Pragmatism

Classical Pragmatism (1870–1920)

Scholars have said that pragmatism originated within The Metaphysical Club, an informal group gathering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1870s, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935), Nicholas St. John Green (1830–1876), Joseph Bangs

Warner (1848–1923), and Chauncey Wright (1830–1875). William James (1842–1910) emphasized choice and the function of the will in shaping perceived reality; Charles Peirce (1839–1914) developed an evolutionary monistic metaphysical system, claiming that concepts must have experiential cash value and be bounded to empirical observations.

All the club's members were Harvard-educated, though they did not all have a professional philosophical education; some were lawyers. Emerging from these conversations was what William James argued was Peirce's principle of pragmatism, which maintained that beliefs are rules of action, and the function of thinking is the production of habits of action.

John Dewey (1859–1952) added social and democratic aspects to pragmatism, combining it with Hegelian idealism and natural selection. Following pragmatism's emergence, scholars labeled the era 1880 to 1920 a revolt against formalism, characterized by an antifoundational rejection of European patterns that dominated philosophy, economics, history, and other sciences in the late nineteenth century. Within this intellectual phase, Holmes framed the pragmatic formula of jurisprudence and law when he declared: “The life of the law has not been logic. It has been experience” (1881: 115). This was followed by a legal intellectual pragmatic group of thinkers named legal realists.

Legal Realism (1920–1930)

The realists used the pragmatic claims against legal rules and exposed their indeterminacy, challenging the use of doctrinal concepts such as property or contract as capable of influencing legal decision making, and emphasizing the role of policy considerations in determining a court case. Their movement remained oppositional to the mainstream formal legal discourse of their time.

Postwar Legal Pragmatism (1946–1968)

Philosophical criticism of pragmatism prevailed following World War II. Some attached pragmatism as an instrumentalist, overly optimistic, conservative, even philistine methodology. Others, in the legal sphere, admired the American pragmatic spirit. The legal [Page 1170]process school of thought exemplified the next pragmatic stage in law. Within this jurisprudential perception, the problem-solving idea became the prominent image of decision making and the indeterminacy of rules was answered by the appeal to experience and to “reasoned elaboration.” At this postwar foundational moment, the American pragmatic voice officially crystallized within legal discourse to provide a conservative utopist jurisprudential perception of society as handled by law through an aspiration to institutional settlement, harmony, reliance on collective thought, and problem solving.

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