James's Moral Equivalent of War

CIVIC RENEWAL: JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR TRYGVE THRONTVEIT James’s essay on “The Moral Equivalent of War” has long been read as either a quaintly naive plan to alter human nature through policy or an insidious scheme for perpetuating norms of male domination under the guise of service. When read closely and in the context of James’s political writings, however, the essay reveals a different purpose: to think creatively across the categories of service and the civic, conjuring a single sphere containing all of the collaborative, co-creative work we do (or should do) with those whose lives affect and are affected by our own. James’s thoughtexperiment of a universal civil service corps has not been realized in detail or even in spirit, but by recovering his essential idea scholars can help to realize its potential for renewing American civic life by starting in their own sickly vineyard: the academy. WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES • VOLUME 14 • NUMBER 1 • SPRING 2018 • PP. 120–41 121 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT ost people familiar with William James’s life and work know that he applauded efforts to think across boundaries and differences and to place oneself in the company of strangers—whether actual or intellectual. I am therefore pleased to have my thoughts on James’s famous essay on “A Moral Equivalent of War” (MEW) follow Marilyn Fisher’s very different treatment in this volume of William James Studies. In contrast to Fischer’s reading, MEW does not strike me as derivative or even particularly representative of major currents of thought in James’s day. Rather, as our fellow contributor Paul Croce finds for much of James’s corpus, MEW was both original and generative, even while crafted to resonate with the thinking and concerns of a wide audience. Specifically, the essay reveals James trying to think creatively across the categories of service and the civic—viewing service as a form of self-government and thus eminently civic while simultaneously viewing the civic as more than mere service to others or even to the polity as whole. Instead, James considers service to be a sphere of symbiotic and ever-evolving relationships, containing all of the collaborative, co-creative work we do (or should do) with those whose lives affect and are affected by our own. Let me be more concrete. By placing MEW in the broader context of James’s political thought, I hope to show that it did not reflect a naïve faith in the abeyance of war nor a chimerical urge to preserve martial heroism through some pacifistic simulacrum. Rather, James was alarmed that despite what many contemporaries considered the moral and intellectual progress of the human race, war persisted. At the same time, he was scandalized by the efforts of other contemporaries to defend war as a means of promoting virtue, when in fact, both war and its apologias only diverted energy and thought from the crucial task of formulating and cultivating a civic ethos adapted to a modern, pluralistic, interdependent society. In short, James envisioned a form of universal service that would be equivalent to war not in a substitutive but a supersessory sense. He imagined something powerful and compelling enough M WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 122 CIVIC RENEWAL not only to displace the institution of war, but to supplant the habits of thought that sustained it with habits that promoted its opposite—the egalitarian, co-creative, continual renewal of an increasingly inclusive commonwealth. Whether original or derivative, James’s vision for that something has yet to be realized or even approximated in our culture. Thus, it has a generative potential at a moment of civic exhaustion as well as civic ferment—a ferment that I hope will spread to and gain sustenance from the academy.1 JAMESIAN POLITICS James was not a political theorist, yet his moral philosophy is pregnant with political implications. As Walter Lippmann recalled of his Harvard mentor, James always believed that “the epistemological problem” his pragmatism addressed—the imperative to act on partial information and tenuous conclusions— had “tremendous consequences” for politics.2 But what are those consequences? James’s concept of an “ethical republic” and his frequent invocations of “republicanism” in moral and intellectual life provide a clue, but no clear answer.3 His moral philosophy does not mesh well with the individualistic, small-government, free-market, libertarian, or socially conservative ideologies associated with the United States’ Republican Party at various points from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first. Nor does it align neatly with any of the various discourses on republicanism that historians of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American thought and culture have identified over the past 40 years or so.4 Indeed, inverting both modern American conservatism and early American republicanism, James favored the reining in of “egoistic interests” (rather than their release) as a precondition for achieving “radical democracy” (rather than a bulwark against it). A self-described “individualist,” he also considered expansive, equal, and effective freedoms for all people to be fundamentals of societal health. “The best commonwealth,” he wrote in 1905, “will always be the one