Questions

Royce says that William Lenthall (the Speaker of the House of Commons) was asserting ancient parliamentary privileges, albeit in an original and precedent-setting way, when he made his famous reply to Charles I: “I have neither eye to see nor tongue to speak, etc.” As I mentioned in lecture, Hume (among others) would disagree with this as a historical matter: Hume claims that these “ancient privileges” were basically invented in the 17th century. If Hume is right, what diﬀerence might that make to Royce’s assessment of Lenthall? What about Addams — how might she think of what Lenthall is doing, and would Hume’s criticism have the same implications for her that it has for Royce? Or, if you prefer, you could discuss Royce and Dewey instead of Royce and Addams.

In “Of the Sorrow Songs,” Du Bois writes: “Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation, — we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse” (p. 263). Why, according to Du Bois (see especially “Our Spiritual Strivings”), does this loyalty to America result in a doubling of the self, rather than in the kind of uniﬁcation of the self that Royce expects from loyalty? How does Du Bois think that uniﬁcation of the self might nevertheless be achieved? Is Du Bois’s project something Royce could understand and agree with?

Both de Cleyre and Dewey deplore the dominance of what Dewey calls “money culture,” and in particular blame it for suppressing or overcoming the traditional American ideals of equality and individual freedom. Are they criticizing exactly the same thing? Why do they propose such diﬀerent solutions to the problem? Compare, for example, de Cleyre’s reservations about socialism — even anarchist socialism (“Anarchism,” p. 112) — to what Dewey says about the inevitability of socialism in ch. 6 of Individualism Old and New. Or, if you prefer, you could discuss de Cleyre and Du Bois instead of de Cleyre and Dewey (in which case you would want to look especially at what Du Bois says in “The Wings of Atalanta” and “The Ruling of Men”).

Du Bois famously says that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (he says this in The Souls of Black Folk, but I think we can assume he still held something like that in 1920, at the time he published Darkwater, and that he would still have maintained something like that in 1930, at the time Dewey published Individualism Old and New). What does Dewey think is “the problem of the twentieth century”? What would Du Bois say that Dewey is missing, both about America and about the world as a whole? You might want to think in particular about some of the things Du Bois says in “The Souls of White Folk.”

Both de Cleyre (in “The Dominant Idea”) and Du Bois (especially in “Of Beauty and Death”) seem to agree with Emerson that nature is an important part of the education of the American scholar. Do the three of them agree or disagree on why we need to learn something from nature, and/or on what kind of thing we should expect to learn?