“Loyal to a Dream Country”: Republicanism and the Pragmatism of William James and Richard Rorty

Abstract

Our nation has been founded in what we may call our American religion, baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well enough together if left free to try.

William James, “Robert Gould Shaw Oration,” 1897

[T]he civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets … centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal … You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning.

Richard Rorty, “A Cultural Left,” 1997

James and Rorty refer here to what sociologists used to call the American civil religion. In 1967, Robert N. Bellah coined this phrase to suggest how Americans, shaped by the complex interplay of republican and Christian traditions, believe they have an obligation “to carry out God's will on earth.” Since the 1970s, though, it has been historians like J. G. A. Pocock who have shown how republicans throughout the modern West have for the last five centuries blended the millennialist beliefs of Christianity with the ancient conviction that humans realize their political nature through the virtuous acts required to sustain republics in a cosmos ruled by fortune. As James once said of pragmatism, republicanism is a new name for an old way of thinking.