American Sojourn, 1938–1953

Pick a label. Black Marxist, labor historian, sports writer, literary critic, novelist, pan-Africanist. C.L.R. James is an elusive figure, and when it comes to matters political, we tend to think of James as a kind of political folk hero, an activist, perhaps a Marxist or Leninist propagandist. Rarely is James taken seriously as a political theorist, and this, I suspect, has to do with his avowed commitment to an orthodox Marxist politics, a commitment that is thought to shape, or perhaps shackle, any possible theoretical contribution. I want to expose additional ambiguity in James's thought. What I call James's “minor narrative” derives largely from a set of reflections on Hegel, and we get a picture of a dialectical way of thinking that operates in tension with James's more orthodox Marxist or Leninist assumptions regarding the revolutionary character of the working class and the historical inevitability of socialism. In order to unsettle any notion that James falls squarely in line with an orthodox Marxist or Leninist politics, I offer some background on James's intellectual development up through his most creative and prolific period, his fifteen-year stay in America from 1938 through the early postwar era.Footnote ⁵

Born in 1901, James left his native Trinidad for England in 1932. There he encountered Marxist thought, and in 1938 he published his influential history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. The same year, he left England for America at the request of Leon Trotsky. By that time James had become a committed Trotskyist, and he was to embark on a nationwide speaking tour on “the Negro question” in an attempt to fold American blacks into the international labor movement. His stay in America was supposed to be short, but the American sojourn quickly became less a mission for Trotsky and more of an open-ended learning experience for James.

Following Trotsky's assassination in 1940, James grew increasingly disillusioned with the theoretical apparatus Trotsky had left behind. Along with Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee, and other members of the group then known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency, James felt a need to move beyond what he regarded as the static and increasingly stale categories of the Trotsky-Stalin polemic.Footnote ⁶ In the throes of his own theoretical insecurity, James took up Lenin as a kind of intellectual mentor. Notes on Dialectics, the key text in our analysis, is very much an attempt to do as Lenin did, to read Hegel and get clear on the dialectic. Where “Lenin had come to the conclusion that you could not understand Capital without an understanding of the Hegelian Logic,” James “came to the conclusion that a fundamental investigation still remained to be done, on Hegel's Science of Logic (with that had to be associated the smaller Logic, a section of Hegel's Encyclopedia).”Footnote ⁷ Following Lenin, then, James came to think of the dialectic as a method, one that could account for the movement and development of theoretical categories, and one that would provide a necessary grounding for a genuinely Marxist theory and practice. And yet it is this association with Lenin and with an orthodox Marxism that obscures much of what James has to offer theoretically.

James would never renounce his affiliation with Lenin.Footnote ⁸ But whatever his allegiance to Lenin, or to a certain spirit of Lenin, James would by 1950 describe his position as a “total repudiation of the theory and practice of the Leninist theory of the Vanguard Party for our era.”Footnote ⁹ For James, “Leninism, the theory of the Vanguard Party … was a particular theory, designed to suit a specific stage in the development of society and a specific stage of working class development. That stage is now passed.”Footnote ¹⁰ By suggesting that Lenin's theory of the party had been historically superseded, James seems to adhere to a kind of teleological political vision, a rather orthodox Marxist set of assumptions regarding the inevitability of socialism and the revolutionary condition of the contemporary working class. But here begin the ambiguities in James's political thought.

James had always displayed a remarkable confidence in spontaneous or autonomous activity on the part of the socially and politically oppressed. This confidence is perhaps a result of James's own colonial background. “Africans must win their own freedom,” he wrote in 1936, “Nobody will win it for them.”Footnote ¹¹ James's experiences in America in the 1940s, his witness to the progressive struggles of women and American blacks, provided further animus for this more radically democratic disposition. And however it may fit into a broader deterministic or teleological vision of social development, there is a sense in which James rejects Leninist vanguardism because it places a theoretical and political damper on the creative expression of the people and because it remains inattentive to the more uncertain and contentious character of democratic political life. James's challenge was to bring a certain Marxian sensibility and a set of reflections on dialectical thought into conversation with a sustained attentiveness to the creative capacities of ordinary human beings. “When the masses, not a few philosophers, grasp the dialectic, the logic, the unity of theoretical, practical, methodological,” James wrote to Dunayevskaya in 1949, then “we have reached the Absolute Idea of society, [that is], social man. There begins the development of human power for its own sake.”Footnote ¹²

