Damn Great Empires William James and The Politics of Pragmatism

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Damn Great Empires!

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Damn Great Empires!

William James and the Politics
of Pragmatism
Alexander Livingston
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-P ublication Data

Names: Livingston, Alexander, author.
Title: Damn great empires! : William James and the politics of pragmatism /
Alexander Livingston.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016001445 (print) | LCCN 2016014049 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190237158 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190237165 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190237172 (Updf)
Subjects: LCSH: James, William, 1842–1910—Political and social views. |
United States—Territorial expansion—History—19th century. |
Philippines—Annexation to the United States. | Imperialism—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC B945.J24 L58 2016 (print) | LCC B945.J24 (ebook) | DDC 320.092—dc23
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Publication of this book was supported by The Hull Memorial Publication Fund
of Cornell University.
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To my parents.
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My political philosophy evidently belongs to the future; certainly

not to the past or present.
—W illiam James to Theodora
Sedgwick, December 25th, 1899 (C 9:108)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Political Uses of William James 24
Chapter 2 Cravings and Consequences 53
Chapter 3 Taming the Strenuous Life 77
Chapter 4 Stuttering Conviction 103
Chapter 5 Tragedy, History, and Democratic Faith 126
Conclusion 153
Notes 165
Works Cited 205
Index 227
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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“ ife,” writes William James, “is in the transitions as much as the terms
connected” (WPE 43). So much more so the life of a book. The years
spent writing this book have been ones of transitions, moving across bor-
ders and between institutions. Along the way, teachers, colleagues, and
friends have generously helped connect the terms.
My first debt is owed to Kai Nielsen at Concordia University who intro-
duced me to pragmatism and has remained a model of politically engaged
and intellectually serious scholarship. In good pragmatic spirit, Kai taught
me that philosophers ought to know something about the world and steered
me towards graduate school in political science. I had the good fortune to
study with exceptional teachers at the University of Toronto. First among
these is Simone Chambers, who courageously supervised an unconven-
tional dissertation on William James and political theory. Simone trusted
my intellectual hunches and eventually taught me to trust myself. Ryan
Balot’s work on democratic courage and Peggy Kohn’s studies of empire
both left a deep impact on my intellectual formation. Melissa Williams
created a wonderful interdisciplinary community at the Center for Ethics,
where a fellowship allowed me to finish the dissertation on time.
Two communities of scholars proved especially influential in giving
this book its final form. Jane Bennett generously agreed to host me as
a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her support and in-
tellectual adventurousness have been constant sources of inspiration. Bill
Connolly and Sam Chambers both pushed me to think about pluralism
in new ways. Their feedback and guidance helped me see the bigger pic-
ture. I completed this book at Cornell University, nurtured by the intellec-
tual support and provocation of colleagues, students, and friends. Thanks
x
to Richard Bensel, Jason Frank, Jill Frank, Isaac Kramnick, Aziz Rana,
Diane Rubenstein, and Anna Marie Smith for their friendship and for
keeping things exciting in Ithaca. A workshop on an early version of the
manuscript hosted by the Department of Government in the fall of 2013
marked a turning point for the project. My colleagues, along with Colin
Koopman and George Shulman, read the entire manuscript and provided
me with the critical insights I needed to pull it all together. Last but not
least, I want to thank the graduate students I have had the good fortune to
learn from at Cornell. The curiosity, intelligence, and creativity of students
in my seminars on pluralism and pragmatism continually remind me of
what a joy the life of the mind can be.
Numerous scholars, colleagues, and friends have graciously commented
on parts of this manuscript or shared their insights in conversations with
me over the years. The book is wiser for their contributions, although
its shortcomings remain strictly my own. I would like to thank Ermine
Algier, Willy Blomme, Marcus Boon, Steve Bush, James Campbell,
Terrell Carver, Paul Croce, Jennifer Culbert, Adam Culver, Stefan Dolgert,
Kathy Ferguson, Kennan Ferguson, Nathan Gies, Loren Goldman, Alex
Gourevitch, David Gutterman, Bonnie Honig, Dustin Howes, Murad Idris,
Duncan Ivison, Nicolas Jabko, Desmond Jagmohan, Isaac Kamola, Nick
Kompridis, James Kloppenberg, Robert Lacey, Patchen Markell, Tracy
McNulty, Andrew Murphy, Emily Nacol, Davide Panagia, Melvin Rogers,
Adam Sheingate, James Tully, Chip Turner, Drew Walker and Hannah
Wells. Two scholars are owed special thanks for their support throughout
this process. David Rondel and Colin Koopman have been regular interloc-
utors on all things pragmatism for many years. This book would not have
been possible without their acumen and encouragement. Another group
of scholars and friends due special recognition are Kiran Banerjee, Inder
Marwah, Mihaela Mihai, Jakeet Singh, and Serdar Tekin. They have been
putting up with James and me graciously since graduate school. Inder, in
particular, has done a yeoman’s service in reading too many drafts over too
many years. I owe him big time.
The chapters of this book have benefited from the critical feedback
they received at various conferences and workshops. Thanks are due to
hosts and audiences at University de Coimbra, Cornell University, Goethe
University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Montreal, Northwestern
University, University of Oregon, and York University, as well as audi-
ences at the American Political Science Association, the Western Political
Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Canadian
Political Science Association, and the American Academy of Religion
x | Acknowledgments
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conferences. Additional thanks are owed to the conversations about

pragmatism I have been lucky to take part in through the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, where I have enjoyed playing the
part of the disciplinary outsider.
Research support was made available through a postdoctoral fellowship
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
as well as from the Society for the Humanities and the Department of
Government at Cornell University. This book would not have been possi-
ble without the diligent work of librarians and archivists at Olin Library
and the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University; Houghton Library,
Pusey Library, and Robbins Library at Harvard University; Thomas Fisher
Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto; the W. E. B. Du Bois
Papers at University of Massachusetts Amherst; and the YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research in New York. Thanks to Nolan Bennett and Vijay
Phulwani for their research assistance in preparing the final manuscript
for publication.
Angela Chnapko at Oxford University Press guided the book through
the editorial process skillfully. Her patience and enthusiasm have been a
great boon in working through revisions. I am indebted to the detailed
comments on the manuscript Angela procured for the Press from two
very attentive and critical reviewers, one of whom—Jeanne Morefield—I
know to thank in person. An earlier version of chapter 4 previously ap-
peared as “Stuttering Conviction: Commitment and Hesitation in James’s
Oration to Robert Gould Shaw,” Contemporary Political Theory 12, no. 4
(2013): 255–76. I thank the journal for permission to republish portions of
the article here in revised form.
Lastly, I thank my family. My deepest gratitude is to Merike Andre-
Barrett. Merike has been there through all the transitions, and there
would have been no terms to connect without her love, humor, and con-
stant companionship. I thank her for all the adventures so far and for the
ones still to come. I dedicate this book to my loving parents, Barbara
Landy-Livingston and Paul Livingston, who were my first teachers and
remain my best ones.
Acknowledgments | xi
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
A ll in-text citations refer to The Works of William James published by

Harvard University Press unless otherwise noted. Citations refer to
abbreviation, followed by volume number (citing multivolume works), with
pages cited following the colon. For example: (PP 2:345).
Edited Works
C The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis

and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 vols. (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1992–2004).
ECR Essays, Comments, and Reviews, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
EP Essays in Philosophy, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
EPs Essays in Psychology, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
ERM Essays in Religion and Morality, ed. Frederick Burkhardt
LWJ The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols.
(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920).
M Manuscript Lectures, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
xiv
Books by William James
ERE Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas

K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1976 [1912]).
MT The Meaning of Truth, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1909]).
P Pragmatism, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1975 [1907]).
PP The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
PU A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge,
SPP Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
TT Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of
Life’s Ideals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983
[1899]).
TWTB The Will to Believe, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers,
and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1979 [1897]).
VRE The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge,
Essays by William James
AQ “Address on the Philippines Question” [1903], in ECR.

AS “The Absolute and the Strenuous Life” [1906], in MT.
DD “The Dilemma of Determinism” [1884], in TWTB.
DF “Diary of French Naval Officer: Observations at Manila”
[1900], in ECR.
DN “Drafts and Notes for Addresses to Graduate Clubs”
[1902–1906], in M.
EC “Address at the Emerson Centenary” [1903], in ERM.
EL “Epidemic of Lynching” [1903], in ECR.
GME “Great Men and Their Environment” [1880], in TWTB.
GR “The Gospel of Relaxation” [1899], in TT.
GRO “Governor Roosevelt’s Oration” [1899], in ECR.
HS “The Hidden Self” [1890], in EPs.
xiv | List of Abbreviations

xv
II “The Importance of Individuals” [1890], in TWTB.

LWL “Is Life Worth Living?” [1895], in TWTB.
MEW “On the Moral Equivalent of War” [1910], in ERM.
MPML “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” [1891], in TWTB.
OCB “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” [1899], in TT.
PA “The Philippines Again” [1899], in ECR.
PB “Remarks at the Peace Banquet” [1904], in ERM.
PC “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results”
[1898], in P.
PhD “The PhD Octopus” [1903], in ECR.
PMI “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy”
[1906], in EP.
PN “The Problem of the Negro” [1909], in ECR.
PQ “The Philippine Question” [1899], in ECR.
PT “The Philippine Tangle” [1899], in ECR.
RGS “Robert Gould Shaw: An Oration” [1897], in ERM.
SDM “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence”
[1878], in EP.
SN “A Strong Note of Warning Regarding the Lynching Epidemic”
[1903], in ECR.
SR “The Sentiment of Rationality” [1882/1897], in TWTB.
SV “The Social Value of the College Bred” [1907], in ECR.
TD “Thomas Davidson: Individualist” [1905], in ECR.
TEC “Two English Critics” [1908], in MT.
TH “True Harvard” [1903], in ECR.
WMLS “What Makes Life Significant?” [1899], in TT.
WPE “A World of Pure Experience” [1904], in ERE.
WTB “The Will to Believe” [1897], in TWTB.
List of Abbreviations | xv

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Damn Great Empires!

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1
Introduction
I. James’s Nachlass
To mark the centenary of the great American philosopher William James

(1842–1910), the American Political Science Association proposed to hold
a panel at its thirty-eighth annual meeting in 1943 on the topic of prag-
matism and politics. The prodigious scholarship of thinkers such as John
Dewey and George Herbert Mead had placed pragmatism—the experi-
mental and collaborative philosophy of inquiry that James popularized in
the early 1900s—at the intellectual center of progressive political thought
in the early decades of the twentieth century. The panel, titled “Pragmatism
and the Current Political Situation,” aimed to bring together prominent
political scientists to discuss the insights James’s writings could offer on
contemporary world politics. The organizers were caught by surprise,
however, when the invited speakers declined to participate. As historian
of political thought George Sabine explained his reluctance: “The great
difficulty is that so far as I can see James had no political philosophy.”1
In response to Sabine’s swift rejection, the conference’s program di-
rector, Henry W. Stoke, reached out to Horace Kallen to inquire whether
or not a panel on James and political science was intellectually viable.2
Kallen had studied under James at Harvard University and consid-
ered himself something of a philosophical heir to his former teacher,
having been tasked to prepare James’s posthumous Some Problems of
Philosophy.3 Kallen’s response was not simply supportive; it was enthusi-
astic. James “might be treated as a fundamental philosopher of liberalism
in American life and thought,” Kallen declared. The American Political
Science Association would do well to reconsider his political legacy in
2
relation to the “revival of liberalism” currently taking place. Kallen di-

rected Stokes to the rich material in James’s Nachlass, where he “has said
enough things having political connections.”4
This Nachlass Kallen mentions is a reference to the collection of notes,
correspondence, occasional essays, and editorials James composed in the
final decade of his life in reaction to the Spanish-American War and its
imperial aftermath. As US infantry landed in Puerto Rico, Guam, and
the Philippines in June 1898, James—by this time a famed psychologist
and renowned professor—set foot into the inaugural meeting of the New
England Anti-Imperialist League at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.5 Over the fol-
lowing months, James would undergo a sort of political awakening that
transformed the celebrated scholar into a prominent voice of American
anti-imperialism. The American public read his stinging indictments
of militarism and jingoism in newspapers such as the Boston Evening
Transcript, the Springfield Republican, and the New York Evening Post.
His hatred of empire would bring him to correspond with a transnational
community of political actors and thinkers, ranging from Boston’s blue-
blooded mugwumps to Tolstoian labor radicals, and from the Russian
radical Maxim Gorky to William Cameron Forbes, commissioner of com-
merce and police of the American colonial government in the Philippines.6
As James confesses in one of his many epistolary salvos against impe-
rialism, “I want all great empires, including our own, to come to grief”
(C 9:264–65). In 1903 James was named vice president of the Massachusetts
chapter of the American Anti-Imperialist League, the national successor
to the New England Anti-Imperialist League, a position he held until his
death in 1910. From 1905 to 1907 James held the additional role of vice
president of the Filipino Progress Association, the purpose of which was to
lobby for Filipino interests in the transition from military to civilian rule.7
And in the essay he would repeatedly revise over the last four years of his
life, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” he squarely confronts the problem of
American militarism and the need to control its destructive power on the
global stage.8
This final decade of James’s life was a political one. This period is
better remembered, however, for the intellectual works that launched him
to international fame as the voice of a bold, new movement in philoso-
phy. Between the outbreak of the war and his death, the philosophical
ideas James had been articulating in the previous decades exploded into a
series of major works that would fundamentally transform the landscape
of American scholarship and intellectual culture in the twentieth cen-
tury: The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907),
2 | Damn Great Empires!

3
A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909), and the

posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) and Essays in Radical
Empiricism (1912). These works did more than simply redefine the terms
of professional philosophy in the United States; they articulated an entire
“phase of American life-experience,” as John Dewey memorably describes
James’s philosophy.9
Under the shadow of James’s monumental contributions to the fields
of philosophy, psychology, and religious studies, his anti- imperialist
Nachlass appears as a minor fragment in his broader corpus. Sabine’s
view remains received wisdom—that these works did not bear “any really
close relationship to [James’s] philosophy.” Echoing the judgment of Ralph
Barton Perry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1935 biography, The Thought and
Character of William James, Sabine confidently asserts that James’s anti-
imperialism was merely the consequence of his sensitive temperament
given free rein during a period of doctor-prescribed bed rest that just hap-
pened to overlap with the outbreak of the war.10 His anti-imperialism, it
would seem, was a feverish outburst rather than a considered reflection on
his times.
After months of correspondence Sabine agreed, reluctantly, to partici-
pate on the panel, only after being assured that he could present a paper
on the political significance of pragmatism broadly rather than James’s po-
litical philosophy in particular. The other speaker scheduled to participate
on the panel was Max Eastman. A former revolutionary socialist turned
vociferous anti-communist, Eastman’s proposed paper represents a very
different response to the question of the political significance of James’s
pragmatism. Eastman had attended James’s pragmatism lectures at
Columbia University in 1907 while writing his dissertation under Dewey’s
supervision. Despite this intellectual pedigree Eastman no longer counted
himself a believer in pragmatism, and his proposed paper, “Pragmatism
and the Totalitarian Will to Believe,” would try to explain why. As Eastman
explains to Stoke in a letter outlining his proposed talk, the paper would
examine the seeming contradiction between Dewey’s “clear-headed” op-
position to “every kind of totalitarian infiltration into the United States”
and the fact that “pragmatism in its exaltation of impulse does seem some-
what akin to the totalitarian rejection of the intellect.” James, he wagers,
would likely have shared Dewey’s political opposition to totalitarianism,
“although I am not so sure.”11
Eastman was not alone during this period in seeing pragmatism as shar-
ing some sort of elective affinity with the totalitarianism of Mussolini,
Hitler, and Stalin. Il Duce himself had cited James’s doctrine of the will
Introduction | 3
4
to believe to a British journalist a decade earlier as one of the sources for

fascism’s consequentialist philosophy of action.12 Sabine and Eastman’s
respective judgments of the politics of James’s pragmatism—either as apo-
litical or as unwittingly laying the intellectual groundwork for the terrors
of modern totalitarianism—shed light on Kallen’s enthusiastic support
for a panel that would commemorate James as a “fundamental” figure of
American liberalism. At a commemorative event held at the New School
for Social Research in November 1941, Kallen delivered a paper titled
“Remembering William James.” “To me,” Kallen pronounces, “the singu-
larity of William James remains his call to arms in the immemorial war
of freedom for every man, of which the present crisis is but the present
phase.” In response to the slander of scholars like Eastman who would
make James a “scapegoat” for the rise of modern totalitarianism, Kallen
reminds his audience of the essentially liberal spirit of James’s thought.
Pragmatism, after all, was dedicated to none other than John Stuart Mill.
James was ultimately a “metaphysical democrat” who forever remained
attentive to the dangers philosophical dogmatism and absolutism posed to
the pursuit of individual freedom.13 A nation at war would do well to recall
James as a model of the courage demanded by liberalism’s fighting creed.
The proposed panel, “Pragmatism and the Current Political Situation,”
never took place. The American Political Science Association canceled
their 1943 meeting in response to the federal government’s request that
citizens limit nonessential transportation as the nation mobilized for war.14
I include this short vignette from behind the scenes of an academic con-
ference three-quarters of a century ago to illustrate some of the persist-
ent interpretive challenges facing this book’s central thesis: namely, that
William James was an important and innovative theorist of politics. Four
challenges in particular stand out. The first is the common denial that James
had any substantial concern with politics. Sabine’s summary dismissal of
the idea that James could be considered a political philosopher has found
innumerable restatements over the ensuing years. James’s involvement in
the anti-imperialist movement is frequently overlooked in major studies of
his life and thought. Where it is acknowledged, it is typically decentered
as a chapter of his personal life unrelated to his philosophy.15 “In regards
to politics,” writes Cornel West in his influential study of the development
of the pragmatist tradition, “James had nothing profound or even provoc-
ative to say.”16 James’s editorials, essays, and letters on empire that Kallen
claims as a rich source for James’s political thought have been character-
ized as “few, scattered, and more on the order of desultory meditations
than systematic arguments.”17 James penned no recognizable treatise on

5
political theory and seldom engaged the works of major figures in the his-
tory of political thought.
Second is the contested history of interpretation surrounding the po-
litical meaning of American pragmatism. The contemporary perception
of pragmatism as a distinctively American and democratic philosophy is
intertwined with an ideological history of canon construction in the de-
cades following James’s death. Canons are always made up retrospectively
to give shape to the past for purposes of the present. The thinkers cele-
brated as the founding figures of classical pragmatism—Charles Sanders
Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—shared overlapping philosoph-
ical methods along with deep disagreements. James traced the origins of
pragmatism back to the influence of Peirce, but at the same time defined
it as merely “a new name for some old ways of thinking,” with roots in
British empiricism and similarities to the “anti-intellectualism” of Henri
Bergson’s philosophy of lived duration and Giovanni Papini’s magical na-
tionalism.18 Peirce famously renamed his own position “pragmaticism” in
response to James’s popularization of pragmatism, declaring that it had
become time to find a word “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.”19
And Dewey shied away from both the scientism of Peirce and the nominal-
ism of James to articulate his naturalized Hegelianism as “instrumental-
ism.”20 These divisions, and many others, are obscured by the posthumous
canonization of these three thinkers as the holy trinity of a national tradi-
tion of liberal democratic philosophy. For example, the opposition between
James as a “fundamental” liberal or as the unwitting intellectual vanguard
of the coming century’s totalitarian terror, figures the meaning of pragma-
tism within the terms of political struggles that bear little resemblance to
the arguments over US imperialism that concerned James. Acknowledging
the anachronism of both Kallen’s and Eastman’s posthumous conscrip-
tions of James as exemplar of American liberalism or its antithesis is not
to dismiss these interpretations as inconsequential, however. It is rather a
reminder that any study of James’s political thought must constantly nego-
tiate the politicized reception history that frames both past narratives and
current perceptions in subtle, enduring ways.
Third is the long shadow cast by the towering figure of John Dewey.
In an enormous corpus of work that spans the late nineteenth century to
the middle decades of the twentieth century, Dewey explored the social
and political implications of pragmatism’s liberation of inquiry from
its eternal search for first principles, fixed forms, or timeless founda-
tions. Dewey’s vision of philosophy as the methodological application of
social intelligence to common problems led to major contributions in the
Introduction | 5
6
development of American political thought in works including German

Philosophy and Politics (1915), The Public and Its Problems (1927),
Individualism Old and New (1930), Liberalism and Social Action (1935),
and Freedom and Culture (1939), to name only a few. Furthermore,
Dewey’s reconstruction of philosophy brought the method of intelli-
gence out of the academy and into the public sphere in his role as a
public intellectual. Given both the intellectual scope and historical influ-
ence of Dewey’s political thought, it is unsurprising that pragmatism has
become synonymous with Deweyan democracy in contemporary politi-
cal theory.21 Accordingly, political theorists have tended to view James’s
political thought—when they recognize it at all—as amounting to little
more than an incomplete and immature statement of Dewey’s democratic
theory.22
Fourth, and perhaps most challenging, concerns how we ought to un-
derstand the relationship between James’s pragmatism as a philosophical
method, articulated in popular works and public lectures, and his writ-
ings on politics, which are brief, fragmentary, and typically unpublished.
Sabine and generations of scholars since have simply denied any intel-
lectual link connecting James’s writing on empire to his philosophy and
psychology. Kallen and Eastman in their own ways look beyond James’s
encounter with American empire to find the purported politics of James’s
thought in the inferred implications of his pragmatism, pluralism, and
radical empiricism. Readings of James as the intellectual forerunner of
Dewey’s democratic theory similarly ignore these writings to draw out
the untapped implications of his ethics and theory of truth. This displace-
ment of James’s anti-imperialist Nachlass is continued in recent works that
aim to rehabilitate James as a resource for political theory. Joshua Miller’s
Democratic Temperament approaches James’s work as “implicitly related
to politics” to shed light on the paradoxes and possibilities of liberal de-
mocracy at the close of the twentieth century. To make explicit what re-
mains implicit in pragmatism, Miller proposes to “translate” James’s phi-
losophy “into the language of democratic politics” rather than consider it
as political in its own terms.23 Similarly, William Connolly and Kennan
Ferguson have brought renewed attention to James’s pluralism for the “in-
timate connection” it draws “between character, history, and philosophy,”
so as to open the way to the power of ideas to actively reshape and redirect
ethical energies that rationalist approaches to morality disparage to their
detriment.24 To the extent James’s writings on imperialism figure into such
approaches, and they seldom do, they serve as illustrations of the practical
political meaning of his pluralist philosophy.

7
This book represents a radically different approach to the study of

James’s political thought. Following Kallen’s advice to focus on James’s
Nachlass, Damn Great Empires! takes James’s anti-imperialism seriously
as a lens for rethinking the meaning of his pluralistic pragmatism. More
than a minor distraction or an illustration of the untapped political impli-
cations of his philosophy, this book takes James’s speeches, essays, notes,
and correspondence on empire as keys for unlocking the political signifi-
cance of his writings on truth, religion, and metaphysics. By resituating
these works in the intellectual and discursive context of Pacific imperial-
ism and Gilded Age political thought, we come to see James as more than
an apolitical scholar, a harbinger of fascism, or a proto-Deweyan demo-
crat. We discover instead an anti-imperialist thinker who was profoundly
attuned to the psychological and existential dimensions of politics. The
master theme of Dewey’s political thought is democracy as a way of life,
a conception of politics as perpetual renewal and reform. James’s politi-
cal vision, by contrast, reorients political thought towards the problem of
empire as a way of life. I borrow this expression from William Appleman
Williams to denote the deep roots of imperial expansion in the institution-
alized patterns of thought, language, and conduct ingrained in American
political culture.25 The originality and importance of James’s political
thought lies in its philosophical examination and transformation of the
psychic, affective, and cultural roots of American imperialism at a crucial
moment in the nation’s rise to global hegemony.
II. Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
Alice James once described her brother William as “just like a blob of
mercury—you can’t put a mental finger on him” (LWJ 1:289). This descrip-
tion of James’s mercurial nature has proven particularly true for schol-
ars seeking to characterize his political commitments. James has been
described alternately as a libertarian, a republican, a radical democrat, a
conservative, a socialist, an anarchist, and simply an adherent of “the gen-
teel democratic liberalism characteristic of his class and his era.”26 Some
of these labels are James’s own; others are inventions of his readers. Of
the various ideological labels that James himself came to embrace during
the final decade of his life, the one this book takes as the most revealing
for approaching his political thought is his self-identification as an anar-
chist. “I am becoming more and more an indiv[id]ualist and anarchist,” he
confesses to William Dean Howells in the autumn of 1900, “and believe
Introduction | 7
8
in small systems of things exclusively” (C 9:362; emphasis in original).

Through his involvement in the anti-imperialist movement, James came
into contact with anarchist writers and ideas, ranging from now-forgotten
American figures like the Boston labor activist Morrison Swift and the
Christian pacifist Ernest Howard Crosby, to better-known European anar-
chist writers like Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
and Max Stirner.27 “I am getting to be more and more of an anarchist
myself in my ideas,” he reports to Pauline Goldmark in 1903, “though
when it comes to applying them to life I am helpless” (C 10:191). He ex-
pressed “strongest sympathy” for “Tolstoi- anism” as “surely the best
life” to one of his anarchist interlocutors, while admitting his admiration
for Kropotkin as “the most ideal man” after reading his Memoires of a
Revolutionist (C 9:551, 451). And in his most shocking and troubling flirta-
tion with anarchism, James goes so far as to privately celebrate the assas-
sination of President William McKinley at the hands of the anarchist Leon
Czolgosz in 1901. He exclaims to Katherine Sands Godkin, “Czolgosz has
been our great deliverer! You’ve no idea how it lightens the atmosphere to
have that type of being gone!—I mean the McK. type!” (C 10:7).
Historian Deborah Coon has carefully sorted through James’s various
confessions and citations regarding anarchism to argue that his angry re-
sponse to the Venezuela Crisis of 1895 and the “rude political awakening”
of the Spanish-American War set him on a course of political radical-
ization.28 Over the course of the 1900s, James came to affirm “a type of
pacifist, communitarian anarchism—strongly individualist, but holding
community to be important.”29 This anarchism valued local, decentral-
ized, and autonomous communities, those “small systems” James refers to
in his letter to Howells, as the ideal form of association to protect individu-
als from becoming reduced to “a mere series of interchangeable cogs in a
vast military-industrial machine.”30 This emerging radicalism had a pro-
found impact on the development of James’s philosophical thinking. Seen
as an extension of his political radicalism, pragmatism’s devastating at-
tacks on dogmatism and absolutism are something more than provocative
interventions in scholarly debates concerning epistemology, empiricism,
and ethics. They are themselves anarchist tools forged to “serve as a basis
of reform and activism in the social and political world as well.”31 George
Cotkin has similarly examined how James’s encounter with anarchism and
anti-imperialism serves as one important context, among others, for the ar-
ticulation of his public philosophy. In his vivid reconstruction of the milieu
of the Gilded Age’s cultural malaise that afflicted James and his fellow

9
elites, Cotkin examines the shared contextual sources of both James’s

philosophy and his anti-imperialism. “James’s philosophical expressions
of pragmatic doctrine,” he writes, “were anchored in a social and political
context.”32 Cotkin, like Coon, takes James’s self-description as an anar-
chist seriously, but is more hesitant to take this flirtations at face value as
a statement of ideological commitment. The “anarchist edges” of James’s
thinking guard against his subscription to any particular political ideology
including Anarchism itself, spelled with a capital “A.”33
Cotkin is right to underscore this distinction between the anarchist
edges of James’s philosophy and the anarchist ideology he may or may not
have subscribed to. It is these anarchist edges that guard against any easy
classification of James’s political thought. The diversity of political labels
scholars have sought to attach to James could be grounds to conclude, as
one reader does, that “the traces of James’s political preferences are too
faint to provide more than a tentative outline of his ideas.”34 A different
conclusion one might draw from the capricious ways James’s remarks on
politics seems to cut across conventional labels, by contrast, is that there is
something unconventional and innovative about his way of thinking about
politics. Concepts, James writes in A Pluralistic Universe, are like scissors
that arrest the creative flow of experience by “cutting it up into bits” (PU
109). Conceptually arresting the pulsing flow of experience can be a help-
ful tool of inquiry, but only if we do not succumb to the typical philosoph-
ical mistake of taking immobile and neatly arranged categories for the
reality itself. “The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what
the name’s definition fails positively to include,” is a symptom of “ ‘vicious
intellectualism’ ” (PU 32). To approach experience in its concrete and rela-
tional fullness, by contrast, you must “place yourself at the point of view
of the thing’s interior doing” (PU 117; emphasis in original). Similarly, at-
tempting to summarize James’s political thought under received labels like
“liberal” or “anarchist” risks domesticating the complexity and nuance of
his political thinking in order to satisfy intellectualist demands for concep-
tual clarity and precision. James was neither conventionally political nor
apolitical; he was, as Colin Koopman rightly argues, “political in a new
key.”35 Resisting the closure of intellectualist thinking requires cultivating
a tolerance for ambiguity, messiness, and paradox—what James referred
to as “the vague”—as creative elements of experience and, by extension,
political thought.36 In the place of categorizing and schematizing James’s
thought, this book seeks to study his anti-imperialism from its “interior
doing,” so to speak, by removing James from the familiar narratives of the
Introduction | 9
10
history of American pragmatism and its well-defined ideological coordi-

nates in order to examine his political thought in a new light.
Seen from the perspective of a contextually sensitive history of polit-
ical thought, James’s adoption of the title “anarchist” during these years
is of interest for what it might reveal about his political vision rather than
his personality or preferences. By “vision” I mean the peculiar art of
seeing, which Sheldon Wolin interprets as the characteristic of any politi-
cal theory: an articulated perspective on the world at once descriptive and
imaginative, describing it as it is and projecting possibilities as they might
be.37 As descriptive, it offers a diagnosis of authority, self, institutions,
and history as they shape a concrete present; and as imaginative, theory
proposes fanciful possibilities and exaggerations that disturb received pat-
terns of perception and introduce new modes of seeing and acting in the
world. As James tells a young scholar, the exercise of “building up an au-
thor’s meaning out of separate texts leads nowhere” unless you first grasp
“his center of vision, by an act of imagination” (LWJ 2:355; see also PU
117). It is through imaginative reconstruction of the vision embodied in his
writings, public and private, political or philosophical, that we can come to
occupy James’s political vision as a perspective for rethinking his pragma-
tism. Taking James’s Nachlass seriously reorients our own view on James
and shed new light on elements of his philosophical works that recede into
the background from the vantage point of our conventional narratives and
ways of seeing pragmatism.
Reading these anarchist confessions in terms of what they reveal about
the political vision contained in his philosophy invites a reconsideration of
the consequences of pragmatism as a practice of anti-authoritarianism.
This is pragmatism, not as a doctrine, but as an anti-intellectualist attitude
of orientation. As he presents it in Pragmatism, it is an “attitude of looking
away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and
of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (P 32). It asks
its readers to reimagine themselves as actors in the world, rather than as
passive knowers of it, whose doings and sufferings may still hold conse-
quences for a future “still in the making” (P 123). Unlike the Cartesian
tradition, which takes the world and ideas as fixed entities to be known,
pragmatism presents the world as a contingent horizon to be remade and
places each of us as actors within the shared drama of the world’s salva-
tion. James characterizes this “alteration ‘in the seat of authority’ ” from
the world as a given to be passively represented by the mind to a project
made and remade in action as nothing short of enacting a second Protestant
Reformation (P 62). To “papal minds,” he admits, this new way of thinking

11
will seem “a mere mess of anarchy and confusion” (P 62). Or, as he writes
of the contrast between pragmatism and rationalist intellectualism later in
Pragmatism:
The rationalist mind, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative com-

plexion: the phrase “must be” is ever on its lips. The bellyband of its universe
must be tight. A radical pragmatist on the other hand is a happy-go-lucky an-
archistic sort of creature. If he had to live in a tub like Diogenes he wouldn’t
mind at all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun. (P 124)
This is anarchism for James: an intellectual repudiation of necessity, dogma-

tism, and rationalism closer to the cheeky mockery of authority of a Diogenes
in the agora than the revolutionary fervor of a Bakunin on the barricades.38
This anti-authoritarian self-conception has been celebrated by later
pragmatists from Dewey to Richard Rorty as a continuation of the
Enlightenment project of replacing the authority of custom with that of
reason, albeit a naturalized and social conception of reason.39 It is no ac-
cident that Dewey celebrates Francis Bacon as a prophet of the pragmatic
conception of knowledge. He explains in Reconstruction in Philosophy:
“For reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of
science, and used in the creation of social arts; it has something to do. It
liberates man from the bondage of the past, due to ignorance and acci-
dent hardened into custom.”40 Rorty describes the practical consequences
of his neopragmatism in similarly secularizing and rationalizing terms.
He characterizes pragmatism as a philosophical “protest against the idea
that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human,
either the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality.”41 Considering
James’s anti-authoritarianism from the perspective of his anti-imperialism
points toward different consequences of pragmatism. Neither Dewey’s at-
tempt to break the torpid crust of custom nor Rorty’s Millian experiments
in living in postmodern drag, James’s anti-authoritarianism is an interven-
tion into the very craving for authority at the core of empire as a way of
life. The craving for authority, a hunger James analyzes most deeply in his
discussions of monism, drives philosophers and lay people alike to affirm
patterns of thinking and practices of perception that impose order on ex-
perience, disavow complexity and difference, and engender hostile and
dogmatic reactions to perceived threats to this fantastic order. The civili-
zational discourse of the United States’ suppression of Filipino self-rule,
Theodore Roosevelt’s martial rhetoric on the strenuous life, and Hegel’s
metaphysical system each struck James as symptoms of a craving for order
Introduction | 11
12
and authority that pragmatism might work to “unstiffen” and transform.

Hence the strange conjunction of metaphysics and politics James draws in
his outburst from which this study draws its title: “Damn great empires!—
especially that of the Absolute. You see how much crime it necessarily has
to involve” (C 9:422).
Anxieties concerning the dangerous consequences of cravings for
order, certainty, and identity have become familiar in political theory since
James’s time. “The dream of home is dangerous, particularly in postcolo-
nial settings,” writes Bonnie Honig, “because it animates and exacerbates
the inability of constituted subjects—or nations—to accept their own in-
ternal differences and division, and it engenders zealotry, the will to bring
the dream of unitariness or home into being.”42 The historical and intellec-
tual setting of James’s political interventions are more colonial than post-
colonial, modernist than postmodernist, but his arguments resonate with
Honig’s concerns about identity and authority because of their shared con-
text of the destabilizing horizon of modernity itself. James sometimes pres-
ents these cravings for order and authority as timeless and universal, but
they ought to be understood as reactions to the crisis of authority wrought
by the dramatic social, economic, cultural, and political transformations
that defined Gilded Age America. James’s writings on philosophy and
religion are often understood against the background of the era’s jarring
experience of modernization. This same context has not been considered
in examining his anti-imperialism, however. The modern crisis of author-
ity that gave birth to such cravings for order and stability extends beyond
the question of faith in a post-Darwinian world. It was rather a cascading
series of authority problems, ranging from faith to gender, the economy,
the nation, and the self. Americans at the turn of the century lived “in a
state of relative insecurity,” James writes in Pragmatism. “The author-
ity of the ‘the State,’ and that of the absolute ‘moral law,’ have resolved
themselves into expediencies, and the holy church has resolved itself into
‘meeting houses’ ” (P 125). This is not the weight of the past that will not
give way under the demands of the modern, as Dewey and Rorty present
the problem of authority. It is rather a society where traditional markers of
authority have collapsed, and individuals are set adrift without orientation
or guidance in modernity’s dizzying complexity. It is here among author-
ity’s ruins rather than its excesses that the craving for authority arises as a
problem for politics.43
This account of modernity as an experience of the collapse of tradi-
tional authority that sparks cravings for order, belonging, and fixity is

13
not entirely novel. As Alexis de Tocqueville argued in Democracy in

America shortly before James’s birth, the collapse of convention in dem-
ocratic times sparks a hunger for authority that leads individuals to con-
form to public opinion, even at the expense of their very freedom. James
could agree with much of de Tocqueville’s analysis, but his reaction is an-
ything but a nostalgic longing for “a salutary bondage” of authority lost.44
It is rather a call to embrace modernity’s disorienting contingency as the
occasion for a new conception of self and the world, one less grasping and
hungry for authority. James politicizes philosophy to draw our attention
to the powerful ways imagined projections of order and disorder, neces-
sity and chance, determinism and freedom inflect the practice of everyday
life. “Philosophy’s results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy’s
queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity”
(P 10). This is the key to pragmatism’s anti-authoritarianism: it works
to unsettle the closure of abstraction, dogmatism, and self-certainty and
to resignify uncertainty, risk, and chance as occasions for creative free-
dom. Pluralization, not rationalization, defines pragmatism’s affirmation
of radical contingency.45 The alternative, James wagers, is an existential
craving for authority that perpetually pulls the modern self into either
fantasies of sovereign mastery or powerless resignation in the face of a
world without final foundations.
III. Pragmatism as Anti-Imperialism
This book brings the study of pragmatism into conversation with the
emergence of empire studies in the history of political thought.46 This
body of literature has redefined understandings of the canon of Western
political thought by exploring how modern political languages were articu-
lated in light of European experiences of contact and domination with non-
European peoples. Despite this burgeoning field, little work has been done
to bring the study of American political thought into a discussion with
political theory’s turn to empire.47 This omission is not simply unfortunate.
The avoidance of American empire is itself symptomatic of the willful
amnesia that continues to surround the imperial history of the world’s only
remaining superpower. Amy Kaplan raised a challenge to American stud-
ies nearly twenty years ago, which the field of political theory has yet to
grapple with: “The absence of the United States in the postcolonial study
of culture and imperialism curiously reproduces American exceptionalism
Introduction | 13
14
from without.”48 This book aims to begin to correct this omission in the
study of American political thought by bridging discussions of the histo-
ries of American philosophy, political thought, and empire that have typi-
cally been conducted in isolation from one another.49
American political thought’s omission of empire is particularly note-
worthy in relation to the period of Pacific expansion that sets the stage for
reconsidering James’s confrontation with empire as a way of life. Scholars
of American political thought have long insulated the Gilded Age’s ex-
periments in overseas imperialism as a unique, exceptional episode in
American political history when the nation broke away from its histor-
ical self-conception as an anti-imperial power under pressure from the
era’s unique cultural crises.50 In a classical statement of this view from
1951, historian Richard Hofstadter characterized the annexation of the
Philippines as “a major historical departure for the American people, a
breach in their traditions and a shock to their established values.”51 This
view of imperialism as an anomaly in the course of American political
development has been overturned by subsequent generations of scholars
who have reframed the United States’ annexation and counterinsurgency
campaign in the Philippines within a longer history of the expansion of
American military and economic power across the globe, reaching as far
back as the ideological frames and governing practices of settler coloni-
zation in the seventeenth century. The United States’ experiment with in-
direct rule over colonial holdings in the Pacific, seen as an episode in a
longer history, represents the transition to a new stage in the development
of American imperialism rather than its sudden emergence.52 The United
States learned valuable lessons about counterinsurgency, foreign policy,
and international political economy in the laboratory of its Pacific colonies
that informed the development of its practices of informal imperialism
over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.53
Pragmatism is more commonly figured as an ideology of American
imperialism than a source of its critique.54 Pragmatism’s allegedly
Promethean conception of agency and Panglossian vision of history have
been lightning rods for critics as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Vladimir
Lenin, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, and Sheldon Wolin, who
characterize pragmatism as the philosophical expression of an industrial
capitalist civilization that reduces morality and politics to matters of mas-
tery and control.55 These well-rehearsed criticisms have been aimed pri-
marily at Dewey’s instrumentalism, with the presumption that they apply
with equal force to James’s pragmatism. As we will see in the following

15
chapters, such charges misrepresent James’s political thought and obscure

the ways he politicized philosophy as a response to the problems of empire
he faced at the turn of the twentieth century. That said, these criticisms
should not be dismissed. They point toward a deeper challenge that neither
Dewey nor subsequent thinkers have been sufficiently attentive to; namely,
pragmatism’s peculiar imbrication with the idioms, languages, and myths
of American exceptionalism. Examining pragmatism as a form of anti-im-
perialism demands interrogating its complicated relationship with the rich
mythology that underpins American empire.
One particularly telling example of this relationship is the language of
pioneer freedom that lies at the heart of James’s philosophy and politics.56
Before the Gilded Age’s captain of industry, it was the pioneer staking
his claim on the open frontier who embodied a conception of freedom,
which united a future-oriented ethos of individual independence with a
moral discourse of responsibility and subjugation of the wild. As Lewis
Mumford asked in 1926, is not James’s pluralistic affirmation of contin-
gency and chance “the animus of the pioneer, translated into dialectic.”57
Friendlier readers than Mumford, such as Kallen and Dewey, have drawn
similar comparisons between James’s pragmatism and the mentality of the
pioneer.58 Familiar twentieth-century criticisms of pragmatism as the ide-
ology of American technocracy find their source in pragmatism’s deeper
roots in a nineteenth-century political language of pioneer freedom. And
so too, this book argues, does pragmatism’s characteristically American
forgetting of empire.
This amnesia of empire is evident in James’s early responses to the
war with Spain. For all of his involvement in anti-imperial advocacy,
James, like many of his fellow anti-imperialists, did not understand
the occupation of the Philippines as continuous with a longer history
of American imperialism and colonialism.59 Nowhere does James draw
a parallel between American suppression of Filipino independence and
earlier military interventions in neighboring states, such as its support
for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 or the suppression
of rebellion hostile to national interests in Brazil in 1894, let alone the
dispossession of indigenous peoples in the course of westward expansion
or the history of New World slavery. James’s letters from the summer of
1898 consistently narrate his experience of awakening to the reality of
empire as one of surprised shock. “We had supposed ourselves (with all
our crudity and barbarity in certain ways) a better nation morally than
the rest, safe at home, and without the old savage ambitions, destined
Introduction | 15
16
to exert great international influence by throwing in our ‘moral weight’

etc.,” he explains to Francois Pillion in June 1898. “Dreams! Human
Nature is everywhere the same; and at the least temptation all the old
military passions rise, and sweep everything before them” (C 8:373).
This is a jarring awakening from the dream of American exceptionalism
to the nightmare of American empire.
This intellectual segregation of America as inspiring ideal from the
United States as historical reality is an example not simply of the pio-
neer’s orientation toward the future but of the history-disavowing ide-
ology of American exceptionalism more broadly. In his classic study of
American civil religion, Sacvan Bercovitch presents such acts of segre-
gating the national dream from political reality as the core ritual of a
national ideological consensus. Through the very act of criticizing the
historical particular in the name of purportedly ideal national princi-
ples, critique reinscribes the ideological distinction between true and
false Americas that sustains the myth of national innocence. Bercovitch
argues, “To condemn the profane is to commit oneself to a spiritual ideal.
To condemn ‘false Americans’ as profane is to express one’s faith in a
national ideology. In effect, it is to transform what might have been a
search for moral or social alternatives into a call for cultural revitaliza-
tion.”60 James’s anti-imperialism, as Frank Lentricchia once noted, is a
distinctively American anti-imperialism.61 It celebrates individualism as
a good to be protected from the encroachment of institutions and groups;
it prioritizes action and self-creation as basic moral goods; and it trades
in the political idioms of national progress, moral purpose, and frontier
freedom that define American exceptionalism more broadly. Is James’s
anti-imperialism, then, only another episode in exceptionalism’s ritual of
consensus? Or can we read “a hidden history of American intellectual re-
sistance” to empire, to borrow Lentricchia’s expression, in pragmatism’s
subversive reworking of political language?62
Confronting Bercovitch’s challenge brings us to the heart of what
it means to speak to James’s political vision. As Wolin and others have
noted, the term “theory” shares an etymology with “vision,” stemming
from the Greek theoria—meaning to see or travel.63 Like James’s intellec-
tualists, political theorists often imagine themselves as spectators who take
a God’s-eye view on politics as if from outside of it. Positioned above or
beyond the concrete world of injustice, conflict, and struggle, the theorist’s
normative conclusions and unmasking critiques are presented as unsolic-
ited gifts to political actors below.64 The pragmatist occupies a different

17
point of view. “The heart of pragmatism,” observes Hilary Putnam, is “the

insistence on the supremacy of the agent point of view.”65 The point of
view of finite social actors confronting concrete problems is both what sets
theorizing in motion and what theories are answerable to in turn. James
never claims his own vision to be more than one perspective among many.
As he tells his audience in Pragmatism, each individual brings their own
unique vision to the world (P 9; see also PU 7–10). His purpose is not to
legislate this plurality of perspectives so as to impose a more comprehen-
sive order on them. It is rather to enter into what James Tully calls “a peda-
gogical relationship of reciprocal elucidation” with them: to participate
in an ongoing relationship of experimentally conceptualizing, negotiating,
and responding to shared problems. The theorist may craft particular tools
for this task, but her perspective and contribution can claim no privileged
status other than that of one citizen among many bound together in a
shared world.66 A philosophy that responds to public problems by entering
into dialogue with the perspective of actors struggling against injustice is
what Tully calls a public philosophy.67
Thinking about pragmatism in terms of public philosophy shifts the
burden of Bercovitch’s challenge, as well as that of other critics who would
reduce pragmatism to instrumental rationality, bourgeois ideology, or
imperial apologia. On the one hand, Bercovitch is right that the situ-
ated nature of political theory means that the languages it draws on to
respond to pressing problems both enable and constrain. On the other
hand, viewing these languages as rooted in ongoing social practices,
rather than impersonal structures, means that they are neither fixed
nor final. As Tully writes of public philosophy’s practice-oriented ap-
proach: “For while we are still entangled in conditions that constrain
and enable, and are difficult to change, we are no longer entrapped in
background conditions that determine the limits of our foreground ac-
tivities, for none is permanently off limits.”68 Tully credits the pragma-
tist tradition, along with ordinary language philosophy and genealogy,
as a source of this insight.69
James’s public philosophy aims to facilitate just such a shift in his au-
dience—from imagining themselves as entrapped in empire as a way of
life to merely entangled in it, and thus capable of transforming it. As
James explains in Pragmatism, we must always begin with “the older
stock of truths” in the face of any novel problem. Intelligence does not lie
in reasserting that truth, however. It is in the art of creating novel truths
that elements of the old are drawn on and transformed into something
Introduction | 17
18
new. “New truth, is a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions” (P 35).

James’s political thought “co-opts” elements of our given stock of politi-
cal languages, as James Albrecht helpfully puts this point, so that they
can be “redirected and enlisted” in the service of an anti-imperial poli-
tics.70 A critical vision of American empire that takes truth as “plastic”
to be reworked, rather than as a stock of norms to be honored, introduces
some slack in the order of our political languages.71
If there is a critical force to pragmatism’s practice-oriented, pluralis-
tic, and redescriptive approach to political theory, there remain dangers
as well. Any particular efforts at subversion are only ever experiments
in an ongoing process of reciprocal elucidation. Accordingly, these ef-
forts may in fact amount to little more than reiteration, a bad repetition
of the same rather than a creative repetition with a difference. Only
the practical consequences of the experiment will tell. James’s politi-
cal vision is not without its blindspots, as we shall see. It provides little
in the way of reliable recipes or normative prescription about how to
assure success in these subversive appropriations and redescriptions. It
is for this reason that this book examines James’s political vision exper-
imentally, as it were, taking note of both his successes and failures as
lessons for reimaging the terms of political theory as a critical practice
today.
IV. Synopsis
To pursue a critical examination of James’s political thought is to stake a

claim concerning the broader meaning of classical American pragmatism
and its afterlife. Disagreement has surrounded the meaning of the very
name “pragmatism” since Peirce introduced the term into the lexicon of
modern philosophy.72 Peirce, James, and Dewey’s diverse uses of the term
have led some to the conclusion that “pragmatism” simply has so many
meanings that it must in fact have no substantive meaning all.73 Debates
about the meaning of pragmatism erupted again in the 1980s and 1990s
when scholars asked whether the “pragmatism” being rediscovered by neo-
pragmatists like Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Cornel West shared
any common lineage with the classical pragmatism of Peirce, James, or
Dewey.74 Contemporary disputes concerning “third-wave” or “new” prag-
matism represent only the most recent chapter in this ongoing history of
disagreement.75

19
Richard Bernstein gives shape to this cacophony of disagreeing voices

by describing the pragmatist tradition as one defined by its argumentative
retellings. Pragmatism “has always been an essentially contested concept,”
one with diverse and competing usages designating divergent and some-
times contradictory meanings.76 To be essentially contested means that the
concept’s meaning is both an object of dispute and constituted by these
disputes themselves.77 Bernstein describes pragmatism as an essentially
contested concept to signal the value of the debates that have surrounded
pragmatism ever since Peirce charged James with kidnapping. Whatever
meaning the term contains lies not in the historical origins of the tradition
itself; rather, it is disclosed in the ongoing argumentative retelling of the
narrative with an eye to its living future. This is a tradition of philosophy
as conversation, albeit nothing as grandiose as the “conversation of man-
kind” imagined by Michael Oakeshott.78 Bernstein better characterizes it
as “more like the type that occurs at New York dinner parties where there
are misunderstandings, speaking at cross-purposes, conflicts, and contra-
dictions, with personalized voices stressing different points of view (and
sometimes talking at the same time).”79 This book takes a seat at pragma-
tism’s table to interject yet another point of view concerning its origins
and consequences. Its argumentative retelling of the politics of Jamesian
pragmatism proposes something more than simply tacking another chapter
onto a familiar story. Instead, it proposes a fundamental shift in how we
understand the place of pragmatism in the last hundred years of American
political development.80
My story begins in c hapter 1 with a consideration of how James’s po-
litical thought came to be overlooked. Central to this story is the influ-
ence of Ralph Barton Perry’s 1935 biography The Thought and Character
of William James. It is the account from Perry’s biography that Sabine
took as authoritative when he declined Stoke’s invitation, and it contin-
ues to shape perceptions of James in powerful ways. For Perry, James’s
anti-imperialism was an artifact of his personal temperament rather than
his pragmatic philosophy. This chapter places Perry’s biography in his-
torical and political context to argue that its reduction of James’s politi-
cal thought to mere “sentiments,” as he puts it, is itself an artifact of in-
terwar debates about the relationship of pragmatism to politics. Perry,
like Kallen after him, sought to rescue James and pragmatism from
their distasteful association with European fascism. Saving James meant
something more than just defending pragmatism; it was a means of de-
fending American liberalism—as personified in James’s nonideological
Introduction | 19
20
sentiments—from its interwar critics. Placing Perry’s biography in con-

text reveals the ways that his depoliticization of James serves a narrative
about the credal meaning of American liberalism as it faced a moment of
intellectual and political crisis in the aftermath of World War I. Thought
and Character’s conscription of James into the ideological struggles of
interwar political thought cast a long shadow over his subsequent recep-
tion as a political thinker.
The following chapters reconsider the politics of pragmatism
from the perspective of James’s anti-imperialist Nachlass. Chapter 2
brings the psychological registers of James’s political vision into the
foreground through an examination of the relationship between his
Nachlass writings on empire and his philosophical writings on con-
tingency. Pragmatism’s embrace of contingency introduces a profound
and productive tension into James’s thinking about agency. On the one
hand is the need to avoid the passivity and despair provoked by the
seeming meaninglessness of a contingent cosmos without any deeper
order. On the other hand is the danger of hubris that comes from the
vision of a contingent world as one to be mastered and controlled.
Both are expressions of a craving for authority that lies at the heart
of philosophizing itself, a craving whose unavoidable frustration can
lead to these two seemingly opposed, but equally dangerous, postures
of agency. Beginning with a reading of James’s editorials and corre-
spondence on “bigness,” his neologism for the experience of fluidity
and crisis that defined the Gilded Age’s imperial modernity, this chap-
ter reconsiders the ways James’s writings on metaphysics in works
such as Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe develop and enrich his
critique of American modernity and its psychological implications for
politics.
This psychological examination of the craving for authority and its
pragmatic consequences informs James’s more direct encounter with the
discourses of American imperialism discussed in c hapter 3. Drawing on
the tools of psychoanalysis to further develop the psychological argu-
ments in c hapter 2, this chapter examines the melancholia that came to
transform republican conceptions of freedom in Gilded Age America.
Like the reactive self-assertion James discusses in the register of meta-
physics, republican melancholia is a political craving for order that cel-
ebrates experiences of effort, daring, and sacrifice as sources of personal
and national regeneration. This chapter reconstructs the martial rhetoric
of the strenuous life as an ideology of Pacific expansion to reconsider the

21
meaning of martial metaphors and cravings for action in James’s major

works, including Principles of Psychology, Talks to Teachers, and The
Varieties of Religious Experience. Whereas Theodore Roosevelt touted
the virtues of the strenuous life to mobilize the craving for authority in
the service of national expansion, James, we will see, creatively reworks
republican idioms in order to subvert rather than satisfy the public’s
cravings.
Central to this chapter’s argument is the notion of exemplarity.
James’s public philosophy does not mobilize moral arguments against
the claims of empire. As Kennan Ferguson observes in his study of
James’s political thought, “James preferred stories to directives, listen-
ing to telling, and self-criticism to critique.”81 The essays in Talks and
Varieties, in particular, speak to this avoidance of instruction in their
use of exemplarity to reorient their readers’ perceptions rather than
refute their premises. By exemplarity, I mean the force of examples to
interrupt received habits of perception and to disclose meliorist pos-
sibilities. Both texts put forward powerful examples of anti-imperial
strenuousness to recode and rework the audience’s perception: the saint
in Varieties and James’s own critical appreciation of the strenuousness
of the ordinary in Talks. The rhetorical and philosophical significance
of James’s appeals to examples is examined in detail in the following
chapter through a reading of his oration to the martyred colonel of the
Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, Robert Gould Shaw. James finds
in Shaw an unlikely exemplar of moral courage more consonant with
the politics of anti-imperialism than the martial hero worship surround-
ing Civil War memory in the Gilded Age.
In considering the substance of Shaw’s “lonely” courage, chapter 4 ad-
dresses James’s most contentious philosophical thesis: the justification of
acting on faith. This chapter examines James’s account of Shaw’s demo-
cratic faith to ask how pragmatism can account for political convictions
in the absence of authoritative foundations. Against critics who charge
pragmatism’s antifoundationalism with collapsing into a form of deci-
sionism, this chapter examines James’s Shaw oration as an exposition of
the psychological and political implications of his 1896 essay, “The Will
to Believe.” What we find is a phenomenologically rich account of po-
litical conviction that situates belief as emerging from within embodied
social experience rather than based on moral ideas alone. Drawing on
Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the “stutter” to capture the dynamic and rela-
tional nature of belief formation, chapter 4 shows how James proposes a
Introduction | 21
22
novel way of conceiving of political conviction that steers between the

Scylla of decisionism and the Charybdis of moral absolutism, or the crav-
ing for foundations.
The topic of democratic faith draws us back to the question of prag-
matism’s relationship to the exceptionalist idioms of American politi-
cal thought. Chapter 5 addresses the broader implications of this study
for understanding the relationship between American political thought
and the history of United States imperialism. It asks whether American
idioms of progress can be constructively reworked or whether pragma-
tism’s politics of experimental redescription only ever unwittingly re-
iterates empire as a way of life. This chapter examines how James’s
repudiation of the craving for order introduces a tragic element into
his notion of faith, one that cuts against both the hubris of American
optimism and the passivity of despair. We see this tragic sensibility
throughout James’s corpus, but it comes out most powerfully in his ac-
count of meliorism and the twice-born soul in The Varieties of Religious
Experience. Unpacking the full implications of James’s tragic melio-
rism as a critical response to imperial amnesia requires extending our
analysis beyond James’s work alone, however. The chapter puts James’s
account of the twice-born soul into a relationship of reciprocal elucida-
tion with W. E. B. Du Bois’s account of double-consciousness in The
Souls of Black Folk in order to critically articulate the political conse-
quences of pragmatism’s tragic meliorism. In drawing this comparison
I do not mean to suggest, as some scholars have, that Du Bois should
be read as applying James’s categories to the politics of race. Rather, I
take Du Bois’s reflections on democratic faith as a lens for thinking with
and against James concerning the political implications of pragmatism’s
tragic interruption of American optimism in the unfinished critique of
American empire.
Pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism are tools James
crafted to provoke his readers to see themselves and their world in new
ways—ways that might invite them to act to transform that world in
a more just and democratic fashion. Pragmatism’s new way of seeing
discloses the imbrication of the ethical in the political, two categories
that are artificially dichotomized in contemporary political theory.
Attending to the irreducible ethical registers of politics can reveal the
ways a political phenomenon as impersonal as empire is entwined with
the personal habits and cravings of those who enjoy its benefits and are
made complicit in its crimes. And in doing so, it opens up grounds for

23
conceiving how local ethical experiments in thinking and acting dif-

ferently can have potentially global political consequences. Looking
at empire as a way of life through James’s political vision might help
us, in turn, come to reimagine the ways our own freedom remains
entangled with, but never fully entrapped by, empire as a way of life.
Introduction | 23
24
CHAPTER 1 The Political Uses

of William James
I. Constructing a Usable Past
No single work played a greater role in shaping the political legacy

of William James than Ralph Barton Perry’s 1935 biography, The
Thought and Character of William James, as Revealed in Unpublished
Correspondence and Notes, Together with His Published Writings. It
was Perry’s portrait that Sabine drew on when he informed the American
Political Science Association that James, while a philosopher, had no
political philosophy to speak of. On Perry’s account, James’s politics
are those of a representative American liberal who battled against the
injustices of his time out of a personal sense of compassion and human-
ity rather than an ideological commitment. Perry’s two-volume tome is a
rich collection of James’s political correspondence, speeches, and mar-
ginalia. It remained the single comprehensive source for understanding
James’s political thought for over half a century, prior to the publica-
tion of his full correspondence and collected writings in the 1980s and
1990s.1 For all of its influence in shaping James’s political legacy, how-
ever, scholars have been insufficiently attentive to the political and intel-
lectual circumstances that surrounded Perry’s presentation of James’s
political “sentiments.”2 James’s encounter with empire provided Perry
with a usable past for an embattled tradition of American liberalism in
the interwar years.
Perry (1876–1957) once described himself as “one of those lonely
beings who used to be called ‘liberals,’ and who are now viewed with sus-
picion from the left and from the right.”3 In James he found a predecessor
25
to his own lonely liberalism that could serve as an intellectual beacon for
orienting a tradition of American politics as it came under increasing scru-
tiny in the early decades of the twentieth century. From 1914 until his
death during the early years of the Cold War, Perry was an unwavering
advocate of liberalism as the nation’s consensual creed. Individualism, tol-
eration, and democratic representation are universal values synonymous
with civilization itself, and the United States is both their historical home
and their guardian within a hostile global order. Against a litany of foreign
threats and tests to America’s liberal faith, ranging from Prussian milita-
rism and Italian fascism to Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism, Perry spoke
out passionately for the need to uphold the liberal creed and, if need be, to
fight and die for it. Thought and Character only touches on these politi-
cal questions tangentially, yet both the book and the portrait of William
James it disseminated to generations of scholars remain entangled with
Perry’s broader project of legitimating American liberalism as a force for
global order.
Perry’s biography was not alone in drawing James into the ideological
terrain of global politics in the first half of the twentieth century. As his-
torian John Diggins has shown, “the notion that the brilliant pioneer of
pragmatic thought [James] influenced Fascism was widely entertained in
the twenties.”4 Through his association with figures like Henri Bergson
and admirers like Giovanni Papini and Georges Sorel, James’s pragma-
tism was seen to share an elective affinity with both the philosophy and
reactionary politics of European anti-intellectualism. No less a figure than
Benito Mussolini would endorse the association, telling journalists that
he counted James among the intellectual influences of fascism alongside
Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Sorel. As Max Eastman and Horace Kallen’s
disagreement about the political significance of pragmatism examined in
the Introduction suggests, this perception of pragmatism as a philosophy
of reaction was not limited to the twenties alone.5 The urgency with which
Perry responds to pragmatism’s critics in Thought and Character unin-
tentionally illustrates the biography’s broader political significance. The
book posthumously “conscripts” James to the era’s ideological battles by
retrojecting him into a Whiggish history of American liberalism, one that
Perry’s own study participates in actively constructing.6
This chapter aims to unsettle elements of the received portrait
of James’s political thought that we have inherited from Perry’s au-
thoritative account. The argument proceeds in three sections. The first
section reconstructs the account of James’s political sentiments from
The Political Uses of William James | 25

