WRITING IN 1980, David Hollinger chronicled the history of pragmatism in the first half of the twentieth century and concluded that “if pragmatism has a future, it will probably look very different from its past, and the two may not even share a name.”1 At that time the focus was more on pragmatism’s past, and its future outside specialized philosophical studies was very much in question. Fifteen years later in 1995, Hollinger had revised this assessment to take account of the explosion of new interest in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey and the tradition of thought they developed and represented: “Pragmatism’s name is invoked in a host of contexts, mostly by people who claim to be inspired by the classical pragmatists, and who see themselves as reaffirming doctrines inherited from them.”2
Since the early 1980s, the philosophical tradition of pragmatism has experienced a wide-ranging renaissance in the North American academy, after decades of marginalization by forms of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in which the widespread perception was that pragmatism was a “rather fuzzy-minded philosophic movement.”3 Following the publication of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979 and Consequences of Pragmatism in 1982, which together almost single-handedly resurrected pragmatism as a viable (anti-)philosophical orientation, other scholars in philosophy and fields such as legal theory, rhetoric and communication studies, literary criticism, theology and religious studies, social theory, and history have followed suit in applying pragmatism to their own disciplines.4
As evidenced by the wealth of recent monographs, anthologies, and dissertations on the subject, pragmatism has generated a great deal of interest for many both inside and outside the academy. Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001), a highly readable and engaging history of pragmatism’s development in post–Civil War American culture, became a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Numerous collections of published conference papers, special issues of journals, and anthologies chronicle the (re)discovery of pragmatist ideas in many academic disciplines. And there is no shortage of contemporary political relevance: intellectual historian James Kloppenberg argued in Reading Obama that President Barack Obama’s writings and speeches demonstrate a markedly pragmatist approach to democratic politics.5
This proliferation of pragmatisms has been accompanied by terminological confusion. One of the most striking things about this pragmatist renaissance is that many are talking and writing about it, but there remains a distinct lack of agreement about exactly what pragmatism is. The popular usage of the term connotes any range of qualities from “problem solving” to “results oriented” to “cunning,” perhaps best summed up in the broadly defined sense of pragmatism as “politics without principles.” As an editor of an anthology on pragmatism’s resurgence commented,
As it is used in common speech, the qualities associated with “pragmatism” generally win our enthusiastic assent. Politicians and pundits see pragmatism as the essence of American politics—the art of the possible, rooted in our aversion to ideology and our genius for compromise. . . . Others condemn this kind of pragmatism as policy without principle, goal-oriented but lacking a moral anchor.6
Such a wide division of opinion on pragmatism—seeing it as either a welcome antidote to overly abstract thinking with its focus on problem solving or as a cynical, amoral instrumentalism—was also present at the beginning of pragmatism’s development, as were recurrent controversies over the meaning of the term. James himself had noted that critics frequently misunderstood pragmatism as being concerned with “action” in a crass physical sense and with “what works” practically:
Our critics treat our view as offering itself exclusively to engineers, doctors, financiers, and men of action generally, who need some sort of a rough and ready weltanschauung, but have no time or wit to study genuine philosophy. It is usually described as a characteristically american movement, a sort of bobtailed scheme of thought, excellently fitted for the man on the street, who naturally hates theory and wants cash returns immediately. (MT, 101)
James and his followers spilled much ink in an attempt to correct such mistaken assumptions, but the association of pragmatism with a general sense of what works in a practical and expedient sense persisted. The result is that today we are no more, and perhaps even less, clear about the term’s meaning than in James’s time. A look at some of the many contemporary varieties of pragmatism in journals and books illustrates this point.
