Talking It Over

Abstract

It's back. The revival of pragmatic social theory in the academy, a phenomenon beginning at least a decade ago, is now in full swing. For Richard Rorty and Jiurgen Habermas, Cornel West and Drucilla Cornell, pragmatists have returned as important ballast for intellectual argument. In the past few years no less than three sympathetic intellectual biographies of John Dewey have been published, the best of them by Robert Westbrook, a co-editor of In Face of the Facts. The new interest in pragmatic social theory is fueling new interest within the academic disciplines. Barbara Maria Stafford in art history, Hillary Putnam in philosophy, James Kloppenberg, Joyce Appleby, Margaret Jacobs, and Lynn Hunt in history-all are among those suggesting that pragmatism is a useful guide for contemporary scholarship. No doubt Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead are looking on from the beyond and yelping a' la George Castanza: We're back in the game, baby!! Back in the game? The of pragmatism? Was it ever really away? Pragmatism saturates so much twentieth-century American intellectual history that speaking of its return can appear odd. Yet, it is appropriate. Pragmatism has never been without its critics and certainly by the 1970s it had fallen out of favor in many disciplines. The neo-Kantian philosophy of John Rawls and the cultural relativism of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz were just two ways that academics distanced themselves from pragmatism. Early feminist scholarship and the neo-Marxism of the seventies were also often either indifferent or hostile to pragmatic theory. The two fine books under review here, both broadly part of the pragmatic revival, are indicators of how much has changed since then. Objectivity is not Neutrality collects a number of essays Thomas Haskell has written since the late seventies. Such collections are often disappointments,