2019 Book RecoveringOverlookedPragmatist

Recovering Overlooked
Pragmatists in
Communication
Extending the Living Conversation
about Pragmatism and Rhetoric
Edited by
Robert Danisch
Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists
in Communication
Robert Danisch
Editor
Recovering
Overlooked
Pragmatists
in Communication
Extending the Living Conversation about
Pragmatism and Rhetoric
Editor
Robert Danisch
Department of Communication Arts
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-14342-8 ISBN 978-3-030-14343-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932942
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Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to all of those scholars involved in the creative

rereading of our various intellectual histories. I am deeply indebted to
the scholars who have contributed essays to this volume for their abil-
ity to think beyond the regular canon of pragmatist philosophers. I have
benefitted from many conversations with those that are in this book and
many who are not. Those conversations are vital to the on-going task of
using pragmatism to make our world a little better. I’m very grateful to
the University of Waterloo for supporting my work, and for the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous sup-
port. Institutions like these are some of the greatest achievements of our
collective democratic efforts, and I am lucky to be a member of them. I
think it is fair to say the relationship between pragmatism and rhetoric is
now a central preoccupation for our field. That is the achievement of a
range of scholars over the last twenty or so years writing terrific books,
participating in panels and conferences, and thinking seriously about
what we might make of the pragmatist tradition going forward. This
book is mostly dedicated to all of the people that have been part of that
conversation for at least the last twenty years, from the senior statesmen
like Steve Mailloux to my younger colleagues with essays in this book.
A special thanks to Scott Stroud for pushing me to develop this project
when I might just have let it slip. And a special thanks to Pete Simonson
for teaching that seminar on pragmatism so many years ago. And my deep-
est appreciation is saved for Eliot and Julien, who continue to extend every
conversation that I’m a part of in the most amazing and productive ways.
v
Contents
1 On the Uses and On-going Relevance of Pragmatism

for Communication Studies 1
Robert Danisch
2 Richard McKeon in the Pragmatist Tradition 23

Peter Simonson
3 Hu Shi’s Search for the “Chinese Sophist”

and “Spirit of Courageous Doubt” 53
Rya Butterfield
4 Echoes of Pragmatism in India: Bhimrao Ambedkar

and Reconstructive Rhetoric 79
Scott R. Stroud
5 The Art of Adjustment: Ralph Ellison’s Pragmatist

Critique of Irving Howe 105
Jansen B. Werner
6 Living Pragmatism: Alice Dewey’s Open-Minded

Approach to Experiential Education and Cross-Cultural
Immersion 129
Karen Shea and Krysten Manke
vii
viii Contents
7 The Accidental Pragmatist: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral

Psychology as Pragmatic Popular Science 157
Jeremy Smyczek
8 Jane Addams’ Rhetorical Ear: Teaching, Learning,

and Listening in the Settlement House Model 177
Amy E. Dayton
9 Emergent Publics, Public Emergencies: The Importance

of John Dewey in Jane Bennett’s Nonhuman Politics
of Vital Materialism 197
Daniel P. Richards
Index 223
Notes on Contributors
Rya Butterfield is Assistant Professor of Speech in the Department

of Mass Communication at Nicholls State University, USA. She is the
recent past president of the Association for Chinese Communication
Studies and a member of the Third Council Committee of the Chinese
Rhetoric Society of the World. Her Ph.D., is in Rhetoric with a minor in
Political Theory from Louisiana State University, USA.
Robert Danisch is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department
of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is
author of Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric and
Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism.
Amy E. Dayton is Associate Professor of English and Director of the
Writing Center at The University of Alabama, USA. She is editor of
Assessing the Teaching of Writing, and has published essays in Rhetoric
Review, Community Literacy Journal, and College English.
Krysten Manke is currently a doctoral candidate for a degree in
Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Rhode Island, USA. Her
dissertation provides an archival investigation of the Dewey Laboratory
School as a site of rhetorical education. Her research interests include
the pedagogical intersections of feminism, pragmatism, and rhetorical
citizenship.
Daniel P. Richards is Assistant Professor of English at Old Dominion
University, USA, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses
ix
x Notes on Contributors
in rhetoric, technical communication, writing pedagogy, and American

pragmatism. His research specializes in professional and technical com-
munication, particularly in the context of risk and disaster, and his
work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Intercom,
Communication Design Quarterly, and Composition Forum, as well as
in several edited collections. His own co-edited collection, Posthuman
Praxis in Technical Communication (2018), has been published in the
Routledge Studies in Technical Communication, Rhetoric, and Culture
series.
Karen Shea is Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University,
USA. She has taught postsecondary English and English as a Second
Language for thirty years, both at home and abroad. Her most recent
research focuses on comparative rhetoric, open-mindedness, pragmatism,
and John Dewey’s personal correspondence from Asia.
Peter Simonson is Professor and Chair of the Department of
Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. He con-
ducts research on rhetorical practice across different media, the intellec-
tual history of communication in the United States, and the international
history of media and communication studies. He is author of Refiguring
Mass Communication: A History, lead editor of The International History
of Communication Study and The Handbook of Communication History,
and producer of two documentary films on the history of media research.
Jeremy Smyczek is Assistant Professor of English at St. Bonaventure
University, USA, where he teaches courses in composition, professional
writing, and rhetorical theory. His research investigates current uses of
American pragmatism in rhetoric and communication studies and its
potential as a tool to supplement existing approaches in the academic
communities studying scientific argument and advocacy.
Scott R. Stroud is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin, USA. His work lies at the intersection of
rhetoric and philosophy. He is author of John Dewey and the Artful Life
and Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric.
Jansen B. Werner is an independent scholar. His research explores
questions related to rhetoric, belonging, and civic life. He is currently
developing a book project that examines how Ralph Ellison employed
contradiction as a dynamic civic resource.
CHAPTER 1
On the Uses and On-going Relevance

of Pragmatism for Communication Studies
Robert Danisch
Pragmatism has a complicated intellectual history with multiple defini-

tions, a plurality of advocates and detractors, and a variety of disparate
figures all claiming some allegiance to its worldview (Menand 2002;
Diggins 1994; Bacon 2012; Stuhr 1999; Misak 2015). This book’s aim
is not to settle any of the controversy surrounding pragmatism or to
reduce the multiplicity or plurality of definitions and forms of it. That
kind of multiplicity demonstrates the advantages and vitality of the prag-
matist tradition. This book aims to cultivate a greater degree of variety
and complexity within the pragmatist tradition by interpreting and relat-
ing a series of figures that we might not ordinarily think of as pragma-
tists. In order to expand the range of characters and commitments that
characterize the pragmatist tradition, I will argue, in this chapter, that we
consider the difference between philosophical pragmatism and rhetori-
cal pragmatism. This distinction will help us track the influence of early
pragmatists on the disparate figures assessed in the forthcoming chap-
ters of this book. This distinction, in other words, will help orient our
R. Danisch (*) 
Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, ON, Canada
e-mail: rdanisch@uwaterloo.ca
© The Author(s) 2019 1

R. Danisch (ed.), Recovering Overlooked Pragmatists in Communication,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_1
2 R. DANISCH
understanding of why some key intellectual figures in the history of the

twentieth century have been overlooked as important pragmatists, and
what the cash value of reading those figures back into the pragmatist tra-
dition might be.
Philosophical pragmatism, as I call it, refers to the professional, aca-
demic concern with tracking the intellectual and theoretical implications
of positions that foreground social interaction, pluralism, and contin-
gency as basic facts of human experience. William James spent consid-
erable time in both Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth explicating
an epistemology that issues from a commitment to contingency, plural-
ity, and social interaction. Contemporary neo-pragmatists like Donald
Davidson and Robert Brandom develop philosophical pragmatisms
that go further and explicate a theory of language that issues from the
same set of commitments. Professional philosophers like Davidson and
Brandom pursue their work even though first-generation pragmatism
rejected much of the tradition of philosophy that extended from Plato
to Descartes. In other words, many pragmatist figures remain devoted
to the task of providing answers to traditional questions in the academic
discipline of philosophy despite the deep critiques of the philosophical
tradition authored by James and Dewey. But what about those figures
that might work outside of, or at the margins of, professional academic
philosophy? Rhetorical pragmatism, as I call it, takes the philosophical
insights of James, Dewey, and other pragmatist philosophers and uses
them as a theoretical resource and justification for seeking, developing,
and deploying methods and practices for improving our democratic
culture. These methods and practices are, more often than not, mat-
ters of communicative practice. William James’s commitment to public
lecturing and his investment in creating an intellectual community with
his audiences were signs of the connection between pragmatism and
rhetoric/communication (Stob). To put it more succinctly: rhetorical
pragmatism turns questions of epistemology or metaphysics into ques-
tions about the effects of our communicative practices.
In my view, philosophical pragmatism (from its beginning in the
works of John Dewey and William James) has entailed a commitment to
communication and rhetorical practice. One can see this commitment
even in the most professionalized versions of contemporary philosophical
pragmatism like Richard Rorty’s account of the contingency of language
and Robert Brandom’s social practice account of meaning. If we take
the entailment to communication and rhetorical practice seriously, then
1 ON THE USES AND ON-GOING RELEVANCE OF PRAGMATISM … 3
one way to advance the pragmatist project is to turn philosophical ques-

tions about truth, morality, logic, or aesthetics into rhetorical questions
about the best practices for citizenship, leadership, inquiry, deliberation,
public argument, and community building. In other words, one of the
intellectual projects that first-generation pragmatism has left for us is
the development and use of methods of communicative practice fit for
the advancement of contemporary democracy. The variety of chapters in
this book all show different kinds of practices or methods that could real-
ize such an end and different figures that sought ways of improving their
socio-political circumstances through leveraging pragmatist intellectual
commitments to different ends. In other words, the essays in this book
argue that what remains after philosophical pragmatism has furnished all
of the answers that it can to the full range of philosophical problems is
rhetorical pragmatism’s commitment to pursuing communication prac-
tices that will build a form of democratic life capable of generating good
decisions about pressing public issues and promoting freedom.
Taken as a whole, this book offers an alternative intellectual history
of American pragmatism, one that reclaims a series of intellectual figures
whose work can push neo-pragmatism beyond its philosophical limi-
tations. From Jane Addams and Jane Bennett to Hu Shi and Bhimrao
Ambedkar, this intellectual history asserts that a variety of forms of prag-
matism developed throughout the twentieth century both inside the
United States and outside, and that these forms of pragmatism were all
deeply concerned with rhetoric and communication in their orientations.
Taken as a whole, therefore, the essays in this book argue that one of
the major entailments of the invention of American pragmatism at the
beginning of the twentieth century is that rhetoric and communication
are important intellectual objects of study, as well as important means of
improving democratic life. Pragmatism entails a commitment to rheto-
ric and communication practices. This is the argument that philosophical
pragmatism either continues to fail to realize or continues to misun-
derstand. This book can hopefully stretch our imagination beyond the
limits of philosophical pragmatism in order to find useful ways toward
important intellectual insights and practical methods for improving our
own circumstances. In this Chapter, I will also argue that a rhetori-
cal pragmatism will be more faithful to the project of John Dewey and
William James’s work, will offer insight into the ways in which commu-
nication operates in contemporary democratic cultures, will recommend
practices, methods and modes of action for improving contemporary
4 R. DANISCH
democratic cultures, and will subordinate philosophy to rhetoric by reim-

agining appropriate ways for pragmatist scholarship and social research
to advance. In order to explicate this argument and to continue the
conversation about the relationship between pragmatism, rhetoric, and
communication, I want to clarify the distinction between p hilosophical
pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism, to consider this distinction
in the light of the disciplinary politics of higher education, and then
return to the original pragmatists for insight into what is at stake in this
distinction.
Philosophical Versus Rhetorical Pragmatism

Another book about pragmatism may be one book too many, and it
might be the case that too much has already been said about the mean-
ing of pragmatism. One could read a fairly large number of books that
begin with an account of the tradition of pragmatism and its core philo-
sophical arguments. This book does seek to add to that long list of other
books making such claims. But my purpose in this opening essay is not
to refute or dismiss this scholarship, much of which is excellent. From
Robert Westbrook and John Patrick Diggins (intellectual historians) to
Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse (philosophers), work about pragmatism
has offered detailed arguments concerning the relationships and distinc-
tions between various pragmatist figures. All of this work has helped to
fully articulate pragmatist-style answers to many philosophical questions,
thus extending and developing the tradition of pragmatism in impor-
tant ways. This book, taken as a whole, offers yet another kind of intel-
lectual history. But instead of trying to define pragmatism or dwelling
extensively on reconstructing a pragmatist tradition and extending phil-
osophical analyses, these essays will show the diverse range of influences
that pragmatism has had. To begin to explain why pragmatism has been
able to have the diverse range of influences outlined within this book, I
want to make clear two different kinds of questions that I think prag-
matism makes central. The first set of questions concerns the traditional
considerations of professional, academic philosophy, and the second set
of questions concerns how best to improve our lived experience. In my
view, examples of the first set of questions are indicative of work in phil-
osophical pragmatism, and examples of the second set of questions are
indicative of work in rhetorical pragmatism. I also think that the first set
of questions are mostly a matter of epistemology and that the second set
of questions are mostly a matter of communication. The essays in this

book reveal the cash value and promise of work in rhetorical pragmatism,
and thus attempt to extend the conversation beyond the limits of work in
philosophical pragmatism.
What are questions that concern traditional considerations in philos-
ophy? Primarily I mean questions that seek an explanation of the way
the world is and an account of why the world is that way, along with
a verifiable description of what we know about the world and how we
know those things. William James (1907 [1995]) asks, for example, what
is truth? It is not the content of this kind of question that interests me,
but the form of it. Robert Talisse (2008), to use another example, begins
his book by asking a series of questions about the existence and defin-
ing characteristics of a pragmatist tradition. These questions have the
same form as James’s question about truth. The goal of a philosophical
question is to get at the unchanging, universalizable truth of the world
and our place in it. Pragmatism does offer some insights that could help
reach such an end. One of the unique features of pragmatism is the kind
of answers that figures like John Dewey and William James have offered
to philosophical questions. The questions themselves, however, are not
new in terms of form or content. William James goes so far as to call
pragmatism a method of doing philosophy, by which he means it is a set
of intellectual practices to use when asking and answering philosophical
questions designed to get at universalizable truths. He shows, to name
just one example, how pragmatism can answer questions about the one
and the many in Pragmatism. What gives the tradition of philosophical
pragmatism a center of gravity are the kinds of considerations that get
foregrounded in the answering of such questions.
That center of gravity is marked by what Robert Westbrook has
called a “workmanlike” position on the nature of knowledge, meaning,
and truth (1). A “workmanlike” epistemology rejects realism and ideal-
ism and rejects the search for foundations upon which to base our truth
claims. In the place of a search for foundational knowledge that is uni-
versalizable, pragmatism is committed to the process of inquiry. That
process of inquiry leads to an evolutionary and ecological account of
knowledge. From this perspective, truth is not the property of a proposi-
tion but an outcome of a process. This is a rejection of Rene Descartes’s
philosophy (which is understood to be one of the hallmarks of the devel-
opment of professional, academic philosophy), along with any attempt
to assert a strong distinction between a knowing subject and an object
6 R. DANISCH
for our knowledge. My intention here is not to offer a careful read-

ing of either pragmatist or realist epistemology or the debates between
those two perspectives. My aim is simply to note that, from a pragma-
tist perspective, human interests and actions (taken individually and col-
lectively) become the measure of truth. If we follow this initial insight,
several other intellectual positions become important to philosophical
pragmatism. For John Dewey, and other pragmatists that have followed,
“experience” is the preferred description for how we interact with our
surroundings because it highlights the constitutive exchange between
people and environments and helps us think about how we are trans-
formed by our interactions with our surroundings and how we trans-
form those same surroundings by our actions. In addition, pragmatism
is committed to a kind of philosophical and political pluralism. Such a
perspective suggests that final determinations regarding human affairs are
not possible given the multiplicity of ways we can and do experience the
world. This also entails that the world, and our place in it, is character-
ized by contingency and uncertainty. Communities are then left with the
task of negotiating and managing the plurality, contingency, and uncer-
tainty that we experience in the world. For philosophical pragmatism, we
are socially encumbered and relational beings. Therefore, the individu-
al’s relationship to community becomes a central consideration. How
communities influence individuals and how individuals maintain and
express themselves through communities are key questions for pragma-
tism. These questions about the individual’s relationship to community
ultimately lead to considerations about the importance of democracy as
the preferred way of managing community relationships. Dewey (1927
[1946]) perhaps most succinctly and eloquently ties the epistemological
insights of pragmatism to a concern for community by suggesting that
“knowledge is a function of communication and association,” by which
he means it is a function of community life (158).
Philosophical pragmatism takes a version of these intellectual commit-
ments as a starting point and then develops sophisticated accounts of the
world and our place in it that amount to univeralizable truths in keep-
ing with the traditions of academic, professional philosophy. In my view,
Robert Brandom has authored the best contemporary articulation of a
well-developed philosophical pragmatism. Brandom’s (1998) social prac-
tice account of language issues from the epistemology that John Dewey
and William James first began to articulate, along with the commitments
to uncertainty, contingency, pluralism, and community that issue from
that epistemology. He articulates and advances an impressive philosophy,

but it is one that is constrained in an important way—it is unrelated to
the project of living in a democratic culture. John Dewey and William
James also articulated and advanced impressive philosophies from the
same intellectual commitments. But they were also seriously committed
to the task of designing and implementing methods for improving their
social and political circumstances. Dewey, for example, worked closely
with Jane Addams at Hull House because he wanted to figure out how
to aid and improve his local community. Early versions of pragmatism
faced the dual task of developing a full and sophisticated philosophy out
of the importance assigned to contingency, plurality, uncertainty, com-
munity and a rejection of realist epistemology, along with the tasks of
building and improving the American democratic experiment. John
Dewey, William James, Jane Addams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alain
Locke and others all thought that the answers they formed to philosoph-
ical questions also happened to entail a commitment to the development
of American democracy because of the nature of those answers. Robert
Brandom, Richard Rorty, John Stuhr, and many other neo-pragmatists
have dropped what I would call the rhetorical project of improving
democratic culture and instead focused exclusively on the philosophi-
cal puzzles that emerge when one sees the world like Dewey, James and
others saw it. When philosophical pragmatism is severed from the dem-
ocratic project, then something profound is lost from the tradition of
pragmatism.
The intellectual commitments outlined above returned John Dewey,
again and again, to questions about, and concerns with, communication.
If truth is contingent, uncertain, plural, and the outcome of a process
of inquiry, and if we are all creatures of associated living, then commu-
nication is the principal means of living within our circumstances. Put
another way, communication is the means by which we come to hold
things to be true and to have things in common. I have argued elsewhere
that philosophical pragmatism commits us to a concern with communica-
tion (Danisch 2015). Communication practices become the pivot point,
from my perspective, that justifies the move from philosophical pragma-
tism to rhetorical pragmatism. My aim is not to deny what has always
appeared true: that pragmatism has long been committed to offering a
philosophical explanation of the work and our place in it. I do aim, how-
ever, to remind us (and hopefully each of the essays in this volume will
remind us all of this argument) that pragmatism was also committed to
8 R. DANISCH
changing the world and producing melioristic consequences. Rhetorical

pragmatism extends beyond the emphasis on descriptive epistemologi-
cal accounts of the world and focuses attention on consequential prac-
tices for changing the world. When saying that communication is a pivot
point between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism, I
mean that it serves as both an essential component of any adequate phil-
osophical account of our plural, contingent and uncertain circumstances
and it serves as the fundamental means of engaging with the world in
consequential and melioristic ways. Part of the method of doing philoso-
phy that William James outlined asks that we evaluate the consequences
of offering a particular account of the world. This is because pragma-
tism, as a philosophy of interaction, is committed to the belief that the
world changes because of human activity. Once that kind of philosophi-
cal account is in place, I think we have an obligation to begin to rework
and revise our habits and practices of interaction in order to produce the
kinds of effects that we think are beneficial. That project signals the move
from what I’m calling philosophical pragmatism to rhetorical pragma-
tism. John Dewey, operating as a professional philosopher, described a
world in which social interaction governed by communication was essen-
tial for a coherent epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. He then went so
far as to make prescriptive recommendations for how we might improve
our habits and practices for the betterment of American democratic cul-
ture. We ought to read this as the way in which his philosophical pragma-
tism pushed him toward a rhetorical pragmatism.
Unfortunately, the first pragmatists did not make a full turn to rhetor-
ical pragmatism and never fully thought through how to improve com-
munication practices for transforming our democratic culture. Toward
the end of his career, John Dewey wrote the introduction to a textbook
for a relatively new class at universities called “Discussion” (Keith 2007).
This was precisely the kind of class that could serve the rhetorical project
of improving citizenship through communication skills. William James
reflected, throughout his career, on the role and complexity of pub-
lic speaking as an integral and essential intellectual practice, but he never
developed a full-blown rhetorical pragmatism capable of recommend-
ing forms of public speaking that could best influence American democ-
racy. Instead, first-generation pragmatists spent more time working out
the philosophical implications of the intellectual commitments described
above. This is not a failure; it is merely a limitation. But if contempo-
rary versions of pragmatism are also unable to work out a full rhetorical
pragmatism and, instead, focus almost exclusively on developing philo-

sophical accounts of the world then we diminish the legacy of pragmatism.
The essays in this book are, in my view, examples of the kind of intellectual
work made possible when we pivot away from philosophical pragmatism
and toward rhetorical pragmatism, or when we pivot away from think-
ing in the terms of academic, professional philosophy and toward how
we might improve our socio-political circumstances. Pragmatism, I think,
demands that we ask: what are the consequences of limiting ourselves to
questions of epistemology that are central to the professional discipline of
philosophy? In my view, the main consequence is that pragmatism, both
new and old, can give excellent and sophisticated intellectual accounts
of the world but cannot provide sophisticated intellectual resources for
improving our democratic culture. One of the reasons that we may have
overlooked the figures in this book is that they might not fit into the tradi-
tion of philosophical pragmatism, and might instead offer us insights more
aligned with rhetorical pragmatism. In addition, the main consequence of
pursuing philosophical questions is the advancement and development of
the professional academic discipline of philosophy, and professional philos-
ophy has developed in the U.S. in the last fifty years by offering pragmatist
answers to basic philosophical questions. But another consequence of the
development of professional philosophy is less attention paid to the prac-
tical socio-political projects of the moment; professional academic life is
separated from the tasks of democratic life. America’s greatest intellectual
contribution to the world of ideas has not been used to improve American
democracy. It is time, in my view, for the constraints of philosophy to be
removed so that pragmatism can fully engage in the project of building an
improved democratic culture. This is the consequence of making a rhetor-
ical turn and putting rhetorical considerations before philosophical ones.
One achievement of extending the conversation between pragmatism,
rhetoric, and communication might just be better resources for improving
our democratic culture. In other words, the importance of extending the
conversation between pragmatism, rhetoric, and communication is that we
might imagine better ways of engaging with and transforming our demo-
cratic culture (and not just better ways of answering traditional questions
in philosophy). Each of the essays in this book provides some insight into
how that might be possible.
Before proceeding any further I want to clarify what I mean by rhet-
oric. The study and practice of rhetoric developed in Greek antiquity as
a way of influencing political affairs (Schiappa 1999; Habinek 2004).
10 R. DANISCH
The Greek sophists argued that uncertainty and ambiguity characterized

human affairs, and that multiple, idiosyncratic perspectives derived from
human experiences created contingent circumstances subject to change
(Schiappa 2003). Rhetoric was formed in response to such situations.
The artful use of language was capable of generating some degree of
order out of otherwise uncertain or chaotic circumstances. In political
affairs, this meant that rhetorical practice was the central way of guiding
deliberation, articulating individual opinions, and holding communities
together (all important political projects). The more eloquent uses of
language were able to distinguish one piece of discourse from another,
and eloquence began to drive community decision-making because of
its ability to persuade audiences. Rhetoric, therefore, was both a technê
and a dynamis (Farrell 1995, 62–67). On the one hand, rhetoric was
a body of rules derived from experience that may be known or applied
through the exercise of reason in order to produce eloquent and effec-
tive discourse. And, on the other hand, rhetoric was a powerful capacity
for doing, or for making and constructing the world through language.
Greek rhetoricians developed handbooks of rhetorical practice to make
recommendations for how best to deploy this powerful art. These
ancient origins of rhetoric foregrounded a set of questions different from
traditional questions of philosophy, and created a set of intellectual com-
mitments that remain with us today. These commitments prioritize a
consideration of the effects of language and symbol systems over ques-
tions about what words or symbols represent. They also recommend that
we pay more attention to how we communicate and less attention to
what we know. Rhetorical theorists and practitioners ask the following
set of questions: What effects will my speech acts have? How can I use
symbols to create order and meaning in different circumstances? What
argumentative choices will be most persuasive? How do I use language
to become a political leader and influence the course of decision-making?
How can I bring and hold a community together through symbols and
speech acts? How does the eloquent use of language aid the process of
public deliberation?
The ancient Greeks had their own set of answers to these questions,
but those answers are not my concern here. My argument is that prag-
matism puts this same set of questions before us as well, and that dif-
ferent contexts demand different sets of answers. Rhetorical pragmatism
will not, and cannot, look exactly like ancient Greek rhetorical theory
and practice (the essays in this book make that clear). Although it will
develop out of a similar set of intellectual commitments, it will lead us

to offer different versions of rhetoric as a technê and dynamis. It will,
however, prioritize questions about communication practices over ques-
tions about epistemology. If we follow rhetorical pragmatism and not
philosophical pragmatism, and begin to attend to questions about com-
munication practices and how symbols and words enact relationships,
generate consensus and make meanings, then we are in a better position
to change, transform or improve our democratic culture. At stake in the
distinction between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism
is whether I want to simply give an epistemological account of the world
or whether I want to change the world. Change is an outcome of rhe-
torical practice not philosophical reflection. The philosophical account of
the world provided by pragmatism entails a commitment to the rhetori-
cal project because it tells us that social interaction in communities gov-
erned by conditions of uncertainty, contingency, and plurality determines
what we know and what things mean. In such circumstances, rhetorical
practice is necessary within the process of social interaction. And it is also
the best available method for guiding those interactions to better out-
comes. The distinction I’ve drawn here is part of an old and enduring
debate between rhetoric and philosophy. I want to briefly describe how
that long debate offers contextual justification for the distinction I’ve just
drawn, and how that debate might condition our understanding of the
value of returning to the overlooked pragmatists in this book.
Communication Studies and Philosophy

in Liberal Arts Education
Bruce Kimball (1995) argued that the distinction I am drawing between

a philosophical and a rhetorical orientation to the world has guided two
competing visions of liberal education since the ancient Greek debates
between Socrates and the sophists. Kimball has not been the only person
to recognize this tension. Much has been written about the 2500 year-
old contest between philosophy and rhetoric, and the meaning and
implications of that contest (Ijselling 1976; Hauser 2008). In some
ways, I am arguing that the philosophical debates inspired by pragmatism
return us, in new variation, to the ancient Greek debates between philos-
ophy and rhetoric. Surprisingly, many proponents of philosophical prag-
matism, including John Dewey, William James, Richard Rorty, Robert
Brandom and others, are unaware of the richness and complexity of the
12 R. DANISCH
rhetorical tradition. Dewey and James certainly did not see themselves
as part of the larger contest between philosophy and rhetoric. In my
view, however, I think that useful and important insights about prag-
matism are made possible by reading pragmatists into this larger, longer
debate. And, in some sense, the authors of the essays in this book also
read a broader group of pragmatist figures into the intellectual tradi-
tion of rhetoric and communication studies to help offer fresh insights
about the cash value of pragmatism. A careful look at the origins and
development of Communication Studies as an academic discipline in the
twentieth century can show how a set of pragmatist commitments helped
to breathe life into an American version of the rhetorical tradition.
In Orators and Philosophers, Kimball describes the ways in which
Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian and other ancient rhetoricians were critical
of the theoretical and abstract pursuit of truth promoted by Socrates and
Plato. On the other hand, and from a philosophical perspective, Socrates
and Plato criticized advocates of rhetoric for their ambivalence or apa-
thy toward truth and “their hand-to-mouth pragmatism” (xvii). Today’s
modern research university, according to perspectives informed by these
earlier debates, represents a triumph of the philosophers over the ora-
tors. Kimball reminds us, however, that the rhetorical perspective made
important and valuable contributions to both our broader intellectual
history and the pedagogical mission of higher education. The orators, for
example, claimed that communicating knowledge was crucial to learn-
ing and that a community of learners would need to make judgments
about what to do and how to act in uncertain circumstances. Isocrates,
Cicero and Quintilian all taught their students the language arts in order
to produce wise, public citizens capable of eloquent and persuasive com-
munication and good decision-making. Beyond commitments to com-
munication and community, the classical rhetorical tradition believed
persuasion was integral to the cultivation of moral character and vir-
tue, and this belief led to the formation of the first version of the lib-
eral arts tradition with the goal of training good citizens to lead society.
Rhetorical education, from this perspective, produced an active citizen,
who was a virtuous, universally competent, and capable orator with the
ability to address any topic and assume any position of leadership in the
state. One main difference between this classical version of the rhetori-
cal tradition and the pragmatist commitments outlined above is the role
of oratory (or, put more simply, the kind of communicative competence
being taught). Classical Athens and Republican Rome required oratory
as a principle communication skill for leaders. Pragmatism’s commitment

to democratic culture requires a more varied set of communicative com-
petencies for leadership (as the essays in this book show). Those compe-
tencies include oratory but extend to other practices like listening, and
small group deliberation, as was made clear by Dewey in his introduction
to a “Discussion” textbook. Regardless, a rhetorical education empha-
sizes communication, community and virtuous leadership and teaches us
to consider consequences and to pursue change in public ways. These are
hallmarks of both the classical approach to rhetorical education and the
pragmatist approach to education more generally.
Edward Schiappa (1995) has argued that Isocrates was the earliest
proponent of both pragmatism and rhetorical education. In Isocrates’
work, we find a careful articulation of the pragmatist intellectual com-
mitments articulated by James and Dewey as well as a philosophy of edu-
cation deeply committed to rhetoric’s ability to transform socio-political
circumstances. I think it is worth noting that Isocrates’ school in Athens
was incredibly successful, attracted many students, and produced alumni
who became political leaders in the ancient Greek world. The students
in Isocrates’ school were taught using a form of experiential learning,
whereby practice was privileged over speculation and discussion (which
were the preferred modes of education at Plato’s Academy). Students
delivered practice speeches on pressing moral, political or social issues.
The goal was to help the students develop a sense of practical wisdom
(Poulakos). Through active practice and experience using rhetoric stu-
dents were put into position to make good decisions (as measured by
whether decisions benefitted the community as a whole) in difficult cir-
cumstances. What is most clear from examples of the kind of education
students received from Isocrates is that the kind of epistemology taught
in the academic discipline of philosophy was simply not taught. This was
because he considered the quest for universalizable accounts of the world
irrelevant for the development of the skill of good decision-making and
community leadership. Unfortunately, Isocrates is mostly ignored or
forgotten as an educational theorist, even as we hear buzzwords about
experiential learning and flipped classrooms. John Dewey is often cred-
ited as the first advocate of experiential learning and for coming up
with the idea that students ought to use and hone practical judgment
while engaging with real-life problems. But this is also exactly what
Isocrates taught his students as a form of rhetorical education. Isocrates
is an example of what might happen when rhetoric is privileged over
14 R. DANISCH
philosophy. Moreover, his work also shows the importance of such privi-
leging for building an effective democracy.
Unlike Isocrates’ school, the primary function of the modern research
university is to produce new knowledge. Science and Engineering pro-
grams tend to be the privileged producers of new knowledge in higher
education (and are often described in the most attractive terms to poten-
tial students) while communication skills are thought of as “soft skills,”
capable of helping with the transmission of new knowledge produced
by scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, the humanities and social
sciences have followed the commitment to knowledge production pro-
moted by the sciences and engineering. Within such a model of higher
education, research is the privileged activity of academics in all fields,
and philosophy occupies a privileged place in the hierarchy of humani-
ties disciplines because of its ability to offer epistemological accounts of
all of this new knowledge. These may be some fairly broad statements,
but I think it is fair to argue that the modern research university is more
committed to knowledge-making than to cultivating wisdom or prac-
tical judgment in students. The mission statements of almost all North
American universities suggest a civic purpose but rarely does the curricu-
lum deliver on that promise. The professionalization of higher education
has coincided with this greater attention on knowledge and research, and
has, in some ways, cut the university off from the civic responsibilities of
leadership within our democratic culture. The “ivory tower” as an apt
descriptor of the modern university nicely summarizes and shows the
gap between the practical judgment required to lead a community and
the abstract, systematic search for knowledge characteristic of systems
of education that stretch back to Plato’s Academy. My argument here is
that a central component of both the pragmatist tradition and the rhe-
torical tradition is a commitment to fostering practical judgment and not
just transferring bodies of knowledge.
William Keith (2007) recounts the origins of Speech Communication
programs in the twentieth century, and in so doing shows that the tradi-
tion of rhetorical education has persisted alongside the successes of sci-
ence and engineering programs. Speech Communication Departments
(which later became Communication Departments) grew out of English
Studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. The split between
English and Communication was mostly a result of a dissatisfaction with
teaching rhetoric as just a matter of composition and taste. From Keith’s
perspective, the central question that Speech Communication programs
faced was: “How do we teach democracy (91)?” If teachers of rhetoric

focused too much on taste or composition, then they could not answer
this question in any robust way. Instead, early communication scholars
relied on John Dewey’s work, with its emphasis on deliberative decision-
making in problematic situations, as a way of teaching democracy. Keith
calls “discussion pedagogy” the mode of teaching that stressed the
importance of deliberative interaction and that developed in the middle
of the twentieth century as a kind of pragmatist rhetorical education for
democratic culture. “Discussion pedagogy” does not give any final, com-
prehensive account of rhetorical education for democratic culture, nor is
it the only kind of rhetorical education that is entailed by pragmatism.
But it is one of the forgotten moments from the twentieth century when
philosophical pragmatism began to pivot toward rhetorical pragmatism
by placing experiential learning and communicative practices over and
above the pursuit of universalizable knowledge.
My aim here is not to end the longstanding debate between philos-
ophy and rhetoric or to use a sustained critique of the modern research
university’s search for abstract knowledge to promote rhetorical educa-
tion (although I think we ought to engage in such a critique whenever
we can). I wanted to describe these larger and longer debates in order
to position pragmatism, especially the versions of pragmatism found
within this book. My argument, and I believe the essays that follow sup-
port this argument, is that pragmatism shares more with the kind of
rhetorical education advanced by Kimball’s “orators” and Keith’s “dis-
cussion pedagogy” than it does with the emphasis on universalizable and
abstract knowledge advanced by Kimball’s “philosophers” or contem-
porary Philosophy departments. A commitment to rhetorical education
becomes one of the key ways to pivot from philosophical pragmatism
to rhetorical pragmatism. Once we are equipped with the philosophi-
cal worldview provided by pragmatism, we ought to be committed to
cultivating rhetorical practices in order to help improve our demo-
cratic culture. I see, especially in examples like Bimrao Ambedkar, Jane
Addams, and Alice Dewey, just this kind of commitment. If one remains
constrained by philosophical pragmatism’s intellectual orientation to
the world, then one cannot articulate, develop and advance a form of
rhetorical education. Pragmatism, time and again in its commitment to
transforming our world, returns us to these old and enduring debates
between philosophy and rhetoric, and, in so doing, recommends that
we privilege rhetoric over philosophy. If philosophical pragmatism loses
16 R. DANISCH
sight of this, then the epistemology, ethics, aesthetics or philosophy of

language that emerge from pragmatism cannot effect change or improve
our socio-political circumstances.
For thousands of years, a rhetorical education has taught through
experiential learning and promoted the mastery of specific communi-
cation skills for the purposes of citizenship and leadership. This was
done with support from the kinds of complex theoretical accounts of
the world given to us by figures like Aristotle, Isocrates, the sophists,
Cicero and others. These complex theoretical accounts of the world
share much with pragmatism. Therefore, extending the conversation
about pragmatism requires us to explore the intersection between com-
munication, rhetoric, and pragmatism in order to more fully flesh out
the ways in which we might engage in, and transform, the world. Speech
Communication programs throughout North America have been the
contemporary realization of the ancient commitment to rhetorical edu-
cation within our own university systems. The chapters of this book will
hopefully show how we might leverage the exciting intellectual work by a
series of overlooked figures in order to advance such a conversation. This
work will show the advantages to be gained for both pragmatism and the
discipline of Communication Studies by focusing on such a series of fig-
ures and moving beyond the limitations of philosophical pragmatism. To
focus on method, practice, interaction, contingency, plurality, and expe-
rience is to occupy a rhetorical worldview from which one can change
one’s socio-political circumstances and help build an effective democratic
culture. To realize the pragmatist project is to make the turn from phi-
losophy to rhetoric in the broadest possible sense.
The On-going Relevance

of First-Generation Pragmatism
Before engaging with the diverse set of figures in this book, I think
we ought to first assess the continued and broad-ranging relevance of
first-generation pragmatism. In my view, the earliest versions pragmatism
gave us two important insights: First, Dewey, James, and others gave us
a series of interesting answers to philosophical questions that foreground
the role of social interaction, plurality, contingency, community, and
practical action. Second, they also gave us an argument for building and
improving a democratic culture. These two insights and commitments
are related and they recommend the development of both philosophical
pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism. We have, unfortunately, spent

too much time fleshing out philosophical pragmatism instead of rhetori-
cal pragmatism. But we cannot build or improve our democratic culture
without articulating and promoting a form of rhetorical pragmatism.
Rhetorical pragmatism makes direct, practical engagement with dem-
ocratic culture possible and holds the potential to change our socio-
political circumstances in ways that the earliest versions of pragmatism
had desired. Remaining faithful to the tradition of pragmatism requires
that we engage this task just as substantively as we have engaged the
philosophical task throughout the twentieth century. If democracy is a
way of life (like John Dewey argued), then we don’t only need an expla-
nation of life in it. We also need a way to live it, which is another way of
saying that we need a set of the rhetorical practices that we could use to
live it well.
Another way of making sense of these two main insights of first-
generation pragmatism is to make a distinction between orthodox prag-
matists and secular pragmatists. Secular pragmatists are not wedded to
philosophical questions and puzzles (or work within the confines of aca-
demic, professional philosophy) but instead seek to find ways of using
philosophical insight in the service of building democratic cultures.
Orthodox pragmatists articulate and explain pragmatism within the
confines of traditional Philosophy Departments by seeking universaliza-
ble claims consistent with the intellectual orientation to the world first
articulated by James and Dewey. Orthodox pragmatists also minimize or
ignore questions about democracy by treating such questions with high
degrees of abstraction (if they treat them at all). I believe John Dewey,
William James, Jane Addams, Alice Dewey, Richard McKeon, Bhimrao
Ambedkar, Hu Shi, Ralph Ellison, Jonathan Haidt, and Jane Bennett are
all secular pragmatists because they are not content to ask and answer
questions within the confines of professional philosophy (although they
may do that kind of work at times, it does not define their careers).
I understand Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Robert Brandom, W.V. Quine,
Donald Davidson, Cheryl Misak, and Robert Talisse to be orthodox
pragmatists because professional philosophy constrains, limits, and deter-
mines the kinds of intellectual work in which each engages. Orthodox
pragmatism is blind to the rhetorical tradition and unable to imagine
or develop practical ways of improving democratic culture. James and
Dewey, at varying points and in various contexts, inhabited both ortho-
dox philosophical positions and secular pragmatist positions that allowed
18 R. DANISCH
them to see beyond the limits of professional philosophy; this is part of

what gives them an on-going and important utility in asking and answer-
ing pressing intellectual questions. The advantage of secular pragmatists
is that they put democratic culture ahead of professional philosophy,
while orthodox pragmatists remain content to put professional philoso-
phy ahead of democratic culture. I think one of the main implications of
the earliest versions of pragmatism is the argument that we ought to be
more secular and less orthodox in our intellectual work. I believe that
this book takes up the secular task in ways that philosophical pragma-
tism cannot, and one of the reasons the figures in this book are often
overlooked as pragmatists is the secular nature of their work. If we don’t
practice a kind of secular pragmatism then the main developments of this
tradition remain confined to professional philosophy. In the tradition
of secular pragmatists, I hope this book will make promiscuous use of
the legacy of first-generation pragmatism in order to better understand
the function of communication and rhetoric in building a democratic
culture.
In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey argues that: “knowledge is
communication” (176). This is part of the kind of epistemology artic-
ulated by philosophical pragmatism, but it is also a fairly puzzling and
ambiguous statement. I want to unpack some of the implications of this
statement beyond the entailments for arguments inside the professional
philosophical debates around epistemology. Thinking through this state-
ment as a rhetorical pragmatist will help to demonstrate what I think is
the on-going usefulness of pragmatism as an intellectual tradition. For
Dewey, communication is a social activity. In Democracy and Education
he claims that: “Men live in community by virtue of the things which
they have in common; and communication is the way in which they
come to possess things in common” (4). In Art as Experience he devel-
ops this position further: “Communication is the process of creating
participation, of making common what has been isolated and singu-
lar” (244). This means that communication involves the coordination
of social action, the sharing of experiences, and broad participation.
Dewey’s understanding of knowledge has a deeply social dimension:
“knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends
upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed
and sanctioned” (1927 [1946], 158). Both communication and knowl-
edge bring people into association, and when people are brought into
association, the meaning of the world they share is made. The fact that
this happens is a matter for philosophy to explain, but how it happens

is a matter for rhetorical practice. From my perspective, the how gives
us the most exciting insight into our potential as human agents and our
ability to develop what Dewey calls “the great community.” For the kind
of social cooperation that Dewey describes to happen, persuasion must
take place as well. Dewey seems keenly aware of this at the end of The
Public and Its Problems: “The essential need … is the improvement of
the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That
is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement
depends essentially upon freeing and perfecting the processes of inquiry
and the dissemination of their conclusions” (208). Methods of persua-
sion, what all of the authors of the essays in this book might call rhe-
torical practices, allow for the participation of the public in the process
of democratic deliberation. According to my reading, this is another
way of saying that we need to improve our rhetorical practices—an
argument that would have seemed very sensible in democratic Athens
or Republican Rome when rhetorical approaches to education flour-
ished. But Dewey does not tell us how we might do this. The essays
in this book open up a conversation about how we might answer these
questions.
I do think that Dewey understood the role that language played
in answering how questions. To use one example, he claimed that the
meanings were made in a community by using “channels formed by
instrumentalities of which, in the end, language, the vehicle of thought
as well as of communication is the most important” (1927 [1946],
210). In How We Think, he goes further to elaborate on the use of lan-
guage for persuasion and also illustrates how the persuasive function of
language is essential to education: “The primary motive for language is
to influence (through the expression of desire, emotion, and thought)
the activity of others; its secondary use is to enter into more intimate
social relations with them” (179). This makes the problem of education
a problem of directing “pupils’ oral and written speech, used primarily for
practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall become a conscious tool of
conveying knowledge and assisting thought [emphasis in original]” (179).
This is a basic description of a rhetorical education, and for that reason
it remains one of my favorite quotes from Dewey’s corpus. Herein lies
the justification for pivoting from philosophical to rhetorical pragmatism.
The argument in this quote is also supported by Dewey’s insight that
language is a mode of action and not a reflection of the world:
20 R. DANISCH
Language is always a form of action and in its instrumental use is always

a means of concerted action for an end, while at the same time it finds
in itself all the goods of its possible consequences. For there is no mode
of action as fulfilling and as rewarding as is concerted consensus of action
… Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a
speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these
creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of
speech. It is therefore a relationship, not a particularity. (1925 [1958],
185)
The main implication of Dewey’s position is that objective meanings

become tacit rules for communication only through habitual interaction
between speakers and hearers over a long period of time. This argument
clearly resonates with Richard Rorty’s later linguistic pragmatism. But
words can also be used in new, creative ways, to bring speaker and hearer
into new and meaningful relationships. When we understand language
as a special kind of action, or at the least as an interaction between two
people, it becomes clear that the practice of rhetoric can and does regu-
late meanings and relationships. This is precisely why language and com-
munication are critical concerns for democratic culture. This insight will
be very central to the essays and pragmatists covered in this book. The
deeper question remains how we might build relationships and regulate
meanings using rhetoric and what kinds of meanings and relationships
are best suited for improving democratic culture.
For Dewey, we all must use our intelligence in order to direct the
affairs of the state while at the same time realizing that we are all bound
to one another in a community. The success of the community depends
on “perfecting the means and ways of communication of meanings so
that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent
activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action” (1927
[1946], 174). Our first task, then, is to discover the methods of commu-
nication that would permit individuals the opportunity to participate in
decision-making and to understand the interconnectedness of the com-
munity to which they belong. Throughout The Pubic and Its Problems,
Dewey suggests a rhetoric of communion, and this kind of communion
requires technology, aesthetics, and inquiry: “The highest and most dif-
ficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of
communication must take possession of the physical machinery of trans-
mission and circulation and breathe life into it … Democracy will come
into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching
communion … It [democracy] will have its consummation when free

social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving com-
munication” (1927 [1946], 184). In other words, when a full and mov-
ing art of rhetoric is functioning, then the great community will finally
be realized. This is not a very specific or complex answer to the how
questions, but it is a start. One of the hopes of a book like this is that
we might be able to start to build a more sophisticated understanding
of what this kind of Dewey-inspired commitment to communication
and rhetoric might look like. The implicit argument of this book is that
we have lots of intellectual resources for developing such a sophisticated
understanding if we pivot away from the traditional canon of philosoph-
ical pragmatists and toward the great variety of other pragmatist figures
that we often overlook.
I’ve quoted Dewey here because I think his statements about com-
munication are both exciting and exasperating. On the one hand, he
seems committed to the kind of rhetorical turn that I am advocating.
More importantly, he seems aware of the importance of that rhetorical
turn for the improvement of American democratic culture. On the other
hand, these recommendations are not very robust. Dewey does not offer
us the kind of systematic or sophisticated rhetorical pedagogy articu-
lated by figures like Isocrates or Aristotle. Dewey writing as an orthodox
pragmatist no doubt constrained Dewey as a budding secular pragmatist.
His insights in these quotations do not match the depth and rigor of his
insights into the issues more germane to philosophical pragmatism. My
hope is that these essays will add depth and insight into the questions
posed by rhetorical pragmatism to make up for some of the frustration
entailed by these quotes. My argument is that one of the primary legacies
of first-generation pragmatism is that philosophy returns us to the cen-
trality of rhetoric and communication. So our responsibility is to extend
and develop the conversation about the connections between pragma-
tism, rhetoric, and communication.
References
Bacon, Michael. 2012. Pragmatism: An Introduction. Boston: Polity Press.
Brandom, Robert. 1998. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and
Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Danisch, Robert. 2015. Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical
Pragmatism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
22 R. DANISCH
Dewey, John. 1916 [1944]. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the

Philosophy of Education. New York: The Free Press.
Dewey, John. 1925 [1958]. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover.
Dewey, John. 1927 [1946]. The Public and Its Problems. New York:
Philosophical Library, Inc.
Diggins, John Patrick. 1994. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the
Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Farrell, Thomas. 1995. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Habinek, Thomas. 2004. Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory. Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Hauser, Gerard, ed. 2008. Philosophy and Rhetoric in Dialogue: Redrawing Their
Intellectual Landscape. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Ijselling, J. C. 1976. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict: A Historical Survey.
New York: Springer.
James, William. 1907 [1995]. Pragmatism. New York: Dover.
Keith, William. 2007. Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the
American Forum Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Kimball, Bruce. 1995. Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal
Education. Mt. Vernon, IL: College Board.
Menand, Louis. 2002. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New
York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Misak, Cheryl. 2015. The American Pragmatists. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Schiappa, Edward. 1995. “Isocrates’ Philosophia and Contemporary
Pragmatism.” In Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism, edited by Steven Mailloux,
33–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiappa, Edward. 1999. The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Schiappa, Edward. 2003. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and
Rhetoric. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Stuhr, John, ed. 1999. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential
Readings and Interpretive Essays. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Talisse, Robert. 2008. Pragmatism: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Westbrook, Robert. 2005. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of
Truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
CHAPTER 2
Richard McKeon in the

Pragmatist Tradition
Peter Simonson
Let’s consider four topics together: Richard McKeon, pragmatism,

rhetoric, and communication. The grouping is rare but shouldn’t be.
Considering them together is an act of discovery and invention that sheds
new light on each topic individually and the interrelations among them.
Such an inquiry can (1) reveal important but previously unseen dimensions
of the history of pragmatism and its entanglements with theories of rhetoric
and communication; (2) shed particular light on the under-analyzed middle
period between the era of classic pragmatism (1870s–1930s) and its revival
since the 1970s; and (3) help bring a generative but little-read figure into
contemporary conversations. McKeon is important as the first and arguably
most important figure in the pragmatist tradition whose philosophy made
extensive use of both rhetoric and communication as terms and concepts.
He was one of the major intellectual figures who turned to rhetoric in the
first half of the twentieth century and was a significant if neglected commu-
nication theorist. His work is ripe for reengagement today.
Though scholars of pragmatism have sometimes noted that McKeon was
John Dewey’s student and Richard Rorty’s teacher, his “place in pragmatism’s
history…has yet to be sufficiently explored” (Koopman 2013, n.p.).
P. Simonson (*) 
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
e-mail: peter.simonson@colorado.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_2
24 P. SIMONSON
There are several reasons for this neglect. One is the relative inattention
to the generation of pragmatist-infused thought between the 1940s and
1970s, McKeon’s prime years. Even among those invested in reclaim-
ing that era, it’s rare to mention McKeon.1 Part of this is due to an unu-
sual and difficult prose style that wards off casual readers. Adding to the
problem is McKeon’s vast corpus of more than 150 essays and a handful
of books, with no single definitive statement to read and teach. His prose
in turn reflects a unique philosophical style that doesn’t easily fit the usual
categories of thought (see Garver 1984). Because he edited two critical
volumes of Aristotle’s writings and consistently drew upon Aristotle, he’s
often been misidentified as an “Aristotelian.”2 Douglas Mitchell insightfully
calls McKeon’s philosophy “Pragmatism in a new key” (2016, 243), a truth
partially cashed out in handful of illuminating studies (Depew 2000, 2010;
Buchanan 2000; Garver 2000; Gross 2008; Danisch 2015; Baranowski
2016). Yet, as I’ll elaborate below, McKeon’s was a complex articulation
of pragmatism. As such, it has largely fallen outside the ken of the con-
temporary pragmatists who charted histories and usable pasts. As David
Depew (2010), Richard Buchanan, and most extensively Robert Danisch
have begun to show, McKeon’s was a pragmatist-inflected rhetorical philos-
ophy animated by a view of culture and intellectual life as communicative
phenomena. Based on my reading of the full corpus of McKeon’s extensive
writings on rhetoric and communication, I’ll sketch the history and con-
temporary significance of his brand of forgotten pragmatism.
Little writing on McKeon provides a historical account of the devel-
opment of his work, which I believe has contributed to misunder-
standings and neglect.3 I try to remedy that lack by telling a mostly
1 Many philosophers try to reclaim mid-century pragmatism, but none makes even passing
mention of McKeon. The key book-length exception comes from a rhetorician, Danisch
(2015).
2 Although McKeon was strongly influenced by Aristotle, he repeatedly claimed that he was
“no Aristotelian,” but “viewed himself primarily as an American philosopher, in the tradition
of the pragmatists. His devotion to pluralism was thoroughgoing. Politically, he was a World
Federalist” (Editors’ Preface to McKeon 1986, 577; see also Buchanan 2000, 141, 153–158).
3 For good overall introductions to McKeon’s work, see the Introductions by
Ruttenberg and by Zahava McKeon in the University of Chicago Press collections of his
essays (McKeon 1990, 2005). The only book-length monograph is the important study
by Plochmann (1990). Buchanan and Garver (2000) has number of penetrating essays,
2 RICHARD MCKEON IN THE PRAGMATIST TRADITION 25
chronological tale across five sections of this essay. In the first, I provide a
brief introduction to McKeon’s life and work for readers unfamiliar with
him. Second, I turn to the questions of what it means to be part of the
pragmatist tradition and how McKeon fits into it. I adopt a rhetorical
framework for addressing those questions. Focusing on his writings from
the 1920s to the 1940s (a period when discovered and began reinvent-
ing rhetoric), I show how he mediated elements of Deweyan pragmatism
and its central topoi of analysis. In the third section, I sketch McKeon’s
postwar embrace of the concepts of communication and culture—the first
a central Deweyan topos, the second partially submerged. Next, I show
how mid-century pragmatism took form in McKeon’s historical seman-
tics and metaphilosophy, before turning to his mature communication
and rhetorical theories of the 1960s and ’70s, when the new key of his
pragmatism came into a different pitch. I conclude with thoughts on
McKeon’s relevance today.
Who Was Richard McKeon?

