William James and the Art of Popular Statement by Paul Stob (review)

Paul Stob’s appreciation for all of William James’s roles—rhetorician, philosopher, psychologist, teacher, and scientist—sets William James and the Art of Popular Statement apart from its pragmatism and rhetoric cousins (see works by Crick, Danisch, Johnstone, and Stroud). Whereas these authors focus on the relationship between American pragmatism and rhetorical theory, Stob’s text is unique in that he chooses instead to highlight the actual rhetorical practices of one of America’s greatest public intellectuals. For this reason, Popular Statement is best understood as a rhetorical biography or history of American rhetoric.

Stob’s central argument is that “James’s commitment to popular statement ultimately led him to a different kind of thought, a different epistemology, a view of science, religion, and philosophy that revolved around ordinary people and their experiences and perceptions” (xv–xvi). To evidence this claim, Stob traces James’s intellectual development through book reviews, key lectures, essays, and major works. Stob demonstrates in the early chapters how, with the rhetorical resources of a culture of eloquence and professionalism in hand (2), James’s art of popular statement first began to develop in his early book reviews and lectures. But this early James, Stob concludes, was conflicted regarding the demos and academic authority. “For all his intellectual egalitarianism,” Stob tells us, James sometimes used his expertise “to move nonprofessionals out of certain debates” (54).

In chapter 3, Stob demonstrates how James’s art of popular statement begins to solidify as he develops his famous lectures called “Talks to Teachers.” Stob argues these talks were really “a collaboration between James and the nation’s teachers” (xxvi). Little scholarly attention has been given to James’s talks to teachers, despite their enormous popularity (75), and for this reason alone Stob’s analysis contributes meaningfully to the history of the American lecture circuit, Chautauqua, and the lyceum movement. Additionally, Stob sheds light on the dilemmas that arise, for both readers and rhetorical scholars, when lectures delivered by someone with a marked oral style are later published as written texts. James, Stob records, used personal pronouns in his lectures, spoke with a “rhythmical balance,” used colloquialisms, and featured what Walter Ong calls a “high oral residue” (96–97). The sum effects of these practices were that James’s lectures were “participatory discourses.” Later, of course, the lectures were published and broadly circulated. The question, then, for Stob and rhetoricians, is “should we treat the lectures and book as the same text?” (93) Stob does not answer these questions for us. Rather, he sets the stage for the inquiry that will serve as a starting point for those who may wish to probe deeper into these questions regarding orality and literacy in popular statement.

Much has been made of James’s fascination with mysticism, and in chapter 4 Stob redeems James’s attempt to “bring psychical research into the world of modern science” in the name of an egalitarian, democratic ethos. James’s critique of the priestly caste of scientists will prove especially rewarding for science studies scholars. Stob notes that James was one of the first American thinkers to begin capitalizing “Science” to demonstrate that it had become “a religion of mechanical rationalism,” whose followers “were true believers, worshiping the god of matter and reason at the expense of human understanding” (133).

Popular Statement really pays dividends in these late chapters, and the “cash value” of Stob’s text becomes a bit clearer. Stob transitions seamlessly from James’s concern with the cult of Scientism to his analysis of the canonical Varieties of Religious Experience. In doing so, he demonstrates how James’s concern with the former shaped his rhetorical strategies in the latter. Varieties established James’s “standing as a thinker of international influence” and its importance to American thought cannot be overstated. In Varieties James fully embraces what Stob calls “intellectual populism” in rebellion of “academic professionalism” (152). Stob gives Varieties just enough attention...