Pragmatism, Power, and the Situation of Democracy

Pragmatism, Power, and the Situation of Democracy Author(s): Brendan Hogan Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2016), pp. 64-74 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.30.1.0064 Accessed: 29-02-2016 11:31 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.30.1.0064?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference# references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions jsp Pragmatism, Power, and the Situation of Democracy Brendan Hogan new york university abstract: Pragmatism as a theoretical enterprise has been criticized since its inception for not having a coherent account of the role of power and violence in human affairs as well as a moral justification and criteria for marshaling arguments in favor of democracy. In this essay I approach recent developments in pragmatic democratic theory with those persistent criticisms in mind. Rather than lacking justificatory resources and underthematizing the role of violence and asymmetrical power relations, Robert Talisse’s and James Bohman’s works, respectively, demonstrate the epistemological depth and power of updating pragmatism as a theory of situated and critical political inquiry. However, each could be extended by utilizing a more robust description of the problematic situation polities currently face. Specifically, I turn to Dewey for guidance in how our pragmatic epistemological and evaluative practices might incorporate the facts of our problematic situation. I do this in terms of the power structures of economic processes both in terms of contract and in terms of the intellectual discourses that attempt to scientifically describe these processes. keywords: pragmatism, democracy, power, violence, Robert Talisse, James Bohman, John Dewey, social science This article has for its focus two recent prominent, and to my mind clarifying, pragmatic theories of democracy. They are representative of pragmatic journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 30, no. 1, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions pragmatism, power, and the situation of democracy 65 theories of democracy insofar as they crystallize an attempt to revive and employ the conceptual battery of classical pragmatism to respond to contemporary problems in politics and political theory. Robert Talisse, the author of the first theoretical perspective I will briefly discuss, explicitly turns to Charles Peirce for an epistemically based approach to the justification of deliberative democracy that also fulfills, to his mind, the requirement that any democratic theory in a pluralist society remain as thin as possible with respect to prescribed ways of life or theories of the good. James Bohman is the second theorist I will discuss. He enlists and reconstructs some of John Dewey’s insights regarding emergent and dynamic publics, democracy’s means and ends, and the creative power of social criticism for the purposes of meaningful and efficacious deliberation, in order to fulfill Dewey’s dictum that, to paraphrase, “what is needed to cure the ills of democracy is more democracy, yes, but democracy of a qualitatively different kind.” Critique of Pragmatism as Weak on Power These two theories are especially welcome as they are joined by other pragmatic theorists of democracy trying to deal with what are seen as two major weak spots in pragmatist political theory. These are the problem of power, on the one hand, and the problem of justice, on the other. Perhaps Randolph Bourne in the early twentieth century is the most pertinent example of this view due to the immanent nature of his trenchant critique of pragmatic instrumentalism in light of Dewey’s strident and public support for World War I: How could the pragmatist mind accept war without more violent protest, without a greater wrench? Either Professor Dewey and his friends find that the forces were too strong for them, that the war had to be, and it was better to take it up intelligently than to drift blindly in; or else they really expected a gallant war, conducted with jealous regard for democratic values at home and a captivating vision of international democracy as the end of all the toil and pain. . . . . . . To those of us who have taken Dewey’s philosophy almost as our American religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique. We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 66 brendan hogan its place as contributory. And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy, when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values. But there was always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just any growth was justified and almost Any activity valuable so long as it achieved ends.1 Even more relevant, and perhaps a bit ironic, is that on the verge of the world war that followed, and perhaps cognizant of being dressed down decades before by his friend Bourne, Dewey famously wrote a very public piece recommending that the United States refrain from intervention in Europe entitled “No Matter What Happens—Stay Out.”2 In addition to drawing on these historical examples of failures of pragmatists in the public realm, commentators trace pragmatism’s lack of a decisive