Richard McKeon (1900–1985) was at once an intellectual cosmopolitan
engaged with the global political currents of his era, an academic philoso-
pher comfortably at home in a discipline that became fully p rofessionalized
in his lifetime, and an intimidatingly erudite interdisciplinary thinker
and educator whose style set him off from the dominant schools of his
day. His biography has not been written, but we can piece elements
together from a handful of semi-autobiographical essays and sketches by
students and colleagues.4 Born outside New York City in Union Hill,
New Jersey, McKeon attended Columbia University, where he would
earn three degrees. Initially, he was on preprofessional tracks for law and
then for engineering, but after a brief stint in the Naval Reserve dur-
ing World War I, he turned to philosophy, which he said offered similar
including several touching upon McKeon’s rhetorical thought. For helpful discussions
of his writings on rhetoric, see Backman (in McKeon 1987, vii–xxxii), Depew (2010),
Goodnight (2014), Hauser and Cushman (1973), and Wess (2015).
4 The main autobiographical sources are McKeon (1952 [1987], 1953 [1990], 1970
[1990], 1975, 1982).

26 P. SIMONSON
attention to “problems…of relating theory and practice in sciences,

social and natural” (1975, 103). He met Kenneth Burke in 1917 when
both were students at Columbia and riding the ferry in from New Jersey
(Selzer 1996, 41). Burke would soon drop out of school, but he and
McKeon would remain lifelong conversation partners. “We argued at
that time [as undergraduates]; we’ve been arguing ever since,” McKeon
recounted in a public dialogue with Burke in 1970. “And gradually, in
the period in between then and now, the rest of the world has caught up
with us and is beginning to talk about rhetoric and poetic” (McKeon and
Burke 1970, 2).5
McKeon’s early intellectual influences helped establish the contours
of his mid-century pragmatism. As an undergraduate, he absorbed les-
sons from intellectual history courses taught by James Harvey Robinson,
whose pragmatist-inspired “new history” took “the relevant and the use-
ful” as standards for writing history (Robinson 1912, 15). Robinson’s
classes also left McKeon with a sense of how accumulated knowledge
“uncovered new characterizations of past ages” (McKeon 1982, 3).
McKeon took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1920. His Master’s thesis on
modern views of art and literature concluded with the flourish, “Not art
for art’s sake should be the cry, but art for life’s sake”—a sentiment that
the 1920s Burke also shared (quoted in Plochmann 1990, 36). McKeon
entered Columbia’s doctoral program in philosophy, where he studied
with Frederick Woodbridge and John Dewey, as I’ll discuss below. His
work with Woodbridge on the seventeenth century led to a dissertation
on Spinoza. He completed it after spending three years (1922–1925) at
the University of Paris—studying medieval philosophy with the Thomist
Étienne Gilson, Plato and Aristotle with Léon Robin, and Spinoza with
Léon Brunschvig. From Paris and Columbia, McKeon learned “to use
the historical development of concepts as part of the analysis of current
problems in their interrelations” and “to trace basic patterns and unity
of philosophic thought through the diversity of philosophic systems
and expressions” (McKeon 1953 [1990], 12). He received his Ph.D.
in 1928, the same year that his book on Spinoza was published, and
would teach in Dewey and Woodbridge’s Department of Philosophy at
Columbia until 1934.
5 For discussions of McKeon and Burke together, see Baranowski (2016) and Wess
(2008, 2015).
Coming out of these experiences, McKeon was a scholar who com-

bined deep knowledge of the history of philosophy with sophisticated
engagement with problems in contemporary philosophy and culture.
From his Master’s thesis forward, literature and poetics were steady top-
ics, and he played a significant role in developing the so-called “Chicago
School” of criticism (see McKeon 1982). His expertise traversed ancient,
medieval, and modern thought and literature, linked the history of con-
cepts to current issues, and was fundamentally informed by a pluralism
that both recognized the wide variety of philosophical expression and
held out the belief that truth was both real and ultimately one. Study
in Paris provided firsthand experience in different cultural traditions of
interpretation of the same texts, a lesson he had learned in a different
way through reading commentaries on Aristotle and other philosophers
across the centuries. McKeon’s absorption of multiple schools of thought
added to his unique intellectual style.
Beyond his scholarship, McKeon’s career is typically discussed in
relation to two other families of practice—one tied to his position as a
dean and educator at Chicago, the other to his work with the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, which had
brought him from Columbia as an external examiner for their great
books program from 1931 to 1933, a visiting professor of history in
1934, and then permanently as a professor of Greek (1935) and phi-
losophy (1937). Under President Robert Maynard Hutchins, Chicago
was reorganizing its curriculum to promote an interdisciplinary general
education and the organization of faculty into “committees” that cut
across departments. The 36-year-old Hutchins appointed the 35-year-
old McKeon Dean of the Division of Humanities in 1935, a position
he would hold until 1947, exerting considerable influence over both
graduate and undergraduate education during that time (Levine 2006;
McKeon 1953 [1990]). Among much else, McKeon helped create a
degree-granting interdisciplinary graduate committee on Language and
Communication in the 1940s, one of the first educational programs to
use the term “communication.” Hutchins and his ally Mortimer Adler
were neo-Thomistic and Aristotelian critics of John Dewey and pragma-
tism who supported the educational pursuit of timeless truths. McKeon’s
position was more complex, historicist, and pragmatist. As he would
write in a kind of culminating essay to his period as dean, “The problems
which arise in education in any age and relative to any subject matter or
28 P. SIMONSON
pursuit are determined in part by the problems of the times and in part
by the knowledge available” (1949 [2005], 235).6
McKeon’s deanship ended as he was becoming deeply involved with
UNESCO, the cultural and scientific arm of the newly formed United
Nations. During the war, he had directed the Army Specialized Training
Program’s Area and Language Studies unit at the University of Chicago.
Beyond its geopolitical functions, the project accelerated an educational
trend toward investigating “the interrelations of cultures and the broad-
ening of interest beyond the limits of the traditions of Western European
and American culture” (McKeon 1953 [1990], 25). This experience
provided an entry point into McKeon’s participation in UNESCO,
which he conceived as “the first attempt to create a public institution in
which ideas are the acknowledged instruments for the achievement of
such political purposes as ‘the intellectual and moral solidarity of man-
kind’” (1948, 574). UNESCO was also a politically crucial example of
“knowledge embodied in organization and required for common action”
and issuing in material “structures of relations,” not merely applications
of some theory (1952, 298, 299). He served as a member of the US
delegation to the first three General Conferences (Paris 1946, Mexico
City 1947, Beirut 1948) and American Counselor for UNESCO in the
U.S. Embassy in Paris (1947). From those positions, he would go on
to take a major role in committees that investigated the place of philos-
ophy and the humanities in UNESCO and the philosophic basis for the
UN’s historic International Declaration of Human Rights (see Doxtader
2010).
The Human Rights Committee opened an important line of inquiry
into key political and philosophical concepts. It reflected McKeon’s plu-
ralistic, historically inflected pragmatism and served as a bridge to the
metaphilosophical semantics projects he would develop over the next
6 As an educator, McKeon left his mark on, among others, the philosopher Richard
Rorty, philosopher-novelist Robert Persig (whose figure of the professor in Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was inspired by McKeon), writer-filmmaker Susan Sontag,
wide-ranging intellectual Paul Goodman, poet-literary critic Elder Olson, sociologist
Donald Levine, anthropologist Paul Rabinow, University of Chicago editor Douglas
Mitchell, and a group of rhetoricians and rhetorically attuned philosophers and critics
that included Wayne Booth, Eugene Garver, Richard Buchanan, Thomas Farrell, Thomas
Conley, Walter Watson, and indirectly David Depew—a list whose near absence of women
should remind us of the gendered conditions of intellectual production of McKeon’s career
and the lines of (often ambivalent) male relations that ran through it.
two decades. The concept of human rights—and related ideas like liberty
and democracy—had disparate meanings and ambiguities across history
and cultures. The philosophic problem at hand, however, was “not to
achieve doctrinal consensus but rather to achieve agreement concerning
rights, and also action in the realization and defense of rights, which may
be justified on highly diverse doctrinal grounds” (UNESCO 1947, 4–5).
This sensibility informed subsequent UNESCO-sponsored inquiries into
the varied cultural meanings and histories of key concepts of the modern
political world (including freedom, democracy, right, dialectic, state, force,
society, institution, justice, common good, and class). The unrealized hope
was to produce a 150-entry International Dictionary of Fundamental
Terms of Philosophy and Political Thought. Several cross-cultural inves-
tigations did however come to fruition.7 McKeon saw them not as exer-
cises in history or philosophy but rather investigations of what those
concepts “significantly and operatively mean to people who seek free-
dom, rights, and justice” (1965, 158–159). They were efforts to exca-
vate “a plurality of meanings which had been, and might again be made,
an effective force in action and in formation of policy” (1975, 110).
Across his UNESCO work, we can hear elements of a liberal democratic
pragmatism attuned to ideas as embedded in cultures, institutions, and
practices; and a rhetorical sensibility attendant to the significance of lan-
guage in use.
McKeon and the Pragmatist Tradition

I’ve laid some biographical groundwork, but in what sense was McKeon
really a pragmatist? The question moves us to issues of definition and
historiography. Some years back, I argued that pragmatism can be
approached as a doctrine or a tradition (Simonson 2001). Let me expand
that claim here. Pluralizing the concept of doctrine, we can view prag-
matism as variably: (a) a philosophical school of thought, (b) a body of
principles, (c) an intellectual problematic, (d) a cluster of habits or meth-
ods of inquiry, or (e) a set of deployable rhetorical topoi and arguments.
Pluralizing the concept of tradition, we can approach pragmatism as:
7 Most notably in the 1948 UNESCO-edited symposium Human Rights: Comments and
Interpretations and the 1951 McKeon-edited Democracy in a World of Tensions. The con-
cepts of responsibility, justice, and society were treated in issues of the Revue Internationale
de Philosophie Volumes 39 (1957), 41 (1957) and 55 (1961) respectively.
30 P. SIMONSON
(a) a historically embedded array of texts, topoi, and ideas—an intellectual

tradition partly constituted by arguments about its very meaning;
(b) a lineage of embodied characters linked through networks of face-to-face
and mediated communication—a social tradition partly constituted by
arguments about affiliations and belonging; or (c) as a historically terri-
torializing and de-territorializing assemblage of texts, discourses, objects,
people, interactions, performances, relationships, and social and institu-
tional practices—a socio-material tradition constituted through agencies
dispersed across different actants. These various approaches to pragma-
tism as doctrine or historically embedded tradition are analytically dis-
tinct but practically overlapping.
I’ll take up a rhetorically inflected approach to pragmatism as both
an intellectual and social tradition manifesting itself through discourse,
embodied characters, and habits of thought and practice. In the process,
I will draw out the persistence and remediation of pragmatist topoi and
thematics over time. This approach allows us to parse out pragmatist
dimensions of McKeon’s philosophy while acknowledging that he some-
times distanced himself from pragmatism as a doctrine or philosophical
school of thought. Any attempt to situate him within the tradition must
acknowledge statements like these: “many, if not most, American philoso-
phers would agree that pragmatism ceased to be one of the active schools
of American philosophy some fifteen or twenty years ago” (1950a,
346); and “I have never felt attracted to the pragmatic principles or dia-
lectical methods, preferring to treat theoretic and practical questions sep-
arately rather than to assimilate theory to practice or practice to theory”
(1952 [1987], 204).
McKeon studied with Dewey in the wake of Dewey’s important
1919–1921 trip to Japan and China. Dewey’s lectures fed Reconstruction
in Philosophy (1920) and likely influenced at least one of the two courses
that McKeon took from him in 1921–1922, Types of Philosophic
Thought (the other was Types of Logical Theory). As McKeon later
remembered, the two courses “set forth the basis of [Dewey’s] philos-
ophy” more fully than it has appeared in the many books that he was to
write in succeeding decades.
In those courses he dwelled on the term which was to become so impor-

tant in the development of his logic and his political and social philosophy,
and explained his hesitations in choosing it. By ‘experience,’ he meant,
not a psychological stage nor an epistemological category, but rather the
context and diversified circumstances in which problems arise and ideas

are developed. If he were to seek a single synonym for what he meant
by ‘experience,’ he said, he would use the term ‘culture.’ He set himself
the task of exploring in nonhistorical but systematic fashion the contacts,
shifts, alternations, and equivalences of the problems which had been pre-
sented to philosophers by experience in their times and of the means which
they had devised to treat them. The solutions, like the problems, found
their criteria in the economic, social, and intellectual circumstances in
which they were developed. (McKeon 1952 [1987], 200–201)
McKeon’s recollection provides evidence of the lasting impression left

by Dewey’s struggle toward culture through experience, his emphasis on
problems, and an attention to circumstances that McKeon found “nonhis-
torical.” All would manifest themselves in McKeon’s own philosophy.
Beyond what he absorbed from Dewey, it’s worth noting McKeon’s
debt to Frederick Woodbridge, an all-but-forgotten figure today some-
times cited for his 1929 declaration that pragmatism “is now a memory
more than a force” (541). McKeon would write that “the crossing of…
influence [of Dewey and Woodbridge] was a greater educational force
than the teacher of either alone could have been,” with both feeding
McKeon’s fundamental concern with “the problem of the one and the
many” (1952 [1987], 200). Woodbridge (1912) argued that philosophy
arises from history, which “is pluralistic and implies a pluralistic philos-
ophy” (4). It may well have been under the influence of Woodbridge’s
interest in ancient philosophical naturalism that McKeon experienced
“the occasion which seems to me to have influenced my work in phi-
losophy more than any other”: a 1921 reading of Cicero and Plato
alongside one another that led him to the recognition that truth,
though one, has no single expression (1952 [1987], 204). Though
not at the time an admirer of Cicero (that would change), McKeon
became convinced “that his importance as transmitter of Greek culture
to the modern world was underrated and…the similarity of our own
philosophic tendencies to his was overlooked” (ibid.).8 Though
their influence came together on McKeon, Woodbridge and Dewey
also represented two poles in a debate between self-described
realists and self-described pragmatists whose battles were particularly
8 The sense of truth being one but given many expressions would also be a lesson the
Thomist Etienne Gilson would underscore to McKeon in Paris.

32 P. SIMONSON
pitched at Columbia (Depew 2000). Through Woodbridge, McKeon

came to identify with the realist position that “ideas are not inventions
constructed by the mind, but discoveries forced upon us by compelling
realities whose natures are basically intelligible” (1952 [1987], 200). In
this and other ways, McKeon reminds us of pragmatism’s heterogeneity
bred through many intellectual cross-fertilizations.
To map McKeon’s pragmatist inheritance, I’ll draw out four of
Dewey’s key topoi and McKeon’s subsequent use of them: history, expe-
rience, problems, and communication. Dewey’s evolutionary naturalism,
along with the early Hegelian influence he never quite escaped, meant
that he understood philosophy within a broadly historical frame. This
came through particularly clearly in the 1920s, when he “worked up an
extended historical explanation…of the origins and persistence” of what
he called the “‘bad metaphysics’ that plagued Western philosophy.”
This was the project of Reconstruction in Philosophy, which argued that
“philosophy originated not out of intellectual material, but out of social
and emotional material,” so the history of philosophy was “a chapter in
the development of civilization and culture” (Dewey 1920 [1957], 25).
Part of Dewey’s task was to show how earlier philosophical doctrines
arose from circumstances, experiences, and cultures inconsistent with
modern liberal democracies. This disconnect prompted a need for recon-
structing philosophical ideas as well as social practices, which for Dewey
were intricately interwoven.
Like philosophies, problems also arose from historically specific con-
stellations of experience. As Alan Ryan has observed, “problem” was
perhaps Dewey’s central intellectual concept, serving as the engine that
stirred individuals and societies into motion and making “[p]roblem
solving…the condition of organic life” (1995, 28). This topos is the cen-
terpiece of Dewey’s most cited book in communication studies, The
Public and Its Problems (1927), where it plays a dual role—pointing to
both the socially perceived problems that call publics into existence and
the difficulty of activating publics in complex, modern societies where
problems fall outside the experiences of particular persons and groups.
That book, following Experience and Nature (1925), also signaled
Dewey’s full turn toward communication as “an architectonic concept”
(Depew 2000, 33). Understood as “the establishment of cooperation in
an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each
is modified and regulated by partnership,” communication for Dewey
drew upon language as “a form of action,” “a mode of interaction,” and
“the tool of tools” through which meanings and communities develop

(Dewey 1925 [1958], 179, 184, 185, 186).
Though a number of contemporary writers have praised Dewey’s
conception of philosophy as embedded in history, his use of history was
broad-brushed and reductive in comparison to McKeon, who no doubt
recognized his teacher’s limits as a historian of philosophy.9 Woodbridge
and McKeon’s Parisian mentors were all better historians than Dewey,
and they provided models toward the kind of scholarly erudition
McKeon would early achieve in his knowledge of ancient, medieval, and
seventeenth-century thinkers. Indeed, one can read McKeon’s earliest
publications as offering implicit critiques of the simplistic historical nar-
rative of Reconstruction in Philosophy, which features a linear narrative
of a singular “ancient tradition” dominated by Platonic and Aristotelian
metaphysics, given Christian supernatural form through the medieval
period, and only beginning to shake its authoritative metaphysical fixi-
ties with Francis Bacon, “great forerunner of the spirit of the modern
age” and “the prophet of a pragmatic conception of knowledge” (Dewey
1920 [1957], 51, 28, 38). Dewey in turn cast Aristotle as measuring
“the worth of knowledge…[by] the degree to which it is purely contem-
plative” (110), a position McKeon would reject in emphasizing multiple
forms of knowing in Aristotle tied to praxis, poeisis, and technê.
From the beginning, McKeon took the topos of history as a method
of discovery that opened to plural traditions, to recurrent philosophical
sensibilities and guiding principles, and to ancient precursors to mod-
ern ways of thought. In “The Empiricist and Experimentalist Temper
in the Middle Ages,” written for a 1929 festschrift to Dewey, McKeon
offered “a prolegomenon to the study of mediaeval science” that compli-
cated the meaning of empirical attitudes and implicitly rejected Dewey’s
story of Bacon and scientific modernity. “The instances which have been
taken to indicate an absence of interest in the things of nature during the
early period of Christianity can be balanced and rectified by examining
9 While still Dewey’s colleague at Columbia, McKeon (1933) obliquely critiqued his for-
mer teacher’s approach to the history of thought. Comparing Dewey’s treatment of medi-
eval philosophy to Hegel’s, McKeon observed, “Philosophers…are untrustworthy guides
to the historic lineaments and thoughts of the ages and the men whom, for the purposes
of…philosophy, they attempt to describe or controvert” (433). He concluded that “[t]he
impractical, supernatural, medieval thinker of recent construction is explained less by the
social and economic organizations…of his times, than by the philosophic convictions of our
own times” (436).
34 P. SIMONSON
what the contemporary observer did see when he looked about him,”
he wrote (1929, 220). Observation and facts are dependent upon “the
system of thought to which they are proper,” so that facts of one time
period are not facts of another; in the Middle Ages the things of the
world were observed and explained through analogical interpretation,
with “the marks of truth…scattered throughout nature and literature”
(219, 221).
In abbreviated form, McKeon was pointing toward paradigms of
knowing and advancing pragmatism by arguing that all thinking occurs
through particular conceptual frames (Depew 2000, 32f.). As he wrote
four years later, again in unstated dialogue with pragmatism, “what con-
stitutes the practical has not been a fixed concept,” an insight he later
developed by parsing out four different philosophical accounts of the
practical, charting its “rhetorical transformation” through Isocrates and
Cicero with asides to John Stuart Mill and William James (1944, 242).
McKeon’s conceptual pluralism in turn fed a more complex kind of his-
toricism than Dewey’s. Like Dewey, he saw philosophy as a reflection of
its cultural moment. Unlike Dewey, he maintained a distance between
theory and practice, and philosophy was both tied to its moment and
part of a transhistorical conversation whose fundamental terms took dif-
ferent meanings over time.
Building out from his knowledge of ancient and medieval thought,
and perhaps drawing upon conversations he was having with Burke,
McKeon began writing about rhetoric while living in New York in the
early 1930s.10 He brought his conceptual pluralism to bear on a grand
interpretive framework for the history of Western thought based on the
arts of the trivium. “Medieval philosophers learned from the ancients…
that philosophic attitudes are determined by the distinctions laid in the
study of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic,” he wrote (1933, 433–434).
Two years later, that kernel of insight had grown into a fuller-blown
schema he characterized as the “first stage of [an] inquiry into the nature
of history, or of verbal expression in general” (1935, 49, 108). Rejecting
10 Wess (2015) dates McKeon’s turn to rhetoric to mid-century, but my reading of his
corpus shows rhetoric to be a topic of interest from the 1920s forward, albeit one that
accelerates in the 1950s and ’60s.
positivist notions of history as the scientific collection of facts, McKeon

cast “history as disguised philosophy” built upon competing concep-
tual frameworks with their own terms, principles, and problematics. He
traced lines of medieval thought as they moved into the Renaissance
and showed how the arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric each had
their philosophical proponents and ways of understanding words and
things. Each of the arts offered distinct perspectives and methods, which
resulted in fundamentally different approaches to problems of knowledge
and action and different characterizations of the other two arts. Each of
the three arts took different forms over time, but they each had central
tendencies: (1) the way of grammar aims to understand texts and prop-
ositions about the state of nature, things, and cosmos; (2) the way of
dialectic aims to determine the ultimate truth of logical propositions,
competing theories, and possible meanings; and (3) the way of rhetoric
operates by grounding itself in how humans actually think “to arrive at
a richer suggestiveness in thought, a greater utility in action and a closer
approximation to the nature of things as they are” (1935, 112).
In short, by the early 1930s McKeon was working up an archi-
tectonic scheme for interpreting both intellectual orientations and
grander historical epochs in terms of the three fundamental arts of dis-
course. His account of rhetoric was initially less developed, but his rich
“Rhetoric in the Middle Ages” elaborated the history and demonstrated
that rhetoric had no singular essence but plural traditions and fluidly
circulating doctrines and devices. Written in an era when he was teach-
ing courses in rhetoric and pursuing his educational reforms as dean,
the essay provides a broadside against histories of rhetoric “as a sim-
ple verbal discipline” and marked by “the monotonous enumeration
of doctrines” (1987, 121). In their stead, he offered a wide-ranging
philosophical history that traced competing traditions of rhetoric var-
iably understood as a part of rational philosophy subordinate to logic,
as an instrument of theology dominating the other arts, and as a cen-
tral investment for those committed to practical actions and words. In
his telling, rhetoric was also the source of doctrines that would migrate
to other sciences (e.g., the study of the passions) and of devices that
would be applied to many subjects (e.g., the commonplaces). In short,
McKeon cast rhetoric as a central but variegated component of the cul-
tural and intellectual history of the West, laying groundwork for making
it philosophically central again.
36 P. SIMONSON
A Turn to Communication and Culture

As McKeon was publishing on the intellectual history of rhetoric in the
1940s (see also 1941, xxix–xxxii; 1987; 1950b), two other key terms
entered his vocabulary with increasing frequency: communication and
culture. The former was of course a key topos for Dewey, while the latter
was the term Dewey perhaps felt that he should have adopted instead
of experience. It would be a mistake to attribute McKeon’s use of them
to Dewey and draw a simple historical line of influence from clas-
sic to mid-century and perhaps on to more recent pragmatist thought.
McKeon’s turns to communication and culture were more proximally
driven by the broader intellectual environment of the late 1940s, by
his participation in UNESCO, and by the internal evolution of his own
thought and educational practice. The story warrants more than the lim-
ited space I have for it here, but I’ll point to several pieces. The concept-
term communication gained increasing salience in the United States in
the 1940s, and careful reading shows this to be the case in McKeon’s
own writings of that decade. Institutionally, the University of Chicago
had created a new interdisciplinary Committee on Communications
and Public Opinion by 1942, with McKeon a member and his Survey
of Rhetorics (Philosophy 348) among the listed courses (University of
Chicago 1942). More broadly, as one observer of the era wrote, remark-
ing on the increasing tendency “to think more of processes and less of
things,…every thoughtful student of human behavior today, no matter
what he calls his field, is likely to find that something which he will have
to call ‘communication’ obtrudes itself in the complex” (Bryson 1948,
1–2). McKeon concurred, writing a few years later, “Future histori-
ans who record what is being said and done today will find it difficult
to avoid giving a prominent place to our preoccupation with ‘commu-
nication’” (1957 [1990], 89). UNESCO would contribute to and help
internationalize that discourse, featuring communication in its 1945 con-
stitution and subsequent mission.
Between about 1944 and 1957, McKeon developed an overarching
view of communication that at once extended Deweyan thematics, his-
toricized them within the present age, and situated them within a met-
aphilosophical semantic scheme partly indebted to rhetoric. Across that
work, communication meant several things for McKeon. For one, to use
the Burkean vocabulary, it was a historically specific terministic screen—a
word that selects, reflects, and deflects socially experienced reality.
The word “does not signify a problem newly discovered in our times, but
a fashion of thinking and a method of analyzing which we apply in the
statement of all fundamental problems,” McKeon wrote (1957 [1990],
89). Adopting that fashion, McKeon retroactively characterized elements
of Aristotle’s philosophy of language and Cicero’s rhetorical theory in
terms of “communication” (McKeon 1947, 1950b). In Deweyan natu-
ralism, communication was a universal human activity. McKeon agreed,
but also recognized it as a historically specific way of seeing the world
that marked certain epochs, including the twentieth century.
By his summative “Communication, Truth, and Society” (1957
[1990]), communication had become an architectonic concept in
McKeon’s pragmatist pluralism. He self-consciously embraced the intel-
lectual fashion of an age where “all problems can be stated as problems
of communication” (90). In different ways, this was also true in the
Roman Republic and Renaissance, an insight he would return to in the
long historical view he adopted for communication across cultures. In
the current era, the “invention of instruments of communication and
massive extension of their use” had both given new intellectual sali-
ence to the concept of communication and created societies that “have
themselves become systems of communication” (92). Speaking into that
moment, McKeon conceived philosophy, political practice, and policy
as forms of communication that also generated problems of communi-
cation (see also 1947, 1950c). At the same time, in a departure from
Deweyan pragmatism, McKeon made a harder separation between the
realms of theory/philosophy and policy/practice. While he cast both as
fundamentally communicative, McKeon argued that the problems raised
by theory required the reconciliation of differences among the principles
of experts, while those raised by practice could be addressed through a
common commitment to find a workable solution (1947, 80–83). One
can hear echoes of Peirce in his view of theory and of Dewey in his view
of practice.
By the 1950s, McKeon was also embracing the concept of culture and
linking it to communication. After his studies at the University of Paris
in the 1920s, he had come to see philosophical systems as “functions of
culture” (1953 [1990], 13), but before 1945 the term made only spo-
radic appearance in his writings. About that time, he begins referenc-
ing anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckholn, but it is
only after his immersion in UNESCO that culture becomes part of his
central vocabulary. During this period, a major source of his intellectual
38 P. SIMONSON
insights arose “from conferring, particularly…[through] UNESCO, with

people of backgrounds, presuppositions, and cultures different than my
own” (1952 [1987], 202). These insights fed his accounts of philosophy,
communication, and culture as intertwined and pluralistic activities. The
philosophies of the world were for him “expressions of the cultures in
which they were developed as well as demonstrations of the truths they
express” (1953, 204). This was a bifocal view that recognized both the
cultural pluralism of anthropology and the regulative ideal of philosoph-
ical dialogue across difference as a way to recognize shared truth and
generate “symbols of concord and agreement” that could provide a basis
for peace and coordinated action (1990). He saw cultural patterns them-
selves as “structures of communication” with entwined social, political,
and expressive-humanistic dimensions that could all three come together
in the constitution of Deweyan publics (1950c, 244, 250). Within and
across cultures, communication was then a historically salient concept
for understanding the world, a social process that establishes relations
among people, and an art whose skillful deployment could promote the
discovery of shared truths, the diverse expression of common values, and
the creation of ethical communities (1990).
Semantics and Metaphilosophy
Paralleling his turns to communication and culture, McKeon developed
two metaphilosophical schemas to facilitate understanding and dialogue
across competing philosophies and the social practices they informed:
historical semantics and philosophical semantics. He situated these twin
programs within the contexts of the current era, when the “dominant
intellectual tendencies…turn discussion of basic questions to consid-
erations of action or of language” (1952 [1990], 161). Again he drew
parallels with the Renaissance and the Roman Republic, whose philo-
sophical loyalties were captured by Cicero’s dictum “words and deeds.”
McKeon’s metaphilosophy leveraged “current fashion in order to analyze
the causes of difficulties and disputes” and provide “a means of commu-
nication” across philosophical difference (ibid., 162, 181). On the one
hand, historical semantics investigated key terms across different phi-
losophies and the ways that persistent human problems took different
forms among them—a project that overlapped with his UNESCO work.
McKeon envisioned it as a framework for analyzing how the meanings
of “important words carry over from the systems of philosophers” into
the broader discourses of politics, poetry, and ordinary speech across his-
tory and cultures (163), though his own studies focused mostly on phil-
osophical thought. Philosophical semantics in turn investigated the formal
principles and rules for determining truth within particular philosophies
(McKeon 1952 [1990], 163, 179). This project reflected McKeon’s view
that the primary purpose of philosophy is the discovery and demonstra-
tion of truth; but he recognized that “‘truth’ is differently conceived
according to the principles of different philosophies,” and philosophi-
cal methods are constructed to form and justify doctrines derived from
those competing principles (1956 [1990], 122). Philosophical semantics
was a metaphilosophical framework for advancing what Walter Watson
calls McKeon’s “agonistic pluralism that develops tensions and opposi-
tions in order to test positions by their consequences” (1994, 23). In
different ways, both historical and philosophical semantics advanced the
pragmatist project, and both were informed by rhetorical and commu-
nicative sensibilities.11
While the project in philosophical semantics grew into an elaborate
system that, in my view, is mostly of interest to harder-core McKeonites,
historical semantics is accessible, useful, and relevant to the purposes
of my essay. Robert Wess calls it “the best place to begin a study of
McKeon” (2015, 56). I’ll speak into two of its dimensions. The first per-
tains to what Wess calls McKeon’s “quartet” of commonplaces: things,
thoughts, actions, words. Playing different roles, these commonplaces
recur across McKeon’s work (see Watson 2000, 16, 234). To my point
here, they provide a means for characterizing the dominant philosophical
positions of cultures and historical eras as well as the grounding princi-
ples for particular theories and disciplines. When things are fundamen-
tal, realities independent of human thought, language, and purpose are
foundational. This is the way of metaphysics, objectivist science, and—in
our own day—new materialisms. When thoughts are fundamental, struc-
tures of the mind and knowing are foundational. This is the way of epis-
temology and Idealism. When actions are fundamental, human purposes,
practices, and actually experienced realities are foundational. This is the
way of politics, Ciceronian civic republicanism, Deweyan pragmatism,
and certain forms of Marxism. When words or signs are fundamental,
11 For a good account of McKeon’s historical semantics, see Harvanek (1956). For his
philosophical semantics, see Zahava McKeon (1990, xvii–xxv; 1998, 5–15), Plochmann
(1990, Chapter 4), Watson (1994), and Depew (2000, 38–44).
40 P. SIMONSON
language is foundational. This is the way of sophistry, rhetoric, the lin-

guistic turn, and forms of constructivism. In McKeon’s grander narra-
tive, history cycles between ages of things, of thoughts, and of actions/
words—the last of which tend to run together, as they did in the twen-
tieth century (see e.g., 1952 [1990], 160–170). Like its predecessors,
the current age had “abandoned the quest for certainty and the search
for reality except as they are involved in problems of symbols, signs, and
actions, and in so far as they are determined by the structure, limits, and
efficacy of communication” (McKeon 1957 [1990], 90).
Layered beneath the quartet of fundamental principles for his his-
torical semantics is a second fourfold scheme, of philosophical meth-
ods: dialectical, logistical, problematic, and operational. Each prioritizes
and conceives things, thoughts, actions, and words differently. These
differences in term shape the meanings that each of the four methods
ascribe to the fundamental terms of philosophies and cultures. McKeon
illustrated these differences in studies of three pairs of terms: free-
dom and history, philosophy and action, and dialogue and controversy
(1952 [1990], 1952, 1956 [1990]). His mid-century metaphilosophi-
cal pragmatism shows through most clearly in his study of philosophy
and action, or theory and practice. (1) Dialectical methods collapse the
opposition between theory and practice and reconcile contraries of both
thought and action into larger dynamic wholes. They cast all genuine
sciences and arts as practical in the sense that they are determined by the
history of a society and find their criteria by their effects on human con-
ditions. (2) Logistic methods in turn construct formal systems of sciences
on the model of mathematics and build complex wholes out of simple
parts. They cast practice as separate from and in need of guidance by
those sciences, which apply their special knowledge to the separate realm
of practical affairs in the manner of engineering. (3) Problematic meth-
ods (also called methods of inquiry) devote themselves to resolving prob-
lems, seen as the task of theory and practice alike. They apply different
forms of scientific method to different realms (e.g., the natural and prac-
tical sciences), with problems of practice requiring modes of discussion,
judgment, and agreement arising out of the felt needs of people. (4)
Operational (also called rhetorical) methods collapse theory into practice,
cast them equally as the products of experience, and test both through
concrete action and discernible results. “When inquiry is considered in
terms of the operations by which it is conducted, the differences between
the laws of logic and of scientific methodology, on the one hand, and the
practices of rhetoric and of adjustment to circumstances, on the other,

disappear,” McKeon wrote (1952, 87). While methods of inquiry gain
their bearings from problems and the particular methodologies they
require, operational methods are centrally based on language and main-
tain skepticism about the ability to know a world beyond words.
McKeon’s historical semantics provides a useful analytic for mapping
the pragmatist tradition and his place in it. As Talisse (2013) observes,
“pragmatism always has had a metaphilosophical bent”—a higher-order
conception of what philosophy is, what it can do, and how one does it
(427; see also Aiken and Talisse 2017). Different branches of pragma-
tism differ in the kind of metaphilosophy they practice. One branch prac-
tices it “as a means for continuing inquiry among opposing views”; the
other “as a way to dismiss opposition and ‘get over’ problems” (Talisse
2013, 430). Talisse and Aiken see Peirce as exemplar of the first tradi-
tion, Dewey (and Rorty) of the second. McKeon belongs to the Peircean
branch, in no small part because both men viewed philosophical inquiry
as communication.
The distinction between problematic and operational methods in turn
points to a different charting of the pragmatist family tree. As McKeon
described them, the operational or rhetorical method is marked by a
commitment to “ordinary ways of life and ordinary uses of language,
with no possible appeal to a reality beyond opposed opinions except
through opinions about reality.” Truth is perspectival with “no overar-
ching inclusive perspective” to appeal to, and the “methods of rhetoric
constitute the whole of philosophic method” (1956 [1990], 124). In the
problematic method, by contrast, reality is more than linguistic. Shared
truths emerge around particular circumstances, problems, and efforts
to address them. Rhetoric does not constitute the totality of methods
but serves as an antecedent to the resolution of problems that clarifies
lived experience and as a means of formulating arguments that can influ-
ence audiences (ibid., 118, 124). McKeon cast Dewey’s pragmatism
as problematic, James’ as operational. Taking his lead, we can distin-
guish one strand of pragmatism that is focused on problems and shared
epistemic inquiry into them and that runs from Peirce and Dewey to
Nicholas Rescher. Another, more deeply perspectival strand of pragma-
tism is then anchored in doxa (as opposed to knowledge) and language
(not problems); it runs from James to neopragmatists like Rorty and
Stanley Fish. Within contemporary communication theory, this distinc-
tion helps us map the fault lines between, for example, Mats Bergman’s
42 P. SIMONSON
“habit-realism” on the one hand and the more strongly constructivist

pragmatism of James Carey and, arguably, Robert Craig (see Bergman
2016; Craig 2016).
McKeon himself straddled the line between the rhetorical/oper-
ational method and the problematic method of inquiry. From his early
essay charting operations of the trivium through his steady attention to
language and terms and his use of the commonplaces things/thoughts/
actions/words, he recurrently engaged in the rhetorical method.
Moreover, he was deeply attuned to the perspectivism inherent in philo-
sophical orientations and their grounding principles. “The subject-matter
and problems of philosophy change with problems of semantic sche-
mata,” as he would put it (1970 [1987], 105). At the same time, he
was not a relativist. He presented his semantic schema as “neutral” with
regard to the four methods and as a metaphilosophical means for discov-
ering truths shared across philosophies and cultures. Historical and phil-
osophical semantics were for him not exercises in language use but ways
of resolving problems not reducible to language. Moreover, instead of
reducing all methods to the rhetorical, McKeon retained an Aristotelian
commitment to a pluralistic range of arts and sciences suited to differ-
ent kinds of inquiries, each driven by its own characteristic problems.12
While he aligned most often with the problematic method, he embraced
it with a sense of historical contingency as one method among several,
each of which periodically rises to dominance. In contrast, Dewey’s
problematic method of inquiry was a kind of evolutionary achievement
that dialectically corrected earlier philosophical mistakes. By the middle
third of the twentieth century, when the Darwinian naturalism that did
so much to shape first-generation pragmatism was overlaid with a lin-
guistic turn in contemporary philosophy, the problematic way of action
needed to be supplemented by the operational way of words. In that
context, McKeon embraced elements of both “the skeptical pluralism of
opinions and perspectives [and] the problematic pluralism of methods
and principles” (1956 [1990], 122). He also lay the groundwork for a
grander philosophical rhetoric he would develop in the next decade.
12 Here I disagree with Barankowski’s characterization of McKeon as practicing an
“aesthetic pragmatism” that challenged Dewey’s linkage of science and democracy, emphasized
the power of words to construct realities, and interjected a corrective based on art instead of
science. This underplays McKeon’s allegiance to a Dewey-inspired problematic method and
the plural forms of inquiry it required.
Pragmatist Rhetoric for an Age of Communication

Entwined historically, the problematic and operational methods came
together philosophically in McKeon’s mature theories of rhetoric and
communication of the 1960s and ’70s. This period birthed some of
McKeon’s most accessible writings and his most impenetrable ones,
which implicitly marked the public and the technical sides of pragmatism.
The public side was evinced by “Philosophy as Humanism” (1965), a
lovely and readable essay which explicitly addressed pragmatism, rheto-
ric, and communication and laid the groundwork for work to come. In
defining humanism, McKeon implicitly sketched his own intellectual
orientation through four principles: (1) concern for the past manifest in
“studies of tradition…as a basis for innovation”; (2) “exploration of plu-
ralism of orientation” not as relativism but as “interested differentiation”
of alternative positions and “active choice among the possible courses of
thought and action”; (3) attention to “the concrete, in unique individu-
als, in experienced occurrences…[as] a specification of what is discovered
in common places relevant to particular questions”; and (4) commitment
to the “problematic [and] exploratory” as a way of seeking “the solution
of problems and the expression of meanings and values” (166). Along
with Existentialism, Marxism, and Science, Pragmatism was for McKeon
a leading example of contemporary humanism. Like their predecessors,
these newer humanisms “have arisen in periods in which diverse cul-
tures have been brought into contact by world-oriented movements”
that are marked by “recognition of pluralisms and the development of
new modes of communication” (156). In this context, he wagered
that “humanistic methods of rhetoric and communication” could pro-
duce “a new mode of philosophizing about common problems” (157).
Pragmatism had rightfully abandoned metaphysics and ontology, but its
revolution “lacked instrumentalities to carry it out successfully because
no art of rhetoric had been formed adequate to the possibilities of com-
munication” (1966 [1987], 57; cf. Danisch 2008).
From 1965 until his death in 1985, McKeon authored a dozen or so
essays that addressed rhetoric and communication (many collected in
McKeon 1987). Two gather much of his most exciting, mature think-
ing on the subjects and should be read as culminating companion pieces:
“Philosophy of Communications and the Arts” (1970 [1987]) and “The
Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts”
(1971 [1987]). Together they articulate a new rhetoric that encompasses
44 P. SIMONSON
both the problematic and operational strains of pragmatism, creatively

bend tradition toward innovation, and advance his four principles of
philosophical humanism. The essays extended his important “Discourse,
Demonstration, Verification, and Justification” ([1969] 1987), which lay
out a sweeping theory of discourse as structured by commonplaces, or
terms whose productive ambiguities of meaning make them seats of dis-
covery and invention. That insight would fuel a creative recounting of
the history of philosophical and scientific discourse as arising from the art
of rhetoric, and of Cicero’s refiguring of the Aristotelian commonplaces
of deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative oratory (42ff.). This revi-
sionist tale reflected McKeon’s deepened identification with philosophy
understood not as metaphysical, epistemological, or ontological mirror
of nature but rather as an art of communication and the construction of
its own subject matter (1970 [1987], 108).
In this philosophical and cultural age, rhetoric took its place as one of
the four traditional arts of discourse radically refigured. Like grammar,
logic, and dialectic, rhetoric for McKeon had a history as “a continuing
art undergoing revolutionary changes” (1971 [1987], 2). In the current
age, the four had shed their earlier status as arts of thought to become
“arts of expression and communication and of experimentation and con-
struction” (1970 [1987], 104). Among them, rhetoric was central, “a
universal and architectonic art” (108). Through its creative use of com-
monplaces, the new architectonic rhetoric produced things, thoughts,
and actions—not just words and arguments as the old verbal rhetoric had
done. It was an art of invention and discovery that also constructed the
common objects of social attention by making them manifest and pres-
ent (109–110). Most grandly, McKeon spoke of a “fundamental rhetoric
of all elements which enter into the perspective of everything commu-
nicated relative to what has already been done and said,” a sweeping
restatement of his earlier metaphor of culture as dialogue over time
(110). Echoing his earliest writings, McKeon made the case that rhet-
oric provided methods for “the discovery of ourselves and our times”
and contributed “to the formation of the culture of the modern world…
by function[ing] productively in the resolution of new problems and
architectonically in the formation of new inclusive communities” (1971
[1987], 11, 2).
Refigured for the twentieth century, rhetoric encompassed the
entwined problematics of words and actions that defined the intel-
lectual milieu and captured the two strands of pragmatism. Verbal
commonplaces—say demonstration, movement, creativity, or public—had

productive ambiguities that could lead inquirers to discover previously
unseen dimensions of the political and cultural present that was unfold-
ing in the late 1960s. At the same time, rhetoric was an architectonic art
that above all responded to the felt problems of the day, when experience
itself had broadened to become “a framework of cultural conditions and
natural circumstances” (1970 [1987], 99). This architectonic art tran-
scended the operational method which the rhetorical tradition had often
embraced and instead played a fundamental role in defining and address-
ing problems not reducible to language. McKeon’s increasingly complex
philosophical semantics (1966 [1990]) would play a metatheoretical
role in organizing pluralistic inquiry, or so he and his followers hoped.
But philosophy, policy, and culture would all need to be informed by
the methods of rhetoric to make possible the continuation of the liberal
democratic project that lay at the center of political pragmatism since the
Progressive Era. The new architectonic rhetoric would provide the con-
ceptual vocabulary and arts of inquiry for addressing problems of com-
munication, cooperation, and their consequences in the modern world.
It was indeed “pragmatism in a new key.”
Concluding Thoughts
McKeon’s work illuminates lines of pragmatism’s development, shows its
entanglements with ideas of rhetoric and communication, and provides
resources to think with today. I’ve shown that while McKeon may have
resisted explicit identification as a “pragmatist,” he made use of central
topoi and problematics of Deweyan pragmatism and advanced its lines
of thinking. Though the historiography of pragmatism has mostly been
silent about him, McKeon occupies a key position between Dewey and
Rorty, which his own schema of methods helps us chart. Dewey sat
squarely within a problem-focused method grounded in experience and
open to science. Rorty wrote a dissertation indebted to McKeon and
early essays on metaphilosophy, but his later neopragmatism represented
an operational/rhetorical method grounded in language and culture and
opening toward poetics. As I argued above, McKeon embraced elements
of both methods and in a way sits between Deweyan modernism and
Rortyean postmodernism. Dewey’s experience morphs into McKeon’s
culture, which Rorty turns toward language. History is central to phi-
losophy for all three but takes different forms: Dewey’s evolutionary
46 P. SIMONSON
naturalism and Hegelian march toward a pragmatist philosophy fit for

democratic culture; McKeon’s cyclical historicism, where the philosoph-
ical starting points of things, thoughts, or words/actions each provide
different conceptual frameworks for investigating transhistorical truths;
and Rorty’s more thoroughgoing historicism, where truths are contin-
gent and fully embedded in culture. Notably, McKeon is the only one of
the three who embraced rhetoric, which provided him the architectonic
framework that enjoined these two strands of pragmatism—one centered
on problems, the other on language. This gave him a more incisive sense
of the historically specific linguistic construction of problems than Dewey
had, and a greater sense of the reality of problems independent of the
way we talk about them than Rorty.
This hybrid character of McKeon’s pragmatism is one source of its
contemporary relevance for rhetorical and communication theory. His
style of rhetorical pragmatism is newly powerful today as we recognize
the limits of the linguistic constructivism that has dominated the field
since the 1970s. As a rhetoric of things, thoughts, and actions as well
as words, it provides a spacious framework for accommodating recent
insights by new materialists and others into the power of things and the
world beyond language. As Wess (2015) has noted, the meta-historical
dimension of McKeon’s quartet also gives us a way to think about the
transition perhaps underway from an era where theory centered lan-
guage to one where things and the methods of investigating them are
now in fashion. At the same time, McKeon also gives us resources to
resist this latest turn as definitive or decisive. The deep pluralism of his
rhetorical pragmatism keeps open our capacity to foreground any mem-
ber of this quartet and use it as a locus of inquiry into the problems of
our age. Each is a commonplace for discovering truths and building
communities, and each can accommodate multiple methods of inquiry
that are themselves more than rhetorical. McKeon’s embrace of the
problem-oriented side of pragmatism invites rhetoricians, philosophers,
and communication scholars to embrace heterogeneous forms of inquiry
and action responsive to the social and material challenges we face in the
warming, late-capitalist Anthropocene. That requires wading through his
corpus and selectively reappropriating the useful insights, redeploying his
commonplaces in creative ways.13
13 Thanks to Chris Voparil and Robert Danisch for helpful comments on earlier drafts of
this essay.
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University Press.
CHAPTER 3
Hu Shi’s Search for the “Chinese Sophist”

and “Spirit of Courageous Doubt”
Rya Butterfield
On May 4, 1919, students swarmed the streets of Peking to air their

frustration over Japan’s successful claim to Chinese territory at the Paris
Peace Conference and the Chinese Nationalist government’s submission
to the Treaty of Versailles (Grieder 1999, 176). They organized on the
pages of student-run periodicals, the likes of which played a fundamental
role in the spread of radical ideas about revolution and reform. In 1919
alone, approximately four hundred new student publications appeared
across the nation. They were written in pai hua, the spoken vernac-
ular language that was popularized by Hu Shi’s Literary Revolution
(Hu 1919, 110).1 It was a reform movement intended to revolution-
ize the use and accessibility of language by expanding the availability of
1 For consistency within the text, words written in the Wade-Giles Romanization system
in direct quotes have been changed to the contemporary pinyin Romanization system.
Likewise, Hu Shi’s name is written according to pinyin in the text. The older variation, Hu
Shih, is used in citations if the source was originally written using Wade-Giles.
R. Butterfield (*) 
Department of Mass Communication, Nicholls State University,
Thibodaux, LA, USA
e-mail: rya.butterfield@nicholls.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_3
54 R. BUTTERFIELD
vernacular literature and creating new vernacular works to introduce and

accustom people to progressive cultural and scientific ideas.
Hu’s plan for a Literary Revolution was popularized on the pages of The
New Youth, a forerunner among the student publications, as “Tentative
Proposals for the Improvement of Literature” (Grieder 1999, 76). Hu
wrote the article while studying in America, first for his B.A. and one
year of graduate study at Cornell University (1910–1914), and then for
his Ph.D., under the advisement of John Dewey, at Columbia University
(1914–1917). His “tentative proposals” were given a more radical inter-
pretation by the journal’s editor, who christened the movement to reform
language and literature as the “Literary Revolution” and Hu as its father
(Grieder 1999, 76). After a widespread show of support, The New Youth
adopted much of Hu’s platform for its operative policies.
The struggle between tentative experimental reform and drastic
revolution was a defining characteristic of Hu’s rhetorical context. There
are multiple names associated with this time period. The term “May Fourth
Movement” is used for the student protests that began on May 4. It is
part of the larger New Culture Movement, also referred to as the Chinese
Renaissance. Hu explains the Chinese Renaissance as the time marking “a
new phase, a new life…not a complete breaking away from the past…a
conscious effort to make articulate all the valuable elements we already pos-
sessed. At the same time the methods were modern, the inspirations were
modern. It thus presented to the people a new and living idea” (Hu 1926,
272–273). At some points, this was a hopeful time. At other points, it was
dark, colored by feelings of hopelessness, humiliation, and anger.
Anger tended toward revolution and Hu would try to talk fellow
radicals off of the revolutionary path in favor of a tempered, gradual
reform. It was a difficult task. As Grieder (1999) writes, Hu’s was “an
era when revolutionary agitation engulfed the streets of China’s cities and
filtered even into the narrow alleys of hinterland villages” (pp. 175–176).
The anger had been brewing for a long time. It was rooted in subju-
gation at the hands of foreigners like the Manchu dynasty, the British
Opium trade, and Japanese exploitation of China’s political corruption
and national resources.
Hu and his peers were especially immersed in the atmosphere of revo-
lutionary anger. In 1904, 13-year-old Hu moved to Shanghai where the
revolutionaries of the first wave of “Young China” had returned from stud-
ying abroad and offered a nontraditional education to a new crop of young
intellectuals. Students in Shanghai were exposed to strong advocacy of
3 HU SHI’S SEARCH FOR THE ‘CHINESE SOPHIST’ … 55
westernization and a steady stream of revolutionary propaganda. As Grieder

