The Pragmatic Approach to Politics1

I have been asked to present for your discussion the pragmatic approach to political science, the reason being, as I suppose, that my business is the study of philosophy and pragmatism is a kind of philosophy. Now philosophy has special interests of its own and hardly ever offers anything that can be taken over ready-made into scientific work with any useful results; moreover, the discussion of methods at large hardly ever leads to much. A method is good for just what it does, and its uses must be apparent just in the science where it is used. I greatly doubt, therefore, whether any good would come of my talking to you about philosophic pragmatism, which is a name of rather indefinite meaning, signifying a group of scientific and philosophic tendencies rather than a systematic doctrine. It does stand roughly for a point of view, which has perhaps been stated most clearly by Professor John Dewey, and it is a fact that this point of view has acted as a sort of ferment outside philosophy, especially in economics and law, and seems likely to have a significant influence on these subjects, at least in America and during the next few years. What I mean to do, therefore, is to try to picture pragmatism in action, compressing into a single paragraph the description of pragmatism as a point of view. To illustrate pragmatism in action, I have chosen some attempts to adopt this point of view in economics, particularly the work of Thorstein Veblen and Professor Wesley C. Mitchell, and also in the study of law, particularly the program put forward by Professors Walter Wheeler Cook and Herman Oliphant.