Parallel Narratives

In 1948 James drafted his major theoretical text, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Notes on Dialectics is an understudied text, too understudied, perhaps, to yield any kind of a standard reading. But I want to suggest that two basic stories emerge in the text; one is rather straightforward while the other is a bit more elusive. James gives us a major narrative that has to do with the more dominant orthodox Marxist strand of his thought, a narrative in which the dialectic is invoked to help explain trends in the international labor movement of the 1940s. But James also gives us a minor narrative that revolves around an idiosyncratic reading of Hegel. For the sake of presentation, I will speak here of “James's Hegel,” but it is important to keep in mind that James's Hegel, the protagonist of the minor narrative, cannot be thought apart from a broader constellation of Marxian concerns. James is in the process of developing his own heterodox Marxian sensibility, and his interest in Hegel does not signal an abandonment of a broader suspicion of capitalism or bourgeois liberalism. James is not aiming to retrieve any kind of Hegelian idealism. Yet James does seem to bracket much of the orthodox Marxist political vision in his effort to grasp a dialectical way of thinking in Hegel's logic.

As the subtitle to the book indicates, James is concerned with three basic characters: Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. But these characters do not always contribute to the same storyline. James makes a distinction between Hegel, on the one hand, and Marx and Lenin, on the other. Hegel, he says, is a thinker of the “instinctive dialectic.” Marx and Lenin emerge as representatives of the “theoretical dialectic.”Footnote ¹³ The former, as I will explain in detail below, has to do with how each of us might view our daily lives through a dialectical lens, how each of us might learn to think dialectically. The latter has to do with larger historical trends and with how we might read the international labor movement in terms of dialectical logic. Throughout Notes, James will make what he calls “transfers” from his discussion of Hegelian instinctive dialectic to its possible expression on a macropolitical register.Footnote ¹⁴ While James always begins with Hegel and then makes his “transfer” to the “theoretical dialectic” of Marx and Lenin, it is precisely the theories we associate with Marx and Lenin—as well as much twentieth century Marxist and Leninist practice—that tends to overshadow James's treatment of Hegel and the subtler, more nuanced, and far more pregnant figuration of dialectical reflection which emerges there.

John McClendon recently published the first book-length study of Notes, and I want to draw on it here to show how the major narrative can usurp James's treatment of Hegel. McClendon's book is an attempt to find an appropriate label for James. Through an “internal critique” of Notes, McClendon seeks a “comprehensive apprehension of [James's] locus as a Marxist-Leninist philosopher.”Footnote ¹⁵ McClendon argues that James fatally departs from his own expressed commitment to dialectical materialism and “becomes ensnared in dogmatism” by virtue of his tacit adherence to a politically bankrupt brand of Hegelian idealism.Footnote ¹⁶ According to McClendon, “James overlooks how Marx and Lenin approach Hegel's dialectic and therefore he cannot replicate Marx and Lenin's mode of apprehending Hegel's Logic, that is, penultimately James does not reclaim their materialist reading and ultimately the materialist inversion of Hegel's idealist dialectics.”Footnote ¹⁷ I am generally sympathetic to the claim that James departs from a strong dialectical materialism and, at least at times, seems to develop a more left-Hegelian or perhaps Hegelian-Marxian theoretical orientation. But because McClendon approaches James from the perspective of Marxism-Leninism and frames his reading in terms of Marxism-Leninism, McClendon determines in advance the character of James's Hegel. In other words, McClendon reads Notes only in terms of the major narrative and does not allow the minor narrative to come forth in any way.Footnote ¹⁸

So what would an emphasis on the minor narrative look like? Who is James's Hegel? Throughout Notes, James gives us a kind of Hegelian pastiche. While many Hegelian themes are respected and treated with care, others are ignored or rejected entirely. James will celebrate contradiction and the movement of dialectical negativity, but world-spirit [Geist] is “one of the funniest things in philosophy.”Footnote ¹⁹ “For our purposes it [world-spirit] does not matter a damn. … To hell with it!”Footnote ²⁰ James's Hegel is one who folds dynamism and movement into the very nature of human thinking. It is one who, while deeply critical of Kant's excessive formalism, takes up and develops Kant's philosophy of consciousness. It is one who extracts dialectical contradictions not from some grand historical narrative, not from some figuration of History or Reason, but from the trials of lived human experience. It is a selective and unique Hegel, and, to say it again, while James brackets Marx and Lenin and “theoretical dialectic” here, his engagement with Hegel is still part of a broader and continuously developing Marxian sensibility.

