Spotlight: Pragmatism in contemporary political theory
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211050618 |
| Author | Matthew Festenstein |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Spotlight |
Spotlight: Pragmatism in
contemporary political
theory
Matthew Festenstein
University of York, UK
Abstract
This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows
both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of
arguments about the character of democracy –although the character of those argu-
ments is open to debate and reimagination –and how pragmatist arguments have
been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches.
This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion.
Keywords
Pragmatism, political theory, democracy, political epistemology, Richard Rorty, John
Dewey
Introduction
A dominant view for much of the twentieth century, expounded by such diverse voices as
Lewis Mumford, Louis Hartz, Bernard Crick, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse,
Christopher Lasch, John Diggins, and Sheldon Wolin, was that pragmatism is a philoso-
phy for liberal technocrats, an account of how to think flexibly about the achievement of
socially endorsed parochial goals but with few resources to think critically about those
goals. For others, including Bertrand Russell and William Elliott, its apparent laxity
about objectivity made it susceptible to capture by darker forces, such as fascism
(a point some fascists were happy to accept). The frame for contemporary readings in pol-
itical theory is very different and largely organised around the idea that pragmatism has a
Corresponding author:
Matthew Festenstein, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: Matthew.festenstein@york.ac.uk
Spotlight
European Journal of Political Theory
2023, Vol. 22(4) 629–646
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211050618
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normative contribution to make to our understanding of the character and justification of
democracy but that it is debatable exactly what that is.
1
And this remains the dominant
frame for current work, in part reflecting the massive efflorescence of normative demo-
cratic theory over the period, including deliberative and epistemic arguments that have
affinities with pragmatism.
Any account of pragmatism needs to acknowledge its internal strife, porous boundar-
ies, contentious historiography, as well as a complex relation with politics, even if it’s not
possible to do all these themes justice in this space.
2
‘Pragmatism’has been a contested
and vague philosophical term since its inception. A year after William James published
Pragmatism (as a ‘new name for an old way of thinking’(James, 1979 [1907])) and a
decade after James gave the term its public philosophical debut, Arthur O. Lovejoy glee-
fully distinguished thirteen pragmatisms, ‘a baker’s dozen of contentions which are sep-
arate not merely in the sense of being discriminable, but in the sense of being logically
independent, so that you may without inconsistency accept any one and reject all the
others, or refute one and leave the philosophical standing of the others unimpugned’
(Lovejoy, 1908: 5). More have proliferated since then and the questions of what pragma-
tists agree on and what distinguishes all and only pragmatists remain quite open.
Sometimes the doctrine is viewed very capaciously, as for instance when in a recent
guide to political epistemology, the philosopher Simon Blackburn refers to ‘the long suc-
cession of pragmatists, from Hobbes through Berkeley, Hume, to Peirce, Dewey,
Ramsey, and Wittgenstein’(Blackburn, 2021: 65). To add to this list, Heidegger,
Rawls, Habermas, and Deleuze, to take a mixed bag, have also had significant strands
of their work dubbed pragmatist.
Further, as Eric MacGilvray writes, ‘[p]ragmatism was only ever meant to provide a
theory of meaning and justification, and not a substantive theory of the good. It is this
theory of meaning and justification that the founding pragmatists (and their critics)
were talking about when they were talking about pragmatism, and so we must be
careful to define pragmatism in these terms rather than to associate it with the moral
and ethical commitments of any particular time, place, or thinker’(MacGilvray, 2004:
11). When it comes to political theory, this can be tricky methodological advice to
follow, however, sound it is as philosophical point. In part this is because the connections
between pragmatism as theory of meaning or justification –themselves quite different
theories –and other aspects of a pragmatist’s philosophy (e.g. James’s and Dewey’s
radical empiricism and conceptions of experience) are often contestable, so it isn’t
clear what falls on which side of the line. And in part, it is because in interpreting and
evaluating the heterogeneous field of politics pragmatists draw on diverse philosophical
resources.
Probably the most fruitful approach to thinking about definitional issues follows
Bernstein (1992)in taking pragmatism to consist in conflictbound by a set of unifying con-
cerns and points of disagreement, in part about what pragmatism is. Most contemporary
thinking about pragmatism emerges froma kind of pincer movement. From one direction,
the protagonists of this conflict, and of ‘America’s homegrown philosophy’(Misak, 2013:
ix), are ostensively defined –Charles Sanders Peirce, James, John Dewey, G. H. Mead,
et al., –with arguments made for inclusion or exclusion. From the other side, some
630 European Journal of Political Theory 22(4)
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