Pragmatism, Nation, and Race

Description

Pragmatism's engagement with contemporary American issues

Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its supporters and "a dog's dinner" by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatism's direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and the contributors to this volume consider the role pragmatism plays, for better or worse, in current discussions of nationalism, war, race, and community. What can pragmatism contribute to understandings of a diverse nation? How can we reconcile pragmatism's history with recent changes in the country's racial and ethnic makeup? How does pragmatism help to explain American values and institutions and fit them into new national and multinational settings? The answers to these questions reveal pragmatism's role in helping to nourish the fundamental ideas, politics, and culture of contemporary America.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Community in the Age of Empire
Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta

Part 1. Transformative Communities and Enlarged Loyalties

1. When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment
Robert Brandom

2. The Unexamined Frontier: Dewey, Pragmatism, and America Enlarged
David H. Kim

3. Pragmatism and Solidarity with the Past
Max Pensky

4. Mead on Cosmopolitanism, Sympathy, and War
Mitch Aboulafia

5. Deliberating about the Past: Decentering Deliberative Democracy
James Bohman

Part 2. The Racial Nation

6. Race, Nation, and Nation-State: Tocqueville on (U.S.) American Democracy
Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr.

7. William James on Nation and Race
Harvey Cormier

8. Race, Culture, and Black Self-Determination
Tommie Shelby

9. Prophetic Vision and Trash Talkin': Pragmatism, Feminism, and Racial Privilege
Shannon Sullivan

Part 3. The Tragedy and Comedy of Empire

10. The Unpredictable American Empire
Richard Rorty

11. Transcending the "Gory Cradle of Humanity": War, Loyalty, and Civic Action in Royce and James
Eduardo Mendieta

12. Pragmatism and War
Robert Westbrook

13. Laughter against Hubris: A Preemptive Strike
Cynthia Willett

Interview with Cornel West, Conducted by Eduardo Mendieta

Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Pragmatism

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 juin 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253023506
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAGMATISM, NATION, AND RACE
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
John J. Stuhr, editor
EDITORIAL BOARD
Susan Bordo
Vincent Colapietro
John Lachs
No lle McAfee
Cheyney Ryan
Richard Shusterman
PRAGMATISM, NATION, AND RACE
Community in the Age of Empire
EDITED BY
Chad Kautzer
AND
Eduardo Mendieta
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2009 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition .
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 .
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pragmatism, nation, and race : community in the age of empire / edited by Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta.
p. cm. - (American philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35311-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-22078-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pragmatism. 2. Philosophy, American-20th century. 3. United States-Social conditions-20th century. I. Kautzer, Chad. II. Mendieta, Eduardo.
B 944. P 72. P 735 2009
144 .30973-dc22
2008052937
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10 09
Dedicated to Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
The cost of empire is not properly tabulated in the dead and maimed, or in the wasted resources, but rather in the loss of our vitality as citizens. We have increasingly ceased to participate in the process of self-government. We have become ever more frustrated and fatalistic, and hence concerned with individual gratification. Finally, we deny any responsibility; and, as part of that ultimate abdication of our birthright, indignantly deny that the United States is or ever was an empire. But that is to deny our own history. We have transformed our imperial way of life from a culture that we built and benefited from into an abstract self-evident Law of Nature that we must now re-examine in light of its costs and consequences. It is, we shrug, simply the way of the world. Empire is freedom. Empire is liberty. Empire is security. We may well be doomed by our acceptance of the imperial dogma that democracy is dependent upon a surplus of space and resources. Our only chance is to talk straight to ourselves and to flinch.
William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION : Community in the Age of Empire
Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta
PART ONE
Transformative Communities and Enlarged Loyalties
ONE
When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment
Robert Brandom
TWO
The Unexamined Frontier: Dewey, Pragmatism, and America Enlarged
David H. Kim
THREE
Pragmatism and Solidarity with the Past
Max Pensky
FOUR
Mead on Cosmopolitanism, Sympathy, and War
Mitchell Aboulafia
FIVE
Deliberating about the Past: Decentering Deliberative Democracy
James Bohman
PART TWO
The Racial Nation
SIX
Race, Nation, and Nation-State: Tocqueville on (U.S.) American Democracy
Lucius T. Outlaw Jr .
SEVEN
William James on Nation and Race
Harvey Cormier
EIGHT
Race, Culture, and Black Self-Determination
Tommie Shelby
NINE
Prophetic Vision and Trash Talkin : Pragmatism, Feminism, and Racial Privilege
Shannon Sullivan
PART THREE
The Tragedy and Comedy of Empire
TEN
The Unpredictable American Empire
Richard Rorty
ELEVEN
Transcending the Gory Cradle of Humanity : War, Loyalty, and Civic Action in Royce and James
Eduardo Mendieta
TWELVE