Because McClendon frames his reading in terms of the major narrative, he gives James a pretty rough treatment. James is criticized for butchering Hegel and Kant, for neglecting the “locus of German idealism,” for misunderstanding Marx and Lenin and their materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectics. But James is not interested in getting Hegel right. “I shall interpret freely,” he says.Footnote ²¹ “I do not guarantee these interpretations. The point is once they are down we begin to get somewhere. I am not afraid of mistakes.”Footnote ²² James plays around with Hegel. Just as he plays around with Kant—“I am doing injustice to Kant, I am sure, and committing crimes against philosophical terminology.”Footnote ²³ Just as he plays around with the language of dialectics and idealism and materialism. My aim is to offer a more generous reading of James, of James's Hegel, and of the more nuanced figuration of dialectical reflection that emerges in this minor narrative. In many ways, as I noted at the outset, I threaten to move beyond James. But my reading is, I think, more in tune with James's remarkably political and theoretical creativity.Footnote ²⁴

James's Humanism

Having introduced my interpretive approach, I want to begin to explain this notion of an instinctive dialectic by reflecting on James's humanism. James's minor narrative, as I have suggested, operates in tension with his more orthodox Marxist vision of progressive social development, his vision of a fateful dialectical teleology. In the minor narrative, James develops a set of reflections on the dialectical interplays between subject and object, particular and universal. Furthermore, he does so without committing to any grand progressive narrative, at least not in any strong or direct way. Indeed, as I will explain in the next section, James's instinctive dialectic has more to do with personal psychology, with how each of us might learn to think dialectically and articulate our experiences in a dialectical fashion. This instinctive dialectic is built upon a set of loosely Hegelian-Marxian humanist assumptions. I want to flesh out these assumptions and show how they prefigure a more open-ended political vision, one that is more attentive to the uncertain and contentious character of democratic politics.

By bringing Hegel, Marx, and humanism together here and in a rather loose fashion, I mean to play up the basic idea that human beings exhibit a foundational drive for not only physical but also emotional and spiritual fulfillment. Unlike other animal species, I seek meaning in my life, and I am capable of judging my life in terms of its meaningfulness. More specifically, I recognize that I have unique inclinations, unique capacities, unique creative talent, unique potential, and I want to recognize my daily life as an expression of this, an expression of who and what I truly am. I seek to express who I am, my particularity, in the activity of something greater, something meaningful, something, to use Hegel's more audacious language, universal.

We need not shy away from this language of universality, for in Jamesian usage it is rather innocuous. As Cornelius Castoriadis has remarked, James “had this wonderful sense of the self-activity of the people, and he was able to translate it in universal terms that were not absolute universals, if I may use this expression.”Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, this notion of self-activity derives from James's belief that human beings desire fundamentally a sense of completeness, or what James will increasingly call “happiness.” This completeness or happiness derives from a unification of subject and object, particular and universal. “Both Hegel and Marx in their different ways believed that man is destined for freedom and happiness,” James writes, and this “nature of man,” this human ontology, motivates a “search for this completeness and the overcoming of obstacles which stood and stand in its way.”Footnote ²⁶ James is committed to the Hegelian and Marxian assumption that human beings ought to recognize their world as an expression of their own creative activity, and that insofar as this world is not such a reflection, insofar as this world prevents such reflection, something is wrong with this world, something needs to be done. We need, as James puts it, an “overcoming of obstacles.”Footnote ²⁷

There are at least two ways in which James's humanism prefigures a political vision. First, it pushes James well beyond any quest for certainty and security, well beyond any liberal modus vivendi. “An intellectual like Dewey believes that man's quest is the quest for certainty,” James notes in 1947. “The intellectual believes that all men are intellectuals. That is wrong. Men seek not intellectual certainty. The quest is the mass quest for universality in action and in life.”Footnote ²⁸ James's humanism gives him a kind of utopian vision, a sense that political struggle should not compromise in its quest to achieve an almost spiritual fulfillment in the here and now, in the lived reality of daily existence. Grace Lee Boggs captures this sentiment in a comment on her experience with James in the 1940s:

McClendon will describe this disapprovingly as James's “messianic, and utopian character.”Footnote ³⁰ But a certain messianic or utopian character is crucial to the Jamesian dialectics of the minor narrative. As I will suggest in greater detail below, this quest for universality, this “struggle for happiness,” provides a moral energy that can help provoke a critical perspective and motivate democratic engagement.

