Chad Alan Goldberg
Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2021-2022)
Department of Sociology, UW–Madison
My project revisits the work of the early 20th-century US intellectuals who developed the doctrine of cultural pluralism. This doctrine arose in opposition to nativism, coercive assimilation, and the melting-pot ideal in the US; it held that American identity should rest on an ideal of harmonious diversity rather than ethnic or cultural homogeneity.
My presentation will focus on the philosopher Horace Kallen (1882–1974), who was the originator and chief architect of cultural pluralism. Previous scholarship has situated Kallen’s thinking in the national context of American Progressivism while criticizing it for a fixed notion of identity and white ethnocentrism.
I offer a reassessment of these views, arguing that Kallen’s vision of cultural pluralism expanded in a double sense during and after the First World War. First, Kallen extended his pluralist vision from the US to the world in writings about international affairs that previous scholarship on cultural pluralism has mostly ignored. These writings responded to a rapidly changing global context that included the Russian Revolution, US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the establishment of new nation-states out of the wreckage of longstanding empires, the formation of the League of Nations, the Minorities Treaties that aimed to provide international protection for the rights of minorities in the new nation-states, and the league’s mandate system for former colonies of the German and Ottoman empires. Second, the extension of Kallen’s pluralist vision to the world stage led him to rethink the fixity of ethnic identity and compelled him to consider the situation of nonwhites much more fully than he had in his original formulation of cultural pluralism. Kallen’s engagement with the war thus triggered a creative development of his ideas that paved the way for a fuller engagement with the situation of African Americans and American Indians later in his career.
Chad Alan Goldberg is a professor of sociology affiliated with the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He writes about politics, history, and social theory. His award-winning books include Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). He has received research support from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, and the Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien.