[In the following essay, Stone claims that despite Arnold's largely unfavorable view of American culture, he appealed to American intellectuals and that his philosophy has been an inspiration for many American pragmatists, including John Dewey and William James.]

I am more and more convinced that the world tends to become more comfortable for the mass, and more uncomfortable for those of any natural gift or distinction—and it is as well perhaps that it should be so—for hitherto the gifted have astonished and delighted the world, but not trained or inspired or in any real way changed it—and the world might do worse than to dismiss too high pretentions, and settle down on what it can see and handle and appreciate.

Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, January 7, 1852

I am finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history.

William James, A Pluralistic Universe

Our neglect of the traditions of the past, with whatever this negligence implies in the way of spiritual impoverishment of our life, has its compensation in the idea that the world is recommencing and being remade under our eyes.

John Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism”

Here or nowhere is America!

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

While pleased that Clough liked “The Scholar-Gipsy,” Arnold persisted in asking his friend, “but what does it do for you?” The greatest poets—Homer, Shakespeare—animate; and “‘The complaining millions of men [who] / Darken in labour and pain’” (Arnold is quoting from his “The Youth of Nature”) desire “something to animate and enoble them—not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their dreams.” In 1853 Arnold called this feeling “the basis of [his] nature—and of [his] poetics.”¹ What does poetry—or, for that matter, criticism or culture—do for you? The utilitarian-sounding question may seem strange coming from an Oxford-trained idealist; but, as I have argued in the preceding chapter, Arnold's idealism is inextricably linked to his emphasis on practice. Like his hermeneuticist descendant Hans-Georg Gadamer, Arnold sees knowledge and action, Hellenism and Hebraism, as incomplete without the other. By now we have seen an Arnold who upholds principles of unity and authority coexisting with an Arnold who praises diversity and who questions dogmas and traditions. There is the Arnold who defers to Burke and Newman, and the Arnold who identifies with Byron and Heine. And yet all these seemingly contradictory selves are part of an individual totality—the personal equivalent of what William James called our “multiverse”—and this polyphonic self pursues a pragmatic goal. If a pragmatist may be defined as a pluralist with standards—someone who believes in subjecting the doctrines inherited from the past, and the unexamined presumptions of the present, to critical reflection; one whose aim is the improvement of the kingdom of this earth, bolstered by humanist ideals that promote social solidarity and individual transformation—then Arnold must be seen as an important precursor of pragmatism.

While acknowledging it to be a “vague, ambiguous, and overworked word,” Richard Rorty nevertheless names pragmatism as “the chief glory of [America's] intellectual tradition. No other American writers have offered so radical a suggestion for making our future different from our past, as have James and Dewey.” In recent years, in large part owing to Rorty, pragmatism has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity,² having become a philosophical refuge and sounding board for a variety of fin de siècle intellectuals: frustrated liberals and enraged radicals, post-Marxists and anti-Marxists, individualists and communitarians, aesthetes and social activists. At a time when many intellectuals feel themselves at odds with the establishment, and at the same time oppose the nihilism and fatalism implicit in some recent academic trends, pragmatism has offered a belief both in the potential for change and in the power of ideas and ideals to effectuate change. And yet, despite Arnold's tendency to regard “America” as symbol of what should be avoided by lovers of culture, this most American of philosophies restates, in many ways, and builds upon some of the Arnoldian attitudes I have been examining for the past four chapters.

Arnold has had an extraordinary appeal for American intellectuals, from North American Review editor Charles Eliot Norton down to the editor of Arnold's Complete Prose Works, R. H. Super. He has been admired by, and inspired, some of America's best minds, beginning with Emerson and Henry James. In recent years, he has attracted such New York intellectuals as Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Morris Dickestein.³ It should not be a surprise, then, that American pragmatists have seen in Arnold a useful ally or a valuable adversary. Rorty includes him among the literary critics whose example he thinks philosophers may profit from. William James drew on Arnold's religious writings and (surprisingly, given his patriotism) praised Arnold's final and harshest piece on “Civilisation in the United States” as “very sensible and good.”⁴ And Dewey conducted a dialogue with Arnold that extended over six decades. In 1890, two years after Arnold's death, Dewey devoted the major portion of a lecture on “Poetry and Philosophy” to a sensitive and highly revealing analysis of Arnold—all the more surprising coming from a philosopher often accused of being indifferent to the arts, but who, early on, showed sympathetic awareness of Arnold's depiction of mankind's tragic plight.

Dewey's apostle Sidney Hook has characterized pragmatism in terms both of its “melioristic” thrust and its “tragic sense of life.” The hopeful aspect of pragmatism is contained within three of its premises: first, that “the universe [is] open,” with the result that human “possibilities [are] real”; second, that “the future [depends] in part upon what” we do or leave undone; and, third, that ideas are “potentially plans of action.” Rather than supporting a materialistic status quo, as some have charged, pragmatism must be seen as “a method of clarifying ideas” and thus as “a method of criticism.” But along with this sense of the “efficacy of human ideals and actions” comes an awareness of “their inescapable limitations.” For it is a finite world that we inhabit—one cut off from divine support or guidance—and living with finitude means accepting a world of “inescapable tragedy.”⁵ Hook's emphasis on the tragic side of pragmatism is supported by a look at Dewey's 1890 lecture. Dewey begins by quoting the opening of Arnold's “The Study of Poetry,” with its account of how, in a time of dying creeds and dissolving traditions, people are increasingly “turning to poetry for consolation, for stay, for interpretation.” Speaking as one for whom philosophy and science should provide the “method and standard” for truth, Dewey nonetheless notes that Arnold's poetry—with its awareness of man's “isolation from nature, his isolation from fellow-man”—sounds a chord of authenticity that cannot be denied. Comparing Arnold's “Stoic” stance with Browning's more optimistic verses (Browning's sense that “the world was made for man, and that man was made for man,” which Dewey would obviously prefer to be closer to the truth than Arnold's view), Dewey contends that “Arnold's message has weight and penetration with us, … because that message conveys something of the reality of things.” What the philosophy of 1890, by contrast, lacks is just such an awareness of the Zeitgeist held by such poets as Arnold and Browning. What is needed, then, is a bridging of “this gap of poetry from science,” of a uniting of the poet's sense of reality with the philosopher's and scientist's method for transforming that reality.⁶

Even with his hopeful conclusion—and from the latter part of the nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century, Dewey was remarkable for his hopefulness—Dewey's recital of all those Arnold passages that undermine optimism (“Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born”; “The sea of faith / Was once, too, at the full”; “Thou hast been, shalt be, art alone”; and so on) indicate how closely he had studied the poet. But he had also absorbed the hopeful side of Arnold the critic, the Arnold who looked to education and the forces of culture to release humankind from its tendency to anarchy, intolerance, and provinciality. In a fragment of autobiography dating from 1930, Dewey, judging the present from the point of view of the future, dismissed “the whole of western European history [as] a provincial episode,” and he called on philosophers “to help get rid of the useless lumber that blocks our highways of thought, and strive to make straight and open the paths that lead to the future.” Not for the first time in his work, Dewey is echoing the theme of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”; and to underscore the resemblance, he concludes with Arnold's image of the forward-looking critic as he wanders through the wilderness: “Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate—unless one attempts to make oneself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.”⁷ It was Dewey's goal no less than it had been Arnold's to counter the individual sense of isolation with a social vision of solidarity.

In this chapter I will be exploring Arnold's affinities with the pragmatists: with William James, himself eminently Victorian in many of his conflicting attitudes, and not least in his desire to reconcile individual and religious needs with societal and scientific claims; with Rorty, whose mixture of private aestheticism and public liberalism, as well as whose ironic stance, bears some resemblance to that of the Arnoldian artist-critic; and finally with Dewey, whose faith in education as the instrument best capable of nourishing a cultivated and creative democracy resembles Arnold's own abiding faith. Arnold's description of himself, in the Introduction to Culture and Anarchy, as “a Liberal tempered by experience [and] reflection,” as, “above all, a believer in culture” (CPW, 5:88) is not a bad description of Dewey too. For if Arnold's keyword culture gives way to Dewey's keyword democracy, the two terms were intertwined from the beginning in Arnold's mind. Arnold's culture was never meant to be a defense against democracy but was meant rather to be a preparation for, and safeguard of, democracy.⁸ Apostles of culture, he repeatedly argued, are necessarily proponents of equality; and no culture is worth its name, he felt, that did not contain all its citizens (“all our fellow-men, in the East of London and elsewhere” [5:216]) in the goal of individual and societal transformation (“progress towards perfection”). As prelude to my last set of Arnoldian dialogues, therefore, I will be looking at perhaps the most pragmatic in tone of all his volumes, the fine and often overlooked collection of Mixed Essays (1879), which brings together his important essays on “Democracy” and “Equality,” as well as his eloquent tributes to Falkland and George Sand.

The author of the Mixed Essays is a more earnest and appealing Arnold than the combative author of the more quotable Culture and Anarchy. The years spent inspecting schools, reevaluating literary and religious texts, and reflecting on the spirit of the age had all intensified Arnold's belief in the need for ideals and in the value of conduct. Without ceasing to be a Hellenist, an advocate of beauty and intelligence (“sweetness and light”), he is more passionate now in his defense of “civilization”—a term that has displaced “culture” in the Preface to the new volume. Arnold has, in part, returned to literary subjects—to George Sand, to the French critic Edmond Scherer (and, through him, to Milton and Goethe)—but in order to examine what part literature plays in the “whole” of civilization, whose aim is the “humanisation of man,” all men, “in society.” To signal the continuity of his interests, Arnold includes in his new book the essay on “Democracy” that had served, two decades earlier, as Introduction to The Popular Education of France (1861). To it he added essays on Clarendon's (and Thomas Arnold's) beloved “Falkland,” on “Equality,” on “Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism,” and on the woeful state of British education (“Porro Unum Est Necessarium”). A “mixed” collection, indeed, and yet each essay illustrates Arnold's principle: “Whoever seriously occupies himself with literature will soon perceive its vital connection with other agencies” (CPW, 8:370).

