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This article claims that over the course of his career Henry James developed a coherent and well-considered theory of the state, which he articulates most directly in The American Scene (1907). It links James's remarkably subtle and nuanced registry of emotions and personal interactions–long taken to indicate an apolitical aestheticism–to his engagement with pressing political and social questions, such as the ongoing debate about "bigness" which preoccupied many of the leading intellectuals of his day. The American Scene , for all its many idiosyncrasies and its intensely personal aspect, provides an acute theoretical analysis of the limitations and rewards of "democratic institutions" and offers a vision of a democratic state linked through a wide range of collective forms to the daily lives of its citizenry.

This article argues for an alternative modernism, which I call "pragmatic modernism" and define through its affinities with the discursive and philosophical preoccupations of American pragmatism. While histories of modernism have tended to emphasize the "oppositional" legacy of the avant-garde, pragmatic modernism favors recontextualization over revolution, the everyday over the spectacular, and institutions over insurrections. Through the concept of habit, I link the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey to the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein. I argue that gradualism, accretion, continuity, and recontextualization define both Stein's work and pragmatic modernism more generally, and that such an approach suggests both an alternative modernism and an alternative model for contemporary criticism.

Chapter One traces philosophical treatments of habit from Aristotle and Burke through Walter Pater and Viktor Shklovsky. It examines pragmatism’s distinctively modern contributions to this genealogy and offers extended readings of the role of habit in Dewey and William James. The chapter argues that pragmatic modernism shares with the historical avant-garde a focus on the relation between habit and shock, and that-despite meaningful differences in tone and emphasis-both consider the consequences of this relation for social change. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the surprising affinities between representations of habit in André Breton’s Nadja (1928), Walter Benjamin’s essays on Surrealism, and Deweyan pragmatism.

Chapter Four claims that James’s remarkably subtle and nuanced registry of emotions and personal interactions-long taken to indicate an apolitical aestheticism-should be linked directly to his engagement with pressing political and social questions. These include the ongoing debate about “bigness” which preoccupied many of the leading intellectuals of his day, including his brother, William James. Despite its idiosyncratic and intensely personal aspect, The American Scene provides an acute theoretical analysis of the limitations and challenges of democratic institutions, and even offers a coherent and distinctive theory of the State.

Chapter Two considers Stein’s literary treatments of pragmatist habit: her writerly experiments with punctuation, syntax, grammar, cliché, and repetition. The chapter argues that habit informs Stein’s modernism both formally and philosophically. In Stein, habit is at once a discursive structure and a subject of inquiry. Habit links Stein’s repetitions, perhaps her most characteristic literary mannerism, to her treatment of questions of national and institutional identity, literary history, and the intimate domestic routines she refers to as “daily island living.” Her literary experiments relate the minutiae of daily life to textual habits such as punctuation, syntax, and cliché, and to the collective habits of thought that create institutions, literary canons, and national identities. Stein takes as one of her most serious engagements the duty of rendering habit visible, and her literary materializations of the problem of habit make her one of our most striking, and unexpected, theorists and practitioners of pragmatic modernism.

The epilogue revisits the contributions of pragmatic modernism through a discussion of Marcel Proust, whose own novelistic meditations on habit rival in their complexity and meticulousness the philosophical analyses of Dewey and James. Proust’s surprisingly intense engagement with pragmatist philosophy, and the larger networks of connection between French and American philosophy it illustrates, shows how the idea of pragmatic modernism might help reunite discourses too often separated by national and disciplinary traditions. Proust offers our richest treatment of habit’s centrality to change; he also offers a final opportunity to consider pragmatic modernism as a transnational intellectual movement.

Modernism has long been understood as a radical repudiation of the past. Reading against the narrative of modernism-as-break, this book traces an alternative strain of modernist thought that grows out of pragmatist philosophy and is characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and recontextualization. It rediscovers a distinctive response to the social, intellectual, and artistic transformations of modernity in the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, and William James. These thinkers share an institutionally-grounded approach to change which emphasizes habit, continuity, and daily life over spectacular events, heroic opposition, and radical rupture. They developed an active, dialectical approach to habit, maintaining a critical stance toward mindless repetitions while refusing to romanticize moments of shock or conflict. Through its analysis of pragmatist keywords, including “habit,” “institution,” “prediction,” and “bigness,” the book offers new readings of works by James, Proust, Stein, and Andre Breton, among others. It shows, for instance, how Stein’s characteristic literary innovation-her repetitions-aesthetically materialize the problem of habit; or how institutions in James’s novels-businesses, museums, newspapers, the law, and even the state itself-manage to shape and influence the subtlest of personal observations and private gestures. This study reconstructs an overlooked strain of modernism. In so doing, it helps us to reimagine the stark choice between political quietism and total revolution that has been handed down to us as modernism’s legacy.

Chapter Three addresses pragmatic modernism’s complex approach to the problem of institutionally-grounded change. It does so by examining a term, “prediction,” that captures one of the central contradictions of modernity. On the one hand, modernity offered an unprecedented range of freedoms, and modernist artists emphasized the dizzying contingency and unpredictability of these new liberties. On the other, modern institutional forms were invented or redesigned to manage risk and minimize contingency. “Prediction”-the central term of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s seminal essay, “The Path of the Law”-functions as a point of entry into the questions raised by the new professional and managerial mode of which Holmes was an early advocate. It signals the potential conflict between pragmatism’s administrative, modernizing, and bureaucratic tendencies, on the one hand, and its commitment to open-endedness, ongoing inquiry, and deferments of judgment on the other. Taking James’s late novel The Wings of the Dove (1902) as the surprising obverse of Holmes’s prediction theory, this chapter concludes by considering the ethical limitations of prediction as a mode of conduct.

The introduction articulates the distinction between the shock-based aesthetic of avant-garde modernism and the “recontextualizing” mode represented by pragmatic modernism. It does so by examining Gertrude Stein’s expulsion from “the Transition crowd,” a community of avant-garde artists and writers that included Tristan Tzara, Eugene Jolas, and Georges Braque. Stein, the introduction argues, rejected the avant-garde ideology of rupture and opposition and embraced instead a nuanced and institutionally based vision of change. Her vision hinged on the concept of habit, which she reconceptualized, following pragmatist philosophy, as a dialectical process.

Abstract in production.