

1996

make clear

how many

distinct

versions of

pragmatism

are alive

and which

versions

differ

markedly

from

the

ideas

of

the

early

pragmatists. Cornel West has

constructed

a

loose

narrative

tradition

connecting

James

and

Dewey

with

Emerson,

Du

Bois,

and

such

thinkers as

C. Wright

Mills,

Sidney Hook,

and

Reinhold

Niebuhr. In

addition to

accurately

associating

antifoundationalism

and

democratic

sensibility

with

American

pragmatists, West

characterizes them

as

champions of those whom

the

theorist of

anticolonialism

Frantz

Fanon calls

"the

wretched of the earth."

West

distances his

position from

Rorty's

pragmatism,

which he

judges

too

narrowly

focused on

language

and

insufficiently

attuned to

the pressing

need for

political

activism.

"The

distinctive

appeal of

American

pragmatism

in

our

postmodern

moment,"

West writes,

"is its

unashamedly

moral

emphasis

and its

unequivocally

ameliorative

impulse."

Although

lack of

precision

and inattention

to detail

make

West's

The American

Evasion

ofPhilosophy

problematic

as a

history

of

philosophy,

it

is a

spirited and

provocative

piece of

pragmatic

cultural

criticism.48

An

ardent

admirer of

Dewey,

West

nevertheless

argues that

Dewey's

pragmatism

must be

supplemented

with the

tragic and

religious

sensibilities

of Niebuhr

("the

vertical

dimension"),

the

awareness of

class of Karl

Marx and

Antonio

Gramsci,

and

a

sharper

sensitivity to issues

of race

and gender

(the

"horizontal

dimension")

than

the

early

pragmatists

showed.49 In

recent years,

as he has

attained

celebrity

status of

a

sort neither

James nor

Dewey

had to

endure, West

has become less an

academic

philosopher

than

a "jazz

freedom

fighter" whose

"prophetic

pragmatism"

attempts to

translate

a

philosophical

perspective

descended

fromJames

and

Dewey,

a

religious awareness of evil

and

finitude,

and a radical democratic

politics

into

the

idioms of

postmodern

academic

discourse, black

spirituality,

and

hip-hop.

Rorty

has

complained

that

West's phrase

"prophetic

pragmatism"

sounds

as odd

as

the

phrase

"charismatic trash

pick up."50

West's

cheerleading seems

pointless

to

Rorty

since he

believes

we

cannot bridge

the gap

between the

rich

possibilities

available to us

in

private life

and Dewey's

imagined

"great

community,"

a now-

meaningless

utopia we

cannot

envision on

the

flattened

landscape

of welfare

capitalism.

Between the

negative

freedoms

individuals

enjoy

in

a liberal

democracy

and the

promise

of an

even richer form

of

life

within a

more

radically

democratic

public

sphere-the

"positive

freedom"

that Dewey

embraced

in

Liberalism and

48

Cornel

West,

The

American

Evasion of Philosophy: A

Genealogy of Pragmatism

(Madison, 1989),

4.

49

Cornel

West, "Politics of

American Neo-Pragmatism,"

in Post-Analytic Philosophy,

ed. Rajchman and

West,

259-72. On West's account

of American pragmatism and

his "prophetic pragmatism,"

see Kloppenberg,

"Knowledge and Belief in

American Public Life." Fine studies of

philosophy, religion, and

ethics from pragmatist

perspectives are Henry Samuel

Levinson, The Religious

Investigations of William James

(Chapel Hill, 1981);

and

Steven C. Rockefeller, John

Dewey: Religious Faith and

Democratic Humanism (New

York, 1991). For a

"modest pragmatism" that does

not rely explicitly on Dewey

but echoes many of his

ideas, see Jeffrey Stout,

Ethics

after Babel: The Languages

of Morals and Their

Discontents (Boston,

1988).

s0

Cornel

West, Race Matters

(1993;

New

York, 1994),

150-51.

For

Henry

Louis

Gates

Jr.'s description

of

West as "the

preeminent African-American

intellectual of our

time,"

see Jack

E.

White,

"Philosopher

with

a

Mission," Time, June 7, 1993, pp.

60-62; for another generous

assessment of West, see

Robert Boynton, "The

New

Intellectuals," Atlantic

Monthly, 275 (March 1995), 53-70.

Compare the pyrotechnic

display of

ressentiment

by

Leon

Wieseltier,

"All

and

Nothing

at

All," New Republic,

March

6, 1995, pp. 31-36.

For

responses from

readers (including Rorty), see

"Decline of Cornel West," ibid.,

April 3, 1995, pp. 6-7.

Richard Rorty, review

of

The

American Evasion of

Philosophy by Cornel West,

Transition, 52 (1991), 75-77.

Pragmatism: An Old

Name for Some New Ways of Thinking? 127

Social Action -falls a chasm. To

Rorty, our century illustrates the cruelty that

must result

from attempts to force

community where there is conflict. But to West

(and others drawn toward Dewey's

ideal), it is essential that pragmatists continue

striving for the democratic

transformation of everyday experience.

