Henry James (original) (raw)

James and Politics: The Radical Democracy of a Radical Empiricist

The Oxford Handbook of William James, ed. Alexander Klein 2018 ff., 2020

William James never developed a comprehensive political philosophy. The radically pluralist epistemology and metaphysics for which “pragmatism” became his shorthand represented a revolt against all closed systems of thought. Yet James’s very resistance to certainty and finality led him to participate actively in civic life. Varying by context, this activity was consistently guided by James’s pragmatist accounts of individual experience, moral obligation, and social interdependence, which to him implied a collective, ongoing responsibility to balance freedom, justice, and order amid complexity and change. Though providing no detailed blueprint for achieving and maintaining that balance, James’s writings suggest a suite of practices and institutions that, in various forms and degrees, have proven effective in the past and deserve continued trial. These writings also articulate a regulative ideal by which to evaluate all such experiments: an ideal of popular participation in all levels of social ordering that James described, toward the end of his life, as “radical democracy.”