19 he Journal of American History June 2018 doi: 10.1093X/jahist/jay006 © he Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Les Intellectuels in America: William James, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Development of the Pragmatist Intellectual David Weinfeld he American philosopher and psychologist William James fancied himself more than a mere scholar. he Harvard University professor embraced the label “intellectual,” bor- rowed from the French “intellectuel,” a term he learned from the 1894 Dreyfus afair in France. James admired the intellectuels who defended the wrongfully imprisoned Alfred Dreyfus, yet his concept of the intellectual was rather diferent than that of “Dreyfu- sards” such as the French novelist Émile Zola. While Zola’s intellectuel embraced absolute and universal truth, James’s intellectual employed philosophical pragmatism and plural- ism, seeking contextual truths. 1 he noun intellectual gained linguistic prominence with the Dreyfus afair. In the sum- mer of 1894, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a major in the French army, sent classiied documents on French artillery and maneuvers to the German military attache Maximil- ian von Schwartzkoppen, in exchange for payment. On September 26, French counter- intelligence intercepted the message, the “bordereau,” directed to von Schwartzkoppen but unsigned. French intelligence oicers, some openly anti-Semitic, implicated Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish oicer from Alsace, as the author of the bordereau. Commandant Armand du Paty de Clam, who led the investigation, dictated a letter similar to the bor- dereau to Dreyfus and, based on the purported matching handwriting on the two docu- ments, French authorities arrested Dreyfus on October 15, 1894. 2 Edouard Drumont, publisher of the newspaper La Libre Parole, printed anti-Semitic articles condemning Dreyfus. In December, Dreyfus was court-martialed, found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to exile. On January 5, 1895, Dreyfus was publicly humili- ated in the courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris. An oicer stripped him of his ribbons David Weinfeld is a visiting assistant professor of Judaic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He would like to thank homas Bender, Hasia Diner, Julian Nemeth, Peter Wirzbicki, Daniel Bessner, Samuel Moyn, Phyllis Zelkowitz, Morton Weinfeld, Rebecca Weinfeld, Joanna Weinfeld, and Marjorie Patterson. Readers may contact Weinfeld at daweinfeld@vcu.edu. 1 William James, “he Social Value of the College Bred,” McClure’s Magazine, 30 (Feb. 1908), reprinted in William James, Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York, 1987), 1242–49, esp. 1246. William James’s article was originally an address delivered at a meeting of the Association of American Alumnae in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 7, 1907. See also Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, “Introduction,” in he Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (12 vols., Charlottesville, 1992–2004), I, xliv. 2 For a concise narrative of the events, see Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Afair: A Documentary History (Boston, 1998), 21–33. For a timeline, see ibid., 193–97; and Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Afair Matters (New Haven, 2009), 215–28. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/105/1/19/5000188 by McGill University Libraries user on 23 May 2018