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"Who We Are": Lawrence Levine as William Jamesian Pragmatist and as Gustave de Beaumont
Nell Irvin Painter
| First of all, I wish to thank Roy Rosenzweig, Lawrence Glickman, James W. Cook, Olivia Ryan, and Mike O'Malley, organizers of this conference to honor a historian of enormous import, a brilliant scholar of intellectual generosity and personal warmth. Although I was neither student nor colleague of Larry Levine's, as a historian I grew up under the sign of his early work. As a member of the professoriate, I have shared his views on the need to open the American mind and his commitment to diversity in American student bodies and faculties. For some thirty years I have loved his writing, laughed at his jokes, appreciated his wife, and, in China in the mid-1980s, accompanied him on his travels. His illness saddens me deeply, even as I hope for his recovery. I know that as serious as is his cancer, healing remains possible. |
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I take great pleasure in the opportunity to think aloud about one part of Larry Levine's provocative oeuvre. At least since the 1980s and surely since long before then, Levine has focused on, in his words, "who we are": what it means to be an American, as manifested in conceptions of the shape and meaning of the past.1 I want to relate his long-term preoccupation with American identity to the work of four of his predecessors: two aristocratic French friends and fellow travelers, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866), the American philosopher William James (1842–1910), and, of course, the contemporary who inspired Levine, Allan Bloom (1930–1992). Like Levine and Bloom, born about a century after the French aristocrats' visit to the United States, Tocqueville and Beaumont explored the nature of American identity. They wrestled with many of Levine's and Bloom's issues, matters now falling under the rubric of multiculturalism. Just as Levine saw himself as James's intellectual descendant, so Bloom harked back to Tocqueville. |
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The parallel loses its elegance here (as it will again later on), for Levine did not call upon Beaumont as Bloom cited Tocqueville. Nonetheless, the fates of the books by Tocqueville and Beaumont roughly—very roughly—parallel those of Bloom and Levine. For Bloom, the absolutist opponent of multiculturalism, sold ten times more books than Levine, multiculturalism's defender; a partial version of Tocqueville's work—a version flattering to the free, white, and male American minority—far outshines Beaumont's novel, which envisions the United States as a triracial society. |
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Were I pursuing absolute symmetry, I would dwell on John Dewey, Bloom's major villain and the embodiment of the historicism Bloom excoriated. But this paper is about Levine, not Bloom; I sacrifice Dewey and a measure of proportion. Let Levine's guide James stand also for Dewey. One hundred years ago the American pragmatist William James engaged opponents who misunderstood pragmatism's plural conception of truth. James's defense of the multiple nature of truth often inspires Levine's conceptions of the complexity and multiplicity of American identity. |
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As you will see toward the end of my comments, Americans have come a long way in a hundred years. The Levine-as-Beaumont comparison hardly holds up today, for Levine, unlike Beaumont, has not been forgotten. |
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William James and Lawrence Levine on Truth | |
| The first twentieth-century round of the fight against narrowness did not occur in Levine's 1990s. Not only has Levine shown us that the Western Civilization canon appeared as the result of early twentieth-century educational innovation, he also pointed to previous epistemological controversies over the nature of truth. William James's defense of the multifaceted nature of truth preceded Levine's and lent Levine useful means of characterizing American identity. |
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