The “Pragmatist Turn” in Theory of Governance

Abstract

In this essay, the author focuses on what Jacques Lenoble and Marc Maesschalck call the “pragmatist turn” in the theory of governance. Speaking of pragmatist turn, they refer to recent work by a range of authors such as Charles Sabel, Joshua Cohen and Michael Dorf, who develop an experimental and pragmatist approach of democracy. The concept of “turn” may raise some perplexity. The author believes that we can speak of “turn” about these experimentalist theories because these theories introduce a key issue, what we may call the question of “self-capacitation of the actors.” The author tries to show that this issue constitutes a novelty compared to the deliberative paradigm in the theory of governance. While the issue of collective learning is a black box in the deliberative paradigm, democratic experimentalism seeks to reflect on how the actors can organize themselves to acquire new capacities and to learn new roles. The author concludes in revealing the limits of this approach.