valence on a variety of political questions to an oversimplified attribution of conflict and power as the result of the lack of scientific spirit, unfettered communication, and time enough to solve common problems. Other theorists, including Melvin Rogers and Alison Kadlec, have recently attempted to redress this problem at length, showing the ways in which Dewey in particular, and pragmatism more generally, is not really guilty of these particular sins of which it is charged.3 That is, pragmatism does not fall prey to the charges that it is fundamentally Pollyannaish or insufficiently differentiated enough to handle the contributions of history, sociology, and anthropology with respect to issues of power, domination, conflict, and ultimately, the problem of evil. Nonetheless, this supposed failure is seen as all the more poignant by many critics, as it was precisely the purpose of pragmatism to refuse the heights of useless metaphysical speculation in favor of the “problems of humans.” Pragmatism’s promise was, as William James put it, to turn thought away from the heights of speculative reason and “towards facts, towards action, and towards power.”4 Critics hold, further, that it is not only a faith in science that causes problems for pragmatism as a theory of democracy. The antifoundationalist conceptual commitments of Dewey’s theory of fallibilist democratic experimentalism leave it morally toothless, for example. Pragmatism’s deflationary metatheoretical commitments, regarding such topics as rights, ethical and moral realism, and philosophical reconstruction of concepts themselves as hypotheses and tools for further inquiry, overemphasizes social learning processes. These processes are funded by a fallibilist theory of This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions pragmatism, power, and the situation of democracy 67 inquiry into shared problematic situations and an adaptationist character of human agency as opposed to focusing on the more trenchant challenges of moral and political theory under conditions of pluralism. Following upon the adaptationist reading of pragmatism’s conception of human action, critics have also brought a variety of criticisms against the philosophy of Dewey and James in particular with respect to the fundamental practical turn in pragmatism’s reconstruction of philosophy. Perhaps the charge that is most damning from this perspective is pragmatism’s lack of critical resources to articulate the true effects of power upon agents supposed to carry out the very project of democratic reconstruction themselves, even if supposedly ostensibly committed to “scientific inquiry.” That is to say, these agents’ performances are effects of what Lukes calls the third dimension of power.5 Habermas articulated this critique of Dewey’s stopgap against manipulation and the font of “creative democracy,” the public, most thoroughly when he wrote, For Dewey it seemed self-evident that the relation of reciprocal guidance and enlightenment between the production of techniques and strategies on the one hand and the value orientations of interested groups on the other could be realized within the unquestionable horizon of common sense and an uncomplicated public realm. But the structural change in the bourgeois public ream would have demonstrated the naiveté of this view even if it were not already invalidated by the internal development of the sciences. For the latter have made a basically unsolved problem out of the appropriate translation of technical information even between individual disciplines, let alone between the sciences and the public at large.6 It is not my purpose or desire here to defend Dewey against this charge; rather, I think that the works of Talisse and Bohman in their own way provide pragmatic paths out of the question of pragmatism’s supposed “naïveté” with respect to the relationship of public inquiry and political problem solving. They also meet Habermas’s further charge in that same piece that pragmatism is especially prone to the ideological distortion of technology’s power. So I turn now to Talisse’s use of Peirce for his articulation of a thin justification of deliberative democracy according to epistemic virtues. This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 brendan hogan Robert Talisse The work in which the Peircean position is most forthrightly articulated is Talisse’s Democracy After Liberalism.7 There Talisse methodically works through the variants of democratic theory in political liberalism, communitarianism, the contestatory or agonistic theories of Leclau and Mouffe, and others. He does this in an attempt to demonstrate that a pragmatic theory of democratic deliberation founded on the Peircean model of inquiry as outlined in “Fixation of Belief,” most prominently, holds out the promise for overcoming the impasse at which these theories find themselves. Specifically, according to Talisse, these theories unwittingly smuggle comprehensiveness into political liberalism’s view of public reasoning an a priori postulate of an implicit unified community interest in communitarianism, respectively. In terms of the ways in which Talisse, following Cheryl Misak, employs Peirce for the sake of developing a pragmatic theory of democracy responsive to its liberal, communitarian, and agonistic critics, one must follow them on their position with respect to the consequences of what it means to have a belief: 1. To believe p is to hold that p is true. 2. To hold the p is true is to hold that p “is a belief that cannot be improved upon, a belief that would forever meet the challenges of reason, argument and evidence.” . . . 