Realism, pragmatism and the public sphere: Restraining foreign policy in an age of mass politics

Abstract

This article explores the links between classical realists such as Hans J. Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr or Arthur Schlesinger Jr, and early pragmatists such as John Dewey or Sidney Hook. Arguing that the question of how to save the creative potential of democracy from the stifling homogeneity of modernity was at the heart of both schools of thought, it treats Early Pragmatism as a window through which perhaps the most crucial question of Classical Realism may come to life: How to make publicity a vehicle of foreign-policy restraint in an age of mass politics?