Roberto Frega

This chapter endeavors to prove the relevance of the wide view of democracy by comparing the philosophical grammar of democratic habits with the most promising contemporary attempt at revivifying the personal dimension of politics, which is the republican theory of civic virtues. The chapter shows what is to be gained by dropping the notion of virtue and replacing it with that of habits, why democratic habits rather than civic virtues provides us with sharp conceptual tools to analyze how personal factors contribute to the democratic quality of a polity.

This chapter discusses the pragmatist group-based theory of politics. It begins by reconstructing some tenets of the political debates of the age, and proceeds to discuss Arthur Bentley’s interest-based theory of democracy, Mary Parker Follett pluralist theory of democratic group formation, and John Dewey’s theory of publics. It then introduces and discusses some basic categories of the pragmatist group-based theory of politics, such as those of consequences, public, institutions, and problem solving. Like in the previous chapter, the contribution of these authors to the genesis of the ideas presented in the chapter is acknowledged and shown.

This chapter is the first devoted to the group-based theory of politics. Its aim is to situate the pragmatist-based theory of publics in the context of the contemporary debate on the transformations of the public sphere, showing in particular that a pragmatist theory of democracy calls for a radical deconstruction of the Habermasian dualism of the state and the public sphere. Hannah Arendt’s notion of communicative power is discussed in relation to Follett’s theory of “power with”, and Habermas and Honneth’s theories of democracy are examined in turn. The chapter then engages contemporary economic and political theories of the commons, that I interpret as a political theory of public activation, one that helps us better grasp the political—and democratic—relevance of emerging economic practices such as peer production and political consumerism.

This chapter discusses the advantages of a pragmatist theory of democracy for understanding the political relevance of new phenomena such as the emergence of forms of private authority and transnational movements in tackling with global issues. The chapter shows in particular that the pragmatist notion of ‘publics’ offers promising insights and proves particularly promising for completing the transition from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism that is required to understand the emergence of new normative orders and the unfolding of new normative practices developing at the global level and to inquire into their conditions of validity. The chapter discusses the contribution of political pragmatism to the critique of methodological nationalism and proceeds then to examine and reject the three major alternative approaches to global politics—constitutional cosmopolitanism, transnational public sphere theory, and global representation theory—showing why they fail to overcome methodological nationalism. The last two sections explore private entrepreneurial authority in contexts of global governance and show that pragmatism succeeds in explaining their political role, while the other three approaches fail.

This chapter provides an overview of contemporary approaches in social and political theory that in a way or another anticipate mine. I critically examine theories of democracy stemming from a plurality of European and Anglo-American traditions, with the aim of showing what is still missing there, and why a pragmatist wide view of democracy accomplishes something that no other theory has achieved so far. The different theories I examine are organized in three main categories: (1) theories of democracy which have accomplished a significant advancement in expanding the scope of democracy to one or another limited sphere of social reality (the family, the workplace, the public sphere, etc.); (2) theories conceiving democracy as an event external to the functioning of political regimes, and (3) theories which conceive democracy as a global, or holistic category of social thought. I contend that my approach is inscribed within this third category, and show differences and similarities with other main approaches.

This chapter endeavors to prove the relevance of the wide view of democracy by comparing the philosophical grammar of democratic habits with the most promising contemporary attempt at revivifying the personal dimension of politics, which is the republican theory of civic virtues. The chapter shows what is to be gained by dropping the notion of virtue and replacing it with that of habits, why democratic habits rather than civic virtues provides us with sharp conceptual tools to analyze how personal factors contribute to the democratic quality of a polity.

This chapter examines the normative grammar of the concept of democracy and compare its most general features with those of similar and competing normative political concepts such as those of justice and nondomination. It begins by problematizing the very concept of democracy and the normative function it has traditionally fulfilled in political philosophy and the political sciences. It then identifies two main conditions that a theory of democracy should perform if it is to play a more ambitious normative function, that I tentatively call ‘paradigm normativity’. It then introduces the notion of ‘normative practices’, that will provide the conceptual background for the discussion of the public-based conception of politics undertaken in subsequent chapters.

This chapter is one of the two more historically oriented chapters of the book. It examines the social and political theories of a series of American thinkers loosely connected with the pragmatist tradition: besides John Dewey, the works of George H. Mead, Charles H. Cooley, and Mary Parker Follett are examined with the aim of developing a social theory of democracy. Three main aspects are highlighted: the idea of democracy as method, the priority of involvement in joint action over autonomy, and the social-ontological structuration of democracy. The contribution of these authors to the genesis of this idea is acknowledged and shown.