James's humanism also prefigures a political vision in that it pushes him beyond any simple emphasis on proletarian class struggle. As we have seen, James has a remarkable faith in the creative activity of the masses, a “wonderful sense,” to again borrow Castoriadis's remark, “of the self-activity of the people.” And this faith, this wonderful sense, derives from James's belief in a natural human quest for universality, completeness, “happiness.” But James remains entirely open to the specific ways in which this struggle for happiness might manifest itself. In 1947, James argued that Marxist thinkers and activists had to respect black political movements and see them as an expression of a broader democratic struggle. Black Americans, he said, “may not formulate their beliefs in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this shibboleth of bourgeois democracy.”Footnote ³¹ Similarly, James championed the struggles of women and students. For James, these struggles were, in their own ways, expressions of a more basic struggle for happiness. While James will continue to use the language of the proletariat, and while bourgeois culture and practice will remain something to be overcome, James's humanism nevertheless facilitates an expanded vision of progressive political struggle.Footnote ³² As Paul Berman has noted, James “was too attached to the flesh-and-blood events of the world to cling to musty old doctrine.”Footnote ³³ The fact that James moves beyond an orthodox Marxist concern with class politics will become especially important as we try to tease out the democratic import of James's “instinctive dialectic.”

Instinctive Dialectic

Having established some necessary groundwork, we are prepared now to address the real substance of James's minor narrative. I suggested, in passing above, that James's instinctive dialectic has to do with how each of us might learn to think dialectically and come to view our experiences through a dialectical lens. James draws on this broadly humanist notion of a struggle for happiness. He takes issue with the human frustrations and anxieties that derive from an inhuman or unhappy existence, from a daily routine and a social and political reality that too often prevents even a struggle for happiness. From these observations, James develops a mode of dialectical reflection aimed at working such frustrations and anxieties into conscious articulation. James's instinctive dialectic signals a mode of dialectical reflection aimed at politicizing human energies in such a way that might ultimately enrich democratic reflection and engagement.

“If we analyze society,” James writes in the introduction to Notes, “we will note certain mass impulses, instinctive actions, spontaneous movements, the emergence of personalities, the incalculable activities which constitute a society.”Footnote ³⁴ We can make sense of these impulses and actions, these movements and personalities in any number of ways. We can deny them. We can suppress them. We can work them into some rigid and prearranged framework (this was the problem of the Trotskyists, according to James). We can also work with these energies and allow them to express themselves. What James calls an instinctive dialectic is a way of making sense of these energies, a way of organizing our thought in such a way as to allow these energies to move and express themselves. “What is Hegel trying to do?” James asks himself. “He is talking about new ideas. His dialectic is new, a new way of organizing thought. Not of thinking. But of knowing what you do when you think.”Footnote ³⁵ While James flirts with some very difficult and fundamental issues of epistemology, and while many readers will find his treatment of these issues somewhat weak and underdeveloped, we can, from a politically theoretical standpoint, learn quite a bit from the story he tells.

As we move along, it will become gradually clear what James means when he speaks of “mass impulses, instinctive actions, spontaneous movements, the emergence of personalities, the incalculable activities which constitute a society.” We will get a better sense for the instinctive component of this instinctive dialectic. And we will get a better sense for the political significance of all this. For now, suffice it to say that for any given person, it is far easier to suppress these energies than it is to think with them. To understand what James's means by “instinctive dialectic,” we have to look at Hegel's logic.

According to James, human beings think in terms of what Hegel calls “hard knots” or “foci of arrest and direction in mental life and consciousness.'”Footnote ³⁶ In the language of German Idealism, we privilege the work of the “Understanding” (Verstand), which “determines, and holds determinations fixed.”Footnote ³⁷ To understand something is to make it intelligible, to bring it into language, to arrest it in time, to identify it; to understand is to stand still as if under the hold of some static force. As such, understanding cannot grasp and enunciate a world that is constantly changing; that is the task of thinking or speculative reason (Vernunft)—“reason is negative and dialectical.”Footnote ³⁸ As Hegel writes in the Phenomenology, thinking reason “spoils its own limited satisfaction.” Although we may try to hold on to some given mode of understanding, our “thought troubles thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.”Footnote ³⁹

