Pragmatism and Radical Democracy

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relationship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and refl exive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. Th ese reconstructions are shown to have explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions presuppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning.