Inner Division and Uncertain Contours: William James and the Politics of the Modern Self (2007)
Bordogna, Francesca M. (Author)
British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 40
Pages: 505--536
This article revisits the question of the social valence of William James's account of the self. As biographers have long noted, James worried much about the crisis of the autonomous, unitary and well-bounded self. This article suggests that, despite his anxieties, James perceived that those features of the self opened up new possibilities both for the individual and for society. By locating the Jamesian self in the context of period techniques for the cultivation of the self, religious and occult practices, and mystical-cum-political discourse, I argue that for James the crisis of the modern self represented a means both of rooting individuals firmly in the community and of endowing them with a form of agency stronger than those promised by traditional doctrines of the simple, self-directed and well-bounded self. Thus, I argue, James's conception of the self and the techniques of the self that he advocated were part and parcel of an attempt to rethink the relationship between individual and community and to promote a new type of society, one composed of spontaneous pluralistic, open and intimate communities.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Viney, Wayne;
(2001)
The Radical Empiricism of William James and Philosophy of History
Book
Heft, Harry;
(2001)
Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism
Book
Bernadette M. Baker;
(2013)
William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-Imperial Discourse
Article
Kilborne, Benjamin;
(1992)
Positivism and its vicissitudes: The role of faith in the social sciences
Book
John J. Stuhr;
(2022)
No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism
Book
Sarin Marchetti;
(2021)
The Jamesian Mind
Article
Skousgaard, Stephen;
(1976)
The phenomenology in William James' philosophical psychology
Book
Thibaud Trochu;
William James;
(2018)
William James. Une autre histoire de la psychologie
Book
David E. Leary;
(2018)
The Routledge Guidebook to James’s Principles of Psychology
Article
Horst Gundlach;
(2018)
William James and the Heidelberg Fiasco
Book
Michael Davis;
(2006)
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country
Book
James, William;
Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Elizabeth M. Berkeley;
(2001)
The Correspondence of William James; Vol. 9: July 1899-1901
Book
Donnelly, Margaret E.;
(1992)
Reinterpreting the legacy of William James
Book
Krister Dylan Knapp;
(2017)
William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity
Article
Watson, Cecelia A.;
(2004)
The Sartorial Self: William James's Philosophy of Dress
Article
Sokal, Michael M.;
(2010)
William James and the National Academy of Sciences
Article
Leary, David E.;
(2009)
Between Peirce (1878) and James (1898): G. Stanley Hall, the Origins of Pragmatism, and the History of Psychology
Article
Wassmann, Claudia;
(2009)
Physiological Optics, Cognition and Emotion: A Novel Look at the Early Work of Wilhelm Wundt
Article
Taylor, Eugene;
(2010)
William James on a Phenomenological Psychology of Immediate Experience: The True Foundation for a Science of Consciousness?
Article
Cooper, Wesley E.;
(1994)
James on mental causation
Be the first to comment!