Horace Kallen

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Horace Meyer Kallen (1882-1974) was a Jewish-American philosopher. Born in Berenstadt, Germany to an Orthodox rabbi and his wife, Kallen came to the United States as a child in 1887. He earned his B.A. in 1903 and his Ph.D. in 1908, both at Harvard University.

A Pluralist, Kallen opposed any over-simplification of philosophical and vital problems. According to Kallen, denying complications and difficulties is to multiply them, as much as to deny reality to evil would aggravate evil.

He and others argued that cultural diversity and national pride were compatible with each other, and that ethnic diversity and a respect for ethnic and racial differences strengthened America. Kallen is credited with coining the term cultural pluralism.

[edit] Selected works

Some of his works:

• Indecency and the Seven Arts:And Other Adventures of a Pragmatist in Aesthe (1930)
• Decline and Rise of the Consumer (1936)
• Art and Freedom (1942)
• Modernity and Liberty (1947)
• The Liberal Spirit (1948)
• Ideals and Experience (1948)
• The Education of Free Men (1950)
• Patterns of Progress (1950)
• Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea (1956)
• Utopians at Bay (1958)
• Liberty, Laughter, and Tears (1968)

Bibliography: see also a special Symposium on Horace M. Kallen in Modern Judaism, Vol. 4, No. 2. (May, 1984)