Contemporary Pragmatist Political Theory: Aims and Practices

Abstract

Among traditions of political theory, pragmatism has experienced an especially tumultuous history. Lauded by some for the advantages they see in its robustly non-metaphysical approach to political thinking, it has more often suffered under the accusation that it entails a naive form of instrumentalism which yields only a complacent understanding of politics. And yet as a voice within nineteenth-, twentiethand twenty-first-century AngloAmerican social and political thinking, it persists and continues to make new contributions. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in pragmatism and its relation to the central questions in political theory. It is to the task of illustrating and examining the diversity of trends of this discussion that this special issue is turned. The return to pragmatism in political theory has confounded the critical consensus that emerged out of the 1990s. The dominant view there had pushed aside pragmatists as apologists for the status quo, whose work (often paradigmatically taken to be Richard Rorty’s) was understood to amount to a ‘politics of acquiescence’ (Festenstein, 2003; MacGilvray, 2000). The current interest rejects this characterisation by explicitly politicising pragmatism. Multiple in its aims and approaches, this ‘third wave’ as it has been dubbed (Koopman, 2009), turns to pragmatism as a resource for thinking critically about politics in the contemporary world. Unlike previous discussions of pragmatism which have often limited themselves to examining the fidelity of a given interpretation of Peirce, James or Dewey (the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’), this revival is turned outwards to wider debates and other traditions within political theory. This focus constitutes an important opportunity to examine and assess how pragmatism can contribute to a variety of ongoing discussions. The potential significance of pragmatism for political theory is multiple and complex. This owes both to the difficulty in systematising a tradition as diverse as pragmatism, and to the number of different trends central to contemporary political thought. Pragmatism’s overarching relevance is its reconstruction of the task of providing critical and normative guidance within liberal democracies. Much current political thought is animated by the