Brendan Hogan

Pragmatic hegemony: questions and convergences

Recent pragmatic political theory in the Anglo-american register has a variety of virtues to recommend it.  The questions of power, democracy, normative justification, and epistemic virtues have all been addressed drawing on a variety of classical American pragmatist sources to marshal a political theory that is relevant not just to the problems of political philosophers, but also to the problems of human beings, more generally.  It is the adequacy of these recent attempts to address the latter audience that I question in this paper.  Specifically, while the fruitfulness of the reconstruction of pragmatism so as to be conversant with contemporary political theoretical debates is beyond doubt, it remains to be seen just how how pragmatic these philosophical achievements are given the social context in which they are formulated.  It is my contention that Dewey’s formulation of social and political philosophy is much closer to some of his Left-Hegelian and Marxist contemporaries than to the left leaning liberal tradition with which  he has come to be more strongly associated. This paper will focus on his convergences with one thinker in particular, Antonio Gramsci.    The purpose of this paper is to extend Dewey’s , and pragmatic political thought more generally, in directions that are a natural consequence of pragmatism’s philosophical views on the relationship of democracy and social inquiry.  The hope is that this will contribute to a clearer vision of the problematic situation all pragmatists profess to be concerned with.

Paper: Hogan – Agency, political economy, and the transnational democratic ideal

Presentation date and time: 1pm-2:15pm, Sunday May 4th, 2014