Spotlight: Pragmatism in contemporary political theory

Abstract

This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of arguments about the character of democracy – although the character of those arguments is open to debate and reimagination – and how pragmatist arguments have been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches. This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion.

Investigación cooperativa y crecimiento como fin moral: El lugar del pluralismo en la noción de democracia de John Dewey

“…A tono con los dos pasos del argumento, parte de la discusión se ha concentrado en su interpretación del enfoque de Dewey -aspecto que trataré más adelante-mientras que otra parte de la discusión se ha concentrado en la alternativa peirceana (Brooks, 2009;Festenstein, 2009Festenstein, , 2010Mayorga, 2009;van Hollebeke, 2009;MacGilvray, 2014;Ervan & Möller, 2019). Sumado a las respuestas del propio Talisse (2009;Misak & Talisse, 2014), este material da cuenta de un intenso intercambio filosófico y ha sido considerado como el punto de partida para una incipiente corriente en filosofía política denominada liberalismo político pragmatista (Festenstein, 2010(Festenstein, , 2021.…”

Rupture and Response—Rorty, Cavell, and Rancière on the Role of the Poetic Powers of Democratic Citizens in Overcoming Injustices and Oppression

“…I am admittedly painting with a broad brush here when I say that contemporary democratic theories-writ large-can be sorted according to whether they understand one or the other of these two contrasting moments as the central critical driver of democratic transformation and progress: on the one hand, radical democratic theories that promote the first moment as the core of a political conception of democracy in their commitment to agonistic political action and the idea of the "ineradicability of antagonism" [1] (p. 756), and on the other hand, theories that recognize the second moment as the core of a normative conception of democracy in their emphasis on the expressive, articulative and problem-solving qualities of public inquiry, deliberation, and persuasion. Scholarship on pragmatist democratic theory (an overview provides [2]) has argued that pragmatism is a great resource for conceptually integrating these two opposing democratic moments in terms of a larger process of experience, inquiry, and meaning-making, thus also challenging the current divide in democratic theory. The idea is that pragmatism offers a happy marriage of both, the making of intelligent rules, practices, and habits and their reworking.…”

“…As for Cavell, contemporary scholarship on his work [21][22][23][24], has drawn some key conclusions for a democratic theory from his views of the democratic self, which is both and at the same time an individual and a collective subject that is marked by a deep entanglement of the private and the public, the voice as being both a personal and public voice, his conception of the individual self and of the just democratic society as split between an attained self/society and a next self/society. 2 Following on from these recent interpretations of the political dimension of Rorty's and Cavell's works, my aim in this essay will be to enrich those interpretations with an aesthetic perspective that emphasizes the importance of the poetic and imaginative powers of individuals and collectives for democratic progress, which then can be related to the similarly aesthetic, radical democratic perspective of Rancière.…”