Our Progressive Century (7)

William James - Pragmatism

If you have been a good student of Progressivism, you will recall that the Fabian Society believed in the gradual progress of socialism ... thus the term "Progressive".

To insert collectivism into a U.S. culture and legal system defined by its opposite was no small task. Progressive icons like John Dewey and William James developed a new intellectual foundation, based upon new theories of human existence. This surge of social theory became the underpinning for socialism in academia - a bulwark of the Progressive movement and husband to another key constituency - the intelligentsia.

Pragmatism has ably served Progressives as justification for disregarding inconvenient legal limits on government intrusion into the non-government sphere. This is how Progressives get around the founding fathers' roadblocks to the undoing of liberty - without having to amend the Constitution. At the start of Our Progressive Century, pragmatism motivated intellectual leaders like Woodrow Wilson to inject the authority of the state into nearly every aspect of civic life. Thus, pragmatism helped undermine the bedrock constitutional doctrine of delegated, and thus limited, government powers.

[excerpted from wikipedia]

William James (1842-1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.

The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., James George Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Carl Jung and Benito Mussolini.

Pragmatism is a philosophic school generally considered to have originated in the late nineteenth century with Charles Peirce, who first stated the pragmatic maxim. It came to fruition in the early twentieth-century philosophies of William James and John Dewey. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists consider practical consequences or real effects to be vital components of both meaning and truth. Other important aspects of pragmatism include anti-Cartesianism, radical empiricism, instrumentalism, anti-realism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and fallibilism.