(1999) explains, the “new education” in Shanghai was engrossed by issues
of China claiming status in the world and making sense of the calamities
that had overrun the latter half of the nineteenth century (21).
A sense of national deficiency would follow Hu and his peers as some
of them left Shanghai to study in the United States on scholarships pro-
vided as part of the Boxer Indemnity Remittance. Hu characterizes the
Boxer War of 1900, often called the Boxer Rising, as “a war which was
the embodiment of anti-foreign and anti-modern reaction running wild
after the early military and naval reforms had failed to insure national
security against foreign aggression” (Hu 2013, 133). Elsewhere, Hu’s
passionate way of characterizing the Boxer Rising reveals its potency as
a reminder of China’s humiliation in the minds of students. He says,
“that episode so disgraced the nation that for many years China was not
considered a respectable member of the Family of Nations” (Hu 1926,
268). Hu and the others would have such things at the forefront of their
minds when they accepted funds from the Boxer Indemnity remittances
to search in universities abroad for tools to build a modern China.
Oscillation between optimism and anger made it difficult to keep
reform on a steady track. Hu maintained that Chinese intellectuals
should forego politics to instead concentrate on nonpolitical cultural
and intellectual transformation. From 1917 to 1919, the journal that
had popularized his guidelines for literary reform upheld this sentiment
(Grieder 1999, 176). In 1919, however, the journal was caught in the
crosshairs between those who desired reform and those who desired rev-
olution. As Grieder (1999) explains, “1919 marked a turning point that
made such a preoccupation with literary and cultural concerns appear to
many only peripheral to the vital issues of the movement” (176). The
liberal reformers all agreed that China had so far failed in achieving a
republican government and that any attempt at responsible government
was continuously marred by warlords, preservationist monarchists, and
militaristic factions. They also agreed that China needed cultural and
intellectual rejuvenation and the means of standing unaided in the mod-
ern world. The contention was essentially about sequence; which should
come first, political or social reform?
Although Hu was “convinced that intellectual and cultural regeneration
must take precedence over political reform” (Grieder 1999, 175) he had
mixed feelings about how the nonpolitical forces had developed by 1919.
Initially, after the student movements when hundreds of student periodicals
56 R. BUTTERFIELD
that adhered to the principles of liberal reform sprung up around the nation,
he applauded the students’ efforts. He said that the events of 1919 had
imparted a “new lesson,” that activities like these could be “democratizing
forces,” “new channels of activity…to rebuild a new foundation for Chinese
democracy” (Hu 1919, 113–114). Later, “Hu described the May Fourth
movement as ‘a most unwelcome interruption’ of the work initiated in 1917
and 1918, a blow from which the New Culture movement never fully recov-
ered” (Grieder 1999, 176–177). He saw that nonpolitical forces, even when
they seem to arise from new intellectual awareness, can, and were, employed
for antagonistic political ends that undermine lasting reform.
To help China along the path of Renaissance, Hu developed a two-
pronged plan for rhetorical pragmatic reform specifically focused on
developing democratic thought and democratic communication. These
developments were intended to “improve [the] lived experience” of
Chinese people, which puts Hu in step with the ambitions of “rhetor-
ical pragmatism” (Danisch 2015, xvi). The first arm of the reform, the
Literary Revolution, focused on the adoption of the vernacular lan-
guage for new intellectual and literary creation and translation of exist-
ing works. The Literary Revolution was intended to develop a shared
logical consciousness among the people and allow for consolidation of
rapid, and sometimes drastic, social changes into a stable cultural whole.
See my essay on Hu Shi’s Literary Revolution in China Media Research
for a more detailed account of that part of the reform. The present
chapter focuses on the second arm of Hu’s leadership, the intellectual
project undertaken in his Ph.D. dissertation, “The Development of
Logical Method in Ancient China.”
Written under the advisement of John Dewey, the dissertation was
itself an exercise in pragmatic judgment. It employed a theory of crit-
ical sophistic logic to evaluate China’s ancient intellectual traditions of
humanism and rationalism. Hu holds that reclamation of the progres-
sive aspects of these traditions is the most necessary step for China’s
transition into the modern world. The latter part of this essay evaluates
three intellectual traditions, the Daojia, Rujia,2 and Mojia, that Hu
2 Confucianism is not the Romanization of a Chinese term; it is not a term used in
Chinese. The term for Confucian teachings and practices is “Ru.” As Xinzhong Yao (2000)
explains, “Confucius,” named Kongzi in Chinese, “was recognized as the symbol of the
Ru” (p. 27). The term “Rujia” refers to “the school or tradition of literati or scholars who
have committed themselves to the tradition of the Ru” (Yao 2000, 27).
concentrated on for their resources and limitations when considered in

relation to Hu’s ambitions to carry out what I identify as rhetorical prag-
matic reform. First, however, I will orient Hu in the pragmatic tradition
and explain why he has thus far remained overlooked.
Hu’s Place in the Pragmatist Tradition

In his book Building a Social Democracy (2015), Danisch explains how
“atten[tion] to…and cultivat[ion of] specific forms of rhetorical practice”
(xiii) is the necessary outgrowth of early philosophical pragmatism. This
is because early, philosophical pragmatists held a strong commitment to
social democracy, which “foreground[s] social interaction, pluralism, and
contingency as basic facts of human experience” (Danisch 2015, xii).
The best, if not only, way to develop and maintain a social democracy in
these conditions is to form what he refers to as “deliberative ecologies,”
meaning environments that are “capable of generating good decisions
about pressing public issues and promoting individual self-development
through community life” (Danisch 2015, xiv, xiii). The argument that
democracy is a “way of life,” Danisch (2015) says, is “pragmatism’s most
important and enduring contribution to American intellectual history
and political theory” (xi).
When accounting for some of the other overlooked pragmatists
outlined in Danisch’s (2015) work, Hu fits into the American pragmatist
tradition along with the neo-pragmatists, somewhere in between
Jane Addams, Richard McKeon, also a student of Dewey’s, and Hugh
Dalziel Duncan. Although their time overlapped, in the development
of the pragmatist tradition, we might say Hu began by picking up
where Addams left off. Danisch (2015) emphasizes the importance of
developing the right rhetorical practices in fostering social democracy
and says this was “a project Jane Addams started but one that has sadly
been left unfinished” (xiii).
The understanding of the need to develop a “deliberative ecology”
conducive to democratic rhetorical practices was with Hu before he ever
came to the United States or sought the advisement of John Dewey. For
instance, in 1906, eleven years before he began studying with Dewey, Hu
was a contributor to, and later the sole editor of, a periodical founded by
some of his schoolmates called The Struggle. The name, he explains, was
“another instance of the popularity of the Darwinian theory” and the
periodical was written in the vernacular spoken language because it was
58 R. BUTTERFIELD
“primarily interested in instilling new ideas into the undereducated masses”

(Hu 2013, 92). Hu’s focus on spreading ideas to the uneducated is a
direct attempt at creating a “deliberative ecology.”
The overlap between Hu’s thought and pragmatism before he trav-
eled to the United States shows that there was something authentically
suitable about American Pragmatism for China’s reform needs. It also
shows that Dewey was not the sole cause of Hu’s pragmatic outlook.
Rather, Hu sought Dewey out as a teacher because he found consist-
ency between Dewey’s pragmatic thought and the ideas Hu had already
been forming. From there, they went on to influence one another. For
instance, it seems that Hu played a particularly influential role in Dewey’s
experience in China (1919–1921), acting as host and interpreter of
events, and in Dewey’s reception in China, as translator of his lectures
for publication in Chinese. Therefore, Apart from the few times that Hu
directly attributes an idea to Dewey, I use points of consistency between
them simply to establish Hu’s place in the pragmatist genealogy.
Hu has been mischaracterized in Chinese memory as a proponent of
wholesale Westernization. This may have resulted in part from his close
connection to Dewey and American pragmatism, but it was likely com-
pounded by the fact that many of Hu’s fellow radicals did develop into
proponents of wholesale Westernization. The pull of Westernization
was particularly strong during Hu’s “new education” as a teenager in
Shanghai. The first wave of Young China spread the ideas of Western
thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, Bentham, Kant, and Darwin.
Works like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Huxley’s Evolution and
Ethics were available in translation (Hu 1931, 395). Huxley’s work
received particularly warm reception among Chinese intellectuals who
believed “the Darwinian hypothesis, especially in its social and political
application, was a welcome stimulus to a nation suffering from age-long
inertia and stagnation” (Hu 1931, 396). Terms and phrases associated
with evolution were trendy. They appeared often in journalism and peo-
ple even took them as names. Even Hu’s name reflects the evolutionary
vogue of the time. He adopted Shi on his brother’s suggestion. It means
fitness, in reference to the slogan “survival of the fittest.” In 1910, he
officially took it as his permanent name (Hu 1931, 397).
Between proponents of westernization and traditionalists, others
tried to complicate the authoritative narrative in attempt to forge a new
path out of the past. This critical approach is more consistent with Hu’s
work and the pragmatist tradition. One of these movements, known as
the “‘doubt antiquity’ (yigu) movement,” is consistent with the pragma-

tism of McKeon’s approach to rhetoric, which Danisch (2015) explains,
is “concern[ed] with pluralism and its historical circumstances” (128).
The doubt antiquity movement “led by the 20th century historian, Gu
Jiegang, turned a critical eye on the accepted narrative of China’s intel-
lectual history (Johnson 2016). Scholars in the movement to “doubt
antiquity” questioned gaps and inconsistencies in the ancient canon to
highlight the loss of ideas during the unification of China under the first
imperial dynasty of Qin (221 BCE) (Johnson 2016). These scholars were
aware that the standard intellectual narrative hadn’t always existed with-
out challenge and believed modern China would benefit from an appre-
ciation of the diversity of ideas in its past.
Any preservation of tradition had to be undertaken with critical care
lest it reassert itself under a new guise. Over time, the traditional cul-
ture has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to adapt and maintain some
degree of culture consistency. From a short term perspective, the capac-
ity for cultural adaptation is helpful. Long term, this capacity would be
an obstruction to reform if not consciously accounted for. Originally,
adaptability developed in response to the need for socio-political unifica-
tion across a vast land. It was a process of translating new and different
influences into the old philosophical structure to negate the disruptive
potential of new thought. For example, Hu Shi explains how Daojia
was developed as a Chinese cultural counter to the influence of Indian
thought. Daojia, he says, was essentially a reassertion of the old Sinitic
religion3 disguised along the lines of the foreign Buddhist influences it
sought to subsume (Hu 1934, 86). Philosophical adaptability functioned
as a cultural defense mechanism. By adapting some of the desirable char-
acteristics of an invading system, even if only superficially, the tradition
could placate would-be reformers and things could remain basically
unchanged.
When new needs face off against an old culture, the capacity to main-
tain cultural consistency become a “trained incapacity.” By subsuming
or altering new thought, traditional philosophy did not allow people to
confront and adequately deal with new problems. A “trained incapacity,”
according to Kenneth Burke (1984), is a tendency in thought or action
that develops as a capability, or “capacity,” but loses its benefit under
3 Hu says the faith “never had a generic name.” Elsewhere he calls it Siniticism
(Hu 1995a, 441).

60 R. BUTTERFIELD
new and different conditions. Instead of being beneficial, a thought or

action that is a “trained incapacity” can be harmful to the thinker or
actor (7) because it can develop into an issue of faulty means-selection,
or a poor choice of tools (Burke 1984, 10).
Various things can prevent people from selecting adequate means,
including choices inherited from the past, intellectual ability, and cultural
attitudes (Burke 1984, 10). Hu looks at the tension between traditional-
ists and leftists in a way consistent with what contemporary rhetoricians
would describe as a rhetorical problem created by the struggle between
alternative sets of conflicting means. This struggle provides an exam-
ple of why Hu sought the help of the Sophistic lens. One of the frag-
ments of writing left by Protagoras, first of the ancient Greek sophists,
maintained that on any topic, people will hold oppositional views. “The
two-logoi fragment,” Crick (2015) explains, “states the central fact of
politics—that because human beings measure appearances differently, the
life of politics is disputation” (p. 71). If modern China was to emerge
from under the paternalistic control of traditionalists, the people would
need to communicate on issues for which a single satisfactory logos, or
accounting of, would never exist. Crick (2015) explains this burden as it
was understood by the ancient Greeks in contrast to the rule of a tyrant:
Whereas conventional tyrants survived by restricting to a minimum the

sphere of freedom in both action and speech, the tyranny of logos forced
freedom upon its citizens, drawing them out of their homes to speak and
be spoken to within the constant chatter of the assembly, the court, and
the agora. (p. 78)
Hu recognized that people needed to learn to critically engage, which

would mean accepting the responsibility placed on their shoulders by the
“tyranny of logos.”
To take on such a responsibility of critical engagement, the peo-
ple needed to see rhetorical power as something that should be theirs.
This marks an example of one of the ways Hu’s contributions to the
method of rhetorical pragmatic reform advanced the pragmatist tra-
dition. Danisch (2015) refers to this notion of rhetorical responsibil-
ity as “communicative agency” and explains that while Addams had
much to say about social organization at Hull house, she had little to
say about the forms of “communicative agency” enabled there (Danisch
2015, 202). Hu’s reform lends far more insight into the function of
the rhetorical practices his reforms aimed at. In a word, they were to
function by enabling new means of making power.
Here, considering the means by which a citizen can claim rhetorical
power in a social democracy, is one place where Hu’s focus overlaps
with that of Hugh Dalziel Duncan. Duncan pointed to the differences
between the rhetorical practices that enable authoritarianism and those
that enable democracy. Democracy, he argued, demands conditions
that “[value] disagreement, debate, and discussion (classic pragmatist
preoccupations)” (Danisch 2015, 163). There are also comparisons to be
drawn between Hu’s focus on literature and poetry and Duncan’s focus
on art in its comic form. For Duncan, studies of comic art could “explain
how communication between equals fosters social integration” (Danisch
2015, 169–170). Hu’s approach to creations in the vernacular language
were aimed at social equality and integration.
The authority traditionally attributed to the scholarly ruling class
needed to be recognized as a faulty means-selection. Hu’s Literary
Revolution was intended to carry out something that had already begun
in Chinese society akin to the sophistical movement in ancient Greece—“a
fundamental shift in how power was distributed and formed” (Crick
2015, 67). Hu wanted to upend the structure and means of making
power. It should be clarified that his predicament was less in a dis-
tant space between the traditional and modern and more in a transition
between the two. So, unlike Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, whom
Arendt (2006) refers to in her 1954 work Between Past and Future, as
“nineteenth-century rebels against tradition,” who “tried desperately to
think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools,” Hu tried
to show that there was, in fact, consistency between Chinese tradition and
what he hoped to see develop as modern Chinese thought (pp. 24, 26).
An important consequence of this was that a “conscious” political reform
could be enough. Hu explains this concept of consciousness here:
We are not willing to be led by the nose by a set of blind leaders. At this
time we must open our eyes and look ahead to the different roads which
branch before us, and see which road takes us to which place, see for
ourselves which road we may, indeed must, travel. Of course we cannot
guarantee that our observation and judgment will be free of error, but we
have a deep belief that a conscious search for the road is far better than
allowing ourselves to be led blindly. We also hope that by public discussion
the search will result in enabling us to find a truer and rounder route.
(Hu 1930, 934)
62 R. BUTTERFIELD
However, if the cultural and intellectual revolutions were not complete,

and the people not enabled to make sound judgment about their path,
than a political revolution would seem, and would perhaps be, the only
course and that would be a dangerous and wasteful route.
Rhetorical Pragmatic Reform

Both arms of Hu’s reform were exercises in developing the rhetorical
practices that would provide adequate means and communicative agency.
The Literary Revolution worked with vernacular language to reposition
social power. This arm of the reform is a strong point of consistency
between Hu and Dewey. “Dewey tells us that art is the characteristic
form of human experience, but he never tells us what form of art can be
used to think about and change social aspects of experience” (Danisch
2015, 247). By offering this advice, Hu makes the “pivot from philo-
sophical to rhetorical pragmatism” (Danisch 2015, 247). Each element
of the Literary Revolution was an example of a form of art used to
remake social experience. In total, they would undermine the paternalis-
tic authority of the literati by developing social awareness and rhetorical
responsibility.
The other arm of Hu’s reform focused on the intellectual tradition
and the institutions that arose from it to create a social landscape that
would enable democratic behaviors and develop a pragmatic “attitude
toward ideas.” To create a landscape conducive to democratic behavior,
Hu worked to free the intellectual-elite from the bonds of their own cul-
tural superiority. This attempt to equalize cultural authority in the belief
that all people were capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of democratic
citizenship is in direct agreement with Dewey’s position. “Dewey…advo-
cates an essentially anti-elitist position while describing democracy as…a
set of social relationships embodied in the social structures within which
we interact with other citizens” (Danisch 2015, 204). Like Addams and
McKeon, Hu paid close attention to social relationships. However, how
he dealt with them shows where Hu advanced rhetorical pragmatism
further than the other neo-pragmatists.
Danisch (2015) asserts that “McKeon is one of the first figures in
the history of pragmatism to explicitly make…[the rhetorical] turn,” by
which he means going beyond rhetorical theory into rhetorical exercise
(121). This assertion overlooks Hu. McKeon wasn’t the first of Dewey’s
students to make this advancement. In fact, Danisch (2015) does
recognize that some of Dewey’s works that most directly point toward
the rhetorical turn, and that would have most influenced McKeon, were
written after Dewey’s time in China under the guidance of Hu (123).
Nonetheless, Addams, McKeon, and Hu are consistent in their attention
to social pluralism. As Danisch (2015) writes, “The pragmatist emphasis
on associated living and the need for identification between plural people
operates at McKeon’s intellectual center of gravity just as it operated for
someone like Jane Addams” (138). However, “McKeon did not leave us
a handbook by which we could practice this new rhetoric in a social and
political context” (Danisch 2015, 138). Hu, on the other hand, was try-
ing to provide that kind of practical guidance. Similarly, like Addams in
Hull House, Hu was trying to “inhabit” the right rhetorical structures
and tried to set an example of how one ought to communicate within
such structures so as to “promote positive social and political change”
(Danisch 2015, 257). As a result, Hu likely suffered a similar fate as
Addams, which was likely compounded by the fact that he undertook
reform far away in China. Of the former point Danisch (2015) explains,
“I believe Addams is largely left out of the history of pragmatism because
she functions more as a rhetorical leader and less as a philosopher”
(257). Hu was always very active as a leader in the reform and was likely
overlooked in much the same way.
The firm divide between the two strata of society kept the intellec-
tual-elite, who might have otherwise given the people the tools they
needed to effectively confront modern challenges, too separate from
the experiences of the common people to fully understand their diffi-
culties or the living philosophy that guided them. Likewise, the future
was uncertain for the elite class following the abolition of the civil ser-
vice examination system. As Wang Ke-wen writes, “with the collapse
of its institutional basis in 1905, the gentry ceased to be an active
class. Its various social and political roles were gradually assumed by
landlords, bureaucrats, merchants, or local bullies, in the twentieth
century” (Ke-wen 1998, 67). The absence of the examination system
left a hole in Chinese society, which created panic among young peo-
ple who now saw no clear means of social or political advancement.
Hu, however, sought to temporarily preserve this new separation
from politics. He asked intellectuals to abstain from dealing with the
established political system, to instead help develop a cultural ground-
work capable of giving rise to an alternative responsible system of
government.
64 R. BUTTERFIELD
A pragmatic attitude toward ideas is one that sees ideas as tools for
confronting social problems (Danisch 2007, 4). Danisch (2007) writes,
“by believing that ideas are useful and adaptable social tools, the pragma-
tists implicitly rejected dogma, moral certainty, and the quest for abso-
lute truth” (4). Also, consistent with Hu’s perspective on reform is the
emphasis Dewey places on conscious decision making. Since “political
facts are not outside human desire and judgment” (Dewey 1954, 6), one
must purposefully choose “between blind, unreasoned attack and defense
on the one hand and discriminating criticism employing intelligent
method and a conscious criterion on the other” (Dewey 1954, 6–7).
However, it is beyond clear that Hu’s assessment of China’s need and
evaluation of China’s intellectual history were guided by this “attitude
toward ideas.” He recognized the adaptability of Rujia thought, which
accounted for its centuries long staying power, and in turn, recognized
how Rujia lost its adaptability once entrenched in intellectual institu-
tions used to preserve political power. The progressive qualities of Rujia
were stifled and the regressive qualities encouraged. Likewise, the propa-
gandized revolutionary zeal of young twentieth-century intellectuals was
no less dogmatic. In step with the way Dewey conceived of democracy as
a “social idea, a way of life” (Danisch 2015, 204), Hu regarded democ-
racy less as a concrete system of political institutions than a state of mind
conducive to the maintenance of a particular social condition. It followed
that the creation of a democratic society would be essentially an intellec-
tual, rather than a political, accomplishment (Grieder 1999, 178).
Hu wanted to create the cultural space for “genuine politics.”
“Genuine politics comes into being” Crick (2015) writes, “when the
resources of logos can be harnessed by ordinary citizens to challenge,
invert, and transform…[the] established hierarchies” that held “strength
and morality…[as] synonymous” (p. 73). Hu wanted to shift author-
ity from an idea’s origin or professed moral aptitude, where it had been
attributed by Rujia, to its performance in an intellectual space con-
structed in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Traditional domestic ideas and
modern foreign ideas should be judged on equal footing according to
their practical merit within a particular situation of need.
Hu saw the lack of a scientific spirit as the chief obstacle to develop-
ing a pragmatic “attitude toward ideas” and enabling “genuine politics.”
Like Dewey, Hu understood the process of critical inquiry as fundamental
to democratic culture. Danisch explains, “at the core of Dewey’s commit-
ment to inquiry as a vital matter for the organization of community life lie
two complimentary but distinct practices: inquiry that requires deliberation

and discussion, and inquiry based on the methods of scientific thinking”
(Danisch 2015, 206–207).
Hu described the “scientific spirit,” as a “critical consciousness,” or
way of apprehending the physical and social world that values situational
analysis, views history as relevant to present-day events and attitudes, and
has the ability to bring ideas and behaviors into accord. Hu said it was
the lack of critical consciousness that prevented China from adopting
a popular government after the success of the anti-Manchu revolution
and abdication of the Qing dynasty in the early twentieth century, when
China’s time to modernize had arrived (Hu 1926, 266). As he explained
to a London audience in 1926:
The Republic has failed, not because modern China has failed—there has
never been a modern China—but because in all these processes the changes
have been superficial and have hardly touched the fundamental issues of
political transformation. There has been practically no modern leadership,
practically no genuine admission of our real weaknesses, no recognition of
the spiritual possibilities of the new [civilization]. (Hu 1926, 269)
A critical consciousness was necessary for all of these things: modern

leadership, admission of weakness, and recognition of spiritual potential.
The only thing capable of enabling critical consciousness is the spirit
of critical doubt, which Hu believed could be reawakened from China’s
intellectual past. The scholastic traditions of Rujia that had domi-
nated China’s intellectual and political institutions had overshadowed
other schools of thought and its own constructive tenants. Hu (1931)
called himself “a historical research worker,” that thinks “genetically” to
reveal the hidden history of thought (403). Today, we might extend the
analogy to call him a genetic engineer, developing a modern scientific
spirit from dormant seeds of humanism.
Humanist doubt, the germ of critical consciousness that developed
in the west with the Sophists was also present in ancient China. As Hu
(1963) writes, “the spirit of doubt has ingrained itself in the Chinese
mentality ever since the days of [Laozi] and [Kongzi]”4 (299).
4 The English name “Confucius” is replaced with the Chinese “Kongzi” in brackets.
66 R. BUTTERFIELD
This spirit of doubt has always manifested itself in every age in a critical
examination of our own civilization and its ideas and institutions. Such
self-critical examination of one’s own civilization is the prerequisite with-
out which no ‘profound and sweeping’ cultural changes are ever possible
in any country with an old civilization. (Hu 1963, 299)
His rhetorical pragmatic reform, prompted by dissatisfaction with China’s

predicament and the trained incapacities imposed by historical inheritance,
would be another installment in China’s legacy of critical doubt. The
remainder of this chapter focuses here, on Hu Shi’s project to critically eval-
uate China’s ancient intellectual traditions of humanism and rationalism.
Hu’s Search for Logical Method in Ancient China

Hu saw the groundwork for a pragmatic “attitude toward ideas” in
China’s ancient intellectual traditions of humanism and rationalism, such
as the original “spirit of courageous doubt” of the Daojia (Daoist/Taoist),
the “Socratic Tradition of [Kongzi],” or Rujia, which Hu describes as
“the tradition of free discussion, criticism, and intellectual honesty,” and
the Mojia (Mohist) practical advancement of logical theory. These philo-
sophical foundations were born of a difficult transition between the age of
poetry and the age of logic. The old Sinitic religion, the religion of ancient
China, that worshipped the Supreme power of Tien (often translated as
“Heaven”), the spirits of the dead, the forces of nature, belief in good and
evil retribution, and a belief in a variety of divinations, based around the
daily experiences in agrarian or nomadic society, had passed (Hu 1934,
80–81). So too had the stable age of the great Zhou dynasty, from elev-
enth to seventh-century BC, when social life was highly ritualized and
social relations were regulated down to the smallest of details.
After the fall of the Zhou, the imperial state turned dark. The state
began to “decay… under weak and wicked emperors” (Hu 1922, 9). Poets
relayed the desperate conditions, as in this quote from the Book of Poetry:
You awe-inspiring Ministers of State, why are you so unjust? Heaven is

multiplying its afflictions; the people are grumbling, and yet you do not
correct nor bemoan yourselves! (Hu 1922, 12)
The strict social system of the Zhou dynasty held society stable for cen-
turies. “The Emperor, or ‘Son of Heaven,’” Hu explains, “was not only
the temporal but also the spiritual head of the empire, ruling in the name
of Heaven to which he alone was privileged to sacrifice” (Hu 1922, 9).
The emperor was lord atop a feudal pyramid. Every tier of the pyramid
was governed by strict rules and duties. With a benevolent emperor,
the system had kept society stable but after the Zhou dynasty, when led
by weak and wicked leaders, the entire system turned weak and wicked
in turn. While poets like the one quoted above continued to appeal
to the righteousness of the old order, other poets believed they were
experiencing the disdain of Heaven itself. Hu mentions one such poet
“who…in bitter distress and despair,” acquiesced that his fate must be
the unfortunate “decree of Providence” (Hu 1922, 13).
The people are now in peril, In vain they look to Heaven:

All is dark and dumb.
Let its determination be fixed
And there is none whom it will not overcome.
There is the great God
Does He hate anyone? (Hu 1922, 13)
China had been aided through many difficult historical transitions by

its foundational philosophies. Hu believed these foundations could aid
China again. However, none of them were individually adequate to the
task of developing a modern form of thought and he was not looking for
a replication of their previous manifestations. For, in the past, they had
led to the classicism, conservatism, and stratification that had taken over
Chinese society and obscured the foundations of critical logic. Yet, with
their help, the people could acquire the skill set to cultivate critical logic,
and through Hu’s pragmatic reform, they could develop the environ-
ment to sustain it. He confronts the foundational philosophies of Daojia,
Rujia, and Mojia to expose their limitations and reveal their potential.
He looked to each for rhetorical tools. As Hu writes:
Three great leaders, [Laozi], [Kongzi], and [Mozi], arose within the
brief space of less than two hundred years (about 570-420 BC) and laid
the foundation of Chinese philosophy for all the centuries to come. All
of the three can only be best understood in their respective relation to
the tottering Sinitic religion and to the critical and skeptical atmosphere
of their times. Broadly speaking, [Laozi] stood at the extreme Left in
the attitude towards the old religion; [Kongzi] occupied the center with
strong leanings towards the Left; and [Mozi], founder of the Mo Sect,
68 R. BUTTERFIELD
represented the Conservative Right. [Laozi] was a rebel in religion and a

revolutionary in philosophy; [Kongzi] was a Humanist and an Agnostic;
and [Mozi] was a religious leader who sought to save the old Sinitic reli-
gion by purifying it and giving it a new significance. (Hu 1995, 443)
Laozi
Laozi was a critic, a doubter, and a rebel; Hu Shi calls him “the
Protagoras of ancient China” (Hu 1922, 16). As an individual figure,
Hu saw Laozi as beneficial to the advancement of logic in ancient China
because he was a bold critic of the established social order. In response
to the poet who asked if God hates anyone, Laozi likely would have
responded that God neither hates nor loves nor cares at all. Heaven, for
Laozi, was indifferent.
Laozi was a “Sophist” Hu says, because his philosophy was fueled
by skepticism and creative doubt (Hu 1922, 14). He juxtaposed the
warped and malfunctioning imperial order of his time with life earlier,
during the time of the old Sinitic faith, before detailed rules and regula-
tions bound the common people to their maltreated lot. The old Sinitic
religion considered only what was relevant in daily experience. The peo-
ple lived on the land and experienced the cruelty of the elements as if
they were part of the land. In the world Laozi knew, this sentiment had
much more fidelity than the conception of a benevolent Son of Heaven.
“Nature,” he says, “is not benevolent: it treats all beings as if they were
mere grass and dogs” (Hu 1922, 17). He thought the existing politi-
cal and social hierarchy was “foolishly civilized and refined and artificial”
(Hu 1922, 16). Worse, not only was the social organization contrived,
but it had also become dangerous to those who partook in its foolish-
ness. Hu explains this with Laozi’s “Master Executioner” analogy for
“nature”:
There is always the Master Executioner who kills. To undertake executions

for the Master Executioner is like hewing wood for the Master Carpenter.
Whoever undertakes to hew wood for the Master Carpenter rarely escapes
injuring his own hand. (Hu 1922, 17)
Nature will steamroll anyone who stands in the way of its inevitable path.
Thus, Laozi maintained that people should live in a state of noninterfer-
ence and nonresistance.
Hu saw the critical aspect of Daojia as good, but if the destructive

energy is taken too far and not directed into a constructive medium, crit-
icism is unable to advance logic or pragmatic reform. Still, the subversive
and revolutionary element of Laozi’s philosophy is a rhetorical resource
because it laid the foundation for constructive philosophies. Confucian
humanism picked up here; “the age of Sophistry was fading into the age
of Logic” (Hu 1922, 19).
Kongzi
Kongzi was not a common kind of philosopher, “he was concerned with
drawing up a set of rules for human conduct… [not] the elaboration of
theories” (Hu 1995, 431). This aspect of Rujia helped the philosophy
develop into bureaucratic form. Kongzi was more tempered in his criticism
than Laozi. “His philosophy was a compromise” between the naturalistic
influence of the sixth-century and the cautious attitude toward traditional
values he maintained as a statesman (Hu 1995, 431). “Whereas [Laozi’s]
naturalism was radically nihilistic,” Rujia can be called a philosophy of
moderation (Hu 1995, 431). It favored consistency, and thus, promoted a
highly stable bureaucracy as a structure of authority. The authority’s legit-
imacy came from a literary tradition revolving around universal original
ideas recorded by sages of antiquity. Due to the reverence, Kongzi attrib-
uted to the history and institutions of the literary tradition, he was called
the “father of Chinese history” (Hu 1995, 431).
The most important rhetorical resource of Rujia thought came from
the important role played by doubt. Hu (1919) writes, “doubt is rarely
purely negative. It leads to inquiries which in most cases lead in turn
to positive reconstructions” (116). The positive kind of doubt is exem-
plified by the “skepticism” that is part of the “‘Socratic Tradition’ of
[Rujia]—the tradition of free discussion, criticism, and intellectual hon-
esty” (Hu 1959, 29). Rujia skepticism asserted “the right to doubt,”
Hu (1963) writes “even in matters traditionally regarded as sacred or
sacrosanct” (296). Kongzi said that some things, like death, fall out-
side of our ability to know and we should not claim to know about
those topics. He kept social focus on the secular world and prevented
formation of metaphysical beliefs, such as belief in an afterlife. This
wholly secular focus worked to further simplify the old Sinitic religion
that already had little mythology or ritual but maintained practices like
burial and ancestor worship.
70 R. BUTTERFIELD
Unlike the Daojia style of criticism, intended to fully deconstruct

all systems of social organization and social naming, in Rujia skep-
ticism, critique was but the first step in a larger reformative process.
First, Rujia sought to critique and deconstruct, but then, to re-form
whatever had been broken down. Kongzi was responding to the same
conditions as Laozi, who was roughly his contemporary, but Kongzi
attributed the “moral perversity and degradation of his age” to a “long
and gradual process of intellectual disorganization, decadence of beliefs
and convictions, and relaxation of duties and relations” (Hu 1922, 21).
Social disorder accompanies intellectual disorder, or in other words,
wrong practice follows from wrong belief.
Discussions of logical theory were naturally attendant to the Rujia
conception of change. Hu explains this connection via the Rujia cam-
paign for the rectification of names. Both Daojia and Rujia saw the use
of names as an important rhetorical resource. While the Daojia aimed
at a state of namelessness and nonaction, the Rujia employed a critical
campaign premised on the idea that institutions and relational roles no
longer functioned as originally intended. Known as rectification, it was
a process that consisted of reevaluation, intellectual reorganization, and
ultimately, aimed to re-form. Hu understood the reform-oriented process
of critiquing, judging, and molding in response to social disorder to be
an essentially practical affair. Judgments made about the original meaning
and value of the name “tell whither things are tending, point to what is
good and what is evil, and thereby ‘inspire the activities of the world’”
(Hu 1922, 33). To reform on the basis of names, is to change the system
of practice by reworking it to align with the structure of belief.
The original meaning held within a name was referred to as “a
[xiang]…an image or ‘idea’ which one forms of a thing” (Hu 1922, 27).
Having no means other than language, the sages of antiquity expressed
the xiang, or original ideas, in the form of names. The theory of xiang,
or original ideas, impacted society in two extremely significant ways.
First, since the sages’ impressions of the universe and perfect ideals
were held in names, language, and the keeping of language, became a
very important affair. The Classical language held all the tools needed
for intellectual reorganization, and authority was predicated on moral
strength, which was obtained by vigorous study of the words and
meanings of the sages. Classical literature became the avenue for appre-
hending “the simple,” unadulterated meanings of names in the past.
Since scholarship in the classics meant access to the moral authority of
the sages, scholarship in the classics became the gateway to social power.
Second, since instruments, customs, and institutions were developed as
social representations, or implementations, of these names, the historical
record of these developments became an extremely important tool for
social reform and intellectual reorganization. The arts of writing became
inextricably linked with the arts of ruling. Hu saw this structure of intel-
lectual authority as a major constraint to reform.
It has been justly said that the greatest obstacle to progress in China is
the deductive habit of mind; that is, the willingness to accept things on
authority, to acquiesce in ideas and ideals without questioning whence they
are derived and whether they are true or not. A quotation from the classics
is sufficient argument for national policy, and a serious saying of [Kongzi]
is good enough to justify the existence of any obsolete custom or institu-
tion. This habit is the most formidable enemy to innovation and progress.
(Hu 1919, 116)
While the Rujia program for reform contributed to the constructive

turn in philosophy, the constructivist elements were ultimately overshad-
owed by the philosophy’s conservative aim. Even the campaign to rec-
tify names, which originated from the reformist impulse that was a great
contribution exhibited the strength of Rujia’s regressive tendencies. The
critique and judgment of the name was the only practical aspect of rec-
tification. Unlike the pragmatic kind of reform that Hu advocated, the
success of rectification was not checked against the situational context.
Hu explains that investigation of the past would be good if it was used
to determine what lessons are applicable and helpful to understanding
the complexities of the present. For Kongzi, the reason to investigate
the past was to “manifest what has come before,” to turn away from the
complex and retreat to the simple. Hu maintained that this regressive
tendency must be excised from modern Chinese intellectualism. A cul-
ture should not be forced to stand still despite the continual movement
of the world around it.
The Rujia doctrine of determinism, however, held that the less a
culture changes, the happier the people will be. Rujia determinism is
rooted in the ancient belief in divination. The tradition of divination
informed man of his particular position in the world. If a culture has
a history of divination, the culture has a history of records, which Hu
connects to “the beginning of literary education and of an intellectual
72 R. BUTTERFIELD
class” (Hu 1995, 440). It was one of the first places where the roles of
priests, scientists, and philosophers clearly merged. They read the ora-
cles and interpreted them as guides for moral behavior. They looked into
the skies and made the calendar. They recorded their findings and main-
tained their class hierarchy (Hu 1995, 441). On the one hand, Rujia
class organization led to the bureaucratic tendency of thought that later
became an impediment, but the intellectual organization it represented
accounted for a constructive aspect of the Rujia philosophy.
Even though Rujia introduced constructivist elements into Chinese
intellectualism, it had a similar shortcoming as Daojia in that its final
aim made it essentially a passive philosophy. They both wanted an end
to the disorder that plagued society. Likewise, both tried to determine
a method of limiting the kinds of disruption that antagonized the dis-
order. Kongzi maintained that “all change…arises from motion, which
is produced by the pushing of that which is active against that which is
passive” (Hu 1922, 26). Thus, for Kongzi, to be “passive” is to remain
simple and close to the original ideas. The “passive” is natural, good, and
difficult. The “active” is the unnatural, bad, and easy. All other major
elements of Rujia thought must be considered in this context. Rujia
gave society access to the original ideas that all things should closely
adhere to. Further, since Rujia determinism maintained that “wealth
and honors are in the hands of Providence” (Hu 1922, 40) and since
Rujia skepticism prevented belief in an afterlife, all of man’s energy
should be focused on the one thing over which he has any control—
keeping man’s institutions aligned with their ideal purpose.
Mozi
The promise of Mojia is in the critical tendencies of thought and argu-
mentative traditions it developed. This promise is countered, however,
by its philosophical and religious encouragement of conformity. Hu
credits Mozi with the beginning of logic in China, writing, “As John
Dewey has long ago pointed out, logic always arose as an instrument
for the defense of a faith that was in danger of being overthrown” (Hu
1995, 448). The polemic machinery of Mojia was engineered to counter
the protests of atheist rebels and agnostic reformers with a united reli-
gion of altruism. Mozi “openly condemned the [Rujia] as ‘atheists’ who
denied the existence of gods and ghosts and yet ceremoniously practiced
all the rites of ancestral worship” (Hu 1995, 446–447)! He said it was
useless to practice the rituals premised on belief in the gods, but at the
same time, deny the gods. “That is as meaningless as throwing a fishing
net where you are sure to find no fish” (Hu 1995, 447)! It was with
the intention to defend his theism against the atheists and agnostics that
Mozi “invented the logic of three-fold argument,” which maintained the
importance of history and the sages of antiquity, but which also devel-
oped the importance of practicality. In short, the most pragmatic of the
leaders in the foundational Chinese philosophies, Mozi, was also the
most conservative. For him, there was nothing inherently impractical
about theism. Theism became impractical when theistic practices were
maintained in the absence of belief; at that point, how could the prac-
tices serve any utility at all?
Mozi was a great religious leader and reformer born around 10 years
after the death of Kongzi (Hu 1922, 39–40).5 Hu likes Mozi as a char-
acter; he explains him as the type of public intellectual who was strong
enough, and could endure enough, to advance a different kind of think-
ing. In particular, Mozi aimed at reducing doubt.
[Mozi] doubted the doubters, and wanted to restore faith and belief in the
traditional religion of the people—the religion of God’s Spirit. He believed
that all evil came from doubt, from freedom of thought and belief, espe-
cially from diversity and standards of right and wrong.
Hu understands Mojia as very similar to pragmatic thought (Hu 1922, 41).

It focuses on practical questions about the benefits of things and ideas in
light of present-day circumstances. As a historical figure, Hu maintains
that Mozi represented important characteristics that in heavy concentra-
tions create leaders and in lower concentrations create modern scientifically
minded individuals.
Mozi rebelled against Rujia ritualism and formalism, the atheism and
agnosticism begot by Rujia skepticism, and the doctrine of determinism,
and most importantly, “he rebelled against their attitudinarianism which
refused to consider the practical consequences of beliefs, theories, and
institutions” (Hu 1922, 40). Mozi worried that people would lose the
capacity for practical judgment if they did not exercise it. He believed
that Rujia naming tended to bring about this sort of regression by
5 Also Hu (1995, 446).

74 R. BUTTERFIELD
keeping the intellectual and ruling class focused on the classical literature
written by the sages rather than the practical world surrounding them.
The rulers would continue to be drawn into the literature until they
became very distant from society and its problems.
By constantly confining one’s mind to defining and re-defining general

principles without testing their validity by examining the kind of conduct
and character they are fitted to produce, one gradually loses one’s sense
of proportion and valuation and tends to ‘strain at a gnat and swallow a
camel.’ (Hu 1922, 40)
Both Mozi and Hu believed that knowledge involves the process of

choice; knowledge is not related to the ability to name, but the ability to
choose, to make a practical judgment.
The difference between Rujia and Mojia is essentially the difference
between what and how (Hu 1922, 44). While Rujia asked what is good
government? Mojia said, we know what good government is; how do we
make it happen? The Rujia deductive habit of mind, that accepted the
prevalence of a truth without practical assessment, disabled the construc-
tive potential of Rujia principles of intellectual reorganization.
Applicability of the Rujia model to Hu’s reform includes criticism of
the current institutions and investigation into their origins, but it can-
not extend any further because the Rujia model did not allow for ideas
or institutions to be revised into anything other than what they were.
The Mojia model realizes that the original idea of an institution was
conceived in relation to the circumstances of the originating day. Thus,
the principle should stay the same but not necessarily the institution
(Hu 1922, 45). Hu uses the following passage from Mozi to show where
Mojia separated from Rujia.
Now a blind man may say, ‘That which shines with brilliancy is white, and
that which is like soot is black.’ Even those who can see cannot reject these
definitions. But if you place both white and black things before the blind
man and ask him to choose the one from the other, then he fails. Therefore
I say, ‘A blind man knows not white from black, not because he cannot
name them, but because he cannot choose them.’ (Hu 1922, 46–48)
Rujia does not consider the practical results when setting a course for the
ideal. Mojia considers the ideal, considers the practical results, and then,
sets a course. This shift is important for the consideration of practical
consequence, but also because it incorporates the aspect of choice into

the philosophical equation. One must consider the possible outcomes,
weigh them against the ideal, and make a judgment about the relative
value of each. For Hu, this is a great stride toward the scientific spirit.
However, Mojia is problematic, Hu says, because it did not always
acknowledge short term verse long term consequences, “the difference
between that which is immediately practical and that the practical worth
of which cannot be immediately seen” (Hu 1922, 52). Hu says this is a
problem across all of Chinese philosophy. There must be a leap of faith
in science that asserts the promise of potential benefits to discoveries that
register no immediate viability. This is the pragmatic assertion that allows
for investment in science—I don’t see the consequences yet but I will know
them when I do. Further, Hu maintains that there are practical conse-
quences that have to do with the aesthetic and larger sense of life. These
are consequences of quality that should not be viewed or judged in terms
of instrumental value—while I don’t understand the value of the things I see
right in front of me, I know that they are of a large and encompassing value.
Hu sought to develop a more nuanced and inclusive conception of science
as a “spirit” that would touch all aspects of daily life and thought. He also
tried to introduce a more mature and expansive conception of pragmatism
that would allow for reforms that did not promise quick returns.
Hu’s critique of Mozi’s shortsightedness is very telling of the
difficulties Hu faced in pursuit of intellectual reform. When practicality
was mistaken for immediate utility, even purported proponents of prag-
matic reform would mistakenly judge knowledge based on the exceed-
ingly limited criteria of knowable benefit. As an advocate for gradual
reform, the kind that is founded in tendencies of thought, encouraged
by institutional changes, and only becomes visible much later, Hu needed
people to understand that the practical benefits of the scientific spirit are
rolling and the line of causality is not always immediately apparent.
Conclusion
Hu’s intellectual project was an exercise in rhetorical pragmatic reform
that pushed against regressiveness and dogmatism and worked toward
progressiveness and critical doubt. After the Communist Revolution,
nuanced representations of Hu’s ideas and project were quieted and he
is now largely known as a Westernizer who wanted to press China into
a Western mold of development at the expense of traditional Chinese
76 R. BUTTERFIELD
culture and thought. Far from this caricatured misrepresentation,

Hu should be remembered for his efforts to uncover and restore the
humanistic and rationalistic strains of thought that had been overshad-
owed by the classicism, conservatism, and stratification that had become
the institutional manifestation of the foundational philosophies in tra-
ditional China. Similarly, Hu should also be appreciated for making the
rhetorical turn in the development of Pragmatism. He was likely over-
looked for reasons similar to Addams; he was more of a rhetorical leader
than a philosopher, but that is the direction toward which pragmatist phi-
losophy tends. He was likely also overlooked because the foreignness of
the Chinese context in which he undertook most of his rhetorical prag-
matic reform. However, this shouldn’t make scholars hesitate to situate
Hu in the American pragmatist tradition. Rather, the suitability of prag-
matism in Hu’s context is a testament to its viability in conditions of plu-
ralism and discord that must account for particular historic circumstance.
The cash value of Hu Shi in communication studies is the great
insight he offers us in developing a rhetorical pragmatist reform theory.
Reform should be a gradual process. He equated the pattern of prag-
matic thought with gradualism; it is not acutely utilitarian and it does not
expect grand, sweeping, and immediate changes, the likes of a revolu-
tion. It has faith that practical reasoning and procedural science will bring
forth benefits and it understands that some of the benefits will not be
immediately recognized for what they are or could one day be. Hu held
faith in the potential of rationality and consciousness and the subsequent
potential of the human species to improve the quality of their existence.
Likewise, he came closer than other neo-pragmatists in providing
something of a handbook for applied rhetorical pragmatic reform. Most
of his reform efforts revolved around establishing progressive modes of
communication and inquiry. Hu sought to construct a theory of logic
from the building blocks of the Chinese intellectual tradition, includ-
ing: the ability to doubt and criticize, attention to one’s situation and
immediate practical consequences, a far-reaching vision of consequences,
an appreciation of history as a resource for reconstruction, and an abil-
ity to form knowledge from various forms of reasoning. Hu was guided
by both Western and Chinese philosophy, but more importantly, he was
guided by the pragmatists concern for creating the conditions suitable
for a democratic lifestyle. Our recognition of this helps us advance a call
made Xing Lu for the advancement of comparative rhetoric. “scholars
of comparative rhetoric,” Lu (2015) says, “need to continue expanding
our ‘contact zones’ and rhetorical repertoire by adopting culturally

specific terms into shared rhetorical tropes and in the creation of new
knowledge” (267). This is yet another way Hu seemed to be ahead of
the game. He walked among philosophies of the world so he might
create something new to do something new.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Group.
Burke, Kenneth. 1984. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crick, Nathan. 2015. Rhetoric & Power: The Drama of Classical Greece.
Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press.
Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press.
———. 2015. Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical
Pragmatism. New York: Lexington Books.
Dewey, John. 1954. The Public & Its Problems. Athens: Swallow Press, Ohio
University Press.
Grieder, Jerome B. 1999. Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the
Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hu, Shih. 1919. “Intellectual China in 1919 (The Chinese Social and Political
Review 4, no. 4).” In Hu Shih Yingwen Wencun (胡適英文文存, A Collection
of Hu Shih’s English Writings), 3 vols., Compiled by Chih-P’ing Chou
(周質平), 345–355. Taibei: Yuanliu chub.
———. 1922. The Development of Logical Method in Ancient China. Shanghai:
Shanghai Oriental Book Co.
———. 1926. “The Renaissance in China.” Journal of the Royal Institute of
International Affairs 5 (6): 265–283.
———. 1930. “Which Road Are We Going?” Pacific Affairs 3 (10): 933–946.
———. 1931. “Essay in Living Philosophies.” In A Collection of Hu Shih’s
English Writings, vol. I, 235–263. New York: Simon & Schuster.
———. 1934. The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures 1933. Chicago: The
———. 1959. “The Scientific Spirit and Method in Chinese Philosophy.” 9
(1/2, Preliminary Report on the Third East-West Philosophers’ Conference).
———. 1963. “The Right to Doubt in Ancient Chinese Thought.” Philosophy
East and West 12 (4): 295–300.
———. 1995. “Confucianism (Edwin R.A. Seligman, ed., Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences Vol. 4. NY: Macmillan Co, 1931, pp. 198–200).” In Hu Shih
Yingwen Wencun (胡適英文文存, A Collection of Hu Shih’s English Writings),
Compiled by Chih-P’ing Chou (周質平). Taibei: Yuanliu chuban.
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———. 2013. “Essay in Living Philosophies.” In English Writings of Hu Shih,

85–100. New York: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Johnson, Ian. 2016. “A Revolutionary Discovery in China, a Review of: Sarah
Allan ‘Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese
Bamboo-Slip’ (2016).” New York Review of Books, April.
Ke-wen, Wang. 1998. Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and
Nationalism. New York: Garland.
Lu, Xing. 2015. “Comparative Rhetoric: Contemplating on Tasks and
Methodologies in the Twenty-First Century.” Rhetoric Review 34 (2):
266–273.
Yao, Xinzhong. 2000. An Introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
CHAPTER 4
Echoes of Pragmatism in India: Bhimrao

Ambedkar and Reconstructive Rhetoric
Scott R. Stroud
Pragmatism is often assumed to be a tradition indigenous to the North

American context. Yet the pluralism and flexibility of pragmatism, not to
mention the international reach of many of its American scholars, surely
should result in international appropriation of its methods and doctrines.
This chapter will begin to tell the untold story of pragmatism’s influence
in India, a land that none of the classical pragmatists ever visited. It will
do this by focusing largely on pragmatism’s leading champion in India,
Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956), the architect of India’s constitution
and a fervent crusader for “untouchable” rights (Jaffrelot 2005). By
reclaiming Ambedkar as a pragmatist and as a master of communicative
persuasion, we can highlight pragmatism’s influence in Indian politics,
and conversely, India’s effects on what we think of as central to prag-
matism. Pragmatism not only informed Ambedkar’s constitution-shaping
views of democracy—distinguishing him from Indian communists and
orthodox reformers such as Gandhi—but it also laid forth a rhetorical
path of appropriation and reconstruction (Stroud 2017b).
S. R. Stroud (*) 
University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA
e-mail: sstroud@austin.utexas.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_4
80 S. R. STROUD
This chapter will argue that Ambedkar was the leading pragmatist in
the Indian context, given both his emphasis on a deep sense of democ-
racy as well as his use of Dewey’s pragmatic method of reconstruction.
In the Indian context, Ambedkar selectively appropriates ideas and texts
from Dewey and uses them in his many nuanced attempts to persuade
Indians to act justly toward his fellow untouchables. Ambedkar’s prag-
matism became a way to communicatively meld Indian tradition with
enlightenment ideas, a fact evident in his writing of the Indian constitu-
tion later in his life in English, with a preface that included the enlight-
enment ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity. Always a pragmatist
democrat, Ambedkar strove to preserve what was useful in tradition
while throwing out what was harmful or dead. Initially, I will introduce
the context from which Ambedkar came, as well as his connection to the
pragmatist tradition represented by John Dewey. Why should we con-
sider pragmatism central to his thought, and not an amusing side episode
or influence? I will then explore this question through a detailed analy-
sis of one of his most important works: the 1936 speech—undelivered,
due to its controversial nature—titled “Annihilation of Caste.” This
speech is important for many reasons, but, most importantly, this speech
serves as Ambedkar’s longest and most sustained engagement with and
use of Dewey’s pragmatism. In examining the rhetorical techniques in
this work, we can see Ambedkar practice what can be identified as recon-
structive rhetoric, or the communicative technique of appropriating and
reconstructing past resources to meet present social problems. This
shows the deep influence of Dewey’s pragmatism at two levels: first, in
terms of the method of reconstruction, and second, in terms of the con-
ceptual resources appropriated by Ambedkar. Ambedkar’s pragmatism
is worth more attention that we traditionally give him—it serves as the
most notable appropriation of Dewey’s pragmatism in South Asia, one
that is integrally tied to a strong view of persuasion in rectifying social
injustice.
Why Consider Ambedkar as Part

of the Pragmatist Tradition?
Ambedkar was born into an “untouchable” caste in 1891 in Mhow,

