This slim, yet comparatively expensive volume familiarizes readers with a generally neglected discourse among American pragmatist philosophers of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era in the late nineteenth and the emerging twentieth century. Its author, Beth L. Eddy, a pupil of Henry S. Levinson (to whom the book is dedicated) and associate professor of philosophy and religion at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, declares herself a pragmatist, too. She presents her retelling of the discourse to show that “the issues and the concerns at stake” in it “remain as timely today as they ever were” (p. xvii) because they “mirror today's concerns about the conflict among science, religion, and morality” (p. 103; see also p. 101). Her “motives for telling that story,” however, “are more normative than descriptive” (p. 107; see also p. xvi); and indeed, considering that the book was some fifteen years in the making, the simple fact of its publication indicates that Eddy is on a mission. Her mission is to make the voices of those “pragmatists … heard in our climate of oligarchy, plutocracy, and individualism run amuck. Their calls to welcome those who are “other” to us, to realize how much we owe our fellow humans, and their courage to uphold their principles without guarantees of success are treasures we need to draw upon. Their pioneering exposition of the values of democratic moral agency squared with the environment of a nonteleological universe may yet help us out of our problems” (p. xvi).

The book consists of six rather independent chapters arranged in historical sequence, some of which present previously published material and thus prompt certain redundancies. The chapters are (1) “Setting the Stage: Darwin and Nineteenth Century Evolutionary Ethics and Theologies” (pp. 1–20), (2) “T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics” (pp. 21–32), (3) “John Dewey in Conversation with Huxley and Santayana on Evolution and Ethics” (pp. 33–58), (4) “Struggle or Mutual Aid: Jane Addams and the Progressive Encounter with Social Darwinism” (pp. 59–77), (5) “Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Evolutionary Tension Points” (pp. 79–106), and (6)“Contemporary Controversies over Chance and Teleology” (pp. 107–23); the bibliography and index follow on pp. 125–35.

While insiders to the debate will easily find their way through the maze of arguments and issues presented, uninitiated readers might best start studying chapter six first because this provides a contemporary context by situating the discourse within the science versus religion debate, especially involving the “New Atheists” (Dennett, Lewontin, Gould, Dawkins, Pinker, Wilson). Noticing that the “heat and venom of the arguments” in this discussion “points toward something deeper at stake … than the typical stakes of an academic debate” (p. 107) and judging that this is “not a dispute” about “the existence or non‐existence of God” or “between science and religion,” Eddy identifies as the root cause of the fiery arguments “the choice … between a world with all‐powerful forces at work in it … and a world with a historically continuous vision of the good,” which is a “forced choice between one sort of divinity or another,” but which is also, according to Richard Rorty, “a choice between metaphysical comfort and moral anxiety” (quoted p. 108; original emphasis). What the discussion is actually about “are existential issues involving differences in ultimate human hopes and fears which bend people toward either a propensity to emphasize the human capacity for predictability and control versus the propensity to highlight the need for human humility and hope for meliorist agency” (pp. 108f, original emphasis).

Since dealing with questions of ultimate concern means de facto dealing with religious questions, Eddy calls all the pragmatists she features “religious” (p. xiii; see also p. 119), meaning not a conventional religiosity but “religious naturalism,” that is, acknowledgment that “humans are wholly described in naturalistic terms, if not strictly in biological ones,” and also that there are “limits of our scientific powers to control the natural world and bend it to human wishes” (p. 109). This attitude, she says, makes one not only humble but also open toward religious traditions and their diverse visions of the good and the beautiful, something the New Atheists simply miss. The author, thus, shows how Thomas H. Huxley, Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams (the “undersung member of the first generation of American pragmatists” [p. 60] and Eddy's favorite subject of study [see p. xv; 59]), and George Santayana challenged the established justification of the appalling social inequalities in the United States of their times. They did not advocate more charity but a radical change in conceiving of the situation. While Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism provided “the robber barons of the day with a sense of spiritual justification” (p. 12) making laissez‐faire capitalists like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and George Pullman argue that “the survival of the fittest” is, in Rockefeller's words, “merely the working‐out of a law of nature and a law of God” (quoted p. 13), the pragmatists, who all embraced Darwin's insights, opposed such biased deterministic reasoning on grounds of the dynamic interplay between the individual and the environment. They held that no environment is unalterably given. According to John Dewey, the environment is rather “an open universe” where “uncertainty, choice, hypotheses, novelties and possibilities” abound (p. 30) and where contingency and unpredictability reign over history. Since humans interact with and thereby constantly change their social as well as their natural environment in random ways, there is well founded hope that matters change also for the better as sometimes happens in evolution. Hence, advocacy for “meliorism—the pragmatic faith that this is possible” (p. xvii) and pleading “the case for tolerance of moderate meaninglessness in the world” (p. 119) is at the core of Eddy's project.

Meliorism is actually Eddy's “normative claim,” presented in typical pragmatist fashion by humbly not declaring to have written the definite account of pragmatism—an untenable essentialist statement—but by telling “particular stories of its history and genealogies for particular purposes” (p. 110). Not giving in to desperation but getting actively engaged in the little which one can do “for the better in the world” as long as one is alive is a conscious expression of the “melioristic hope” (p. 119) “against all hope” (p. 121), which pragmatists want see cultivated not just through words and reflection but the more so by acting accordingly, to which especially the life and work of the 1931 Peace Nobel Laureate Jane Addams and John Dewey bear impressive testimony.

The style of Eddy's book is dense, at least in most of its parts. While this shows the author's intimate familiarity with her research material, it sometimes makes it difficult for the reader to comprehend properly what she is referring to. The focus on minute details of and differences in argument in the pragmatist discourse is often done at the expense of neglecting the larger philosophical and historical context—for instance, Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—consideration of which would have emphasized pragmatism's distinctly American approach to social issues. Further, there is no mention of or reference to more recent work which would have allowed for a distinction between and critical discernment of pragmatism over against utilitarianism (e.g., Peter Singer's Practical Ethics []). Despite these rather substantial omissions, the book remains an important contribution to the history of mind and social theory and action and will serve well as a textbook in higher level college classes on these topics.