Expertise or experimenting? Pragmatism and American public administration, 1920-1950

This article examines pragmatism's role in aspects of American public administration's development during the period of the orthodoxy and the reactions to the orthodoxy (roughly 1920 to 1950). It concludes that the administrative mainstream of expertise never embraced and indeed implicitly rejected, the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey, which is characterized by an attitude of experimentation. A more complete understanding of this aspect of our intellectual heritage is important as we consider contemporary calls for a turn toward pragmatism as a way to address the legitimacy issue, the theory-practice gap, and other problematic conditions in the field.