This article is a study of political pragmatism in the American and in the Russian political thought. Political epistemology articulated, in particular, public vision of US citizens participating directly in the governance of their country and putting an end to many intractable problems, including racial discrimination, poverty, and the paranoid logic of cold war policy. To understand why participatory democracy was so short-lived, the author argues that one must trace its intellectual origins to the pragmatists who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries laid the foundations for this ethos.