Book Review

Canada and the United States

James Hoopes is worried about the current state of American liberalism. For him, its disarray in the face of attacks by conservative political and social thought is troubling enough, but even more troubling is the choice of contemporary liberals to seek the resources to mount a counterattack in John Dewey's pragmatism. As part of the search for an alternative philosophic basis for liberalism, for a "usable past," Hoopes wishes to draw on the work of the "strong" pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce was a metaphysical realist whose thought was built out of the logical, semiotic relationship between objects. For Peirce, this relationship was real. Thus, generals—horse, rather than a horse—were real, although their precise qualities could only be know by a pragmatic working in the world. Since generals were real and not simply the addition of numerous particulars, communities were real as well. Thus, a community could have real desires, needs, or understandings and was not just the aggregation of individual preferences.

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Hoopes contrasts Peirce's pragmatism with the work of two "weak" pragmatists: William James and Dewey. James's focus on the stream of consciousness of the individual committed him to an empiricist, nominalist metaphysics of atomistic individuals. That commitment made it difficult to see how two people could share one thought, much less how a community could form and do so. Though Dewey forswore nominalism, he shared James's inability to formulate a theory of communication that would support his belief in the reality of community. He was thus reduced to asserting, but not demonstrating, the ability of society to respond intelligently to social problems.

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