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War and the Intellectuals: Bourne, Dewey, and the Fate of Pragmatism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

James Livingston
James Livingston
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

My purpose here, apart from convincing you that John Dewey was quite possibly right about American entry into World War I, is to address the repression and mutilation of pragmatism by left-wing intellectuals in the twentieth century. These would seem to be very different purposes, but in fact they are the same. If we are to understand how pragmatism acquired its unsavory reputation among leftists everywhere, we must go back to 1917, when Randolph Bourne denounced not only Dewey's decision in favor of American entry but also pragmatism itself as the source of that decision. These almost ancient denunciations would not matter very much, except that they are repeated in every subsequent account of the American Left in World War I, and are recalled if not reiterated in every subsequent critique of pragmatism – they still determine our thinking about Dewey, about pragmatism, and about the war. Revisiting this primal scene allows us to ask why. It allows us to convert the following statement, which still serves as a left-wing credential, into a question: Dewey's support for American entry into the Great War demonstrates that pragmatism is a philosophy of acquiescence to “the existing fact,” a philosophy that must validate capitalism, accept imperialism, and repudiate socialism.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 2 , Special Issue 4: New Perspectives on Socialism II , October 2003 , pp. 431 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2003

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References

1 See Livingston, James, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1994), ch. 9Google Scholar, “The Romantic Acquiescence: Pragmatism and the Young Intellectuals.”

2 Ibid., ch. 6.

3 Ibid., chs. 8–10.

4 Ibid., 361n.

5 Ibid., (1997 ed.), xv–xxi

6 Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York, 2001).

7 The preceding paragraphs are drawn from ibid., particularly the Introduction, 1–14. Peirce quoted at 8.

8 Ibid., chs. 2–3, 6. James, Dewey and Butler quoted at 155, 152.

9 See Zizek, Slavoj, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pt. I. Adams quoted in Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 10–11, 172–73.

10 Burke, Kenneth, Attitudes Toward History (1937; rev. ed. Boston, 1961)Google Scholar

11 These authors cited in Pragmatism and Political Economy, ch. 9, except for Diggins, John Patrick, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar; McClay, Wilfred, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar; and Lloyd, Brian, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceplionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922 (Baltimore, 1997).Google Scholar Peter Osborne's work on pragmatism is forthcoming from Verso.

12 See Sklar, Martin J., “The Open Door, Imperialism, and Post-Imperialism: Origins of U.S. Twentieth-Century Foreign Relations, Circa 1900,” in Postimperialism and World Politics, eds., Becker, David G. and Sklar, Richard L. (Westport, CT, 1999): 317–36.Google Scholar

13 Bourne, Randolph, “A War Diary,” Seven Arts (September 1917)Google Scholar, reprinted in The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne Selected Writings, ed., Hansen, Olaf (New York, 1977), 319–30Google Scholar, here 328; see also “Twilight of Idols,” Seven Arts (October 1917) in ibid., 336–47, here 344.

14 Bourne, , “War Diary,” 329.Google Scholar See otherwise, Hutchinson, George, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA, 1995)Google Scholar; Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Cruse, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967).Google Scholar There is no comprehensive work on what Cruse calls the cultural revolution of the 1920s; certainly there is nothing that deals with painterly strategies and popular musical forms as both expressions of a similar aesthetic and innovations related to the larger cultural field.

15 See esp. Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” in Hansen, , Radical Will, 336–47Google Scholar; Brooks quoted and discussed in Livingston, , Pragmatism and Political Economy, 226–27.Google Scholar

16 On the American approach to war, I have relied on Parrini, Carl P., Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (Pittsburgh, 1969)Google Scholar because it is the only account I know that foregrounds the long-term dangers of allied victory; but, see also Thompson, John A., Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (New York, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 5, esp. 150–68; and Fischer, Fritz, Germany's Aims in the First World War (trans. New York, 1967).Google Scholar On the Freikorps and National Socialism, see Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, vol. 1 (trans. Minneapolis, 1987), 3–249.Google Scholar

17 Dewey, John, German Philosophy and Politics in The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 8, ed., Boydston, Jo Ann (Carbondale, IL, 1979), 202.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as MW.

18 “Schools and Social Preparedness,” MW, vol. 10, 193; German Philosophy, MW, vol. 8, 203.

19 “Nationalizing Education,” MW, vol. 10, 204; “The Principle of Nationality,” ibid., 288–89.

20 “America in the World,” MW, vol. 11, 71.

21 “What Are We Fighting For?” MW, vol. 11, 104; “Internal Social Reorganization After the War,” ibid., 82; Dewey on “respectable society” quoted in Westbrook, Robert, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991), 204.Google Scholar

22 MW, vol. 11, 103.

23 Ibid., 99, 85. Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Frank, Dana, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (New York, 1994).Google Scholar See also Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York, 1987), chs. 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McCartin, Joseph, Labor's Great War: the Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997).Google Scholar

24 MW, vol. 11, 74–78.

25 Ibid., 81, 335.

26 Ibid., 81, 99.