Ezra Pound launches the book as a dramatic “case study” illustrating William James’s theory of “conversion” as a cognitive process by which individuals become converts to a cause, be it artistic, religious, or political. Even as recent scholars have revitalized our understanding of James’s politics and his philosophical engagements with the social, they nonetheless underscore a conspicuous gap: none have investigated how James’s understanding of the social realm is indebted to his pioneering work as a psychologist and, more specifically, to his theorization of conversion as a cognitive phenomenon that impacts not just individuals but larger groups. At one extreme, conversion can yield blind commitment to doctrine, or, more productively, can fracture such monolithic narratives to achieve productive disagreement with, or “dissent” from, repressive or demagogic systems. Literary modernists after James can be understood as mind scientists because they deploy the psychodynamics of conversion both formally and thematically. By making the psychodynamics of conversion visible, their writings encourage readerly dissent from rigid points of view and authoritarian ideological frameworks.