Despite the subtitle, Joseph Margolis's twenty-second book has little to do with either America or the present historical moment. Pragmatism is often maligned as a dressed-up version of a crude and naive American faith that willpower, cash, and technical know-how can overcome all obstacles, while John Dewey constantly called for a philosophy responsive to the needs of its time. Margolis, however, focuses on pragmatism's response to philosophical conundrums dating back to Descartes, with nary a glance at how or why we might engage those puzzles differently or with any sense of urgency in our own moment.

Margolis's account of pragmatism's relation to modern philosophy is useful and illuminating. His major claim is that the two most important contemporary pragmatists—Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam—each succumbs to the major flaws of the post-Cartesian tradition, even though the classical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey provides the resources for escape. The first flaw is Cartesian dualism, which entails the notion of an objective reality standing independent of the human minds that know it: “The minimal Cartesian dogma is that it is cognitively feasible to gain a true account of the way ‘the world is’ apart from any presumed distortion effected by human inquiry” (p. 38). Despite all the difficulties attending the attempt to offer that “true account,” the terrors of subjectivism and relativism have fueled endless revisionary efforts to secure “Cartesian realism” (p. 38).

Margolis is not afraid of relativism—and he insists that pragmatism becomes just another version of Cartesian realism if its acceptance of relativism is not accepted. Putnam, in particular, has let his fear of relativism undermine his commitment to pragmatism. I cannot, in a short review, rehearse Margolis's arguments for relativism. And he has made the case better elsewhere than he does in the book under review. (See, in particular, Joseph Margolis, The Truth about Relativism, 1991.) More striking to me is how endless, how inconclusive, the debate between realism and relativism has become. All the moves on both sides are utterly familiar by now—and never seem to change anyone's mind.

The second major flaw that Margolis identifies in the tradition leads him toward more interesting territory. Troubled by the Cartesian legacy of mind–body dualism, philosophy has adopted the project of “naturalizing” human capacities and activities. The goal, we might say, is a unified field theory, one in which causes in the physical world are exactly consonant with causes in social and psychological realms. Margolis shows how Rorty is committed to such causal monism. (Hobbes, whom Margolis never mentions, is the causal monist whose work is most relevant to political philosophy.) Margolis contrasts “naturalizing” to the “original pragmatists' naturalism,” understood as “a refusal to admit non-natural or supernatural resources in a descriptive or explanatory discourse” (p. 6). Naturalizing, Margolis insists, is reductive at best (claiming that all observed behavior can be reduced to physical processes), and false at worst.

Unfortunately, Margolis is not very clear about either the stakes in his rejection of naturalizing projects or his reasons for that rejection. Reinventing Pragmatism as a whole is poorly organized, jumping about from point to point, continually leaving the reader in the lurch just when a crucial explanation or a full-blown argument seems in the offing. He has much of interest and value to say, but he abuses his audience's patience mightily. So what follows is my best effort at reconstructing the stakes and arguments that he leaves all too obscure.

At stake is nothing less than William James's old bugbear: freedom versus determinism. Underlying the naturalizing project is the “doctrine” that “truth-explanation is ultimately causal” (p. 6). The uncovering of a causal narrative is the only path to truth—and demonstrates why this outcome was the only one possible. Against this vision of foreclosed possibilities, Margolis highlights the pragmatist insistence that human action alters the very lineaments of the real. The world changes as the result of human action upon it. If we take different actions, we produce different worlds. But to put it that way is too heroically subjective. Better to say: The world emerges for humans through their interactions with it. Quoting Ralph Sleeper, Margolis writes: “Dewey's ontology is ‘pluralistic and relativistic … since Dewey accepts no eternal objects or permanent kinds’ ” (p. 123). Our world (here Margolis quotes Dewey) “ ‘can be grasped only in and through the activity which constitutes it’ ” (p. 125). We find ourselves in the midst of a temporal flow of events and situations to which we adapt. There are external pressures upon us, so this is not pure subjectivism. But—and here is the key pluralistic claim—there are multiple ways to constitute, to characterize, these situations and multiple (although hardly infinite) paths from the present to a possible future.

Margolis's active, pluralistic position sees humans as “constructively” moving into the future, even though they have no guarantees that the futures they aim for will come to pass. But a lack of guarantees is not an assurance of failure. If we did not, at least some of the time, secure outcomes sufficiently close to what we aimed to achieve, then the bite of our concepts of and our faith in action would be lost: “You must remember that, on the argument being offered, both referential and predictive success inherently lack sufficient or criterial confirmation, except constructively” (p. 156). The proof is in the pudding. Was the action successful, on its own terms? This question also suggests the pluralistic conclusion that “divergent productive schemes … might generate either incommensurabilities or incompatible predications about the same denotata” (p. 156). Different characterizations of the situation will suggest different courses of action—and those different actions might all prove efficacious responses. Reality does not dictate one script.

For readers interested in politics, Margolis offers a theoretical justification for asserting that our situations are plastic and that human making does play a role in creating our worlds, our futures. But, we might ask, did we need such philosophical assurances? Does anyone really live as if action does not take place in a field of multiple possibilities? Arguments at Margolis's level of abstraction miss the messier, less tractable, and (I think) more momentous questions about negotiating within a situation's constraints (what it concretely makes difficult, if not unfeasible) and with the many others with whom we share a world. Knowing that action is possible is a far cry from knowing what to do.

Margolis reminds us that Dewey always praised “the resources” afforded by “savoir-faire” (knowledge of how to do things) over “savoir” (knowledge simpliciter, or knowledge of things) (p. 156). One way to read pragmatism is to say that it recommends turning our backs on abstract theorizing, on the notion that only if we get our philosophical ducks in line, our conceptual and ontological foundations aligned, will successful action be possible. Such a conviction is Cartesianism rearing its ugly head once more. The pragmatists vehemently deny that we will be paralyzed with doubt if we have not found metaphysical bedrock. We come to consciousness embedded in a world (both social and natural), already standing in relation to it, and act by trying to maintain those relations or alter them. The scene of action, the place of decision, the site where knowledge is acquired and deployed, is a level below the abstractions of the philosophical tradition. That is why pragmatism—like the work of the post-Tractatus Wittgenstein—is antiphilosophical philosophy. You cannot escape the traps of Cartesianism (including the endless realism/relativism debate) unless you step outside the entire language game in which it unfolds. Margolis shows us why such an escape is desirable, even if he cannot effect that escape himself.