The radical nature of Arnold's “Democracy” is evidenced if we put it in the context of the authors on the subject who preceded him, Tocqueville and Mill, and the pragmatists who succeeded him. On Liberty (1859) had appeared just two years before Arnold's Popular Education; but whereas Mill's argument is made in behalf of the “highly gifted” individual's right to develop himself, free from the dictates of the unreflecting “mass,” Arnold's plea is in behalf of that mass's right: “no longer individuals and limited classes only, but the mass of a community—to develop itself with the utmost possible fulness and freedom” (CPW, 2:8). Mill shares Tocqueville's fear of the “tyranny of the majority,” and he celebrates, in romantic fashion, the right of genius to resist and reshape public opinion. (Mill bristles, however, at the thought that he is “countenancing … ‘hero worship’” of a Carlylean nature; the Millite genius must not force the public into doing his bidding, but he does claim “freedom to point out the way.”)⁹ But Tocqueville had warned not only of the conformist power of public opinion but also of the excesses of individualism in America, where “Everyone shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there.” To the French observer, “individualism is of democratic origin”: it encourages a self-reliance that prides itself on “contempt for tradition” and disregard for the past, but that also occasions an alienation between man and man, throwing “him back forever upon himself alone and [threatening] in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”¹⁰ From Emerson to William James to Rorty, the individual has remained the romantic intellectual's focus of attention; and this romantic impulse has often pulled against pragmatism's activist streak. Thus, as a liberal of the laissez-faire school, Mill opposes state intervention in public education. He does not oppose the state's requiring that its children be educated, but he demands that parents be free “to obtain the education where and how they pleased.” To his mind, a state-run education will only mould “people to be exactly like one another,” and is thus to be resisted.¹¹ Mill's text has become a secular bible for conservatives and radicals alike, all those for whom freedom to go one's own way takes precedence over what Arnold, in Popular Education, called “the strong bond of a common culture” (2:89). In “My Countrymen,” Arnold assailed his fellow Liberals for failing to see that “Freedom … is a very good horse to ride;—but to ride somewhere” (5:22). And, like Dewey, he suggests that the worship of individual freedom is often done at the expense of the other two principles of the French Revolution, equality and fraternity.

Arnold begins “Democracy” with a glance at Mill's position that no amount of state action is permissible; but, unlike Mill, he accepts the fact that a new force is coming to power—that “democracy” is now in the process of “trying to affirm its own essence; to live, to enjoy, to possess the world, as aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it” (CPW, 2:7). Supporting the legacy of the French Revolution, Arnold notes how in France democracy has flourished with the aid of a massive state-run educational system, and how the French support the state because they see it working in their name. (As Dewey will say of democracy, it is the one political system in which the dualism between governor and governed disappears.)¹² In England, however, with its traditions supporting self-reliance, there is no rallying point to provide the uneducated masses with a sense of ideals existing beyond the self. “Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active,” Arnold maintains; “but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself” (2:18). Arnold is not setting up the state as an authoritarian ideal. Rather, he is positing an ideal of the solidarity of men, “a true bond of union,” in which the “best self” of each citizen finds a “rallying-point for the intelligence and for the worthiest instincts of the community” (2:19). To those who demand, “Leave us to ourselves!” Arnold suggests that they look at the present state of England, to the widespread indifference to beauty, the paucity of intelligence, the scarcity of essential services that such an attitude has prompted: “The State can bestow certain broad collective benefits, which are indeed not much if compared with the advantages already possessed by individual grandeur, but which are rich and valuable if compared with the make-shifts of mediocrity and poverty. A good thing meant for the many cannot well be so exquisite as the good things of the few; but it can easily, if it comes from a donor of great resources and wide power, be incomparably better than what the many could, unaided, provide for themselves” (2:21). To charge Arnold with elitism (as so many do) is to ignore where he stands when it comes to the sharing of education, culture, even health care.

It is in Arnold, not Mill, that Dewey's faith in democracy finds its true forebear. Dewey's early “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888) builds upon Arnold's position that each individual in a democracy is not to be seen as a “disorganized fragment” (as Sir Henry Maine claimed in his attack on Popular Government) but rather as a member of an “organism.” There is no such thing in reality as a “non-social individual,” Dewey maintains, and the Platonic (and liberal) notion that “democratic freedom” means “doing what one likes,” without respect for ideals, is wrongheaded. (“For men are solidary, or co-partners; and not isolated,” Arnold says in a late religious essay [CPW, 8:43].) For Dewey, democracy is itself an ideal, an ideal allowing for each person's right to fulfill himself; and the “democratic ideal includes liberty, because democracy without initiation from within [without that is, in Arnoldian terms, regard for one's “best self”], without an ideal chosen from within and freely followed from within, is nothing.” Dewey's democracy is thus “a social, that is to say, an ethical conception”; “it is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.” Dewey's vision of democracy is more idealized than Arnold's; but for both educators, the goal of their vocation is the guidance of the masses toward ideals of self-fulfillment (affirming “one's own essence”) and solidarity. Only a democracy enables every individual to follow the Nietzschean injunction to become what one is; only with “equality,” Dewey and Arnold agree, do we have an “ideal of humanity.” Dewey ends his essay on the same note with which Arnold ends his essay on George Sand: his may be an ideal, but (to cite James Russell Lowell) “‘I am one of those who believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis till it rests upon the ideal.’”¹³

The pragmatist thrust of Arnold's and Dewey's essays rests upon their belief in the efficacy of the ideal to move us forward. (“Perfection will never be reached,” Arnold says in the conclusion to “Democracy”; “but to recognize a period of transformation when it comes, and to adapt ourselves honestly and rationally to its laws, is perhaps the nearest approach to perfection of which men and nations are capable” [CPW, 2:29].) And they share an awareness that “civilisation” or “culture” is connected to “character,” to conduct. The Arnoldian sense of culture as Bildung (which I discussed in the last two chapters) is also Dewey's; and Dewey's democratic ideal (what he later calls “Creative Democracy”) is precisely that which Arnold advocated in “A French Eton,” wherein the transformation, the “growth in perfection,” of the individual is paralleled by the transformation of society as well (2:312-13). To turn from Arnold to a contemporary pragmatist like Rorty is to see how tenaciously this faith in democracy as Bildung has persisted, even in one for whom ideals and values are merely localized and transitory terms.

Rorty's career as philosopher has been the attempt, by turns ironical and serious, to justify both the aesthetic doctrine of self-fulfillment and the liberal appeal to solidarity—despite his sense that there is no foundation to support either belief. In “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” (in the Cambridge University Press reprint, capital letters are coyly dispensed with), Rorty's position is that the democratic society we live in is a worthy one even if he cannot offer philosophical reasons to support the claim. (Elsewhere, he celebrates “bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far, while regretting that it is irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the population of the planet.”) Rorty supports a Rawlsian view of democratic society, in which the “Socratic commitment to free exchange of views [exists] without the Platonic commitment to the possibility of universal agreement”; and he is willing to accept an image of the self as a “centerless web of historically conditioned beliefs and desires.” Any attempt to speak of enduring values existing outside or within the self is clearly a waste of time. Claiming Dewey as his source, Rorty argues that “communal and public disenchantment is the price we pay for individual and private spiritual liberation,” and that this “liberation” is worth any regressive return to the realm of “philosophical reflection” or “religion.” And yet, one can only marvel at the tenacity whereby this disbeliever in all absolutes (Rorty describes his procedure as a kind of Socratic slapstick, a “joshing” of his fellow citizens out of their earnestness) clings, with the sincerity of a romantic pragmatist, to the belief in “individual liberation” and to a faith in democracy as affording “experiments in cooperation.”¹⁴ Even without the capital letters, democracy retains a metaphysical sense of priority.

In the Mixed Essays Arnold readily admits the lack of absolute standards, and he denies the value of all systematic judgments (“altogether unprofitable”). Still, he points to the examples of Falkland and Goethe and George Sand for having reflected lucidly and acted generously. Together, they embody an ideal of civilization whose components (in Arnold's view) are the liberty that allows for human “expansion” and a sense of “equality” that encourages human civility (CPW, 8:371-72). Falkland's personal civility during the time of the English civil wars makes him “a martyr of sweetness and light” (8:206) to Arnold. Choosing to fight on the Royalist side, despite his awareness of its aristocratic “vices” and “delusions,” Falkland realized that the alternative was an unsound Puritan cause that promoted religious “narrowness” and “intellectual poverty” (201). In giving “himself to the cause which seemed to him least unsound” (204) because its opponent was opposed to the progressive spirit of the age, but which contained no more “truth” than its antagonist, Falkland found himself in a “tragic”—and, for Arnold, modern—dilemma. A pragmatist's “tragic sense,” Hook argues, derives precisely from this sense that one is often forced in practice to choose between what is “good” and what is “right.”¹⁵ For Arnold, looking at the unsoundness of the Liberal and Conservative positions of his own time, the individual can only act in behalf of what is right for the future. Falkland's “lucidity of mind and largeness of temper,” Arnold declares “… link him with the nineteenth century. He and his friends, by their heroic and hopeless stand against the inadequate ideas dominant in their time, kept open their communications with the future, lived with the future …

To our English race, with its insularity, its profound faith in action, its contempt for dreamers and failers, inadequate ideals in life, manners, government, thought, religion, will always be a source of danger. Energetic action makes up, we think, for imperfect knowledge. We think that all is well, that a man is following “a moral impulse,” if he pursues an end which he “deems of supreme importance.” We impose neither on him nor on ourselves the duty of discerning whether he is right in deeming it so.

Hence our causes are often as small as our noise about them is great.

(8:204-5)

If the “impassioned seekers of a new and better world” such as Falkland fail, Arnold notes, paraphrasing George Sand, that “proves nothing … for the world as it is. Ineffectual they may be, but the world is still more ineffectual, and it is the world's course which is doomed to ruin, not theirs” (CPW, 8:223). Calling himself a liberal not of the present but “of the future,” Arnold identified with the French novelist. In the eloquent essay devoted to her, he speaks of the power of ideals to form “a purged and renewed human society” (220). Sand's idealism is based on intense love—for nature, for the past, for all mankind, beginning with the French peasantry. He sees her as a Wordsworth devoid of any post-Wordsworthian Romantic egoism: “She regarded nature and beauty, not with the selfish and solitary joy of the artist who but seeks to appropriate them for his own purposes [but] … as a vast power of healing and delight for all” (226). But she is also a daughter of the Revolution, dismayed by the ideological hatreds of French intellectuals. Rorty has written, without irony, of the ethical power of “edifying” novelists. For Arnold, no novelist was more edifying than Sand, none more committed to what she called “the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it” (219).¹⁶

Having invoked a pre-Deweyan faith in idealism in the pieces on Falkland and Sand, Arnold argues elsewhere in the Mixed Essays the pragmatic view that human development requires a critical examination of the defects of the present. (Pragmatism means “death on bunkum and pretentious abstractions,” Hook says, “especially when they are capitalized as Success or Historical Destiny or Reality.”)¹⁷ In “Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism,” Arnold blames the English, including his fellow Liberals, for failing to see the justice of Irish grievances; and he lambasts the middle class, which prides itself on “knowing how to make money, but not knowing how to live when they have made it” (CPW, 8:338). In “Porro Unum Est Necessarium,” he points up once again (as Dewey will devote his life to arguing) the value of public education in creating a sense of “social solidity” (8:361), a solidarity that in France translates into an agreeable social life. “If there is one need more crying than another,” he says, “it is the need of the English middle class to be rescued from a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners. And what could do so much to deliver them and to render them happier, as to give them proper education, public education, to bring them up on the first plane; to make them a class homogeneous, intelligent, civilised?” (369).

In the great essay “Equality” (a remarkable act of confrontation on Arnold's part, since his first audience was the Royal Institute, “‘the most aristocratic and exclusive place out’” [CPW, 8:283]), Arnold attributes the lack of civilization in England to its “religion of inequality” (8:303). Civilization, “the humanisation of man in society,” requires that we “make progress towards this, our true and full humanity” (286); but England, with its materialized upper class, its vulgarized middle class, and its brutalized working class, perpetuates a condition in which incivility rules. It is not by the widespread possession of material goods but “by the humanity of their manners that men are equal,” Arnold contends. “‘A man thinks to show himself my equal,’” says Goethe, “‘by being grob,—that is to say, coarse and rude; he does not show himself my equal, he shows himself grob.’ But a community having humane manners is a community of equals, and in such a community great social inequalities have really no meaning” (289). However, to attain a community of civility, there must be political equality. No one, Arnold daringly (and pragmatically) argues, has “natural rights”—neither peasant nor nobleman (285). Democratic France, thanks to its “spirit of society” (286), has produced an atmosphere in which people of all conditions feel a sense of companionship with, not alienation from, each other. And thus, Arnold notes (looking to the Liberals as they grapple with the Irish Question), the Alsatians want to be part of the affable French “social system,” whereas “we offer to the Irish no such attraction” (291).

Acknowledging democracy to be the political power of the future, Arnold deplores the examples of the two classes who have hitherto held power: the aristocracy, incapable of ideas or an aesthetic sense (“They may imagine themselves to be in pursuit of beauty,” he scoffs; “but how often, alas, does the pursuit come to little more than dabbling a little in what they are pleased to call art, and making a great deal of what they are pleased to call love!” (CPW, 8:301]); the middle-class heirs to Puritanism, drugged with religion and business, not knowing, “good and earnest people as they were, that to the building up of human life there belong all those other powers also,—the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners” (294). In what is perhaps the most passionately argued of all his essays, Arnold charges “that we are trying to live on with a social organisation of which the day is over. Certainly equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilisation. But, with such inequality as ours, a perfect civilisation is impossible” (304). More than fifty years later, across the ocean, Dewey would make a case similar to Arnold's about the inefficacy of present-day (1935) liberalism, and would argue that it “must now become radical, meaning by ‘radical’ perception of the necessity of thoroughgoing changes in the set-up of institutions and corresponding activity to bring the changes to pass.” And, for both writers, education is the “first object” of a “renascent liberalism,” education's task being the encouragement of “the habits of mind and character, the intellectual and moral patterns, that are somewhere near even with the actual movements of events.”¹⁸ For the genuine “well-being of the many,” as Arnold argues in “Equality,” “comes out more and more distinctly … as the object we must pursue” (289).

Arnold's pragmatism is, in some respects, more progressive-minded than William James's. On the subject of democracy, for example, James resembles Carlyle more than he does Arnold or Dewey. “If democracy is to be saved,” James avowed in 1907, “it must catch the higher, healthier tone” that intellectuals trained in the humanities possess. The aim of the humanities, he says, is to teach stimulating “biographies”—to show what great men have achieved so that we may be provided with diverse “standards of the excellent and durable.” History, for Carlyle (for whom democracy meant “despair of finding any Heroes to govern you”), was synonymous with biography, the biographies of heroes. James's Carlylean hero worship is evident in the essays “Great Men and Their Environment” and “The Importance of Individuals” (1880) and in his celebration of those who act, who practice the “strenuous mood,” who break the rules, and who exert their free will in defiance of deterministic philosophies. Philosophy itself, James states in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), is not the expression of a man's “reasons” but of his “vision”: “all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.”¹⁹

James's strong individualistic streak—a compound of Emerson's self-reliance, Carlyle's hero worship, and Mill's libertarianism—is accompanied by an unidealized view of the masses. Arnold's disgusted reaction to the Hyde Park rioters of 1866 (a prime example of “doing as one likes,” in Culture and Anarchy) pales in comparison to James's reaction to demos in action, whether illustrated in the imperialist war fever occasioned by the Spanish-American War or in the “lynching epidemic” that occurred in Massachusetts in 1903. James's tribute to the college-bred (“the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries”) as a bulwark “in our democracy, where everything else is so shifting,” is in keeping with his fear of that human “carnivore,” the uncivilized multitude. In 1892 James urged teachers to “wean” students “from their native cruelty”; and in his outcry against the lynchings, he gives way to a Darwinian pessimism absent (perhaps to their loss) in Arnold or Dewey: “The average church-going Civilizee realizes, one may say, absolutely nothing of the deeper currents of human nature, or of the aboriginal capacity for murderous excitement which lies sleeping even in his own bosom. Religion, custom, law and education have been piling their pressure upon him for centuries mainly with the one intent that his homicidal potentialities should be kept under.”²⁰

Nearly two decades prior to these remarks, James took issue with Ernest Renan's virulently antidemocratic sentiments. While admitting his own “dislike” for the Commune (Arnold, in contrast, had sympathized with “that fixed resolve of the [French] working class to count for something and live”), James maintained that the new “Democratic religion which is invading the Western world” would probably provide for a “political or spiritual hero” to stand “firm till a new order built itself around him.” In the Talks to Teachers, he described his “pluralistic or individualistic philosophy” as one whose “practical consequence … is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,” that is to say (with a nod to Mill), “the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant.” James renamed his philosophy on several occasions—calling it, variously, “pragmatism” (in lectures dedicated to Mill, “our leader were he alive today”), “meliorism,” “pluralism,” and “radical empiricism”; but in all its incarnations, he sought to balance a “personal and romantic view of life” with a scientific regard for the “facts of experience.” Dewey perhaps intended to minimize the confusions occasioned by such a balancing act when he described James as being “possessed of the spirit of the artist.” One need not be too critical of a thinker who “sees the functions of the mind in terms of drama, and records his insights as though he were writing for the theatre.” But Dewey recognized that if James veered toward singularity at times—a kind of romantic-aesthetic waywardness—he also aimed at making artists of his auditors and readers. Paradoxically, the Carlylean individualist promoted a “radical liberalism,” a “philosophy which invites each man to create his own future world.”²¹

In the lectures on Pragmatism James elaborates on the “creative” aspect of “cognitive” life. “The world stands really malleable,” he declares, “waiting to receive its final touches at our hands” (P, 167). Truth, hence, is not something we find, but something we make and test: “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events” (133). It is for remarks of this sort that Rorty has celebrated Jamesian pragmatism for having rejected all truths or values existing prior to the self (truths of science, religion, or “Philosophy”) or pertaining to the self—for having promulgated the modernist “sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.” What we are left with, thus, is a “post-Philosophical culture—in which men and women [feel] themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond.”²² But Rorty's reading ignores the way in which James's pragmatism, like Arnold's, contains a wistful dialogue between the finite and the “Beyond”; it ignores the ways in which James is very much a man of his time, the late Victorian period, and in some respects even behind his time.

Born only twenty years after Arnold (in 1842), James found himself caught in the same dilemma as other Victorians, having seen the grounds for belief eroded by scientific discoveries and yet clinging to a “will to believe.” James's pragmatism puts itself forward as a “solution” to those who want both “the scientific loyalty to facts …, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type” (P, 33, 26). Hence, F. C. S. Schiller, James's English disciple (who preferred the name “humanism” to “pragmatism”), speaks of the “middle path” this philosophy offers between naturalism and idealism: “it will neither reject ideals because they are not realised, nor yet despise the actual because it can conceive ideals.”²³ To a considerable degree, James is updating Carlyle's own “solution,” his “Natural Supernaturalism,” which redirects human attention to this world and this time sphere. James's focus on the finite and the temporal restates Carlyle's view (expressed as early as 1831, in “Characteristics”) that we are “beings that exist in Time, by virtue of Time, and are made of Time.” One might call James's philosophy a version of the Goethean idea, translated and preached by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, “that your ‘America is here or nowhere.’ … Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal.”²⁴ James correctly labels pragmatism “a new name for some old ways of thinking” (empiricist methods, in his case, that extend back to Socrates and Aristotle), but he also sees his efforts as part of a “new dawn” in which the acceptance of our finitude allows us to decide what we are going to make of ourselves and our world (P, 45, 18, 86). “I am finite once for all,” he affirms in A Pluralistic Universe, “and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history” (APU, 48). Yet it is a characteristic of our historical natures to reach beyond ourselves, James avows—not to a Deweyan sense of community but toward God. Using his pragmatic argument that whatever “works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word” is “true,” James is able to accept the divine hypothesis as one that “certainly does work” (192).

Gerald Myers has compellingly argued that James's “pragmatism was developed to make room for faith.”²⁵ Indeed, if “democracy” is the thread in Dewey's writings and “culture” in Arnold's, then, “religion” is the omnipresent theme in James. “The most interesting and valuable things about a man,” James proclaims, “are his ideals and over-beliefs” (WB, xiii). In this respect, James is echoing Arnold's view, in his religious writings, that “the chief exercise of [mankind's] higher thought and emotion which they have, is their religion” (CPW, 7:117); and James would scarcely dispute Arnold's sense that “the chief guide and stay of conduct, so far as it has any at all, is their religion” (117). Given his sense of humanity as “carnivores,” James might appear to be adopting a utilitarian defense of religion as an instrument of control. But that is by no means the intention of the essays that make up The Will to Believe (1897) or of the lectures that pay tribute to The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). His idol Mill had modified his position on the “utility of religion”: having argued in the 1850s that “those great effects on human conduct, which are commonly ascribed to motives derived directly from religion, have mostly for their proximate cause the influence of human opinion,” Mill suggested, two decades later in “Theism,” that the “hope” born of religion might well promote a sense of fellow-feeling and duty in believers.²⁶ Mill's view (startling to his fellow Liberals, for whom, as Arnold complained, “religion is a noxious thing … that … must die out” [CPW, 7:117]), which denies certainty to both believer and atheist, is James's starting point in The Will to Believe volume. But James quickly makes it clear that what Mill condoned, and Arnold praised, as an aid to mankind's social well-being, was for himself the most personal of concerns.

