The American Evasion of Philosophy

A history of American pragmatism, subtitled A Genealogy of Pragmatism, by the American philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West. West argues that pragmatism evades the central concerns of modern European philosophy, the search for certain foundations of knowledge, and turns philosophy instead into cultural criticism aimed at expanding democracy. He finds its prehistory in Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ideas of power, provocation and personality set the tone. He then reads Charles Sanders Peirce on science and community, William James on individuality, and John Dewey, whom he treats as the high point, on critical intelligence and creative democracy. A long chapter examines mid-century figures, including Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W. E. B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr and Lionel Trilling, before discussing the revival of pragmatism by W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty. The last chapter proposes West's own prophetic pragmatism, which joins pragmatist thought to a sense of tragedy and to Christian and radical traditions of political engagement.

It is one of the best histories of pragmatism, and it shows how an American philosophical tradition can be turned toward questions of race, democracy and social justice.