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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Taysom, Martha. "The Hope of the Great Community: The Communal Philosophy of Josiah Royce," History, Indiana University, July 2000.
Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was an American Philosopher who has sometimes been dismissed as a sentimental figure who longed for the spirit and values of the nineteenth century and who fought against progress. This work seeks to show that Royce does not fit this description. A serious philosopher of ethics and metaphysics, he addressed the issues of the Progressive era. He was a public American philosopher whose central concern was the tension between individualism and social responsibility. In the closing months of his life, when the Great War had begun in Europe, he worked out an elaborate plan for achieving world peace based on the principle of insurance. He called this work “The Hope of the Great Community.” The plan had characteristics in common with the League of Nations of 1918 and the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. Royce’s plan was never tested as a possible road to peace, but his hope for a great world community was based on his vision for the future and his concern for humanity. This dissertation makes three assertions. First, unlike his sometime reputation, Royce was an intellectual who should not readily be dismissed as a serious public philosopher. Second, Royce’s proposed solution to personal, national, and international ills was loyalty to the community. Third, Royce was a defender of humanity in a way that anticipated the horrors of the twentieth century in which whole nations would see their neighbors, not just as enemies, but as non-human objects to be liquidated without a second thought as an affirmation of racial, national, religious, or ethnic pride. Royce looked forward with a new world view, one that would avoid elitism and power. Although his plan was too idealistic, it is worthy of a place in the collection of world peace plans, both those of his own time and those of our own.
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