Contents
William James: experience and the social self
Pragmatism and Darwin’s The Origin of the Species
The foundations of pragmatist social theory today
Charles Sanders Peirce: semiotics and the unity of ego
The Progressive Era: John Dewey and Jane Addams
George Herbert Mead: mind, self and society
Herbert Blumer: Symbolic Interactionism
Pragmatism is the one enduring tradition of social and philosophical thought to have begun uniquely in America. Since Charles Sanders Peirce first sketched the idea of pragmatism in 1878, it has come to influence thinkers around the world. Thus, when attempting to understand pragmatism, the first fact to consider is its association with the down-to-earth, action-oriented values many consider the dominant cultural ethic in the United States. Of course, generalities of this sort leave out the fine-grained details; no single set of values or ideas can be simply American or German or French or whatever. Yet, it remains that social theories are always rooted in historical circumstance and, therefore, reflect something of the social experiences of a given culture. Still, social theories would not endure beyond the time of their origins were they not able at least to call attention to some set of truths that transcend a locale or a time.
Pragmatism entered American life at a crucial but bitter moment in the nation’s history – the years just following its Civil War (1861–1865). That war was violent beyond belief. Some 600,000 on both sides died in battle or from disease. The civil conflict threatened the very idea of the United States as a union of diverse states with a common purpose. When it was all over in 1865, the nation was awash in blood that carried away many of the cultural and even scientific traditions that had emerged since its War of Independence (1775–1783).
From the revolution of the 1770s until the Civil War of the 1860s, the new American society struggled to establish itself as an independent nation with its own political system, a free economy among others in the Atlantic system of world trade, and its own distinctive culture. The dissidents and economic refugees coming to the New World had to detach themselves from the past from which their European ancestors had fled but to which they remained connected. As a result, long after its political system was well established, America had yet to find its unique cultural voice.
It is commonly said that the American declaration of cultural independence was a speech given at Harvard in 1837 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his ‘The American Scholar’ oration, Emerson proclaimed the necessity for the scholar to take his place among the practical men who were building the towns and cultivating the farms. The time had come, he said, for America to make room for Man Thinking. The American Scholar would not however be a recluse or a mere speculator. She too (and Emerson meant women as well as men) would be engaged in public life, as he was. ‘Action is with the scholar subordinate,’ he said, ‘but it is essential.’ The day after Emerson’s August 31, 1837 proclamation at Harvard, he met in Boston with a group of intellectuals to form what some called the Transcendental Club (Richardson, 1995: 266–70). Members of the Transcendental Club shared the common purpose of rethinking European philosophies in ways consistent with American cultural independence.
Forty-five years later, in 1872, just across the river from Emerson’s club in Boston, anotherclub was loosely organized in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its members were a good generation younger than Emerson. They had all lived through the Civil War – several as combatants, all as veterans of America’s soul-wrenching internal war over slavery. Some called this the Metaphysical Club (Menand, 2001: 201–32). Its members included Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, acknowledged founders of pragmatism. Though its name suggests a reversion to classically European philosophies, the Metaphysical Club was a haven for ideas that were even more practical than Emerson’s. Some years later, in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), William James would popularize and explain the pragmatic method: To develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is its sole significance.’
On the surface, Emerson’s club in 1837 and James’s in 1872 would seem to have shared a commitment to the importance of action in social and philosophical thought. They did, but, more deeply; pragmatism differed sharply from Emerson’s American transcendentalism by bringing action and its relations to thought and language to the forefront of the new method. To be sure, Peirce and James, like Emerson, were highly sophisticated philosophers (as the names of their clubs remind us). But the early pragmatists were philosophers with a fresh agenda in which the consequences of ideas for social and practical life were essential and primary. The writings of social theorists in the pragmatist tradition are not always clear and succinct to the practical mind. Still, in this tradition one can see the background influence of the practical experiences of the American nation – a society committed to building a state self-consciously different from that which it rebelled against, in spite of the many social, political and ideological challenges it faced in the century since the War of Independence. Such a project requires attention to practical realities. It may not always succeed, as today we realize that the American experiment has failed in many ways. Yet, whatever is good, or even acceptable, about the nation’s institutions and its culture is owed largely to its famous willingness to solve, or try to solve, the world’s problems. Pragmatist social theories are decidedly not as simple as this easy slogan, but they are related to this quality of American history.
The reader may find it strange in a book on contemporary social theory to begin a chapter with allusions to nineteenth-century intellectual movements; and then, to discuss William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, writers who died early in the twentieth century. Social theory in North America, unlike its counterparts in Europe, was late to develop for several reasons. As recently as the mid-twentieth century, American culture as a whole was still very young – agile in many ways but slow to disentangle itself from Europe’s. When Americans began to assert themselves as independent thinkers, they had to rely on the European ideas in which they had been schooled. Emerson’s Transcendental Club, for example, was named after the key term in German idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the great eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher. Furthermore, until late in the nineteenth century, the United States lacked anything like the university system it has today. William James, as a child, attended European schools and, later, as a distinguished Harvard professor, visited Europe often to study the latest scientific and philosophical methods. Harvard, in James’s student days, was just emerging from the small, parochial school of Emerson’s day. Less obviously, it could be said that ‘theory’ did not move the American heart or head as ‘theory’ today still does not. After the Civil War, the business and industrial sectors matured (if that is the word) much more quickly than, even, America’s political system and, certainly, than its scientific and intellectual institutions.
It was, thus, only in the mid-twentieth century that a growing number of Americans began to read European social theories as distinct from Europe’s classical philosophical literatures. Until then, American social thinkers were more likely to have been psychologists or philosophers. American sociology, for example, first prominently institutionalized at the University of Chicago in 1892, was a field for researchers who worked on empirical problems arising from the welter of ethnic and racial differences of the immigrant populations whose labor drove the burgeoning industrial United States. It was not until the world-wide revolts of the 1960s that American culture began to explore theory as a way of understanding the world. Theory can be obscure, but one thing it does better than the collecting of data is to demand a deeper and broader intellectual attitude. Only when the cultural and global political crises of the 1960s proved unyielding to sheer empirical science did the founding traditions of pragmatism begin to influence social theory in the United States: James, Peirce, and the theorists that followed them, in different ways and to differing degrees, influenced ‘contemporary’ to American social thinking at the time of its tardy but most robust growth after the 1960s.
