Who Owns Pragmatism
This paper compares the approach to legal theory associated with the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty with that of classical pragmatism, as it emerged from the Metaphysical Club, the discussion group in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1870s. The two approaches derive from distinct historical and intellectual origins. Neopragmatism's prominent feature is its proximity to, and common purpose with, Continental writers of an anti-foundational bent, including some for whom the pragmatic label would not previously have been comfortable, for example, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. For Rorty’s neopragmatism, the exhaustion of Enlightenment foundationalism has implicated an end to epistemology and metaphysics. For the early pragmatists, it is attributed to failure to be adequately consequentialist and inclusive. For classical pragmatism, generalizing was tested by consequences and connected to the solution of human problems. The Metaphysical Club included lawyers like N. St. John Green and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. While its main agenda is often seen as undressing traditional metaphysical problems with a consequentialist test for meaning and belief, for the lawyers this also involved a political mission: articulating a coherent legal theory for a revolutionary democratic republic still less than a century old. In law, science, and philosophy itself, meaning can be described as the best consensus of all those confronted with a practical stake in the outcome. In law this highlights the degree of inclusion. Pragmatism emerged as the philosophy of democracy, ideally an unbounded democracy of unlimited inquiry, not apologizing for the existing order but rather making actual inquiry, as well as real democratic institutions, always appear inadequate. It originated as the first philosophy founded not on foundational certainty but on exigency, fallibility, and representivity.