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

This article examines pragmatism's role in aspects of American public admin istration's development during the period of the orthodoxy and the reaction s to the orthodoxy (roughly 1920 to 1950). It concludes that the administra tive mainstream of expertise never embraced and indeed implicitly rejected, the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey, which is characterized by an a ttitude of experimentation. A more complete understanding of this aspect of our intellectual heritage is important as we consider contemporary calls f or a turn toward pragmatism as a way to address the legitimacy issue, the t heory-practice gap, and other problematic conditions in the field.