More Publics, More Problems: The Productive Interface between the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique and Deweyan Pragmatism

Abstract

1. IntroductionThe pragmatic 'sociology of critique' has been developed over the past two and a half decades by a group of French scholars collaborating within the Groupe de sociologie politique et morale at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. The approach seeks interpret situated communication with a critical lens, understand public disputes and political culture and practice, and propose a structure for a range of common and more nuanced understandings of the variegated socio-political landscapes in which public disputes occur. A critical pragmatic analysis of cases of disputed justice focuses not only on the dynamics of the arguments that actors use justify their engagement in the public sphere, but also on the institutional, technical, legal, and material arrangements that are mobilized support the debates. A common ontological structure and method of inquiry unites this work, oriented around the linked concepts of grammars of public disagreement and models of justice, along with justification, denunciation, and compromise, and the tests which they are put.We refer here the French school of critical pragmatism, but we should note before proceeding in this direction that the term 'critical pragmatism' and its implications have independent origins in North America apart from those in France. In North America, the term can be traced at least as far back as 1935 Alain Locke, who developed a critical pragmatic theory of valuation as a means of undergirding the evolution of cultural pluralism (Kadlec 2007). This thread of American pragmatism notwithstanding, the struggle between pragmatism per se and critical social theory dates the very origins of American pragmatism; notably, with the critique leveled, from France, by one of the fathers of the discipline of sociology, Emile Durkheim, in 1895. In no uncertain terms, Durkheim saw the notion of a pragmatic sociology as a logical contradiction; he saw pragmatism as foregoing inquiry into eternal human truths by flattening these the same plane as sporadic individual actions (Karsenti 2004; Karsenti 2012). By insisting in various ways that, when it comes justifying and judging truth claims, there exists no means to get outside our beliefs and our language so as find some test other than coherence (Rorty 1979, 178), classical pragmatists seemed, from the perspective of classical sociologists, abandon the quest for a means base social inquiry on something more enduring than contemporary human communities.From Durkheim the present, critical social theorists along with conservatives such as Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr (MacGilvray 2010) have repeatedly confronted this lack of foundation or external reference point for the purpose of transcending, ordering, or judging individual experience as a failure of American pragmatism contest abuses of power in the real world. Pragmatists working in the American tradition respond these critiques in numerous ways. Hans Joas, for example, argued in 1993 that the stand-off constituted, primarily, an enduring misunderstanding. Richard Rorty's extensive opus draws upon Dewey build a defense and project of American democracy as an eternal project of seeking justice by the greatest number for the greatest number. A number of recent texts1 revive and further this tradition of synthesis. Among these, Torjus Midtgarden (2012, 507) has recently argued that Dewey derives immanent standards for social criticism from a sociological and historical reading of the cultural sources of normative authority. In the French language, recent work such as La Croyance et L'Enquete: aux sources du pragmatisme (Belief and Inquiry: the sources of pragmatism), a collection of essays by French philosophers and social theorists on the relevance of first generation American pragmatists - Dewey and Mead in particular - their own work, suggests a readiness for further bridge building. …