Damn Great Empires!: William James and the Politics of Pragmatism

by Alexander Livingston

Overview

Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs James's overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass -- his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines -- as the key to unlocking the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James's major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the conventional view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with a transatlantic critique of modernity, as well as with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190626631
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/05/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alexander Livingston is Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: The Political Uses of William James Chapter 2: Cravings and Consequences Chapter 3: Taming the Strenuous Life Chapter 4: Stuttering Conviction Chapter 5: Tragedy, History, and Democratic Faith Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

"Livingston s book is an excellent reminder that William James can provide essential guidance for understanding American political culture and our country s tortuous relationship to authority and democratic responsibility...Damn Great Empires! helps illuminate why William James can provide the psychological key for understanding contemporary political dysfunctions." —Review of Politics

"The thematic and literary ground he covers is remarkable. Livingston not only provides a respectable foundation for constructing a Jamesian-based political vision, but he also creates a valuable resource for uncovering links between James s earliest writings, his later writings, and even his personal writings." —Reading Religion

"In arguing that James' pragmatist philosophy entailed significant political commitments, and that James' anti-imperial writings are not peripheral but rather essential to his philosophically informed politics, Livingston has challenged several well-worn maxims of James scholarship. ... this [is a] rich and thought-provoking study." —Theory & Event

"...a convincing, theoretically rich, and exemplary set of cases showing why and how Jamesian pragmatism leads to political practices."
—Contemporary Political Theory

"Conceptually innovative and gorgeously written, Damn Great Empires! offers readers an alternative contextualist approach to the political thought of William James that upends mainstream pragmatist and liberal accounts of his life and work. Livingston's book situates James's pragmatism in its American imperial context and demonstrates-with clear, convincing, and uncompromising clarity-the way this approach reveals the habits of imperialism in everyday life. The book is simply a must read for anyone interested in James' work, in new historical approaches to political theory, and in counteracting the politics of empire in our contemporary moment."
—Jeanne Morefield, author of Empires without Imperialism

"In this exhaustively researched and timely book, Alexander Livingston uncovers the political philosophical insights of William James. If John Dewey was the go-to, even if sophisticated, defender of United States democracy, James is the go-to critic of the United States tendency toward empire! There is still much for us to learn from James today, and Livingston's book must now be the start of our inquiry."
—Melvin L. Rogers, author of The Undiscovered Dewey

"In this impressive study Alexander Livingston shows both how William James resisted powerful American drives to sovereign agency and imperial expansion and how self-hesitations-stutters-in thinking, judgment and agency make a crucial contribution to that resistance. This is an impressive study of James and America. An indispensable book for today!"
—WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY, author of Facing the Planetary

"This is as much a work of intellectual history as it is a work of exegesis or of constructive normative theory. Indeed, its thematic unity, broad humane vision, historical sweep, and rigorous but conversational style call to mind the classic works of Richard Hofstadter. [T]his book can be read with profit by students of James, of pragmatism more generally, of imperialism, and of the historical period that it examines."
— Eric MacGilvray, Political Theory

"Livingston's readings of James are sophisticated and scholarly. Drawing both on the historical sources and on a wide range of contemporary political theory, this book is an imaginative attempt both to reconstruct James's point of view and remain sensitive to the blindspots and evasions that it entails. Livingston's outstanding study calmly skewers many of the critical and polemical clichés that have gathered around James's pragmatism."
—Matthew Festenstein, Perspectives on Politics

From the Publisher