3. To hold that a belief would forever meet these challenges is to engage in the project of justifying one’s belief, what Peirce called “inquiry.” 4. One cannot determine on one’s own when all the best reasons and evidence have been considered, so the project of squaring one’s beliefs with all the best reasons and evidence is an ongoing and social endeavor that requires what Peirce called a “community of inquiry.”8 Specifically, the way out of the dilemmas of the comprehensive doctrine that Talisse argues political liberalism cannot escape from when one sets up a distinction between public and nonpublic reasons is to shift justice even further away from metaphysical disputes, past political conceptions embedded in historically shared notions that inform our conceptions of what is “reasonable” in an ungrounded and historically arbitrary way, and to move it more solidly onto the stronger justificatory ground of pragmatic epistemology grounded in Peirce’s conception of scientific method. This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions pragmatism, power, and the situation of democracy 69 Of course, the various practices requisite for recognizing and testing belief do not exist in a vacuum, and so Talisse also ends up calling for epistemic norms of argument and virtues of character to sustain the implicit ideal of truth that beliefs carry within them. Invoking Cass Sunstein, Talisse calls for the cultivation of epistemic virtues that are culturally prerequisite for the legitimacy of deliberative democracy. However, he is clear to state that to call for these is not to suffer the vice of just those coercive theories of the good that Rawls was trying to avoid by making justice political and not metaphysical. The thinness of Talisse’s justification of deliberative democracy is ensured by the circumscription of the requirements of owning up to what it is to hold a belief, the practices this engenders publicly, and nothing more. In short he makes what is perhaps a questionable distinction by saying that these are epistemological virtues, and not moral ones in any sense that would broach liberal prohibitions on a coercive theory of the good guiding politics.9 James Bohman James Bohman’s theory of democracy, on the other hand, while deeply committed to the epistemic aspects of the pragmatic theory of inquiry, follows Dewey where Peirce did not think pragmatic inquiry held provenance. Specifically, while Peirce’s arguments regarding the logic of inquiry were significant enough for someone such as Popper to rank him as one of history’s great philosophers of science, in the league of Aristotle, Bacon, and others, Peirce himself, as is well known, was quite conservative with respect to social and political matters. He advised against extending the logic of inquiry into political matters for fear that society could not handle the more broadly rigorous practices of instituting doubt, especially if such doubt were extended into the horizon of everyday practical reason. He was skeptical that society could function in a social context too ardently and continuously critical of the major premises of its syllogisms of practical reason. This is untroubling to Talisse, as it is clearly stated in a variety of places that his interest is not to “get Peirce right” in terms of a scholastic exegesis but, rather, to see what consequences Peirce’s thought has for political problems we are facing today with respect to the legitimacy of democracies, especially in the face of a variety of louder and louder skeptics and technocratic ministrations. However, Talisse’s argument, because it is This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 70 brendan hogan so concerned not to overstep the bounds of the liberal prohibition on any single coercive imposition of “the good life” on a pluralist society, is in my view less robust social-scientifically speaking than Bohman’s, with respect to the qualitative features of the problematic situation of democracy under conditions of globalization. In this sense I see Bohman’s theory as pointing in a more promising direction, but one that I believe could be pushed further. Bohman’s reconstruction of a transnational democratic ideal that is “up to date” with respect to global conditions, and in his words, practicable, depends on the employment of the concept of normative power. For Bohman, normative powers are those acts by “which people create and control their rights, obligations, and deontic statuses.”10 In order that these powers be politically efficacious there is a twin and accompanying conception of communicative freedom that requires spaces in any community, and across communities, for the articulation and implementation of interests and resulting practical resolutions, what Bohman calls “practical verification.”11 This “communicative freedom” requirement necessitates that agents are able and