The term “pragmatism” is widely contested in the academy. A survey of the literature shows that sometimes “pragmatic” is simply used as a synonym for “practical” or “strategic.”7 In other cases, it is taken negatively to refer to a “narrow instrumentalism.”8 Alternatively, pragmatism is understood to be a central part of the continuum of a broadly construed American philosophical tradition dubbed “classical American philosophy.” Definitions in this vein can run from the general, as in Charlene Haddock Seigfried’s definition of pragmatism as “a range of positions originating in the classical period of American philosophy that challenge the traditional philosophical privileging of theory at the expense of practice,” to the more specific.9 For example, John J. Stuhr states that pragmatism can be defined historically as a movement traced to the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge in the 1870s that regards the writings of Peirce, James, and Dewey as foundational, as well as thematically with characteristics such as an emphasis on the inseparability of theory and praxis, fallibilism, pluralism, and community.10 Similarly, John E. Smith has identified the “spirit of American philosophy” as consisting of three primary features:
First, the belief that thinking is primarily an activity in response to a concrete situation and that this activity is aimed at solving problems. Second, the belief that ideas and theories must have a “cutting edge” or must make a difference in the conduct of people who hold them and in the situations in which they live. Third, the belief that the earth can be civilized and obstacles to progress overcome by the application of knowledge.11
Smith notes that pragmatism is not necessarily coterminous with the broader tradition of American philosophy that he demarcates, but he finds that uniquely American “spirit” and “vision” in the writings of Peirce, James, and Dewey, whose pragmatism “clearly represents an indigenous and original philosophical outlook.”12
David Hollinger is critical of attempts to treat pragmatism as representative of American thought or an American philosophical tradition, declaring that “we will not understand pragmatism as an episode in American history so long as pragmatism is either stretched to cover all of America or confined to those of its formulations sufficiently fruitful philosophically to have found places in the history of Western philosophy.”13 The problem with the first formulation is that the complex thought of Peirce, James, and Dewey, for none of whom can pragmatism be said to exhaust the whole of their thought, is “flattened into a style of thought characterized by voluntarism, practicality, moralism, relativism, an eye toward the future, a preference for action over contemplation, and other traits of the same degree of generality.” These characteristics are present to some degree in the early pragmatists’ writings, but, according to Hollinger, scholars’ attempts to treat pragmatists as “representatives of America” tend to forestall analysis of the relationship between them and their historical and social contexts. However, when pragmatism is limited to what it can be said to have contributed to the Western philosophical tradition, it “is sharpened into a highly distinctive theory of meaning and truth to which the writings of other modern philosophers can be contrasted.” It is often construed as “an ideal type toward which the pragmatists strived, but which they failed to fully articulate,” leaving it to contemporary scholars to “fill in the holes” and hence “complete and clarify their arguments.”14 In both cases, Hollinger argues, the complex relationship between pragmatists, their ideas, and the American cultural milieu out of which they emerged is occluded. It would be more accurate, he says, to treat Peirce, James, and Dewey as representatives of a mode of thought broadly characteristic of their time and as contributing to that ethos through the broad circulation of their ideas.
In still other cases, pragmatism is seen as a constellation of ideas and attitudes constituting the zeitgeist of the post–Civil War generation in America.15 There are also historical definitions of pragmatism with reference to the writings of the so-called classical pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey and the degree of faithfulness to the spirit if not the letter of their ideas.16 There are others for whom pragmatism signifies a useful means of classifying and bracketing their own intellectual influences, whether or not related directly to the classical pragmatists.17 Some depict pragmatism as a late-modern or proto-postmodern theoretical framework, foreshadowing and complementing deconstructionism in “demonstrating the futility of many philosophical questions and thereby presaging the European poststructuralists of our era.”18 A kind of “zero-degree pragmatism,” defined as “simply antiessentialism with respect to traditional philosophical concepts like truth and reason, human nature and morality,” is proffered as a possible consensus-building device in feminist theory.19 Another understanding of pragmatism is that it amounts to “nothing more than antifoundationalism,” a kind of minimalist, zero-sum deconstructionism and linguistic skepticism.20 These are just a few of the current usages of the term.
The question becomes how to circumscribe the topic to take into account the widest possible range of interpretations and divergent meanings of pragmatism while still keeping the project manageable. If one takes pains to clearly set forth a certain definition of pragmatism at the outset as a means of delineating the topic, one is already taking a stance on what pragmatism is: a set of clearly definable philosophical propositions, a historical complex of ideas, a cultural mind-set, a postmodern assemblage of strategically deployable theoretical tools, or none of these.
My approach here is different. Rather than attempt to set out in advance a definition of pragmatism, I trace a deployment of the term going back to James and the beginnings of the classical tradition, attending to a series of particular textual tropes that reveal the intimate connections between American pragmatism and U.S. culture. Though pragmatism takes all of the forms I have just described and many others, I am not so much interested in pinning down the meaning of the term as in critically analyzing its uses. I think the meaning(s) of the term can be identified in and through an analysis of how pragmatism is deployed and for what ends. This method treats pragmatism itself more pragmatically by not essentializing it through a definition or foundationalizing it by identifying it as a monolithic tradition but rather attending to how it functions in particular textual formations.
The late Richard Rorty can be said to have initiated the current pragmatist renaissance, with the provocative assertion in 1979 that, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Dewey was “one of the three most important philosophers of our century.”21 While most philosophers at the time considered pragmatism to be, in Rorty’s words, “an outdated philosophical movement—one which flourished in the early years of this century in a rather provincial atmosphere, and which has now been either refuted or aufgehoben”—Rorty argued instead that pragmatism provided not only a preferable alternative to analytic and to Continental philosophy, which he critiqued as continuing to replicate the notion of “mind as mirror,” but indeed was their logical conclusion.22 “On my view,” he wrote, “James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.”23 The end of this road is the end of Western Philosophy, properly speaking—“capital P” philosophy and its notion of the correspondence “either of thoughts to things or of words to things.”24
Rorty’s version of neopragmatism is far from an uncontested one, of course. Putnam, West, Stout, Brandom, and other contemporary philosophers who have formulated their own neopragmatist frameworks have done so in response to and, more often than not, in criticism of Rorty’s provocative writings. In particular, they have been critical of Rorty’s interpretations of James and Dewey and his understanding of the relationship between philosophy and politics in contemporary liberal democratic societies.25 So, too, historians, legal theorists, literary critics, social theorists, and religious studies scholars have frequently taken Rorty’s interpretations as a starting point for their own diverse pragmatist explorations.26
As the sketch I offered in the previous section indicates, there is a great deal of contemporary scholarship on pragmatism in a number of fields, yet as West commented as far back as 1993, there remains a “relative absence of pragmatist accounts of why pragmatism surfaces now and in the ways and forms that it does.” West’s concern was the lack of attention to the “structural background conditions” of intellectual-cultural developments like the revival of pragmatism. Efforts to account for pragmatism’s renaissance, he argued, “must situate the nature of pragmatist intellectual interventions—their intended effects and unintended consequences—in the present historical moment in American society and culture.”27
West’s own view was that the revival of pragmatism was connected with the “crisis of purpose and vocation” in the humanities. Writing in 1993, he explained:
The recent hunger for interdisciplinary studies—or the erosion of disciplinary boundaries—promoted by neopragmatisms, poststructuralisms, Marxisms and feminisms is not only motivated by a quest for truth, but also activated by power struggles over what kinds of knowledge should be given status, be rewarded and be passed on to young, informed citizens in the next century. These power struggles are not simply over positions and curriculums, but also over ideals of what it means to be humanistic intellectuals in a declining empire—in a first-rate military power, a near-rescinding economic power and a culture in decay.28
This crisis of purpose is heightened by a growing awareness of the massive structural inequalities in U.S. society, an awareness that prompts us to radically reexamine our epistemological paradigms. Because pragmatism as developed in the writings of James and Dewey, and as it flourished among liberal U.S. intellectuals in the early to mid-twentieth century, functioned “at its best” as a means of applying philosophical reflection productively to social problems, it “provided a sense of purpose and vocation for intellectuals who believed they could make a difference in the public life of the nation.”29 West saw echoes of this search for meaning in pragmatism’s contemporary renaissance. The great challenge facing these new appropriations of pragmatism, for West, was whether this awareness and search for meaning would lead contemporary intellectuals to retreat to an impotent posture of simply celebrating the unsettling of cherished paradigms or whether it would be accompanied by a close analysis of the power dynamics involved.
To be sure, many of today’s pragmatists would sidestep West’s challenge for critical, historicized accountings of the revival of pragmatism by saying that pragmatism now appears as a viable theoretical option well suited to our contemporary circumstances because, in fact, it is one. Understood in particular ways, they argue, pragmatism does not appear as symptomatic of the problems of the contemporary era but rather as one of its potential solutions. In arguing for the preferability of neopragmatism, such responses tend to make the rhetorical move of first setting up an intractable theoretical opposition and then arguing that pragmatism helps resolve it and/or provides a “third-way” alternative.
For example, Nicholas Rescher puts the appeal of pragmatism today in its broadest terms when he contrasts the “traditional” or “modernist” view of philosophy—the view that “philosophy deals in well-defined concepts that have well-defined meaning”—with the “categorically opposed,” “post-modernist” view that denies definite meaning or structure and sees the philosophic task as a “therapeutic” one of “freeing [people] from yearning after an unrealizable delusion.” Between these extremes, Rescher presents pragmatism as a “promising and workable via media,” one that “opens the door to objectivity without absolutism, thus combining the most promising features of the traditional absolutism and present-day relativism.” In making “concessions to both sides,” pragmatism achieves what Rescher calls a “meditative position” that provides us “safe passage between the Scylla and Charybdis of problematic extremes.”30
West had asserted earlier that the “distinctive appeal of American pragmatism in our postmodern moment is its unashamedly moral emphasis and its unequivocally ameliorative impulse,” in contrast to discarded forms of foundationalism or universalism and versions of postmodernism that tend toward nihilism.31 Likewise, Giles Gunn asserts,
Indeed, pragmatism’s ability at the present time to offer itself for methodological use in a world without consensual ideological foundations has everything to do with its determination, in America as elsewhere, to span the divide between the personal and the public, the private and the collective.32
This is so because for Gunn, the problem of identity and the related issue of difference, and of how to theorize the relationship between self and other, public and private, is a currently central theoretical and practical issue to which, in his view, pragmatism provides an especially productive approach. In particular, Gunn finds a specifically African American pragmatist tradition, encompassing writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin and expressing its reflections on the relationship between public/private and self/world through literature, to be a productive resource for thinking about difference in our multicultural, globalized context.33 Similarly, Nancy Fraser has attempted to sketch out a neopragmatism that would successfully resolve key theoretical impasses between postmodern notions of the self and critical-theoretical analyses of power in contemporary feminist theory.34 She finds a pragmatic orientation to be an indispensable tool in overcoming the “false antitheses” of varieties of feminism informed by Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault.
West’s effort to incorporate Marxist social analysis and a prophetic understanding of radical evil and social hope into the pragmatist tradition has been incredibly influential and provocative. Gunn’s attempt to expand our understanding of the pragmatist tradition to include the works of prominent African American authors and reflections on the problem of difference and Fraser’s thoughtful reflections on what a modified feminist neopragmatism might contribute to feminist theoretical debates are also significant contributions. But to explain the turn to pragmatism with the argument that it is perfectly methodologically suited to the problems of the present is, I think, to miss the real challenge underlying West’s question. The question “Why pragmatism and why now?” calls for more robust analysis and contextualization of pragmatism as a rhetorical and cultural tradition. This is especially true when we consider that quite often today, pragmatism is explicitly and deliberately acknowledged as a construction, a set of loosely related or even unrelated, possibly contradictory, ideas cobbled together to form a kind of theoretical patchwork that a particular thinker finds useful for addressing a particular issue of import. “Pragmatism” is the label chosen for this bricolage, a kind of conceptual placeholder evoking the American philosophical tradition of the same name but not necessarily bearing a direct relation to any prior pragmatist ideas, in the writings of either Peirce, James, Dewey, or other twentieth-century pragmatist thinkers.
David Hollinger, reflecting on what he terms the “problem of pragmatism”—how to understand it as an American historical phenomenon—prefers to define pragmatism “as a presence in the discourse of American intellectuals” in the early twentieth century in terms of “three interpenetrating layers: a theory of meaning and truth that served to flag the movement, a cluster of assertions and hopes about the basis for culture in an age of science, and a range of general images stereotypical of American life.”35 He emphasizes the complex interrelationship between pragmatist thinkers, their writings, and the American cultural/intellectual context. He argues that pragmatism provided a “rudimentary ‘philosophy of life’” with respect to the new science, an idealization of “experimentation,” and a buttressing of American cultural ideals such as action, democracy, meliorism, voluntarism, and practicality, all of which can be found in pragmatist writings, “as these writings specifically advance the cluster of ideas by which pragmatism became a presence in American intellectual life.”36 In other words, for Hollinger, pragmatism achieved popularity during the early twentieth century not because of the superior explanatory power of its ideas but because those ideas carried profound cultural resonance in the context in which they were propounded and popularized. As these cultural ideals waned in midcentury and were supplanted by others, so, too, did the influence of pragmatism.
Such an approach that considers the interplay between ideas and culture can be helpful for thinking about pragmatism’s contemporary renascence. As Hollinger observed in 1995, the reasons for pragmatism’s renewed popularity were not yet clear. Concerning the rapid resurgence of interest in pragmatism since 1980, he declares,
An interesting question for some future historian will be this: How and why did so many American intellectuals of the 1980s and 1990s come to believe that “pragmatism” was a desirable label for their ideas, and why were these intellectuals eager to establish connections between themselves and Peirce, James, and Dewey?37
Reflecting on the differences between pragmatists as late as the 1950s and those writing in the 1980s and 1990s, Hollinger notes that “discussions of American pragmatism as late as mid[twentieth]century still conveyed a belief that there existed in history a genuine pragmatic tradition that could be discovered, assessed, and critically renewed.” However, today’s pragmatists are often “making it up: they are designating as pragmatists those past thinkers with whom they feel the most affinity.” Thus, he concludes, “the self-consciousness with which some of today’s pragmatists construct a ‘pragmatic tradition’ suitable to present purposes is perhaps the most striking point of contrast between the contemporary discourse about pragmatism and that of [the 1950s].”38
Historians of pragmatism have been critical of Rorty and other neopragmatists who employ the label of “pragmatism” as a descriptor for their work while advancing claims that would find little support in the writings of the classical pragmatists. For them this move indicates a kind of intellectual dishonesty and a frustrating disregard for the history of ideas. As John Pettegrew notes, the phrase “recovery of pragmatism” has a double meaning when referring to Rorty and pragmatism: “While referring to the philosophy’s ongoing revival in American political culture, it also describes the process of recovering from pragmatism’s primary recoverer, namely Richard Rorty.”39 In the anthology A Pragmatist’s Progress? intellectual historians engage with Rorty in the context of the American pragmatist tradition. The contributors treat pragmatism as a progressive democratic tradition and emphasize the connections between James and Dewey and progressive politics. They find Rorty to be an inheritor of this tradition but also criticize certain aspects of his thought for not living up to the political progressivism of earlier pragmatism.
For example, James Kloppenberg’s contribution to this collection contrasts the early pragmatists’ emphasis on experience, democracy, and social action with some contemporary neopragmatists’ insistence that political commitments are matters of cultural-linguistic ethnocentrism and individual preference. For Kloppenberg, this “new linguistic pragmatism,” as practiced by Rorty most notably, essentially excises the heart of Jamesian and Deweyan pragmatism—their focus on experience, which is central to the early pragmatist commitments to democracy, meliorism, and community. Insofar as this “new pragmatism” conceives of the achievement of American democracy as, according to Rorty, “an accidental coincidence” rather than the product of committed and principled struggle, it also carries the danger of fostering “selfishness, cynicism, and resignation by undercutting efforts to confront the hard facts of poverty and greed.”40
Kloppenberg posits another explanation for the contemporary resilience of pragmatism, one that links it explicitly with democracy. He argues that “democracy is uniquely consistent with pragmatism” because undergirding pragmatism, in the writings of James and Dewey, is an epistemology that requires a continuing process of free and open inquiry by all members of a community in the pursuit of truth and more just solutions to social ills. This process is fallibilistic and requires the participation of all members of a community. In the absence of sure foundations, “such a conception of democracy must remain open-ended”; hence, “a pragmatist epistemology and ethics in the spirit of James and Dewey culminates necessarily in a democratic politics.” For Kloppenberg, “this view of the relation between pragmatism and democracy . . . helps explain the resurgence of interest in pragmatism”:
Now that alternative ideals appear either discredited or impossible, democracy has emerged as a universally attractive norm. But in our multicultural and skeptical age, the case for democracy can no longer be established on the basis of self-evident truths about natural rights or arguments from religious doctrine that no longer command general assent. . . . The great strength of pragmatism as James and Dewey conceived of it . . . lay in its denial of absolutes, its admission of uncertainty, and its resolute commitment to the continuing vitality of the ideal of democracy as a way of life.41
Pragmatism’s commitment to practice democracy in the face of uncertainty has garnered it fresh appeal in this context of the loss of sure foundations and disillusionment with other political alternatives. As various thinkers explore different justifications and arguments for democracy—philosophers and legal theorists coming to the enterprise later than historians have done—they find the early pragmatists’ ideas attractive. Along with Kloppenberg, others such as West, Putnam, Stout, Rebecca Chopp, Richard Bernstein, and Robert Westbrook have made convincing arguments for the affinity between pragmatism and democracy.42
In a review of Pettegrew’s volume, Bruce Kuklick criticizes the contributors for having a view of both intellectual history and pragmatism that is colored by their own political commitments to liberalism and pragmatism, causing them to overemphasize the importance of political action in the pragmatist tradition and in the thought of Dewey and, especially, James. Quoting from Pettegrew’s introduction to the volume, Kuklick writes:
It is certainly easy to figure out why the authors hold the positions they do, despite the fact that so little evidence sustains it. They believe themselves to be, like Rorty, public intellectuals interested in social change. As historians trying to understand the past of the tradition of which they think themselves to be a part, there must be . . . “an obligatory element” to search out a past that will serve present needs. The histories of their own field and of pragmatism evident in this collection have been “determined by the distinct perspective of the historian[s] who produce . . . it,” no matter what the research.43
As Kuklick’s comments indicate, there is debate today regarding not only the meaning(s) of pragmatism but also the history and historiography of the tradition. For Kuklick, the intellectual historians who have contributed to Pettegrew’s volume are, to paraphrase Hollinger, also “making it up” when they engage in historical reconstruction of a pragmatist tradition they find to be in line with their own ideals. In adopting a “historical method [that] makes an individual’s politics the key to good research,” the contributors are creating an intellectual history that is false. Kuklick wants us to separate a writer’s philosophy from her or his—and our—politics in order to “tell the truth about the history of pragmatism.”44
While it is certainly the case that one criterion for evaluating interpretations of pragmatism might be fidelity to the historical record and the original sources, it is precisely the pliability of the term and its meaning, going back to the classical period, that makes it difficult to assert “truth” and “falsity” about the tradition. To claim that the study of the past and its ideas is in some sense determined by the interests of those who undertake the task is not, as Kuklick laments, to make the historian a “propagandist” who creates a “distorted” history of ideas but rather to acknowledge the situatedness and interested nature of all scholarship.45
As biblical scholars have long argued, texts and textual interpretations don’t have to be simply true or false, and interpretation depends a great deal on the employment of different hermeneutical lenses. Feminist theologian and biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza writes of biblical interpretation, in an argument that can be extended to interpretation of all texts:
As political and religious discursive practices, [texts] and their contemporary interpretations involve authorial aims and strategies, as well as audience perceptions and constructions. . . . [A] critical rhetorical understanding of interpretation investigates and reconstructs the discursive arguments of a text, its socioreligious location, and its diverse interpretations in order to underscore the text’s possible oppressive as well as liberative performative actions, values, and possibilities in ever changing historical-cultural situations. This approach understands . . . [textual] interpretation as a site of struggle over authority, values, and meaning.46
If we treat pragmatism as a diverse historically and culturally situated amalgam of philosophical, political, cultural, and religious discourses that can be critically evaluated and assessed, then we can understand pragmatism, the pragmatist tradition, and its reception history in the U.S. context as an ongoing site of struggle. We are then able to investigate the (re)emergence of pragmatism from a new angle.
In the chapters that follow I treat American pragmatism as a set of heterogeneous rhetorically and culturally situated discourses and traditions of thought that reflect and engage the context and social location of their authors. At its best, pragmatism can be understood as a form of cultural criticism that sets out to evaluate and critique American democratic culture in its workings, its inconsistencies, and its exclusions. As West has argued, American pragmatism can be read as “a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises” and “a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment.”47
U.S. feminist theologian Rebecca Chopp takes this a step further, developing a feminist pragmatist public theology in dialogue with the pragmatist tradition as a form of critical theory and cultural politics that can be located at the intersection of Christianity and democracy in the U.S. context and that seeks to transform both. When it is conceptualized as a “prophetic pragmatism” in West’s sense, this critical-theoretical approach to pragmatism can be seen to have two related tasks in the context of U.S. democratic culture: a theoretical critique of structures of domination and oppression, and a transformative politics committed to the development of “multicultural forms of social and personal flourishing.”48 It is in this sense of being situated within ongoing traditions of American philosophical and theological reflection on social and political issues, and of being oriented toward critique and transformation, that pragmatism at its best can be understood as a deliberative discourse about the meaning and future of U.S. democracy.