William James: experience and the social self
William James did not invent pragmatism. Peirce did. James himself was generous enough to say so in 1907 in Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking. William James was the one who popularized the new method which, as things turned out, was far more than just a ‘new name’ for traditional ideas. The genius of the popularizer, is to be able to link the new with the familiar. Pragmatism did just that by challenging two prevailing schools of nineteenth-century epistemology, the philosophical theory of knowledge. These were on the one hand, rationalism, which holds that knowing begins with principles, of which the most famous was then Immanuel Kant’s philosophy that we can never know things in themselves. Knowledge, Kant argued, begins with mental categories; hence the name rationalism. On the other hand, there was empiricism, for which knowing begins with observation or sense experience of the real world, popularized by the works of John Locke and David Hume, the leaders of the English and Scottish Enlightenment. William James cleverly situated pragmatism as a third way between the two schools of modern scientific philosophy.
In 1907, William James, writing ever more simply of ideas that Peirce first spoke of some twenty years before, began with the bold statement that truth is nothing more, nothing less, than an idea that works:
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes for us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as …. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
(2000: 88)
So when James spoke of verifying and validating an idea he was not referring to the pure logical procedure. He was referring instead to ideas that were tools for making sense of human experience, without falling into either the rationalist or the empiricist camps of principles imposed deductively or induced from evidence. Experience was, in effect, a primary, generative aspect of human life.
Pragmatism asks its usual question. ‘Grant an idea or belief to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which one would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?’ The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer. True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James (1907) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Oxford (UK): Longmans, page 97.
In our day, still early in the twentieth-first century, many theorists who are familiar with twentieth century debates over logical or empirical positivisms and analytic philosophies would say that James’s pragmatism was a sincere but insufficient response to nineteenth-century debates. Indeed, one need not be a latter day empiricist or rationalist to find James’s theory of truth not up to the demands of social theory in our time. Beyond this, where James does come down to us in still powerful ways is by what is known, because of him, as the idea of the social self.
James actually started out in medicine, then turned to biology and physiology – fields then as now not obviously associated with the Self concept. In 1876, however, James abruptly changed his teaching program at Harvard to include what was then called physiological psychology. It would be a good while before his first major publication in this new field. Finally in 1890, when he was already 48 years old, he published his first major book, Principles of Psychology, which earned James the reputation for being a founder of modern psychology. This sprawling textbook of nearly 1,300 pages is little read today – except for its still famous Chapter 10, ‘The Consciousness of Self.’ The enduring value of this single chapter is that it invented the key dynamic terms for understanding the Self in ways that wrenched this modern concept out of its association with the ancient idea of a Soul, in particular by its often quoted lines:
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him. But as the individuals who carry about the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares.
(1981: 281–2)
Today, we know very well that who we are is a consequence of very many social influences, a good many of which – parents, siblings, friends, lovers, teachers – are so powerful that they become who we think ourselves to be. To have a self is to contend with these many social selves, a trick we perform not quite consciously until they come into conflict with each other. Generally speaking, however, what James was taking seriously in 1890 was a new kind of practical dilemma faced by generations of people having to adjust to the psychological stimuli that came from living in crowded, largely impersonal, cities. James himself was by no means a sociologist; the theory of the social self was only part of the practical matters he meant to account for in his formal psychology. But it would be this practical sociological sensibility that would lead, in time, to his influence on subsequent social theorists.
James’s self was made up four elements. The social Self was one, of course. The others were the material Self (roughly, the bodily and personal extensions of the Self into its external worlds such as his family, home, and properties), the spiritual Self (or, the Self of selves, a kind of residual aspect of the idea of a Soul), and the pure Ego. Curiously, for a thinker of such supreme philosophical abilities, James failed to integrate the four parts. This may be because two of the elements (the material and spiritual selves) were more descriptive than dynamic. There can be no question that we identify with the material features of our life worlds; nor can there be doubt that we experience the many social selves we contend with as somehow part of a whole.
Key to James’s psychological pragmatism was the notion that, though the Self is cognitive, it is also deeply infused with feeling. The mind is never simply an instrument for thinking. We not only have Self-feelings, but these feelings and their attendant thoughts prompt actions of Self-seeking and Self-survival. Yet, when all is said and done, what one feels, thinks, and does must issue from some practical sense of sameness. This is where the Pure Ego, or sense of personal identity, comes in. Consciousness of Self entails a sense of the integrity of the Consciousness. Hence, the second most famous line in James’s theory of Self:
The sense of personality identity is … the sense of sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things thought-about. These things are a present self and a self of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but thinks they are identical. The psychologist looking-on and playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, and show there is no real identity. In either case the personal identity would not exist as a fact; but it would exist as a feeling all the same; and the consciousness of it by the thought would still be there and the psychologist would still have to analyze … [the practical question whether] I am the same self that I was yesterday.
(1981: 315–16)
Consciousness itself is consciousness of an integrated whole. It is in effect impossible to be conscious of an inchoate welter of differences. However many social selves we may have (and they can be very many indeed), we cannot be conscious of them all at once. Even the multiple personality syndrome requires the loss of one self to enter another. The puzzle inherent to the pragmatics of the thinking, acting, feeling Self is: how does an individual maintain her individuality against the powers of the social environment?
Here is the dynamic element at the heart of James’s theory of self. Social differences come up against the practical reality that the individual thinks he is One. Social Self and Pure Ego are at unrelenting odds with each other – at least in the realm of practical experience. In fact in a number of places James speaks of the Self as divided (1981: 295–302). It would not be long before this concept would be taken up and essentially remade by social theorists. Yet, though others after James would try, none could quite solve the conflict he identified between the inherent parts of the Self.
Pragmatism and Darwin’s The Origin of the Species
By situating pragmatism between empiricism and rationalism, James was influenced by the controversial findings of Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Darwin was not by any means a pragmatist by name; but in effect he was at least a precursor. It is clear that, in one sense, Darwin was an empiricist. His 1859 book, The Origin of the Species, was the fruit of his 1831 scientific voyage of the HMS Beagle, during which he collected specimens of different species from around the world. He worked with evidence garnered from the plants and animals he saw, collected, and shipped back to England. Yet, Darwin took nearly thirty years back home in England studying and thinking about his collection before he would publish his findings. Why so long? Simply put: because he wanted to get the principle right. He knew that his science would challenge old ways of thinking about human nature, religion, natural history, and about science itself. Induction for Darwin was not enough; yet neither was sheer deduction. He did not start with the idea any more than he allowed the empirical evidence from his voyage to rush him to a conclusion. Ultimately, the conclusion required an entirely new method that at the time had no name at all.