that most cherishes the men who represent the residual WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 123 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT interests, the one that leaves the largest scope to their peculiarities.”5 James’s association of selflessness with “radical democracy” and of the common good with a personally idiosyncratic society help to clarify his political thought and its objectives—as well as its relevance today. James examined a problem central to modern political theory and pertinent to our daily political life: the problem of individual or minority interests at odds with more powerful or popular agendas. James also sketched the major features of a polity equipped to ameliorate that problem: a pragmatist polity, with powers and authority calibrated to the dynamic historical experience of its members and employed to optimize freedom of thought and action across social space and time. James was not particularly creative in identifying the institutions that would propagate such radical democracy in a pragmatist polity. In the spirit of pragmatism, he looked first to tools that had proven their value, at least when in good repair: popular government; social equality; an educated citizenry; and even, for all his hatred of violence, the military. Where James was bold, and the originality of his pragmatism evident, was in his vision of the radical purposes these institutions could and should achieve. For James, popular government meant more than electoral plebiscites on the decisions of professional politicians. Above all, it meant citizen input in the business of state. James saw little logic and no point in a government established for the people but not directed by them. For that reason, James was deeply critical of the American people (including himself) for their complacency in the run-up to the American invasion of the Philippines at the close of the Spanish-American War. Supposing themselves to be “a better nation morally than the rest,” James and his fellow Americans let their leaders romp, assuming that “the results were fairly safe,” and that a little dose of the strenuous life would be good for a flaccid body politic. The results, instead, were death, destruction, and a “damning indictment” of American civilization.6 For related reasons, James was generally disgusted with both major political WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 124 CIVIC RENEWAL parties. Controlled by “pecuniary corruptionists” and “unscrupulous” partisans, they were “blind to the real life of the country.” Impervious to fresh ideas emanating from the people, “dead shibboleths” were all they could offer, along with a paralyzing “hatred and prejudice” against the opposition.7 Yet for all his disappointments, James never abandoned faith in popular government. For one thing, citizens were still ultimately responsible for their nation’s affairs, even when “Congress was entirely mad” (and citizens themselves were in similar condition); indeed, James wrote his brother, such are the proving times of genuine “liberalism.”8 After all, the public could vote—their collective reflection and conversation could thereby have consequences, whether their representatives listened or not.9 Still, James knew that the trenchancy and efficacy of public discourse depended on broad participatory bases. Thus, he also ranked social equality among the critical institutions of a pragmatist polity. He frequently worried that economic disparities were eroding the nation’s democratic habits and dividing the creative forces of society. That society, James insisted in 1898, had “undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change.” By the time he wrote his “Moral Equivalent of War” essay, James had grown more radical and identified a “socialistic equilibrium” as central to his pragmatist political ideal.10 James also worried about other forms of inequality, including racial inequality. He sometimes indulged in the casual racism that mars so many private letters and diaries from his class and day. But he also publicly celebrated both Booker T. Washington and his former philosophy student, W. E. B. Du Bois, as political heroes, lauding their courage in helping the whole nation, in their different ways, learn to live more democratically. Indeed, for either man to quit his cause would be “a national calamity.” “For colored men openly to forego, simply on grounds of heredity, their right, as individuals, to win the best,” James explained, would turn all of American civilization “into an irrevocable caste-system.”11 By contrast, a society in which all individuals were free from inherited WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 125 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT constraints would be nearly limitless in its moral potential. “Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us,” he wrote in 1907.12 Each individual immobilized by social caste was a potential genius shackled, and a chance for “human progress” lost.13 James might have had his country’s hardening caste system in mind in 1907, when he made the following striking statement while discussing education, another pillar of a pragmatist polity: “The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously,” he declared (in “The Social Value of the CollegeBred”) “is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities.”14 James’s point was not to