Pragmatist Politics: Making the Case for Liberal Democracy by John McGowan (review)

Given how much the tradition owes to Dewey’s pragmatic reconstruction of philosophy, that more is not written of a political bent by those working under the sign of pragmatism is to me always surprising. John McGowan’s Pragmatist Politics is a shining exception. The book’s aim is “to articulate and practice a liberal democratic ethos inspired primarily by the American pragmatist tradition.”¹ Two compelling opening chapters lay out McGowan’s melioristic conception of pragmatism as a philosophy of possibility animated by a belief in progress, drawing most heavily from James and Dewey but ranging well beyond them, both within the pragmatist tradition and outside it. Three subsequent chapters articulate “a vision of a possible liberal democracy” in the spirit of this philosophy of possibility and progress, devoted, respectively, to the liberal democratic ethos itself, human rights, and an alternative vision of that ethos as “secular comedy.” Most prominent in this vision is a Deweyan conception of democracy as “a moral idea” and a “way of life.”²

For McGowan, pragmatism is, at bottom, a philosophy of action and possibility. And it is by “reconfiguring what can be meant by ‘the possible’”³ that his pragmatist politics generates its transformative, melioristic energy. When tied to a “liberal democratic ethos,” cashed out primarily in Deweyan terms that emphasize lived relations and communicative associations, McGowan’s “liberal democratic pragmatics” is a countervailing force in the face of four existing threats that it is well-placed to oppose: the expanding income and wealth inequality; the continued growth of American imperialism; ever-present nativist fears and antipathy toward non-English speaking immigrants; and the ill effects of globalization and changing technologies. In the face of these and other challenges to the democratic ethos, pragmatists, in McGowan’s view, “strive to close the gap between the few and the demos.”⁴

McGowan’s is a capacious pragmatism that draws a common-sense realism from Peirce, James, and Dewey, at the same time that it learns from Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Wittgenstein, Arendt, Nussbaum, and Latour (“the most important contemporary descendant of the pragmatists”) occupy prominent places as well. Those looking for ammunition to wage battle in the various internecine wars among classical, paleo-, neo-, and new pragmatists, thankfully, will find none here. “Nothing significant,” he tells us, “hinges on whether what I say deserves the name ‘pragmatist’ or not.”⁵ Yet it is nonetheless clear that pragmatist philosophy is at the center of democratic action for McGowan. Most interesting is McGowan’s use of Kenneth Burke, a figure—at least the pre-1940 Burke—whom he has argued over the last decade is best understood as a pragmatist. Indeed, there is much in Burke’s account that echoes and enriches Peirce’s semiotics, Dewey’s transactionalism, James’s emphasis on relations, and Mead’s account of interpretive activity. Yet Burke also offers McGowan a framework for bringing these disparate elements together in novel and productive ways—for instance, how Burke’s understanding of literature as providing “equipments for living” suggests ways to bridge language and experience.

Among the signal contributions of this book is the explicit, extended attention to a “qualified ‘reconstruction’ of the idea of the progress” that forms the second chapter. Highlighting the melioristic commitments behind the progressivism of James, Dewey, and Addams, as well as the philosophical orientation informed by “the positivist faith in science’s ability to improve human life” shared by Peirce, James, and Dewey, McGowan sees a reconstruction of progress as essential to pragmatism’s ability to spirit us through current doldrums of “leftist quietism” by crafting animating visions of an alternative future.⁶ Importantly, this reconstruction entails attending to the ways in which a standard of progress has justified colonial and imperial projects of the past by offering “a metric to determine which lives are ‘more precious’ than others.”⁷ McGowan usefully reminds us that James and Dewey...