This restlessness, this conscious embrace of negativity or difference, is, of course, dialectical, which means it is driven by the principle of contradiction. In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel makes no mistake about the status of contradiction. “Generally speaking,” he says, “it is contradiction that moves the world.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In the Science of Logic, he displays an even greater confidence that this principle, contradiction, is “the root of all movement and vitality.” For Hegel, “it is only insofar as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.”Footnote ⁴¹

To late modern ears, the dialectical principle of contradiction bespeaks yet another mode of philosophical foundationalism, an attempt to reduce the play of difference and political possibility to a rather simple logic of binary opposition. Rather than welcome difference, rather than allow for that which is new and other, that which exceeds our conceptual determination, dialectical reason is said to deny such difference by reducing it to the opposition of what we already know. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, “difference is already placed on a path or along a thread laid out by identity.”Footnote ⁴² Hegelian dialectic is but “a perpetual misinterpretation of difference itself.”Footnote ⁴³ In a late modern world, in light of an ongoing suspicion of philosophical foundationalism, the prevailing sentiment seems closer to Nietzsche—“there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of metaphysical interpretation.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Where Hegel says that, “every determination, every concrete thing, every Notion … [must] pass over into contradictory moments,” James will admit to hyperbole.Footnote ⁴⁵ He questions how “every determination, every concrete, every concept” can reduce to a play of contradiction. “Hegel,” he says, “as usual you exaggerate.”Footnote ⁴⁶ But despite this admission, James will defend the principle of contradiction, and dialectical reason more broadly, and he will do so on political grounds.

For James, contradiction is something we impose upon our experiences. It is not something we get from the world, nor is it something we get from the character of our mind. It is not the expression of some ontological or epistemological truth. Hegel, of course, will go on to make stronger metaphysical claims here, but before that he says simply that without the speculative sharpening of dialectical reason, our experience “affords to mind only a fragmentary and uncertain actuality.”Footnote ⁴⁷ And James works from these more innocuous Hegelian gestures. For James, contradiction is a means to avoid “complete frustration.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Contradiction is a way to avoid “panic and disintegration.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Why frustration? Why panic and disintegration? And what does any of this have to do with James's concern for “mass impulses, instinctive actions, spontaneous movements, the emergence of personalities, the incalculable activities which constitute a society”? For James, these impulses and actions, these movements and personalities constitute the creative energies of human beings, the self-activity that makes us who we are. And because James is committed, as we have seen, to a certain Hegelian-Marxian humanism, these energies contribute to that “struggle for happiness,” that quest for universality in our daily lives. For James, we struggle to see our daily lives, the object, as an expression of our own creative energies, subject. But all too often, our daily lives are not an expression of these energies; all too often, object is at odds with or suppresses subject. And all too often, we are not quite sure what to do about this problem. Our daily routine is in no way an expression of our creative passions and talents, our objective reality is in no way a reflection of our deep sense of who we really are, and we do not know what to do about this discrepancy. We do not know how to make sense of this condition. Too often, James says, we resign ourselves to this reality, to the belief that this is “just the way it is.” As James puts it in a 1950 comment on the American worker, “The worker during the last [twenty-five] years no longer has any illusions that by energy and ability and thrift or any of the virtues of Horatio Alger, he can arise to anything. That is his life, will be his life for ever and ever.”Footnote ⁵⁰ It is as if our political psychology has been reduced to, in Hegelian language, the Understanding which “determines and holds determinations fixed.” There is no movement in our thinking or our activity, no prospects for change. Our human energies still churn, but they issue in an experience of “frustration” and “panic” and “disintegration.”

James's instinctive dialectic emerges at this point as a means of animating the imagination, the critical and political imagination. In his Science of Logic, Hegel makes a “broad distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free act,” arguing that the latter “is performed with an awareness of what is being done.”Footnote ⁵¹ Instinct, or “instinctive activity,” for Hegel bespeaks a kind of spontaneous or impulsive activity. It is not yet dialectical. It is not yet intelligent, not yet free. Instinctive activity will provoke dialectical movement, but insofar as it is a function of the instincts, it has not yet been brought to consciousness, not yet “sharpened” into the dialectical logic of contradiction. James follows Hegel here to suggest that these experiences of instinctive frustration, these experiences of panic and disintegration, can only be overcome if we work our experience into a conscious dialectical framework. Negativity, or movement and change,

We have seen that for James, Hegel gives us a “way of organizing thought.” And the point here is that if we can organize our thoughts, our “understanding” of our social and political reality, into a kind of dialectical picture, we thereby introduce the “unbearable nature of contradiction.” We introduce an imperative to movement. We thus provoke the critical and political imagination in the face of frustration, panic, and disintegration.

