American Democracy, Pragmatism and the Ideal State

Abstract

The issue of democracy in the world and therefore of democracy per se as the solution to the world ‘s problems seems to be a current issue in American world politics. The Great Middle East policy initiated by G.W. Bush and the neo-conservatives a few years ago takes as its first premise the fact that most of the Muslim world is undemocratically ruled. His policy was to pressurize these regimes to change from dictatorships or tyrannical rules to democracies following the Western model. In so doing, the US leaders thought of democracy as an “off-the-peg” commodity or something that can easily be exported to other nations regardless of their historical background or cultures. This dissertation started off from the idea of democracy per se. But since America seems to be the leading example of democracy and of a world democracy implementer, the idea was to work precisely on the American democracy as such within a purely American philosophy called Pragmatism. The rest of the dissertation also discusses democracy and its relation to the notion of ideal state.