equal to initiate deliberation, including reflexively—and thus normative power is crucial—into the very terms of that deliberation itself. Further, this deliberation has efficacy within policies that affect the plans and agency of the individuals subject to it. In fact and perhaps unsurprisingly, actions by state and nonstate actors can only gain legitimacy through the exercise of the normative powers of those who are affected by such actions in their determination of their “rights, obligations, and deontic statuses.” An additional key and connected component of Bohman’s theory is the notion of a democratic minimum that has as its floor nondomination. “Fundamental human rights are precisely such normative powers,” Bohman writes, “the most basic of which is the right to initiate deliberation. This freedom is the basis of what I call ‘the democratic minimum’”:12 “Nondomination is in fact more basic than any such good, primary or otherwise, since to be part of a cooperative scheme is already to have legitimate expectations concerning one’s status with respect to others in that scheme. Thus we can see nondomination as a fundamental condition for participation in projects that are common only to the extent that, qua member, one can influence the terms of cooperation with others, and not be ruled by them”; “thus political domination is the arbitrary use of normative power to impose duties and obligations, and it can operate even against This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions pragmatism, power, and the situation of democracy 71 the democratic background of normative expectations. This means that domination is the result of the use of distinctly normative powers.”13 Discussion Both of these strategies—the strategy of Talisse to sharpen the epistemological conception of the consequences of belief for deliberation through the use of Peirce and Bohman’s refashioning of democratic theory along the lines of the communicative freedom to exercise the normative powers of agents engaged in social problem solving through deliberative inquiry on a global scale—greatly extend pragmatic democratic theory. First, both exemplify the resources that pragmatism’s conceptual battery has within it to address the critical suspicion that it falls prey to the ideological mystification of a scientific community engaged in solving problems together and is particularly ripe for a community of experts to manipulate. Second, Bohman’s theory in particular demonstrates how his reconstructed democratic ideal of “a qualitatively different kind” has as its primary task to thematize, problematize, and address forces of domination at work in undercutting the sine qua non of legitimate political life, the exercise of normative power. As he writes: “Besides producing rising numbers of stateless persons, the current distribution of global political authority produces situations in which many people lack the very minimum of normative powers and control over their own rights and duties: they lack the capacity to make claims of justice and to initiate deliberation, and in lacking this power are subject to normatively arbitrary political authority.”14 These theories are significant contributions to the articulation of a viable pragmatic democratic theory. However, neither theory goes quite far enough in terms of naming the obstacles to fulfilling the preconditions of pragmatic inquiry under current historical conditions, either in terms of the normative commitments to a culture of epistemic virtues honed in the open contestation of beliefs (which remain abstract on this reading), or in a creative and dynamic global demoi of intersecting publics. Rather, I evoke a description of a problematic situation proffered by John Dewey in the midst of the Great Depression, because the problem of capitalist accumulation has reasserted itself amid another global crisis that continues, with only mild abatement, in the United States. With conceptually confused expressions endowed with the imprimatur of establishment This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 72 brendan hogan economic “science” such as a “jobless recovery” having such an inordinate impact on policy, the social scientific frame of reference reveals itself as a major part of the problem: The patterns of belief and purpose that still dominate economic institutions were formed when individuals produced with their hands, alone or in small groups. The notion that society in general is served by the unplanned coincidence of the consequences of a vast multitude of efforts put forth by isolated individuals without reference to any social end, was also something new as a formulation. . . . It demands no great power of intelligence to see that under present conditions the isolated individual is well-nigh helpless. Concentration and corporate organization are the rule. But the concentration and corporate organization are still controlled in their operation by ideas that were institutionalized in eons of separate individual effort. . . . That society should see to it that a cooperative industrial order be instituted, one that is consonant with the realities of production enforced by an era of machinery and power, is so novel an idea to the general mind that its mere suggestion