ABSTRACT
This entry discusses the connections between philosophical pragmatism and public administration. It describes the main ideas of turn-of-the-twentieth-century pragmatic philosophers and the extent to which those ideas were evident at public administration's founding and throughout its development as a field of study and practice. With a few exceptions, pragmatism's influences on the field throughout most of the twentieth century are revealed to be tenuous and indirect. This entry concludes with a discussion of more recent developments, specifically projects done by some administrative theorists to recover the field's historical roots in pragmatism and the influence of Richard Rorty's neopragmatism.
