Abstract
This chapter is one of the two more historically oriented chapters of the book. It examines the social and political theories of a series of American thinkers loosely connected with the pragmatist tradition: besides John Dewey, the works of George H. Mead, Charles H. Cooley, and Mary Parker Follett are examined with the aim of developing a social theory of democracy. Three main aspects are highlighted: the idea of democracy as method, the priority of involvement in joint action over autonomy, and the social-ontological structuration of democracy. The contribution of these authors to the genesis of this idea is acknowledged and shown.
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Notes
- 1.
To that extent, several of the masterworks of the Chicago School of Sociology are vivid depictions of this new way of life, of its unprecedented opportunities and challenges. Works such as Cressey (1932), Anderson (1923), Zorbaugh (1929), or the essays that Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and others devoted to the ethnographic study of urban life (Park and Burgess, 1921, 1925), explored the transformations undergone by traditional habits and patterns of interactions once individuals moved from small rural areas to big cities.
- 2.
For an overview of the experimentalist attitude of this generation of American intellectuals, see Gross and Krohn (2005).
- 3.
The historian Robert Palmer (Palmer 1953, 2014) has shown that the emergence of the terms ‘democratic’ and ‘aristocratic’ is simultaneous, and that the two are defined through their mutual opposition. Closer to us, James Kloppenberg has contended that our present society continues to suffer from the failed attempts at dismantling the pre-democratic organization of social life, and that “those assumptions and hierarchies continue to inflect European and American cultures today” (Kloppenberg, 2016, x).
- 4.
A similar argument is developed also in Eckstein and Gurr (1975).
- 5.
See, in particular, the sociological analyses contained in Veblen (2007).
- 6.
See, in particular, Schumpeter (2008).
- 7.
- 8.
Dewey ’s later proposals to democratize the educational system should be read against the background of this persistence of an élitist and inegalitarian society. Cf. Dewey (1916).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
I elaborate more fully this argument providing an account of the pragmatist theory of rationality as inquiry and of its political implications in Frega (2012b).
- 12.
For a more extended analysis and critique of this dualism, see Frega (2013b).
- 13.
For a more extensive analysis of the epistemological basis of political pragmatism, see Frega (2012b), esp. Chs. 1 and 2.
- 14.
I discuss this use at some length below in the section devoted to democratic habits.
- 15.
Lasswell ’s indebtedness to Dewey and pragmatism for the foundation of an experimentalist, problem-driven, and practice based approach to politics is explicitly stated in Lasswell (1971, xiii).
- 16.
- 17.
Axel Honneth’s recent works articulates this connection in details, under the heading of a theory of democratic ethos which owes equally from to Critical Theory and pragmatism. See, in particular, Honneth (2014, 2015). I come back to this theme in Chap. 9. For a comparison between Marx and Dewey as theorists of the relation between democracy and alienation, see Medearis (2015, Ch. 3).
- 18.
The archaic verb ‘to partake’ captures more effectively than the modern verb ‘to participate’ the difference between the idea of sharing an experience and that of participation as involvement in decision-making current in contemporary political theory.
- 19.
For a classical statement, see Walzer (2007).
- 20.
To this extent, a pragmatist interpretation of councils differs from Hannah Arendt’s, for whom they essentially represented a space where free political discourses could exist. I come back to this theme in Chap. 9.
- 21.
- 22.
See Joas (1985) for a more sophisticated interpretation of Mead which emphasizes the socio-practical dimension of the symbolic action.
- 23.
Pragmatism can also be seen as engaging in a reinterpretation of the very notion of autonomy along Hegelian lines. According to this perspective, one could simply state that ‘self-fulfillment’ is autonomy in pragmatist terms. For a recent interpretation along these lines, see Kloppenberg (2016).
- 24.
- 25.
See Frega (2019b) for a fuller account of an interactionist social ontology of democracy. See also Testa (2016). While I concur with Italo Testa in seeing John Dewey as a founding father of social ontology, I disagree with him about the interpretation of his ontology. Whereas Testa sees in habits and habituation the constitutive principle of Dewey’s ontology, I interpret instead his ontology in terms of the processual or transactional priority of the principle of association.
- 26.
Andrew Abbott described this social ontology in terms of a processual social theory at the basis of which stands the idea—that he traces back to pragmatism and Chicago sociology—that “everything in the social world is continuously in the process of making, remaking, and unmaking itself” (Abbott, 2016, i).
- 27.
In Chap. 7 I will further elaborate on this idea by relying on recent studies in contemporary sociology of interactions.
- 28.
- 29.
As Richard Bernstein has remarked in his critique of Jürgen Habermas’ discursive theory of democracy, the very idea of a democratic theory purified of any substantial ethical commitment is misguided, because the pragmatic presuppositions which lie at the bottom of communicative rationality are not merely linguistic. At the same time, Bernstein does not wish to reintroduce ethical commitments to political theory. Indeed, the kind of habits he has in mind concern rather the discursive practices through which communicative rationality is exercised. In other words, the idea of a democratic ethos does not necessarily imply postulating moral and political virtues.
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
Some strands of cultural theory applied to the study of politics have recently developed an interaction-based model of social explanation that resonates with the pragmatist account. For example, Michael Thompson and collaborators coined the term “social solidarity” to analyze political cultures as combining “a distinctive pattern of social relationships, a distinctive cultural bias and a distinctive behavioral strategy” (Thompson, Grendstad and Selle, 1999, 8). In so doing, they clearly locate patterns of social interaction at the heart of political life. As they acknowledge, focus on patterns of interaction enables the analyst to move up and down the layers composing the social ontology: “by thinking in terms of solidarities, and of their complex dynamics, we are able to zoom in on any scale level–the household, the state, the international regime, the firm, the political party or whatever” (Thompson, Grendstad and Selle, 1999, 10). The same assumption lies at the basis of the interaction-based pragmatist account of the social ontology of democracy.
- 33.
Recent works in evolutionary ethics (Kitcher , 2011a) and in social anthropology (Boehm, 1999) provide independent confirmation to Cooley’s intuitions. In particular, they demonstrate that, well before the advent of modernity and the spread of Enlightenment ideals of individual autonomy and collective self-government, the ethical life of mankind has been fashioned by practices of group discussion in which all mature members participated on roughly equal terms.
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
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Frega, R. (2019). The Pragmatist Social Account of Democracy. In: Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18561-9_4
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