
eBook - ePub
Pragmatism, Politics, and Perversity
Democracy and the American Party Battle
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About this book
The political project of pragmatism has focused primarily on its defense of democracy as the best political system to maintain and improve human well-being over lifetimes and generations. Pragmatism Politics and Perversity: Democracy and the American Party Battle describes this project of Peirce, Dewey, Hook, and Rorty, and combines it with Charles Beard's study of the party battle as the most determinative influence upon American democracy. The book updates and confirms Beard's hypothesis that the history of the party battle is a chronicle of perverse schemes and self-inflicted wounds – the most salient to date being the American Civil War – because it reflects a ceaselessly disruptive contest over the creation of two largely incompatible political states: nation state and market state.
The book supports its thesis with detailed historical accounts of the formation of the Constitution and early federal judiciary, the sedition trials and political schemes of the 1790s, the frustration of market state Whigs to attract white working-class voters by exploiting their religious identities, the reckless machinations of Whig Republicans in precipitating a national crisis over a contrived threat of oligarchy and white slavery, and the ideological oscillations of the Supreme Court from market state to nation state jurisprudence and back again.
To reduce perversity in political rhetoric and free up pragmatic democratic practices, the book proposes a robust neo-Madisonian view of free speech, where political actors and their surrogates are not only free to speak and write, but are also obligated to explain, retract, and revise what they have said and written.
The book supports its thesis with detailed historical accounts of the formation of the Constitution and early federal judiciary, the sedition trials and political schemes of the 1790s, the frustration of market state Whigs to attract white working-class voters by exploiting their religious identities, the reckless machinations of Whig Republicans in precipitating a national crisis over a contrived threat of oligarchy and white slavery, and the ideological oscillations of the Supreme Court from market state to nation state jurisprudence and back again.
To reduce perversity in political rhetoric and free up pragmatic democratic practices, the book proposes a robust neo-Madisonian view of free speech, where political actors and their surrogates are not only free to speak and write, but are also obligated to explain, retract, and revise what they have said and written.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Pragmatism, Politics, and Perversity by Joseph L. Esposito in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Political Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I: TOWARD A PRAGMATIC THEORY OF DEMOCRACY
- Chapter 1: Pragmatism and the Democracy Project
- Chapter 2: Pragmatic Political History
- Part II: PERVERSE THEMES AND SCHEMES IN PARTY BATTLE HISTORY
- Chapter 3: A Foundation on a Serbonian Bog
- Chapter 4: Market State and Nation State
- Chapter 5: A Judiciary for the Market State
- Chapter 6: Rogue Justice
- Chapter 7: Too Much Democracy
- Chapter 8: Judicial Review as Ideology
- Chapter 9: Religion and Race
- Chapter 10: Old Wine in New Bottles
- Chapter 11: Rewriting History
- Chapter 12: The Great Kansas Charade
- Chapter 13: Free Labor and the Economics of Slavery
- Chapter 14: Civil War
- Chapter 15: Disorder in the Court
- Part III: IMPROVING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
- Chapter 16: Understanding the Party Battle
- Chapter 17: Free Speech in the Age of the Big Megaphone
- Notes
- Bibliography
- About the Author