Review of James Kloppenberg's "Uncertain Victory"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

There are many books that provide a systematic history of a certain subject (Menand’s “Metaphysical Club,” for example, looks at the birth of philosophical pragmatism in the United States), but it’s much rarer to find a book that starts with a philosophical foundation, and then goes on beyond it and reaches into another field. That is precisely what Kloppenberg does here, focusing on much the same subject that Menand discusses in his book. The project is impressive in its scope: starting with the birth of American pragmatism and European historicism, he argues that many of the great liberal and progressive social reformers of this time period, unimpressed with the various dualisms that had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes, used pragmatism and the ideals of philosophical liberalism to undergird their social programs and ideas. 

During the first third of the book, Kloppenberg details why previous philosophical ideas proved unable to deal with complex social and philosophical problems, and why this dissatisfaction necessitated the birth of pragmatism. He focuses here on six thinkers and their critiques of previous ideas: they are William James, Alfred Fouillee, Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green, Henry Sidgwick, and John Dewey. The general criticism they level against previous philosophical thought was its interaction between subject and object (or, in the language of psychology, stimulus and response), which assumed they could be separated and thought of as different entities. Dewey especially takes this idea to task, calling for experience to be understood as a unified whole, instead of a series of subjects understanding different objects. He said that we need to think of experience as a “reflex circuit instead of an arc,” i.e., not one-way, but something more resembling a simultaneously feedback loop. James, whose early career was just as much involved in psychology as it was in philosophy, elaborated on these points, creating what is in effect a uniquely American epistemology focusing on the wholeness of lived experience instead of abstract, theoretical interactions between the mind and reality.

The Europeans of the group, especially Fouillee and Dilthey, tried to correct for the ahistorical trends that were prevalent in a lot of philosophy. Descartes and Kant had conceived of knowledge has happening in the utterly disconnected brain, unconditioned by culture or society. To even study one person in a specific context is pointless, since, according to Dilthey, “the connection of the individual with humanity is a reality … The starting point lies in my consciousness so far as it contains a coherence of knowledge which is in agreement with other consciousnesses perceived by me – a coherence therefore which extends beyond my own consciousness.” Here, Dilthey gives what is, more or less, a pragmatist theory of truth – one that emphasizes coherence more than correspondence with reality. Disenfranchised by both philosophical idealism and empiricism, these thinkers opted for history as the source of immanent critique and the basis for all foundational judgments.

Kloppenberg then makes the move away from these radicals’ (he’s always calling them “radicals” or “renegades”) critique of epistemology and toward their critique of ethics. Previous systems – and he discusses especially Benthamite utilitarianism – provided a final, lasting system of ethical principles. As Fouillee noted in “The Psychology of Idees-Forces,” while the dualism of pleasure and pain “may constitute the dominant quality of original sensations,” it is hardly the sole content of human consciousness. By failing to differentiate between among experiences, he argues that Bentham’s calculus of happiness ultimately proves inadequate. There was also a growing acknowledgement between public (the commonweal) and private interests (which Kloppenberg terms “prudence,” but might more appropriately be called “self-interest”). Sidgwick, Dilthey, and James especially doubted that tragic collisions between self-interest and the requirements of justice could ever be prevented. All six thought that politics was ultimately reducible to philosophical questions over values, about which there can be no final answers.

While the first half of the book focuses on the history of philosophical tradition and a critique thereof, the second half considers how contemporaries expressed similar ideals, though they sought to locate them in the action of social reform and progressivism. Again, he presents six representative thinkers: Eduard Bernstein, Richard T. Ely, Beatrice Webb, Sidney Webb, Jean Jaures, and Walter Rauschenbusch. Kloppenberg claims that “there is a distinctive continuity between the two groups’ philosophical and political ideas.” The similarity here seems to be mostly in their respective views of history. Only Bernstein spoke of a “critique of socialist reason,” but all of them thought that socialism should let go of its scientific pretense. The pretense to science is just a smug confidence “in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat.” Instead, they argued for a radically empiricist approach to historical understanding, approaching knowledge as a “conscious process of truth testing and its recognition of the historical and qualitative dimensions of understanding.” In the last few chapters, another set of six (yes, a third set!) are considered in the context of mostly European power politics. Those thinkers are Leon Bourgeois, Leonhard T. Hobhouse, Max Weber, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey (again).

The second half of the book begins to flirt with something Susan Haack once referred to in a New Criterion article as “vulgar Rortyism.” As I mentioned above, these thinkers criticized Marxist conceptions of history for their scientism, but Kloppenberg almost leads the reader to believe that pragmatism should be in the service of democratic politics. He also manages to turn pragmatism – a relatively well-defined, mostly American, philosophical tradition – into something smacking of mushy relativism. Granted, the author never includes pragmatists like Peirce who emphasize the role of logic and science in any of the 17 people that he examines, this strand of thought seems to get lost – a dubious trait in what seems to be a book about the historical development of pragmatism and Anglo-European historicism. 

While I found the intellectual connections in the first part of the book fascinating, Kloppenberg fails when trying to show that those same ideas influenced the second and third groups of six. He just flatly claims that the philosophers influenced the social reformers and progressives, but never connects the threads for the reader, which is a serious fault in a book of intellectual history. And none of this is helped by the fact that Kloppenberg insists on covering the contributions of so many people. In parts, it seems like a rush to list all the contributions and name the important books associated with one of the above. For sheer ambition and breadth, I think this is an interesting book to look into, especially if you’re excited by Kloppenberg’s interdisciplinarity. But for being included on so many graduate-level European and American intellectual history syllabi, I was surprised to find the book has the weaknesses that it does.