Like

West, many feminists

endorse pragmatism

as

an alternative to the sterility

of

analytic philosophy and the

nihilism of post-structuralism and as a lever to

dislodge entrenched ways

of

thinking. Against dueling conceptions of fixed

"male"

and "female"

natures, feminist

pragmatists instead call for an open-ended, anti-

essentialist, experimental approach

to gender. In a special issue of the journal

Hypatia published

in

1993,

Charlene Haddock Seigfried, who has written

exten-

sively on William James, has

brought together works by historians, philosophers,

and

political theorists exploring the

potential of pragmatism for feminism."5 Such

early pragmatists as James, Dewey,

and George Herbert Mead considered pragma-

tism

a

weapon

in

the campaign

against restrictive gender roles for the

same

reason

they considered it a weapon in the

campaigns against imperialism and racism

and

for

democracy. They

allied with feminist

activists

and

championed

feminist scholars

such as Jessie Taft

because their

conception

of

pragmatism

extended

beyond

language to an awareness of the

experience of people who were denied choices,

or

unnecessarily restricted

in

their

choices, by prevailing assumptions and patterns

of social

relations.52

The pervasiveness of power that

many contemporary feminists emphasize has

led

some, notably Joan Scott, to

resist the concept of "experience" because they

fear it can lead us

away

from historicism

toward

a new foundationalism.

But

instead

of

dismissing

the

concept

as Rorty does, Scott recommends examining

how

experience

is

said to

yield unassailable

knowledge,

a

strategy resembling

that

of James

and

Dewey."3 Similarly, other feminists resist

the

ideas

of

a

community

of

inquiry

or

a

deliberative

democracy because they fear such ideas valorize

white

"

Charlene Haddock

Seigfried, Chaos

and

Context:

A

Study

in

Williamjames

(Athens, Ohio, 1978);

Charlene

Haddock Seigfried, William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany, 1990). Seigfried brought

together

a

group

of

essays with

her

introduction, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, "The Missing Perspective:

Feminist

Pragmatism," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 27 (Fall 1991), 405-74. And

see the

special

issue

"Feminism and Pragmatism," ed. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Hypatia, 8 (Spring 1993).

There are

no specifically

pragmatist or feminist doctrines about philosophical or political issues, according to Richard Rorty, "Feminism,

Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View," ibid., 96-103.

52

The

special issue "Feminism and Pragmatism" contains essays on the importance of experience for early

feminist

pragmatists

and

responses

to

contemporary linguistic pragmatists.

See

especially

Jane

Upin,

"Charlotte

Perkins Gilman: Instrumentalism beyond Dewey," Hypatia, 8 (Spring 1993), 38-63; M. Regina Leffers, "Pragma-

tistsJane Addams andJohn Dewey Inform the Ethic of Care," ibid, 64-77; Gregory Fernando Pappas, "Dewey

and Feminism: The

Affective and Relationships in Dewey's Ethics," ibid.,

78-95;

Timothy

V.

Kaufman-Osborn,

"Teasing Feminist Sense from Experience," ibid., 124-44; Mitchell Aboulafia, "Was George Herbert Mead a

Feminist?," ibid., 145-58; Jane Duran, "The Intersection of Feminism and Pragmatism," ibid., 159-71; and

Lynn Hankinson Nelson,

"A

Question of Evidence," ibid., 172-89. For documents illuminating Jessie Taft's

pragmatist feminism and demonstrating James's commitment to feminism in practice, see "Archive," ibid.,

215-33.

13

For a persuasive case for historicizing the concept of experience and examining critically all appeals to

experience that resembles the perspective

I

call pragmatic hermeneutics, see Joan Scott, "The Evidence of

Experience," Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer 1991), 773-97. Cf. James T. Kloppenberg, "Objectivity and Histori-

cism: A Century of American Historical Writing," American Historical Review, 94 (Oct. 1989), 1011-30. For

a feminist

perspective

on the

uses

of

the concept of experience,

see

Lorraine Code, "Who Cares?

The

Poverty

of

Objectivism

for

a Moral

Epistemology,"

Annals

of

Scholarship,

9 (Winter-Spring 1992),

1-18.

128

The Journal

of

American History

June

1996

male norms

of

rationality

and

are thus

inevitably

exclusionary.

Recent

work

by

pragmatist

feminists

suggests

both

how

historicizing

experience

enables

us

to move

beyond

language

without

positing

a

new foundationalism

concerning

"women's

ways of

knowing"

or

"rational

deliberation"

and

how

to acknowledge

power

relations

without

positing

a new

essentialism

about

"difference"

and

"power."

Pragmatist

legal

theorists

such as

Joan

Williams

and

Margaret

Jane

Radin

argue

that profound

conflicts,

for example,

those

between

women

who

work

inside

and

outside

the

home

and

between

women

who

support

and who

oppose

abortion

rights,

are

powerfully

shaped

by

deep

but

seldom

recognized

cultural

fissures

concerning

the

meanings

of freedom

and

responsibility

for

men and

women.

Those

divisions

can

be

traced to the nineteenth-century

doctrine

of

separate

spheres,

unfortunately

resurrected

as

an indirect

consequence

of early-twentieth-century

feminist

essen-

tialism. The

ironic

result

was a

reinforcing

of stereotypes

of

home and

mother

that undercut

feminists'

efforts to

loosen

gender

roles and

broaden

women's oppor-

tunities.

Reinscribing

a comparable

essentialism

under

the

banner

of

"difference,"

as

some

contemporary

feminists

do,

merely

resuscitates

older

versions

of separate

spheres

and notions

of privileged

knowledge

that

exclude

new