ABSTRACT
It seems to be widely believed that pragmatism is less normatively potent than critical legal studies or postmodernism on the political left or law and economics on the political right. Pragmatism is grounded in a specific model of human reasoning. This is not, however, anything so simple as a prescriptive model for deductive reasoning akin to Aristotelian or symbolic logic. The sophistic, skeptical, Kantian, and now pragmatic conception has consistently involved both a larger and more social view of that which provides the necessary framework for reasoning and a much more minimal and manipulable view of its internal structure. The different conceptions of reasoning in the two traditions are closely associated with different conceptions of the social setting within which reasoning occurs. Multiple institutions do much more than provide checks and balances that preserve or support liberty at the societal level.
