Transnational America: Cultural Pluralist Thought in the Twentieth Century. By Everett Helmut Akam. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. x, 227 pp. Cloth, $70.00, isbn 0-7425-2197-4. Paper, $24.95, isbn 0-7425-2198-2.)

Abstract

In Transnational America, Everett Helmut Akam mines the publications and papers of Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and Alain Locke to reveal how their pragmatist views of a changing Americanism might lead us to an adequate cultural pluralism. He also writes briefly about John Collier. He argues, as have many others that he does not cite, that Jamesian pragmatic philosophy helped the early Kallen, Bourne, and Locke to oppose rigid and anti-immigrant sentiments and ideas. Akam likes Bourne's op-positional politics, his philosophical grounding, and the democratic aspirations of his Beloved Community (pp. 63–65; Bourne's term for the future transnational America). Kallen, however, comes in for sharp criticism as he turned toward elitist ideas, first Edward Bellamy's consumer socialism and then Marxism. Strangely, Akam does not examine Kallen's Zionism in any depth. During his critique of Kallen, we become more aware that Akam's version of cultural pluralism is linked to an anti-Enlightenment ideology or perspective. The Enlightenment, he argues, is the source of several evils. One is universalism, which erodes culture or a values/ culture dialectic, which is needed for pluralism. Second, it leads to a new class whose commitments are to technical reason rather than to culture, whose stance is not populist but elitist.