Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems

Abstract

In 1908, American philosopher Josiah Royce foresaw the future. Race questions and prejudices, he said, “promise to become, in the near future, still more important than they have ever been before”. Royce recognized that the problem of the next century would be, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, “the problem of the color line”. The twentieth century saw vast changes in race relations, but even after the election of the first African-American U.S. president, questions of race and the nature of community persist. Royce's work provided the conceptual starting place for the Cultural Pluralism movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and his notion of the Beloved Community influenced the work and vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. Communities, whether they are understood as racial or geographic, religious or scientific, Royce argued, are formed by the commitments of individuals to causes or shared ideals. This starting point—the philosophy of loyalty—provides a means to understand the nature of communities, their conflicts, and their potential for growth and coexistence. This volume also includes six supplementary essays by Royce that raise questions about his views and show the potential of those views to inform other discussions about religious pluralism, the philosophy of science, the role of history, and the future of the American community.