Several critical versions of pragmatism have emerged throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. These perspec- tives 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 knowl- edge as relative and shaped by multiple and instru- mentalist 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 influ- enced by classical pragmatism, and to their credit some of them have explicitly recognized their debt.
Therefore, rather than an entity living on its own, crit- ical 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 prag- matism. These four characteristics represent strong theoretical threads in the ongoing growth of critical pragmatism.
The Socially Constructed Nature of Reality
Whereas for many theoretical perspectives the world is either ready-made or hardly malleable, for pragma- tists reality is constantly open to change, becoming, and flux. Pragmatism’s indeterminate view of reality is now shared by many researchers who put a pre- mium of the constructed nature of social reality. On the one hand, this has opened up pragmatism to the criticism of those who believe its indeterminacy eas- ily dismisses obdurate sources of social inequality; on the other hand, this makes pragmatism particularly amenable to progressive political philosophies aiming for cultural criticism, social reform, and political transformation.
Pragmatists view social action as the site where multiple realities are created. Contemporary critical pragmatists supplement this view with an emphasis on the construction of reality as a struggle between con- flicting discourses and competing definitions of the situation. Viewing reality construction as a site of con- tention opens up the space for deconstructive and polemical approaches to the making and remaking of reality as a political act. Because pragmatism privi- leges the doing and the performing over the done and the performed, critical pragmatists emphasize the openness of culture to critical change, to knowing as a critical form of inquiry, to reflexive understanding as emancipation and radical pedagogy, to concerted action as orchestrated resistance, and to power as knowledge.
Influenced by the quasi-pragmatism of Foucault, many contemporary critical pragmatists emphasize the polyvocality of power, pluralism, inclusiveness, the value of subaltern cultural beliefs and practices, and the incomplete, partial, and contingent nature of 160———Critical Pragmatism
reality. Critical pragmatists value involvement and participation and, therefore, embrace an understand- ing of multiple realities as the tool for a participatory orientation toward praxis and change. As Norman Denzin discussed, such a critical pragmatist view of cultural realities becomes a politics of resistance and possibility and a moral call for everyone to intervene in public life and interrupt the uncontested flow of inequality.
The Emergent Nature of Social Structure and Organization Pragmatists have repeatedly been criticized for their supposed astructural bias. The story goes that pragma- tism and related theoretical perspectives neglect to consider the pervasiveness of structural powers and the deep-rootedness of ascriptive traits, such as race, sex, and (in part) class, and instead privilege an overly voluntarist view of life. Yet both classical pragmatists and contemporary critical pragmatists argue that the very nature of interaction constitutes a form of social organization that limits (as well as enables) individual and group action. In other words, pragmatists are well aware of the constraining potential of group life, yet they refuse to believe that individuals have no choice but to succumb to the power of the structures they have created.
Contemporary critical followers of the pragmatist tradition such as Peter Hall have capitalized on the pragmatists’ rich arsenal of concepts for the study of social structure and built their theoretical approaches around a negotiated and historical view of social orga- nizations and institutions. These approaches empha- size organization as recurring patterns of collective activity, interlinked contexts of action, intersecting intentions, conflicting goals, and the emergent forma- tion of conventions and practices. Researchers influ- enced by critical pragmatism have outlined the differential consequences of forms of inequality, the interactive constitution of injustice, and the contingent nature of the creation and reproduction of social prob- lems and their definitions.
Inspired by the emancipatory political conscious- ness of C. Wright Mills, current studies informed by critical pragmatism pay close attention to the compo- nents of generic social processes of inequality repro- duction within institutions such as stigmatization,
“othering,” marginalization, alienating emotional labor, subordination, the formation of symbolic boundaries,
the selective transmission of cultural and social capi- tal, the regulation of discourse, the scripting of mass events, and more. These inequality orders function neither at the macro level nor at the micro level of sociological analysis alone; rather they function within a meso domain that mediates distant contexts and local situations of interaction through forms of meta power—processes that influence local condi- tions of interaction from afar.
The Situated Nature of Knowledge Classical pragmatists’ stance toward objectivist epis- temology is without doubt one of its most critically progressive aspects. Knowledge cannot be generated from the outside; it can be understood only through sympathetic introspection by taking the role of the other. Understanding the world from a culture member’s perspective constitutes a uniquely radical position in a world still dominated by universalist and absolutist pretensions toward the objects of knowledge. Participant observation and life history research—the methods privileged by most social researchers influenced by pragmatism—require that research-driven knowing not be guided by overly rationalist, pretentiously unbiased, deterministic, and atomistic models. By blurring the boundaries between common sense and scientific knowledge, by privileg- ing depth and diversity over superficial uniformity, and by viewing the verification of truth as a contin- gent process based on negotiation, pragmatism fea- tures one of the most critical and radically democratic views on knowledge.
Contemporary critical pragmatists such as Dorothy Smith have embraced a view of knowledge based on embodied situated forms of experience of the world.