Darwin’s question was: why are there regional differences in the kind and number of natural species? His answer was: chance variation. Living forms ‘evolve’ and new and differing species arise because of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Different times and places threaten living organisms differently. The organisms best suited to overcome these challenges live on, the others die out. Cockroaches are still with us because, to our disgust, they manage to survive even in modern cities. Dinosaurs are gone because they were too big to hide under dank rocks when the earth was barren. This, in the attitude assumed by pragmatism, neither induced facts nor claims deduced from principles is sufficient. Cockroaches do better in cities than dinosaurs, if only because they have figured out that they are able to feed on all kinds of nasty little things. Pragmatism, the philosophy, thinks like cockroaches in the sense that it takes chance seriously and adapts to realities. Its standard is not truthful principles or sheer evidence but how do things work?
The foundations of pragmatist social theory today
By 1910, when James died, pragmatism had secured a foothold in American intellectual culture. Actually, if one could speak this way, it would be better to say that it secured two footholds, different, distinct, but ultimately compatible. Both of them came, in time, to begin to solve James’s dilemma of the contradictory experience of the modern Self as both social and individual. All-too-simply put, the two footholds, so to speak, were, first, a deep reconsideration of the role of language and meaning in human life; and, the other, roughly put, was primarily a fusion of social ethics, educational theory, and democratic politics. Put more simply still: the two were theories of meaning (what today we would call culture) and theories of democratic values. The two can best be visualized as lines of theory that began separately and in different periods of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American thought. The one (what I am calling the meaning theory) lay fallow for decades until late twentieth-century social theory, when it reemerged as a large number of debates over the role of language as a key to understanding culture and social behavior. At about the same time, the blossoming meaning line became entangled above ground with branches of social theories of democratic values associated with pragmatism (which after the 1930s had itself fallen dormant). Yet, in spite of their various divergences and disappearances, aspects of each line had shown an affinity for each other even before they blossomed late in the twentieth century. This, then, is the story of the strange, almost rhizomatic, root system that connected James and Peirce, then James with John Dewey, then Dewey with George Herbert Mead, then later Mead and Peirce with Jürgen Habermas and, strangest of all, Dewey and analytic philosophy with Richard Rorty. Admittedly, this is a complicated way of introducing the development of contemporary pragmatist theory which even now is contemporary only to the degree that it continues to draw on its own classical sources.
Charles Sanders Peirce: semiotics and the unity of ego
Charles Sanders Peirce, unlike his friend William James, was never a celebrity; nor was he, it seems, even capable of popularizing of his ideas. In fact, the unsurpassed genius of his writings was so far beyond even the next most intelligent of his peers that many would say, as James himself once did, that they understood nothing of what he was saying but they took pleasure in listening to him say it. Peirce was, in effect, a philosophical wizard (Menand 2002: 153) whose thoughts few others, then or now, can grasp. He was a kind of magician of pure philosophical inventiveness.
The very complexity of Peirce’s ideas may well be the reason behind the strange fact that a writer whose first works appeared nearly a century-and-a-half ago is justly considered a contemporary social theorist. Hard thoughts take time to sink in. Plus, they sink in only when the times themselves are right. One way to illustrate this fact of the life of ideas, is with reference to William James’s important but unresolved theory of the Self. When James clarified the importance of the social self in the mental life of an individual he was, in effect, taking into account an important social fact that could no longer be avoided late in the nineteenth century. The fact was that in the industrializing and urbanizing early modern world, there were few who experienced themselves free from hitherto unthinkably powerful social forces. The individual ego, in other words, was by then understood to be caught in tensions with the ever-present social forces that pressed in through the social self. Not even those who, like James, lived relatively cloistered lives in towns like Cambridge, could deny this fact. Yet, as we’ve seen, James could not resolve the tension. One of the reasons he could not was that social thought and psychology, like most late nineteenth-century habits of thought were, as we say today, strictly binary. Binary, in the sense, that almost everything considered a legitimate concept came in twos – subjects/objects, actions/structures, private/public, women/men, and so on, endlessly. Thus it was for James and others that the idea of the Self was necessarily one member of a couplet – self/society or I/me, and the like.
Still how could it be that Peirce re-enters the picture so much later in social time, at the end of the twentieth century and still now early in the twenty-first? One answer is the very idea of the individual self as it has been subjected to an ever greater number of social, visual, and informational pressures, thus complicating further the inscrutable relations among social things.
This is where Peirce comes in. He is an acknowledged inventor not only of pragmatism but also of semiotics, the theory of signs and meanings. Others in Peirce’s day worked on the development of a general theory of signs, or semiotics (and sometimes called semiology). The most important of these parallel sources on the subject was going back to Peirce’s contemporary, the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Saussure’s theory of language, of which a more detailed discussion can be found in the following chapter, is built upon the arbitrary relationship between the linguistic ‘sign’ and the ‘signified,’ the meaning that it refers to. You can see, perhaps with a little difficulty, that this is a strict binary theory. Saussure’s theory of signs, however, had an enormous influence, beginning in the 1960s in large part because it provided, in effect, a model for the puzzling relation that James himself dealt with – how does the individual ‘communicate’ with the ‘social.’ For James the ‘social’ was the social self. For Saussure, the ‘social’ was the social structures of language which is why it became an important source for twentieth-century structuralisms.
Saussure’s scheme, being binary, fails at a crucial point. How does the ongoing communication, or conversation, work? It is one thing to explain that meaningful signs depend on a social contract among those who live in the sign-or language-community. But quite another is to explain, beyond a simple binary communication, how meanings move forward in practical life from one meaningful sign to another. Peirce provides an answer and one entirely distinct from Saussure’s theory.
