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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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