Abstract
William James was one of the most influential American thinkers of the Gilded Age, and during his long career at Harvard University served as a teacher and mentor to many of the leading lights of early twentieth-century American social and political thought, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Kallen, Walter Lippmann, Alain Locke, and Ralph Barton Perry—as well as future governor and president Theodore Roosevelt. He was a correspondent of and inspiration to many more. However, while James’s status as one of the founders of philosophical pragmatism—and, to a lesser extent, his commitment to metaphysical pluralism and “radical empiricism”—has attracted substantial attention from political theorists and political philosophers, he has seldom if ever been treated as a political thinker in his own right. This is largely because, unlike his fellow pragmatist John Dewey, he wrote very little about politics, and nothing systematic.
Alexander Livingston’s Damn Great Empires! makes the case that James was nevertheless “an important and innovative theorist of politics” (p. 4). The central claim of the book, as its title suggests, is that “the originality and importance of James’s political thought lies in its philosophical examination and transformation of the psychic, affective, and cultural roots of American imperialism at a crucial moment in the nation’s rise to global hegemony.” Where “the master theme of Dewey’s political thought is democracy as a way of life,” Livingston argues, “James’s political vision, by contrast, reorients political thought towards the problem of empire as a way of life” (p. 7, original emphasis).
Livingston develops this striking thesis by exploring what he refers to as James’s “anti-imperialist Nachlass”; “the collection of notes, correspondence, occasional essays, and editorials James composed in the final decade of his life in reaction to the Spanish-American War and its imperial aftermath” (p. 2). These writings, he suggests, can serve “as keys for unlocking the political significance of [James’s] writings on truth, religion, and metaphysics” (p. 7). Although Livingston makes judicious use of correspondence and archival papers, he focuses primarily on published books and essays, and some of the occasional essays, like “The Moral Equivalent of War,” are quite well known. This stretches the meaning of the word Nachlass somewhat, but Livingston nevertheless performs a valuable service in pulling together a group of writings that are usually considered apart from James’s main corpus and showing that they have a kind of unity both in themselves and with his larger philosophical project. He performs an equally valuable service in placing James’s writings in their social and political context: this is as much a work of intellectual history as it is a work of exegesis or of constructive normative theory, although it is both of those things as well. Indeed, its thematic unity, broad humane vision, historical sweep, and rigorous but conversational style call to mind the classic works of Richard Hofstadter, which go over some of the same ground.
The book begins, like many studies of this period, by calling attention to the “cascading series of authority problems” that arose in areas as diverse as morality and religion, politics and economics, and racial and gender relations. As a result, Livingston writes, “individuals [were] set adrift without orientation or guidance in modernity’s dizzying complexity” (pp. 11–12); in what James famously described (though Livingston does not quote the passage) as the “great blooming, buzzing confusion” of unassimilated experience. This way of describing the modern condition will be familiar to readers of Dewey, for whom it was something of a trope. However, where Dewey saw it as a temporary condition—as a sign that modern societies were making a difficult but salutary transition from a dogmatic and authoritarian to an experimental and democratic worldview—James, on Livingston’s account, saw it as a permanent one, to be confronted and wrestled with but not ultimately to be overcome.
The key claim of the book is that this unsettling of traditional authorities gave rise, paradoxically, to the very “craving for authority” that characterizes the “imperialist” mindset, a craving that “drives philosophers and lay people alike to affirm patterns of thinking and practices of perception that impose order on experience, disavow complexity and difference, and engender hostile and dogmatic reactions to perceived threats to this fantastic order” (p. 11). As this passage makes clear, the craving for authority is ultimately a craving for order, and so imperialism appears from this point of view as an attempt to impose order by force on a world whose salient feature is disorder. James’s anti-imperialism consists, by contrast, in an ongoing effort to navigate the tension between conviction and doubt, action and restraint, without succumbing to these “imperialist” temptations—or to the opposing temptations of political paralysis or apathy. Politically speaking, this requires “a difficult double-gesture of recovering a fragile sense of political efficacy to resist injustice while taming the drive toward authoritarian dogmatism that perpetuates injustice” (p. 56).
