A miserable fit of the blues: Pragmatism, exceptionalism and the failure of American Marxism, 1900-1922.

Abstract

This study documents the encounter, on both philosophical and political terrain, between American pragmatism and European Marxism during the first two decades of the 20th century. I narrate the struggle to construct the scientific conceptions of American reality that thinkers from both traditions used to legitimize agendas for the reconstruction of social theory and American society, paying particular attention to the effort to translate Marxism into an American idiom. By exposing the philosophical underpinnings of this contest, I illuminate dimensions of American radical discourse and practice that have eluded historians attentive only to the stated, political commitments of the radical tradition. I argue that intellectuals' readings of the major political events of this period--the outbreak of war in 1914, the decision by the U.S. to intervene in 1917, and the success, just months later, of a Marxist-led seizure of power in Russia--are prefigured in arguments beginning in the 1890's over the character of modern science. The theoretical crisis sparked by the outbreak of war and revolution in Europe, in turn, serves as a crucible for canons of interpretation that continue to shape the way we understand American politics and history. The war-related effort to create a sufficiently nasty image of German Kultur to justify American intervention constitutes a key moment in the construction of a distinctively pragmatist, Anglo-American tradition. The thinness of American Marxism derives in part from radicals' failure at this critical juncture to defend and develop the theoretical commitments that define Marxism as a distinctive variety of anticapitalism.