Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?

William James was stuck. Facing the publication of Pragmatism in 1907, he had to decide whether to stress the novelty of his philosophy or its continuity with earlier ideas. James joked that pragmatism would launch "something quite like the protestant reformation" and predicted that it would be "the philosophy of the future." Yet he also believed that he and his fellow pragmatists were building on a foundation laid by philosophers from Socrates to the British empiricists. To soften the blow he was about to deliver, James dedicated Pragmatism to the memory of the venerated John Stuart Mill and added the subtitle A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, hoping that such a pedigree might restrain those inclined to denounce his progeny. As my inversion of James's subtitle suggests, a historian seeking to analyze and explain the current revival of pragmatism confronts the same question James faced: Have contemporary pragmatists resurrected the ideas of earlier thinkers or rejected everything but the name?' The return of pragmatism is something of a surprise. When David A. Hollinger recounted the career of pragmatism in the Journal of American History in 1980, he noted that pragmatism had all but vanished from American historiography during the previous three decades. In 1950, Hollinger recalled, Henry Steele Commager had proclaimed pragmatism "almost the official philosophy of America"; by 1980, in Hollinger's judgment, commentators on American culture had learned to get along just fine without it. "If pragmatism has a future," Hollinger concluded, "it will probably look very different from its past, and the two may not even share a name." Yet pragmatism today is not only alive and