A look at how pragmatism—a quintessentially “American” philosophy—was the vanguard of a cultural revolution that altered the entire world.

As shaped by William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and others, pragmatism is considered the most American of philosophical currents, brashly privileging action, experience, embodiment, contingency, and real-world impact. In The Intellectual Earthquake, James Livingston recaptures pragmatism’s initial scandalous vitality and its worldwide influence. Livingston ambitiously covers more than a century, showing pragmatist roots in countless strains of thought, and connecting seemingly far-flung and disparate thinkers. He also aims to explain how pragmatism has been steadily maligned and misunderstood, and he makes the case for fresh attention to its lineal influence on “French Theory.” 

James Livingston is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University. He is the author of many books, including Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul and No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. 

Preface

Introduction: The Persistence of Pragmatism, or The Perennial Return of William James

Part I. Seismology
1. Pragmatism In and As Intellectual History
The Questions
The Intellectuals’ Exceptionalism
War and the Intellectuals
2. Moral Philosophy, Social Ethics, Radical Empiricism
Beyond Utilitarianism
Social Ethics
Radical Empiricism
3. Being in Time
History of the Self
Hesiod’s Heirs, Aristotle to Kant
A Purely Inherent Existence
4. The Labor Question
From Hegel and Marx to Whitman and James
The Ideal Tramp as the Scientist of the Superfluous
5. Marx, James, and the Proletariat
From Mourning to Melancholia: Requiem for the Working Class
The Proletarian vs. the Inner-Directed Individual
Arendt, Heidegger, and Lasch in the Prison House of Poiesis
6. Money Questions, Financial Metaphors, Moral Equivalents
Banking, or Betting, on the Truth
Commodity Fetishism as a Division in Time
7. The Phenomenology of Religious Experience
The Intersection of the Sacred and the Profane
The Uniformity of the God-Idea
8. The Time of Being: Varieties of Modernism
The Politics of Language
The Vanishing Subject in the Psychology of James
9. The Politics of Linguistic Turns
Philosophies of Language
Money, Class, Corporate Capitalism
10. The Metaphysics of Money
From Marx to Nietzsche to Derrida, and Back Again
The Varieties of Pragmatism and Pluralism
The Politics of Poetry

Part II. Measuring the Aftershocks
11. The French Connection: Tracking the “Unhappy Consciousness”
Breaking the Silence
From Kojève to Wahl to Derrida
The “Unhappy Consciousness” as Religious Experience: From Royce and James to Wahl
12. Toward the Concrete
The Empiricisms of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger
The Transcendent and the Immanent
13. Expropriation of the Means of Predication: The Radicalization of Marxism in “French Theory”
What We Talk About When We Talk About Post-Structuralism
The Varieties of Marxism
14. The French Reception of Pragmatism Before the 1920s
Early Engagement: Bergson’s “Utilitarian Romanticism”
Competition and Appropriation: Durkheim and Sorel on Pragmatism
15. The Difference Made by Derrida’s Writing
From Hyppolite to Derrida, Bataille, and Foucault
Toward Nietzsche
16. “The Greek Logos Had No Contrary”: Foucault’s Return to the Origin
Power, Ethics, History
The Primal Scene of Subjectivity
17. Full Circle: The Return of Radical Empiricism and the Re-Marxification of “French Theory”
From Wahl to Deleuze
Toward Pragmatism
18. After Empire: The Radicalization of Empiricism, Redux
The Politics of a Radicalized Empiricism
From Empire to Pluralism and Cosmopolitanism
War and the Intellectuals, Once More

Coda

Acknowledgments
A Note on Methods
Bibliographic Essays
Index