Jamesian Liberalism and the Self

Despite he did not write any full-fledge and comprehensive treatise of the kind Thomas Jefferson, Walter Lippman, or John Rawls did, William James is among the great American liberal philosophers. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson before him, and John Dewey and Richard Rorty after him, James was in fact highly skeptical of the opportunity of theorizing upon such matter – and much else –, mostly because of his wider distrust of top-down, idealized approaches in philosophical and political matters alike. As a consequence, and consistently with the pragmatist line he was part of, throughout his works we find a wealth of bottom-up, non-ideal insights about how to picture and exercise this particular option. In what follows I shall briefly present James’s distinctive understanding of liberalism, highlighting the two key features of it that in my opinion are still very much relevant for us today, placing them in some historical context: namely, the ethical feature of liberalism and its grounding in a conception of the self as contingent and mobile