Maharashtra, and was immediately inserted into a system of identity
and limitation dating back over 2000 years. As a Mahar, Ambedkar fell
4 ECHOES OF PRAGMATISM IN INDIA: BHIMRAO AMBEDKAR … 81
outside of the four varnas of brahmins (priests), kshatriyas (warriors),

vaishyas (merchants), and shudras (servants). As an avarna or out-caste,
he was lower than even the most menial servants in this hierarchy: so
low, in fact, that his touch or presence was considered religiously pol-
luting. His youth was defined and determined to many extents by the
injustices he suffered through being identified as an “untouchable” (now
relabeled by many as “dalit,” or literary “crushed”). His biographers
have done a thorough job of detailing how Ambedkar suffered in school
because his classmates did not want him to sit near them or their posses-
sions, or to even use the school’s water source. At other points, he failed
to find transport or housing because no one would assist an untouchable
out of fear of religious pollution (Keer 1990; Zelliot 2005).
Through luck and hard work, Ambedkar found a path out of the
normal fate associated with being an untouchable (e.g., removing dead
livestock from streets, emptying latrines, and so forth). This path was
education. Early on, his father insisted that young Bhimrao go to school.
While struggling with schoolyard bullying at Elphinstone High School
in Bombay, young Ambedkar met the Maharashtra-based reformer
and teacher, Krishna Arjun Keluskar, around 1904 or 1905 (Omvedt
2004). Keluskar befriended the young man, and began introducing him
to his significant library of books. He also was an important figure at
Ambedkar’s modest graduation celebration in 1907, giving him a copy
of his book on the Buddha’s life (Keer 1990). Keluskar would be an
important figure later, encouraging Ambedkar to apply for funds from
an enlightened prince, the Gaikwad of Baroda, for his university educa-
tion in America 1913–1916. There is even evidence that Keluskar gave
Ambedkar a copy of John Dewey and James Tufts’ 1908 Ethics, although
it is difficult to determine when exactly this transaction happened
(Stroud 2017a).
What we do know for certain was that Ambedkar’s experience in
America was life-changing. Enrolled at Columbia University in New
York from 1913 to 1916, Ambedkar experienced the relative freedom
of American society. Beyond his experience of a society that knew little
of Hinduism and cared even less about Vedic castes, he took classes in
politics, economics, and anthropology from some of the best scholars in
America. Even though his focus was on economics, he somehow found
himself in three philosophy classes taught by John Dewey. Ambedkar
took the following classes from Dewey: Philosophy 231: “Psychological
Ethics and Moral and Political Philosophy” in the fall of 1914 and
82 S. R. STROUD
Dewey’s two-course series, Philosophy 131–132: “Moral and Political

Philosophy,” during 1915–1916 (Stroud 2017b). The bulk of what
Ambedkar knew of the western philosophical tradition therefore came
from the time he spent in Dewey’s classes.
Over a decade later, after he completed his work at Columbia, as
well as a variety of London-based schools and institutions, Ambedkar
remembered Dewey fondly: “The best friends I have had in my life
were some of my classmates at Columbia and my great professors, John
Dewey, James Shotwell, Edwin Seligman and James Harvey Robinson”
(Columbia Alumni News 1930, 12). Eleanor Zelliot parses the influ-
ence of all of these academics and concludes: “John Dewey seems to
have had the greatest influence on Ambedkar” (2013, 69). Others make
a similar judgment. K. N. Kadam observes that “Dr. Ambedkar took
down every word uttered by his great teacher [Dewey] in the course of
his lectures; and it seems that Ambedkar used to tell his friends that, if
unfortunately Dewey died of a sudden, ‘I could reproduce every lec-
ture verbatim’” (1997, 1). Dewey seemed to captivate young Ambedkar.
Arun Mukherjee (2009) goes as far as to warn scholars against engaging
Ambedkar and his thought “in isolation, without paying attention to his
dialogue with Dewey” (368). How exactly do we attend and do justice
to the Ambedkar–Dewey relationship?
One way of fleshing out claims of influence is to investigate expo-
sure and contact, such as what happened in Ambedkar’s time with
Dewey at Columbia. While I have found no evidence that Dewey and
Ambedkar corresponded during the latter’s time at Columbia, or after
Ambedkar returned to India, we do have a confirmed vector of influ-
ence in the form of the three classes that Ambedkar took with Dewey. In
these courses, Ambedkar surely absorbed Dewey’s psychology and focus
on habits as contingent and culturally mediated ways of shaping impulses
and resulting activities. He also learned about a range of political philos-
ophies and Dewey’s evolving reading of means and ends as inter-related
(see Stroud 2017b). Dewey’s influence extended beyond these three
courses, however, and lasted throughout Ambedkar’s life in the form of
books. Ambedkar voraciously consumed books, and seemed especially
attuned to Dewey’s works—both during and after his days as a student
in the west.
Preserved among his remaining personal books on a range of sub-
jects is a large collection of works by pragmatists or on pragmatism. At
Siddharth College, one can find Ambedkar’s original copies of some
of William James’s works: A Pluralistic Universe (1912), Radical

Empiricism (1912), and Psychology (1948). The largest collection
of books by one specific author, in any tradition, belonged to Dewey.
Ambedkar owned copies of Dewey’s Ethics (with James H. Tufts, 1908),
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), German Philosophy and
Politics (1915), Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and
Nature (1929), The Quest for Certainty (1930), Freedom and Culture
(1939), and Problems of Men (1946). He also collected books about
Dewey’s pragmatism that were published well after Ambedkar’s days
at Columbia: A. H. Johnson’s The Wit and Wisdom of John Dewey
(1949), Sidney Hook’s John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom
(1950), Jerome Nathanson’s John Dewey: The Reconstruction of the
Democratic Life (1951), and Paul Arthur Schilp’s The Philosophy of John
Dewey (1951). In another collection of his personal books housed at
the Symbiosis Institute, two other books related to pragmatism can be
found: Dewey’s Essays in Experimental Logic (1953) and Joseph Ratner’s
collection of Dewey’s essays, Intelligence in the Modern World: John
Dewey’s Philosophy (1939). The collection housed at Ambedkar’s Milind
College in Aurangabad contains Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct
(1948) and James’s Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1913).
All of these vectors of influence lead us to ask: What did Ambedkar
learn from Dewey’s pragmatism? How might Ambedkar have been dif-
ferent if there was no influence of Dewey on his life and work? Ambedkar
said he liked Dewey and pragmatism, and he was exposed to Dewey’s
courses and books, but what difference did it make in his life? This
larger question asks for a counterfactual that we don’t have a good grasp
on—what Ambedkar’s writings and activism would look like had he fol-
lowed in the tracks of Gandhi and most other Indian intellectuals of his
day and sought an education solely from British institutions. We must
find a way to answer the skeptic who places Dewey as one among many
influences on Ambedkar.
There are two ways to answer the question of how Dewey influenced
Ambedkar. First, we can follow the lead of Christopher Queen (2015)
and examine Ambedkar’s annotations in his books as a sign of engage-
ment with ideas and authors. One does not underline or highlight some-
thing that is not that significant in one’s attention. Using this method,
I have made the case elsewhere that Ambedkar’s annotations in his cop-
ies of Ethics and Democracy and Education bring to light a pattern of
influence from Dewey’s philosophy that can help explain his latter activist
84 S. R. STROUD
strategies (Stroud 2017a, c). From his own annotation in his personal
copy, we know that Ambedkar acquired his copy of Dewey’s Democracy
and Education in January 1917 while in London. Looking at the anno-
tations and underlining in his copy of this book, we see many passages
highlighted that bear on important Deweyan themes: experience as
educative, the idea of reconstruction in improving society from its past
states, and the relation between individual dispositions and social func-
tioning. His copy of the 1908 Ethics is also heavily marked, but it is more
difficult to determine when he acquired this copy. As I speculate else-
where (e.g., Stroud 2017c), it is most likely that he received this book
as a gift from K. A. Keluskar in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Looking
at the fifty plus pages that are marked in this book, one sees Ambedkar
the reader becoming entranced with Deweyan points that would find a
place later in Ambedkar’s mature speeches and writings. For instance,
the 1908 version of Tufts and Dewey’s Ethics places a greater emphasis
on the role of the individual in moral progress than does the later edi-
tion in 1932. Societies make moral progress when the individuals within
them move from a reliance on customary morality to what Tufts and
Dewey call a “reflective morality.” Another point that one sees Ambedkar
highlight in his copy of Ethics is the well-known Deweyan distinc-
tion between rules and principles. Ambedkar, whenever he was reading
the 1908 Ethics, saw clearly one of its most important themes: society
improves in moral quality as its members rely more and more on such
individualized habits of reflective thinking.
A second way is to examine influence as something that is evident
from the effect—the texts or works that he produced. This method
has the advantage of sorting through influences and potential lines of
influence—not everything Ambedkar heard from Dewey (or any other
teacher) “stuck.” This approach also allows some flexibility in assessing
what exactly was influencing a present text. As Meera Nanda (2003) has
demonstrated, Deweyan conceptions of science and inquiry have ready
parallels with Ambedkar’s revisioning of Buddhism as a rational faith
later in his life. This operates at a general or more probabilistic level of
influence: one thinks it more likely than not that Ambedkar’s reading
of Buddhism as rational and scientific was influenced by Dewey, but he
nowhere writes or says this is the case. This is useful, though, as it shows
a powerful way of understanding what lies behind Ambedkar’s works on
the Buddha—and why he emphasizes or changes some points of the tex-
tual record of the Buddha’s own activities (see Queen 2004; Fiske and
Emmrich 2004). Keya Maitra (2012) also operates at the level of philo-
sophical convergences, arguing for the influence of Dewey’s experimen-
tal method on Ambedkar’s views on the ideal constitution for Indian
democracy.
A more specific way of assessing influence from Ambedkar’s work
would be to look for specific passages or concepts taken from Dewey’s
work. This method has the strength of clearly identifying what
parts are influenced by material within Dewey’s corpus. Mukherjee
(2009) has done an admirable job pursuing a specific version of this
textual-trace method of influence estimating, scanning Ambedkar’s 1936
“Annihilation of Caste” address for its Deweyan resonances:
Ambedkar’s writings mark his affiliation with Dewey through extensive

quotations from Dewey’s work. So deeply embedded is Dewey’s thought
in Ambedkar’s consciousness that quite often his words flow through
Ambedkar’s discourse without quotation marks. Ambedkar not only bor-
rowed concepts and ideas from Dewey, his methodological approach and
ways of argumentation also show Dewey’s influence. (347–348)
It is this observation that I want to explore in depth, as it exposes a prag-

matism based upon the appropriation of specific pragmatist concepts and
texts, as well as his use of a pragmatist method of reconstructive rhetoric.
Echoes of Deweyan Pragmatism in “Annihilation

of Caste”
To illustrate Ambedkar’s pragmatist inheritance in both ideas and rhe-

torical method, let us examine his most important and well-known work,
the 1936 speech “Annihilation of Caste.” The 1930s were a tumultu-
ous time for Ambedkar. The 1920s were spent attempting to secure
untouchable rights to temple entry and water use, activities that upper-
caste Hindus staunchly opposed. Ambedkar conceived of the untouch-
ables as members of the Hindu fold that could regain rights that were
lost long ago. Yet after securing concessions from the British for sepa-
rate electorates for the untouchables, Gandhi embarked on a “fast
until death” until Ambedkar gave back these protections (Jaffrelot
2005). Rather than be responsible for the death of an idol, Ambedkar
relented and gave up most of his gains. He would never forgive Gandhi
for this forceful tactic. By 1935, Ambedkar was certain—respect could
86 S. R. STROUD
not be gained for him and his millions of untouchable followers within
Hinduism. He delivered a bombshell of an address at Yeola in October
1935 that even though he was born as a Hindu, “I solemnly assure you
that I will not die a Hindu” (Ambedkar 2003, 95). This announcement
caused a stir across India, as Ambedkar was the undisputed leader of the
millions of untouchables and outcastes throughout the colony; he would
inevitably take millions out of the Hindu fold with him. Muslims, Sikhs,
Christians, and other delegations visited with him in an attempt to gain
this mass of converts. Ambedkar spent twenty years before he formally
announced that Buddhism was to be the religion of his, and his people’s,
conversion.
In 1936, Ambedkar was invited to give the Presidential Address for
the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal of Lahore, a group of upper-caste Hindus
dedicated to erasing caste discrimination. As Keer (1990) documents,
the Mandal’s leaders eventually got wind of Ambedkar’s address—which
he had printed in advance—and demurred at his mention of destroying
the vedas, or Hindu holy books, as the only way to eradicate caste. In the
prologue to the published version of the address, Ambedkar reprinted
the letters from one official of the Mandal, Sant Ram, who worried:
“I am now very anxious to read the exposition of your new formula—‘It
is not possible to break Caste without annihilating the religious notions
on which it, the Caste system, is founded’” (Ambedkar 2003, 27). The
Mandal saw this path of eliminating the textual basis of Hinduism as too
big of a threat to the version of Hinduism they sought to preserve; it
probably also perturbed them that the month before the conference was
to be held, Ambedkar was meeting with Sikhs in Amritsar, a possible tar-
get for untouchable conversion (Keer 1990, 267). The Mandal decided
to postpone the conference indefinitely so as to prevent Ambedkar’s
delivery of his incendiary speech. Ambedkar, having already printed
up 1500 copies of “Annihilation of Caste,” sold them all within two
months in 1936. A second edition would be printed in 1937, this time
with Gandhi’s reply to the speech and Ambedkar’s subsequent response.
This speech has an interesting rhetorical history of its own, seeing that
it was read at a range of subsequent untouchable conferences as a sort
of stand-in for the great leader, Ambedkar (Zelliot 2013). The address
was composed in English, a move with its own normative dimensions—
untouchables were not allowed to learn Sanskrit in Hindu schools, so the
English of the colonial educational system became a way to have agency,
sophistication, and a sort of universal reach across India and beyond

(Anand 1999; Stroud 2016).
The “Annihilation” address can be examined as an effect of
Ambedkar’s pragmatist legacy, and not simply as a manifesto of his dis-
gust at Hindu tradition and its incorporation of the caste system. If we
do so, we will see integral and undeniable traces of pragmatist philos-
ophy in its central arguments. Beyond this, we will see how pragma-
tism also influenced Ambedkar’s rhetoric, or manner of addressing and
persuading his various audiences. This analysis will build on and extend
Mukherjee’s (2009) study, specifically in the realm of rhetoric. What
grounds this study is a simple, but odd, occurrence in this text that only
some will notice. While Ambedkar approvingly quotes Dewey later in the
essay, the entire text is filled with words that should strike a reader of
Dewey as similar to those of Dewey’s own works. Let us start by illus-
trating this pervasive feature of Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste,” and
then ask what it means for his rhetorical practice.
The “Annihilation of Caste” address is straightforward in its critique
of those in the South Asian setting that refuses to see social reform as
vital for India’s political independence and advancement. Ambedkar
comes out swinging against those in the Indian National Congress
who insist on political reform before any sort of social reform, or those
influenced by Marxist socialism that demand economic reform before
or instead of social reform. All of these, Ambedkar maintains, miss the
fundamental decay that lies inside of the Indian proto-nation: the caste
system that divides and devalues vast groups within the millions of peo-
ple that would make up a free India. Answering those that would defend
caste based upon a useful societal division of labor, Ambedkar coun-
ters that “It is also a division of labourers…it is a hierarchy in which
the divisions of labourers are graded one above the other” (1989, 47).
Ambedkar fleshes out this claim in the following passage:
This division of labour is not spontaneous; it is not based on natural apti-

tudes. Social and individual efficiency requires us to develop the capacity of
an individual to the point of competency to choose and to make his own
career. This principle is violated in the Caste System in so far as it involves
an attempt to appoint tasks to individuals in advance, selected not on the
basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the social status of the
parents. … Industry is never static. It undergoes rapid and abrupt changes.
With such changes an individual must be free to change his occupation.
88 S. R. STROUD
Without such freedom to adjust himself to changing circumstances it

would be impossible for him to gain his livelihood. (47)
This seems like a pointed argument that caste divides workers based
upon a metaphysics of karma, thus writing unjust social exclusion and
servitude into the nature of the world. But looking closer at this text
next to a book that we know Ambedkar read and annotated—Dewey’s
1916 Democracy and Education—we begin to see something curious.
Ambedkar uses, without any citation or reference, Dewey’s own phrases
and sentences in this novel argument against the Indian caste system.
Here is Dewey’s original passage from Democracy and Education, with
the words appropriated by Ambedkar emphasized:
A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of compe-

tency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the
attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial call-
ings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the
wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present
time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inven-
tions…. When the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left
behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less
definite training. (1916 [1985], 126, emphasis added)
This point is originally situated in Dewey’s critique of methods of edu-

cation biased toward tracking individuals into menial jobs in increasingly
large and impersonal corporations. It was clearly not about caste or reli-
gious pollution due to karma, yet Ambedkar takes it and echoes parts of
it—with his changes—to make it a vigorous critique against the inflexi-
bility of the caste system.
This echoing of Dewey’s Democracy and Education continues as
Ambedkar implicates the caste system in the creation of unjust condi-
tions of existence for untouchable and lower-caste individuals. On the
next page, one sees a similar echoing in Ambedkar’s text:
Considerations of social efficiency would compel us to recognize that

the greatest evil in the industrial system is not so much poverty and the
suffering that it involves as the fact that so many persons have callings
which make no appeal to those who are engaged in them. Such callings
constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will and the desire to evade. There
are many occupations in India which on account of the fact that they are
regarded as degraded by the Hindus provoke those who are engaged in

them to aversion. There is a constant desire to evade and escape from such
occupations which arises solely because of the blighting effect which they
produce upon those who follow them owing to the slight and stigma cast
upon them by the Hindu religion. What efficiency can there be in a system
under which neither men’s hearts nor their minds are in their work? As an
economic organization Caste is therefore a harmful institution, inasmuch
as, it involves the subordination of man’s natural powers and inclinations
to the exigencies of social rules. (48)
The caste system assigned occupations to individuals based upon family

birth, including those of a menial and degrading character for untouch-
ables like Ambedkar. This is not an optimal way to set up society, argues
Ambedkar using an incipient pragmatist criterion of organizing econo-
mies based upon the maximum value or meaning added to individuals
with a diverse range of capacities and interests. What we notice, however,
upon closer inspection is that this argument echoes Dewey’s critique of
industrialized education in Democracy and Education:
Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present
régime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the
fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which
are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings
constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade.
Neither men’s hearts nor their minds are in their work. On the other hand,
those who are not only much better off in worldly goods, but who are
in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of the activities of the many are
shut off from equality and generality of social intercourse. (Dewey 1916
[1985], 326–327, emphasis added)
Dewey’s point about acquisitiveness and greed in capitalist schemes of

work—and the consequent meaninglessness they so often give to occu-
pational activity—is taken by Ambedkar and changed into a critique
of caste-based occupational sorting. Ambedkar leaves out the phrases
concerning the rich or the focus on monetary reward by workers; in
their place, he emphasizes the meaninglessness of occupations forced
upon individuals by caste placement. Dewey’s argument is echoed in
Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste,” but with a distinctive change in
meaning and focus.
90 S. R. STROUD
After arguing that caste is not defensible on economic grounds or a

racial basis, Ambedkar turns toward the core of his argument: caste must
be resisted because it fragments communities of individuals. Throughout
this argument one also finds the ideas and words of Dewey being sum-
moned, changed, and echoed in Ambedkar’s attack on caste ideology.
For instance, Ambedkar writes
The Hindus often complain of the isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or

a clique and blame them for anti-social spirit. But they conveniently forget
that this anti-social spirit is the worst feature of their own Caste System…
An anti-social spirit is found wherever one group has “interests of its own”
which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its pre-
vailing purpose is protection of what it has got. This anti-social spirit, this
spirit of protecting its own interests is as much a marked feature of the dif-
ferent castes in their isolation from one another as it is of nations in their
isolation. (51)
While his target is uniquely Indian, some of the ideas are not. Compare
this passage to Dewey’s argument about the nature of democracy in
Democracy and Education, with overlapping phrases highlighted:
The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its antisocial spirit
into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has interests “of
its own” which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its
prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorgani-
zation and progress through wider relationships. It marks nations in their
isolation from one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns
as if they had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated
from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor;
learned and unlearned. (1916 [1985], 91)
The argument in “Annihilation of Caste” is recognizably Deweyan in

its focus on what makes democratic communities ideally democratic,
yet Ambedkar molds the point to target caste deformations in-group
interactions.
Castes are animated by an anti-social spirit that does not contribute
shared interests and meanings to all in the community; instead, caste ori-
ents each sub-group against all other sub-groups. The idea of interests
and how they affect activity is a recognizable Deweyan point, but we see
its altered application a few pages later:
The assertion by the individual of his own opinions and beliefs, his own
independence and interest as over against group standards, group authority
and group interests is the beginning of all reform…. It is true that man
cannot get on with his fellows. But it is also true that he cannot do with-
out them. He would like to have the society of his fellows on his terms. If
he cannot get it on his terms then he will be ready to have it on any terms
even amounting to complete surrender. This is because he cannot do with-
out society. (56)
The ideas and concepts in these lines can be traced back to Ethics, a work
that Dewey published with James H. Tufts in 1908. While the first and
third sections of this book are authored by Tufts and the second section
by Dewey, the preface indicates that each author made “suggestions and
criticisms to the work of the other in sufficient degree to make the book
throughout a joint work” (Dewey 1908 [1978]). In the first section,
authored by Tufts, we find material (with the echoed portioned empha-
sized) that must have been in the mind of Ambedkar as he wrote the pre-
vious passage in “Annihilation of Caste”:
They constitute what Kant calls the unsocial sociableness of man.

“Man cannot get on with his fellows and he cannot do without them.”
Individualism.—The assertion by the individual of his own opinions and
beliefs, his own independence and interests, as over against group standards,
authority, and interests, is known as individualism. (75)
We see here the same tactic of echoing, and the insertion of small
changes—the order in “Annihilation of Caste” is different than it is the
original text, and Ambedkar breaks the quotations about Kant’s notion
of unsocial sociability into two parts, deleting Dewey’s reference to the
Prussian philosopher along the way. The argument becomes Ambedkar’s,
but it remains tied to its original pragmatist formulation.
Turning our attention to one of the most crucial passages in
“Annihilation of Caste,” we see Ambedkar use this echoing technique
alongside an evocation of enlightenment values in his critique of caste.
He turns to the “constructive side of the problem” (57), and inquires
as to what the “ideal society” will be based upon: “If you ask me, my
ideal would be a society based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” (57).
These values—tied to French revolution—were probably first heard by
an attentive Ambedkar in Dewey’s course in spring 1916, judging from
92 S. R. STROUD
the lecture notes we have of what Ambedkar heard in this course (Stroud
2017b). In “Annihilation of Caste,” Ambedkar defends these values,
especially fraternity or fellow-feeling, without referring to Dewey:
An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying

a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there
should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There
should be varied and free points of contact with other modes of associa-
tion. In other words there must be social endosmosis. This is fraternity,
which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a
form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of con-
joint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and
reverence towards fellowmen. (57)
This passage is riddled with echoes of Dewey’s distinctive formulations of

democracy and the democratic ideal. For instance, Dewey describes the
democratic ideal as follows:
In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and
there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association.
(1916 [1985], 89, emphasis added)
Ambedkar uses the highlighted portions of this passage in an uncon-

nected part of his argument against caste. Ambedkar also echoes the core
to Dewey’s position on democracy from Democracy and Education:
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of

associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. (1916 [1985], 93,
emphasis added)
Even the concept of “social endosmosis” referenced by Ambedkar shows

his pragmatist debt to Dewey. As Mukherjee (2009) notes, “the term
‘social endosmosis’ was used by him [Dewey] only once,” but it became
“a major heuristic tool that [Ambedkar] used repeatedly in his writ-
ings” (353). Mukherjee explains the meaning behind Ambedkar’s use of
this term—“When a society has groups that are separated into ‘a privi-
leged and a subject class,’ social endosmosis—free circulation of individ-
uals, with various points of contact—cannot take place.” This leads to
“a sort of atherosclerosis of the social body…Ambedkar’s frequent use
of metaphors of disease and pathology to describe Indian society is thus
an extension of the metaphorical possibilities of endosmosis” (353). This

term, of course, can be found in Dewey’s Democracy and Education:
“And the experience of each party loses in meaning, when the free inter-
change of varying modes of life-experience is arrested. A separation
into a privileged and a subject-class prevents social endosmosis” (1916
[1985], 90). In Ambedkar’s restructured use of Deweyan terms and
positions, caste destroys the fellow feeling that is so vital in allowing a
free interchange or communication between various groups in a society.
Democracy demands such a free interchange being existent, regardless of
the status of voting rights or constitutions. Like Dewey, Ambedkar sees
democracy as a deep habit of interaction among individuals and groups,
not as a matter of institutions.
In defending the value of liberty in this community ideal, Ambedkar
again echoes Dewey in his “Annihilation of Caste”:
But to object to this kind of liberty is to perpetuate slavery. For slavery

does not merely mean a legalized form of subjection. It means a state of
society in which some men are forced to accept from other the purposes
which control their conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no
slavery in the legal sense. It is found where, as in the Caste System, some
persons are compelled to carry on certain prescribed callings which are not
of their choice. (57)
Part of this passage is drawn from Dewey’s discussion of Plato in

Democracy and Education:
Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which
control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in
the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is
socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no
personal interest in. (1916 [1985], 90–91, emphasis added)
Dewey provides much of Ambedkar’s conceptual structure; Ambedkar

bends and uses it for a new purpose that Dewey did not seem cogni-
zant of—the critique of caste as inherently harmful for freedom and
liberty.
Even the value of equality gets a Dewey-influenced treatment in
“Annihilation of Caste.” Ambedkar explains his reliance on this key value
in the following terms:
94 S. R. STROUD
Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as the gov-
erning principle. A man’s power is dependent upon (1) physical heredity,
(2) social inheritance or endowment in the form of parental care, educa-
tion, accumulation of scientific knowledge, everything which enables him
to be more efficient than the savage, and finally, (3) on his own efforts. In
all these three respects men are undoubtedly unequal. But the question is,
shall we treat them as unequal because they are unequal? This is a question
which the opponents of equality must answer. From the standpoint of the
individualist it may be just to treat men unequally so far as their efforts
are unequal. It may be desirable to give as much incentive as possible to
the full development of every one’s powers…. On the other hand it can
be urged that if it is good for the social body to get the most out of its
members, it can get most out of them only by making them equal as far as
possible at the very start of the race. (58)
From what source does Ambedkar draw some of the inspiration for this
argument? Our answer lies in Tufts’ final section in Ethics, identified here
with the appropriated parts highlighted:
A man’s power is due (1) to physical heredity; (2) to social heredity, includ-
ing care, education, and the stock of inventions, information, and institu-
tions which enables him to be more efficient than the savage; and finally (3)
to his own efforts. Individualism may properly claim this third factor. It is
just to treat men unequally so far as their efforts are unequal. It is socially
desirable to give as much incentive as possible to the full development of
every one’s powers. But the very same reason demands that in the first
two respects we treat men as equally as possible. For it is for the good of
the social body to get the most out of its members, and it can get the most out
of them only by giving them the best start possible. (1908 [1978], 490,
emphasis added)
We see Ambedkar building upon another Deweyan text—this time, the

1908 Ethics—and using verbatim and summarized portions in his novel
argument against caste. Ambedkar, dealing with the structural and reli-
gious inequalities bequeathed to India from a millennia-old religious
framework, uniquely emphasizes the inequalities among people in his
context. He couples this emphasis with a stronger reading of equality
as a moral ideal. Even though caste members are unequal now, it does
not mean it is ideal or virtuous for our future actions to continue to re-
enforce this equality.
In the following portions of the controversial “Annihilation of

Caste,” Ambedkar advises the virtual destruction of the current form of
Hinduism that created this state of injustice—including its shastras and
holy Vedas. This was the same Ambedkar who burned a copy of the most
famous shastra or law book, the Manusmrti, in 1927 during a protest
for untouchable rights to communal water sources (Shastri 2012). His
audience would surely have been horrified had he uttered these solu-
tions in a presidential address. But as his printed copy of his speech
reveals, he was ultimately a pragmatist about such matters. He did not
seek to destroy religion simply to be free of all religious guidance. Even
in the 1930s, a period of time identified with his rejection of his native
Hinduism, he strives to clear up what he means “by destruction of reli-
gion.” Acknowledging that “some may find the idea revolting to them
and some may find it revolutionary,” he explains his position by drawing
a distinction between “principles and rules” (75). He then explains this
distinction as follows:
Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things according to
prescription. But principles are intellectual; they are useful methods of
judging things. Rules seek to tell an agent just what course of action to
pursue. Principles do not prescribe a specific course of action. Rules, like
cooking recipes, do tell just what to do and how to do it. A principle, such
as that of justice, supplies a main head by reference to which he is to con-
sider the bearings of his desires and purposes, it guides him in his thinking
by suggesting to him the important consideration which he should bear in
mind. This difference between rules and principles makes the acts done in
pursuit of them different in quality and in content. (75)
This, of course, is a distinction derived from Dewey’s (and Tufts’) Ethics.

One can tell that Ambedkar is drawing from the 1908 version of this
text by the presence of the adjective “useful,” since the 1932 revision of
Ethics replaces “useful” with “final.” Here is how Dewey and Tufts put
the distinction in the 1908 Ethics, with echoed passages highlighted:
Rules are practical; they are habitual ways of doing things. But principles
are intellectual; they are useful methods of judging things. The fundamen-
tal error of the intuitionalist and of the utilitarian (represented in the
quotation from Mill) is that they are on the lookout for rules which will
of themselves tell agents just what course of action to pursue; whereas the
object of moral principles is to supply standpoints and methods which will
96 S. R. STROUD
enable the individual to make for himself an analysis of the elements of

good and evil in the particular situation in which he finds himself. No gen-
uine moral principle prescribes a specific course of action; rules, like cooking
recipes, may tell just what to do and how to do it. A moral principle, such
as that of chastity, of justice, of the golden rule, gives the agent a basis
for looking at and examining a particular question that comes up. It holds
before him certain possible aspects of the act; it warns him against taking a
short or partial view of the act. (Dewey 1908 [1978], 301–302, emphasis
added)
Ambedkar takes this point from Dewey and Tufts’ vision of ethics as an
evolution from customary morality to reflective morality and applies it to
the caste system. Caste is a harmful habit that needs reflective attention
and melioration; it is based upon rules that cannot adapt to situations of
injustice and detriment. What is needed is the use of principles to sort
through this complex, problematic social situation in India; Ambedkar
wants to destroy Hinduism as set of rules and replace it with “Religion in
the sense of spiritual principles” (75). This would be a type of religious
orientation that would be “truly universal, applicable to all races, to all
countries, to all times” (75). Whereas Dewey and Tufts’ critique applied
to overly sedimented habits of moral judgment, Ambedkar adapts their
ideas and text to religion: “Religion must mainly be matter of principles
only. It cannot be a matter of rules” (75). Hinduism, as a religion of
rules, promulgates caste and results in a situation that Deweyan prag-
matists would abhor: “[it] tends to deprive moral life of freedom and
spontaneity and to reduce it (for the conscientious at any rate) to a
more or less anxious and servile conformity to externally imposed rules”
(76). The words and ideas of Deweyan pragmatism seep into both his
indictment of Hinduism and the advocated solution to its caste-based
problems. Ambedkar could not make these same points with the same
strength if he had lacked the guidance of pragmatist texts such as Ethics
and Democracy and Education.
Ambedkar and Reconstructive Rhetoric

What lies behind this curious tactic employed by Ambedkar in
“Annihilation of Caste” and various other works? The fact that I have
only been able to find this tactic with Deweyan source texts reaffirms
the importance of calling Ambedkar an Indian pragmatist. He was so
captivated by pragmatism that he often used the words, phrases, and

ideas of Dewey without drawing explicit attention to their source in the
western pragmatist’s corpus. This manner of address is intriguing and
important for a reason beyond establishing the centrality of pragmatist
ideas to Ambedkar’s thought.. In this final section, I will explore the
rhetorical import of Ambedkar’s form of Indian pragmatism and illustrate
his commitment to reconstruction, meliorism, and rhetorical practice.
We must first ask the question—why doesn’t Ambedkar explicitly ref-
erence Dewey’s works in many (but not all) of the places that he employs
them? He obviously knows how to cite sources, having produced schol-
arly theses at a variety of western educational institutions. And he does
cite Dewey elsewhere (even in “Annihilation of Caste”). Given the con-
text of lecturing and writing in India, it is not clear that he is taking own-
ership over the ideas of Dewey, so we must conclude that this is different
than cases involving the plagiarism of the ideas of others. As demon-
strated previously, Ambedkar cuts and alters Dewey’s passages to fit his
quest for social justice in an Indian setting that is vastly different than the
context that Dewey engaged.
The explanation that Ambedkar’s strategy stems from his unique cul-
tural placement can be bolstered by the parallel rhetorical practices of
Martin Luther King, Jr. While I will ultimately find this sort of explana-
tion lacking, it is useful, to a certain extent, to show the range of choices
that rhetors have in how they make their arguments to various audiences.
Keith Miller’s (1992) work on King, Jr. could be used to support this
argument, since King often borrowed lines and passages from previous
pastors in addressing white and African-American church congregations.
This tactic is not totally removed from Indian matters, since in one of
his major essays on nonviolence, he uses a range of uncited authors and
their words to “delineate his interpretation of Gandhi and nonviolence…
The intertextual pattern is plain: King uses lines from lesser-known writ-
ers to account of his responses to famous philosophers, theologians,
and Gandhi” (55). We can ask a similar question about King’s rhetori-
cal tactics—why did he follow this path of argument construction for his
audiences?
There are at least three reasons that Miller’s study finds as explaining
King’s techniques of borrowing and voice-merging. Both of these tech-
niques muddy the distinction between the voice of another preacher or
author and the voice of the person (King) speaking in front of a particu-
lar audience or writing a particular text. The first of these reasons deals
98 S. R. STROUD
with the protection of the speaker. King’s activist goals were extreme for
his day, and even white civil rights partisans might be shocked at portions
of his message. King’s use of “approved” sources in his own arguments
then allows him to advance relatively radical points:
Encased in an exceedingly orthodox sermon about balanced Christian

living, King’s argument about black America becomes almost irrefutable
because his larger, framing argument is as balanced theologically as it is
geometrically. By wrapping his racial protest in what amounts to theolog-
ically indisputable discourse, King comes as close as possible to foolproof-
ing his protest. (76)
By mixing revolutionary appeals with accepted texts that have passed

the test of time, King gives his message the aura of acceptability while
still pushing for novel conclusions and radical goals. This does not seem
to account for Ambedkar’s echoing of Dewey, since Ambedkar did not
hold much back from his audience. “Annihilation of Caste” was censured
through the indefinite delay of the Mandal’s conference precisely because
its ideas were overtly offensive to caste Hindus, and incurred some
amount of danger to Ambedkar. Hiding Deweyan references did nothing
for Ambedkar’s safety or effectiveness.
A second reason that Miller gives for King’s borrowing and
voice-merging relates to the context of rhetorical activity he usually oper-
ated in: that of preaching, and not writing theology or philosophy. Such
appropriation of Christian sources displayed and performed his mastery
of these standard sources and stories. Part of its efficacy came in signal-
ing his authority through the masterful use of other Christian authority
figures: “For King and others, borrowing sermons also served as a way
of arguing from authority…When King reiterated their texts, he evoked
the authority of those certified by all of liberal Protestantism” (Miller
1992, 137). This rhetorical tactic constructed his persona and personal
authority through the reaction of his Christian audience that was famil-
iar with the context of preaching in African-American churches: “Like
folk preachers before him, he gained an authoritative self in part through
ideas and language that were known and honored by those who had
already heard them” (137). Beyond protection for radical ideas, bor-
rowing and voice-merging conferred a powerful ethos to King. This
does not seem to exactly account for Ambedkar’s use of Dewey, how-
ever, since most in British-dominated India had not heard of the great
American pragmatist. Dewey’s international reputation did not noticea-

bly extend to India, and he never visited India on his international lec-
turing tours. One finds few references to the work of Dewey to Indian
intellectuals, and Dewey’s Democracy and Education was first translated
into one of the native languages of India (Ambedkar’s native Marathi)
only in 1959 (Boydston 1969). It is not clear that Ambedkar would
curry favor from either his educated or illiterate audiences by subtly
evoking the American pragmatist, John Dewey.
A third reason that King may have employed these techniques relates
to dominant epistemological commitments in the Christian tradition. As
Miller (1992) argues, the epistemology underlying King was the same
that guided Paul and Jesus, “who often repeated and adapted mate-
rial from the Old Testament and apparently from oral rabbinic sources
as well” (136). This not only established credibility with their audi-
ences, it also met the requirements of the Christian view that truth was
immutable and established by divine decree long ago. Thus, innova-
tion is prized less than repetition and fidelity to an original version of
the truth. In terms of rhetorical method, “King’s preaching also sprang
from the assumption that God’s Word is repeated and repeatable”
(117). Borrowing and voice-merging are necessary tactics entailed by
this foundational view of truth. This sort of explanation also falls short
in accounting for Ambedkar’s tactics, however, as it relies on a founda-
tional view of truth and communication as the repetition of that truth.
Pragmatism does not start with a notion of truth being settled in some
remote past.
While all of these reasons fail to satisfy our quest for the method
behind Ambedkar’s rhetorical practices, they help us fine-tune our ques-
tion. The third reason with its emphasis on foundational truth being
echoed brings our quest into focus. Ambedkar clearly disagreed with
views of truth as eternal (sanatan, in the Sanskrit tradition), given his
demurs in “Annihilation of Caste” to old texts and practices such as
those infesting Hinduism that lead to the crushing reality and reifi-
cation of the caste system. Ambedkar, like Dewey, saw knowledge as
ever progressing through controlled processes of inquiry and reflec-
tion, not simply through the preservation of foundational truths of the
past. Herein lies our key to understanding his use of echoing—it is a
way of operationalizing a rhetoric of reconstruction. What does this term
mean? Ironically, we can find its pragmatist roots in plain sight. In one
of the two places that Ambedkar explicitly refers to or cites Dewey in
100 S. R. STROUD
“Annihilation of Caste,” he also spells out his appreciation for pragma-

tism’s emphasis on reconstruction:
Prof. John Dewey, who was my teacher and to whom I owe so much, has
said: “Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood
from the past, and with what is positively perverse… As a society becomes
more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to conserve and
transmit, the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for
a better future society”. (1989, 79, ellipses in original)
Ambedkar both cites Dewey and approves of his teacher’s relation of past
to present. Following Dewey, Ambedkar insists that the materials of the
past do not need to be used in the same fashion in the present and the
future; these materials can be trimmed or reconstructed to fit our chang-
ing needs of the present. It is helpful to look at the original passage from
Dewey’s Democracy and Education, however:
Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the
past, and with what is positively perverse. The school has the duty of omit-
ting such things from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing
what it can to counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment.
By selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reenforce the power
of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is respon-
sible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but
only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for
the accomplishment of this end. (1916 [1985], 24, emphasis added)
With the echoes emphasized, we see both Ambedkar’s continuation of

Dewey’s notion of reconstructing the past in light of present needs and
a reconstruction of Dewey’s emphasis on schools as a method for this
meliorative activity. Ambedkar excises any mention of schools, staying
true to Dewey’s own words about past materials not determining future
means and ends in activity. Ambedkar’s textual resources, drawn from his
copy of Democracy and Education acquired in 1917, could be trimmed
and reconstructed to meet the needs of his present situation. Ambedkar’s
situation was different from the one Dewey was addressing in his treatise
on education; education was important, but as “Annihilation of Caste”
made clear, what was most needed in India was a change in the religious
notions and orientations evidence in oppressed and oppressor.
We arrive at a tentative answer to the question of echoing in

Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste.” Ambedkar did not cite Dewey
because he was treating the pragmatist texts as pragmatism itself
dictated—as resources to be used, altered, or set aside in one’s present
battles for more meaningful experience. Citing Dewey would cement the
passages and ideas as either authoritative, or as settled, and either out-
come does not harmonize with the pragmatist theme of reconstruction.
Ambedkar was practicing a pragmatist rhetoric of reconstruction in argu-
ing against the caste system. Thus, we can see his debt to Dewey in two
levels: first, at the level of Dewey’s emphasis on habits and individual
orientation as vital for meliorative projects, and second, at the level of
method and reconstructive temper.
This rhetorical method Ambedkar relies upon is calculated to exert
the optimal level of force upon the problems of his communicative or
social present. In the face of illiteracy, injustice, and oppression, it does
not get distracted by issues of citation and reference to past (and for-
eign) texts. We see this in an unnoticed echo of Dewey in Ambedkar’s
“Annihilation of Caste.” In later editions, this text included Gandhi’s
response, as well as Ambedkar’s rebuttal to the Mahatma. In the final
section, Ambedkar problematizes the mindless adherence to the past
exemplified by Gandhi’s reaction:
The Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking. He prefers to follow the

saints. Like a conservative with his reverence for consecrated notions he is
afraid that if he once starts thinking, many ideals and institutions to which
he clings will be doomed. One must sympathize with him. For every act
of independent thinking puts some portion of apparently stable world in
peril. (1989, 95)
We can sense here the Deweyan ideas of reflective thinking and inquiry,
perhaps even the final stage of moral development in the Ethics known
as reflective morality. But what we also see is that in his response to
Gandhi, Ambedkar continues to use and adapt Dewey’s texts—situated
in a vastly different context—as vital tools in his rhetorical struggles
against the habits of caste. Looking at Dewey’s 1925 Experience and
Nature, a book that can be found among the remains of his personal
library, we can identify where Ambedkar gets part of his response to
Gandhi:
102 S. R. STROUD
Let us admit the case of the conservative; if we once start thinking no one
can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends
and institutions are surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an
apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will
emerge in its place. (1925 [1981], 172, emphasis added)
Ambedkar is inspired by Dewey’s statement of the value of reflective

thought, but ultimately feels licensed to reconstruct it to fit his reli-
giously situated context of oppression. “Ideals” is added next to Dewey’s
“institutions,” and “objects” and “ends” are minimized through dele-
tion. Ambedkar builds upon Dewey’s statement of this vital pragmatist
point, but he clearly makes it his own—it now targets this specific reli-
gious conservative with a unique, Indian respect and reliance on reli-
gious texts that have been followed for millennia. In this final missive,
we see the contours of Ambedkar’s distinctive Indian pragmatism: it will
be a flexible program of melioration that relies upon and rebuilds the
materials of some imperfect past in the project of reconstructing a bet-
ter future. Ambedkar would not have this sort of emphasis, method, or
exact democratic ideal if not for his engagement with and reconstruction
of Deweyan pragmatism.
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Kadam, K. N. 1997. The Meaning of the Ambedkarite Conversion to Buddhism
and Other Essays. New Delhi: Popular Prakashan.
Keer, Dhananjay. 1990. Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.
Maitra, Keya. 2012. “Ambedkar and the Constitution of India: A Deweyan
Experiment.” Contemporary Pragmatism 9: 301–320.
Miller, Keith. 1992. Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Its Sources. New York: The Free Press.
Mukherjee, Arun P. 2009. “B.R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of
Democracy.” New Literary History 40: 345–370.
Nanda, Meera. 2003. Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science
and Hindu Nationalism in India. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Omvedt, Gail. 2004. Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India. New York:
Penguin Books.
Queen, Christopher S. 2004. “Ambedkar’s Dhamma: Source and Method in
the Construction of Engaged Buddhism.” In Reconstructing the World: B.R.
Ambedkar and Buddhism in India, edited by Surendra Jondhale and Johannes
Beltz, 132–150. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 2015. “A Pedagogy of the Dhamma: B. R. Ambedkar and John Dewey on
Education.” International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 24: 7–21.
Shastri, Shankranand. 2012. My Experience and Memories of Dr. Babasaheb
Ambedkar. Delhi: Gautam Book Centre.
Stroud, Scott R. 2016. “Pragmatism and the Pursuit of Social Justice in India:
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———. 2017a. “The Influence of John Dewey and James Tufts’ Ethics on
Ambedkar’s Quest for Social Justice.” In The Relevance of Dr. Ambedkar:
Today and Tomorrow, edited by Pradeep Aglave, 33–54. Nagpur: Nagpur
University Press.
———. 2017b. “Pragmatism, Persuasion, and Force in Bhimrao Ambedkar’s
Reconstruction of Buddhism.” Journal of Religion 97 (2): 204–243.
———. 2017c. “What Did Bhimrao Ambedkar Learn from John Dewey’s
Democracy and Education?” The Pluralist 12 (2): 78–103.
Zelliot, Eleanor. 2005. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar
Movement. New Delhi: Manohar.
———. 2013. Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit
Movement. New Delhi: Navayana.
CHAPTER 5
The Art of Adjustment: Ralph Ellison’s

Pragmatist Critique of Irving Howe
Jansen B. Werner
Ralph Ellison was a pragmatist. His expansive corpus of intellectual

work—spanning his landmark novel Invisible Man, two collections
of essays, and lesser known pieces of short fiction and political report-
age—is teeming with penetrating meditations on pragmatist principles
such as experience, consciousness, and pluralism. And, embodying the
experimental spirit of his pragmatist forebears, Ellison’s work routinely
accents the traditional with generative new riffs. Indeed, alongside his
engagement with established pragmatist concerns, Ellison added depth
to pragmatist thought by underscoring the significance of previously
underappreciated concepts such as chaos, complexity, and improvisation
(Callahan 1987; Wright 1987; Albrecht 2012; Magee 2003).
Given his engagement with, and extension of, pragmatism, it is some-
what puzzling that Ellison has not received greater consideration within
the published literature on pragmatism. Among the range of factors that
may have contributed to this relative lack of engagement, three possi-
bilities emerge as particularly plausible. First, perhaps the most likely
explanation for Ellison’s limited inclusion within pragmatist scholarship
is that his intellectual legacy has been tethered largely to the literary
J. B. Werner (*) 
Independent Scholar, Minneapolis, MN, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_5
106 J. B. WERNER
contributions of Invisible Man. More than six decades after its pub-
lication, not only does Invisible Man remain a wildly popular book, it
also continues to draw significant scholarly attention (Germana 2018;
Harriss 2017; Conner and Morel 2016). Furthermore, within the field
of Ellison scholarship, even when projects do not take Invisible Man
as their primary focus, there is still a tendency for scholars to link their
projects to Invisible Man in some fashion—often treating the success of
Invisible Man as a justification for why further research on Ellison is war-
ranted (note, for example, that it took this chapter merely two sentences
to invoke Invisible Man) (Foley 2010; Parrish 2012; Turner 2012).
In short, it is possible that the scholarly fixation with Invisible Man has
attenuated scholars’ appreciation for the richness of Ellison’s overall cor-
pus by deflecting critical attention from the nonfiction works wherein he
grapples most overtly with pragmatist concepts.
Second, and closely related to the previous point, it seems that a
consequence of Invisible Man’s popularity has been for Ellison to be
regarded principally as a novelist. Though such a categorization is under-
standable, it is also reductive. After all, throughout his career, Ellison
produced two volumes of essays—one of which, the 1964 Shadow &
Act, is widely considered to be among the greatest essay collections
ever published (Callahan 1987, 125–143). Nevertheless, the critical
acclaim and enduring popularity of Invisible Man has enshrined Ellison
chiefly as a novelist within the public imaginary. And while there does
not exist a mandate of mutual exclusivity that would prevent one from
being both a novelist and pragmatist, in reality, novelists (or, at least,
those who are regarded as novelists) have received only sparing attention
within the published literature on pragmatism. Within my disciplinary
homes of Communication Studies and Rhetorical Studies, for example,
the work on pragmatism has focused almost exclusively on academicians,
legal figures, and social reformers—which is sensible, given the fact that
such roles tend to coincide with robust involvement in public affairs.
In this respect, perceptions that Ellison was principally a novelist may
help to further explain why his work has not received greater considera-
tion within pragmatist circles.
Finally, and particularly germane to the focus this chapter will take, it
is possible that Ellison’s relative lack of uptake within pragmatist schol-
arship owes at least in part to his proclivity for vitriol. For example, in
his biography of Ellison, Arnold Rampersad (2007) notes that Ellison’s
contemporary, James Baldwin, referred to Ellison as “the angriest man
5 THE ART OF ADJUSTMENT: RALPH ELLISON’S PRAGMATIST CRITIQUE … 107
he knew” (455). It is perhaps fitting that Ellison, the man who crafted
the iconic “Battle Royal” scene in Invisible Man, happed to find himself
involved in skirmishes of his own periodically—albeit of the intellec-
tual variety. A journey through Ellison’s corpus reveals some rather
acidic exchanges with other thinkers. Such a tendency toward clash
seems out of step with the spirit of reflective, experimental inquiry that
is normally ascribed to pragmatism. And, so, it is possible that Ellison’s
reputation as something of a scornful, counterpuncher may offer yet
another explanation for his relatively cool reception within pragmatist
scholarship.
In a broad sense, this chapter proposes that scholars of pragmatism
ought to give greater consideration to Ralph Ellison’s work. To advance
that general claim, I explore what many Ellison scholars regard as perhaps
Ellison’s most vitriolic public exchange: his multi-part essayistic feud with
Irving Howe (Porter 2001; Jackson 2005; Posnock 2005). To briefly recap
the sequence of the exchange: The feud was set in motion by Howe’s 1963
essay “Black Boys and Native Sons”; Howe’s essay prompted a rebuttal
from Ellison, entitled “The World and the Jug”; Howe answered Ellison’s
rebuttal with a rebuttal of his own; and the feud came to a close with a
final rejoinder from Ellison (in the interest of clarity, it must be noted that,
following his clash with Howe, Ellison published his contributions to the
exchange as a single essay entitled “The World and the Jug” in his 1964
essay collection Shadow and Act; hence, throughout the chapter, I use
“The World and the Jug” to refer to that combined version of the texts).
Shaped by the trajectory of Howe’s initial essay, the exchange essentially
gravitated around the following questions: (1) Is there such a thing as a
representative—or authentic—African American experience? (2) What is
the basis for African American identity? (3) What, if any, political obliga-
tions, do African American writers face? (4) Who has the authority to define
the objectives of African American artistic expression? Frustrated by what
he viewed as the ideological limitations of Howe’s perspective, at times,
Ellison regarded his interlocutor with contempt; indeed, at one point
in the exchange, Ellison (1964 [1995]) even suggested that Howe—a
socialist literary critic and civil rights advocate—was just as complicit in
stymieing African American advancement as the most ardent southern
white supremacist (120). In issuing critiques of that nature, it would seem
unlikely that, in the very same exchange, Ellison would also perform a
masterful pragmatist critique of Howe’s position. Yet, as this chapter will
demonstrate, such was precisely the case. And that dynamic—the pairing of
108 J. B. WERNER
vitriol and pragmatism—is pertinent to my overall purpose of elucidating

Ellison’s commitment to pragmatism. That is, in part, my analysis will
attempt to demonstrate that, even when Ellison was at his most antagonis-
tic, he still managed to operate through a pragmatist modality.
Alongside this general aim of clarifying Ellison’s commitment to prag-
matism, more specifically, this chapter will illustrate that, in his exchange
with Howe, Ellison showcased the civic value of a particular pragma-
tist concept: adjustment. Among pragmatist thinkers, John Dewey was
perhaps the leading theorist of adjustment. As Dewey (1911a [1968],

1916 [2008], 1934 [1980]) understood it, adjustment was the outcome of
an interaction between an individual and his environment. Through such
interaction, Dewey maintains, adjustment induces a change in the individ-
ual that disposes him to more favorably pursue his needs or aims. Drawing
upon that understanding of adjustment, this chapter contends that, in his
exchange with Howe, Ellison advocated a Deweyan notion of adjustment
as a vital resource for navigating the civic challenges that emerge within a
diverse, pluralistic society such as the United States. Ultimately, by exam-
ining Ellison’s appeal for adjustment, we are able to appreciate the ways in
which Ellison elaborated and extended Dewey’s crucial insight that democ-
racy is not merely a political system, but, rather, a “way of life.”
Democracy, Meliorism, and Adjustment