In the Preface to The Will to Believe, James agrees, with Arnold, that most men lack a sense of Hellenism (“criticism”) rather than a sense of Hebraism (“faith”), but the “academic audiences” he is addressing (and of which he is a member), “fed already on science, have a very different need” (WB, x). For such people, “criticism” is not what is wanted; and, for James in particular, the Hellenizing that Arnold brought to bear on the Bible is inadequate in certain respects. Where Arnold, for example, treats Aberglaube (the belief in miracles or immortality) as “a kind of fairy-tale,” part of the Bible's “poetry” but not something subject to scientific verification (CPW, 6:212), James accepts this “extra-belief.” He calls it “over-belief” in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and affirms that this “over-belief on which [he is] ready to make his personal venture” persuades him that “divine facts … exist.”²⁷ Preeminent among these divine facts is God Himself; and here James rejects Arnold's abstract definition in God and the Bible. James wants “A power not ourselves, … which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which recognizes us” (WB, 122), a personal God, in short. In A Pluralistic Universe, James concedes “that the only God worthy of the name must be finite” (125) if human beings are to exert their freedom of will (an article of faith to Jamesian pragmatism). Elsewhere, James maintains, “The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another” (VRE, 264). Yet James wants to be true to the “unseen world” no less than to the “seen world” (295).

A guiding principle of the French critics admired by Arnold was “ne pas être dupe.” James, by advocating the “right to believe” (the title he claims he should have given his famous essay), contends “that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world” (WB, 19). In an early essay on Renan (1876), James criticized the “dandified despair” flaunted by this favorite of his brother Henry and of Arnold; and his subsequent references to Renan are startling in their ferocity.²⁸ In Varieties, he assaults Renan's “Who cares?” attitude, the French critic's willingness to treat life as an ironic spectacle rather than a strenuous activity (46-47). “The name of Renan,” he later notes, “would doubtless occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith” (380). In “The Dilemma of Determinism,” James assails this Renanian attitude as “subjectivism,” a spectator's view of life that inevitably degenerates into “the corruptest curiosity,” and whose worst sin is “ethical indifference” (WB, 170-71). Condemning the “romanticism” of Renan and his aesthetic kind, James invokes Carlyle to say for him, “Hang your sensibilities!” But if the Carlylean message is one Arnold would support (“It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for our recognition” [174]), James implicates Arnoldian culture, in debased form, among his villains: “if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children of the light,” he snarls, “a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom” (172).

The James who pits Carlyle against Renan is not an author one might expect to appeal to another connoisseur of “irony,” Richard Rorty. And Rorty is indeed uncomfortable with the James who writes (defying Rorty's antifoundationalism), “If this life be not a real fight in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals, from which we may withdraw at will.” Rorty has written movingly of the pragmatist enterprise as a matter of “our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right,”²⁹ yet he has also praised the Renanian aesthetic antihumanists, Nietzsche and Foucault, who mock such presumptions of solidarity. For James, our ethics and our sanity depend upon our having a something Out-there “which recognizes us.” Never mind, he argues, the possibility that we may be duped: “The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious” (WB, 27). Despite Nietzsche's scorn for saintliness (an attitude James finds “itself sickly enough” [VRE, 295]), James compares the visions of saints to “Utopian dreams of social justice” (dreams like those Arnold found in George Sand) that “help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness and are slow leavens of a better order” (VRE, 285). In the conclusion to Varieties, James asserts that “we belong to” a region beyond self (call it “the mystical region, or the supernatural region”) “in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong” (399). In the last resort, he avows, we belong to the supreme “other,” to whom James gives the name of God: “We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled” (399).

James's pragmatist ethics requires a religious sphere, as well as a Carlylean work ethic, to draw mankind out of its isolation and potential murderousness. The melancholy tone of much of Arnold's poetry—the sense, that so haunted Dewey, that “We mortal millions live alone”—finds expression in the famous description, in James's Principles of Psychology, of the “stream of consciousness”: “Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.” What the scientist in James and the poet in Arnold had deduced required a counterweight: religion for James, culture for Arnold. For both, what the facts of “experience” reveal, the values emanating from something that transcends the self must counteract. In James's case, science may speak in support of determinism, but “ethics makes a counter-claim” to the effect that “our wills are ‘free.’”³⁰ Comparing Arnold and James, one notes this paradox: while the stoical Englishman trusts to the future (what else is culture but an ideal guiding us forward?), the optimistic American instinctively retreats to the emotional position of a Carlyle or to the Tennyson of In Memoriam, who answers the voice of scientific determinism with a confident “I have felt.” Whereas the melancholy poet in Arnold gave way to the critic speaking of social solidarity, the scientist in James inevitably bowed to the “personal and romantic” voice. Perhaps even more so than his brother or Arnold, William James was indeed “possessed by the spirit of the artist.”

Of Rorty, too, it has been said that he writes with “A Touch of the Poet.” One might describe Rorty's career to date as an attempt to redefine philosophy along the lines of romantic poetics, which Rorty sees as the progenitor of pragmatism. In an era when many English professors routinely profess their distaste for “literature”—seeing it as an agent of hegemonic forces, or else essaying to deconstruct its authorial pretensions—it is touching to find a philosopher who praises the power of literature so unstintingly and who draws on credos of literary modernism (such as “Make it new”) that have become virtually threadbare through overuse. Lacking James's Victorian confidence in the seriousness of “this life,” Rorty has occasionally taken refuge in an ironic posture (he calls it “light-minded aestheticism”) that resembles Arnold's notorious “vivacity.” Both have been criticized accordingly.³¹ One thinks of the famous Max Beerbohm cartoon of Arnold being addressed by his earnest niece (the future novelist Mary Augusta Ward), “Why, Uncle Matthew, Oh why, will not you be always serious?” Arnold's reply (“My vivacity is but the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark, the last glimpse of colour before we all go into drab,—the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future” [CPW, 3:287]) is prelude to Rorty's apologia in “The Priority of Democracy.” Here he claims that his aim of “joshing” his “fellow citizens … out of the habit of taking these [traditional philosophical] topics so seriously” is not without a “moral purpose.”³²

Arnold's targets were the enemies of enlightenment, the latter-day Philistines; and his goal, as he told his mother, was to do “what will sap them intellectually.” But where Arnold saw Protestant Dissent, with its opposition to culture and state-run education, as the leading obstacle standing in the way of England's necessary transformation, Rorty initially saw “Philosophy,” with its pretensions of having discovered universal truth, as the first obstacle to be cleared away. At most, according to Rorty, philosophers can provide an edifying conversation for the benefit of the Zeitgeist. Rorty's recent criticism of neo-Marxist ideologues resembles Arnold's criticism of the Dissenters—both groups sharing a naive faith in the truth of dogma; both incapable of appreciating beauty or art, but seeing them only as forms of “ideology.” (Interestingly, Rorty, like Arnold, wrote poetry in his youth.) Attracted initially to the fashionably antifoundationalist views of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Rorty soon realized that his closest affinity was to the unfashionable Dewey, whose hope had been “that philosophy will join with poetry as Arnold's ‘criticism of life.’”³³

As Rorty's enthusiasm for Heidegger has ebbed, his enthusiasm for Dewey has intensified. “What seems to me most worth preserving in Dewey's work,” Rorty has recently affirmed, “is his sense of the gradual change in human beings' self-image which has taken place in recorded history—the change from a sense of their dependence upon something antecedently present to a sense of the utopian possibilities of the future, the growth of their ability to mitigate their finitude by a talent for self-creation.” Beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty has praised Dewey's democratic vision: “in his ideal society, culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement.”³⁴ Rorty's first book also draws on Gadamer's preference for “edifying” philosophy over “systematic” philosophy (a preference shared by Arnold), and he invokes Gadamer's substitution of “the notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of ‘knowledge’ as the goal of thinking.” However, this crucial German term, so important to Arnold's sense of culture and Gadamer's sense of the humanities (a term, for both of them, linked to knowledge), is translated by Rorty to mean “edification,” a term that departs from Gadamerian hermeneutics to include personal projects that may be poetically “edifying” without being socially “constructive.” And here one can see a source of tension between Rorty's Deweyan allegiance and his romantic-aesthetic predilections. Dewey, after all, sought to break down dualisms—as Arnold implicitly did when he defined knowledge in terms of practice, Hebraism in terms of Hellenism—particularly the dichotomy between self and society. For Rorty, aesthetic delight in the workings of the self (a mixture of Hellenism, Emersonian self-reliance, Germanic Bildung, and Bloomian genius-worship) coexists with, but does not necessarily interpenetrate his liberal Deweyan faith in the advancement of the community. For art, as Rorty realizes (to the dismay of the ideologues), does not necessarily serve the people. Like the poetic (but not the critical) Arnold, Rorty sees finite man as inescapably isolated—detached from anything “out there.” Perhaps with Arnold's reversal of attitude in mind, Rorty contends, in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) that there is no “something, not ourselves, which makes for rigor.” “Both the Age of Faith and the Enlightenment seem beyond recovery.” The modern self must give up any pretense of seeing “things steadily and [seeing] them whole,” he says, and instead must “take a nominalistic, ironic view of oneself.”³⁵

Rorty's rejection of a humanistic hermeneutics in favor of aesthetic pragmatism has social and ethical “consequences,” as he makes clear in his second book. Discussing the transformation of “Nineteenth-Century Idealism” into “Twentieth-Century Textualism,” he traces the establishment of a romantically imbued cultural criticism (a critical dynasty extending from Coleridge to Arnold to Trilling) that uses literature to fill up the space left by the disappearance of metaphysical certainties. But humanistic “culture,” for all its benign intent, lacks a unifying center; and the inevitable result of literature's displacement of religious or Enlightenment certainties has been the emergence of the private vocabularies of a Nietzsche or Foucault. The “strong” modernist textualist (admired by Harold Bloom) becomes, thus, for Rorty a heroic pragmatist whose goal is to cultivate novelty, privacy, and sometimes (in the case of Nietzsche and Foucault) contempt for humanity—all contrary to the ideal of the Arnoldian culture-critic. (In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche expressed contempt for the spread of higher education, what he called the “democratism of Bildung.”) “The stimulus to the intellectual's private moral imagination provided by his strong misreadings [the inevitable consequence of making things new], by his search for sacred wisdom,” Rorty observes, “is purchased at the price of his separation from his fellow-humans.” It is to Rorty's credit that he does not minimize the “moral cost” of the Nietzschean-Foucauldian enterprise; yet, as a believer in democracy, Rorty champions a democratic society “in which there is room for subjectivity and self-involvement, room for the kind of private spiritual development that politically irrelevant philosophers and novelists help us to achieve.” Rorty's reverence for creative genius resembles James's infatuation with heroism; but Rorty's democratic principles temper his wilder romantic flights. For just as Rorty is almost unique among academics in his faith in literature, he is also unique in his refusal to hate the democratic society that allows such creativity and self-creation to flourish.³⁶