Recent growing interest in institutional ethnography, critical ethnography, reflexive and postmodern ethnog- raphy, and narrative and performance studies has blended traditional pragmatist approaches to knowl- edge with contemporary poststructural concerns with the power of discourse, the social construction of knowledge, and representation. For example, institu- tional ethnographers study how everyday experiences are shaped by relations of power generated within social institutions and typically transmitted through texts and discourses. Performance scholars such as Norman Denzin have instead been instrumental in shaping and diffusing awareness of postcolonial research strategies that center around emotions, Critical Pragmatism———161
polemics, situated narratives, bodily presence, cultural diversity, and multiple versions of truth.
Contemporary critical pragmatist approaches to knowledge continue to show the relevance of earlier pragmatist concerns with the changing character of scientific truths, the sensitizing nature of research concepts, the role of science in constituting knowledge (and thus in reproducing or eradicating inequalities), the obtuse instrumental rationality of quantifying research procedures, the anthropocentric character of science and technology, the alienating character of nonintimate methods such as mass scale survey research, the cognitive bias of positivism, ethnocentric faith in formal rationality and linear logic, and the elit- ist and exclusionary character of scientific writing and representation.
The Progressive Nature of Pragmatism’s Democratic Ideology As the influential contemporary pragmatist scholar Hans Joas noted repeatedly, classical pragmatism has been wrongly accused of being an overly naive, opti- mistic, and accommodating philosophy. The creativity of human action that pragmatism posits, coupled with its adaptive spirit and accompanied by healthy skepti- cism toward essential views of human nature and tele- ological perspectives of social history, constitutes the very backbone of a truly democratic philosophy.
When compared with the elitism of polemical critical theories, the inevitability of destiny embraced by his- torical materialism, the various forms of reductionism typical of much social theory, and the deindividualiz- ing spirit of structuralism and functionalism, pragma- tism’s egalitarianism appears to be most congenial with the ideology of authentic democracy. Indeed, pragmatism’s view of social reality as malleable could very well be the philosophical foundation for pro- grams oriented toward social reform.
Within critical pragmatism, no principles of truth are absolute; no realities transcend the local condi- tions under which they emerge. Experience and inter- action are the sites where knowledge takes shape, and dialogue is the process through which consensus is achieved. Pragmatism is critical of liberal democra- cies founded on technocratic principles. Science is meant not to rule but rather to help in concrete circum- stances. Ethics is to be guided not by universal codes but rather by context-driven action focused on how
goals-at-hand serve the public good. Cultural policy is to follow not objective aesthetic criteria of elites but rather a universe of diversity. State organization is not to supersede the spirit of individuals freely collaborat- ing and creating local institutions built to protect civil liberties. Meanings can be shaped and shared in com- municative action. The public sphere can be reformed through mutual understanding and relationality.
Communication can be free from domination and occupy the most central role in the formation of inclu- sive social welfare structures. Citizens’ ability to form associations and movements can impede further colo- nization of the lifeworld by the hands of a consumerist corporate hegemony.
Yet this is no carefree rosy optimism. Contemporary critical pragmatists share a deep concern for the concil- iatory nature of bourgeois liberalism. Nancy Fraser’s socialist–democratic feminist pragmatism, for exam- ple, challenges the essentialism of male-centric views of power and politics and opens the door for a histori- cal and hermeneutic criticism of institutions as the site of gender-biased discursive political practice. Her per- spective is critical of hegemonies in the structures of knowledge and the economy that lead to unequal gen- der divisions of labor, the racial segmentation of mar- kets, and a global economy insensitive to need. Other contemporary critical pragmatists have empirically out- lined systems of disjuncture and difference in global cultures and identities, the blurring of national and eth- nic identities, the power of the technological imperative to shape media ecologies, the pervasiveness of dias- poric populations, the transnational formation of iden- tity-based and interest-driven social movements, the demagogic impression management of ruling politi- cians, and the resilience of old conservative meta- narratives and the reactionary party structures that sup- port them.
Much like classical pragmatism, contemporary critical pragmatism’s power resides in its potential to generate useful knowledge through concrete empirical observation. The future of critical pragmatism, there- fore, resides not in its internal coherence or its resilience from external criticism but rather in its potential to remain useful for the critical goals its followers set out to achieve.
Phillip Vannini
See alsoConstructivism; Institutional Ethnography;
Pragmatism; Symbolic Interactionism 162———Critical Pragmatism
Further Readings
Denzin, N. K. (1992).Symbolic interactionism and cultural studies: The politics of interpretation.New York:
Blackwell.
Denzin, N. K. (1996). Post-pragmatism.Symbolic Interaction, 19,61–75.
Denzin, N. K. (2003). The call to performance.Symbolic Interaction, 26,187–207.
Fraser, N. (1989).Unruly practices.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Habermas, J. (1992).The structural transformation of the public sphere.Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hall, P. M. (2003). Interactionism, social organization, and social processes: Looking back and moving ahead.
Symbolic Interaction, 26,33–55.
Sahlin, D. (1986). Pragmatism and social interactionism.
American Sociological Review, 51,9–29.
Schwalbe, M., Godwin, S., Holden, D., Schrock, D.,
Thompson, S., & Wolkomir, M. (2000). Generic processes in the reproduction of inequality: An interactionist analysis.Social Forces, 79,419–452.
West, C. (1989).The American evasion of philosophy.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.