26
Thought and Character. As this section consists of little more than an

exercise in citation, I ask for patience from readers familiar with Perry’s
biography to bear with my restatement of his account. The following sec-
tion examines Perry’s engagement with Mussolini later on in the biogra-
phy as a clue for reconsidering the book’s earlier interpretation of James’s
political thought. Here, we examine the broader politics of interpretation
surrounding pragmatism from the transatlantic perspective of the postwar
crisis of liberalism in both the United States and Italy. Through under-
standing how James’s pragmatism came to be associated with Italian fas-
cism, we come to reconsider the political and intellectual stakes of Perry’s
interpretation of James’s liberalism. The third section telescopes further
to situate the biography within the development of Perry’s broader writ-
ings on politics and political philosophy. From his popular essays calling
for American intervention in World War I until his death in the aftermath
of World War II, Perry approached the history of ideas as an ideologi-
cal tool for the consolidation of American liberalism. In particular, what
Perry’s pre–and post–Thought and Character writings reveal is that the
familiar portrait of James’s “ethical creed” restates the terms of the na-
tional liberal creed that Perry had been advocating for over two decades
as a means of defining the moral purpose of US foreign policy. The result
is a depiction of James’s political thought that blurs the boundaries be-
tween personal and national biography, as James becomes an exemplary
representative of American credal values just as American liberalism be-
comes figured as uniquely Jamesian.
II. Perry’s Thought and Character
Perry first encountered James when he arrived at Harvard as a gradu-

ate student in 1896. He had graduated with a degree in theology from
Princeton and was planning to spend a year studying philosophy before re-
turning to the Princeton Theological Seminary to complete his training as
a Presbyterian minister. Under the tutelage of James and the generation of
intellectual giants then teaching at Harvard’s Department of Philosophy,
however, Perry underwent something of a conversion. Studying philoso-
phy awoke him from his religious slumbers and set him upon the path to
become a teacher and scholar.7 Perry received his doctoral degree in 1899
with a dissertation on the topic of moral philosophy. He left Cambridge to
teach philosophy at Williams College and then at Smith College before re-
turning to Harvard to join the faculty in 1902. He would remain at Harvard

27
until his retirement in 1946. Perry came to prominence within the field of
philosophy as an advocate of “new realism.” New realists continued along
the intellectual path of James’s radical empiricism to refute the idealist
claim that objects cannot be known independent of ideas. James’s mentor-
ship left a profound impact on Perry, evident in the familial language he
used to describe their relationship. “To specify my indebtedness to James
is as impossible as it would be to enumerate the traits which I have inte-
grated from my parents.”8 As historian of philosophy Bruce Kuklick ob-
serves, Perry’s judgment of James’s greatness lay in his “anticipation” of
Perry’s own realism.9 A similar perception of “anticipation” shapes Perry’s
account of James’s political sentiments.
Like many of James’s students, Perry became a close acquaintance of
the James family. After William’s death in 1910 the family turned to Perry
to assist in the publication of his literary remains. In 1912 Perry published
an envelope of essays James deposited in the Philosophical Library at
Harvard’s Emerson Hall as Essays in Radical Empiricism. When James’s
son, Henry, sought to remove his father’s sizable library from the fam-
ily’s Irving Street home following the death of his mother, Alice James,
Perry again played an important role. Henry consulted with Perry to select
notable books to be donated as a gift to Harvard. Together with A. A.
Roback from the Department of Psychology and librarian Benjamin Rand,
Perry assisted in disposing of James’s remaining library.10 Given his fa-
miliarity with both James’s philosophy and his literary estate, Perry was
uniquely positioned to write an authoritative life-and-letters biography.
Henry James’s 1920 volume, The Letters of William James, contained
selections from his father’s diaries, letters, and marginalia to present his
generous personality to a general audience. It included only “the most in-
teresting” letters held by the James family that pertained to the project of
composing a vivid picture of his father’s personality, excluding any ma-
terial Henry deemed “wholly technical or polemic” (LWJ 1:viii). Perry’s
envisioned volume aimed to complement this biographical collection with
a wider selection of letters demonstrating James’s intellectual development
and influence over time. For over half a decade Perry wrote hundreds of
letters to scholars across the globe in search of correspondence to or from
William James.11 The culmination of these years of research, The Thought
and Character of William James, appeared in 1935, containing over five
hundred previously unpublished letters and weighing in at over sixteen
hundred pages in length. The book organizes the material into a broad
narrative of James’s intellectual maturation and his place in the intellec-
tual conversations of his times over the course of ninety-one chapters of

28
exegesis and commentary. Perry claims to have taken a light hand in ed-
iting the volume so as to be sure that the collected materials might best
serve as “a vehicle for James himself.”12
The book has rightly been described as a “monumental” contribution.13
It was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1936, thereby cementing Perry’s status
as a world authority on James. A concise single-volume version, issued in
1947, remains a standard teaching text. Many of Perry’s original claims
and arguments have become conventional wisdom to generations of schol-
ars: the influence of Henry James Sr.’s unconventional educational philos-
ophy on William’s personality and philosophical development, his life-
long struggle to reconcile modern science with religious insight, and the
characterization of James’s personal life as an interplay of his morbid and
benign traits. “For James scholars, rereading Ralph Barton Perry’s The
Thought and Character of William James is like reading Shakespeare and
finding the originals of now conventional sayings,” observes one scholar
of American philosophy.14 This experience is particularly striking when
rereading Perry’s presentation of James’s political development. In two
consecutive chapters titled “Social and Political Sentiments” and “James
the Reformer,” Perry portrays James’s “general ethical creed” as the ex-
pression of his personal temperament.15
“Social and Political Sentiments” opens by restating the conclusion of
the book’s previous chapter on James’s moral philosophy. “Though there
are two well-marked principles in James’s moral philosophy, that of mili-
tant self-assertion and that of humanity, it is, as we have seen, the second
which is the more fundamental in both theory and practice.”16 The principle
of militant self-assertion refers to what Perry characterizes throughout the
book as the romantic side of William James. This is the James who insists
on the value of courage, struggle, and risk as the strenuous experiences
that give life its meaning. From his early essays on hero worship to his
later fascination with martial experience, the romantic James was persis-
tently fascinated by experiences of extreme physical and psychic exertion.
Perry psychologizes James’s advocacy of the strenuous life as a symptom
of his mental breakdown as a young man and his ensuing lifelong strug-
gle with depression. “James’s preaching of the martial spirit reflected his
need rather than his achievement.”17 In contrast to the principle of militant
self-assertion that he associates with James’s “morbid traits,” Perry identi-
fies the principle of humanity with James’s “benign traits” of compassion
and sociability. This principle refers to the sympathetic side of James’s
thinking and his generous toleration of difference. Where his morbid
traits tempted James to romanticize war and suffering, his benign traits

29
inform “James’s endorsement of democracy” as the means to respect the

unique individuality of all persons.18 James’s moral thinking oscillates be-
tween these two poles, but it is his humanistic sympathy that is ultimately
the stronger of the two. Making morality itself an object of struggle and
sacrifice put James’s morbid traits at work in the service of his benign
traits. “The principle of sympathy,” Perry concludes, “is itself a cause
which calls for moral and even for physical courage.”19
Following the establishment of this clear distinction between James’s
celebration of militant self-assertion from his humanitarian sentiments,
Thought and Character presents a summary of James’s political activi-
ties. Perry portrays James’s involvement in the political questions of his
day as expression of his humanitarian sympathies, the result of his own
personal experience of suffering and depression. James hated all forms
of cruelty. He instinctively sided with history’s underdogs, whether it be
his support of the Boers against the British, his enthusiasm for Japan’s
military victory over Russia, or his advocacy of Filipino insurgents at
war with American soldiers. These political commitments are continu-
ous with James’s temperamental disposition to side with losing causes
of any sort, whether it be with religion against science, “with heresy
against orthodoxy, with youth against age, or with the new against the
old.”20 Along with this natural sympathy, James’s political thought re-
veals benign traits of sociability. His deep commitment to the value of
toleration sprung from his “indiscriminate taste for association” with
his fellow human beings. James’s “peculiar relish and gift for human
intercourse” took his toleration to extremes at points, leading him to
associate with “cranks” such as spiritual mediums, faith healers, and
mystics.21
Temperamental pity for suffering, hatred of cruelty, and relish for asso-
ciation characterize the motivations behind James’s political commitments;
education and social class define their substance. “The root of James’s pol-
itics is to be found not in his ethics and philosophy, but in the fact that he
belonged to the educated class, and accepted on that account a peculiar
role and a peculiar responsibility.”22 The role and responsibility of this
educated class were those of the New England mugwump. A term of de-
rision coined by critics to describe the gentlemen who fled the Republican
Party in 1884 to endorse the election of the Democratic Party’s presidential
candidate Grover Cleveland, the “mugwump” was a man of independent
or inherited wealth, educated in the nation’s finest universities, who saw
himself tasked with lending his intellect to shaping the public’s opinion of
common affairs. As Richard Hofstadter memorably described this group

30
of “genteel reformers,” the mugwumps represented a conservative element

of old New England society hostile to the Gilded Age’s new class of busi-
ness elites, insensitive to the pains and injustices suffered by workers, and
proudly alienated from America’s common culture.23 Mugwumps valued
their embattled minority status as a precious voice of reasoned reflec-
tion in an era of yellow journalism and short-sighted popular excitement.
Perry portrays James as a mugwump in both the sociological and ideolog-
ical sense.24 A celebrated professor at a prestigious university, James was
bound to this circle of mugwump elites through family connections and
professional ties. James embraced the mugwump’s self-conception of the
role of the educated elite within this milieu. The duty of the intellectual
was to “apply critical reflection to public affairs” and “to offset to the best
of his powers both the self-seeking of the ambitious and the blind passion
of the crowd.”25 The mugwump was a guardian of reason against the pas-
sions of the mob.
Within the network of familial, professional, and ideological ties that
bound James to this circle of mugwump elites, Perry identifies E. L. Godkin
as “the greatest single influence upon James’s political thinking.”26 Founding
editor of The Nation magazine and, later, editor of the New York Evening
Post, Godkin was the preeminent voice of genteel discontent in America
for nearly half a century. His editorials, railing against issues ranging from
the corruption of party politics to the foolishness of America’s military ad-
ventures abroad, found a wide audience in the nation’s growing appetite for
newspapers and set the tone of educated opinion. Particularly notable was
Godkin’s vociferous criticism of American foreign relations. He had been
a provocative voice of isolationism since the earliest issues of The Nation
appeared at the close of the Civil War.27 American imperialism posed a
moral danger. This danger, however, was not the violence and injustice it
inflicted on subjected peoples; it was instead that of betraying the nation’s
founding principles and traditions.28 Resistance to empire was fidelity to the
nation. The young William James, according to Perry, looked up to Godkin
as a political mentor. “In the earlier years I may say that my whole political
education was due to the Nation,” James confesses to Godkin in the spring
of 1889. “You have the most curious way of always being right, so I never
dare to trust myself now when you’re agin [sic] me” (C 6:471; emphasis in
original. See also C 11:244).29
With James’s personal temperament and mugwump heritage estab-
lished, the following chapter, “James the Reformer,” illustrates their influ-
ence on his “role in social and political reform.”30 Beginning with a series

31
of public lectures on the subject of temperance from the 1880s, Perry pres-
ents a brief history of James’s early involvement in public issues rang-
ing from his role in Harvard’s curriculum reform to his advocacy of the
mind cure movement. For example, James spoke before a committee of the
Massachusetts legislature in 1898 against proposed legislation that would
exclude mind cure practitioners from medical licensing in the state. But,
like Godkin and his fellow mugwumps, the “issue which stirred James
most deeply and exacted from him the greatest expenditure of time and
effort was that of imperialism.”31 First in response to the Venezuela Crisis
of 1895, and again in reaction the Spanish-American War of 1898, James
stood his ground as a man of reflection against the tide of popular passions
driving national policy. He saw imperialism as “an outlet for blind passion
masked by a profession of benevolence,” and it fell to intellectual men like
himself to stand up against the majority’s irrational appetite for war and
excitement.32
Along with these mugwump commitments, James’s anti-imperialism
was informed by his temperamental principle of humanity. His politics
grew out of a sympathetic identification with the suffering of Filipinos
on the other side of the world. As James explains in the Boston Evening
Transcript in 1899, “We have treated [the Filipinos] as if they were a
painted picture, an amount of mere matter in our way. They are too remote
from us ever to be realized as they exist in their inwardness” (PQ 160).33
James sought to reveal the Filipino in his full inwardness to the American
public through his newspaper editorials and by circulating witness reports
of the violence in Manila (see DF).
For all of his indignation at the injustice of empire, however, James’s
anti-imperialism was only a brief distraction from his more serious philo-
sophical pursuits, on Perry’s account. “James’s period of reform and evan-
gelism,” as Perry characterizes James’s life between 1892 and 1902, was
the expression of intellectual exhaustion and melancholic depression that
preceded his return to serious scholarship.34 On the basis of this psycho-
logical profile Perry disregards the persistence of political questions and
concerns in James’s subsequent writings to conclude that James’s “active
participation in the anti-imperialist movement” came to a close with a final
address before the Anti-Imperialist League, “Address to the Philippines
Question,” in the fall of 1903 (AQ).35 James’s attention thereafter shifted
from politics back to philosophy, even though his generous temperament
continued to push him to speak up on behalf of “underdogs” and uncon-
ventional points of view.

32
Perry concludes that James’s involvement in the social and political

questions of his day reflect his deeply held “individualistic and libertarian
creed.”36 James loved human differences and looked suspiciously on any
“organization, mechanization, and officialdom” that threatened to reduce
human diversity or stifle individual spontaneity.37 “James’s standard of in-
ternational politics was an application of his individualism: tolerate differ-
ences, and enjoy them.”38 In describing James’s creed as libertarian, Perry
does not mean to reduce it to a variety of benign neglect. James’s passion-
ate defense of the individual is balanced by this temperamental sympathy
for others, injecting an egalitarian element into his individualism. This
democratic individualism was something greater than a reflection of the
crass commercialism of American life. It was an aspirational ideal that
the nation too often failed to meet. So understood, James’s individualism
is intrinsically linked to his moral meliorism. Moral ideals have the force
to transform reality when individuals lend their efforts in willing them
into existence. “The good is not something to be contemplated, but some-
thing to be brought to pass. … Ideals are the objects of will, rather than of
taste.”39 Melorism, like his moral philosophy, disciplines militant urges to
serve humanitarian ends. This is what Perry calls the “wholesome” quality
of James’s moralism: it reconciles militancy and humanism in a principled
defense of the moral value of individual liberty.40
Despite these international sympathies, James never lost his first al-
legiance to America and its founding ideals. His anti-imperialism, like
Godkin’s, confronted the nation for its moral failings, but his “Americanism
was never seriously shaken… . A momentary weakening of his national at-
tachment only served to reveal the infrangible strength of the tie.” America
alone remained a safe haven for individualism in an increasingly com-
mercialized, bureaucratic, and intolerant world. His anti-imperialism, his
sympathy, and his cosmopolitan allegiances ultimately served to deepen
and enrich his ultimate attachment to the nation. Despite his criticisms of
American policy, and even during moments of despair about the state of the
nation’s soul, “James’s patriotism ran with two of his fundamental moral
attitudes,” namely, his jealous love of individualism and his faith in the
practical power of men to bring about a better world.41
III. William James: Fascist?
The presentation of James’s benign political sentiments in Thought and

Character highlights five features of his ethical creed. It is intellectual,

33
tolerant, individualistic, progressive, and, finally, American. James places

his faith in the power of the educated intellect to guide political judgment
in a calm and reflective manner. His creed tolerates human differences
and celebrates diversity. It holds individuality to be a sacred good without
disregarding the need for common goods and cooperation. Progress is for-
ever possible based on the will and effort of individuals who labor in the
service of an ideal. And, at its core, it is a critical liberalism in the serv-
ice of distinctively American values and ideals. Thought and Character
puts forward this account of James’s liberal “sentiments” in these chapters
only to put the question of politics aside for a discussion of the apoliti-
cal philosophical work that supposedly dominated James’s focus in his
remaining years. It is therefore surprising that Perry returns to the topic
of politics fifteen chapters later in “Pragmatism in Italy and Germany.”
After a brief survey of James’s travels in Italy and his correspondence with
Italian pragmatists at the turn of the century, Perry’s chapter turns to a de-
tailed discussion of what influence, if any, James had on the development
of communism and fascism. Perry finds resonances between the morbid
side of James’s thinking and these modern political ideologies, only to
conclude that it would be a great mistake to reduce James’s humanistic in-
dividualism to “an authoritarian form of the gospel of action, by which the
conquests of violence can be preserved, consolidated, and moralized.”42
Tucked between a series of chapters discussing the development of
James’s thinking from Pragmatism to A Pluralistic Universe, “Pragmatism
in Italy and Germany” interrupts the book’s thematic narrative. If this
chapter appears as a digression in a discussion of James, it is revealing of
the political and professional anxieties that shape Perry’s account of James
as the representative of a national political tradition. The quarter-century
between James’s death and the publication of Perry’s book was a tumul-
tuous and transformative period for liberalism in the United States.43 The
jarring contrast between the moral purpose that led the nation into war
and the catastrophic experience of the war itself provoked questions about
the fate of liberalism. Could moral and political ideals inherited from the
nineteenth century confront the complexity and sheer destructive power of
global politics in the twentieth century?
Walter Lippmann summarized this challenge to American liberalism
when he described President Woodrow Wilson as struggling to use the
simple morality of village life as a guide to the disorienting complexity
of a new international world.44 The distance between Wilson’s high ideals
and the conflict of interests that characterized the Treaty of Versailles un-
derscored for many American liberals exactly how prescient Lippmann’s

34
appraisal was. Liberalism in this new environment appeared directionless,

uncertain. Writing as late as the end of the 1930s, John Dewey could con-
clude, “Liberalism today is hardly more than a temper of mind, vaguely
forward-looking, but quite uncertain as to where to look and what to look
forward to.”45 Dewey’s proposal for a renewed and more radical liberalism
leaned closer to democratic socialism, with its emphasis on cooperative
control of economic production and distribution, than it did to the indi-
vidualism, moral purpose, and ethos of toleration Perry found in James.
In this postwar context the eruption of the Bolshevik Revolution and the
fascist march on Rome signaled to many the birth of new political ideolo-
gies for a radically new political world. Bolshevism and fascism were seen
as distinctively practical, even pragmatic, approaches to governance, in
contrast to the archaic liberalism that led the nation into war.
While much has been written about the influence of Bolshevism in
the United States, interwar American flirtations with Italian fascism
have not received the same attention.46 “The liberal century,” announced
Benito Mussolini, “after piling up innumerable Gordian Knots, tried
to cut them with the sword of the world war. Never has any religion
claimed so cruel a sacrifice. Were the Gods of liberalism thirsting for
blood?”47 Mussolini’s stress on fascism’s nondoctrinal consequential-
ism, its emphasis on political order and unity, and its militant suppres-
sion of Bolshevism endeared him to American audiences in the 1920s.
Flattering comparisons were frequently drawn between Mussolini and
America’s own Teddy Roosevelt as bold and energetic political states-
men.48 “Fascism’s appeal to liberals,” writes Diggins in his classical
study of Mussolini’s cultural and intellectual reception in the United
States, “was found in its experimental nature, anti-dogmatic temper,
and moral élan.”49 The pages of the New Republic under the editorship
of Herbert Croly served as a critical site for American progressives to
experiment with fascist ideas.50
Representative of this moment in the New Republic’s history is Kallen’s 1927
report on the state of Italian politics “Fascism: For the Italians.” Describing
the fascist rise to power as “unusually bloodless and free from violence,”
Kallen argues that Italian standards of living drastically improved and the
nation achieved a profound sense of shared purpose under the dictatorship.
Moreover, Italy’s corporatist economy offers an attractive model for control-
ing the influence of big business over government. Repression and dictator-
ship are the costs of these admirable features, but this fact alone is not grounds
for liberals to repudiate fascism.51 Kallen reminds his readers, “With the

35
things that liberalism rejects go, as their obverse, things that liberalism recog-
nizes as requisite to the good life of the masses of men. One begins to doubt
whether, in a world so mixed as this, there ever can exist the unmixed goods
that liberalism requires, or the unmixed evils it rejects.”52 Mixed within the
illiberal elements of Mussolini’s regime is a novel political experiment that
should be allowed to run its course. The dictatorship, after all, may only be
a temporary stage in Italy’s transition to a bolder and stronger liberal order.
Fascism’s success or failure should not stand on its ability to satisfy prepoliti-
cal moral commitments. Rather, its test must lie in its practical consequences.
Similar paeans to fascism’s experimental politics appeared prominently in the
New Republic during the late 1920s, celebrating Italy’s political innovation and
its power to unite the nation behind a common purpose. Charles Beard and
Herbert Croly, to name only two prominent voices of American progressivism,
shared Kallen’s willingness to overlook the illiberalism of Mussolini’s regime
and reserve judgment until Italy’s political experiment had run its course.53
Along with this perception of Mussolini’s rule as distinctively prag-
matic, it was also seen as distinctively pragmatist. In 1926, the London
Sunday Times asked Mussolini what philosophies most influenced him in
the development of fascism. The dictator replied:
That of Sorel. Nietzsche enchanted me when I was twenty, and reinforced

the anti-democratic elements in my nature. The pragmatism of William
James was of great use to me in my political career. James taught me that
an action should be judged rather by its results than by its doctrinary basis.
I learnt of [sic] James that faith in action, that ardent will to live and fight,
to which Fascism owes a great part of its success. … For me the essential
was to act.54
Mussolini’s declaration of his intellectual debt to James was not uncom-

mon in these years. If fascism’s consequentialism made it appear prag-
matic to some American liberals, Mussolini sought to exploit this percep-
tion for propagandist purposes by identifying himself with pragmatism
before Anglophone audiences. The initial impetus for Kallen’s essay on
Italy was a 1926 interview with Mussolini published in the New York Times
Magazine, in which the dictator counted James to be among the most
“useful” political philosophers in shaping the ideology of fascism.55 Kallen
arranged an interview with Mussolini that year in Rome to explore how
James’s work came to influence Il Duce’s personal philosophy. Mussolini
proved unable to name any works of James’s he had read, leading Kallen to

36
conclude that the dictator “was clearly far more aware of William James’s
name than his teachings.”56
Despite challenges to Mussolini’s claims to pragmatism, they found a
receptive audience in the discipline of political science. American political
scientists turned to those elements of James’s thinking Perry described as
militant or morbid—his emphasis on strenuousness, energy, willing, and
action—as clues for understanding fascism’s political philosophy. Writing
in the American Political Science Review in 1928, William Kilbourne
Stewart argued that reading James helped Mussolini clarify and focus
the practical and action-oriented nature of his thinking. Mussolini’s re-
jection of the doctrinal quality of liberalism is an application of James’s
“polemic against absolutism in thinking.”57 Such comparisons were not
restricted to those American liberals, like Stewart, who expressed en-
thusiasm for Mussolini’s new politics. William Y. Elliott, Perry’s col-
league at Harvard in the Department of Government, drew a similar con-
clusion. Elliott was “among American political thinkers” of the period
“the most active critic of Mussolini’s Italy.”58 Like Stewart, Elliott saw
James’s pragmatism as an element of the philosophy behind fascism, but
he took this association to be an indictment of pragmatism’s relativism
and lack of moral orientation rather than an endorsement of Mussolini’s
practical politics. James’s distrust of rationalism and the justification of
faith serve as the philosophical grounds for fascism’s celebration of na-
tional myth and its Machiavellian logic that the ends justify the means.
As Elliott explained in Political Science Quarterly, “Although they have
not always so named it, and although only its protagonists attribute to
the movement a profound underlying idea, Fascism has come to mean to
the popular imagination just this application of pragmatism to politics.”59
Machiavelli, Papini, and Sorel are all more properly described as ideolog-
ical influences on Mussolini than James, Elliott admits, but the antiliberal
political philosophy that results from this hodgepodge of influences is
one consistent with the entire ethos of pragmatism, from James’s anti-
intellectualism, to Dewey’s instrumentalism, to the pluralism of Harold
Laski.60 Elliott restated this sweeping indictment of pragmatism in his
1928 book, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and
the Constitutional State. Many of Elliott’s readers found the comparisons
with Mussolini and Dewey overblown, if not preposterous, but the book
remains illustrative of the peculiar association James’s pragmatism came
to share with European anti-intellectualism throughout the decade.61
Behind the mythology of James’s influence on Mussolini lies the reality
of pragmatism’s European reception. Elliott’s exaggerated portrayal of a

37
pragmatic revolt in Anglo-American political philosophy draws much of

its rhetorical force from the fact that both James and his pragmatism did
indeed find a warm welcome among some of the thinkers that Mussolini
more accurately credits as intellectual influences. One such unexpected
site of transmission between American philosophy and European politics
noted by Elliott was revolutionary syndicalism. Italian fascism’s origins
in syndicalist socialism are well documented, and need not be repeated
here.62 What is notable is the unlikely welcome Jamesian pragmatism
found in French and Italian syndicalist circles after the war. Having crea-
tively adopted Bergson’s philosophy of intuition as the frame for his theory
of revolutionary myth in his 1908 Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel’s
evolving fascination with religion led him to a study of James’s pragma-
tism. Sorel’s 1921 The Utility of Pragmatism presented James as a fellow
traveler to syndicalism’s mythic struggle against modern scientific ration-
ality. When properly rethought in “a European brain,” Sorel explained,
pragmatism offers syndicalism a philosophical framework for conceptual-
izing the action-orienting power of ideas.63
A more direct point of contact between pragmatism and the intellec-
tual origins of Mussolini’s fascism was the Florentine journal, Leonardo.
While visiting Rome in the summer of 1905 to deliver a paper at the Fifth
International Congress of Psychology, James reports meeting a group of
young Italian scholars familiar with his work:
The most interesting, and in fact, genuinely edifying part of my trip has
been meeting this little cénacle, who have taken my own writings, entre
autres, au grand serieux, but now are carrying on their philosophical mis-
sion in anything but a technically serious way, in as much as Leonardo (of
which I have hitherto only known a few odd numbers) is devoted to good &
lively literary form. (C 11:27; emphasis in original)
Among this group of would-be disciples was a young philosopher named

Giovanni Papini. Papini’s “philosophical mission,” as James put it, was to
reawaken the Italian nation through the power of the revolutionary new
philosophy of pragmatism. Published by Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini
between 1903 and 1907, Leonardo was less a scholarly periodical and
more a cultural and intellectual manifesto for the Florentine avant-garde.
As Carlo Golino explains, “the spirit of Leonardo might be synthesized in
one word, ‘insofferenza’—a word which can mean dissatisfaction, intoler-
ance or impatience with existing conditions, and a desire for change.”64 In
an expression of both youthful impertinence and modernist enthusiasm,

38
Leonardo’s editors railed against Italy’s bourgeois cultural decadence, po-

litical corruption, moral complacency, and lack of national will. James, no
less than Nietzsche, Bergson, and Croce, provided Papini with a new phi-
losophy that could inspire his readers to the task of leading Italy’s cultural
regeneration. Papini found a practical approach to reality in pragmatism
that, unlike the sterile intellectualist philosophies of the academy, focused
on experience and the power of action to remake the world. “The common
denominator to which all the forms of human life can be reduced is this:
the quest of instruments to act with, or, in other words, the quest of power”
(cited in PMI 146; emphasis in original).65 Pragmatism, as a philosophy of
power, offers a path to restore Italy from its state of corruption and decline.
The most important of James’s works for what one scholar describes as
“Papini’s militantly voluntaristic pragmatism” was “The Will to Believe”
(1896).66 The notion that faith could become a practical instrument to ac-
tively remake reality spoke to Papini’s Promethean ambitions. In Leonardo
and his 1906 Il crepuscolo dei filosofi (The Twilight of the Philosophers),
Papini developed a bold interpretation of the will to believe as the basis
for a new post-Christian civil religion. If man could learn to embrace the
power of ideas as instruments to transform reality, he could become more
than a mere man. He could become a Uomo-dio, a man-God. “My much-
talked-of ‘pragmatism’ of those days did not indeed concern me so much
as a rule of research, as a test of procedure, as a tool of method. I was look-
ing farther ahead,” Papini explains some years later. “I adopted therefore
that part of pragmatism which promised most—the part which taught how,
through faith, beliefs not corresponding to reality could be made true. But
why limit this action to beliefs? Why create the truth of a few particular
faiths only? The spirit should be master of everything. The power of the
will should have no limitations whatever!”67 Pragmatism promised spir-
itual powers of self-transcendence to both the individual and the nation
through the pursuit of militant self-assertion.
Papini found an enthusiastic supporter of this creative appropriation
of pragmatism in James. Their friendship would grow into a close re-
lationship of mentorship over the two years following their meeting in
Rome. James lavishes his young European protégé with compliments in
the letters they exchanged. “What a thing is genius! And you are a real
genius!” (C 11:214). Papini’s creativity and tenacity, his willingness to put
forward big and bold ideas, struck James as a breath of fresh air compared
to the sophisticated pedantry he found among his doctoral students at
Harvard (C 11:27–28; see also PhD). “Here have I, with my intellectual
timidity and conscientiousness, been painfully trying to clear a few steps

39
of the pathway that leads to the systematized new Weltanschauung,

and you with a pair of bold strides, get out in a moment beyond the
pathway altogether into the freedom of the whole system, into the open
country,” he exclaims (C 11:214). James offered to contribute a pref-
ace to Papini’s forthcoming book on pragmatism, and assisted him in
placing English translations of his essays in American publications (C
11:164–65; 285; 418).
James introduced Papini to the English-speaking philosophical world
in an 1906 article titled “G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy,”
published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method.
The essay advances Papini as “the most radical conceiver of pragmatism
to be found anywhere” (PMI 145). Leonardo and Il crepuscolo dei filosofi
offer a robust program for pragmatism as a method for “enlarging our
means of action … the bringing of our spiritual powers into use, and the
need of making the world” (PMI 146). James acknowledges that Papini’s
talk of men becoming gods may stretch the imagination to its limits. Such
a claim “has decidedly an element of literary swagger and conscious im-
pertinence,” for sure, but it is no less worthy of being treated respectfully
for its ambition (PMI 147):
The program of a Man-God is surely one of the possible great type-

programs of philosophy. I myself have been slow in coming into the full
inwardness of pragmatism … in the writings of this young Italian, clear
in spite of all their brevity and audacity, I find not only a way in which our
English views might be developed farther with consistency—at least so it
appears to me—but also a tone of feeling well fitted to rally devotees and
to make of pragmatism a new militant form of religious or quasi-religious
philosophy. (PMI 148)
James’s willingness to count himself such a devotee is evident from

Papini’s prominence in Pragmatism.68 Many of the book’s most famous
images and metaphors are credited to Papini’s influence. The presentation
of the pragmatic method as a hotel corridor lying in the midst of a plural-
ity of theories is one borrowed from “the young Italian pragmatist Papini”
(P 32). The description of pragmatism as a method to unstiffen rigid and
fixed thinking, too, is borrowed “from my friend G. Papini” (P 78). And in
the discussion of pragmatism’s inspiring picture of a world in the making,
always awaiting the power of man to “engender truths upon it,” James
nods again to “Signore Papini, the leader of Italian pragmatism” and his
view of man’s “divinely-creative functions” (P 123). So taken was James

40
with the young Italian that he even considered dedicating Pragmatism to

him, along with F. C. S. Schiller and John Dewey, as torchbearers of a new
international movement in philosophy.69
Papini’s reciprocal enthusiasm for James, however, was fleeting. By
1908 Papini’s pragmatism had begun to give way to an interest in futurism
before he finally subscribed to a form of fascist Catholicism.70 His antici-
pated book on pragmatism that James promised to preface, Sul pragma-
tismo (On Pragmatism), appeared three years after James’s death. After
shuttering Leonardo in 1907, Prezzolini began a new journal, La Voce
(The Voice). Where Leonardo verged on the magical and theological in its
vision of national regeneration, La Voce gave a new political and economic
direction to Papini and Prezzolini’s nationalism. One marker of this de-
velopment was the replacement of the journal’s philosophical preoccupa-
tion with Bergson’s élan vital with Sorel’s mythical syndicalism. Another
was the appeal its vision of elite leadership and cultural nationalism held
for Mussolini in the years following his break with the Socialist Party.71
During his interview with Kallen in Rome, Mussolini credits La Voce with
exposing him to the political uses of James and American pragmatism.72
Just as Papini’s infatuation with pragmatism represents a brief but for-
mative episode in the intellectual development of Italian fascism, the sym-
pathetic curiosity American liberals showed to Mussolini’s new regime
was equally short-lived. Diggins points to a cascading series of events
at the close of the decade that brought America’s flirtation with fascism
to an abrupt end.73 The New Republic’s progressivist fascination with
Mussolini’s corporatism died with Herbert Croly in 1929, while the onset
of the Great Depression that same year pushed liberal views of economic
reconstruction in increasingly socialist and welfarist directions.74 At the
same time, the full scale of the political repression that Kallen and others
argued was a necessary means toward liberal ends became increasingly
undeniable as Italian political exiles began to arrive in the United States in
the early 1930s.75 Few American intellectuals could still espouse fascism
as a respectable political ideal by the time of Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of
Ethiopia.76
Elliott’s exaggerated warnings about the pragmatic revolt began to seem
prescient to American liberals as the drums of the coming war beat louder.
The relativism and consequentialism that made pragmatism attractive in
the 1920s appeared increasingly problematic to American liberals anxious
to stand on firmer ground in their opposition to authoritarian mass politics.
Beginning in the 1930s and continuing throughout the war, American lib-
eralism underwent a process of historical reorientation around a consensus

41
view of Western civilizational values, encompassing political democracy,

property rights, and individual toleration.77
“Pragmatism in Italy and Germany” is an artifact of these emerging
debates concerning liberalism’s philosophical foundations. Perry, like
Kallen, hoped to get to the bottom of Mussolini’s citations of James to
assert authoritatively whether or not pragmatism was a direct influence
on the development of fascism. From the earliest stages of his research
right until the manuscript went to press in 1935, Perry remained in cor-
respondence with Papini, Prezzolini, and other Italian scholars to pro-
cure correspondence for publication and confirm or disprove the rumors
of pragmatism’s influence on Mussolini. In December 1932, Perry wrote
directly to Mussolini to inquire about what of James he had read and
through what channels he encountered pragmatism. What he received in
return some months later was only a brief letter from the Italian consul
in Boston stating, incredibly, that Mussolini read all of James’s work and
even came to know him personally.78 More trustworthy correspondents as-
sured Perry that such a meeting was impossible. Mussolini’s statements
should “be taken with precaution,” Prezzolini warns.79 “The time and the
means of Mussolini’s contact with pragmatism are obscure,” Perry con-
cludes in Thought and Character, and what he did find in James “he could
easily have found elsewhere, as it was widely disseminated and had many
parallels.”80
Elements of James’s thought do share a philosophical resemblance
to the gospel of action espoused by Papini, Sorel, and Mussolini. Perry
admits that James’s enthusiasm for Papini, no less than his love of the
strenuous life, should not be discounted. But at the same time these simi-
larities should not allow readers to lose sight of the fact that “James was a
prophet for the other side as well.”81 What this “other side” might refer to
becomes clear as Perry delves into a diagnosis of the intellectual crisis of
liberalism in the aftermath of the Great War:
Whatever be the channels of transmission through which individual leaders

have been influenced, there can be no doubt of the broad fact that pragma-
tism and Fascism (as well as Bolshevism) hold some ground in common;
and that Mussolini has a right to cite James, even if it be an afterthought.
The contemporary political revolution, construed broadly, is a rejection of
liberalism. It is the gospel of force consciously opposed to the gospel of
humanitarianism and political democracy. It explicitly rejects the widely
accepted dogma that the several individuals who compose society, since it
is their interests which are at stake, shall be the final judges both as to what

42
is good and what means shall be adopted for its realization. William James
was a liberal in precisely this sense. That he would have had the least sym-
pathy with either Bolshevism or Fascism is unthinkable.82
James stood on the liberal side of history. He valued energy and mili-
tancy, like Mussolini, but only in the service of liberal values. What makes
fascism dangerous is not the passion and militancy it brings into politics,
but rather its failure to harness this energy to moral ends. Militant self-
assertion undomesticated by moral principle leaves Papini and Mussolini
oscillating back and forth between a gospel of action that fetishizes vi-
olence as an end in itself and a gospel of subjection to the authoritarian
state. Fighting fascism, Perry concludes, will require something more
than calm heads and reasoned arguments. It will require harnessing mili-
tancy to a genuinely universal moral cause. Perry finds just such a bulwark
against reactionary immoralism in a militant commitment to America’s
ethical creed.
IV. Inventing an American Philosopher
Perry’s own “practical creed” is outlined in a profile on his intellectual de-

velopment published half a decade before Thought and Character. Perry
explains that, as both a scholar and a citizen, he holds individual rights as
sacred goods and stands opposed to any political ideology that would sac-
rifice the individual for the greater good. “I suspect egoism, opportunism,
dictatorship, militarism, theocracy, and mysticism (strange bed-fellows) of
being the practical sequel to a theory which finds the ground of author-
ity in the will or feeling of the judge rather than in the correctness of his
judgment.”83 Political ideologies grounded in the authority of the will or
the immediacy of experience judge action by its source rather than by its
consequences. Political institutions informed by a generous liberal creed
need to check the morbid fetish for self-assertion that dominates interwar
political discourse and ideology. Perry admits that such a view of practical
matters is “old-fashioned—that is to say, Christian and democratic in the
historic sense of the terms.” But such values were once revolutionary, and
Perry is himself “revolutionary enough to remain loyal to the great revolu-
tions of the past.”84
The history of Christian and democratic values that Perry pledges fidel-
ity to is a history of American liberalism, one that he dedicated much of
his scholarly career to articulating and justifying. John Gunnell argues that

43
historians of political philosophy during the interwar years played an over-

sized role in constructing the narrative of a distinctively “liberal” political
tradition in the United States. “The history of political thought was, either
implicitly or explicitly, a justification of liberal democracy and an account
of its progress in the world.”85 Whereas prominent studies of American
political thought prior to this decade seldom used the term “liberalism”
to denote a particular ideology, these new histories traced the progress
of a doctrine of American liberalism back to ever more distant historical
origins. In a Tocquevillean vein, Vernon Parrington’s three-volume Main
Currents in American Thought (1927) presents the history of liberalism
as the continual development of a national creed from the colonial period,
when Puritan colonists brought Old World conceptions of individualism
and limited government into the open horizon of the New World.86 Similar
is Sabine’s hugely influential A History of Political Theory (1937). The
history of political thought, according to Sabine, is the growth of a single
tradition across millennia. American liberal democracy is the mature civi-
lizational fruit of a tradition of individual freedom and compromise he
traces back to Pericles’ funeral oration in democratic Athens.87 Common
to these histories of political thought is the presentation of liberalism as
the teleological realization of past political ideas. “The history of Western
political thought was told as a whiggish tale of the gradual if not inexora-
ble triumph of liberalism over illiberalism, and individual liberty over col-
lectivist tyranny,” observes Terrance Ball.88 These histories ideologically
equate liberalism with the natural development of Western civilization and
frame fascism and communism as aberrations from a progressive realiza-
tion of universal values.89
Perry published numerous histories of American political philoso-
phy over the course of his career that belong to this genre. The political
intentions of these studies were never far from the surface. As he de-
scribes the ambitions of one such history he wrote after the United States
entered World War I, the history of ideas can provide “moral reserves”
for war, no less important than the reserves of men, munitions, and ma-
chines that “shall make this nation’s strength inexhaustible and irresisti-
ble.”90 Perry makes no such similar claim for the purpose of Thought and
Character, and yet these unapologetically politically motivated narratives
of American liberalism inform his portrait of James in indirect ways.
Perry’s portrayal of the struggle between humanity and militancy at once
precede his 1935 study of James’s political sentiments and takes on an
afterlife through the authorial figure of James in his subsequent political
writings throughout the 1930s and 1940s. James the fighting liberal of

44
Thought and Character bears a striking resemblance to the liberal per-

sona that Perry created for both the American citizen and for himself as
a public intellectual.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, Theodore Roosevelt, along with
prominent voices in Congress and the armed forces, launched a campaign
to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to prepare the nation for military
intervention in Europe. In response to the president’s rebuff of the call for
investing in naval power and national conscription, the preparedness move-
ment established a highly publicized voluntary military training camp for
civilians in Plattsburgh, New York.91 Perry was among the volunteers who
flocked to Plattsburgh. He published an article on his experience in the
New Republic, where he waxed poetic about the transformative experi-
ence of crawling through trenches, sleeping outdoors, cleaning his gun,
and the camaraderie of military life. “There is a fine restraint in military
ceremony that enables the purest product of New England self-repression
to feel—without awkwardness or self-consciousness.”92 This is a celebra-
tion of action as feeling, but importantly it is a feeling in the service of the
moral purpose of making the world safe for democracy. Over the course
of the year, Perry published a series of essays on war and preparedness,
collected in 1916 as The Free Man and the Soldier. Blurring the lines
between philosophy and propaganda, the book puts forward moral argu-
ments in support of Roosevelt’s proposed system of national conscription
as a school of civic virtue for teaching citizens habits of self-discipline
and patriotism. Individuality, democracy, and toleration “exist not by
virtue of private self-assertion, but by virtue of a disciplined regard for
the rights of others,” Perry explains. “We owe them to that tradition and
experience which impels us with loyal accord to support a system that
defines our mutual relations and establishes our collective life.”93 The Free
Man and the Soldier presents the case for American entry into the war in
moral terms as a struggle for cosmopolitanism against bellicose German
nationalism.
Perry found a convenient foil to the universalism, limited government,
toleration, and humility of American liberalism in the ominous figure of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout this decade of Perry’s writing, Nietzsche
served as a synecdoche for the brutal realpolitik of Wilhelmine Germany.
“If a Nietzschean superman should break into any settled community he
would of course have to be jailed at once. National self-consciousness has
to be met in the same way by the neighborhood of nations.”94 The asso-
ciation of Nietzsche’s martial language of rank, self-overcoming, willing,

45
and power with Germany’s aggressive expansion across Europe was a

common trope among American intellectuals throughout the war.95 Perry
delves deeper into this comparative analysis of American humanitarian-
ism and German Nietzscheanism in his 1918 study The Present Conflict
of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical Background of the World War. At
once a textbook in the dominant schools of philosophy and an analysis of
German, French, English, and American national cultures, Perry describes
the book as an exposition of “the philosophies of life” that underlie “the
conflict of submarines, airplanes and howitzers.”96
Central to the protean influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy over German
culture and politics is his repudiation of Christian morality. Humanitarian
concern for the unfortunate and unequal, what Perry calls “the orthodox
morality of to-day,” is to Nietzsche merely the ressentiment of the weak
against the strong.97 The cultivation of a single privileged class of super-
man elites is the end to which “every present interest must be subordi-
nated,” including the interests of the weak who must suffer his amazing
strength of will.98 Much like he will argue of Sorel and Mussolini twenty
years later in Thought and Character, Perry argues that Nietzsche’s
gospel of action is philosophically self-defeating and politically cata-
strophic. Celebrating force without putting it in the service of a moral
purpose is only another statement of the modern nihilism that Nietzsche
repudiates. “He has no remote goal, no greater cause, to give himself,”
Perry observes of the superman. His life is without any purpose. The su-
perman “can only sit and meditate on his own greatness.”99 Such a man
“who finds himself so at ease and so comfortable in his conscience, when
pain and death and despair abound, can be no more than a spoiled child
or a pompous prig.”100
American power, in contrast to Germany’s Nietzschean immoral-
ism, serves the higher purpose of making the world safe for democracy.
“Democracy,” Perry writes, is “the substance of Americanism” and the
nation has a duty to defend this humanitarian value beyond its borders.
Philosophy can “renew our devotion to purpose” on the battlefields of
Europe by illustrating the principles for which America fights. Absent
its principles, the nation no better than Germany with its nihilistic “dis-
eased nationality” destroying everything of value in this world.101 Citing
President Wilson’s speech to America’s “soldiers of freedom” shipping off
to fight for democracy in Europe, the final pages of Perry’s book conclude
with the grand rhetorical pronouncement: “Let us, then, ask and expect
this great thing of ourselves: to be good soldiers and at the same time to be

46
both the embodiment and the champions of our democratic creed. Nothing
short of this will prove democracy.”102
The meaning of this democratic creed is articulated in three chap-
ters on American political culture that conclude the book. Perry defines
democracy as both a form of government and, more importantly, a senti-
ment shared by the American people. The American political tempera-
ment is defined by a feeling of compassion. Unlike the cultivated hardness
of the Nietzschean superman, compassion is an “instinctive and inalien-
able” motive, but one cultivated and intensified by Christianity in America.
Compassion motivates Americans to care for one another as precious and
irreplaceable individuals. “The essential truth which it speaks is this: that
in the last analysis the units of life are individual, sentient beings.”103 It is
compassion for individuals before groups or clans that makes Americans
a genuinely cosmopolitan people. Alongside compassion, Perry includes
feelings of emulation, self- respect, and fraternity as elements of the
American temperament. Where compassion draws Americans to respect
individuals as individuals, these other passions balance natural individual-
ism with a sense of social responsibility and community. Together, they
make for a love of esteem, a willingness to grant respect to our fellow men,
and a desire for “fair play” and rules of justice that apply equally to all.104
The temperamental sources of America’s democratic creed dovetail
with the nation’s exceptional history of political development. Present
Conflict provides a thumbnail sketch of Perry’s account of the historical
sources of the American creed that he develops in greater detail in the
1940s. Like Perrington would argue in his history of political thought a
decade later, Perry argues that America inherited a sense of spiritual indi-
vidualism from the Puritans. This individualistic and self-reliant streak of
American culture was tempered by a second source, the social and politi-
cal bonds formed in the process of expansion across the frontier. The hard-
ship of carving out a new nation in the wilderness gave Americans their
“active, restless, and inventive” character, as well as the political virtues of
common regard.105 The twin forces of religion and the frontier together ex-
plain the American propensity to combine a strenuous love of daring with
a moral respect for individual freedom.
These twin historical origins give shape, too, to the nation’s philosoph-
ical tendencies. Perry charts a history of the influence of British, French,
and German philosophy on the intellectual life of the United States, from
Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinism to the influence of British Hegelianism
at the beginning of the twentieth century to argue that the only truly
American expression of philosophy to have taken shape from the historical

47
experience of both the Puritan and the frontier is the pragmatism of James
and Dewey. Pragmatism’s commitments to pluralism, democracy, human-
ity, and faith define “the general spirit in which Americans of this day are
moved to undertake their duties.”106 Nietzsche’s vision of a society of rank
is the highest expression of the German spirit; pragmatism’s generous hu-
manism expresses what is greatest and worth fighting for in the nation’s
“popular creed.”107
The parallels between the portrayals of American political culture in
1918 and of James’s personal political sentiments almost two decades later
in Thought and Character are striking. Both are moved first and foremost
by a principle of humanity. The temperamental sociability and sympathy
that explain James’s political commitments in Thought and Character are
prefigured in Present Conflict as a national temperament of compassion
and fraternity. Like James’s generous sentiments, American political cul-
ture is one that extends its sympathies beyond its borders to friends and
allies across the globe, without succumbing to the parochial prejudices of
nationalism. And like James’s individualistic creed, Americans uphold a
credal commitment to liberty, toleration, and democracy as universal com-
mitments that demand both loyalty and sacrifice. Americans are tempera-
mentally pragmatists in philosophy, and pragmatist philosophy is uniquely
American.
What placing these two texts side-by-side demonstrates is that the rough
contours of the ethical creed Perry claims to find in James’s political senti-
ments are already sketched out in great detail in his account of American
political culture nearly two decades earlier. James is presented, as the ex-
emplary voice of a liberal temperament that is national before it is personal.
Also revealing in the comparison is the consistency of Perry’s argumenta-
tive tropes over time. Like James’s own pragmatism, Perry’s liberalism is
perpetually seeking to “reconcile and mediate” seemingly contradictory
goods: militarism and pacifism, the gospel of humanity and the gospel of
action, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, Puritanism and democracy. The
perpetual conflict between these dichotomous goods in American public
life prefigures the psychic conflict between the benign and morbid he finds
in James’s life and thought. And so too does their reconciliation: the goods
of action must be made to serve the goods of morality, the morbid made to
serve the benign, the militant made to serve the humanitarian.
It should be noted, moreover, that what precedes this portrait of American
culture in the second half of Present Conflict is a repeated discussion of
the unsettling parallels between pragmatism and Nietzsche’s aesthetici-
zation of the will. Perry goes to great effort in the first part of the book

48
to distinguish pragmatism’s anti-intellectualism, its justification by faith,

and its emphasis on action from what he calls the Romantic “cult of the
spontaneity of action” he associates with European writers like Rousseau,
Nietzsche, and Sorel.108 Their anti-intellectualism is an attractive philoso-
phy for “impatient men of action,” but it is not one advocated by James.109
Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism represents a sort of reductio ad absurdum
of James’s pragmatism for Perry in how it disfigures the humanitarian im-
pulse by extending the notion of justification by faith into a license of revo-
lutionary immorality. Sorel aestheticizes action as a power of transcendent
self-creation, allowing him, like Nietzsche, to pursue a partisan “program
of social revolution” that requires “transcending morality” itself.110 James’s
celebration of strenuousness and effort, by contrast, underscores the “pre-
ciousness of the individual” and invites a “sympathetic and receptive kind
of activism.”111
The gospel of action for action’s sake ultimately sacrifices the individ-
ual for the higher good, whether it be the immediate realness of experi-
ence or the purposes of the organic state. It is this conclusion that explains
Perry’s otherwise confusing description of German national culture as at
once in the grasp of a Hegelian theory of the totalizing state and a worship
of the Nietzschean superman—both are repudiations of the individual-
ism that characterizes the American creed. Like the discussion of James’s
political sentiments, Perry’s project of distinguishing the benign side of
James from the morbidity of Papini, Sorel, and Mussolini in Thought
and Character reproduces this earlier criticism of Nietzsche and Sorel as
intellectual icons of liberalism’s political enemies. Perry’s discussion of
Mussolini in 1935 looks backward to these earlier intellectual skirmishes
with the enemies of American liberty and the need for intellectuals to
provide “moral reserves” for democracy’s muscular defense in a hostile
world. These arguments continue in renewed form after 1935 as the per-
ceived antithesis of the American creed shifted from the Kaiser to Nazi
and Soviet totalitarianism.
Perry’s voluminous writing during World War II continued his proj-
ect of reconciling the gospel of action and the gospel of humanity. As he
did in 1914, Perry dedicated all of his professional and personal efforts in
the early 1940s to warning Americans of the danger posed by German
militarism and the urgent need to intervene in Europe. As the chairman
for the Committee for American Defense, Harvard Group, Perry worked
to steer public opinion on and off campus toward intervention, publish-
ing editorials on the danger of fascism and the need for a humanitarian
international order in the New York Times, Harvard Alumni Bulletin,

49
and Christian Science Monitor. In the midst of this flurry of writing and
organizing, Perry composed three major works on American political phi-
losophy and its democratic creed. Like Present Conflict, these books con-
stituted another chapter of Perry’s war effort. Shall Not Perish from the
Earth (1940), Our Side Is Right (1942), and Puritanism and Democracy
(1944) each reiterate warnings of the crisis facing American liberalism
and the need “to revive and reaffirm our common creed.”112 Just as James
showed how these competing values could be united in the militant com-
mitment to liberal inclusiveness, these hortatory histories of philosophy
aim to demonstrate the objective and universal value of America’s credal
commitments.
These works develop the historical claims of Present Conflict into
a bold account of American liberalism as the synthesis of two national
sources: Puritanism and political democracy. Puritanism gives America
its belief in high moral standards of right and wrong, good and evil, and
its love of the moral truths of human equality embodied in the Declaration
of Independence. Puritanism alone becomes stingy and theocratic, how-
ever. Its figuration of original sin and human corruption leads to a mo-
rality of prohibitions and denial, rather than affirmation and toleration.
It is for this reason that Puritanism needs correction from the optimistic
rationalism of the Revolution’s democratic ideals. Puritanism without de-
mocracy is morbid; democracy without Puritanism is benign. Together,
Puritanism and democracy gave shape to the individualism, toleration, and
cosmopolitanism that characterize the America’s tradition of “Christian
democracy.”113 Humanitarianism, individualism, and political democracy
took root in American soil, and yet they are the fruit of “man’s allegiance
to universal culture.”114 It is in the service of this universal culture that
America fights to establish “a just and humane international order” work-
ing in the service of “universalistic individualism.”115
This final productive decade represents the culmination of Perry’s life-
long defense of the liberal creed. The values he calls the American public
to fight for are precisely the same ones he found in James’s political sen-
timents: educated political judgment, tolerance of diversity, individual
rights, the promise of democratic progress, and a faith in America as the
guardian of these universal values in a hostile international order. Passages
and examples from James appear throughout these writings, but James is
depicted in Perry’s post–Thought and Character writings as an exemplar
of this American tradition rather than an original source.116 The political
sentiments he identified in James’s unpublished works are extended into
statements of a deeper American political ethos rooted in history, and

50
in need of champions today as the nation faces yet another time of crisis.
Indeed, Perry’s histories of the American creed present it as one under
almost continual crisis since the time of Godkin, who Perry now character-
izes as “the exponent of American orthodoxy in its pristine purity.”117 A
nation in perpetual crisis is perpetually in need of political educators like
Godkin, James, Wilson, and Perry himself to guide public opinion.
James returns to the center of Perry’s narrative of what it means to be
an American in his postwar Characteristically American (1949). James’s
thought and personality remain the “most perfect philosophical expres-
sion of American individualism,” and the competing tendencies within his
thought remain those tensions and puzzles at the heart of the American
creed.118 How can an admiration for heroism and action be united in the
end with tenderness and love of humanity? James’s Americanness, Perry
explains, consists in his ability to unite these two impulses in “that strange
blend of attributes which gives him what nobility he has: his sense of his
own limitations and of almost insuperable resistance, coupled with fidel-
ity to the good as he sees it, and with a willingness to risk a failure whose
magnitude corresponds to the greatness of the undertaking. This is the
heart of William James’s philosophical attitude and the essence of that cast
of mind which is characteristically American.”119
V. Beyond Liberal Creed
At a banquet held to celebrate his retirement in 1946, Perry summarized

his transformation from a young theologian to a professional philosopher
as the pursuit of one single vocation: “I have referred to my change in
career. There has never been any change of vocation. I was and remain
at heart a preacher.”120 For over four decades Perry preached the gospel
of liberal democracy. Like the mugwumps he studied in his biography
of James, Perry saw himself as a voice of reason struggling to be heard
against the roar of popular passions as the nation again and again faced
the challenge of making the world safe for democracy. Individualism, tol-
eration, and political democracy are fragile goods in this turbulent world,
and they need their champions if they are to survive. From the pulpit of
his professorship at Harvard, Perry spoke not just to his students but to a
congregated nation so as to call them to their sacred duty to defend this
national creed.
James played a crucial role in Perry’s philosophical liturgy as a kind
of exemplary saint of the American creed. A liberal by both temperament

51
and social position, James exemplified the peculiar combination of hu-

manity and courage that ought to define the American citizen. Thought
and Character immortalized this image of James and handed it down to
generations of scholars seeking to understand the political consequences
of pragmatism. This chapter has situated this momentous and hugely influ-
ential portrait of James’s political sentiments within a longer narrative of
Perry’s thinking and writing about politics. Perry presents James’s politics
as an expression of his personal temperament, but in turn nests this tem-
perament within a national narrative of what it means to be an American
citizen. The temperamental compassion and fraternity that defined James’s
political engagements were a synecdoche for a liberal ethos that was at
once national and universal. The militant commitment to moral values
and the willingness to put them into action, the ultimate triumph of the
benign elements of James’s personality over the morbid, is a testament to
the genius of the American citizen that must be periodically recalled as the
nation confronts episodes of crisis. James’s political “sentiments” as they
are presented in Thought and Character are a cipher for a distinctively
national identity based on fidelity to a universal moral creed.
It is a great irony that James, the pacifist anti-imperialist, would be
made to symbolize the moral purpose of state power at war. Perry’s nar-
rative conscripts James’s passionate opposition to the United States’ claim
to civilize foreign peoples into an apologia for democratizing imperial-
ism that has defined American foreign policy since Wilson’s interven-
tions in South America. The following chapters will discuss James’s own
anti-imperialism along with the continuities and innovations in the de-
velopment of American global power. But before leaving Perry, we must
acknowledge two of his insights concerning James’s political thought that
merit further attention. The first is the seemingly divided temperament of
morbid and benign traits that frame his political thought. Perry reduces the
tension between militant action and moral toleration in James’s political
thought to a matter of biography, even if the subject of this biography is
ambiguously both national and personal. The following chapter will ex-
plore why a biographical reduction of this tension obscures more than it
reveals. Importantly, it obscures the ways that the jarring experience of
modern contingency motivates an anxious craving for authority to neatly
order the world. Perry attempts to make self-assertion safe for democracy
by domesticating it in the service of a foundational moral creed. But in
doing so, his liberalism succumbs to the very nostalgic craving for author-
ity that James places at the center of his analysis of empire as a way of life.
The hunger for foundational grounds for politics, even the moral order of

52
a national creed, is the very craving James’s politicization of philosophy

works to unsettle.
The second topic from Perry concerns the Americanness of James’s
political thought. Without moralizing national identity to take James as
“characteristically” American, as Perry puts it, we must ask how James’s
anti-
imperialism and pragmatism restate and rework the idioms of
American political thought. As we will see over the following chapters,
the idioms of pioneer freedom, frontier mastery, individualism, and dem-
ocratic faith that give James’s anti-imperialism its critical purchase always
also threaten to co-opt his political thought into a distinctively uncritical
faith in the liberal nationalism he challenges. James’s public philosophy is
entangled in these idioms, but it is not entrapped by them. The insight and
originality of James’s political vision lie in his experiments to creatively
rework the enabling constraints of these languages to articulate an anti-im-
perialist philosophy that resists the exceptional segregation of noble credal
ideals from a shameful historical reality.

53
CHAPTER 2 Cravings and Consequences
I. Crises, Contexts, Contingency
Studies of William James often attribute privileged importance to his

personal biography in explaining his philosophy. The previous chapter
examined a case of this biographical reduction in Ralph Barton Perry’s
authoritative account of James’s political “sentiments.” Biographical in-
terpretations of James’s thought, like Perry’s, typically focus on the for-
mative episode of depression he suffered as a young man.1 James was
afflicted by a pessimistic crisis that brought him to the edge of suicide as
he contemplated the existential consequences of materialism. How could
life be worth living without free will? He ventriloquizes this experience
through the voice of an invented French melancholic in The Varieties of
Religious Experience: “Suddenly there upon me without any warning,
just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence”
(VRE 134). Here we see a symptom of the “morbid traits,” as Perry calls
them, that lingered throughout James’s life and that led him to philoso-
phize as a form of personal therapy. Below the surface of his doctrine
of the will to believe and his plea for an open and unfinished universe,
“one finds that James’s exhortation to action was addressed primarily to
himself.”2
This narrative of personal crisis dovetails with a broader narrative of
cultural crisis. Gilded Age culture was marked by experiences of both
insecurity and disorientation as traditional markers of authority frac-
tured under the pressure of intense cultural and social modernization.
Secularization, bureaucratization, corporatization, and the radical expe-
rience of contingency ushered in by the publication of Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species are only a few of the markers of what one
54
scholar has called nineteenth-century America’s “crisis of authority.”3

By drawing a parallel between James’s personal crisis narrative and the
broader crisis of authority that characterized his elite milieu, scholars
have come to see James’s pragmatism itself, with its defense of faith,
will, and heroism, “as a response to the social paralysis that he found
in his own life and culture.”4 Just as philosophy afforded a young James
therapeutic release from a paralysis of the will, pragmatism afforded a
young American modernity means of orientation in a new age of uncer-
tainty and doubt.
Thought and Character places James’s political vision squarely
within the narrative of personal crisis. His ethical creed is an expres-
sion of the clash of two sides of his personal temperament—a liberal
tolerance, grounded in his benign sympathy, and a militant call to action
symptomatic of his morbidity. More recent studies have resituated
James’s political thought within the broader context of cultural crisis in
order to foreground problems of agency in modern mass politics. “The
heart of James’s democratic thought,” writes one interpreter, “lies in his
call for civic action.”5 Deborah Coon presents James’s political vision
as such a therapy for action in her important study of his encounter with
American anarchism. The political significance of pragmatism lays in
“encouraging activity rather than indifference” in the face of injustice.
“It encouraged people to think for themselves, to have faith in their own
beliefs and truths, and to fight actively rather than accept passively the
evils that they saw around them.”6 Against the disorienting experience
of “bigness,” as James described the assemblage of institutionalization,
corporatization, and imperialism in turn-of-the-century America, his
meliorist pragmatism aimed to teach his readers how to recover a sense
of their own individual power and courageously speak out against the
injustices of empire. “The impotence of the private individual, with im-
perialism under full headway as it is, is deplorable indeed,” James ob-
serves in “The Philippine Tangle.” “But every American has a voice or a
pen, and may use it. So, impelled by my own sense of duty, I write these
present words. One by one we shall creep from cover, and the opposition
will organize it” (PT 158). Pragmatism, it would seem, is a therapy for
the general will.
Shifting lenses from personal crisis to cultural crisis provides a valu-
able new perspective on James as a political thinker. In the place of
psychologizing James it allows us to consider James as psychologizing
politics itself. James sought philosophical means to call his neighbors
to critically interrogate their political world and to speak out against

55
injustice. There is much to be gleaned from such a revisionary approach.

But that said, it is also important to observe the ways tropes from the older
biographical reading continue to constrain the potential insights of such
an approach. The analogy between these personal and collective crises of
will, in particular, demands further interrogation. James did not simply
exhort individuals to act as if they were free. He called for a courageous
will to act tempered by moderation and humility. As he explains in the
preface to The Will to Believe, “what mankind at large most lacks is criti-
cism and caution, not faith” (TWTB 7). The experience of radical contin-
gency is the horizon for new problems and possibilities. Central among
these, as we shall see, is a dangerous overconfidence in the self’s sovereign
power to master its world. The puzzle of how to both encourage willful
action and simultaneously rein in its excesses brings us to the center of
James’s political vision: the craving for authority.
This chapter builds on the recent recovery of James as a political psy-
chologist in order to examine the ways in which his political thought con-
fronts the causes and consequences of this craving for authority in modern
politics. The modern experience of radical contingency unleashes two
seemingly contradictory postures of agency, each with potentially danger-
ous political consequences. The first is resignation. In the absence of au-
thoritative guidance, individuals lose faith in their own agency and acqui-
esce in the face of power. This experience of resignation is compounded
by “bigness,” the concentration of power in modern mass institutions.
Contrariwise, the second posture is an inflated sense of sovereignty. This is
the fantasy of mastery and control awakened by the disappearance of tra-
ditional obstacles and limitations. Both responses to contingency represent
what James characterizes as two pathologies of the will in The Principles
of Psychology. On the one hand is the obstructed will that cannot trans-
late its wishes into action; on the other hand is the explosive will that he
characterizes as raw energy with the “brakes” taken off (PP 2:1144–52).
These two pathologies are not merely temperamental. They are two con-
tradictory but, nonetheless, interlocking expressions of a nostalgic craving
for authority lost. Understanding acquiescence and heroism as factors in
the nation’s hunger for empire requires tracing these two civic pathologies
back to their psychological roots.
James’s most subtle investigation of this craving for authority and
its practical consequences lies in his account of monism. Monism, the
rationalist vision of a fixed and ordered universe, promises to resolve
the anxious sense of uncertainty that afflicts modern men and women.
Monism’s salve, however, is only a disavowal of the very problem of
Cravings and Consequences | 55

56
contingency that it purports to resolve. Anticipating what John Dewey

would call philosophy’s “quest for certainty,” James saw a hunger for au-
thority and mastery as one of the basic motives that lead men to philos-
ophize. It is a craving that too often leads philosophy to divorce theory
from practice in pursuit of “an object which is unqualified by risk and
the shadow of fear which action casts.” 7 The political consequences of
this craving to master contingency rather than affirm it will be explored
in the following chapter on the imperialist rhetoric of the strenuous life.
This chapter does not mean to dismiss the claims that James sought
to recover a faith in action as a precious political good. Rather, it com-
plicates these accounts by drawing out James’s parallel concern with
constraining action’s excesses. The normative posture countenanced
by James’s anti-imperialism is neither simply action nor inaction. It is
rather a difficult double-gesture of recovering a fragile sense of politi-
cal efficacy to resist injustice while taming the drive toward authoritar-
ian dogmatism that perpetuates injustice. This difficult double-gesture
is the cost of affirming contingency’s whirl without the bad faith of
clinging to the ruins of authority in a postfoundational era. In order to
reconstruct James’s account of the craving for authority, this chapter
examines his writings on imperial “bigness” and their links to his philo-
sophical account of monism. These political and philosophical writings
intertwine to reveal a complicated portrait of the psychic life of the
modern American self.
II. Bigness
“As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness & greatness in all their
forms,” James announces in a 1899 letter to Sarah Whyman Whitman,
and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to in-
dividual, stealing in through the crannies of this world like so many soft
rootlets or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rendering the hardest
monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you
deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life
displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first
and foremost, against big success and big results, and in favor of the eternal
forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuc-
cessful way, underdogs always, till history comes after they are long dead,
and puts them on the top. (C 8:546)

57
The occasion for this confession was reading George Edward Woodberry’s
essay “Democracy,” a neo-Platonist exposition of the foundations of popu-
lar rule.8 Woodberry argues that the idea of democracy is premised on the
unity of men’s souls. It alone is the regime that gives each the power to
develop their soul’s potential in harmony with all men. So understood the
democratic state is no mere artifice of convention or contract. The state
is the highest expression of the unity of all men’s souls “jointly making
one sum.”9 Woodberry’s essay “is very fine indeed,” James explains, but
is ultimately “too abstract” (C 8:545–46). Too abstract, that is, for the way
Woodberry’s craving to find a spiritual foundation to democracy as its only
sure grounds obscures the importance of the experience and actions of con-
crete individuals.10 As James approvingly cites a piece of colloquial wisdom
elsewhere, “ ‘There is very little difference between one man and another;
but what little there is, is very important’ ” (II 191; emphasis in original.
See also GME; TD). Such a contrast between abstraction and experience
is familiar from James’s philosophical writings. However, the cri de coeur
in this letter equates philosophy’s reduction of individual freedom with a
social and institutional phenomenon he calls “bigness.” What exactly is
bigness? And what does this association of philosophy, politics, and the
experience of modern institutional life reveal about the conditions of free
individuality?
Bigness was a familiar idiom of Gilded Age social criticism, used to
denote the consolidation of money and power in the nation’s emerging cor-
porate economy.11 As Alan Trachtenberg explains in his classical cultural
history of the Gilded Age, the era’s defining feature was “a significant in-
crease in the influence of business in America, corresponding to the emer-
gence of the modern business form of ownership.”12 This “incorporation of
America” involved not only the restructuring of firms from small artisan
units to national combinations with near-monopolistic control over mar-
kets, but also the emergence of “a changed, more tightly structured society
with new structures of control.”13 These transformations signaled ominous
changes for the very idea of American democracy. The consolidation of
unprecedented economic power in the hands of trust corporations signaled
the eclipse of the Jeffersonian ideal of the autonomous yeoman citizen by
the rise of a new mode of corporate capitalism.14
These dramatic transformations of the nation’s political economy played
no small role in the imperial ambitions that would come to concern James.
Writing in the North American Review in 1898, journalist Charles A. Conant
argued that the nation’s rapidly accumulating surplus capital could lead to
economic crisis unless new foreign markets were opened for investment.

58
The most promising sites of investment for the nation’s stagnating capital
were “countries which have not felt the pulse of modern progress.”15 Conant
called for “a broad national policy” of investment in naval power to expand
national interests across the globe in order to open markets in Asia and
Africa to American capital.16 Conant’s argument outlines the strategic logic
of the open door diplomacy proposed by Secretary of State John Hay the
following year. The United States’ competition with European powers for
control over Asian markets shaped an imperial vision of the nation’s ex-
panding naval power as a tool to secure privileged access to foreign econo-
mies and impose tariff structures consonant with the interest of American
creditors.17 Bigness’s emerging nexus of finance capital, military power, and
expanding global hegemony found a bullish champion in Massachusetts
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge envisaged the coordination of military
and economy power as part of the United States’ “large policy.” Drawing
on the imagery of trust consolidation to describe the position of the United
States on the global stage, Lodge writes:
The tendency of modern times is toward consolidation. It is apparent in

capital and labor alike, and it is also true of nations. Small States are of the
past and have no future. The modern movement is all toward the concen-
tration of people and territory into great nations and large dominions. The
great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their pre-
sent defence all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes
for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations
of the world, the United States must not fall out of the line of march.18
Competition in the global economy is impossible without a dramatic ex-

pansion of the state’s military and political influence over the Western
hemisphere. The destiny of the United States in the twentieth century, if it
has any future at all Lodge warns, must be a “big” global power.
The specter of “bigness” enters James’s writings in the winter of 1899
following congressional ratification of the United States’ purchase of the
Philippines from Spain, although precedents can be found in his earlier
remarks on the Venezuela Crisis of 1895 (C 8:498–99; 3:49–50). In an
urgent editorial published in the Boston Evening Transcript, James warns,
“Imperialism and the idol of national destiny—based on martial excite-
ment and mere ‘bigness’ keep revealing their corrupting inwardness more
and more unmistakably” (PT 154; see C 8:522–23, PA). Lodge’s view that
America’s “national destiny … must be ‘big’ at any cost” is both a wrong-
headed policy and a symptom of a nation in crisis (PT 157). Notable is

59
James’s reluctance to draw firm lines between bigness as a political phe-

nomenon referring to American imperialism and bigness as an economic
condition. In both this and subsequent editorials, James denounces the
government’s bad faith negotiation with Filipino nationalists as sympto-
matic of the amoral logic of the market. “On its face it reeked of the infer-
nal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached the perfect
expertness in the art of killing silently with no public squealing or com-
motion the neighbouring small concern” (PT 156). “It was merely a big
material corporation against a small one, the ‘soul’ of the big one consist-
ing of stock moral phrases, the little one owning no soul at all” (PQ 160).
State power and corporate influence become increasingly indistinguisha-
ble in this new age of empire. Commenting on the reelection of President
William McKinley in 1900, James remarks, “The election has not only
given the policy of William McKinley the endorsement (he prayed his God
for) but it has endorsed quite as much the policy of Trusts as the ideal busi-
ness methods in this new state—the old Republic in name—but essentially
an Empire in substance” (C 9:367–68).19
James came to discern the outlines of a broader sense of bigness trans-
forming American society in empire’s conspiracy of business and govern-
ment. “Our national infamy is I fear irremediable, after our massacring
of these poor Filipino ‘rebels’ with whom we have refused to hold any
communication,” he writes to his brother Henry James after the capture of
Manila in February 1899. “The day of ‘big’ness—big national destinies,
political parties, trade-combines, newspapers, is sweeping good principle
and quality out of the world” (C 3:50). Bigness was something more than
either an economic condition or a military policy, however. It was an afflic-
tion that reached into almost every corner of American life. As he writes
in a private letter:
Stillness, harmony sincerity have fled the world, and instead we have “live”
churches, big hideous national destinies, political parities, newspapers,
trade combines. Principles, sincerity, honesty, delicacy all overwhelmed. It
is time to organize an opposition. The resounding idol of mere empty “big-
ness” and “success” is killing every genuine quality and ideal. Was there
ever such a national infamy as this filippine business which we are enact-
ing? And the loathsome greasy cant of McKinley & Co. which we swallow
with it as its sauce! (C 8:499; see also PhD 70, TD 97)
The use of the term “bigness” in passages like these is so broad as to

seem indiscriminate, leading some scholars to read these polemics as an

60
expression of James’s inarticulate rage or resignation against modernity

itself.20
Deborah Coon provides a nuanced interpretation of bigness by situat-
ing it within the broader arc of James’s anti-imperialism. Coon argues
that James interpreted the incorporation of America from the perspec-
tive of the waning power of the individual faced with increasingly com-
plex, massive, and impersonal institutions. Individuality and a sense
of independent agency were being crushed “in an era when humanity
was increasingly in danger of becoming a mere series of interchangea-
ble cogs in a vast military-industrial machine.”21 Coon’s interpretation
rightly underscores the experiential aspect of James’s critique of bigness.
“Bigness” is not so much the name for an objective social phenomenon
as it is James’s attempt to name the experience of waning freedom in the
face of America’s economic and political transformations. Confronting
social problems requires teaching individuals to recover a sense of power
from under the shadow of these hollow institutions. James attacks bigness
in such broad terms in order to “convince people that it was imperative to
struggles against those forces and the social and political evils that sprang
from them.”22
Because James’s use of the term is so capacious, however, it is not en-
tirely clear exactly which forces of “bigness” he would have individuals
struggle against. Coon may overstate her conclusion, but she is certainly
correct in underscoring the experience of acquiescence born of bigness as
a pressing problem for mobilizing a popular opposition to imperialism.
Overwhelmed by the awesome complexity and scale of modern society,
individuals too easily resign in the face of injustice rather than speak out
against it. James decries this resignation as “moral flabbiness” in a 1906
letter to H. G. Wells. In response to Wells’s report on the prison sentence
handed down to anarchist William MacQueen in the aftermath of the
Paterson weavers’ strike, James laments that Americans had lost their very
ability to be moved by injustice.23 The typical American, unlike the British
with their native sense of indignation and idealism, “begins to pooh-pooh
and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general
fund of optimism and respect for expediency. ‘It’s probably right enough.’
‘Scoundrel,’ as you say, ‘but understandable,’ from the point of view of
‘parties interested’” (C 11:267; see also PhD).
Acquiescence is commonly thought of as a form of passive resignation
devoid of political agency. But even resignation is itself an action, James
reminds us, and there is an element of active complicity that comes with
acquiescing in the face of injustice. The refusal to take a stand for right is

61
often synonymous with active partnership in wrong. James underscores

this most damning aspect of Americans’ response to bigness in a letter to
Josephine Shaw Lowell:
It seems to me that the great disease of our country now is the unwilling-
ness of people to do anything that has no chance of succeeding. The or-
ganization of great machines for slick-success is the discovery of our age;
and, with us, the individual, as soon as he realized that the machine will
be irresistible, acquiesces silently, instead of making an impotent row. One
acquiescence leads to another, until acquiescence itself becomes organized.
The impotent row-maker becomes in the eye of public opinion, an ass and a
nuisance. We get to live under the organization of corruption, and since all
needful functions go on, we next treat reform as a purely literary ideal: We
defend our rotten system. Acquiescence becomes active partnership. (C
10:339)
The individual is made grist for the mill of the “great machines” of incor-
porated America. The impersonality of modern institutions is experienced
as a fate-like power, alien to the will of the lone individual. And yet, this
experience of powerlessness obscures the role individual choices and deci-
sions play in creating, sustaining, and even desiring the “great machines
of slick success” that disempower them. Individuals facilitate the power of
bigness through their passivity and complacency.
The opposition between passive obedience and active resistance that
frames James’s polemics on bigness gives credence to Coon’s views that
the basic problem of politics for James is a popular crisis of confidence,
not unlike that crisis of the will that he faced as a young man. In “The
Philippine Question,” James writes of a popular atmosphere of “resigna-
tion to the torrent of events” surrounding the military campaign to sup-
press Filipino insurgents in the winter of 1899. American spectators of
their state’s violence abroad simply acquiesce with a “mixture of inner
unhappiness with fatalistic resignation” (PQ 159). The passivity and res-
ignation that perpetuate complicity in these injustices represent only one
side of James’s lament, however. James’s letters and articles additionally
point toward a false image of activity as another face of this “active part-
nership” with empire. The source of the “moral flabbiness” he decries in
his letter to Wells cited above is not resignation alone. The experience of
bigness provokes both dejection and cravings for intimacy and control.
The moral passivity on display is “understandable in onlooking citizens
only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship

62
of the bitch-Goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpreta-

tion put upon the word success—is our national disease” (C 11:267). James
points to the seduction of success as a reactive, but ultimately fantastic,
craving to identify with American bigness as a source of freedom and
power.
The hunger for “success” was a pillar of Gilded Age cultural ideology.
Louis Hartz famously depicted American cultural discourse at the close
of the century as captured by the Horatio Alger myth that anyone could
achieve the financial success of a robber baron if they simply tried hard
enough.24 In “Acres of Diamonds,” a speech given hundreds of times
across the country, Russell H. Conwell spread the gospel of wealth by
telling Americans that “you ought to get rich, it is your duty to get rich.”25
Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie offered another version of this gospel.
Carnegie’s social Darwinism considered the competition for wealth and
the resulting power of the biggest trusts as evidence of the rationality
of America’s new corporate order. While survival of the fittest meant
that not all could become as wealthy as himself, Carnegie argued that
Americans should not resent this fact. The “man of wealth” is “becom-
ing the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their
service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing
them better than they would or could do for themselves.”26 Winners
or losers, everyone benefits from the pursuit of success. Conwell and
Carnegie’s gospel promises a kind of agency to Americans to participate
in the radical financial transformations taking place before their eyes.
They portray the consolidation of capital in the hands of metropolitan
elites as both an expression of individual power and a contribution to the
common good.
James frequently denounces bigness and success in conjunction, as
the passages cited above demonstrate. Precisely because the two terms
are frequently paired together, scholars have not attended to the ways
they denote different but complementary reactions to the cultural crisis
James was struggling to name in these letters and essays. Where bigness
denotes passive withdrawal and resignation, success names the craving
to recover one’s individuality through intimate attachment to reality.
James’s most substantial reflection on success is found in a set of notes,
penned sometime between 1902 and 1906, that served as the basis for
his speeches to student clubs. These nineteen pages are kaleidoscopic,
moving from a discussion of the purpose of higher education to topics
including the Dreyfus Affair, the Philippines, the meaning of liberalism,
the passions of the mob, the conservativism of Edmund Burke, and the

63
cultural criticism of Gilbert Chesterton.27 At its core is a mugwump argu-

ment about the duty of university-educated men to lend their might in the
struggle of intellect against passion in American life that Perry focuses his
attention on.28 Alongside this language, however, we find James’s richer
social-psychological attention to cravings, desires, and wants. Particularly
telling is the manuscript’s call on university-trained men to awaken their
fellow Americans from the conformist obsession with bigness and success:
People never realize how much the idols they worship are idols of the
tribe, imitated ideals, caught from suggestion, & followed because we are
ashamed to feel isolated. The idol of the American nation to day is what
is called “big success.” To be big, a success must be immediate and fla-
grant; and as the immediate test of success is always market-value, it has
come about that the only success that strikes our national imagination as
big is the making of a fortune… . If the other people had been simpler, we
should have been so too; If none of us had been so rich, we all would have
been happier; but of the spirit of the age, the idol of the tribe, we are both
accomplices and victims. We have blindly followed the vulgar herd and
drawn others to follow us instead of setting an example of distinction. (DN
106; emphasis in original)
Notable is James’s attention to the psychological sources of this urge to

conform to “the vulgar herd.” It is shame at isolation that leads individuals
to cling to success as a stable marker of social status. As we will see in
the following sections, James identifies just such a craving for authority in
his psychologizing account of the monistic temperament as a symptom of
“moral separateness” in Pragmatism. Monism is a philosophy that prom-
ises to compensate for the experience of uncertainty and groundlessness
that increasingly defines modern life. Both monism and success illustrate a
more complicated relationship of acquiescence and assertion, what James
here calls our roles as “both accomplices and victims” than Coon’s ar-
gument would suggest. Monism and success are, on the one hand, afflic-
tions the American student suffers under and, on the other hand, objects
of intense craving and promise. To borrow a concept from literary theorist
Lauren Berlant, success is an object of cruel optimism.29
This interpretation of James’s passing and fragmentary remarks on big-
ness and success risk attributing greater significance to their meaning than
this slight evidence can support. Reading any substantial political meaning
into James’s private remarks and occasional essays on bigness by them-
selves risks overreading them. It is for this reason that we must now turn to

64
James’s more systematic and considered writings on philosophy. Parallels

between these philosophical writings and these more fragmentary pas-
sages are reason for reading themes in James’s philosophical works as
fuller articulation of arguments that are present only incipiently and in-
choately here and in other writings on politics. Before turning to these
writings, however, we must take note of one final aspect of James’s critique
of bigness that has escaped scholarly attention but that points toward the
fuller picture of the promise and dangers of the craving for authority in
Pragmatism. This is his use of prophetic language when he describes the
problem of bigness as one of idolatry.30
In the prophetic tradition, idol worship is a form of bondage that a way-
ward people places upon itself as it turns away from God to worship false
deities, graven images, or false prophets.31 Such idolatry is a permanent
temptation for finite beings after the Fall. James invokes these prophetic
registers to present bigness and success as objects of worship in modern
America. Individuals freely put themselves under the spell of these false
idols. Implicit in James’s charge of idolatry stands a rebuke to the people
for turning away from the one true God. But what is the true God here?
Reading these fragmentary prophetic remarks in terms of the declaration
against bigness James made to Sarah Whyman Whitman in the letter cited
at the beginning of this section, we might infer that the true God he calls
the people back to is a practice of self-reliant individuality born of both
risk and faith. Bigness and success are false gods, promises of intimacy
that tempt the people to abandon their individuality to the bondage to a
false authority. Why the people crave this authority so passionately is the
question we turn to next.
III. Psychologizing Philosophy
This compensatory craving for intimacy and power mirrors a psycholog-

ical dynamic James analyzes in philosophical terms in his essay “The
Sentiment of Rationality.” One of James’s earliest published essays in phi-
losophy, it exemplifies the psychological approach that would define his
mature work. The essay contains in embryonic form elements of his views
on monism and pluralism developed in later works such as The Varieties
of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and Some
Problems of Philosophy.32 “Sentiment” begins by posing the question of
what philosophers mean when they characterize their competing concep-
tions as rational or irrational. His answer, as the title suggests, locates the

65
meaning of rationality in experience itself. Philosophers describe a doc-

trine as rational when it satisfies aesthetic cravings. First among these is
the craving for order, stability, and certainty. A belief is rational, philoso-
phers say, when it provides a calm sense of ease in the person who holds it.
“Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce
the sentiment of rationality” (SR 58). At the core of this craving is an anx-
iety that needs to be soothed by expunging uncertainty from experience.
“Sentiment” figures this anxious craving as an existential feature of the
human condition, but we can hear in James’s depiction the historical symp-
toms of what Paul Jerome Croce has described as the nineteenth century’s
“cultural and theoretical shifts towards uncertainty.”33
James figures this craving to expunge uncertainty from experience as a
desire to “feel at home” in the world. He writes:
What is meant by coming “to feel at home” in a new place, or with new
people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our quarters in a new
room, we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what
doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be
found in cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have learned the
range of all these possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears. And
so it does with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any
essentially new manifestations from their character. (SR 67–68)
Coming to feel at home is an experience of settling expectations, of gain-

ing a sense of comfort in a situation through the exclusions of surprises.
What was once a collection of strange objects and mysterious symbols
to decipher become familiar reminders of comfort. Analogously, a phi-
losophy satisfies the desire for comfort and ease by “banish[ing] uncer-
tainty from the future” (SR 67). We crave a static existence safe from the
“haunting sense of futurity” (SR 67). Despite James’s own reluctance to
historicize his analysis, this depiction of the challenge of being “at home”
is distinctively modern. As Jürgen Habermas observes, modern time con-
sciousness is defined by a reorientation from the customary authority of
the past to the horizon of open futurity. “It is an epoch that lives for the
future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.”34 Modernity and
its future-oriented time consciousness perpetually unsettle the craving for
certainty. The longing for authoritative guidance and order are precisely
the calm harbors that are nowhere to be found amid modernity’s churning
sea of uncertainty.

66
As we will see in the following section, this notion of being at home in

experience is central to James’s philosophy. Philosophy must respond to
the experience of felt needs, and the most basic of these needs is for a con-
ception of the world that allows people to conceive of their lives as sources
of meaning; that is, as free. The craving for certainty is one expression of
this felt need, but by itself it does not exhaust the sentiment of rationality.
Alongside this craving for certainty and order there lies a “sister passion”
for uncertainty and change. James explains: “This is the passion for dis-
tinguishing… . It loves to recognize particulars in their full completeness,
and the more of these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of
incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal details
of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of conceiving things
that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the same time their con-
crete fulness [sic]” (SR 59). This sister craving speaks to James’s own phil-
osophical predilection for pluralism. A monism that presents the future
course of history as devoid of conflict and surprise, he writes in one letter,
is a vision of reality “which leaves the world unheimlich, reptilian, and
foreign to man” (C 6:163). Too singular a hunger for certainty and order in
the face of modernity’s disorienting contingency leads to false projections
of being at home in the cosmos that inevitably fails to recover the feeling
of belonging and freedom it hungers after.
James is a partisan of pluralism, but “Sentiment” is no piece of phil-
osophical propaganda. It does not make the case that his own position is
the only game in town. Sentiments, rather than reasons, are the ultimate
grounds of men’s convictions, James admits, and this includes his own
convictions as well. “In short, it is almost certain that personal temper-
ament will here make itself felt, and that although all men will insist on
being spoken to by the universe in some way, few will insist on being
spoken to in just the same way” (SR 75). To make the case for contingency
as a good to be embraced rather than a danger to be feared means learn-
ing to speak to both sorts of cravings. The sentiment of rationality, that
feeling of “home,” must be reconstructed as a balance of these cravings. It
would need to both “determine expectancy” and “make a direct appeal to
all those powers of our nature which we hold in highest esteem” (SR 89).
James offers his doctrine of the will to believe as one that can satisfy both
cravings by presenting contingency as the condition for collaboratively
creating authority in a common world. He explains:
If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of
revival, or expansion of the human mind, display in common we shall find,

67
I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being,
“The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you pos-
sess.” (SR 73; emphasis in original)
The future-oriented experience of modernity can provide a new shelter

for the human craving to feel at home for men and women who can find
the strength to live without illusions. As we will see in greater detail in
chapters 4 and 5, wrestling with the persistence of these illusions of order
holds consequences for understanding the scope of agency, or what James
here calls the “powers which you possess.”
James’s psychological portrait of the modern self shares an elective affin-
ity with that of another critic of modernity, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche,
like James, conceived of modernity as a time of radical contingency that
destroyed the fixed, moral, and philosophical foundations on which the
premodern world rested. “We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We
have destroyed the bridge behind us—more so, we have demolished the
land behind us!”35 And, like James, Nietzsche understood this experience
of transition as a source of psychic disorientation that leads to a dangerous
nostalgia for the authority and order of a lost world. He calls this nostalgia
“homesickness” and associates it with a drive to revenge. As a palliative
to this craving for home, Nietzsche invites his readers to embrace con-
tingency itself as the horizon for a brave new conception of the self. In
a section of The Gay Science titled “We Who Are Homeless,” he writes,
“We children of the future—how could we be at home in this today! We
are unfavourably disposed towards all ideals that might make one feel at
home in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its ‘realities,’ we don’t
believe they are lasting.”36 Nietzsche’s homeless ones say “yes” to contin-
gency, futurity, and transition as sources of strength to create a bold new
world, rather than a poisonous nostalgia for the safety of God or Truth,
spelled with a capital “T.”37
Modernity’s experience of mobility, futurity, and contingency presents
one possible definition of the world. But so too does it inspire feelings of
anxiety and fear that lead some men and women to long for a conception of
the world that is more stable and comforting. James presents his mediated
solution as one that will reassure those who crave authority without deny-
ing the reality of contingency. He is under no illusion that his solution will
be a universally accepted one. Nausea, rather than reassurance, is always
a possible reaction to this pluralistic depiction of reality. James recounts
the experience of one monastically tempered friend who “told me that the
thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the horrible motion

68
of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed” (DD 136). Living without cer-
tainty demands a rare sort of courage.
IV. Monism, Pluralism, and the Craving for Order
“Sentiment” concludes by turning its attention to the pragmatic conse-

quences of each of these cravings for the moral life. “Anaesthesia is the
watchword of the moral sceptic brought to bay and put to his trumps.
Energy is that of the moralist” (SR 87; emphasis in original). These op-
posed associations of certainty with passivity and contingency with action
are frequent in James’s writings. The association of the craving for author-
ity with anesthetic docility supports Coon’s account of political agency
and acquiescence. In more circumspect moments, however, James is less
willing to draw such strong conclusions about the necessary consequences
each craving holds for conduct. Responding to critics in 1906, James admits
that the monism born of such cravings “dictates nothing” and will “sanc-
tion anything” in terms of consequences (AS 124; emphasis in original).
More important than the doctrines men hold is the spirit with which they
hold them. “Quietism and frenzy thus alike receive the absolute’s permit
to exist. Those of us who are naturally inert may abide in our resigned pas-
sivity; those whose energy is excessive may grow more reckless still” (AS
124). This section turns to Pragmatism and other late writings to examine
how the craving for authority comes to prefigure these seemingly opposed
postures of both resignation and assertion. Like the resignation at bigness
and the frenzy for success discussed in the second section of this chapter,
James’s critique of monism shines a psychological light on the seemingly
contradictory postures of modern agency that frame his vision of empire
as a way of life.
James returns to the topic of temperament in Pragmatism. The lectures
begin by boldly declaring that the history of philosophy can be summa-
rized as the clash of two human temperaments and the opposed cravings
they reflect; namely, the tough-minded and tender-minded temperaments.
The tough-minded tend toward facts and experience; the tender-minded
lean toward principles and ideas. Where the former is skeptical, empiricist,
secular, and pessimistic, the latter is dogmatic, rationalistic, religious, and
optimistic. Such temperaments are not unique to professional philosophers.
James’s audience should recognize both types from everyday life. “In man-
ners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authori-
tarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In

69
art, classics and romantics” (P 12). Reiterating his earlier argument con-
cerning the need to satisfy both sorts of cravings, James admits that neither
set of temperamental commitments alone will satisfy most in the audience.
“Most of us have a hankering for good things on both sides of the line” (P
14). In the face of this divide and the need to find a way to satisfy both sets
of demands, pragmatism’s method of looking to the practical consequences
of these disagreements promises to serve as “a mediator and reconciler” of
this perpetual clash (P 43).
The subsequent lectures demonstrate the uses of the pragmatic method
to resolve (or better: dissolve) a series of eternal philosophical disputes in
a manner that combines the best of both the tender-minded and the tough-
minded while guarding against the excesses of each. The argument builds
across the first three lectures to confront “the most central of all philo-
sophical problems” in the fourth lecture: the problem of the one and the
many (P 64). James call it the most “pregnant” of philosophical problems:
“I mean by this that if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a
decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions
than if you give him any other name ending in ist” (P 64). Monism names
a metaphysics that embodies the craving for authority. This is a world ulti-
mately of order and fixity, where contingency has been tamed. Against the
monistic idealist’s claim that the world is ultimately one stands the skepti-
cal materialist James calls the “pluralist.” This is a philosophy that satis-
fies the craving for difference with its insistence that the ultimately many-
ness of the world is never gathered up into a final unity or system. Where
monism speaks to the tender-minded craving for meaning in the cosmos,
pluralism is a skeptical philosophy for people who want the hard facts.
James applies the pragmatic method to this conflict between spiritual
and material metaphysics to ask what practical consequences each may
hold in conduct. Each side’s claim to ultimate unity or ultimate pluralism
of reality is found to be underdetermined. It is only from the perspec-
tive of human purposes that we can consider the oneness or manyness
of the world, making the future, not the past, the ultimate arbiter of their
debate. Seen from the agent perspective, different contexts reveal different
degrees of manyness and oneness in experience. Consequences, lines of
influence, generic kinds, purposes of action, and narratives are the active
conjunctions that bind the world together in many ways, but so too are
there always boundaries and limits to these connections. “The world is
one just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connection. It is
many just so far as any definite connection fails to obtain” (P 76). To the
extent that the world is ultimately more unified than disjointed, it is as a

70
result of connections built by human effort—through ideas, explanations,

institutions, networks, and technologies. Pragmatism mediates and recon-
ciles the apparent conflict of these two claims with an account of meliorist
pluralism that claims the world is indeed many, but is continually being
made more united through the labor of human action. Individual action in
the face of contingency can be world-building. “Human efforts,” he writes,
“are daily unifying the world more and more in definite systematic ways”
(P 67).38
Would this easy reconciliation assuage his friend’s nightmare of a plu-
ralistic universe of maggots in their carrion bed? James confesses that
pragmatism’s knack for mediating and reconciling will do little to satisfy
the “ultra-monistic way of thinking” (P 73–74). To understand the limits
of his own argument to persuade the monist, James turns his attention to
the psychology that might lead one to embrace the notion of the absolute
unity of the self and world as One. Citing examples of monism, ranging
from neo-Hegelianism to Christian Science and the Vedic philosophy of
Swami Vivekanda, James finds the appeal of monism to lay in its promise
of an experience of intimacy:
I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual
reasoning they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical
feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must somehow at any cost
be true. Oneness overcomes moral separateness at any rate. In the passion
of love we have the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all
sentient life. This mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic
utterances, acknowledges their authority, and assigns to intellectual consid-
erations a secondary place. (P 76; emphasis in original)
Like the urge to conform to the “vulgar herd” in James’s lecture notes and
the craving to feel at home in “Sentiment,” monism appeals to the crav-
ing for order and the anxiety with uncertainty that afflict the modern self.
These mystical experiences of oneness with a force greater than the self
satisfy a longing for an authority that transcends the separateness of indi-
viduals. Monism promises a feeling of being at home in the universe for
those willing to abandon the goods of pluralism in its pursuit.
James psychologizes this craving and defends its claim on the human
heart. “We all have some ear for this monistic music; it elevates and reas-
sures” (P 76). What monism promises is a moral holiday from the burdens
of action and the anxiety of change. To take a moral holiday is “to treat
the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust

71
its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our
finite responsibility” (P 41). James again points to the fear and anxiety of
contingency that drives men to embrace monism. Trust in the ultimate
rationality of the cosmos or in the optimistic course of history releases
individuals of the burdens of responsibility. Monism promises a peaceful
experience of the cosmos safe from contingency and surprise.
The practical consequences of taking such a moral holiday are not
action but rather “quietism” and “indifferentism” to the fate of the world
(P 133). These may be worthy occasional delicacies from the responsibil-
ity of life, but the monist makes a mistake in supposing that its vision of
totality can sustain them. No simple act of wishing or willing can deny
that haunting sense of futurity and surprise that erupts into experience.
“Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us cor-
rect our present formulas,” James writes in the preface to The Meaning of
Truth (MT 4). The fragility of monism’s promise of order and meaning in
the face of the whirling contingency of modern experience can lead just
as soon to anxious reaction as to quiet resignation. Monism’s promise of
absolute unity and order “is shattered if, along with all the union, there has
to be granted the slightest modicum, the most incipient nascency, the most
residual trace, of a separation that is not ‘overcome’” (P 79).
Monism tries to soothe fears of contingency but ultimately only exas-
perates them. On the one hand, anxiety and fear in the face of modern
contingency motivate a compensatory attachment to monism. On the other
hand, this same contingency perpetually threatens to unmask monism as
just that, a fantastic compensation for the feeling of moral separateness.
The craving to escape from time can turn just as easily into a rage against
contingency as monists become increasingly dogmatic and authoritarian
in order to cling to their fragile fantasy. It is against the failure of monism
to satisfy the very craving it promises to fulfill that James’s meliorist plu-
ralism proposes a vision of being at home in the universe that seeks to
affirm contingency rather than to vengefully domesticate it.
James discusses the failure of monism to fulfill its promise of a
moral holiday in detail in A Pluralist Universe. Moving from the con-
trast between pluralism as scientific materialism and idealism as reli-
gious monism, which frames the argument of Pragmatism, A Pluralistic
Universe focuses on the contrast between Hegelian monism and James’s
own meliorist pluralism as two contending spiritual responses to the
unsettling experience of modernity. “The vaster vistas which scientific
evolutionism has opened, and the rising tide of social democratic ideals,
have changed the type of our imagination, and the older monarchical

72
theism is obsolete or obsolescent,” he writes of the modern condition in

his opening lecture. “The place of the divine in the world must be more
organic and intimate” (PU 18). Both monism and pluralism promise an
“intimacy” with the cosmos more consonant with human cravings and
flourishing than the “foreignness” of cynical materialism that denies
the reality of both faith and will. A deterministic materialism defines
the world “so as to leave man’s soul upon it as a sort of outside passen-
ger or alien” might inspire the panic and terror James experienced as a
young man, but it will not satisfy the all-too-human craving to figure
oneself as an agent in the world (PU 16). Monism’s vision of spiritual
unity promises the deepest possible continuity with the cosmos, but its
repudiation of contingency results in a similar definition of the world as
an alien and inhuman home. Disappointment is a more probable conse-
quence than comfort.
These lectures present the contrast between monism and pluralism in
the boldest cosmological terms. The monist defines the world as a “block-
universe” (PU 39). Taking aim at the Hegelian orthodoxy that dominated
American and British philosophical circles, A Pluralistic Universe por-
trays monism as an attempt to explain away contradictions and uncer-
tainty from experience.39 For the monist, the meaning of concepts follows
from their place in a larger organic whole. All parts of experience are
included and nothing is excluded within this totality. When faced with a
seeming contradiction or conflict, the monist looks to a higher-order unity
to explain how the apparent reality of difference can be reconstituted as
the identity of Reason, or the Absolute, or God. Pluralism, by contrast,
presumes that it is the whole that needs to be explained in terms of its
parts, not the other way around. But this explanation will not be a merely
reductive one because the pluralist acknowledges that no one perspective
on experience can exclude the perception of all others. Nature’s seem-
ingly stable orders and systems are inhabited by irreducible elements of
chance and contingency. “Something always escapes” from all claims to
closure and totality (PU 145). Like Diogenes in his tub, the pluralist hap-
pily admits that
there may never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never
get collected, that some part of it may remain outside of the largest com-
bination of it ever made, and that a distributive form of reality, the each-
form, is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form
commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the self evident thing. (PU 20;
emphasis in original)

73
A pluralistic universe is one where the boundaries between things are leaky
and porous rather than final and fixed. Connections actually made exist
within a sea of possibilities excluded. This is a world of becoming, where
process always exceeds product and chance occurrences are inexhaustible.
James borrows a Hegelianism to describe such a world as one of “the bad
infinite”: an ongoing dialectic with no final synthesis or Aufhebung (PU
51). Experience always remains open to the shock of further experience.
Even God Himself, on the pluralist view, is a finite being in a contingent
cosmos that even He cannot master or control (PU 137–49).
James invites his audience to think of the distinctions between monism
and pluralism in pragmatic terms: What practical habits of conduct follow
from each? The difference between foreignness and intimacy translates
into one of habits of trust and habits of wariness (PU 19). Habits of trust
are tendencies to act spontaneously, even courageously, in the faith that
one’s actions will contribute to ameliorating the future trajectory of a
world still in the making. Habits of wariness are tendencies to hesitate
and to settle for what is given in fear of the unknown consequences that
change or surprise might bring. Monism’s claim to intimacy needs to be
judged in terms of its ability to produce such habits of trust. The fusing of
the self with a power greater than the self, whether God or Reason or the
Absolute, promises an experience of harmony in the universe. Portraying
the greater order of this cosmos as a mighty One that includes the individ-
ual among its intimate parts, monism overcomes the anxious feeling of
the moral separateness of individuals. The self shares an intimate kinship
with the Absolute. Your own actions and beliefs contribute in some way to
its greater realization. Like he did with monism’s mystical abandonment
of intellect to authority in Pragmatism, James foregrounds the dangers of
monism’s promise of a moral holiday. A monistic universe allows us “to
let the world wag on its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands
than ours and are none of your business” (P 41). What makes this holiday a
distinctively moral one is the suspension of responsibility that the promise
of an ordered and perfect cosmos solicits.
Here too, however, the promise of intimacy as an anchor in the flux
of experience is one monism cannot deliver on. James asks his audience
to consider: In what sense is there any sort of shared identity between
the concrete perspective of the individual and that of an abstraction like
the Absolute? “As such, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves
nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or success,
friends or enemies, victories or defeats” (PU 27; emphasis in original). All
the challenges and trials that constitute the meaning of human experience

74
are inaccessible to a being that is perfect and complete. If such perfection

exists, it must then be something radically divorced from the lived world
of human doing and suffering. Monism presumes “a universe in many edi-
tions, one real one, the infinite folio, or édition de luxe, eternally complete;
and then various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mu-
tilated each in its own way” (P 124). Absolutism promises intimacy but,
when seen from the agent’s perspective, reproduces the dualism it claims
to overcome. The practical consequences of a vision that delegates the self
to live among the mutilated editions of the unattainable ideal are habits of
wariness, rather than trust.
From a pragmatic point of view, the consequences of the monist’s fail-
ure to domesticate contingency are plural. One might sink into a pessimis-
tic horror at the ultimate foreignness of the imperfections of this mutilated
world divorced from the perfection of the édition de luxe. James himself
knew this reaction all too well. But where some men would resign in the
face of such failure, others will lust ever more hungrily and aggressively
after this ideal world. James points to this other reaction with his repeated
insistence on the authoritarian streak in the monist’s temperament. Unlike
the pluralist’s sensitivity to partiality and experiment, the monist disavows
contingency through a dogmatic assertion of the necessity of his claims.
“The temper of monists have been so vehement, as almost at times to be
convulsive: and this way of holding a doctrine does not easily go with
reasonable discussion and the drawing of distinctions” (P 78). Like the
formalist in manners and the authoritarian in government, monism’s failed
promise to satisfy the craving for order breeds inflexibility and dogmatism.
Anticipating the arguments we will examine in the following chapters,
James draws an analogy between the authoritarian disavowal of contin-
gency and imperialist rhetoric. Pantomiming the monist’s incredulous re-
action to the pluralist’s seemingly anarchic and unsystematic world, James
exclaims, “A universe with such as us contributing to create its truth, a
world delivered to our opportunisms and our private comparison. Home-
rule for Ireland would be a millennium in comparison. We’re not more
fit for such a part than the Filipinos are ‘fit for self-government’ ” (P 125;
emphasis in original).
The interruption of contemporary political events into these lectures
suggests that James saw a link between the questions of philosophy and
the problems of politics. Indeed, philosophical works like Pragmatism
and A Pluralistic Universe can be fruitfully read as both continuing and
developing further the fragmentary arguments from his anti-imperialist
Nachlass. As he tells his audience at the beginning of Pragmatism, the

75
clash of temperaments and the cravings he examines are not the particu-
larities of professional philosophers. They are features of their own lives.
They too feel these cravings for authority, they long for calm and ease, and
they too feel these reactive attitudes of resentment and denial in the face
of contingency. To see how James’s account of contingency and cravings
inform his broader social criticism, we turn in the following chapter to his
exploration of these political consequences of the cravings to master con-
tingency through the strenuous life.
V. Politicizing Psychology, Psychologizing Politics
“All ‘homes’ are in finite experience; finite experience as such is home-

less,” James explains in Pragmatism. “Nothing outside the flux secures
the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own intrinsic promises
and potencies” (P 125). James invites his readers to join him in embracing
contingency and finitude as goods rather than ills. A pragmatic method
“to unstiffen all our theories” invites the monist, too, to loosen his anxious
grip (P 78; emphasis in original). There are other cravings beyond cer-
tainty, and pragmatism’s pluralistic perspective promises a more balanced
satisfaction of existential needs with “no need of this dogmatic rigoristic
temper” (P 78). “Something always escapes,” James observes of moder-
nity’s deep pluralism. “‘Ever not quite’ has to be said of the best attempts
made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The plural-
istic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a
kingdom” (PU 145). This is not a world without order. It is an order in the
making, forever being cobbled together like a diplomatic accord that could
always fall apart at the last minute rather than a sovereign law imposed
by imperial decree. Only a cosmos with room for both faith and finitude,
order and freedom, can mediate and reconcile the competing cravings that
have shaped the history of philosophy.
Loosening the craving for authority and embracing this less certain and
wilder vision of contingency is no easy task. Pluralism may be only bear-
able for those able to “fall back on a certain ultimate hardihood” to live
“without assurances or guarantees” (AS 124). Or, as Nietzsche puts the
same point in his meditations on the courage and strength needed to repu-
diate the temptations of homesickness, “The hidden Yes in you is stronger
than all the Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease;
and you must sail the seas, you emigrants, you too are compelled to this
by—a faith!”40 It is unsurprising that James and Nietzsche both saw their

76
respective pluralisms, with their demanding virtues of courage and re-

pudiation of the craving for order, as minority reports in the history of
philosophy. This is not an optimistic conclusion, but it is the only one
James thinks the evidence warrants given the tenacity and hunger with
which men hold on to the fantasy of certainty. This is modernity’s double
bind: the dissolution of traditional markers of certainty both opens up new
possibilities for creativity and freedom, all the while intensifying the bad
faith that flees it into false hopes of order, safety, and certainty.
This chapter has examined James’s account of the craving for certainty
and its pragmatic consequences to reconstruct the psychological underpin-
nings of his political thought. James’s account of American empire ought to
be interpreted within the contours of the crisis of authority facing modern
agents attempting to negotiate the burdens of action in an uncertain world.
This means delving into both “the political and psychological” aspects of
freedom, as Colin Koopman observes.41 The psychological aspect of free-
dom at stake here is not simply that of motivation and inspiration, how-
ever. Drawing too close a parallel between James’s personal crisis of will
and the political acquiescence that he denounces in his political essays
obscures the craving for authority, mastery, and order that lie at the center
of James’s vision of empire as a way of life. James’s psychological ap-
proach to politics goes deeper than either controlling passions, as Perry’s
mugwump portrait suggests, or motivating and inspiring action, as Coon’s
anarchist James does so well. It dives deep into the existential anxieties,
cravings, and resentments that circulate below the surface of everyday life
and yet hold the most profound and, at times, destructive consequences
for politics. Both the hunger for certainty and the resentment at its frus-
tration drive a strange oscillation of resignation and rage in American life
that James saw as central to the attractions of empire and its promise of a
renewed sense of masculine virility and national purpose.

77
CHAPTER 3 Taming the Strenuous Life
I. Manly Temperaments
Recall Pragmatism’s claim to reconcile and mediate the tough-minded

and tender-minded temperaments. Each is characterized by a set of philo-
sophical “traits” (P 13). On the side of the tender-minded are rationalism,
optimism, free will, theism, monism, and dogmatism. On the side of the
tough-minded are empiricism, pessimism, fatalism, pluralism, and skep-
ticism. James personifies the distinction between the two philosophical
temperaments as the clash between two types of men. The tender and
tough-minded temperaments are as different from one another as “are
tender-footed Bostonians pure and simple” and “Rocky Mountain toughs”
(P 14). This contrast between the effort and freedom of the American
pioneer and the culture and gentility of the metropolitan consumer was a
familiar trope in Gilded Age political and cultural discourse. For exam-
ple, Governor Theodore Roosevelt marshaled precisely these terms in his
renowned paean to imperialism, “The Strenuous Life,” in the spring of
1899. Roosevelt’s speech aimed to rally national support behind a coun-
terinsurgency campaign to suppress nationalist opposition to the United
States’ newly purchased rule of the Philippines. He called on Americans
to “play the part of men” and embrace the nation’s newfound imperial
duties.1 Roosevelt posed this challenge of empire in terms of a choice
between two visions of masculinity. On one side was the man of the
“strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife,” who would
sacrifice his petty interests, and even his life itself, for the chance of tast-
ing the exhilaration of struggle and the thrill of victory.2 On the other
was the man of “ignoble ease… . The timid man, the lazy man, the man
who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great
78
fighting, masterful virtues.”3 Empire’s new frontier holds the promise for
a generation of rugged men to live the strenuous life and resist the nation’s
luxurious decline.
Roosevelt’s dichotomy between the man of ease and the man of the
strenuous life offers a vivid illustration of two seemingly contradictory
reactions to the experience of modernity James examined in philosophical
terms in Pragmatism: namely, the conformist withdrawal of resignation
and the heroic fantasy of sovereign mastery. James surely felt urges toward
both responses, but we miss an important insight when we narrow James’s
fascination to the clinical terms of his own morbidity. Continuing the con-
textual and social approach of the previous chapter, this chapter examines
the strenuous life as both a cultural idiom of Gilded Age political thought
and central ballast for the ideology of American empire. At this intersec-
tion of culture and empire, we find a peculiar melancholia affecting Gilded
Age republican political thought.4
Gilded Age republicanism, likes its classical predecessor, considered
civic virtue as the foundations of political freedom. The stability of the
civitas rests on the character of its citizens. Similarly, it viewed moral cor-
ruption as a grave political threat. Where Gilded Age neorepublicanism
breaks from its Roman and revolutionary predecessors is in its expressiv-
ist conception of civic regeneration. The corrupting decadence of a con-
sumer society was to be kept in check by the raw experience of frontier
regeneration. The wild, violent frontier became a mythic site for renewing
civic virtue from the corrupting force of civilization. What makes this
republicanism melancholic, however, was the physical absence of the un-
settled frontier as a site of renewal. In its place, Gilded Age republicans
reimagined the globe as an imperial frontier. This imaginative projection
of a mythic frontier beyond the continent would make the strenuous life of
empire the bulwark against civic decline.
John Dewey captures the melancholic character of Gilded Age po-
litical thought in a passing remark about James himself, no friend of
imperialism. James’s emphasis on willing, action, and faith “summed
up an age, a pioneer age, when it was passing from the scene.”5 Dewey
correctly observes the way James’s thought was rooted in a particu-
lar historical context; however he, like many commentators since him,
comes close to reducing James’s philosophy to the discourse of a par-
ticular stage in the nation’s historical development. James repeated the
melancholic and gendered terms of Gilded Age republicanism; but he
did so with a difference. Theodore Roosevelt, his former student, mar-
shaled the language of the strenuous life in order to satisfy the longing

79
for regeneration through violence. James figured a practice of strenu-

ous individuality in order to subvert it.
James held no illusions about the potentially violent consequences of
the strenuous mood. During the “relapse into barbarism” occasioned by
the Venezuela crisis, James discovered “how near the surface the fight-
ing instinct remains in Mankind, and how little stimulus is required to
touch-off the fighting nerve” (C 8:117). James’s anti-imperialism sought
to tap these fighting instincts and redirect them toward less destructive
ends. Like pragmatism’s promise to “mediate and reconcile” the clash of
temperaments, James’s psychological approach to politics aimed to square
intellect and action, culture and wildness, without sacrificing the goods of
the Boston tenderfoot for the vitalizing seductions of warfare. When we
take this anti-imperialism as an important subtext for his mature writing
on the strenuous life, the political registers of these philosophical works
are thrown into sharp relief. These texts rescript the strenuous life and
work to subvert the public’s melancholic cravings.
This chapter begins with a study of republican melancholia as a form
of imperial ideology in order to recontextualize two of James’s texts writ-
ten at the outbreak of the war, Talks to Teachers (1899) and The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902). Both texts model dissident performances
of strenuousness where experiences of crisis and powerlessness are trans-
formed into sources of ethical energy. These texts rhetorically subvert
the republican rhetoric of strenuous regeneration by channeling it toward
nonviolent ends. Where Roosevelt’s melancholic republicanism turned to
the strenuous mood as a means of disciplining the self and interpolating a
national subject, James’s examples of strenuousness draw their force from
their exemplarity. The force of exemplarity is not a command for mimetic
imitation. An exemplar is rather an outstanding model of moral action that
interrupts received habits and provokes the audience to reexamine their
own moral motives, beliefs, and conduct.6 Taking James’s discussion of
sainthood in Varieties as a guide, this chapter shows how these texts mobi-
lize the force of the example to both rehabilitate a notion of strenuousness
while guarding against its imperial excesses.
II. Republican Melancholia and Regenerative Violence
In what sense can Gilded Age republicanism be described as melan-

cholic? James’s psychological investigation of philosophy in terms of anx-
iety, desire, and disavowal (examined in the previous chapter) bears some
Taming the Strenuous Life | 79

80
family resemblance to the insights being developed at the same moment

by the nascent science of psychoanalysis. By describing Gilded Age re-
publicanism as melancholic, I mean to bring out frequently overlooked
elective affinities in James’s psycho-pragmatic approach to authority with
the terms of psychoanalysis.7 Psychoanalysis characterizes melancholia as
a symptomatic response to a traumatic experience of loss. Freud classi-
cally pairs melancholia with mourning in his 1917 essay, “Mourning and
Melancholia,” to illustrate the pathological character of the former.8 Both
mourning and melancholia represent the traumatic experience of loss of
a loved object. Where mourning involves accepting that loss as a means
of working through the trauma, melancholia is a neurosis that develops
when the ego disavows the loss of its object, refusing to accept it as gone.
In melancholia, the ego narcissistically identifies itself with the missing
object to shore up the experience of loss. The ego, however, makes a dis-
appointing counterfeit of the lost object itself. The result is an experience
of self-hatred. The divided ego seeks to punish itself for failing to be a real
enough proxy for the missing object. On Freud’s account, melancholia is
characterized by an ambivalent economy of self-love and aggression.
The Gilded Age’s disorienting experience of modern contingency was
marked by the felt loss of a whole host of loved objects: the yeoman agrar-
ian economy, paternal authority in the family, Anglo-Saxon ethnic homo-
geneity, fantasies of free-market infallibility in the Panic of 1893, and so
on. Republican political thought responded to these transformations with
an ambivalence akin to the ego’s relationship to loss. This ambivalence
took the form of a nostalgic celebration of yeoman republican virtues like
courage, self-mastery, and sacrifice, just as the economic and agrarian
basis of this republican form of life was being eclipsed. Without open land
or artisan labor to ground the practice of republican freedom, Gilded Age
neorepublicans turned toward an expressivist language of raw experience.
Virtue was seen to be cultivated through vital experiences of danger, vio-
lence, and war. Like the vengeful self-hatred of Freud’s melancholic ego,
an ambivalent economy of nostalgia and belligerence characterizes the
Gilded Age republicanism’s modernist moment.
Nowhere is this political melancholia clearer than in the response
to the US Census Bureau’s decision to close the geographical fron-
tier to further settlement in 1890. The frontier played a mythical role
in American self-understanding over the course of its transformation
from a colony to a nation-state. From the Puritans’ prophetic errand
in the wilderness to Henry David Thoreau’s antebellum adventures in
Walden Pond, the wild has been figured in the nation’s psyche as a space

81
of moral renewal and regeneration.9 The pioneer repeats the original

American experience of fleeing the moral corruption of the Old World
in the frontier beyond the colony by regressing to a simpler and purer
state of virtue. In his classic study of the frontier myth, Richard Slotkin
argues that regression through violence in the wild is what promises
the pioneer’s renewal from civilizational corruption.10 The pioneer dem-
onstrates his mastery over the unmastered wild and the uncivilized
non-European he encounters on the frontier through acts of violence.
In an inversion of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, it is through the vio-
lent act of killing the Other, an act licensed by the very savagery he
seeks to overcome, that the pioneer achieves the recognition he desires.
The pioneer proves both his distance from the moral corruption of the
Old World and his virile mastery over the New World by indulging in
and transcending this savagery. The frontier symbolizes a mythic state
of exception where this ritual of moral and civic regeneration through
violence can take place. So long as there is wilderness, the nation can
renew its original contract by episodically purging itself of moral cor-
ruption through westward expansion.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier
in American History,” is both a symptom and a diagnosis of republican
melancholia. Turner proposes an explanation for American political devel-
opment in terms of an ongoing process of renewal along the frontier:
Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a

single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing
frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social devel-
opment has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. The per-
ennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with
its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive
society, furnish the forces dominating the American character. … In this
advance, the frontier has been the outer edge of the wave—the meeting
point between savagery and civilization.11
The “continuous touch” with the wild’s archaic power lays at the heart of
the United States’ exceptional political development. The European set-
tler undergoes a psychic and moral transformation in the New World as
he seeks to adapt to its harsh conditions. He is required to become more
savage to survive the environment and master it with his own strength.
As Turner explains this transformation, “The wilderness masters the colo-
nist.”12 Wilderness regeneration is the condition for cultivating the virtues

82
of self-reliance and rugged individuality that define the American char-

acter. This transformation is not a singular event, however. As cities and
railways moved westward, the mores of commercial society moved too
and tamed the wild virtues of the pioneer. Turner’s frontier is a process,
the edge of a wave, in which a dialectic of overcivilization and wilder-
ness regeneration drive westward expansion. Because commercial society
inevitably tames and corrupts that which is vital in the American char-
acter, the frontier’s promise of “perennial rebirth” is a bulwark against
overcivilization.
Turner’s essay concludes on an ambiguous note. The closure of the fron-
tier, that vital, generative source of American political development for
over four centuries, marks the conclusion of the “first period” of American
history.13 Is the end of the frontier merely a point of transition in an evolv-
ing history of national progress, or is it a sign of coming centuries of de-
cline? While Turner draws no strong conclusions in his essay, prophecies
of national decline were common among Gilded Age historians.14 Brooks
Adams and Henry Adams both penned influential historical works that
charted civilization’s continual decline since the spiritual and cultural
pinnacle of medieval Europe. Brooks Adams went so far as to propose a
materialist theory of civilizational decline, whereby the pressures of in-
stitutionalization, centralization, and economic competition inevitably
worked to exhaust civilization’s vital energies. “Consequently,” he explains
in his 1896 The Laws of Civilization and Decay, “the survivors of such a
community lack the power necessary for renewed concentration, and must
probably remain inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the
infusion of barbarian blood.”15
Both historically and spatially closer than the virile strength of medi-
eval Europe was the memory of the “barbarian blood” spilt on the battle-
fields of the Civil War. Like the frontier, the Civil War became a mythic
era of heroic self-assertion and civic renewal for elite men in the 1890s.
Both sites marked imagined periods of national glory that threatened to
become undone by the corrupting luxury of commercial society. Associate
Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes skill-
fully interweaves the melancholic longing for barbarian blood with the re-
generative meaning of martial sacrifice in his 1895 Memorial Day address,
“The Soldier’s Faith.”16 Holmes’s speech takes aim at both possessive in-
dividualism and reformist concern for the welfare of the downtrodden to
denounce “cosmopolitanism” as a steady degeneration into nihilism.17
A society defined by its appetite for consumption and entertainment is
lacking in the self-discipline and virtue that republican freedom demands

83
of citizens. War, by contrast, teaches a duty-bound morality that binds men

together as a nation. Himself a veteran who felt “the passion of life to its
top” on the battlefield, Holmes tells his audience that martial virtues are
the nation’s “inheritance.”18 It is their duty to tend to the glowing embers
of the warrior ethos that continue to burn away under popular culture’s
fantasy of ease and leisure. War is “horrible and dull,” and he has no wish
to see a younger generation “called to the master’s feet” as he himself
was. But warfare alone, Holmes insists, has the power to renew and “some
teacher of that kind we all need.”19
The closure of the frontier and the growing historical distance from the
patriotic gore of the Civil War created the cultural and psychic conditions
for imagining expansion beyond the boundary of the continent as an op-
portunity for renewal through the regenerative power of the wild. In a late
essay, Turner suggested that such possibilities for renewing the frontier exist
in “lands beyond the seas.”20 Crucially, imperialism served to soften the
tensions between civic virtue and commercial society rather than to tran-
scend them. Both civic myth and commercial society converged in a pur-
suit of empire to negotiate the paradox of resisting the corruption of luxury
while promoting the pursuit of finance capital. We saw one statement of
the economic rationale for overseas expansion in Charles A. Conant’s argu-
ment about surplus capital in the previous chapter. More representative of
the paradoxical reconciliation of republican melancholia and free-market
rationality were the influential writings of naval historian Alfred Thayer
Mahan.21 In The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660–1783 and the
two-volume The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and
Empire: 1793–1812, Mahan argues that naval supremacy is the key factor
in the rise and fall of great nations.22 Drawing on the lessons of Britain’s
rise as a great power, Mahan’s histories project future consequences for
the United States in terms of its geopolitical power to hold key strategic
resources in the Western hemisphere, such as the Isthmian Canal and the
Pacific Islands. Without rule over colonies in the Caribbean and Hawaiian
islands, “the ships of the United States … will be like land birds, unable
to fly far from their own shores.”23 The ability to fly unimpeded is essential
for the pursuit of military greatness in an age of competing empires, all the
while expanding the nation’s economic power.
Along with the corrupting force of commerce, republican arguments
figured racial contamination as another threat to civic virtue. For example,
Reverend Josiah Strong presented the duty of imperial expansion in apoc-
alyptic terms that transfigured the Puritan errand in the wild into a mil-
lennial duty for global racial domination. Predating the actual closure of

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the frontier, Strong’s popular 1885 Our Country offers a prediction of what
awaits America in “this new stage of history” once civilization’s world-
historical transition from east to west is complete. Strong’s jeremiad syn-
thesizes Christian eschatology with social Darwinism to warn of a loom-
ing crisis of overpopulation and food scarcity that will result in “the final
competition of the races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled.”24
To survive this coming race apocalypse, the United States must assert
itself by extending out west across the Pacific, south through the Americas,
and finally east again into Africa. It will not be arms and technology that
decide the outcome but rather a competition of “vitality and civilization”
in the coming struggle for survival of the fittest.25 The American Anglo-
Saxon is uniquely fit to win this battle because of his economic power,
“instinct for colonizing,” and the intensity of his mental constitution.26 It is
nothing short of a duty for the United States to rule over the planet in the
name of a Christian commonwealth and uplift the uncivilized races.
Strong’s argument stresses the moral contribution Anglo-Saxon empire
would make to humanity, yet his jeremiad is a rebuke of the corrupting
domestic tendencies at work in the United States.27 The arrival of new im-
migrants on the nation’s shores is taxing the Christian mores and energetic
personality needed to survive the struggle of the races. Catholicism and
Mormonism; the vice of intemperance; the crowded, polyglot tenements
of the nation’s sprawling cities; imported socialist and anarchist ideas; and
the worship of wealth are all “dangerous and destructive elements” sap-
ping America’s spiritual strength.28 Americans must return to the Christian
gospel and the church itself must “rise to a higher level of sacrifice” if the
nation is to be protected from decline.29 Strong compares the immigration
“crisis” to the outbreak of the Civil War and asks his readers whether they
are ready to sacrifice their own money and power to protect the Anglo-
Saxon race as their forefathers did for the Union.
These multiple threads of republican melancholia—anxieties of over-
civilization, regeneration through violence, suspicion of commerce, fears
of race contamination, and celebration of martial violence and self-sacrifice
as sources of personal and civic renewal—are exemplified in the strenu-
ousness of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s celebrity in his early career as
a writer and junior politician was due in no small part to how he presented
himself to the public as the very example of manly renewal through the
strenuous life.30 According to the vivid mythology Roosevelt constructed
around his own biography, his physical weakness as a child made him an
object of ridicule and harassment. His life changed when, on the advice of
his family doctor that he would only be able to develop his spirit by first

85
developing his body, young Teddy announced, “I will make my body!”31

Roosevelt spent his adulthood making his body by heading out beyond the
frontier, first as a cowboy mastering the west and later as a Rough Rider
charging up San Juan Hill.
Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech challenged Americans to follow
his model and make their bodies in order to stem the tide of individu-
alism, racial intermixing, and intellectualism sweeping America toward
“the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”32 Americans must
think of themselves as pioneers of an emerging global empire. Roosevelt
argues in “National Duties” that “we are a nation of pioneers. … Our
country has been populated by pioneers, and therefore it has in it more
energy, more enterprise, more expansive power than any other in the wide
world.”33 Invoking the central vitalist tropes of republican melancho-
lia, Roosevelt warns that the nation’s “expansive power” is under threat
both domestically and internationally. The pioneer spirit can only sur-
vive through expanding American influence faster and more aggressively
than Britain, Spain, or Russia in an age of competing empires. “You, the
sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your
lives as worthy as they made theirs.”34 With neither the West to win nor
blood sacrifice to offer up on the altar of the Civil War, imperial expan-
sion promises new avenues for remaining true to this ancestry. Unlike the
shackles of British imperialism that the United States freed itself from
in the Revolution, however, Roosevelt insists that this new imperialism
will be a distinctly humanitarian project of uplifting the world’s peoples.
America’s expansion is a “duty towards people living in barbarism to see
that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by de-
stroying barbarism itself.”35
Roosevelt, like Strong, understood the imperative to expand as a re-
sponse to the threat of domestic degeneration at home. Both commerce
and racial mixing put American liberty at risk. “If we stand idly by, if we
seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the
hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk
of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger people will pass us by,
and will win for themselves the domination of the world.”36 Only virility
itself is self-reliance in this coming competition with “bolder and stronger
people.” Echoing Strong’s anxiety about Anglo- Saxon racial decline,
Roosevelt calls on men to become fighters and women to become breeders
of Anglo-Saxon children. Courage, hard work, and love of daring are the
virtues most wanting. The alternative is to become effete like China, “con-
tent to rot by inches in ignoble ease.”37

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James read the text of Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech and pub-
lished a rejoinder, “Governor Roosevelt’s Oration,” in the Boston Evening
Transcript.38 The speech’s impassioned rhetoric struck him as the work
of the same sort of immaturity he witnessed in Roosevelt when he was
a student in James’s comparative anatomy class at Harvard two decades
earlier.39 “Although in middle life, as the years age, and in a situation of
responsibility concrete enough,” James writes of the governor, “he is still
mentally in the Sturm and Drang period of early adolescence” (GRO 163).
Roosevelt’s celebration of martial experience as an end in itself is politi-
cally irresponsible for it must celebrate the courage and virility of Jefferson
Davis no less than that of Lincoln and Grant. James calls Roosevelt’s cel-
ebration of regeneration through warfare “abstract” for its inattention to
the lives and perspectives of the Filipinos suffering under its pursuit. The
governor “swamps everything together in one flood of abstract bellicose
emotion” (GRO 164).
James faults Roosevelt for allowing emotion to distort the issue, but
the problem was neither its emotional nature nor the craving for stren-
uous experience. James, too, was an advocate of the strenuous life. On
“the battle-field of human history,” he pronounced in his 1891 essay
“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” it is “the strenuous type
of character” who will triumph over the easygoing personality (MPML
161). James shared Roosevelt’s keen sense of the value of courage, ex-
citement, and passion as essential to living the good life.40 Writing to
Frances Rollins Morse the following year, James admits sympathy for
the urge “to celebrate mere vital excitement” as “a protest against hum-
drum solemnity.” But to elevate this experience to “an ideal and a duty,”
as he found Oliver Wendell Holmes’s celebrations of the regenerative
power of soldierly life to do, was “to pervert it altogether” (C 9:184).
The question James’s anti-imperialism poses is not how to purge passion
from political life. It is rather that of how to harness it and redirect it
against violence and war.
III. Habit, Will, Effort
To understand James’s intervention in the discourse of republican mel-

ancholia, we must now turn our attention to both his personal struggle
with morbidity, as Perry calls it, and its implications for his account of
action in The Principles of Psychology. While James’s concern with the
strenuous life predates his concern with imperialism, it was what George

87
Cotkin calls “the noisy ranting of Roosevelt and his jingoist supporters”
that provoked James to understand the political stakes of his conception of
the strenuous life in a new light.41 This section examines James’s biograph-
ical and scientific statements on willing and effort to set the stage for the
examination of his anti-imperialist rescripting of the strenuous life in the
remainder of the chapter.
A twenty-eight-year-old James suffered a life-altering mental and physi-
cal collapse upon returning to Cambridge from his studies abroad in 1870.
The episode left him housebound, with severe eyestrain and other ailments
that would continue to plague him throughout his life. James later con-
ceived of this experience of “soul-sickness” as a crisis of philosophical
confidence.42 At its core were questions of free will and whether or not
the deterministic sciences were correct in their description of nature as a
closed system. In a diary entry from April, James declares to have found a
philosophical resolution to his psychic and physical ailments through read-
ing the works of Charles Renouvier:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the part of

Renouvier’s second “Essais” and see no reason why his definition of Free
Will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have
other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will
assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act
of free will shall be to believe in free will. (LWJ 1:147; emphasis in original)
The existence of the will is not something to be proven by scientific theo-

rems or philosophical deduction. James would make his will through be-
lieving in his freedom, just as Roosevelt would claim to make his body
through action. The entry expresses the core of what will become the cen-
tral elements of his mature pragmatism and pluralism: the priority of prac-
tical belief over theoretical knowledge, the pursuit of action as means of
self-creation, and a meliorist faith in the will to believe.
This experience of crisis served as the model for James’s psycholog-
ical understanding of the will in his epochal study of the human mind,
The Principles of Psychology. Principles presents consciousness as a form
of action rather than as an organ of representation.43 Mental ideas and
purposes shape perception and orient the mind toward concrete actions.
“Every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a
fighter for ends” (PP 1:144; emphasis in original). This active conception
of the mind culminates in the Principles’ chapter on the will.44 As opposed
to the onto-theological tradition from Augustine to Kant that understood

88
the will as a divine spark or ontological kernel of the self, Principles charts
a semiotic of willing in terms of the interplay of habit and effort.45
Living beings are “bundles of habits” (PP 1:109). Habits are learned
structures of action that a body performs in response to cues from its
environment. As learned, they represent a latent level of intelligent
decision-making that agents are constantly exercising. This intelligence
is latent in the sense that habits are seldom consciously chosen or willed.
The defining feature of habitual conduct is that it is exercised with fluid-
ity and ease precisely because it is not consciously calculated. “Which
valve of my double door opens first? Which way does my door swing?
etc. I cannot tell the answer; yet my hand never makes a mistake” (PP
1:120). As this example suggests, conduct is the result of the coordinated
activity of bodily systems, functions, and parts working together. The
complexity of such an operation attests to the latent intelligence that is
always operative in habit. Habits are a sort of memory through which
past lessons and solved problems carry into the present in the felicity of
unreflective action.
The force of habit explains much of human conduct. Even social
roles, institutions, and forms of hierarchy are reproduced in the habits
individuals passively adopt. “Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of
society, its most precious conservative agent” (PP 1:125. See GR, TD
91–93). This conservative agency comes to a limit when the self is faced
with either a novel situation or feels the imposition of conflicting de-
mands. In these moments of impasse, the will must focus in on only
one among competing possibilities. “The essential achievement of the
will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to ATTEND to a difficult
object and hold it fast before the mind” (PP 2:1166). This is not the will
as an original source or font. James says that willing involves attention
and effort to signal that the will is itself always responding to disposi-
tions and incipient actions that seek to find discharge. He describes it
alternatively as a “permission” that allows a drive to find discharge,
or as a quota of energy we can attach to a certain idea to allow it to
trump its competitors in becoming an external act (PP 1:122).46 If the
motor function that results from this cathexis helps the body adapt to
its environment, it becomes repeated and with time becomes learned as
a new habit. In the same diary entry from 1870 where he describes his
choice to will, James prescribes himself the task of developing this sort
of habitual second nature as part of his recovery. The entry continues,
“Principiis obsta—Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate
initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I

89
will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in Anschauungen, but in ac-
cumulated acts of thought lies salvation” (LWJ 1:148). Habituation is a
tapestry woven through a lifetime of willed effort.
Habit proceeds in a mood of ease; willing is essentially a feeling of
tenseness.47 Those moments where we feel intense resistance to overcome
are those where our actions are most conscious and so those instances
where we feel that we are making our most authentic contributions to
the world. Unlike the functional but feelingless routines of habit, willing
is an affect of power that signals our own creative capacity to overcome
the world’s resistance. James locates a minor drama of psychic heroism
in this agonism between habit and will, between numbness and feeling.
The twin cravings for order and diversity described in “The Sentiment of
Rationality” mirror these twin pressures of habit and will. When the crav-
ing for order and ease is satisfied, we sink into “a sort of anaesthetic state”
(SR 58). We need this numb feeling of ease as a source of fluency in our
thinking, to economize psychic energy and focus on particular tasks. But
so too, then, do we want the feeling of energy that comes with challenge.
Where fluency numbs the sensorium, conflict and resistance intensify it.
James gives the example of breathing to illustrate this point:
All feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological specula-

tions, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple discharge
of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest, impediment, or
resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when we breathe freely,
but a very intense feeling of distress when the respiratory motions are pre-
vented,—so any unobstructed tendency to action discharges itself without
the production of much cogitative accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent
course of thought awakens but little feeling; but when the movement is in-
hibited, or when the thought meets with difficulties, we experience distress.
It is only when the distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave,
to aspire. (SR 57–58)
Like the unconscious quality of habit, nervous energy discharges with-

out feeling when without obstruction. But where there is a blockage or
a problem to overcome, that energy must swell in strength to continue
along its path. This means discomfort and confusion, but without this
distress, we never find the energy to pursue our ideas with effort. Like
in the discussion of the will in Principles, it is the affect of effort and
distress that call us back from the thoughtlessness of habit to the vitality
of action.

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This dialectic of habit and will informs James’s view that conflict can be
a good of moral life to be encouraged rather than a problem to be solved.
Experiences of distress, friction, and conflict summon forth the power of
will that allow individuals to break through habit’s torpid crust. James
calls such experiences “seriousness,” “which means the willingness to live
with energy, though energy brings pain” (SR 73). Genuine individuality
resides in such experiences of serious living; or, as he will call it later,
in the strenuous life. Through the experience of willing, the self is most
keenly in touch with its own powers and potential. Borrowing a term from
Stanley Cavell, we can describe the strenuous life as an episode of moral
perfectionism, a form of self-fulfillment where the self transcends its own
boundaries to be truer to unrealized possibilities.48 What Cavell calls the
drama of perfectionism lies in the tensions between habit and will, be-
tween a self achieved and a self yet to come. The self finds the power to
motivate morality in the vital feeling of constriction and confidence.
In his introduction to an edited volume of James’s writings, Horace
Kallen presents James’s “own personal struggle and salvation” as represen-
tative of the broader moral and intellectual struggles of American society
during his lifetime. Just as James found the courage to will his own ther-
apy, Gilded Age America found relief from the devitalizing stagnancy of a
European genteel tradition through the salvation of its pioneer spirit. “For
the pioneer and his faith in his adventure dominated what was living in the
America wherein James had come to the fullness of his power.”49 James’s
psychology was deeply tied to the melancholic longing for freedom and
renewal that defined the Gilded Age. But where figures like Holmes and
Roosevelt saw pioneer mastery as the source of regeneration from decline,
James sought to inflect this melancholia into a distinctively moral experi-
ence of strenuousness. Talks to Teachers and The Varieties of Religious
Experience, two books written in the aftermath of the annexation, stress
effort rather than conquest to pacify the urge for renewal and put it to work
for anti-imperial purposes.
IV. Two Models of the Strenuous Life
In a speech delivered at the closing reception of the 1904 World Peace

Congress, James wagered a thesis about the source of war’s seductive
power. “Man lives by habits, but what he lives for is thrills and excite-
ments. The only relief from Habit’s tediousness is periodical excitement.
From time immemorial wars have been, especially for non-combatants,

91
the supremely thrilling excitement” (PB 122; emphasis in original). James

held no illusions that the vitalizing experience of strenuousness that he
thought so central to the moral life may also hold dangerous consequences
for politics. The desire for strenuous energy is the greatest aid to the “bel-
licosity of human nature” when left to discharge along conventional lines
(PB 121). Human nature cannot be changed, and institutional measures for
controlling the popular will are limited at a point, as popular enthusiasm
for imperialism reveals. Pacifists must do more than advocate for better
laws and better rulers, James tells the crowd. They need to “foster rival
excitements and invent new outlets for heroic energy” (PB 123).50 In this
section, I argue that James attempts to point the way to such new outlets
in his magisterial work on religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Written during his early awakening to empire and engagement with the
Anti-Imperialist League, James took his lectures on religion as an oppor-
tunity to reconceive and redefine what it could mean to practice the stren-
uous life in an anti-imperialist spirit.
Varieties turns on two characteristically Jamesian arguments: that reli-
gion is ultimately a matter of experience rather than doctrine, and that the
meaning of faith lies in its practical consequences for conduct. Subtitled A
Study of Human Nature, Varieties presents religious experience as contin-
uous with the wider spectrum of human experiences. “Call it conscience
or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion—under either name
it will be equally worthy of study” (VRE 33). What makes religious expe-
rience worthy of study is the insight into ordinary experiences of the moral
life to be found through seemingly extraordinary cases, such as conver-
sion, mysticism, and asceticism. As Justin E. Smith observes of Varieties,
“James was engaged not only in judging the fruits of religion in the lives of
individuals; he was also attempting to determine what religious phenom-
ena tell us about our human constitution” (in VRE xxxviii). At the center of
this study is the figure of the saint. What distinguishes the saint from the
man on the street is only his special sensitivity to emotional excitement.
Habitual inhibitions to emotional excitement mean that few of us often feel
deeply moved or transformed by religious ideals. But among individuals
with more sensitive mental constitutions, “sovereign excitements” break
through habit’s routine and sweep the self away with a “willingness to
live with energy, though energy bring pain” (VRE 213–14). Varieties cata-
logues the consequences and excesses of saintliness as case studies in the
vicissitudes of “the strenuous mood” (VRE 214).
Saintliness exhibits four features common to all religious experience.51
The first is a feeling of being drawn to a higher principle or force greater

92
than individual self-interest. This principle may be personified as a God,

“but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of
holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of life.”
Second is a feeling of continuity with these powers and a willingness to
surrender to self-control under their benevolence. This experience of con-
tinuity gives way to a third feature: the ecstatic freedom that comes with
“the outlines of the confining self” melting away. And fourth is the affect
of loving joy as the self shifts toward the will’s “yes, yes” and away from
the inhibitions of habit’s “no” (VRE 219–20). James cites a telling list of
examples to demonstrate how such empowering feelings of participating
in something larger than the self are not unique to the religious. They in-
clude Thoreau’s freedom in the wilderness of Walden Pond, no less than
the impartial detachment of the day laborer “who makes his bed wherever
his right arm can support him” (VRE 222, 255).52 James also gives the ex-
ample of “the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contempo-
rary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticability
and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the
saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven” (VRE 287).
This eclectic list of examples reveals that political ideas are no less the
stuff of saintly commitment than faith in a divine power. Both religious
faith and political ideals decenter selfish interests and hunger for pecuni-
ary gain. James’s example of the anarchist suggests an additional parallel
between the two. Religious energy, like the will, is experienced as in ten-
sion with the existing social or moral order. “Some austerity and wintery
negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some ‘no! no!’
must be mixed in, to produce the sense of existence with character and
texture and power” (VRE 240). In his embrace of “austerity and wintery
negativity,” the saint represents the constitutive outside of the culture of
bigness and pecuniary success. Like the will’s tense relationship to habit,
the saint lives in friction with the world.
It is then no accident that throughout Varieties the strenuous life of the
soldier serves as a counterpoint to that of the saint (VRE 213, 255–56, 291–
92). Both exemplify the energetic excitement and feeling of vitality that
come with the willful contribution to a wider life, whether it be to the State
or God. The “good side” of warfare is its power to make men “less swayed
by paltry personal considerations and more by objective ends that call for
energy, even though that energy bring pain” (VRE 45). “Owning nothing
but his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the cause
commands him,” the soldier is “the representative of unhampered freedom
in ideal directions” (VRE 255). The saint and the soldier are tightly bound

93
together as two examples of how self-discipline and ascetic control can re-
lease incredible powers of will.53 Both represent a vision of masculine self-
control at odds with the conformist docility of success culture. “Does not,
for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes
so large a portion of the ‘spirit’ of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy
and unmanliness? … Are there not hereabouts some points of application
for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline?” (VRE 291). Like James’s
gendering of success as a “bitch-goddess” discussed in the previous chap-
ter, what is at stake in the eclipse of individuality is a practice of freedom
that is distinctively masculine.
Varieties presents the soldier and the saint as two antitheses to big-
ness’s luxurious emasculation. It states this equivalence, however, pre-
cisely to resist the republican turn to violent renewal. James attempts
to draw this cleavage by illustrating the proximity between saintliness
proper and its “corruption by excess” (VRE 271). The impulsive consti-
tution of the saint can go to extremes where it is not properly balanced
by the inhibitions of reflection. As Reinhold Niebuhr warns of applying
religious insight to political life: “Religion draws the bow of life so taut
that it either snaps the string (defeatism) or overshoots the mark (fanati-
cism and asceticism).”54 Defeatism snaps the string when religious faith
abandons the affairs of this world for the promise of the next. Fanaticism
breaks the bow when it attempts to remake the profane in the image of
the sacred. James describes this fanatic excess as an idolatry that shows
devotion through acts of self-sacrifice and punishment of the deity’s ene-
mies. It is this fanaticism that “churches with imperialistic policies” have
conspired to cultivate into a source of persecution and religious hatred
(VRE 274). “The saintly temper is a moral temper,” James observes, “and
a moral temper has often to be cruel” (VRE 279). Religious violence is
the result of institutions that have harnessed this agonistic dimension of
saintly devotion and put it to work in the service of antagonistic dogma-
tism. Saintliness proper, by contrast, is some balanced mix of fanatical
yeses and theopathic nos. Saintliness displays a fragile equilibrium of
the moral and the energetic, the habitual and the willful. James calls this
balance “intellect.” Varieties never defines the normative terms of saint-
liness or lays out the appropriate principles worthy of devotion. Instead,
the book collects examples of what such a balance might mean through
a historical survey of the saintly virtues of charity, purity, love of God,
and asceticism.
No set of rules or a doctrinal creed can define who is or is not a saint.
The saint is exemplary and is known by his practical effects on others.

94
He is “a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of

virtue that it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors,
auctores, increasers, of goodness” (VRE 285). The saint is a representation
of character that is meant to provoke and elevate his audience to inquire
within themselves what strenuousness might properly mean in their own
lives. In this sense the saint is an untimely figure, working against the
moral and social expectations of his time in the service of a future moral
world to come.
Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead
of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and
are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the
midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of
the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but
for them would lie forever dormant. (VRE 285)
The saint performs a kind of heroic masculinity that, as James puts it,
animates and impregnates the world with possibilities. This is an active
and voluntarist self, but the moral animation he performs is not one of
molding others to his measure. The passage’s sexual language suggests
that the moral force of the saint depends on his relationship to an audi-
ence. It is through this relationship of example and reception that the
saint works a kind of moral provocation. The other must receive him
as an incitation to self-transformation. The soldier, by contrast, simply
demands conformity and destroys. The saint treats others as morally
worthy of respect, regardless of their actual station or moral conduct, and
so “they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed
them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation”
(VRE 285).
The saint is a force of prefigurative provocation rather than authoritative
instruction. A comparison with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of great
men is helpful here.55 Like great men, saints are “lenses through which we
read our own minds.”56 To say that we can read our own minds is not to
say that the saint offers us a diagnosis of our moral condition, like a psy-
choanalyst would of our real but inaccessible unconscious. This kind of
naming does not emancipate but rather stultifies individuality by imposing
new labels on the self. “True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate,
and add new sense.”57 The saint’s new sense, then, is not a lesson plan to
digest. It is a provocation to self-reflection that brings the individual back
to his self-reliant judgment.

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The saint presents one configuration of the energetic character that

combines the push of willful impulse with the constraint of habitual inhi-
bition, but the proper economy of the forces can only be judged in conduct.
“There is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellence of the saint” (VRE
298). Individuals can only pragmatically test the values of the right sorts
of virtues that their context demands. “Let us be saints, then,” James con-
cludes his discussion. “But in our Father’s house are many mansions, and
each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount
of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers
and feels to be his truest mission and vocation” (VRE 299). No rules or
decision-procedures can answer such a question in advance. James places
the responsibility to reflectively judge the potential meaning of these
choices back on his readers.
V. Subverting Melancholia
James himself performs the sort of prefigurative exemplarity described

in Varieties in an earlier lecture recounting his visit to the Chautauqua
Assembly in upstate New York, published in Talks to Teachers. While
nominally a textbook that summarizes the major findings of Principles
for the purposes of classroom pedagogy, Talks closes with an appendix
of essays titled “Talks to Students.” The preface to Talks explains that the
lectures are meant as contributions to recovering American democracy’s
lost “passionate inner meaning.” This meaning must be lost if the nation
is willing to “inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon
Orientals.” Rescuing this political tradition from the clutches of empire, he
writes, will involve effort and sustained political pressure where the pas-
sions for empire “meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far as it has been
gallant and spirited” (TT 4–5). Such a gallant resistance means one where
individuals actively commit themselves to the political project of question-
ing their own roles as acquiescent cogs in a system of imperial bigness.
The Chautauqua Assembly was established as a Methodist educational
retreat in the early 1870s. By the time of James’s visit in 1896 it had grown
in size to become a permanent institute that middle-class families visited
to pursue spiritual and intellectual self-development, enjoy leisure, and
attend lectures offered by visiting scholars.58 “The moment one treads that
sacred enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of success” (WMLS
152). Relaxation and ease pervade life at the camp. One is taken in by the
magical music of the open-air auditorium, the scenic splendor of the lake,

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the edifying lectures and educational programs, the good cheer, the order-
liness, and “perpetually running soda-water fountains” that Chautauqua
has to offer (WMLS 152). It is an image of perfect peace and equality, a life
of relaxation without poverty or crime. “You have, in short, a foretaste of
what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and
no dark corners” (WMLS 152). When he describes Chautauqua’s “atmos-
phere of success,” James is underlining the class-character of this event for
his audience. This is a bourgeois enclosure captured by the idea that the
good life is a matter of commercial stability and leisure alone.
As he departs from Chautauqua, James is overwhelmed by an intense
hunger for violence. “Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial
and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set
the balance right again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-
rate, this goodness too uninspiring” (WMLS 152). James is disgusted with
“the atrocious harmlessness of all things” at Chautauqua. It offers nothing
to “the brute animal in man” but the mawkish excitement of a soda foun-
tain. As James’s sense of contempt swells, he comes to see in Chautauqua
something more than the stifling decorum of a small group of middle-class
campers. It becomes a horrifying image of the banality of “all the ideals
for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, human-
ity, and order” (WMLS 153).
Here is the melancholic rhetoric of luxurious decline. A commercial
society grows flabby in its narcissistic obsessions, and the correction is a
purging experience of violence to “set the balance right.” James, however,
does not advocate violence. He sets himself the hermeneutical task of un-
derstanding why men like him feel this pull toward violent regeneration.
Where does this feeling come from and what does it signify? The essay
frames this question as a philosophical puzzle, but in doing so James him-
self performs a process of self-critical examination for his audience. He
introspectively turns on his own experience of antimodernist resentment in
order to provoke his readers to reflect cautiously on their own judgments.
The source of James’s discontent with Chautauqua stems from its lack
of “moral style.” What is missing is the “element of precipitousness, so to
call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger” (WMLS 153).
The pursuit of safety and comfort has led the Chautauquans to create for
themselves a hermetically sealed “middle class paradise” where there is
no opportunity for “human nature in extremis” (WMLS 152, 154). Life
at Chautauqua is lived as if in a state of permanent habit. The banality of
leisure life assures its residents that they will never be challenged or pro-
voked in their settled convictions, and so never have to actively interrogate

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their own values. Such introspection is an exercise of will. It involves effort

to take stock of one’s commitments and actively shape one’s life around
them. Chautauqua’s boring passivity insulates itself from the feelings of
friction where such encounters are put to work on the self.
James works himself into a state of great excitement thinking about the
possibility of a world without will. “An irremediable flatness is coming
over the world. … Even now in our country, correctness, fairness, and
compromise for every small advantage are crowding out all other quali-
ties. The higher heroism and the old rare flavors are passing out of life”
(WMLS 154). Such a sentiment could be taken straight from the pages
of Adams, Holmes, or Roosevelt. But just as James finds himself pushed
toward the fantasy of violent regeneration, he switches gears before his
audience. While riding a speeding train to Buffalo, James realizes that the
excitement, friction, and heroism he is longing for are lying all around him
in the sensorium of the city itself. He is transfixed at the sight of workers
“on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction.” He finds the manly
courage he longs for in the ordinary lives of the laboring class. The bour-
geois mediocrity of the Chautauquans is built on the toil and strenuousness
of these men. Happy to realize how blind he had been to “all this unideal-
ized heroic life around me,” he concludes, “not our generals and our poets,
I thought, but the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather,
ought the monuments and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared”
(WMLS 155).
This rediscovery of the strenuous in the midst of the ordinary inverts
the familiar terms of republican melancholia. It is aboard a speeding train,
a symbol of America’s growing industrial complexity, that James finds
an experience of vitality no less vivid or powerful than on the wild fron-
tier. Immigrants in American cities are signs of energy and renewal rather
than racial contamination. James, like the saint who experiences “friendly
continuity” with a wider power, finds moral sustenance in the experience
of belonging to the vibrant plurality of the modern cityscape. The coop-
erative labor of the immigrant workers is not an alien threat but a sign of
James’s own “wider self” as a potential agent in the remaking of a shared
world. James performs this moment of transfiguring conversion to signal
to his readers how they too might draw ethical energy from the experien-
tial pluralism of modern America. This is a place of strenuousness with-
out the longing for violence and barbarism. This scene invites the reader
to channel the longing for energy and action toward cooperative endeav-
ors of world building like those of the Hungarian workers. Both his own
performance of regeneration in the flows of the urban sensorium and the

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resignification of the worker as an ideal rather than a threat are meant as

a means of persuasion. James does not give arguments for or against the
value of certain forms of strenuousness. Rather, he presents his own ex-
perience as exemplary of how acknowledgment of the rich ordinariness of
the common world might become the source of democratic respect rather
than melancholy or resentment for a missing extraordinary.
If there is an extraordinary residing in the ordinary, however, it is not
simply the manual toil and effort James sees in the workers. It is instead
the spiritual toil available to anyone willing to become strenuous, like the
saint, in the service of a moral ideal they wish to make a reality. James in
turn comes to realize that the reason monuments are raised to soldiers,
and not to workers, is because “soldiers are supposed to have followed an
ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none” (WMLS 163).
Feelings and moods are morally empty without some fusion to a noble
ideal. But which ideals are worthy of this fidelity? Here again James’s sub-
versive performance of conversion puts the onus of judgment back on his
audience. He insists, “there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative
to the lives that entertain them” (WMLS 163). The force of principles is an
authoritarian one by James’s lights. A more pluralistic standard of validity
is the novelty of our ideals;
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing—the marriage,
namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, cour-
age, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—And whatever or
wherever that life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage
to take place. (WMLS 166)
“What Makes Life Significant?” occupies the psychic economy of the

desire for strenuousness in order to tame it. It does this not by shackling
these psychic energies to a more demanding and principled morality, but
rather by placing the responsibility for individuals’ moral and political ori-
entation back upon them. Because principles ought to be novel to be worth-
while, it is up to individuals themselves to reflectively commit themselves
to the values and desires they hold rather than passively adopt the ideals of
others or let themselves be persuaded by the heroic script of pioneer impe-
rialism.59 At the same time, James’s trepidation in grounding the authority
of ideals in anything deeper than lived experience raises serious questions
about what it would mean to hold a political conviction on the grounds of
its novelty, let alone be willing to fight and die for one. We will examine
this question in greater detail in the following chapter.

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The recovery of the extraordinary within the ordinary in Talks to

Teachers marks a sharp contrast to the emasculating banality of modern
life lamented by Holmes and Roosevelt. James recovers the strenuous life
from the party of empire by pacifying it, yet it retains its gendered and
misogynist implications. Despite the egalitarianism of his individualism,
the gendered discourse of James’s texts constitutively exclude women from
participating in the strenuous life.60 For example, the ordinary strenuous-
ness of the Hungarian workers is paired with that of peasant women James
recalls seeing in Vienna. “Old hags many of them were, dried and brown
and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings
on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering thorough fares”
(WMLS 155). What makes these women worthy of attention is their in-
congruity within the “glittering thorough fares” of the commercial capital.
Their simple clothes and honest labor is presented as the antithesis of gen-
teel and feminized civilization. James can only recognize the strenuous-
ness of these “hags” by depriving them of the aesthetic markers of nor-
mative femininity, and therefore distinguishing them from the essentially
gendered vice of overcivilization and the “bitch goddess” success. Women
can embody the strenuous life, then, but only through repressing markers
of femininity that cannot be translated directly into the masculine values
of labor, struggle, and self-mastery.
VI. The Moral Equivalent of the Frontier
James happened upon an innovative formula in the course of Varieties’

discussion of saintliness that he returns to in an essay he wrote and rewrote
over the final years of his life.61 “One hears of the mechanical equivalent of
heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equiv-
alent of war” (VRE 292). “On the Moral Equivalent of War” begins by in-
voking Chautauqua and the social crisis he thought it to represent. “The war
against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party” (MEW
1281). Pacifists and anti-imperialists will remain on the losing side of his-
tory so long as they refuse to acknowledge the imaginative and aesthetic
power that strenuousness living holds for the American public. “We must
make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the
military mind so faithfully clings” (MEW 1290). James proposes a venue
for such manly hardiness without war through a national system of public
service. The nation’s elite youths, like those Holmes chastised and James
himself took as his audience in Talks to Teachers, would be conscripted

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to perform manual and productive labor in America’s galleys, kitchens,

mines, trains, and foundries. This “army enlisted against Nature” would
create the conditions of effort and cooperation to which “the luxurious
classes are now blind” and so sustain the place of “manly virtues” with-
out the horrors of war (MEW 1291; emphasis in original). Impressionable
youth will “get the childishness knocked out of them” through the toil of
service (MEW 1291).62
What needs knocking out of the nation’s youth is the individualistic
ethos of the consumer citizen. This much is clear. But so too is James
proposing a remedy to the childish impulsiveness of the melancholic impe-
rialist who worships the educative force of violence without regard for the
moral and political carnage that it leaves in its wake. Between the claims
of commercial society and the melancholic reaction against it, James
here again aims for a via media. His proposal aims to abolish the spatial
and social division that encloses the leisured elites of Chautauqua from
the alien others who live and toil in America’s growing urban centers.
Bridging the segregation of mass and elite is a necessary precondition for
cultivating a democratizing or humanizing perception of one another. But
more than simply humanizing the other, James’s proposal aims to replace
the elitist conception of strenuousness as the realization of self through the
domination of others with a democratic strenuousness that finds beauty
and meaning in nonviolent acts of cooperative action.
“The Moral Equivalent of War” is surely unsatisfying as a policy pro-
posal. Abolishing warfare between nations requires more than sublimating
the passions and cravings that drive men to fight. As Walter Lippmann
argued in a 1928 essay, international political and economic institutions
offer a more promising “political equivalent of war” than James’s pro-
posal.63 While such criticisms rightly point to the weakness of the essay’s
proposal as a policy for controlling war between nations, they miss what
is really at issue for James. “The Moral Equivalent of War” should be read
less as a piece of policy and more as a continuation of James’s plumbing
the depth of the craving for authority in American culture. A war against
“Nature,” as James so infelicitously puts the point, is the task of the pio-
neer. The frontier that James’s pacifist pioneer would tame is internal and
moral rather than external and physical. In the disciplined effort to make
one’s will lies a school of virtue that continues the regenerative work of the
wild within rather than against the cultural constraints of metropolitan cul-
ture. The virtues of both the Boston tenderfoot and the Rocky Mountain
tough can be mediated and reconciled in a distinctively democratic form
of courage.

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John Dewey’s Hegelian characterization of James’s philosophy as its

time captured in thought, a testament to the nation’s “pioneer age” pre-
cisely at the moment when “it was passing from the scene,” surely cuts
right to the heart of James’s political thought. Such an archaic individual-
ism can offer little guidance for confronting the challenges of American
democracy in the twentieth century. The “United States has steadily
moved from an earlier pioneer individualism to a condition of dominant
corporateness,” Dewey writes in Individualism Old and New.64 The fron-
tier conditions that called for a vision of independent and rugged individ-
ualism no longer define American society. Attachment to old ideals of self
and freedom stand in the way of the intelligent experimentation needed to
address new problems. They are “more than irrelevant. There are an en-
cumbrance; they are the chief obstacle to the formation of a new individ-
uality integrated within itself and with a liberated function in the society
wherein it exists.”65 Social conditions, not physical wilderness, define the
problems facing the modern public. Frontier individualism and republican
hunger for the strenuous life are idioms that must be rejected rather than
reworked if American democracy is to face the future intelligently rather
than blindly.
Yet despite Dewey’s repudiation of pioneer idioms as archaic, his own
individualism carries over the same language of frontier freedom. “At
the present time,” he writes in 1939, “the frontier is moral, not physical.
The period of free lands that seemed boundless in extent has vanished.
Unused resources are now human rather than material. They are found in
the waste of grown men and women who are without the chance to work,
and in the young men and young women who find doors closed where
there was once opportunity.”66 Despite the demise of pioneer conditions
that gave rise to the frontier myth, freedom, individuality, labor, and op-
portunity still lie on the frontier in industrial America. The persistence of
the language of frontier freedom in Dewey’s political thought even as he
claims to transcend such historical discourses point to the depth of frontier
idioms in American political culture in general and pragmatism in par-
ticular. Pragmatism, in both James’s time and after him, is constitutively
bound to a national mythical discourse of frontier freedom. Here lies part
of its continuing influence over American intellectual culture. But here too
lie troubling associations as well. These ideals of individuality, freedom,
and opportunity bound to the idioms of the frontier are entwined with
imperialist idioms of American political culture as well: manliness, mas-
tery, violence, the nation. Both sides of these idioms characterize James’s
efforts to pragmatically redescribe the strenuous life. His equivalent of

102
war may be moral, but it is still distinctively masculine, trades in symbolic

violence, and orients public life around the nation-state. Must a genuinely
anti-imperialist politics repudiate the frontier frame or can it be creatively
reworked to guard against reinscribing the very drives to mastery it chal-
lenges?67 Negotiating the dangers of these pioneer idioms is the challenge
of James’s anti-imperialism in its invitation to the difficult double-gesture
of affirming action while admitting humility.

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CHAPTER 4 Stuttering Conviction
I. Two Concepts of Courage
William James’s subversive repetition of the militaristic and masculine

idioms of Gilded Age republicanism is most clearly exemplified in his
Decoration Day speech, “Robert Gould Shaw,” arguably the only work of
political oratory in his entire corpus. On May 31st, 1897, an audience of of-
ficers, officials, and Civil War veterans, including Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr., assembled in the Boston Music Hall (now the Orpheum Theater) to
celebrate the unveiling of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze memorial to
Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, often
considered one of nineteenth-century America’s greatest works of public
sculpture (see fig. 4.1).1 Saint-Gaudens’s memorial combines a detailed nar-
rative relief of the individual soldiers of the Fifty-fourth marching together
into an uncertain future under the watchful eye of the angel that guides
them from above.2 In the middle of the monument stands the equestrian
figure of Colonel Shaw, who rises serenely above the labored expressions
of the infantry marching forward.3 Shaw died in 1865 fighting alongside
the Fifty-fourth in the foiled assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor.
The assembled audience came together that afternoon in Boston for an
ambiguous civic ritual of mourning. Mourning, first, the courageous men
who fought and died for the high moral ideal of abolition and equality. But
they were mourning too the perceived demise of manly valor in the Gilded
Age’s commercial republic.4
The invitation to speak at this military celebration struck James as “a
strange whirligig of fortune” (C 3:1). While William himself was spared
service in the Civil War, his younger brother Garth Wilkinson (Wilky)
104
Figure 4.1 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw

(sculpture).
Photographer unknown. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image #S0002246.
James served as an officer in the Fifty-fourth and was seriously wounded

in the assault on Fort Wagner. Both James’s family connection to the Fifty-
fourth and his fame as a prominent local intellectual explain the unantici-
pated invitation.5 His correspondence in the months leading up to the event
show signs of great anxiety as he wrestled with the question of how to craft
a speech that would at once honor “the spirit of the event” without succumb-
ing to “the vulgar claptrap of war sentimentalism” (C 3:6).6 In a speech he
described as a “schoolboy composition, in good taste enough, but academic
and conventional,” James praised Shaw’s courage, albeit not the martial
courage his audience longed to hear celebrated (C 3:8). “[O]‌ur pugnacity, is
the virtue least in need of reinforcement by reflection, least in need of orator’s
or poet’s help” (RGS 72). Another kind of courage was worthy of the orator’s
praise. Shaw’s sacrifice teaches the need for the “more lonely courage” of
critical self-reliance that he demonstrated when he chose to risk humiliation
and social exclusion by fighting alongside African American men. Shaw’s
moral exemplarity, like the saint in The Varieties of Religious Experience,
lies not in his selfless devotion to the nation, or even to a regiment, but

105
in his power to challenge Americans to trust their own judgment in the

face of moral injustice. The “monuments of nations should most of all be
reared” not to warfare but to “the common and gregarious courage …
that lonely courage” displayed by Shaw (RGS 72).
The oration’s celebration of Shaw’s moral courage exemplifies the rhe-
torical power and moral hazards of the rescripting of the strenuous life dis-
cussed in the previous chapter. Recall James’s claim from “What Makes
Life Significant?” that all ideals are relative to the experience of the in-
dividuals who hold them, and that what makes them worthy of strenu-
ous commitment is novelty (WMLS 875). If there is no deeper meaning or
authority to beliefs than their pragmatic consequences, no surer guaran-
tee of success than trust, and no practical necessity to moral and political
commitments, why would anyone fight and die for an ideal—even a novel
one? How can such a contingent and fallible notion of value motivate the
kind of courageous action that James puts on display for his audience in
this oration? From James through Richard Rorty, the pragmatist concep-
tion of belief has been faulted for sapping the energy of political contesta-
tion. When pragmatism conceptualizes political beliefs as akin to hypoth-
eses awaiting confirmation, it drains them of “a motive force … required
to nerve them for their task.”7 Critics of pragmatism, such as Randolph
Bourne, Waldo Frank, and Reinhold Niebuhr, have charged that without
a place for the authority of foundational principles of justice or a militant
commitment to ideals as something more than mere hypotheses, pragma-
tism promotes a politics of “acquiescence.”8 Compromise takes the place of
critique when foundational claims are excised from politics. Even as gen-
erous a reader of pragmatism as historian Louis Menand reiterates this line
of criticism when he asks whether the civil rights movement could have
achieved the gains it did had leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. thought
of their moral ideals as experimental hypotheses rather than as universal
commands of divine justice.9
This chapter explores James’s account of acting on faith and its con-
sequences for conceptualizing political conviction. It argues that James’s
pluralism provides a powerful, although radically transfigured, vision of
political conviction. Against critics who presume that the imperative force
of a belief should take the form of a command, James invites us to con-
sider: What if the experience of conviction is in fact less like a command
that pushes us toward some course of action and more like a faith that
draws us out of ourselves? Faith is “belief in something concerning which
doubt is still theoretically possible; and a test of belief is willingness to
act” (SR 76). Where the authority of a normative command exists before
Stuttering Conviction | 105

106
the act and imposes certain obligations on an actor, the legitimacy of faith
can only ever be decided retrospectively. It is a commitment that could
prove wrongheaded, but it is only through a risky pursuit in action that its
validity is put to the test. James pursues the question of how to conceptual-
ize the experience of being moved by such a faith in his studies in psychol-
ogy and in his moral writings, most famously in “The Will to Believe.”
This same phenomenology of acting on faith lies at the heart of the ideal
of civic courage that James puts forward in his oration in particular and
in his anti-imperialism more generally. While Saint-Gaudens’s monument
positions Shaw high above his men like the very image of a commanding
ideal, James’s depiction of Shaw is more ordinary and profane. The oration
upset the event’s celebration of martial hero worship by presenting Shaw’s
moral conviction as a faith that stuttered forth in the course of his short
and tragic life.
In describing Shaw’s conviction as “stuttering,” I mean to highlight the
ways that faith always involves a dimension of hesitation and self-doubt
that is overlooked when conviction is figured as acting on command. I
borrow this notion of the stutter from Gilles Deleuze, a fellow traveler
of Jamesian pragmatism, to flesh out James’s conception.10 To stutter (de
arriver à bégayer) is a manner of speaking that builds relations between
words in a fashion that disrupts their natural flow and connection. It is a
glitch or skip that breaks up the continuity of a process. Deleuze portrays
the stutter as a literary “device” or “formula” for putting words in varia-
tions that modulate a language and release untapped possibilities for ex-
pression that the rules of syntax preclude. By portraying conviction as a
stutter, this chapter means to highlight the ways that practical reason can
become punctuated by variations of hesitation and self-doubt that trans-
form the ethical quality of conduct. A stuttering conviction, unlike both
relativism and moral absolutism, can be at once principled and reflexive,
held passionately but not blindly.
Michael Oakeshott once recommended that political theory would do
well to stop thinking of moral principles as fixed criteria and instead think
of them as the “prevailing winds which agents take account of in sailing
their several courses.”11 James’s account of stuttering conviction makes a
similar recommendation, but insists on taking a greater recognition of the
morally relevant degrees of turbulence along these streams. A stuttering
hesitation does not need to mean a refusal to act. It is rather an ebb in the
ongoing flow of action. This is an image of conviction as a process, with
both a history of emergence in experience and a potential source of con-
flict with other commitments in a concrete present as they give way to a

107
creative future. The trope of the stutter captures both these dimensions
of James’s conceptions of faith. It is a commitment that emerges in the
course of lived experience, rather than an obligation that follows from a
philosophical justification. Furthermore, it is a way of cautiously relating
to oneself as always open to potential correction and surprise. Grasping
James’s radically empiricist conception of conviction decenters the intel-
lectualist demand that the strength of one’s convictions must be correlated
to the depth of their foundations. At the same time, as we will see in the
following chapter, James’s presentation of Shaw as an exemplar of stutter-
ing conviction and moral courage illustrates again both the power and the
problems of a social criticism rooted in the reworking of national idioms
of masculinity, strenuousness, and the nation-state.
II. Morality and the Priority of Experience
In 1891 James published what Gerald Myers describes as “his only sys-
tematic essay in ethics,” “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.”12
The essay’s declared aim is nothing less than a demonstration of the im-
possibility of “an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance”
(MPML 141). Denying the possibility of a philosophical morality is not an
argument for moral skepticism, however. Both skepticism and philosophy
are two sides of the same coin in so far as they both share monism’s intel-
lectualist prejudice that says morality must be either a system of absolute
values or nothing at all. Morality and moral reflection become meaningful
only where properly understood as aspects of the social reality of human
experience. In seeking to prove or disprove moral claims in advance of ex-
perience itself, both philosophy and skepticism fall victim to what James
calls “absolutism.”
The essay proposes a thought experiment to demonstrate the implausi-
bility of any philosophical justification of absolute value. Imagine a world
devoid of sentient life. In this “absolutely material world,” there may exist
chemical and material objects but no spectator or divinity to watch over
or judge them. James asks you now to consider whether “there be any
sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another”
(MPML 145). Such a proposition would make little sense precisely because
we would have to ask the further question, better for whom? Without an
interested agent who can be affected for better or worse in this world, it
makes no sense to pass evaluative judgments about its content. Now com-
pare this insentient world with a second world of a different material and

108
chemical makeup, but still devoid of conscious life. Can you judge one
of these worlds as better than the other? The philosophers weighing this
question may have their own private interests in preferring one to the other,
but these interests are distortions of the experiment because they introduce
precisely what the question is meant to exclude—namely, some agent’s
value-laden point of view. The inability to make evaluative judgments in
either context demonstrates the impossibility of finding moral values inde-
pendent of human experience. “Goodness, badness, and obligation must be
realized somewhere in order to really exist. … Their only habitat can be a
mind that feels them” (MPML 145; emphasis in original).
After demonstrating the inability to speak about moral phenomena out-
side of experience, James extends the thought experiment to illustrate the
essentially social character of experience itself. Add just one conscious
thinker to the material world. The conscious self who inhabits this uni-
verse of “moral solitude” may reasonably introduce judgments of better
and worse or good and bad (MPML 146). Some ideals may strike his fancy
more strongly than others, but the only source of moral challenge he will
face is that of maintaining a logical order among his chosen ideals. The
moral life of this solitary inhabitant is entirely concerned with the spec-
ulative pursuit of consistency and the strategic pursuit of maximization.
He will never experience a genuinely moral dilemma or face a tragic de-
cision between competing values as all values are commensurate to him.
Now introduce a second inhabitant to this universe with her own ideals
and desires. The possible consequences that might follow are many. One
possibility is that each thinker studiously avoids the others and keeps their
private evaluations of good and bad to themselves. Where the “same object
is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view which one
or that one of the thinkers takes,” moral values multiply in such a way that
the pursuit of moral unity becomes impossible (MPML 146). Each party
has their own tastes with no common standard that applies to both. The
earlier moral universe becomes split into a “moral dualism” (MPML 146).
Add yet more agents, and you now have “pluralism” in which “individual
minds are the measure of all things, and in which no ‘objective’ truth, but
only a multitude of subjective opinions, can be found” (MPML 147).
In this world, should one party ever meet another and come to learn
about their conflicting evolutions, the result will not likely be the happy
admission that all ideals are relative in the end. Because each seeks only
a rational interpretation of his or her experience of value, both sides will
claim that their own order of values is somehow more authoritative or
accurate than those of their fellow inhabitants. To his ideals “the others

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ought to yield, so that system and subordination may reign” (MPML 147;
emphasis in original). At this point in the experiment, James enjoins his
readers to see that invoking the language of rational obligation to correct
the other’s ideals is bound to fail. Just as there are no values independent
of sentient beings who judge things valuable, there are no obligations apart
from those vitally felt by individuals in a pluralistic universe. This is again
not to say that moral argument and obligation are impossible, but that any
obligation must arise from the values one does hold rather than be imposed
like a command from above.
If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness

must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one’s actual per-
ception. It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of meteoro-
logical phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal light. Its esse
is percipi like the esse of the ideals themselves between which it obtains.
(MPML 147)
To borrow the language of contemporary moral philosophy, there are only

internal reasons in a pluralistic moral universe.13 The imperative force of
moral reasons can only be grounded in the experience of holding them
as one’s own reasons. This is what James means in “What Makes Life
Significant?” when he describes the value of values in terms of the mar-
riage of some novel ideal with some individual’s willingness to suffer for
it (WMLS 166). Where moral rationality is conceived as the strictly specu-
lative pursuit of the justification of an objective system of values, there are
no conceptual resources actors can appeal to in order to speak across the
difference of their conflicting values.
At this point, James lifts the veil of the thought experiment to reveal
that the pluralistic world he is describing is in fact his audience’s real world
of everyday experience. In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, morality
itself must be understood as an evolutionary social practice that finite de-
pendent animals have created to negotiate a shared environment. Validity
is not a property that “rains down upon the claim … from some sublime
dimensions of being” (MPML 148). Moral obligation is simply an expres-
sion of “life answering to life” (MPML 149). Philosophers in the universe
of moral dualism seek a theoretical source of obligation to harmonize the
reality of conflicting values. James’s pluralistic naturalism, by contrast,
places obligation itself within this natural history of values. He explains in
a dense passage: “But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we
see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person

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there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there
is a claim” (MPML 148). Where values are plural and incommensurate, so
too are the obligations that actors expect and demand from one another.
There is no reason to presume that one experience of value is any more
authoritative than any other within this Babel of competing claims and
obligations. Actors are faced with the burden of making a decision in the
absence of any transcendent moral point of view. Any decision will be a
partial one, but a decision must be made if action is to go on. As Isaiah
Berlin echoed James’s pluralistic conclusion some decades later, “We are
doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”14
Philosophy’s refusal to acknowledge that essentially indeterminate
quality of moral experience is a testament to the craving for certainty that
James analyzed earlier in “The Sentiment of Rationality.” Like the abso-
lute idealism that James diagnosed as the fruit of such a craving in met-
aphysics, its consequence in ethics is a drive to moral absolutism. Moral
absolutism is the monistic thesis that all moral values can be known with
an unflinching certainty, and that a plurality of values can in the final
instance be reconciled into a logical, coherent system. Moreover, abso-
lutism views value disagreements as factual errors in representing the
one true order of the moral system. James’s thought experiment gives
his readers reasons to reject this thesis on genealogical grounds, but his
more powerful argument is pragmatic. Moral absolutism holds dangerous
consequences for politics.
“When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical appli-
cation to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscien-
tious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted
than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear” (WTB 23).15 As we saw in
chapter 2, James saw such absolutism at work in the paternalistic discourse
of national “duties” in the Philippines. Under the influence of moral abso-
lutism, the architects of American imperialism approached their colonial
subjects as objects of moral correction rather than as individuals with their
own reasonable desires, values, and ideals. “Roosevelt and the McKinley
party make one understand the French revolution, so long an enigma to
our English imaginative power,” he writes of the abstract and absolutist
rhetoric of Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech. “How could such bald ab-
stractions as Reason and Rights of Man, spelt with capitals, and ignoring
all the concrete facts of human nature, ever have let loose such a torrent of
slaughter?” (GRO 164; see also PT 156, PA 161–62).
James’s critique of absolutism again moves in temperamental terms to
explain the psychic sources of dogmatism rather than to debunk absolutism

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on epistemic grounds. Where “we are all such absolutists by instinct,” the
moral problem is not the fact of abstraction, but the psychic drive toward
abstractionism (WTB 22).16 A moral philosophy that would guard against
the temptations of abstractionism would be one that could satisfy such a
craving while also tending to the craving for particularity, contingency,
and change. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” offers no such
full moral philosophy. Indeed, the essay is a warning against the very urge
to articulate any such moral system. What positive conclusion James does
draw, however, is that the most desirable moral ideals would be those that
“prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number
of other ideals are destroyed” (MPML 155; emphasis in original). An em-
pirical moral philosophy so conceived would be less a doctrine than a
manner of orienting oneself toward a world of competing and conflicting
moral ideals.17 Attending to the ideal while not losing sight of its tragic
“pinch” means embracing principles contingently, being ready to revise
them without loosening a grip on their passionate meaning in the present
moment. James’s thought experiment nudges his readers in the direction of
such an empiricist temperament by collecting a series of reminders about
the inevitable trace of subjectivity submerged in claims to moral abstrac-
tion. His pluralism presents a Darwinian account of life as a project of
experimental problem-solving where our moral terms are tools like any
other whose value resides in their ability to help us cope with a dynamic
environment. The political result is a skeptical politics that promotes tol-
eration as an inhibition against cruelty. “Hands off,” goes James’s ethical
motto, “neither the whole of truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any
single observer” (OCB 149). To bring about a society where each member
tolerates the practical and speculative differences of their neighbors would
constitute “empiricism’s glory” (WTB 33).
III. Faith, Deliberation, Decision
Louis Menand portrays James’s critique of moral absolutism as a contribu-

tion to a public discourse about violence in postbellum America. Classical
pragmatism was born out of the spectacular violence of the Civil War
as a method to deflate the claims of certainty that drive moral conflict.
Pragmatism “was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to
violence by their beliefs.”18 In attempting to tame conviction, however,
James risks evacuating the possibility of political contestation altogether:
“Pragmatism explains almost everything about ideas except why a person

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would be willing to die for one.”19 Menand is a sympathetic reader of prag-

matism, and his skeptical conclusion is echoed in much recent contempo-
rary pragmatist thought. Frank Lentricchia writes of James’s pragmatism
that “[i]‌t has nothing to say about where we should be, only about where
we do not want to be.”20 Without an account of the deep normative founda-
tions of our ideals and their power to motivate acts of political courage,
James’s individualism may appear to fall back into a subjectivistic deci-
sionism. James faced criticisms of subjectivism, and nowhere more so than
in response to this account of acting on faith in “The Will to Believe.” We
turn now to James’s famous essay in order to trace the rough contours of
the vision he outlines there before turning to their fuller illustration in his
oration to Robert Gould Shaw.
First presented to the Philosophy Club at Yale University in 1896, “The
Will to Believe” articulates an account of faith and the strenuous life that
James had been developing since his depressive crisis. The essay argues
that individuals are sometimes justified in adopting a faith without prior
evidence if and only if acting on this faith is the condition for proving said
faith’s validity. Faith is akin to a practical hypothesis that awaits experi-
mental confirmation. While James has been charged with confessing a sort
of radical voluntarism concerning truth, “The Will to Believe” specifies
strict constraints as to when this sometimes holds true. You are justified in
acting on faith when you are faced with a decision between two possible
beliefs, where both are live, the decision is forced, and the consequences
momentous. A belief is live when it holds practical consequences for the
believer; forced when one cannot avoid choosing between one of two hy-
pothetical beliefs; and momentous when the decision holds significant
rather than trivial consequences for how you will lead your life. Where
all of these constraints hold, you are justified in willing an unproven but
desired faith because in such cases no more determinate criteria of judg-
ment are available.
James’s famous example of willing a faith into existence is the case of
the Alpine climber (WTB 33; see also LWL 53; SR 88). Stuck on a mountain
ledge in a winter storm, the climber is faced with a forced decision: either
remain where he is and surely freeze to death, or jump across the cre-
vasse and maybe live to see another day. Both options are possible, making
them live. The decision is forced because there is no third option. And the
life and death consequences of the decision are momentous indeed. James
offers up this example to suggest that there is no way of knowing in ad-
vance whether or not the climber can make the leap. Whatever evidence
there is for the mountaineer’s faith that he can make it can only be decided

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retrospectively. If he has the faith that he can make it, he will be “nerved”
to give it his all. But if he hesitates and waits for further evidence, his fate
is sealed.
“The Will to Believe”—or the will to make-believe, as one of James’s
interlocutors dubbed it—has been charged with everything from wishful
thinking, to irrationalism, to sacrilege for its conclusion that the existence
or nonexistence of God is itself such a question that can be decided by
the believer’s leap.21 The most politically damning criticism of the essay,
however, is that leveled by Bertrand Russell. Russell’s 1909 essay, simply
titled “Pragmatism,” presents James’s notion of truth as a characteristi-
cally American statement of the will to power.22 To say that questions of
truth can be reduced to a willful decision is to hand philosophy over to
“the worship of force,” leaving “ironclads and Maxim guns” as the sole
arbiters of moral and political disagreement. In its flight from foundation,
Russell concludes, pragmatism reinstates precisely the will to truth it seeks
to escape: “Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the
surface of the planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels
confident in progress, and unaware of non-human limitations to human
power.”23
For Russell, acting on faith must either fall into an irrational form of
decisionism or become recuperated as a deliberative conclusion.24 This
framing of the text and the lack of a third option, one where decision is not
simply the triumph of an invincible will but a conclusion that is punctuated
with doubt, finitude, and indeterminacy, begs the question of Russell’s in-
tellectualist ultimatum. It is precisely this third option, however, a space
between decision and deliberation, or better, a stuttering incipiency of their
imbrication, that James articulates so insightfully in his essay. That said,
the essay’s choice of the Alpine climber to illustrate this point does James
a disservice and invites Russell’s intellectualist oversimplification. The
mountaineer exists in what is described in “The Moral Philosopher and
the Moral Life” as a universe of moral solitude. He is alone in his decision,
unencumbered by the consequences his actions might hold for others, and
isolated from the surprising encounter with other bodies and ideals. The
example’s force stems from its ability to satisfy the philosophical desire for
a clean instance of willing rather than a messy, pluralist one.25 A pluriverse
too can be a place of forced and momentous decisions. Attending to how
faith works in an encumbered context starts to blur the opposition between
intellect and action that James’s imagination of the Alps facilitates.
The heroic character of the mountaineer’s decision gives credence
to Russell’s description of pragmatism as a characteristically American

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fantasy of the power of individuals to master reality. The mountaineer,

however, does not offer the only possible way of figuring the power of
will at issue in James’s argument. The account of the will put forward
in Principles, as seen in c hapter 3, is more complex than the one James
presents in “The Will to Believe.”26 Indecision begins in an experience
of doubt that interrupts the felicity of habit. A plurality of conflicting im-
pulses, desires, and instincts give rise to a sense of unrest as they vie for
discharge as motor action. James’s name for this experience of conflict is
“deliberation.” “The process of deliberation contains endless degrees of
complication,” he explains, for it concerns both “the whole set of motives
and their conflict” present in consciousness at any moment, as well as a
“dimly felt … fringe” of unconscious impulses and desires (PP 2:1136).
Deliberation continues until one of these impulses prevails and turns into a
bodily action. This conclusion to deliberation is called a “decision.”
James makes two important insights in this account of decision. The first
is that deliberation is not a strictly intellectual exercise. Like his account of
rationality as a sentiment discussed previously, deliberation is continuous
with the impulsive and unconscious aspects of psychic life. Connected to
this insight is a second one. Precisely because there is no higher intellec-
tual self behind the deed, neither decision nor willing are singular. The
mass of unconscious and unwilled impulses competing to burst through
the routine of habit as motor action are felt rather than willed. The experi-
ence of deliberating among them is therefore a heteronymous feeling of
attending to given impulses rather than a sovereign act of self-creation.
Principles portrays the ambiguities of decision as a free act by present-
ing a continuum of types of decisions, each playing a role in human life.
On one end of the spectrum is the “reasonable” decision that weighs all
the evidence for or against a course of action until the case is proven in or
against its favor (PP 2:1138). Next are decisions where “there is no umpire
to decide” what side should yield, and the decision is affected by accidents
“from without” or “from within” (PP 2:1139) Moving closer to the other
extreme are decisions where “we suddenly pass from the easy and care-
less to the sober and strenuous mood” on the basis of some “inexplicable”
outer experience or inward change. The final type of decision is the heroic
one, where we undergo such a change of mood and “we feel, in deciding,
as if we ourselves by our own willful act inclined the beam” (PP 2:1141).
The presence of the “feeling of effort” certifies to the self’s deliberate role
in bringing the decision about. James celebrates this final type of decision
as the fullest expression of strenuous individuality, all the while acknowl-
edging that few decisions actually meet this high standard (PP 2:1141).

115
“The immense majority of human decisions are decisions without effort.

In comparatively few of them, in most people, does effort accompany the
final act” (PP 2:1141). The majority of decisions are no less free for the
lack of effort they demand, but they are less sovereign for the influence
inside and outside factors play. The Alpine climber’s blind leap is a heroic
one in precisely this fullest sense. If this can only be said to characterize a
minority of human decisions, how might a messier, less heroic account of
the will to believe drawn from the middle range of the spectrum be con-
ceived? And what can it tell us about the question of political conviction?
To consider such an alternative account of will and faith, we turn now to
James’s account of the lonely courage of Robert Gould Shaw.
IV. Shaw’s Stuttering Faith
“The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their pictur-
esqueness,” James observes as he begins his speech about the life and
death of Robert Gould Shaw (RGS 64). Similar to the depiction of the
strenuous Hungarian workers in “What Makes Life Significant?,” James’s
oration places Shaw’s heroism within the common competencies of ordi-
nary individuals. He was not a hero who stood above his time. The story
of Shaw’s life and death is that of a compromised individual who wrestled
with his own faith as much as he wrestled with the duty of his office. “The
very lack of external complication in the history of these soldiers is what
makes them represent with such typical purity the profound meaning of
the Union cause” (RGS 66). Neither weak-willed evasion of the strenuous
life nor a heroic act of decision, the life and death of Robert Gould Shaw
serves as an exemplar of moral courage’s double gesture of modest hesita-
tion and daring self assertion.
The faith that James portrays stuttering forth in Shaw’s short life is a com-
mitment to democratic equality. He fought for “our American religion …
the faith that a man requires no master to take care of him, and that
common people can work out their salvation well enough together if left
to try” (RGS 66–67). This national religion is a faith because the demo-
cratic equality it professes is not something established by philosophical
deduction or objective evidence. It is instead a claim that has to be enacted
to become true. To call this faith “democratic” means that the claims of
equality need to be politically made through world-building action rather
than philosophically found in the leisure of armchair reflection. This con-
structive dimension of equality is clearly relevant to the mission of the

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Fifty-fourth. Advocates of black enlistment argued that by arming African

Americans and offering them the opportunity to fight their oppressors,
they would themselves be able to dispel the white supremacist myth of
black inferiority. “When it is seen that black men no more than white men
can be enslaved with impunity, men will be less inclined to enslave and
oppress them,” announced Frederick Douglass in one of his calls for black
enlistment. “Enlist therefore, that you may learn the art and assert the abil-
ity to defend yourself and your race.”27
James’s talk of Shaw’s “lonely” courage seems to evoke the interiority
of consciousness and the abstraction of the mountaineer, unlike Douglass’s
call for solidarity and collective sacrifice. As the oration develops, however,
exactly what is signified by this affect becomes apparent. It is not a with-
drawal into the absolutism of conscience, but rather a manner of bearing
witness to faith’s stutter. James first invokes loneliness when he explains
that hesitation Shaw felt about giving up his post in the Massachusetts
Second Infantry to accept Governor John A. Andrew’s commission to
lead the Fifty-fourth.28 The Second was a battle-tested unit that had seen
some of the war’s most gruesome violence at Antietam and Gettysburg.
But despite the horror of these battles, James insists that Shaw, the child of
wealthy New England abolitionists and lieutenant of a respected unit, had
“been walking socially on the sunny side of life” (RGS 67). He would have
to risk exclusion and dishonor to lead the Fifty-fourth, where “loneliness
was inevitable, ridicule certain, failure possible” (RGS 67). Despite the
celebration Shaw received when he marched the men of the Fifty-fourth
through Boston and the respect he came to feel for his men, he remained
haunted by “feelings [of] loneliness that still prevailed in that command”
(RGS 67).
Shaw’s loneliness was clearly a token of racial dislocation alongside
the black men of the Fifty-fourth, but it was not only this. His loneliness
appears to be an expression of his indecision as to why he was engaged in
what he saw as a risky experiment of leading African American men into
war. Shaw’s personal letters demonstrate no sign of fierce abolitionist con-
victions. His opinion on slavery and racial equality would be better char-
acterized as indifference punctuated by the occasional racist rumination.29
This indecision is thrown into stark relief in James’s account of an episode
in Darien, Georgia. Under the orders of the abolitionist Colonel James
Montgomery, the Fifty-fourth partook in the sacking and burning of the
undefended town of Darien. Shaw was horrified that such acts would only
confirm the prejudices of a Northern public who saw African Americans
as unfit to carry arms for the Union. He found himself torn between the

117
soldierly duty to follow orders or to refuse Montgomery’s commands and

risk court-martial. Shaw was ultimately spared the need to decide one way
or another, as James reports it, when Montgomery was unexpectedly re-
lieved from command.
The Darien episode is important for James’s argument for two reasons.
The first is that it demonstrates the vengeful excesses he associates with
the moral absolutism of conscience. The second is the fact of Shaw’s inde-
cision. When faced with a moral outrage, he hesitates. James says that it
was “fortunate” that Shaw did not ultimately need to come to a decision,
but on James’s account there is little evidence to suggest that he was capa-
ble of making one in the first place. He found himself lost in his convic-
tions, without firm ground to stand on in trying to make sense out of a
moral dilemma.
Shaw, then, appears to offer an inverse example to the Alpine climber.
Where the mountaineer is faced with a momentous decision, he decides
without deliberation. But faced with a similar choice, Shaw seems to de-
liberate at the expense of deciding. The option to risk his status and stand
up for his men is at once live, forced, and momentous, but he appears to
respond with momentous indecision, not sure which path to take or what
action to stand by. When the Darien episode is read as an example in a
broader argument James is making about faith and conviction, Shaw’s
loneliness and frustration might be read as something more than the ab-
sence of decision. These affects disclose something about the perdurance
of decision, the self-interruptive process of self-doubt and inarticulacy that
marks decision’s deliberative emergence. Shaw’s conviction is stuttering
here, in the sense of being disrupted and breaking up, but it is also stutter-
ing forth. It comes in fits and starts, stumbling over itself, until it finally
seems so well established that there is never a doubt that it wasn’t there.
If this perdurance of decision is less picturesque than the mountaineer’s
more dramatic leap of faith, it is more accurate to the experience of acting
on faith than James’s analysis in “The Will to Believe.”
The incipiency of decision is helpfully elucidated in the “Jamesleuzian”
account of faith proposed by William Connolly.30 For Connolly, an ele-
ment of nonrational faith inhabits any and all articulate beliefs. The re-
lationship of faith to belief is both horizontal and vertical, always at once
intersubjective and intrasubjective. Faith has a horizontal dimension in the
sense that it is shaped and refined through encounters with the different
faiths professed by others. And it has a vertical dimension in that to pro-
fess a faith exceeds intellectual commitment alone. Faith involves “em-
bodied feelings, habits of judgment, and patterns of conduct below direct

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intellectual control.”31 Each of these two dimensions affect one another, in

that as beliefs become challenged or confirmed through transaction with
others (the horizontal), they establish new patterns of relating to oneself
and one’s convictions (the vertical). And similarly, experienced dissonance
between the visceral and the intellectual registers of conviction may set in
motion a project of seeking new conversations and experiences to critically
interrogate one’s faith.
Connolly’s layered account of faith helps us see the connection be-
tween James’s notion of faith and his relational conception of the self
that lies in the background of his moral philosophy.32 Principles, as we
have seen, rejects the notion of a stable ego at the core of the self on
the grounds that introspective experience reveals consciousness as a
complex phenomenon defined by a constant state of motion. Elements
of both past and future commingle in the “stream of thought” as they
rush through the experience of the present. Consciousness is an ongo-
ing and varied process of emergence, perdurance, and decay. Consider
the experience of having a forgotten name on the tip of one’s tongue, or
anticipating the following bar of a melody. One feels the experience of
struggling to sustain a flow of time, to draw on memory’s presence, or
to allow an idea to percolate up. “One may admit that a good third of
our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of
schemes of thought not yet articulate” (PP 1:245). James, like his con-
temporary Henri Bergson, insists that the temporal nature of experience
is too complex to be broken down into intellectualist units and categories
that can be kept neatly separated.
On this account, the self is a porous and mobile construction, consisting
of “all that he is tempted to call by the name of me” (PP 1:279). This fluc-
tuating experience of the me includes feeling one’s own body as it moves
through the world, as well as the me’s attachment to things outside the self,
including friends, family, and social reputation. James draws these concen-
tric circles of the feeling of self to decenter the onto-theological notion that
the subject is some original kernel fundamentally distinct from its world.
He writes, “never is the body felt all alone, but always together with other
things” (PP 1:286). If the “me” is the feeling of the body in transaction
with its world, then self-perception involves the surprising influence with
what James calls the “not-me” or the “fringe” to denote the conscious and
unconscious impressions other bodies make on the conscious self. This
“not-me” includes the influence of the physical, social, and cultural envi-
ronment on the “me.” The “ ‘me’ and its ‘not-me’ [are] objects which work
out their drama together” (PP 1:291). Connolly’s schema reveals the ways

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that the feeling of confidence in one’s faith (the me) always bears traces of
the embodied self’s relations with others (the not-me).33
James draws out conviction’s stutter by foregrounding its emergence in
lived experience. It is no knock-down argument or divine revelation that
sways Shaw’s decision. It is instead the horizontal experience of living,
training, eating, and fighting alongside the not-me of black soldiers that
makes a democratic faith take hold in his actions. The momentous quality
of Shaw’s decision to fight with the Fifty-fourth to the bitter end did not
take place in a moment like the mountaineer’s sudden leap or Principles’
heroic mode of decision. The disarticulation of a web of prejudicial habits
by the claims of a new faith is a slow process whereby willing and hes-
itation fold over each other in an experimental way. Like the modes of
decision on the spectrum between rational scrutiny and heroic will, con-
victions emerge neither from sufficient evidence alone nor from a forced
moment of decision. James narrates the stuttering emergence of conviction
as a “back door and not a front door process” that begins with a “subtle
brain-born feeling of discord” as a new faith clashes with one’s received
practices (PP 2:1266; MPML 144). The encounter with these soldiers and
bearing witness to their own faith puts a principle to work on Shaw and his
own received habits of racial ambivalence.
This horizontal and worldly dimension of conviction then works in
transaction with the vertical dimension whereby something abstract, like
a democratic faith in the equal capabilities of all persons, becomes more
concrete as it sinks into embodied patterns of habit and feeling. “Life is
one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiv-
ing cases, and opposite conclusions promoted by our instinctive perception
of them as individual facts” (PP 2:1266). The mind struggles between the
new and the old in order to coordinate words and deeds. But this process
is not intellectual alone. It also goes on across multiple registers of feeling
as they incipiently develop new ways of enacting convictions below the
explicit register of consciousness.
James’s oration takes this back-door perspective on the question of
pragmatism’s place for principles so as to shift the issue from the front-
door question of what principles command actions to the pluralist one
of how an experimental circuit of ideas, feelings, and actions occasion
creative change. In reframing the issue in these terms, however, James
risks making too little out of Shaw’s convictions. If Shaw’s faith is not
a first principle but rather a feeling that strikes him as a consequence
of his environment, then little place is left for agency on this account.
“Conclusions grow on us like fungus,” warns Nietzsche, “one morning

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they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and
grey. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the
plants that grow in him!”34 Is James’s Shaw merely the soil of a faith or
an agent who cultivates a political sensibility?
To answer this question, we can return to Saint-Gaudens’s memorial
itself. Shaw is seated on horseback high above his men, ready to issue
commands down to passive soldiers below. But on James’s account, it is
not that Shaw exercises sovereign power of command; rather, he finds
himself being worked on by the encounter with others. The monument’s
depiction of Shaw riding calmly amid the steady march of the men also
captures the sense of the entanglement and interdependence that James’s
oration foregrounds. Shaw appears carried along by the movement of
the soldiers as they march for their equality, and yet his calm demeanor
suggests that he is not simply passively swept away by the event.35 When
seen from this perspective, the memorial’s positional distinction of Shaw
from the men is not a statement of hierarchy. It is instead a portrayal of
the ways that faith comes to move an individual, while ultimate responsi-
bility for moral deliberation remains with the self. Here faiths and bodies
encounter each other along a horizontal dimension and the vertical rela-
tionship of sovereign command is made to stammer or break up.
The influence of such encounters on the self undermines the eques-
trian pose’s image of sovereign agency. James finds an alternative
image of the willful self in the shadow of this posture that is at once
more precarious and agentic. The contours of Shaw’s lonely courage
emerge from the depiction of his stammering indecision and stutter-
ing conviction as two moments of practical reason. James writes in
the preface to The Will to Believe that the aim of his doctrine of faith
is to teach “courage weighted by responsibility” (TWTB 8). Courage
means confronting risk, most profoundly risk to life and limb, in the
service of ideals one holds dear. James’s depiction of Shaw points to
two elements of what a strenuous embrace of risk could mean. The
first is that Shaw staked his life on a faith that he was aware was just
that—a contingent and revisable faith. James returns to the contin-
gency of faith with his depiction of Shaw’s emerging conviction in
order to call his readers to the courage to trust their convictions in
the acknowledgment of their essential contestability. This is a cour-
age directed inward toward the risks of choosing a self rather than
outward toward the threat of bullets and bombs (RGS 72–73). Moral
courage demands something more than the willingness to confront
death in the service of the community, as Douglass seems to suggest.

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It is the courage to persist in an egalitarian faith in the face of the all-

too-human desire to seek salvation in absolutism or abandon all hope
in cynicism. Countenancing both risk and trust are the two building
blocks of pragmatism’s democratic faith.
James’s speech telescopes out from the individual to the national by
describing Shaw’s stuttering moral courage as testament to the “civic
genius” of a democratic people (RGS 74). This genius is less a civic creed
than an orientation toward shared principles and commitments, born of
ordinary and everyday practices of facing up to a pluralistic world with-
out sovereignty’s conceits. This is the second element of Shaw’s courage.
The example of how Shaw’s conviction is made to stutter points to the
need for others. To build on Nietzsche’s warning above, Shaw cultivates
his stutter like a gardener who tends to a fragile faith incipiently already
on its way rather than as a landscaper who imposes the architect’s plan
on the soil. To make conviction stutter is not simply an intellectual ac-
tivity. You effectuate a stutter when a conviction finds itself made to
quiver or reverberate by a milieu that puts it into disequilibrium. Moral
principles are not objectively chosen, nor are they merely commands to
which we are subjected; rather, they are claims that percolate up in the
surprising encounter with others. There is a creative spark that takes
place where life encounters life, but we too often insulate ourselves from
the risk of such encounters through the conceits of moral certainty. The
agency at stake here is not a matter of crafting the stutter as an affecta-
tion, but rather experimenting with affective stuttering. A rule for radical
empiricists: Put yourself in the place where something might happen.
In the life and death of Robert Gould Shaw, James finds a lasting testi-
mony to the possibility of nondogmatic orientation toward conviction that
is at once affective and reflective, principled and mobile. On the one hand,
he holds his convictions with firmness and passion. And on the other, the
painful awareness of their contingency, fallibility, and slow emergence
reminds him that they are not final or finished. James describes Shaw’s
lonely courage in the oration’s closing lines not in terms of principles or
virtues, but in terms of his habits—slow, stuttering forms of repetition that
attest to the priority of social conduct in shaping the self. These habits,
as James describes them, are the agonistic respect of “good temper to-
wards the opposite party” and “fierce and merciless resentment” toward
the agents of injustice (RGS 74). This is a “fierce” conviction against injus-
tice, but one that folds a moment of hesitation into its speed and passion.
A celebration of such lowly habits ought to replace civic monuments as the
true markers of democracy’s glory.

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V. John Brown’s Riddle
By the end of his life, James came to describe his doctrine of the will
to believe in terms of the slow process of climbing the rungs of a ladder
rather than making one dramatic leap. He writes in the conclusion of A
Pluralistic Universe, “A conception of the world arises in you somehow,
no matter how. Is it true or not? you ask.”
It might be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self-contradictory.

It may be true, you continue, even here and now.
It is fit to be true, it would be well if it were true, it ought to be true,
you presently feel.
It must be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and
then—as a final result—
It shall be held for true, you decide; it shall be as if true, for you.
And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of
making it securely true in the end. (PU 148; emphasis in original.
See also SPP 111–17)
Climbing the faith ladder rung-by-rung captures the gradual and hesitant
experience of coming to will a belief as your own. Belief is the result of
experimentation with something that comes to you, “somehow, no matter
how.” It is not the depth of the belief’s foundation that explains the fidelity
with which it is held. It is rather the experience of tarrying with the belief,
of letting it stutter forth in practice, that the blind something of impulse
transforms into a passionate faith in action.
James’s reconceptualization of conviction as a faith rather than a com-
mand offers a response to critics like Menand, who charge pragmatism’s
account of belief with failing to motivate passionate action and sacrifice.
At the same time, James’s example of Shaw as the beacon of this stutter-
ing faith may provide something less than a compelling image of sacri-
ficial commitment. Within the hagiography of Civil War memory, Shaw
appears decidedly less moving an icon of political conviction than another
figure more commonly associated with personal sacrifice for the sake of
moral principle: John Brown.36 Like Shaw, Brown fought and died for the
abolition of slavery. But Brown never stuttered. He saw himself as a holy
soldier on a prophetic mission to destroy the blight of slavery. His moral
absolutism, moreover, had no qualms about using violent means for moral
ends, even if that meant plunging the entire nation into civil war. What
gave him this strength, as Henry David Thoreau famously eulogized him,

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was the way Brown wore his moral principles as “a kind of armor” against
the world.37 Neither humiliation, nor blows, nor arguments could sway him
in his moral mission.
Thoreau’s hagiography of Brown’s moral heroism raises a deep chal-
lenge to the kind of stuttering James defends. In conclusion, I want to sug-
gest, contra Thoreau, that a different lesson can be drawn from the death of
John Brown, not about the necessity of principles but rather about the inev-
itably tragic quality of acting on faith. This is a lesson that James’s former
student W. E. B. Du Bois draws in his 1909 biography, John Brown.38 Du
Bois’s Brown is a prophetic figure, sent as God’s chosen messenger to do
justice with the sword to a nation of sinners. He did not make arguments
for the justice of his cause. Rather, “he himself was an argument.” Du Bois
reconstructs Brown’s early life, his bloody campaign in Kansas, and his
capture at Harpers Ferry, and comes to the conclusion that “John Brown
was right.” Brown was right because he saw that morality must triumph
over might. And he was also right because, as Du Bois repeats throughout
the biography, the “price of repression” is always greater than the cost of
liberty, even if that cost must be paid in blood.39
Du Bois raises up Brown as an exemplar without denying the profound
limits of his example.40 This is nowhere more evident than in his discussion
of Frederick Douglass’s refusal to follow Brown in his attack on Harpers
Ferry. Douglass thought the plan suicidal and sure to fail. He “believed in
John Brown but not in his plan.” A disagreement about strategies is not
especially morally telling, given that Douglass too believed that only the
armed force of the federal government could break the grip of slavery.
But as Du Bois presents their disagreement, it was about more than strat-
egy alone. It was about perspective. Douglass was of a different tempera-
ment than Brown, but more importantly, “he knew, as only a Negro slave
can know, the tremendous might and organization of the slave power.”
Escaped slaves like Douglass had just begun to enjoy their hard-won free-
dom and were not about to sacrifice this for the sake of a risky plan. It was
from this perspective that Douglass knew that it would be black slaves and
freemen who would bear the brunt of the slaveholders’ violent retributions.
He could not help “but feel that he [Brown] was about to rivet the fetters
more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.”41
In recounting their disagreement, Du Bois does not come down squarely
in favor of either man. The conclusion he draws from this difficult weigh-
ing of principles and consequences is that both men were right. Brown was
right that radical action had to take place and that further reflection would
only lead to greater oppression; Douglass was right to be wary of Brown’s

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zealotry and his blindness to the consequences of his deeds. On the page
following the climactic chapter on Brown’s capture at Harpers Ferry, Du
Bois poses the question to his readers: How would you respond to the ap-
pearance of a moral zealot like Brown in your midst?
Must we follow out the drear, dread logic of surrounding facts, as did the
South, even if they crucify a clean and pure soul, simply because consistent
allegiance to our cherished, chosen ideal demands it? If we do, the shame
will brand our latest history. Shall we hesitate and waver before his clear
white logic, now helping, how fearing to help, now believing, now doubt-
ing? Yes, this we must do so long as the doubt and hesitation are genuine;
but we must not lie. If we are human, we must thus hesitate until we know
the right. How shall we know? This is the Riddle of the Sphinx.42
Du Bois calls this a riddle to underscore how moral principles alone do not
exhaust burdens of political action. On Du Bois’s account, Brown’s passion
goes hand in hand with a willful blindness to the conditions of pluralism
in which he acts. This is why his action is necessarily a tragic one: not be-
cause it ends poorly for the antagonist, but because it displays the ways that
doing good seem to always also involve doing wrong.
In a thoughtful reflection on Du Bois’s John Brown, Lawrie Balfour
argues that the book does not aim to either justify or denounce Brown;
rather, it seeks to remind its readers of the tragic nature of political action.
In Du Bois’s hands, “the lesson of Brown’s violence is not an answer but
a question,” she explains.43 Bearing witness to conviction’s tragic “pinch,”
as James calls it in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” hedges
against the evasions of moral responsibility that sustain white supremacy.
But so too is it a way of reminding his audience of the unavoidable, and
perhaps even impossible, dimensions of risk and courage that justice de-
mands of them. Du Bois addresses the biography to the racial entangle-
ments of a present audience in order to teach Americans how to fold both a
moment of hesitation and a sense of tragedy into their convictions without
sapping their courage to strike against injustice.
It is a similar lesson in stuttering James sought to teach with his ora-
tion before the audience seated in the Boston Music Hall that afternoon in
1897. Standing before the assembled audience of military dignitaries, poli-
ticians, and soldiers, James’s refusal to present Shaw as a war hero upset
the nationalist moralism that the Decoration Day celebration presumed.
James puts himself at risk in contesting the notion that martial valor is the
essence of civic virtue. But in his frank speech, he also trusts his audience

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to meet his leap halfway by hearing his call to stammer in their convic-
tions, that is, to hear the danger of violence and conflict that resides in
such a public celebration of moral righteousness. Rhetoric scholar Paul
Stob describes James’s performance as an act of “confrontational ther-
apy” with his audience: “[H]‌e wanted to separate them from what they
thought they know about the 54th—i.e., what they thought they know
about themselves.”44
A stuttering countenance of both risk and trust is not merely an eth-
ical posture, although it is also that. It is a practice of political engage-
ment in the surprising and unpredictable conditions of a pluralistic
universe. Attending to how political convictions come to stutter, stam-
mer, murmur, and quiver cuts across the forced dichotomies of princi-
ple or project, contingency or conviction, pluralism and partisanship,
that frame much discussion of pragmatism and political theory. In their
place, James opens up new ways to see how hesitation and political de-
cision can felicitously fold over one another, and how agency resides
in more subtle and imperceptible connections with others than the lan-
guage of sovereign decision presumes.

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CHAPTER 5 Tragedy, History,

and Democratic Faith
I. “A False Moralistic View of History”
In the early months of the Spanish-American War, William James suffered

a profound crisis of faith in American democracy. He confided to Henry
Sidgwick, “I am too heart-sick over the infamy of our philippine [sic] con-
duct to care for much else. The stars and stripes which did truly stand for
something ideal, & on the whole mean it, in spite of imperfect ways of ful-
fillment, are now a lying rag, pure and simple” (C 8:523). James’s colleague
George Santayana recounts one such outburst of grief at the nation’s turn
to empire. Santayana recalls:
One afternoon in the autumn of 1898 we were standing in [George Herbert]

Palmer’s library after a brief business meeting, and conversation turned on
the terms of peace imposed by the United States on Spain after the end of
the Cuban war. James was terribly distressed. … James said that he felt he
had lost his country. Intervention in Cuba might be defended, on account of
the perpetual bad government there and the sufferings of the natives. But
the annexation of the Philippines, what could excuse that? What could be a
more shameless betrayal of American principles? What could be a plainer
symptom of greed, ambition, corruption and imperialism?1
Santayana makes note of this episode for the striking naiveté of James’s
distraught reaction. “Why was William James so much upset by an event
that the victims of it could take so calmly?” he asks. “Because he held a
false moralistic view of history, attributing events to the conscious ideals
and free will of individuals.”2
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These sentiments of despair and disappointment represent a sharp

contrast to the call to democratic faith that James made only a year ear-
lier in his oration to Robert Gould Shaw. “Democracy is still on trial,”
he told his Boston audience, and its future relied on the “civic genius”
of the American people as a “bulwark” against decline (RGS 74). This
bulwark appeared to have crumbled under the flood of jingoism and ex-
citement that swept the nation into war. The United States “seems de-
liberately to have embraced the vocation of the older nations,” James la-
ments to Theodora Sedgwick. “The predatory instinct is too strong, and
we whites are evidently destined to enslave or kill everything in sight”
(C 9:108). For Santayana, this drastic fluctuation from idealism to de-
spair concerning the future of American democracy was not a symptom
of James’s morbid personality. Rather, it was a practical consequence
of pragmatism itself. Santayana raises this charge when he describes
James’s reaction as a symptom of his “false moralistic view of history.”
This is pragmatism’s view of history as an open and unfinished horizon
of a world still in the making. It is false for its depiction of the scope of
agency as boundless and unlimited. It is moralistic for its faith in ideas
and values as the primary movers of human conduct. Missing from prag-
matism’s conception of history is an acknowledgment that “individuals,
especially in governments, are creatures of circumstances and slaves to
vested interests.”3 A philosophy premised on such unrealistic and ideal-
ized premises cannot but lead to disappointment when it crashes into the
hard reality of politics.
Santayana’s remark contains the elements of two persistent criticisms of
pragmatism. The first is the claim that pragmatism exaggerates the scope
of human agency to control and direct reality, culminating in a Promethean
conception of the self. We saw a version of this criticism in chapter 4 where
Bertrand Russell characterized pragmatism as appealing to a temperament
“unaware of non-human limitations to human power.”4 The second is con-
tained in Santayana’s claim, more tacit than expressed, that the naive opti-
mism of this view of history is characteristically American. Generations of
pragmatism’s critics have seen its vision of an open and unfinished world
awaiting the contribution of the individual as an expression of the naive
optimism of American civilization. As Martin Heidegger described prag-
matism, it amounted to little more than the “American interpretation of
Americanism.”5 As we saw in the Introduction, the charge of a hubristic
conception of individual agency and an optimistic confidence in perpetual
progress converge in the question of pragmatism’s relationship to the im-
perial imaginary of frontier freedom.
Tragedy, History, and Democratic Faith | 127

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In respect to the first of these charges, that pragmatism embodies an

extravagant conception of human agency as unbounded will, we have
seen that such criticisms overlook the Janus-faced nature of James’s con-
ception of agency. On the one hand, pragmatism is a philosophy of action.
Its repudiation of historical necessity and causal determinacy reorients in-
dividuals toward the future as an open horizon of action. A pluriverse still
in the making remains perpetually open to creative acts of innovation and
change. On the other hand, the contingency that makes such assertions
of agency possible also demands humility and restraint. A world without
final foundations and guarantees is also one defined by conflict, partiality,
and the tragedy of suffering and loss. Negotiating such a world demands
an element of reflection on the contingency of one’s own deepest beliefs
and, accordingly, generous toleration toward the perspectives of others.
The ethical work of balancing self-assertion and self-restraint defines the
democratic ethos at the heart of pragmatism’s anti-imperialism.
That said, James’s testaments of despair cited above bespeak a view
of American history that is not simply naive in its optimism but false and
moralizing. James’s claim to have suddenly “lost his country” to the vice
of imperialism in 1898 exemplifies the peculiar form of national amnesia
intertwined with the myth of American exceptionalism.6 For all of his in-
volvement in anti-imperial advocacy in subsequent years, James, like the
majority of his fellow anti-imperialists, never understood the occupation
of the Philippines as continuous with a longer history of American im-
perialism and colonialism.7 A similar historical myopia is evident in the
Shaw oration’s curious silence on race and the racial meaning of Civil War
memory in the depths of the nation’s post-Reconstruction nadir. James’s
singular focus on Shaw’s conviction decenters the courage and sacrifice
of the Fifty-fourth’s African American soldiers who gave their lives to de-
stroy slavery.8 To memorialize the Civil War as a battle over moral ideals
in 1897 certainly disputes the Lost Cause revisionist narratives coming to
define national memory of the war. Democracy remains on trial, James
rightly reminds his audience, but the continuing struggle for racial equal-
ity does not seem to be submitted in evidence. As Santayana suggests, this
historical narrative of America’s democratic trial is false for its refusal to
acknowledge the history of violence and domination that had coexisted
with democratic expansion and progress. It is moralistic for its faith in
national ideals as the movers of progress that remain untarnished by the
nation’s myriad failures to live up to them.
James’s dramatic shift from optimistic hope to pessimistic despair con-
cerning the meaning of “the stars and stripes” illustrates the persistence of

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the all-too-human fear of uncertainty and craving for order lurking within
pragmatism’s political rhetoric of democratic faith. Like monism’s posit-
ing of an édition de luxe above experience that remains untarnished by
the “the various finite editions” of the order below, “full of false readings,
distorted and mutilated each in its own way,” exceptionalism’s shining ab-
straction on the hill called “America” bears little resemblance to the brutal
and violent imperialist history of the United States of America (P 124).
Abstractions speak to human cravings and existential wants to give order
to experience and provide a sense of “feeling at home.” But being at home
in a pluralistic universe, James argues, is an experience of belonging to
time, not timeless abstractions. Experience’s persistent interruption of our
authoritative abstractions reveals their broken promise and, in doing so,
as we have seen in the previous chapters, frustrates emotional longings
for order. It is not surprising, then, that the practical meaning of abstrac-
tions in practice is an oscillating one, swinging between bellicose rage and
dejected resignation or national optimism and political despair. A false,
moralistic view of history, like that James espoused with his rhetoric of
democratic faith, is a disavowal of the very contingency his pragmatism
aspires to embrace.
Faith, however, need not be lodged in monistic abstractions or fantastic
myths. As James’s political maturation from this episode of catastrophic
awakening to empire in 1898–1899 illustrates, a democratic faith inspired
by a pluralistic sensibility can be tragic without being pessimistic and in-
spiring without being optimistic. Pluralism’s tragic sensibility resists the
seductions of American optimism and its blinding abstractions to allow
history to appear in all its thickness, as James might say (PU 64). James’s
term for this alternative to both optimism and pessimism is meliorism.
Meliorism, like pragmatism, is not a theory but an orientation. It “treats
salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility,
which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the
actual conditions of salvation become” (P 137). Unlike optimism, meliorism
takes faith as a hypothesis to test through experience rather than fidelity
to abstract ideals. Meliorist faith takes progress as possible without deny-
ing the tragedy and loss that progress always entails. Unlike pessimism,
it acknowledges the finitude of human powers to transform reality with-
out denying the need to struggle at their boundaries. Where a democratic
faith bound to allegiance in mythic abstraction blinds actors to reality,
a pluralistic meliorism invites a different orientation towards history and
action. A meliorist faith is a hope for the future lodged in pluralism’s dif-
ficult double-gesture of bearing witness to experiences of suffering, evil,

130
and human limitation as an affirmation of joy, power, and life. Affirming

the creative powers and humble limitations of action within the contin-
gency of a pluralistic modernity, James wagers, may be grounds for a faith
in democracy that remains wary of the seductions of the monist myth of
American exceptionalism.
This chapter takes the two lines of criticism embodied in Santayana’s
remark to confront a question that has been at the boundaries of the discus-
sion in the previous chapters: Does pragmatism creatively rework or merely
reiterate the imperial idioms of American exceptionalism? The first section
of this chapter examines the political criticisms of pragmatism’s notion
of democratic faith, leveled by self-styled realist critics like Santayana.
At the heart of their criticism of pragmatism’s American optimism is the
charge of a strong conception of the scope of agency. Examining how the
critique of agency lies at the foundation of these criticisms of pragmatism’s
view of history sets the stage for the following section, where we see in
greater detail that James’s pragmatism presumes no such conception of
unbounded agency. James’s critique of optimism in both The Varieties of
Religious Experience and Pragmatism presents a conception of meliorist
faith that is constitutively bound with finitude. Evil, death, and suffering
are no accidental elements of James’s meliorist vision; they reside at its
very core. The following two sections ask what implications this vision
of finitude holds for affirming faith in American democracy. Because the
majority of James’s comments on political progress and national history
date from the outbreak of the war and reflect the naive exceptionalism he
came to doubt, we lack explicit examples of the application of his mature
tragic vision to empire as a way of life. This chapter aims to supplement
this omission by rereading Jamesian arguments through those of W. E. B.
Du Bois in order to explore the political consequences of meliorism. Du
Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk provides a powerful example of a meliorist
faith that is grounded in the experience of historical time rather than the
abstractions of a national intellectualism. Souls discloses an illustration of
a tragic conception of democratic faith through its gift of “second sight”
that shies away from both the councils of despair and the triumphalism of
exceptionalist myth.
In turning to Du Bois as a site for theorizing the political consequences
of pragmatism, I build on the work of a line of scholars who have docu-
mented the influence of pragmatism on Du Bois’s early writings.9 Jonathon
Kahn helpfully summarizes this literature when he writes that Du Bois
“can be plausibly thought of as problematically a pragmatist in that he
adapts and extends a Jamesian radical empiricism to moral, social, and

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political questions about race and power in American life, issues and con-
cerns that James and the rest of the pragmatists were largely deaf to.”10
Some readers will find this turn to Du Bois counterintuitive. Dewey’s volu-
minous writings on democratic faith surely provide a more obvious touch-
stone for understanding the politics of pragmatism.11 As I have argued
throughout this book, however, we err when we interpret James’s political
thought as merely an immature predecessor to Dewey’s democratic theory.
Taking Du Bois as a comparison case opens another perspective on the
politics of pragmatism that is occluded by the habitual turn to more famil-
iar examples.
Three important contributions follow from bringing Du Bois rather than
Dewey into the discussion here. The first is that the tragic and conflictual
dimensions of experience, so central to James’s notion of meliorism, are
foregrounded by Du Bois’s doubled-perspective, whereas they are muted
in Dewey’s democratic theory at best, or, worse, absent altogether.12 The
second is that Du Bois at once continues James’s critique of American
imperialism while profoundly deepening it by demonstrating the entan-
glement of empire, history, and race. Third, the tragic faith I reconstruct
through Du Bois raises important challenges for contemporary pragma-
tists and neopragmatists who champion the discourse of democratic faith.
A tragic conception of faith that negotiates the boundaries of hope and de-
spair has been eclipsed by a conception of faith in democracy that comes
dangerously close to the exceptionalist mythos that both James and Du
Bois would warn pragmatists against.
II. Promethean Pragmatism and the Ambiguity of Faith
Santayana’s remark about James’s false and moralistic conception of his-

tory foreshadows a century of realist criticism of pragmatism. Reinhold
Niebuhr judged James’s “optimism” to be an admirable but dated expres-
sion of the innocence of an era “untroubled” by the twentieth century’s
horrors of world war and the specter of nuclear catastrophe.13 To historian
Christopher Lasch, Jamesian pragmatism’s optimism and Prometheanism
embody the hubris of American liberalism.14 In Democratic Faith, Patrick
Deneen positions himself in the lineage of Santayana, Niebuhr, and Lasch
to level a critique of pragmatism’s naive optimism as representative of a
vicious cycle of democratic faith and democratic despair. The optimistic
exaggeration of human possibilities and democratic potentials necessarily
leads to disappointment when their impossible promise is not realized.

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Calls for democratic faith result in democratic disillusionment, which in

turn inspire further calls for optimistic faith and repeat the cycle of prom-
ise and disappointment. To break free of this vicious circle would mean to
abandon the superhuman projection of human capabilities to master time
that democratic faith promises in favor of a “democratic realism.”15 This
realism would be one that begins with an acknowledgment of the limita-
tion of human powers and the imperfection of finite rational animals so
as to enjoin a more chastened view of political possibility. Deneen follows
Lasch to propose a more modest and less destructive stance as “hope with-
out optimism.”16
These criticisms of pragmatism as both naive and self-defeating attack
a straw man, as we will see, but they should not be simply dismissed. The
exaggerated terms of their critique give voice to a deep ambiguity in the
language of faith, one pragmatists themselves are not always been atten-
tive to.17 Pragmatism champions faith and hope in action-oriented terms.
Its aim is to inspire hopeful action and ward off pessimistic despair. This
depiction of democratic faith as either “thankfully present or woefully
absent,” as George Shulman describes this literature, fails to capture the
ways faith can be both “present and problematic.”18 As Deneen’s criticism
makes clear, the injunction to hope can work to reinforce disappointment
and despair by projecting abstract ideals unmoored from any vital reality
in experience.
This ambiguity of faith is classically expressed in the myth of
Prometheus and Pandora. In The Works and Days and Theogony, Hesiod
recounts how Zeus introduced both hope and evil into human society as
punishment for Prometheus’s transgression against the gods. Prometheus
first slights Zeus when he unequally distributes the shares of a slaughtered
ox by hiding the meatiest and fattiest parts in the ox’s stomach for humans,
while handing over to Zeus only the animal’s bones disguised by a thick
piece of fat. Zeus withholds fire from humanity as punishment for this de-
ception. But it is only after Prometheus disobeys the gods again by stealing
fire that Zeus reveals his true anger. “As the price of fire I will give them
an evil, and all men shall fondle this, their evil, close to their hearts and
delight in it.”19 This evil is a cursed woman named Pandora; Zeus gifts her
to Prometheus’s gullible brother, Epimetheus. In The Works and Days, the
evils Pandora brings are contained in a jar that she opens, setting free “sad
troubles for mankind.”20 With the opening of the jar, illness, suffering, and
toil enter the world and fundamentally transform the human condition.
The final content of the jar is hope, but Zeus guides Pandora’s hand to shut
hope inside the jar before it escapes with the other evils.

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Commentators since antiquity have been puzzled by the inclusion of

hope in Pandora’s jar of evils.21 Why is hope included among the evils
Zeus inflicts as punishment? And what is the significance of the fact that
Zeus traps hope inside the jar at the last minute? One answer may be that
the inclusion of hope is an expression of Zeus’s sympathy for the humanity
he punishes. Zeus does not deny humanity hope by trapping it inside the
jar. Rather, he preserves it from being lost in the face of Pandora’s evils.
On this interpretation, hope is a strength that allows humanity to endure
evil and suffering. On another interpretation, by contrast, Zeus’s decision
to trap hope inside the jar is the fullest expression of his promise to un-
leash an evil that humanity will hold “close to their hearts and delight in.”
Hope is the punishment for Prometheus’s insatiable desire for more than
his share. It is an affliction that forever disappoints satisfaction with what
humans possess in pursuit of an insatiable desire for what they lack. This
is hope not as a psychological defense against evil; it is a form of self-de-
lusion that extends man’s suffering by forever making him complicit in his
own disastrous overreaching.
These two competing interpretations of the Prometheus myth illustrate
the competing views of pragmatists and realists concerning the meaning
of democratic faith, and their respective figurations of agency’s scope.22
For these realists, pragmatism’s justification of faith reflects a conception
of agency as limitless power. Deneen puts this point sharply when he de-
scribes James’s meliorist faith as “a faith that human aims and ambitions
were in perfect concord with the created existence that they are empow-
ered to alter and control.”23 Does pragmatism presume such an unbounded
vision of human agency? Understanding the boundaries of the comparison
between pragmatism and Prometheus is important for grasping the ways
meliorism negotiates faith’s constitutive ambiguity.
We saw one answer to this question in the earlier discussion of Giovanni
Papini. Papini embraced pragmatism as a philosophy for cultivating super-
human powers of self-transcendence into a Uomo-dio. “A gospel of power,
a gospel of courage, a practical, and optimistic, an American gospel! Away
with fear! Daring! Forward! A leap into the dark! Away with doubt! …
Away with metaphysics! Welcome to religions!,” he exclaims of pragmatism’s
vitalizing power.24 Nowhere does this description of pragmatism as a philosophy
of self-deification seem more fitting than in the seventh lecture of Pragmatism
titled “Pragmatism and Humanism.” There, James takes a strong stance on
the ontological implications of pragmatism’s conception of truth discussed in
the previous lecture. Ideas, propositions, and claims are not true independent
of the social practices in which they are embedded. Pragmatism defines truth

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in terms of its process of practical verification. “Truth happens to an idea,” he

writes. “It becomes true, is made true by events” (P 97; emphasis in original).
Lecture seven clarifies this point by stressing that the events that make truth
are human labors that put beliefs in action. Extending his argument about
the action-oriented nature of consciousness, James argues that reality is not
simply given as a datum to experience independently of human purposes.
Agents’ interests, ideas, and prejudices are constitutive parts of experience
that cannot be weeded out. Anticipating the insights of phenomenology and
Gestalt psychology, James describes experience as an active poesis. “We re-
ceive in short the block of marble,” he writes of conscious experience, “but we
carve the statue ourselves” (P 119).
The lecture continues from this phenomenological point about the action-
oriented nature of consciousness to a stronger claim about reality’s plasticity.
“We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will” (P 122).
He continues, “In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are crea-
tive. We add, both to the subject and to the predicate of reality. The world
stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like
the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders
truth upon it” (P 123; emphasis in original).25 James concludes this startling
passage by acknowledging the influence of “Signore Papini, the leader of
the Italian pragmatism,” who “grows fairly dithyrambic over the view that
it opens of man’s divinely-creative functions” (P 123). Humanism, pragmat-
ically conceived, projects a vision of boundless mastery that stands unop-
posed by a docile reality that suffers its violence willingly.
This passage gives strong support to pragmatism’s realist critics. More
responsible interpreters than Papini and more sympathetic ones than
Deneen have found a similar Promethean streak in James’s conception of
agency. Richard Gale, for example, locates an “ethics of Prometheanism”
at the heart of both James’s personality and his philosophy. James’s future-
oriented philosophy “is fueled by his Promethean quest to gain power to
control our environment so as to realize our goals,” although, on Gale’s
account, this Prometheanism stands in perpetual tension with the recep-
tive passivity of James’s religious mysticism.26 While these readers are
correct to emphasize the quasi-divine conception of agency that frames
James’s philosophy, they are mistaken to conclude that a divine concep-
tion of agency is a boundless one. As we saw briefly in chapter 2, the God
of a pluralistic universe is not the omnipotent and omniscient Absolute
being sought by the monist. “I hold to the finite God,” James pronounces
in A Pluralistic Universe, as the only sort of God possible in a cosmos still
unfinished and defined by chance (PU 54; emphasis added). “His will has

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to struggle with conditions not imposed on that will by itself. He tolerates

provisionally what he has not created, and then with endless patience tries
to overcome it and live it down. He has, in short, a history” (PU 133). The
unmasterable chance and contingency of a world still in the making along
its many edges means that even God’s powers must be limited in some
fashion, that He must suffer imposition on His will, and divine patience
is required in the face of events even God cannot control. This insistence
that the contingency of a world of becoming denies sovereign mastery to
even the Creator suggests a more chastened vision of mortal powers than
the comparisons with Promethean hubris suggest. To better understand
James’s bounded and finite conception of agency and its consequences for
the politics of faith we return once again to the figuration of the tragic en-
twinement of faith and finitude in Pragmatism.
III. Meliorism as Mortalism
The finitude of the human condition is a central, if sometimes muted,

theme in Pragmatism. The pragmatic method promises to mediate and
reconcile the competing temperaments that have defined the history of
philosophy. We have seen a number of these feats of reconciliation across
the previous chapters: cravings for order and change; monism and plu-
ralism; tender and tough; risk and trust; action and restraint. The very
proposal that a method might overcome millennia of seemingly intrac-
table philosophical disagreement suggests a claim of control over reality
that seems exaggerated on first reading. It is for this reason worthwhile to
notice the persistence of one problem in this text that no method can solve:
namely, death. As William J. Gavin demonstrates, the invocations of death
in the opening and closing lectures of Pragmatism bespeak pragmatism’s
acknowledgment of the very limits of its method. It marks the boundaries
of human powers to organize and master reality. Taking these limitations
seriously holds broad consequences for James’s vision of agency, faith, and
history. The self figured by pragmatism’s sense of mortality “is more frag-
ile and tragic than just promethean in nature.”27
The first death strikes in Pragmatism’s opening lecture. To demonstrate
the insufficiency of the tender-minded optimism “now in vogue” in phi-
losophy, James presents his audience with two examples of brutal death
from “a publication of that valiant anarchist writer Morrison I. Swift” (P
20–21). Swift was a radical writer and labor organizer in Boston, most
famous for leading marches of the unemployed on the Massachusetts State

136
House.28 James most likely encountered Swift’s writings through his 1899
Imperialism and Liberty.29 James cites two lengthy passages from Swift’s
1905 Human Submission to convey his “dissatisfaction” with idealistic op-
timism, a dissatisfaction that James himself confesses to “sympathize with
a good deal” (P 21). The chapter of Human Submission James draws from is
a full-throated indictment of religious optimism. Swift takes aim at James’s
Hegelian colleague, Josiah Royce, with his charge that any philosophy that
seeks to give meaning to suffering works to justify the social injustices at its
source. Against the monistic optimism of the ivory tower, Swift marshals
a catalogue of starvations, suicides, and murders committed by workers
and artisans left destitute and hopeless by their exploitation at the hands
of American capitalists. James cites just two of them. The first is the clerk
John Corcoran, who “to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid” after
an illness that cost him his job left him unable to feed his family (P 22). The
second is the case of a Bohemian laborer in Cleveland who shot his children
before taking his own life. Such horrendous events “cannot be glozed [sic]
over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being,
helplessly existing in their monumental vacuity,” argues Swift (cited in P
22). Monism’s optimistic and ahistorical catalogue of oughts, duties, and
proofs of God’s existence cannot grasp the visceral reality of this suffering.
And worse still, it perversely justifies this suffering as a necessary element
of an essentially just world. Better to be rid of religion, Swift concludes,
than endure the disgrace of rationalizing injustice.
James cites Swift as an example of the tough-m inded temperament
that perpetually clashes with tender-m inded optimism, inviting the con-
clusion that pragmatism will reconcile and mediate this dispute. But
what would it mean to resolve this problem? While the economic and
political conditions that lead these men to such desperate conclusions
can be transformed, the fact of their suffering and death cannot.30 A
transformed economy would not redeem their deaths, let alone recon-
cile or mediate them. The acknowledgment of human suffering as a
limit case for any form of rationalistic optimism is a persistent trope in
James’s writings. Recall that James himself considered suicide in the
depths of his psychic collapse, and this experience of despair left a per-
manent scar on his philosophical thinking.31 Philosophy must do more
than respond to human aspirations and cravings. It also needs to respond
to the depths of human misery and the experiences of powerlessness that
drive persons to take their own lives. In an 1895 essay, “Is Life Worth
Living?,” James writes that in philosophy, as in life, we must remem-
ber that “we are of one substance” with “the whole army of suicides”

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who declare life to be not worth living. “The plainest intellectual integ-
rity,—nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget
their case” (LWL 38). James’s deepest and most evocative account of
this fact is found in The Varieties of Religious Experience’s portrait of
the sick s oul. Like Pragmatism, Varieties is structured around the clash
of two temperaments, the optimistic healthy-m inded and the pessimistic
sick-souled. James presents their clash as one that can, in principle, find
reconciled expression in a higher temperament he calls the “twice-born
soul.” The twice-born soul does not resolve human suffering and limita-
tion, however. She affirms experiences of suffering and evil as a source
of strength. Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, a twice-born soul that
bears witness to the limits of human power as a condition of her faith
is a meliorist.
James introduces the healthy-minded temperament in Varieties’ fourth
lecture. The healthy-minded temperament “looks on all things and sees
that they are good” (VRE 78). He feels a sense of inspiring delight at the
very presence of the world with “no element of morbid compunction or
crisis” (VRE 74). James proposes the example of Walt Whitman as the “the
supreme contemporary” of this optimistic faith. Like the “indiscriminate
hurrahing for the Universe” of Leaves of Grass, the healthy-minded soul
sees everything as good and nothing as evil (EC 114). “Evil is a disease;
and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only
adds to the original complaint.” The best cure for this affliction is simply
to turn a blind eye toward the reality of evil “and forget that you ever had
relations with sin” (VRE 109). Healthy-minded optimism is constitutively
blind to the reality of evil.
Optimistic blindness may inspire a sense of religious surrender or com-
fort, but, like a monist’s moral holiday, it provides only a false comfort.
Optimism can only be sustained through willful blindness.
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the
slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded
are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recog-
nize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer
and cleaner and better than the world that really is. (VRE 80–81)
This poetic reality is a monistic abstraction that conceals the elements of

suffering, evil, and pain that are woven into the existential fabric of life.
The reason so many turn toward the healthy-minded religion is because
acknowledging the darker elements of existence and lingering in their

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presence inspires a sense of helplessness. The religious temperament will-

ing to acknowledge the reality of evil and the horrors on which optimism
is founded is the more robust kind of faith James admires. “Here is the real
core of the religious problem: help! help!” (VRE 135). This is the moral
universe of the sick-souled temperament.
Suffering is an essential and unavoidable element of reality seen
through sick-souled eyes. Hers is a pessimistic and morbid outlook that
James describes as “world sickness” (VRE 118). For this sort of temper-
ament, “life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together… . The
breath of the sepulcher surrounds it” (VRE 118). The moral universe the
sick soul inhabits is not that of ecstatic unity celebrated by Whitman. It
is rather a dirempted moral universe where the self experiences itself as
forsaken by God. The sick soul is set adrift without the hope of redemp-
tion in this morbid world, where all good things are tainted with evil and
pain. Religious thinkers articulate this experience of helplessness through
the idea of sin “with a capital S” (VRE 114). In the face of such experi-
ences, the self’s “original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with
the dust” (VRE 135). Sin sunders the will between the conflicting impulses
of love and pride.
St. Augustine’s Confessions epitomizes the pathos of this divide soul.
“It is therefore no strange phenomenon partly to will to do something and
partly to will not to do it… . So there are two wills in us, because neither
by itself is the whole will, and each possesses what the other lacks.”32 This
is a self at war with itself, both ashamed of its weakness and longing for
a healing salvation it lacks faith will ever arrive. Varieties draws on both
Augustine’s writings and research in clinical psychology to suggest that this
experience of internal division is an abnormal phenomenon that finds ex-
pression in a diversity of mental pathologies. James explored the physiolog-
ical basis of the “doubling of the self” in Principles as it manifested in cases
of hysteria, trance phenomena, and hypnosis (PP 1:377).33 Pathological
brain behavior becomes uncoordinated in these cases, which gives rise to
experiences of a divided consciousness. Sick-souled religious experience
is one psychological manifestation of “an incompletely unified moral and
intellectual constitution” (VRE 140). The experience of rupture and discord
internal to the self is a painful and almost unbearable experience. Religion
for the sick-souled is a prayer for redemption from a life of suffering.
Literary scholar Shamoon Zamir suggests that a normative concep-
tion of American and European political cultures lays behind James’s dis-
tinction between the two temperaments. Varieties holds up Whitman and
Emerson as exemplars of the healthy-minded soul, while James’s examples

139
of the sick soul are primarily drawn from the texts of St. Augustine,
Tolstoy, and other European writers. James celebrates the vitalizing power
of “American action” against the torpid passivity of “European introspec-
tion.”34 There is some truth to this claim in terms of how James organizes
his examples, but we would be remiss to conclude, along with Zamir and
pragmatism’s realist critics, that James himself sides with a characteris-
tically American optimism. The conclusion he draws from his compari-
son is in fact just the opposite. The most complete religions are “those in
which the pessimistic elements are the best developed” (VRE 138). Action,
conflict, effort, chance—all the elements of a pluralistic universe James
embraces—are impossible without risk, danger, loss, suffering, and pain.
James must reject optimism as the more shallow of the two temperaments
for its inability to account for the suffering and risk that make life worth
living. These “evil facts,” he argues, “may after all be the best key to life’s
significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels
of truth” (VRE 136).
Varieties progresses in a dialectical manner, from healthy-minded sim-
plicity to its antithesis in sick-souled division, to find a higher synthesis in
the eighth lecture: “The Divided Self and the Process of Its Unification.”
Overcoming the paralyzing powerlessness of the sick soul amounts to
nothing less than an experience of rebirth as a new self. This “twice-born”
soul, who has felt the horrific depths of sick-souled division and yet has
reconstituted herself as a new and more powerful soul, is the protagonist of
Varieties’ middle chapters. James writes of this experience of reunification:
One has tasted the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes
again. The happiness that comes, when any does come … is not the simple
ignorance of evil, but something vastly more complex, including natural
evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block
and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The
process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and
the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems like a second birth, a
deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before. (VRE 131)
The result of this struggle with the existence of evil is not a simple-minded
return to an optimistic temperament. “They had drunk too deeply of the
cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste,” James writes of this twice-born
soul, “and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep” (VRE 155).
This is a chiaroscuro of the cosmos where evil exists alongside good, but
no longer as a crushing existential weight. The reborn soul continues to

140
hold on to an element of sadness “as a minor ingredient in the heart of the

faith by which it was overcome” (VRE 155). Neither optimistic nor pessi-
mistic, a twice-born faith in salvation is one chastened by an acknowledg-
ment that trust comes only with risk. It is a trust in the future no longer
blind to the tragic remainders that accompany any redeeming good.
Despite the apparently Hegelian logic to James’s argument, what
distinguishes the twice-born soul’s redemptive experience of evil from
the abject experience of the sick-souled self is a repudiation of monism.
The pessimistic, sick-souled view of reality, like that of her optimistic
healthy-minded counterpart, is a monistic one. Both conceive of theology
in totalized terms that erect God into an “All-in-All”: the world is either
ultimately saved or ultimately damned, and the only response one can
take is a moral holiday of innocent ease or crushing despair (VRE 112).
A monism that raises God’s grace to a principle outside of history turns
evil into a speculative problem for theologians and philosophers to wres-
tle with. Why would a benevolent God allow His children to suffer? The
twice-born soul does not overcome evil through answering this philo-
sophical puzzle. Rather, she takes her escape from both the puzzle and the
dichotomy of optimism or pessimism that frame it by rejecting monism
altogether. James explains, “[T]‌he only obvious escape from paradox here
is to cut loose from the monistic assumptions altogether, and to allow the
world to have existed from its origins in pluralistic form, as an aggregate
or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an ab-
solute unitary fact” (VRE 113; emphasis in original). The twice-born soul
recognizes both good and evil, joy and suffering, as elements of the world
but refuses to admit either as an essential feature. The problem of evil for
her is not the speculative one of why it exists; it is a practical problem of
abolishing it through action. Evil “might be, and may always have been,
an independent portion that has no rational or absolute right to live with
the rest,” James explains, “and which we might conceivably hope to see
got rid of at last” (VRE 113).
This pluralist faith of the twice-born soul brings us back to Pragmatism
and morality. The second death appears in the book’s final lecture,
“Pragmatism and Religion.” James concludes his previous lecture on prag-
matism and humanism with a worry that his strong statement of humanist
self-deification, discussed in the previous section of this chapter, had left
his audience with the perception that pragmatism was too tough-minded
and insensitive to the religious cravings of the tender-minded tempera-
ment (P 129). Pragmatism, he admits, offers no pacifying promises of
the world’s ultimate salvation or any relaxing moral holidays. But neither

141
does it deny such possibilities either. Pragmatism invites the reader to em-
brace contingency, rather than the monism of optimism or pessimism, as
a source of faith. James’s name for this “attitude in human affairs” is mel-
iorism. “Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It
treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability
the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become” (P 137).
The language of probability here is meant to suggest that judgments con-
cerning the future course of events can be made even in the absence of
certainty. What matters are the “actual conditions of salvation” we attend
to. These conditions may be logical or empirical, but the most important
of them is the reader’s own will to believe. Actions and omissions alike
constitute “one moment in the world’s salvation” (P 137). We each “add
our fiat to the fiat of the creator” and through these acts redirect the future
course of the world (P 140; emphasis in original).
Crucially, the open and uncertain character of a pluralistic universe
that makes action possible also demands humility in the face of the un-
known. No actor is sovereign to rule over such a universe. We add our fiat
to that of the creator, along with the diversity of acts, values, and interests
of our fellow inhabitants of this pluralistic world. Two important conse-
quences follow from this. The first is the limited conception of mastery
it implies. No one fiat is a necessary trump on any other, even the fiat
of God Himself. The second is an acknowledgment of the tragic nature
of salvation. Each fiat realized may contribute to the world’s salvation,
but each world saved is at the cost of alternative possible worlds lost. As
James put this point in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” the
tragedy of the moral life is that some part of the ideal must inevitably
be “butchered” (MPML 154). The meliorist self, like the twice-born soul
who overcomes the experience of evil without denying its reality, can
acknowledge the tragic consequences of action and still affirm it. James
imagines someone asking the meliorist: “Doesn’t the very ‘seriousness’
that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses are part of
it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something per-
manently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?” (P
141). Yes, the meliorist affirms, “[w]‌hen the cup is poured off, the dregs
are left behind for ever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet
enough to accept” (P 142).
James gives substance to meliorism’s tragic remainders and what it
means to “accept” them in the following quotation. He offers a Greek epi-
gram as an admirable example of the “acceptance of loss as unatoned for,
even though the lost element might be oneself.”