Dewey figures in Rorty's pantheon as a liberal who championed solidarity and aesthetic self-creation, but who was perhaps too idealistic to see a potential conflict between the two aims, who saw them rather as interdependent. In the nineteenth century, Mill had similarly proposed a marriage of Coleridgean and Benthamite “half-truths,” an alliance of romantic ethics (true for all time) with a liberal faith in progress (the Zeitgeist at work). For Rorty, liberalism and romanticism make for necessary, if sometimes unwilling, bedfellows; and in place of Coleridge and Bentham, he offers us Foucault and Habermas, the former “an ironist who is unwilling to be a liberal,” the latter “a liberal who is unwilling to be an ironist.” By embracing both figures, Rorty concedes that Foucault may provide “a very bad model for a society,” yet he deserves a “poet's privileges.” For it is incumbent upon liberal democrats that they support a society in which all voices are heard: “The point of a liberal society is not to invent or create anything, but simply to make it as easy as possible for people to achieve their wildly different private ends without hurting each other.” (Elsewhere, he notes the usefulness of Foucault's work.)³⁷ Rorty's most unsatisfactory book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), speaks in behalf of private and public vocabularies, the Foucauldian language of ironic detachment and the Habermasian language of communitarian goals. But having jettisoned, in his early writings, any reason why we should sustain either vocabulary, let alone both, he can offer little more here than his personal vision of a “liberal utopia” in which “we ironists” cultivate private gardens while, at the same time, the social-minded dream of a “solidarity” that remains little more than a dream. Rorty's utopia contains an ivory tower for the ironists, plus a stable of writers below who produce edifying novels to sensitize the “nonintellectual” masses. Having reduced all intellectual positions to fictions alone, Rorty has no way to justify the value of his own distinctive fiction, his utopian vision.³⁸

In recent years, perhaps in response to the charge of aesthetic detachment, Rorty has strenuously demonstrated his liberal allegiances, often in defiance of the pervasive antiliberalism coming from left and right. He has also spoken in favor of the cultural canon, again in defiance of academic trendiness. “One good reason for having a high culture,” he maintains, in support of E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s defense of a communal heritage, “is to provide an alternative set of fantasies to those current in mass culture”—fantasies that serve as “stimuli to social change.” Like Arnold assailing his fellow-liberals for their lack of vision, Rorty has criticized the new left for clinging to an outmoded set of dogmas and for regarding itself as “a saving remnant which despises its opponents too much to argue with them.” In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991), he attacks the ideologues within the American academy who preach hatred against the democratic society that supports them, and he criticizes the “Foucauldian left” for “its failure to offer such visions and such suggestions” for change as the Deweyan liberals once did. Only a democratically based culture, he argues (as did Dewey and Arnold), offers room for hope, room for change: “if there is social hope,” he affirms, “it lies in the imagination—in people [like Dewey and Roberto Unger] describing a future in terms which the past did not use.”³⁹

“The School of Resentment,” Rorty wittily observes, “made up of people who can single-handedly deconstruct a large social theory faster than a Third World village can construct a small elementary school, does not take kindly to romance.” It prefers a “fruitless exercise in nostalgia” (Marxism) to the Deweyan faith in liberal democracy with its hope for the future. And yet, Rorty notes elsewhere, Dewey's philosophy of education does provide a vision and a method that have enabled society to move forward. At times Rorty's disdain for the past exceeds Dewey's own disdain. (“We think that Dewey and Weber absorbed everything useful Plato and Aristotle had to teach, and got rid of the residue.”)⁴⁰ But because Dewey felt that certain “traditions of the past” stood in the way of progress, he was willing to accept a certain “spiritual impoverishment” in exchange for his pragmatist faith “that the world is recommencing and being remade under our eyes.” “For the past as past is gone,” Dewey declares in Liberalism and Social Action (1935), “save for aesthetic enjoyment and refreshment, while the present is with us. Knowledge of the past is significant only as it deepens and extends our understanding of the present.” Such Deweyan disregard for the past might seem to mark a considerable gap between Dewey and Arnold, the former fixated (as Santayana complained) on the “foreground,”⁴¹ the latter supposedly enmeshed (in the eyes of detractors) in a flimsy web called “culture.” But many of Dewey's views are extensions or restatements of Arnoldian ideas, especially Arnold's views on education, culture, and democracy. The two men shared a common task as liberals and educators, and they shared a common faith in the efficacy of a democratic culture that included (or came to include, in Dewey's case) the fruits of science, religion, and art. For the remainder of the chapter, hence, I will be focusing on the Arnoldian side of Dewey, while underscoring, at the same time, Arnold's pragmatic side.

With regard to the past, Arnold is by no means animated by the nostalgia of Newman or Carlyle. “The past in itself has no attraction for him.” Peter Keating observes; “it is only in so far as the past illuminates, guides, or acts in any way as a model for the present, that he speaks with approval of its study.” Hence, Arnold looks for the “modern element” in past history (and literature), and he accuses liberals and Dissenters of failing to follow the spirit of the time. Dewey, too, takes a pragmatic view of the past. “We live,” he writes, “… in a haphazard mixture of a museum and a laboratory. Now it is certain that we cannot get rid of the laboratory and its consequences, and we cannot by a gesture of dismissal relegate the museum and its specimens to the void. There is the problem of selection, of choice, of discrimination. What are the things of the past that are relevant to our own lives and how shall they be reshaped to be of use?”⁴² What, in other words (to rephrase Arnold's question to Clough), can the past do for us, and what can we, thus edified, do for the future?

Dewey was born in the year of Mill's On Liberty and Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859)—the year also of Arnold's first inspection of the superior state-run schools on the Continent—and he quickly found himself in the position of Arnold's pilgrim, “wandering between two worlds.” Although Dewey claimed that the loss of his religious beliefs did not affect his philosophic views, he nevertheless admitted to having undergone a “trying personal crisis.” From his college days, he retained a strong residue of Hegelian idealism, allied with what he later called the Hegelian “glorification of the here and now.”⁴³ Very early on, Dewey found in science one of the “articles” that constituted his “creed of life.” Like Arnold (as well as like William and Henry James), the young Dewey was fascinated by the example of Renan, the seminarian turned science-lover turned ironic aesthete. For Dewey, Renan was fully justified in having put his faith in science: the youthful French author of The Future of Science (L’Avenir de la science) had seen that, thanks to the French Revolution, ideals were set forth in “practice [in Dewey's words]; knowledge into action.” The “development of science” had allowed for that legacy of the Revolution that Arnold praised in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”: it put “intelligence,” for the first time, in the controls.⁴⁴

Despite Dewey's disagreement with Arnold over the superiority of a scientific to a literary education, it should be noted here that in Dewey's earliest descriptions of the scientific method, science plays a role analogous to Arnold's “criticism” (a term Arnold himself partly owed to Renan). Indeed, for Dewey the terms science, intelligence, and criticism are often interchangeable. As Robert B. Westbrook notes, Dewey regarded science as “a strictly methodological conception. … The scientific attitude of mind, he said, was apparent whenever beliefs were not simply taken for granted but established as the conclusions of critical inquiry and testing.” Arnold's description of criticism as “a free play of the mind on all subjects” (CPW, 3:270) suits the experimental role of the Deweyan scientist no less than the (Henry) Jamesian literary critic. In the late essay “Construction and Criticism” (1930), Dewey restates Arnold's thesis of the necessary connection between criticism and creation (“Critical judgment is … not the enemy of creative production but its friend and ally”), and he defines criticism as a universal task whereby we discover how much our beliefs are still “validated and verified in present need, opportunity, and application.”⁴⁵

In “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method” (1909), Dewey does take issue with what he interprets to be Arnold's underestimation of a scientific education. (Although Dewey often defers to Arnold, here he sides with Arnold's friendly opponent, T. H. Huxley.) “Without ignoring in the least the consolation that has come to men from their literary education,” Dewey argues, “I would even go so far as to say that only the gradual replacing of a literary by a scientific education can assure to man the progressive amelioration of our lot. Unless we master things, we shall continue to be mastered by them; the magic that words cast upon things may indeed disguise our subjection or render us less distinguished with it, but after all science, not words, casts the only compelling spell upon things.” That philosophy or criticism should be (in Wittgenstein's memorable phrase) “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”⁴⁶ was an idea shared by Arnold and Dewey. But the notion that science provided the only key to a more humane future was doubted by Arnold. In Friendship's Garland, Arnold humorously notes how the well-intending utilitarian “educational creed” of “Archimedes Silverpump, Ph.D” (“We must be men of our age. … Useful knowledge, living languages, and the forming of the mind through observation and experiment”), becomes perverted into the illiberal views of Silverpump's pupil, the businessman Bottles: “Original man, Silverpump! fine mind! fine system! None of your antiquated rubbish—all practical work—latest discoveries in science—mind constantly kept excited—lots of interesting experiments—lights of all colours—fizz! fizz! bang! bang! That’s what I call forming a man” (CPW, 5:70-71). Without disputing the importance of science (he invokes science in his religious writings), Arnold foresaw the possibility that the language of science might become yet another bewitching jargon. At its best, however, science, by liberating mankind from past errors, cleared the way so that “the value of humane letters, and of art also,” might “be felt and acknowledged, and their place in education be secured” (10:68-69).

