Critical Pragmatism

Several critical versions of pragmatism have emerged throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. These perspectives have done much to rediscover the radical political spirit of classical pragmatism and to present an updated progressive version of pragmatism capable of critically assessing the shortcomings of liberal democracy and the global consumer capitalist spirit typical of the current times. Although there are no clear boundaries between pragmatism and critical pragmatism, and although critical pragmatists share with pragmatists at large key presuppositions about human nature and social processes, it is fair to say that critical pragmatists strongly emphasize the emancipatory, polemical, and transformative potential of pragmatist philosophy and social theory and research as well as the polemical and even activist role of the citizen-scholar.

Classical pragmatism, embodied by the likes of John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, W. I. Thomas, Charles Herbert Cooley, and George Herbert Mead, has often been criticized for positing a view of human nature as excessively voluntarist and optimistic, complacent toward the status quo of U.S. democracy, and largely biased by a classless, raceless, and genderless ideology. Such criticisms of classical pragmatism have also often been mounted against the social theory of symbolic interactionism—pragmatism's main intellectual offshoot in the social sciences.

Although these criticisms have taken a strong hold in a handful of sociological circles, in actuality early pragmatism constituted a sharply critical perspective, even a radical one for the times. Pragmatism's views on social reality as being constantly in flux, on knowledge as relative and shaped by multiple and instrumentalist goals, on society as a form of discursive interaction, on the self as a biographical project free of metaphysical baggage, on science as will to meaning and power, and on methodology as a form of situated inquiry largely predate the onset of most postmodern and poststructural social and cultural criticism. Indeed, philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Donna Haraway, and Jean-Francois Lyotard all have been clearly influenced by classical pragmatism, and to their credit some of them have explicitly recognized their debt. Therefore, rather than an entity living on its own, critical pragmatism stands in close rapport not only with the history and past intellectual development of classical pragmatism but also with current social and cultural theory. Furthermore, its boundaries are extremely difficult to draw, and the identity and status of its figureheads are contested and uncertain. Nevertheless, critical pragmatism is enjoying a remarkable renaissance across the social sciences, and its followers are multiplying exponentially. Rather than describing central figures or currents, this entry outlines four critical characteristics of classical pragmatism. These four characteristics represent strong theoretical threads in the ongoing growth of critical pragmatism.