This chapter introduces ‘democratic experimentalism’ as the most significant contemporary attempt to revivify and reactualize the pragmatist approach to the democratic relevance of private and public institutions. The chapter reviews the most relevant theories of democratic experimentalism in political sociology, political theory, constitutionalism, and theory of organizations, with the aim of developing a distinctive approach, which emphasizes the two factors of social learning and distributed cooperation as the main contributions of a pragmatist theory of democracy to the problem of social innovation. In the last section I propose to read democratic experimentalism as a theory of ‘realist utopias’.

This chapter is devoted to the analysis of the sociological foundations of democracy, and in particular to the notion of democratic patterns of social interaction. The chapter examines three major contributions to the understanding of the social basis of democracy: a plurality of strands of social interactionist approaches in sociology, sociological studies of civilities from Norbert Elias to contemporary French social theory, theories of association from Tocqueville to Habermas, with a focus on the social-theoretic implications of functionalist approaches. The main goal of the chapter is to add some thick sociological flesh to the concept of democratic patterns of social interaction, showing in what they consist, how they can be studied empirically, and why they constitute an indispensable ingredient of the concept of democracy.

The article reviews the recent debate about workplace democracy. It first presents and critically discusses arguments in favor of democratizing the firm that are based on the analogy with states, meaningful work, the avoidance of unjustified hierarchies, and beneficial effects on political democracy. The second part presents and critically discusses arguments against workplace democracy that are based on considerations of efficiency, the difficulties of a transition towards democratic firms, and liberal commitments such as the rights of employees and owners to work for or invest in nondemocratic firms. The conclusion summarizes the debate and argues that experiments with democratic workplaces as what Erik Olin Wright calls “real utopias” could deliver new insights and thus move the discussion forward.

There is... something both intellectually and socially unresponsive in the appeal to self-evidence upon controverted issues. Over the last two decades philosophers have focused increasingly on the role of society and practices in shaping practical normativity.3 Contemporary moral and political philosophy remains fundamentally committed to individualistic and causal approaches to normativity, but a contrary trend has taken root—at least since Wittgenstein’s insights regarding the role of context, practices, and uses—with increasing appeals made to the “social” and to “practice” in reaction to the over-individualistic and idealistic trends characterizing mainstream philosophy, especially in the..

The question of rationality and of its role in human agency has been at the core of pragmatist concerns since the beginning of this movement. While Peirce framed the horizon of a new understanding of human reason through the idea of inquiry as aiming at belief-fixation and James stressed the individualistic drives that move individuals to action, it is in Dewey’s writing that we find the deepest understanding of the naturalistic and normative traits of rationality considered as the qualifying attribute of human agency. Recent developments in moral and political philosophy as well as in general pragmatist scholarship have shown a renewal of interest in the role of human reason in agency, both with respect to control of conduct (decisions about how to act) and with respect to normative attitudes (considerations of what is good and right). In this article I will examine some features of Dewey’s epistemology which are particularly promising for the elaboration of a theory of practical rationality based on pragmatist sources. In particular, I will focus on Dewey’s notion of “judgment of practice” in order to frame a distinctively Deweyan approach to practical rationality. In order to point out the specificity of Dewey’s epistemological framework, I will refer to it as an “epistemology of practice”i. The aim of this article is to clarify the epistemological meaning of the concepts of articulation and transformation, that Dewey places at the heart of his theory of inquiry. Part of my argument consists in showing that through these notions Dewey aimed at broadening the conception of rationality, bringing it beyond the reach of the standard notions of analysis and synthesis and of induction, deduction, and abduction. Once the specificity of Dewey’s conception of rationality will have been demonstrated, I will proceed to show some of its implications in the explanation of the rationality of human agency with reference to practical reasoning and value assessment. I will then conclude the article by drawing some implications of Dewey’s theory of judgment for a broader epistemology based upon the acknowledgment of the primacy of practice.

The theory of the firm initially developed by Ronald Coase has made explicit the political nature of firms by putting hierarchy at the heart of the economic process. Theories of workplace democracy articulate this intuition in the normative terms of the conditions under which this political power can be legitimate. This paper presents an organizational theory of workplace democracy, and contends that the democratization of firms requires that we take their organizational dimension explicitly into account. It thus construes democracy as an organizational principle and juxtaposes it to market, hierarchy, and norm-compliance as rival principles for the organization of economic activities. Attempts to construe democracy as an organizational principle with unique features in the tradition of transaction-cost economics are discussed before proposing an innovative solution based on an updated version of grid/group cultural theory of politics, adjusted to accommodate the basic requirements of democratic theory.

ABSTRACT Although less known than his theory of democracy, John Dewey's social philosophy provides an articulate and original perspective on political life based on pragmatist intuitions. Dewey's struggle with social philosophy spanned more than four decades of his intellectual life. This article provides an overview of the main themes that characterize it and shows that two distinct projects animate Dewey's social philosophy. One is closer to the British reformist social philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and John S. Mill. Another is closer to the program of a critical theory of society initially developed by Karl Marx and subsequently expanded by the Frankfurt school. The article contends that to understand Dewey's social philosophy we should first understand what he took and what he rejected from both these tradition, how he managed to steer a middle course between Mill and Marx.

This chapter explores some basic tenets of pragmatist philosophy of logic to inquire into its fruitfulness to understand diverse patterns of thinking. Reference will be made to C. S. Peirce theory of reasoning as developed in his famous paper “The Fixation of Belief” and to John Dewey’s mature logic of inquiry. The different phases of Dewey’s philosophy of logic are examined in turn. It will be contended that Dewey completes the process of naturalization of thinking begun by Peirce, developing an anthropology of thought and logic that places the practice of doubting at its heart. The upshot of the paper is that doubting is at the same time a practice which demands training and the potential source of a pleasurable experience, provided an initial fear of incertitude is overcome. The paper follows the various logical stages through which the ambivalent value of doubt is dealt; the evolution that is observed at the level of humanity, of individual growth, and of western civilization.

This paper reclaims the concept of solidarity for democratic theory. It does this by proposing a theory of solidarity as social involvement that is construed through the integration of three better known conceptions of solidarity that have played an influential role in the political thought of the last two centuries. The paper begins by explaining why solidarity should receive more sustained attention from political theorists with an interest in democracy, and proceeds by presenting two indispensability arguments. Section three outlines the three rival conceptions of solidarity and contends that whilst individually incomplete, each provides an important insight, so that a fuller and more satisfying conception of solidarity can be developed by weaving together some features of these three conceptions. This task is undertaken in section four, which introduces the theory of solidarity as social involvement, defining solidarity in terms of acting-for and acting-with. Section five briefly discusses some of its potential implications for democratic theory, before bringing the article to a close.

This article examines the political crisis of social-democratic parties in Western Europe in light of its impact on the social-democratic emancipatory project, and asks whether the first calls the second into question. It begins by defining social democracy as an emancipatory project, and identifies three major historical phases that correspond to three distinct conceptions of the project. “Social-democratic dilemmas” section examines recent literature in comparative welfare state economics, political sociology, and studies of populism and authoritarianism, to show how the socio-economic transformations of the last five decades have enlarged and fragmented the constituency of social-democratic parties, and contends that this situation has generated powerful tensions between the normative and the mundane dimensions of the social-democratic project. Three major dilemmas—economic, cultural, and political—leading to three deep conflicts internal to the social-democratic constituency are identified and discussed. Combining these empirical findings with the three rival interpretations of the social-democratic project introduced in “Social democracy as an ideational and a mundane project” section, “Three scenarios” section develops three possible scenarios for the evolution of this project in the near future: decline, drift, and renewal. “Implications for policy and politics” section assesses the likelihood and political meaning of each scenario for the pursuit of the social-democratic project, taking into consideration the recent upsurge of left-wing populism.

This book provides a wide-ranging, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the moral philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. It does so by focusing on his greatest achievement in this field: the Ethics he jointly published with James Hayden Tufts in 1908 and then republished in a heavily revised version in 1932. The essays in this volume are divided into two distinct parts. The first features essays that provide a running commentary on the chapters of the 1932 Ethics written by Dewey. Each chapter is introduced, situated within a historical perspective, and then its main achievements are highlighted and discussed. The second part of the book interprets the Ethics and demonstrates its contemporary relevance and vitality. The essays in this part situate the Ethics in the broader interpretive frameworks of Dewey's philosophy, American pragmatism, and 20th-century moral theory at large. Taken together, these essays show that, far from being a mere survey of moral theories, the 1932 Ethics presents the theoretical highpoint in Dewey's thinking about moral philosophy. This book features contributions by some of the most influential Dewey scholars from North America and Europe. It will be of keen interest to scholars and students of American pragmatism, ethics and moral philosophy, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

The article aims to bridge divides between political theory and management and organization studies in theorizing workplace democracy. To achieve this aim, the article begins by introducing a new definition of democracy which, it is contended, is better suited than mainstream accounts to highlight the democratizing potential of employee involvement. It then defines employee involvement as an offshoot of early twentieth-century humanistic psychologies, from which it inherits an emancipatory ambition. In a third step, the article presents employee involvement as a set of organizational practices liable to transform dominant patterns of authority and social interaction in the workplace. The article concludes by contending that, apart from representation/participation and the employee’s voice, employee involvement must be considered the third necessary pillar of workplace democracy, endowed with distinctive normative features that neither representation/participation nor voices can aptly capture.