In the past few years, the word “pragmatism” has been spreading like a weed through the discourse of democracy. Theresa May and Boris Johnson both promised us a “pragmatic” Brexit, and Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer undertook to be “pragmatic” in response. The same applies to every other issue you might mention: from Covid and the climate emergency to the supply chain crisis, our politicians assure us they are going to be thoroughly pragmatic.
They might be speaking truer than they know: Samuel Johnson’s dictionary glossed “pragmatism” as “impertinently busy,” “meddling” or “assuming business without leave or invitation.” At the end of the 19th century, however, a group of iconoclastic American thinkers adopted the word as a rallying cry in their campaign against the fine-spun abstractions of the philosophers of the past. The central contention of the self-proclaimed pragmatists was that nothing matters if it does not make a difference; or, in the words of their most eloquent advocate, William James, that “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact.”