Ellison’s democratic vision closely paralleled Dewey’s. As Ross Posnock
(1998) points out, Ellison and Dewey were unified in viewing democracy
as a “strenuous way of being in the world” (203). Dewey’s opposition to
bureaucratic views of democracy has been well documented. Ellison, too,
resisted simplistic notions of democracy, emphasizing instead the ways
in which democracy was enacted through expressions of love, risk, and
sacrifice (Allen 2004). For example, in his address at the 1953 National
Book Award ceremony, Ellison stated, “For the novelist, Proteus stands
for both America and the inheritance of illusion through which all men
must fight to achieve reality; the offended god stands for our sins against
those principles we all hold sacred. The way home we seek is that con-
dition of man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and
which we term democracy” (2003, 154). Given the overlap between
Ellison’s and Dewey’s views of democracy, our appreciation of Ellison’s
call for adjustment can be enriched by placing Ellison’s appeal alongside
major concepts from within the civic nexus of Dewey’s thought.
Throughout his work, Dewey championed the idea that democ-

racy was more than merely a system of government; rather, for Dewey,
democracy was an ethos: an ethical way of dwelling with others (Asen
2003; Keith 2007; Stroud 2011). Though Dewey (1939 [1988])
frequently voiced this viewpoint, he perhaps best captured it in “Creative
Democracy—The Task Before Us,” where he writes, “Democracy as
compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes
wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means.”
“[T]he task of democracy,” he continued a few sentences later, “is for-
ever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all
share and to which all contribute” (229–230). Addressing such charac-
terizations, William M. Keith rightly argues that Dewey viewed democ-
racy as a “ubiquitous possibility.” For Dewey, any situation that carries
the possibility for joint action and collaborative decision-making—in
other words, virtually every context of human sociality—is a potential
site of democracy. The radical implication of that insight is that democ-
racy is nearly boundless. Democracy can be practiced anywhere there
exists a possibility for human interaction.
As a complement to his organic view of democracy, Dewey also
espoused the notion of meliorism. In the most basic sense, the term
meliorism refers to the idea that worldly conditions can be improved by
human effort (Stroud 2011; Stob 2005). As Dewey (1920 [1982]) out-
lines in Reconstruction in Philosophy,
Meliorism is the belief that the specific conditions which exist at one
moment, be they comparatively bad or comparatively good, in any event
may be bettered. It encourages intelligence to study the positive means of
good and the obstruction to their realization, and to put forth endeavor
for the improvement of conditions. (181–182)
Scott Stroud (2010) has written extensively on Dewey’s view of meli-

orism and, through close engagement with Dewey’s work, Stroud has
devised a framework for the implementation of meliorism. Among the
valuable insights Stroud’s work provides, he proposes that, for meliorism
to achieve practical potency, the philosophical orientation of meliorism
must be paired with means of engagement—in other words, tangible
habits, techniques, and practices.
The concept of adjustment offers a compelling response to Stroud’s
call for meliorism to be extended through specific means of engagement.
110 J. B. WERNER
Within Dewey’s work, “adjustment” is articulated alongside two

related phenomena: “accommodation” and “adaptation.” Dewey
approaches each of those phenomena as distinct modalities for coping
with the evolving scenic conditions of existence. What differentiates
the three phenomena is the character of the interactions they signify.
Accommodation, for Dewey (1911b [1968]), entails an individual assim-
ilating to his “existing environment” in a manner that involves minimal
effort to resist or alter that environment (35). At the other end of the
spectrum, adaptation occurs when the individual manipulates the envi-
ronment to better meet his “needs and ends” (38–39). With adjustment,
the individual neither submits to the limitations of the environment
nor alters the environment; rather, adjustment occurs when an indi-
vidual undergoes “deep seated” changes “in relation” to his environ-
ment—changes that enable the individual to better pursue his purposes
(Dewey 1934 [1998], 406). As that description conveys, for Dewey,
adjustment somewhat straddles the space between orientation and habit.
On the one hand, insofar as adjustment requires skillful execution, it
would seem to approximate a habit that is cultivated through mindful
practice; on the other hand, it seems only reasonable to argue that the
skillful execution of an adjustment generally necessitates that one is first
receptive—on some level—to making adjustments, which, in turn, seems
to locate adjustment on the side of orientation. In light of this h
ybridity,
adjustment possesses great potential as a medium for moving from a
melioristic orientation to the development of tangible, civic habits.
Especially in a diverse, pluralistic society, adjustment possesses tre-
mendous civic value. Moreover, following the arc of Dewey’s thought,
it would seem that adjustment constitutes a resource that could be
employed to purposefully align the overlapping projects of democ-
racy and meliorism. That is, through a conscious, disciplined practice
of adjustment, citizens could develop symbolic and social habits that
enhance their ability to democratize the various civic spaces they inhabit.
In “The World and the Jug,” Ellison would vividly illustrate how African
Americans had already put adjustment to such uses.
Ellison’s Call for Adjustment

Ellison’s clash with Howe offers an interesting case study because it
typifies the idea of “antagonistic cooperation” that Ellison was so fond
of promoting—a concept that Ellison just so happened to invoke in his
second reply to Howe. The basic premise to “antagonistic cooperation”

is that ostensibly antagonist interactions, such as Ellison’s clash with
Howe, when viewed from an ironic perspective, can actually be inter-
preted as acts of cooperation. As an example, in baseball, a hitter cannot
experience the exultation of driving in the game-winning run without
the antagonism provided in the form of the opposing pitcher. Following
this framework, whatever valuable insights that Ellison produced within
his exchange with Howe, those insights are indebted to the antagonistic
presence that Howe provided.
Howe (1963 [2011]) activated his antagonistic presence through the
publication of his essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” which appeared
in the autumn 1963 issue of the Leftist magazine Dissent. At its core,
the essay was an encomium of Richard Wright and his novel Native
Son. “The day Native Son appeared,” asserted, “American culture was
changed forever” (660). Howe insisted that Native Son was pathbreak-
ing for the way in which it gave voice to suppressed black rage, which,
in turn, he argued, had induced a dual recognition: “A blow at the white
man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor. A blow
at the black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his sub-
mission” (660). Howe’s praise for Wright was accompanied by criticism
of both Ellison and James Baldwin. In short, Howe questioned Ellison’s
and Baldwin’s ostensible aversions to overtly political writing. Countering
such reservations, Howe maintained “the clenched militancy” that Wright
had modeled signified the “only” way that “men with black skins, and for
that matter, all the oppressed of the world, [could] achieve their human-
ity” (664). Howe rendered a similarly sweeping critique in response to
Baldwin’s contention from Notes of a Native Son (1955 [1998]) that
“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience” (8). After
quoting Baldwin’s passage directly, Howe countered:
What, then, was the experience of man with a black skin, what could it be
in this country? How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so
much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest, be it harsh
or mild, political or private, released or buried? The “sociology” of his
existence formed a constant pressure on his literary work, and not merely
in the way this might be true for any writer, but with a pain and ferocity
that nothing could remove. (660)
These kinds of sweeping generalization would be subjected to harsh

scrutiny in Ellison’s rebuttals.
112 J. B. WERNER
In the analysis that follows, I will illustrate that “The World and the
Jug” articulated a Deweyan sense of adjustment. In order to establish
this claim, I focus on two sets of moves that Ellison performed in the
text. First, Ellison suggested that Howe operated from a flawed orien-
tation; in gesturing to that flawed orientation, Ellison implicitly signaled
the need for adjustment. Second, by outlining the wide range of strat-
egies that African Americans have devised to counter white supremacy,
Ellison showed that adjustment possesses dynamic possibilities for the
invention of civic agency. In tandem, these moves constituted a call for a
renewed civic commitment to adjustment.
Orientational Critiques
At root, “The World and the Jug” marked Ellison’s rhetorical corrective
to the orientation that Howe had expressed in “Black Boys and Native
Sons.” Synthesizing insights from Dewey, Scott Stroud (2014) concep-
tualizes “orientation” as the “deep-seated habituation of an organism
toward its environment” (51). Orientations, then, are like the figuration
that emerges from a constellation of habits. And, like habits, orienta-
tions “set up ways of acting/reacting in future situations” (Stroud 2014,
59). From this standpoint, one’s orientation is not innate. Rather, as
Stroud points out, orientations are formed culturally, in accordance with
“the range of experiences we undergo” (56). Insofar as our experience
is mediated through language, discourse plays a powerful role in shap-
ing our orientations. “The World and the Jug” teemed with Ellison’s
critiques of Howe’s orientation. However, Ellison’s critiques did more
than just highlight the shortcomings of Howe’s individual orientation;
“The World and the Jug” demonstrated that orientation, in general, was
instrumental to the development of civic consciousness.
In a sense, Ellison’s response in “The World and the Jug” was insti-
gated by Howe’s interpretation of Richard Wright’s significance. In
Ellison’s view, Howe misinterpreted Wright as synecdochal of black writ-
ers in particular and black American experience more generally. Ellison’s
critique advanced the sense that Howe’s assessment of Wright stemmed
from orientational flaws. Addressing what he judged to be Howe’s dis-
torted view of Wright, Ellison (1964 [1995]) stated, “Wright, for Howe,
is the genuine article, the authentic Negro writer, and his tone the only
authentic tone” (118). Though not overtly critical, Ellison’s use of the
terms “genuine” and “authentic” was significant. As many scholars have
noted, throughout his career as a writer and critic, Ellison consistently

challenged static concepts such as “genuineness” and “authenticity”—
especially when applied to the complex matter of racial or cultural iden-
tity (Callahan 1987; Eddy; Turner 2012).
Aside from the general orientational problems inherent to viewing any
individual’s perspective as the “authentic” perspective, Ellison offered
further reasons for why Howe’s interpretation of Wright suffered from
orientational shortcomings. As Ellison saw it, part of the trouble with
approaching Wright’s novel, Native Son, as an “authentic” portrayal of
black American life was that the novel itself suffered from orientational
problems. Discussing Native Son, and particularly the development
of “Bigger Thomas’s” character, Ellison remarked critically that “envi-
ronment is all” (1964 [1995], 114). In other words, Ellison critiqued
Wright’s portrayal of “Bigger Thomas” on the basis that it relied upon
the logics of social determinism, that “Bigger’s” character was wholly a
product of the material and social forces of his context.
In keeping with Dewey’s attention to the interaction between the
organism and its environment, Ellison was a staunch critic of virtually
any “deterministic” framework.
Demonstrating the efficacy of his anti-deterministic approach, Ellison
pointed to the ironic tension between Wright the man and the protag-
onist he had invented in Native Son. “Wright could imagine Bigger,”
Ellison wrote, “but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright”
(114). Indeed, as Ellison explained, Wright had endured conditions that
at least approximated those of his protagonist “Bigger Thomas,” but
nevertheless Wright went on to become an accomplished and celebrated
writer—a reality that Ellison positioned as evidence that “deterministic”
frameworks failed to account for individual agency.
Of course, this did not mean that Native Son was worthless; it sim-
ply served to underscore the deficiencies of Howe’s orientation. Rather
than simply deconstruct the flaws in Howe’s orientation, Ellison enacted
a pragmatist corrective by demonstrating an alternative, more flexible
orientation to Wright and his novel Native Son. “While I rejected Bigger
Thomas as any final image of Negro personality,” Ellison explained,
“I recognized Native Son as an achievement; as one man’s essay in defin-
ing the human condition as seen from a specific Negro perspective at a
given time in a given place” (118). Such framing captured the signifi-
cance of the interplay between Wright, his individual experiences, and
his context of production. In similar fashion, Ellison revised Baldwin’s
114 J. B. WERNER
aforementioned contention that “One writes out of one thing only—

one’s own experience.” Quoting Baldwin directly, Ellison parenthetically
stated “(I would have added, for the novelist, this qualification: one’s
own experience as understood and ordered through one’s knowledge
of self, culture and literature)” (110–111). Modifying Baldwin’s for-
mulation, Ellison countered that there was not a pure correspondence
between one’s experience and one’s writing; rather, capturing the influ-
ence of orientation, Ellison maintained that, in the act of writing, one’s
experience was always already articulated from a perspective that had
been shaped by a confluence of cultural forces.
To be sure, Ellison was concerned with much more than just Howe’s
interpretations of Native Son and Richard Wright. Howe’s judgment
demanded scrutiny, Ellison reasoned, because it carried the potential to
shape public understanding of race, especially blackness. Thus, Ellison’s
critique addressed not just Howe’s orientation toward Wright and
Native Son, but, more broadly, Howe’s orientation toward black expe-
rience and black identity. “One unfamiliar with what Howe stands for,”
said Ellison, “would get the impression that when he looks at a Negro
he sees not a human being but an abstract embodiment of living hell”
(112). This comment closely resembled a statement that James Baldwin
made in his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, published just a few months
prior to Ellison’s exchange with Howe. Therein, Baldwin (1963 [1993])
had posited that “white liberals … could deal with the Negro as a sym-
bol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man” (58). Like Baldwin,
Ellison insisted that even self-identified antiracists, such as Howe, were
often complicit in perpetuating regressive understandings of blackness.
Ellison further established the significance of orientation by inter-
rogating the specific terms by which Howe promoted a reductive con-
cept of blackness. One aspect that troubled Ellison was the way that
Howe’s conception of blackness appeared to support theories of racial
essentialism. Employing Howe’s own comments to justify that judg-
ment, Ellison wrote, “When [Howe] uses the term ‘Negro’ he speaks
of it as a ‘stigma,’ and again, he speaks of ‘Negroness’ as a ‘sterile’ cat-
egory” (1964 [1995], 130). Further elaborating the point, Ellison
insisted that Howe approached “‘Negroness’ [as] a metaphysical con-
dition, one that is a state of irremediable agony which all but engulfs
the mind” (130–131). In addition to this issue, Ellison also voiced
concern that Howe seemed to believe in a universal black experience.
“Evidently,” he wrote, “Howe feels that unrelieved suffering is the only
‘real’ Negro experience” (111). To counter such a notion, Ellison drew

upon an anecdote from his own life experience: “Some twelve years
ago, a friend argued with me for hours that I could not possibly write
a novel because my experience as a Negro had been too excruciating to
allow me to achieve that psychological and emotional distance neces-
sary to artistic creation. Since he ‘knew’ Negro experience better than I,
I could not convince him that he might be wrong” (111). Gesturing to
his critically acclaimed novel Invisible Man, recipient of the 1953 National
Book Award, the point of the anecdote was that it showed that Ellison’s
“friend” had been woefully mistaken about the constraints of “Negro
experience.” Placed alongside Ellison’s critique of Howe, the anecdote
functioned enthymematically to imply that Howe, like Ellison’s “friend,”
was also woefully mistaken about the character of “Negro experience.”
Another way that Ellison demonstrated the importance of orientation
was by subordinating political motive to symbolic action. An admirer
and friend of Kenneth Burke, Ellison was well versed in Burke’s theories
of rhetoric and symbolic action. According to Michael Magee, Ellison’s
understanding of symbolic action entailed interrogating how lan-
guage “operates,” paying close attention to what language “does” (239).
Reflecting that perspective, Ellison made clear that he was less concerned
with Howe’s motives—indeed, he even acknowledged that Howe had
maintained a commitment to advancing racial justice—than he was with
the symbolic implications of his discourse. For example, while discuss-
ing the generic limitations that Howe imposed on black writers, Ellison
wrote, “In his effort to resuscitate [Richard] Wright, Irving Howe would
designate the role which Negro writers are to play more rigidly than any
Southern politician—and for the best of reasons” (1964 [1995], 120). The
statement functioned as a “perspective by incongruity.” Though Howe
acted from “the best of reasons,” and presumably had nobler motives
than the hypothetical “Southern politician,” it was nevertheless Howe,
Ellison argued, who imposed the more rigid racial constraints.
Ellison not only complicated the connection between motive and
effect but also redirected attention to the significance of symbolic action.
In a passage that expressed a keen understanding of rhetoric’s constitu-
tive properties, Ellison stated:
Howe is not the first writer given to sociological categories who has
had unconscious value judgments slip into his “analytical” or “scien-
tific” descriptions. Thus I can believe that his approach was meant to be
116 J. B. WERNER
“analytic, not exhortatory; descriptive, not prescriptive.” The results, how-

ever, are something else again. And are we to believe that he simply does
not recognize rhetoric when he practices it? That when he asks, “what
could [his italics] the experience of a man with a black skin be …” etc.,
he thinks he is describing a situation as viewed by each and every Negro
writer rather than expressing, yes, and in the mode of “exhortation,” the
views of Irving Howe? Doesn’t he recognize that just as the anti-Negro
stereotype is a command to Negroes to mold themselves in its image,
there sounds through his descriptive “thus it is” the command “thus you
become”? And doesn’t he realize that in this emotion-charged area defini-
tive description is, in effect prescription (129)?
Here, Ellison suggested that Howe seemed to misunderstand the sym-

bolic consequences endemic to the act of “describing” African American
life. Prefiguring Burke’s formulation in Language as Symbolic Action,
Ellison argued that Howe’s description was not merely observational,
but, rather, “hortatory” (44). That is, in ostensibly describing the con-
ditions of African American life, Howe simultaneously enunciated a
symbolic directive for how African American life ought to be. In short,
Ellison’s critique implied that Howe’s orientation toward language was
lacking in that it failed to account for such constitutive dynamics.
While Ellison took issue with Howe’s orientation toward language, he
took greater issue with what he interpreted as Howe’s absolutist view of
blackness. Such an orientation was faulty in that it obscured the particu-
larity and complexity of actual black individuals. More troubling still, in
Ellison’s assessment, Howe’s view was “merely symptomatic” of a more
fundamental “public disorientation” (1964 [1995], 123). “Those who
regard blackness as an absolute,” Ellison wrote, “see in it a release from
the complications of the real world” (121). In other words, for individu-
als who shared Howe’s orientation, blackness provided an escape. When
conceived as a monolith, blackness offered a source of stability in an oth-
erwise chaotic world. Such a viewpoint was untenable to Ellison—and
not simply because of its reductive conception of blackness. As others
have noted, Ellison viewed “chaos” as a vital source of democratic pos-
sibility. Thus, by approaching blackness as a remedy to chaos, individuals
such as Howe were suppressing the growth of democracy.
In contrast to the absolutism he attributed to Howe, Ellison advo-
cated an orientation that acknowledged and promoted pluralism.
Addressing Howe’s critical judgments of his and Baldwin’s deviations
from Richard Wright, Ellison wrote, “In his loyalty to Richard Wright,
Howe considers Ellison and Baldwin guilty of filial betrayal because, in

their own work, they have rejected the path laid down by Native Son,
phonies because, while actually ‘black boys,’ they pretend to be mere
American writers trying to react to something of the pluralism of their
predicament” (115). Here Ellison argued that Howe’s “loyalty” to
Wright—and, by extension, his commitment to an absolutist view of
blackness—had prevented him from considering the plurality of issues
that black writers might address in their work. And the pluralism to
which Ellison referred owed to the diversity of experience within black
American life. Ellison extended this point by disputing the extent to
which institutional racism had prevented African Americans from forg-
ing connections with the larger society in which they were embedded.
He declared,
Howe seems to see segregation as an opaque steel jug with the Negroes
inside waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork.
Wright is his hero and he sticks with him loyally. But if we are in a jug it
is transparent, not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside but
to read what is going on out there; to make identifications as to values and
human quality. (116)
Employing metonymy, the trope of reduction, Ellison conveyed the

sense that Howe grossly overestimated the degree to which segregation
disconnected African Americans from the rest of American society. The
second half of the passage, then, countered the reductive image of the
“opaque steel jug” by directing attention to the tangible practices, such
as seeing and reading, that enabled African Americans “to make identifi-
cations” with the wider society.
Perhaps even more compelling was Ellison’s appeal to the converse
of this point: that African Americans had indelibly shaped the culture
of Southern society. Again emphasizing Howe’s orientational short-
comings, Ellison posited that Howe was “so committed to a sociologi-
cal vision of society that he apparently cannot see … that whatever the
efficiency of segregation as a socio-political arrangement, it has been
far from absolute on the level of culture” (116). Importantly, the state-
ment proposed that it was Howe’s “sociological vision” that prevented
him from seeing that ostensible reality. Elaborating the cultural dynamic
to which he gestured, Ellison explained, “Southern whites cannot walk,
talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or
118 J. B. WERNER
freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes” (116).

Ellison’s counterpoint carried considerable weight. As Kirt H. Wilson
(2002) has pointed out, racialized rhetorics of “place” powerfully shaped
the Southern imaginary from Reconstruction up through the 1960s era
from which Ellison wrote.
Taken collectively, Ellison’s various critiques of Howe’s orientation
signaled that Howe’s conception of blackness did not comport with the
actual character of black American life—or, for that matter, the character
of American life writ large. Howe’s orientation privileged theory at the
expense of practice. In Deweyan parlance, Ellison’s orientational critiques
implicitly invited consideration of adjustment. In A Common Faith, for
example, Dewey (1934 [2008]) positions “orientation” and adjust-
ment as correlates. In a section that probes the dynamics of “religious
experience,” Dewey asserts that, at the root of the perceived “religious
experience” is “some complex of conditions” that produces “an adjust-
ment” and, with it, a corresponding “orientation” (10). While Ellison’s
critiques of Howe’s orientation implicitly encouraged an adjustment,
“The World and the Jug” did not stop there. Rather, through a variety of
appeals, Ellison characterized adjustment as a valuable resource for grap-
pling with the hardships that emerged from US institutional racism.
Demonstrating the Value of Adjustment

Linked closely to the aforementioned orientational critiques, a prom-
inent cluster of Ellison’s appeals for adjustment were premised on the
idea that Howe approached African American consciousness as merely
the byproduct of white supremacy. To be sure, Ellison did not refute
that white supremacy had played a significant role in shaping African
American consciousness; rather, Ellison countered deterministic view-
points with appeals that underscored interaction. Expressing his rejection
of the view that African American consciousness was marked by passivity,
Ellison wrote, “For even as his life toughens the Negro, even as it bru-
talizes him, sensitizes him, dulls him, goads him to anger, moves him to
irony, sometimes fracturing and sometimes affirming his hopes; even as
it shapes his attitudes toward family, sex, love, religion; even as it modu-
lates his humor, tempers his joy—it conditions [emphasis original] him to
deal with his life and with himself” (1964 [1995], 112). Then, shifting
his focus to the interactive dimensions of African American conscious-
ness, he added:
Because it is his [emphasis original] life and no mere abstraction in some-

one’s head. He must live it and try consciously to grasp its complexity until
he can change it; must live it as [emphasis original] he changes it. He is no
mere product of his socio-political predicament. He is a product of the inter-
action [emphasis added] between his racial predicament, his individual will
and the broader American cultural freedom in which he finds his ambiguous
existence. Thus he, too, in a limited way is his own creation. (112–113)
Such a statement contested powerfully the deterministic assumption

that African American consciousness was merely a side effect of white
supremacy.
In conjunction with such appeals to interactivity, Ellison further cap-
tured the function of adjustment by proposing that what appeared to be
African American submission did not always reflect a genuine stance of
submission. That is, Ellison proposed that, through their interactions
with white supremacy, African Americans had devised strategic ways of
performing their identities so as to meet the demands of particular cir-
cumstances. African American life, Ellison stated, was “not only a bur-
den (and not always that) but also a discipline—just as any human life
which has endured so long is a discipline teaching its own insights into
the human condition, its own strategies of survival” (112). From this
perspective, what appeared to be a sign of involuntary submission was,
perhaps, actually a conscious, calculated strategy for navigating racism.
There was, Ellison asserted, an entire “American Negro tradition which
teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain
pain,” a tradition that “springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of
existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always
done” (111). Such a conception resembles what Houston A. Baker, Jr.
(1987) refers to as the “mastery of form,” a modality in which one “con-
ceals, disguises, floats like a trickster butterfly in order to sting like a bee”
(50). Moving from the general to the particular, Ellison testified to his
own enactment of such a modality:
I could escape the reduction imposed by unjust laws and customs, but
not that imposed by ideas which defined me as no more than the sum
of those laws and customs. I learned to outmaneuver those who inter-
preted my silence as submission, my efforts at self-control as fear, my
contempt as awe before superior status, my dream of faraway places and
room at the top of the heap as defeat before the barriers of their stifling,
provincial world. And my struggle became a desperate battle which was
120 J. B. WERNER
usually fought, though not always, in silence; a guerilla action in a larger

war in which I found some of the most treacherous assaults against me
committed by those who regarded themselves either as neutrals, as sympa-
thizers, or as disinterested military advisers. (1964 [1995], 122)
What others had misinterpreted as “submission,” Ellison insisted, had

actually constituted “a guerilla action in a larger war.” Highlighting the
value of such adjustment, he maintained that his strategic identity per-
formance had proven valuable in drawing out the attitudes of individ-
uals such as Howe—individuals who did not appear hostile to African
Americans, but, when given the opportunity, revealed assumptions
that were antagonistic to African Americans’ progress. In short, Ellison
showed that behaviors that seemed to signal “submission” could actu-
ally reflect a subversive adjustment to the racial hostilities endemic to
American life.
Ellison did more than just identify covert modes of African American
adjustment Rather, “The World and the Jug” characterized adjustment
as a key facet of African American life. Consider, for example, Ellison’s
description of African American “consciousness”: “Negro American con-
sciousness is not a product (as so often seems true of so many American
groups) of a will to historical forgetfulness. It is a product of our memory,
sustained and constantly reinforced by events, by our watchful waiting,
and by our hopeful suspension of final judgment as to the meaning of
our grievances” (124). Ellison’s phrasing here was striking. For exam-
ple, the phrase, “will to historical forgetfulness,” insofar as it evoked an
unqualified acceptance of the United States’ racist past, closely paral-
leled Dewey’s notion of “accommodation.” In contrast to that, the col-
lective “memory” that Ellison positioned as the actual source of African
American “consciousness” was infused with a sense of adjustment.
This collective “memory,” Ellison contended, was “sustained and con-
stantly reinforced by events”; furthermore, it was marked by a move-
ment between recollection of the past, attention to emerging events,
and the exercise of critical judgment. According to Ellison, then, African
Americans adjusted their “consciousness” in accordance with the tug-and-
pull of those dimensions.
A similar sense of adjustment emerged from other portions of the
text in which Ellison discussed what he considered the distinguishing
features of African American life. Refuting the equation of skin pigment
with racial identity, Ellison asserted, “It is not skin color which makes a
Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American expe-

rience, the social and political predicament; a sharing of that ‘concord
of sensibilities’ which the group expresses through historical circum-
stance and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the
larger American culture” (131). The view of blackness as “skin color”
was static and devoid of any sense of adjustment Ellison’s corrective
pivot to “cultural heritage,” on the other hand, captured the dynamic
interaction between “individual” and “environment” on which adjust-
ment was predicated. Environmental factors, such as “the American
experience” and “the social and political predicament,” undeniably
exerted influence; however, in Ellison’s rendering, African Americans
had “constituted” their identities by interacting with that environment,
particularly through communicative acts in which they expressed and
negotiated cultural values in accordance with shifting circumstances. In a
subsequent passage, Ellison further explicated the diverse matrix of envi-
ronmental factors and cultural practices from which African American
lives were shaped and textured. Among the elements he included
within that matrix, Ellison cited, for example: “forms of labor”; “forms
of pleasure”; “manners”; “customs”; and “a special perspective on the
national ideals and the national conduct.” Though such a constellation
of factors gestured indirectly to a sense of adjustment, this particular sec-
tion of the text also entailed more explicit appeals to adjustment. For
example, Ellison stated that African American life was distinguished by
“a rugged initiation into the mysteries and rites of color which makes
it possible for Negro Americans to suffer the injustice which race and
color are used to excuse without losing sight of either the humanity of
those who inflict that injustice or the motive, rational or irrational, out of
which they act” (131). Though racism was structured into the US envi-
ronment, Ellison again highlighted adjustment by asserting that African
Americans’ interaction with that oppressive environment had allowed
them to still acknowledge the humanity of their oppressors. Ellison
would render an even more conspicuous appeal to adjustment in the
very next sentence. Closing this lengthy section on the distinctive fea-
tures of African American life, Ellison concluded that African Americans’
interactions with US society had ultimately furnished “the uneasy
burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid, ambiv-
alent response to men and events which represents at its finest, a pro-
foundly civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in this modern
world” (131–132).
122 J. B. WERNER
In accordance with such characterizations of African American life,

Ellison urged African Americans to maintain a unique attunement to
their experiences, with a particular eye toward how those experiences
could inform future acts of adjustment. The basic reasoning for this was
that experience could function like a compass and thereby point the way
to conditions that needed to be remedied. Capturing that point, Ellison
exhorted African Americans to pursue their freedom “by depending upon
the validity of their own experience for an accurate picture of the reality
which they seek to change, and for gauge of the values they would see
manifest” (114). Dewey extends a similar point in Art as Experience. “[E]
xperience,” Dewey writes, “becomes conscious, a matter of perception,
only when meanings enter it that are derived from prior experiences.” For
Dewey, the only way those prior experiences gain meaning in subsequent
interactions is through “imagination,” which, significantly, Dewey describes
as “the conscious adjustment of old and new” (272). Thus, by calling for
African Americans to draw upon their experiences as indicators of the “val-
ues” that needed to be emphasized in society, Ellison had essentially con-
verted Dewey’s conception of adjustment into a principle of social change.
Ellison doubled down on that principle as it pertained to the respon-
sibilities of black writers. Discussing the central questions that black
writers should address, Ellison notably included: “What values emerg-
ing from Negro experience does he [the black writer] try to affirm”
(1964 [1995], 113)? Not only did this extend a Deweyan notion of
adjustment, it also responded to the issue that had prompted Ellison
to compose the text in the first place: Howe’s reductive view of African
American experience. Pressing against what he interpreted as the “socio-
logical” biases of Howe’s orientation, Ellison countered, “What moves a
writer to eloquence is less meaningful than what he makes of it” (112).
In a sense, such a stance seemed to merely invert Howe’s orientation;
indeed, it ostensibly stressed the individual’s agency at the expense of
considering the individual’s environment. However, Ellison’s emphasis
on the production of “eloquence” signaled an attunement to the inter-
activity of the aesthetic process. In a statement that incorporated Howe’s
phrasing, Ellison declared, “It would seem to me … that the question of
how the ‘sociology of his existence’ presses upon a Negro writer’s work
depends upon how much of his life the individual writer is able to trans-
form into art” (111–112). By focusing on the production of “eloquence”
and the transformation of experience into “art,” Ellison placed adjust-
ment at the center of African American aesthetic practice.
Although “The World and the Jug” primarily addressed questions

related to black Americans in general and black writers in particular,
Ellison also demonstrated that the brand of adjustment he advocated was
beneficial to US society writ large. As Ellison pointed out, the ongoing
freedom struggle that underwrote his and Howe’s exchange “involve[d]
not merely Negroes but all Americans” (132). Insofar as there existed
a “basic unity of human experience,” Ellison maintained, that freedom
struggle possessed the “possibility” to induce “empathic and symbolic
identification with those of other backgrounds” (123). According to
Ellison, writers—whether white, black, or otherwise—were ideally sit-
uated to cultivate that sense of identification between diverse individ-
uals. For example, discussing his role as an “American writer,” Ellison
characterized himself as “a custodian of the American language”—a
crucial aspect of which entailed, in Ellison’s words, “contributing as
much as he is capable to the clear perception of American social reality”
(125–126). In a subsequent section of the text, Ellison positioned
adjustment as fundamental to making such a contribution. “[T]he writ-
er’s real way of sharing the experience of his group,” posited Ellison, “is
to convert its mutual suffering into lasting value” (139). Capturing the
character of adjustment, the statement suggested that works of “lasting
value” were those in which the writer employed an interactive movement
between “experience” and aesthetic production. Following Ellison’s
logic, insofar as a writer adopted that mode of adjustment, she was better
disposed to produce a work of “lasting value”—a work that could induce
“empathic and symbolic identification” between diverse individuals. Such
a framework could be readily converted to the everyday communicative
practices of civic life. Communicative exchanges that were animated by a
spirit of adjustment could transcend ostensible boundaries of difference
and, in turn, forge new symbolic bonds.
Conclusion
Viewed within the overall landscape of Ellison’s public discourse, “The
World and the Jug” embodied a pair of rhetorical patterns that were
prevalent within his work. As Jack Turner notes, Ellison’s work gener-
ally signals a commitment to at least two intellectual projects. The first
project is “diagnostic” and functions by “identifying the individual
and social psychoses underlying American white supremacy” (Turner
2012, 72). Ellison’s criticism of Howe’s orientation marked just such
124 J. B. WERNER
a diagnostic move. That diagnostic move was also intriguing in that it

seemingly ran counter to prevailing trends within the ongoing black free-
dom struggle. While the prominent spokespersons of the 1960s directed
attention outward to structural and policy issues, Ellison’s focus on ori-
entation seemed to direct attention inward to the individual. It is perhaps
tempting to dismiss the significance of that divergent focus as merely a
sign of what other scholars have described as Ellison’s stubborn commit-
ment to individualism. To do so, however, would be to underappreci-
ate the value of Ellison’s diagnostic move. By stressing the relationship
between orientation and white supremacy, Ellison reminded his readers
of the depths to which white supremacy plagued US society. As much
as white supremacy was a structural problem with policy implications, it
was expressed through, and exercised by, individual persons. Of course,
Ellison was not suggesting that efforts at structural change should
be abandoned. Rather, his focus on orientation signaled that it would
not be enough to just tear away white supremacy’s superstructure and
replace it with more equitable laws and policies. A comprehensive cam-
paign against white supremacy would need to attend to its bedrock: the
social conditions of civic life. In this way, Ellison’s focus on orientation
redirected attention to the social foundations of participatory democracy.
The second project that emerges from Ellison’s overall body of work,
according to Turner, is a “reconstructive” one. This reconstructive
project centers on providing “Americans with the imaginative equip-
ment they need to escape racialized social outlooks and see the world
from the perspectives of racial others” (73). As this chapter has argued,
“The World and the Jug” participated in such a reconstructive project
by advocating a Deweyan notion of adjustment Ellison’s articulation of
adjustment possessed considerable civic value. With greater attention to
adjustment, individuals could better appreciate the matrix of elements
from which their fellow citizens crafted and expressed their identities.
Furthermore, attunement to that dynamic could enable individuals to
adjust their civic practices in ways that might promote a deeper sense
of connection with citizens whose experiences or perspectives differed
widely from their own. Particularly on matters of race, in which the pre-
sumption of a priori difference often hinders the possibility for identifica-
tion across racial categories, greater attention to adjustment could offer
insights for how to mediate seemingly intransigent conflicts.
Ellison’s critiques of race and racism also yield a more general set of
insights regarding identity. Specifically, Ellison’s appeals for adjustment
underscored the pitfalls of determinism. In identifying the novel meth-

ods that African Americans had devised for navigating white supremacy,
Ellison highlighted that human agency can never be fully determined—
or delimited—by situational constraints. Ellison showed that our human
capacity for adjustment endows us with the ability to improvise in the
face of uncertainty and to counter challenges with creative activity.
And, still, for many of his contemporaries, Ellison’s call for adjustment
was almost certainly underwhelming. As it pertained to contesting white
supremacy, adjustment had somewhat of a conservative ring to it. For
Dewey, though, adjustment was the stuff from which democracy was
made. Indeed, in The Public and Its Problems, Dewey notably remarks:
“Political democracy has emerged as a kind of net consequence of
a vast multitude of responsive adjustments to a vast number of situations.”
Echoing Dewey’s insights, Ellison exhorted his readers to embrace
an ecological view of social change. From this perspective, sustaina-
ble social change would not result from seismic shifts. Rather, enduring
social change would need to be accumulated through wave after wave of
adjustments to the evolving predicaments of life in a plural democracy.
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CHAPTER 6
Living Pragmatism: Alice Dewey’s

Open-Minded Approach to Experiential
Education and Cross-Cultural Immersion
Karen Shea and Krysten Manke
The increasing recuperation of John Dewey’s corpus among

twenty-first-century scholars has alternately illustrated the ways in which
ethical rhetorical practices are crucial to the development of democratic
culture, invited people of different educational and cultural backgrounds
into conversations, and uncovered strategies to help individuals navi-
gate the complexities of social engagement among diverse citizens with
open-mindedness. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how
Dewey’s pragmatism expresses social, communicative, and political goals
that often fit in contemporary definitions and motivations of rhetoric.
While much has been written about John Dewey, far less has been
written about his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey. John Dewey demonstrates
continued gratitude for his wife’s efforts both in published works and in
lengthy correspondence between the couple over multiple decades, but
K. Shea (*) 
Johnson & Wales University, Providence, RI, USA
e-mail: Karen.Shea@jwu.edu
K. Manke 
University of Rhode Island, South Kingstown, RI, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_6
130 K. SHEA AND K. MANKE
few others have openly acknowledged Alice’s contributions to pragma-

tism, since she never published any texts within the philosophical canon.
Yet a closer look into John Dewey’s pragmatism, both in its inchoate and
more developed forms, reveals Alice Dewey’s influence at nearly every
turn. Her work—both in collaboration with and independent of John
Dewey—is emblematic of pragmatism in action. This chapter will argue
that Alice’s impact on Deweyan pragmatism has been understated and
overlooked. In service of this argument, it will trace how Alice’s impact
on this emerging philosophy can be seen through her work with the
Dewey Laboratory School as well as her firsthand experience with other-
ness while living with John in Asia for two years. It will further consider
the degree to which Alice’s rhetoric shaped the pedagogical processes
at the Laboratory School and John Dewey’s increasingly open-minded
philosophies.
When they first met at the University of Michigan, Alice captivated
John with her willful spirit, her dedication to education and women’s
rights, and her ability to translate theory into practice; the year they mar-
ried, John writes to her, “You make me know something every day.”1
Alice is also generally credited with helping her husband to shift “from
pietistic ethics to ethical culture” (Martin 2002, 96). More specifically,
Alice’s insistence that philosophy have an application inspired John’s
thinking to transition from neo-Hegelian thinking into more practically
motivated ideation (Whipps and Lake 2017). While George Herbert
Mead opened John’s thinking beyond Hegelian dualisms and into plu-
ralistic thinking, it was Alice who capitalized on this in order to open
John’s mind and bring it into contact with present social issues—so that
“things which had previously been matters of theory acquired through
his contact with her a vital and direct human significance” (Rockefeller
1991, 150).
A former student of John Dewey’s remembered years later how
“Mrs. Dewey would grab Dewey’s ideas—and grab him—and insist that
something be done” (Durst 2010, 13). Chicago colleagues Katherine
Camp Mayhew and Anna Edwards also confirm in a draft of their manu-
script for The Dewey School that Alice was described by many as a woman
“with a fierce and independent intelligence who was deeply concerned with
matters of justice and equality” (12). There is no doubt that Alice was a
1 John Dewey to Alice Dewey, April 1, 1886 (00038) The Correspondence of John Dewey
(electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).

6 LIVING PRAGMATISM: ALICE DEWEY’S OPEN-MINDED … 131
strong-minded woman who stated her ideas straightforwardly, and that

John took her input quite seriously in matters both personal and profes-
sional: as an activist, educator, partner, and parent. She supported him
likewise, and their work, while not always performed together, tended to
grow together.
John and Alice Dewey: The Early Years at Chicago

A primary influence on the way that John came to understand educa-
tion and develop his theories about education was through his relation-
ship with Alice and their children (Dyehouse and Manke 2017, 5). He
marveled at the way children experienced their worlds and learned based
on what they encountered, and grew increasingly more interested in the
issues of child study and elementary education, which had long been of
interest to Alice since her own education had led her to study Froebel,
an educator and philosopher who had focused on early childhood devel-
opment. Through Froebelian pedagogy, Alice learned about the impor-
tance of familial connection, play, activities with tools, and imaginative
exploration in education; in sum, she acknowledged a pedagogical the-
ory centered upon the impulse to create, which she then applied in her
own parenting of her and John’s children. She worried, however, at the
lack of these features in the typical child’s education, and increasingly
drew John into conversations about these concerns. It was Alice who
advocated: “We must not underestimate the intelligence of the child—
by intelligence meaning his training and whatever power he has acquired
in judging and discriminating—in short his experience: for he has expe-
rience all his own, and he will not tell you what it is, and no one knows
its full nature” (Dewey 1903). For Alice, there was a considerable value
in allowing students to be agents in their own education, and in let-
ting a curriculum be shaped by creative impulses—that is, by a desire to
create.
In November 1894, John echoed these sentiments when he wrote to
Alice, “I think sometimes I will drop teaching philosophy directly… and
teach it via pedagogy.” He went on to explain:
There is an image of a school growing up in my mind all the time; a

school where some actual & literal constructive activity shall be the centre &
source of the whole thing, & from which the work should be always growing
out in two directions—one the social bearings of that constructive
industry, the other the contact with nature which supplies it with its mate-
rials. … This general theorizing is very edifying when our own children
can’t get even a poor school to go to….2
As they observed unsatisfactory schooling conditions, the pair began

considering how John’s emerging philosophies could be actively applied
toward that very problem. Together, they considered a school that
would put students in constant contact with the social nature of the
issues they encountered and would allow those students to have some
amount of agency in their learning in order to facilitate the growth of
individuals who would go on to be active participants in their democ-
racy. Such a project, in their minds, required a working laboratory school
where these ideas could be tested in practice, and they gained support
from William Harper, President of the University of Chicago. A little
over a year later, Robert Westbrook writes, the Deweys had their school
(Westbrook 1992, 402). In The School and Society, John Dewey describes
the school as a joint undertaking with Alice, and writes that “the clear
and experienced intelligence of my wife is wrought everywhere into its
texture” (Dewey 1899, xiii–xiv). While John Dewey traditionally receives
credit for the Laboratory School, as Westbrook suggests and John
Dewey outright states, Alice was instrumental in bringing the project to
fruition, and ownership of the school—and the ideas that drove it—was
shared.
The Laboratory School opened in January 1896 with twelve students
and two teachers, and by 1901 had grown to house 140 students, 23
teachers, and 10 graduate teaching assistants. The school allowed stu-
dents to garden, create in an art studio, build with carpentry and met-
alworking, cook meals, and learn about concepts of science, arithmetic,
and language in relation to their activities along these areas. For exam-
ple, students learned about principles of weight and measurement as
they created and altered recipes for lunches. They learned about botany
in relation to the gardens that they cultivated each year, and saw social
benefit when those who gardened shared what they had grown with
those who prepared the meals. Finally, when a recipe was mastered,
they learned both literacy and bookbinding in order to fashion a recipe
2 John Dewey to Alice Dewey, November 1, 1895 (00218) The Correspondence of
John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1999–2004).
book that would hold their creations. In this school, educators took on
the role of mentors, and treated the school like a home environment.
Students, by turn, learned activities through an “occupational” lens; that
is, they learned skills in relation to how those skills were used to create
the environment with which the children were familiar.
These activities were all in service of building among students the
kind of habits that would imbue in them “the idea of responsibility,
of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world”
(Dewey 1899, 7). The occupational curriculum was meant to bring each
child into “contact with realities” with the hope that, “with the growth
of the child’s mind in power and the knowledge it ceases to be a pleas-
ant occupation merely and becomes more and more a medium, and
instrument, and organ of understanding—and is thereby transformed”
(19–20). Given these motivations, it is easy to see how the pedagogy
John and Alice worked together to promote at the Dewey School aligns
with current conversations about rhetorical education, which include
“any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic
identity and articulates for them rhetorical strategies, language practices,
and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in
communal and civic affairs” (Enoch 2008, 7–8). In all activities, children
were focused on working together to learn skills that would allow them
to positively impact the “embryonic community” of their classroom, so
that they might be better prepared for the responsibilities of a demo-
cratic citizen later.
In order to discover the best means to achieve these pragmatic ped-
agogical goals, the Laboratory School was largely experimental, and
students, instructors, and administrators navigated a constantly chang-
ing curriculum that sought, as well as possible, to accommodate each
individual and that individual’s relationship with the larger social envi-
ronment. This process was meant to demonstrate the revision process
inherent to democracy, a process that John Dewey described in The
Public and its Problems: “By its very nature, a state is ever something to
be scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is
stabilized, it needs to be remade” (Dewey 1927, 56). As John Dewey
saw it, endeavors in democracies and in the classrooms that educated citi-
zens required constant revision in order to be actively applicable.
Such a system meant that students did not follow the traditional pat-
terns of learning, which meant that parents often bore anxiety when their
children had not learned skills, like literacy, that were seen as compulsory
by a certain age. Teachers and administrators constantly had to defend

their policies, even as they revised them from within. In this, Alice took
an active role, and provided a defense for the literacy practices that trou-
bled so many observers and parents at the Laboratory School:
Parents who are anxious to have their children learn reading and writing
before the years mentioned are not urged to place their children in the
school unless they are willing to wait for the later results to justify the
methods used. The chief aims with children of ten and older, are to cul-
tivate a love of good literature, to form a habit of consulting books, and
of using them independently as tools - both being points in which those
methods of teaching language which lay the emphasis upon facility in deal-
ing with symbols only are lamentably defective.3
As the director of language instruction at the Laboratory School, Alice

explained in the University Elementary Record the reasoning for intro-
ducing literacy at a later point—in order to allow the students to arrive
at the use and love of literature through their own experiences with
language, rather than having such encounters artificially imposed on
them. Further, she straightforwardly stated that parents who would
be anxious about these methods should not enroll their children in
the school, because it would not meet their expectations—the school
would only suit those who were willing to cultivate that spirit of prag-
matic open-mindedness. This explanatory statement both outlined the
methods of the school regarding literacy and laid out the parameters for
participants—namely, that the parents be willing to see the experiment
through to its conclusion, and to not enroll in the program unless they
believed in its methods. As a rhetor, Alice was keenly aware of her audi-
ences, and composed a direct statement of purpose with those groups in
mind.
While anxiety still arose around the unconventional methods, through
efforts like Alice’s the students at the Laboratory School were largely
receptive of the experimental curriculum, and years later, both parents
and students reflected positively on their experiences. In gathering mate-
rial for The Dewey School, Mayhew and Edwards reached out to parents
3 Article in the 1900 Elementary School record, a nine-part monograph that explained
the theory and practice of the Laboratory School, Box 12 Folder 2, Katherine Camp
Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
and students alike to find out where Laboratory School alumni had
ended up. One parent explained that her child was now a lawyer at a
firm.4 Another stated:
One of the girls of the class in later years, as part of her entrance require-
ments to Bryn Mawr, wrote a paper on this subject of great outstand-
ing quality. The head of the Department of Physiography declared: ‘this
girl must have been a pupil of Professor Salisbury’s.’ [Professor Salisbury
taught at the University of Chicago and lent his support to the Laboratory
School by instructing students.] Needless to say, the same teacher made for
this pupil an easy way into her department classes.5
One student reflected that there were so many great events at The
Dewey School that it was difficult to recall them all.6 Still another for-
mer student reflected that, with her own children, she found that in “the
problem of preparing them for life I find that my greatest aid on help-
ing them is my ‘Dewey School’ background,” explaining that since she
was understood by her teachers, she has been able to raise her children
under that same premise, in a way that makes it possible for her to “enter
into my children’s childhood life with them, and influence not merely
through my point of view born of experience but through theirs too.”7
A note at the end of her letter indicates that Mrs. Russell had gone on to
open her own Dewey School in California.
Of course, there were students who recognized the problematic nature
of the curriculum. Paul McClintock was a perfect example; he did not
learn to read until he was fourteen years old, much to the despair of his
literary parents. In 1930, McClintock reflected to Mayhew and Edwards:
4 Correspondence from Mrs. C.M. Burns to Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna
Edwards describing her son’s life following The Laboratory School, Box 17 Folder 7,
Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell
University Library.
5 Footnote in draft for Chapter 9 of The Dewey School, Box 17 Folder 3, Katherine Camp
Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
6 Article by Brent Dow Allinson, former student of The Laboratory School, Box 17
Folder 7, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Cornell University Library.
7 Correspondence from Helen Greeley Russell to Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna
Edwards, Box 18 Folder 3, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library.
“The school as an experiment stopped just before we non-book people

came to the point where we wanted to write or read. This was bad for
the experiment and was very bad for us” (Mayhew and Edwards 1936,
404). McClintock’s memories at The Dewey School encapsulate the
very concerns that led Alice to defend the workings of the experiment,
and it is true that he did not learn to read fluently until he was fourteen.
Yet it is the nature of his eventual literacy acquisition and its successful
results that demonstrate the Laboratory School’s pedagogy in action. At
age fourteen, Mayhew and Edwards reported, “an interest in Geology
developed, and, of his own initiative, he began to read widely on this sub-
ject.” Following his graduation, his parents unveiled, McClintock went
on to study at the University of Chicago and went on to join the fac-
ulty as a professor in the department of Geology.8 So while McClintock
did not necessarily develop an appreciation for the pedagogy of the
Laboratory School, his eventual success demonstrates that the ends jus-
tified the means. In light of his eventual success as a geology professor
at the University of Chicago, Mayhew and Edwards speculated “whether
the superior literary quality of his later writing as a geologist might not
be due, in some measure at least, to his freedom from coercion in those
early years, when pleasure in the use and form of language had not yet
dawned on him.”9 Though she had passed before these words were writ-
ten, Alice’s rhetoric in these ruminations rings clear.
The success of this school has been argued variously by some who
contest that the school was an interesting but ultimately unremarkable
experience, others who see inexcusable ethnocentric implications in the
curriculum, and still others who see the school as a valuable lesson with
still-relevant implications to teaching. Like the experiment itself, Alice’s
role in the Laboratory School has received alternating celebration and
denunciation, which has led to a relative obfuscation of her full role in
the experiment, and by extension her role in John Dewey’s developing
theories. Yet in John Dewey’s How We Think, he expresses “fundamen-
tal indebtedness” to Alice (Dewey 1910, 83), “by whom the ideas of
this book were inspired, and through whose work with the Laboratory
8 Letter from McClintock’s parents, Box 18 Folder 3, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers
(6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

