Matthew Festenstein

Inquiry as critique: On the legacy of Deweyan pragmatism for political theory

This article provides a critical reconstruction of John Deweys theory of social and political inquiry. Clearing away some misconceptions about this theory allows us to grasp its practical and political focus, and to see its similarities to other strands of anti-positivist social thought, including hermeneutics and critical theory. I go on to examine the relationship between democratic values and the theory of inquiry. Like recent proponents of discursive conceptions of democracy such as Habermas he sees a connection between democracy and the conditions for rational procedures of problem solving. What connects democracy to inquiry for Dewey is primarily ethical and political, rather than epistemological. The article considers what may be usefully taken from Deweys conception of social inquiry, without accepting his full ethical agenda.

Deliberative Democracy and Two Models of Pragmatism

This article examines the relationship of pragmatism to the theory of deliberative democracy. It elaborates a dilemma in the latter theory, between its deliberative or epistemic and democratic or inclusive components, and distinguishes responses to this dilemma that are internal to the conception of deliberation employed from those that are external. The article goes on to identify two models of pragmatism and critically examines how well each one deals with the tension identified in deliberative democracy.

Unravelling the Reasonable: Comment on Talisse

This comment addresses itself to a central feature of Robert Talisse’s A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (Routledge, 2008). In particular, I raise an objection to three claims: that the search for true beliefs requires extensive epistemic testing, that this requires a democratic social order, and that these first two claims are themselves a philosophically neutral articulation of every reasonable believer’s epistemic practices. I suggest some implications of this doubt for the conception of liberalism Talisse promotes in this book.

Toleration and Deliberative Politics

Liberal arguments for toleration often seem to rest on values as contestable as the practice of toleration itself. Some liberals insist that the only worthwhile way of life is ‘self-chosen’ and led in a challenging and experimental society. As Susan Mendus argues, this autonomy-based liberalism sees toleration as only a pragmatic device for encouraging such lives, and restricts its benefits to ‘those diverse forms of life which themselves value autonomy’.1 Forms of life which value simplicity, hierarchy or fixed moral codes may be allowed to perish, or at least would not receive equal treatment under this dispensation. Other liberals hope to avoid the task of vindicating the ultimate value of an autonomous life, and instead evoke a neutral perspective, from which the state shows equal concern for the freedom of all its citizens, independently of their particular views about the meaning, value and purpose of human life. The suspicion lingers over this manoeuvre too that ‘the liberal has nothing to say to someone whose conception of the good is non-liberal except that he must set this conception aside for political purposes’.2 These perspectives on toleration, according to their critics, merely assert controversial liberal values in a pluralistic social context.3

Truth and Trust in Democratic Epistemology

Recent arguments for an epistemic conception of democracy have moved away from arguing that democracy possesses epistemic power by virtue of effectively aggregating the preferences or opinions of participants and toward the claim that these powers flow from deliberation, viewed as a constitutive element of democracy. This chapter reviews a version of this perspective, drawing on sources in pragmatist political philosophy, and tries to develop it, focusing on frequently overlooked issues of trustworthiness and the place of testimony in democratic theory. In Sect. 6.2, I briefly review the claim that the epistemic power of democracy derives from processes of deliberation and experiment, not merely from judgement aggregation, and go on to outline a pragmatist account of this, drawing on recent work in this area. In Sect. 6.3, I develop this account by introducing the notion of democratic testimony: a key epistemological problem in the process of democratic deliberation is that of credibility or trustworthiness; this is not a problem to be eliminated, but only one whose possible pernicious consequences must to be checked. In Sect. 6.4, I argue that the pragmatist conception of democratic epistemology outlined in Sect. 6.2 successfully captures what is distinctive about this problem. In Sect. 6.5, however, I go on to outline a residual problem for this approach to the epistemic character of democracy, and to offer some tentative solutions.

Self-censorship for democrats

On the face of it, self-censorship is profoundly subversive of democracy, particularly in its talk-centric forms, and undermines the culture of openness and publicity on which it relies. This paper has two purposes. The first is to develop a conception of self-censorship that allows us to capture what is distinctive about the concept from a political perspective and which allows us to understand the democratic anxiety about self-censorship: if it is not obvious that biting our tongues is always wrong, we need a fuller account of the moral sensibility that finds it so troubling and this is elaborated here. The second is to develop an argument to the effect that this sensibility should not have the last, or only, word, but instead that self-censorship should be viewed as an ‘ordinary vice’ of democratic societies. The grounds for tolerating it rest on the democratic values that critics believe it threatens.

