Book Review: Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism, by Alexander Livingston

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Author: Eric MacGilvray
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717740070
• Date: 01 February 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

138 Political Theory 47(1)

Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism, by Alexander

Livingston. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by: Eric MacGilvray, Ohio State University

DOI: 10.1177/0090591717740070

William James was one of the most influential American thinkers of the

Gilded Age, and during his long career at Harvard University served as a

teacher and mentor to many of the leading lights of early twentieth-century

American social and political thought, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace

Kallen, Walter Lippmann, Alain Locke, and Ralph Barton Perry—as well as

future governor and president Theodore Roosevelt. He was a correspondent

of and inspiration to many more. However, while James’s status as one of the

founders of philosophical pragmatism—and, to a lesser extent, his commit-

ment to metaphysical pluralism and “radical empiricism”—has attracted sub-

stantial attention from political theorists and political philosophers, he has

seldom if ever been treated as a political thinker in his own right. This is

largely because, unlike his fellow pragmatist John Dewey, he wrote very little

about politics, and nothing systematic.

Alexander Livingston’s Damn Great Empires! makes the case that James

was nevertheless “an important and innovative theorist of politics” (p. 4). The

central claim of the book, as its title suggests, is that “the originality and impor-

tance of James’s political thought lies in its philosophical examination and trans-

formation of the psychic, affective, and cultural roots of American imperialism

at a crucial moment in the nation’s rise to global hegemony.” Where “the master

theme of Dewey’s political thought is democracy as a way of life,” Livingston

argues, “James’s political vision, by contrast, reorients political thought towards

the problem of empire as a way of life” (p. 7, original emphasis).

Livingston develops this striking thesis by exploring what he refers to as

James’s “anti-imperialist Nachlass”; “the collection of notes, correspondence,

occasional essays, and editorials James composed in the final decade of his life

in reaction to the Spanish-American War and its imperial aftermath” (p. 2).

These writings, he suggests, can serve “as keys for unlocking the political sig-

nificance of [James’s] writings on truth, religion, and metaphysics” (p. 7).

Although Livingston makes judicious use of correspondence and archival

papers, he focuses primarily on published books and essays, and some of the

occasional essays, like “The Moral Equivalent of War,” are quite well known.

This stretches the meaning of the word Nachlass somewhat, but Livingston

nevertheless performs a valuable service in pulling together a group of writings

that are usually considered apart from James’s main corpus and showing that