Table Of ContentConservatism and Pragmatism
Also by Seth Vannatta
THE WIRE AND PHILOSOPHY: This America, Man
( co-editor with David Bzdak and Joanna Crosby, 2013 )
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN AND PHILOSOPHY: The Real and the Cereal
( editor, 2012 )
Conservatism and
Pragmatism
In Law, Politics, and Ethics
Seth Vannatta
Morgan State University, USA
© Seth Vannatta 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-46682-2
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In Memory of
Marianne Vannatta, my mother,
and
Michael Eldridge, fellow Oklahoman,
Dewey scholar, and kind mentor
Dedicated to
Jerry Vannatta, my father, a teacher, scholar, and physician,
who has always served as a model of scholarship
and professional excellence for me,
and
Rachel Vannatta, my wife,
for her love, support, and her model of hard work
and excellence in scholarship
This page Intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction 1
Part I Rationalism in Politics and Ethics
1 Enlightenment Political Theory and British Conservatism 1 3
Social contracts and states of nature 1 3
Kant’s transcendental politics 17
Paine’s radicalism 19
Burke’s conservatism 22
Burke’s progressivism 30
2 Enlightenment Moral Theory and British Conservatism 3 8
Utilitarian moral theory 39
Deontology 42
Hume’s conservatism in moral theory 44
Scottish common sense philosophy 46
British conservatives: harbingers of pragmatism 4 9
Part II The Question of History
3 The 19th Century and History 57
G.W.F. Hegel 58
Karl Marx 60
Charles Darwin 65
Sir Henry Maine 66
4 The Problem of History 74
Foundations for science 74
Historical positivism 75
Postmodernism and neo-pragmatism 77
Historical relativism 79
Problems for history 82
5 Conservative and Pragmatist Historical Inquiry 8 4
Dewey’s history qua inquiry 85
vii
viii Contents
O akeshott’s inferential history of the present 9 0
G adamer’s hermeneutics 9 7
Part III Normative Methodologies in Law,
Ethics, and Politics
6 P ragmatist Responses to Enlightenment Reason 1 05
P eirce on Cartesian “capacities” 1 06
P eirce on Cartesian doubt 1 10
D ewey’s reconstruction of the quest for certainty 1 15
F .A. Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology 1 21
7 C onservatism and Pragmatism in Holmes’s Jurisprudence 126
H olmes’s pragmatism 1 26
H olmes’s critique of legal formalism 1 28
P eircean foundations for the external standard 1 35
J udicial restraint and experimentalism 1 39
8 T he Aesthetic Dimensions of Moral Experience 1 45
T aste and reflective judgment 1 45
H olmes’s pragmatist ethics 1 49
J ohn Dewey’s moral theory 1 52
R eflection and imagination 1 58
P eirce’s conservative moral philosophy 1 61
9 T he Conservative Mind by Comparative Analysis 1 66
B urke and Dewey 1 67
G adamer and Dewey 1 77
O akeshott and Dewey 1 80
O akeshott and Peirce 1 82
10 Conservative and Pragmatist Politics 189
U topianism 1 89
M eliorism 2 01
C onservatism and critical philosophies 2 07
T he claims of conservative politics 2 13
Conclusion: Detachment and Engagement in Conservatism
and Pragmatism 2 20
Notes 224
Bibliography 255
Index 265
Preface
Before entering a doctoral program in philosophy, I taught for ten years
at Casady School, an Episcopal day school in Oklahoma City. Each
morning we started our day with a brief chapel service. The boys wore
coat and tie, we sang a hymn, listened to a few words from our vicar,
and were given announcements for the day. Dividing morning classes
from those in the afternoon, the upper division students walked around
the campus lake to the lunch hall where, once again with the boys in
coat and tie, we sat at assigned tables and ate a family-style meal. The
students took turns serving as table waiters, and the teachers modeled
and encouraged proper manners. In the afternoons, the students prac-
ticed sports, a school requirement.
Reading the history of philosophy while teaching history at Casady
School, I reflected on the relationship between equipping young
students with knowledge and critical thinking skills and the customs
and traditions of our religious day school. Socrates learned the hard way
that arming young people with the weaponry of reason was a dangerous
game. I found that employing the Socratic method of persistent ques-
tioning brought with it the danger of producing young ironists and
cynics, those who doubted the sincerity and authenticity of the teacher,
much like Thrasymachus, red-faced with frustration, doubted Socrates’s
posturing in Book I of Plato’s R epublic .
But the students at Casady were believers: they were hopeful and
genuinely engaged in the educational process. Without discounting the
role of their parents in encouraging excellence in academics, I found
that something else at the school provided a frame for their studies.
Norms, not the product of reason, guided their academic endeavors.
The aesthetics of their education provided non-rule-based norms which
fostered a sense of hope and commitment. The quiet setting of morning
chapel and the communal nature of chapel, lunch, and team sports
structured their otherwise naked pursuit of knowledge, their striving for
good grades, competitive college admissions, and their honing of critical
skills. Somehow questioning and accepting took place together.
It was in this setting that I began to reflect on the aesthetic dimensions
of experience featured by Edmund Burke. At the same time, I discov-
ered the insights of the classical American pragmatists, Charles Sanders
Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and John Dewey – their philosophical
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