For much of our century, pragmatism has enjoyed a charmed life,
holding the dominant point of view in American politics, law,
education, and social thought in general. After suffering a brief
eclipse in the post-World War II period, pragmatism has enjoyed a
revival, especially in literary theory and such areas as
poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this sweeping critique of
pragmatism and neopragmatism, one of our leading intellectual
historians traces the attempts of thinkers from William James to
Richard Rorty to find a response to the crisis of modernism. John
Patrick Diggins analyzes the limitations of pragmatism from a
historical perspective and dares to ask whether America's one
original contribution to the world of philosophy has actually
fulfilled its promise. In the late nineteenth century,
intellectuals felt themselves in the grips of a spiritual crisis.
This confrontation with the "acids of modernity" eroded older
faiths and led to a sense that life would continue in the
awareness, of absences: knowledge without truth, power without
authority, society without spirit, self without identity, politics
without virtue, existence without purpose, history without meaning.
In Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber faced a world in which
God was "dead" and society was succumbing to structures of power
and domination. In America, Henry Adams resigned from Harvard when
he realized there were no truths to be taught and when he could
only conclude: "Experience ceases to educate". To the American
philosophers of pragmatism, it was experience that provided the
basis on which new methods of knowing could replace older ideas of
truth. Diggins examines how, in different ways, WilliamJames,
Charles Peirce, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., demonstrated that modernism posed no obstacle in
fields such as science, education, religion, law, politics, and
diplomacy. Diggins also examines the work of the neopragmatists
Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty and their attempt to resolve the
crisis of postmodernism. Using one author to interrogate another,
Diggins brilliantly allows the ideas to speak to our conditions as
well as theirs. Did the older philosophers succeed in fulfilling
the promises of pragmatism? Can the neopragmatists write their way
out of what they have thought themselves into? And does America
need philosophers to tell us that we do not need foundational
truths when the Founders already told us that the Constitution
would be a "machine" that would depend more upon the "counterpoise"
of power than on the claims of knowledge? Diggins addresses these
and other essential questions in this magisterial account of
twentieth-century intellectual life. It should be read by everyone
concerned about the roots of postmodernism (and its links to
pragmatism) and about the forms of thought and action available for
confronting a world after postmodernism.
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