Abstract
Where do pragmatism and conservatism intersect? What does pragmatism offer conservatives? Following Seth Vannatta, I argue that, as a methodology, pragmatism concerns itself with the situated, the embedded, the contextual, the experiential, the fallible, the social, and the customary. Chief among its concerns is lived experience. It recalls philosophical modes associated with Michael Oakeshott, Edmund Burke, F. A. Hayek, and Russell Kirk. This chapter explains and evaluates Vannatta’s arguments about pragmatism and conservatism with an eye toward animating a pragmatic conservative tradition within libertarianism.
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Notes
- 1.
Seth Vannatta, Conservatism and Pragmatism in Law, Politics, and Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 2.
Based upon interactions with audiences at lectures and conferences, the reviewer acknowledges this claim as anecdotal and experiential.
- 3.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 5–6, 19, 22–37, 45–47, 50–53, 67, 122–24, 167–77 (discussing Burke); ibid., 6, 23, 34, 44–53, 90, 123, 145–46, 151 (discussing Hume); ibid., 7–8, 105, 115, 121–25 (discussing Hayek); ibid., x–xi, 7, 9, 73, 90–96, 106, 162, 180–88, 212–22 (discussing Oakeshott); ibid., 22–23, 167–77, 182, 185, 187 (discussing Kirk).
- 4.
Ibid., 2–5.
- 5.
Ibid., 2.
- 6.
Allen Mendenhall, “Pragmatists versus Agrarians?,” review of John D. Langdale, Superfluous Southerners, The University Bookman, June 1, 2013) (“[T]he pragmatism of Peirce and James is not about sociopolitical or socioeconomic advancement. It is a methodology, a process of scientific inquiry. It does not address conservatism per se or liberalism per se. It can lead one to either conservative or liberal outcomes, although the earliest pragmatists rarely applied it to politics as such. It is, accordingly, a vehicle to an end, not an end itself”).
- 7.
James M. Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison (2012), 17.
- 8.
Ibid.; Allan C. Hutchinson, Evolution and the Common Law (2005), 104–5, 108 (distinguishing between conservative, liberal, and radical pragmatism in a careful manner, which irradiates this point); Jonah Goldberg, “On Pragmatism & Fascism: Part One,” National Review, April 27, 2009 (describing an example of oversimplification of pragmatism as leftist); Peter Berkowitz, “Pragmatism Obama Style: Surprise, It’s Left-Wing,” Weekly Standard, May 4, 2009 (overstating pragmatism’s affiliation with the left in light of Richard Rorty); Rich Lowry, Bob McDonnell, “Conservative Pragmatist,” National Review, October 22, 2009 (describing a simplistic attempt at associating pragmatism and conservatism); John Osborn, “Pragmatic Conservatism at the Heart of Chief Justice’s Ruling to Uphold ACA Subsidies,” Forbes, June 25, 2015.
- 9.
See generally Thomas Short, “The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce,” Modern Age 43 (2001): 295 (regarding confusion about the meaning of pragmatism, the association of pragmatism with leftism, and the danger of misconstruing pragmatism in the vein of Richard Rorty).
- 10.
See, for example, William James, “Pragmatism,” in William James: Writings 1902–1910 (1987); C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868): 140; C. S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1877): 1; C. S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1878): 286; C. S. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” Monist 15 (1905): 161; C. S. Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, ed. Patricia Ann Turrisi (1997); C. S. Peirce, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” Monist 15 (1905): 481; Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, Vol. 5, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (1931). For representative work by Peirce and James on pragmatism, see William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University Chronicle 1, no. 4 (1898): 287.
- 11.
Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (2007), 9.
- 12.
Ibid., 106–7.
- 13.
Ibid., 102.
- 14.
Ibid., 107.
- 15.
Ibid., 51.
- 16.
Ibid., 168.
- 17.
Ibid., 28, 37, 51, 94, 98, 102, 106, 117, 149, 157, 176, 337, 423.
- 18.