denigrate self-government or the reliance on representative institutions to effect it. Rather, his point was that democracy assumes—and in fact hinges upon—meaningful encounters among interdependent individuals and groups who must learn about and from one another. A polity of anonyms would be a polity of isolates, living in a literal state of blindness to one another, whereas a democracy, in the pragmatist ideal, is a polity organized to bring its members into one another’s sight. In “The Social Value of the College-Bred,” James focused on the potential of the modern college curriculum to evolve into a specialized tool for encouraging such civic seeing, by producing a specialized subset of democrats, the critics, committed to the task—a class he also described (to the horror of some interpreters) as an “aristocracy.”15 But James was not suggesting that the country should be ruled by highbrows and “prigs” (as he put it). Rather, embracing the spirit of the liberal arts, the college-bred should table their assumptions and look beyond stereotypes in order “to scent out human excellence” and bring it to society’s attention. In other words, the “educated classes” deserve no formal privileges or power; they comprise an “aristocracy” only insofar as they promote the “rule of the best”—whatever, wherever, and whoever the best may be. Their ranks must be open, their duty being to spread, as widely as possible, the “higher, healthier tone” of life that alone defines membership of their class.16 And in WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 126 CIVIC RENEWAL meeting that duty, true democratic aristocrats must view themselves as students of those they seek to engage and instruct, thereby modeling a virtue that anyone loyal to the democratic ideal must practice. Indeed, all of us, if genuinely committed to moral freedom, must learn, in James’s words, to “see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations.”17 After all, as James stated here and elsewhere, “Democracy is on its trial.”18 Only by nourishing citizens determined to accept its critical burdens, yet “bound not to admit its failure,” can a democratic polity surmount both complacency and nihilism. This is the service that “the best of us” provide, namely, promoting a “vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty.”19 JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR It was that humbly aristocratic vision of democracy—as precious, even fragile, yet capable of greatness if our best selves do the work—which inspired James’s boldest idea for a pragmatist political institution; and here, finally, we come to “The Moral Equivalent of War.” On one level, James’s argument is indeed simple, even prosaic. Pacifist that he was, James thought military training and combat did often cultivate certain civic virtues, but channelled them in wasteful directions. Pragmatist that he was, he also reckoned the baser instincts inflamed by war impossible to extinguish fully. Rather than excoriate the military as a hopeless evil or aberrant excrescence, James sought to replicate its best features in a civil institution that might ultimately transform its parent and the polity: a national service corps that was conscripted from “the whole youthful population” in an “army enlisted against Nature.”20 By stopping there, however, readers have missed the profounder implications of James’s essay. It should not be read as a celebration of force, for instance, or environmental destruction, or the subjugation of “feminism” to “manliness” that James himself imagined war’s genuine apologists to endorse. From the WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 127 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT essay’s beginning, James’s position is clear: any benefits of war come at too high a cost. “In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest.”21 Those modern eyes were his: in 1895, he had called for a “permanent safeguard against irrational explosions of the fighting instinct,” suggesting a war-spending freeze to divorce “armament” from “opportunity.” Four years later, with US forces suppressing the Philippine independence movement, he warned “what an absolute savage and pirate the passion of military conquest always is,” insisting that “the only safeguard . . . is to keep it chained for ever.” Despite the qualms of the “modern” conscience, war at the turn of the twentieth century was as destructive as ever, to both weak and powerful. As James wrote in 1899, while the “cannon of our gunboats at Manila” brought bodies and buildings low, the “excitement of battle” that swept America had its own “disorganizing effect” on speech and conscience and revealed its “corrupting inwardness more and more unmistakably” as the victories piled up.22 Modern war, in sum, was a high-risk and nearly zero-reward affair. Nevertheless, the stubborn fact of human nature remained. “Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow,” James wrote; the human “capacity for murderous excitement,” he lamented, is “aboriginal.”23 The central problem of war was its appeal to this capacity which partakes of both our drive to control our environment and our desire for social esteem. But here is the key insight of the essay and the glimmer of a solution to the problem it addresses. For war, as organized pugnacity, had taught our ancestors to seek the esteem of groups, whether fearful enemies or grateful