The Pragmatists' Last Bulwark: The Rise and Fall of the Early New School, 1917-1922

Despite pragmatism’s American origins and significance in early American social science, its presence in the historiography of inter- and post-war sociology is sparse, and its contemporary relevance is consequently limited. This paper endeavors to document and understand why pragmatism came to bear such little influence on American sociology and social science more broadly. Towards this end, I examine the early New School for Social Research as the site of a unique sort of pragmatic sociological knowledge. The New School was founded in 1919 by a cohort of Columbia social scientists closely related to John Dewey following their exit from Columbia due to free speech concerns during the First World War in 1917. The emerging institution was originally conceived to defend pragmatic knowledge in a world that The New School founders perceived as growing more hostile to it. But after a mere three years, The New School was marred by internal conflict and dissatisfaction with how operations were living up to its founding ideals. Consequently, many of the founders left The New School, and following their exit, The New School conformed to a more standard academic institutional form, fundamentally changing The New School away from its original pragmatic character. I conclude that The New School’s inability to render a coherent institutional form exemplifies how pragmatic knowledge and its corresponding ideals struggle to coalesce into organizational forms, which accounts for pragmatism’s declining salience in an academic system that was becoming increasingly organized.