I'm back

After a week long hiatus, I'm back and blogging. Last week was mentally exhausting. I spent most of my free time working on a fifteen page midterm for my "History of American Thought" class.

I am the only one in the class. Originally there were four of us. The two other guys in the class dropped the course because they couldn't hack it. The lone female of our small group had a death in her immediate family and had to drop out of school for a term. That just leaves me.

I've never been in a class this small. It basically amounts to a guided independent study with an adviser. It is tough. Dr. Sklansky, the instructor, assigns a ton of reading for a three-credit course. What is more,as the only student, I can't get away with not doing the reading for a day. That being said, this might be my favorite class I have taken at OSU. "Great Figures: Jesus" with Marcus Borg, and "The History of Sexuality" with Robert Nye were both awesome but this one is right up there. Dr. Sklansky got his Ph.D. from Columbia and is a brilliant man. He is pithy and insightful. He makes the hard concepts we study easy to understand. Also, we usually just skip the classroom entirely and meet for lunch somewhere to have a dialogue about the reading. The class material is very interesting to me and I see so many parallels between the problems this country was having at the end of the nineteenth-century and the problems we are having today. That might be why I went a little above and beyond on the midterm.

He gave the midterm to me on Thursday the 7th and I worked on it throughout the week. I just kept writing. And writing. It was supposed to be due Thursday the 14th but, if I don't turn it in, what is he going to do? Also, how can the paper be considered late if there is no one to actually turn it in ON TIME. So, I got an extension to Friday at 5 which turned into an extension to Friday at midnight. I put the finishing touches on the paper around 11 and then played "drinking hockey" with my roommates and assorted other friends.

The focus of the essay was the labor/capital conflict of the Gilded Age and the rise of Pragmatist Philosophy in the United States. Here is a sample, copied and pasted for your viewing pleasure:



In what ways, and how satisfactorily or persuasively, did the Pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Holmes respond to the social and ideological conflict over industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century? Consider the character, scope, and significance of the Pragmatist response to the crisis of the Gilded Age with reference to the alternative responses represented by the readings in the first half of the course. Your answer should describe the broad parameters of the Pragmatist approach as well as the more specific ideas of individual thinkers.



Less than a half century after the Civil War tore the country apart, The United States of America was teetering on the brink of another war with the potential to be even more destructive. This new conflict had nothing to do with states’ rights and everything to do with class. In the years after the Civil War, the rise of industrialization and the laissez faire Social Darwinist logic of political economy, according to Alan Trachtenberg, “produced new monied dynasties: a ruling stratum of inherited wealth, position, and power.” In contrast to these ultra-wealthy capitalists, the industrialization of America also created a huge, new American working class of wage laborers who performed work for long hours at low pay that was often “dirty, backbreaking, and frustrating,” and were crammed into “slum tenements.” The disproportionate levels of power and wealth between capitalists and working-class wage laborers forced the working men and women to band together into labor unions such as the Knights of Labor. The Knights, who were fundamentally opposed to the free labor system, blew up in size in the 1880s. The primary method that unions used to stand up to big industrial business was the strike. The tens of thousands of strikes in the peak years of 1877, 1886, and 1892-93 serve to show how unstable the situation was.

Into this great societal upheaval stepped the Pragmatist philosophers. In a world which seemed increasingly hemmed in by large forces such as the economic laws of political economists or the natural human rights presented by Rationalist philosophers, Pragmatism rejected these fixed systems and first principles. In many ways, this revolt against all forms of dogma was a response to the crisis of belief that came with the class struggle between labor and capital. Pragmatism tried to avoid the labor/capital dualism entirely and move the terrain of the conflict to a discussion of individual and social welfare. Ultimately, Pragmatism was able to advance a progressive ideology that helped the working poor while avoiding radical class revolution.

Labor thinkers in the late nineteenth-century presented a dualism in which working-class laborers and capitalists were fundamentally opposed. Henry George traced the powerlessness of the workers and unequal distribution of wealth to the private ownership of land. The dualism for him was between wealthy landowners and the people who worked the land. The landowners could extort the people who worked their land with unfair rents. His solution was the radical conversion of land from private property to common property. Thorstein Veblen articulated a class conflict between a working class of manual laborers and a “leisure class” of capitalists who exploited the laborers to acquire great wealth and were exalted for doing so. The Knights of Labor, the most influential labor organization of the 1880s, declared in their manifesto, “an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and republican system of government.”

