This volume in tribute to Elizabeth Flower is loosely organized, with scarcely a mention of Flower’s work—the presumption doubtless being that the general sentiments and character of her work are best captured by such a gestaltist approach. While there is something to be said for such a loose organization, that only makes the reader grateful for the bio-bibliographical note on Professor Flower, which nicely and clearly in two pages summarizes what she has meant as a teacher and scholar. In words one suspects were largely crafted by her husband, Abraham Edel (himself the recipient of an earlier festschrift called Values, Science, and Democracy), we are told that: “Persuaded that the scientific was value-laden and the genuinely normative grounded in scientific understanding, she dealt with ethics in its relations to psychology and social science, to law and education, and to the larger social and intellectual context. Her courses in the history of ethics preserved historical insights and approaches at a time when American philosophers had largely abandoned historical perspectives.” Edel’s own contribution, the first in the volume, can be considered a finely rendered amplification of these points. For Edel, as for Flower, “the question is always whether appropriate choices have been made, what values persistently mislead, which can be properly entrenched.” But this lifelong effort of husband and wife to narrow the gap between fact and value, science and ideology, truth and error seems to advance the discussion of value analysis without ever quite addressing the complex dualisms they purport to overcome. Naturalists and pragmatists have had to struggle for a place in the intellectual sun even more than those who grab hold of one side of the dualism and hold on for dear life.

It is a credit to the editors of this volume that this anguishing status of pragmatism is displayed rather than buried. The simple statement of Flower’s lebenswerke is nicely woven into a mosaic created by many hands. To those for whom the naturalistic enterprise still has meaning (and I definitely include myself amongst that number) the book will be a useful, as well as an enjoyable, volume: this particular glass being much more than half-full. If a few of the essays are bottom-of-the-drawer stuff, they are for the most part fresh in content, nicely written, exhibiting the sort of concerns and preferences Flower has spent a lifetime cultivating. Since this volume is co-edited by a sociologist as well as a philosopher, it should be assessed as a contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences, no less than on strictly parochial grounds. Indeed, it is the distinguishing aspect of Flower’s work to call attention to mundane problems and realms as the sources of first principles. Such an emphasis on society writ small, rather than on Nature or on Mind writ large, gives her writing a friendly accessibility that disguises real sophistication.

The choice of words in a subtitle that emphasizes “twentieth-century America” is well taken, since Betty Flower, for all of her worldly concerns, always seems to express them as a native American radical—taking the highest ideals of the United States and seeking to confront American realpolitik with those ideals. In this, she is more of a Platonist than a Deweyan—but who is to say that consistency is a particularly American trait! For that reason, the quite decent if overly cautious application of Morgenthau’s morally centered theory of the national interest, written by Robert L. Simon, strikes me as the most anomalous paper in the volume, although by no means lacking in either worth or interest. It is just that I have never heard Flower make an appeal—not even the most limited one—to the national interest in outlining either her political persuasions or the appropriate tasks of a nobler American Republic.

The five papers on pragmatism, written by Robert Schwartz, Ralph W. Sleeper, Peter Manicas, Finbarr W. O’Connor, and John J. McDermott, suggest that here is a festschrift honoring John Dewey; all save the first even have Dewey in the title. In fact, the major influence on Elizabeth Flower was Dewey, and if her work differs in its emphasis from that of Edel it is precisely in her insistence on the experiential (as opposed to the structural) framework in. which valuational discourse takes place. The papers in this segment vary from the brilliant—as with Robert Schwartz’s outstanding dissection of the failure of the pragmatic enterprise to take hold despite its popularity—to a surprisingly tendentious and, I must say, tedious paper on Dewey and the class struggle that wanders over old turf loosely. Indeed, Dewey’s dislike of orthodoxy is well understood when contrasted with Manicas’ strange conclusion that “Lenin was, I think, correct when in 1902 he argued that ‘the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology.’ There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology).” It was precisely this sort of incipient fanaticism, however romantic, anarchical, and well-intentioned, that Dewey found appalling. That he should be castigated for attempting to find a “third ideology,” and failing, is a sad state of affairs that indicates far more the bankruptcy of Marxist “ideology” than the irrelevance of John Dewey’s “philosophy.”

I found the other papers on Dewey, and particularly on those aspects of his work that pertain to science and education, quite sober and well reasoned. The paper on Thorstein Veblen properly fits into this cluster, since here Murray G. Murphey attempts to compare and contrast, with great skill and care, Veblen’s The Insistence of Workmanship with the pragmatic tradition in philosophy. Murphey shows how Veblen moved to a collective, societal imagery and away from the idea of the individual as being at the center of the universe. Veblen’s understanding of the history of culture as being equivalent to the history of knowledge and his comprehension of the capacity of machine discipline to subvert the pecuniary culture are handled with enormous skill and understanding. In a curious way, Veblen was perhaps simply too much the outsider in American culture to be overly identified with the assumptions and presumptions of that culture. Possibly, we have here the answer to Robert Schwartz’s problem: what ever happened to pragmatism? It was not so much defeated as overtaken by the internationalization of the cultural and philosophical environment.

At the fringes of this book are the sort of problems that positivism sought to erase, pragmatism aimed to make experiential, and naturalism sought to pluralize—alas, with little success. Thus, in Joseph Margolis’ cleverly entitled “Dirty Hands,” the problems of moral responsibility and personal dilemmas are raised in the context of principles, absolutes, the reality of good and evil—in such a way, in short, as to suggest the impossibility of construing “moral life as systematically explicable in terms, only and always, of the application of adequate principles to the details of every serious engagement.” And the paper by the fine novelist Chaim Potok discusses value metaphors precisely in terms of God’s silence (rather than the pragmatic acquiescence) in the 20th century. The existential challenge is raised, not as a philosophical debate between systems of analysis, but as a raw nerve throbbing in a world in which the scientific analysis of values moves much more slowly than does the destruction of human life. And if the volume cannot begin to cope with—much less resolve—such dilemmas, it remains a good place to begin such a discussion as we approach the 21st century.

[Values and Value Theory in Twentieth-Century America: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Flower, Edited by Murray G. Murphey and Ivar Berg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press) 301 pp., $39.95]