Peirce’s pragmatism, as it developed over the years, came to be the core of his general philosophy. He had gone so far, for example, as to say that ‘logic, in its general sense, is … only another name for semiotic’ (1960a: 134). Already, from this scant line, you can see that he considered thought itself as the fundamental semiotic of mind – that reasonable thought is itself a signifying process. This goes farther beyond (or one might say, deeper than) Saussure’s concept and especially in the way that Peirce challenged the fundamental binarism of modern social thought for which he substituted a doctrine of thirds. Thinking and meaning, as well as action, are triadic:
The action of a sign calls for a little closer attention. Let me remind you of the distinction referred to above between dynamical, or dyadic, action; and intelligent, or triadic action. An event, A, may, by brute force, produce an event, B; and then the event, B, may in its turn produce a third event, C. The fact that the event, C, is about to be produced by B has no influence at all upon the production of B by A. It is impossible that it should, since the action of B in producing C is a contingent future event at the time B is produced.
(1960b: 323)
Hence, Peirce developed his theory of the sign as comprising three elements (strictly speaking, the association between three actions) – sign, object, interpretant. The three have, thus, as he states, the effect of signifying ‘by means of another mental sign’ which, he adds ironically, is not purely and simply ‘mental’ in the sense of being ideal as opposed to real.
Suppose, for example, an officer of a squad or a company of infantry gives the word of command ‘Ground arms!’ The order is, of course, a sign. That thing which causes a sign is called the object (according to the usage of speech, the ‘real,’ but more accurately, the existent object) represented by the sign: the sign is determined to some species of correspondence to that object. In the present case, the object the command represents is the will of the officer that the butts of the muskets be brought down to the ground. Nevertheless, the action of his will upon the sign is not simply dyadic; for if he thought the soldiers were deaf mutes, or did not know a word of English, or were raw recruits utterly undrilled, or were indisposed to obedience, his will probably would not produce the word of command. However, although this condition is most usually fulfilled, it is not essential to the action of the sign. … In [this case] however, a mental representation of the index is called the immediate object of the sign; and this object does triadically produce the intended, or proper, effect of the sign strictly by means of another mental sign. … For the proper significant outcome of a sign, I propose the name, the interpretant of the sign. The example of the imperative command shows that it need not necessarily be of a mental mode of being.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1960) The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Vol V: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pages 324–5.
In respect to his pragmatism, Peirce’s claim that thinking is a semiotic of signs breaks open the confining binary idea that, most generally, the thinking subject thinks about external objects or, more generally, that the acting subject acts against in relation to structured objective realities. Instead, the practical actions themselves – whether of thinking, communicating, or acting – are simultaneously inside and outside the individual concept, sign, or action. Admittedly, Peirce’s words are heavy with abstraction, but the idea that all events occur in threes, in which a first or original event intends to produce a second or, let us say, an outcome. Yet, there can be no outcome (no final result of the sign) unless there is an interpretant in the pragmatic relations. The interpretant is thus not an abstract concept but the significant action, an action that signifies by becoming the object of the sign.
Behind Peirce’s idea of logic as sign-making stands the single most important of his principles that influenced James’s pragmatism. Like James, but even more so, Peirce took Darwin’s scientific method of chance variation as the key to modern science. Truth is not a fixed idea, he thought, but a fixed belief. Events happen and we, like the cockroaches, react to the events. It is entirely a matter of chance that we encounter certain events – which is to say, they are neither imprinted in the nature of things, nor are they purely of an individual’s making. Indeed, Peirce argued, events are experienced as chance occurrences to which we respond – and we respond not by thinking but by actions. An event is thus a sign that leads to any object or action. In time, we come to understand the signs we encounter in the field of action and we act in accordance with them; when we do, we form a belief – which is the interpretant of ordinary practical signs and the objects they generate in action. Eventually these beliefs are sedimented as habits. And here is the crux of James’s pragmatism and, for all intents, the key to pragmatism itself.
Surprisingly, Peirce also had a theory of what James called the self. In effect that theory was that the selfs consciousness of itself is the elemental form of meaning making, or as he put it, logic. In fact, all consciousness is, practically speaking, a general idea that depends on a prior sense of a person being an ego.
The consciousness of a general idea has a certain ‘unity of ego,’ in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person; and, indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.
(1892: 22)
This way of explaining the self is not by any means as clear as James’s I/Me concept but, then again, it may be more accurate. One of the problems with, as we shall see, most pragmatist theories of the self is that they cannot provide a strong point of integration between individual experience and social forces. Peirce’s original semiotic of the self and meaning may not be a fully developed alternative. Yet his triadic theory of meanings, logics, and actions does open a new line of inquiry.
The Progressive Era: John Dewey and Jane Addams
The Progressive Era in the United States was roughly from the 1890s through to the 1920s, when the new nation ripened just to the point of political and economic maturity. The most notorious aspect of the era was the emergence of the country as a global economic power riding on the rapid, post-Civil War development of railroads, industrial manufacturing, oil production and, somewhat later, mass production of automobiles. Even the economic downturn of 1893, usually taken as the end of the Gilded Age, did not reverse the astonishing growth of wealth, nor the terrible inequalities that fell upon the poor and the nascent working classes. The great bosses of industry accumulated wealth beyond what was then imaginable. Many of them, like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt, were also philanthropists, as were others to a lesser degree. But still others, like George Pullman and, later, Henry Ford were, more than most, exploiters of the workers who helped them accumulate their wealth.
As Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, identified the greed of this era, other muckraking novels, like Upton Sinclair’s 1906 The Jungle, described the corruption of the new industrial age in the United States. The Progressive Era that came into being in the 1890s was a many-sided reform movement, ranging from woman’s suffrage and educational reform and the Social Gospel and Settlement House movements to prohibition and political attacks on corporate and political corruption as well as the still young trade union movement. If there was a key principle of the Progressive Era, it was that change by reformation of the political and economic structures is possible. If, in time, prohibition and aggressive trade unions came to be seen as the outlying extremes of the Progressive Era, in the period from the 1890s to the 1920s democratic values of fairness and cooperation were salient. And none better represented these ideals than two Chicago friends, the Settlement House leader, Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, and John Dewey, founder of the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago and the foremost proponent of liberal, democratic reform in education.
