For American pragmatists, XXe century, democracy was a radical experiment: that of the deliberative and deliberative participation of the people in the identification and resolution of their own problems. Who are their heirs today?
In recent years, political philosophy, in France as elsewhere, has been rediscovering American pragmatism, whether through the study of the classic texts of this tradition, or through the use of its arguments to contribute to contemporary debates, such as those on deliberative democracy, epistemic democracy, or critical theory. Alice Le Goff’s book is part of this current of renewal, casting a new look at “radical democracy” based on the contribution of American pragmatism, which she grasps through the prism of a selection of major authors of this current.
Apart from a short text by the philosopher John Dewey, the notion of radical democracy does not figure among the key concepts of pragmatist political philosophy. The choice to study this notion from the perspective of pragmatism is nevertheless relevant, because if by radical democracy we mean, as the author does, the set of participatory and deliberative approaches to democracy, then we can easily consider pragmatists as proponents of these conceptions of democracy. Or, at least, we can legitimately ask ourselves whether their political philosophies fall under participatory or deliberative approaches.
Le Goff’s starting point is the critical look she casts on the contemporary discourse of radical democracy, which she sees unifying around a few common axes. All these theories “question the autonomy or specificity of politics; they defend an agonistic democracy against a liberalism perceived as consensualist; they defend a plural and dynamic conception of identities; they develop a critical discourse on the processes of institutionalization suspected of “betraying” democratic dynamics” (p. 8).
The notion of radical democracy is approached in a very broad manner, perhaps too broadly, because it includes authors such as Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe or Sheldon Wolin, and one could question the relevance of certain connections, notably that of Arendt and Mouffe.
After a first chapter devoted to John Dewey, the second chapter focuses on the work of Charles Wright Mills, a sociologist whose relationship with pragmatism has been ambivalent. The third and final chapter of the book is devoted to contemporary debates on participatory and deliberative democracy in contemporary political philosophy, a debate that has continued largely independently of the pragmatist tradition in the proper sense. Here Le Goff does not seek to establish direct lines of descent, but rather to show the permanence of themes that have been at the heart of the original pragmatist project, including in particular those related to going beyond the model of representative democracy through experiments that rely on citizen participation and deliberation.
The book, explicitly, does not aim at an exegesis of the pragmatist tradition. It is rather a question of drawing from the writings of certain pragmatist authors theoretical intuitions that would allow us to go beyond the false alternative between representative (or liberal) democracy on the one hand and radical democracy on the other, to open the way to a conception capable of resolving the difficulties that each model/conception/tradition encounters.
The label “radical democracy” nevertheless plays an ambiguous role in the work. Because if, on the one hand, Le Goff proves to be extremely critical of the contemporary versions of this project mentioned above, she nevertheless claims to be part of it, albeit in a version renewed by the contribution of pragmatism.
Political Pragmatism from John Dewey to Charles Wright Mills
Le Goff offers a scholarly historical reconstruction of Dewey’s political thought, situating it in the intellectual climate of his time. Following the work of historians such as Daniel Rodgers, James Kloppenberg, and Marc Stears, she shows that Dewey can be compared to those reformist thinkers who, in search of a middle way between liberalism and socialism, claimed the name “liberal socialists” or “liberal socialists” on both sides of the Atlantic. Dewey himself developed a social theory of liberalism as well as a theory of human individuality that sought to overcome the atomistic conception at the heart of classical liberalism.
In the intellectual portrait she paints, Le Goff rightly underlines the importance that the theme of industrial democracy took on for Dewey. In this regard, we only regret the absence of reference to Mary Parket Follett, who was the true pragmatic theoretician of corporate democracy. The author also shows that one of the implications of pragmatism is the conception of social philosophy as an engaged practice, as evidenced by the “Dewey Schools” movement or that of Hull House initiated by Jane Addams. It is therefore the image of a pragmatism based on participation, cooperation and various forms of self-government that emerges from Le Goff’s pages. “Broadened individualism, rejection of “laissez-faire”, articulation between social democracy and political democracy, experimental conception of democratic politics” are the salient features of the Deweyan perspective according to Le Goff.
