Dr Molly Cochran

This book considers eleven key thinkers on American foreign policy during the inter-war period. All put forward systematic proposals for the direction, aims and instruments of American foreign policy; all were listened to, in varying degrees, by the policy makers of the day; all were influential in policy terms, as well as setting the terms of contemporary debate. The focus of the volume is the progressive agenda as it was formulated by Herbert Croly and The New Republic in the run-up to the First World War. An interest in the inter-war period has been sparked by America’s part in international politics since 9/11. The neo-conservative ideology behind recent US foreign policy, its democratic idealism backed with force, is likened to a new-Wilsonianism. However, the progressives were more wary of the use of force than contemporary neo-conservatives. The unique focus of this volume and its contextual, Skinnerian approach provides a more nuanced understanding of US foreign policy debates of the long Progressive era than we presently have and provides an important intellectual background to current debates. -- Supplied by publisher.

John Dewey (1859-1952) was a major figure of the American cultural and intellectual landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. While not the originator of American pragmatism, he was instrumental to its articulation as a philosophy and the spread of its influence beyond philosophy to other disciplines. His prolific writings encompass metaphysics, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychology, moral philosophy, the philosophies of religion, art, and education, and democratic political and international theory. The contributors to this Companion examine the wide range of Dewey's thought and provide a critical evaluation of his philosophy and its lasting influence, both elsewhere in philosophy and on other disciplines.

Jane Addams, in both her thought and activism during the Progressive era, was focused on human problems at both local and global levels and asked of each level what a democratic attitude of radical social justice could bring to felt indeterminacies. She employed a philosophical method associated with American pragmatism, made her own as a relational and feminist approach—inseparable from her lived experience as a woman and advocate of social reform domestically and internationally. The historical context of the Progressive era and Addams’s experience of it, her part in the American Settlement movement and her leadership of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom are discussed to illuminate her human-centered, democratic social approach to international relations.