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This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of arguments about the character of democracy – although the character of those arguments is open to debate and reimagination – and how pragmatist arguments have been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches. This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion.

L'argument selon lequel l'ethos et les institutions démocratiques sont, en un certain sens, une forme d'enquête reste l'un des thèmes les plus puissants et pourtant insaisissables de la pensée sociale et politique pragmatiste. Conceptuellement, la démocratie est antérieure à l'État moderne. Or, le projet de justifier la démocratie est essentiellement un projet de justification à l'intérieur et pour l'État moderne. En s'appuyant sur le développement important de l'argument d'enquête chez Misak et Talisse, cet article examine comment l'argument épistémique pragmatiste rompt avec cette conception traditionnelle de la justification démocratique, et comment son penchant à éliminer les obstacles à l'inclusion épistémique fournit des raisons générales de remettre en cause le concept de frontière politique.

Political trust has become a central focus of political analysis and public lament. Political theorists and philosophers typically think of interpersonal trust in politics as a fragile but valuable resource for a flourishing or stable democratic polity. This article examines what conception of trust is needed in order to play this role. It unpicks two candidate answers, a moral and a responsiveness conception, the latter of which has been central to recent political theory in this area. It goes on to outline a third, commitment conception and to set out how a focus on commitments and their fulfilment provides a better account of trust for political purposes. Adopting this conception discloses how trust relies on a contestable public normative space and has significant implications for how we should approach three cognate topics, namely, judgements of trust, the place of distrust and the relationship of interpersonal to institutional trust and distrust.

Pragmatism is often seen as an unpolitical doctrine. This article argues that it shares important commitments with realist political theory, which stresses the distinctive character of the political and the difficulty of viewing political theory simply as applied ethics, and that many of its key arguments support realism. Having outlined the elective affinities between realism and pragmatism, the article goes on to consider this relationship by looking at two recent elaborations of a pragmatist argument in contemporary political theory, which pull in different directions, depending on the use to which a pragmatist account of doxastic commitments is put. In one version, the argument finds in these commitments a set of pre-political principles, of the sort that realists reject. In the other version, the account given of these commitments more closely tracks the concerns of realists and tries to dispense with the need for knowledge of such principles.