Volume 42, Number 3 · February 16, 1995
Pragmatism Rides Again
By Alan Ryan
The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority
by John P. Diggins
University of Chicago Press, 515 pp., $29.95
You might imagine that the hero of The Promise of Pragmatism would be John Dewey the sturdy democrat, or William James the enemy of the cult of bigness and 'the bitch goddess SUCCESS,' or even the mordant and self-destructive Charles Sanders Peirce—perhaps an unlikely hero, but the most inventive of American philosophers. All three, and especially Dewey, play a large part in advancing the book's case; but it turns out the hero of John Diggins's account of the intellectual, spiritual, and political yearnings of nineteenth and twentieth century America is that unsatisfied and unsatisfying character, the historian Henry Adams.
Review, 5787 words
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