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Pragmatism and democracy in a global world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2017

Roberto Frega
Roberto Frega*
Affiliation:
Senior Researcher, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
*
*Correspondence to: Roberto Frega, CEMS-EHESS, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France. Author’s email: fregarob@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article discusses the advantages of a pragmatist theory of global 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 article 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 new normative practices developing at the global level and to inquire into their conditions of validity. After having presented a basic outline of the pragmatist theory of democracy, I discuss the contribution of pragmatism to the critique of methodological nationalism and proceed then to examine and reject two alternative approaches to global politics – 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 shows that pragmatism succeeds in explaining their political role, while the other two approaches fail.

Keywords

Global DemocracyPragmatismPrivate AuthorityPublic SphereJohn Dewey
Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 720 - 741
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2017 

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References

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5 I offer a fuller account of political pragmatism in R. Frega, The Democratic Project, unpublished manuscript.

6 For a justification of this claim, see Frega, ‘The normativity of democracy’.

7 J. Dewey, The Public and its Problems: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume II (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1927).

8 Bohman takes pragmatism to task to explore the normative consequences of a pluralisation of publics in contemporary politics. See Bohman, J., Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007)Google Scholar. See also Bohman, J., Participation through publics: Did Dewey answer Lippmann?’, Contemporary Pragmatism, 7:1 (2010)Google Scholar, pp. 49–68 for a discussion of Dewey’s notion of public in the context of post-Westphalian politics.

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30 See in particular Dewey, J., ‘Lectures in social and political philosophy’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 7:2 (2015)Google Scholar. I have provided a lengthy examination of Dewey’s idea of basic goods in R. Frega, ‘John Dewey’s social philosophy: a restatement’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 7:1 (2015).

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37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., p. 689.

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41 Schaffer, ‘The boundaries of transnational democracy’.

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50 Ibid.

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54 Bray, Pragmatic Cosmopolitanism.

55 Saward, The Representative Claim, p. 4.

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64 I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of the national origin of standard setting bodies.

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66 Berstein and Cashore, ‘Can non-state global governance be legitimate?’.

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69 Green, Rethinking Private Authority.

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71 On this point, see Bernstein and Cashore, ‘Can non-state global governance be legitimate?’.