The Politics of Pragmatism

Chris Hayes has a “nice piece”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081229/hayes/single in _The Nation_ about how the term ‘pragmatism’ is used in US public debate.

In a postelection essay on Obama, George Packer noted these two strains of his campaign rhetoric and dubbed them the “‘progressive’ Obama” and “the ‘post-partisan’ Obama.”In Washington “pragmatic” is a kind of code word for the latter, and it’s that Obama the Beltway establishment is happily embracing. On the front page of the Times, in a “news analysis” (a recurring feature that might as well be titled “Conventional Wisdom Digest”), David Sanger pointed to the likely appointments of Hillary Clinton and Timothy Geithner as suggesting that “Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists”–that word again!–“rather than ideologues.” David Brooks could hardly contain himself: “the team he has announced so far is more impressive than any other in recent memory,” he gushed, praising it as made of “open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence” and “admired professionals” who are not “excessively partisan” and, probably most important, “not ideological.”

Pragmatism in common usage may mean simply a practical approach to problems and affairs. But it’s also the name of the uniquely American school of philosophy whose doctrine is that truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. What unites the two senses of the word is a shared skepticism toward certainties derived from abstractions–one that is welcome and bracing after eight years of a failed, faith-based presidency. …

if there’s a silver thread woven into the pragmatist mantle Obama claims, it has its origins in this school of thought. Obama could do worse than to look to John Dewey, another onetime resident of Hyde Park and the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, which Obama’s daughters attend. Dewey developed the work of earlier pragmatists in a particularly fruitful and apposite manner. For him, the crux of pragmatism, and indeed democracy, was a rejection of the knowability of foreordained truths in favor of “variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation.”

Dewey’s pragmatism was reformist, not radical. He sought to ameliorate the excesses of early industrial capitalism, not to topple it. Nonetheless, pragmatism requires an openness to the possibility of radical solutions. It demands a skepticism not just toward the certainties of ideologues and dogmatism but also of elite consensus and the status quo. This is a definition of pragmatism that is in almost every way the opposite of its invocation among those in the establishment. For them, pragmatism means accepting the institutional forces that severely limit innovation and boldness; it means listening to the counsel of the Wise Men; it means not rocking the boat. But Dewey understood that progress demands that the boat be rocked. And his contemporary Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood it as well. “The country needs,” Roosevelt said in May 1932, “and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation.”

I think – and here I’m relying on a 1996 “article”:http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/192091.pdf (behind paywall) in _Political Theory_ by Jack Knight and Jim Johnson – that you could go even further than Chris does here in critiquing the Beltway usage of the term pragmatism. Knight and Johnson’s piece is a stringent critique of Richard Posner’s account of pragmatism. Like Sanger and Brooks, Posner is trying to insulate a sort-of-Deweyan pragmatism from ideology – and in particular from the ideology of legal realism, which suggests that the interpretation of law is politics by another name. But as Knight and Johnson convincingly (to me) show, Posner’s account collapses under its own weight. You simply can’t get the politics out of pragmatist accounts. Furthermore, Dewey’s arguments may carry some quite radical implications. Dewey and other pragmatists lay a very heavy emphasis on the benefits of unforced inquiry as a guide to practice. Yet unforced inquiry is only possible in a society where there aren’t economic or social barriers to free engagement in discussion and deliberation. Thus – to really achieve the benefits of free debate and untrammeled inquiry – you need (where it is feasible) to dismantle barriers that prevent full and unfettered participation in the processes of discussion through which inquiry takes place. As Knight and Johnson conclude:

For the legal pragmatist, precedent or statute can constrain judicial discretion only as arguments in a process of reasoned deliberation. This process presupposes, in turn, that all relevant actors have free and equal access to relevant deliberative arenas. And, if it is to be pragmatically meaningful, this commitment demands that the pragmatist challenge social and economic barriers that distort or subvert the sort of unforced inquiry that reasoned deliberation requires. This is Posner’s predicament. The “left-wing slant” that he finds so distasteful is not a coincidental or contingent feature of legal realism. It is central to the realists’ pragmatist commitments. In this sense, legal realism, Posner notwithstanding, articulates and helps us to see the political consequences of pragmatism.