Abstract

The pragmatist revival of recent decades has in some respects obscured the radical emancipatory potential of Deweyan pragmatism. The author suggests that neo-pragmatists such as Richard Rorty have too often failed to grasp the ways in which Dewey's notion of social intelligence was bound up with the case for participatory democracy, and that recent efforts to bring out the potential of pragmatism for supporting certain forms of feminist and gay critical theory make for a more compelling reconstruction of pragmatism.