allies. It also taught that struggle and sacrifice for an uncertain goal are the greatest earners of esteem, whether or not a direct or immediate gain results. Since we all experience life as a struggle for ideals, we admire as “moral” those who are swayed “by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss and pain”— and we seek to emulate them.24 For much of history, war had been “the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness.”25 But war WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 128 CIVIC RENEWAL was not the only field of struggle in which such training could occur. Rather, the experience of struggle and desire for camaraderie precede war, psychologically. War is but one outlet for the primal moral drive to reconcile our surroundings to our will and but one demonstration of the original ethical lesson that other wills are relevant to such efforts. That primal ethical insight guided James in nearly all his writing. Only by attending to its role in his thinking can we understand his solution to the problem of war: namely, a new kind of service corps dedicated to universal training and concrete exercises in “civic passion” that would not simply conserve martial virtues in an era when war had become too costly, but would transform our collective moral lives without denying our deepest psychological needs and drives. After all, James argued, given the contingency of human ideals and the social purpose of all moral inquiry, any vision of collective achievement might serve as a cause patriots could rally around. Whether they choose war over more “constructive interests,” James wrote, depends on which “spark” is fanned by the winds of their deliberations.26 For his part, James thought the cause of collective justice the better use of breath. To conquer other people is to shrink our moral universe; to conquer the forces oppressing them is to expand it. Thus, James’s effort was to imagine an institution that could practically advance that goal. By working together to ameliorate pain and suffering, build better public spaces, and ensure employment and leisure to all, citizens could hope to see “the injustice” of their society “evened out” with “numerous other goods to the commonwealth” sure to follow. Universal service, like war, would instill the “hardihood and discipline” that some of James’s contemporaries thought lacking in the nation’s youth. But more importantly, and far better than war, universal service would reveal to the eyes of citizens their “relations to the globe” including the “hard and sour foundations” of the physical comforts, moral commitments, and intellectual premises they might otherwise take for granted. Having “done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature,” these foot soldiers of a WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 129 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT new civic empire would know the social as well as material dimensions and challenges of that struggle and teach the next generation to appreciate them.27 JAMES’S UNFINISHED CAMPAIGN Pacifists, environmentalists, and feminists thus have little to fear from James’s suggestion—and we have much to learn. Despite his rhetoric of a manly army conquering nature, James sought to obviate aggression and destruction through the promotion of inclusive, mutually educative experiences and causes. The moral equivalent of war did not consist in the specific tasks of a civilian corps, but in supplanting, through democratic organization, the volatile “morals of military honor” with robust “morals of civic honor” (as James put it)—morals made manifest in the continuous effort of a free commonwealth to enlarge its effective membership as well as its collective moral imagination.28 Few, I assume, would argue that any such moral equivalent of war has been established since James’s day. Consider James’s own United States. In 2000, scholars across fields heard and recall Robert Putnam’s warning bell regarding the state of American civil society in Bowling Alone. Despite that book’s best-seller status, however, major indices such as the National Conference on Citizenship’s America’s Civic Health Index and the University of Southern California’s Understanding America Study reveal that Americans’ civic skills, dispositions, opportunities, activities, and sense of agency have continued to decline since its publication. To take just a few measures:    The percentage of Americans who read a newspaper every day has declined, along with trust in all forms of news media. Confidence in all branches of government has declined, along with voter turnout. Fewer than 25 percent of Americans devote time to volunteering. WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 130 CIVIC RENEWAL  The percentage of survey respondents expressing “displeasure” at the thought of their child marrying someone outside their political party increased from 5 percent in 1960 to 40% percent in 2010.29 These figures paint a grim picture of ostensibly democratic citizens displaced from the center of self-government. Indeed, they conjure a nation composed not of citizens at all, but rather of consumers, accepting or rejecting proffered solutions to their problems or enhancements to their lifestyles rather than coproducing their commonwealth. Ironically, the current hyperpolarization of American politics is exacerbated by this torpid civic climate, in