9 Footnote in draft of Chapter 19 “Parents and Children” in The Dewey School, Box 17
Folder 11, Katherine Camp Mayhew Papers (6561), Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Cornell University Library.
School, existing in Chicago between 1896 and 1903, the ideas attained
such concreteness as comes from embodiment and testing in prac-
tice” (Dewey 1910, iv). Similarly, in The Dewey School, Katherine Camp
Mayhew and Anna Edwards write, “The school was deeply indebted to
Mrs. Alice C. Dewey for her exceptional insight in solving many of its
problems” (Dewey 1910, vii). They go on to explain that it was Alice
who made sure records of the experiment were maintained, and that she
had preserved a large part of the source materials that they used to write
their book. Deweyan scholars have also noted that Alice’s influence was a
controlling factor in improvement of the Laboratory School, and intro-
duced a system of order that it had previously lacked (Lagemann 1996,
176; Nebeker 2002, 16).
When the school opened, Alice was an instructor of literature,
Director of the Department of English and Literature, and coordinator
of language expression at the school (Mayhew and Edwards 1936, 9). In
1901, she became principal. Assuming this position was particularly dif-
ficult, especially since her dedication to the Laboratory School and to its
following a truly experimental, organic course combined with her admin-
istrative duties meant that she was frequently the face of what could be a
frustrating curriculum. These difficulties became particularly pronounced
following the increased association and eventual merging with William
Parker’s University Elementary School, another elementary school on
campus. Alice maintained her position as principal during this time,
which meant that she was constantly embroiled in the issues surround-
ing this integration, which was already fraught as it had been opposed by
both schools and only carried forward out of budgetary necessity.
Some historians have placed blame directly on Alice for the issues
associated with the merger. Knoll asserts that teachers both at the Dewey
School and the Parker School disliked Alice, and contends that: “Because
of her unprofessional conduct and poor management, less because of
the issue of nepotism, Alice Dewey faced such powerful opposition, in
particular from the former Parker School faculty … that Harper had no
other choice than to ask for her resignation as school principal” (Knoll
2014, 455). Biographer Joan K. Smith further contends that Alice and
John lacked the personal and administrative skills necessary to make the
experiment successful. It is true that Alice Dewey expected nothing less
than the best from her teachers (Stack 2009, 30), and to be sure, Alice’s
strong-willed demeanor was certainly not typical for a woman of her
time. Instead, she was a woman ahead of her time, and her strength of
mind combined with her powers of advocacy would seem far less out of
place today. Given the political climate of her own time regarding wom-
en’s rights, it is worth considering the extent to which systemized sexism
undermined the true nature of Alice’s pragmatic contributions.
Evidence of such inequity can be seen in correspondence regarding
the Dewey School. As the plans to merge the Dewey School with the
Parker School progressed, John Dewey and Wilbur Jackman, head of the
Parker School, exchanged a series of letters regarding the future of their
educational endeavors together. In one such letter, Jackman sent over
4000 words to Dewey suggesting revisions to the school on administra-
tive levels, organization of the grades, and suggestions for faculty. In this
last, Jackman specified that, with regard to the position of principal in
this combined school, “I would suggest delaying the appointment until
the plan of organization has been decided upon and then I should get a
strong man for the place” [emphasis in original].10 With Alice still serv-
ing as principal, Jackman’s specificity seems to underscore his disapproval
that a woman occupied the position.
It also stands to reason that another gender-related dispute occurring
throughout the university shaped the public perception of Alice as prin-
cipal. At the time, the university was trying to decide whether to separate
the men and women in the junior colleges. John and Alice Dewey were
both fervently opposed to the idea, and John expressed:
The fundamental reason for coeducation is that by association in intellec-

tual inquiry and discussion men and women become acquainted with each
other’s points of view, ideas, and methods of work, and learn mutual sym-
pathy and respect; and that such intellectual sympathy and respect is a pro-
found factor in the proper social and moral attitude of the sexes to each
other… The move will tend to lower the level of instruction of women in
the University.11
Both Deweys were perpetual supporters of women’s rights who had seen
firsthand how people from both genders could collaborate to better an
10 Wilbur Jackman to John Dewey, June 10, 1902 (01503) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
11 John Dewey to Alonzo K. Parker, July 25, 1902 (00765) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
educational setting. Further, they had maintained a co-educational setting

at the Laboratory School and insisted that boys and girls be given the
same opportunities to learn and experiment. Thus, it also stands to reason
that the nature of the gender-related debate at the University of Chicago
likely had some impact on the perception of Alice gaining a position of
authority in the schools, particularly in light of Jackman’s phrasing.
The correspondence regarding both schools further supports the idea
that most of the problems that arose specifically surrounding Alice began
following the school’s new and closer quarters with the Parker School at
Blaine Hall. To an extent, this discomfort makes sense. Alice was one of
the school’s strongest advocates, and as principal, she was also the face of
the school’s administrative operations. Not only did that mean that she was
tasked with the job of turning John’s complex thinking into pedagogical
practice, but it also meant she had to help teachers navigate complications
and manage frustrations. Alice acknowledged that the teacher had the
problem not only of discerning the best methods of instruction but also
of figuring out what the children in the class were to learn from each other
in this new environment (Dewey 1903, 278). It was key not to underes-
timate the intelligence that the child had gained through experience, and
Alice firmly believed that teachers should operate with that understanding
in mind despite the practical complications that mentality introduced.
If these parameters were challenging to the teachers at the Laboratory
School, who had willingly signed onto the project, it is easy to under-
stand the frustration of teachers at the Parker School about continuing
these methods. For the Parker School, which enacted progressive ped-
agogies but in quite different ways from the Laboratory School, Alice’s
position as principal over schools meant a clear preference for one
school’s methods and teachers over the other. While Alice remained
the principal through 1903, the opposition against her intensified.
Teachers who had originated at the Parker School registered their con-
cern with Alice’s continued position as principal. One teacher explained
how Parker School teachers worried that Alice Dewey would not sup-
port them, and that it would be difficult to reconcile the different meth-
ods among teachers who had come from both schools.12 Yet that same
12 Anita McCormick Blaine to Whom it May Concern, Report of conversation between
Miss Rice, Miss Baber, and Mrs. Blaine, teachers at the Parker School, April 17, 1903
(08087) The Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1999–2004).
instructor admitted that she “felt intellectually Mrs. Dewey should lead
the school well.” Following the registration of these objections, the
faculty of the School of Education unanimously voted to ask Alice to
become Editor of the Elementary School Teacher, which she declined in
fear that it would cause further tension.
In Spring 1904, the final straw came in the form of a misunderstand-
ing about Alice Dewey’s tenure as principal. President Harper claimed he
had explained the temporary nature of Alice’s position as principal, but
the Deweys did not believe themselves to be informed of that decision.
On April 5, 1904, on President Harper’s request, Alice submitted a letter
of resignation in which she acknowledged “the satisfaction I have had in
sharing in the furtherance of this interesting educational experiment.”13
John’s resignation immediately followed, and thus, the Laboratory
School in its original iteration came to an end. The nature of its demise
continues to be a topic of debate among Deweyan scholars, and the neg-
ative attention that Alice sometimes received obscures the level to which
her contributions to the Laboratory School identify her as a pragmatist.
This is particularly true since Alice’s disassociation with the
Laboratory School by no means signaled an end to Alice’s staunch
support of experiential education, social justice, and equal opportu-
nities, as she continued to defend the rights of minorities, particularly
by becoming involved with the NAACP. As Larry Hickman explains,
Alice’s “involvement in the progressive causes such as securing the vote
of women and defending the rights of ethnic minorities had a great influ-
ence on John Dewey’s growing awareness of social justice” (Hickman
2009, 5). Dewey biographer Jay Martin reiterates this activism, and once
again highlights how Alice is often the catalyst and the vehicle for action:
When John was passionate about some aspect of social justice, Alice was
likely to be even more active. No sooner had the NAACP been formed
than Alice organized a big meeting of a group of African American women
at her house, in an attempt to join with them and to join them to the
women’s suffrage movement. Hearing of this, the owner of the building
forbade by letter any further integrated meetings in the Dewey apartment.
(Martin 2002, 248)
13 Alice Dewey to President Harper, resignation letter, April 5, 1904 (00931) The
Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois

University Press, 1999–2004).
Of course, Alice held the meeting anyway, and her support launched
a new dialogue about rights to assemble. Her ability to cultivate
open-mindedness in her own environment as she had in the Laboratory
School meant that her contributions to women’s suffrage were many,
and her involvement gave her new opportunities to engage with people
from different cultures and backgrounds. When granted the opportu-
nity to expand her efforts to understand others, then, it is not surprising
that Alice agreed to venture to Asia with John, a journey that opened her
mind to difference in ways that would not have been possible had she
remained in the United States.
In 1918, while living in California, Alice and John decided to voyage
across the Pacific in order to explore Japan for a few months. When John
was invited to lecture in China as a visiting scholar by his former student,
Hu Shih (Wang 2007, 3), their stay was extended to a year in Asia. One
year ultimately became two, which enabled the Deweys to experience the
diverse cultures of two Asian countries far more comprehensively than if
they had been tourists on a temporary visit.
Prior to experiencing life as a foreigner in Japan and China, John had
dedicated much of his early twentieth-century writings to advocating
open-mindedness as a critical value for education—an idea which had
been proven valuable through his experiences with Alice and with the
Laboratory School. Rather than a passive kind of tolerance that is acquired
through intellectual consideration alone, he recommended open-mind-
edness that is attained through a combination of contemplation and
embodied experience. The profound impact that experiencing the unfamil-
iar cultures of Japan and China had on his understanding of difference
compared to considering them from afar is apparent in his personal corre-
spondence sent to friends, colleagues, and family members in the United
States between 1919 and 1921, while he was living in Asia. Although
some attention has been given to the concept of open- mindedness
in John’s personal correspondence from Japan and China (see Shea
2016), there has been far less regard for Alice’s correspondence dur-
ing the same time, particularly her letters related to the ways in which a
pragmatic rather than merely contemplative approach to cultural aware-
ness led to her deeper understanding of otherness. Like John, Alice wrote
several letters to the Dewey children in which she recounted experienc-
ing the language, food, and ways of thinking in Japan and China, with
an added emphasis on what it meant to appreciate nature, enjoy food,
and be a woman there. Alice’s letters, then, not only support John’s idea
that open-mindedness results from experiencing other cultures, but also

expand the breadth of topics that John addresses in his own letters and
publications.
Alice’s correspondence reflects the ways in which her firsthand experi-
ence of the local cultures contributed to her understanding and appreci-
ation of how her own ideas, actions, habits, and behaviors compared to
those of the people of Japan and China. A close examination of Alice’s
rhetoric in these letters leaves little doubt that her experiences in Asia
reconfirmed and arguably expanded her pragmatic beliefs in the bene-
fits of experience that she had actualized at the Laboratory School, as
she came to understand the ways in which immersion in unfamiliar sur-
roundings opens the eyes, the mind, and the body to a deeper under-
standing and appreciation of difference. Alice’s insights regarding the
new cultures, in turn, arguably influenced John’s contemplation of prag-
matism during this time, as they traveled and engaged in philosophical
and educational endeavors side-by-side in Asia.
Years prior to the Deweys’ journey to Asia, pragmatist William James
promoted “directly, personally feeling” other people’s experiences “as
they feel” them as opposed to merely contemplating, imagining, or read-
ing about them in order to understand otherness. In other words, James
asserted that consideration alone does not lead to consummate under-
standing, since “philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who
live and feel know truth” (James 1995, 12). He disagreed with philos-
ophers who sought to find “the truth” or “the way” to live a productive
life, asking what difference it would make “if this world-formula or that
world-formula be the true one” (James 1995, 20). While living in Japan
and China and subsequently experiencing diverse physical and mental
realities of eating, sleeping, communicating, and interacting with people
and nature, Alice lives James’s words by experiencing otherness and cul-
tivating an openness to these new perspectives through that exposure.
While Alice had encouraged that experience at the Laboratory School,
her time in Asia allows her to immerse herself in otherness to truly test
the limits of her open-mindedness.
At first, Alice is shocked and disgusted by some of the cultural habits
of the Japanese. Appalled by the sight of the black teeth of the geisha, for
example, she writes to the Dewey children, “The teeth of these [little]
girls are so bad that I asked if they blackened them … when they smile as
they do a great deal their [mouths] are ugly black holes in their painted
faces.” Alice is also critical of the smell of Japanese women, noting in
the same letter, “One thing about the J woman I can never get used to
… the thing I cannot like is the odor she spreads. The grease on her
hair always gives out a stale odor and then the perfume of the powder
and perfumery mixes with that rather than for a blend to shock you into
wondering what she is trying to cover up.” Alice is equally disturbed by
the slurping sounds made by Japanese men while eating, and she com-
plains, “The Japanese have the worst [table manners] in the world.”14
Perhaps the most significant cultural difference that Alice experiences
in Japan and China, and one that she cannot accept even after two years,
is the attitude toward women. A strong woman who has raised strong
daughters, Alice emphasizes in her letters her frustration as a woman and
for all women in Japan and China. She notes, for example, that speaking
Japanese is “impossible” for a foreign woman since Japanese language
books are tailored to men. As she explains to her children, “The way
given in the phrases of the guide book is the way the man speaks,” an
injustice of which she is constantly reminded when she is corrected by
the Japanese women who find her “male speak” quite amusing. She con-
tinues, “So when I stammer off those phrases the girls are literally tickled
to death. When they tell me what I ought to say in the more elaborated
polite way of the women, then I am floored.” In the same letter, she
describes how men and women are separated into two different rooms
at typical dinner parties, “the men all seated and smoking in one, and
the women in the other.”15 Later, when she and John visit a shrine, they
learn that ladies could not enter without “visiting dresses,” a surprisingly
discriminatory experience that John relays in a letter to the Dewey chil-
dren.16 In Japan, Alice learns that women are legally prohibited from
“taking any part in politics,”17 and in China, she dines with John and
14 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, April 27, 1919 (03893) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
15 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, March 14, 1919 (10743) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
16 John Dewey to Dewey children, April 12, 1919 (10749) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
1999–2004).
their male host at a dinner party while the man’s wife remains in the
kitchen for the duration of the meal. While Alice has played major roles
both at home and in the workplace, she describes with dismay women
in China who are constantly “plodding to keep up with the house work
and sewing with no stimulation from without.”18 She notes that women
are segregated at public gatherings and in theaters.19 After attending a
wedding, she reports that “none of the men spoke to the women.”20
Although these firsthand experiences open Alice’s mind to difference,
she never accepts the gender inequality that she witnesses in Asia, even
though she is forced to acknowledge its social primacy. Although John
may have noticed this discrimination even if he had traveled to Asia
alone, Alice’s direct experiences as a woman expose John to experiences
that he may not have had without her.
Alice is particularly appalled by the gender inequality in Japanese and
Chinese schools, describing to the Dewey children the rare and mainly
unsupported efforts to raise funds to educate girls “that make you want
to sell your earrings.”21 In a letter to her daughter Evelyn, Alice calls the
supposed efforts of the Chinese government to foster democratic educa-
tion “a farce,” and claims that the “authorities” are satisfied by minimal
efforts to promote education for women. She asserts that “to teach dem-
ocratic education to men only is a false representation of democracy,”
and in frustration concludes, “I for my own part shall refuse to have any
part in it.”22 Not long after filling this letter with anti-government rhet-
oric in the face of such discrimination, she reports in another letter to
18 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, May 3, 4, 1919 (03899) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
19 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, June 7, 1919 (10762) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
20 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, June 25, 1919 (10766) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
1999–2004).
22 Alice Dewey to Evelyn Dewey, May 26, 1919 (03906) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
her children that a girls’ “Normal School” has been established. Rather
than citing this as a victory for girls, however, she sarcastically highlights
the fact that the principal assigned to oversee the school is “thin in h[i]
s body as in his mind,” and that those in charge of reluctantly establish-
ing a school for girls have simply found “a convenient place to unload
an antiquated official who really [can’t] be endured any longer by real
folks.”23 Alice’s steadfast promotion of gender-equal education at the
Laboratory School and in the University of Chicago’s junior colleges
clearly laid the foundation for her frustration, which was undoubtedly
expressed to John in person as it was to their children in these letters.
John’s decades-long philosophical consideration of just about any topic
in his published works prior to 1920 implies that when Alice vented her
frustration, he not only paid attention but was deeply influenced by her
perspective on their experiences in Asia.
Alice’s experiences in Asia as a foreign woman exemplify the kind
of immersion that William James describes when he compares water to
reality and air to abstraction, noting that experience results from immer-
sion in the water (James 1995, 49). Submersion in the new environment
understandably causes preliminary shock, but in time, Alice begins to
appreciate the beauty and other-worldliness surrounding her. New visual
and physical experiences gradually convince Alice that reality is relative,
and her stay in Asia supports William James’s suggestion that the uni-
verse be considered a “pluriverse” (Menand 88) and that truth must
constantly be reevaluated (James 1995, 27). Likewise, immersion in the
Asian cultures leads Alice to reconsider her own culturally determined
definitions of “beautiful,” “clean,” “delicious,” “respectful,” “uncom-
fortable,” and “fair,” and confirms the futility of a dogmatic belief in
one truth and one reality, just as William James did when he called for a
world in which individual differences are respected, “in which the eaches
form an All and the All a One that logically presupposes, co-implicates,
and secures each each without exception” (Menand 2001, 102).
In her correspondence to the Dewey children, Alice describes with
awe and envy the ability of the rickshaw drivers to tolerate without com-
plaint what she perceives to be unbearable discomfort. Even experiencing
23 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, June 1, 5, 1919 (03907) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
the oppressive heat as a passenger encourages her contemplation of the

fortitude of the drivers. In a letter to her children, she explains, “The
ricksha men … run all day through the mud and snow and wet in these
things made of cotton cloth that are neither stockings nor shoes but
both, and they stand about or sit on steps and wait, and yet they get
through the day alive.”24 Bumping her way as an overheated passen-
ger through the streets of Japan on rickshaws aroused in Alice a level
of empathy that would arguably have been impossible to attain by read-
ing guidebooks. Alice’s concerned and awed rhetoric for the drivers
demonstrates her continued attempts to inhabit the perspectives of those
around her, which undeniably affects John’s interpretation of the experi-
ence as well.
The pins and needles that accompany her and John’s attempts to sit
on the floor in the Japanese “seiza,” or “correct sitting,” style serves as
another reminder that they are not accustomed to the physical stress that
the Japanese seemingly endure with ease. When Alice and John try to
sit on the floor with their backs straight, legs bent, shins abutting the
floor, and buttocks resting on their ankles, they realize that even the sim-
ple act of sitting is culturally defined. While Alice is able to sit “seiza” at
least for a short time, John soon welcomes the opportunity to sit in a
chair. Considering their age at the time, neither Alice’s discomfort nor
John’s inability to sit in the traditional Japanese style is surprising, and
Alice pokes fun at herself and John in a letter to their children, writing,
“One of the amusements of the Japanese is seeing the foreign visitors try
to sit, and you can’t wonder they are amused. I can manage it, in awk-
ward fashion, but your father can’t even bend for the pose … Getting up
properly is the hardest part.”25 Alice’s good-humored rhetoric regarding
this issue further diffuses the awkwardness of difference and physical dis-
comfort, showing the good nature with which it is possible to respond
in new and different situations. Her reactions, in turn, may have led
John to write about experience more explicitly in his post-1920 publica-
tions than he had prior to their stay in Asia. In the 1910 publication of
24 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, February 10, 1919 (10735) The Correspondence
of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1999–2004).
25 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, March 4, 1919 (10740) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
How We Think, for example, John calls for “conclusions that are prop-
erly grounded” (Dewey 1910, 202) but stops short of explicit references
to the importance of firsthand experience. In the revised 1933 edition
of How We Think, in contrast, he asserts, “No one can think about
everything, to be sure; no one can think about anything without expe-
rience and information about it” (Dewey 1933, 139). Although John
delivered the message regarding the importance of experience in the
attainment of open-mindedness in his post-1920 publications, his ideas
were supported, reinforced, and expanded by Alice.
While Alice struggles to embrace some of the cultural differences that
she experiences in Asia, she is envious of others, particularly the polite-
ness and respect expressed toward foreigners in Japan. In a letter to the
Dewey children, she describes a typical scene: “This morning a man
came out of a curio shop. Bow. ‘Exguse me, madame, is this not Mrs.
Daway? … Will you not come in and look at our many curios? I shall
have the pleasure of bringing them to your hotel’ … Bow. ‘No, please do
not bring them to my room, for I am always out. I will come in and see
them sometime.’ ‘Thank you, madame, please do so, madame …’ Bow.
‘Good-morning, madame.’”26 A few days later, John explains their warm
reception upon returning home, writing to the Dewey children, “There
were five maids bowing and smiling to get our slippers and hang up our
hats,” and that “just going in or out is like going to a picnic.”27
Alice and John are similarly impressed by the hospitality of the
Chinese people, describing a time when they were lost in Shanghai:
“First we got to the wrong hotel and there while we were waiting
they gave us tea. We were struck by the fact that they asked for noth-
ing when we [left] and thanked us for coming to the wrong place.”28
Likewise, trying to utter Japanese or Chinese words and phrases leaves
Alice feeling thankful for the patient kindness of the locals. In Japan, for
1999–2004).
27 John Dewey to the Dewey children, February 22, 1919 (03877) The Correspondence
1999–2004).
28 John and Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, May 1, 1919 (03898) The
Correspondence of John Dewey (electronic resource) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois

University Press, 1999–2004).
example, even her most pathetic attempts to practice guidebook phrases

are received with warm encouragement. This, she writes in a letter to
the Dewey children, is quite unlike the attitude toward foreigners in the
United States. “One thing no one expects is for a foreigner to know a
word of Japanese. Therefore, when you pop out an awkward word or
two, you are applauded by laughter and compliments on your good
pronunciation.”29
Although Alice at first relays these stories to her children as quaint,
humorous anecdotes, her rhetoric later takes on a more pensive tone as
she realizes the fundamental significance of respect in Japan. As Alice
explains in a letter to the Dewey children, “The Japanese do one thing
that we should do well to imitate. They teach their children in school a
very nice lesson about the beauty and the responsibility of being polite
and kind to the foreigner, like being so to the guests of your own house.
This adds to the national dignity.”30 As an elementary school teacher and
mother, Alice was arguably more deeply impressed by this cultural ten-
dency than John, which may have influenced both his experience of the
new culture as well as his later writing on these topics.
In time, Alice and John feel a shift in their own perceptions of val-
uable cultural attributes, commenting that they may be unrecogniza-
ble when they come home, or intolerant of the lack of the same level of
politeness in their own culture. John writes to the Dewey children, “The
fact is that politeness is so universal here that when we get back we shall
either be so civil that you [won’t] know us, or else we shall be so irri-
tated that nobody is sufficiently civil that you [won’t] know us either.”31
Likewise, Alice’s letters imply that she will return to the United States
having attained new expectations regarding cleanliness. In a letter to the
Dewey children, for example, she describes a restaurant as “cleaner than
29 Alice Dewey to the Dewey children, April 19, 1919 (10752) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
1999–2004).
31 John Dewey to the Dewey children, February 22, 1919 (03877) The Correspondence
1999–2004).
any American one, even the best.”32 In another, she praises the Japanese
for leaving their shoes at the door to keep their homes, schools, and
other buildings tidy, concluding, “Truly, the Japanese are a cleaner peo-
ple than we are.” In the same letter, she compliments the Japanese for
their reverence toward the “o-furo,” or “honorable bathtub,” a sacred
part of the bathing ritual of the Japanese. She writes, “Have I told you
we bathe in a Japanese tub? Every night a hot, very hot wooden box
over three feet deep is filled for us … It seems all right and I regret all
the years our country went without bath tubs.”33 By exchanging her
shoes for slippers upon entering any building and soaking in the Japanese
o-furo, Alice feels rather than only imagines a new definition of “clean.”
Even after dedicating much of their personal and professional lives to
experiential education at the Chicago Laboratory School, both Alice and
John further comprehend the emotional and physical impact of experi-
ence by living in Japan and China; their conversations surrounding such
experience undoubtedly influenced John’s later philosophical works,
in which his earlier beliefs about the importance of experience become
firm convictions regarding the necessity of experience in understanding
difference.
Alice’s correspondence reveals a more contemplative approach to their
experiences of nature and art than John’s letters do; in a letter to the
Dewey children, for example, Alice describes the “wonderful temples of
enormous size, of natural wood filled with paintings and sculptures of
an ancient and unknown kind … a combination of nature and art as one
dreams of” and temples that “fascinate to the point of feeling there must
be many more worlds when such multiplicity of ideas and feelings can
exist on a single planet, and we live unconscious of the whole of it or
even any part of its extent.” And while at first, she cannot see the beauty
of the popular screens in Japan, after some time, her descriptions begin
to shift, as she reveals in a letter to the Dewey children, “The kakemonas
and the screens and the makemonas … are wonderful and I am glad to
say that we have got over seeing them as grotesque and we feel their
1999–2004).
1999–2004).
beauty.”34 Alice also describes Japanese lanterns as “impressive beyond

anything I had imagined” and the cups and kimonos of the traditional
Japanese tea ceremony as “even more [wonderfully] interesting than we
anticipated.”35 She revels in the artistic presentation of the food, con-
cluding, “Every dish is a work of art in its arrangement.”36 In the same
letter, she tries to relay the “magical appearance” of the fields and “sharp
precipices leading up from the water” that she observes while on the
Kumano Maru, headed for China. Appreciating the value of experience
over words, she writes to her children, “Come and see the Inland sea
sometime. It is worth a trip across the world.”37
Gradually, Alice realizes the truth in William James’s pragmatism, as
she comes to understand that being “other” is simply a matter of per-
spective. She hones in on the important moment in the acculturation
process when she realizes that being “foreign” is relative, explaining,
“We are as much curiosities to them as they are to us, though we live
where the most foreigners go. Now on top of it all we can no more make
a car driver understand where we want to go than if we were monkeys.
We can’t find any names on the streets, we can’t read a sign except the
few that are in English.”38 Although she and John had experienced life as
foreigners in other countries, they had never experienced being illiterate
foreigners before finding themselves surrounded by logographs rather
than Roman letters in both Japan and China.
While in Asia, Alice reconsiders the rules of society, ultimately real-
izing that the effectiveness of an operating system for each culture is
1999–2004).
35 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, February 11, 1919 (13873) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
1999–2004).
1999–2004).
38 Alice Dewey to Dewey children, February 10, 1919 (10735) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
relative. Although Alice’s letters continue to convey frustration regarding

the educational inequality for girls, she is gradually able to find the local
food delicious, the art beautiful, the respectful attitude toward others
commendable, and the cleanliness of the people enviable. As a result of
living as a foreigner in Asia, in other words, Alice realizes that the operat-
ing systems of societies determine beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
Ultimately, living in Japan and China as a foreigner reconfirms and
enhances Alice’s notions about the significant role of experience in the
attainment of knowledge and open-mindedness. In Japan and China,
exploring the culture with her body rather than only with her mind
enables her to viscerally experience otherness. Her experiences, at best
humorous and at worst painful, are constant reminders of the differ-
ences between her cultural expectations and those of the people of Japan
and China. In a letter to a family friend, Alice summarizes her profound
awareness of the significance of experience in the attainment of open-
ness toward difference, explaining that her experience in Asia “is thrill-
ing and reconstructive and revolutionary and reorganizing” and that it
has taught her to “realize that after all everything is experience, expe-
rience we are feeling for in the newer world. Having that new world
become remote, and this the real one, knowing the ‘dead past’ is not
past at all, but simply the base on which we are resting our air castles,
moving not so much in space as in time, having a ricsha man pull you
two thousand years into that past in half an hour … one can go on indef-
initely.”39 Although Alice admired some of the unfamiliar cultural hab-
its and rejected others, the years that she spent in Asia, similar to the
years that she spent at the Chicago Laboratory School, signified for her
the sweet spot of pragmatism, where the impact of experience leads the
mind to profound understanding and an ability to conceive of pluralities.
Through personal anecdotes relayed primarily to the Dewey children in
her correspondence from Asia, as well as her shifting rhetoric from disap-
proving references to cultural peculiarities as “grotesque” to complimen-
tary acclamations of differences as “wonderful” and “impressive,” Alice
repeatedly validates John’s belief that open-mindedness is something
more than “empty-mindedness,” and that pragmatism is a philosophy
that ultimately leads to intercultural understanding.
39 Alice Dewey to Albert C. Barnes, August 19, 1920 (04099) The Correspondence of
1999–2004).
Incorporating Alice into the Canon

Though John Dewey has been credited for his philosophical analyses
of the importance of experience in education and in the attainment of
open-mindedness, a closer look at his partnership with Alice while at
the Chicago Laboratory School as well as in Asia reveals the undenia-
bly significant role that Alice played in catalyzing his contemplations, and
in particular those which have had the greatest resonance in the field of
rhetoric. As Alice directed affairs at the Laboratory School and experi-
enced life as a woman in Japan and China, she affirmed the pragmatic
ideas that John had been developing for years, and demonstrated a per-
spective rooted in the context of practice. Taken together, these exam-
ples demonstrate how Alice’s lived experiences helped to shape John’s
philosophies in ways that continue to align with rhetoric, communica-
tion, and political action.
In the Laboratory School, Alice orchestrated the activities that allowed
John to hone his pedagogic philosophies. Through her work as adminis-
trator, principal, teacher, archivist, and advocate of the school, Alice had
the immense task of translating John’s complex philosophy into daily prac-
tice, and of cultivating an open-mindedness in her faculty, her students
and herself that would allow such an experiment to succeed. Over the
course of seven years, Alice demonstrated constant willingness to try new
ideas and pedagogies that focused on preparing students more directly
for the world in which they would find themselves. Her rotating list of
administrative duties demonstrated not only her dedication to this prag-
matic endeavor, but also her abilities as a communicator. Through her
straightforward rhetoric and her keen sense of audience, Alice defended
an often misunderstood program by explaining the methodology in a way
that would speak to the families who would be most willing to try it out,
as well as deter those who would be least open-minded to the new, occu-
pation-based pedagogy. Alice articulated the need to attend to each child’s
past and future, and to use the former to help each individual develop
agency in the latter. It was her instruction that propelled language and lit-
erature education at the Laboratory School. All told, there is no part of
this school, which so greatly influenced Dewey’s thinking about the con-
nections among education, writing, communication, and democracy, that
Alice did not touch. Through her work as an administrator and educa-
tor, she made significant contributions to a project that is characteristic of
pragmatism, and which today is emblematic of rhetorical education.
In later years, Alice continued not only to validate but also to expand
the scope of John’s confidence in pragmatism as a guiding philosophy
while they experienced life as foreigners in Asia for two years. In Asia,
as with the Laboratory School, Alice and John revised and rebuilt their
expectations about otherness, this time by immersing themselves into
a new and sometimes uncomfortable setting. Unlike John, Alice expe-
rienced Japan and China as a woman, mother, and elementary school
teacher, which arguably encouraged John to consider both the treatment
of women and the education of children in new ways, and bolstered the
open-mindedness of his pragmatism. Their extensive correspondence
with their children during this time period demonstrates the rhetorical
strategies by which Alice relays her various experiences to her husband,
and John’s later works reveal the extent to which these communications
had an impact on his thinking.
As various historians, friends and associates, and even the Deweys’ own
children have pointed out, Alice perpetually drew her husband out of his
own mind and into the world around him. She was a driving force that
helped him to realize that merely considering great concepts does not
lead to greater awareness of those concepts. Actually creating, inventing,
exploring, and experiencing them, on the other hand, results in the kind
of openness of mind that fosters understanding of otherness and advances
social issues. Under this interpretation, it is clear that Alice demonstrated
the workings of a consummate pragmatist whose efforts at home and
abroad should not be overlooked. Her efforts to realize gender-equal,
experiential education by co-creating the University of Chicago
Laboratory School, combined with her suffrage work and personal
experiences in the face of genuine difference in Asia, opened countless
minds, including John’s, to the epistemic nature of experience. Through
her time in Chicago, Japan, and China, Alice proved herself to be the
practitioner of John’s theories about education and open- mindedness.
Throughout their lives together, John and Alice came not only to know,
but more importantly to feel, that pragmatism is a philosophy that makes
things happen.
Although Alice did not receive the credit that she deserved in con-
tributing to John’s philosophical insights and contemplations, he himself
must have been aware of the influence that she had on his conclusions
regarding the power of pragmatism to help members of a society attain
knowledge and openness of mind. As John writes in The Public and Its
Problems, “Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation.
The action of everything is along with the action of other things”

(Dewey 1927, 250). Reflections like this lead us to consider: would
John’s actions have changed had he not experienced the lab school and
Asia with Alice? Of course, we can never know the answers to hypo-
thetical alternate histories, but Alice’s actions and words, as well as the
observations of those close to the Deweys, lend credence to the con-
clusion that Alice should be lauded as an influential pragmatist due to
her invaluable, influential, and constant contributions to John’s prag-
matic convictions. She had no publications on the philosophical tradi-
tion of pragmatism, and in fact little of her writing remains except for
correspondence. Nonetheless, she did what a true pragmatist should do,
which is to live the philosophy, and by so doing, has earned a spot wor-
thy of attention among the great pragmatists in the canon. Her efforts,
just like John Dewey’s, can contribute to our understanding of the inter-
sections between pragmatism, communication, and active citizenship.
References
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Teacher 3 (5): 273–288.
Dewey, John. 1899. The School and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
———. 1910. How We Think. Boston: D.C. Heath & Co.
———. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. New York: H. Holt and Company.
Durst, Anne. 2010. Women Educators in the Progressive Era: The Women Behind
Dewey’s Laboratory School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dyehouse Jeremiah, and Krysten Manke. 2017. “The Philosopher as Parent:
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the Development of His Thinking About Communication.” Education and
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edu/entries/femapproach-pragmatism/.
CHAPTER 7
The Accidental Pragmatist: Jonathan

Haidt’s Moral Psychology as Pragmatic
Popular Science
Jeremy Smyczek
In The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey famously writes, “The essential
need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of
debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. We
have asserted that this improvement depends essentially on freeing and per-
fecting the processes of inquiry and the dissemination of their conclusions”
(1927 [1954], 208). In the passage, Dewey neatly combines a number of
his central and always-interrelated concerns: communication, deliberation,
logic, science, and education. Successful communication is enabled by bet-
ter information, the product of good-faith inquiry into the problems that
arise in human experience. Read thus, two of Dewey’s seemingly contra-
dictory impulses—a lionization of democracy and communication and an
ostensible affection for technocracy—become expressions of appreciation
for problem-solving endeavors springing from a common origin in the
experience of humans dealing with uncertainty. William Keith and Robert
Danisch (2014) explain that Dewey used the term “science” to mean both
“the professional practices of those who pursue knowledge, not for its own
J. Smyczek (*) 
St. Bonaventure University, Allegany, NY, USA
e-mail: jsmyczek@sbu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_7
158 J. SMYCZEK
sake but as a professional occupation” as well as “the cultural understand-

ing of a variety of practices having a strong family resemblance to the pro-
fessional science and its epistemology” (35). They write that for Dewey,
“both kinds of science are most beneficial when used in response to every-
day, social, or rhetorical situations and become knowledge by virtue of their
communication and practical action, not their reflection of some objective
reality” (42). They add that “Dewey sought a sociology of rhetoric that
cultivated community-based inquiry and participation. He believed that
this was essential to the improvement of American democracy and that it
required specific forms of communication. He also believed that scientific
thinking was a model for this form of inquiry and could therefore serve
as an important resource for building a better democratic culture” (44).
If we follow Dewey in recognizing the common roots of democratic public
deliberation and scientific inquiry and then follow the Keith and Danisch
contention that Dewey “was committed to a belief in the meliorism of sci-
entific work if it emerged from a democratic society,” we might then ask
a practical question: what does scientific work that speaks to the shared
problems of public communication, democratic participation, and scientific
inquiry look like? What are working examples of the kinds of texts pro-
duced by a pragmatist rhetoric of science?
To that end, we would likely look for science communication that
both extols the virtues of the scientific method and yet recognizes the
responsibility of the sciences to be ethical participants in a broadly
construed democracy—communication that shares Dewey’s view of
science as inquiry meant to enrich experience. To find such a scientific–
democratic intervention, we might look at science communication that is
meliorative—that seeks to better a situation by reaching a broader audi-
ence than a disciplinary or professional community of other scientists. As
Paul Stob (2013) has argued, early pragmatist thinking was dispropor-
tionately well-received by nonacademic publics due to William James’
willingness to lecture popularly. In other words, we would be looking for
popular science outreach efforts which are presently so abundant across
both traditional and new media.
Second, we might hope that the science communication in question
would in practice recognize that knowledge emerges from situational
contexts and is essentially a practical affair rather than a collection of for-
mal propositions, the opposite of science outreach based in contempo-
rary forms of rationalism. Dewey describes this empirical sense when he
writes:
7 THE ACCIDENTAL PRAGMATIST: JONATHAN HAIDT’S MORAL … 159
The commonsense world includes, to be sure, perceived objects, but these

are understood only in the context of an environment. An environment is
constituted by the interactions between things and a living creature. It is
primarily the scene of actions performed and of consequences undergone
in the processes of interaction; only secondarily to parts and aspects of it
become objects of knowledge. (1938 [1949], 150)
Likewise, Dewey was doubtful about efforts to “prove” anything via for-
mal logical propositions divorced from the empirical content of a specific
unresolved situation. Use of such theory “is formal only in the sense of
being empty and mechanical. It neither reflects existence already known
nor forwards inquiry into what may be known. It is a logical vermiform
appendix” (198). Yet because so much science outreach proceeds from
rationalist models of persuasion that appeal to objective universals of rea-
son and argument, it is apparent that Deweyan pragmatism is in short
supply in this genre of published writing. In looking for pragmatist sci-
ence outreach, we would look for writing that minimizes or eschews
such strategies.
Nevertheless, I will propose that there is science outreach that oper-
ates upon pragmatic rather than rationalist principles, and as an exam-
ple, I offer selections from the work of the moral psychologist Jonathan
Haidt as examples of such outreach. Haidt both models science com-
munication that is both pragmatic in the general sense of being effec-
tive but also in the historically specific sense that Haidt is consciously
applying the work of William James. Based on his opposition to naive
realism, philosophical monism, and rationalism, his assiduous emphasis
on living beings negotiating a world of sense and meaning, his interest
in elevated, “peak,” experiences, and his generally unnoticed citations of
James (James is quoted at length in Haidt’s major works and on occa-
sion echoes James’ language), I want to situate Haidt’s writings within
the extended philosophical context of American pragmatism. Finally, I
suggest that by looking for pragmatists outside of the traditional lines of
transmission within philosophy departments, we may help to ameliorate
debates about the extent to which pragmatism goes into periodic eclipse.
My claim, though, is somewhat heterodox: although Haidt cites James
but not Dewey, he uses science to provide practical tools for everyday
living and to promote improved democratic deliberation in the service of
Dewey’s democratic and melioristic project. I will first introduce Haidt’s
work and contextualize my claim that Haidt should be considered a
160 J. SMYCZEK
pragmatist by examining other arguments for inclusion in, and exclu-

sion from, the pragmatist canon. I will then review four pieces of Haidt’s
published work and specifically chart his rejection of scientific rational-
ism and universalism and his use of James. Finally I will suggest ways in
which this distinction might be productive for future scholarship.
Haidt as a Pragmatist

The undergrad-philosophy-major-cum-moral-psychologist Jonathan
Haidt has become, in recent years, a polarizing figure in the culture
wars through his work with the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education (FIRE), the politically centrist campus free-speech organiza-
tion opposed to what it sees as creeping censorship practices in higher
education. His 2015 co-authored Atlantic piece with FIRE president
and attorney Greg Lukianoff (2015), “The Coddling of the American
Mind,” in particular drew criticism for its opposition to safe spaces, trig-
ger warnings, and campus speech restrictions favored principally by the
American left (Jensen 2016; Hanlon 2015; Sleeper 2016). Haidt has also
drawn both acclaim and controversy for his popular scientific works such
as The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, which address the
role of religion, politics, and group affiliation in human identity, con-
flict, and happiness (Haidt 2006, 2012). Ironically, positive (Berg 2012)
and negative (Fromm 2013) responses have largely centered around
the same contentions: Haidt rejects monist foundational views of both
ethics and epistemology, instead contending that humans define what
is ethical and true using plural and sometimes radically different crite-
ria (that frequently align with one’s political and religious identifica-
tion), and, as controversially, Haidt’s “social intuitionist” ethical model
significantly diminishes the causally prior role of moral reasoning in eth-
ical decision-making. Downplaying universal rationales and logical rea-
soning, Haidt sketches a moral theory in which empirical observations
about ethics are tools for better living—“moral thinking is for social
doing” is how he puts it (2012, 323)—rather than metaethical means for
understanding a single foundational essence of good. His views stand in
opposition to claims about the objectivity and universality of science—
as well as its role in determining what is right—commonly encountered
in other recent popular science books addressing morality, such as Sam
Harris’ 2010 The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human
Values, a book Haidt specifically refutes in his later work. Looking at
Haidt’s work as a form of melioristic science outreach that is also explic-

itly invested in public deliberation, this essay argues for a novel reading
of Haidt’s oeuvre: Jonathan Haidt as modern pragmatist.
A pragmatist (or at least pragmatic) response to this proposed expan-
sion of the canon might be: what’s in a name? What are the beneficial
effects of such a declaration? Often, the answer seems likely to be “very
little of interest,” and yet the issue of defining who is and is not a prag-
matist has carried on since the putative founder of this functionalist phil-
osophical school, C.S. Peirce, renamed his thinking “pragmaticism” to
distance it from the pragmatism of William James. Defining the narrower
concerns of the former, Peirce (1905) defined its content thus: “The
entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all gen-
eral modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible
different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of
the symbol” (481). Much more recently, Stanley Cavell, arguing in 1998
against the inclusion of Emerson in the pragmatist canon, tersely asserted
that “sometimes labels should be struggled over” (72). Generally,
though, what is the cash value of a label? What work does it enable or
advance to include an individual in a movement, especially if the individ-
ual has never claimed the label or sought the distinction, as is the case
with Emerson, who died 16 years before William James could give this
burgeoning functionalist philosophical school a name, or in the case of
Haidt? When should canons extend labels to recover existing thinkers
and when should they use them recruit them? Specifically, how should we
define a pragmatist?
The philosopher John Shook takes a genealogical approach, trac-
ing a detailed institutional history through which pragmatism is passed
across geographic and generational divides by students of the original
Cambridge Metaphysical Club members Peirce, James, Holmes, Royce,
and Santayana diasporic fashion. Cornel West (1989) instead writes of
the “frightening wilderness of pragmatism and historicism with their
concomitant concerns of social theory, cultural criticism, and histori-
ography,” a wilderness that follows no path of direct descent, contains
multiple European thinkers, and finds its beginnings in—Emerson (3).
Morris Dickstein (1998) casts an even wider net, writing that “Emerson
and Frost, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Santayana and Stevens, DuBois
and Ellison … have been reconsidered in the light of a broader con-
ception of pragmatist thinking” (3). Giles Gunn similarly contends
that “pragmatism has never been an exclusively American phenomenon
162 J. SMYCZEK
or movement” (xiii). Also seeking to expand the pragmatist canon to

include Kenneth Burke, David Hildebrand (1995) argues that intellec-
tual affinity is enough to at least consider the label and spur additional
interest: “Burke’s work has enough in common with the epistemologi-
cal and metaphysical doctrines of Classical pragmatism to merit renewed
consideration by philosophers” (623). Clearly, many roads lead to (prag-
matist) Rome.
My reading of Haidt-as-pragmatist, however, mostly closely responds
to Larry Hickman’s (2009) blanket description of pragmatism as a guid-
ing idea:
Its broad reach transcends the analysis of concepts and definitions in

order to engage the real-world problems of men and women. And at the
same time it rejects the notion of a “grand narrative,” it also transcends
the postmodernist denial of commonality and referentiality. It engages the
physical and social sciences, as well as technology, in ways that are rarely
found within other philosophical traditions. (3)
In other words, if we follow Hickman, pragmatism might be described

in a bare-bones kind of way as: (a) the rejection of the separation of the
intellectual and the practical (or the epistemic from the ethical); (b) the
acknowledgment of experience and materiality as the common denom-
inators that ameliorate the putative divide between them; and (c) the
use of a broad swath of available tools for scientifically and technologi-
cally informed civic engagement. If we also add an element of American
historical and geographic specificity, and imagine pragmatism as a tradi-
tion integrally related to the historical, cultural, and intellectual trends
of the United States, the inclusion of Haidt can provide a productive
working distinction as opposed to an arbitrary claim without meaningful
consequence.
In 2001s “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social
Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Haidt articulates a theory
of moral psychology that stands opposed to rationalist models, instead
of arguing for schema of moral deliberation that are thoroughly infused
with emotional cognition. In fact, forms of verbal reasoning (what Haidt
roughly equates with rationality) mainly function in Haidt’s model as post
hoc justifications for the deliberating individual’s cognitive intuitions.
Relying heavily on Hume’s comments on affect combined with his
own research, Haidt (2001) reaches the following conclusion:
Rationalist models made sense in the 1960s and 1970s. The cognitive rev-
olution had opened up new ways of thinking about morality and moral
development, and it was surely an advance to think about moral judgment
as a form of information processing. But times have changed. Now we
know (again) that most of cognition occurs automatically and outside of
consciousness (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999) and that people cannot tell us
how they really reached a judgment (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Now we
know that the brain is a connectionist system that tunes up slowly but is
then able to evaluate complex situations quickly (Bechtel & Abrahamsen,
1991). Now we know that emotions are not as irrational (Frank, 1988),
that reasoning is not as reliable (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), and that
animals are not as amoral (de Waal. 1996) as we thought in the 1970s.
The time may be right, therefore, to take another look at Hume’s perverse
thesis: that moral emotions and intuitions drive moral reasoning, just as
surely as a dog wags its tail. (830)
Although Haidt’s principal aim here is to create a clinical model for

understanding moral decision-making and not, clearly, to advance a
particular school of philosophy, he already engages in a pragmatist pro-
ject of ameliorating reason–emotion and ethical–aesthetic binaries, situ-
ating human beings on a spectrum with other live creatures interacting
with environments, and emphasizing the idea of situational response
over permanent principles of moral thought. And in Haidt’s subse-
quent work, he begins to flesh out this anti-rationalist critique by sup-
plementing his Humean orientation with reference to American thinkers
such as Emerson, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James. What,
we might ask, would push Haidt to supplement Hume’s emotivism and
intuitionism with these subsequent philosophical developments? One
answer might be that Hume’s conception of rhetoric demonizes the aes-
thetic dimensions of communication that Haidt will explore in this sub-
sequent works. As Nathan Crick (2010) puts it, “Hume [articulates] a
method that would effectively eliminate all rhetorical discourse that fails
to address itself to unadorned understanding” when he claims that argu-
ments not based in mathematics or empirical demonstration “can con-
tain nothing but sophistry and illusion” (130). Haidt’s move away from
Hume could also be prefaced by Sharon Krause’s (2008) critique of
Hume’s incompleteness: “The irrepressible political dimensions of moral
sentiment mean that Hume’s account needs to be supplemented by a
commitment to democratic equality, liberal rights, and contestatory pub-
lic debate, a commitment that takes us beyond Hume’s own philosophy”
164 J. SMYCZEK
(78). In significant part, it will take Haidt from Hume’s emotivism to

William James and to pragmatism.
Haidt’s first popular book, 2006s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding
Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, continues his project of contesting
rationalist claims about ethics, claiming that “moral judgment is like
aesthetic judgment,” based in often-unconscious affective responses
occurring prior to the verbal justifications given by individuals (21). The
book also bears a subtitle that likely echoes that of James’s Pragmatism:
A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Haidt’s stated purpose for
writing each chapter was to “savor one idea that has been discovered by
several of the world’s civilizations—to question it in light of what we
now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that
still apply to our modern lives” (ix). Unlike “The Emotional Dog,” The
Happiness Hypothesis does specifically cite both Principles of Psychology
and The Varieties of Religious Experience, calling the latter “still the
greatest work on the psychology of religion” (235). He cites James in
the book’s two final long chapters, “Divinity with or without God” and
“Happiness Comes from Between.” In the former, Haidt begins with the
surprisingly pragmatist contention that “Our life is the creation of our
minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor. We see things in
terms of what we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a
war, the mind is a rider on an elephant” (181). Paul Stob, paraphrasing
James’ earlier use by Kenneth Burke, makes a similar claim: “We employ
symbols that construct our social realities, similar to the way a contractor
employs the materials and labor that construct a house. Consequently,
the realities we face are not inherent in nature but are built up discur-
sively and can therefore be reconstructed as we alter our discursive prac-
tices” (131). In short, Haidt displays a pragmatist tendency toward what
might be called “social construction.”
The idea of reconstituting our perceptions and attitudes in experience
is the central theme of “Divinity with or without God”: not merely any
experiences, but experiences of elevation and clarity, in which elements
seem purposive and the aesthetic character of the entirety seems reflected
in its constituent elements—what James called “religious experience,” in
a broad sense or what Dewey refers to as “having an experience” (1934
[2005], 36). Although the chapter includes eclectic examples of such
transcendent, awesome, and elevated experiences, drawing examples
from literature ranging from Abbott’s Flatland to Thomas Jefferson’s
letters to Arjuna’s realization of the divine perspective in the Bhagavad
Gita, Haidt reserves a special emphasis, including a lengthy paraphrase

and 13-line quotation (the longest nonfiction quotation in the book),
for James and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Haidt paraphrases
James’ interest in “rapid” conversion experiences, in which we “experi-
ence life as a divided self, torn by conflicting desires” before an encoun-
ter that leaves the individual feeling “whole and at peace” (2006, 204).
James uses the term “melting moods,” inspired by life events or encoun-
ters with theater or literature, “leaving us now washed and soft of heart
and open to every nobler leading” (205). Haidt suggests that modern
psychological research into what Maslow calls “peak experiences” locates
common features, “nearly all of which can be found somewhere in
William James”—high praise, indeed (205).
Haidt’s second extended use of James occurs in the final long chapter
of The Happiness Hypothesis, “Happiness Comes from Between.” Here,
Haidt cites James’ erasure of conventional distinctions between Eastern
and Western mystical exercises (e.g., meditation and yoga vs. repetitive
prayer) to introduce modern neuroscience research explaining how a
person immersed in religious practice “feels merged with something vast,
something larger than the self” (237).
Like James, Haidt maintains that the existence and value of religious
experience is in no way causally connected to the existence of any god or
gods. (He refers to himself as a “Jewish atheist.”) His estimation of faith
conforms to the functionalist measure of belief offered by James in “The
Pragmatic Method”:
Pragmatism asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it

says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual
life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different
from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is
the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms (312)?”
For Haidt, the answer is that religion has positive affiliations with human
happiness, and that “a society that utterly ignored the ethic of divin-
ity would be ugly and unsatisfying” (211). He adds that, “If religious
people are right in believing that religion is the source of their great-
est happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness
and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe
in God” (211). In other words, religion has “cash-value in experiential
terms.” It offers benefits that are practical and social, and in this regard,
Haidt closely mirrors James’ thought.
166 J. SMYCZEK
Because The Happiness Hypothesis is, like most popular science books,
an ambitious synthesis of hundreds of books and peer-reviewed articles,
James may not initially seem to have outsized influence on the argu-
ment. I think, however, even though the first discussion of James is both
lengthy and laudatory, that James looms still larger in the work than is
apparent on a casual reading. Beyond the fact that both specific discus-
sions situate James as a still-valuable starting point for research on expe-
rience and perception, Haidt’s conclusion that “happiness comes from
between” and is neither a purely internal condition nor a quest for exte-
rior goods—that in fact, this internal–external boundary is both arbitrary
and malleable—is a solvent that ameliorates reason–emotion, East–West,
religion–philosophy, thought–action binaries in ways that deserve to be
described as pragmatist in their treatment of these concepts (238).
Haidt cites James three more times in 2012s The Righteous Mind: Why
Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, his longest work and,
in its attempt to understand and ameliorate the more vitriolic aspects of
the contemporary US culture wars, Haidt’s project that is most osten-
sibly focused on rhetoric and communication. Haidt frames the book’s
purpose in three interrelated ways that strike me as broadly Deweyan
in their orientation, despite Haidt’s reliance on James and unfamiliarity
with Dewey. The first is to alleviate conflict through applied intelligence.
Haidt asserts, “My goal in this book is to draw some of the heat, anger
and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, won-
der, and curiosity” (xii). The second is to encourage more effective and
democratic communication. Haidt writes, “My hope is that this book
will make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more com-
mon, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. My hope is that
it will help us to get along” (xii). The third is to extol the valuation of
many perspectives in ways that lead to interconnectedness and coopera-
tion combined with checks and balances rather than violence and coer-
cion. Haidt shares that “When I was a teenager I wished for world peace,
but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in
balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with
too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent
means” (xiii).
To achieve those ends, Haidt uses James in a variety of ways. First,
in “Elephants Rule,” an expansion of the elephant-rider metaphor intro-
duced in The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt contends that babies enter into
life unable to easily map and categorize the stimuli in the world around
them, confronting their environment as what James in The Principles of