Capitalist apologists, on the other hand, exalted the fixed systems of social Darwinism and classical, free-market economics. Responding to unrest among poverty-stricken farmers, J. Laurence Laughlin argued that it was only the stupid and unfortunate farmers who were having trouble. He argued that wherever men “of executive ability” farmed on good soil, there was prosperity. William Graham Sumner argued that the rich earned their wealth through hard work and self-denial while the poor lacked wealth because they were “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” Andrew Carnegie claimed that free-market economics led to progress so profound that the poor of the Gilded Age were better off than the rich of a century before. Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller wrote, “The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest, the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”

Pragmatism was a rejection of the kind of “natural law” advocated by Rockefeller. Additionally, though the Pragmatists were sympathetic to the plight of working class, they rejected the labor/capital dualism suggested by the leading minds of the labor movement. The leading Pragmatist philosophers wanted to move the focus of the entire conflict away from class struggle toward the advancement of the social welfare using Pragmatic method.

The widely-accepted progenitor of pragmatism is Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce, according to William James, first articulated the Pragmatist philosophy in his essay “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” Peirce was skeptical of a priori fixed systems such as political economy but had great faith in human intelligence if it was employed in the right way. The right way, for Peirce, was through the use of scientific method. He specifically attacked political economy in the essay, “Evolutionary Love.” He wrote, “The economists accuse those to whom the enunciation of their atrocious villainies communicates a thrill of horror of being sentimentalists. It may be so: I willingly confess to having some tincture to sentimentalism in me, God be thanked!” Peirce wanted see scientific method applied to philosophy and economics in service of sentimentalism. Peirce’s work paved the way for the development of the social sciences by others, such as his colleague and friend, James.

James has been called the “founder of modern psychology.” His version of Pragmatism, though he claimed it came from Peirce, was much less concerned with realizing objective truth. James’s solution to class conflict was to change the way we, as individuals, conceptualize it. James had great faith in the human ability to control our own lives. He wrote that habit is, “the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.” Logically, it follows that by changing our habits we can change society. He wrote, “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.”

In addition to changing their habits to improve their lives, James asserted that individuals can choose the truths that work best for them. “Purely objective truth,” he wrote, “truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatever, is nowhere to be found.” James articulated pragmatic method as, “the attitude of looking away from first things, principle, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.” Thus, people can ignore the principles which had a negative impact on their lives and only accept as true that which experience teaches us “is better for us to believe.” For the people of the Gilded Age, this meant they were not bound by principles thrown at them by ivory tower intellectuals. They were free to choose their own truth.

John Dewey inherited James’s pragmatist aversion to dogma surrounding labor and capital, but focused on societal welfare instead of the individual. Dewey applied pragmatic method to the “social organism.” He was a great proponent of democracy because he felt that it was the best form of government yet constructed for expressing the will of the social organism. He rejected all forms of dualism, including the labor/capital dualism suggested by the radical segments of the labor movement. Though he rejected some of the more radical precepts of the labor movement, he argued that America needed to move toward “industrial democracy”, as well as civil and political, though he admitted that he did not know what an industrial democracy would look like. In order to investigate ways achieve a better society, he attempted to mobilize pragmatist philosophers. He wrote, “Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large task for our philosophy.”

Like Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes promoted a philosophy for improving society to cope with the problems of the Gilded Age. Unlike Peirce, James, and Dewey, Holmes was concerned strictly with the legal framework of society and did not even consider himself a Pragmatist. His rejection of legal formalism, however, and advocacy of a new method of jurisprudence which would come to be called “legal realism,” caused many people to lump him with the early Pragmatist thinkers. Holmes discounted the idea that judges could take the facts of a case and logically reason their way to a conclusion. Instead, he argued that judges looked at history and used their own subjective experience to make judgments. He wrote, " The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed." If judges don’t logically deduce their decisions from set principles, it follows that much of the law within the American common law tradition is judge-made law. As such, Holmes contended, judges have a duty to “weigh considerations of social advantage” when making their decisions. Taking into account the labor/capital conflict of the Gilded Age, he advised legal professionals to study economics, history, and philosophy in order to better fulfill their social duty.

Holmes and the Pragmatist philosophers successfully avoided class revolution by shifting the discussion of Gilded Age problems away from class conflict and toward individual and social welfare. The historian R. Jeffrey Lustig has argued that this shift was an evasion that actually preserved the status quo. While it is true that the Pragmatists ignored politically-charged, activist segments of the labor movement who advocated action to overthrow the capitalist system, Pragmatist philosophy paved the way for the Progressive movement which cured many of the ills of the Gilded Age without a full-blown class war.




Peace and Love,

Andy