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

A number of recent essays and books have asked how pragmatism, since its inception, informs questions that are central to the theory and practice of rhetoric and communication. Paul Stob’s book makes a significant contribution to that conversation, not least through a demonstration of the depth of William James’s work as a public lecturer and the ways in which James’s conception of public lecturing shaped his larger intellectual perspectives and commitments. John Dewey often gets most of the attention of rhetorical scholars, largely because of several cryptic passages that Dewey penned on the importance of communication. Stob’s work offers an important corrective to those that overemphasize Dewey’s role in founding pragmatism and its relevance to rhetorical studies. His book also offers perhaps the most thorough and detailed articulation of how rhetorical considerations were constitutive features in the development of pragmatism.

Stob begins the book by citing a letter that James wrote to F. C. S. Schiller in 1903. In that letter, James states that he believes “popular statement to be the highest form of art” (xi). William James and the Art of Popular Statement is devoted to demonstrating the importance of this claim (and how it has often been overlooked in scholarship on James) and explicating how James developed his art of popular statement. The former argument is probably of most interest to philosophers and historians of pragmatism, while the latter argument ought to be of interest to rhetorical scholars. This book is a fully articulated argument for why and how popular public lecturing made James a unique and important philosopher. Put more broadly, this is an argument that rhetorical practice was a constitutive feature of William James’s intellectual contributions to philosophy and a range of other subjects. As such, Stob shows how rhetorical practices, and not abstract philosophical principles, oriented all of James’s intellectual endeavors, and that James’s work on the public lecture circuit is not distinguishable from his roles as philosopher and scientist. This is not an argument traditionally found in scholarship on William James, and, therefore, Stob makes an original and important contribution to our understanding of James.

To advance this claim, Stob positions James at the intersection of two historical trends. On the one hand, James was “reared in the culture of eloquence.” On the other, he was “trained in a culture of professionalism.” The culture of eloquence taught James about the importance of the “cultivation of the moral character of oneself and one’s community” (36). At the same time, the culture of professionalism drove the development of his work in psychology and recommended attention to specific puzzles and problems only comprehensible to a trained expert. The tension between these two traditions provided the rhetorical resources for James to invent novel ways of relating to audiences and a novel philosophy that “centered on the experiences, perceptions, and predicaments of the man and woman ‘of the street’” (37). James constantly pushed back against the expectations of the culture of professionalism, even though he gained fame as a certified professional expert, through the intellectual commitments of the culture of eloquence. Furthermore, the culture of eloquence provided James with the intellectual support necessary for orienting his more expert insights into philosophy and psychology. Throughout the book, Stob argues that James purposefully engaged popular audiences and critiqued experts with the intention of empowering those audiences and bringing people into a participatory intellectual community.

James’s massively popular lecture series, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals,” is an excellent illustration of how James worked within these two traditions. A critical investigation of these lectures makes up the third chapter of Stob’s book, and his insights here offer a serious contribution to one of the most often overlooked works of James’s career. James delivered these lectures hundreds of times to audiences all over the United States. “Talks to Teachers...