As Dewey gradually came to see the importance of art and religion—and as the twentieth century gave increasing evidence of the potential misuse of science—he qualified some of his earlier scientific optimism. But just as Arnold saw in culture the means of prodding his countrymen toward the future, Dewey saw in the scientific method the means of encouraging us to deal with a universe not “closed” but rather “infinite in space and time, having no limits here or there,” a world capable of being transformed by our own efforts and intelligence. Science, he argues in The Quest for Certainty (1929), allows us to become artists, working on the inexhaustible “material” afforded by nature (QC, 100). Here too, Renan may have affected the young Dewey by having developed a principle of “evolution” (a decade before Darwin's Origins) as the law for individuals and society alike. “‘Each individual travels in his turn,’” Dewey in 1890 quotes from Renan's early work, “‘along the line which the whole of mankind has followed, and the series of the development of human reason is parallel to the progress of individual reason.’” To a professional educator, this was a pregnant idea indeed; and by 1893 Dewey was praising “Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal,” arguing that the unending activity of education is not a means but “an end in itself.”⁴⁷ (“There is nothing which a scientific mind would more regret,” Dewey says in The Quest for Certainty, “than reaching a condition in which there were no more problems” [101].) In practice, Dewey is drawing upon Arnold's activist sense of culture as continuous Bildung. For if the author of Culture and Anarchy described the sense of “a growing and a becoming [as] the characteristic of perfection as culture conceives it,” he also noted that the aim of culture is to beget “a dissatisfaction” with the status quo “which is of the highest value in stemming the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and industrial society” (CPW, 5:94, 98).

Only in a democracy, Dewey felt, could the principles of Bildung be applied to everyone. But while he defined “Culture and Culture Values” in the Germanic-Arnoldian sense of their aiding the individual expansion of one's talents, Dewey also adopted Arnold's sense of culture as something that prepares the individual for society. (He questions Arnold's “humanistic notion, … not in its end, but in its exclusive reliance upon literature and history as means of reaching this end”—missing Arnold's repeated inclusion of science among the ingredient of culture.) “From the broader point of view,” Dewey states, “culture may be defined as the habit of mind which perceives and estimates all matters with reference to their bearing on social values and aims.” In one of his most suggestive phrases, Arnold calls “education … the road to culture”;⁴⁸ and in one of his last works, a “Special Report” on Continental “Elementary Education” (1886), based on a recent inspection tour, he praises the humanities-centered schools abroad for humanizing their students. The fault of English elementary education, he complains, is “that it is so little formative; it gives the children the power to read the newspapers, to write a letter, to cast accounts, and gives them a certain number of pieces of knowledge, but it does little to touch their nature for good and to mould them.” Why shouldn’t all English children, Arnold asks, have the right (hitherto reserved for the privileged classes) to a “fuller cultivation of taste and feeling?” (CPW, 11:28).

Dewey's philosophy of education expands upon three basic Arnoldian premises: that in a democracy all students should have access to the best, that critical thinking should be encouraged, and that education should instill a sense of social solidarity. “Education must have a tendency, if it is education, to form attitudes,” he asserted in 1936. But “The tendency to form attitudes which will express themselves in intelligent social action is something very different from indoctrination”; education consists, for Dewey, in learning not what to think, but rather in learning to think critically and to think as part of a social dialogue. In response to Walter Lipmann and others who felt (in the 1920s) that democracy had failed to create an enlightened, responsible public, Dewey argued that it was education's task to do just this. “We are born organic beings associated with others,” he contends in The Public and Its Problems (1927), “but we are not born members of a community. The young have to be brought within the traditions, outlook and interests which characterize a community by means of education; by unremitting instruction and by learning in connection with the phenomena of overt association.”⁴⁹ The fullest expression of Dewey's pedagogic views is found in Democracy and Education (1916); here, he combines Mill's sense of a progressive society as one that allows for “the play of diverse gifts and interests” with an Arnoldian sense of culture as something that encourages solidarity as well as free play of mind (“the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one's perception of meanings”) for everyone. In a brief account of “The Aims and Ideals of Education,” Dewey in 1921 condensed the Arnoldian program into two goals: to transmit “the ‘best of what has been thought and said’” and to work for the reformation of society.⁵⁰

Arnold's views on education came out of his experience as inspector of schools and his fight with the Liberal Party's tendency to favor individual rights at the expense of communal responsibilities. He took issue, moreover, with the insensitivity of Liberal leaders like Robert Lowe, for whom public education was treated as little more than a means of training students to pass examinations (Lowe's policy of “payment by results”) rather than a means of instructing them in the “power of reading.” As a future-oriented liberal, Arnold deplored the negative strain of his party, which permitted, under the slogan of “doing as one likes,” a widespread national neglect of minds and bodies. In his reports on English schools, Arnold called attention to the lack of “humanizing” instruction. Unlike “rich” children, who had opportunities to read good books outside of class, the working-class children Arnold inspected were at the mercy of “second or third-rate literature,” which would remain henceforth their “principal literary standard”; they (and their middle-class counterparts) received an education that reflected the national obsession with “mechanical processes” at the expense of “intelligence.” (Arnold cites, approvingly, Bishop Butler's comment, “Of education, … information itself is really the least part.”) To those skeptical of his “high estimate of the value of poetry in education,” Arnold retorts, pragmatically, “Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.”⁵¹ In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold called for a rethinking of Liberal premises (“turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” [CPW, 5:233]) in order to promote an inward and social change. Instead of praising the fruits of industrialism (as Liberals tended to do), we should, he argues, be tending to the increase of education, thereby advancing common goals of “increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy” (5:109).

Arnold's political essays of the 1880s harp on the theme of Liberal irresponsibility. In “The Future of Liberalism” (1882), he derides the Liberal celebration of “heroes of industrial enterprise,” who, in their hurry to make a fortune, “have not made the fortunes of the clusters of men and women whom they have called into being to produce for them” (CPW, 9:146), and who have left behind a legacy of slums (“hell-holes”) and widespread illiteracy. And he mourns the Liberal coddling of the badly educated middle class, with its “effusion and confusion,” its lack of ideas and its addiction to empty phrases. (The natural human instinct for “beauty …, intellect and knowledge has been maltreated and starved; because the schools for this class, where it should have called forth and trained this instinct, are the worst of the kind anywhere” [9:147-48].) Elsewhere, Arnold laments the English mistreatment of Ireland and the specious (as he sees it) Liberal support for Home Rule as a way of ensuring continued Irish misery. If in the early lectures on Celtic literature Arnold had highlighted the indispensible Celtic components of the English imagination, in his later writings he was incapable of imagining a political disjunction of the two countries that would not be harmful to both sides. Supporting political separatism, he felt, was equivalent to supporting the negative Liberal sense of human beings as detached atoms.

However questionable Arnold's views on Ireland may seem in hindsight, they are consistent with his sense of himself as a “Liberal of the future,” one believing in solidarity within nations and codependency between nations. (He believed that Ireland and England were as codependent, and mutually supportive, as Alsace and France or Alabama and the Northern States.) Arnold held an organic view of society in which classes and individuals could rise above partisan interests “to the idea of the whole community” (Arnold's idealized “state” [CPW, 5:134]). And so did Dewey, whose faith in democracy was sustained from the beginning by his sense “that men are not isolated non-social atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations to men.”⁵² Dewey's faith in democracy is Arnold's belief in culture writ large. If Dewey inherits Arnold's future-oriented liberalism, he does so, like Arnold, in revolt against the outmoded view of liberalism as the party of laissez-faire individualism. Democracy, like culture, provides for the liberation of creative energies; but, Dewey cautions, “Doing as one pleases signifies a release from truly intellectual initiative and independence, unless taste has been well developed as to what one pleases.” And just as the school provides, in Dewey, the educational means for the development of taste (with the help of teachers who “guide the child,” as Westbrook notes, “in the subject matter of science and history and art”), so too does the democratic community provide lessons in cooperation and interdependence. The future-oriented liberal, hence, is not one who is “jealous of every extension of governmental activity,” but rather one “committed to the principle that organized society must use its powers to establish the conditions under which the mass of individuals can possess actual as distinct from merely legal liberty.” But liberalism, according to Arnold and Dewey, must also wean the public and itself from the addiction to “clap-trap” (Arnold's term), from the force of “party politics” wherein (in Dewey's phrase) “words not only take the place of realities but are themselves debauched.” It is because of such debasement that Dewey looked to scientific “intelligence”—just as Arnold had appealed to “criticism”—to create a climate of “greater honesty and impartiality [Arnold's “disinterestedness”], even though these qualities be now corrupted by discussion carried on mainly for purposes of party supremacy and for imposition of some special but concealed interest.”⁵³

Rorty has characterized Dewey's educational philosophy as one “calculated to change the character of American institutions—to move society to the political left by moving successive generations of students to the left of their parents.” But this is another way of saying that Dewey was a lifelong liberal, believing (with Arnold) in the promise of the future despite all the blunders of the present. Dewey himself maintained, in 1936, that the “new social ideals” implicit in his educational views were only “a new version of the very same ideals that inspired the Declaration of Independence,” the ideals of democracy forever renewing themselves, and those of liberty and equality finally being applied to all people. As liberals of the future, Dewey and Arnold saw that the real strength of liberal ideals remained to be tested. Both trusted to the idea of liberalism, despite the inevitable debasement of the term, and despite jeers from left and right alike at liberal pretensions.⁵⁴ They never lost sight of a liberal vision of society and its inhabitants in constant development, always moving toward the unreachable goal Arnold called “perfection.” But liberalism also meant, for both, a communal ideal, a dream of associations of men and women (what John Rawls, the most recent defender of the liberal ideal, calls “the idea of overlapping consensus”) forming common bonds, as Dewey says, “for the better realization of any form of experience which is augmented and confirmed by being shared.” In the end, they invoke a sense of liberalism implicit in the word's original meaning: this is what Arnold's heir Lionel Trilling means when he calls the “job of criticism” a recalling of “liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility”; and it is what Rawls means when he describes the ideal social union in terms of an orchestra whose various musicians need one another's complementary gifts in order to flourish individually. Like the Arnold of Essays in Criticism, with its appeal “To try and approach truth on one side after another” (CPW, 3:286), Dewey in his eighties defined the liberal mission as the “quiet and patient pursuit of truth, marked by the will to learn from every quarter.”⁵⁵

What is obvious in even a brief examination of Dewey's and Arnold's views on education and liberalism is the fact that these terms run into each other, and that they keep ending up in Arnold's “culture” and in Dewey's “democracy.” Their common mentor, here, is Emerson, whose concept of culture as something that combines the principles of Bildung (cultivation of the “best”) with a corrective to human isolation anticipates both Arnold's culture and Dewey's democracy. “Culture,” says Emerson, “is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”⁵⁶ Arnold's culture and Dewey's democracy resemble each other because they are both processes and ideals, something to steer by and something to steer toward. As Dewey moved toward his own journey's end, he never lost his democratic faith, but, increasingly, he saw democracy as a cultural ideal that needed more than the stimulus supplied by science. By the 1920s, even as he rebutted Lipmann's critique of democracy, Dewey was replacing the pragmatic trust in “experience” with the larger term of culture. He realized, soon after its publication, that Experience and Nature (1925) should have been titled Culture and Nature—the term referring, he explained, to more than what Arnold and his followers meant by culture: “the whole body of beliefs, attitudes, dispositions which are scientific and ‘moral’”; a world in which facts and values are no longer at odds and in which the “scientific” coexists with the “‘ideal’ (even the name ‘spiritual,’ if intelligibly used).”⁵⁷

The later Dewey, hence, turns increasingly to the world of art and religion to extend the range of experience available in a democratic culture. And here his Arnoldian affinities cause him to adopt a rather different position from the one Rorty claims for Dewey—“following [in the unlikely company of Foucault and Derrida] through on Enlightenment secularization by, roughly, pragmatizing and demetaphysicizing culture.” On the contrary, Dewey, as early as 1920, in Reconstruction in Philosophy, imagined a revival of “the religious spirit,” set within the kingdom of the earth (this resembles Arnold's position in his religious writings) and inspiring a poetry and religion that arise out of hope, not fear. That the “old beliefs have dissolved” (QC, 71) Dewey knew no less than did the Arnold of “The Study of Poetry” (“not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable” [CPW, 9:161]), but that does not prevent the desire for “standards, principles, rules.” Like Arnold, he redefines these standards as “hypotheses” that are endlessly “tested and confirmed—and altered,” losing “all pretence of finality—the ultimate source of dogmatism” (QC, 277). In Reconstruction Dewey updates Arnold's appeal to “criticism,” calling for a new “poetry and religious feeling,” born of the union between “science and emotion” that has been facilitated by a new, clearsighted “philosophy.”⁵⁸

Arnold's massive attempt at Hellenizing the Bible led him to the conclusion that, in spite of the efforts of “modern liberalism,” people “cannot do without” religion, even as “they cannot do with it as it is.” In wanting the joy provided by religious faith, they “are on firm ground of experience” (CPW, 7:378-81). Mill came round to this position (which William James never lacked), and eventually, in his own way, so did Dewey. In Human Nature and Conduct (1922) Dewey questions Arnold's habit of treating cognition and righteous action, Hellenism and Hebraism, as separate faculties. (In the conclusion to Literature and Dogma, Arnold, somewhat disingenuously, claimed that “In praising culture, we have never denied that conduct, not culture, is three-fourths of human life” [CPW, 6:407].) “Potentially,” Dewey retorts, “conduct is one hundred per cent of our acts.” In A Common Faith (1934), his Jamesian defense of the religious impulse (as opposed to organized religion), Dewey again challenges the Arnoldian “opposition between Hellenism and Hebraism,” not realizing that Arnold himself had implicitly been arguing all along that knowledge and action, the love of truth and beauty and right conduct, are interlinked. Arnold was pleased by the popular success of these rhetorical terms, and while he spoke of their being a “distinction on which more and more will turn,”⁵⁹ he nevertheless did not doubt “the old and true Socratic thesis of the interdependence of virtue and knowledge” (8:162). For, as Dewey argues, “Intelligence becomes ours in the degree in which we use it and accept responsibility for consequences” (HNC, 314). But humanity requires “symbols” to draw forth their “reverences, affections, and loyalties,” and perhaps the most potent symbol of the “communal sense” (330) is that which finds expression in the religious impulse.⁶⁰

As much as Dewey would have liked for the democratic community to constitute the only needful source of faith, and as much as he might have wished for science to provide the only earthbound hypotheses, he was obliged to recognize, in A Common Faith, the psychological need for a belief that links the real world and the ideal. “I should describe this faith,” he offers, “as the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices” (ACF, 33). “In a distracted age,” there is a particular need for an “active relation between ideal and actual to which [Dewey gives] the name ‘God’” (51), and such a name “may protect man from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance” (53). In the end, however, Dewey's own faith is in the union of knowledge and conduct that (like Arnold in the Mixed Essays) he calls “civilization.” “The things in civilization we most prize,” he says, “are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it” (87).

In Art as Experience (1934) the Arnoldian faith in the humanizing power of civilization reaches its Deweyan climax. Here, the man accused by Lewis Mumford of having no aesthetic sense, no appreciation of the imagination, writes knowingly, and sometimes eloquently of art as the consummate human “experience.” Dewey describes art's capacity to imagine a better world as the consummate “criticism of life.” (The book's wealth of citations reveals that Dewey, in 1934, was as familiar with Cezanne, van Gogh, and Matisse as he was with Goethe, Johnson, Keats, Shelley, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Pater—and, of course, Arnold.) Arnold's “dictum that poetry is criticism of life” is true, Dewey contends, because art imagines “possibilities that contrast with actual conditions. A sense of possibilities that are unrealized and that might be realized are when they are put in contrast with actual conditions, the most penetrating ‘criticism’ of the latter that can be made.” Moreover, in a world in which “mortal millions live alone,” “works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community and experience.”⁶¹ There are other (and nonpragmatic) ways to describe and defend artistic experience, but Dewey here provides perhaps the fullest answer to the Arnoldian query, “What does it do for you?”

In stressing areas where Arnold and Dewey have shared interests, I have underplayed their differences in taste and sensibility. Arnold makes more of the internal dimension of culture and education than does Dewey, although both ultimately agree on the social ends of these two forces. And even though his aesthetic sensibility is less refined and more utilitarian than, say, Pater's or Henry James's, Arnold had a far deeper awareness than Dewey of the qualitative nature of beauty and art (of poetry's “natural magic,” for example [CPW, 3:33]). In the essay on Wordsworth, Arnold faults those who prize the “philosophy” over the “poetry” (9:48). Still, Arnold and Dewey were critics active in the public arena, fighting in behalf of a liberal society that they saw beckoning in the future. “That promised land it will not be ours to enter,” Arnold realized; “… but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries” (3:285). Opposing (like Falkland) “the inadequate ideals dominant in their time,” Arnold and Dewey “kept open their communications with the future, lived with the future.”

All his life, Dewey sought a way for philosophy to bridge the gap between the old order and the new, between a feudal and a democratic world. In 1946 (Dewey's eighty-seventh year), with yet another terrible reminder of man's cruelty to man recently experienced, he once more cited Arnold in connection with the fate of humanity, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” But he remained confident in the possibility of philosophy—a philosophy that transmuted Arnold's belief in civilization into his own faith in “creative democracy”—to project pragmatic ideals sufficient to “give intelligent direction to men in search for ways to make the world more one of worth and significance, more homelike, in fact. There is no phase of life, educational, economic, political, religious, in which inquiry may not aid in bringing to birth that world which Matthew Arnold rightly said was as yet unborn.”⁶²

Notes

1. Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996- ), 1:233, 282.

2. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” Consequences of Pragmatism (henceforth CP) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 160. See, for example, Richard J. Bernstein, “The Resurgence of Pragmatism,” Social Research 59 (Winter 1992): 813-40, and Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Giles Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience (New York: New York University Press, 1976) and Streams of Experience (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989); John Rajchman and Cornel West, eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

3. See John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). “Ever since Arnold found that reflecting upon the place of poetry in an industrial society led him to worry about ‘a girl named Wragg,’” Irving Howe writes in A Margin of Hope (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), “the most valuable critics have often doubled as cultural spokesmen, moral prophets, political insurgents” (147). The finest recent contribution to Arnoldian criticism is Morris Dickstein's Double Agent: The Critic and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Arnold “believed not simply in the spread of knowledge and the free play of mind,” Dickstein observes, “but above all in usable knowledge, knowledge that could take on flesh and blood and make a difference, knowledge that was also poetry” (11). Cornel West, in American Evasion, dubs Trilling a “Pragmatist as Arnoldian Literary Critic” (164-81); but Diggins, in Promise of Pragmatism, finds divergencies as well as affinities between Trilling and Dewey (3-4, 382-84).

4. Rorty, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (henceforth CIS) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 81. James, quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 1:407.

5. Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 3-5, 22.

6. Dewey, “Poetry and Philosophy,” in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-72), 3:110, 123, 115, 120, 122, 123.

7. Ibid., 114-15; Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. John C. McDermott, 2 vols. (New York: Putnam's, 1973), 1:13.

8. “To read Arnold as the foe of democracy is false,” observes Ruth apRoberts. “Democracy is the spring and the motive of Culture and Anarchy and of Arnold's whole career” (“Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars,” American Scholar 64 [Winter 1995]): 147.

9. Mill, On Liberty, in Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 413-14. For Arnold on Mill, see Arnold, Letters, ed. Lang, 1:468. Edward Alexander compares the two in Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).

10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Philips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 2:4, 104, 42, 106.

11. Mill, On Liberty, 452-53. Herbert Spencer, following Mill, attacked the “tyrannical system” of state-run education in “From Freedom to Bondage,” 1891 (reprinted with The Man versus the State, ed. Donald MacRae [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], 325). For a splendid recent account of Mill's position, see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

12. Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” Early Works, 1:237.

13. Ibid., 235, 232, 244, 245, 240, 246, 249.

14. Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (henceforth ORT) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191, 188, 194, 193, 196.

15. Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life, 13-14.

16. For Arnold's attachment to Sand, see Patricia Thomson, George Sand and the Victorians (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), chap. 6.

17. Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life, 4.

18. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 17 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981-91), 11:45, 44.

19. James, “The Social Value of the College-Bred,” in Works of William James: Essays, Comments, and Reviews (henceforth ECR) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 111, 118; Carlyle, Past and Present, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, 30 vols., Centenary Edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1898-1901), 10:25; “Biography,” Works, 28:46; James, A Pluralistic Universe (henceforth cited as APU in text) (1909; reprint, New York: Longman's, 1920), 20.

20. See James's letters to various newspapers on “The Philippine Tangle” (etc.), ECR, 154 ff.; “The Social Value of the College-Bred,” ECR, 110; Talks to Teachers (New York: Norton, 1950), 131; “A Strong Note of Warning Regarding the Lynching Episode,” ECR, 171.

21. For Arnold on the Paris Commune, see Letters, ed. George W. E. Russell, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 2:65-66; James, “Renan's Dialogues,” ECR, 330-31; Talks to Teachers, 19; Pragmatism (henceforth cited in text as P) (1907; reprint, New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 11; The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (henceforth cited in text as WB) (1897; reprint, New York: Dover, 1956), 325; Dewey, Three Contemporary Philosophers, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 15 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976-83), 12:206, 250.

