It’s a Positivist, It’s a Pragmatist, It’s a <i>Codifier</i>! Reflections on Nietzsche and Stendhal

Richard Rorty writes that "[n]owadays, Allan Bloom and Michael Moore seem to be the only people who still think pragmatism is dangerous to the moral health of our society." Given the source, I would not contest the generalization. Nor would I seek to correct the adjective about pragmatism used more than once by Professors Rorty and Grey: "banal." Indeed, the popularity of pragmatism may reflect its banality. Its amorphous nature has produced strange alliances. For example, the same Stanley Fish who once declared Richard Posner's humanistic forays to be "execrable" now joins Posner's pragmatic program almost without qualification.

If Pragmatism's tent is big enough to cover such disparate personalities, its grounding is unlikely to be distinctive or even identifiable. On the other hand, when we consider that pretenders to pragmatist status have included Holmes, Cardozo, Brandeis, Pound, Llewellyn, Fuller, Frankfurter, Douglas, Brennan, and Powell, we must ask who was or would be rash enough, imprudent enough, to wish to be excluded?