But my approach here, though it builds on this previous work, is more critical than constructive. By retrospectively tracing some key intersectional points between American pragmatism and U.S. culture, I hope to contribute not only to a better appreciation of the historical and cultural situatedness of Jamesian pragmatism but also to current conversations about its usage and applicability today. It is well understood that in the U.S. context, pragmatism has historical ties to periods of great cultural change. Classical pragmatism emerged in the post–Civil War period, a time characterized by changing gender roles, the promise and disastrous failure of Reconstruction, the development and rapid expansion of industrial capitalism and American imperialism, and widespread labor unrest.49 Parallels exist between this period and the context of post-1960s America, with the declining public fortunes of political and intellectual liberalism, the backlash against feminism, the failure of hard-won civil rights gains of formal equality to translate into either equality in fact or constructive national dialogue about race and U.S. history, and the proliferation and consolidation of a neo-imperialist global capitalist system, when pragmatism and neopragmatism (re)gained their fortunes in the academy.
Pragmatism in the United States also has strong ties to religion, specifically to strains of mid- to late nineteenth-century Protestantism. Scholars of American pragmatism have counted liberal Protestantism and the Social Gospel movement as major influences on the development of the tradition.50 James himself likened pragmatism to a “protestant reformation” in philosophy, shifting “the centre of gravity of philosophy” and bringing about a massive “alteration in ‘the seat of authority,’” from principles to facts (PM, 62). Menand, in his study of the origins of pragmatist thought, sees a full-fledged Protestant ethic at its core, helpfully relating religious and democratic values to the development of pragmatism:
The value at the bottom of the thought of Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey is tolerance. The United States was created in part by Europeans who emigrated in the name of religious tolerance (more precisely, in the name of opposition to religious intolerance). The various offshoots of the pragmatist way of thinking—the educational philosophy, the pluralist conception of culture, the argument for expanded freedoms of expression—were, in a sense, translations of this individualist, Protestant ethic into social and secular terms.51
Mindful, then, of these multiple contexts, I situate my analysis of contemporary pragmatist discourse interdisciplinarily, as part of an ongoing conversation regarding the relationship of pragmatist texts and ideas to their intellectual, historical-cultural, political, and religious contexts.
Throughout the book I employ a hermeneutical approach attentive to narrative and rhetoric, treating pragmatist texts and traditions as heterogeneous, historically and culturally situated argumentative discourses that move between context and text to invoke specific audience responses. My attention to pragmatism as a mode of rhetoric is appropriate for this project for two additional reasons: the recent convergence of rhetoric and pragmatism in cultural studies and rhetorical theory; and the importance of rhetoric in the pragmatist tradition, from James’s mastery of audience-specific rhetoric in his lectures to Rorty’s characterization of the philosopher as a kind of ironic “strong poet,” both discussed in detail later. Indeed, one can argue that it is impossible to overemphasize the importance of rhetoric when dealing with pragmatism.
Other scholars have written about the connections between rhetoric and pragmatism. Steven Mailloux, in his introduction to the edited volume Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism, connects a revival of interest in the Sophistic tradition with the pragmatist revival in the academy, arguing that neopragmatism can be considered a new form of Sophistic rhetoric in the shared assertion of the impossibility of a criterion for truth outside human experience.52 The volume focuses mainly on Dewey as a locus for connections between rhetoric, pragmatism, the humanities, and cultural politics. Robert Danisch encourages a broadening of inquiry into rhetoric and pragmatism by arguing for similarities of “orientation” in the classical pragmatist tradition and the rhetorical tradition, both of which understand philosophy, rhetoric, and democracy as intimately related.53 And Paul Stob argues that Pragmatism, specifically, was “the culmination of James’s intellectual populism and his pursuit of popular statement.”54
A few caveats are in order. This project does not attempt to provide an exhaustive or complete description or analysis of classical or contemporary pragmatist discourse, although it is intended as a contribution to this discourse. There is much about James’s work, and about the pragmatist tradition, that is left out of my account. I offer a narrative of the pragmatist tradition that places rhetoric, gender, nation, and religion at the center to bring to light certain features of the tradition that have not yet received much attention. I do not postulate any “essence” of pragmatism but view it as composed of multiple, heterogeneous, conflicting strands. Some of these are in need of critique, while others may prove to be more fruitful avenues of exploration for constructive theorists. My contribution to this ongoing process of engagement with the pragmatist tradition is a critical analysis of pragmatist rhetoric as it intersects with themes of religion, gender, and nation. To accomplish this, I undertake an intentionally selective reading of these particular themes within the wider context of engagement with the pragmatist tradition.