142
A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,

Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale. (P 142)35
This is Pragmatism’s concluding scene of mortality. Where Swift’s cat-

alogue of gruesome deaths was presented as a challenge to philosophers
to acknowledge mortality and loss as limits to their optimistic flight into
abstraction, here death functions as a reminder of the boundaries of melio-
rism itself. Meliorists must confront evil as a practical problem and strug-
gle to lend their might “to throwing it overboard and getting beyond it” as
they sail into the future so as to help “make a universe that shall forget its
very place and name” (P 142). The very idea of a universe that could, in
principle, overcome evil is a bold claim, but even in such a universe the
death of the sailor who bids the meliorist to sail forth would not be ulti-
mately redeemed. It is an “unatoned” loss. Meliorism demands a coura-
geous leap into the future, chastened by a tragic knowledge that this future
too will be one of possibilities lost and pains endured. Remaining attentive
to the “dregs” left behind requires escape from the monistic abstractions
that leave us captured by healthy-minded blindness or sick-souled despair.
Most dangerous of these illusions, and most difficult for reconceiving a
genuinely meliorist democratic faith, is the idealized mythos of American
exceptionalism.
IV. Meliorism on the Color Line
Du Bois sent a copy of The Souls of Black Folk to James when it was
first published in April 1903. The book struck Du Bois’s former teacher
as something of a revelation. In a letter to Sarah Whyman Whitman that
summer, James described it as “a very remarkable literary production—as
mournful as it is remarkable” (C 10:261; see also C 3:242). The impact Du
Bois’s book made on James is clear from his sudden decision to lend his
name to the struggle against lynching in two widely circulated editorials
published that July. James denounced the “epidemic” of lynch mobs and
the collusion of courts and police in perpetuating white terror (EL 173). He
writes that nothing shy of lynching the mob leaders themselves is needed
to forestall a future where “we shall have negro burning in a few years
on Cambridge commons and the Boston public garden” (SN 173). These
strong remarks suggest that reading Souls awoke James to the reality of

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American white supremacy. That James, a man who lived through the Civil
War, Reconstruction, and the rise of Southern redemption, could have re-
mained oblivious until this moment of the living legacy of white terror over
black bodies in the United States illustrates the very challenge of melior-
ism’s double gesture that Du Bois tackles in Souls. For Du Bois, a faith in
the future progress of American democracy too often came at the cost of a
strange amnesia concerning the nation’s past—an amnesia that could make
James’s awakening to white supremacy a surprising realization in 1903, no
less than his shocking discovery of American imperialism half a decade
earlier. Recovering faith in the democratic struggle against white suprem-
acy, Du Bois argues, demands confronting the peculiar fusion of this am-
nesiac evasion of history with the idealism of American exceptionalism.36
This recovery of memory against amnesia is announced on the book’s
opening page. The “Forethought” presents Souls as an exercise in recov-
ering “truth hidden” and things “buried.” First among these is what Du
Bois provocatively calls “the strange meaning of being black here in the
dawning of the Twentieth Century.” The reason this experience must be
unburied is that it remains hidden, forgotten, under the weight of an excep-
tionalist myth of the nation’s perpetual progress. “I have seen a land right
merry with the sun,” Du Bois writes of this myth, “where children sing,
the rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton for harvest. And there in
the King’s Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the
traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go.” This veiled figure is the American
Negro, barred like Moses in Kadesh from progress into this land of plent-
itude. The fourteen essays making up Souls are essays in recovery of the
memory of this veiled figure as the grounds for a faith in a future different
from the past. A counter-memory of the past that shatters the amnesia of
the nation’s optimistic and monistic history prepares the way for a genuine
future where both races can travel this road together. “Three centuries’
thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and
how behold a century new for the duty and the deed,” Du Bois writes of
the challenge facing American democracy at the dawn of the new century.
“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”37
The depiction of the problem of the color line as that of donning and es-
caping the veil discloses Du Bois’s central claim about the “strange mean-
ing” of black experience. The veil separating the black self and the white
world is the experience of double consciousness. The black self at once
participates in the white world and is excluded from it. Du Bois describes
the experience of this paradoxical form of inclusive exclusion as one of
self-estrangement, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the

144
eyes of others, of measuring one’s self by the tape of a world that looks
on in amused contempt and pity.”38 This is an experience of a divided self,
of a consciousness at war with itself. “One ever feels his two-ness—an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps
it from being torn asunder.” This history of the Negro in America is “the
history of this strife,” he explains, “this longing to attain self-conscious
manhood, to merge his double self into a better and true self.” A healing
reconciliation of this divided consciousness would not be the overcoming
of one’s blackness through integrating into the white world, nor the ex-
punging of white consciousness from the black soul. Double consciousness
longs for reconciliation in a proud hyphenization that would “make it pos-
sible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed
and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity
closed roughly in his face.”39 Escape from under the veil segregating these
worlds demands an affirmation, both individually and collectively, and
from both sides of the color line, of the Negro as “a co-worker in the king-
dom of culture.”40
The concept of double consciousness was not unfamiliar in the dis-
course of clinical psychology at the turn of the century. As we have seen
above, it was one that James deployed in Varieties and Principles (see PP
1:200–218; PP 2:200). There has been much ink spilled concerning the
possible influence of James’s psychology on Du Bois’s famous account of
black experience.41 Scholars like Zamir and Adolph Reed Jr. argue that
such comparisons obscure more than they reveal about Du Bois’s concept
of double consciousness; namely, his sociological account of black experi-
ence as a form of alienation. “James’ discussions of double consciousness
or of the divided self in the realms of hysteria or religious experience favor
medicalized diagnoses and remedial strategies that naturalize society in
their stress on the return to healthy equilibrium,” writes Zamir, arguing
against claims for a tight theoretical parallel between their two views of
consciousness. “Du Bois’s psychology, by contrast, is committed to a po-
litical understanding of alienation and a social and historical location of
the self.”42 James differentiates healthy and sick-souled temperaments in
Varieties, in terms of their innate sensitivity to what he calls “the misery
line.” Temperamental sensitivity is a contingent feature of an individual’s
psychological profile without a clear physiological or biological source. As
James puts this point in a pithy aside, “There are men who seem to have
started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit”
(VRE 115). For Du Bois, by contrast, double consciousness is the reflection

145
of the racial hierarchy that structures American society.43 He recounts his

own introduction behind the veil as a child in Great Barrington as a scene
of interpolation: it is through the refusing glance of a white child that he
falls from innocence into the history of double consciousness.44
These critics are correct to warn against any direct parallelism of James
and Du Bois’s accounts of double consciousness. But this alone does not
repudiate the possibility of reading Du Bois as appropriating and rework-
ing Jamesian concepts in an innovative manner.45 We might better read
Du Bois’s foregrounding of the social construction of racial consciousness
as marking an example of the flexibility of pragmatist concepts as poten-
tial tools for political thought. We move beyond the question of whether
or not Du Bois’s account of double consciousness was directly influenced
by James’s when we ask in its place: What new political significance can
Jamesian concepts take on when read from within the terms of Du Bois’s
historicization of consciousness? Such a critical rereading can offer impor-
tant insights into how a meliorism’s tragic consciousness might negotiate
the political ambiguities of democratic faith. Recall that the twice-born
soul, too, is a doubled one, afflicted with a consciousness of evil and fini-
tude. She does not succumb in pessimistic despair to this experience, but
rather draws courage and strength from the experience of struggling with
her divided soul. It is such an open-eyed acknowledgment of both beauty
and suffering, of progress and tragedy, that makes the twice-born soul the
representative of a meliorism that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. The
absence of an explicit examination of the political consequences of this
meliorism by James during his final years invites a reading of Souls that
foregrounds the pragmatic sensibility informing Du Bois’s confrontation
with white supremacy as a way of life.
Approached in this manner, we may see more in double consciousness
than alienation or a wounded attachment. It is the historical position of a
subject with a perspective on things unseen under the glaring optimism of
the monistic vision of the nation as a City upon the Hill. Du Bois expresses
this perspectivism of double consciousness with his recurrent image of the
veil. To experience life from behind the veil of race is at once to be unrec-
ognized by others and also to potentially see something that goes unno-
ticed from without. Du Bois calls this perspective second sight. “After the
Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian,
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-
sight in this American world.”46 The seventh son is a figure of black folk
culture with prophetic power to see into the future and communicate with
the dead.47 By comparing second sight to a supernatural power, Du Bois

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suggests that truths are disclosed to a black perspective that go unnoticed

or unseen through white eyes. Like the healthy-minded optimism that
turns a blind eye to the “slaughterhouses and indecencies without end”
on which its life is founded, as James presented it in Varieties, the white
world blinds itself to darker realities that the gift of second sight sees all
too clearly.
What Du Bois sees from behind the veil is “a land whose freedom is to
us a mockery and whose liberty a lie.”48 Emancipation’s promise of equal-
ity rings hollow in the age of Jim Crow. The freedman was released from
the shackles of slavery only to be abandoned by the nation. He was ex-
ploited by the planters, terrorized by the Klan, enchained by debt through
sharecropping, bound by Black Codes, disenfranchised through criminal
law, denied the education to uplift him, declared “separate but equal” by
the Supreme Court, and taught to despise himself through the internalized
white gaze he bears within his consciousness. The half-century since the
conclusion of the Civil War, seen from the perspective of racial justice, had
not been one of progress. Rather, history repeated itself as the destruction
of chattel slavery gave rise to new forms of debt peonage, white terrorism,
and reenslavement of the convict by Southern courts. “The Nation has not
yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom
his promised land.”49
Despair, disappointment, and anguish are the dominant moods of Souls.
This desperation comes to a climax in “Of the Passing of the First Born,”
where Du Bois recounts the loss of his infant son Burghardt to diphtheria
in 1899. Du Bois’s response is one torn between inconsolable grief and
tragic joy. Grief at the loss of his son’s future; joy that he will be spared
the violence of the veil the white world would thrust upon him. “All that
day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame
me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—and my soul whis-
pers ever to me, saying, ‘Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bound, but
free.’ ”50
It may have been this despondent passage that James had in mind when
he wrote to Du Bois that he judged Souls not simply mournful but hope-
less. But as Du Bois explains in response, such a conclusion misses the
meaning of the message Souls means to bring from behind the veil. “You
must not think I am personally wedded to the ‘minor key’ business,” Du
Bois tells James, “—on the contrary I am turned to a most aggressive and
unquenchable hopefulness. I wanted in this case simply to reveal fully the
other side to the world.”51 For the white world looking in, the world seen
from behind the veil will seem like a pessimistic one. But as Du Bois

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explains here, the suffering, disappointment, and pain the second-sighted

bear witness to is in the service of a hope for the future. Hers is the mel-
iorist double-gesture of looking forward to the future while also bearing
witness to a history of pain and sorrow that lines this King’s Highway. A
hope premised on denying the existence of evil can only repeat it. Bearing
witness to the past is the very condition of recovering the possibility of
hope in the future.
Du Bois performs this double gesture in “Of the Passing of the First
Born” as he moves beyond the experiences of both grief and joy. Like the
twice-born passage from pessimism to a world that is two levels deep, Du
Bois moves from ambivalence to faith in the future. “Surely there shall yet
dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free,” if
not for him in his lifetime then for a generation to come for whom he must
continue the struggle.52 Du Bois here, as elsewhere in Souls, plays on the
doubled sense of the word “morning”: at once signifying morning as the
dawn of a new beginning and “mourning” as the working through of grief
and loss without denial.53 To work through the trauma of the past is the
condition of freeing oneself from its hold, as Freud explains. The alterna-
tive is a melancholic violence the ego imposes on itself as it disavows its
loss. While Du Bois’s encounter with psychoanalysis will come some de-
cades later, he already anticipates Freudian insights on trauma and history
in Souls.54 An optimistic hope in perpetual progress does not work through
this trauma, but disavows it, and so condemns the nation to its perpetual
repetition. Recovering the future as a time of uncertainty and creation,
rather than repetition, means recovering the memory of the past that opti-
mism casts out. A double gesture toward possibility and limitation, toward
knowledge of the past and uncertainty about the future, is the condition for
recovering a democratic faith as something nobler than delusion.
Du Bois recovers his central example of this difficult doubled prac-
tice of hope in the spiritual songs passed down by the slave. Du Bois
celebrates the songs as the expressions of a living tradition of meliorist
struggle in opposition to the received wisdom of white historians and
social scientists that viewed African American songs as museum arti-
facts of a premodern race. The sorrow songs are much more than the ar-
tifacts of civilizational immaturity. They are “the sole American music”
and “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side
of the seas.”55 Du Bois is stating a historical fact as well as making a po-
lemical point when he calls these songs the “sole” American music. The
collision of African culture with Christian eschatology on the shores of
the New World was the historical site of profound aesthetic and cultural

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creativity. These sorrow songs were a creation of modern history itself

when millions of Africans were kidnapped and transported across the
Middle Passage. It was in America—a nation built through the slave’s
stolen labor—that these songs were born. This historical claim under-
pins Du Bois’s more pointed polemical purpose. To say that the sorrow
songs embody the “sole” American music is to say that America is,
and always has been, hybridized, plural. Failure to hear the slave’s “ar-
ticulate message” to the world in these songs is a symptom of the for-
getting of this national history under the antimnemonic orientation of
American exceptionalism’s monistic ideal.56 In terms not unlike those
of James’s critique of monism’s repudiation of the experience of time we
saw in chapter 2, Du Bois describes the reluctance to hear these songs as
American music—but rather to reify them as the exotic sounds of some
archaic Other—as “the arrogance of peoples irreverent towards Time
and ignorant of the deeds of men.”57
The slave’s message runs throughout Souls in the musical epigraphs ap-
pended to each essay, paired with passages from poets the likes of Shelley,
Byron, and Schiller.58 These double epigraphs perform Souls’s vision of
a world beyond the veil, where the black race may be perceived as equal
to the white race, as “a co-worker in the kingdom of culture.”59 The mes-
sage these epigraphs tell is one of faith and loss, progress and struggle,
mourning and morning in the history of strife toward this world beyond
the veil. “They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of dis-
appointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward
a truer world, of misty wandering and hidden ways.”60 Their message of
hope is neither the vision of this truer world for which the slave longs nor a
nostalgia for an unblemished time before the nightmare of slavery. Rather,
their power resides in the very performance of the songs themselves, as
testaments of the slave’s will to survive in the face of domination, and the
transmission of these songs from generation to generation as a record of a
strenuous black struggle in America. Du Bois finds “the one true expression
of a people’s sorrow, despair, and hope” in the living history of black song.61
Du Bois calls on his American readers to hear in these songs a cry for
faith in democracy that is hopeful but unoptimistic:
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a power of
hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of
despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is
faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of bound-
less justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning

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is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their

souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the sorrow songs
ring true?62
This final line is more than a rhetorical question; it is a prophetic call to

the will to believe.63 Du Bois calls on his readers to act to make this faith
true, to make the courageous leap into a world beyond the veil by judging
men by their souls rather than their skins. Such a will to make the future
different from the past, however, means first escaping from the monis-
tic abstractions that hold his readers captive, whether in the optimism of
white denial or the pessimism of black despair. Most central of these is
the monistic ideal of “America” itself. Describing the sorrow songs as the
only American music tells the lie of the picture of white America’s self-
conception as some essential édition de luxe. “Your country? How came
it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here,” Du Bois thunders an-
grily to his reader after posing this question. “Would America have been
America without her Negro people?”64 A call to the will to believe is not
the call for a more fastidious faith in some national ideal. It is rather an ac-
knowledgment that the nation has always already been plural and hyphen-
ated. To admit this truth, to look into history, to see the violence and the
gifts, the sorrow and the struggle, is to renew a faith in the future as one
of collaboration and equality beyond the reified Absolute of the nation’s
providential progress.
“If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal
Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend
the Veil and the prisoned shall go free,” Du Bois concludes.65 What is this
America? It is not the America of the Puritan covenant or the idealized
principles embodied in the nation’s founding documents or consensual
creed. These are abstractions out of history that purport to give order and
purpose to the violent reality they obscure. The America that shall rend
the veil is not the édition de luxe but rather the “thick” concrete historical
one: a hyphenated, pluralized nation of women and men on both sides of
the color line who share both the horror and the promise of the sorrow
songs as their national music. “America” is an ideal only because it is
always already a contested and pluralistic social practice. By returning our
gaze from ideals to history—the hard, gruesome, and demanding history
white America wills to forget—Du Bois calls for the meliorist action of an
interracial alliance to come together to pierce the veil and set the prisoned
free. In the book’s conclusion, “The After-Thought,” it is this historical
America—not its mythic representation—that is the traveler Du Bois calls

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to “set his face towards Morning” as he “girds himself” to continue his

struggle along the King’s Highway.66
V. For a Pragmatism without Illusions
Through examining the figure of finitude in Varieties and Pragmatism

we have seen how meliorism embodies a posture different from naive op-
timism. It is a darker and more tragic sensibility of the twice-born soul
that James holds up as the genuinely meliorist perspective, one that takes
evil as a practical problem to be abolished without denying the unatonable
loss and pain incurred in the course of this struggle. To understand how
this conception of meliorism might frame a conception of democratic faith
that resists the slide into the exceptionalist mythology that its realist crit-
ics accuse it of repeating, we have considered the ways Du Bois attempts
to carve out a space between optimism and pessimism in Souls. Du Bois
both invokes meliorist idioms in his critique of American optimism and—
through the gift of second sight—gives them a historical and sociological
depth missing from discussions of meliorism by both pragmatists and their
critics.
The pluralized conception of democratic faith reconstructed here marks
a sharp contrast to contemporary idioms of hope in American politics.
From the democratic hope of neopragmatism to the electoral rhetoric of
President Barack Obama, contemporary political theorists and actors have
often championed a discourse of democratic faith that overlooks the tragic
sensibility of James and Du Bois’s meliorism in favor of a false and mor-
alistic one.67 We saw one such example of the conscription of James’s mel-
iorism into a false, moralizing rhetoric of American exceptionalism in the
works of Ralph Barton Perry examined in chapter 1. Perry’s call for a
strenuous commitment to liberalism’s benign “ethical creed” constructed
a highly reified conception of American history as the continual progress
of a consensual moral ideal. It was just such a monistic vision of the nation,
as the continuing realization of European ideas revitalized by their trans-
position onto the open frontier, that Souls characterized as myth against
memory.
Perry’s conscription of pragmatism into an exceptionalist narrative
of credal consensus was resurrected in the neopragmatism of Richard
Rorty in his 1998 William Massey Sr. Lecture in the History of American
Civilization at Harvard, Achieving Our Country. Rorty’s lecture fol-
lows Perry’s exceptionalist narrative of Puritan democracy by wedding

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pragmatism to a history of American civil religion. The ability to hope,

Rorty writes, is essential to American citizenship, its most important
historical motor of progress and its only safeguard against nihilism and
decline. Rorty hears a healthy-minded civil religion in America sung by
the likes of Whitman, James, Dewey, and James Baldwin. This national
creed carries on the Christian message of fraternity and generosity into
American politics without the theological baggage of “supernatural par-
entage, immortality, providence, and—most importantly—sin.”68 These
writers and activists in the first half of the twentieth century told “inspir-
ing stories” about America and its history to motivate struggles for social
justice.69 “You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than the one you
wake up to every morning,” Rorty writes. “Unless such a loyalty exists,
the idea has no chance of becoming actual.”70 The acknowledgment of
anything akin to evil in American history spoils the innocence and purity
on which democracy’s faith seemingly depends, turning it into a debilitat-
ing gothic despair.71 Like James said of the healthy-minded refusal to even
imagine evil as an element of Creation, Rorty’s dream country is “a poetic
fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is”
(VRE 81). In the context of profound and enduring injustice—whether it be
the persistence of American imperialism or forms of racial oppression—
the call to come together behind a consensual ideal of American hope is
only another disavowal of reality. Its meaning for conduct can only be
optimistic blindness to history that perpetuates injustice or a debilitating
experience of despair when reality brings the mythos crashing down.
“One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the
idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over,” Du Bois ob-
serves in Black Reconstruction in America. “The difficulty, of course,
with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and
example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell
the truth.”72 Du Bois’s distinction between a false idealism and a more
truthful realism is not a rejection of meliorism or hope, as many of
the realists reviewed at the beginning of this chapter conclude. It is in-
stead a call for renewed attention to the ambiguity in faith. A meliorism
that bears witness to the difference between the ideal and the real may
itself be the greatest defense against the deceptive craving for the false
and moralistic history of American hope that holds us captive. James
Baldwin, who Rorty mistakenly claims as a supporter of his civil reli-
gion, avows such a tragic meliorism when he remarks that black skepti-
cism toward the claims of American exceptionalism has been a prudent
source of strength for African Americans. “The American Negro has

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the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths

to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-
loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world
has ever seen… . Negroes know far more about white Americans than
that.” 73 We can hear in Baldwin’s call for an acknowledgment of re-
ality as protection from the ideal a hope in a renewed future, albeit
one not premised on the disavowal of the past. This would be a future
made not found, one built by the clear-eyed acceptance of the risk of
action that remaking American society would demand. To return to
ourselves as agents—not as heroes or Gods, but as vulnerable, fallible,
historical creatures trying to negotiate the vicissitudes of contingency
together—means guarding against the craving for authority that drives
us to dogmatic fits of rage or paralyzing resignation. A difficult melior-
ist double-gesture of witness to reality and hunger for the possible is our
only protection against the seductions of idolatry, whether they be the
myth of success or the blinding abstraction of the nation. This will to
meliorism alone is the “civic genius” that James upholds as democracy’s
salvation.

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Conclusion
I. Vision and Blindness
To conclude this study, I want to return to the essay James once described
as “the perception on which my whole individualistic philosophy is based”
(C 8:522). “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” was published along-
side his report on Chautauqua in the appendix to Talks to Teachers. The
essay is a wandering reflection on a curious fact apropos of experience;
namely, “the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feel-
ings of creatures and peoples different from ourselves” (OCB 132). Each
individual is a spectator to the inner lives of others, blind to their personal
values, interpretations, and desires. This blindness is the root cause of a
sense of moral superiority that leads individuals to take their perspectives
as universal and so discount or discredit those of others. It is just this hubris
born of blindness that James finds in the imperialist discourse of civilizing
the Filipinos. Awakening to the partiality of one’s particular perspectives
is necessary “if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals
and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as
obdurate as so far as it has been gallant and spirited” (TT 4–5).
The felicity with which James moves between psychology, philosophy,
and anti-imperialism in this essay is representative of the persistently po-
litical character of his thinking examined in this book. By taking James’s
Nachlass writings on imperialism as something greater than either a tem-
porary distraction from his scholarly pursuits or a biographical record of
his gentle soul, these chapters have sought to shed new light on the politi-
cal consequences of his pragmatism as both a diagnosis and a response to
empire as a way of life. Pragmatism, James’s novel philosophy of inquiry
that asks us to reconsider theoretical disputes in terms of their practical
154
consequences for conduct, aims to “unstiffen” and “limber up” the habits
of thought that keep women and men captive to reified intellectual catego-
ries, dogmas, and authoritative certainties. These rigid habits of thought
are not simply bad habits or epistemic vices. They are psychological and
existential reactions to the jarring experience of contingency that defined
Gilded Age America in particular and modernity more broadly. In other
words, they are symptoms of disorientation in a postfoundational world.
Modern agents desperately grasp for authority and fixity in a pluralistic
world where all that was solid has melted into air, to borrow Marx and
Engels’s felicitous phrase.1
We have seen how these reactive cravings for authority lost can lead
to two seemingly contradictory postures of agency, each with dangerous
consequences for politics. On the one hand was the pessimistic resignation
of contemporaries like Henry Adams, who, in The Education of Henry
Adams, narrated his own life from a third-person perspective to represent
the fractured consciousness of a self decentered and determined by the me-
chanical spirit of an industrial age.2 On the other hand was the melancholic
reaction to loss that longed to reassert a sense of authority through acts of
heroism that violently impose order on a seemingly disordered world. This
was the pioneer fantasy of Roosevelt’s strenuous life. Pragmatic pluralism
embodies a different response to the experience of modernity’s whirl of
contingency. Neither resignation nor reaction, pragmatism embraces the
open nature of a pluralistic cosmos, along with the acknowledgment of
one’s limitation to ever transcend or master it. Acknowledging contest-
ability, finitude, and contingency cuts against monism’s persistent drive to
suppress disagreement and diversity.
We can call this lesson the negative consequence of pragmatism’s inter-
vention into empire as a way of life. It is important to note, however, that
consciousness of one’s blindness or cravings alone is not the same as their
satiation. As Freud remarked of his talking cure, self-knowledge is a neces-
sary preliminary of treating the neurotic. Self-knowledge alone, however,
is as efficacious in relieving the analysand’s symptoms as reading a menu
is at satisfying the hunger of someone suffering from famine.3 The value
of this reflexive self-knowledge lies in orienting the course of the therapy
to follow; or, to return to James’s language, in reorienting citizens to the
ongoing practices of resisting the persistent seductions of monism and ab-
stractionism. Knowledge is the fruit of action. The prioritization of action
sutures pragmatism’s negative implication for politics to a positive one, as
James suggests when he refers to mobilizing a “gallant and spirited” resis-
tance to empire. It is through meliorist action that injustice is confronted

155
and the world remade. Neither pessimistic resignation in the face of evil
nor optimistic blindness to the claims of the oppressed, pragmatic me-
liorism is an attitude of orientation that draws moral strength from loss
of final foundations without succumbing to the fantasies of mastery and
control that this modernism often inspires. The orientation of the meliorist
agent is a bicameral one, perpetually working the intervals between the
need for assertion and humility, for acknowledging finitude while acting
on faith. Such an orientation toward both self and world is demanding. It
countenances courageous action without the comfort that comes from the
certainty of the righteousness of one’s cause. Meliorism calls for faith in
the future without illusion about the inevitability of tragedy and the fact
that even final victory cannot atone for losses incurred along the way.
Scholars who raise the question of James’s contribution to the history
of political thought often find themselves like the outside spectators de-
scribed in “On a Certain Blindness” who miss “the inward significance
of the situation” in their clumsy attempt to summarize his perspective
in the terms of their own concepts and categories (OCB 134). We saw
the dangers of just such an interpretive approach in Perry’s influential
portrait of James’s political sentiments. Conscripting James’s anti-im-
perialism to the terms of interwar crisis of American liberalism, Perry
presented James as the unwitting embodiment of his own muscular
Wilsonian liberalism. Anachronistic projections of the present onto the
past, like blindness, are unavoidable to some degree. We do well to
become reflexive about the interpretive baggage that we as readers bring
to a text rather than try—a nd necessarily fail—to bracket our own situ-
ated perspective. Approaching James’s political vision from the terms of
it’s “interior doing,” as I described this book’s interpretive approach in
the Introduction, asks us to reposition our own point of view to examine
elements of James’s thought that go obscured or unnoticed when we ap-
proach his works along the well-worn path of pragmatism’s canonized
narrative. Saying this is not to deny that such a perspective, too, is still
one interpretative lens among many. Indeed, this book has placed James
in dialogue with a pluralist tradition, including the likes of Nietzsche,
Bergson, Freud, and Deleuze, in order to draw out aspects of his politi-
cal vision that are too easily passed over by more familiar interpretive
lenses. James reminds his readers in “Blindness,” “neither the whole
truth, nor the whole good, is revealed to any single observer, although
each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar
positions in which he stands” (OCB 149). Whatever partial superior-
ity of insight is to be found in this book’s self-consciously pluralistic
Conclusion | 155
156
perspective on James and the politics of pragmatism must lie in its prac-
tical consequences. What, then, is the “cash value” of reconsidering
James’s political thought today?
Bonnie Honig writes that “one way to assess the merits of a politi-
cal-theoretic position is by inhabiting it for long enough to see the world
through its perspective and assess that world.”4 This book has tried to
imaginatively occupy James’s political vision in just this way. Seeing
empire as a way of life through the lens of James’s pragmatism discloses
the ways imperial politics take root in seemingly everyday habits of
thought and action in modern times. Along with these insights, we have
also encountered blind spots at the limits of James’s vision. One of these
blind spots concerns the issue of gender and his masculine conception of
strenuous action. Another was the dissonance between James’s concern
for colonialized peoples abroad and his general disinterest in the plight
of people of color within the United States. I return to these topics in this
conclusion to consider the ways James’s vision was not simply blind to
particular topics like gender and race but rather myopic in its individual-
ism. By bringing agency and action into the foreground of political life,
James’s vision can be seen as obscuring the importance of institutions
and structures at work in the background. As M. C. Otto wrote in a 1943
article, “On a Certain Blindness of William James,” James “treated cer-
tain important social facts as he might have brushed against strangers in
a crowd.”5
We do not need to reach far for evidence of this myopic attention con-
cerning economic and institutional factors in politics. Simply consider
James’s diagnosis of imperialism in “Blindness.” It is the habit of imaging
one’s personal perspective and value as universal rather than particular
that “lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers
over subject-peoples make” (WMSL 150). Is James’s insistence on stating
political questions solely in “psychological and moral terms” evidence that
“he could not think economically or historically,” as many critics have
concluded?6 Or does this myopic focus on the experience of agents provide
a powerful perspective on politics that cut across well-worn dualisms like
structure and agency or morality and power?
II. Myopia against Empire
One way to reflect on this challenge is to return to the political context of

James’s essay to see for ourselves what was and was not captured under its
myopic gaze. A clear illustration of the “stupid forgetfulness” at the root

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of imperialism is “The White Man’s Burden,” Rudyard Kipling’s poetic

celebration of the United States’ proposed annexation of the Philippines
(published the same year as Talks to Teachers). For Kipling, annexation
signaled the passage of responsibility to civilize the world’s people from
Britain to the rising imperial power of the United States of America. He
writes in the essay’s famous opening stanza:
Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.7
The burden of uplifting “new- caught, sullen peoples” falls on the

white men of America. The poem gave lyrical form to President William
McKinley’s talk of the nation’s divine duty to “uplift and civilize and
Christianize” peoples liberated from Spanish colonial rule.8 Moreover,
the poem’s depiction of this duty as a distinctively manly and mature one
tapped into the melancholic craving for martial experience as a source of
civic renewal that we have examined in previous chapters.9 “The White
Man’s Burden” appeared simultaneously in three major American news-
papers on the eve of Congress’s vote to annex the Philippines in February
1899.10
James held special contempt for the imperialists’ hubris of presuming
themselves authorized to uplift their “new-caught, sullen peoples” to the
standards of American civilization. “Christ died for us all, so let us all be
as we are, save where we want to reform ourselves. [The only unpardon-
able crime is that of wanting to reform one another, after the fashion of the
U.S. in the Philippines]” (C 10:60; emphasis in original). As we saw in the
discussion of Teddy Roosevelt’s martial rhetoric in c hapter 3, invocations
of the nation’s duty to uplift the dark races was a central plank of imperial-
ist ideology. Roosevelt, in his “National Duties” speech, characterized the
benevolence of American interests in the Philippines in terms of the duty
to “bring light into the world’s dark places.”11 Senator Albert J. Beveridge
similarly argued that the outbreak of war in Spain revealed the United
States’ duty to extend the “blessed reign” of free institutions “until the
empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind.”12 In
Conclusion | 157
158
response to such language of philanthropic colonialism, the anti-imperial-

ist press was replete with clever parodies of Kipling’s poem, with titles like
“The Brown Man’s Burden,” “The Poor Man’s Burden,” and “The White
Woman’s Burden.”13 James kept a scrapbook of these parodies he collected
from Boston newspapers.14 “If the anglo-saxon race would drop its snivel-
ing cant it would have a good deal less of a ‘burden’ to carry. We’re the
most loathsomingly canting crew that god ever made,” James writes of
Kipling (C 8:495).
At the moment when James was deeply engaged in articulating the
psychological and moral underpinnings of empire as a way of life, figures
like John Hobson, Jane Addams, and Vladimir Lenin were forging a radi-
cally different understanding of imperialism.15 Each found the “taproot
of imperialism” in the competitive logic of global capitalism rather than
the moral blindness of individuals.16 As we have seen across the previous
chapters, one does not need to impute hidden motives to historical actors
to appreciate the ways the “big” corporate and financial transformations of
Gilded Age America both impelled and legitimated the project of Pacific
expansion. McKinley’s philanthropic mandate to civilize foreign peoples
dovetailed elegantly with a robust vision of informal or free-trade impe-
rialism.17 Free-trade imperialism, Wolfang Mommsen explains, is a mode
of economic, rather than territorial, expansion whereby great powers le-
verage their economic influence to control, shape, and develop the econo-
mies and politics of underdeveloped nations.18 The competition between
great powers for access and control over Asian markets was a central
motive for the United States’ open door diplomacy.19 Charles Conant, we
saw in c hapter 2, argued that the finance capital rapidly accumulating in
the United States would precipitate a national economic crisis unless it
found an outlet for investment in new international markets. The impera-
tive for capital mobility drove the need for an expansion of the United
States’ military power across the hemisphere to coercively open the
door to foreign markets and secure strategic naval resources, such as the
Panama Canal. “Commerce follows the flag,” as Henry Cabot Lodge put
this point euphemistically in support of his vision of an imperial “large
policy” that combined investment in naval power with the liberalization
of foreign trade.20 The popular lectures and histories of Alfred Thayer
Mahan provided a powerful account of the interdependence of merchant
and military naval capabilities as key factors in the rise and fall of great
powers. Through the establishment of a permanent network of naval bases
and island depots across the Western hemisphere, Mahan’s geostrategic
vision of naval power promised to secure the political conditions for the

159
United States to control the movement of capital and commodities across

borders.
The prima facie tension between these philanthropic and economic
justifications for Pacific expansion was the source of some anxiety for
supporters of the imperial cause.21 The philanthropic argument framed
imperialism as a moral duty to dedicate the nation’s resources to the exten-
sion of Christian liberty. Contrariwise, the economic argument was more
consonant with national strategic interests but lacked the moral legitimacy
of the former. It is therefore important to understand how these two modes
of justification became reconciled during the years of the brutal coun-
terinsurgency campaign that followed the United States’ declared 1902
armistice in the Philippines conflict. One elegant and influential exam-
ple of this reconciliation was put forward by President Roosevelt in his
State of the Union address to Congress in 1904.22 Roosevelt’s corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine established firmer intellectual ground for the le-
gitimation of American military and economic power beyond the nation’s
borders in a manner that learned from the political errors of annexation.
The 1823 Monroe Doctrine asserted the United States’ opposition to any
and all European colonial influence in the Western hemisphere, thereby
declaring Latin and Southern America as its singular sphere of influence.
The doctrine was invoked to justify the war against Spain in Cuba, as it
had been four years earlier against England during the Venezuela Crisis,
but its orientation remained outward-looking rather than inward-looking;
that is, the Monroe Doctrine justified the use of military power to defend
Latin and South American states from European intervention. Roosevelt’s
corollary reoriented the Monroe Doctrine inward into the domestic affairs
of sovereign states by reframing the United States’ moral duty under the
doctrine as that of an international police power.23
Roosevelt’s reformulation of the ideological foundations of American
imperialism follows a clear line of reasoning that binds the logic of philan-
thropic burden with the pursuit of free-market profit. The address begins
by asserting that all enlightened nations share the aim of seeing “the peace
of justice” reign around the world. This peace of justice is one made free
and equal by protection from the peace of tyrants. Any nation genuinely
committed to the peace of justice therefore has a duty not only to see jus-
tice triumph at home. This duty must extend outward beyond each nation’s
borders to protect others from injustice and the false peace of oppression.
Roosevelt argues, “The right of freedom and the responsibility for the ex-
ercise of that right can not be divorced.”24 The burden to protect the free-
dom of weak nations falls on the shoulders of great nations in the absence
Conclusion | 159
160
of a strong international legal order. It follows, therefore, that the United

States must use its military power to actively intervene in the affairs of
its neighboring countries “in exceptional cases” in pursuit of peace and
justice. Roosevelt explains:
If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and
decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obliga-
tions, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdo-
ing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civi-
lized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention
by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of
the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, how-
ever reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the
exercise of an international police power.25
The reluctant duty to intervene in the affairs of other states in response to

cases of “wrongdoing” and “impotence” is Kipling’s white man’s burden
writ large.
What is innovative about Roosevelt’s argument is the policy space
opened up by the notion of “wrongdoing” to the imperatives of free-trade
imperialism through equating the protection of human life and private
property as cause for intervention. A nation that “pays its obligations,” as
Roosevelt puts this point, is one that enforces the obligations of domestic
debtors to foreign creditors. The blurring of the humanitarian and the ec-
onomic in Roosevelt’s invocation of a nation’s “inability or unwillingness
to do justice at home or abroad” becomes clear as he cites examples of
how the United States has already long used this power both “in our own
interests as well as in the interest of humanity at large.”26 They include the
Venezuela Crisis, the protection of Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish
abuse, intervention in Colombia to secure the Panama Canal, and suppress-
ing the Boxer Rebellion “to secure the open door in China.”27 Through this
simple and elegant argument Roosevelt puts forward a powerful account
of the United States’ imperial power without repeating the costly trouble
of governing permanent colonies or annexed territories as it had attempted
in the Philippines. An early application of this benevolent police power
was the imposition of custom receivership over a bankrupt Dominican
Republic on behalf of aggrieved American and European creditors.28
Based on this thumbnail sketch of the ideological and political trans-
formations of American imperialism taking place in the aftermath of the

161
Philippines war, it may be tempting to conclude that the problem to which

James’s anti-imperialism was the answer is no longer with us. After a
costly and gruesome decade of counterinsurgency in the Philippines that
cost the lives of over four thousand American troops and left hundreds of
thousands of Filipinos dead, the United States abandoned its experiment in
British-style indirect colonial rule to pursue a route toward the hegemonic
informal imperialism it enjoys today. This is an informal empire mediated
through a system of global governance, international law, and a network of
corporate intermediaries. As Roosevelt’s corollary makes clear, however,
informal imperialism does not represent a radical break with the civili-
zational imperialism James rages against in “Blindness.” It is rather an
innovation giving it new form. Reflecting on the development of American
global power since Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, James
Tully observes that while the language of civilization was removed from
international law and the United Nations Charter following the period of
decolonization, “it was immediately replaced with the language of mod-
ernization, marketization, democratization and globalization with the
identical grammatical structure.”29 The spread of free-trade imperialism
today presumes the universalization of economic and political structures,
along with a system of property law, political liberties, and civilized sub-
jectivities. It remains the prerogative of hegemonic powers to develop the
social, legal, and political prerequisites of free markets open to interna-
tional trade where they are missing from underdeveloped nations, through
neo-imperial institutions including the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, the G7 and, at the limit, episodic military interventions mo-
bilized from any of the hundreds of US military bases that currently ring
the globe. The presumption that the liberal capitalist values and institu-
tions of the United States remain the only natural end to the processes of
development, modernization, and democratization taking place around the
world remains at the center of its hegemonic project of global security.
Continuities in this long history of imperialism were on display in
the aftermath of 9/11 when the United States’ colonial experiment in the
Philippines was rediscovered as a laudable precedent for the use of mili-
tary power to democratize the Middle East. The imperial adventure in the
South Pacific was symbolically recuperated across the political spectrum
in the early years of the twenty-first century, from neoconservatives on the
right who held up the brutal suppression of Muslim insurgents in Moro
province as a model of effective counterinsurgency to liberals on the left
who presented the nation’s experience in the Philippines as a moral lesson
for the burdens of nation building in Iraq.30 Speaking in Manila in 2003,
Conclusion | 161
162
President George W. Bush presented the United States’ history in the
Philippines as an example of the nation’s long legacy of benevolent police
power. Just as the United States “liberated the Philippines from colonial
rule,” so too would he lead the way to bringing democracy to the peoples
of Iraq and Afghanistan.31 And along with the recovery of the Philippines
as a usable past for legitimating American unilateralism in the Middle East
came a surprising rediscovery of Kipling.32
“Imperialism used to be the white man’s burden. This gave it a bad rep-
utation,” explains Michael Ignatieff in the pages of the New York Times
Magazine in the run-up to the United States’ invasion of Iraq. “But impe-
rialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically
incorrect.”33 The use of American military and financial power to sta-
bilize and democratize sovereign states is a form of imperialism differ-
ent from the unjust colonial imperialism of Kipling’s time. “Empire lite,”
Ignatieff’s neologism for the century’s allegedly new era of humanitarian
intervention, describes “a global hegemony whose grace notes are free
markets, human rights, and democracy.”34 The burden of courageously
and wisely exercising global power as a force for good still falls upon the
shoulders of the United States. Contemporaneous with Ignatieff’s call to
take on the white man’s burden in a new form was the appearance of Max
Boot’s award-winning Savage Wars of Peace, a book that drew its title
directly from Kipling’s poem. For Boot, the history of the United States’
“small wars” from the Philippines to Vietnam prove that US military
power, when used with strenuous resolve, can be both an international
force of good for others as well as a vehicle of securing national self-in-
terests. “America should not be afraid to fight ‘savage wars of peace’ if
necessary to enlarge the ‘empire of liberty,’ ” he writes in the book’s con-
cluding line. “It has to be done.”35 Historian Niall Ferguson tacks closest
to the spirit of Kipling in Empire and Colossus by presenting the United
States as positioned to inherit the British history of civilizational imperi-
alism if the nation is willing to accept the moral burdens it entails. Both
books conclude with the invocation of Kipling as a call to arms for a new
era of liberal imperialism. “I believe the world needs an effective liberal
empire,” Ferguson writes in the conclusion of Colossus, “and that the
United States is the best candidate for the job.”36 And in an added flour-
ish, Ferguson’s neo-imperialist rhetoric borrows the prophetic idioms of
earlier imperialists like Roosevelt and Josiah Strong when he warns that
the choice facing the United States is to stiffen their spines and heroically
accept the burden of empire lest their nation succumb to decline from
within.37

163
The recuperation of Kipling by these twenty-first century’s neoimperi-

alists illustrates the basic dilemma of American foreign policy described
by William Appleman Williams nearly half a century ago.38 The nation’s
humanitarian impulse to improve the lot of the world’s less fortunate is
perpetually undercut by its insistence that improving other peoples means
making them more like Americans, both in terms of their values, institu-
tions, and, perhaps most importantly, their markets. The nation projects its
monistic vision of freedom and security across the globe in a manner that
blurs any meaningful distinction between philanthropy and domination. It
is the (neo)imperial deflection of the brutal consequences of this monism
that James laments when he writes, “We have destroyed in Luzon the one
sacred thing in the world, the spontaneous budding of a national life; we
are destroying their souls even more than their bodies, and we think that
the violent imposition of our own entirely desperate ideals will be an act of
charity! Oh the big idiots that we are!” (C 9:207).39 James looked toward a
different vision of the international community of nations than the hege-
monic one that was beginning to take shape before his eyes at the turn of
the century. It was a pluralistic network of self-determining peoples, each
working to live in accordance with their own lights and their own institu-
tions, not subject to the coerced imposition of Western institutional forms
and values.40 It is perhaps this celebration of a world of decentered, plural-
istic, and autonomous communities of peoples that drew James to flirt with
anarchism as a politics of “small systems,” as he confessed to Howells (C
9:362; emphasis in original).
James’s anti-imperialism asks us to look out across the globe to wit-
ness the injustice and violence of American power that many are blind
to. Through the medium of philosophy, an unlikely candidate for po-
litical critique, James follows the sources of this blindness down into
cravings for order, authority, and moral purpose that drive individuals
to psychically invest in the fantasy of American empire while disavow-
ing its brutal reality. This is the myopic gaze at work. It looks inwards
towards the self rather than outwards toward structures because the self
is always already relationally imbricated with the structures, myths, and
values—t he “not-me” —of empire as a way of life. The self is entangled
with its political world. Myopia is a way of seeing this entanglement
from the agent’s point of view, the perspective of the political vision
that we have examined throughout this book. Pragmatism’s myopic gaze
forces us to see beliefs as creative forces in the world rather than simply
passive representations of it. Separating self and world into foreground
and background, as the intellectualist tendencies of political theory and
Conclusion | 163
164
practice often do, fails to acknowledge the ways our actions are inex-
tricably part of a world still in the making. Like the “bigness” James
railed against, the hegemonic consolidation of modern imperialism can
become cause for passive acquiescence in the face of a power too big
to resist or the source of an optimistic idolatry that celebrates it as a
vehicle of freedom. But so too might we interrogate the ways our crav-
ings, anxieties, and even our false hopes serve to perpetuate the violent
expansion of America’s informal empire. A myopic political gaze places
the ethical at the center of the political, and in doing so discloses the
persistent possibility for futures different from the past lying before us
in the living present, if we will to believe.

165
NOTES
Introduction
1. George H. Sabine to Harold Stoke, March 31, 1942, Box 7, Folder “Lectures Away
from Cornell,” George H. Sabine Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Cornell University Library, Cornell University. The second invited speaker was Walter
Lippmann.
2. Henry W. Stoke to Horace Kallen, April 30, 1942, Series IV, Folder 728, Reel 40,
Frame 599, Horace Myers Kallen Papers, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.
3. On Kallen’s self-perception as a philosophical heir to James see Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001), 388; Richard J.
Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Malden: Polity Press, 2010), 64.
4. Horace Kallen to Henry W. Stoke, May 4, 1942, Series IV, Folder 728, Reel 40,
Frame 600, Kallen Papers.
5. William James to Francois Pillon, June 15, 1898: “I am going to a great popu-
lar meeting in Boston to-day where a lot of my friends are to protest against the new
‘Imperialism’” (C 8:373). James’s shifting opinions on the war between his initial re-
sponse to the explosion of the USS Maine in February 1898 and his full denunciation
of American imperialism by the summer of that year are reconstructed in Ralph Barton
Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935),
2:304–12.
6. James’s relationship to E. L. Godkin and mugwump anti-imperialism is discussed
in chapter 1. His encounter with Crosby’s Tolstoian anarchism is discussed in n. 27
below. Maxim Gorky visited the United States in 1906 under the invitation of Mark
Twain and William Dean Howells to raise financial and military support for revolu-
tionary agitation against Czar Nicholas II. James wrote Gorky a letter apologizing for
being unable to meet him in person during his visit and lauding his essay, “The City of
Mammon: My Impression of America,” which shared much of James’s contempt for
what he derisively described as “success.” James tells Gorky that, despite the ugliness
of American life, he must not “mind the immediate present” too greatly. Writers like
himself truly belong to “a higher nation, the cosmopolitan communion of liberal minds,
of ‘les intellectuels,’ which is organizing itself more and more, and out of which the
166
essential lines of the future will be drawn” (C 11:270; see also AQ 86). Gorky, in turn,
described James as “a wonderful old man, but he is also an American. Oh, to hell with
them.” Cited in C 11:271n1. See James’s exchange with Forbes in C 10:378, 515–16; C
11:374–75, 476–77, 564. Peter W. Stanley, “William Cameron Forbes: Proconsul in the
Philippines,” Pacific Historical Review 35, no. 3 (1966): 285–301. In addition to his
discussions with Forbes, James also had some limited contact with soldiers serving in
the Philippines. During his medical stay in Rome during the summer and fall of 1900,
James reports meeting a student who had served “in an Illinois regiment.” From this en-
counter James claims to have learned that “nothing is printed in America as it happens”
in the conflict and that the greatest military weakness of the Filipino insurgents was
their tendency to fire their rifles above the heads of American infantry (C 9:367; empha-
sis in original). James is presumably referring to this fact when he tells Sarah Wyman
Whitman, “My consolation for all things is in the way in which the Filipinos and the
Boers keep up the fighting. If the former could only learn to take a lower aim, I should
still be more contented” (C 9:397).
7. On the New England Anti-Imperialist League and its evolution into the American
Anti-Imperialist League, see Christopher Lasch, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines,
and the Inequality of Man,” Journal of Southern History 24, no. 3 (1958): 319–31; E.
B. Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic
or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman,
1972); Richard Seymour, American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-
Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 35–58; Michael Patrick Cullinane,
Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, 1898–1909 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012). James’s office in the League is recorded in its annual reports. George S. Boutwell,
Report of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-
Imperialist League, 1904); Moorfield Storey, Report of the Seventh Annual Meeting of
the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist League, 1905); Report of the
Eighth Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist
League, 1906); Report of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League
(Boston: The Anti-Imperialist League, 1907); Report of the Tenth Annual Meeting of
the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist League, 1908); Report of the
Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League (Boston: The Anti-Imperialist
League, 1909). James’s role in the Filipino Progress Association is discussed in C
10:539; and Christopher McKnight Nichols, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of
a Global Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 69.
8. F. O. Matthiessen describes “The Moral Equivalent of War” as James’s “most far
reaching political essay.” The James Family: A Group Biography (New York: Vintage,
1980), 636. The essay’s composition is discussed in ERM 250–63.
9. John Dewey, “William James in Nineteen Twenty-Six,” in The Later Works,
1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 2, 1925–1927 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984), 158.
10. Sabine to Harold Stoke, March 31, 1942, Box 7, Folder “Lectures Away from
Cornell,” Sabine Papers. Perry’s biography and its influence on the reception of James’s
political thought is discussed in c hapter 1.
166 | Notes
167
11. Max Eastman to Harold M. Stoke, October 17, 1942, Box 7, Folder “Lectures
Away from Cornell,” Sabine Papers.
12. Discussed in chapter 1.
13. Horace M. Kallen, “Remembering William James,” in In Commemoration of
William James, 1842–1942, ed. Horace Kallen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1942), 12, 23, 20. See John Dewey’s similar claims about the political significance of
James’s pluralism made on the occasion of his centenary: “We may justly find in them
[James’s writings on pluralism and monism] a forefeeling for the conditions which have
culminated in the life-and-death struggle for supremacy of democratic and totalitarian
faiths. The source and spirit of his pluralism assuredly becomes more understandable
when his arguments in its behalf are placed in the context that is made so vivid and so
engrossing by this present crisis.” Dewey, “William James and the World Today,” in
The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 15, 1942–1948 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 4.
14. Kenneth Colgrove, “Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association,” American Political Science Review 37, no. 1 (1943): 102–27.
15. James’s anti-imperialism is depicted as of little significance in most major
studies of his life and thought. See, e.g., Matthiessen, James Family, 622–46; Gay Wilson
Allen, William James (New York: Viking, 1967); Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William
James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 167–75; Howard M. Feinstein,
Becoming William James, new ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Menand,
Metaphysical Club, 379; Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism (New York: Mariner Books, 2006), 382–85; Linda Simon, Genuine
Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998), 301–5; Paul Fisher,
House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York: Henry Holt, 2008).
An important exception is Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 422–45. On James as apolitical see Max C. Otto,
“On a Certain Blindness in William James,” Ethics 53, no. 3 (1943): 184–91; Richard
Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press,
1955), 134–35; Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Mass.
1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977): 306–14; Ross Posnock, The
Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991); John P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism:
Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994); Loren Goldman, “Another Side of William James: On Radical Approaches
to a ‘Liberal’ Philosopher,” William James Studies 8 (2012): 34–64.
16. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 60.
17. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism
in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 147.
18. On Peirce as originator of the pragmatic method see PC 258–59 (see also P
28). “A New Name for Some Old Way of Thinking” is the subtitle James chose for
his 1907 Pragmatism. James’s intellectual relationship with Bergson is examined in
Horace M. Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories
Notes | 167
168
of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914); Perry, Thought and Character of