Though Addams and Dewey were reformers in the Progressive Era, in time each, differently, developed more radical ideas about methods of democratic change. Addams was an activist, Dewey a philosopher and, after James and Peirce, a founder of modern pragmatism. Yet, at a crucial moment in American history they engaged with each other to important effect. That moment was the Pullman Strike of 1894. George Pullman had made his wealth by the design, construction, and operation of Pullman cars which provided luxurious rail travel to the wealthy. Pullman, Illinois, was the company town he built to house his workers, at rents he fixed without option to purchase. The economic downturn of 1893 cut into his profits, which led Pullman to cut back wages to his workers, but without reducing the rental rate for their housing. The strike became a national cause célèbre. Among liberals who sympathized with the plight of the workers there arose the first major national debate over the conflict between labor and capital in the American democracy, a debate that was already well underway in Europe.
In an evening’s discussion at Hull House in 1894, Addams and Dewey debated the moral grounds of proper attitudes toward the strike. What was to be done when major institutional sectors like labor and capital came into conflict? Addams’s idea was that the conflict fractured the unity of democratic society and that direct action that aggravated the conflict must be avoided at all costs. Dewey, then still under the saw of the Hegelian dialectic, held that structural antagonism would lead to change for the better, a new democratic synthesis. But, that night, after he left Addams, Dewey struggled with his position and by morning came to the conclusion that she was right and he was wrong. In that moment of their accord, the Progressive ideal and pragmatism were joined. They would remain friends ever after, even as their respective philosophies changed in accord with the wars and economic disasters of the twentieth century. Years later, in reflecting on the Strike of 1894, Addams wrote:
To touch to vibrating response the noble fiber in each man, to pull these many fibers, fragile, impalpable and constantly breaking, as are into impulse, to develop that mere impulse through its feeble and tentative stages into action, is no easy task, but… progress is impossible without it.
(2002: 176)
This was precisely the philosophy that Addams built into Hull House and which served the noble instincts of marginalized immigrant people by affirming their dignity through education and humanitarian programs. Hull House, which continued her work from its founding in 1899 until its closing in 2012, was never a philanthropic program that condescended to its people but one that showed democratic respect for their nobility.
Addams, strictly speaking, was more a progressive activist than a philosophical pragmatist. Yet her relations with Dewey indicated the extent to which the leading public figures of early twentieth-century America would at close or distant remove find encouragement in a national movement that meant to advance the causes of democratic society against the ravages of economic greed and social discord. Louis Menand, for example, commenting on the importance of these historical circumstances to pragmatism said: ‘Everything James and Dewey wrote as pragmatists boils down to a single claim: people are the agents of their own destinies.’ (2001: 371) In Dewey’s case, nothing more strongly exemplified his progressive pragmatism than his commitment to education – a commitment that was every bit as much an activism, like Addams’s work at Hull House, as an informed philosophy. As she developed Hull House, Dewey developed the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in which he developed his philosophy of education that, in his view, was at the heart of modern democracy – a philosophy he carried forth later in his writings as well as his teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University:
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These numerous and more varied points of contact… secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
(1916: 101)
Education, thus, is a primary social function of a democratic society and the school ‘coordinates within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters’ (1916: 26). The work of the school, in his mind, cannot be exclusively the direct inculcation of beliefs and knowledge. Schools must coordinate among children the experiences of society, and especially those arising from social conflicts and differences. As with Peirce and James, once again experience is at the heart of the pragmatic philosophy which, for Dewey, was the foundational philosophical principle in a democratic society.
Even with his best thought, a man’s proposed course of action may be defeated. But in as far as his act is truly a manifestation of intelligent choice, he learns something: – as in a scientific experiment, an inquirer may learn through his experimentation, his intelligently directed action, quite as much, or even more, from a failure, than from a success. He finds out at least a little as to what was the matter with his prior choice. He can choose better and do better next time; ‘better choice’ meaning a more reflective one, and ‘better doing’ meaning one better coordinated with the conditions that are involved in realizing his purpose. Such control or power is never complete; luck or fortune, the propitious support of circumstances not foreseeable is always involved. But at least such a person forms the habit of choosing and acting with conscious regard to the grain of circumstance, the run of affairs. And what is more to the point, such a man becomes able to turn frustration and failure to account in his further choices and purposes.
John Dewey (1993) ‘Philosophies of freedom,’ in D. Morris and I. Shapiro (Eds), John Dewey: The Political Writings. Cambridge: Hackett, pages 133–4.
Dewey’s philosophical writings, both technical and applied, are voluminous. In his time, which lasted through the better part of the first half of the twentieth century, he was one of the nation’s most famous and respected public intellectuals, as Addams had also been earlier that century. From writings like Democracy and Education in 1916 to his later years, Dewey changed in many ways but he never abandoned his faith in democracy. In 1939, in ‘Creative Democracy,’ he wrote that democracy is ‘the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as an end and as means.’ Today this principle, like Addams’s opposition to social conflict, may seem naïve and ill-suited to more complexly structured democratic societies in which experiences are disjointed and artificially at odds. Still, Dewey’s influence on pragmatist social theory has had an enduring effect on subsequent, truly contemporary, schools of social theory, the first of which derived from Dewey’s close friend in early life, George Herbert Mead.
George Herbert Mead: mind, self and society
George Herbert Mead was with Dewey at the University of Michigan where they entered into an enduring friendship that was both personal and intellectual. In 1894 they both moved to the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago where Mead remained until his death in 1931.
Where Dewey was very much a public figure, Mead was not. Yet, they shared important philosophical values, already apparent in the academic articles each wrote early in the Chicago years. Dewey’s bore the ominous title, ‘The Reflex Arc in Psychology’ (1896), while Mead’s was called, just as abstractly, ‘The Definition of the Psychical’ (1903). Though neither article is read seriously today, except for their historical importance, they share two striking features in common. Both are hyper-academic studies of then-prevailing concepts in the field of psychology. In a subtle and authoritative review of the literature on the relation between a neural stimulus and a cognitive reflex, Dewey argued that the reflex is always and necessarily indistinguishable from the stimulus – that, in effect, there is no arc in time between the two. This was a crucial idea for his brand of pragmatism because it amounted to the deeper conclusion that action is not first and foremost mental or cognitive. More generally, Dewey held that thoughts or ideas are rooted not in the mind but in the experience of action.
