The Pragmatists is an early play by Polish polymath Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), an insane avant-garde genius who made his mark in the fields of painting, philosophy, theatre, and drug use. The play is one of his early attempts to bring to life his theory of Pure Form, which in highly reduced forms more or less posited a type of play in which the internal reality of the action is submissive to the play's formal elements: color, sound, language, gesture, etc. As such it is a more highly distilled vision of his ideas than his later plays, which made deeper nods to conventional narrative and staging.

Essentially, The Pragmatists is about an existential conflict between two former friends: the weak, passive recluse Plasfodor Mimecker and the confident, bombastic Minister of Poisons Graf Franz von Telek. They use the women surrounding them as weapons in their struggle: Plasfodor's mute wife Mammalia, his androgynous maid Masculette, and a mysterious Chinese Mummy in the employ of von Telek. However, these women, no mere objects, control the action just as much as the play's ostensible protagonists, and life is made difficult for everyone involved.