Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  A little more than three years ago I wrote here about a book by Stephen Bates , of the University of Nevada, called AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020). It concerns a commission of intellectuals convened during the Second World War at the instigation of press maven Henry Luce to look into philosophical and practical questions concerning freedom of the press.  The aristocracy issued a report in 1947, four years after its creation, entitled A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE PRESS. As the title implies, much of it is taken up with the responsibilities an institutional press must bear in order to earn its continued freedom.   I'm writing about the Bates take on that report now because on another look at the book I've found an odd mistake. In his introduction (on p. 4) Bates mentions, in justifying his concern with the 1947 report, various indexes of its continuing influence through subsequent decades. One of these, "In a key First Amendment ruling, the Supreme Court quotes the commi...

I offered some observations last week about the book  An Aristocracy of Critics, which is a study of the 1940s-era Hutchins Commission, and its report about a "free and responsible press."  What strikes me reading it is the extent of my sympathies for Robert McCormick, who wore the black hat in the imagination of the authors of the book that issued from the Commission's work. McCormick, often called Colonel McCormick in acknowledgement of his First World War service, when he was on the staff of General Pershing, ran the Chicago Tribune from the early 1920s until the mid 1950s. The Trib's infamous "Dewey Wins" fiasco occurred on his watch.  Well before that headline, though, McCormick was often regarded as an unscrupulous and arrogant presence.  In the 1930s, everyone associated with the New Deal despised him. Everyone interested in assisting the western allies against the Axis powers ... likewise. He used his position as the owner of the Tribune to campaign...

My recent reading includes AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020), by Stephen Bates. I won't say much about it today: but I will give you some bibliographic particulars. Let's do this is question-and-answer form. Who is Stephen Bates? An associate professor at the University of Nevada, in Las Vegas, teaching journalism and media studies. Is this his first book? No, it's his fifth. Perhaps his best known before this was THE POISONER (2014) about a notorious Victorian-era serial killer, William Palmer.  Okay. What is the new book about? Chiefly it is about the Hutchins Commission and its report. This was a Commission created by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, at the behest of his friend Henry Luce, then a press baron with roughly the power and wealth of a Hearst or a Murdoch. Hutchins collected some renowned philosophers, theologians, and Big Thinkers to think about the issue of a free press -- what it means and how it should be nurtured. It pr...