Courtship with anarchy: The sociopolitical foundations of William James's pragmatis

The focus of the dissertation is the impact of William James's socio-political interests of the 1890s on his later writings. Drawing on published and unpublished correspondence and manuscripts, as well as annotated books from James's library, it is shown that James became increasingly interested in various strains of radical social and political thought and ultimately thought of himself as an intellectual anarchist. While James's affinity for American democratic ideals and pluralism has been pointed out in the extant literature, neither the increasing radicalization of James's political views during the last two decades of his life, nor the importance of this change for his published works after 1897, has been sufficiently addressed. The dissertation documents this change and its impact, and provides a theme unifying James's unpublished correspondence and the corpus of his published writings in psychology, religion and philosophy at the turn of the century.;Early chapters review the James literature and, through a discussion of anarchism and radical social thought in nineteenth-century America--including that of Henry James, Sr.--establish the context through which to understand James's later variant of anarchistic individualism. The dissertation then traces the development of James's radical individualism in the 1890s as he reacted especially to the Spanish-American War, continued American presence in the Philippines, and the Dreyfus Affair. Finally, it demonstrates how James's anarchistic individualism pervaded his psychological and philosophical writing at the turn of the century, citing examples from Talks to Teachers, The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, various minor essays, and ultimately, the essays on Pragmatism.;A major point of the thesis is that pragmatism was not merely the logical extension of his earlier ideas, but was an outgrowth of James's socio-political activities, reading and thinking in the course of the 1890s. It is demonstrated that James in his later years came to consider himself an anarchist and it is argued that he intended pragmatism to be an anarchist contribution--a worldview embracing philosophical, social and political domains.