Elegy for William McBride
They buried the philosopher in Indiana on a Thursday in April, at a chapel on Twickenham Boulevard in Lafayette, half a world and half a century away from the island where the arguments that shaped him once ran into the Adriatic dusk. Korčula, in those summers between 1963 and 1974, was the unlikeliest place in Europe for a philosophical revolution: a walled Croatian town on a Dalmatian island, its cafés and beaches full of Marxist humanists from Zagreb and Belgrade arguing with Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, Jürgen Habermas, and a young American named Richard Bernstein about alienation, self-management, the early Marx, and what socialism was actually for. Lefebvre, who knew a thing or two about pleasure, called it dionysian socialism, meaning that the theory of the good life and the living of it had briefly, improbably, converged on a rocky coastline where the wine was cheap and the regime was watching but not yet striking.
McBride was the one who kept the correspondence going after the weather changed. When the Yugoslav party finally moved against the Praxis philosophers in January 1975, expelling the Belgrade Eight from their faculty and shuttering the journal, the network could have quietly dissolved into exile and defeat. It did not, partly because figures like McBride kept showing up, kept translating, kept insisting that what had happened on that island was not a regional curiosity but a living contribution to the world’s philosophical inheritance. He helped sustain Praxis International, the journal that Belgrade exiles relaunched from Oxford in 1981 and that would eventually become Constellations. He wrote about Gajo Petrović and Mihailo Marković and Svetozar Stojanović when most American philosophy departments could not have placed their names on a map. He treated them as peers rather than specimens, which is the rarest and most difficult form of intellectual respect.
Praxis was his word for what a human life could do when it was not yet administered, not yet priced, not yet sorted into the long queue of consumers waiting to be told what they had always wanted. He had learned the word from the Yugoslavs, who had learned it from the 1844 Manuscripts, who had learned it from Aristotle, who had meant by it the kind of activity that is its own end, the kind of doing in which a human being becomes what a human being is for. Pathos was the word he learned later, against his will, in the long decade when the country that had hosted the summer school fell into IMF austerity and then into the wars of dissolution. He watched old interlocutors choose the smaller flag over the larger idea. Marković, who had helped found the whole project, ended his career as vice president of Milošević’s party and its chief ideologue during the Bosnian war. Stojanović and Tadić turned in similar directions. McBride had to think, in public, about what it meant that a Marxist humanism grounded in creative agency could produce, in some of its founders, apologists for ethnic cleansing.
McBride concluded that nationalism was itself a form of pathos, the retreat a people makes when the universalist horizon collapses and nothing larger than blood remains to organize the self around. In the spring of 1999, NATO’s bombs fell on Belgrade, on a city where he had once argued, late at night, about Hegel. From Yugoslav Praxis to Global Pathos came out two years later.
He did not stop hoping. That was the discipline, and in the Cold War’s long aftermath it was not the obvious move. Others turned cynic, writing the end of history or the clash of civilizations or the cool ironies of liberal proceduralism. Others turned nationalist, as his friends had. Others simply took tenure and went quiet. McBride wrote his way through the whole period instead. Nineteen books, more than two hundred and fifty articles, a steady output that ran from his 1970 Fundamental Change in Law and Society, which put H.L.A. Hart into conversation with Sartre on revolution, through The Philosophy of Marx in 1977, Social Theory at a Crossroads in 1980, Sartre’s Political Theory in 1991, and on into the Yugoslav reckoning of the 2000s and the eight-volume Sartre and Existentialism collection he edited later. At Purdue, where he arrived in 1973 and stayed for fifty years, he taught the hard texts the way they deserve to be taught, the Critique of Dialectical Reason and the Eighteenth Brumaire and the essays that still carried the heat of the Korčula arguments.
He taught the harder lesson too, which is that a tradition is not what you inherit but what you refuse to abandon when abandonment would be the reasonable course.
The institutional world noticed, eventually, in the way it notices such things. He became Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor. He was elected Secretary General of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies in 2003, the first American ever to hold the post, and then President from 2008 to 2013, presiding over the World Congress in Athens. The French made him a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. The Russian Academy of Sciences gave him its silver medal in 2010 for outstanding contribution to philosophy by a foreign philosopher. Athens gave him an honorary doctorate in 2015. He accepted these the way a working person accepts weather, useful for the day’s small business, incidental to the weather inside, which was always the same preoccupation: that the human being is not yet what a human being could be, and that philosophy’s task is to keep the difference between the two open, unclosed, unbearable, alive.
Now the island is a yacht marina, full of the kind of tourism that consumer capitalism has taught the Adriatic to perform. The journal is a memory of a memory, accessible mostly through digital archives maintained by a handful of Croatian leftists in a Zagreb cultural center. The students who carried his argument forward are themselves grey, themselves writing the elegies. A festschrift appeared in 2013, Revolutionary Hope, with thirteen essays by his former students and colleagues, and last year four of them convened a panel in his honor at the North American Society for Social Philosophy. He was married to Angela Barron McBride, whom he met at Yale, for sixty years. He was a father and a grandfather. He helped found the Women’s Studies program at Purdue. He chaired the University Senate. He did the unglamorous institutional labor that keeps a faculty functioning, which is itself a kind of praxis and was recognized as such by everyone who served alongside him.
The praxis he believed in was always just about to arrive, always just about to begin. That is the condition of such hopes. The pathos he named has spread beyond the Balkans into the whole global order he spent his last decades analyzing, the hegemony of consumption and capital and their cultural machinery, the structural conversion of peoples into audiences and markets. He leaves us a hope that was not optimism, because optimism is a prediction and hope is a practice.
McBride leaves us a tradition that was not nostalgia, because nostalgia mourns what was and a tradition lives toward what is not yet. He leaves us a practice that was not a profession, though it paid his salary and filled his shelves and sent him to the capitals of Europe. He leaves us the task of keeping open what he refused to close, the long argument with the age, which is the long argument with ourselves, the long rehearsal, here on the far side of every catastrophe, of a freedom we have not yet learned to use.
