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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published originally by [log in to unmask] (May, 1999)
Brian Lloyd. _Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of
American Marxism, 1890-1922_. New Studies in American Intellectual and
Cultural History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 472
pp. Bibliographic references. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8018-5541-1.
Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by John Pettegrew <[log in to unmask]>, Department of
History, Lehigh University
The Impracticalities of Pragmatism
Brian Lloyd's excellent book bears an ambiguous relationship to the
current revival of pragmatism among American intellectual historians. In
keeping with pragmatist history, _Left Out_ keys on William James and John
Dewey and the successor generation of young public intellectuals who
contributed a fervent socialist edge to progressive era politics; what's
more, in examining these thinkers, Lloyd resists poststructuralist
theories regarding the indeterminacy of language and instead adopts a
contextualist approach to intellectual history that measures the
incremental difference of ideas in relation to the material needs of
specific time and place. It's what he has to say about these ideas,
however, that separates Lloyd from many of his colleagues. In sharp
contrast to privileging pragmatism as a flexible foundation for social
democracy, Lloyd sees the philosophy as an ideological drain upon modern
American radical thought, insidiously distracting would-be revolutionaries
from the analytic logic of Marxism and thereby frustrating any political
economic change more fundamental than liberal reform.
_Left Out_ is a bold polemical work, unabashed in its embrace of Marxist
science. Anticipating charges that his orthodoxy is grossly anachronistic
after the fall of the Soviet Union, Lloyd counters that it is so only if
one adopts a narrow time frame: "I presume that we are witnessing, not the
death of Marxism, but the end of the first period during which Marxists
managed to seize and, for a time, wield state power" (p. 3). With this
perspective in mind, _Left Out_ takes on a visionary purpose. Lloyd could
have been more attentive to convincing us of the inevitable unfolding of
the Marxist dialectic or at least why this historical view is superior and
more certain than others; but his book is nevertheless valuable for its
sustained criticism of late-nineteenth early-twentieth century leftist
thought and for delineating the close convergence between American
socialism and pragmatism.
Organized chronologically, _Left Out_ begins with James' and Dewey's "dual
tradition" of pragmatism and ends with World War I era pacifists and rebel
intellectuals, with each part fixing on particular infidelities to the
"Marxism of Marx." While favoring Dewey's modern scientific project to
James's pre-industrial ideal of individual autonomy, Lloyd believes that
both were corrupted by a Darwinian-based social psychology incompatible
with Marxist historical materialism. Roughly the same problem hindered
Thorstein Veblen and E.R.A. Seligman, who otherwise offered the most
fruitful economic interpretations of social structure and change. Daniel
De Leon and Louis Fraina, usually identified as the most doctrinaire
American Marxists of the pre-World War I period, also erred in their
revolutionary industrial unionism and criticism of Lenin. A climactic
point of Lloyd's study is his treatment of William English Walling, Walter
Lippmann, Max Eastman, and Randolph Bournethe group of talented
pre-warintellectuals who most fully synthesized pragmatist philosophy with
socialist intentions, effectively locking the two together until the Cold
War. _Left Out_ ends with the diffusion of American responses to the
Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution; these dramatic events brought hope
for the seizure of power in the United States; but the distinctiveness of
Marxist revolution remained lost to radicals brought up on pragmatism.
_Left Out_ can be slow going in places--Lloyd overuses labels and other
abstractions that tend to muddle his otherwise beautiful writing--but the
most serious problem is his un-self reflexive reliance on the verity of
Marxist science. Marxism, Lloyd writes in the beginning of the book, is
"the only trustworthy weapon for analyzing and transforming complex, and
seemingly well defended, systems of oppression" (p. 2). Rather than going
on to explicate in history and theory why this has been so, though, the
statement remains a presupposition, a matter of faith that nevertheless
accounts for his thoughts and positions throughout the study. Leftist
alternatives such as the pre-Marxist socialist-communitarian tradition,
radical trade unionism, and parliamentary socialism are dismissed out of
hand as naive, reactionary, or generally misinformed. For all his
stylistic sophistication and complex reading, Lloyd rather routinely pours
out the value of a certain thinker after having concluded that he or she
strayed from the Marxist-Leninist model. The unfortunate result is that
even as Lloyd infuses a new urgency into the study of American socialism,
his goal of explaining how progressive-era radicals missed an
anti-capitalist moment and how that moment can still be seized remains
unfulfilled.
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