Word: pragmatist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...phrase "the Great Society." While there was apparently no single source (just before he mentioned it at Ann Arbor last May, he had been talking with Writers John Steinbeck and Barbara Ward, among many others), two possible inspirations are particularly intriguing. One is a 1927 book by Pragmatist Philosopher John Dewey, in which he discussed the "search for the Great Community" in terms of liberating individual potentialities; the other is a 1921 book by British Fabian Socialist Graham Wallas entitled The Great Society, which advocated beauty and serenity in a harsh, industrialized world through the psychological "Organization of Happiness." Whether...
...merely that he is willing to accept slow but steady progress toward the "great society" he envisions, rather than risk a setback or stalemate by trying to knock heads together. Johnson's great society does not consist of some grand philosophic design. Johnson distrusts philosophy. He is a pragmatist, and his interest lies in moving step by step toward clearly attainable goals...
...much of a pragmatist to do more than mention in passing the "drastic Constitutional amendment" which would be necessary to make this possible. America, like West Germany, is a federal government, he says, without the power to establish a national educational policy. And so we must work something out given our decentralized system...
...somewhat "sanitized" since Stalin's days, who remains in many ways Russia's top cop. His was the most remarkable of the new promotions, since he leapfrogged over the heads of oldtimers waiting around for membership to become the youngest member of the party Presidium. A persuasive pragmatist, Shelepin talked 350,000 Russian youths into volunteering for work in the virgin lands, served as Nikita's iceman when Khrushchev decided to re-refrigerate the thaw in Soviet art and literature two years-ago. Significantly, Shelepin is now the only man in the leadership who simultaneously holds...
Winning the Winnable. Humphrey's fire-eating stance as a doctrinaire liberal has long since shifted to that of the pragmatist who is satisfied to win what is winnable rather than go down to defeat demanding all or nothing. "I am not a theologian," he has said. "I'm a politician." Where he was once vocally suspicious of any business much larger than the corner drugstore or the family feed mill, he now takes pains to assure big businessmen of his modified views. "For the most part," wrote Humphrey in his recently published book, The Cause Is Mankind...