The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism (review)

Agriculture is not usually identified as one of the significant contexts out of which pragmatism arose. The usual story points to the influence of Darwin, science generally and an increasingly urban and industrialized society, as well as reaction to the Platonic and Cartesian traditions in philosophy. The closest one comes to a farming and rural society is a deep appreciation for nature. But, once again, one usually comes to this nature talk through Darwin or biology. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism attempts to expand our understanding of the sources to include the American agrarian tradition.

It is not that the conventional account denies pragmatism's agrarian origins. Rather it ignores them. This anthology corrects the too narrow conventional account. Through a series of well-crafted introductory essays and historical studies, the several authors capably remind us of the initial theistic-centered, agrarian worldview of the early settlers. The pragmatists, to be sure, are several generations removed from this colonial understanding of the world. But the immediate forebears of pragmatism, such as Emerson, are shown to have been transformers of the colonial legacy.

I will not summarize the various essays. That is done quite well in Thompson and Hilde's introduction: "Agrarianism and Pragmatism." Their introduction also lays out the argument that is sustained by the several essays. This I will rehearse, for it is crucial to grasp just what the editors are claiming.

The editors content themselves with a brief account of agrarianism, for a later essay by Thompson, "Agrarianism as Philosophy," treats the topic more fully and critically. I will crudely characterize agrarianism as the view that farming is not only economically important, but also politically, morally, and spiritually valuable both for those who do it and for society as a whole. The editors then turn to the other focus of the book, pragmatism. Wisely they do not attempt a concise, definitive account of this elusive movement, choosing instead to call attention to "two broad strands"—"the innovative antifoundationalism of Peirce" and "the conception of experience that emerges from the Protestant settlers of New England, finding nineteenth-century expression in the transcendentalists" (6). It is the latter that the anthology's essays explore most fully. Thus the pragmatism of the book turns out to be "pragmatic naturalism." This is made explicit at the end of the introduction. Thompson and Hilde write: "There is . . . a thematic unity to these essays. Agrarian naturalism—the belief that culture and conduct are conditioned by nature because they are of a piece with nature—becomes pragmatic naturalism. . ." (20).

The book is divided into four parts. The first has three essays that attempt to define the agrarian tradition—the already cited piece by Thompson on agrarianism, James Montmarquet on American agrarianism, and Charles Taliaferro's account of the theistic agrarianism of the colonial period. The second looks at the transitional century prior to pragmatism, focusing on the work of Franklin (James Campbell), Jefferson (Thompson), Emerson (Robert Corrington), and Thoreau (Douglas Anderson). To this I shall return momentarily. The third looks at the two pragmatists, Dewey (Armen Marsoobian and Larry Hickman) and Royce (Hilde), who were closest to agricultural and rural life. (Clearly, by including Royce, the editors are operating with a broad notion of pragmatism.) Finally, the book concludes with four essays that deal with twentieth-century pragmatic agrarian issues and figures—John Brewster and Gene Wunderlich on the Jeffersonian legacy in the twentieth century, Richard Hart on Steinbeck as an experimental naturalist, and Jeffrey Burkhardt on the neo-agrarianism of the land grant universities.

In terms of the issue suggested by the book's title, I find the second part the most interesting. Campbell, the author of a book-length study of Franklin, expertly and concisely makes the case for Franklin as an agrarian. "Indeed," the editors write, "Campbell...