[In the following review, Brick offers a positive assessment of The American Evasion of Philosophy.]

The title of this book [The American Evasion of Philosophy] is laudatory, not pejorative. Here evasion is emancipation: Turning away from “epistemology-centered philosophy” and its search for absolute standards of knowledge and ethics can release intellectual energy for cultural criticism, political action, and social change. That transformation of intellect, Cornel West says, is the burden and promise of American pragmatism broadly defined. In this subtle and complex account of pragmatism’s development and meaning. West demonstrates an enormous range of reading and reflection, a bold, almost acrobatic style of argument, and a nondogmatic sensitivity to the virtues in diverse currents of thought.

West’s “genealogy” charts three groups of intellectuals: those who in different ways developed key pragmatist ideas of experience, historical relativism, personal creativity, and communal belonging (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey); those who struggled with the pragmatist legacy when twentieth-century political catastrophes imposed a new “tragic” sense of limits on Emersonian and Deweyan optimism (Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling); and those who preserved the pragmatist bent of mind in postwar academic philosophy and finally championed a Dewey revival in the 1970s (W. V. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Wilfred Sellars, and Richard Rorty). West’s balanced appreciation and critique leads to his own proposal of “prophetic pragmatism” (a standpoint rooted in African-American liberation theology) as a synthesis of strains drawn particularly from Emerson, Dewey, and Du Bois.

Like historian Robert Westbrook, West rebuts claims that Dewey promoted corporate liberalism and applauds instead the radical, quasi-socialist implications of Dewey’s ideas of democracy. West argues, however, that Dewey’s ties to middle-class and professional means of reform left him with a perspective politically impoverished by its distance from the more lively, disruptive sources of social change among exploited classes and groups. Rorty’s work, a major influence on West’s thinking, is also too limited in West’s view by narrow class and cultural loyalties, which deprive Rorty of a critical standpoint beyond the bourgeois liberal norms of the established United States political community.

West’s critique of Rorty’s Dewey revival is incomplete, however. He refrains from challenging Rorty’s philosophical antirealism, and though he repeatedly (but casually) calls for complementing pragmatism with Marxist and other radical social analyses of “modes of production, state apparatuses, [and] bureaucratic institutions,” he never fully clarifies which elements of such analyses he chooses to confirm and which not. Readers may also wonder whether West’s broad definition of pragmatism comes close to reviving the old view of it as “America’s philosophy” rather than as a historically specific product of reflections on the meaning of science and modernity in a period of rapid industrialization. It is the spirit of the book as a whole, however, that counts in West’s favor and makes his pragmatist vision of a new kind of intellectual life inspiring. That new intellectual life would escape the caste consciousness of the academy without dismissing worthy intellectual traditions or norms of scholarly rigor, and it would look outward as an ally of the oppressed to social and political life at large. For offering a compelling portrait of that allegiance and that vision, West deserves the greatest appreciation and applause.