2 American pragmatists
In the United States, too, there had been a desire at the turn of the
century to escape from the dogmatic identification of liberty and the market. The
progressive era, with its programme of regulating the robber barons, ushered in a more
critical attitude. Historians Charles and Mary Beard wrote an iconoclastic account of the
constitution, listing the economic holdings of the framers. The message was evident: The
American constitution was not an absolute and universal ideal, but the juridical framework
of sectional financial interests (and hence, government was justified in acting against
those interests, even where its actions appeared unconstitutional). And, contrary to the
mainstream political nativism, American anthropologists, like Margaret Mead, Herscovits
and Ruth Benedict inspired by Franz Boas were looking at the moral codes of other
cultures, and learning the lesson that the White race was only one amongst many.
It was the pragmatists, John Dewey, William
James and CS Pierce that created the intellectual framework in which it was possible to
reconcile these contradictory ideas of race and nation, liberty and government. Like the
analytical philosophers in Britain, the pragmatists rejected the determinate totalities of
classical philosophy in favour of a more eclectic approach. Dewey in particular did most
to draw a generation of American radicals back into the fold. In the twilight of his life
Dewey courted the renegade Bolshevik leader Trotsky in Mexico, at the behest of his
radical students, like Max Eastman and Sidney Hook. To those
younger American radicals Trotsky represented the lost ideal of the Russian revolution. To
Trotsky, Dewey was the academic authority needed to give the stamp of respectability to
his counter-enquiry to Stalin's show trials. To Dewey Trotsky's arguments case against
capitalism could be plundered for arguments against the laisser faire policies in his own
country, while Trotsky's denunciation of Stalin was the living evidence that bolshevism,
too, could fail. In the long run it was Dewey's pragmatism that won out, as successive
layers of American radicals embraced Dewey's philosophy as an alternative to the 'God that
failed'. Passing through the Trotskyist milieu they had the best informed arguments
against the Soviet Union to contribute to a new Cold War liberalism, but they also had
reinvigorated Dewey's pragmatism.
After the second world war British analytic philosophy and American
pragmatism merged more closely as a narrowly apolitical concern with matters of formal
logic and semantics united such thinkers as Ayer in Britain and WVO Quine in the US.
American sociologists
The influence of positivism in the US was not wholly within the realm of
philosophy. Early American sociologists were inspired by Comte and Durkheim.
At the University of Chicago the study of urban populations rested the race question from
eugenics and criminology from ethics. Studies like Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown,
while theoretically naïve, nonetheless proved the worth of social research. Functional
sociology, while criticised, was given a new lease of life by Talcott
Parsons' integration of Durkheim's structural positivism and Weber's
ideal-types. It was Parsons who wrote President Eisenhower's bon mot that freedom meant
the freedom to fail as well as to succeed. But positivist sociology in the US was dealt a
death blow by the success of Karl Gunnar Myrdal's Weberian magnum opus An American
Dilemma (1944). Commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation as a study on the position of
America's black people, the Swedish sociologist's analysis of racism as a cultural
hangover of slavery made Weber's approach to sociology mainstream - so much so that the
work was admitted as evidence in the famous Brown v Board of Education judgement
that overturned segregation in schools. Peter Berger moved
American sociology irretrievably out of the positivist orbit with his phenomenologically
inspired The Social Construction of Reality, written with the German sociologist
Thomas Luckmann.
3 Analysts and therapists