It is important to say something more about why James refers to this as an instinctive dialectic. James highlights one instance in the Science of Logic where Hegel refers to consciousness as “concrete and engrossed in externality.” James admits this is a “curious phrase for the great Idealist.” But it is here, he says, that “we run up against the dialectic in life.”Footnote ⁵³ For James, Hegel's repeated gestures toward embodiment and a consciousness grounded in the concrete point toward a materialist side of Hegel's thinking.Footnote ⁵⁴ And for James, Hegel's materialism issues in a concern for human desire, human need, human feeling, and for the ways in which our thinking is attentive to these. Our thinking, James says, is rooted in “Desire, Will, etc., human feelings and actions. We abstract them to think about them. But they come from there. … The whole magnificent structure is rooted in the concrete.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Because James in the first place is concerned with “desire, will, etc., human feelings and actions”—because James listens to the instinctive side of life and the frustrations that emerge there—he is driven to concern for dialectical analysis. Again, James does not invoke the dialectic as an expression of some deep epistemological or ontological truth. Hegel's dialectic emerges in James's text as a kind of psychological and political tool, a way of making sense of our experiences and channeling our energies toward active political expression. By emphasizing a materialist side of Hegelian thought, James is able to draw on instinctive frustration as a kind of cue or index for when and where we might be able to work our lived condition into a politically resonant dialectical picture.

The Democratic Imagination

I have sketched in what I call the “minor narrative” of Notes on Dialectics and explained James's understanding of an instinctive dialectic. Because his minor narrative seems to at least bracket the determinism and teleology of an orthodox Marxist dialectic, James is able to bring dialectical reflection into conversation with the uncertain and contentious character of democratic politics. But this is more than just a formal exercise in creating the conditions for the possibility of such a conversation. In order to develop further the specific democratic import of James's instinctive dialectic, we must look to another text, namely James's 1950 commentary on American political culture. In American Civilization, James develops a concern with what I call the democratic imagination, and I want to suggest, in this final substantive section, that James's instinctive dialectic is best understood as a means of animating—or perhaps reanimating—the democratic imagination in the face of social frustration and political apathy.

Notes was written in 1948. As most readers of James see, the two years that follow represent something of a turning point in James's thought. As Kent Worcester puts it, “James appears to have taken the Johnson-Forest Tendency problematic just about as far as it could go” and is poised to take on a “whole new array of concerns.”Footnote ⁵⁶American Civilization is largely a study of literature, sports, Hollywood films and radio, mass culture more broadly. If dialectical theory figures in this text, so the usual interpretation goes, it is simply as a kind of background frame for a broader diagnosis of a civilization in crisis. Because most readers of James miss the minor narrative of Notes on Dialectics, they tend to miss, or at least do not fully appreciate, the ways in which something like an instinctive dialectic might figure in James's subsequent commentary on American democratic culture.

American Civilization was not published during James's lifetime. However, just before he died in 1989, James prepared the manuscript for publication under an alternative title, The Struggle for Happiness. Footnote ⁵⁷ This alternative title is a better indicator of how James's instinctive dialectic might figure in the text. We have seen how the “struggle for happiness” is James's shorthand for the quest for universality, the quest for that subject-object unity that is so crucial to his Hegelian-Marxian humanism. We have seen how James's instinctive dialectic is both derivative of and intended to inform precisely such a struggle. American Civilization is very much a continuation of this story, a continuation of the minor narrative of Notes on Dialectics. It is a story about how this struggle is built into the democratic culture, inscribed in the very moment of the American founding. It is a story of how this struggle has been, by 1949–1950, largely dismissed and forgotten, erased from the democratic imagination. While James says his study “is an objective analysis” and that he “advocates nothing,” he is clearly worried about an arrested struggle for happiness.Footnote ⁵⁸ Against this worry, an appeal to the instinctive dialectic can be read into the text as a possible and perhaps even necessary means of reanimating that struggle and provoking the democratic imagination.

