Pragmatism, Planning, and Power

Abstract

Many contemporary planning theories share a pragmatic conception of action which does not adequately account for questions of power After a brief illustration of this limitation, the historical and structural criticisms of recent Marxist theories are analyzed It is argued that since both Mainstream and Marxist theories of planning both use the consequences of action as the ultimate test of theoretical validity, they tend to overemphasize their different interpretation of power as mutually exclusive The paper examines the work of four contemporary theorists the author calls Radical Pragmatists whose writings undermine this antagonism by introducing critical insights that broaden the meaning of what counts as action The result is a concept of power that critically combines our experience of what it means to choose, our knowledge of what it means to communicate without distortion, and our expectation of what it means to govern ourselves democratically

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