Borderline Maverick

A man with an abiding interest in multiple personalities, William James would doubtless be gratified to know that Francesca Bordogna has added another version to the growing inventory of William Jameses proffered by scholars over the years. James, as historian Robert Westbrook has suggested, must surely be the most “congenial” of American public intellectuals, not solely because of his famous generosity and tolerance, but also because his profuse personal and intellectual life is so accommodating to interpretation.¹ One imagines James in recline on the analyst’s couch, playing cheerful host to a throng of scholarly examiners, all avidly delineating a different permutation of him. Hence we have James the psychologist, James the metaphysician, James the pragmatist, James the neurotic, James the anarchist, and James the occultist—to name but some of the most prominent versions of James now on the shelf.

Such multiplicity is fitting both because of James’ chronic worrying about the fragmentation of his own identity and because of the exceptionally eclectic and extravagant nature of his interests and pursuits. Becoming William James, as Howard Feinstein has shown in his 1984 biography of the same name, was challenging enough; actually being William James—the mature researcher, writer, and Harvard professor—must surely have been an equally difficult feat. Francesca Bordogna offers fresh insight into the achievement in her fine study, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy , Science, and the Geography of Knowledge. James’ multiplicity, Bordogna reveals, was less the result of his peripatetic upbringing, his eccentric family, his vocational indecision, or his bouts of depression and existential crisis than it was a conscious strategy of cultivating a uniquely open and pluralistic approach to the production of knowledge.

Bordogna employs an unconventional combination of analytical tools assembled from the sociology of science, the history of disciplinarity, and borderlands theory to shed new light on James’ intellectual and professional life. One result is a remarkably cogent depiction of the complex and shifting terrain of ideas and institutions that environed James’ thought and work. This alone makes William James at the Boundaries a valuable contribution to the short list of contextualizing intellectual histories of James and his contemporaries, a list that would include, at a minimum, the work of Perry, Kuklick, Kloppenberg, Cotkin, and Croce.² But Bordogna’s astute analysis of ideas and institutions, far from an end in itself, is driven by an ambitious and, ultimately, compelling thesis about James’ own intellectual and moral agenda. James, according to Bordogna, was a “serial transgressor” of professional and disciplinary norms and boundaries. He rebelled both against the compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines and against the segregation of “amateur” from “professional.” This was, moreover, no mere incorrigible quirk like the polka-dotted cravats and garish plaid trousers he was known to sport at faculty meetings, but an “essential strategy within a broader intellectual and social project” (p. 7).³ James sought nothing less than to transform the “geography of knowledge,” redrawing the divisions and hierarchies that constituted the professionalization of the sciences and philosophy to make room for more inclusive, eclectic, and democratic epistemological spaces. This enterprise, furthermore, was at the center of an even more far-reaching effort to rethink the nature of the self and its relations with others, a scheme with significant social and political implications.

Bordogna explains James’ multifaceted project in eight chapters of close analysis and lucid prose. James’ 1906 address before the American Philosophical Association, “The Energies of Men,” sets the stage. The speech is portrayed as a provocation, intended to challenge its audience of professional philosophers to think outside the academic box and consider the ideas both of ordinary “practical men” for whom the notion of “mental energy” was a commonplace and of “amateur” social commentators and therapeutic practitioners concerned with what many regarded as an epidemic of enervation afflicting Americans of the privileged classes. The performance epitomized the sort of “boundary work” that Bordogna claims was James’ modus operandi, especially during the final decade...