This tentative, melioristic approach to politics frames Livingston’s exploration of the central themes of James’s thought, including the role that temperament, and thus “sentiment,” plays in defining a moral and political outlook (chapter 2); the promise and perils of what Roosevelt called the “strenuous life” (chapter 3); the relationship between reason, faith, and will (chapter 4); and the metaphysical grounds for holding an optimistic or a pessimistic—a hopeful or a tragic—view about the moral possibilities that the world will admit (chapter 5). Livingston tacks skillfully throughout between philosophical works such as Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe and James’s responses to political issues and events such as the Venezuela Crisis of 1895, the Spanish–American War, and the ill-fated American experiment with imperialism in the Philippines. He also reconstructs several of the political and philosophical conversations in which James was directly or indirectly engaged; of particular note is an extended discussion of The Souls of Black Folk that reads Du Bois’s seminal analysis of the “color line” in the light of his teacher’s “anti-imperialist” sensibility (pp. 142–50).
The book concludes by throwing a bit of cold water on James’s “myopically” individualistic and psychological analysis of imperialism—noting its blindness to structural and institutional factors—before offering a capsule genealogy of American global hegemony in the postwar period; a hegemony whose ideological roots Livingston traces to the political debates in which James was engaged. He concludes that by “plac[ing] the ethical at the center of the political,” James’s thought “discloses the persistent possibility for futures different from the past lying before us in the living present, if we will to believe” (p. 164).
As even this brief summary should make clear, this book can be read with profit by students of James, of pragmatism more generally, of imperialism, and of the historical period that it examines. I will nevertheless conclude by raising two related sets of concerns.
The first set of concerns has to do with the scope of the argument. The conquest and domination of foreign peoples is of course a depressingly ubiquitous feature of human history, one in which almost all sufficiently powerful states and peoples have been implicated. It is therefore doubtful that the attractions of “empire as a way of life” can be attributed entirely, or even primarily, to the anxieties that arose from the collapse of traditional authorities and hierarchies over the course of the nineteenth century. Even if we limit our attention, as Livingston does, to the modern European, and especially British, imperial projects on which American imperialism was modelled, it is not clear that this kind of anxiety can be said to have played a central role: few cultures have been as self-confident (or as self-satisfied) as that of the Victorian and Edwardian Britain on whose empire the sun never set. As Livingston points out (pp. 13–14), the United States is not an exception to the imperial rule, whatever Americans may sometimes have thought, or wanted to think, about themselves. But it seems to me that the explanation for the turn to empire that Livingston finds in James is more plausibly applied to the American case than to the phenomenon of imperialism more generally—and indeed there is every sign that this is how James himself saw the matter. Thus, where Dewey treats “democracy as a way of life” as a project that all modern societies might pursue, James’s critique of “empire as a way of life” is more provincial, both geographically and temporally speaking.
This brings me to the second set of concerns, which have to do with Livingston’s use of the term “anti-imperialism” as a shorthand for James’s political position. The question is not, of course, whether James was opposed to imperialism, but rather whether empire plays the kind of organizing role in his political thought that, for example, democracy plays in Dewey’s. As I have said, Livingston performs a valuable service in bringing to light and collecting together the scattered essays and other writings in which James comes to terms with the imperial question. However, these writings make up only a subset of the political writings that he discusses. The political essay that receives the most sustained attention (pp. 103–7, 115–21) is James’s Decoration Day speech in honor of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army—the first regiment to be composed entirely of African American soldiers, although Shaw and the other officers were white. The best-known of James’s political essays, as I have already mentioned, is “The Moral Equivalent of War,” which Livingston also discusses at some length (pp. 99–101). Both essays are meditations on the same theme: the seductive power of war as a cultural archetype, the horror of war as an experienced reality, and the superiority of civic to martial virtue as a model for the “strenuous life.” The craving that they try to tame is not so much for authority or order as for glory, and neither essay is concerned with empire except insofar as it provides one of the (many) rationales for engaging in war. To describe them as part of James’s “anti-imperialist Nachlass” therefore stretches the meaning not only of Nachlass but of imperialism itself.
These concerns do not detract from the force of Livingston’s subtle and far-reaching exploration of James’s thought, nor do they diminish its relevance. We live in a historical moment in which the causes of empire, war, and—to use a favorite expression of James’s—“bigness” are not only ascendant but fundamentally intertwined. The task of imagining alternatives to imperialism—and of coming to terms with the psychological sources of its attractiveness—is therefore of the utmost urgency. And of course any effort to perform this task today must begin by coming to terms with the nature and origins of American imperialism. In this respect, William James is very much our contemporary.