The theory of the rhizome comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For some of Goldberg’s breezy, categorical, and sweeping claims, see Goldberg, Liberal Fascism , 1 (referring to the character types “[a]ngry left-wingers” and “corporate fat cats” as fascist without specifying actual people who meet this description). Ibid., 5–6 (implying that pragmatism was militaristic and thus appealed to Mussolini, associating Nazism with Afrocentrism, and accusing unspecified leftists of conflating Zionism and Nazism); ibid., 9–10 (accusing the American left of adopting Italian fascism while Stalin rose to power, supporting Stalinism and Nazism); ibid., 38–43 (discussing the alleged fascism of the French Revolution as a precursor to fascism during World War I); ibid., 53–77 (comparing Hitler and Nazism to the American left); ibid., 82–93 (discussing Woodrow Wilson, progressivism, Nazism, Christianity, Teddy Roosevelt, Darwin, evolution, the Republican Party, and nationalism); ibid., 93–106 (attributing supposed fascism in America to the teachings of Nietzsche and William James and claiming that American progressives demonstrated an affection for Nazi Germany and Italian fascism); ibid., 238–40 (suggesting that the Civil Rights Movement and liberal reforms of the 1960s led to fascist street riots, increased rights to criminals, and “the pre-fascist logic of the Bismarckian welfare state”); ibid., 243–83 (linking the contemporary American left to racism, eugenics, Nazism, jingoism, xenophobia, and the Ku Klux Klan); ibid., 392 (referring to unnamed “smug, liberal know-nothings, sublimely confident of the truth of their ill-informed prejudices,” without naming those alleged prejudices); ibid., 397–99 (suggesting that Patrick Buchanan leaned toward leftist fascism rather than populist conservatism).
- 19.
See, for example, David Neiwert, “Jonah Goldberg’s Bizarro History,” American Prospect, January 8, 2008; Austin Bramwell, “Goldberg’s Trivial Pursuit,” American Conservative, January 28, 2008; Eric Alterman, “Conservative Cannibalism,” Nation, February 21, 2008; David Oshinsky, “Heil Woodrow!,” New York Times, December 30, 2007; Michael Tomasky, “Jackboots and Whole Foods,” New Republic, March 12, 2008; David Gordon, “Fascism, Left and Right,” Mises Daily, January 31, 2008.
- 20.
The National Review, for which Goldberg is editor-at-large, had a total, paid, and verified circulation of 137,681 as of December 31, 2014, according to Alliance for Audited Media, “Total Circ. for Consumer Magazines,” http://abcas3.auditedmedia.com/ecirc/magtitlesearch.asp. Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. See Jonah Goldberg, American Enterprise Institute, September 2, 2015, https://www.aei.org/scholar/jonah-goldberg/.
- 21.
To be fair, Goldberg demonstrates occasional cautiousness in Liberal Fascism . For example, he states,
The relationship between Pragmatism and conservatism is a bit more complicated. William James was a great American philosopher, and there is much in his work that conservatives admire. And if by Pragmatism you simply mean realism or practicality, then there are a great many conservative pragmatists. But if by Pragmatism one means the constellation of theories swirling among the progressives or the work of John Dewey, then conservatives have been at the forefront of a century-long critique of Pragmatism. However, it should be said that both James and Dewey are thoroughly American philosophers whose influence in a wide range of matters defies neat categorization along the left-right axis.
Goldberg , Liberal Fascism , 434 n. 22. That he relegates this caution to a footnote, leaving the more tendentious passages for the text proper, suggests a willingness to sacrifice academic rigor for commercial success. Such a willingness is not bad in itself, but it does problematize Goldberg’s claims by undermining his credibility. The existence of this footnote raises the specter of ghost authorship or editorial intervention because it so glaringly contradicts Goldberg’s dogged attempts to link James and Dewey to fascism.
- 22.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 1.
- 23.
Ibid., 4.
- 24.
Ibid., x, 2–3, 6, 8–9, 17, 23, 33, 41, 45, 50, 52–53, 61–62, 67, 76, 81–82, 85, 88–89, 93, 97–98, 100, 105–6, 115, 117, 120, 123–25, 151, 156, 162, 164, 173, 175, 179, 187, 191, 200, 202, 207, 210, 213–19, 222, 247.
