JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS
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Charles Sanders Peirce, the founding genius of the school, was skeptical of
democracy, believed that philosophy should stick to scientific questions
only, and came from a family that opposed the aboli tion of slavery. Dewey,
who did more than any other thinker to influence American education,
wrote little on such social issues as poverty and stayed completely clear of
the controversial issues of race and the status of women. Lest it be said that
such issues came to the fore only in the sixties, and thus earlier thinkers can
hardly be cri ticized for ignoring them, one should remember that race and
the woman question were addressed by Thorstein Veblen, Lippmann,
Bourne, and other Greenwich Village intellects. But it may be the philoso–
pher james who poses the most awkward political record, however beloved
he remains as a human being.
The "senseless 'anarchist' riot in Chicago," james wrote in 1888, refer–
ring to the Haymarket affair, "is the work of a lot of pathological Germans
and Poles. All the Irish names are among the killed and wounded police–
men." Only one policeman was killed in a strike that called for reducing
the workday to eight hours. But james believed the strikers were "sense–
less" because they supposedly stood outside the mainstream of American
values in which communi ty and individuali ty developed together.
The Haymarket riot stirred the American conscience, dividing society
along class lines and often within the family itself. Although his friends
urged him to sign a petition against the imminent execution of the con–
victed anarchists, james refused. "When you're not sure, don't act," he
explained.
"It
is very hard to forecast consequences, and all that is said
about making martyrs and embittering the working classes fails to affect
me, if the men be guilty." (The governor of Illinois did pardon them.)
Our contemporary academics and philosophers alike should be startled
by james's stance. Today on campus the philosophy of pragmatism, togeth–
er with postmodernism and deconstruction, is presented as radically
"subversive" and "transgressive," as though the existing social order should
tremble when students and professors speak its language. james, however,
was prudently conservative on such social issues as labor-capital relations
and the traditional domestic role of women.
Even more ironically,james's stance on politics contradicts his philos–
ophy. In "The Will to Believe" and elsewhere, james argues that it is
precisely when one is in a state of doubt that one is obligated to act. Not
to act and experiment, not to exercise will and effort, is to risk losing the
possibili ty of knowing truth as a matter of effects and outcomes. In such
essays james had religion in mind, the possibility of overcoming doubt and
anxiety by means of belief in God. But in politics, with the exception of
his opposition to the Spanish-American War, james hesitated before the
unknown future. Pragmatism failed its own test of praxis.