Psychology called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (63). While
critics of James have decried the blank-slate character of his depic-
tion (Hawks 2010; Goldman 2012), Haidt then puts this observation
to work in a framework that pragmatically blurs the lines between the
ethical and the epistemic as well as infants’ innate and acquired capac-
ities. The emergence of infant intelligence from the Jamesian state of
confusion occurs concurrently with the emergence of moral intuitions.
“Babies,” Haidt writes, “seem to have some innate ability to process
events in their physical world—the world of objects. But when psy-
chologists dug deeper, they found that infants come equipped with
innate abilities to understand their social worlds as well. They understand
things like harming and helping” (2012, 63). In other words, Haidt
puts James’ description in service of the idea that humans learn to per-
ceive and to act—their formative epistemologies and ethics—in ways that
work prior to and outside of what is conventionally thought of as reason.
The emergence of perceptual differentiation and synthesis is hence not
unrelated to the development of moral approval and disapproval. These
capacities emerge out of the characteristic abilities of living beings well
in advance of the acquisition of language and thus also prior to anything
that might ground formal systems of reasoning.
Haidt returns to James in his next chapter, titled “Vote for Me
(Here’s Why),” a discussion of moral reputation as a necessary compo-
nent of an individual or group’s ethical orientation. Here, Haidt provides
a lengthy summary of James:
William James, one of the founders of American psychology, urged psy-

chologists to take a “functionalist” approach to the mind. That means
examining things in terms of what they do, within a larger system. The
function of the heart is to pump blood within the circulatory system,
and you can’t understand the heart unless you keep that in mind. James
applied the same logic to psychology: if you want to understand any men-
tal mechanism or process, you have to know its function within some
larger system. Thinking is for doing, he said. (2012, 74)
Having endorsed James’ view of human psychology as functional and

adaptive, in a familiar and Jamesian move, situates this understanding
in opposition to rationalist systems like those of “Plato, Socrates, and
Kohlberg” (74). Just as James at one point divides the world of thought
168 J. SMYCZEK
into pragmatism and anti-pragmatism, Haidt defines his brand of social

theory in opposition to realist views that deny the motivated, situational,
and functional aspects of reasoning and belief (443).
Haidt’s third and final citation of James is actually somewhat critical
of James’ reliance on individual perspective as the lens to best under-
stand belief. James is cited in a footnote to Haidt’s chapter “Religion Is
a Team Sport.” Haidt argues in the chapter that scholars of religion such
as Durkheim and Eliade—who understand religions as systems that ena-
ble coordinated social action—describe them more accurately than sci-
entists who perceive them as sets of perceptual errors transmitted within
groups. He writes that “the greatest scholar of religion in psychology,
William James (1961 [1902]) took a lone-believer perspective too. He
defined religion as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men
in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation
to whatever they may consider the divine’” (Haidt 2012, 366). Haidt
contrasts this focus on individual belief, “common to psychologists, biol-
ogists, and other natural scientists” with the understanding of “sociolo-
gists, anthropologists, and scholars in religious studies departments, all
of whom are more skilled at what Durkheim called ‘social facts’” (366).
What is interesting about Haidt’s identification of James’ blindness
to the sociological rather than the psychological dimensions of religious
thought, however, is how it reiterates Haidt’s commitment to using sci-
ence as a tool to better understand public association in order to improve
it. This is, after all, Haidt’s stated goal in writing the book. If it is a move
away from James, the psychologist, it is one toward a Deweyan project of
building a democracy in and through communication.
The last work that we will examine is a collaborative article from
2013 Haidt wrote with authors Jesse Graham et al. (2013) titled “Moral
Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism.”
Although the language of foundations may carry reductionist implica-
tions, the rest of the title indicates the Jamesian flavor that Haidt imparts
to the article. The purpose of the piece as a whole. As the authors put it,
is to explain how moral judgments are “often so similar across cultures,
but sometimes so variable” while offering a theory that has both “parsi-
mony as well as explanatory adequacy” while recognizing” an inherent
tension between the two values” (56). To that end, the authors juxta-
pose monist views which emphasize parsimony at the expense of accuracy
with pluralist views (such as theirs) that attempt to reconcile these values.
Monists, including the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg and the author

Sam Harris, argue that “all manifestations of morality are derived from
an underlying psychological architecture for implementing the one basic
value or virtue they propose” as opposed to pluralists such as Aristotle,
Isaiah Berlin, and most importantly, William James, for whom the num-
ber of moral foundations is “more than one” (57). The authors include
a lengthy quotation from James’ “extended critique of monism and
absolutism, A Pluralistic Universe,” which contains James’ opposition
to “rationalizing pictures … aimed at cleaning up the litter with which
the world is apparently filled” instead of James’ “pluralistic empiricism,”
a “muddled, gothic sort of affair, without a sweeping outline and with
little pictorial nobility” (57). Taking James as their starting point and
practical lens, the authors write that “We are unabashed pluralists and
… we will try to convince you that you should be, too” (57). They pro-
pose Moral Foundations Theory, a “pluralist view of moral psychology”
a theory that “has led to discoveries missed by monists,” and one to be
judged on the merits of its “pragmatic validity … its scientific useful-
ness for both answering existing questions about morality and allowing
researchers to formulate new questions” (57).
After being used to frame MFT as a whole, James is cited twice more
in the chapter. Describing the piecemeal evolutionary adaptations that
would lead to a pluralistic moral psychology, the authors write that “evo-
lutionary thinking also encourages functionalism. Thinking is for doing,”
a reiteration of how Haidt used James’ functionalism in both of the
books already discussed (67). James’ final appearance comes as part of a
reply to the rationalist author Sam Harris, who is critical of Haidt’s work
in the former’s 2010 The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine
Human Values, arguing that the multiple moral foundations Haidt’s
work identifies reduce to a single concern about harm. Haidt pointedly
replies:
But even if one agrees with Harris’s normative views, would the reduction
of all morality to harm help us understand how morality actually works?
Or Would it be (to paraphrase William James) another attempt to clean up
the litter the world actually contains? A monist model in which all moral
judgments(even those based on explicitly harmless transgressions) are pro-
duced by a single mental process (perceptions of intentional dyadic harm)
cleans up much of the “litter” of empirically observed moral life, and in
this cleaning suffers as a scientific description of morality.
170 J. SMYCZEK
In this final citation, Haidt frames both the positive features of his
descriptive model of ethics as derived from James as well as his oppo-
sition to reductionist and rationalist prescriptive models. Moreover, by
adding a third of James’ major works to his growing list of citations,
Haidt indicates an ongoing and evolving relationship with the great
pragmatist thinker.
Answering Objections
Next, I want to consider some objections to the definitional claim that
has been made thus far. My contention is that the definition is a pro-
ductive one in that, by following the ways pragmatists are cited by
those off the direct line of descent from accepted pragmatists, we gain
a method for assessing the pragmatist canon as well as a new take on the
rhetorical analysis of scientific outreach. Although there will be signifi-
cant differences between Haidt and any currently canonical pragmatist,
these differences need not be fatal to the argument: differences exist, of
course, between any two pragmatists who are rough contemporaries or
between the pragmatism of early scholars such as James and Dewey and
neo-pragmatists such as Rorty and Fish. Given the thoroughgoing com-
mitment to pluralism demonstrated by pragmatist thinkers, uniformity of
perspective has never seemed much of a goal. Nevertheless, there must
be some evidence, some test-in-experience that would work against a
claim of similarity between any two things to be worth debating. What
kind of arguments might problematize such a suggestion?
First, we might consider James’ status as a seminal figure in American
psychology. Although Haidt’s citations of James are weighty and indi-
cate a significant influence relative to his other sources, it could be the
case that a broad survey of similar works—that is to say popular books
written by psychologists—might show that Haidt cites James neither
more frequently nor meaningfully on average than other practitioners of
his discipline of psychology or sub-disciplines of positive or moral psy-
chology. While it appears that Haidt’s commitment to James’ theory
of religion and moral pluralism take Haidt outside of the mainstream
of popular writing about psychology, it might be conceded that such a
finding would, nevertheless, undermine the distinction—that Haidt is
“doing” pragmatism—that has been proposed. Nevertheless, that might
be a battle lost on the way to a war won: if James is or other pragma-
tists are cited more frequently in psychology than scholars of rhetoric
and communication have previously imagined, then we simply have addi-

tional resources to examine how pragmatism continues to function and
to inform science outreach, enabling continued and better-informed
conversations about pragmatism and communication as well as the rheto-
ric of science. Looking at how pragmatists are cited by rhetors not on the
immediate lines of descent articulated by Shook or West might provide
a method of gauging the influence of pragmatism across disciplines and
eras, a method not yet fully explored. It might give scholars interested in
these traditions some things to do.
A second objection that might be advanced is that the search for moral
foundations is not itself a pragmatist project, but something of a struc-
turalist one, meaning that Haidt moves from a situational to a universal
orientation as his thought evolves. Hildebrand makes a similar argument
about Burke, suggesting that his earlier works are more pragmatist and
his later development of his universal and famed pentad of discourse pulls
him away from his pragmatist influences. Is Haidt attempting to formu-
late unyielding rules and laws that suffocate the continuation of the very
inquiry from which they purport to derive? It seems that Haidt and his
co-authors anticipate the shape of this objection when they write that
“One common critique of MFT has been that our list of foundations is
arbitrary, chosen originally by Haidt and Joseph based on their reading
of five books and articles” (2012, 107). Yet, they emphasize that their
framework is tentative and revisable, working distinctions rather than laws
of motion, writing “We think that our original list of five foundations
did a good job of capturing the most obvious and least debatable foun-
dations, but we acknowledge that there is still room for debate, and …
we are confident that our initial list is not the final list.” Moreover, the
Jamesian spirit of inquiry hardly compels one to avoid labeling or quan-
tifying anything: it instead merely recommends that, as Haidt does, we
understand our labels to be functional and situational rather than closed
or “true” in any permanent epistemic sense detached from the formation
of concepts in experience. As James (1968) puts it:
A completed theoretic philosophy can never be anything more than a com-

pleted classification of the world’s ingredients; and its results must always
be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract essence
embodied in the living fact–the rest of the living fact being for the time
ignored by the classifier. This means that none of our explanations are
complete. (320)
172 J. SMYCZEK
The spirit of his description is, then, that our abstractions do not sub-
stitute for the living experiences that they represent in shorthand. Haidt
seems to avoid situating the foundations as anything other than useful
criteria based in other useful criteria, names given to cognitive responses
humans experience as beings that evolved in certain evolutionary con-
texts. Human capacities for moral feeling and judgment are then not
discontinuous with those of other animals; they have been shaped by
and they shape the material exigencies of live creatures in a world of
things, always navigating the interplay between biology and environ-
ment, innate and trained capacities, to solve the problems contained
therein.
Lastly, I want to address the question of definitional rigor. Defined
loosely enough, of course, everyone is a pragmatist in a very general
sense of the word: we all devote substantial thought applying our intelli-
gence to improve problematic situations, and it should come as no spe-
cial surprise that a psychologist is interested in providing people with a
toolkit for better living. The social sciences in general and psychology
in particular have long been interested in human happiness more than
the secrets of the cosmos, almost by definition. It is true that, from
the founders of the pragmatic tradition such as James and Dewey, that
there has been a strain of pragmatism in social science that one is less
likely to find in, say, the popular works of physicists (Shook). Taking
note of Haidt’s claim that rationalist arguments in popular science tend
to be more the province of the physical sciences than the social ones,
I’ve nevertheless tried to offer criteria that engage existing arguments
about the lines of hereditary transmission, practical method, and the-
oretical orientation that define the pragmatist canon in order to claim
that Haidt’s public outreach efforts are pragmatic in both the melio-
ristic sense of using intelligence as a tool to improve human situations
as well engaging with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. But
I offer an additional word to Hickman (2009), who writes, “if you
look to the sciences, the humanities, and the arts as informing and
informed by philosophical inquiry and thus as sources of philosoph-
ical insight and renewal—then you are aligned with the program of
American Pragmatism” (3). It certainly seems that Haidt’s work fits that
description well.
Conclusion
Much of the scholarship on pragmatism speaks in tropes of eclipse and
revival, ebb and flow. West writes in 1988 that “A small-scale intellec-
tual renascence is occurring under the broad banner of pragmatism” (3).
Dickstein writes in 1998 that “The revival of pragmatism has excited
enormous interest and controversy in the intellectual community over
the past two decades” (1). Nevertheless, this conception is hotly con-
tested by Shook, who offers the following rejoinder:
There has been much talk of pragmatism’s “eclipse” during analytic phi-
losophy’s greatest dominance from 1950 to 1990. The myth must be
corrected: pragmatism was never eclipsed … Already quite marginalized in
the 1920s and 1930s, the handful of pragmatist professors such as Dewey
at Columbia and Mead at Chicago encouraged many of their students to
go into psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, education, and
economics. Many of the best new minds favorable towards pragmatism
strongly influenced the social sciences during the 1940s - 1980s.
Or perhaps many of the best new minds favorable toward pragmatism

are still influencing social science, and because we are looking too closely
at scholars who wish to adopt or reconstruct pragmatist philosophies in
conspicuous and label-conscious ways, we neglect those who blend prag-
matism and pragmatists into a mix of other qualitative and quantitative
resources. It seems thoroughly pragmatic to track pragmatism by seeing
the work that it does.
But more importantly, Haidt’s pragmatic work to form connec-
tions between individual emotional affect and public deliberation helps
to reestablish the importance of the relationship between rhetoric and
psychology, itself a relationship with a marked historical ebb and flow.
This may be one of the more salient services that his iteration of prag-
matism offers to current theorists of communication, and one whose
implications are presently least addressed. From Plato’s description of the
divisions of the hearer’s soul in the Phaedrus to Aristotle’s detailed depic-
tions of the character of the listener, rhetoric has from its earliest era as
an organized branch of study been keenly interwoven with its notions of
the character traits and behavioral inclinations of its audiences. Academic
study has in the meanwhile expanded and stratified to an extent that
rhetoric, psychology, and sociology have staked out territories of their
174 J. SMYCZEK
own, and knowledge in any given field is so vast that it is hard to claim
general command of any one discipline, let alone several. But it is worth
noting that despite writing about political and religious divisions in the
United States that are poorly addressed by current argumentative strate-
gies, Haidt cites pragmatists but not a single theorist of rhetoric besides
Aristotle, and even then cites only the Nichomachean Ethics. The idea
that interpersonal conflict, ethical values, and public deliberation can be
spoken about through multiple academic lenses both historically and in
the present is obvious; the idea that pragmatism offers a natural bridge
between modern discussions of ethics, psychology, and communication
is perhaps less so. Looking at how different thinkers in largely isolated
fields continue to use pragmatism to advance their individual projects can
not only expand our conceptions of whom we might call a pragmatist
but may also offer a point of common ground between those looking to
better understand the relationship between thought and communication.
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CHAPTER 8
Jane Addams’ Rhetorical Ear:

Teaching, Learning, and Listening
in the Settlement House Model
Amy E. Dayton
Accounts of Jane Addams—both her own and those of other people—

often emphasize her commitment to and capacity for listening. One
such account is given by Marie Diaz, a friend of Addams’, in an oral his-
tory collected in the early 1980s.1 Diaz (1982) describes the day she met
Addams. She went to Hull House in an angry state, after hearing that
some neighborhood children were turned away from the settlement.
As she put it, “I didn’t go there in a meek way… I went there demanding”
(4). After she spoke with Jane Addams, Addams reassured her that the chil-
dren were welcome and invited them to return. Diaz remarks, “That was
our encounter. [It was] an unpleasant thing for her, an unpleasant thing
1 The Diaz interview is part of a collection of oral histories taken in the 1980s to gather
the recollections of people who worked or participated in the settlement activities and who
interacted with Addams.
A. E. Dayton (*) 
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
e-mail: adayton@ua.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_8
178 A. E. DAYTON
for me, because I went talking to her in [that] manner” (4).2 But instead of
dismissing her, Addams “began listening … and the more [Diaz talked]—
the more she asked about things” (6). As Diaz and Addams talked, their
conversation spanned Diaz’ education in Mexico, her life in the United
States, her family, her work as a teacher, and more. This encounter was the
beginning of a long association marked by frequent visits and much conver-
sation that Diaz still remembered fondly, many decades later.
Addams’ published work also demonstrates her love of listening. In
fact, it is the impetus for her book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory
(2002), which begins with an account of one summer at Hull House
when local residents became caught up in a wild rumor that there was
a possessed “Devil Baby” living at the settlement.3 For six weeks dur-
ing that summer, people called the settlement and came to its doors,
demanding to see the baby and refusing to believe that it did not exist,
despite staff members’ denials. Although Addams recognized the clamor
over the Devil Baby as a form of group hysteria; she nonetheless found
herself compelled to talk—and listen—to some of the residents who
came to see it. As she puts it, “when I heard the high eager voices of old
women, I was irresistibly interested and left anything I might be doing
in order to listen to them” (9). While they came out to see the mythical
baby, the women lingered to share their own stories of marital strife, mis-
carriage, loss of children, and trauma. Sharing these stories allowed them
to protest the trauma and loss they had experienced, and to scold and
teach the younger generation. As William Duffy puts it, Addams saw that
the women’s stories “served to legitimate experience [and] gave them
power to speak… from positions of knowledge and authority” (2011, 6).
By sharing their stories, women could reinterpret and transform their
2 The conflict that prompted Diaz to confront Addams was a racialized incident. The
local children believed they were turned away because they were Mexican. Addams told Diaz
that all children were welcome but that Hull House was open to children only for specific
hours of the day when children’s programming was taking place. Stories like Diaz raise ques-
tions about how racial conflicts might have played out at Hull House, but unfortunately do
not answer that question.
3 Several versions of the story circulated among the various ethnic groups that comprised
the Hull House community, but the essential details of the tale were as follows: a young
couple was expecting a baby and had a fight when the woman attempted to hang pictures
of the saints on their wall. Her husband yelled that he would rather have a “devil for a
baby” than religious pictures in his home. Upon his curse, the child was transformed into a
demon. After its birth, it was brought to Hull House to be baptized and cared for.
8 JANE ADDAMS’ RHETORICAL EAR: TEACHING, LEARNING … 179
experiences. Through this process, remembering became an active and

communal process of meaning-making (Duffy 2011, 7; Addams 2002).
But of course, merely recounting their stories would not be sufficient
to help the women transmute or interpret the past; it was necessary for
them to have an audience—to be listened to, and understood.
The acts of talking and listening were central to the work of the US
settlement house, a model of social reform that originated in England
and was brought to the United States by Addams and other activists at
the turn of the twentieth century. Settlement workers sought to address
social problems brought on by mass urbanization, industrialization, and
an influx of new immigrants, and to overturn traditional models of phi-
lanthropy where the poor were passive recipients of largesse. Hull House
residents—social workers, teachers, and other young professionals—lived
cooperatively in their working-class neighborhood in West Chicago, and
worked collaboratively with community members to address social issues
such as poverty, labor rights, health/sanitation, childcare, education,
and more. Operating as a kind of combined adult-education, daycare/
nursery, health clinic, library, and social-recreational club combined, the
settlement addressed the multi-faceted needs of both its middle-class
residents and their working-class neighbors in its clubs, classes, and pro-
grams. In their attempts to teach English and civics to new immigrants,
settlement workers also took part in a larger national movement to
Americanize the millions of new immigrants who arrived during this era.
Ultimately, the settlement came to represent a new model for both civic
education and social activism. In keeping with the progressive emphasis
on the “whole person,” settlement workers wove educational initiatives
into many aspects of settlement life. Clubs and classes encouraged immi-
grants to study current events and read great works of literature. Meals for
immigrant women and their children became informal seminars on good
nutrition. The Labor Museum became a place where people could share
their artisanal knowledge and celebrate workers’ knowledge and experi-
ence. These activities provided opportunities for cross-cultural exchange
as well as personal development. But they relied on the willingness of
teachers and students to talk and listen to one another in ways that did not
resemble traditional classroom practice. This chapter examines the rhetor-
ical practice of listening as it played out in Hull House’s public pedagogy.
Influenced by her feminist, pragmatist ethos, Addams sees listening as an
embodied, active, and reciprocal process, essential to the work of teaching,
learning, and promoting social reform.
180 A. E. DAYTON
A Feminist, Pragmatic Rhetoric

The activist work of the social settlement relied on rhetorical engagement
among the settlement workers, the neighborhood residents, civic leaders,
and members of the broader public. Though Addams does not explic-
itly use the term rhetoric to talk about the means and methods for civic
engagement, she nonetheless models a set of communicative practices
designed to foster collaboration and encourage listening and learning.
For Addams, effective public dialogue should emphasize cooperation and
collaboration over overt persuasion and conversion, focus on the con-
crete results of human interaction, and allow for the expression and inter-
pretation of individual experiences (Danisch 2007; Duffy 2011; Fiesta
2007; Jackson and Clark 2014; Knight 2014; McMillan 2002; Roskelly
2013). Addams eschews traditional modes of rhetoric in which one inter-
locutor seeks to win an argument by verbally overpowering the other.
As Duffy puts it, she seeks to create “discursive spaces where the foster-
ing of identification takes priority over the achievement of persuasion”
(2011, 137). Although she predates second-wave feminists by many dec-
ades, she anticipates their concerns about the potential harm of antag-
onistic rhetoric. Her mediating approach to language stands in contrast
to the “conversion” model, which has been criticized by feminist schol-
ars such as Sally Miller Gearhart (2004), who argues that the attempt
to change other people through discourse is an act of violence (242).
Moreover, in Gearhart’s analysis, non-violent means of persuasion—
conversion instead of conquest—are not necessarily more ethical, because
they can be more insidious, giving the illusion of consent where it may
not exist (242).
Addams’ feminist style of rhetoric is influenced by her commitment to
nonviolence and social cooperation. In the early years of their friendship,
Addams avowed to John Dewey that antagonism was the result of a dan-
gerous excess of emotion, and only harm could come of it. At that time,
she believed that “objective differences… would always grow into unity if
left alone” (Dewey 1916, qtd. in Knight 2014, 109; Knight 2010, 94).
Louise Knight has argued that Addams’ views on conflict shifted over
time, as she began to see that overt protest was sometimes necessary if it
served common goods such as economic justice or world peace—as with
the case of the Pullman Strike, or her opposition to World War I (2010,
96–106). Protesting the war, for instance, which resulted in widespread
criticism and public ridicule of Addams, was, in her view, a necessary act
of antagonism. Over time, Addams developed a rhetorical style that could

be “hard-hitting,” yet invited readers to rethink their prejudices and see
the connections between themselves and others (Knight 2010, 106).
Addams’ goal of bringing different classes of people together, fostering
reciprocal exchange, and encouraging cultural translation shaped her rhe-
torical practices. For Gloria McMillan (2002), Addams represents a fem-
inist style in which interlocutors (or readers, of written text) are invited
to be “co-creators” of the future. This style is exemplified in Addams’
essay on the violent Pullman Strike, in which she urges all “public-
spirited” Chicagoans who lived through the summer of the strike to ask
themselves, “How … am I responsible for this social disorder? What can
be done to prevent such outrageous manifestations of ill-will?” (Addams
1902, qtd. in McMillan 2002, 72). Through her invitational style of
rhetoric, Addams conveys her belief that all citizens have a role to play in
addressing and ameliorating broader social conflicts. This process, how-
ever, relies on a willingness to listen to others with a spirit of affection-
ate interpretation.4 Charlene Seigfried (1996) notes that Addams’ style of
communication fit well within a pragmatist framework, which emphasizes
“shared understanding and communal problem solving rather than ration-
ally forced conclusions” (32). Moreover, as Hephzibah Roskelly (2013)
notes, Addams’ style of rhetorical pragmatism embraces uncertainty as a
means of motivating sustained inquiry. She shares with Oliver Wendell
Homes a belief that too much certainty can be dangerous. Instead of
coming to quick conclusions, Addams’ models the pragmatist impulse to
test her beliefs in search of “usable truths” (38). Like Dewey, she focuses
on the power of human experience to help people connect to one another
and to move toward change, and she seeks to break down binaries and
find common ground between mediating positions.
For someone who believes in the power of human experience to foster
connections and transform social conditions, the use of narrative is an
ideal mode of discourse. Stories are universal and democratic—everyone
has access to them. In fact, Addams’ style of writing reflects her belief
that all citizens have a role to play in public discourse. As Robert
Danisch (2007) points out, this broad view of rhetoric may be Addams’
most significant contribution to communication theory. Her view of
public rhetoric stands in contrast to the classical tradition, which treats
4 She uses this term in her essay, “A Modern Lear” (1912a).

182 A. E. DAYTON
deliberative rhetoric as a formal, highly stylized practice that takes place

in institutional settings (like courtrooms, for example, or legislative
chambers). Addams believes that important civic dialogue takes place
in informal, grassroots settings outside of “authorized” spaces for such
speech. Moreover, she does not draw sharp distinctions between pri-
vate or domestic speech and public rhetoric because she sees the value of
private discourse as a site for rhetorical activism and change since cross-
cultural cooperation can emerge from private conversations like the one
she shared with Marie Diaz. As Danisch points out, Addams’ project of
expanding the domain of public discourse, and inviting marginalized
groups to participate, “required a radically different set of rhetorical
practices” as well as “the development of social structures and organi-
zations capable of supporting the economic and social unity of citizens”
(2007, 74–75).
Addams’ tendency to rely on narrative, especially in Twenty Years at
Hull House, can sometimes give the impression that the book is a-theo-
retical, a set of stories and recollections. Charlene Seigfried (1996) notes
in her book that accounts of American pragmatism have tended to treat
her as a practitioner rather than a theorist in her own right. And in some
ways, Addams can even be read as suspicious of theory, as she frequently
criticizes scientists and academic scholars who embrace abstraction with-
out applying their knowledge to everyday life. Yet her writing style in
Twenty Years, with its narrative, first-person approach, reflects her the-
ory that people learn best through firsthand experience, and that social
democracy can be better achieved when different classes of people have
opportunities to learn from one another. She writes to future audience
members who will never have the opportunity to visit Hull House, yet
her use of narrative allows us to place ourselves in her shoes, to experi-
ence life in the settlement, and to “hear” the voices of the people that
Addams talks with. As Marilyn Fischer (2004) notes, a book like Twenty
Years, therefore, is better understood as a philosophical treatise than an
autobiography: “Telling stories is a good method for Addams to use, one
that enables her to reveal aspects of experience that other methods might
conceal” (22). Her use of narrative helps Addams to emphasize the com-
plexity of human experience, and to model the process by which people
can learn from listening to one another.
This style of listening is reciprocal. It avoids overt persuasion, instead
of relying on generosity (or affectionate interpretation) toward her inter-
locutors. She models this style of reciprocal, generous listening in a
story (in Twenty Years at Hull House) about a visitor to the settlement
who criticizes it for being un-American. As the man looks around the
settlement at artwork that celebrates the new immigrants’ cultures, he
complains that Hull House is promoting “foreign views” (1961, 71).
Addams listens to the man’s concerns, then responds by gently pointing
out that the artwork at Hull House is meant to be “a familiar island to
the immigrants in a sea of new and strange impressions.” Her comments
spark a sympathetic response from the man, who admits that he feels the
same way when he encounters “Yankee notions” from his home [back
East]. Rather than judging or overtly criticizing the man’s rejection of
“foreign” art, Addams invites him to place himself in the role of immi-
grant or outsider. Because she recounts the story in her memoir, we the
readers also get to “listen in” on this conversation and to imagine our-
selves as part of the larger dialogue about what it means to be American,
and about what we should expect from new citizens. Through exchanges
like these, Addams shows the reader that the act of listening is essential
to the work of interpreting America to its newcomers, and vice versa, and
that thoughtful listening can lead to increased cooperation and tolerance.
In her book, The Dissonance of Democracy, political theorist Susan
Bickford (1996) argues that an understanding of listening is critical to any
theory of political action. Far from being a passive activity, “listening,”
writes Bickford, “is a creative act, one that involves conscious effort”
(144). Krista Ratcliffe (2005) notes that historically, western rhetor-
ical theories have neglected the art of listening. Listening is often seen
as a feminine practice, and thus, less important than speaking; moreover,
dominant cultural groups have not historically seen a need to listen to
people of color or the working class, though the opposite is not true (21).
Ratcliffe promotes the practice of rhetorical listening—“a stance of open-
ness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text,
or culture,” especially “in cross-cultural exchanges” (2005, 1). When we
approach a text or situation with a stance of rhetorical listening:
we may become apprentices of listening rather than masters of discourse… .

Such listening does not presume a naïve, relativistic empathy, but rather, an
ethical responsibility to argue for what we deem fair and just while ques-
tioning that which we deem fair and just. (25)
Looking again at Addams’ interaction with the visitor to Hull House,

we can see how rhetorical listening operated in this context: Addams’
184 A. E. DAYTON
empathy for the man is not “naïve,” but rather, strategically designed to
prompt reflection. Rather than passively accepting his criticism of Hull
House, she gently argues for what she believes is “fair and just.”
To practice listening in a rhetorical fashion involves seeking to under-
stand ourselves and others, and to be accountable for our actions. It
means finding ways to identify with others without smoothing over or
erasing differences. And finally, it requires that we seek to understand the
other people’s claims as well as “the cultural logics in which these claims
function” (Ratcliffe 2005, 26). As Wayne Booth (2004) puts it, listening
rhetorically is an ethical practice that transforms the act of persuasion,
from a one-directional process to a reciprocal one that sparks change
from both speaker and listening. Listening rhetorically requires “not just
seeking a truce” but “[pursuing] the truth behind our differences” (46).
It requires that “both sides [pursue] not just victory but a new real-
ity, a new agreement about what is real” (47). Seen through this lens,
Addams’ responses to conflicts such as the Devil Baby incident, or visi-
tor who criticized Hull House’s “foreign” influences, offer a good model
of rhetorical listening. She seeks to achieve identification with others
without negating her differences with them, and she looks for ways to
connect individuals’ experiences to the larger social tensions playing out
around them. And she expects that rhetorical engagement will lead to
change from both parties. Addams herself was changed and moved by
the time she spent listening to the women who came looking for the
Devil Baby. The settlement’s image and mission is shaped through the
interaction of the residents and their neighbors, and through rhetorical
exchanges like those that Addams shares with local women, with Marie
Diaz, with the visitor to Hull House, and with many others.
Public Listening: Rhetoric, Teaching,

and Learning in Hull House
The emphasis on rhetorical listening—on narrative form, cross-cultural

exchange, and identification rather than overt persuasion—infused the
pedagogical efforts at Hull House. In their efforts to promote teaching
and learning and to assimilate working-class immigrants into the larger
culture, Addams and her colleagues took part in a nationwide move-
ment to Americanize the new immigrants. A quintessentially progressive
undertaking, Americanization can be best understood not as a unified
effort but rather a series of initiatives that were sometimes in ideological
conflict with one another, as Robert Carlson (1975), Lawrence Cremin

(1961), Mina Carson (1990), and others have noted. Organizations as
diverse as public schools, YMCAs, libraries, labor unions, and factories
developed classes for new immigrants under the campaign’s umbrella.
While students in these settings learned English and civics under the ide-
ological banners of their “literacy sponsors” (to use Deborah Brandt’s
term), the pedagogies were quite similar. Instructors relied on drills and
repetition of simple phrases, leaving little room for student participation.
Textbooks for adult learners reflected a view of immigrants as passive,
not active, citizens, encouraging them to adopt middle-class habits and
customs in all aspects of their lives, from their clothes, to their house-
keeping and hobbies. I have argued elsewhere that Americanization
workers saw themselves as participants in a broader civic project to build
a more linguistically and culturally homogenous nation (Dayton-Wood
2008).5 In this sense, Americanization was as much as rhetorical pro-
ject as a pedagogical one, as teachers and policy makers sought to per-
suade middle-class Americans to help assimilate the newcomers, and to
convince new immigrants to adopt middle-class habits and values.
As previous scholars have pointed out, settlement workers saw them-
selves as participants in a civic project to remake the American nation
(Danisch 2007; O’Rourke 2014; Wendler 2014). In the settlement
context, however, the focus was less on remaking individual immi-
grants but on encouraging collective action to foster social democracy.
Like Dewey and her pragmatist counterparts, Addams views democracy
not merely as a political system, but a way of life—“a form of associa-
tion especially appropriate for persons who are constituted by the mul-
tiple relations through which consciousness evolves and values develop”
(Seigfried 1999, 210). The settlement required a distinctive pedagogical
model that would foster the “social ethic” required in the new democ-
racy. Settlement workers sought to create a flexible space for innovation,
one with the “power of quick adaptation, [and] readiness to change
its methods as its environment [required]” (Addams 1961, 83–84).
Education at Hull House was woven into many of its activities, in forms
that didn’t like traditional classroom education. Pedagogical work took
5 There were some exceptions, as labor unions and other progressive groups taught
classes designed to promote activism. Pedagogically speaking, however, even these ideo-
logically liberal programs were not necessarily more progressive than the more conservative
courses operated in the factories and the public schools.
186 A. E. DAYTON
place through clubs, lecture series, classes (including “university exten-

sion” coursework), and physical demonstrations (of arts and crafts, for
instance). Students read works of literature, studied civic problems by
inviting local people to debate about them, and wrote essays about cur-
rent events. Although settlement workers were appointed to be leaders
of Hull House clubs, they were also expected to be participants who
would investigate the subject matter and learn along with men and
women from the community.
Despite their desire to be a laboratory for pedagogical innovation,
the settlements were not immune from the larger conflicts dividing the
Americanization movement. This sense of ideological conflict comes
through in Addams’ discussion of teaching and learning. She vacillates
between praise for immigrants’ heritage and skills, and despair at the
entrenched habits and beliefs that prevent them from assimilating in the
United States. She criticizes wealthy Americans who “send young peo-
ple to Europe to see Italy, but … do not utilize Italy when it [exists in]
the schoolhouse” (1994, 141), yet she draws firm distinctions between
high culture and low culture, and establishes a hierarchy between indus-
trial and pre-industrial nations. In the conclusion of Twenty Years, she
argues that the role of the settlement is to preserve and perpetuate the
traditions of “cultivated men” [emphasis added] and to incorporate the
“best results of civilization” into the new social democracy (1961, 295).
Addams’ conflicting goals play out in her views on language as well; she
laments that Italian schoolboys “drop their English” the moment they
leave the classroom, but she praises the Hull House theater program for
offering plays in multiple languages, and criticizes those who hold neg-
ative attitudes toward non-English speakers (1994, 81, 87). In their
efforts to promote English speaking, to teach “cultivated” styles of living
and to advance the “best” aspects of civilization, Addams and her set-
tlement colleagues could be subtly coercive, suggesting that despite the
value of immigrants’ knowledge and experience, white, middle-class,
Protestant culture was the ideal (Carlson, Carson, Fiesta, Wendler).
Moreover, she often fails to consider “the highly asymmetrical power
dynamics” that shaped interactions between settlement workers and
immigrants. She believes that immigrants “had to share American symbols—
the English language—and have the cultural literacy necessary to make
meaning of these symbols” (Wendler 2014, 41). Despite these limita-
tions, Hull House’s public pedagogy was an alternate to existing models
that emphasized student passivity and passive listening.
Hull House pedagogy had multiple aims: to help students lead produc-
tive, meaningful lives; to prepare them to be active participants in a social
democracy; and to allow them to make productive use of their experience.
For Addams, a pedagogy of civic engagement should not create sepa-
rate classes of people, or segregate the poor into vocational or manually
learning programs that solidified their place within the working class, but
rather, should “connect [the student] with all sorts of people by his ability
to understand them” (1961, 285). In other words, Addams sees educa-
tion as a critical tool for forging connections—between groups and classes
of people, as well as between individuals and their larger communities.
The Hull House model was built on real-world inquiries into civic and
social problems. It invited learners to participate in exploring, understand-
ing, and addressing those problems by bringing them in conversation
with one another and with other members of the larger community. For
Addams and her colleagues, good pedagogical practice requires rhetorical
engagement. Moreover, following Dewey’s maxim that “education is not
preparation for life, it is life itself,” Addams believes that all the activities
of Hull House should serve an educational function.
Addams is critical of pedagogies that place students in a passive role and
encourage students to listen passively. When a child arrives in a traditional
school, “The first thing that [he] must do … is to sit still, at least part of
the time, and … learn to listen … with all the perplexity of listening to
a foreign tongue” (1907, 185).6 Public schools, in other words, encour-
aged an a-rhetorical form of listening—one that was disconnected from the
broader social world, and that placed students in a passive role as recepta-
cles of new information, not possessors of pre-existing knowledge. Addams
faults public schools both for operating in isolation from the larger com-
munity and for offering rhetorical instruction that is removed from stu-
dents’ lived experiences: They force students to write about dull topics
unrelated to their own experience, “and [students] patiently accept this
uninteresting information because they expect ‘education’ to be dull and
hard. There seems to be a belief among educators that it is not possible for
the mass of mankind to have experiences which are of themselves worth
anything” (1994, 85–86). Rather than wanting to listen quietly, Addams
says, students desired to “express in the newly acquired tongue some of
6 Addams and Dewey make similar critiques of the public schools. In Democracy and
Education, Dewey criticizes schools for “the great premium put upon listening, reading, and
the reproduction of what is told and read” (1916, 155).
188 A. E. DAYTON
the hopes and longing which had so much to do with their emigration”
(1961, 285). In other words, they want to be listened to and heard.
In the settlement house context, numerous barriers to listening exist.
One barrier was a traditional mode of pedagogy which did not allow for
much interaction between student and teacher. Another was a literal lan-
guage barrier, since Hull House residents did not always speak their neigh-
bors’ language. Another barrier was cultural misunderstanding. For all of
these reasons, the acts of translation and interpretation—acts that turn the
passive process of listening into an active process of engagement—became
central to the settlement’s mission. Addams frequently suggests that trans-
lation is one of the most important activities that settlements can foster;
the role of the settlement, says Addams, is to “interpret democracy in
social terms” (1961, 83). In turn, for second generation immigrants who
have been assimilated, their job is to become “transmitter[s]” and “help-
er[s]”, who “teach the entire family and [form] a connection between
them and the outside world, interpreting [emphasis added] political
speeches and newspapers and eagerly transforming [native] customs into
American ones” (1994, 81). Emphasizing translation and interpretation—
whether linguistic interpretation or cultural interpretation—is a means by
which the settlement promoted active, reciprocal forms of listening.
For Addams and her fellow pragmatists, however, the most important
means by which to transform passive listening into meaningful, recip-
rocal classroom engagement, is to make productive use of experience.
Listening to students means creating opportunities for them to share
and interpret their experiences. Addams draws on Dewey’s belief (drawn
in turn from William James), that experience is both active and passive,
a central component in how knowledge is made and how we come to
understand the world. As Dewey (1916) puts it,
It is not an experience [emphasis added] when a child merely sticks his

finger into a flame; it is experience when the movement is connected
with the pain which he undergoes in consequence. … [It is] “cumulative
growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that term.” …
To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection
between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in
consequence. (139–140)
Experience is the primary means by which we come to know the world

and arrive at an understanding of what is true. For William James, this
process involves confronting new evidence in light of our previously

held beliefs, recognizing the disjuncture between the two, and estab-
lishing new truths that account for both. The pragmatist view of experi-
ence, then, treats it as the critical factor in shaping our knowledge of the
world, an ongoing process by which new knowledge builds on previous
frameworks.
Within the context of Hull House’s public pedagogy, experience is
not merely an individual possession but one that can be communally
held. Insofar as she feels that the educational efforts of the settlement
should foster the goal of cultural translation and interpretation, Addams’
pedagogy emphasizes the potential for rhetorical listening to foster con-
nections between social groups and to address civic conflicts. This com-
munal notion of experience is reflected in the setting and structure of
the Hull House Labor Museum, which stands as an illustrative example
of how rhetorical listening is translated into pedagogical practice. The
Museum was designed to collect, display, and share the community expe-
rience represented in the traditional arts and crafts of the neighborhood
residents. Demonstrating arts like spinning, basket-weaving, sewing, and
cooking, the Museum exhibits traced the historical development of the
raw materials and the processes for creating the final products. For young
people working in textile factories and other industrial settings, the
Museum helped them understand the history and origins of the materials
they used in their daily work.
The Museum addressed a problem that was fundamentally rhetorical
in nature: the failure of understanding and lapse in cross-cultural com-
munication between native-born and immigrant Americans, and between
first- and second-generation immigrants. This gap is crystallized for
Addams (1961) in the story of a young Italian girl who came to Hull
House to take cooking classes, while her mother came to teach spinning
in the Labor Museum. The young woman would use the back entrance
rather than enter the Museum with her mother, because she was
ashamed of her mother’s kerchief, “uncouth boots, and short petticoats”
(160). One day, however, Angelina visited her mother’s exhibit and
found a group of professors from the nearby School of Education gath-
ered around her mother to learn about her spinning (160). Upon wit-
nessing this demonstration, “she openly came into the Labor Museum
by the same door as her mother, proud … of the craft which had been so
much admired” (161). The Labor Museum opened a space for listening
in the form of shared knowledge between individuals such as Angelina
190 A. E. DAYTON
and her mother, as well as between groups of people, including the

native-born and immigrant Americans, the working class and the elite,
Hull House social workers and their Hull House neighbors. It fostered
listening that was not one directional (as with a lecture or speech), but
collaborative and reciprocal, placing immigrants in the role of teachers
while they were learning English and other skills.
In addition to being collaborative and active, rather than passive,
rhetorical listening, in Addams’ framework, addresses the affective
and interpersonal needs of the community. In sharing the story about
Angelina and her mother, Addams suggests that the domestic conflicts
of her students matter, and that successful pedagogies will take those
conflicts into account when working with families. Moreover, she shows
that “individual” problems are often not individual at all, but manifes-
tations of larger social patterns, like the cultural gap between first gen-
eration immigrants and their children. Addams sees emotions as a
central factor in how individuals perceive and act in the world, and an
important source of knowledge, as sociologists Patricia Lengermann
and Gillian Niebrugge (2015) point out. By exploring the affective
domain of immigrants’ lives, she can “build an analytic bridge between
the microsocial and the macrosocial, between emotion and social struc-
ture” (19). Moreover, it is worth noting the gendered dimension of
Addams’ attention to emotion. It is not only important for Addams
that we listen to immigrants, but that we listen to immigrant women,
and to elderly women, who are doubly marginalized due to their gender
and age.
Rhetorical listening, within the context of Hull House’s public peda-
gogy, was also an embodied act. Steph Ceraso (2014) argues that from
a pedagogical perspective, it is more productive to think of listening
as a “bodily practice” that involves attention to sensory input as well
as “material and environmental” factors that shape our interactions.
Addams’ stories of teaching and learning at Hull House point to the ways
that material and environmental factors, as well as bodily activities, con-
tributed to students’ learning. This is true in the Labor Museum where
students actively demonstrated their knowledge, and it worked in other
settings as well. Addams notes that teachers at Hull House were con-
cerned about the nutritional practices of parents who gave young children
bread soaked in tea (or sometimes wine) for breakfasts. They attempted to
make home visits and talk to mothers about the need for better nutrition,
but made little progress; ultimately, Addams says, “It has been possible
to teach some of these women to feed their children oatmeal instead of
tea-soaked bread, but it has been done, not by statements at all, but by
a series of gay little Sunday morning breakfasts” (1961, 67–68; 1994,
89). In fact, Addams frequently suggests that embodied listening trumps
any kind of lectures or statements that the settlement workers could
make. She envisions classes in which Americans would teach English to
immigrants while the immigrants teach them how to make Italian pasta,
or how to handle tools and materials. As in the Labor Museum, this
approach makes learning “a comparatively easy thing” because students
are learning something new while conducting a physical activity (cooking,
for instance) that is already familiar to them (1994, 121).
I have argued that in its pedagogical approach, Hull House—
especially its Labor Museum, offered a space that redefined listening as
a reciprocal, embodied process with the potential to foster civic progress
through rhetorical engagement. In Twenty Years at Hull House and her
various essays on education, Addams illustrates the importance of this
specific kind of listening. But she also conveys her commitment to lis-
tening implicitly, through her use of narrative as a tool for teaching. Her
use of narrative and autobiography shows us what the process of rhetori-
cal listening can look, especially when it is accompanied by the reflection
that is required to make sense of experience. Addams frequently takes the
approach of sharing an experience from the settlement, and then walking
the reader through the process of reflection that allows her to learn from
it. She does this even when her stories don’t paint her in the best light,
illustrating her willingness to be uncertain and to work from contingent
truths. One example is the story of a man who comes to the settlement
to request aid for his family. Addams gently suggests that he should look
for work before seeking charity, and points him toward an opportunity
to work on a local drainage canal. After two days of work, she reports, he
collapses and died of pneumonia. Addams says: “I have never lost trace
of the two little children he left behind him, although I cannot see them
without a bitter consciousness that it was at their expense I learned that
life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations” (1961,
108). Through this unfortunate experience, Addams recognizes the flaws
in a “charity” model that faults the poor while it purports to help them.
In contrast to this model, she points out that she has often been struck
“with the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman who lives
192 A. E. DAYTON
upstairs will willingly share her breakfast with the family below because
she knows they are ‘hard up’” (108). She connects these observations
to some emerging research on unemployment among the working class,
synthesizing her experience with the more abstract knowledge of expert
research. Addams is willing to model her own process of listening, reflec-
tion, and learning, even when that process implicates her in some of the
social problems that she critiques.
Addams’ use of narrative and reflection place the audience in the posi-
tion of listener and learner—perhaps more so than that of reader. After
all, reading is an act that is marked by separation between writer and
audience. Listening, on the other hand, involves personal, immediate
interaction with our interlocutors. Though her future audience cannot
have first-hand experience of Hull House, Addams’ narratives provide
a window in these experiences. For O’Rourke (2014), this use of sto-
rytelling reflects Addams’ philosophical stance and her educational phi-
losophy: “Addams’ use of storytelling rather than objective analysis …
exemplifies her philosophical position that abstractions are best defined
by daily actions” (36). Addams not only promotes a pragmatist, feminist
style of rhetorical and pedagogical engagement, she models it in her own
writing.
Conclusion
Jane Addams’ Hull House represents a unique space—historically, a sig-
nificant social movement that attempted to redefine democracy to fit
the changing needs of an increasing diverse, industrial, and urban soci-
ety; rhetorically, a movement that championed new methods for talk-
ing, listening, and communicating across social and cultural divides;
and pedagogically, as a model that brought these social and rhetorical
goals into the classroom and made them an explicit focus for teaching
and learning. Jane Addams was troubled by the wide gap between the
social classes, which was a function of geographical, cultural, and rhetor-
ical/ideological differences. If citizens were to overcome those divides, it
was necessary not only to find new means of rhetorical engagement but
also to learn how to use those new methods—to find spaces where stu-
dents could study social issues, discuss solutions, and practice engaging
in debate and discussion that could lead to social change. It is true, as
critics have pointed out, that the Hull House model of public pedagogy
sometimes fell short, and that settlement workers were sometimes una-
ware of their own biases and limitations. Despite its limitations, how-
ever, the settlement represents an educational model that was unlike any
other of its day, and that continues to shape our understanding of what
community-based rhetorical instruction can achieve. It was quintessen-
tial pragmatist in its emphasis on individual experience and concrete con-
sequences. It foreshadows feminist efforts to give voice to women, the
working-class, and other marginalized groups. It illustrates the potential
for rhetorical and pedagogical engagement to contribute to a more just,
robust democracy for all.
References
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CHAPTER 9
Emergent Publics, Public Emergencies:

The Importance of John Dewey in Jane
Bennett’s Nonhuman Politics of Vital
Materialism
Daniel P. Richards
“Thus spoke the grid.”

