An unusually deep and innovative work

books:


	• Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Cultural Studies of the United States) James Livingston The University of North Carolina Press, 1997 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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bridging culture and economy

One of the largest contributions of this book is its effort to combine economic history with cultural analysis. Livingston takes the time to distinguish important structural changes in the US economy during this period (1850-1940). More cultural historians and critics should grapple with this material--Livingston can wean us off of blanket labels ("incorporation," "Gilded Age") that leave no room for thinking through the more dynamic relations of the economic and the cultural.

A second virtue of this book is Livingston's provocative, polemic argument. Although his political sympathies are with the left, he offers a strong critique of the tendency among left historians to see the emergence of corporate capitalism as the effective end to any chance for victory on the left. This "tragic" mode of analysis, Livingston argues, means we can only remain mired in a nostalgic orientation toward the past. Livingston turns to two cultural formations--literary naturalism (especially the fiction of Theodore Dreiser) and pragmatism (especially William James)--to argue for a "social self" that offers hope for political progress but is not inherently at odds with corporate capitalism. I'm still not sure if I buy Livingston's argument, but his frame of analysis and reflections on history and models of selfhood are tremendously fruitful.

Although the book is largely an advanced academic study, it is clearly written and free of jargon. Well read students of American history and culture will be able to follow the analysis.

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An unusually deep and innovative work

This is a work of conceptual brilliance, in its argument about why pragmatism occurred when it did, its cultural ramifications and its current importance. In addition Livingston illuminatingly connects pragmatism with post-modernism.

The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.

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