Prophetic Pragmatism

“The tradition of pragmatism—the most influential stream in American thought—is in need of an explicit political mode of cultural criticism that refines and revises Emerson’s concerns with power, provocation, and personality in light of Dewey’s stress on historical consciousness and Du Bois’ focus on the plight of the wretched of the earth. This political mode of cultural criticism must recapture Emerson’s sense of vision—his utopian impulse—yet rechannel it through Dewey’s conception of creative democracy and Du Bois’ social structural analysis of the limits of capitalist democracy. Furthermore, this new kind of cultural criticism—we can call it prophetic pragmatism—must confront candidly the tragic sense found in Hook and Trilling, the religious version of the Jamesian strenuous mood in Niebuhr, and the tortuous grappling with the vocation of the intellectual in Mills. Prophetic pragmatism, with its roots in the American heritage and its hopes for the wretched of the earth, constitutes the best chance of promoting an Emersonian culture of creative democracy by means of critical intelligence and social action.”