Pragmatism's boundaries

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 549-571

  Festenstein, Matthew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33751180765     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298020310030901     Document Type: Article

References (115)

1. For example, Kimberley Hutchings, "The Question of Self-Determination and Its Implications for Normative International Theory', in Human Rights and Global Diversity, eds. Simon Caney and Peter Jones (Ilford: Frank Cass, 2001), 91-120
2. and Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998).
3. See, for example, Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
4. A. G. Gagnon and James Tully, Multinational Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
5. Paul Gilbert, Peoples, Cultures and Nations in Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000);
6. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
7. Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
8. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, eds., Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
9. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000);
10. and Ayelet Scachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
11. Chris Brown, 'The Borders of (International) Political Theory', in Political Theory in Transition, ed. Noël O'Sullivan (London: Routledge, 2000), 190;
12. see also John Williams, 'Territorial Borders, Toleration and the English School', Review of International Studies 28, no. 4 (2002): 737.
13. Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992);
14. Janna Thompson, Justice and World Order: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Routledge, 1992);
15. and Molly Cochran, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
16. But see the elaboration of themes from Peirce in Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge, 2000).
17. John Dewey, 'Context and Thought', in The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 6:1931-1932, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 5.
18. John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 6:1931-1932 Ibid., 7.
19. John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 6:1931-1932 Ibid., 19.
20. Jack Knight and James Johnson, 'Inquiry into Democracy: What Might a Pragmatist Make of Rational Choice Theories?', American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 2 (1999): 567.
21. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press), 163.
22. Charles Sanders Peirce, Selected Writings, ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Dover Press, 1958), 192.
23. Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 213-14
24. and see also Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 40-41.
25. Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 73-74.
26. W. V. Quine, 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).
27. Hilary Putnam, Words and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 153.
28. Putnam, Words and Life, 153-54;
29. Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 13-18;
30. and Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 84-89.
31. Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 86.
32. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 12: 1938, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 109.
33. See Putnam, Pragmatism, 20
34. and Words and Life, 152.
35. Putnam, Words and Life, 152
36. and Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 59-60.
37. Putnam, Words and Life, 171
38. and Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 53.
39. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 304.
40. Compare with Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), 138-39.
41. Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 125.
42. Compare with Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 107-08.
43. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 162.
44. Keith Graham, Practical Reasoning in a Social World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 140.
45. Compare with Jon Elster, 'Introduction', in Rational Choice, ed. Jon Elster (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 22.
46. For IR, see Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
47. Putnam, Words and Life, 211-12.
48. Graham, Practical Reasoning, 135, emphasis in original.
49. Compare with Alexander Wendt, 'Collective Identity Formation and the International State', American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1994): 384-96. This is not to say that rationalism may not have value, if you accept its parameters: compare
50. James Bohman, 'Democracy as Inquiry, Inquiry as Democratic: Pragmatism, Social Science, and the Democratic Division of Labour', American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 2 (1999): 590-607
51. and Knight and Johnson, 'Inquiry into Democracy'.
52. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 187.
53. I discuss this further, along with the claim that often goes with it that pragmatism defers to established social and political forces, in relation to one version of the doctrine, in Matthew Festenstein, 'Politics and Acquiescence in Rortyan Pragmatism', Theorin, forthcoming.
54. Compare with Bernard Williams, 'Left-Wing Wittgenstein, Right-Wing Marx', Common Knowledge 1 (1992): 33-42.
55. Compare with Gilbert, Peoples, Cultures and Nations, 35-38. We should tread carefully in the use of this term, of course: this line of thought often accompanies scepticism about the 'marketisation' of social relations and about imperial domination, and so is not compatible with any and every version of conservative political ideology. Indeed, as the example of Walzer suggests, this may be tethered to a kind of political radicalism (or reformism) grounded in a sense that dominant social and political forces betray underlying cultural 'understandings'.
56. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983). The use of Walzer here is, I should stress, a trifle opportunistic, concentrating on the epistemological grounds for his view of social criticism in keeping with the focus of this article, and neglecting other aspects of his thought, such as the importance attached to political self-determination.
57. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality Ibid., 314.
58. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality Ibid., xiv.
59. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality Ibid., 28.
60. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality Ibid., 312-14.
61. Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, 21-51
62. and Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 59-60.
63. For some illuminating points in defence, see Garens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, esp. 25.
64. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