Mead, in his 1903 article, just as authoritatively reviewed the scientific literature defining the ‘psychical’ (roughly, mental process or mind):
The image is the suggested object-stimulus, adapting itself to the conditions involved in the problem. It interprets the conditions as the predicate interprets the subject. But neither the subject nor the predicate is there in fixed form, but are present in the process of formation. The value and content of the conditions is continually changing as the meaning of the problem develops, and this meaning grows as it recognizes and accepts the conditions that face it. It is evident in this that in this state of reflection it is impossible to present the elements out of which the new world is to be built up in advance.
(1903: 112)
In a comparison to Dewey’s concept of the primacy of experience, one sees not only their common thinking, but also the ways, early in their careers, both shared an attitude that Peirce had already announced and James was soon to publicize – that thinking begins not in the mind but in experience.
With Mead, in particular, pragmatism’s thread of language and signification as a source of meaning, first identified by Peirce, re-enters the story of contemporary pragmatism. Mead’s best known book is Mind, Self, and Society, which was published on the basis of student notes edited by Charles Morris after Mead’s death in 1931. Oddly, it was Morris himself who exaggerated Mead’s way of thinking as social behaviorism – a mistake partly excused by the fact that behaviorism as we know it today was just then distinguishing itself as a formal method distinct from other nineteenth-century psychologies. In fact, Mead does not abandon his earlier principle that it is experience that unifies thought and action. What he adds in his later work is the role of symbols and language:
Only in terms of gestures as significant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures which are significant symbols can thinking – which is simply the internalization or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gestures – take place. … [The] genesis of existence of mind or consciousness – namely, the taking of the attitude of the other toward oneself, or toward one’s own behavior – also necessarily involves the genesis and existence at the same time of significant symbols, or significant gestures.
(1934: 47–8)
Here, Mead, discussing the mind, sets the role of language and signs straight at the center.
Though Mead was always a philosopher and, at best, a social psychologist, what made Mead’s use of meaningful gestures and significant symbols so valuable to sociologists and social theorists was how he understood them as the integrating and dynamic elements of the two sides of the consciousness of experience – the attitude toward oneself and the attitudes others take toward oneself. And here we encounter, once again, William James’s dilemma of self-consciousness: how does one maintain a sense of personal identity while also contending with the realities of social selves? Where James kept the identity/pluralist aspect of self separate, Mead’s theory illustrated how in experience they are kept together. Thus, and famously, Mead re-configured James’s original description of the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ in self-consciousness:
The ‘I,’ then, in this relation of the ‘I’ and the ‘me,’ is something that is, so to speak, responding to a social situation which is within the experience of the individual. It is the answer which the individual makes to the attitude which others take toward him when he assumes an attitude toward them. Now the attitudes he is taking toward them are present in his own experience, but his response to them will contain a novel element. The ‘I’ gives the sense of freedom, of initiative. The situation is there for us to act in a self-conscious fashion. … Such is the basis for the fact that the ‘I’ does not appear in the same sense in experience as does the ‘me.’ The self is essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable phases.
(1934: 177–178)
Still one could ask, as many have: what holds the two phases, or the two aspects, of self together? And what becomes of his earlier idea of the unity of experience and thought?
What does Mead mean, thus, in the most oft-quoted of all his lines – that ‘the “I” of this moment is present in the “me” of the next’ (1934: 174)? The key is the subtle interjection of the word ‘present’ as if to suggest that the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ are always ever-present one to another. Still, how does this work? And here is where his implicit semiotics comes in. The I/Me relation is a symbolic dialogue in which the ‘Me’ presents the social situation to the ‘I’ which, in that instant, to use Peirce’s term, interprets the experience. Though Mead had little of interest to say about Peirce, it is hard to miss the notion that symbolic meanings, even gestures, are the interpretants that, in effect, hold together the straining parts of self-consciousness while, also, carrying forward the self itself. He could very well have said, after Peirce’s triadic scheme, that the interpretant of this moment is present in the meaning of the next.
This is no more than a sampling of Mead’s remarkably systematic social theory of the mind-self-society relations. Among the many other details of his social theory is a clear, if sparsely, worked-through developmental theory of the human social self as a meaning maker. He argued that even lower, pre-human, animals have a sort of self-consciousness insofar as they engage in a communication of gestures – high-pitched sounds, chemical trails, urine markings, and the like. In this, the human infant is still animal-like in that she will use gestures such as cooing or crying to communicate pleasure or need. In the meantime, the infant is at once taking in the maternal object and engaging in a crude conversation of gestures that in time shapes her into what humans rather arrogantly consider a human being.
Mead in the Self section of Mind, Self, and Society notably distinguishes between the play and game stages of childhood development. A child’s play is often no more than taking the role of another, often an imaginary one – a doll becomes the ‘child’ as the actual child becomes the ‘mother’ just as, in other instances, a phantom friend becomes part of her ongoing conversation in which she plays out feelings or fantasies. This is the phase in which self-consciousness ripens. The play stage is necessary for development, but it is insufficient for full social participation. Try to teach a group of four-year-olds how to play football and you will have a strange set of random runnings about. At best they may be able in time to manage hide- and-seek, which still involves a degree of pretending. Social activity is possible only when the child enters the game stage, which demands that all in the game know the rules of the game but, thereby, understand what each player is meant to do. In football you cannot score, or even know that scoring is what you are meant to do, unless you understand the basic rules of the game – that no one can use his hands in moving the ball, that there is a difference between offense and defense, that a goalie is particularly responsible for stopping your kicks or headers from entering the net, and so on. It is the same in social life.
One gets on with others, even strangers, because one has a normal set of expectations as to what others will do under certain social circumstances. Queues for tickets or services don’t work unless everyone in the line knows what the others are doing. Where there is a queue, those who try to cut will be told to get in line, often with anger and disgust. Visualizing what others are doing or meant to do involves visualizing what one is meant to do in the same situation. This is the symbolic aspect of social communication – the ability to develop an image of the significant meaning of self and other in the experience at hand. Meaning is what meaning does in ordinary experience. The meanings we encounter become significant when we attach a symbolic interpretant to the action. The chemical trace is an ant’s gesture, just as the queuing is the meaningful symbolic sign, applicable in many (not all) cultures, that one who takes his place is a self worthy of inclusion in that little slice of social experience. Ants who wander off on their own will die, as line cutters are usually killed off in the instance of their rule breaking. Knowing the rules and symbolically appreciating (or knowing) the meaning of the actions of all others is the foundation of the self’s social ability to be conscious of himself through a dialogue with the attitudes others take toward him. This, Mead called the competence of possessing a sense of the Generalized Other.
