Pastoral Ideology and the Pragmatic Response

Abstract

Pragmatic pastorals offer a poetic response to William James’s innovative perspective on subject/object relations and John Dewey’s efforts to connect the potential for democracy directly to issues of aesthetics and discourse. Their pragmatic template for twentieth-century thought is not only essential to the methodology of modern pastoral poetry but also crucial to the development of modern intellectual life in the United States. Early in the century, James and Dewey were already developing comprehensive models of inquiry that problematized the disjunction between the individuals who constituted the nation and those who wielded power. Dewey’s writings provoke and propagate the idea of a public sphere in which expanding political and social rights make visible and debatable issues that had formerly been considered intimate, domestic, or private.¹ In the throes of the Progressive Era and after its peak, Dewey developed a new form of pragmatism that directly engaged with the national sense of crisis and continued to resonate long after his death in 1952 in the work of C. Wright Mills and Sidney Hook, among others, until its reemergence in the varied neopragmatisms of today. Insofar as it invokes and seeks to transform a tradition of imagining the American self and community that can be traced back to the eighteenth century, Dewey’s—and to an extent William James’s—pragmatism seeks to figure itself as the modern equivalent of the civic humanism implied in earlier versions of American pastoral ideology.