65. An alternative strategy is more peculiar to Walzer's theory of social justice, and rests on his notion of complex equality. In brief, this is the idea that different 'spheres' of social life possess different principles governing the allocation of the goods that they govern, and that the integrity of these different spheres should be preserved. So, for example, political office, health care and familial affection should not be purchasable, since the former ought to be allocated by distinct and noneconomic principles. The precise content of these principles is determined by the specific understandings of these goods entertained by a particular society. Now I do not want to enter into the debate concerning this conception of justice. But there is an ambiguity about the relationship of the thesis of complex equality to that of the cultural constitution of ethical values. In places, Walzer deploys the idea of complex equality as a cross-cultural ethical criterion. For example, in discussing Iran he claims that the absence of democratic citizenship is 'morally problematic… because it blocks the full development of complex equality'; Michael Walzer, 'Response', in Pluralism, Justice, and Equality, eds. David Miller and Michael Walzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 289.
66. But that is only problematic if complex equality is a moral standard that Iranian society already accepts, or ought to accept. But we are given no reason to accept either of these propositions, and the use of complex equality as a critical vantage point seems like just the sort of arbitrary imposition against which Walzer seeks to warn us. The alternative way to construe this relationship is that the notion of complex equality is itself a culturally relative one, which may have no purchase on some sorts of society. In his example of a caste society, the latter is characterised by the 'extraordinary integration' of the meanings attached to goods in all spheres, so that prestige, wealth, office, occupation, clothing, food and knowledge are all subject to the same hierarchy; Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 27. This suggests that the ideal of complex equality is one which itself only holds for relatively pluralistic societies, which share the understanding that different goods should be distributed by different criteria.
67. Compare with Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
68. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23, 30.
69. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 349
70. and Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 197.
71. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 349.
72. Richard Rorty, 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty', in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, eds. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 235.
73. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 167-88.
74. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress Ibid., 170-71.
75. For a trenchant statement, see Richard Rorty, 'Response to Molly Cochran', in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, 200-02. I discuss this disposition further in Festenstein, 'Politics and Acquiescence'.
76. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 190.
77. Rorty, 'Response to Cochran', 200
78. and 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty', 223-24.
79. Compare with Larmore, Morals of Modernity, 57.
80. Rorty, 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty', 223.
81. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
82. and Matthew Festenstein, 'Pragmatism, Social Democracy and Political Argument', in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, 203-18.
83. Compare with Brown, 'Borders of (International) Political Theory', 201-02
84. and David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
85. For example, see Rorty, Truth and Progress, 172.
86. Rorty, 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty' and
87. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
88. Rorty, 'Justice as a Larger Loyalty', 232.
89. See Putnam, Words and Life, 198-220.
90. For a more historical treatment, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Political Theory, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
91. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
92. and Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
93. Matthew Festenstein, "The Ties of Communication: Dewey on Ideal and Political Democracy', History of Political Thought 18, no. 1 (1997): 104-24.
94. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 2: 1925-1927, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 325-26.
95. John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 2: 1925-1927, Ibid., 327-28.
96. John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 2: 1925-1927, Ibid., 293-94.
97. Axel Honneth, 'Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today', Political Theory 26, no. 6 (1998): 763-83
98. and Matthew Festenstein, 'Inquiry as Critique: On the Legacy of Deweyan Pragmatism for Political Theory', Political Studies 49, no. 4 (2001): 730-48.
99. The non-instrumental and instrumental accounts are not then separable, although we can distinguish each component. See Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory, 35-36
100. and Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, 125-26.
101. See the discussion in Cochran, Normative Theory, 250-56.
102. James Johnson, 'Arguing for Deliberation', in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
103. See also Jack Knight and James Johnson 'Political Consequences of Pragmatism', Political Theory 24, no. 1 (1996): 68-96
104. 'What Sort of Equality Does Democratic Deliberation Require?', in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. James Bohman and William Rehg (Boston: MIT Press, 1997), and 'Inquiry into Democracy'.
105. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, 'Outer Edges and Inner Edges', in Democracy's Edges, eds. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.
106. Compare with Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 3
107. and Anthony McGrew, 'Transnational Democracy', in Democratic Theory Today, eds. Avril Carter and Geoffrey Stokes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 80: 'who or what decides how the demos is to be constituted and on what basis?'.
108. I owe this way of putting the issue to Susan Hurley, 'Rationality, Democracy and Leaky Boundaries: Vertical vs. Horizontal Modularity', Democracy's Edges, 273-93.
109. Hurley assumes something of this kind, without making it explicit.
110. Ibid., 274.
111. Russell Hardin, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 277-80.
112. Compare with Ian Shapiro, 'Group Aspirations and Democratic Politics', in Democracy's Edges, 210-21.
113. Compare with Michael Freeman, 'The Right to Self-Determination in International Politics: Six Theories in Search of a Policy', Review of International Studies 25, no. 3 (1999): 355-70.
114. For a discussion of the relationship of claims for differentiated citizenship to the status of vulnerable minorities, particularly women and children, within the ethnic and cultural groups advancing these claims, see Schachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions.
115. Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 136-47.