is hailed with abusive epithets—sometimes with imprisonment.15 I quote this in detail because the consequences react back into the descriptive adequacy of Bohman’s transnational democratic ideal, especially in terms of its consequences across sectors of society. Specifically, though it is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth mentioning his invocation of the democratic peace hypothesis and the open method of coordination in the European Union, which serve as situational parameters that motivate his version of a “practicable” ideal. And they also speak to the original charge that pragmatism lacks a deep enough understanding and thematization of ideological and institutional domination. On this understanding of democracy, as Torjus Midtgarden and others have argued recently, we are making a conceptual error by calling wage labor mere “exploitation” as opposed to “domination.” Rather, it seems that Dewey is correct when he calls into question the domination inherent in the legal labor contract framework at the heart of market societies across the globe, in a way similar to critiques of domination that operate in the analysis of feudal and slave societies. As Dewey writes in his lectures in China in 1919: “Workers sign the contract under the force of circumstances, and not by the exercise of free will.”16 To point this out, to give it a name, is also to recommend that This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions pragmatism, power, and the situation of democracy 73 the hegemonic domination that the neoliberal model of political economy exercises globally be the starting point of more adequate social scientific descriptions. In the spirit of making pragmatic political theory adequate to a problematic situation in which normative powers ought to be exercised, this analysis should not simply articulate the empirically verifiable elements of immiseration through mechanisms of “austerity” and other policies. Rather, targeting ossified frames of reference and their linkages to policy and power should be one of the top priorities of the continuing problematization and practical reconstruction of democracy—a reconstruction articulately theorized in Bohman’s work and epistemically fine-tuned in Talisse’s. Both thinkers are engaged in extending pragmatism to deal with the problem of theorizing political power in a model of deliberative democracy. Given the ravaged globe since Dewey’s death, and the marriage of military and economic action with exculpatory discourses in the most entrenched and powerful social scientific disciplines and schools, Bourne’s question about what we can accept and what is to be done are still our questions today. notes 1. Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” Seven Arts 11 (October 1917): 688–702, http://www.expo98.msu.edu/people/bourne.htm. 2. John Dewey, “No Matter What Happens—Stay Out,” in The Later Works, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 364. 3. See, for examples, Alison Kadlec, Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Press, 2007); and Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 4. This is of course one of John Patrick Diggins’s main themes in The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994). 5. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1974). The third dimension of power concerns the ability of social forces to shape the perceived interests of those agents engaged in political decision making by controlling the agenda and what is considered relevant. 6. Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 69. 7. Robert Talisse, Democracy After Liberalism (New York: Routledge Press, 2004). This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 74 brendan hogan 8. Ibid., 103, quoting Misak. 9. Ibid. See especially chapter 6, “A Pragmatist Conception of Deliberative Democracy.” 10. James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Boston: MIT Press, 2007), 5. 11. See James Bohman, “Theories, Practices, and Pluralism: A Pragmatic Interpretation of Critical Social Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29, no. 4 (1999): 466. 12. Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 5. 13. Ibid., 27, 9. 14. Ibid., 8. 15. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Capricorn Books, 1936), 60–61. 16. John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920, trans. and ed. R. W. Clopton and T.-C. Ou (Honolulu: University of Honolulu Press, 1973), 114. See also Torjus Midtgarden, “Critical Pragmatism: Dewey’s Social Philosophy Revisited,” European Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 4 (2012): 505–21. In previous work I have focused more explicitly on Dewey’s critique of the contract form at the heart of liberal political economy. See my “Pragmatic Hegemony: Questions and Convergence,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2015): 107–17; and “Hegemony, Social Inquiry, and the Primacy of Practical Reason,” in Persuasion and Compulsion in Democracy, ed. J. A. K. Kegley and K. P. Skowroński (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2013), 69–82. This content downloaded from 128.122.230.132 on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:31:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions