Strategy (58 page)

This experimental aspect excited John Dewey, who joined the University of Chicago in 1894 with an established reputation in psychology and philosophy. By the time he arrived he was moving into more radical political and intellectual positions, encouraged by his wife Alice. The university itself was not a comfortable place for radicals. Men had been fired for giving too vocal support for labor. But Dewey also saw Chicago as “filled with problems holding out their hands and asking somebody to please solve them.” He found his outlet at Hull House, where he became a friend of Addams and lectured regularly. His arrival coincided with the Pullman strike. Although at first all his sympathies had been with the unions, Addams persuaded him of the need to promote reconciliation rather than struggle. This view was reinforced by the costs of the union's failure. His distinctive brand of liberalism reflected an interest in the health of the social organism, which could be damaged by unnecessary divisions, rather than in the more classical liberal concerns with individual rights. But he also felt a firm conviction that this could be achieved through democracy, which he later claimed to be the one constant in his long life.
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He shared this particular form of democratic optimism with Addams. It was reflected in an educational philosophy focused on creating
conditions in which all could realize their potential by learning how to think about the self as part of society, which in turn would encourage compromise and accommodation. His view was that all those affected by institutions, from schools to the workplace, should have a role in their decision-making. He advocated participatory democracy, a source of both better government and an improving and civilizing experience. Unlike Addams, he was not a pacifist and did support America's entry into the First World War, although he took an ardent antiwar stance thereafter.
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What he sought from philosophy was not a “device for dealing with the problems of philosophers” but instead “a method, cultivated, by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”
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It was to offer a challenge to conservatism and an alternative to revolution. The radicals and conservatives needed to be brought together. The radicals would provide the “future vision and the stimulus to act,” but “without the wisdom of past experience,” they would be “wanton and disorganized,” following only “the random and confused excitation of the hour.”

This created a special role for the social reformer. As “psychologist, social worker, and educator,” this person had to “interpret opposing sides to each other, simultaneously reconciling social antagonists and completing the incomplete personalities of individuals involved.”
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A view of society as an organic whole challenged laissez-faire economics based on assumptions of autonomous individuals. Lazy Darwinian talk about the survival of the fittest, which taken too literally was a recipe for violence, had to be replaced by the imperatives of social solidarity. If there was an evolutionary process at work it was the gradual acceptance that the rational way forward would be based on cooperation and reciprocity rather than individual gain.
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This was a philosophy for the non-strategist, whose aim was to overcome conflicts rather than conduct them effectively. Yet he also adopted pragmatism, which as a philosophy has come to be associated with strategy.

The origins of the word
pragmatism
lie in the Latin
pragmaticus
, linked in Roman times to being active and businesslike. For a while it had a negative connotation as excessive activity, in the sense of meddling or interfering. By the nineteenth century, however, pragmatism had become more positive. It referred to treating facts or events systematically and practically, being realistic and factual, aiming at what was achievable rather than what was ideal. Its origins as a philosophical construct go back to the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. As an example of a situation in which it was necessary to act in the face of uncertainty, Kant used a doctor treating a patient and making a diagnosis on the basis of observed symptoms. As he could not be sure that this was the right treatment, his belief was contingent.
Another physician might come to a different and better conclusion. “Such contingent belief, which yet forms the ground for the actual employment of means to certain actions, I entitle pragmatic belief.” This describes exactly the sort of belief required for strategy, one acknowledged to be no more than a best guess in the face of uncertainty, but sufficient to permit action.

Charles Pierce took the view that Kant was not describing a particular type of belief but all belief, for all was contingent. All actions were bets because all depended on a degree of guesswork. A belief that worked was a winning bet. The psychologist and philosopher, William James, who died aged 68 in 1910, is widely considered to be the true father of pragmatism. He took Pierce's insight and developed it further. He defined the pragmatic method as “the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, fact.”
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For James, ideas did not start true but became true as a result of events. An idea's “verity is in fact an event, a process; the process namely of its verifying itself.” What were described as beliefs were not about truth but about preparations for action. “Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action.”
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On this basis, the test was not how much a belief described reality but whether it was effectively prescriptive. As with banknotes, which had value so long as they were accepted as currency, so with ideas. They were true so long as this was acknowledged by others. This could stand as a shrewd observation about the fate of ideas in the public arena, though it had awkward implications for the reliability of claims about truth.

Pragmatism could be a prescription of how to think, a form of reasoning that encouraged a proper evaluation of the outcomes of actions, to be commended to strategists and contrasted with modes of thought that were crude and insensitive. Or it could be a description of how everybody thought, with the understanding that some were more effective thinkers than others. As a response to a growing awareness of the conditionality of knowledge, beliefs became working hypotheses and events experiments. Just as physical scientists could only confirm their hypotheses through experiment, so all social action was an attempt to validate through experiment a hypothesis about consequences.

It was on this basis that Dewey retained a commitment to the idea of a progressive, experimental science. This was captured in his preference for the term “instrumentalism” rather than “pragmatism,” though this did not catch on.
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Pragmatism worked for him as a means of making sense of the origins of beliefs and how they developed through experience. Unlike Weber, he did not consider facts to exist separately from values. The viewer's perspective was
bound to shape how he saw the world. The worldview changed not because of shifting values but because of different forms of engagement. Dewey was sufficiently confident in the working hypothesis that thinking and acting were part of the same process to not only develop an educational theory on this basis but also apply it in what became known, tellingly, as the Laboratory School in Chicago.

Thoughts were therefore not so much revelations of reality as means of adapting to reality. Truth was what worked in practice. Views of reality were always partial and incomplete, our own constructions rather than objective representations. As critics observed, this line of argument led to relativism if pushed too far; one set of beliefs was as good as any other so long as it worked as a guide to action. But whether or not it “worked” depended on how effects were evaluated.
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This is why social research was important, for if it were cumulative, then the risk of being surprised by the consequences of actions should be reduced. So when considering the standard ethics question of whether ends justified the means, Dewey had no doubt that means could only be justified by results. He accepted that confidence in particular means leading to a desirable end might need to be qualified by the same action having other, less-desired consequences. Before acting, therefore, it was necessary to consider the full range of possible consequences, intended as well as unintended, and on that basis make a choice.
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That required considerable foresight. Without it, the value of pragmatism was undermined.

Dewey linked an intellectual process with a social process. He was in accord with Tolstoy in assuming that a good life was one developed as part of a community. Because of the potential for conflict—and here he differed from Tolstoy—Dewey saw democracy as a way of bringing individuals' needs in line with each other and the wider community, transcending apparent antagonisms, and integrating the private with the public. This meant accepting that individual goals might not be met in full while there was progress toward social goals, and that this could be achieved by an active state. Conflict was not a means of resolving problems; it was the problem to be resolved.

Dewey decided not to go to the 1904 Congress to which Weber had been invited and so the two did not meet (although he met James at Harvard). Weber would have been aware of Dewey's work because of the overlap, at least in some core themes, with his own. They were on similar tracks in their appreciation of the scientific method, their focus on the relationship of thought to action, and their stress on the need to judge actions by consequence as much as intent. There were also crucial differences between the two. While Dewey did not take seriously attempts to separate fact from
value, Weber insisted upon it. While Dewey saw democracy as inclusive and participatory, for Weber the value of democracy was as a means of electing a proper leader from a wide pool and ensuring a degree of accountability.

It was as a strategist's philosophy that pragmatism prospered. It came to be taken to refer to a particularly political virtue, a talent for adapting ends and means to a changing environment; demonstrating flexibility; accepting a world of contingency, trial, error, policy reversals, and shifting positions. A pragmatist could be compared favorably with the dogmatist, who refused to compromise and was impervious to circumstances and negligent of evidence. But Dewey combined this strategist's philosophy, pragmatism, with an a-strategic worldview, which sought to deny deep conflicts and supplant politics with research-led reform. Menand observes that “a time when the chance of another civil war did not seem remote, a philosophy that warned against the idolatry of ideas was possibly the only philosophy on which a progressive politics could have been successfully mounted.”
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In this respect it provided a form of thinking that appeared both provocative and reassuring. But there was no inherent reason why this should be so. Consideration of consequences depended on confidence that they could be discerned, at least to a useful approximation. This might allow the best choice to be made, but that choice might still be between two evils.

In 1936, Robert Merton, an American sociologist influenced by Weber, wrote “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.”
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The main explanation normally offered for why all consequences could not be anticipated, Merton noted, was ignorance, which led to the view that more and better knowledge would steadily improve the quality and effectiveness of action. But there were limits to what knowledge could be acquired and, anticipating a point that would be made many years later by behavioral economists, Merton questioned whether it was always worth the time and energy to acquire extra knowledge. Another factor was error, assuming for example, that just because a course of action had produced a desired result a previous time it would do so again, without paying regard to variations in circumstances. This could reflect carelessness or something more psychological, “a determined refusal or inability to consider certain elements of the problem.”

Next came what Merton called the “imperious immediacy of interest,” putting an emphasis on the short term to the exclusion of consideration of later consequences. An action might be rational in seeking to ensure a particular outcome, but “precisely because a particular action is not carried out in a psychological or social vacuum, its effects will ramify into other spheres of value and interest.” Lastly, he made the point central to all strategy: “Public predictions of future social developments are frequently not sustained
precisely because the prediction has become a new element in the concrete situation, thus tending to change the initial course of developments.” He took the example of Marx's predictions. The “socialist preaching in the nineteenth century” led to labor organizations which took advantage of collective bargaining, “thus slowing up, if not eliminating, the developments which Marx had predicted.”

At the heart of any debate on strategy was the question of cause and effect. Strategic action presumed that desired effects would follow from the choice of appropriate courses of action. In principle, social science should have made strategic choices easier, because causal relationships would be much better understood. This created its own ethical imperatives. For Weber, the possibility of appreciating the likely consequences of action or inaction meant that it was irresponsible not to take advantage of the greater insights that social science had to offer. For Dewey, it was also foolish, because it meant denying an opportunity to get the most from every action. For Tolstoy, the foolishness was only in the conceit that social processes—in all their complexity—could ever be properly grasped. There could be no true experts in these matters. No human mind could grasp the totality of factors that were at play in great and social and political processes. There could be no strategy because there could be no confidence in the difference any particular action could make.