| Sociologists have often turned to philosophical pragmatism as a means of social theory, whether with regard to a general theory of action, symbolic interaction, contextualism in the sociology of ideas, or otherwise. Although sociologists have thus found pragmatism of great practical use, they have oddly neglected the uses of pragmatism in the social practice of others. This dissertation is an express attempt to analyze an instance of pragmatism in social practice, in particular how philosophical pragmatism was resorted to as a means of critiquing and reconstructing elements of American jurisprudence and judicial technique in the first third of the 20th century. To the extent that these uses of pragmatism became working elements within the American judiciary, it can be said that aspects of pragmatism became locally embedded in American social organization.; It is widely agreed that the American judiciary underwent a significant change in the 1930s. However, that shift has often been characterized as a discrete "revolution" in the U.S. Supreme Court, instigated by political forces pressing on the Court during its 1937 term. Recent scholarship has rightly challenged this temporally discrete, political interpretation, focusing instead more internally, on the slow breakdown and reconstruction of doctrinal structures within the Court. Even this recent scholarship has significant flaws; it is too narrowly internal, failing to consider the broader discursive context that provided the specific intellectual means by which constitutional thought was renovated. The present dissertation attempts to reconstruct this broader context, focusing on two distinct, decades-long discourses, a discourse on judicial action and a discourse on the relation between laws and facts. These discourses are shown to be not only directly tributary to the "revolution" in American jurisprudence but also deeply entwined with American philosophical pragmatism. By demonstrating this latter connection, the dissertation makes the case that pragmatism---so useful to social theorists---has also become a working element in American social organization. |
