William James and the Federal Republican Principle

Abstract

Anybody who is casually acquainted with William James'sPluralistic Universe knows that he argued there that the world is more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.' But few realize either how important or how hard won or how costly this claim was for James. The thrust of the claim can be stated fairly simply: whatever order (or coherence or harmony) there is in the world (or universe) is constituted by the independent powers which inhabit it. This, of course, recapitulates the form of polity enunciated in the motto of the United States of America: e pluribus unum, one out of many. The claim that the world is constituted one out of many was important to James for a number of reasons. Among others, its successful defense amounted to a sort of metaphysical deduction of both his pragmatic philosophical stance and his melioristic religious stance. In other words, among other strategies, James would argue that the general philosophic and religious policies he recommended were better than others, the ways of the world being as they are. The federal republican claim about the world was hard won for James because the pluralism he held for (roughly) thirty years disallowed his making it; though he wanted to make it, perhaps even felt that he needed to make it to maintain integrity of belief, for most of that time. He wanted to make it because he was committed to a religious attitude he called (in 1897) American Religion,2 which, among other things, construed the federal republican principle, the 'one out of many' principle, as a principle of salvation, of the perfection of things in general, of ultimate harmony. Given his understanding of the self-denying ordi-