Abstract

Until the mid 1970s, pragmatism reigned as the “almost… official philosophy of America.” European critics charged that James’ and Dewey's pragmatism was less a philosophy than a “method of doing without one.” But pragmatism's loose and democratic emphasis on problem-solving suited the unbounded American personality with its optimistic faith in persistent progress. Dewey's pragmatism was at once so democratic and informal in its emphasis on shared methods of rational inquiry that Bertrand Russell once accused him of “being unable to distinguish between the work of a scientist and that of a bricklayer.” Pragmatism was so central to America's sense of itself, noted a widely-read 1950 Amherst College pamphlet on “Pragmatism and American Culture,” that to question its merits was to place “American civilization itself on trial.”