—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010, 34)
Larry A. Hickman’s (2007) predictive assertion that John Dewey awaits

us at the end of the road of postmodernism has been borne out, as we
see those seeking to move beyond postmodern theory—namely those
under the posthuman or new materialist umbrellas—grappling with over-
coming the same restrictive capacities of Cartesian dualisms (Bernstein
1983) and false fissures between nature and culture and objectivity and
subjectivity, to name just a couple, that Dewey grappled with a cen-
tury ago. Armed with a pragmatist invocation that theory should help
us do better, new materialists, such as political theorist Jane Bennett,
have returned to Dewey’s expansive vision of publics to help address
the public problems facing us in the twenty-first century, particularly in
D. P. Richards (*) 
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
e-mail: dprichar@odu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5_9
198 D. P. RICHARDS
what Ulrich Beck (1999) coins our “world risk society.” For Bennett,
this means thinking more inclusively about our political ecologies, which,
in the key ontological shift marked by posthumanist and new materi-
alist thinkers, now require more thorough theorization about the role
of nonhuman entities in our political lives—entities that were indeed
acknowledged as part of publics but left under-theorized by Dewey, part
of Latour’s (1992) lamentable “missing masses” (225). Faulty power
grids, deepwater carbon deposits, litter, pesticides—all co-constitute
our public spaces and affect and are affected by human agency. This is
in no small part an aspect of Hickman’s articulation of pragmatism as a
post-postmodern enterprise able to address the questions postmodernism
left unresolved (14).
This chapter delves into Bennett’s specific project on political ecol-
ogies and positions her work as inherently pragmatist, not only in its
explicit use of Dewey to think more holistically about the human and
nonhuman co-constitution of publics, but moreover in its move toward
using this vision of publics to facilitate a more prudent, socially respon-
sible communicative approach in the context of risk, accidents, and dis-
asters. More than just engaging in definitional work, this chapter deploys
Bennett’s theory of vital materialism to articulate a more prudent way
to engage with the troubling prospect of communicating causality and
blame in disasters, using the Deepwater Horizon blowout and subse-
quent oil spill of 2010 as an example. In doing so, this chapter furthers
the conversation of communicative prudence in the context of risk com-
munication in the ever-changing role of risk in changing political cul-
ture (Danisch 2010) and reasserts the importance of moving beyond the
inadequate postmodern toolkit (Latour 2004) to address technoscien-
tific problems currently facing rhetoricians and communication scholars.
When it comes to ecological disasters such as Deepwater Horizon, chalk-
ing fault and blame up to miscommunication or organizational disjuncts
is losing usefulness in the larger role of science in our everyday lives.
Attention to new materialist approaches, which call to mind pragmatist
principles and impulses, is allowing us more and more to think forward
about improving our relations across ontological lines through renewed
forms of communication.
But before moving on, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment on my
phrasing above, that new materialist approaches “call to mind” pragma-
tist principles and impulses. I realize that this chapter is not digging dil-
igently through the canon to dust off a lost figure with clear pragmatist
9 EMERGENT PUBLICS, PUBLIC EMERGENCIES: THE IMPORTANCE … 199
connections. Bennett’s work is too contemporary to be considered

overlooked in the historical sense. No, this chapter instead takes on
“overlooked” in a more contemporaneous sense, that work in the new
materialist and posthuman corners of philosophy are, right before our
eyes and without due acknowledgement, fulfilling Hickman’s vision of
the post-postmodern value of pragmatism by foregrounding experience
with materiality and rethinking the constitutive bodies of publics. The
reasons why perhaps we do not think of Bennett and other new mate-
rialists as part of the pragmatist tradition or fulfilling pragmatist goals
are ample. First, the analytical and continental divide in philosophy is
striking and, despite efforts to position pragmatism as bridging the two
(Hildebrand 2003), pragmatism gets cast as a member of the former
with writers in new materialism being educated in the latter. Second, and
subsequently, not many new materialists consider themselves as pragma-
tist, or are simply unaware of the nuance and influence of the pragmatist
tradition, which is unfortunate since the exhilaration for a pragmatist in
seeing Bennett use Dewey or Bruno Latour use William James (albeit
ever so sparingly) comes from a nagging sense that Bennett and Latour,
to name just two, are grappling with the same things and in the same
way the American pragmatists did from the Civil War, onward: the
unproductivity of stubbornly axiomatic stances, the impotence of cri-
tique to bring about change. Third, new materialist work is not inher-
ently political, in the narrow sense of the term. Bennett’s project is
groundbreaking in its very attempt to take new materialist ontologies to
democratic governance. And lastly, as Morris Raphael Cohen pointed out
in 1940, pragmatism, particularly of the Deweyan variety, can be a fairly
anthropocentric enterprise. It is not full-blown subjectivism, but it is, as
Hildebrand (2003) points out, still perspectival. Still, even in the light of
these potentially damning obstacles, Bennett utilizes Dewey at a critical
juncture in her work and offers a framework for how pragmatism and
new materialism—of which Bennett’s flavor is “vital materialism”—can
work together on the same projects and with the same ends in sight.
In terms of structure, this chapter is divided into three main sections.
The first section explores Bennett’s project of vital materialism, which
calls for a more refined, theoretical attentiveness to the very public roles
of nonhuman things. The second section covers Bennett’s treatment
and usage of Dewey in her expanding of publics to support this pro-
ject. The third section merges both thinkers in their shared vision of a
more prudent way to deliberate in public matters of disaster, ultimately
200 D. P. RICHARDS
culminating into the argument that Bennett has indeed been to this
point an overlooked or under-defined pragmatist and that, as articulated
in the conclusion, much is to be gained by reading Bennett and pragma-
tism together.
Bennett’s Vital Materialism

If there is one line that aptly abridges Jane Bennett’s project in Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), it is not a contention but
rather a question appearing near the end of the book:
If we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are,

would we continue to produce and consume in the same recklessly violent
ways? (113)
Bennett broaches this question not from the perspective of protest rhet-
orics or engineering inquiry or media messaging but from a philosoph-
ical standpoint of ontology. A political theorist, Bennett is certainly
concerned with crafting more responsible environmental policy; how-
ever, this position is predicated on the argument that the reason why we
might not have the best extant policies to date is precisely because we
have not been attentive enough to the complexity involved in the pre-
cipitation of public events, specifically ecological and technoscientific
disasters. This complexity of causality hinges upon questions of agency
as Bennett asks us to think slowly through the idea that matter itself is
“passive stuff” and instead consider the proposition that our material
surroundings are imbued with a vitality—“thing power”—that philos-
ophy, by and large up until recent surges in new materialist and post-
human thinkers, has overlooked. Bruno Latour refers to this work as
uncovering philosophy’s and sociology’s “missing masses.” While not
Bennett’s lone focus, disasters are apt exigencies for this project since
they act as ruptures that allow her to “highlight the active role of nonhu-
man materials in public life” (2).
Bennett proffers a genealogy (in the Neitzschean sense) exploring
the vitality of nonhuman things beginning well before the posthuman
project of Donna Haraway or the anthropological and science and tech-
nology studies (STS) Actor-Network Theory project of Bruno Latour
and John Law to the work of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics published post-
humously in 1677. There, readers find an ecologically minded Spinoza
ascribing to all bodies a “striving,” what Spinoza coined conatus that

describes an “active impulsion,” (3.6) or what Bennett herself phrases as
a “trending tendency to persist” (2). This tendency, this conatus exists in
all human and nonhuman bodies, even banal objects engaging in banal
activity; as Spinoza (1677) illustrates,
Any thing whatsoever, whether it be more perfect or less perfect, will

always be able to persist in existing with that same force whereby it begins
to exist, so that in this respect all things are equal. [Even a falling stone] is
endeavoring, as far as in it lies, to continue in its motion. (3.6)
This conative nature, shared as it is by all human and nonhuman bodies,

inspires Bennett to focus on the “power present in every body” (Bennett
2). Spinoza’s consistent emphasis on the continuity between humans and
all other things and beings is the admittedly speculative space in which
Bennett’s project resides, and affords Bennett both (i) the possibility to
theorize the “thing-power” inherent in the missing masses of our phil-
osophical and political thinking and (ii) a productive genealogy that
challenges our assumptions of Enlightenment thinkers as ubiquitously
hierarchical in their positioning of mind above materiality.
Spinoza’s assertion that “all things are equal” in their persistence of
existence uncannily anticipates the larger philosophical project of “onto-
logical flattening” between human and nonhuman objects currently
taking place in the seminal work of Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton,
Levi Bryant, Rosi Braidotti—those who loosely fall under the umbrella
of new materialists, object-oriented ontologists, and posthumanists,
held together by their concern to theorize and legitimize the presence,
energy, agency, and affect of nonhuman artifacts, things, and objects in
our world. Collectively, they ask: What happens to our philosophies and
politics when we de-instate humans from the top of the ontological lad-
der? What does this ontological coup d’état mean for the way we theorize
epistemology? science? sociology? politics? How does this humility recal-
ibrate who or what is effecting change and creating affect in our world?
For Bennett and her concern with the vitality of things, these ques-
tions can be explored and speculated about even through the most banal
interactions, as banal and common as Spinoza’s falling rock. In one of
her “speculative onto-stories,” Bennett describes an encounter she had
with debris over a Chesapeake Bay-bound grate of a storm drain outside
a bagel store in Baltimore:
202 D. P. RICHARDS
When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and
the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the con-
tingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the
weather that morning, with me. For had the sun not glinted on the black
glove, I might not have seen the rat; had the rat not been there, I might
not have noted the bottle cap, and so on. But they were all there just as
they were, and so I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of
these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage,
objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely exhausted by
their semiotics. (5)
While perhaps uncharacteristically poetic for a political theorist, this

debris-centric encounter is meant to highlight how things produce
effects, how they make things happen, and perhaps even how inorganic
matter and things, as Manuel De Landa (1997) notes, might possess the
propensity to self-organize. This requires a certain readiness and atten-
tiveness on the behalf of the observing human, of course, as vital materi-
alists “try to linger in those moments during which they find themselves
fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that
they share with them” (17). In this fashion, the objects themselves and
their own conative trajectories might be understood more intentionally
as provocative, in contrast to Sherry Turkle’s articulation of objects we
think with as evocative (2007).
Such street-level musings are not the end of Bennett’s project, as one
might imagine. Rather the mundanity of such an example to exemplify
the thing-power about which she speaks is necessary, in her estima-
tion, to then theorize more large scale interactions between things. For
example, as a way to overcome the “latent individualism” in the specu-
lative thinking of thing-power, Bennett develops a theory of distributive
agency by way of examining a real-life effect brought about by the inter-
activity of human and nonhuman bodies: the power blackout in North
America in 2003 that affected over 50 million people. In using Spinoza’s
notion of “affective bodies” and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
notion of “assemblage” to analyze the faltering power grid as an “agen-
tic assemblage,” Bennett attempts to reconfigure our understanding
of agency to include forces within and across bodies, both human and
nonhuman, ultimately seeking to address the question: “How would an
understanding of agency as a confederation of human and nonhuman
elements alter established notions of moral responsibility and political
accountability?” (38). That is, rather than focus on the lone electrical
engineer or site manager closest to the fault or accident, should not an

accident with the massive scope of the blackout turn our attention out-
ward and more expansively—and more inclusively—to all bodies impli-
cated in the event?
Bennett’s ontological flattening thus becomes even more meaning-
ful in the context of disaster. Since exploring how agency works on an
ontological level is Bennett’s pursuit, traditional models of agency in
the context of accidents, faults, and disasters need to be challenged. Her
position is that if we aren’t even quite sure how human agency works
after all these years, then how can we be entirely sure that nonhumans
“make their mark” (34) in any substantially different way? While she
does not deny the impact of a “willing subject,” Bennett points out that
there is a certain “slipperiness” to a human-centered location of agency:
[T]here is not so much a doer (an agent) behind the deed [blackout] as a
doing and an effecting by a human-nonhuman assemblage. This federation
of actants is a creature that the concept of moral responsibility fits only
loosely and to which the charge of blame will not quite stick. (28, empha-
sis added)
In an effort to move even further beyond the phenomenological work

of Maurice Merleau Ponty (1981), who developed theory that extends
agency beyond the scope of human rationality, Bennett wants to include
nonhumans in the demos (30). She wants to do this because she thinks
that seeking to answer the question “Why?”—representing an inquiry
into the moral state of a doer or group of doers—is unproductive because
it demands reductive moral responsibility from a complex assemblage.
While individual culpability might frame legal proceedings, it makes for
poor development of policy. Bennett thus seeks a theory of distributed
agency that does not “posit a subject as the root cause of an effect” (31).
Simply associating the blackened night sky of powerless homes and cities
or the slicked ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico with a moral decision is
drawing a straight line over and through a complex web of interactions
and intersubjectivities, to borrow Diana Coole’s (2010) new materialist
terminology.
Rather, Bennett, like Latour, favors more of a tracing methodology
aimed at delineating all the actants involved in the swarm: “To figure
the generative source of effects as a swarm is to see human intentions as
always in competition and confederation with many other strivings” (32).
204 D. P. RICHARDS
This approach frames an accident or disaster more as the result of com-

peting forces of human and nonhuman actants, even if that theory is
supported within a more traditional approach to blame. In the aftermath
of the North American blackout of 2003, the news media struggled
to explain the complexity of the outage as it related specifically to the
(dys)functionality of the power grid. Bennett sees this struggle as point-
ing to the inadequacy of understanding the grid as a discrete object that
either works or does not work; Bennett is quick to note that, “to the vital
materialist, the electrical grid is better understood as a volatile mix of
coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams,
profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery,
static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood—to name just
some of the actants” (25). Bennett’s intentionally juxtaposed list of act-
ants resembles the litanies of Latour, operating as a rhetorical strategy to
flatten the ontological status of things and transform abstract concepts
and mundane artifacts into the same bowl of ontological potpourri, or
perhaps even an ontological grocery list where items lack meaningful cat-
egorization or distinction. This complexity is borne out, even years after
the event:
Investigators still do not understand why the cascade ever stopped itself,
after affecting 50 million people over approximately twenty-four thou-
sand square kilometers and shutting down over one hundred power plants,
including twenty-two nuclear reactors. The U.S.-Canada Power Outage
Task Force report was more confident about how the cascade began,
insisting on a variety of agential loci. These included electricity, with its
internal differentiation into “active” and “reactive” power; the power
plants, understaffed by humans but overprotective in their mechanisms;
transmission wires, which tolerate only so much heat before they refuse
to transmit the electron flow; a brush fire on Ohio; Enron FirstEnergy
and other energy-trading corporations, who, by legal and illegal means,
had been piling the grid without maintaining its infrastructure; consum-
ers, whose demand for electricity grows and is encouraged to grow by the
government without concern for consequences; and the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, whose Energy Policy Act of 1992 deregulated the
grid, separated the generation of electricity from its transmission and distri-
bution, and advanced the privatization of electricity. (26–27)
The phrase “agential loci” is critical in understanding Bennett’s concern

to trace the various things involved in the precipitation of the blackout
listed above because it undermines traditional conceptions of agency

that tend to frame agency as an undeniably intentional move, resembling
Kantian and neo-Kantian accounts (29), stemming from an autonomous,
willing human person. Bennett seeks a “radical displacement” of agency
from its exclusive moorings to the human, while still acknowledging
that each different materiality will express different types and degrees of
power within a given situation or assemblage. To do so a vital materialist
needs to identify the “contours of the swarm”—as Bennett does astutely
above concerning the blackout—to better understand the differentiation
of power and agency, and specifically in the context of a disaster, rethink
the topos of causality (Richards 2017).
In terms of locating causality, Bennett distinguishes between efficient
causality and emergent causality. Efficient causality can be understood as
a “chain of simple bodies acting as the sole impetus for the next effect”
(32), and is, according to her, “impossibly rare”: “Is George W. Bush the
efficient cause of the American invasion of Iraq? Is Osama bin Laden?”
(32). Efficient causality assumes that events operate as chains, as dis-
cernible, linear, hierarchical systems of cause and effect and “rank[s] the
actants involved, treating some as external causes and others as depend-
ent effects” (33). Emergent causality, by contrast, “places the focus on
the process as itself an actant, as itself in possession of degrees of agentic
capacity” (Bennett 33). Bringing it to the Deepwater Horizon accident
of 2010—which will be discussed in section three of this chapter—we
see this version of ontology present in journalistic accounts of the one,
singular cause, usually with the intention of educating the public. On
June 10, 2010, The New York Times published their own impressive,
demonstrative epideixis—an interactive, multimodal, six-page write-up of
the key areas of public concern regarding the blowout (Gröndahl et al.
2010): where the oil is; where it made landfall; the efforts being made
to stop the leak; the effects on wildlife; the final moments of the rig; and
of course the investigation of the cause. Appealing to the public con-
cern, The New York Times used experts from the field to “get inside” the
blowout preventer (the piece broadly understood as the “main” technical
cause), to show every single last component of the complicated back-up
safety mechanism, to the blind shear ram within the blowout preventer,
and even further to the faulty shuttle valve with the shear ram. Working
toward the weakest link of the blowout preventer, and reducing the
explosion to such a minute interaction, signals an attempt to restrict cau-
sality to a moment in time, which is, according to Bennett, a problematic
206 D. P. RICHARDS
characteristic of efficient causality: “If one extends the time frame of the
action beyond that of even an instant, billiard-ball causality falters” (33).
Journalistic attempts to identify the “initial” cause in lay language rests
on the implicit ontological assertion that, in the chain of agency, identi-
fication of the technical cause reigns supreme atop the hierarchy of agen-
cies and, more importantly, that other utterances of blame are entirely
contingent upon the identification of that initial cause.
For Bennett, distributing agency and thus pinning the locus of polit-
ical responsibility in a human–nonhuman assemblage (36) reflects a
larger value system that resists reductive attributions. In her examples of
Middle East conflict, this reductiveness often leads to violence. On the
great North American blackout of 2003, she writes: “Though it would
give me great pleasure to assert that deregulation and corporate greed
are the real culprits in the blackout, the most I can honestly affirm is
that corporations are one of the sites at which human efforts at reform
can be applied, that corporate regulation is one place where intentions
might initiate a cascade of effects” (37). Bennett intentionally withholds
the temptation to dole out blame to individual parties because for her
“autonomy and strong responsibility seem […] empirically false, and
thus their invocation seems tinged with injustice” (37). If considering
the Deepwater Horizon blowout, one can anticipate Bennett feeling
uncomfortable with the anti-BP protestors or the heavy-handedness with
which the Obama administration levied out blame and subsequent penal-
ties and fines because her distributed ontological/philosophical purview
of the disaster produces a less reductive approach to causality and, thus,
blame.
As such, Bennett’s project to think more slowly and thoroughly about
the roles of nonhuman things in public events is simultaneously a phil-
osophical argument about ontology but also and inevitably a political
argument about how shifting the way we conceive of publics might pro-
ductively alter our communicative frameworks and lead to more appro-
priate and productive policy.
Bennett, Dewey, and the Constitution of Publics

While Bennett appears to migrate seamlessly from mundane street-level
encounters with debris to massive multinational malfunctions as a way to
hint at the political possibilities involved in such encounters, these spec-
ulative onto-stories do not in and of themselves, as she readily admits,
confront the more difficult questions of articulating the directly political

capacity of actants (94):
Even if a convincing case is made for worms as active members of, say, the
ecosystem of a rainforest, can worms be considered members of a public?
What is the difference between an ecosystem and a political system? Are
they analogs? Two names for the same system at different scales? What
is the difference between an actant and a political actor? Is there a clear
difference? Does an action count as political by virtue of its having taken
place “in public”? Are there nonhuman members of a public? What, in
sum, are the implications of a (meta)physics of vibrant materiality for polit-
ical theory? (94)
To address such difficult questions pertaining to the politics of the non-

human, Bennett engages two theories of democracy—those of John
Dewey and Jacques Rancière—to explore what constitutes a public, how
they form and deform, and was constitutes a distinctly political act. For
the specific purposes of this chapter and the scope of this collection, I
will focus on Bennett’s treatment and use of Dewey, in particular his
important work in the early part of the twentieth century on the emer-
gent properties of publics.
There are two reasons why Bennett is drawn to Dewey’s work to
explore the political ramifications of her vital materialism. The first is
broad: Dewey’s analogy between an ecosystem and political system
lends thinkers metaphorical affordances through which to draw explicit
parallels between “natural” and “cultural” processes. These parallels
reveal similarities between, say, a citizen voting and the “small agency
of worms”—as Bennett phrases it in borrowing from Charles Darwin—
exacted in these tiny creatures’ decisions to select and carry leaves for
their burrows; decisions that, as Darwin noted, vary by situation and the
resources afforded to them. Worms “pay attention,” and, in their crucial
role below the ground in cultivating productive vegetable mold and pre-
serving soil and by extension human artifacts, move alongside humans
in history. In this sense, the “small agency” of worms play significant
roles in the anthropological and agricultural success of humans. Using
this analogy, a person casting one vote within a country of thirty mil-
lion might also be said to have “small agency” in the political ecology of
democracy. While Darwin was not as literal as Bennett, or even Spinoza
before him—indeed Darwin was engaging in a certain type of whimsy
anthropomorphism—such metaphorical or creative work can reveal
208 D. P. RICHARDS
structural similarities within “nature” and “culture” and as such “can

catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically dis-
tinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously com-
posed materialities that form confederations” (99). As was the case with
the debris over the drainage grate, expanding the nonhuman purview of
agency requires a type of openness and disposition within the observer.
The second reason why Bennett is drawn to Dewey’s work is because
the “gap between action and political action is relatively small” (95). Of
importance here is Dewey’s generative concept of “conjoint action,”
which refers to “the agency behind the emergence of a public; a pub-
lic’s agency or capacity to produce effects is also a function of conjoint
action” (95). Bennett’s underlying thesis here is that Dewey’s theory
“leaves open the possibility that some of the acts of conjoint action orig-
inate in nonhuman (natural and technological) bodies” (95) and thus
political action can theoretically be directly generated and effectual from
a suasive relationship between a human and nonhuman body—a sort of
nonhuman or posthuman public.
A considerable, underlying part of Bennett’s project, then, is to
advance, expand, and challenge just what constitutes a public. This too
was the underlying project of Dewey in The Public and Its Problems
(1954). For Dewey, the improvement of the conditions of debate, dis-
cussion, and persuasion resides in a fundamental alteration in just what
constitutes a public, or the public, or the publics. For Dewey, if we could
move beyond the stifling and false dichotomies of the state and the pub-
lic, then individual citizens and groups of citizens would be in a better,
more empowered position, able to mobilize through the creation and
re-creation of multiple publics that best help address their felt needs.
Wearisome of his own artificial distinction between the “state” and the
“public,” as well as the widespread acceptance of Walter Lippmann’s
(1922) repudiating the very existence of a rational public, Dewey used
his earlier theories on “naturalism” in Experience and Nature (originally
published in 1925) to expound an articulation of publics that at times
is rather analogous to the natural interactions in a given ecosystem or
collection of ecosystems. From Bennett: “Like the conjoint action of
Darwin’s worms, the conjoint action of Dewey’s citizens is not under the
control of any rational place or deliberate intention. No efficient cause
of the problems it generates can really be pinpointed” (100). The field
of political action is in many ways ecological, with no one body solely
responsible for action as each body is conjoined with another, clustered
together as they respond to harm, and then re-acting from this for-
mation into new trans-actions and new groups (or “swarms”) to be
affected—and publics (r)emerge ad infinitum: “Any action is always
a trans-action […] This is because an act can only take place in a field
already crowded with other endeavors and their consequences, a crowd
with which the new entrant immediately interacts, overlaps, and inter-
feres. The file of political action is thus for Dewey a kind of ecology”
(101). For Dewey, conjoint actions generate “multitudinous conse-
quences” and “each of these consequences ‘crosses the others’ to gen-
erate its own problems, and thus its own publics or ‘group of persons
especially affected’” (101).
According to Dewey publics do not, however, preexist. Publics are
not simply willed into existence. They arise or emerge in response to
particular problems; enrollment of individuals into these publics is char-
acterized by induction rather than willing volunteering. Because pub-
lics emerge as responses to events, as responses to problems, they can
be characterized in terms of their shared harm: a public “consists of all
those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to
such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences
systematically cared for” (Public 16). The homeowners with no energy
in 2003, the individuals running fisheries in coastal Louisiana, and the
progressive clean energy protestors during the spill in 2010—they con-
stitute a cohesive public because they are a group that emerged out of
shared harm, provoked together by the “indirect, serious and enduring
[consequences of] conjoint action” (Public 16). Conjoint action can be
best understood as the intentional and unintentional effects of a given
interaction, an interaction in which “no efficient cause of the problems
it generates can really be pinpointed” (Bennett 100). In characteristically
pragmatist fashion, publics for Dewey do not concern themselves with
infighting over the specifics of their genesis but rather with their ability
to produce effects and affect to resolve a given problem at hand. This is
how rural, coastal fishers can conjoin with progressive protestors. There
is an emphasis on consequences, not intentions—of the ethical responsi-
bility of responding to harm, not identifying blame. This is precisely how
Bennett sees Deweyan theories of publics as “[paving] the way for a the-
ory of action” (103).
Bennett reads Dewey as ahead of his time in terms of addressing the
complicated intersections of humans, technologies, and ecologies, stat-
ing that even current theories of democracy are not equipped to address
210 D. P. RICHARDS
or explain such nuanced relationships: “Theories of democracy that

assume a world of active subjects and passive objects begin to appear as
thin descriptions at a time when the interactions between human, viral,
animal, and technological bodies are becoming more and more intense”
(108). The weak distinction between active subjects and passive objects,
as articulated carefully by Dewey in Art as Experience (1934), is like the
epidermis of the skin, which is “the most superficial way an indication of
where an organism ends and its environment begins. There are things
inside the body that are foreign to it, and there are things outside of it
that belong to it de jure if not de facto” (61). Bennett’s contention is
that if Dewey sees the objective and the subjective as superficially dis-
crete, and publics as emergent from conjoint action between two bodies,
then the likely conclusion to draw—albeit without direct evidence—
would be that Dewey, given the language, would have been amenable to
the possibility of a distinctly posthuman public. While, generally speak-
ing, Dewey positions conjoint action as a human activity in the politi-
cal realm, his ecological framework for interactivity and his biological
metaphors to describe in concert the fluidity across which agency flows
through human and nonhuman bodies, a public as emergent from a
trans-action between a human and nonhuman body affords Bennett the
space to theorize the political role of nonhuman, vital materiality in our
demos, our state of affairs, indeed our policy and protests: “In naming a
problem (rather than an act of will) as the driving force behind the for-
mation of a public, Dewey (almost) acknowledges that a political action
need not originate in human bodies at all” (102). She admits that he
“flirts” with the posthuman and, in Art as Experience, “comes close to
saying that even human initiatives are not exclusively human” (102).
This idea of public initiatives as “not exclusively human” stems from
Dewey’s definition of a member of a public as one “affected by the indi-
rect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed
necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey
1925, 277). For Bennett, this characterization encourages us to think
of how to better attend how nonhuman bodies participate in conjoint
action and will help us “more clearly discern instances of harm to the
(affective) bodies of animals, vegetables, minerals, and their ecocultures”
(103), which would then in turn provoke responses. In circling back to
an earlier question posed by Bennett—“If we were more attentive to the
indispensable foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and
consume in the same recklessly violent ways?” (113)—we see that the
answer approaches the notion that an acknowledgment of the inclusion

of nonhuman bodies in the harms generating and shaping our publics
would hopefully produce a more ethical and prudential and productive
framework through which to solve problems.
At first blush, you might ponder, as I did: to what extent is the dis-
tinction between Bennett and Dewey a terminological one? Might a
swarm or assemblage be synonyms for publics, as Dewey broadly con-
strued them? But upon deeper consideration, Bennett’s project is in no
small part hinged upon the idea of publics as emergent, with the emer-
gence taking place through Dewey’s conjoint action between a human
and potentially a nonhuman body. Without an expansive vision of pub-
lics provided by Dewey, Bennett’s project remains mostly theoretical and
lacking in a framework for political mobilization. My contention is that
Bennett’s thinking about how publics are formed and her building off of
Dewey’s notion of “conjoint action” between humans and nonhumans
to do so moves her closer to being part of the pragmatist tradition, yes,
but also him closer to becoming increasingly relevant for contemporary
projects in new materialism.
Changing the “Conditions of Debate” in Disasters

As stated earlier, this project of ontological inclusion of nonhuman
things requires more attentiveness from humans; Bennett’s ecologi-
cal-minded ethical framework hinges upon an ethic of listening. The
next issue, obvious as it may be, is how we precisely listen to nonhu-
man, “nonlinguistic” bodies? If nonhuman actants participate in our
publics, then how can communication proceed in meaningful, practical
ways? Bennett, in acknowledging this conceptual obstacle and practi-
cal limitation, asks: “Can we theorize more closely the various forms of
such communicative energies? How can humans learn to hear or enhance
our receptivity for ‘propositions’ not expressed in words? How to trans-
late between them? What kinds of institutions and rituals of democracy
would be appropriate?” (104). In this final section, I use the case of the
Deepwater Horizon blowout out and subsequent oil spill much in the
same way Bennett uses the North American blackout: to account for
the swarms of actants involved in an event, particularly a fault, accident,
or disaster. I contend that it is in these dire contexts that the role of non-
human constituents of publics become apparent, become examples of
how attention to the nonhuman constituents to publics might actually
212 D. P. RICHARDS
move us forward in solving problems by shifting our conversations

post-disaster away from singular ways of thinking of causality and blame.
Akin to Dewey’s contention in The Public and Its Problems that impor-
tant work needs to be done not only in the arguments of debate but in
the very conditions of debate itself, Bennett seeks to provide readers with
a productive, nonreductive framework from which to develop robust
communication theories of political-ecological disaster.
The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, along with the
subsequent spilling of oil from the Macondo 252 well in the northern
part of the Gulf of Mexico, took place starting on April 20, 2010. The
Deepwater Horizon blowout includes the explosion stemming from a
pressure gauge; the subsequent oil spill resulting from the opening of
the oil well from said explosion; and the ecological impacts that rever-
berated—and continually reverberate—throughout the Gulf waters,
shorelines, and beyond. And while the event is colloquially referred to
as the BP Oil Spill, the name only paints part of the picture. BP in this
instance leased the Deepwater Horizon rig from Transocean, one of the
few rigs in the world large enough to meet the requirements necessary
of drilling at unprecedented depths. Halliburton was contracted to com-
plete cement jobs around the pipeline itself for reinforcement purposes.
Cameron, a parts company, sold the blowout preventer, which would
play a major role in the precipitation of the explosion, to Transocean.
Save for Cameron, each of the companies—BP, Transocean, and
Halliburton—had employees working side by side aboard the Deepwater
Horizon rig that night.
Fordham University law professor Howard Erichson, when inter-
viewed during the spring 2013 court trials of the oil spill, was quoted
as saying that, “In terms of sheer dollar amounts and public attention,
[Deepwater Horizon] is one of the most complex and massive disputes
ever faced by the courts” (“Gulf Spill Trial”). And with the courtroom
occupied with almost a dozen teams of lawyers representing the major
stakeholders, namely BP, contractors Transocean, Halliburton, and
Cameron, the US Justice Department, and five Gulf states, it is easy to
see why. Yet, in 2010, in the spring and summer months following the
spill, and before the courtroom drama, it was seemingly not that compli-
cated. For the media and the public, there was only one party to look to,
and that was BP. Protestors, environmentalist groups, and images of oil-
soaked pelicans and sullied BP logos all contributed to the notion that
BP, a corporation with a terrible track record, was at fault. Even more
than their counterparts, BP has been known to “cut corners” to save

money, leading people to believe that the oil ravaging their local eco-
systems, oil that belonged to BP and from which BP would profit, was
directly BP’s fault.
Yet, while it was BP’s oil from which to gain, and while greedy deci-
sions were no doubt made, I contend that the singular aggression toward
the oil giant represented an over-attribution to human will and human
character, echoing the autonomous visions of agency proffered by
Immanuel Kant. BP was operating in a larger swarm of actants involved,
from the United States government, which overlooked some key safety
issues and contributed heavily to deregulation in the industry, to leased
blowout preventers, which were made overseas and leased as a separate
component of the rig itself. Protesting one certain company over an
event represents a belief that agency is located in the moral responsibil-
ity of an individual’s actions. This Kantian approach to agency casts the
“autonomous will,” specifically its choice or inability to abide by moral
law, as the cause of “evil.” This Kantian approach, however, is problem-
atic not because of any theological obstacles but rather because it works
reductively rather than toward a more comprehensive view of an event.
Thus in any disaster, but specifically in one as ecologically catastrophic
as Deepwater Horizon, there emerges a distinct intersection of dis-
courses with competing patterns and motives. Protest rhetorics demand
justice for environmental harm caused by greedy corporations who
place public health and well-being down the list of priorities. Technical
discourse consists of engineers and industry experts seeking to trace
the mechanisms of the broken machine back to a single inefficiency or
break. News media outlets attempt to update the public on dramatic
recent developments in organizational inquiries, such as who was on shift
that night and who was in charge of overseeing that particular aspect.
Regarding a disaster of this scale, there exists not merely a post-disaster
narrative, as Schwartzman et al. (2011) have phrased it, but competing
post-disaster narratives far more complex than mere finger-pointing, as
underlying each narrative are assumptions about agency, risk, and pub-
lic health—each in their own right trying to answer a broader question:
“What causes disaster?” Yet, if viewed through the lens of Dewey’s nat-
uralistic political pragmatism, an approach that “makes responsibil-
ity more a matter of responding to harms than of identifying objects of
blame” (Bennett 2010, 101–102, emphasis added), we are left won-
dering what precisely the value in this question is. Lawsuits need to be
214 D. P. RICHARDS
filed; government agencies need to be improved; businesses need to be

assigned reparations. A stakeholder, practically speaking, needs to liter-
ally “pay” for causing such harmful effects. But the litigation and engi-
neering discourses oftentimes become entwined with political discourse
about energy sources and regulations in a way that conflates ethics and
moralism. After the spill, many were left just with protest. How else can
individuals rise up and change regulatory structures on unclean energy?
Dewey himself not only laments the general powerlessness of dem-
ocratic citizens but the subsequent impotence or difficulty of enacting
productive public deliberation. While others writing at the time, specifi-
cally Walter Lippmann, did not believe that the “public” had the rational
capability of engaging in democratic methods of communication, Dewey
remained hopeful and optimistic. For Dewey, the “public”—more as
a concept than an identifiable entity—was to regain its voice, indeed
re-empower its very sense of self/selves through communication: “The
essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and
conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of
the public” (1954, 208). Dewey’s work, from all three epochs of his
writing (early, middle, and later), shows a consistent concern to funda-
mentally reconfigure the conditions of debate. If persuasive methods can
be understood as situation-based prescriptive techniques for effective
communication, then the conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion
can be understood as the social structures, philosophies, and material
realities within which said methods are situated.
I argue here, in lockstep with Bennett, that the best way to mitigate
and protect against future catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon is
not to merely levy fines and restrictions on the most culpable of stake-
holders involved in the complex extraction of carbon from the ocean
floor but rather to frame the conversation around the confluence of pre-
cipitating factors involved in such an event. To move forward the con-
ditions of debate, there needs to be a separation of blame and causality.
In this approach, blame and causality need not be conflated or even
taken so nonchalantly as synonymous because agency is seen as emer-
gent rather than as a moral quality. This is not to say that approaches
to disaster do not seek justice. As Bennett writes, there should not be
an effort to release the overseers of the power grid of any legal culpabil-
ity: “Outrage will not and should not disappear, but a politics devoted
too exclusively to moral condemnation and not enough to a cultivated
discernment of the web of agentic capacities can do little good, [for in]
a world of distributed agency, a hesitant attitude toward assigning sin-

gular blame becomes a presumptive virtue” (38). Her theory of distrib-
uted agency calls us to be more attentive to the specific agentic swarms
involved in the given event. In a vital materialist framework, the task
of the rhetorician or writer is not to unethically hone in on one single
agent like a technical investigator. Rather, the task is to negotiate the
“delicate balance”: How to negotiate the centripetal forces of blame
with the centrifugal distributive forces of causality when these two
opposing forces are seemingly so closely, positively correlated with each
other? The identification of a singular, technical cause in the midst of
disaster drives the inquiry process because it is the fulcrum of all legal,
moral, and epideictic discourses. The legal accountability and pub-
lic responsibility in large part is understood and doled out by an iden-
tification of who “allowed” the technical malfunction to occur, but, as
Bennett points out, a “federation of actants is a creature that the concept
of moral responsibility fits only loosely and to which the charge of blame
will not stick” (Bennett 28).
Bennett challenges us with the following task: to account for the wide
range of human and nonhuman forces involved in the precipitating of a
disaster while still remaining firm in the ethical accountability of its stake-
holders. This is underwritten by the notion that the acknowledgement
of the agential capacity on nonhuman objects within larger assemblages
renders the task of assigning singular blame (1) impossible because the
human-centered notions of disaster rely on a conflation between blame
and causality that new materialist approaches work to detach, and
(2) unproductive because it does nothing to enhance the accountabil-
ity of all stakeholders involved in the precipitation of the event. Where
agency is distributed and recourse of action focuses on a more full-scale
approach to individuals and ethics, the problematic conflation of blame
and causality begins to unravel, and we are given an approach to dis-
aster that would “detach ethics from moralism” (Bennett 38). In many
current usages of epideictic rhetorics in the context of disaster, the appli-
cation of the moral concept of blame is entrenched within technical and
forensic inquiries into causality. Ultimately, adopting a vital materialist
approach to disaster allows us to look closely at responsibility without
having it hinge upon a reductive technical cause.
A recent study conducted by the University of New Hampshire found
that a significant number of Gulf Coast residents who were directly affected
by the oil spill in some economic capacity indicated changed views about
216 D. P. RICHARDS
major environmental issues. Explaining the study, Dr. Lawrence Hamilton,

professor of sociology at the university, claims that
If disasters teach any lessons, then experience with the Gulf oil spill might
be expected to alter opinions about the need for environmental protection.
About one-fourth of our respondents said that as a result of the spill, their
views on other environmental issues such as global warming or protect-
ing wildlife had changed […] This proportion rose to 35 percent among
those most affected economically by the spill. People reporting changed
views also expressed greater concern about sea level rise due to climate
change, more support for a moratorium on deepwater drilling, and were
more likely to favor alternative energy rather than increased oil explora-
tion. (Wright 2012)
Out of the midst of unfortunate events comes the changing of minds

on important political and ecological issues. A group of individuals who
had material experience with the oil in some capacity—with many having
direct contact with oil substance—were led to engage in some form of
inquiry and rethink their views and, if it comes to it, actions at the polls.
However, when looking deeper into the comparisons between
responses from individuals in Louisiana and those in Florida, we see
that the larger political forces at work—the very same forces Dewey cri-
tiques—are restricting publics’ ability to articulate their long-term inter-
ests. Participants were asked if they were in favor of a moratorium on
offshore drilling, which would then lead to an increased use in alter-
native energies. Participants in Louisiana, though more extremely
affected by the spill than their Florida counterparts, were less likely to
favor a moratorium. The reason why becomes clear when looking at the
amount of state income deriving from offshore drilling. Louisiana, and
its open laws on offshore deepwater oil drilling, benefit somewhere in
the neighborhood of 65 billion dollars per year from the oil industry.
Florida, on the other hand, “actively opposed offshore drilling, which
is currently banned in state waters” (Wright 2012). In explaining why
coastal Louisiana residents were still generally pro-deepwater drilling,
Dr. Hamilton continues:
The pattern of responses from coastal Louisiana, where many more peo-
ple reported effects from the spill, extreme weather, or threats from cli-
mate-related sea-level rise—but fewer supported a deepwater moratorium,
alternative energy, or resource conservation—reflects socioeconomic
development around oil and gas. Specialization has been channeled partly
by physical characteristics of the Louisiana coastline itself. (Wright 2012)
Without engaging in reductiveness, the differences in state viewpoints

can be explained by two general patterns: the actual geography of the
coasts (Florida coasts are more conducive to other industries, such as
tourism) and the larger corporate and governmental benefits in Louisiana
derived from the high-risk processes of deepwater drilling. The short-
term gain, long-term risk approach enacted by the Louisiana state gov-
ernment is precisely the conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion
that stifle the publics’ abilities to articulate their own needs, desires, and
protections. For those individuals who changed their mind about larger
environmental concerns because of the very real, very deep impact of the
spill on their lives, there is not an avenue to promote an ethos of alterna-
tive energy in a political context where the state’s budget and the func-
tioning of its citizens rely on the ethos of its opposite. For Lippmann, the
problem was that the “public” did not own a rational capability to enact
change; for Dewey, the “public” does have this capability, it’s just that
they are restricted by conditions that are out of their control.
So, what to do? BP, a corporation who works very closely with the
Louisiana state government, has a lengthy record of producing deadly
technical failures and heavily impacting American families; it is woven
into the narrative of their existence as a corporation in America. Rather
than feed into the boycotts and protests that seem to happen every
decade or so toward BP, it behooves rhetoricians and communication
researchers to provide a different framework for the public to both
understand and act on the events that transpired in April 2010. It begins,
in a way, with the realization that the blowout and spill are not just on
BP’s dime and that it did not just begin in April of 2010. The roots that
brought us to where we are today—still polishing oil off Florida pan-
handle rocks—penetrates deep into a culture dominated by politically
influential, affluent corporations, stifled citizens, and a government who
is generally content to look the other way. Spills are not catastrophes so
much as symptoms of the publics affected by them unable to articulate
their needs in the larger scope of the closely knit ties between the federal
and state governments and the oil industry. Until the fundamental con-
ditions are changed, until the public refuses to abide by the belief that
the 4.9 million barrels of oil dispersed throughout the Gulf water was
the result of corporate greed, oil spills will happen and the corporations
218 D. P. RICHARDS
and stakeholders primarily involved in the event will continue to exist

(read: thrive). A head will roll, and we as a culture will move on, inte-
grating the event into our psyche but not pronounced enough to alter
our everyday actions.
Much like the Deepwater Horizon example, which was a rig that pro-
duced oil to fund the state of Louisiana but then also manufactured a
risk for the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem, a certain amount of scientific liter-
acy or rhetorical prudence is necessary. An attunement to material causal-
ity, to how our actions and others’ actions are impacting our well-being
and those of others, and how our interaction with technology and sci-
ence is building society, is the key component life in such a society. John
Dewey knew this. According to Hickman (1990), “Dewey repeatedly
emphasized his view that failure of artifacts to do their work is not nec-
essarily due to the lack of productive skill on the part of the artist, but
may be due to the lack of such skill on the part of the person who is
confronted with and called upon to take account of produced artifacts”
(Pragmatic Technology 67). It is important to keep in mind here that for
Dewey an artist was both a factory line worker and a sculptor. We, as cit-
izens in a world risk society (Beck 1999), are those who are asked to take
account of produced artifacts, to have a prudence and ethics about our
consumption and/or use of any given technological artifact. While my
example is of citizens who consume oil, Dewey, as explained by Hickman
(1990), uses a different example:
Productive skill is required on the parts of the mining engineer and smelter
in order to effect the transformation of natural materials such as ores into
artifacts that possess intrinsic as well as extrinsic meanings. Productive skill
is required on the parts of individuals going about their quotidian busi-
ness in order to effect the transformation of the raw and immediate mate-
rials of focus and context, enjoyment and routine use, into an experience
that exhibits enlarged meaning and significance. And productive skill is
required of those who appreciate and use art objects in order to effect the
transformation and appropriation of those objects into sources of renewed
delight and refined insight. (67)
Far from merely generously doling out the blame of the oil spill to all
those involved, to all those who have every pumped gas, Hickman’s read-
ing of Dewey is contending that the failure of artifacts—say, an oil rig—
is a failure of collective inquiry, a failure on behalf of society to create
the proper conditions of debate and access of risk for all those impacted:
“One of the principle causes of failure of inquiry is neglect of the recip-

rocal connections among means and ends” (Hickman 1990, 67). The
conditions for properly assessing risk and for properly attuning oneself to
the material reality of industrial progress were just as faulty, in Dewey’s
view, as the hydraulic liquid switch deep within the blowout preventer.
Dewey’s material approach to communication and to our relating to
objects echoes Coole and Frost’s (2010) new materialist insistence that
attunement with the everydayness of materiality, with the artifacts that
shape our existence, offers a productive reorientation to the world.
Conclusion
When disasters happen, we clearly require frames inclusive of both
human and nonhuman agents. The media-driven bloodlust for a singu-
lar moral failure, while temporarily satiating, does little in the realm of
long-term prevention or mitigation. Reading Bennett and Dewey (and
perhaps pragmatism more broadly, as well) side by side brings us payoff
three-fold. First, it highlights their shared concern for altering in rela-
tively radical ways the conditions and structures of communication, and
also highlights how they can mutually supplement each other. Dewey
provides for Bennett’s political ecology an ethic of action to supplement
her already expansive criteria for participation. In tandem, Bennett works
to expand what has agency (to help supplement Dewey) and Dewey
works toward moving this vision toward action (to help supplement
Bennett). Read together in light of the rhetorics of disaster, Bennett and
Dewey can work to help us in avoiding the same sins over and over by
being less reductive in blame, more inclusive in the agents involved, but
also more incisive and intelligent about the political actions required.
Second, Bennett’s reliance on Dewey hints at a new sense of what
I might call posthuman pragmatism (and what Hickman’s frames as
pragmatism as post-postmodernism). More work into this sense would
be quite productive, not only because it might help address divides
between analytical and continental philosophy as well as realist and anti-
realist stances, but also because it provides a new frame for synthesizing
Dewey’s naturalistic writings with his more political ones. And thirdly,
reading Bennett and Dewey together helps paint a clearer, more realistic
picture of a political ethic—particularly for but not just related to disas-
ters—for new materialists, who are leaving our humanist ethics behind
potentially at great risk.
220 D. P. RICHARDS
I hope the arguments constructed above do not lose significance or

clarity in their dual nature. My overarching argument is that Bennett can
be construed as doing pragmatist work in her rethinking of publics and
then using this more expansive vision of publics to change the condi-
tions of debate around our global and local risk cultures. The parallel
argument being made is that Dewey’s attention to the roles of nonhu-
mans in generating and affecting publics has been overlooked and, given
recent philosophical trends, should be rediscovered and uncovered to
further the role or pragmatist theory in contemporary political discus-
sions, which are increasingly inclusive of materiality and technology. In
this sense Bennett is both an overlooked pragmatist while simultaneously
helping surface an overlooked part of pragmatism.
If, as Richard Bernstein so confidently states in his essay “The
Pragmatic Century” (2006), the ideas of pragmatism have dominated
twentieth-century thought, and as Hickman so boldly predicts that
Dewey awaits us in the epoch of post-postmodernism, then it is my belief
that pragmatism has the legs to continue the same trend into the twen-
ty-first century as well. Positioning Bennett as a pragmatist opens the
door for further cross-movement analysis between the American pragma-
tists and contemporary new materialists and posthumanists that will help
achieve this. Bennett is an overlooked pragmatist, yes, but also Dewey’s
inclusion of nonhumans in his publics is also an overlooked aspect of his
thinking. For as Dewey himself asks in Experience and Nature, “Since
we ‘call’ things by their names, why should they not answer?” (181).
And I might add the following amendment: Since we call things by their
names, why should they not help us do better?
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Index
A Chicago School, 27, 130, 132

Addams, Jane, 3, 7, 15, 17, 57, 60, Chinese Renaissance, 54, 56
62, 63, 76, 177–192 Cicero, 12, 16, 31, 34, 37–39, 44
Adjustment, 41, 108–110, 112, Citizenship, 3, 8, 16, 62, 154
118–125 Columbia University, 25–27, 54, 81
Agency, 62, 86, 100, 112, 113, 122, Communication practices, 2, 3, 7, 8,
125, 132, 152, 198, 200–203, 11, 158
205–208, 210, 213–215, 219 Community, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12–14, 16,
Ambedkar, Bhimrao, 3, 15, 17, 18–21, 57, 64, 90, 93, 133, 158,
79–102 173, 178, 179, 186, 187, 189,
Aristotle, 16, 21, 24, 26, 27, 33, 37, 190, 193
169, 173, 174 Comparative rhetoric, 76, 191
Conjoint action, 208–211
Contingency, 2, 6, 7, 11, 16, 42, 57
B Cooperation, 19, 32, 45, 111, 166,
Bennett, Jane, 3, 17, 197–215, 219, 180, 182, 183
220 Critical consciousness, 65
Brandom, Robert, 2, 6, 7, 11, 17 Culture, 24, 25, 27–29, 31, 32,
Burke, Kenneth, 26, 34, 36, 59, 60, 36–40, 42, 44–46, 54, 59, 71,
115, 116, 162, 164, 171 76, 111, 114, 117, 121, 130,
141, 142, 145, 148, 150, 151,
160, 166, 168, 183, 184, 186,
C 197, 198, 208, 217, 218, 220
Caste system, 80, 86–90, 93, 96, 99,
101
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 223

under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14343-5
224 Index
D 186–189, 191–193, 199, 208,

Darwin, Charles, 42, 57, 58, 207, 208 210, 216, 218, 220
Deepwater Horizon, 198, 205, 206, Experiential education, 140, 149, 153
211–214, 218
Deliberation, 3, 10, 13, 19, 65, 157–
159, 161, 162, 173, 174, 214 H
Democracy, 3, 6–9, 14, 15, 17, 20, Habit, 8, 20, 29, 30, 71, 74, 82, 84,
29, 56, 57, 62, 64, 79, 83, 85, 93, 95, 96, 101, 109, 110, 112,
89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 133, 134, 142, 151, 185, 186
108–110, 116, 124, 125, 132, Hinduism, 81, 86, 95, 96, 99
133, 152, 158, 168, 188, 192, Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 7, 161, 163,
207, 209, 211 181
Democracy and Education, 18, 83, 84, How We Think, 19, 136, 147
88, 90, 92, 93, 100, 187 Hull House, 7, 60, 63, 177–179,
Democratic culture, 2–4, 7–9, 11, 182–192
13–18, 20, 21, 46, 64, 129, 158 Hu Shi, 3, 17, 53, 56, 59, 66, 68, 76,
Democratic education, 144 141
Descartes, Rene, 2, 5, 58
Dewey, Alice, 15, 17, 130, 132, 137,
139, 140, 143–151 I
Dewey, John, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 13, 15, Isocrates, 12–14, 16, 21, 34
17, 23, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 54,
56, 57, 64, 72, 80–84, 88, 89,
91, 93, 96, 99, 100, 108–110, J
118, 125, 129–133, 136, James, William, 2, 3, 5–8, 11, 17, 26,
138–140, 143–151, 157, 180, 34, 142, 145, 150, 158, 159,
197, 207, 218 161, 164, 165, 167–169, 188,
199
E
Ellison, Ralph, 17, 105–108, 110– K
125, 161 King Jr., Martin Luther, 97
Epistemology, 2, 4–9, 11, 13, 16, 18,
39, 99, 158, 160, 201
Experience, 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 16, 18, L
27, 28, 30–32, 36, 39–41, 43, Laboratory School, 130, 132–137,
45, 56–58, 62, 63, 66, 68, 81, 139–142, 145, 149, 151–153
84, 92, 93, 101, 105, 107, 109, Latour, Bruno, 198–201, 203
111–117, 121–124, 130–132, Lippmann, Walter, 208, 214, 217
134–136, 139, 141–147, 149– Listening, 13, 177–180, 182–184,
154, 157–159, 162, 164–166, 186–192, 211
168, 170–172, 178–182, 184,
Index 225
M R
Marxism, 39, 43 Reconstructive rhetoric, 80, 85, 96
Materialism, 39, 198–200, 207, 211 Reflective morality, 84, 96, 101
McKeon, Richard, 17, 23–46, 57, 59, Rhetorical listening, 183, 184,
62, 63 189–191
Mead, George Herbert, 130, 173 Rhetorical practice, 2, 10, 11, 15, 17,
Meliorism, 97, 108–110, 158 19, 57, 61, 62, 87, 97, 99, 129,
Moral psychology, 162, 169, 170 179, 181, 182
Rhetorical pragmatism, 1–5, 7–11, 15,
17, 19, 21, 46, 56, 62, 181
O Roman Republic, 37, 38
Orientation, 3, 11, 15, 17, 35, 42, 43, Rorty, Richard, 2, 7, 11, 17, 20, 23,
96, 100, 101, 109, 110, 112– 28, 41, 45, 46, 170
116, 118, 122–124, 163, 166,
167, 171, 172
S
Scientific spirit, 64, 65, 75
P Semantics, 25, 28, 38–42, 45
Pedagogy, 15, 21, 131, 133, 136, 152, Settlement house, 179, 188
179, 186–190, 192 Skepticism, 41, 68–70, 72, 73
Peirce, C.S., 37, 41, 161 Social democracy, 57, 61, 182,
Persuasion, 12, 19, 79, 80, 157, 159, 185–187
180, 182, 184, 208, 214, 217 Social interaction, 2, 8, 11, 16, 57
Philosophical pragmatism, 1–9, 11, Socrates, 11, 12, 167
15, 16, 18, 21, 40, 57 Sophists, 10, 11, 16, 60, 65
Plato, 2, 12–14, 26, 31, 93, 167, 173 Spinoza, 26, 200–202, 207
Pluralism/Plurality, 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 16, Symbolic action, 115
24, 27, 29, 34, 37–39, 42, 43,
46, 57, 59, 63, 76, 79, 105, 116,
117, 168, 170 T
Political philosophy, 81 Terministic screen, 36
Posthuman, 197, 199, 200, 208, 210,
219
Protagoras, 60, 68 U
The Public and Its Problems, 18, 19, United Nations Educational, Scientific,
32, 125, 133, 153, 157, 208, 212 and Cultural Organization
Public listening, 184 (UNESCO), 27–29, 36–38
Publics, 32, 38, 158, 197–199, University of Chicago, 24, 27, 28, 36,
206–211, 216, 217, 220 132, 135, 136, 139, 145, 153
Q W
Quintilian, 12 Westbrook, Robert, 4, 5, 132

2019 Book RecoveringOverlookedPragmatist

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2019 Book RecoveringOverlookedPragmatist

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Recovering Overlooked

ISBN 978-3-030-14342-8 ISBN 978-3-030-14343-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932942

This book is dedicated to all of those scholars involved in the creative

1 On the Uses and On-going Relevance of Pragmatism

2 Richard McKeon in the Pragmatist Tradition 23

3 Hu Shi’s Search for the “Chinese Sophist”

4 Echoes of Pragmatism in India: Bhimrao Ambedkar

5 The Art of Adjustment: Ralph Ellison’s Pragmatist

6 Living Pragmatism: Alice Dewey’s Open-Minded

7 The Accidental Pragmatist: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral

8 Jane Addams’ Rhetorical Ear: Teaching, Learning,

9 Emergent Publics, Public Emergencies: The Importance

Rya Butterfield is Assistant Professor of Speech in the Department

in rhetoric, technical communication, writing pedagogy, and American

On the Uses and On-going Relevance

Pragmatism has a complicated intellectual history with multiple defini-

© The Author(s) 2019 1

understanding of why some key intellectual figures in the history of the

one way to advance the pragmatist project is to turn philosophical ques-

democratic cultures, and will subordinate philosophy to rhetoric by reim-

Philosophical Versus Rhetorical Pragmatism

of questions are mostly a matter of communication. The essays in this

for our knowledge. My intention here is not to offer a careful read-

that epistemology. He articulates and advances an impressive philosophy,

changing the world and producing melioristic consequences. Rhetorical

pragmatism and, instead, focus almost exclusively on developing philo-

The Greek sophists argued that uncertainty and ambiguity characterized

develop out of a similar set of intellectual commitments, it will lead us

Communication Studies and Philosophy

Bruce Kimball (1995) argued that the distinction I am drawing between

as a principle communication skill for leaders. Pragmatism’s commitment

faced was: “How do we teach democracy (91)?” If teachers of rhetoric

sight of this, then the epistemology, ethics, aesthetics or philosophy of

The On-going Relevance

pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism. We have, unfortunately, spent

them to see beyond the limits of professional philosophy; this is part of

this happens is a matter for philosophy to explain, but how it happens

Language is always a form of action and in its instrumental use is always

The main implication of Dewey’s position is that objective meanings

communion … It [democracy] will have its consummation when free

Dewey, John. 1916 [1944]. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the

Richard McKeon in the

Let’s consider four topics together: Richard McKeon, pragmatism,

© The Author(s) 2019 23

Who Was Richard McKeon?

[1990], 1975, 1982).

attention to “problems…of relating theory and practice in sciences,

Coming out of these experiences, McKeon was a scholar who com-

McKeon and the Pragmatist Tradition

(a) a historically embedded array of texts, topoi, and ideas—an intellectual

In those courses he dwelled on the term which was to become so impor-

context and diversified circumstances in which problems arise and ideas

McKeon’s recollection provides evidence of the lasting impression left

Thomist Etienne Gilson would underscore to McKeon in Paris.

pitched at Columbia (Depew 2000). Through Woodbridge, McKeon

“the tool of tools” through which meanings and communities develop

positivist notions of history as the scientific collection of facts, McKeon

A Turn to Communication and Culture

insights arose “from conferring, particularly…[through] UNESCO, with

language is foundational. This is the way of sophistry, rhetoric, the lin-

practices of rhetoric and of adjustment to circumstances, on the other,

“habit-realism” on the one hand and the more strongly constructivist

On the Uses and On-going Relevance

Communication Studies and Philosophy

Richard McKeon in the

McKeon and the Pragmatist Tradition

A Turn to Communication and Culture

Pragmatist Rhetoric for an Age of Communication

Hu Shi’s Search for the “Chinese Sophist”

Hu’s Place in the Pragmatist Tradition

Hu’s Search for Logical Method in Ancient China

Echoes of Pragmatism in India: Bhimrao

Why Consider Ambedkar as Part

Echoes of Deweyan Pragmatism in “Annihilation