Pragmatism and War
Robert Westbrook
THIRTEEN
Laughter against Hubris: A Preemptive Strike
Cynthia Willett
Interview with Cornel West, Conducted by Eduardo Mendieta
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Kelly Oliver. While Kelly was Chair of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University, she provided the seed money to host the conference at which many of these papers were originally presented. We also want to thank Ann Kaplan, Director of the Humanities Institute, for her support and encouragement, and Jos Medina for his many insightful comments on the original manuscript. Dee Mortensen, our editor at Indiana University Press, took this project under her wing and raised it to its present quality. We are particularly grateful for her wisdom as well as that of John Stuhr, which guided us through many hurdles and editorial challenges.
Contributors who participated in the Stony Brook conference have been particularly gracious. They generously accepted the invitation to come and join us at Stony Brook without monetary reward and have been patient throughout the manuscript s long journey to publication. The papers by Jim Bohman, Max Pensky, and Mitch Aboulafia were originally presented at a panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy. They were expanded for inclusion in the book together with original essays by Shannon Sullivan and Robert B. Westbrook. We are profoundly grateful to all of them for their trust and solicitude.
We also want to acknowledge Robert Brandom for granting us permission to reprint his essay on Louis Menand s The Metaphysical Club , and Cornel West, who granted Eduardo Mendieta the time to conduct a long interview, originally intended for this book. Chad Kautzer would also like to thank Manuel Schottm ller, Farnaz Shahshahani Far, Daniel Loick, and particularly Jenny Weyel for their friendship and hospitality during his stays in Frankfurt and Berlin, where much work on this volume was completed with generous financial support from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the Max Kade Foundation.
Finally, a special thanks goes to Richard Rorty, who as always was very generous with his time. He gave the plenary lecture at the Stony Brook conference but also joined us for its entirety, eating with the graduate students and participating in the friendly banter that followed each paper. The paper he presented, and here included, went through several revisions, evidence that he was deeply worried about the subject matter of what was to be one of his last lectures. We are very saddened that he did not see this volume in print before his untimely death.
PRAGMATISM, NATION, AND RACE
Introduction: Community in the Age of Empire
Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta
The recent revival of American pragmatism has, for the most part, been a retrieval wary of elision, involving a return not only to figures like George Herbert Mead, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, but to previously neglected pragmatists like W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who placed the color line on the front line of democratic struggles. This retrieval could thus be seen as the beginning of a reconstruction of American pragmatism that seeks to fulfill the radical democratic promise of American Reconstruction. Yet not long into this process, the attacks of 9/11 pierced the social imaginary, rejuvenating American imperialism and its logic of racial supremacy and gentrification. A creative rethinking of the pragmatist tradition, intended to meet this new challenge to the democratic project (in both its actualities and potentialities), has thus become more urgent and more challenging as political hope becomes increasingly tempered and philosophical vision more circumscribed.
This anthology seeks to engage the relationship among the historical context, intellectual milieu, rational unfolding, and meta-narratives that gravitated around and framed both the emergence and resurgence of pragmatism. Our contributors investigate the political-philosophical status of community, democracy, and cosmopolitanism as well as the enduring legacy of racism and nationalism in American philosophy and cultural identity. The diversity of theoretical orientations brought to bear in this volume-from American Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Race Theory to American Studies, African American and Diaspora Studies, and Post-Colonial Theory-provide a uniquely rich and informative engagement with several ongoing debates concerning the limits of solidarity and the possibility of cosmopolitanism, the role that race and ethnicity should play in American culture and identity, the problems implicit in the status of the United States as republic and empire, and whether early pragmatism s conciliatory, experimental disposition inevitably led to the Unionist compromise and subsequent oppressive ideologies after the Civil War. While the book has organized these debates around three thematic rubrics that guide the contributions and dialogue, each part inevitably overlaps with the others, producing a continuous and coherent, albeit polyphonic, dialogue throughout.
One possible way of talking about the emergence of pragmatism in the United States could be to refer simultaneously to the Civil War and the transformation of the United States into a fledging empire. The Civil War was and remains one of the most central events in the history of the United States. It stands on the same level as the Declaration of Independence and the revolutionary war at the end of the eighteenth century. In fact, the Civil War was a second founding of the nation. One may even argue that the Civil War provided the opportunity to establish the nation on a different foundation than the foundi