- 25.
Ibid., 3.
- 26.
See generally Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1991), 5–12.
- 27.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 3.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid., 2, 6–8, 23–24, 28–29, 34–35, 42, 53, 65, 98, 106–7, 120, 124–25, 161, 164, 168, 172, 184–85, 187, 190–91, 201, 204, 207, 209, 220, 222.
- 32.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th rev. ed. (1995), 9.
- 33.
See F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 11th ed. (2011), 519–33.
- 34.
Ibid., 110.
- 35.
Ibid., 54.
- 36.
Ibid., 75. For more on Hayek and pragmatism, see Richard Posner’s summary of Hayek’s jurisprudence. Richard A. Posner, “Kelsen versus Hayek: Pragmatism, Economics, and Democracy,” in Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003), 250, 250–91.
- 37.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 121–25.
- 38.
Ibid., 2; see also Oakeshott, Rationalism, 168 (Opening his essay, Oakeshott writes, “[m]y theme is not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition. To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices. And my design here is to construe this disposition as it appears in contemporary character, rather than to transpose it into the idiom of general principles”).
- 39.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 2.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Ibid., 22–37 (discussing Burke); ibid., 44–46 (discussing Hume); ibid., 13–15, 18–19, 33 (discussing Hobbes); ibid., 13–23, 25 (discussing Locke); ibid., 15–19, 21, 23, 26 (discussing Rousseau); ibid., 19–22 (discussing Paine); ibid., 17–19, 42–43 (discussing Kant); ibid., 39–41 (discussing Bentham); ibid., 41–42 (discussing Mill).
- 42.
See generally ibid., 23–53. Vannatta develops the anti-utopian characteristics of pragmatism and conservatism later in the book. See, for example, ibid., 64, 73, 184, 190–91, 195, 199, 201, 206, 215.
- 43.
Ibid., 51 (“Insofar as we inherit the dictates of morality naturally and unreflectively from the past, we should not cut ties with the past. Without this inheritance, Peirce tells us we are left only to be victims of our passions. But his warning is not against the influence of passions in morality, but rather the severing of morality from the past by reason. Reason, as we have seen in the radicalism of Paine, cares nothing for the past, which has no right to bind us. But as we saw in Burke’s prescient warnings about revolutionary innovations in government founded on the abstractions of reason, cutting ties to past inheritance can cause us to be victim to the passions of the day”).
- 44.
Ibid., 49.
- 45.
See generally ibid., 57–101.
- 46.
See generally ibid., 126–44.
- 47.
Ibid., 126. For my discussion of Holmes and conservatism, see Allen Mendenhall, “Justice Holmes and Conservatism,” Texas Review of Law & Politics 17, no. 2 (2013): 305. For my work on Holmes and pragmatism, see Allen Mendenhall, “Pragmatism on the Shoulders of Emerson: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s Jurisprudence as a Synthesis of Emerson, Peirce, James, and Dewey,” South Carolina Review 48, no. 1 (2015). See Allen Mendenhall, “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Is the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist: A Brief and Belated Response to Stanley Cavell,” Faulkner Law Review 6 (2014), 197; see also Allen Mendenhall, “Dissent as a Site of Aesthetic Adaptation in the Work of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,” British Journal of American Legal Studies 1 (2012): 517; Allen Mendenhall, “Holmes and Dissent,” Journal Jurisprudence 12 (2011): 679.
- 48.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 126.
- 49.
Ibid., 112–14, 126–28, 132, 135, 137–39, 141, 143, 164, 217.
- 50.
Ibid., 127–28.
- 51.
Ibid., 128.
- 52.
Ibid., 149.
- 53.
See generally Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (2001).
- 54.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 3.
- 55.
Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism, 17.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Kirk, Conservative Mind, 9.
- 58.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 3.
- 59.
Ibid., 3, 10, 25, 85, 91, 113, 137, 166, 173–74, 183, 185, 211, 213, 217.
- 60.
Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 47.
- 61.
Ibid., 124.
- 62.
See Vannatta, Conservatism, 22–37 (discussing Burke); ibid., 44–46 (discussing Hume); ibid., 7–8, 121–24 (discussing Hayek).