What goes on in the game goes on in the life of the child all the time. He is continually taking the attitudes of those about him, especially the roles of those who in some sense control him and on whom he depends. He gets the function of the process in an abstract way at first. It goes over from the play into the game in a real sense. He has to play the game. The morale of the game takes hold of the child more than the larger morale of the whole community. The child passes into the game and the game expresses a social situation in which he can completely enter; its morale may have a greater hold on him than that of the family to which he belongs or the community in which he lives. There are all sorts of social organizations, some of which are fairly lasting, some temporary, into which the child is entering, and he is playing a sort of social game in them. It is a period in which he likes ‘to belong,’ and he gets into organizations which come into existence and pass out of existence. He becomes a something which can function in the organized whole, and thus tends to determine himself in his relationship with the group to which he belongs. That process is one which is a striking stage in the development of the child’s morale. It constitutes him as a self-conscious member of the community to which he belongs.
George Herbert Mead (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 160.
There is no question that Mead fleshed out a more sociological idea of the social foundations of self-development based on Peirce and James. For his time, it was a truly impressive feat to clarify the I/Me dialogue as an ever-in-the-present dialogue linking the interior and exterior dimensions of self-consciousness; as was his argument for a generalized other as a necessary embracing idea of the role of the social whole to the individual self. That Mead accomplished so much by recovering the role of signification in meaning-making is itself a tribute to Peirce’s original semiotic, but it is also an important contemporary affirmation of what has come to be called the linguistic turn in both philosophy (after Wittgenstein) and social theory (after Lévi-Strauss). What transpired in these two areas, well after Mead was gone, probably would not have moved him. Yet, what remains, in the larger picture of the history of social theory is the importance of his refinement of a working idea of language and sign systems as central to cultural meanings – as, in effect, just how hard it is to get away from the symbolic.
Herbert Blumer: Symbolic Interactionism
To the degree that Mead was not, even metaphorically, a sociologist, Herbert Blumer was. When mortally ill, Mead designated Herbert Blumer, a former graduate student, to take over his course at Chicago in Social Psychology. Over the four decades after Mead’s death, Blumer named, and to a considerable degree codified, the single most important sociological tradition to come directly from Mead: Symbolic Interactionism.
It is relatively easy, even on a quick look, to see the influence of Mead on the Symbolic Interactionist tradition. At the same time, it may be easier to miss Blumer’s serious attempt to introduce the one sociological element that was missing in Mead and all prior pragmatist thought – a robust theory of hard, enduring, and powerful social structures. It was not until Blumer that a strong theory of what he called ‘the obdurate character of the empirical world’ came into the tradition. In his foundational text, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (1969), Blumer says:
The empirical world can ‘talk back’ to our pictures of it or assertions about it – talk back in the sense of challenging and resisting, or not bending to, our images and concepts of it. … It is this obdurate character of the empirical world – its ability to resist and talk back – that both calls for and justifies empirical science.
(1969: 22)
A true theory of social structures arises on two conditions, both of which Blumer comes close to meeting – first, an attempt to establish an empirical science in the sense of a science that aims to explain reality as such; and second, a sociology in which it is granted that structures that transcend local, practical actions are an essential feature of the empirical study of societal arrangements. One indication of Blumer’s effort to convert Mead’s pragmatism into an empirical sociology is that he engaged in sociological research on a variety of subjects, including collective behavior, crime and delinquency, and media. A reading especially of his writings from 1931, when he took over Mead’s social psychology course at Chicago, to 1969, when he published the locus classicus of Symbolic Interactionism, his theoretical work on specifically structural and empirical subjects was the means through which he worked out the general principle of the school of thought he names.
Social theorists insisting on a formal theory of social structures have never been satisfied with Blumer’s program, but a general summary of his basic principles in Symbolic Interactionism makes it clear that, while he remained faithful to the general terms of Mead’s pragmatism, there was always a kind of structural theory struggling to get out from behind the primacy of languages, actions and experiences. Here is a reasonably complete outline of Blumer’s general theory of society:
It is impossible to read through this list and not to see the main traditions of pragmatism in general, and especially of Mead. Blumer himself was a major figure in the second and most theoretical tradition of what is known as Chicago sociology – after the first founded and enduringly influential department in the United States at the University of Chicago. Among others who worked along the same lines as did Blumer were Everett Hughes and Lloyd Warner, Howard Becker at a later time, and some would add (rather conjecturally) Erving Goffman. At the very least, however one defines the membership list of this line of the Chicago School (of which there were at least two other, differing approaches), no single tradition has done more to support and encourage careful and thoughtful research and thinking about the lives of people in local gatherings.
Pragmatism’s limits and prospects: Habermas and Rorty
Today, well outside sociological social theory, there are at least two active lines of the pragmatist tradition at work. One is the latter-day critical theory inspired by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas, whose work we will examine in detail in Chapter 11, had begun late in the 1960s to explore the role of language as a practical, quasi-universal human resource for and topic of what he then called, in Knowledge and Human Interests (1987), critical knowledge with an interest in emancipation. Habermas slowly turned to linguistics and speech act theory to study the ideal speech situation (already an important concept in linguistic philosophy) as an inherent aspect of all human dialogue and communication. Ever restless, Habermas soon enough turned to the question asked in a 1979 essay, ‘What is universal pragmatics?’ As this question suggests, he was by this time at least attuned to the two main strains of American pragmatism – language and democracy.
