Pragmatism, Feminism and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History

As Virgina Woolfe once noted, human character changed. At the turn of the century, a battery of new intellectual and cultural currents came together to reorient society--progressivism, Pragmatism, feminism, labor activism, and consumer culture.

In this work, Livingston reads philosophers like John Dewey alongside activists like Jane Addams and finds in their ideas a similar and novel sense of the individual's place in the world.By drawing new connections between these developments, Livingston recasts the discussion of the coming of modernity.

James Livingstonis a Professor of History at Rutgers University. He is the author of Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution and Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate and Corporate Capitalism.