Il pragmatismo americano tra darwinismo e democrazia della crisi

In order to analyze the relationship between evolutionism and democracy, this article starts retrieving Koselleck’s reconstruction of the Western concept of crisis. From this standpoint, the processual, evolutionist model of crisis is the one which seems to fit best with the North-American post-civil war idea of politics. Following the twofold reception of evolutionism in the USA, it is outlined to what extent the Spencerian teleological idea of evolution is adapted by John Fiske’s historiographical works, while the Darwinian concept of fortuitousness is on the background of Chauncey Wright, William James and Charles Peirce’s philosophical reflections. In particular, American Pragmatism seems in many ways to hybrid the Darwinian idea of casual variation with the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics. John Dewey’s concept of democracy is a possible political synthesis of the two.