William James as Revolutionary Thinker

To Hell with Culture


Quoted by Herbert Read from the essay “The Cult of Leadership,” by William James

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in thru the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favour of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.

William James, Letters II, 90