Building a Social Democracy offers an alternative intellectual history of American pragmatism, one that tries to reclaim the middle of the twentieth century in order to push neo-pragmatism beyond its philosophical limitations. Danisch argues that the major entailment of the invention of American pragmatism at the beginning of the twentieth century is that rhetorical practices are the rightful object of study and means of improving democratic life. Pragmatism entails a commitment to rhetoric. Rhetorical pragmatism is intended to be more faithful to the project of first generation pragmatism,...

Taken as a whole, this book argues that the very idea of what it means to be a "citizen" in our global, cosmopolitan world is no longer as clear as it may have been for an Athenian democrat of the fifth century BC, a Roman Republican of the first century BC, a British coloniser of the eighteenth century, or an American patriot of the nineteenth century. Given the now undeniable fact of pluralism highlighted by globalisation and the massive movement of peoples across borders (alongside the legal expansion of rights to minority groups in Western democracies throughout the twentieth century),...