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Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth

Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth

by RobertWestbrook (Author)

  • New

    Hardcover 2005

    $51.60
Synopsis

Pragmatism, as Richard Rorty has said, names the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition. In Democratic Hope, Robert B. Westbrook examines the varieties of classical pragmatist thought in the work of John Dewey, William James, and Charles Peirce, testing in good pragmatic fashion the truth of propositions by their consequences in experience. Westbrook also attends to the recent revival of pragmatism by Rorty, Cheryl Misak, Richard Posner, Hilary Putnam, Cornel West, and others and to pragmatist strains in contemporary American political thinking. Westbrook's aims are both historical and political: to ensure that the genealogy of pragmatism is an honest one and to argue for a hopeful vision of deliberative democracy underwritten by a pragmatist epistemology and ethics.

$51.60

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 272
 Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 01 Sep 2005
ISBN 10: 0801428335
ISBN 13: 9780801428333

Media Reviews

This book is the rare work of intellectual history that is simultaneously a powerful contribution to political criticism.

* Dissent *

Democratic Hope is an impassioned plea for a particular kind of democratic politics from one of John Dewey's most fervent and persuasive champions. Robert B. Westbrook calls for a participatory democratic culture broader than that embraced either by Jeffersonians at the dawn of the republic or by populists a century ago. Never has Dewey's vision of the ethics of democracy mattered more than it does today, and no one illuminates American democratic ideals better than Westbrook does in this book.

-- James T. Kloppenberg, Harvard University

Robert B. Westbrook is a fine historian of 'old' pragmatism and its politics: his knowledge and skill are evident in the first half of this book. In the second half, which is even better, he proves himself to be a brilliant critic of contemporary pragmatic politics and, finally, a practitioner.

-- Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study
Author Bio
Robert B. Westbrook is Professor of History at the University of Rochester. He is the author of John Dewey and American Democracy, also from Cornell, winner of the Merle Curti Award. He is also the author of Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II and the coeditor of In Face of the Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship.