Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden presents a rigorous intellectual history of Josiah Royce’s essays on race. Curry explains the several arguments that Royce made on this topic between 1900 and 1908, and he situates these within Royce’s social philosophy and some contemporaneous literatures on racism. The result is a comprehensive theory of cultural assimilation informed by an idealist metaphysics. Royce, namely, disdained segregation and rejected biological accounts of racial difference. But Royce scholars have wrongly taken these observations, Curry (...) argues, as evidence that their hero held progressive views on race. Royce rather began from the premise of Anglo-American cultural superiority, and... (shrink)

Over the course of a fifty-year scholarly career, Frank M. Oppenheim, SJ, has devotedly studied and encouraged others to study the American philosopher Josiah Royce. Early in my own study of Royce, I read and learned a great deal from Oppenheim’s book Reverence for the Relations of Life. I met Oppenheim at a 2007 conference at Harvard on Royce and William James, and he encouraged my continued study. Thus, I am honored to participate in this issue of The Pluralist celebrating (...) Oppenheim’s thought and his study of Royce.In spite of all the efforts of Oppenheim and other scholars, Royce remains too little known.1 It is tempting to ask why a contemporary scholar would devote painstaking and devoted attention... (shrink)