All the evidence is that Obama rally is that kind of pragmatist, and that the centrists are right to praise him.

In the anthology Menand put out, Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks for a kind of cynical, non-ideological realism. He started the Civil War as an abolitionist and returned to battle twice after recovering from wounds. (Henry Adams also seemed to have learned cynicism during his Civil War experience in the diplomatic service.) Posner picks up on Holmes, I think, though I’m not a legal scholar.

Dewey was on the far left in American politics and opposed US entry into WWII. Between the militarization of the intelligentsia during WWII and McCarthyism, that kind of pragmatism ended up being progressively squeezed out of the American university in favor of something less engaged. (The marginalization of C. Wright Mills and his students and of JK Galbraith and his students are other examples.)

Aaron Preston has argued that analytic philosophy is a paradigm rather than an idea or a group of ideas, and that the difference is that paradigms are given and enforced, and are not to be examined or argued about. This could apply to most academic disciplines. Dewey and James at least did not believe that there are things that should not be discussed, and they also did not believe that philosophy or science should be an expert specialist activity excluded to the public and from political debate. Dewey especially dedicated his attention to the two way dialogue between philosophers and the rest of the world.

Jeff Schmidt, in a book everyone should read, has argued that obedience to unexamined paradigms is the main lesson taught in universities, and defines a class of highly skilled experts and professionals who will always be at someone else’s service—i.e., obedient to management. One of the reasons why Democrats lose is that they mostly have a rule-following professional orientation and have not learned the more aggressive, competitive, and assertive management skills, which are quite different.

Sources: Philip Mirowski, “Machine Dreams”; John McCumber, “Time in the Ditch”; George Reisch, “How the Cold War transformed Philosophy of Science”; Deborah Redman, “Economics and Philosophy of Science”; Aaron Preston, “Analytic Philosophy: the History of an Illusion”; Jeff Schmidt, “Disciplined Minds”.

Among the problems with neo-pragmatists of various sorts – especially Rorty & Posner – is that they think pretty much everyone is a pragmatist. Rorty includes Heidegger, Posner Schumpeter … now there is no denying that there may be some family resemblance between some of the views those two endorse and the views central to pragmatism. But the Richards then draw the conclusion that pragmatism as a philosophical or theoretical view has no political implications. That is just plain silly. It requires that we ignore explicit (and I think persuasive) arguments by Classical Pragmatists. By my lights the Richards don’t like the political direction that pragmatism pushes them so they fabricate allies and caricature pragmatists in order to evade the consequences of pragmatism. The Knight/Johnson piece you mention takes Posner to task for precisely that reason.

In any case, for readers interested in all this, I highly recommend a recent collection of essays by my colleague Robert Westbrook – Democratic Hope ~ Pragmatism & the Politics of Truth (Cornell ‘05). Robb has forgotten more about pragmatism than I’ve ever learned (I also recommend his earlier, definitive book on Dewey). In any case, especially in the opening chapter of Democratic Hope, he simply demolishes the propensity to identify pragmatism of the Dewey-Pierce-Putnam etc. variety with inside-the-beltway view of pragmatism that Obama seems to be embracing.—————-
The problem is not that Obama is a pragmatist; the problem is that he is a clone of Clinton and other DLC types. He is not now and never has been a progressive. So he is not compromising his principles an d policies by appointing the re-treads. He is expressing his principles and values by doing so. Perplexity resolved.

On a related topic, this now all-too-commonplace account of what Obama is up to…

I still have some faith that Obama’s team may be denouncing left-wing strawmen in order to establish that left-wing goals are actually “centrist.”

…would be a lot more convincing if Obama and his team had ever given any indication, during or since the campaign, that they were pursuing left-wing goals.

Obama is appointing centrists, some of them ideologues, because he’s a centrist. He campaigned as one and intends to govern as one.

Haven’t read Hayes’ essay yet, have had it in my to-read tabs since last night.