Book Review

The recent revival of interest in American pragmatism has spurred lively debate concerning the relation between philosophy and social theory. James Hoopes's book refreshingly departs from the conventional approach of U.S. intellectual historians in both its method and subject matter. Hoopes employs a close reading of texts that challenges the standard contextual approach favored by most historians, and he focuses on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce as a lens through which to read the better-known writings of William James and John Dewey. In championing Peirce, Hoopes argues against the notion of a single tradition of pragmatism. He provocatively distinguishes between the "vulgar" pragmatism of James and Dewey, which privileges subjective experience and individualism, and the "real" pragmatism of Peirce, which privileges objective logic and community. Hoopes sees the triumph of James and Dewey over Peirce as the "wrong turn" of pragmatic liberalism and traces its disastrous influence on three influential social visions of twentieth-century America: the elite managerialism of Walter Lippmann, the interest group politics of Reinhold Niebuhr, and the neighborhood communitarianism of Mary Parker Follett. For Hoopes, all three social theories represent impoverished visions of community in need of correction by Peirce's authentically communitarian philosophy.	1
Hoopes looks to Peirce as an antidote to the postmodern pragmatism currently in vogue among philosophers and historians. The "vulgar" pragmatism running from James to Dewey to Richard Rorty draws its continuity from a persistent nominalism, "the view that the only real things in the world are particular, individual things" (4). James and Dewey directed their nominalist, radical empiricism against the abstract, deductive logic of Cartesian rationalism, only to reaffirm the more insidious Cartesian fallacy of clear and distinct ideas. Hoopes argues persuasively for a clear connection between philosophical empiricism and social individualism. By insisting on the irreducibility of experience, the inviolability of the direct apprehension of reality, James and Dewey reaffirmed the primacy of the individual in social life; society never appears as anything more than a collection of forces that act on the individual, and thus, by implication, await apprehension and mastery by the individual. Ironically, Peirce founded the philosophy of pragmatism explicitly as a critique of nominalism. He wrote from a tradition of philosophical realism that insists that universals--general patterns, classes, or laws--are also real. Peirce rejected clear and distinct ideas as a basis for knowledge and developed a strenuously unpsychological view of logic based on "objective relations among external signs rather than intuitive, subjective feelings of reasonableness" (12). Whereas James and Dewey asserted that individual selves create the unity of thought, Peirce argued that the objective semiotic relations "that create society also create the self so that there is no impassable barrier between self and society" (21). The move from experience to logic shifts the focus of knowledge from the object in itself to how we think about the object, and this process of thought is open to all equally within the community of interpretation.	2
This defense of interpretation would seem to require something like a fatal interpretive leap of faith. Hoopes argues that Peirce's conception of truth as the opinion fated to be agreed upon has been distorted by historians such as Thomas Haskell. Even as Hoopes argues for community, he insists that truth lies not in "agreement among the community of inquiry but consistency with the logic of reality itself" (34). Suspicious of the authority of experts, Hoopes looks to Peirce for confirmation that "reality, not an expert, is the final arbiter of community opinion" (45). Hoopes clearly invokes this reality as an antidote to postmodern nihilism, but he never engages the serious Nietzchean arguments for conceptions of reality as relative, at best arbitrary and at worst a mask for the will to power. This "reality" appears as a kind of Peircean equivalent of Deweyan experience, as that which stands outside of the process of interpretation.	3
As interpretation falls into unmediated reality, so community falls into individualism. The weakness of Dewey's thought lies not in its privileging of individualism over holism, but in its failure to reconcile two equally affirmed, yet contradictory, intellectual orientations; this weakness is nowhere clearer than in Dewey's embrace of the culture concept, an episode in Dewey's thought particularly relevant to his conception of community, yet ignored by Hoopes. Like Dewey, Hoopes is careful to insist that strong conceptions of community in no way threaten the sanctity of the individual. Even as he insists that society may be seen as a self, he cautions that "Society is bound to be more complex, less coherent, and less vital than a human person" (22). Like Dewey, Hoopes insists on the vitality of the individual as a bar against totalitarianism. Hoopes's Peirce resolves the tension between individual and society through an appeal to process and evolutionary growth perfectly consistent with Deweyan instrumentalism: "Self and society merge, not indistinguishably, but fluidly in Peirce's metaphysics."	4
Hoopes's book makes clear important philosophical distinctions within the tradition of pragmatic liberalism. It also makes clear that within liberalism, social theory always takes precedence over philosophy. For all of his urgency, Hoopes turns to Peirce merely for "a mild communitarianism" that he finds "appealing" (11). For all his rhetoric of holism, his vision of community rests on "a traditional notion of social responsibility" that has long served as the social bond of a basically individualistic social order. Hoopes's Peircean community rests on the basic social welfare agenda of health care, child care, and abortion on demand. Postmodern pragmatism stands in need of a Peircean corrective because it appears to Hoopes to lack the intellectual resources to shore up this regime. There seem fewer more concrete examples of Peircean semiotic firstness, secondness, and thirdness than the creation of a child by a mother and a father; Hoopes instead uses Peircean relationalism to argue for the importance of other considerations beyond the status of the humanity of the unborn child. This type of relational thinking apart from substantive questions of truth and value is precisely what made an earlier generation of radical scholars dismiss pragmatism as a philosophy of corporate liberalism. Hoopes's account of Peirce suggests that this social consensus is sufficiently flexible to accommodate a variety of contradictory intellectual positions.	5
Christopher Shannon University of Notre Dame

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