22. Rorty, CP, xlii-xliii.

23. Schiller, Humanism: Philosophical Essays (1903; reprint, Freeport: Books for Library Press, 1969), xxiv.

24. Carlyle, “Characteristics,” Works, 28:37; Sartor Resartus, Works, 1:156.

25. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 305. And see Hilary Putnam with Ruth Anna Putnam on Jamesian ethics in Philosophy with a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 217-31.

26. Mill, “The Utility of Religion,” Three Essays on Religion (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1874), 87; “Theism,” Ibid., 249, 255-56. Noting the similarity between Arnold's and James's religious views, Lionel Trilling remarks, in Matthew Arnold (1939; reprint, New York: Meridian Books, 1955), “had James not read Arnold, we might have argued that Arnold had read James, for the earlier writer argued the pragmatic position with which the name of the latter is more intimately associated” (291).

27. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (henceforth cited in text as VRE) (1902; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1961), 401; and see WB, 89 (on “what Matthew Arnold likes to call Aberglaube”).

28. James, “Renan's Dialogues,” ECR, 331. R. W. B. Lewis suggests, in The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), that the real target of the Renan review is brother Henry (“William discerned in [Renan's Dialogues] an exaggerated version of everything that … he most feared about Henry: priggishness, fussy self-regard, and a disdainful—by implication, an anti-American—elitism”; 269-70). Henry James's response to William's Renan review was to agree with his brother about French “superficiality” (see Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography [New York: Viking Press, 1967], 206). Perhaps William was taking the occasion, in the Renan review, to scourge his own aesthetic leanings.

29. Rorty, CP, 174, 166.

30. James, Psychology, Briefer Course (1892; reprint, New York: Fawcett, 1963), 148, 402. In the first passage James seems to echo the words of Arnold's follower, Walter Pater, in The Renaissance: “Every one of [our] impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986; 151).

31. Rorty, ORT, 193. Among those disturbed by Rorty's aesthetic turn are Richard J. Bernstein, in “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15 (Nov. 1987): 538-63; Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technology,” Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 206-7; Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 15-19; the various contributors to the collection Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Cornel West in American Evasion (194-210) and his afterward to Post-Analytic Philosophy (deploring Rorty's unashamed “ethnocentrism” and his non-Marxism: 259-72). For Alexander Nehamas, on the other hand, Rorty is insufficiently Nietzschean, insufficiently ironic (“A Touch of the Poet,” Raritan 10 [Summer 1990]: 101-25).

32. See R. H. Super, “Sweetness and Light: Matthew Arnold's Comic Muse,” in Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours, ed. Clinton Machann and Forrest D. Burt (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 183-96; Rorty, ORT, 193.

33. Arnold, Letters, ed. Russell, 2:20; Rorty, CP, 45.

34. Rorty, ORT, 17; Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 13.

35. See Arnold, CPW, 3:53, 179 (on Spinoza's “edifying” versus Strauss's unedifying views); 9:254; Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 359-60; CP, 24, 175; Essays in Heidegger and Others (henceforth EH) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 152.

36. Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” CP, 148-49, 158; Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 510; Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” Political Theory 15 (Nov. 1987): 573; (Rorty deploring the sense of “alienation” in Lentricchia and others) “Two Cheers for the Cultural Left,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Winter 1990): 228, 223 n; “The Unpatriotic Academy,” New York Times (Feb. 13, 1994), 15.

37. Rorty, CIS, 61; EH, 196-98. Foucault's emergence as a human rights advocate in the late 1870s and early 1880s is touched on in chapter 2.

38. See “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” CIS, esp. pp. 87-95. “Why language that is not stable enough to support truth,” Diggins wonders in Promise of Pragmatism, “can be clear enough to forge solidarity as a unifying principle held by different people remains unexplained” by Rorty (476).

39. Rorty, “Two Cheers,” pp. 234 n, 229; ORT, 15-16; EH, 186.

40. Rorty, EH, 183; “Thugs and Theorists,” 571. Rorty's fondness for Harold Bloom (who coined the phrase “School of Resentment”) has led him to the dubious position that “strong modern” authors are always better than their predecessors. “Once we had Yeats's later poems in hand,” Rorty says (CIS, 20), “we were less interested in reading Rossetti's.” It is this kind of crassness that gives pragmatism a bad name in aesthetic matters.

41. Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism,” in Philosophy of John Dewey, 1:56; Liberalism and Social Action, in Later Works, 11:52; George Santayana, “Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1939), 251.

42. Keating, “Arnold Social and Political Thought,” in Writers and Their Background: Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 222; Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” Later Works, 5:142.

43. Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” 7, 8-9; The Quest for Certainty (henceforth cited in text as QC) (1929; reprint, New York: Perigree Books, 1980), 62. James, in 1903, noted in a letter to Dewey that while he had come “from empiricism,” his fellow pragmatist had reached “much the same goal” even though proceeding “from Hegel” (Perry, Thought and Character, 2:521).

44. Dewey, “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method,” Middle Works, 6:78; “Two Phases of Renan's Life,” Early Works, 3:174-79; “Renan's Loss of Faith in Science,” Early Works, 4:11-18. Dewey supports Renan's position (which Renan later abandoned) that science, in supplanting religion, presents “us with a deeper truth,” and that the “practical outcome” of science should be “made the possession of all men” (4:14-15). See Arnold, CPW, 3:264-65.

45. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 141. And see Richard J. Bernstein, John Dewey (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), esp. chap. 9. In “Science as Solidarity,” Rorty suggests that Dewey saw the community of “scientific inquirers” as a noteworthy example of democracy in action (ORT, 43). Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” 134, 142.

46. Dewey, “Science as Subject-Matter,” 78; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 47e.

47. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Middle Works, 12:114; “Two Phases of Renan's Life,” 174-75; “Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal,” Early Works, 4:50.

48. Dewey (defining “Culture” for A Cyclopedia of Education), Middle Works, 6:406; Arnold, canceled passage from Culture and Anarchy, CPW, 5:527.

49. Dewey, “The Challenge of Democracy to Education,” Later Works, 11:189; The Public and its Problems (1927; reprint, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 154. See Lipmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925).

50. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 357, 145; “The Aims and Ideals of Education,” Middle Works, 13:399-405.

51. See W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950); G. H. Bantock, “Matthew Arnold, H. M. I.,” Scrutiny 18 (1951): 32-44; Vincent L. Tollers, “A Working Isaiah: Arnold in the Council Office,” in Matthew Arnold 1988: A Centennial Review, ed. Miriam Allott, Essays and Studies 41 (John Murray, 1988): 108-24; Peter Smith and Geoffrey Summerfield, eds., Matthew Arnold and the Education of the New Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 239, 215-16, 223-24, 227 (selections from Arnold's inspector reports). Bantock notes Arnold's emphasis on “the value of the [student's] inner life” (which Dewey neglects), and he applauds “Arnold's insistence that the teachers should have a high standard of culture” (35, 39). Connell points to Arnold's and Dewey's joint stress on individual “growth” for the sake of social progress (279). In their goods anthology (and introduction), Smith and Summerfield demonstrate Arnold's commitment to his task as school inspector, his anxiety over the deprivations endured by working-class children, and his sense that teachers were undervalued. The most stinging of Arnold's published rebukes of the Liberal mishandling of British education is his tract on “The Twice-Revised Code” (the policy dictating, for example, payment to schools on the basis of examination results): CPW, 2:212-43.

52. Dewey, “Ethics of Democracy,” 231. Trilling pertinently notes that Arnold “demanded that men think not of themselves but of the whole of which they are a part” (52).

53. Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” 132; Westbrook, Dewey And Democracy, 100 (Westbrook also notes that “Dewey clearly differentiated his pedagogy” from that of “child-centered” educators who failed “to connect the interests and activities of the child to the subject matter of the curriculum”; 99); Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, 21, 51-52.

54. Rorty, introduction to Dewey: Later Works, 8:xi-xii; Dewey, “Education and Social Ideals,” Later Works, 11: 167. Two recent assaults on liberalism from within the academy emanate from Stanley Fish, who, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), claims that “Liberalism Doesn’t Exist” (like pragmatism, in Fish's view, it has no right to offer opinions that have a claim on us since it lacks a foundation, a center, to argue from); and from John Kekes, in The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), who derides the notion that there are “overriding values.” From the left, liberals such as Dewey and Rorty (and Arnold) have been attacked for their adherence to old-fashioned values (Kekes prefers what he calls a “reasonable immorality”; 163); from the right, they have become a convenient target for those opposing tolerance and public-mindedness.

55. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 197; Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, n.d.), xii; Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), see chap. 4 (“Overlapping Consensus”), 321 (social union as an orchestra); Dewey, “The Meaning of the Term: Liberalism,” Later Works, 14: 254. Arnold's forward-looking liberalism is well treated by R. H. Super in The Time-Spirit of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970); a welcome recent defense of Dewey's liberalism is Alan Ryan's John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995). The development of nineteenth-century English liberalism from an individualistic to a more collectivist position is considered by Stefan Collini in Public Moralists. J. W. Burrow, in Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), stresses the traditional liberal concerns with individuality and diversity. Nancy L. Rosenblum's collection, Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), includes authors like Charles Taylor and Judith Shklar, who consider liberalism's moral purpose. See also Richard Bellamy, ed., Victorian Liberalism (London: Routledge, 1990); John Gray, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989) and Postliberalism: Studies in Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 1993).

56. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life (1860), in Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 724.

57. Westbrook, Dewey and Democracy, 345.

58. Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 571; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 200-201.

59. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (henceforth cited in text as HNC) (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1922), 279; A Common Faith (henceforth cited in text as ACE) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 54; Arnold, Letters, ed. Russell, 2:37.

60. Steven C. Rockefeller, in John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), discusses the uses of religion in Dewey's thinking. And see West's advocacy of “Prophetic Pragmatism” (Dewey applied to Christian Marxism) in American Evasion, chap. 6. “Symbols control sentiment and thought,” Dewey observes in The Public and its Problems, “and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities” (142).

61. “I recollect eulogies of Bacon in Mr. Dewey's works,” Mumford complains in The Golden Days (1926; reprint, New York: Dover, 1968), “but none of Shakespeare; appreciations of Locke, but not Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth and Blake” (134). Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; reprint, New York: Perigree Books, 1980), 346, 105.

62. Dewey, Introduction to Problems of Men, in Later Works, 15: 156, 169.