William James, 2:599–636; Kennan Ferguson, William James: Politics in the Pluriverse
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 51–72; Paola Marrati, “James, Bergson,
and an Open Universe,” in Bergson, Politics, and Religion, ed. Alexandre Lefebvre and
Melanie White (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). James’s relationship to Papini is
explored in detail in c hapter 1.
19. C. S. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 5: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 277.
20. It is notable that Dewey identified his own intellectual debts to James through
the naturalized account of consciousness in The Principles of Psychology rather than
Pragmatism’s theory of inquiry or the metaphysics of A Pluralistic Universe. Dewey,
“From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann
Boydston, vol. 5, 1929–1930 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). On
the development of Dewey’s instrumentalism from its Hegelian origins see Robert B.
Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1991); Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1997); James Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The “Permanent
Hegelian Deposit” in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2005).
21. Inter alia Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a
New Age, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Matthew Festenstein,
Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1997);
Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jack Knight and James Johnson, The
Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011).
22. For examples of scholars who read James’s political theory in Deweyan de-
liberative terms see Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Andrew F. Smith, “Communication and
Conviction: A Jamesian Contribution to Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 21, no. 4 (2007): 259–74; Trygve Throntveit, William James
and the Quest for an Ethical Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 121–28,
163–68. Despite his otherwise excellent book’s aim to place James’s ethical and political
thought in historical context, Thronveit’s discussion presumes a Deweyan conception of
politics as the institutional cultivation of democratic virtue.
23. Joshua Miller, Democratic Temperament: The Legacy of William James
(Wichita: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 1, 3.
24. William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 71;
Ferguson, William James. See also Avigail I. Eisenberg, Reconstructing Political
Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 27–53; David Schlosberg,
“Resurrecting the Pluralist Universe,” Political Research Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1998): 583–
615; Richard E. Flathman, “The Bases, Limits, and Values of Pluralism: An Engagement
with William James,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149, no. 2
(2005): 159–98; Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-
Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press,
168 | Notes
169
2006), 115–41. Along with James’s anti-imperialism, his pragmatism is similarly decen-
tered by readings that focus on the political implications of his pragmatism. For criticism
of these pluralist reading of James as one-sided see Jonathan McKenzie, “Pragmatism,
Pluralism, Politics: William James’s Tragic Sense of Life,” Theory & Event 12, no. 1
(2009), https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/summary/v012/12.1.mckenzie.
html (accessed March 6, 2016).
25. William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the
Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, new ed. (Brooklyn: IG
Publishing, 2006).
26. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 149. For these various descriptors see West,
American Evasion of Philosophy, 60; Daniel S. Malachuk, “‘Loyal to a Dream Country’:
Republicanism and the Pragmatism of William James and Richard Rorty,” Journal
of American Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 89–113; Miller, Democratic Temperament; C.
Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), 273; Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel
Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1988), 128; Deborah J. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation’: Anarchism and
the Radicalization of William James,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996):
70–99.
27. James discusses Swift’s 1905 Human Submission in the first lecture of
Pragmatism. Swift’s 1899 Imperialism and Liberty and 1906 Marriage and Race
Death were both included in the James family’s 1926 gift of William’s remaining
books to Harvard University. “Books and Pamphlets Selected from the Library of
William James and Presented to Harvard College Library by His Family. 1923,”
William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard
University. The gift and James’s library are discussed in greater detail in Chapter
1 note 10. James’s encounter with Swift is discussed in chapter 5. Crosby was a
fellow member of the Anti-Imperialist League and sent James a copy of his Plain
Talks in Psalm and Parable in 1901 (C 9:551; see also C 9:557). See Ernest Howard
Crosby, Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899); Perry E.
Gianakos, “Ernest Howard Crosby: A Forgotten Tolstoyan Anti-M ilitarist and Anti-
Imperialist,” American Studies 13, no. 1 (1972): 11–29. James was an avid reader of
Tolstoy, particularly after 1896, but it is not clear whether or not he read his political
works. His references to Tolstoy in Talks to Teacher, Varieties, and correspondence
typically concern his admiration for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, although
he also mentions purchasing Leo Wiener’s translation of The Complete Works of
Count Tolstoy while preparing his pragmatism lectures in 1906 (C 3:330; see also
C 8:178–79). Both volumes of Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix are included in the
list of books included in the 1923 gift to Harvard held at Houghton Library. James
carried on a short correspondence with James Gibbons Huneker, a friend of Emma
Goldman’s, concerning his book Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909), which con-
cludes with a very sympathetic critique of Stirner’s anti-authoritarianism as an ad-
mirable, albeit extreme, sentiment consonant with the best of both Emerson and
Nietzsche (C 12:208–9). In the context of this exchange James mentions, “I read a life
of Stirner a few years ago, by some conscientious German” (C 12:209). This refer-
ence is to the biography written by the German anarchist individualist John Henry
Notes | 169
170
MacKay, Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk (Max Stirner: His Life and Works)
(Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1898). It is improbable that James met with Kropotkin
during either his 1897 or 1901 visits to Harvard, although he reports reading Memoires
of a Revolutionist shortly after the anarchist prince’s second visit. On Kropotkin’s
Harvard visits see George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince:
A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (London: T. V. Boardman, 1949), 274–84;
Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 91–92;
Deborah J. Coon, “Courtship with Anarchy: The Socio-Political Foundations of William
James’s Pragmatism” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), viii. What
these connections suggest is that James’s contact with anarchism was facilitated pri-
marily through the circulation of print media in a transatlantic public sphere. James’s
remaining papers include fragments of catalogues from French antimilitarist publish-
ing houses (e.g., Bibliotheque Pacifiste Internationale), containing works by Bakunin,
Kropotkin, and other anarchist writers, with volumes of interest circled. “Clippings,
1903–1910 and undated,” Folders 2 and 3, William James Additional Papers, 1903–
1910, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University.
28. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 77; Coon, “Courtship with
Anarchy.”
29. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 86. Compare Stephen S. Bush,
“Religion against Domination: The Politics of William James’s Individualism,” Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 3 (2015): 13–15.
30. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 87. Coon’s interpretation of the
political significance of pragmatism is examined in chapter 2.
31. Ibid., 94.
32. George Cotkin, William James: Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 154.
33. Ibid., 17.
34. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 169.
35. Colin Koopman, “William James’s Politics of Personal Freedom,” Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 182.
36. “It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental
life which I am so anxious to press on the attention” (PP 1:246). William J. Gavin,
William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1992).
37. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17–20.
38. Peter Sloterdijk takes no account of either James or pragmatism in his classic
study of modern cynicism, but his depiction of Diogenes’ cheeky politics bears some
resemblance to the anti-imperial pragmatism I outline here. Particularly notable is
Sloterdijk’s emphasis on Diogenes’ impertinent undoing of Platonic aspiration for a phil-
osophical “high theory” by embracing a “low theory” that emphasizes the body, disorder,
and excess. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 102. Compare James: “Whether materialistically
or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter
with which the world apparently is filled… . As compared with all these rationalizing
pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a
170 | Notes
171
turbid, muddled, gothic sort of affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial
nobility” (PU 26).
39. Richard Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” in Truth and Progress
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
40. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, in The Middle Works, 1899–1924,
ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 12, 1920 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1982), 134–35. Compare Melvin Rogers’s stress on the importance of situating Dewey
within a Darwinian, rather than Baconian, enlightenment tradition. See his The
Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 59–103. See James’s discussion of Darwin in GME.
41. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” Revue internationale de
philosophie 53, no. 207 (1999): 7.
42. Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,” in Democracy
and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 270.
43. In drawing a distinction between James and Dewey I do not mean to deny that
Dewey, in some moments, shared James’s acute sense of the psychological hunger for
order as a problem for politics. Describing the experience of industrial modernization
in 1935, he writes, “The fact of change has been so continual and so intense that it
overwhelms our minds. We are bewildered by the spectacle of its rapidity, scope, and
intensity. It is not surprising that men have protected themselves from the impact of
such vast change by resorting to what psycho-analysis has taught us to call rationaliza-
tions, in other words, protective fantasies.” Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, in
The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 11, 1935–1937 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 41–42. This more psychologically attuned side
of Dewey’s pragmatism is helpfully brought to the foreground in Rogers, Undiscovered
Dewey. As the title of Rogers’s book suggests, however, his is not the received view that
continues to obscure our understanding of James’s political thought. Dewey’s allusion to
the language of rationalization and fantasies points to the importance of psychoanalysis
for articulating some the psychological aspects of pragmatism’s critique of empire as we
will see further in c hapters 3 and 5.
44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 434.
45. “To pluralize is, in short, to learn ways to exist as human beings who engage the
world rather than always trying (and always failing) to conquer it.” Ferguson, William
James, xxv.
46. Founding texts of modern empire studies in the history of political thought in-
clude Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance
to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); James Tully, Strange
Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain,
Britain and France C.1500–C .1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Uday
Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); David Armitage, The Ideological
Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sankar
Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003);
Notes | 171
172
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
47. Jennifer Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism,” Annual Review
of Political Science 13 (2010): 217. I say this with the intention of distinguishing the
field of American studies, which has a rich and vast literature on American impe-
rialism, from the field of political theory. Notable exceptions to political theory’s
blindness to American empire include James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key,
vol. 2, Imperialism and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010); Jeanne Morefield, Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-
American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014).
48. Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Abscence of Empire in the Study
of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and
Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 17. On American imperial am-
nesia more broadly see Michael P. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes
in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 134–68;
Kevin Bruyneel, “The Trouble with Amnesia: Collective Memory and Colonial Injustice
in the United States,” in Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and
Chage, ed. Gerald Berk, Dennis Galvan, and Victoria Hattam (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Morefield, Empires without Imperialism.
49. Important exceptions to this omission of empire in the history of American phi-
losophy include Scott L. Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American
Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Cornel West, Democracy
Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Books, 2004);
Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community
in the Age of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Erin McKenna and
Scott L. Pratt, American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
50. For a helpful discussion of historiography’s insulation of American imperialism,
see Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and
the Phillipines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14–18. My brief
overview of the development of the scholarship draws from Kramer.
51. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage,
2008), 147.
52. Inter alia William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,
50th anniversary ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Walter LaFeber, The New
Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898, 35th anniv. ed. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998); Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the
United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt,
2010); V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism (London: Verso, 2005); David
C. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International
Relations, 1789–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); Aziz Rana, The
Two Faces of American Freedom; Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History
of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton:
172 | Notes
173
Princeton University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffmann, American Umpire

53. I return to the issue of informal imperialism in the Conclusion.
54. Harry K. Wells, Pragmatism: Philosophy of Imperialism (New York:
International Publishers, 1954).
55. The two dominant lines of critiques of pragmatist instrumentality and optimism
are characterized as Promethean and Panglossian in Colin Koopman, Pragmatism as
Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009), 201–2. These two lines of criticism are examined in detail in
chapter 5. See criticisms in Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism,” in The Collected Papers
of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 6: Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–13, ed. John G.
Slater (London: Routledge, 1992); Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism, in Collected Works, vol. 14 (Moscow: Progress, 1962), 17– 388; Martin
Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology,
and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1997); Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of
Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974), 36–57; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 503–23.
56. James Campbell, Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative
Intelligence (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 2–7; H. David Kim, “The Unexamined
Frontier: Dewey, Pragmatism, and America Englarged,” in Pragmatism, Nation, and
Race; Jack Turner, “Race, Individualism, and Imagination,” unpublished paper pre-
sented at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Denver, CO,
2014.
57. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture
(New York: Horace Liveright, 1926), 186–87.
58. This point is examined in detail in c hapter 3.
59. Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 51–52; George R. Garrison and Edward H. Madden,
“William James—Warts and All,” American Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1977) 207–21.
60. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1978), 179.
61. Frank Lentricchia, “On the Ideologies of Poetic Modernism, 1890–1913: The
Example of William James,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 246.
62. Ibid., 225.
63. Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political
and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 34; Adriana
Cavarero, “Politicizing Theory,” Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 506–32; Roxanne
L. Euben, Journey to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of
Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 20–45.
64. Wolin characterizes the constructivism of John Rawls’s theory of justice as a
“one-time gift to the demos.” Tully uses the expression to describe the actor-transcend-
ing character of neo-Kantian political thought more generally. Sheldon S. Wolin, “The
Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 24, no. 1
(1996): 98; James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. 1, Democracy and Civic
Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9.
Notes | 173
174
65. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures (Peru,
IL: Open Court, 1987), 70.
66. “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the
problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing
with the problems of men.” John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy,” in
The Middle Works: 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 10, 1916–1917 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 46.
67. Notice how this definition of public philosophy avoids the elitist connotations as-
sociated with the notion of a public intellectual that Cotkin presumes when he describes
James as a public philosopher: “To be a public philosopher meant accepting responsibil-
ity for addressing public problems and for applying insights gained from one’s technical
work to public issues.” Cotkin, William James, 4.
68. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 1:9; emphasis in original.
69. The intellectual affinities between genealogy—Tully’s primary point of ref-
erence in articulating his notion of public philosophy—and pragmatism are helpfully
examined in Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of
Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
70. James M. Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from
Emerson to Ellison (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 186.
71. I borrow this expression “slack in the order” from William E. Connolly, Politics
and Ambiguity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
72. Peirce famously borrows the term from Immanuel Kant. In “What Pragmatism
Is” Peirce explains why he could not abide by the names “practicism” or “practicalism”
for his new doctrine, with the moral connotation of praktish in the Kantian system, pre-
ferring instead Kant’s category of the pragmatisch, “expressing relation to some definite
human purpose.” Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 274.
73. Arthur Lovejoy, “Thirteen Pragmatisms,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods 5, no. 1 (1908): 5–12.
74. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons
of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 323–40; James T.
Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking,” in The
Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris
Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); John Pettegrew, ed., A Pragmatist’s
Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2000).
75. Colin Koopman introduces the notion of a pragmatist “third wave” in Pragmatism
as Transition. For a critical rejoinder to Koopman’s argumentative retelling, see Gregory
Fernando Pappas, “The Narrative and Identity of Pragmatism in America: The History
of a Disfunctional Family?,” The Pluralist 9, no. 2 (2014): 65–83. On the “new” prag-
matism see Cheryl Misak, New Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
76. Richard J. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism: The Conflict of Narratives,”
in Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J.
SaatkampJr. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 66.
77. Gallie W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Meeting of the Aristotelian
Society 56 (1956): 167–98; William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd
ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
174 | Notes
175
78. Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry and the Conversation of Mankind,”
in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1991). Compare Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 389–94.
79. Bernstein, Pragmatic Turn, 31.
80. For a different vision of the history of Jamesian pragmatism in the twentieth
century see James T. Kloppenberg, “James’s Pragmatism and American Culture, 1907–
2007,” in 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy, ed.
John J. Stuhr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Throntveit, William James
and the Quest for an Ethical Republic, 139–60.
81. Ferguson, William James, xxiii.
Chapter 1
1. The influence of Perry’s biography is evident from the diversity of scholars across
ideological, disciplinary, and methodological divisions that take it as authoritative in
their respective accounts of James. See inter alia Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism;
Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought
and Character since the 1880’s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 91–107;
Herbert Marcuse, “Some Implications of Modern Technology,” in The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum,
1982); Beisner, Twelve against Empire; West, The American Evasion of Philosophy,
54–68; James Campbell, The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic
Social Thought (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 10–22; Robert
J. Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2007), 45–81. Earlier anthologies containing some of these writings
include the posthumous Memories and Studies, edited by James’s son Henry in 1911; and
the 1925 work by Horace M. Kallen, The Philosophy of William James: Selected from
His Chief Works (New York: Modern Library, 1953), 234–68.
2. This is not to say that Perry’s portrait is without its critics. Horace Kallen penned
an early critical review in “Remarks on R. B. Perry’s Portrait of William James,”
Philosophical Review 46, no. 1 (1937): 68–79. More damning of Perry’s hagiographic
depiction of James is Garrison and Madden, “William James—Warts and All.”
3. Ralph Barton Perry, “Realism in Retrospect,” in Contemporary American
Philosophy: Personal Statements, ed. George P. Adams and Wm. Pepperell Montague,
vol. 2 (New York: Russel & Russell, 1930), 206.
4. John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975), 221. While this chapter focuses on both the imagined
and real connections between American pragmatism and Italian fascism, certain fas-
cist intellectuals in Germany drew similar conclusions concerning the elective affinity
between James’s philosophy of action and the ideology of the Third Reich. Hans Joas,
Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 107–11.
5. Inter alia William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of
Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1941), 400–415, 544–
48. W. T. Stace, The Destiny of Western Man (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942),
194–98; Donald Cary Williams, “William James and the Facts of Knowledge,” in In
Commemoration of William James.
Notes | 175
176
6. I borrow this notion of historical conscription from Duncan Bell. Bell argues
that liberalism’s ideological struggles in the 1930s worked through “posthumous con-
scription” of political thinkers into a growing canon of liberalism. As an example of
this process Bell illustrates the construction of John Locke’s place in the liberal tradi-
tion during this era. Prior to World War I, British and American historians of political
thought typically defined liberalism as a nineteenth-century ideology represented by
Jeremy Bentham to the exclusion of an earlier tradition of Whig constitutionalism repre-
sented by Locke, whose political writings were widely seen as theoretically defective or
obsolete. Bell shows how this was changed by the 1930s when Locke came to displace
Bentham as the leading figure in a tradition of liberal thought defined by individualism,
religious freedom, and contract. Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” Political Theory
42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715. I argue that Perry’s histories of political philosophy should be
read as parallel efforts of ideological canon construction.
7. Ralph Barton Perry, “First Personal,” The Atlantic, October 1946, 107.
8. Perry, “Realism in Retrospect,” 189.
9. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, 340. See also Kuklick, A History of
Philosophy in America, 1700–2000 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 201–7.
10. The family’s 1923 gift included some 1,450 volumes donated to Harvard
University. While a small selection of these volumes were put aside in the university’s
Treasure Room under Perry’s supervision, the majority of the books were absorbed into
the university’s circulating collection at Widener and Robbins Libraries. For a partial
list of books included in this initial gift see “List of Books and Pamphlets Selected
from the Library of William James and Presented to Harvard College by His Family,
1923,” James Papers. Additional volumes of James’s library have been donated to the
university since since this initial gift. According to A. A. Roback, the Harvard hold-
ings represent less than one-fifth of an estimated ten thousand books James owned.
Included in the gift is a collection of works on spiritualism, mental healing, demonology,
and the occult drawn from what Henry James described as “the largest collection ever
assembled of crank literature in New England at the turn of the century.” Roback ac-
knowledges James’s large collection of “crank” literature and notes its partial omission
from the Harvard University collection “may be due to the special bias of the men who
were in charge of the selection of James’s books for the purpose, Professor R. B. Perry
and Benjamin Rand.” William James: His Marginalia, Personality, & Contribution
(Cambridge, MA: Sci-A rt Publishers, 1942), 62. What additional books on politics and
political thought that may have been included in this omitted collection of literature is
unknown. Perry sold off hundreds of volumes from the Harvard collection after 1923
that he deemed unimportant. A partial list of these sales is recorded in “William James’s
Sources,” James Papers. Eugene Taylor attempted to reconstruct the transmission his-
tory of James’s library only to conclude that the collection is currently “scattered,” with
the majority of the library either distributed to friends, sold to collectors, remaining
in the James family, or simply thrown away. See Thibaud Trochu, “Investigations into
the William James Collection at Harvard: An Interview with Eugene Taylor,” William
James Studies 3, no. 1 (2008): http://williamjamesstudies.org/investigations-into-
the-william-james-collection-at-harvard-an-interview-with-eugene-taylor/ (accessed
October 31, 2015). The most comprehensive record of books known to be owned or read
176 | Notes
177
by James is the electronic guide recently assembled by Philip J. Kowlaski, The Guide
To William James’s Readings (2014): http://williamjamesstudies.org/guide-to-william-
jamess-reading/ (accessed October 31, 2015). Perry’s role in the disposal of James’s re-
maining books is discussed in “Correspondence with Henry James. 1923–1940. And
undated,” Abraham Aaron Roback Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library,
Harvard University.
11. “Correspondence: Thought and Character of William James,” Boxes 1–3, Papers
of Ralph Barton Perry, Harvard University Archives. Perry posted advertisements in
periodicals like the New Republic to procure materials for the volume. For example,
“Wanted: Letters of William James,” New Republic, November 27, 1929, 19.
12. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1935), 1:vii.
13. Sidney Hook, “William James,” The Nation, December 11, 1935, 684.
14. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Introduction,” in The Thought and Character of
William James (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), ix.
15. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:300.
16. Ibid., 2:280.
17. Ibid., 2:271.
18. Ibid., 2:267.
19. Ibid., 2:277.
20. Ibid., 2:281.
21. Ibid., 2:281, 287.
22. Ibid., 2:290.
23. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage,
1966), 145–96. On mugwump social criticism more generally see David M. Tucker,
Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1998); Beisner, Twelve against Empire; John Sproat, The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in
the Gilded Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Schirmer, Republic or Empire.
24. Cotkin offers a more ambivalent judgment of James’s relationship to the mug-
wumps. Cotkin, William James, 127–32. For an account that emphasizes the radically
democratic dimensions of James’s anti-imperialism when seen in a global, rather than
national, context see Daniel B. Schirmer, “William James and the New Age,” in Beyond
Liberalism: The New Left Views American History, ed. Irwin Unger (Waltham: Xerox
College Publishing, 1971), 133–40.
25. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:297, 290.
26. Ibid., 2:290.
27. The distance seperating James’s anti-imperialism from the isolationist discourse
he could have learned from Godkin is examined in Nichols, Promise and Peril, 68–112.
It is notable that Perry’s reading of Godkin as prefiguring both his and James’s muscular
liberalism passes over Godkin’s isolationism.
28. Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 14. See also Myles Beaupre, “‘What Are
the Philippines Going to Do to Us?’ E. L. Godkin on Democracy, Empire and Anti-
Imperialism,” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012): 711–27.
29. Cited in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:291.
30. Ibid., 2:300.
Notes | 177
178
31. Ibid., 2:306.
32. Ibid., 2:310.
33. Cited in ibid., 2:311.
34. Ibid., 2:208; see also 2:325.
35. Ibid., 2:312. Cotkin challenges the suspect psychological theory that underpins
Perry’s attempt to clearly demarcate these discrete political and philosophical periods of
James’s thinking. William James, 123–27.
37. Ibid., 2:317.
38. Ibid., 2:315.
39. Ibid., 2:319.
40. Ibid., 2:252. As Perry reiterates this point in the book’s conclusion, “James was
a moralist in the good old-fashioned sense of one who believes that right is right and
wrong is wrong, and he enrolled himself under the first to combat the second … In
short, unlike a later and faltering generation, James united liberalism, tolerance, and
humanity with a resolve that these principles should, so help him God, prevail.” Ibid.,
2:702–3.
41. Ibid., 2:316, 316.
42. Ibid., 2:579.
43. Inter alia, Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against
Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 180–202; Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis
of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1973); Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American
Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1043–73; John Gunnell,
Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy
(College Bark: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Marc Stears, Demanding
Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 21–55.
44. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current
Unrest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 82.
45. John Dewey, Individualism Old and New, in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed.
Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 5, 1929–1930 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1986), 70. On radical liberalism see Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, 45.
46. Alan Cassels, “Fascism for Export: Italy and the United States in the Twenties,”
American Historical Review 69 (1964): 707–12; Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic
Theory, 117–38; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism. A more expansive literature exists
discussing Mussolini’s American reception among political and financial elites who
embraced the fascist regime, alternatively, as an island of market stability in the rocky
waters of revolutionary Europe or as a moderate fascist ally to tame the extreme fas-
cism of Nazi Germany. David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–
1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Peter R. D’Agostino,
Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Gian Giacome Migone, The
United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe, trans. Molly
Tambor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The following discussion of
Mussolini’s cultural and intellectual reception in the United States draws on Diggins’s
178 | Notes
179
seminal study. See too John P. Diggins, “Fliration with Fascism: American Pragmatic
Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy,” American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (1966): 487–506.
47. Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” in Fascism: Doctrine and
Institutions (Rome: Ardita, 1935), 24–25.
48. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 58–73, 226.
49. Ibid., 231.
50. Ibid., 220–39.
51. Horace M. Kallen, “Fascism: For the Italians,” New Republic 49 (January 12,
1927): 211.
52. Ibid.
53. E.g., Charles Beard, “Making the Fascist State,” New Republic (January 23,
1929): 277–78; Unattributed, “An Apology for Fascism,” New Republic 49 (January
12, 1927): 207–9. Diggins persuasively argues that this editorial was almost certainly
written by Herbert Croly. Diggins, “Fliration with Fascism,” 497n442. Progressive
intellectuals made similar claims about the experimental nature of the Soviet Union
during these years. See Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 120–21. For example,
John Dewey favorably judged Bolshevism as a road to participatory democracy in his
“Impressions of Soviet Russia” in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston,
vol. 3, 1927–1928 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). See also David
C. Engerman, “John Dewey and the Soviet Union: Pragmatism Meets Revolution,”
Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 1 (2006): 33–63.
54. Sunday Times April 11, 1926. Cited in Perry, The Thought and Character of
William James, 2:575.
55. Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Behind Fascism Stands a Philosophy” New York
Times Magazine, Sept 26, 1926, 2–3, 18. Clipping in Series I, Folder 42, Reel 1, Frame
223, Kallen Papers. See also Horace Kallen to Sarah Martha Watson, May 1, 1942,
Series 4, Folder 728, Reel 40, Frame 597, Kallen Papers.
56. Kallen, “Fascism,” 212. For Kallen’s notes from his interview with Mussolini see
Series 1, Folder 42, Reel 1, Frames 229–31, Kallen Papers.
57. William Kilborne Stewart, “The Mentors of Mussolini,” American Political
Science Review 22, no. 4 (1928): 862.
58. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 238; Schmitz, The United States and Fascist
Italy, 69.
59. William Yandell Elliott, “Mussolini, Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics,”
Political Science Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1926): 164.
60. In a retrospective essay on The Pragmatic Revolt, Elliott admits that James him-
self “remained essentially a passionate individualist in his pluralism” and that Pragmatic
Revolt used him “to typify the revolt against reason in the name of satisfying total emo-
tional urges” that characterized fascism. “The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Twenty
Years in Retrospect,” Review of Politics 2, no. 1 (1940): 3.
61. The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and the Constitutional
State, new ed. (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968). John Gunnell discusses the response to
Elliott’s book in American political science in The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 112–14 and Imagining the American Polity, 170–71.
62. E.g., Jack J. Roth, “The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo,” Journal
of Modern History 39, no. 1 (1967): 30–45; Anthony James Gregor, Young Mussolini
Notes | 179
180
and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979);

Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton
63. Georges Sorel, De l’utilité du pragmatisme, 2nd ed., Études Sur Le Devenir Social
(Paris: M. Rivière, 1928), 21. On Sorel’s interpretation of James see Joas, Pragmatism
and Social Theory, 107; Goldman, “Another Side of William James.”
64. Carlo L. Golino, “Giovanni Papini and American Pragmatism,” Italica 32, no.
1 (1955): 42; Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 52–101.
65. “[W]‌e see the pragmatist kindled by a certain spirit of enthusiasm for all that
shows complexity and multiplicity of things; for whatever increases our power to
act upon the world; for all that is most closely bound up with practice, activity, life.”
Giovanni Papini, “What Pragmatism Is Like,” Popular Science Monthly 71 (1907): 3.
66. E. Paul Colella, “Reflex Action and the Pragmatism of Giovanni Papini,” Journal
of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 3 (2005): 189.
67. Giovanni Papini, The Failure, trans. Virginia Pope (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1924), 130, 205.
68. By identifying James’s use of Papini’s idioms, I do not mean to suggest, with
Colasacco, that “James’s thought, in his final years, was moving in new directions
one could feasibly call ‘Papinian.’” Brett Colasacco, “From Men into Gods: American
Pragmatism, Italian Proto-Fascism, and Secular Religion,” Politics, Religion & Ideology
15, no. 4 (2014): 556. For a helpful statement of the intellectual distance separating James
and Papini see Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 74–79.
69. James asks Schiller in a 1906 letter, “Don’t you think Papini deserves it? With
his Uomo-Dio he certainly has given a new kind of shove to the doctrine” (C 11:289).
70. Walter Adamson, “Giovanni Papini: Nietzsche, Secular Religion, and Catholic
Fascism,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 14, no. 1 (2013): 1–20.
71. Avant-Garde Florence, 102–52; Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual
Origins of Fascism, 87–100.
72. See Kallen’s interview notes in Series 1, Folder 42, Reel 1, Frame 229, Kallen
Papers.
73. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 231–39, 313–61.
74. Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism”; Stears, Demanding
Democracy, 115.
75. Compare Kallen’s revised appraisal of Mussolini’s alleged pragmatism
in “Mussolini, William James, and the Rationalists,” Social Frontier 4, no. 35
(1938): 253–56.
76. A notable exception here is James’s Harvard colleague, George Santayana.
Santayana came to distance himself from Mussolini after the war, calling him a “bad
man,” but continued to embrace the label of “fascism” to describe his Catholic ideal
of a well-ordered society. “GS to Corliss Lamont, December 8th, 1950,” in George
Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana, vol. 8, 1948–1952 (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2008), 309–10. See Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 209–11.
77. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 444–96. See also Purcell, The Crisis of
Democratic Theory, 139–96; Gunnell, Descent of Political Theory, 126–45; Terence
Ball, “Discordant Voices: American Histories of Political Thought,” in The History of
180 | Notes
181
Political Thought in National Context, ed. Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampshire-Monk
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
78. Consolato generale di S. M. il Re d’Italia to Ralph Barton Perry, May 11, 1933,
“Correspondence: Thought and Character of William James,” Box 1, Folder M, Perry
Papers.
79. Giuseppe Prezzolini to Ralph Barton Perry, December 8, 1932, “Correspon
dence: Thought and Character of William James,” Box 2, Folder PQ, Perry Papers.
81. Ibid.; emphasis added.
82. Ibid., 2:578.
83. “Realism in Retrospect,” 206.
84. Ibid., 208.
85. Gunnell, Descent of Political Theory, 131. This paragraph follows the recon-
struction of the material in Gunnell and Bell, “What Is Liberalism?”
86. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Political Thought: An
Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1927), 1:397.
87. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, rev. ed. (New York: Henry
Holt, 1950), 11–19. See Perry’s description of the funeral oration as illustrating “the in-
evitable pressure in the direction of liberal government.” Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral
Economy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 157.
88. Ball, “Discordant Voices,” 110.
89. E.g., Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 904–9.
90. Ralph Barton Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical
Background of the World War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1918), 5; emphasis in
original.
91. Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, 443–44; John Garry Clifford,
The Citizen Soldier: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913– 1920
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972); John Patrick Finnegan, Against the
Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917
(Westport: Greenwood, 1974), 57–72.
92. Ralph Barton Perry, “Impressions of a Plattsburg Recruit,” New Republic (1915):
231. Perry subsequently published an expanded version as The Plattsburg Movement: A
Chapter in America’s Participation in the World War (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921).
93. The Free Man and the Soldier: Essays on the Reconciliation of Liberty and
Discipline (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 6.
94. Ibid., 61.
95. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and
His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Ratner-Rosenhagen addresses
Perry’s reading of Nietzsche at 141–43.
96. Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals, 2.
97. Ibid., 165.
98. Ibid., 170.
99. Ibid., 171.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., 5, 543.
Notes | 181
182
102. Ibid., 544–45.

103. Ibid., 500.
104. Ibid., 501.
105. Ibid., 533.
106. Ibid., 537.
107. Ibid., 536.
108. Ibid., 285.
109. Ibid., 295.
110. Ibid., 307.
111. Ibid., 338.
112. Ralph Barton Perry, Shall Not Perish from the Earth (New York: Vanguard,
1940), 20; Perry, Our Side Is Right (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942);
Perry, Puritanism and Democracy (New York: Vanguard, 1944).
113. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, 638.
114. Ibid., 592.
115. Ibid., 598.
116. A notable exception is his 1938 In the Spirit of William James. Perry continues
his longstanding defense of credal liberalism by leveraging his newfound authority as a
world-renowned interpreter of James to read the incipient politics of World War II into
the history of pragmatism. American liberalism, he argues, is being grinded away be-
tween the millstones of fascism and communism. If it is to survive these double threats,
liberals must renew their faith in liberty as a fighting creed. “It so happens that James
not only prophesied this hour of crisis, but in his own person and philosophy pointed
the way by which it can be met. From him we shall seek to learn how liberalism can be
militant, and how militancy can be illuminated by the spirit of liberalism.” In the Spirit
of William James (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 125. See also Perry’s
1941 paper “If William James Were Alive Today” published in In Commemoration of
William James, 75–80.
117. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, 8.
118. Ralph Barton Perry, Characteristically American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1949), 70.
119. Ibid., 86.
120. Perry, “First Personal,” 106.
Chapter 2
1. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:320–32.
This biographical narrative took hold shortly after James’s death through his son Henry
James’s account of his life and thought (LWJ 1:140–64). Sarin Marchetti discusses
the problems with Perry’s biographical reduction of James’s thought in Ethics and
Philosophical Critique in William James (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 43–47.
3. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 108–57. On pragmatism, uncertainty, and
the cultural crises of American modernity see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Posnock,
The Trial of Curiosity, 27–53, 105–38; James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political
Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994), 158–224; Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William
182 | Notes
183
James, Vol. 1, The Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–8 0 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 73–148; Giles Gunn, Beyond
Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2001), 51– 110; James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and
Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001),
117–82; Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science,
and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 21–58.
4. Cotkin, William James, 102. See also Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation
of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, new ed. (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2007), 140–45; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and
the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
5. Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith, 47. Other examples of this
action-oriented reading include Myers, William James, 404–15; Koopman, “William
James’s Politics of Personal Freedom”; Miller, Democratic Temperament, 10–32;
Megan Rust Mustain, Overcoming Cynicism: William James and the Metaphysics
of Engagement (New York: Continuum, 2011); Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical
Critique in William James, 214–47. Miller acknowledges the Janus-faced challenge of
political action in his reading of James but his tendency to interpret James’s thought
through an Arendtian lens often makes for a one-sided emphasis on the action as a pre-
cious miracle to be protected from institutional and instrumental encroachment.
6. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 97; emphasis in original.
7. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in The Later Works: 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann
Boydston, vol. 4, 1929 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 7. In the
terms of contemporary political theory, Connolly has referred to this compensatory pro-
jection of certainty as “ontological narcissism.” See his Identity\Difference: Democratic
Negotiations of Political Paradox, expanded ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), 30.
8. On Woodberry’s neo- Platonism see R. B. Hovey, “George Edward
Woodberry: Genteel Exile,” New England Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1950): 506–26; Martha
Hale Shackford, “George Edward Woodberry as Critic,” New England Quarterly 24 no.
4 (1951): 510–27.
9. George Edward Woodberry, Heart of Man (London: MacMillan, 1901), 227.
10. James expresses similar skepticism about monism in political philosophy in
his remarks on the British radical Edward Carpenter. In his 1883 Towards Democracy,
a lyric poem modeled on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Carpenter provides a phil-
osophical justification of radical democracy as the erotic reconciliation of self and
society. Democracy is the ecstatic release from the stratification of class through “a
flash of loving recognition, a closeness to nature and the loving comradeship of men.”
Carpenter drew on Whitman’s poetry, Hindu mysticism, and socialist millennialism to
demonstrate the existence of a monistic cosmic consciousness that united all individuals
as one. James discusses Towards Democracy approvingly in The Varieties of Religious
Experience; elsewhere he describe it as “one of my favourite books” (C 9:557; see VRE
256). At the same time, James looked warily on Carpenter’s project of transcending
the moral separateness of individuals through an experience of mystical unity. Like
monism in general, Carpenter’s radical mysticism abandons individuality before an
Notes | 183
184
experience of authority. “I used to think that that authority [of mystical states] was a
staggerer to all forms of pluralistic belief,” James writes of Carpenter, “but I now feel
less respectful—mysticism is authoritative as to more unity than which at first appears
but is always ‘passing to the limit’ to erect it into an absolute philosophical author-
ity, as excluding the ‘other’ completely” (C 10:548; emphasis in original). Whatever
more unity there may be between individuals is something to be actively built through
the meliorist effort of individuals in action, not philosophically found through appeal
to otherworldly experience. Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (London: Swan
Sonnenschein, 1905). Carpenter quoted in Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter:
A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008), 72. See also Michael Robertson,
Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 167–88. James’s encounter with Carpenter’s democratic mysticism is discussed
further in Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries, 189–218; Gandhi, Affective
Communities, 115–41; Alexander Livingston, “Excited Subjects: William James and
the Politics of Radical Empiricism,” Theory & Event 15, no. 4 (2012): http://muse.jhu.
edu/journals/t heory_ a nd_event/summary/v015/15.4.livingston.html (accessed March
6, 2016).
11. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 188– 237; Horace H.
Robbins, “‘Bigness,’ the Sherman Act, and Antitrust Policy,” Virginia Law Review 39,
no. 7 (1953): 907–48; Walter Adams and James W. Brock, The Bigness Complex:
Industry, Labor, and Government in the American Economy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1986). For an anti-imperial text that appeals to the language of bigness
in a polemical spirit similar to James see H. C. Potter, “National Bigness or Greatness:
Which?,” North American Review 168, no. 509 (1899): 433–44.
12. Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 4. See also Martin J. Sklar, The
Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law,
and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
13. Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 3–4.
14. Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution,
1850–1940.
15. Charles A. Conant, “The Economic Basis of ‘Imperialism,’” North American
Review 167, no. 502 (1898): 338.
16. Ibid., 339.
17. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 18–89; Hendrickson, Union,
Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941,
261–89; Hoffmann, American Umpire, 179–96. I return to this point in greater detail in
the Conclusion.
18. Henry Cabot Lodge, “Our Blundering Foreign Policy,” Forum 19 (1895): 17. See
Immerman, Empire for Liberty, 128–62; Nichols, Promise and Peril, 22–67. See also
James’s remarks on Lodge in C 9:211.
19. James’s reference to McKinley’s prayer refers to the president’s claim to have
found spiritual guidance in his decision to champion annexation. “And one night late
it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came: (1) That we could not
give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonourable; (2) that we could
not turn them over to France and Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—
that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to
184 | Notes
185
themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy
and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and (4) that there was nothing left for
us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize
them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for
whom Christ also died.” Cited in General James F. Rusling, “Interview with President
McKinley,” Christian Advocate (1903): 137.
20. Marcuse, “Some Implications of Modern Technology”; Posnock, The Trial of
Curiosity, 3–24; Lisi Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), 114–22.
21. Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 87.
22. Ibid.
23. Originally published as H. G. Wells, “Two Studies in Disappointment,” in
Harper’s Weekly 50 (September 8, 1906): 1279–84; republished in H. G. Wells, The
Future in America: A Search after Realities (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906),
167–84.
24. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American
Political Thought since the Revolution (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1991),
219–24.
25. Russell Herman Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1915), 18.
26. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review 148, no. 391 (1889): 662.
27. One source for James’s critique of success was the essayist Gilbert Chesterton
(C 11:267). In Heretics, the “admirable collection of essays” that James cites in
Pragmatism’s opening page, Chesterton argues that a life dedicated to pecuniary gain
is an empty one, forever longing after an impossible satisfaction for more (P 9). “Every
man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success must end in mere mediocrity.”
“Heretics,” in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, ed. David Dooley, vol. 1 (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 100.
28. This manuscript served as the basis for James’s most conventionally mugwump
and elitist speech, SV. Compare also TH.
29. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
30. On prophetic idioms in American social criticism see Cornel West, Prophecy
Deliverance! An Afro- American Revolutionary Christianity, anniversary ed.
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002); Michael Walzer, Interpretation and
Social Criticism, reprint ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 67–94;
Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad; Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations
in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 29–67; George
Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
31. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
32. Originally published in Mind in 1879. Subsequently revised and republished
in The Will to Believe in 1897. All citations are from the later, revised version. The
significance of James’s revisions and the publication history of the amended version are
discussed in Richardson, William James, 199–211.
33. Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James, 4.
Notes | 185
186
34. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick

G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 5. See also Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985), 3–21.
35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del
Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §124.
36. Ibid., §377; emphasis in original.
37. For a sharp statement on the relationship between homesickness, the longing
for the past, and Hegelian idealism see Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §419. By drawing this con-
nection I do not mean to deny the deep disagreements seperating James and Nietzsche,
most notably the distance between pragmatism’s meliorism and the apocalyptic charac-
ter of Nietzsche’s moral imagination.
38. Meliorism is discussed in detail in c hapter 5.
39. On Anglo-American Hegelianism at the end of the twentieth century and its in-
fluence on James’s thought see Jean Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophies of England and
America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Open Court, 1925).
40. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §377; emphasis in original.
41. Koopman, “William James’s Politics of Personal Freedom,” 179.
Chapter 3
1. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in Letters and Speeches, ed. Louis
Auchincloss (New York: Library of America, 2004), 764.
2. Ibid., 755.
3. Ibid., 755, 758.
4. For classical studies of American republican fears of luxury and corruption see
Bernard Baylin, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed.
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American
Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2nd paperback ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). The continuities and innovations in these
republican anxieties of decline are helpfully explored in George M. Fredrickson, The
Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper
& Row, 1965); Lears, No Place of Grace; Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America;
Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom. The relationship of pragmatism to republi-
canism is discussed in James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Malachuk, “‘Loyal to a Dream Country’”; Throntveit, William
James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic; Bush, “Religion against Domination.”
This chapter focuses on republican political thought in Gilded Age America without
seeking to make a claim in the historical debate concerning the relative priority of re-
publicanism and liberalism in American political development. The binary terms of this
debate often overshadowed nuances and innovations within the development of
American republicanism. Alex Gourevitch forcefully demonstrates the importance
of such overlooked innovations in his recent study of labor republicanism, From Slavery
to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
186 | Notes
187
5. Dewey, “William James in Nineteen Twenty-Six,” 159.

6. Divergent conceptions of the force of exemplarity in contemporary political
theory that nonetheless underscore the provocative force of the particular to interrupt
ordinary modes of thinking and feeling include Kirstie M. McClure, “The Odor of
Judgment: Exemplarity, Propriety, and Politics in the Company of Hannah Arendt,” in
Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 53– 84; Akeel Bilgrami,
“Gandhi’s Integrity: The Philosophy behind the Politics,” Postcolonial Studies 5, no.
1 (2002): 79–93; Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the
Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Jason Frank,
“Standing for Others: Reform and Representation in Emerson’s Political Thought,”
in A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alan Levine and Daniel S.
Malachuk (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 381–414. See also GR
123–26.
7. James discusses melancholia in TT 100; GR 127; VRE 122–38. Even James
failed to grasp this connection in his response to Freudian psychoanalysis. James
looked skeptically on what he considered the foundationalism implicit in the
Freudian architecture of the psyche, its deterministic implications, and its singular
emphasis on sexuality. Following his meeting with Freud at Clark University in 1909,
James would admit that while Freud struck him as “a man obsessed with fixed ideas,”
the psychoanalytic method “can’t fail to throw light on human nature” (C 12:334;
see 11:101). The topic of the continuities and innovations of James’s psychological
views vis-à-vis psychoanalysis and other approaches to the study of abnormal psy-
chology is insightfully discussed in Barzun, A Stroll with William James, 227–61;
David E. Leary, “William James on the Self and Personality: Clearing the Ground
for Subsequent Theorists, Researchers, and Practitioners,” in Reflections on the
Principles of Psychology: William James after a Century, ed. Michael G. Johnson and
Trace B. Henley (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990); Eugene Taylor, William James
on Consciousness beyond the Margin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996),
40–81; “William James and Sigmund Freud: ‘The Future of Psychology Belongs to
Your Work,’” Psychological Science 10, no. 6 (1999): 465–69; “William James and
Depth Psychology,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience: Centenary Essays, ed.
Michael Ferrari (Philadelphia: Imprint Academic, 2002). A young Walter Lippmann
attempted to construct a political philosophy out of the synthesis of Bergson and
James’s radical empiricisms with Freudian psychoanalysis in his A Preface to Politics
(New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913).
8. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (1974).
9. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); Slotkin, The Fatal
Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890
(New York: Atheneum, 1985); Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth- Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). See also
Michael P. Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the
American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991).
10. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; Gunfighter Nation.
Notes | 187
188
11. Frederick Jackson Turner, “On the Significance of the Frontier,” in Rereading
Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and
Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 32.
12. Ibid., 33.
13. Ibid., 60.
14. Lears, No Place of Grace; Russell L. Hanson and W. Richard Merriman, “Henry
Adams and the Decline of the Republican Tradition,” in A Political Companion to
Henry Adams, ed. Natalie Fuhrer Taylor (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky,
2010), 17–42.
15. Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History
(New York: Vintage, 1955), 7.
16. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War, 217– 38; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic
Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Norton, 1994),
758–66; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–
1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 30–31.
17. “The Soldier’s Faith,” in The Fundamental Holmes: A Free Speech Chronicle
and Reader, ed. Ronald Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29.
18. Ibid., 33, 29.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,”
in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 79.
21. On the influence of Mahan’s theory of sea power on American conceptions
of imperialism see Julius William Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of
Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959);
Immerman, Empire for Liberty, 128–62; Nichols, Promise and Peril, 25–38; James
Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary Imperialism,” Proceedings of the British Academy
155 (2009): 3–29.
22. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660–1783
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1918); The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution
and Empire: 1793–1812, 2 vols. (New York: Greenwood, 1968).
23. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 83.
24. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis
(New York: Baker & Taylor, 1885), 175.
25. Ibid., 175, 176.
26. Ibid., 173.
27. Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 268–70.
28. Strong, Our Country, 216.
29. Ibid., 217.
30. See the classical statement of this view in Richard Hofstadter, The American
Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1948), 231.
31. Quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), 60. For discussion of this passage see Kim Townsend,
Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996),
257–58; Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006),
91; Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 36. In his Autobiography Roosevelt offers a different
account of his turn toward self-making that is even more explicitly gendered. There,
188 | Notes
189
the turning moment in young Teddy’s life was the humiliation of not being able to
fight back against two older boys who bullied him at Moosehead Lake. “The experi-
ence taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me. I made
my mind up that I must try to learn so that I would not again be put in such a helpless
position; and having become quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the
natural prowess to hold my own, I decided that I would try to supply its place by train-
ing.” Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography, in The Rough Riders: an Autobiography, ed.
Louis Auchincloss (New York: Library of America, 2004), 281. It is an experience of
violence, or better yet his failure to truly become wild in the fight and to protect him-
self from the other boys, that begins Roosevelt’s lifelong quest for personal and civic
regeneration.
32. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” 757.
33. Theodore Roosevelt, “National Duties,” in Letters and Speeches, 767.
34. Ibid., 768.
35. Ibid., 775.
36. Ibid., 765.
37. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” 757. On the persistent connection between fem-
inization, decadence, and the Orient in Western political discourse, see Edward W. Said,
Orientalism (New York: Vintage , 1979).
38. James additionally asked his wife Alice to send a clipping of his response from
the Transcript to Governor Roosevelt (C 8:518). It is not clear whether this letter was ever
sent or received.
39. Townsend, Manhood at Harvard, 243–44.
40. As Perry puts this point, “As a fighter for ideals Roosevelt was a man after
James’s own heart; while the roughness of his methods—his lack of taste, sympathy,
and discrimination—was profoundly offensive.” Perry, The Thought and Character of
William James, 2:314. Perry’s credal reading of James puts the emphasis on the shared
commitment to ideals. My reading emphasizes the shared affective orientation toward
the fight.
41. Cotkin, William James, 121.
42. Classically in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:320–32.
More recent studies have challenged the narrative of philosophical crisis by emphasizing
other factors such as James’s anguish over the sudden death of his love interest, Minnie
Temple, as well as the vicissitudes of his Oedipal relationship with his father. Allen,
William James, 162–70; Feinstein, Becoming William James; Simon, Genuine Reality,
97–123; Richardson, William James, 108–22.
43. On this point PP restates an insight from James’s first major scholarly publica-
tion, SDM. See also GME, 165–70.
44. Nancy Bentley provocatively reads Principles as a literary text in the genre of
the Bildungsroman, where the transition from the early chapters on physiology to the late
“Will” chapter models a journey of self-creation. Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas:
American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870– 1920 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
45. I draw this distinction between a semiotic of willing and a theory of the will from
Richard E. Flathman, Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political
Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 158–66.
Notes | 189
190
46. James’s famous example of willing as a complex experience of permitting an

impulse to pass through the threshold of consciousness is getting out of bed. Describing
the experience of laying in a bed and considering the day’s obligations, James asks how
it is possible to find the resolution to face the cold morning and get out of the “delicious”
warm bed. His answer is that we find no resolution at all. “We suddenly find that we
have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and
the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which
the idea flashes across us, ‘Hollo! I must lie here no more’—an idea which at that lucky
instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces
immediately its appropriate motor effect” (PP 2:1132).
47. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, Willing (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 38.
48. Despite his well-k nown aversion to pragmatism, Cavell sees James’s Varieties
as worthy of inclusion into his pantheon of Emersonian perfectionist texts. Stanley
Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1–32; Cavell, Cities of
Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2004), 17. On pragmatism more broadly see his “What’s the
Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” in The Revival of Pragmatism.
49. Kallen, The Philosophy of William James, 39.
50. Myers, William James, 442.
51. Despite its claims to universality, Varieties’ methodological commitment to fo-
cusing exclusively on individual experience at the expense of institutional or ritual di-
mensions of religion biases its depiction of the universal elements of religion in favor
of a distinctively Protestant conception of religiosity. See Charles Taylor, Varieties of
Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002); David A. Hollinger, “‘Damned for God’s Glory’: William James and the Scientific
Vindication of Protestant Culture,” in William James and a Science of Religions:
Reexperiencing the Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004).
52. James continues, “The loathing of ‘capital’ with which our laboring classes
today are growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound senti-
ment of antipathy for lives based on mere having” (VRE 256).
53. On the persistence of soldierly experience as a model for pacifist moral commit-
ment see Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Nonviolence and Modern American
Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
54. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and
Politics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 71.
55. See the thoughtful engagements with the conception of exemplarity in Emerson’s
concept of great men in Judith N. Shklar, “Emerson and the Inhibitions of Democracy,”
Political Theory 18, no. 4 (1990): 601–14; Frank, “Standing for Others: Reform and
Representation in Emerson’s Political Thought.”
56. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Poems (New York: Library of America,
1983), 616.
57. Ibid., 623.
58. Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 140.
190 | Notes
191
59. For an interpretation of James’s ambiguous criteria of “novelty” as a contribution

to moral philosophy see Ruth Anna Putnam, “Some of Life’s Ideals,” in The Cambridge
Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge
60. “Both attraction to the feminine side of experience and assertions of masculin-
ity pervade his published and unpublished writings, but are not themselves analysed
or challenged. His philosophy is so at odds with the masculine character ascribed to
Western philosophy by many feminists, yet not free of sexist stereotyping,” observes
Charlene Haddock Seigfried in Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 115. On James and gender more broadly,
see Garrison and Madden, “William James—Warts and All”; Kim Townsend, “William
James’s Rugged Individualism,” in Liberal Modernism and Democratic Individuality:
George Kateb and the Practices of Politics, ed. Austin Sarat and Dana Richard Villa
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and
Democracy, 117–82. Some scholars have argued that James’s masculine language is a
harmless rhetorical flourish that can be translated out of his political thought without
distortion, although these arguments are not entirely persuasive. See Miller, Democratic
Temperament, 33–53.
61. MEW was originally given as a speech at Stanford University in 1906. James
develops elements of the argument, including the notion of a war on nature, in his earlier
GR 121.
62. The description of this army of public service evokes the “industrial army”
from Edward Bellamy’s popular Looking Backwards. James’s account of a moral
equivalent of war was likely influenced less by Bellamy, however, than by the Christian
pacifism of Tolstoy and his fellow anti-imperialist, Jane Addams. In “Democracy or
Militarism” (1899) and “A Moral Substitute for War” (1904), Addams argued that
Americans should look toward collective cooperation in the labor movement as “some-
thing which will develop their finest powers without deteriorating their moral nature,
as war constantly does.” Jane Addams, Essays and Speeches on Peace, ed. Marilyn
Fischer and Judy D. Whipps (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), 34. Nichols
argues that James may have been directly influenced by Addams’s idea of labor soli-
darity as an equivalent of war. I suspect that this is true, but Addams, in turn, may have
on James’s discussion of a moral equivalent of war in Varieties. See Nichols, Promise
and Peril, 106–7. On the development of Addams’s position see James Cracraft, Two
Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy, and the Quest for Global Peace (Lanham,
MD: Lexington, 2012), 71–96.
63. Walter Lippmann, “The Political Equivalent of War,” The Atlantic Monthly 142
(1928). See too Dewey’s criticisms of MEW in John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct,
in The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 14, 1922 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 79–80. James’s proposal is commonly de-
scribed as naive by even his most sympathetic commentators; Myers, William James,
444– 45; Cotkin, William James, 150; Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism, 183–
90. For a critical defense of James’s essay see Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition,
168–69.
64. Dewey, Individualism Old and New, 58.
65. Ibid., 86.
Notes | 191
192
66. “Creative Democracy—the Task before Us,” in The Later Works: 1925–1953,

ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 14, 1939–1941 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1988), 225.
67. I borrow this formulation from Shulman, American Prophecy, 25.
Chapter 4
1. Major General David Hunter raised an earlier unit of black soldiers, the First
South Carolina, in May 1862 without authorization. The unit was disbanded under di-
rection of the federal government. The first authorized unit to fight for the Union was
the First Kansas Colored later that same year. My account of the history of the Fifty-
fourth is drawn from Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War
Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992);
Peter Burchard, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965); Martin Henry Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald
Yacovone, eds., Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts
Regiment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); David W. Blight, Race
and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2002), 171–210, 300–337.
2. The angel is a foreboding icon: Holding out both the olive branch and poppies, it
symbolizes both peace and death.
3. On the history and meaning of the monument see Robert Gould Shaw, The
Monument to Robert Gould Shaw, Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897); Lois Goldreich Marcus, “The ‘Shaw Memorial’
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens: A History Painting in Bronze,” Winterthur Portfolio 14,
no. 1 (1979): 1–23; Stephen J. Whitfield, “‘Sacred in History and in Art’: The Shaw
Memorial,” New England Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1987): 3–27; Kirk Savage, Standing
Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Blight, Race and Reunion. The monu-
ment is unique for many reasons, not the least of them being that it is the only Civil War
monument to depict African American soldiers in uniform. Saint-Gaudens spent over a
decade working on the monument in an attempt to depict the face of each soldier in his
unique individuality rather than a homogenous group. The result is a work of art that
skillfully combines the diversity of the men and the singularity of their mission. Art his-
torian Kirk Savage describes the monument as conveying a sense of uniformity enriched
“by a kind of contrapuntal rhythm of diversity” (Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves,
201). Albert Boime, by contrast, argues that the monument figures the African American
men as united in inferior animality compared to the serene white colonel riding above.
The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
4. For a discussion of the ambiguous significance of Shaw’s martyrdom to the Gilded
Age’s masculinist obsession with moral and civic decline see Fredrickson, The Inner
Civil War, 152–55. Frederickson mistakenly aligns James’s conception of strenuousness
with the rhetoric of republican melancholia without sufficient attention to the ways that
James is appropriating this language for different moral purposes, as demonstrated in
the previous chapter. Compare, for instance, James’s depiction of Shaw’s strenuousness
to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s invocation of Shaw as an example of the soldier’s faith.
192 | Notes
193
“Harvard College in the War: Answer to a Toast at Harvard University Commencement,

June 25th, 1884,” in Holmes, Speeches (Boston: Boston University Press, 1900), 14.
5. Robert James, another younger sibling of William, similarly served as an officer in
the racially integrated Massachusetts Fifty-fifth Regiment. Robert Gould Shaw’s parents
were well-k nown Boston abolitionists with close connections to Henry James Sr. Paul
Stob notes that such familial connections were not unusual in Boston Brahmin circles,
and certainly not reason enough to presume that William James would be an appropri-
ate speaker for the event. Stob, “Lonely Courage, Commemorative Confrontation, and
Communal Therapy: William James Remembers the Massachusetts 54th,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 98, no. 3 (2012): 251. On Wilkinson and Robert’s Civil War service
see Garth W. James, “The Assault on Fort Wagner,” in War Papers Read before the
Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, vol. 1 (Milwaukee: Burdick, Armitage & Allen,
1891), 9–30; Matthiessen, The James Family; Richardson, William James, 52–56.
6. While not unfamiliar lecturing before large audiences, James was so nervous
about the oration that he sought illocution lessons and made a point to memorize the
entire forty-m inute speech word for word. Due to all this anxious rehearsal James lost
his voice the night before he was scheduled to speak and had to seek out medical assis-
tance to recover his voice in time. Simon, Genuine Reality, xi–xvi.
7. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, xxvii.
8. Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911–1918,
ed. Ola Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 336–54; Mumford, The
Golden Day; Waldo Frank, “Our Guilt in Fascism,” New Republic 6 (1940): 603–8;
Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Lewis Mumford coins the term “the prag-
matic acquiescence” in his critique of Dewey in The Golden Day. See more recent ver-
sions of this criticism in Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between
Romanticism and Technocracy,” Praxis International 8, no. 3 (1988): 257–72; John P.
Diggins, “Pragmatism and Its Limits,” in The Revival of Pragmatism; Robert Brandom,
“When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment,”
in Pragmatism, Nation, and Race; Nancy K. Frankenberry, “Bernstein and Rorty on
Justification by Faith Alone,” in The Pragmatic Century: Conversations with Richard
J. Bernstein, ed. Sheila Greeve Davaney and Warren G Frisina (Albany: SUNY Press,
2006).
9. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 441.
10. On Deleuze and pragmatism see Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 56–60, 68–90; Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 103–6; Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts:
Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 60–80;
John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). The
resonance between James’s “radical” empiricism and Deleuze’s “transcendental” em-
piricism is frequently noted but has yet to be studied in detail. An important excep-
tion to this omission is the Deleuzian interpretation of Jamesian pragmatism in David
Lapoujade, William James: Empirisme et pragmatisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1997). See also David Lapoujade, “From Transcendental Empiricism to Worker
Nomadism: William James,” Pli 9 (2000).
11. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 70.
Notes | 193
194
12. Myers, William James, 396.

13. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981).
14. Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An
Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1997), 11.
15. See also James’s similar remark to John Jay Chapman, “The trouble about your
robust and full-blooded faiths, is, that they begin to cut each other’s throats too soon,
and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refine-
ments and reasonableness and moderations have to creep in” (C 8:254–55).
16. The author thanks Colin Koopman for this formulation.
17. Andrew F. Smith, “William James and the Politics of Moral Conflict,” Trans
actions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 40, no. 1 (2004): 135–51.
18. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 440.
19. Ibid., 375.
20. Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police, 123. On the negativity of James’s politi-
cal thought see also Miller, Democratic Temperament, 81–92; Robert B. Westbrook,
Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2005), 72; Brandom, “When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray.”
21. Dickinson S. Miller, “‘The Will to Believe’ and the Duty to Doubt,” International
Journal of Ethics 9, no. 2 (1899): 187.
22. Russell, “Pragmatism.” See too the critique of pragmatism in G. E. Moore,
“Professor James’ ‘Pragmatism,’” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 8 (1907): 146–
53. James responds to Russell and Moore’s criticisms in TEC.
23. Russell, “Pragmatism,” 282, 284.
24. Russell rightly notes the continuities between James and Papini’s pragmatisms,
and characterizes James’s apparent “worship of force” as a more moderate iteration of
Nietzsche; ibid., 282–83.
25. Isabelle Stengers raises a similar point, noting that “the mountaineer, experi-
enced and trusting in his own means, can nevertheless fall into the crevice, because
the rock that he trusted he would be able to reach was cracked for example: chance is
not eliminated by trust.” Isabelle Stengers, “William James: An Ethics of Thought?,”
Radical Philosophy, no. 157 (2009): 16.
26. On the influence of Psychology, and of James’s notion of the self in particu-
lar, on the development of his moral and social thought see John K. Roth, Freedom
and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James (Philadelphia: Westminister Press,
1969); Myers, William James; Colin Koopman, “William James’s Ethics of Self-
Transformation: The Will, the Will to Believe, and the Value of Freedom,” unpub-
lished paper presented at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy,
(2012).
27. Frederick Douglass, “Why Should a Colored Man Enlist?,” in Frederick
Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip Sheldon Foner and Yuval Taylor
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 529.
28. Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 283–86.
29. On Shaw’s ambivalent relationship to abolition see the editor’s introduction in
ibid., 1–68.
194 | Notes
195
30. Connolly coins this neologism to describes the confluence of Deleuze’s and
James’s influence on his own conception of deep pluralism: “I am indeed a Jamesleuzian.
I find this combination to both provide me with preliminary bearings and to support the
commitment to cultural pluralism that each already evinces. In a world where the glob-
alization of capital multiplies the number and types of minorities, the pursuit of deep
pluralism would become more feasible if more advocates of each faith acknowledged
without resentment the legitimacy of its contestability in the eyes of others.” William
E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2008), 133.
31. Connolly, Pluralism, 25.
32. On James’s relational conception of self see John J. McDermott, “The Promethean
Self and Community in the Philosophy of William James,” in Streams of Experience:
Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 44–58; Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries;
Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 57– 84; Livingston, “Excited
Subjects.”
33. Brian Massumi captures this complicated relationship of feeling, relation-
ality, and faith when he remarks that, for James, “participation precedes cognition.”
Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2011), 32.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,
trans. Maudemaire Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), §382.
35. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 203.
36. Eyal J. Naveh, Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America from
Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: New York University
Press, 1990), 22–49; R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long
Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2014).
37. Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Collected Essays
and Poems, ed. E. H. Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2001), 401.
38. I expand on this reading of John Brown in greater detail in Alexander Livingston,
“The Cost of Liberty: Sacrifice and Survival in Du Bois’s John Brown,” in A Political
Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Nick Bromell (Lexington: University Press of
Kansas, forthcoming).
39. W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown, ed. John David Smith (New York: International
Publishers, 1997), xxv, 172, 173, 172.
40. William E. Cain, “Violence, Revolution, and the Cost of Freedom: John Brown
and W. E. B. Du Bois,” boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990); Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives!,
79–105.
41. Du Bois, John Brown, 175, 175, 149.
42. Ibid., 172.
43. Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E.
B. Du Bois (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 68.
44. Stob, “Lonely Courage, Commemorative Confrontation, and Communal
Therapy,” 262.
Notes | 195
196
Chapter 5
1. George Santayana, Persons and Places, vol. 2, The Middle Span (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 167.
2. Ibid., 169–70.
3. Ibid., 170.
4. Russell, “Pragmatism.”
5. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 152n112.
6. On forgetting empire as a constitutive element of the American exceptionalist
narrative see Michael P. Rogin, “‘Make My Day!’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial
Politics [and] the Sequel,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism.
7. Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 51–52.
8. More troubling than this omission are James’s private remarks concerning the
African American veterans in attendance at the oration: “The thing that struck me most
in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of which there were perhaps about
thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey faces, the heavy animal look
entirely absent, and in its place the wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen” (C 3:9).
James uses similarly racist language in reference to African Americans elsewhere in
his correspondence (C 7:87; 8:262; 10:223; 11:197). See too PN. James’s views on race
and racism are discussed in Garrison and Madden, “William James—Warts and All,”
215–17; Myers, William James, 596; Harvey Cormier, “William James on Nation and
Race,” in Pragmatism, Nation, and Race; Throntveit, William James and the Quest
for an Ethical Republic, 130–31. On pragmatism and race more generally see Nancy
Fraser, “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics
of Culture,” in The Revival of Pragmatism; Bill E. Lawson and Donald F. Koch, eds.,
Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004);
Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006); Glaude, In a Shade of Blue; Terrance
MacMullan, Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2009); Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism.
9. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 138– 50; Nancy Ladd Muller,
“Du Boisian Pragmatism and ‘The Problem of the Twentieth Century,’” Critique of
Anthropology 12, no. 3 (1992): 319–37; George L. Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance
in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996),
33–42; Richard Cullen Rath, “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E.
B. Du Bois,” Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (1997): 461–95; Ross Posnock, Color
and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Paul C. Taylor, “What’s the Use of Calling Du
Bois a Pragmatist?,” Metaphilosophy 35, nos. 1–2 (2004): 99–114; Jonathon S. Kahn,
Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009). See critical rejoinders in Robert Gooding-Williams, “Evading
Narrative Myth, Evading Prophetic Pragmatism: Cornel West’s ‘The American Evasion
of Philosophy,’” Massachusetts Review 32, no. 4 (1991): 517–42; Shamoon Zamir, Dark
Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995); Diggins, “Pragmatism and Its Limits.”
10. Kahn, Divine Discontent, 27; emphasis in original. Kahn overstates the case
when he depicts James as silent on questions of politics.
196 | Notes
197
11. For a reading of Dewey on faith that shares many parallels with the account
of meliorist faith I develop here see Melvin L. Rogers, “The Fact of Sacrifice and the
Necessity of Faith: Dewey and the Ethics of Democracy,” Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society 47, no. 3 (2011): 274–300.
12. For the former perspective see Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan
Democracy,” in Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990); Raymond Boisvert, “The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Deweyan
Pragmatism,” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey
Haskins and David I. Seiple (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Cornel
West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993),
107–18. This conventional perception of Deweyan pragmatism as insensitive to trag-
edy and conflict are challenged in provocative ways in Campbell, The Community
Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought, 91–109; Glaude, In a Shade
of Blue, 17–46; Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey.
13. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Introduction,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience
(New York: Collier, 1961), 7, 8.
14. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 279–303.
15. Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005), 8.
16. Ibid., 8, 260–69. See Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, 78–81, 390–92.
17. Following the norms of writing on pragmatism and democratic faith, I use the
terms “faith” and “hope” interchangeably in this section. On pragmatism and democratic
hope see inter alia Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin,
1999); Patrick Shade, Habits of Hope: A Pragmatic Theory (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2001); John J. Stuhr, Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of
Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003); Richard J. Bernstein, “Pragmatism’s Common
Faith,” in Pragmatism and Religion, ed. Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2003); Westbrook, Democratic Hope; Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The
Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007); Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith; Stephen M. Fishman and
Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Judith M. Green, Pragmatism and Social
Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008); Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition.
18. George Shulman, “Hope and American Politics,” Raritan 21, no. 3 (2002): 4.
19. Hesiod, The Works and Days; Theogony; the Shield of Herakles, trans. Richard
Lattimore (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1991), lines 57–58.
20. Ibid., line 95.
21. For a historical survey of responses to the myth, as well as the conceptual and
aesthetic consequences of Erasmus’s interpellation of the myth from that of Pandora’s jar
to a box, see Dora Panofsky and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects
of a Mythical Symbol (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1991). In Aeschylus’s tell-
ing of Prometheus’s transgression, the birth of hope is not the punishment but rather
the offense for which Zeus punishes him. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. James
Scully and C. J. Herington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), lines 373–78.
Notes | 197
198
22. This point is put powerfully in Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey, 1–13.

23. Deneen, Democratic Faith, 47.
24. Papini, The Failure, 204; emphasis in original.
25. James is making an allusion to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew: “And
from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence,
and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12).
26. Richard M. Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 12; The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–37. On James’s Prometheanism
see too Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy
(New York: George Braziller, 1970), 11; McDermott, “The Promethean Self and
Community in the Philosophy of William James.” For a critical rejoinder to Gale’s divi-
sion of James’s pragmatism into Prometheanism and mysticism see James O. Pawelski,
The Dynamic Individualism of William James (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2007).
27. William J. Gavin, “Pragmatism and Death: Method vs. Metaphor; Tragedy vs.
the Will to Believe,” in 100 Years of Pragmatism, 83.
28. Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in
Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); William O. Reichert,
“The Melancholy Political Thought of Morrison I. Swift,” New England Quarterly 49,
no. 4 (1976): 542–58; Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation,’” 70–71.
29. James’s encounter with Swift’s writing is discussed in the Introduction.
30. Gavin, “Pragmatism and Death,” 83.
31. Ibid., 84. Stengers makes provocative use of this statement and its parallels with
themes in Deleuze for recovering what she calls James’s “ethics of thought.” Stengers,
“William James.”
32. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Garry Wills (New York: Penguin, 1961), 172.
33. The best source for deciphering the imbrication of James’s psychological writings
with his religious concerns remains Taylor, William James on Consciousness beyond
the Margin. On Principles in the context of “psychical research” more broadly, see
Myers, William James, 54–80; Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality
and the Science of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 221–34; Paul
Redding, The Logic of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 24–45; Bordogna,
William James at the Boundaries.
34. Zamir, Dark Voices, 36.
35. The epigram is commonly attributed to Theodorides of Syracuse. In a 1901 letter,
James thanks Frances Rollins Morse for bringing the passage to his attention (C 9:528).
36. On memory and amnesia in Souls, see Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations:
Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), 457–89; Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction, 1–17.
37. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Terri
Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 5, 5, 33, 33.
38. Ibid., 11. On “internal exclusion” see Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and
Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55–57.
39. On hyphenization and the construction of African American cultural memory
in Souls see David Levering-Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a
198 | Notes
199
Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 281; Rath, “Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric
Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois.”
40. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 11.
41. Du Bois approvingly cites the essay in which James originally published his views
on double consciousness, HS, in his Harvard convocation address, “Jefferson Davis as a
Representative of Civilization,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering-Lewis
(New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 19. For strong statements of the influence of Principles
on Du Bois’s development of double consciousness see Arnold Rampersad, “Slavery
and the Literary Imagination: Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” in Slavery and the
Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 117; Dickson D. Bruce, “W. E. B. Du Bois and
the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature 64, no. 2 (1992): 570–71; James
Campbell, “Du Bois and James,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28, no. 3
(1992): 569–81; Taylor, William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin, 75; Posnock,
Color and Culture, 64–68. Rath makes a more attenuated version of this claim in “Echo
and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois,” 478.
42. Zamir, Dark Voices, 116–17. See also Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and
American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 99–105. On alienation and double consciousness see Thomas C. Holt, “The
Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–
1940,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1990): 301–23.
43. Given the influence of Marxism on Du Bois’s conception of race and racism in
later works like Dusk of Dawn, there is some controversy as to how the Du Bois of Souls
understood the nature of power and whether or not the analysis of the causes of double-
consciousness are consistent throughout this text. For a reading of Souls that draws out
both the idealist and materialist dimensions of the young Du Bois’s analysis of white
supremacy, see George Ciccariello-Maher, “A Critique of Du Boisian Reason: Kanye
West and the Fruitfulness of Double-Consciousness,” Journal of Black Studies 39, no.
3 (2009): 371–401.
45. Ross Posnock, “Going Astray, Going Forward: Du Boisian Pragmatism and Its
Lineage,” in The Revival of Pragmatism, 176–77.
46. The Souls of Black Folk, 10.
47. Shannon Mariotti, “On the Passing of the First-Born Son: Emerson’s ‘Focal
Distancing,’ Du Bois’ ‘Second Sight,’ and Disruptive Particularity,” Political Theory 37,
no. 3 (2009): 362; Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern
Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 78.
49. Ibid., 12.
50. Ibid., 133.
51. W. E. B. Du Bois to William James, June 12, 1906, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers,
Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Libraries. Given that William James both reports reading Souls in 1903 and writing
a letter to Du Bois that June, it is most likely that the date of 1906 attributed to this
letter by early archivists is incorrect. See C 2:242–43; 9:261. According to the editors
of James’s Correspondence, the whereabouts of this letter from James to Du Bois are
Notes | 199
200
“unknown” (C 9:604). See James’s additional notes on lynching from that same year in
“Clippings, 1903–1910 and undated,” Folder 3, and “Notes, 1910 and undated,” James
Additional Papers.
53. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 1–2, 497–99.
54. Christina Zwang, “Du Bois on Trauma: Psychoanalysis and the Would-Be Black
Savant,” Cultural Critique 51 (2002): 1–39.
56. I borrow this expression “antimnemonic orientation” from Balfour, Democracy’s
Reconstruction, 11.
58. See the careful analysis of these pairings and their significance for Souls’s argu-
ment in Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois.
60. Ibid., 157.
61. Ibid., 120.
62. Ibid., 162.
63. The role of democratic rhetoric in Souls is examined in great detail in Melvin
L. Rogers, “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The
Souls of Black Folk,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (2012): 188–203.
64. Ibid., 162, 163.
65. Ibid., 163.
66. Ibid., 164.
67. In light of so-called pragmatism of the Obama presidency’s foreign policy in
comparison to the right Wilsonian idealism that preceded it, scholars have been eager
to construct a philosophical lineage for the Obama presidency rooted in American prag-
matism. Central to these investigations of the supposed philosophy behind the pres-
idency has been an attention to Obama’s rhetoric of hope. Bart Schultz, “Obama’s
Political Philosophy: Pragmatism, Politics, and the Univeristy of Chicago,” Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 39, no. 2 (2009): 127– 73; James T. Kloppenberg, Reading
Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011); Rogers M. Smith, “The Constitutional Philosophy of Barack
Obama: Democratic Pragmatism and Religious Commitment,” Social Science Quarterly
93, no. 5 (2012): 1251–71.
68. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth- Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6.
69. Achieving Our Country, 1. In a thoughtful essay, Simon Stow situates Rorty’s
“inspirational” politics within the tradition of American poetry that views the role of lit-
erature itself as a foundation of the American republic. Stow demonstrates how Rorty’s
own selective readings of American poets like Whitman, along with his famously
“strong” readings of Dewey, Heidegger, and others, is a feature of the pluralism of this
literary tradition itself as “a historical tradition of subversive counter readings” in the
service of crafting “a compelling narrative of hope about America’s future.” “‘To Him
Continents Arrive as Contributions’: Richard Rorty, European Theory, and the Poetry of
American Politics,” Zeitschrift für Äesthetik und Allgemine Kunstwissenschaft (Journal
for Aesthetics and Art Theory) 11 (2011): 114–15. One persistent feature of this tradition,
Stow argues, is its avoidance of race. Christopher Voparil similarly identifies the literary
200 | Notes
201
character of Rorty’s politics in Achieving Our Country. See his Richard Rorty: Politics
and Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 155–82.
70. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 101.
71. Rorty’s use of genre to frame his appeal to democratic hope as melodrama is crit-
ically scrutinized in Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), 107–22. Examining the politics of genre in the post-9/11 reconsolida-
tion of the national security state, Elisabeth R. Anker argues that melodramatic genre
conventions prove particularly useful for the legitimation of American state power
Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham: Duke
72. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free
Press, 1998), 722.
73. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993),
101; Shulman, “Hope and American Politics.”
Conclusion
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin,
1985), 83.
2. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, in Democracy, Esther, Mont
Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams, and Poems, ed. E. Samuels
and J. N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983).
3. Sigmund Freud, “Wild Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Stachey, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957), 224.
4. Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton:
Princeton Univerity Press, 2009), 137.
5. Otto, “On a Certain Blindness in William James,” 188.
6. Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, 264.
7. Rudyard Kipling, The Complete Verse (London: Kyle Cathie, 1990), 261.
8. Quoted in Rusling, “Interview with President McKinley,” 137.
9. “Take up the White Man’s burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years.”
Kipling, The Complete Verse, 262.
10. Judith Plotz, “How ‘The White Man’s Burden’ Lost Its Scare-Quotes; or Kipling
and the New American Empire,” in Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalization and
Postcolonialism, ed. Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 38.
11. Roosevelt, “National Duties,” 775.
12. Albert J. Beveridge, “The March of the Flag,” in The Meaning of the Times and
Other Speeches (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1908), 48.
13. Patrick Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Aftermath,”
English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 50, no. 2 (2007); Plotz, “How ‘The White
Notes | 201
202
Man’s Burden’ Lost Its Scare-Quotes.” Du Bois, too, penned a parody of Kipling’s essay
that underscored the essentially racist character of its depiction of masculine freedom.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Burden of Black Women,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed.
David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).
14. “A Collection of Newspaper Clippings Related to the Philippine Question,
1899–1903,” Film W 11316, Harvard College Library, Harvard University.
15. John Atkinson Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1935); Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1907); Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Collected Works, vol. 22
(Moscow: Progress, 1964), 185–304.
16. Hobson, Imperialism, 71.
17. Both lines of justification were often invoked together, as in the speeches by
Beveridge and Roosevelt cited above.
18. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, trans. P. S. Falla
(New York: Random House, 1980), 86–92. See also Harry Magdoff, Imperialism with-
out Colonies (New York: Monthly Review, 2003); Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary
Imperialism,” 6–10.
19. The classic statement of this interpretation of United States foreign policy is
Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 19–89.
20. Lodge, “Our Blundering Foreign Policy,” 17.
21. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International
Relations, 1789–1941, 266–68; Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism, 153–63.
22. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, 119–29. John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire
(New York: Scribner, 2004), 69–74; Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2:133; Rana,
The Two Faces of American Freedom, 285–90.
23. This is not to deny that the Monroe Doctrine was frequently invoked to justify
the deployment of military force in Latin America and South America over the course
of the nineteenth century. Greg Grandin counts 5,980 cases of American warships being
sent into Latin American ports between 1869 and 1897. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop:
Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 20. For the clas-
sic study of the United States’ influence in Latin America see Eduardo Galeano, Open
Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric
Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
24. Theodore Roosevelt, “Message of the President of the United States,
Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Third Session of
the Fifty-Eighth Congress,” in Presidential Addresses and State Papers, vol. 3, April 7,
1904 to May 9, 1905 (New York: Review of Reviews Company, 1910), 172, 173.
25. Ibid., Ibid., 176.
26. Ibid., 177.
27. Ibid.
28. Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism (Malden: Blackwell,
2001), 118–22.
29. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2:263.
30. For neoconservative invocations of the Philippines see Max Boot, The Savage
Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, rev. ed. (New York:
Basic, 2014), 99–128; Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on
202 | Notes
203
the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005), 131–84. For liberal variations of this
construction of imperial memory see Michael Ignatieff, “Why Are We in Iraq?; (and
Liberia? And Afganistan?),” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2003,38–43,
71–72, 85; Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (New York:
Vintage, 2003).
31. “Remarks to a Joint Session of the Philippine Congress in Quezon City,
Philippines. October 18, 2003,” http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-2003-10-27/pdf/
WCPD-2003-10-27-Pg1427.pdf (accessed October 25, 2015). See discussion in Judis,
The Folly of Empire, 1–3.
32. John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Robert W. McChesney, “Kipling,
the ‘White Man’s Burden,’ and U.S. Imperialism,” in Pox Americana: Exposing the
American Empire, ed. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2004); Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and
Its Aftermath”; Matthew Connelly, “The New Imperialists,” in Lessons of Empire:
Imperial Histories and American Power, ed. Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and
Kevin W. Moore (New York: Free Press, 2006), 26; Plotz, “How ‘The White Man’s
Burden’ Lost Its Scare-Quotes.”
33. Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-Building Lite,” New York Times Magazine, July 28,
2002, 26–31, 54–59.
34. “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 22–27, 50–54.
35. Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American
Power, 369.
36. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin,
2004), 301. Compare Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the
Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic, 2003), 364–67.
37. These unironic celebrations of Kipling might be dismissed as an artifact of
the overzealous idealism that marked the United States’ unilateral foreign policy
during the years of the Bush presidency. The so-called pragmatic foreign policy
of the Obama presidency, by contrast, has closed this chapter of imperial foreign
policy in favor of a return to diplomatic multilateralism. What such a conclusion
mistakes, as James Tully demonstrates, is the continuity between military unilater-
alism and diplomatic multilateralism in sustaining the web of informal imperialism.
Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2:134–47; Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary
Imperialism,” 21–28.
38. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 88.
39. Jeanne Morefield uses the term “deflection” to characterize the rhetorical sepa-
ration of illiberal practices of imperialism from the liberal principles celebrated by the
likes of Ferguson and Ignatieff. Morefield, Empires without Imperialism.
40. Schirmer, “William James and the New Age”; Ferguson, William James, 39–47.
Notes | 203
204
205
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INDEX
Achieving Our Country (Rorty), 150–51 modern mass politics and, 54

“Acres of Diamonds” (Conwell), 62 pessimism regarding, 154
Adams, Brooks, 82 pluralism and, 128, 139
Adams, Henry, 82, 154 pragmatism and, 14, 17, 20, 127–28,
Addams, Jane, 158, 191n62 130, 133–34, 154
“Address to the Philippines Question” stuttering and, 125
(James), 31 the will and, 128
African Americans. See also Civil War; Albrecht, James, 18
Douglass, Frederick; Du Bois, American exceptionalism. See also
W.E.B; Shaw, Robert Gould authority; monism; imperialism
as Civil War soldiers, 104, 115–17, Baldwin on African Americans’
119–20, 128 skepticism toward, 151–52
Du Bois on John Brown and, 123–24 frontier freedoms and, 16
Gilded Age segregation and, 128 imperialism and, 22, 128–30
James’s private comments James’s philosophy and, 20, 128, 130
regarding, 196n8 myth of national innocence and, 16
skepticism toward American pragmatism and, 15, 22, 52, 127, 130
exceptionalism among, 151–52 American Political Science Association,
spiritual songs of, 147–49 1–2, 4, 24
agency. See also bigness; meliorism; anarchism, 7–11, 54, 92, 163, 169–70n27
pluralism; the will Andrew, John A., 116
“bigness” as threat to, 60–61, 93 Anti-Imperialist League, 2, 31, 91
contingency and, 20, 55, 67–68, 70, Augustine, 87, 138–39
128, 152 authority. See also contingency; monism
faith and, 55–56, 119, 121 anti-authoritarianism and, 7–13
finitude of the human condition contingency and, 51, 53–56, 66–67, 75,
and, 135 152, 154
gospel of success and, 62 “craving” for, 11–12, 20–21, 51, 55–56,
habit and, 88 63–66, 68–71, 74–76, 100, 129, 152,
James on, 20, 56, 68, 128, 130, 135 154, 163, 171n43
228
authority (Cont.) resignation in the face of, 60–61

Gilded Age crisis of, 12, 53–54 success-worship and, 61–64
James’s psycho-pragmatic U.S. foreign investment and, 57–59
approach to, 80 Woodberry and, 57
monism and, 11, 55–56, 63, 68–71, Black Reconstruction in America (Du
73–74, 129 Bois), 151
philosophy and the craving for, Bolshevism, 34, 41
56, 65–66 Boot, Max, 162
pluralism and, 75–76 Bourne, Randolph, 105
pragmatism and, 10–13 Boxer Rebellion (China), 160
the will and, 42, 66–67 Brazil rebellion (1894), 15
Brown, John, 122–24
Bacon, Francis, 11 Buffalo (New York), 97–98
Baldwin, James, 151–52 Burke, Edmund, 62
Balfour, Lawrie, 124 Bush, George W., 162
Ball, Terrance, 43
Beard, Charles, 35 Cameron, William, 2
Bell, Duncan, 176n6 Carnegie, Andrew, 62
Bellamy, Edward, 191n62 Carpenter, Edward, 183–84n10
Bentham, Jeremy, 176n6 Cartesianism, 10
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 16–17 Cavell, Stanley, 90
Bergson, Henri Characteristically American (Perry), 50
élan vital and, 40 Chautauqua Assembly, 95–97, 99–100,
Italian fascists’ inspiration from, 38 153. See also Talks to Teachers
James and, 25 (James)
philosophy of intuition and, 37 Chesterton, Gilbert, 63, 185n27
philosophy of lived duration and, 5 Christian Science, 70
pluralism and, 155 Civil War
Sorel and, 37 African American soldiers in, 104,
on the temporal nature of 115–17, 119–20, 128
experience, 118 Gilded Age memories of, 21, 82–83,
Berlant, Lauren, 63 85, 103–5, 122, 128
Berlin, Isaiah, 110 myth of masculine self-assertion and,
Bernstein, Richard, 19 82–83, 85
Beveridge, Albert J., 157–58 pragmatism as response to, 111
bigness. See also agency; Gilded Shaw’s moral courage during, 21,
Age; monism 103–7, 115–16, 119–22, 124–25,
agency and freedoms threatened by, 128, 192–93n4
60–61, 93 Cleveland, Grover, 29
business and, 57, 59, 158 Colossus (Ferguson), 162
Gilded Age culture and, 20, 54, 57, 158 Conant, Charles, 57–58, 83, 158
idol worship and, 63–64 Confessions (Augustine), 138
James on the problem of, 20, 54, 56–64 Connolly, William, 6, 117–18, 195n30
Lodge on nations and, 58 contingency. See also agency; monism;
“moral flabbiness” in the face pluralism; pragmatism
of, 60–62 adventure and, 15
228 | Index
229
agency and, 20, 55, 67–68, 70, 128, 152 on philosophy’s “quest for
authority and, 51, 53–56, 66–67, 75, certainty,” 56
152, 154 political philosophy and, 6–7, 101, 131
conviction and, 121 pragmatism and the philosophy of, 1,
faith and, 120, 128, 141 5–6, 11, 18–19, 36, 47, 131
God and, 135 on “problem of authority,” 12
modernity and, 13 as public intellectual, 6
monism and, 55–56, 63, 69, 71–72, Diggins, John, 25, 34, 40
74, 141 Dominican Republic, 160
moral philosophy and, 111 Douglass, Frederick, 116, 120, 123–24
Nietzsche on, 67, 75–76, 155 Dreyfus Affair, 62
pluralism and, 67, 72–74, 130, 141, 154 Du Bois, W.E.B.
pragmatism and, 10, 13, 20, 129, 141 on African Americans’ spiritual
strenuousness and, 75 songs, 147–49
Conwell, Russell H., 62 on American amnesia toward history
Coon, Deborah of white supremacy, 143, 149–51
on James and political agency, 68 anti-imperialism and, 131
on James’s anarchism, 8–9, 54, 76 on “double consciousness” and race,
on James’s critique of “bigness,” 22, 131, 143–49, 199n41
60–61, 63 James as professor of, 142
Corcoran, John, 136 on Jim Crow era, 146
Cotkin, George, 8–9, 86–87, 174n67 on John Brown, 123–24
Croce, Paul Jerome, 38, 65 meliorism’s tragic consequences
Croly, Herbert, 34–35, 40 examined by, 130, 145–47, 149–50
Crosby, Ernest Howard, 8, 169n27 pragmatism and, 130–31
Czolgosz, Leon, 8 on the problem of the color
line, 143–44
Darien (Georgia), Civil War sacking
of, 116–17 Eastman, Max, 3–6, 25
Darwin, Charles, 53 The Education of Henry Adams (Henry
Davis, Jefferson, 86 Adams), 154
Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 106, 155, 195n30 Edwards, Jonathan, 46
“Democracy” (Woodberry), 57 Elliott, William Y., 36–37, 40
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 13 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 94, 139
Democratic Temperament (Miller), 6 empire. See imperialism
Deneen, Patrick, 131–34 Empire (Ferguson), 162
Dewey, John. See also specific works The Enlightenment, 11
anti-authoritarianism and, 11 Essays in Radical Empiricism
on change and craving for (James), 3, 27
authority, 171n43 exemplarity, 21, 79, 93–94
civil religion in America and, 151
on the frontier, 101 faith. See also agency; meliorism;
instrumentalism and, 5, 14, 36 strenuousness; the will
on James, 4, 15, 78, 101, 167n13 action and, 105–7, 112–13, 116–17, 119,
on liberalism, 34 123, 155
Mussolini compared to, 36 afterlife and, 93
Index | 229
230
faith (Cont.) Frank, Waldo, 105

agency and, 55–56, 119, 121 Frederickson, George M., 192–93n4
Connolly on, 117–18 Freedom and Culture (Dewey), 6
contingency and, 120, 128, 141 The Free Man and the Soldier
conviction and, 105–7, 119–20, 122 (Perry), 44, 82
craving for order and, 22 Freud, Sigmund, 80, 147, 154–55, 187n7
defeatism and, 93 the frontier
in democracy, 22, 115, 119, 126–27, pragmatism’s idioms of, 101, 127
129–33, 142–43, 145, 147–51 regeneration and, 80–81
in divine power, 92 republican melancholia and,
fanaticism and, 93 80–82, 101–2
finitude of the human condition Turner on, 81–83
and, 135
James on, 21–22, 35–36, 56, 105–7, Gale, Richard, 134
112–20, 140 Gavin, William J., 135
James’s Alpine climber example and, The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 67
112–15, 117, 119 German Philosophy and Politics
in liberal nationalism, 52 (Dewey), 6
materialism’s denial of, 72 Gilded Age. See also authority; bigness,
Niebuhr on, 93 Civil War; republican melancholia
optimism and, 137–38 Civil War memory and, 21, 82–83, 85,
practical consequences of, 91 103–5, 122, 128
pragmatism and, 47–48, 54, 105–6, contingency in, 154
122, 132 corruptions of luxury and, 83–85, 96,
reality potentially reshaped by, 38 100, 103
Russell on, 113 crisis of authority during, 12, 53–54
“stuttering forth” in, 115–17, 119–25 cultural malaise during, 8–9
without prior evidence, 112 educated class political reformers
fascism. See also totalitarianism; and, 30
Mussolini, Benito metropolitan gentility and, 77
Americans’ curiosity toward, pioneer freedoms and, 15, 77
34–36, 40 political thought and culture during,
consequentialism and, 35–36 7, 77–78
liberalism compared to, 34–35 the problem of “bigness” in, 20, 54,
Mussolini’s regime and, 25, 57, 158
35–37, 40, 42 prophecies of national decline
pragmatism and, 35–37, 40–42 during, 82
syndicalism and, 37, 40 “republican melancholia” in, 21, 78–80,
“Fascism: For the Italians” 90, 103
(Kallen), 34–35 segregation and, 128
Ferguson, Kennan, 6, 21 social Darwinism and, 62
Ferguson, Niall, 162 success-worship in, 62
Fifty-fourth Regiment. See Massachusetts Godkin, E.L., 30–32, 50, 177n27
Fifty-fourth Regiment Godkin, Katherine Sands, 8
Filipino Progress Association, 2 Goldmark, Pauline, 8
Fort Wagner, Battle of (1861), 103–4 Golino, Carlo, 37–38
230 | Index
231
Gorky, Maxim, 2, 165–66n6 “craving for order” and, 12

“Governor Roosevelt’s Oration” frontier metaphors and, 78
(James), 86 Godkin’s critique of, 30
“G. Papini and the Pragmatist Movement Great Britain and, 83, 85, 157
in Italy” (James), 39 James’s opposition to, 2–3, 5–12, 15–16,
Grant, Ulysses S., 86 18–21, 24, 31–32, 51–52, 54, 56, 58–61,
Great Depression, 40 74–76, 79, 86–87, 91, 95, 100, 102, 106,
Gunnell, John, 42–43 110, 126, 128, 131, 143, 153–58, 161,
163–64, 165n5
Habermas, Jürgen, 65 Kipling’s poetry celebrating,
habit, 88–92, 95, 96. See also the will 157–58, 160
Hartz, Louis, 62 masculine virility and, 76–78, 85–86
Hawaii, 15, 83 naval power and, 83, 158–59
Hay, John, 58 philanthropic rhetoric and, 85,
Hegel, G.F., 12, 48, 72–73 157–60, 162–63
Heidegger, Martin, 14, 127 pluralism and, 6–7
Hesiod, 132 race and, 131
A History of Political Theory (Sabine), 43 republican melancholia and, 79,
Hobson, John, 158 83–86, 102
Hofstadter, Richard, 14, 29–30 Roosevelt on, 21, 77–78, 85, 110,
Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell. See also 157, 159–62
republican melancholia “strenuousness” in the rhetoric of, 21,
Decoration Day commemoration of 56, 77–78, 99–100
Robert Gould Shaw (1897) and, 103 United States and, 13–16, 18, 21–22,
elite youths’ idleness lamented by, 100 30–31, 51, 54–55, 58–59, 61, 76–78,
James on, 86 83, 85–86, 110, 126, 128–31,
modern banality lamented by, 99 151, 157–63
pioneer virtues and, 90 U.S. foreign investment and,
on the virtue of martial sacrifice and 58–59, 158–60
discipline, 82–83, 86 as “way of life,” 7, 23, 51, 68, 76, 130,
Honig, Bonnie, 12, 156 154, 156, 158, 163
Horatio Alger myth, 62 Imperialism and Liberty (Swift), 136
Horkheimer, Max, 14 Individualism Old and New
Howells, William Dean, 7–8 (Dewey), 6, 101
Human Submission (Swift), 136, 169n27 The Influence of Sea Power upon History
(Mahan), 83
Ignatieff, Michael, 162 In the Spirit of William James (Perry),
Il crepuscolo dei filosofi (The Twilight of 182n116
the Philosophers, Papini), 38–39 Iraq War, 161–62
imperialism “Is Life Worth Living?” (James), 136
academic studies of, 13–14
American exceptionalism and, James, Alice (mother of William
22, 128–30 James), 27
capitalism and free trade cited as James, Alice (sister of William James), 7
justification for, 158–61 James, Garth Wilkinson
civic regeneration through, 83, 85, 157 (“Wilky”), 103–4
Index | 231
232
James, Henry (son of William James), 27 militant self-assertion principle and,

James, Henry Sr. (father of William 28–29, 51
James), 28 modernity critiqued by, 20
James, William. See also specific works monism and the philosophy of, 11,
agency and, 20, 56, 68, 128, 130, 135 55–56, 68–74, 77, 136–37, 140, 142,
American exceptionalism and, 20, 148, 183–84n10
128, 130 moral philosophy of, 28–29, 32, 107–11,
American founding ideals and, 32 113, 178n40
anarchism and, 7–11, 76, 163, 170n27 as a “mugwump,” 29–31, 63, 76
anti-imperialism of, 2–3, 5–12, 15–16, Mussolini’s inspiration from, 3–4, 25,
18–21, 24, 31–32, 51–52, 54, 56, 35–36, 40–41
58–61, 74–76, 79, 86–87, 91, 95, 100, on pacifism, 91
102, 106, 110, 126, 128, 131, 143, Papini and, 25, 37–41, 48
153–58, 161, 163–64, 165n5 on the Philippines, 29, 31, 54,
anti-lynching editorials by, 142–43 59, 61–62, 110, 126, 153, 163,
on “bigness” and its problems, 20, 165–66n6, 184–85n19
54, 56–64 on pioneer freedoms, 15
biographical interpretations of the pluralism and the philosophy of, 6–7,
philosophy of, 51, 53–55, 76 22–23, 66–67, 69–73, 75–77, 87, 105,
on blindness toward feelings of peoples 108–11, 113, 139–40, 155, 167n13
different from ourselves, 153 political philosophy of, 1–2, 4–16,
on the Chautauqua Assembly, 96–97, 18–19, 22–26, 28–34, 36, 41–44,
99–100, 153 47–52, 54–55, 74–76, 95, 99–102,
on deliberation, 114 105, 111, 115, 131, 150,
depression suffered by, 28–29, 31, 53, 153–56, 163–64
87, 136 pragmatism in the philosophy of, 1–6,
Dewey on, 4, 15, 78, 101, 167n13 9–12, 15, 17–20, 22–23, 25–26, 33,
educated class background of, 29–30 35–37, 39–40, 47–48, 51–52, 54,
exemplarity in the philosophy of, 21, 69–70, 73, 87, 105, 111–13, 129–31,
79, 94–95 133–34, 150, 153–56
faith in the philosophy of, 21–22, on the “problem of authority,” 12–13
35–36, 56, 105–7, 112–20, 140 “psychologizing philosophy” and,
Godkin as mentor to, 30, 177n27 64–68, 75–76
humanitarian principles and, 28–29, “psychologizing politics” and, 54–55
31–33, 47 public philosophy of, 8–9, 18, 21,
on Kipling, 158 52, 174n67
liberalism and the philosophy of, 4–5, race relations views of, 156, 196n8
7, 9, 20, 24–26, 33–34, 41–4 4, 47, republican melancholia and, 78–80,
49–51, 54, 62, 131–32, 182n116 97–98, 100, 192–93n4
libertarianism and, 32 Roosevelt and, 78, 86
literary estate of, 27–28, 169–70n27, Shaw celebrated by, 103–7, 115–16,
176–77n10 119–21, 124–25, 127–28
on McKinley, 59 on sociability and tolerance, 29, 33
meliorism and the philosophy of, 22, on The Souls of Black Folk,
32, 54, 70–71, 87, 129–30, 133–50, 142–43, 146
152, 155 Spanish-American War and, 31, 126
232 | Index
233
strenuousness and the philosophy of, 21, Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 137

28, 36, 41, 48, 75, 79, 86–87, 90–102, Lenin, Vladimir, 14, 158
105, 107, 112, 156, 192–93n4 Lentricchia, Frank, 16, 112
on success-worship, 61–63 Leonardo (Italian journal), 37–40
syndicalism and, 37 The Letters of William James (1920
on temperaments, 68–69, 74–75, edited volume), 27
77, 135 Liberalism. See also Perry, Ralph Barton
totalitarianism and, 3–5, 20, 25, 33 anti-authoritarianism and, 40
Venezuela Crisis (1895) and, 31, 58, 79 contradictory goals contained
on the will, 3–4, 53, 55, 66, 87–90, 122 within, 47
on Woodberry’s “Democracy,” 57 democratic representation and,
World Peace Congress (1904) remarks 25, 41, 49
by, 90–91 fascism compared to, 34–35
John Brown (Du Bois), 123–24 hubris and, 131–32
individualism and, 25, 33–34,
Kahn, Jonathon, 130–31 42–43, 49
Kallen, Horace James’s philosophy and, 4–5, 7, 9, 20,
on Italian fascism, 34–36, 40–41 24–26, 33–34, 41–44, 47, 49–51, 54,
on James and liberalism, 4 62, 131–32, 182n116
on James and political philosophy, 1–2, Mussolini’s criticism of, 34, 36
4–6, 25 Perry’s championing of, 24–25, 42, 44,
on James and pragmatism, 15 49–51, 54, 150, 182n116
on James and totalitarianism, 19 property rights and, 41
James as mentor to, 1 tolerance and, 25, 33–34, 41, 49
on James’s struggles as representative United States and, 25–26, 33, 42–44,
of the Gilded Age, 90 47, 49, 150
Mussolini’s interview with, 35–36, 40 “Whiggish history” of, 25, 176n6
Kant, Immanuel, 18, 87, 174n72 World War I and the crisis of, 20,
Kaplan, Amy, 13 33–34, 41, 44–45, 155
Kilbourne, William, 36 World War II and the crisis of, 26, 33,
King Jr., Martin Luther, 105 40–41, 48–49, 182n116
Kipling, Rudyard Liberalism and Social Action
contemporary U.S. neoimperialists’ (Dewey), 6
citing of, 162–63 libertarianism, 32
imperialism celebrated in the poetry Lincoln, Abraham, 86
of, 157–58, 160 Lippmann, Walter, 33–34, 100
James on, 158 Locke, John, 176n6
Koopman, Colin, 9, 76 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Henry, 58, 158
Kropotkin, Peter, 8, 169–70n27 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 191n62
Kuklick, Bruce, 27 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 61
Lasch, Christopher, 131–32 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 25, 36

Laski, Harold, 36 MacQueen, William, 60
La Voce (journal), 40 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 83, 158–59
The Laws of Civilization and Decay Main Currents in American Thought
(Brooks Adams), 82 (Parrington), 43
Index | 233
234
Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment (U.S. optimism and, 136–37, 141, 145

Civil War), 21, 103–4, 115–17, 119–20, pragmatism and, 69–70, 73, 79,
128. See also Shaw, Robert Gould 136, 154
McKinley, William, 8, 59, 110, Monroe Doctrine, 159–61, 202n23
157–58, 184–85n19 Montgomery, James, 116–17
Mead, George Herbert, 1, 126 “The Moral Equivalent of War” (James),
The Meaning of Truth (James), 3, 71 2, 99–100
meliorism (James). See also agency, faith; “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral
pluralism; pragmatism Life” (James)
as alternative to optimism and on conviction’s “tragic pinch,” 124
pessimism, 129, 145, 150, 155 on the impossibility of absolute ethical
American exceptionalism and, 142 philosophy, 107–11
on the color line, 142–50 on possible future worlds, 141
contingency and, 141 on strenuousness, 86
democratic faith and, 150, 152 Morse, Frances Rollins, 86
individualism and, 32 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 80
mortality and, 135–42 Mugwumps (Gilded Age Republican
pluralism and, 70–71 Party faction), 29–31, 50
the problem of “bigness” and, 54 Mumford, Lewis, 15
progress and, 129–30 Mussolini, Benito
salvation and, 141 action emphasized by, 41–42
the “twice-born soul” and, 22, 137–40 cultural nationalism of, 40
the will to believe and, 87, 133–34 elite leadership philosophy of, 40
Memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Ethiopia invasion (1935) and, 40
Shaw (Saint-Gaudens), 103–4, 106, fascist ideology of, 25, 35–37, 40, 42
192–93n3 James cited as inspiration by, 3–4, 25,
Menand, Louis, 105, 111–12, 122 35–36, 40–41
Mill, John Stuart, 4 liberalism criticized by, 34, 36
Miller, Joshua, 6 Perry on, 26
Mommsen, Wolfang, 158 Roosevelt compared to, 34
monism. See also authority; bigness; Myers, Gerald, 107
imperialism
Carpenter’s poetry and, 183–84n10 Nachlass (collection of James’s notes and
contingency and, 55–56, 63, 69, 71–72, correspondence), 2–3, 6–7, 20, 74,
74, 141 153, 176-77n10
cosmic unity and, 72–73 The Nation (magazine), 30
craving for authority and, 11, 55–56, neo-Hegelianism, 70
63, 68–71, 73–74, 129 “new realism,” 27
craving for change and, 66 The New Republic (magazine), 34–35, 40
critiques of, 71–74 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 93, 105, 131
ideal of America and, 149–50 Nietzsche, Friedrich
intimacy promised by, 70, 72–74 action emphasized by, 48
James’s account of, 11, 55–56, Christian morality repudiated by, 45
68–74, 77, 136–37, 140, 142, 148, on conclusions, 119–21
183–84n10 Italian fascists’ inspiration from, 38
morality and, 107, 110 Mussolini’s inspiration from, 25, 35
234 | Index
235
Perry on, 44–48 on James and anti-imperialism, 3,

on pluralism and contingency, 67, 19–20, 31
75–76, 155 on James and fascism, 20, 33, 41
social stratification advocated by, 47 on James and liberalism, 24–26, 33–34,
“superman” of, 44–46, 48 41–44, 47, 49–51, 155, 182n116
on the will, 45, 47–48 on James and libertarianism, 32
James as mentor to, 26–27
Oakeshott, Michael, 19, 106 on James’s educated class
Obama, Barack, 150, 200n67 background, 29–30
“On a Certain Blindness in Human James’s literary estate and, 27–28
Beings” (James), 153–56 on James’s moral philosophy,
On Pragmatism (Papini), 40 28–29, 178n40
Otto, M.C., 156 on James’s political philosophy, 19–20,
Our Country (Strong), 84 24–26, 28–34, 36, 41–44, 47–52, 54,
Our Side Is Right (Perry), 49 76, 155
liberalism as guiding philosophy
Panama Canal, 158, 160 of, 24–25, 42, 44, 49–51, 54, 150,
Pandora (Greek mythology), 132–33 182n116
Papini, Giovanni on Mussolini, 26
action emphasized by, 41 new realism and, 27
cultural regeneration advocated by, 37–38 on Nietzsche, 44–48
fascism and, 40–42 on Puritanism, 49
James and, 25, 37–41, 48 World War I and, 44–46
Leonardo journal and, 37 World War II and, 48–49
magical nationalism of, 5 “The Philippine Question” (James), 59, 61
men’s ability to become gods The Philippines. See also imperialism
advocated by, 38–39, 133–34 counterinsurgency in, 14, 159, 161
Mussolini’s inspiration from, 36 James on, 29, 31, 54, 59, 61–62, 110,
pragmatism and, 38–41 126, 153, 163, 165–66n6, 184–85n19
on the will, 38 Kipling’s poetry celebrating
Parrington, Vernon, 43, 46 U.S. imperialism in, 157
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 5, 18–19, 174n72 Moro insurgency in, 161
Perry, Ralph Barton Spanish-American War and, 2, 126
on American political culture, U.S. imperialism and suppression
45–47, 49–50 of self-r ule in, 12, 14–15, 29, 31,
anti-fascism of, 48–49 54, 58–59, 61, 77, 110, 128, 153,
biographical background of, 26–27 157, 159–63
biographical interpretations of James’s “The Philippine Tangle” (James),
philosophy and, 51, 53 54, 58–59
Committee for American Defense pluralism. See also agency; contingency;
and, 48 pragmatism; meliorism
on individual rights, 42 agency and, 128, 139
Italian fascists’ correspondence contingency and, 67, 72–74, 130,
with, 41 141, 154
on James and American craving for authority and, 75–76
exceptionalism, 20 craving for change and, 69
Index | 235
236
pluralism (Cont.) contradictory meanings within, 18–19

democratic faith and, 129 democratic faith of, 121, 129–31, 133
God and, 134–35 Dewey’s philosophy and, 1, 5–6, 11,
imperialism and, 6–7 18–19, 36, 47, 131
James’s philosophy and, 6–7, 22–23, Du Bois and, 130–31
66–67, 69–73, 75–77, 87, 105, European reception of, 36–37
108–11, 113, 139–40, 155, 167n13 faith and, 47–48, 54, 105–6, 122, 132
meliorism and, 70–71 fascism and, 35–37, 40–42
modern America as exemplar of, 97–98 frontier freedom idioms in, 101, 127
moral philosophy and, 108–11, 113 Gilded Age “crisis of authority” as
new ways of seeing and, 22–23 impetus for, 54
porous boundaries within, 73, 75 James’s philosophy and, 1–6, 9–12,
pragmatism and, 17–18, 47, 70, 75, 154 15, 17–20, 22–23, 25–26, 33, 35–37,
A Pluralist Universe (James) 39–40, 47–48, 51–52, 54, 69–70,
anti-imperialism and, 74–75 73, 87, 105, 111–13, 129–31, 133–34,
concepts described as scissors in, 9 150, 153–56
on the development of a conception of Mill and, 4
the world, 122 monism and pluralism weighed
on God, 134–35 in, 69–70, 73, 79, 136, 154
metaphysics discussed in, 20 new ways of seeing and, 22–23
monism’s limits discussed in, 71–72 nonviolent aspirations of, 111–12
The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics origins of, 5, 18–19
(Elliott), 36 pioneer spirit and, 15
pragmatism. See also Pragmatism pluralism and, 17–18, 47, 70, 75, 154
(James) Progressive Movement and, 1
action emphasized in, 48, 54, 128, 132 public philosophy and, 17–18
agency and, 14, 17, 20, 127–28, 130, rational intellectualism contrasted
133–34, 154 with, 11
American civil religion and, 151 secularism and, 11
American exceptionalism and, 15, 22, syndicalism and, 37
52, 127, 130 totalitarianism and, 3–4, 25–26, 35–38
American modernization and, 12 the will and, 113
American Political Science Association Pragmatism (James)
panel (1943) on, 1 on Americans’ “state of relative
anarchism and, 11 insecurity,” 12
anti-authoritarianism and, 7–13 anti-imperialism and, 74–75
anti-foundationalism of, 22 on beginning with “the older stock of
anti-imperialism and, 7, 13–20, 22–23, truths,” 17–18
128, 153–54 on contingency, 75
beliefs as hypotheses in, 105 on “craving for authority,”
capitalist civilization and, 14–15 63–64, 68, 78
Civil War as impetus to, 111 on the finitude of human
conception of history in, 127–31 condition, 135–36
conception of truth in, 133–34 meliorism and, 130, 141–42, 150
consequentialism and, 10, 40, 69 mortality and, 140–42
contingency and, 10, 13, 20, 129, 141 Papini’s prominence in, 39–40, 134
236 | Index
237
pragmatism and rationalist economic panics and, 80

intellectualism contrasted in, 11 the frontier and, 80–82, 101–2
pragmatism defined in, 10 imperialism and, 79, 83–86, 102
on pragmatism’s conception of James’s inversion of, 97–98
truth, 133–34 martial virtues and, 82–83, 86
temperaments discussed in, 68–69, pioneer virtues and, 80–82, 85, 90
74–75, 77, 135 racial and ethnic contamination as
“Pragmatism” (Russell), 113 threat cited in, 80, 83–85, 97
“Pragmatism and the Current Political Roosevelt and, 84–85
Situation” (American Political social Darwinism and, 84
Science Association panel, Roback, A.A., 27
1943), 1, 4 “Robert Gould Shaw” (James), 103–7,
“Pragmatism and the Totalitarian Will to 115–16, 121, 124–25, 127–28
Believe” (Eastman), 3 Roosevelt, Theodore. See also
The Present Conflict of Ideals republican melancholia;
(Perry), 45–49 strenuousness; the will
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 37, 40–41 childhood of, 85, 188–89n31
The Principles of Psychology (James) imperialism and, 21, 77–78, 85, 110,
on consciousness as a form of 157, 159–62
action, 86–88 James and, 78, 86
on the “doubling of the self,” modern banality lamented by, 99
138, 144–45 Monroe Doctrine corollary of, 159–61
stable ego rejected in, 119 Mussolini compared to, 34
on the will, 55, 90, 114 “National Duties” speech of, 85, 157
Prometheus (Greek mythology), 132–33 on the pioneer spirit of United
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 8 States, 85, 90
The Public and Its Problems (Dewey), 6 racial views of, 85–86
Puritanism and Democracy (Perry), 49 republican melancholia and, 84–85
Puritans, 43, 46–47, 49, 149 San Juan Hill battle and, 85
Putnam, Hilary, 18, 19 strenuousness advocated by, 12, 21,
77–79, 84–87, 110, 154
Rand, Benjamin, 27 World War I and, 44
Reconstruction in Philosophy Rorty, Richard
(Dewey), 11 on American civil religion, 151
Reed, Jr., Adolph, 144 anti-authoritarianism and, 11
Reflections on Violence (Sorel), 37 pragmatism and, 11, 18, 105, 150–51
“Remembering William James” on “problem of authority,” 12
(Kallen), 4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 48
Renouvier, Charles, 87 Royce, Josiah, 136
republican melancholia. See also Gilded Russell, Bertrand, 14, 113, 127
Age; strenuousness; the will
Christian eschatology and, 84 Sabine, George
civic regeneration and, 78, 81–84, 86, History of Political Theory by, 43
90, 93, 97, 157 on James as “apolitical” philosopher, 1,
corruptions of luxury and, 83–85, 100 4, 6, 19, 24
craving for order and, 21 on James’s anti-imperialism, 3
Index | 237
238
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 103–4, 106, death of Du Bois’s son recounted

120, 192n3 in, 146–47
Santayana, George, 126–28, on “double consciousness” and race,
130–31, 180n76 22, 131, 143–49, 199–200n41
Savage Wars of Peace (Boot), 162 James on, 142–43, 146
Sedgwick, Theodora, 127 meliorism’s tragic consequences
segregation, 128, 146 examined in, 130, 145–47,
“The Sentiment of Rationality” (James), 149–50
64–66, 89–90, 110 opening passage of, 143
Shall Not Perish from the Earth on the problem of the color
(Perry), 49 line, 143–44
Shaw, Robert Gould Spanish-American War, 2, 8, 15, 31, 126,
Battle of Fort Wagner (1861) 159. See also imperialism
and, 103–4 Stewart, William Kilbourne, 36
Darien (Georgia) sacking and, 116–17 Stirner, Max, 8, 169n27
democratic faith of, 22, 115, 119, 127 Stob, Paul, 125
James’s Decoration Day speech Stoke, Henry W., 1–2, 19
(1897) on, 103–7, 115–16, 119–21, “The Strenuous Life” (Roosevelt),
124–25, 127–28 77, 85–86
moral courage of, 21, 103–7, 115–16, strenuousness. See also agency; authority;
119–22, 124–25, 128, 192–93n4 republican melancholia; Roosevelt,
Saint-Gaudens memorial and, 103–4, Theodore
106, 120, 192n3 Chautauqua Assembly as antithesis
Shulman, George, 132 of, 96–97
Sidgwick, Henry, 126 contingency and, 75
“The Significance of the Frontier in frontier idioms and, 101–2
American History” (Turner), 81–83 gender and, 99, 102
Sloterdijk, Peter, 170n38 imperial rhetoric and, 21, 56,
Slotkin, Richard, 81 77–78, 99–100
Smith, Justin E., 91 James’s philosophy and, 21, 28, 36, 41,
social Darwinism, 62, 84 48, 75, 79, 86–87, 90–102, 105, 107,
“The Soldier’s Faith” (Holmes), 82–83 112, 156, 193n4
Some Problems of Philosophy (William laboring classes and, 97–99
James), 1, 3 martial virtues and, 92–93, 99–100
Sorel, Georges regeneration through violence
action emphasized by, 41, 48 and, 78–79
Bergson and, 37 Roosevelt’s advocacy of, 12, 21, 77–79,
James and, 25, 37 84–87, 110, 154
Mussolini’s inspiration from, 25, 35–36 saints and, 91–95
syndicalism and, 37, 40, 48 Strong, Josiah, 83–85, 162
The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) the stutter (Deleuze), 21, 106–7
on African Americans’ spiritual Sul pragmatismo (On Pragmatism,
songs, 147–49 Papini), 40
on American amnesia toward Swift, Morrison, 8, 135–36, 142,
history and white supremacy, 143, 169n27
149–50, 149–51 syndicalism, 37, 40, 48
238 | Index
239
Talks to Teachers (James) melancholy described in, 53

anti-imperialism in, 95 meliorism and, 130, 137, 150
exemplarity and, 21, 79, 95 monism repudiated in, 140
“On a Certain Blindness in Human on the moral equivalent of war, 99
Beings” appendix and, 153–56 on optimistic blindness, 137
preface of, 95 on religion and ordinary experiences, 91
strenuousness and, 79, 90, 99 on saints, 79, 91–95, 99
“Talks to Students” appendix and, 95 on soldiers, 92–94
Theogony (Hesiod), 132 on the soul, 22, 137–40
Thoreau, Henry David, 80, 92, 122–23 strenuousness and, 79, 90–95
The Thought and Character of William on temperaments, 137–40, 144–45
James, as Revealed in Unpublished Vedism, 70
Correspondence and Notes, Venezuela Crisis (1895), 8, 31, 58, 159–60
Together with His Published Vietnam War, 162
Writings (Perry) Vivekanda, Swami, 70
James’s correspondence published
in, 27–28 Walden (Thoreau), 80, 92
James’s ethical creed described in, Wells, H.G., 60–61
32–33, 54 West, Cornel, 4, 18
James’s political philosophy described “We Who Are Homeless”
in, 3, 19–20, 24–34, 47, 51, 54 (Nietzsche), 67
scholarly impact of, 24, 28, 51 “What Makes Life Significant?” (James).
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 13 See also Talks to Teachers (James)
Tolstoy, Leo, 8, 139, 169n27, 191n62 on Buffalo’s strenuous laboring
totalitarianism, 3–5, 20, 25–26, 33, classes, 97–99
35–38. See also fascism on the Chautauqua Assembly, 96–97
Towards Democracy (Carpenter), on individuals’ willingness to suffer for
183–84n10 ideals, 109
Trachtenberg, Alan, 57 on principles and novelty, 98–99, 105
Treaty of Versailles, 33 on Vienna’s peasant women, 99
Tully, James, 17–18, 161 “The White Man’s Burden” (Rudyard
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 81–83 Kipling), 157–58, 201n9
The Twilight of the Philosophers Whitman, Sarah Whyman, 56, 64, 142
(Papini), 38–39 Whitman, Walt, 137–39, 151
the will. See also agency; faith;
United Nations, 161 meliorism; strenuousness
The Utility of Pragmatism (Sorel), 37 agency and, 128
authority and, 42, 66–67
The Varieties of Religious Experience belief and, 22, 38, 55, 66, 87, 106, 133,
(James) 141, 149, 164
anarchism discussed in, 92 bigness as a threat to, 61
anti-imperialism and, 91 “craving for order” and, 12
on the divided will, 138 decision and, 114–15
exemplarity in, 21, 79, 94 deliberation and, 114
masculine freedom celebrated as divine spark, 88
in, 93–94 divisions in, 138
Index | 239
240
the will (Cont.) “The Will to Believe” (James)

effort and, 88–90, 93, 95, 100–101, absolutism critiqued in, 110–11
114–15, 190n46 acting on faith described in, 106, 117, 120
freedom of, 87, 126 Alpine climber example in, 112–15,
of God, 11, 135 117, 119
habit and, 88–90, 92, 95 critiques of, 113
ideals and, 32 on the need for caution, 55, 110, 120
introspection and, 97 Papini and, 38
James on, 3–4, 53, 55, 66, 87–90, 122 Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 44–45, 50–51
James’s crisis of, 76 Wolin, Sheldon, 10, 14, 16
to live, 35, 148 Woodberry, George Edward, 57
materialism’s denial of, 72 The Works and Days (Hesiod), 132
Nietzsche on, 45, 47–48 World Peace Congress (1904), 90–91
paralysis of, 54 World War I, 20, 33–34, 44–46
pragmatism and, 113 World War II, 26, 33, 40–41, 48–49, 182n116
“stuttering forth” and, 122
tension with existing order and, 92 Zamir, Shamoon, 138–39, 144
Williams, William Appleman, 7, 163 Zeus (Greek mythology), 132–33
240 | Index
241
242
243
244
245
246

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i

Damn Great Empires!

Damn Great Empires!

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​P ublication Data

My political philosophy evidently belongs to the future; certainly

Chapter 2 Cravings and Consequences 53

Chapter 3 Taming the Strenuous Life 77

Chapter 4 Stuttering Conviction 103

Chapter 5 Tragedy, History, and Democratic Faith 126

conferences. Additional thanks are owed to the conversations about

A ll in-​text citations refer to The Works of William James published by

C The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis

ERE Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas

AQ “Address on the Philippines Question” [1903], in ECR.

xiv | List of Abbreviations

II “The Importance of Individuals” [1890], in TWTB.

List of Abbreviations | xv

Damn Great Empires!

To mark the centenary of the great American philosopher William James

relation to the “revival of liberalism” currently taking place. Kallen di-

2 | Damn Great Empires!

A Pluralistic Universe (1909), The Meaning of Truth (1909), and the

to believe to a British journalist a decade earlier as one of the sources for

4 | Damn Great Empires!

development of American political thought in works including German

6 | Damn Great Empires!

This book represents a radically different approach to the study of

II. Pragmatism as Anti-​Authoritarianism

in small systems of things exclusively” (C 9:362; emphasis in original).

8 | Damn Great Empires!

elites, Cotkin examines the shared contextual sources of both James’s

history of American pragmatism and its well-​defined ideological coordi-

10 | Damn Great Empires!

The rationalist mind, radically taken, is of a doctrinaire and authoritative com-

This is anarchism for James: an intellectual repudiation of necessity, dogma-

and authority that pragmatism might work to “unstiffen” and transform.

12 | Damn Great Empires!

not entirely novel. As Alexis de Tocqueville argued in Democracy in

III. Pragmatism as Anti-​Imperialism

14 | Damn Great Empires!

chapters, such charges misrepresent James’s political thought and obscure

to exert great international influence by throwing in our ‘moral weight’

16 | Damn Great Empires!

point of view. “The heart of pragmatism,” observes Hilary Putnam, is “the

new. “New truth, is a go-​between, a smoother-​over of transitions” (P 35).

To pursue a critical examination of James’s political thought is to stake a

18 | Damn Great Empires!

Richard Bernstein gives shape to this cacophony of disagreeing voices

sentiments—​from its interwar critics. Placing Perry’s biography in con-

20 | Damn Great Empires!

meaning of martial metaphors and cravings for action in James’s major

novel way of conceiving of political conviction that steers between the

22 | Damn Great Empires!

conceiving how local ethical experiments in thinking and acting dif-

CHAPTER 1 The Political Uses

I. Constructing a Usable Past

No single work played a greater role in shaping the political legacy

The Political Uses of William James | 25

Thought and Character. As this section consists of little more than an

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-P ublication Data

A ll in-text citations refer to The Works of William James published by

II. Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism

history of American pragmatism and its well-defined ideological coordi-

III. Pragmatism as Anti-Imperialism

new. “New truth, is a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions” (P 35).

sentiments—from its interwar critics. Placing Perry’s biography in con-

pragmatic revolt in Anglo-American political philosophy draws much of

Among this group of would-be disciples was a young philosopher named

The program of a Man-God is surely one of the possible great type-

to distinguish pragmatism’s anti-intellectualism, its justification by faith,

scholar has called nineteenth-century America’s “crisis of authority.”3