CUSHING STROUT
443
His utopian strain meant that, though he was not a member of the
Socialist party, he always voted for Norman Thomas until Harry Tru–
man's victory in
1948.
Dewey's orientation was primarily towards the
future ra ther than the pas t, but if he had had more of a historical sense,
he might also have been more aware of the intractable, of unavoida bl y
conflicting loyalties, and of the unintended, unforeseeable consequences
of action. Rya n always reads Dewey as sympathetically as he possibly
can, but he acknowledges that Dewey was vulnerable in a way that
james was not to the charge that pragmatism had little to say about
events like war that are "not easily explained as intelligent problem
solving. "
james had concluded from a tour of Italy's ruins that they showed
powerfully "how man's life is based historically on sheer force and will
and fight, and how th e inner world only grows up inside and under the
shelter of these brute tendencies." He always lamented that his philoso–
phy was incompl ete, like an "unfinished arch, built only on one side";
and a philosoph y of history, which he never had, might have helped
complete it. "I am finite once and for all," James wrote, "and all the cat–
ego ries of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world
as such
and
with things that have a history." As Arthur O. Lovejoy pointed out,
james was unusual among philosophers for having "a keen sense of th e
validity and the distinctiveness of the temporal point of view. "
james died in
1910,
and the next generation of philosophers was the
first to be purely professional in the modern academic sense, as the hi s–
torian Bruce Kuklick has noted; and with its specialization, philosophy
lost its public.
It
is revealing that the man who reclaimed that public was
not a philosopher but a theologian and preacher, Reinhold Niebuhr. "I
sta nd in the Willi am james tradition," Niebuhr wrote. "He was both an
empiricist and a religious man. " But Niebuhr recogn ized that he was dif–
ferent from james in emphasizing "collective destiny," rather than indi–
vidualism, in social life and "the mea ning of history," rather than
mysticism, in the religious life. A circuit rider to colleges and liberal orga–
nizations in the
1940S
and
1950S,
Niebuhr yoked together the political
ideals of modern liberalism with a conservative theo logical respect for
the symbols and myths of Biblical Chri stianity, which he found
expounded with intell ectual power in the European existentia li st-Christ–
ian theologies of So ren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and Emil Brunner.
Niebuhr and Dewey were at contrary philosophical poles abo ut reli–
gion and psychology, but they were often in the same political camp
with a common reluctance
to
endorse the New Deal until it was virtu–
ally over and with a shared vigorous opposition
to
Stalinist communism
