William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

For his biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, American historian and biographer Robert D. Richardson was awarded Columbia University's Bancroft Prize for distinguished works of American History. The book argues that despite the tendency of some modern academics to view nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James as an old-fashioned holdover from the Victorian Era, the philosopher's work was, in fact, an early harbinger of the modernist movements of the twentieth century.

Born in New York City on January 11, 1842, William James was part of a wealthy family that encouraged all its children in scholarly pursuits. William's brother, Henry, became one of the most important novelists of his time, while his sister, Alice, later became famous for her witty, acerbic diaries. Throughout his early life and on into young adulthood, James suffered a number of physical ailments which prevented him from being enlisted in the Civil War. After a brief flirtation with the arts, James enrolled at Harvard Medical School, determined to become a doctor. He took a break from his studies in 1865 to join a friend on an Amazon expedition. Unfortunately, he suffered from smallpox and intense seasickness, which affected his health over the next two years. In 1867, he was forced to take a more open-ended break from his medical studies. He retreated to Germany, hoping that the change of scenery would help heal him. While there, he wrote a number of literary works that were reviewed in North American periodicals. After a year, he returned to the United States, finally completing his medical degree, though he would never practice medicine. His time of soul-searching in Europe had led him to embrace the fields of philosophy and psychology.

Although he would never practice medicine, he remained in the academic sphere of Harvard for many years, serving as an instructor in physiology and anatomy, before eventually becoming an assistant professor and later a full professor of psychology. At this point, psychology still had not been universally accepted as one of the hard sciences; rather, it was thought of as a social science at best and, at worst, a passing fad. However, thanks in large part to James's seminal 1890 work, The Principles of Psychology, the field finally had the foothold it needed to be taken seriously in the United States. His work in popularizing and legitimizing psychology helped earn him the title, "Father of Modern Psychology" among many high-profile observers.



In tandem with his work in psychology, James wrote extensive treatises on philosophy. He helped establish and popularize the theory of truth known as Pragmatism. Truth, James wrote, is not something that is "ready-made" and simply waiting for us to discover it. Rather, the truth is both mutable and "relative to a conceptual scheme." We, as humans, collaborate with what we observe to establish what truth is, through our experiences with it and inquiries of it.

By arguing in favor of something not unlike the "moral relativism" that would take hold during the modernist era of thought, Richardson asserts that James helped to usher in the modern era. This, some observers argue, runs counter to popular ideas of James as someone belonging to an era that was far more wedded to religious beliefs or Victorian Era mores. According to Richardson, the questions of James's personal life, however, aren't of much consequence when considering the content of his philosophical treatises. Nor is James's style of writing, which some argue doesn’t resonate with modern or post-modern audiences. In this way, James's work laid the groundwork for the demise of his own legacy. Nevertheless, Richardson persuasively argues in William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, that legacy should not be forgotten.