ABSTRACT
The American philosopher William Ernest Hocking believed that negative pragmatism serves a valuable critical function, a kind of self-help function for flabby idealists who need to get out of the universal and into the particular and just do it. Hocking's analysis of the defects of liberalism and modernism is informed and penetrating, and it remains timely and genuinely important. He attempted to spread idealism by engaging tirelessly its critics, particularly pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. Hocking's supplement for the defects of liberalism are the God of his brand of idealism, Christianity, and mysticism. For Hocking, individualism has a lasting element to the extent that it provides conditions necessary for the realization of the meaning of God in human experience. His co-agent state is the political embodiment of the meaning of God in human experience. Liberalism's success, Hocking concluded, now has produced conditions that leave it vulnerable to attack from inside and outside.