which policy questions are presented as binary choices to constituents who ignore or simply lack opportunities to engage civilly across their differences. Thankfully, in the unfinished universe that James’s work reveals to us, the chance for something better remains. In my brief remaining space, I will point to two broad efforts to advance a cocreative civic culture that might have particular resonance for readers of an interdisciplinary academic journal. The first is the burgeoning scholarly interest in the field of Civic Studies, an enterprise uniting citizens within and beyond the academy in critical analysis and collaborative production of the society they aspire to share.30 Civic Studies is a conceptually elastic, intellectually plural response to the uncertain and unfinished phenomenon of politics. It comprises a field of interdisciplinary (across the academy) and transdisciplinary (beyond the academy) research, scholarship, and practice in support of the kind of civic renewal James sketched in his work. As such, its purpose is to understand and strengthen the work of citizens who endeavor to govern themselves and shape their common world. It does not seek, either in theory or practice, to divorce citizenship from government, but to restore government to its role as a tool and organ of citizenship.31 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 131 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT Emerging originally among political philosophers disenchanted by ideal theory and economists influenced by the work of 2009 Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, the Civic Studies enterprise has since attracted attention and intellectual investment from scholars and practitioners in disciplines including history, social work, pediatric brain science, family therapy, business ethics, public administration, engineering, medicine and physiology, sociology, education research, and many more. A small but growing number of institutions have developed valuable stores of research and wisdom regarding how to weave the Civic Studies ethos of collaborative inquiry and co-creative, egalitarian community relationships into academic structures and practices. Preeminent among them is the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, which for years has united sophisticated research into the current state of civic life with community collaboration to improve it and which recently launched a new major giving interested undergraduates a direct incentive to join the enterprise.32 That brings me to a second broad movement that testifies both to the crisis of citizenship in America and to its potential amelioration. Nationwide, professionals across multiple domains find themselves chafing at the barriers dividing their working and civic lives; they yearn to define and adopt a new posture of citizen professionalism.33 Among scholars, the citizen-professional ideal finds nascent expression through academy-wide efforts to harness the “public” potential of disciplines such as history and sociology; to advance “translational” and “participatory” research paradigms such as those gaining traction in mental health, public health, education research, and developmental science; and to adopt standards and methods of “public engagement” for colleges and universities that are clear and evaluable without being technocratic or chauvinistic.34 Missing, however—at least at the vast majority of our institutions of higher education—is any systematic effort to address the professional crisis by exploring how scholars themselves can fulfill their potential as co-creative citizens while simultaneously advancing their research through exposure to the WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 132 CIVIC RENEWAL data, perspective, wisdom, and legitimacy that emerges from public scrutiny and exchange. In short, the Civic-Studies/citizenprofessional ethos has moved only a small minority in the academy. This is both a shame and an opportunity, for I believe it can help us answer the existential question facing higher education generally and public institutions of higher education in particular— namely, what public purpose does it serve? For decades, the most frequent and persuasive answers have been “workforce development” and “technology transfer,” both viewed as proxies for the university’s contribution to economic growth. In other words, the public purpose of higher education is often reduced to its capacity to provide private goods—whether to students, to the corporate entities demanding their skills, or to those who consume the product of the two. This capacity is important. Indirectly, it does serve public purposes, like helping to raise standards of living and levels of health (however unevenly). Unfortunately, when the public image of the university is that of a provider of private goods, all of its activities become subject to the narrowest market reasoning. Why should someone not getting a high-paying job, a stream of dynamite employees, or a life-saving medical device from the university invest in the institution? And why should the university—or the state—invest in curricula that do not directly create such jobs, workers, and products?35 Indeed, such questions are being posed by scholars themselves. As many as twenty years ago, John Bennett identified a growing “faculty malaise” stemming from their self-perceived “alienation” from public life.36 Sadly, a 2012 study by Robin Wilson that was focused on associate professors reported that little had changed. This seems in part due to the referred civic frustration radiating from students who feel pressure to treat their education as a purely economic instrument. In 2012, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement discovered that only onethird of twenty-four thousand surveyed undergraduates felt that college had helped them expand their civic awareness, develop skills to change society for the better, or deepen their commitment to the common good.37 Meanwhile, at a 2015 Chicago convening, WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 133 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT faculty from multiple disciplinary clusters spread across two-year, four-year, and comprehensive institutions “spoke of how many of their students were searching for ways to live meaningful lives, wrestle with big problems facing their generations, and contribute to making a more just world.”38 Fortunately, research reveals secondary and postsecondary education to be among the most effective means of fostering citizenship. This is doubly fortunate, in fact, for research also shows that education for citizenship not only produces graduates with capacity and confidence to combat the forces undermining civic health, but also improves learning across all domains. The “open classrooms” best suited to fostering civic dispositions and civic agency further benefit students by nurturing critical reflection and disburdening working memory through productive confrontation (rather than awkward, artificial suppression) of tensions and differences. These outcomes are only reliable, however, if education for citizenship is infused throughout the curriculum, rather than segregated into co-curricular or extracurricular spheres inevitably construed (by students and faculty) as secondary or even discretionary.39 In other words, a civically reformed academy might provide just the sort of moral equivalent of war that James was looking for. Identifying the public implications and civic potential of their disciplines would not only permit scholars to explain their profession and their work in a more broadly relevant and accessible way, but would also help them make more informed and more publicly responsible choices about the teaching, research, and outreach they choose to undertake in the first place. Moreover, bringing such civic clarity to disciplinary commitments and practices would influence the frameworks through which scholars justify and transmit civic learning to students. If fully embraced, this academic commitment to citizen professionalism would mean weaving civic learning throughout the disciplinary course of study for students in all fields. The result would be graduates who are not just more civically-minded but also more knowledgeable, skillful, adaptable, and thus productive—graduates whose professional and WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 134 CIVIC RENEWAL public lives are integrated in such a way as to drive the nation’s democratic as well as economic, technological, intellectual, and cultural growth. James is finally getting his due as a political thinker and deeply engaged intellectual after decades of scholarship casting his pragmatism as irrelevant, or even an impediment, to politics.40 His effort to sketch a moral equivalent of war is not his best work. But if it can guide his heirs in the contemporary academy between the Scylla of technocracy and the Charybdis of social criticism toward a land of common public work and wealth, it will prove to be among his most important. University of Minnesota tthrontv@umn.edu BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwell, Matthew N., John Bridgeland, and Peter Levine. 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WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 137 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT Levine, Peter. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Levine, Peter, and Karol Edward Soltan, eds. Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field. Washington, DC: Bringing Theory to Practice/American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2014. Lippmann, Walter. Papers. Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, microfilm edition. Livingston, Alexander. Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Miller, Joshua I. Democratic Temperament: The Legacy of William James. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Musil, Caryn McTighe. Civic Prompts: Making Civic Learning Routine Across the Disciplines. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2015. National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2012. O’Meara, Kerry Anne. Because I Can: Exploring Faculty Civic Agency. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, 2012. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1935. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Reardon, Jayne R. “Civility as the Core of Professionalism.” In Essential Qualities of the Professional Lawyer. Edited by Paul A. Haskins. 