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<Woiiiing>... Aaaahh, got it. (finally! =)

I guess it didn't occur to me to think of as "totalitarian" our finishing the job -- I'd have backed Patton all the way to Moscow -- by staying put for a bit instead of beating it back home and leaving the vacuum into which the left rushed in.

I'm not sure I'm ready to concede a "duality" of pragmatism. Maybe it's still a failure on my part to understand.

Using his example, I don't think it would have been "totalitarian" for us to remain in place and -- for a short time, anyway -- extend the Justice and authority of our Constitutional Republic such that we could rout the last of the aggressors and allow the aggrieved some opportunity to reclaim their rightful land or property or otherwise obtain justice.

However forceful our occupation would have been, I still don't see it as a totalitarian "ideology" based and circuscribed -- as it would have been -- on the objective truths by which (ostensibly) we fought a Just War in the first place.

In fact, I'd probably argue we failed in our obligation to see the Just War all the way through by not doing so.

Headed home ... I'll check the stacks and see if I can't get a handle on "pragmatic" once and for all before coming back.

I guess it didn't occur to me to think of as "totalitarian" our finishing the job

That is because you were looking at it (you won't like this) pragmatically. ;-)

I don't think that in general you think nations should be threatening to nuke other nations. It would be rather totalitarian of us (exercising autocratic powers, controlling aspects of a nation via coercive measures), to be threatening to nuke the hell out of another nation.

But in the context of World War II, when there was a greater good to be obtained and a ready excuse for doing so, it would have been quite pragmatic of us to advance our cause at the expense of the communist Soviet regime.

It also would have been right and good, and prevented quite a few problems down the road; generally these are the defining characteristics of wise, moral pragmatism. The key to it is that the basis for decisions has to be grounded in morality.

Here's the bare and dry bones: The Thirteen Pragmatisms, by Arthur Lovejoy.

"In the present year of grace 1908 the term "pragmatism"--if not the doctrine--celebrates its tenth brithday. Before the controversy over the mode of philosophy designated by it enters upon a second decade, it is perhaps not too much to ask that contemporary philosophers should agree to attach some single and stable meaning to the term. There appears to be as yet no sufficiently clear and general recognition, among contributors to that controversy, of the fact that the pragmatist is not merely three but may gentlemen at once."

I. Pragmatist Theories of Meaning

1. The "meaning" of any judgment consists wholly in the future experiences, active or passive, predicted by it.
2. The meaning of any judgment consists in the future consequences of believing it.
13. The meaning of any idea or judgment always consists in part in the apprehension of the relation of some object to a purpose.

II. Pragmatism as an Epistemologically Functionless Theory concerning the "Nature" of Truth.

3. The truth of a judgment "consists in" the complete realization of the experience (or series of experiences) to which the judgment had antecedently pointed; propositions are not, but only become, true.

III. Pragmatist Theories of Knowledge, i.e., of the Criterion of the Validity of a Judgment.

4. Those general propositions are true which so far, in the past experience, have had their implied predictions realized; and there is no other criterion of truth of a judgment.
5. Those general propositions are true which have in past experience proved biologically serviceable to those who have lived by them; and this "liveableness" is the ultimate criterion of the truth of a judgment.
7. All apprehension of truth is a species of "satisfaction"; the true judgment meets some need, and all transition from doubt to conviction is a passage from a state of at least partial dissatisfaction to a state of relative satisfaction and harmony. This is strictly only a psychological observation, not an epistemological one; it becomes the latter by illicit interpretation into one of the two following.
8. The criterion of the truth of a judgment is its satisfactoriness, as such; satisfaction is "many dimensional," but all the dimensions are of commensurable epistemological value, and the maximum bulk of satisfaction in a judgment is the mark of its validity.
9. The criterion of the truth of a judgment is the degree in which it meets the "theoretic" demands of our nature; these demands are special and distinctive, but their realization is none the less a kind of "satisfaction". 10. The sole criterion of the truth of a judgment is its practical serviceableness as a postulate; there is no general truth except postulated truth, resulting from some motivated determination of the will; "necessary" truths do not exist.
11. There are some necessary truths, but these are neither many nor practically adequate; and beyond them the resort to postulates is needful and legitimate.
12. Among the postulates which it is legitimate to take as the equivalent of truth, those which subserve the activities and enrich the content of the moral, esthetic, and religious life have a co-ordinate place with those which are presupposed by common sense and physical science as the basis of the activities of the physical life.

IV. Pragmatism as an Ontological Theory

6. Temporal becoming is a fundamental character of reality; in this becoming the processes of consciousness have their essential and creative part. The future is strictly nonreal and its character is partly indeterminate, dependent upon movements of consciousness the nature and direction of which can be wholly known only at the moments in which they become real in experience (Sometimes more or less confused with 3.)