How Pragmatists and Purists work together to change the world

History shows that progress often depends on activists at both ends of the spectrum.

Ben Gibson

By Jonny Thomson

Activism is a spectrum with two extremes. At one end, you have the Purists. These are uncompromising, evangelical idealists who will never meet in the middle and will fight until total victory is won. At the other end, you have the Pragmatists. These are morally flexible bureaucrats who will give a little to get a little, even if it means sacrificing the bigger prize. Most activists will fall somewhere along this spectrum, but with significant clusters at either end.

If you are an outsider looking in, activism can seem a mess. Thousands of environmentalists, each demanding a different thing. Hundreds of anti-war campaigners, all chanting their own slogans. And when it looks like the left hand is trying to cut the right hand off, it’s tempting to assume the entire mission is doomed. But that tension between idealism and compromise isn’t necessarily a sign of failure. The push and pull between Purists and Pragmatists is what makes activism work.

Some people hold signs. Some write policies. Some get arrested. Some get invited to Downing Street. So, what separates the Pragmatists and Purists, and why do we need them both?

The difference between progress and perfection

What is the point of activism?

This isn’t a trolling, faux-ignorant attempt to belittle the efforts of those trying to make the world better. It’s the first question anyone needs to answer if they actually want to make the world better. On the face of it, it’s obvious: an activist is someone who wants to change how things work. They want the government to adopt a new law or to scrap an old one. They want corporations to do more of X and less of Y. They want the public to think about this thing more than that thing.

In one way, Pragmatists and Purists want the same thing. They will meet in the same townhall, are members of the same Facebook group, and might have read the same books. But the key difference between the two groups is measured in how they define success, and under that lies moral philosophy.

Pragmatists see progress in terms of raw numbers. Purists see it in terms of an absolute criterion.

A Pragmatist will often define success in terms of a scale — “make the legal system fairer,” “reduce inequality,” or “increase awareness.” These activists work to the beat of comparative adjectives: more, better, safer, happier, fairer, etc. A Pragmatist will never “win” because there will always be more to do, but they will also have greater success because it’s relatively easy to make the world even a bit safer, happier, better, etc.

It makes sense, then, that Pragmatism is often tied to a consequentialist philosophy — it can measure the good or bad of something by the numbers. If more people are better off today than yesterday, that’s a good thing. If more people are worse off, that’s a bad thing. Numbers make success. And so, if a Pragmatist is hoping to make the world 100% better, but is only offered a choice between a 10% improvement or no improvement at all, they will always take the 10%.

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Purists don’t settle for incremental gains. They define success in terms of an absolute result: all women over 18 should get the vote, slavery must be abolished, the war has to end, and so on. It’s much harder to compromise on absolute, defined criteria like this because compromise looks like a loss. Sometimes, this pure absolutism might be tied to a philosophical or religious position — for example, religious commandments rarely allow wiggle room.

These days, most readers will agree there is no “acceptable” amount of slavery or marital rape. These are always, everywhere, and forever wrong. Similarly, Purists believe there is no compromise position on certain issues. The only success criterion is this specific thing, and anything else is a moral failure.

And so, on one level, the battle lines between the Purists and Pragmatists are waged on philosophical grounds: Pragmatists see progress in terms of raw numbers or a measurable outcome ticking upward, and Purists will see it in terms of an absolute criterion.

The world of tomorrow and the people of today

The goal of most activists — whether Purists or Pragmatists — is to achieve lasting change, helping not just the people of today, but the people of tomorrow, too.

In 1984, the British philosopher Derek Parfit wrote a book called Reasons and Persons, where he laid out the basic ideas of “longtermism,” a philosophical position that says when we weigh up the good or bad of our actions, we shouldn’t consider only the billions of people alive today but also the billions and billions who’ve yet to be born.

Thinking long-term forces both Pragmatists and Purists to grapple with the unintended consequences of their approaches.

If you were an abolitionist in the 18th century and the president or prime minister said, “Okay, we’ll ban the slave trade for children if you back down,” would you take the deal? As a Pragmatist, this might seem like a win: You would be saving countless children worldwide from misery. But the move might also entrench a system that continues to treat adults as property — possibly delaying full abolition for decades. A Purist would immediately shoot down the offer. This might accelerate the abolition of slavery entirely, but until that day, children would continue to suffer from its harms.

Suddenly, the moral equation becomes very complicated. It isn’t about absolutism vs. consequentialism, but longtermism vs. presentism.

The spectrum itself wins

If Parfit is right, and we have a moral obligation to the future as much as today, then activists ought to be most concerned with changing systems, laws, and institutions to achieve their ultimate goals. And in reality, you often need both Purists and Pragmatists to enact this kind of change.

Purist William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution in 1854, calling it “a covenant with death.” His moral absolutism horrified many — but it also forced the U.S. to confront slavery’s depravity. Within 11 years, the 13th Amendment abolished it. When the Women’s Social and Political Union smashed windows in 1912 to demand equal voting rights, their militancy pushed suffragists into the mainstream. By 1918, Pragmatists had a win: Women over 30 could vote. Full equality followed a decade later. In 1961, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s jail-ins dramatized injustice so starkly that Pragmatist Martin Luther King Jr.’s negotiations no longer looked radical but reasonable.

Purists’ moral defiance draws attention that Pragmatists can use to move policy — even if it doesn’t happen as fast as the Purists want or all at once, change happens.

The Purist calls out the moral horror. The Pragmatist makes the change possible.

Today, you can see the same pattern playing out. Climate activists glue themselves to roads while policy negotiators haggle over carbon targets in Dubai. Factory farming abolitionists call for an end to animal agriculture altogether, while those pushing for animal welfare reforms work to make the system less cruel. Protesters block arms shipments as diplomats broker ceasefires. It’s easy to call one side naïve and the other cowardly, but each depends on the other: The Purist calls out the moral horror. The Pragmatist makes the change possible.

Activism is messy. There is no one-size answer that can hope to explain the complicated socio-historical factors that lead to change finally happening. In some ways, the history of activism is a classic case of survivorship bias — we look at the success stories, create a narrative, and ignore the inconvenient counter examples. We might say that change needs both Purists and Pragmatists, but can equally point to cases when both hamstrung the other.

This article is part of our Engine of Progress special issue. If you want to see the rest of the collection, click below.

For example, the “Purists” of the Weather Underground and all the radical movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s accomplished virtually nothing with their department store bombings and cop slayings. If anything, their bombings made middle America hate them and leftist movements. Likewise, in the early 20th century, Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor deliberately restricted the labor movement to skilled, largely white, male craft workers. This was framed as strategic pragmatism to keep goals narrow, avoid large-scale confrontation, and win incremental improvements. Stay respectable in the eyes of business and the state, and you will get things done. But it’s been argued that this cautious pragmatism set back the formation of broader industrial unions, fragmented worker solidarity, and enabled existing racist and sexist policies.

Progress is not a straight road but a winding, incoherent network of paths that kind of moves forward eventually. The only thing we can say is that activism involves lots of different elements, made up of different people, with different tactics. We need brave, bold, intelligent individuals and a fertile socio-economic ground in which to work. Activism is messy. And yet, in this messy arithmetic of moral courage, what emerges — slowly, unevenly — is something a bit better than it was before.

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