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Politics is the art of the possible. And a pragmatist, in everyday parlance, is someone ready to jettison prior convictions or commitments to get something accomplished. Neither the common saying about politics nor the common understanding of the pragmatist is meant as high praise. At best, they reflect resigned acceptance that the best is often deemed impossible, and thus getting something done is respectable in many cases, albeit admirable only rarely. The taint of the ideal haunts actual achievements. Pragmatism as the name of a philosophical movement stands in a complex relationship to the ordinary language meaning of pragmatist . The pragmatist philosophers are, as I hope to show, very committed to the possible, both as a concept and as characterizing a certain attitude about what can be done to improve human lives. Most crucially , the pragmatists were committed to expanding our sense of what is possible, engaged in an ongoing resistance against the tendency to settle for too little. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that this book is an attempt to resignify the saying about politics as the art of the possible by reconfiguring what can be meant by “the possible.” More concretely, this book aims to articulate and to practice a liberal democratic ethos inspired primarily by the American pragmatist tradition. “Democracy as an ethical ideal,” Robert Westbrook writes, “calls upon men and women to build communities in which the necessary opportunities and resources are available for every individual to realize fully his or her particular capacities and powers through participation in political, social and cultural life.”1 This ideal xi Introduction: Philosophy and Democracy The task of future philosophy is to clarify men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become as far as is humanly possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts. That which may be pretentiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical distinctions becomes intensely significant when connected with the drama of the struggle of social beliefs and ideals. —John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy is recognizably liberal in its insistence that any polity be judged by the quality of the individual lives it enables. But it is democratic insofar as it picks up John Dewey’s insistence “that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities [can] take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association.”2 Democracy in Dewey is built upon “the acknowledgement that goods exist and endure only through being communicated” and it should be “a means of promoting association, of multiplying effective points of contact between persons, directing their intercourse into the modes of the greatest fruitfulness” (RP, 206–7). We live in a time of greatly diminished expectations. Who among us believes that our nation—or the world—can achieve political modes of association that will enrich individual lives, both materially and emotionally? The outlines of the possible have shrunk. The left talks of hope and change but is reduced to merely tinkering at the margins as various runaway financial and environmental catastrophes unfold outside of any effective means to control or regulate them. Civil order has collapsed in large parts of the globe, and neither intervention nor indifference on the part of the West seems to do any good. The right clamors for the aggressive imposition of democracy around the globe while presiding over the growing divide between the haves and have-nots at home, buoyed by its insistence that the market must rule and will brook no interference. A sense of intractable conflict joined with a resigned surrender to the necessities of capitalism has generated calls in Europe for rolling back the gains of social democracy and in America for a rugged individualism that yields a winner-take-all, devil take the hindmost, society. As Paul Krugman puts it, a “learned helplessness” seems to have infected our political, economic, and intellectual elites, all of whom talk more about how there is nothing that can be done than about efficacious ways to respond to our many problems.3 Pragmatism, a philosophy of possibility tied to a commitment to liberal democracy, provides me with the opportunity to articulate in these pages a more expansive vision of what our polity might be. Inspired by Dewey, philosophy should attend to describing a world we want to live in as well as describing the world we currently inhabit...

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