- 63.
See Pat Buchanan, “The Obama Doctrine,” Creators, April 14, 2015 (“Obama is in that tradition of ruthless American pragmatism,” which includes breaking foreign policy ties with traditional allies of the United States); see also Matthew Continetti, “A Ruthless Pragmatism,” Weekly Standard, April 29, 2009 (implying that President Obama’s championing of the Affordable Care Act was pragmatic); Paul Mirengoff, “A Pragmatic Heresy,” Weekly Standard, February 8, 2006 (associating pragmatism with the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise). These examples use the term “pragmatism” in a way that is foreign to the classical pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. For additional examples of incorrect or negative portrayals of pragmatism in conservative publications or by conservative authors, see Jonah Goldberg, “A Pragmatic Look at Obama’s Pragmatism,” Townhall, September 30, 2009 (treating Obama as a pragmatist because he allegedly changed his mind about the War in Afghanistan).
- 64.
Vannatta, Conservatism, 127 (acknowledging that Vannatta states, “Conservativism and Pragmatism does not read pragmatism through the lens of William James”). Therefore, the inattention to James is not a result of oversight.
- 65.
Vannatta is careful to distinguish Holmes and James. Ibid., 126–27.
- 66.
Ibid., 223.
- 67.
Ibid. (explaining the author’s use of the first-person plural “we,” Vannatta appears to include himself among the conservative pragmatists: “We produce data showing problems, and we generate works of art which stir the emotions and call humanity to a consciousness of social ills and sympathy for its victims. We proceed in our inquiries as meliorists, whose hope is checked by a healthy skepticism and a realization of the tragic shortfalls of such conservative progress”).
- 68.
Ibid., 106.
- 69.
Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism, 17.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
John Dewey, “An Introductory Word,” in The Metaphysics Of Pragmatism (1927), 1.
- 72.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Essay XII: Art,” in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (1983), 431.
- 73.
See generally Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (1974), ix (citing from the author’s introduction: “The strange notion prevails among those who misread Peirce and Dewey that because any assertion of fact or value may be challenged to submit its credentials to further test, we therefore can possess no firm knowledge about anything. Equally bizarre is the assumption that the experimentalist believes that we can or should experiment in human affairs in the same manner or with the same methods and techniques employed in the natural sciences”). Ibid., ix–x (correcting a prevailing misunderstanding about the pragmatic notion of truth: “Technically, pragmatism was developed as a theory of meaning and then as a theory of truth. In its broadest sense as a philosophy of life, it holds that the logic and ethics of scientific method can and should be applied to human affairs. This implies that one can make warranted assertions about values as well as facts. It recognizes that the differences in the subject matter of values requires the use of different methods of inquiry, discovery, and test in ascertaining objective knowledge about them. Most daring and controversial of all, pragmatism holds that it is possible to gain objective knowledge not only about the best means available to achieve given ends—something freely granted—but also about the best ends in the problematic situations in which the ends are disputed or become objects of conflict”); see also Susan Haack, “Vulgar Pragmatism: An Unedifying Prospect,” in Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. (1995), 126–47. For a more recent denunciation of the distorted forms of pragmatism espoused by Richard Rorty, see Susan Haack, “Vulgar Rortyism,” in The New Criterion 16 (1997): 67.
- 74.
George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States, ed. James Seaton (2009), xxiv.
- 75.
Charles Hartshorne, The Darkness and the Light (1990), 307.
- 76.
See generally Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist And Pragmatist (Cornell University Press ed., 2005), 2 (“Hook spent the Reagan years as a senior research fellow at one of the country’s two top conservative think tanks, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in Stanford, California, where his files grew thick with complimentary letters from such high-ranking Reagan officials as William Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Lynne Cheney, and Edwin Meese, as well as foreign policy hawks Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Ronald Reagan himself sent warm greetings for Hook’s eightieth birthday party in 1982 and a holiday card in 1984”).
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Mendenhall, A. (2020). Toward Pragmatic Conservatism. In: The Three Ps of Liberty. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39605-3_6
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