Still, it is far from clear that even in the use of the term pragmatics Habermas could or should be considered a pragmatist, pure and simple. In either case, the key term that surfaced in Habermas’s long transition through language to a critical theory of emancipatory democracy is in the title of his massive, two volume, 1981 manifesto, The Theory of Communicative Action. From the point of view of his alleged pragmatism, the most striking essay in the book is the one with which he begins Volume Two, ‘The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action.’ The section on Mead begins, first with the important acknowledgement that ‘Mead’s theory of communication … recommends itself as a point of intersection of the two critical traditions stemming from Peirce’ (1989: 3). While he has little directly to say of Peirce (with whom Habermas would have been unlikely to be satisfied) he gives careful attention to Mead, whose work he summarizes as ‘the task of capturing the structural features of symbolically mediated communication’ (1989: 5). Though Habermas treats Mead at times more as a template than an original of critical theory, there can be no doubt that Habermas’s critical social theory of communicative action is, for all intents and purposes, pragmatist in theoretical disposition if not formal allegiance.
Habermas, himself, is one of the world’s most accomplished and influential social theorists, and has, very probably, done more that anyone in his lifetime to clarify the cultural grounds of democracy in complex worlds. It makes little difference, thus, whether he should be called a pragmatist. For one, Richard J. Bernstein of the New School, a distinguished theorist in his own right, has not the least reservation on this point as he makes clear in The Pragmatic Turn (2010), the single best current work on the varieties of pragmatism. What is important is that quite a number of younger sociologists, many in Europe, are working as sociologists to advance something like a critical pragmatism. Hans Joas, the German sociologist, is author of Pragmatism and Social Theory (1993) which in effect re-imports European ideas back into a relation with American social and critical theory. Filipe Carriera da Silva, a Portuguese sociologist, is among other European social thinkers who have taken up the task of interpreting both Mead and Habermas and their respective relations to pragmatism.
The other current line of pragmatist thought is inspired by the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) who is widely considered, with John Rawls and a few others, as at the top of a shortlist of greatest American philosophers in recent years. Among his many contributions, Rorty is noted for two important and interrelated ideas, each embedded in a long and rich corpus of writings. One is his devastatingly persuasive dismissal of foundationalism, the idea that mind and knowledge reflect the essential nature of things – an argument alluded to in the title of his revolutionary work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). The second of Rorty’s striking ideas follows on the first, namely his account of a philosophy that must take the place of essentialism. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Rorty begins with the pragmatist axiom, ‘truth cannot be out there’ (1989: 5), from which he moves immediately to the startling claim that philosophy without foundations in reality must be replaced by literary criticism! The philosopher, hence, must be not the truth teller but the ironist – a vocation required by the prior claim that if there is no truth out there, all there is is language; and language is contingent in the sense that an ironist must, in effect, tell what truth there might be even though there are no final arguments. A philosopher cannot hope, he says, to demonstrate convincingly that her ideas are right and another’s wrong.
What is remarkable about Rorty’s ideas is that they are explicitly pragmatist in the formal sense of his robust rejection of epistemological essentialism and his turn to language and the symbolic as the foundation without foundationalism of social life. Just as remarkable is the degree to which his claim that philosophy must be ironic literary criticism has led many to characterize this very liberal, even gentle man, as a radical, even a postmodern one. This characterization is not entirely idle. He was attacking the very core principles of modern culture to the same degree as Habermas, at the same time, was attempting to shore them up.
Needless to say, always implicit in every major pragmatist thinker from James and Dewey to Mead and Blumer to Habermas and Rorty was a commitment to revising and affirming basic democratic beliefs (as Dewey put it) and actions (as Habermas has it). Yet, once the Progressive Era in which James and Dewey worked, and from which Mead benefitted, gave way to economic crisis, war upon war, false post-WWII affluence and mass culture, the principle of democratic communication fell on hard times. Even Blumer’s Symbolic Interactionism was not well suited to all that followed after his great book of 1969. In many ways, Habermas, in one way, and Rorty, in another, applied the principles that throve in early pragmatism to the new, late-modern circumstances. Habermas has done so directly by a series of political writings that have made him Germany’s, and possibly Europe’s, most important public intellectual. Rorty’s life was cut short, so who knows what he might have done. Younger pragmatists, like Judith Green, in Pragmatism and Social Hope (2008) extends Rorty’s ideas in a serious and compelling way as in Deep Democracy (1999) where she applies pragmatist values to questions native to feminism and race theory. Then too, there are the early writings of the gadfly philosopher, Cornell West, who started his intellectual career as a pragmatist much in the vein of Rorty before turning to public and academic commentary on the cultural and political issues of the day.
Whether democracy endures is, to some, an open question. Whether pragmatism will be among the cultural and intellectual resources to that end is also open, of course – but not unreasonable. There can hardly be any question that the single most formidable barrier to democratic culture is the corruption of public language – a corruption due, in the first instance, to the mind-numbing effect of popular culture and media but, no less, to the narrow focus and foolish abstractions of a good many academics who ought be at the fore of this movement. Pragmatism has always been at the advanced guard of progressive thought in America. Whether it can accommodate its principles to the harsh global structures of global realities is what remains to be seen.
1 How did the post-Civil War era contribute to the development of American Pragmatism?
2 What did Charles Saunders Peirce contribute to the new science of semiotics (or semiology) and what justifies a discussion of his ideas in respect to contemporary social thought?
3 How does William James’s psychology of the social self suggest his later contributions to pragmatism?
4 What is George Herbert Mead’s famous theory of the I/Me dynamic and how does it relate to his ideas on the practical experience of childhood development?
5 Herbert Blumer invented the field of sociology theory called Symbolic Interactionism. What is it and how was it influenced by Mead’s pragmatism?
William James
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Oxford, UK: Longmans, 1907)
The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (London: Longmans, 1909)
The Principles of Psychology (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952)
Charles Sanders Peirce
(edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958)
(edited by Charles S. Hardwick, with the assistance of James Cook) Semiotic and Signifcs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977)
John Dewey
Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959)
Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: Free Press, 1966)
Essays in Experimental Logic (New York: Dover, 1953)
How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process (New York: D. C. Heath and Company, 1933)
Jane Addams
(edited by Anne Firor Scott) Democracy and Social Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1964)
(edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain) The Jane Addams Reader (New York: Basic Books, 2002)
Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1964)
George Herbert Mead
Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934)
(edited by Anselm Strauss) On Social Psychology: Selected Papers. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)
The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938)
The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing Company, 1932)
Herbert Blumer
George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct (Oxford: Alta Mira, 2004)
Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
Jürgen Habermas
Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979)
Knowledge and Human Interests (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987)
The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
Richard Rorty
Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–198o (Brighton: Harvester, 1982)
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)