In the 1990s, the turn to pragmatism became such a commonplace in multiple fields of scholarship that it was almost taken for granted. In the context of fragmented and often contentious conversations among scholars about the most theoretically satisfactory and practically efficacious accounts of such central issues as identity, community, and democracy, pragmatism emerged as a way out of deadlock and a means of facilitating common ground: often a via media. Theorists and theologians often spoke of deploying pragmatism “pragmatically” or “strategically,” meaning as temporary tools to be picked up and discarded as needed.
The heritage of American pragmatism is indeed rich, but it is also ambiguous, as West and Chopp have both noted.55 For West, the tradition is compromised when it is not combined with a recognition of the reality of radical evil and a robust structural critique of social inequalities and power. His own formulation, prophetic pragmatism, attempts to incorporate these elements as correctives. For Chopp, pragmatism is best seen as part of the tradition of American public theology, a “movement of Christianity addressing the problems, doubts, and desires within the American situation.” While she acknowledges that even though American public theology “has functioned, at times, to covertly and overtly affirm oppressive practices,” still “its prophetic spirit, its relation to morality and public judgment, its employment of religious metaphors to criticize the public also allowed for debates within American public theology about its own oppressive practices.”56 Chopp understands there to be an element within pragmatism that can allow for its own self-critique, a process that must happen rigorously and continually.
One of the best ways to appreciate the pragmatist tradition’s richness and ambiguity is through analyzing the stories it tells about itself. I highlight three particularly influential pragmatist narratives, two told by William James and the other by Richard Rorty, each of whom works with the notions of gender and/or nation to construct his narrative accounts of pragmatism. The chapter on pragmatism and nationalism reveals an attempt to tell the story of pragmatism as a distinctively American story. I attend to how James ties pragmatism and “the Anglo-Saxon race” directly together in his 1898 Berkeley lecture that becomes the germ of Pragmatism, as he declares his hope that pragmatism will spread like wildfire across the North American continent just as “the Anglo-Saxon race” has done. I offer a close analysis of the underexplored connection between pragmatism and this Jamesian version of manifest destiny to situate pragmatism’s beginnings on the American scene.
The chapter on James and gender reveals another narrative of pragmatism, which focuses on gender. Pragmatism becomes a way of mediating between dueling commitments or what he calls “attitudes,” primarily religion/morality on one side and the “new science” on the other, concepts that are gendered in particular ways in his context. Gender thus becomes a key component of how James constructs pragmatism.
Finally, Rorty’s narrative about pragmatism posits it as the culmination of the long march of Western modernity away from the tutelage of religion with the help of philosophy and literature. His neopragmatism relies on a gendered dualism of public and private, partitioning off politics and responsibility in the public realm from individual self-realization, philosophy, and religion in the private. This construction has been widely critiqued by feminist theorists, largely without addressing the privatization and feminization of religion in Rorty’s thought. Moreover, in keeping with the public/private distinction, in Rorty’s writings on feminism and pragmatism he poses pragmatism as a neutral ground between progressive political movements such as feminism and dominant practices and discourses, a construction that feminist theorists and theologians have accepted and continued even while critiquing other elements of Rorty’s presentation of pragmatism.
Each of these rhetorical positionings of pragmatism—as national story, gendered mediator, and progressive neutral ground—help construct and perpetuate pragmatism’s “Americanness” and resonance in different ways. The next chapter introduces the idea of pragmatism as a series of influential yet contested narratives as background for analysis of these three specific narratives in the remainder of the book.