Rorty believed that taking the linguistic turn meant rejecting the idea of “immediate experience,” and he was equally certain that philosophy had nothing of value to offer social and political theory. Those convictions distinguished his version of neopragmatism from those of his contemporaries Hillary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, and Richard J. Bernstein, and from the ideas of his predecessors William James and John Dewey. In his last book, Achieving Our Country, Rorty sought to respond to the critics who challenged his public/private dualism by aligning himself with the Cold War-era labor movement. He remained unwilling, however, to acknowledge the costs of moving from the social democratic “historical Dewey” to his preferred “hypothetical Dewey,” an insouciant proto-Rorty who attributed progressive changes to “lucky accidents” and championed the poetized culture of liberal ironism over the hard work of forging new democratic alliances among a new generation of activists inspired by demands for recognition as well as redistribution.

By the time Jean-Paul Sartre first visited the United States in the winter of 1945, he was already fascinated by American culture. A bookish child, he had grown up reading not only French classics but also American detective novels; he romanticized the Wild West along with medieval France. While teaching in a lycée in Le Havre in 1931–1932, he discovered the fiction of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, whom he described in an essay six years later as “the greatest writer of our time.” Like many Europeans experiencing the United States for the first time, Sartre saw much to like and much to loathe. New York City, he wrote in 1945, “is for far-sighted people, people who can focus on infinity.” Sartre and his fellow French visitors were put up at the Plaza and welcomed in New York by members of the École Libre des Hautes Études, which had already greeted many French and German émigrés fleeing the Third Reich. During their eight-week stay, the French guests of the US government traveled to Pittsburgh, Chicago, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and rural Georgia, and – from a plane swooping too close for comfort – marveled at the Grand Canyon.

In 1881 a seventeen-year-old boy apprenticed to a mortician in the town of Oldenburg faced conscription into the German army. Like many others in his region, Ignatz felt no particular loyalty to the new German Reich, nor did he have any interest in military service, so he decided to leave home for America. Lacking money and papers, his only choice was to stow away on a ship leaving Bremen bound for New York. On board he met a seventeen-year-old girl named Anna, from nearby Nordwalde, who was traveling to America with her parents and her two sisters. When the ship's authorities searched for stowaways, she managed to hide him under her down comforter. Perhaps not surprisingly, by the time the ship reached New York Ignatz and Anna had become good friends, and the girl's family agreed that the boy should accompany them to Hanover, Kansas, where they knew other recent German immigrants and planned to make their home. When they arrived in Hanover, Ignatz found there was already a mortician in the town, so he decided to become a carpenter. Soon he and Anna married, his carpentry business flourished, they had ten children, and their family became a permanent part of the town. Because Ignatz and Anna were my great grandparents, I have always had more than a passing interest in the subject of German immigration to America during these years.

Although Henry Sidgwick is doubtless best known for his role in the reformulation of utilitarianism, he also played an important part in a broader transatlantic community of discourse. Having written elsewhere about Sidgwick's ideas in the context of that more general transformation of American and European philosophy and political theory, I will concentrate in this essay on the relation between Sidgwick's ideas and those of the American pragmatists William James and John Dewey. Both James and Dewey admired Sidgwick, and James knew him well not only as a philosopher but as a fellow member of the Society for Psychical Research. After Sidgwick's death in 1900, James wrote a moving tribute to Sidgwick's widow describing the “flawlessness in quality” of his character as well as his genius as a philosopher. In Dewey's estimation, Sidgwick stood as a “monument” to all that was best in the British liberal tradition because of his “simplicity, openmindedness, absolute fairness and sincerity.” But it was not merely Sidgwick's personality that attracted James and Dewey. They were drawn equally to Sidgwick's incisive criticism of prevailing options available in late nineteenthcentury thought: idealism and positivism in epistemology, Kantian intuitionism and Benthamite utilitarianism in ethics, and revolutionary socialism and laissez-faire liberalism in political theory. Like James and Dewey, Sidgwick worked to create alternatives to such positions not only because he was by nature a moderate – although he surely was that – but because he genuinely believed that more fruitful philosophical and political arguments lay between, or beyond, those poles.