Pragmatism, Realism and Moralism

Pragmatism is often seen as an unpolitical doctrine. This article argues that it shares important commitments with realist political theory, which stresses the distinctive character of the political and the difficulty of viewing political theory simply as applied ethics, and that many of its key arguments support realism. Having outlined the elective affinities between realism and pragmatism, the article goes on to consider this relationship by looking at two recent elaborations of a pragmatist argument in contemporary political theory, which pull in different directions, depending on the use to which a pragmatist account of doxastic commitments is put. In one version, the argument finds in these commitments a set of pre-political principles, of the sort that realists reject. In the other version, the account given of these commitments more closely tracks the concerns of realists and tries to dispense with the need for knowledge of such principles.

Fallible Democracy: Comment on Bufacchi

In ‘Sceptical Democracy’, Vittorio Bufacchi offers a stimulating argument for a link between scepticism and liberal democracy (Bufacchi, 2001). Democracy is positioned between two extremes, each of which, he argues, embodies a mistaken doctrine about belief. The first is the belief in epistemic certainty, shared, he argues, among totalitarians, religious fundamentalists, and Alasdair MacIntyre. This aims ‘to ground society on infallible foundations’ (ibid., p. 23), and further believes that there exists an infallible epistemic route to those foundations. At the other pole is nihilism: in Bufacchi’s account, this consists in the claim that there can be no rational foundations for values, and is found in Nietzsche and J.-F. Lyotard. It is not part of this brief response to analyse Bufacchi’s interpretations of other philosophers, although it seems to me that any typology that puts MacIntyre’s moral philosophy in the same box as the Fuhrerprinzip is an exceedingly blunt instrument. Bufacchi rather intemperately describes both his dogmatists and nihilists as equally ‘cancerous’ threats to democracy, which has managed to carve out a space between them.

Book Review: Sheldon S Wolin (edited by Nicholas Xenos), Fugitive Democracy and Other EssaysFugitive Democracy and Other Essays by WolinSheldon S (edited by XenosNicholas). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 499pp., £29.95 (h/b), ISBN 9780691133645

This book is about the social and cultural life of ‘Viennese students of civilisation’ during the interwar period. During this time, many Viennese intellectuals felt that their civilisation was in decline or even worse, about to be destroyed. Instead of just witnessing the downfall of their civilisation, however, many of these intellectuals came to the conclusion that this civilisation was worth preserving. In this book, Erwin Dekker limits his discussion to a group of intellectuals and economists that is usually known as the Austrian School of Economics. Dekker’s purpose is to ‘examine how they conceptualized the importance of civilization for the study of the economy and of society’ and then ‘how they conceptualized their own relation, as scholars, vis-à-vis the economy and society’ (p. 3). Although the emphasis of the book is on the economists, Dekker does not strictly restrict himself to that field because of the inter-disciplinary character of Viennese intellectuals during that period. In his discussion about Viennese circles, Dekker argues that the boundaries of different scientific disciplines were not rigid among Viennese intellectuals and they were able to know a great deal of knowledge about the fields that were not their own profession. ‘[T] he intellectual conversations in Vienna’ Dekker says ‘were never restricted by disciplinary boundaries’ (p. 4). Therefore, the book has very insightful things to say about non-economists such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper, Norbert Elias and the therapeutic nihilism movement in medicine, all of which either influenced or were influenced by Viennese students of civilisation. One common feature that Dekker points out among Viennese intellectuals is their awareness of their ignorance or their ‘incomplete knowledge of their civilization’. In the case of economists, this means that economists cannot steer or engineer the economy. Dekker argues, however, that this did not make economists redundant for the society. ‘Economic knowledge does not easily lead to solutions or cures, but instead makes us aware of our limitations’ (p. 5). Therefore, it has a therapeutic effect on us. Dekker’s book is well organised and he elucidates different concepts in very clear and accessible language. Also, I would say that this book should be considered one of the rare books on Friedrich Hayek’s early life in Vienna and the effect of the Viennese intellectual atmosphere on shaping his particular version of liberalism.