Historical perspective

The pragmatist intellectual trend started as an anti-Cartesian revolt by amateur philosophers and became a major inspiration for anti-Taylorian managerial thought. In the early days of the pragmatist movement, a small group of friends fought idealist and Cartesian ideas. The influence of classical pragmatists Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, and some of their closest fellow travellers (Royce, Addams, Follett, and Lewis), grew in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some misunderstandings of the central tenets of pragmatism later led to its distortion into the common language acceptance of the word “pragmatism” and contributed to a relative decline in the 1930s, precisely when pragmatism began to inspire an anti-Taylorian managerial movement. Finally the chapter narrates how “the pragmatist turn,” a revival of pragmatist ideas, took place in the last quarter of the twentieth century.