James's major concern in the text has to do with a growing sense of frustration among American blacks, women, and waged workers in general. By 1950 James had spent a good twelve years traveling throughout the United States. He had lived in New York and seen the industrial cities of the north; he had traveled down through Missouri and into the deep South; he had been out west to California and Reno, Nevada, where he drafted Notes on Dialectics in 1948. With American Civilization, James set out to record his observations on “the intimate lives of the population.” And what he produced in 1949–1950 was a story of “tremendous antagonisms [that] are eating away at the core of the personalities of the great masses in the free democratic society of the US.”Footnote ⁵⁹ He spoke of “the bitterness, the violence, the brutality, the sadism simmering in the population, the desire [among the American people] to revenge themselves with their own hands, to get some release for what society has done to them since 1929.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In a key chapter of the text, James draws on the popular arts—radio, television, Hollywood films, comic strips, popular novels—as a kind of index for the mounting frustrations of the American experience. As Kent Worcester remarks,

This “drudgery” and “manipulation” is, for James, a reflection of an American society that denies the creative energies of the people. For many, everyday American life bespeaks a frustration of that subject-object unity. But what is especially troublesome for James is the impact this frustration has had on the democratic culture. “The crisis in America,” James writes, “is a crisis of tens of millions who have only an instinctive conception of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”Footnote ⁶²

Although the text is largely descriptive, although James “advocates nothing,” he does say that, in the face of such a frustrating experience, “the American people need to be given, not prospects of a happy life and higher wages, but a method of thought and a conception of social development that makes their own lives and efforts intelligible to them.”Footnote ⁶³ James seems to suggest that American blacks, women, and waged workers need a way of thinking that can help make sense of a frustrating experience and help put the struggle for happiness back at the core of the democratic imagination. James suggests that ordinary American citizens, working men and women, need the resources of that instinctive dialectic he so subtly extracted from his reading of Hegel.

There are two ways, then, in which James's instinctive dialectic might serve a kind of democratic ethos. Implicit to James's instinctive dialectic is an appeal to the critical function of dialectical thought. James's instinctive dialectic provides a certain moral energy, a faith that a better world is possible, and this moral energy can help cast a critical perspective on the present.Footnote ⁶⁴ As I have suggested throughout, James's commitment to a Hegelian-Marxian humanism, his commitment to a subject-object unity, gives what McClendon described as a “messianic, and utopian character” to his thinking. But it is precisely this moral energy, this faith that the world can and should better reflect our creative capacities that animates the critical imagination in the face of a frustrating and seemingly hopeless condition. Furthermore, James's instinctive dialectic provides a directive toward decision and political action. I mentioned above that James defends the dialectical principle of contradiction not on epistemological or ontological grounds, but rather on political grounds. By learning to imagine our world in terms of contradictions that cannot, or should not, sustain themselves, James's instinctive dialectic provides us with an imperative toward democratic engagement, an imperative toward political decision. Rather than simply accept a daily experience that frustrates our creative energies, we learn to confront that experience with a humanist moral energy, and we look for contradictions, obstacles to be overcome, changes to be made. By sharpening our frustrations into a working dialectical picture, we thereby provoke the critical and political imagination.

As one way in which we might put dialectics into conversation with democratic politics, James's instinctive dialectic clearly contributes to a conception of a democratic ethos rather than to any substantive figuration of ideal democratic structures or institutions. The meaning of democracy here is to be understood in the way Sheldon Wolin understands the term. That is to say, James's democratized dialectics has to do with the lived experience of democratic life, with “acquiring experience of the political.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Democracy, as Wolin has influentially formulated it, “is about the continuing self-fashioning of the demos”; it is “a project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Similarly for James, democracy is an expression of the self-activity of the people. In our discussion of the instinctive dialectic and in our emphasis on the materialist side of Hegelian thought, we have seen that human thinking for James is rooted in the lived experiences of daily life. Reflection, for James, is rooted in “Desire, Will, etc., human feelings and actions.” Democracy is no different. While reflection on the part of the demos may filter up, as it were, and affect political structures and institutions, democracy for James always starts at the bottom, from democratic reflection about the experiences of everyday life. The task of democratic theory, James seems to suggest, is to encourage reflection, to animate the democratic imagination, to provide, in this case, frustrated American citizens with “a method of thought and a conception of social development that makes their own lives and efforts intelligible to them.” Against the background of an arrested democratic imagination, James's instinctive dialectic emerges as a resource, however limited, for the provocation of critical reflection and democratic engagement.