35–47. Washington, DC: American Bar Association, 2013. Rhode, Deborah L. In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Rodgers, Daniel T. “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11–38. WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 138 CIVIC RENEWAL Saltmarsh, John, Matthew Hartley, and Patti Clayton, Democratic Engagement White Paper. Boston: New England Research Center for Higher Education. Santoro, Doris A. “Good Teaching in Difficult Times: Demoralization in the Pursuit of Good Work.” American Journal of Education 188.1 (2011): 1–23. Schrecker, Ellen. The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University. New York: The New Press, 2010. Snyder-Hall, Claire. Civic Aspirations: Why Some Higher Education Faculty are Reconnecting Their Professional and Public Lives. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, 2015. Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Throntveit, Trygve. William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Wilson, Robin. “Why Are Associate Professors So Unhappy?” Chronicle of Higher Education (June 3, 2012). http:// chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-Associate-Professors/132071 NOTES  Sections of this essay are reproduced, with minor omissions and changes, from Chapter Four of Throntveit, William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic. 1 The best and broadest analysis of the roots and implications of civic crisis in the American context as well as the creative responses of citizens to it is Levine’s We Are the Ones. 2 Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, 30 October 1912, Lippmann, Papers, reel 32. On Lippmann’s close relationship with James during the former’s undergraduate days at Harvard, see Steel, Lippmann and the American Century, xv, 16–18, 66; and Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 317–18. WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 139 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT James, “Renouvier’s Contribution,” 266; James, “Will to Believe,” 30. 4 See especially Rodgers, “Republicanism.” 5 James, Correspondence, 12:291; James, “Thomas Davidson,” 103. 6 James, Letters, 2:73; James, “The Philippines Tangle,” 154, 157. 7 James, Correspondence, 5:505. 8 Quoted in Perry, Thought and Character, 2:307–08. 9 James, William James and Theodore Flournoy, 62. 10 James, “What Makes a Life Significant” 298; James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 286. 11 James, “Problem of the Negro,” 193. 12 James, “The Social Value of The College-Bred,” 318. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 See, for example, Miller, Democratic Temperament, 24. Somewhat bizarrely, in 1968, Robert L. Beisner grouped James with 11 other “mugwumps” and “dissident Republicans” who opposed many of America’s imperialist adventures from 1898 onward because, in Beisner’s opinion, they saw jingoism and economic expansion as part of a syndrome of mass democracy that threatened enlightened government by the well-born elite to which they belonged. In contrast, Jonathan M. Hansen has argued persuasively that James’s anti-imperialism was in fact inspired by a broad rather than a narrow vision of the civic nation, while Leslie Butler has shown how the impulse to reinvigorate rather than resist popular government lay behind James’s domestic and foreign political views, and behind those of others whom Beisner portrayed as fundamentally conservative liberals. See Beisner, Twelve against Empire, ch 3; Hansen, Lost Promise of Patriotism, esp. Chapter 1; and Butler, Critical Americans, esp. Chapter 6. 16 James, “Social Value of the College Bred,” 315, 316–17, 323. 3 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 140 CIVIC RENEWAL 17 Ibid., 313–14. Ibid., 315–16. 19 Ibid., 317–18. 20 James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 287–88. 21 Ibid., 268. 22 James, Letters, 2:29; James, “The Philippine Tangle,” 155– 156. 23 James, “Moral Equivalent,” 272; James quoted in Perry, Thought and Character, 2:317. 24 James, Varieties, 45. 25 James, “Moral Equivalent,” 272, 287–88. 26 Ibid., 285, 289. 27 Ibid., 290–91. 28 Ibid., 289. 29 Atwell, Bridgeland, and Levine, Civic Deserts, esp. 4–6; see also Iyengar, Sood, and Lekles, “Affect, Not Ideology” and Jones, “Record High.” 30 The best brief overview of the field is Levine, “Civic Studies.” For a more comprehensive introduction providing a taste of the field’s pluralism see Levine and Soltan, eds., Civic Studies. 31 Citizenship in this context does not denote legal membership in a particular polity, but a guiding ideal and practical ethos embraced by individuals loyal to, empowered by, and invested in the communities they form, inform, and continually re-form together. 32 See Tufts University, “Civic Studies.” 33 See, e.g., Dzur, Democratic Professionalism; Doherty, “Beyond the Consulting Room”; Santoro, “Good Teaching”; Reardon, “Civility as the Core of Professionalism”; Snyder-Hall, Civic Aspirations; Christopherson, Scheufele, and Smith, “Civic Science Imperative.” 34 On this last point see Saltmarsh, Hartley, and Clayton, Democratic Engagement White Paper; and National Task Force, Crucible Moment, esp. chapters IV and V. 18 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018 141 TRYGVE THRONTVEIT See Burwell et al., “Claiming Our Story.” Bennett, Collegial Professionalism, vii 37 National Task Force, Crucible Moment, 41 38 ; Musil, Civic Prompts, 8–9. 39 Gould et al., Guardian of Democracy, 20–25; National Task Force, Crucible Moment, 11–13. 40 Recently Throntveit, William James; Livingston, Damn Great Empires!. 35 36 WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES VOL 14 • NO 1 • SPRING 2018