In addition to the reference role conferred on Dewey, the reconstruction of the pragmatist current proposed by Le Goff reserves a special place for Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962). This sociologist is undoubtedly less known to the French public than Dewey, and it is one of the major merits of this book to remind us of his importance not only as a sociologist of class conflict, but also as a political thinker in his own right.
While Dewey may have been criticized for his refusal or inability to think about power, the question of domination, power and conflict is, on the other hand, at the heart of Wright Mills’ social and political theory, as well as his theory of knowledge, which he develops by crossing Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge with pragmatist epistemology.
Le Goff reconstructs in detail Wright Mills’ attempt to synthesize Dewey’s thinking and that of Max Weber. In the sociologist’s reading of Weber, several pragmatic themes emerge: the value of democracy, which comes from the open possibility of selecting rulers capable of assuming political responsibility and limiting the growing power of bureaucrats (p. 116); an integrated and non-dualistic vision of the relationship between ideas and interests; but also a conception of the self compatible with the social psychology of George H. Mead, a pragmatic sociologist to whom Dewey was very close. But Dewey and Weber, in this interpretation of Wright Mills, Le Goff tells us (p. 120), also come together in the concern to go beyond the opposition between deontology and utilitarianism and in a questioning of the development of democratic forms in societies in the process of massification, marked by a rise in instrumental rationality.
According to Le Goff, Wright Mills’ theory of power shows that Dewey’s approach pays insufficient attention to the effects “of forms of stratification on the development of social struggles and the way in which the latter can stifle democratic dynamics” (p. 136). Dewey, in other words, lacks a sociological sensitivity to class dynamics. As the author rightly points out, the posthumous publication of ” Lectures in China » by Dewey allows us today to make a more nuanced judgment on this aspect of the latter’s work, and to understand that the gap between the critical thinking of Dewey and that of Wright Mills is perhaps less than the latter thought.
Political pragmatism put to the test by contemporary debates
The third and final chapter is perhaps the one that connects less easily to the project of the book. Not only because the link with pragmatism seems weaker, despite the fact that Archon Fung, an author discussed at length in the chapter, has repeatedly claimed to be part of this tradition. But also because here we leave the plane of the history of ideas – Dewey died in 1952 and Wright Mills in 1962 – to address questions of contemporary political theory. Here Le Goff focuses on a specific approach to participatory democracy called “democratic experimentalism,” of which Fung is one of the best-known representatives. Le Goff clearly shows that the principles of contemporary democratic experimentalism share a wide range of principles with Dewey’s conception of democracy: “collective decision-making is thought of in terms of public deliberation in arenas open to all concerned; deliberation is seen in terms of a cooperative process of problem-solving; “Deliberative-direct polyarchy emphasizes the importance of “local” democracy; it articulates democracy, experimental method and learning” (p. 186).
However, the reader wishing to learn more about what would make pragmatism specific in a panorama otherwise irrigated by many theoretical inspirations will remain a little hungry. Although Le Goff assumes this “frugal” posture, referring to the works of Charles Sabel and Christopher Ansell for a more in-depth treatment of the question, the discontinuity of this chapter with the previous ones is amplified.
The author could have introduced us to the debate on the relationship between pragmatism and participatory and deliberative conceptions, because although both are part of this “radical” turn, the pragmatist literature does not reach a consensus regarding the desirability of one or the other, with some authors advocating an interpretation closer to participatory approaches, and others advocating an interpretation closer to deliberative approaches (see note 2 above). In particular, Fung’s attempt to go beyond the dualism of participation and deliberation could have been more explicitly placed in tension with the pragmatist conception of democracy.
Despite these criticisms, the effort to have shown the link between the Deweyan conception of democracy and contemporary attempts to renew the theory and practices of democracy is more than welcome. As the author rightly notes, “we can measure here the interest of such a use of Deweyan intuitions by the defenders of democratic experimentalism: to develop a critical perspective of political and administrative institutions according to whether or not they favor the development of an experimentalist approach to public action and to show how the implementation of pragmatic experimentalism can be achieved at all levels, from micro to macro to meso” (p. 248). This is the legacy of American pragmatism to contemporary debates on the limits of the democratic model and on the possibilities of transforming it from within.