THE TITLE OF this essay is, of course, a gentle tease at the expense of Richard Rorty’s well-known essay “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” an essay that is itself something of a tease at the expense of the harder Left’s attack on middle-of-the-road social democrats and their concern for human rights and nonviolent change.1 I have a nonteasing purpose, however, and that is to emphasize (as, of course, Rorty himself does) that Dewey’s own conception of his social and political theory was that it expressed the self-understanding of modern society—“modern” being no more precise in its denotation than “postmodernist,” but certainly meaning at different times both the society that lived off and built on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the society that came into existence with the capitalist Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 Dewey’s beliefs about the demands of modernity provide the part of my framework that deals with modernity.
As to “nonbourgeois,” I want to emphasize in a way that many commentators on Dewey do not that he was a keenly class-conscious writer. I do not mean that he advocated the politics of class war; quite the contrary. He was, rather, gloomily conscious that the class-divided nature of capitalist societies—sometimes seeing this as a matter of owners versus workers in a more or less Marxist or Weberian style, sometimes seeing it as managers versus the managed in a way more akin to C. Wright Mills—meant that his view of the ways in which modern society opened up novel possibilities of self-expression and social advance was constantly at odds with the immediate facts. One of his many jokes against himself was the observation “I am very skeptical about things in particular but have an enormous faith in things in general.”3 In social theory, this meant that the organic unity of thought and action, efficiency and free expression, that was latent in modern society was constantly frustrated by conflicts based on misunderstanding and disorganization. What class division pointed to was not the need for a Marxian revolution but for something closer to guild socialism and a system of devolved workers’ control.4 His belief in the need for industrial democracy as a complement to political democracy provides at least one nonbourgeois element in the framework I use. I should emphasize that this is not entirely at odds with Rorty’s essay, though I think Dewey would have thought that “bourgeois” covered too great a multitude of sins to be entirely at home praising bourgeois democracy, and Rorty is far less optimistic about the possibilities of anything resembling workers’ control in the context of twenty-first-century capitalism.
Dewey’s views about the peculiar form of freedom available in the modern world make him a liberal. I say this while agreeing, and indeed emphasizing, that until quite late in the day, Dewey’s organizing concept was “democracy” rather than “liberalism”—that is, from the very beginning of his discussion of social issues, back in 1888, Dewey thought in terms of the character of a democratic community rather than in terms of the liberal repertoire of individual rights and immunities.5 When he turns to discussing liberalism in so many words, it is largely in order to argue that American liberalism must be updated, must turn away from laissez-faire, and must be redefined as “intelligent social action.”6 Nonetheless, Dewey’s conception of democracy is emphatically a conception of liberal democracy; its origins lie in the ideas of T. H. Green, whose liberal credentials have never been impugned, and its guiding ideal is the strengthening of the organic interconnection of individuals on the basis of freedom and equality. I cheerfully admit that if we define “postmodernism” in terms of the renunciation of the search for “foundations,” and “bourgeois” in terms of the educated middle-class audience for views like Dewey’s, we can, stretching a point, talk about postmodernist bourgeois liberalism—but I rather hope we shall not want to.
The mode of analysis I employ is genealogical. I do not mean this in an elaborately Nietzschean or Foucauldian sense, but literally—that is, Dewey is here treated against the intellectual background out of which he emerged, because it is easier to understand any writer by seeing where he or she comes from and what assumptions he or she has brought with him or her and has kept or abandoned along the way, and Dewey is discussed, to a degree, in the political context in which he wrote, because some element of contextual understanding is necessary to make sense of what his ideas meant in their own time. It is oddly difficult to do either of these things with any degree of persuasiveness. Assessing just how much baggage he carried with him from his Hegelian youth is difficult because he was obsessed with an issue that hardly bothers us, and yet is one that makes some difference to understanding just what he was up to. That is, his autobiographical sketch “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” gives us Dewey’s version of his intellectual progress—an escape from the Absolute. When Russell teased him, none too gently, about the residually Hegelian elements in his thinking, Dewey would angrily insist that he had indeed escaped from Absolutism and that the charge was preposterous. But Russell’s charge was not that Dewey wished to revive the Hegelian Idea or Notion; it was that Dewey shared Hegel’s belief that thought uncovered an organic unity in the world, that the world was a world replete with meaning and not just with cause-and-effect connections (which were themselves anyway to be understood as resting on the meaningfulness of experienced reality as a field of causal forces), and that the empiricist’s sharp divisions between fact and value, religion and science, art and utility, misrepresented a reality that presented itself to us as a seamless whole. Of course, Dewey was also insistent that he was an “infinite pluralist” as well and that the world was, so to speak, remaking itself as a differentiated unity. Antidualism was quite other than a form of monism. Dewey would also have objected to the suggestion that one is tempted to make: that he was an “experimental Hegelian.”7 He had briefly espoused such a position in the 1880s, arguing that it was empirical evidence in the field of psychology that took us to the understanding that the world was dependent on a Self, so he knew what he had repudiated.8 What is less easy to decide is how he understood these other “organic” commitments; but it is at least clear that there was more to Dewey’s metaphysics than the naturalism of W. V. Quine or other successors.9
Understanding the connections of his work to matters of the day is not intellectually difficult; the problem is that we have an abundance of Dewey’s writings but very little autobiographical evidence with which to illuminate their purpose. That is, a great deal of Dewey’s output from the time he moved to New York, and especially after 1914, just is commentary on current politics. This is often politics of a fairly domestic sort. For instance, he wrote against proposals to allow religious instruction in school or to reduce the “progressive” elements in education or to close down art classes and so on, all of which were topics on which Dewey could speak with the authority of the nation’s greatest educational theorist, the longtime president of a teachers union, a founder of the American Association of University Professors, and a sponsor of the American Civil Liberties Union. He also wrote on politics on the grand scale—the American entry into World War I, the Versailles Treaty, and, while he was chairman of the People’s Lobby, on the early New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt—and on much of that one may reasonably have some reservations about his credibility. What is harder to come by is nonpublic thinking on his political positions. There is an over-abundance of prepared material—articles, letters to the editor, and statements of position—but a great shortage of private statements. This makes it hard to see quite how Dewey’s political responses tie into his philosophical thinking. As we shall see in conclusion, one thing that happened to Dewey during the 1930s was that he became convinced that he ought to have paid more attention to the importance of the individual; but it is extremely hard to know quite what he meant and equally hard to know what he wished he had said differently earlier in his career.
Although the explanatory tactics here are historical—to show how Dewey employed the intellectual machinery he had constructed by about 1904 to understand the politics of the next forty years—the point of the story is not historical at all. The point I wish to make may surprise some readers, since I claim both that Dewey’s work is of great importance and that it is unsatisfactory in crucial respects. Deweyan liberalism is, in my analysis, very close to the only philosophy of liberal democratic politics that a twenty-first-century reader is likely to find credible. This is not to withdraw any of the skepticism already implied and later spelled out a little about Dewey’s contributions to the politics of the day; in particular, it is not to deny that his thoughts on the “outlawry of war” were muddled, incoherent, and laced with wishful thinking, and it is not to deny that his most serious essay on democratic politics, The Public and Its Problems, is maddeningly evasive and equally laced with wishful thinking. It is to say that Dewey provides a philosophical basis for twenty-first-century liberalism; or, if you do not like the term “basis,” that he provides a uniquely persuasive philosophical gloss on the convictions and commitments of the twenty-first-century liberal. Readers sometimes complain that Dewey’s account of twentieth-century politics is shrouded in mist. In the account of the matter offered here, the fog in the photograph sometimes reflects the wobbling hand of the photographer, but is more often a clear representation of a foggy world. Since we all know perfectly well that no philosophical theory can preempt the messy processes of politics and policy making, and indeed that modern liberalism is committed to taking the messiness seriously, we ought not to ask for a clarity that we cannot have at any price we are ready to pay.
What is Dewey’s claim on our attention? Dewey, uniquely, ties the concerns of Jefferson, Tocqueville, Mill, and writers of a Millian persuasion to a philosophy that escapes the pitfalls of both empiricism and classical Hegelian Idealism. The persuasiveness of contemporary writers such as Charles Taylor and (to a lesser degree) Jürgen Habermas owes a great deal to what they share with Dewey—in particular, to the thought that our moral and intellectual horizons are not closed by our social attachments but are, in ways that it is hard to elucidate, nonetheless bounded by communal understandings, and that a modern ethics and politics must be individualist at the same time that it must be understood as the product of a particular culture and time, outside which the very idea of the overwhelming importance of individuality would make no sense10 It is by now not much disputed that the so-called liberal–communitarian debate was nothing of the sort and that the parodic picture of liberalism offered in Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice served only one valuable purpose, that of forcing liberal political theorists to say more clearly than they had bothered to before just what the sociological and cultural assumptions of their theory were. Once we see that any liberalism must be simultaneously communitarian and individualist, we can work out more delicately in what sense it is true, as Sandel and Taylor have surely persuaded us, that persons would not have selves at all but for the ways they have been shaped by their backgrounds and up-bringing, and yet, as Dewey emphasizes, and Taylor’s Sources of the Self surely persuades us too, that persons fully attuned to the modern world must pursue the project of individual authenticity and social progress that we call liberalism.11
From a purely philosophical perspective, the most interesting years of Dewey’s life came between about 1882 and 1899, when he moved gradually through and out of neo-Hegelianism and into the naturalism that was his trademark. Here, there is no room to do more than sketch those parts of this progress that bear on the present topic. But one extraordinary feature of his career is how soon he seized upon the field that became his life’s work. It needs to be stressed here not for biographical reasons but as contextual evidence for the claim of this essay that Dewey was primarily a philosopher, not a political commentator propping up his political enthusiasms with philosophy. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879 at the age of twenty; he was at something of a loose end until he took up a job teaching in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in a high school run by a cousin. But while he was there, he wrote and sent off to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy the essay “The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism,” which he hoped would decide whether he should pursue a career in philosophy. The piece—at this distance in time, it is almost unreadable—was well received by the editor, W. T. Harris, and Dewey’s career was set.12 Dewey’s first philosophical allegiances were to an intuitionism that was commonplace in the late nineteenth-century United States and was what he had been taught by H.A.P. Torrey at the University of Vermont; it was (oddly, perhaps, but certainly beneficially for Dewey) not shared by W. T. Harris, nor by G. S. Morris, who taught him at Johns Hopkins, both of whom were Hegelians rather than followers of James McCosh, the president of Princeton University, or Sir William Hamilton. Dewey’s attachment to intuitionism dissolved very rapidly. By the time he came to write an article on what he called “Intuitionalism” for an encyclopedia of philosophy during the 1890s, he had come to believe that intuitionism was little more than Christian platitudes propped up by wishful thinking. It was not so much philosophy as the assurance that anything we minded about enough had an objective correlate in the real world—a quick way to God, freedom, and immortality. But this was reason conscripted into the service of orthodoxy, unrespectable in motive and argument alike. Dewey’s education did him more good than one might have expected it to, however. The piety and conservatism of teachers like Torrey and the university’s president, Matthew Buckham, ran off him like water off a duck’s back. Indeed, his education had the unintended effect of making him take empiricism and naturalism seriously because it left him a great deal of time to read the British periodical journals to which the University of Vermont subscribed. There he came across John Morley, the Stephens (Leslie and James Fitzjames), H. S. Maine, Henry Fawcett, Henry Sidgwick, and an intellectual life not circumscribed by the conventions of Congregationalist New England.
It seems to have been these writers, rather than his philosophy teachers, who sparked his interest in philosophy; it was certainly they who persuaded him that the political options were wider than his teachers supposed. President Buckham was a good citizen but one who believed that all that was needed for social reform was already embodied in the Christian Gospels and that men needed no more than a change of heart to induce them to accept those Gospels as a guide. Radicalism seems to have alarmed him and puzzled him in more or less equal measure. Dewey liked Torrey and continued to study German and German philosophy with him after he graduated; but his verdict on Torrey, too, was that he had hidden his light under a bushel. His constitutional timidity stopped him from pressing arguments to their conclusions—and Dewey cited the telling anecdote of Torrey remarking that, philosophically speaking, pantheism was the only plausible doctrine and was incredible only in the light of revelation.
For Dewey’s final philosophical stance, it was not a course in philosophy that mattered most at all. Dewey seems to have acquired the belief that naturalism and organicism were consistent with each other by reading Thomas Huxley’s Physiology in his junior year. Fifty years later, in the autobiographical sketch “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” it was Huxley’s Physiology that he said was the crucial model for successful understanding. He was never tempted by atomistic forms of empiricism; he never subscribed to ethical individualism in the social-contractarian sense, nor to the hedonist individualism that underlay Benthamite utilitarianism, but he was always ready to be a naturalist.
The path led through T. H. Green and Hegel. The importance of Green is almost impossible to overstate—even though Dewey himself always had reservations about Green that one imagines he must in part have imbibed from G. S. Morris. Morris’s grasp of the history of German philosophy was sufficient for him to teach Dewey that Green was a Fichtian rather than a Hegelian. For all that, Deweyan conceptions of the good of the individual, and Dewey’s “democratic” allegiances all his life, had a strongly Greenian flavor. Under the influence of Green, he suggested some remarkable intellectual possibilities. The most astonishing and most dazzling of these was his vision of the eventual transformation of Christianity into democracy:
It is in democracy, the community of ideas and interest through community of action, that the incarnation of God in man (man, that is to say, as an organ of universal truth) becomes a living, present thing, having its ordinary and natural sense. This truth is brought down to life, its segregation removed; it is made a common truth enacted in all departments of action, not in one isolated sphere called religious.13
The thought was that the church would eventually cease to exist as a separate institution—a typically Deweyan thought—and would realize itself by dissolving back into the wider community. Eighty years later, a similar fascination with the idea of the Aufhebung (transcending) of state and civil society in the communist utopia was something of a commonplace among readers who had rediscovered the humanistic Young Marx, but in Dewey’s oeuvre, the thought stands out because it comes with no account of its pedigree. Its flavor is not unlike that of much else of Dewey’s thinking; for instance, in his account of the way the school is to be an aspect of the community’s transmission of its own self-understanding rather than a separate institution. But for someone from a Congregationalist background, it was a bold move to suggest, even in passing, that the church should wither away when the Christian message came to fruition in the lives of a democratic people.
The specific attention to Christianity here, however, points to another important feature of Dewey’s work. He always insisted on the religious quality of the democratic faith; however sociological his understanding of philosophy, he never doubted that democracy rested on “faith in the common man” and that that faith was a religious faith. The sense in which it was to be at once religious, philosophical, naturalistic, and scientific is one that takes some elucidation—but unless one accepts that that is what Dewey offered, one underestimates his reach. Dewey soon concluded that Green was an inadequate philosophical guide; he suffered from the Kantian tendency to divide the empirical selves that we fully were from the universal self that we aspire to be but can never wholly become. Dewey’s antidualism repudiated even such a vestigial duality and insisted that we were already one with the universal and that we could rest securely in the sense that the world was not inimical to human aspiration. This was transformed into a reliance on our communal nature by the time he wrote Human Nature and Conduct, but the sentiment is much the same:
With responsibility for the intelligent determination of particular acts may go a joyful emancipation from the burden of responsibility for the whole which sustains them, giving them their final outcome and quality. There is a conceit fostered by perversion of religion which assimilates the universe to our personal desires; but there is also a conceit of carrying the load of the universe from which religion liberates us. Within the flickering inconsequential acts of separate selves dwells a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies them. In its presence we put off mortality and live in the universal. The life of the community in which we live and have our being is the fit symbol of this relationship.14 [Hence his distaste for the “lachrymose” quality of Russell’s Free Man’s Worship.]
Although Dewey’s autobiographical essay “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” gives a general sketch of the transformation, it is more difficult to see on the ground. His famous essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” however, deserves the place it has in all accounts of Dewey.15 He wanted to repudiate both the idea—very prominent in his earlier Psychology—that the study of any empirical phenomena led inexorably to the conclusion that the world was mind, and his earlier belief that the only alternative to that metaphysical idealism was atomistic empiricism. But even when Dewey had lost faith in his argument that the world was essentially a Self, the thought that we could understand an organism by building up a system of stimulus-response connections remained incredible. The essay on the reflex arc argued, as Dewey always argued thereafter, that stimulus-response connections made sense only because they were embedded in an organism whose whole constitution was oriented to something like self-maintenance in a problematic environment.
“Experimentalism” was a label Dewey preferred to “instrumentalism,” largely because he was less willing than William James to scandalize the believers in truth; “instrumentalism” suggests that truth is what it is good to believe, while “experimentalism” suggests only that a major part of all thinking is forming plans or projects for dealing with the world. Dewey’s critics were never satisfied that he had given an answer to their questions about the relationship between our thoughts and the world to which those thoughts referred. They were clear that he did not believe in truth as correspondence to fact; but did he think that beliefs were true only to the extent that the world was as we believed it to be? Dewey’s refusal to divide experience into subjective sensation and belief on the one side and objective fact of the matter on the other thoroughly irritated them. All the same Dewey insisted that all beliefs needed to be tested in experience, and that experience was not in any sense merely subjective. It was, so to speak, the experienced world. One has to be delicate here; although he was less scandalous than James, Dewey was less an “objectivist” than C. S. Peirce. While he was helped to stabilize his own ideas on “warranted assertability” by Peirce’s 1878 paper “The Fixation of Belief,” he set no store by the thought that there would be a final convergence on beliefs that, by virtue of that “end of the day” convergence, one would know to represent “objective” reality. So far as he was concerned, the progress of human understanding would be indefinite and perhaps infinite. Dewey was not hostile to the notion that truths were established, and he certainly was hostile to wishful thinking. Rather, we should take seriously the fact that the search for truth was problem driven and (perhaps most crucially) take seriously the injunction to turn from “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men” and look for fruitful kinds of cultural criticism rather than hope that a new philosophical wrinkle would resolve the dilemmas that had held up our predecessors.
What this means for Dewey as liberal and democrat is easy to list, but not easy to articulate as the connected philosophical argument he meant it to be. Dewey was best known—after 1899 and the publication of The School and Society—as the great theorist of the school as an institution central to a democratic society.16 A characteristic production, it suggests a good many of the reasons why he was simultaneously regarded with near veneration by the mildly progressive and assailed with some fierceness by both the conservative and the more wildly radical. Much of what he thought about education might appeal to any reader, philosophically inclined or the reverse: for example, the claim that the school must itself be a community in which children learned to respect the rights of others while they learned to claim their own, his fastidiousness about balancing leadership from the instructor and intelligent acceptance of that leadership by the children, and his insistence that education had to become livelier and more interesting, less a matter of rote and more a matter of lived experience. Both friends and enemies, in fact, could seize upon such statements; those who think Dewey conceded too much to vocational education in the sense of job training will read those concessions into his defense of the practical, while those who think he conceded too little will read impracticality into his insistence that the meaning of the practical must be elicited by reflection—when what the enthusiasts for vocational training usually wished the schools to produce was quick and obedient workmen. According to taste, one could side with those who thought he conceded too much or too little to rote learning, to the authority of the teacher, and to almost any feature of applied pedagogy one cares to name. It is built into the “philosophy of the via media” that it should be vulnerable to those who want the brisker and simpler extremes.17
The deeper interest of Dewey’s educational views, at any rate for us, lies in the philosophical doctrines that all this embodied. In 1894, he sketched, in an amazing twenty-page letter, a syllabus for the Laboratory School that worked through practical and theoretical tasks and linked the tasks to the changing seasons, in a sort of Hegelian spiral; this unity of theory and practice, and the ascent to deeper understandings through seeing the practical implications of theory and the theoretical questions raised by practice, were supposed to carry the child through the various stages of school and beyond. It embodied one of his many antidualisms—in this case, the claim that there is no ultimate division between theory and practice—and was an image of his later understanding of science: that science properly was not the piling up of mathematical abstractions but the achievement of an increasingly organic understanding of the meaning of events. Whether six-year-olds really understood the full interest of the fact that metal rusting and food cooking are examples of the same oxidization process, one might wonder, but the thought is a fertile one. In practice, in the Laboratory School, Dewey’s teachers taught in what a British observer fifty years later might have thought was an enlightened but not an astonishing fashion. Children would spend their first morning at school making boxes for their pens and pencils, and then go on to consider the geometry of what they had created; the sandbox would provide both recreation and an opportunity to think about three-dimensional geometry, the different properties of different materials, and so on. None of this was to be hurried; it is noticeable that Dewey balances his insistence that play must be shaped and directed by an adult understanding of where the child is heading with such statements as this:
The first [stage] extends from the age of four to eight or eight and a half years. In this period the connection with the home and neighbourhood life is, of course, especially intimate. The children are largely occupied with direct social and outgoing modes of action, with doing and telling. There is relatively little attempt made at intellectual formulation, conscious reflection, or command of technical methods . . . Hence in the second period (from eight to ten) emphasis is put upon securing ability to read, write, handle number etc., not in themselves, but as necessary helps and adjuncts in relation to the more direct modes of experience.18
Or, to put it somewhat uncharitably, a long time was spent on socialization before the three Rs were inflicted on the kids.
In fact, as everyone noticed, Dewey wrote next to nothing thereafter about the details of curriculum issues or pedagogical tactics and strategy. As I have said, pedagogy is subordinate to social theory, and social theory is subordinate to what one might call the Lebensphilosophie (“philosophy of life”) of the modern world. This is not a complaint; Dewey was a philosopher, not a professor of pedagogy—except during the ten years at the University of Chicago when he was indeed professor of pedagogy as well as the head of the Department of Philosophy. The role of the philosopher was not so much to spell out ways in which students might be taught more or more enjoyably as to elucidate the place of education in the experience of the community. The opening paragraph of School and Society is an obvious illustration; in his first breath, Dewey insists on discussing education as a community concern, not an individual one: the community must treat all its children as devoted parents treat their individual children, and a society in which their education turns on a competitive struggle between parents seeking the best for their children one by one is a society in disarray. What he then goes on to discuss is not the mysterious quality that makes each child both typical and a unique individual—something to which Russell, for instance, comes closer—but the social background that sets the problems of modern education, such as urbanization, industrialization, the factory, the city, and the slum.19
Democracy and Education, published in 1916, was the culmination of such thinking. That book, he later said, “was for many years that in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most fully expounded,” though he went on to observe that his philosophical critics had taken no notice.20 It was certainly true that the conception of democracy to which the discussion of education was attached was philosophical rather than political; Dewey made almost no reference to institutions such as the vote, nor to such central liberal institutions as accessible law courts and an uncorrupt police and judiciary. The book makes many references to two basic liberal values—freedom and equality—and Dewey took it for granted, as he always had, that all arrangements in a democratic society should foster freedom and equality and that all its benefits and opportunities should be available to members of the society on a free and equal basis. Nonetheless, what made democracy democracy was, he said, “organic communication.” Hilary Putnam has lately written admiringly of Dewey’s “epistemological” justification of democracy; but what is striking is not so much that Dewey thinks of democracy as “organized intelligence,” which he certainly does, as that he defines democracy in communicative terms. Democracy is less a political concept in this account than a social one, and its everyday descriptive meaning has been transmuted into something altogether richer; a democratic society is (though this is a thoroughly un-Deweyan thought) one in which the essence of sociability is actualized. A democratic society is one in which we can reveal ourselves to one another more deeply and more comprehensively than ever and, therefore, come to understand ourselves adequately in the process. There is no such thing as an adequate but solipsistic self-understanding; all self-understanding implies an actual or potential interlocutor, and only a thorough training in explaining oneself to others will provide the basis for any sort of skill in explaining oneself to oneself.21 For any of this to happen, we have to be educated in such a way that we are self-aware and adept at communicating with our fellows; and for that to happen, we have to share an education with them. Here was the essence of Dewey’s emphasis on making the school continuous with the community. The common school was thus, to put it in the simplest way, the basis of a democratic morality; but that slightly pious way of putting it is un-Deweyan, because by this time the usual notion of morality had also suffered a sea-change.
Readers of Human Nature and Conduct will remember that an ethics of rules and prohibitions, sanctions and requirements, was not what Dewey had in mind at all. Dewey’s ethical pragmatism had, by the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, become a democratic Aristotelianism, if that is not too sharp a contradiction in terms. Dewey starts from a double departure from what Bernard Williams has abused as “the institution called morality.”22 For him, the crucial point was that ethics was not primarily an individual matter; since that is a misleading formulation, one might better say that he thought that beginning with an image of ethical inquiry as a matter of the single individual searching for principles to guide his conduct, or scrutinizing his conscience for its judgments on his behavior, was to start in the wrong place. Ethics begins and largely ends in social practice and socialized habit. In other ways, this was not an anti-individualist argument. It is obvious enough that ethical decisions are made by individuals; they draw upon a common stock of solid judgment about what a satisfactory life in a satisfactory community is like, what behavior it requires, which questions are settled, and which open, but it is individuals who draw upon these resources when they engage in decision making. So the second innovation was to play down the separateness and distinctiveness of moral requirements, to remind us that ethics is a form of practical reasoning and that all forms of practical reasoning have much in common; they are not divided by nature into prudential, ethical, and aesthetic forms. (Indeed, though this is by the way, the division of theoretical and practical reason is by no means natural.) They all have a strong means-ends quality, and their goal is always—in formal terms—the satisfactory resolution of a problematic relationship between the organism and the environment. Ethics, like most interesting aspects of experience, is a form of problem solving. It is a general axiom of Dewey’s account of experience and inquiry that without a problem, the organism would not think at all and would, in Dewey’s analysis, scarcely have anything one could call an experience of the outside world. This is not to say that the problem is always what the layman would call a practical one; Dewey’s analysis of the painting of Cézanne and Matisse is an analysis of problem solving, but the goal is a form of experience that he calls “consummatory,” and the problem thus to enhance that experience rather than attain a further goal.23
Dewey’s contribution to moral theory is, up to a point, to slide it toward the use of the concept of healthy functioning as its main organizing notion and away from treating either adherence to principle or the pursuit of utilitarian goals as such a notion.24 Not to belabor the point, a radical and secular reinterpretation of Green might take one a long way toward such a position. A democratic society, in this view, is a healthy society; surprisingly, in view of Dewey and Russell’s quarrelsome relations, the similarities with the views of Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction are striking, though I know of no direct evidence that Dewey read the Principles, and I am sure that he would have found too much of the lachrymose tone of A Free Man’s Worship in the text. But the emphasis on education, the secular religiosity, and the organic account of successful psychological functioning are strikingly alike.
If this picture is generally accurate, we can see why Dewey was, by 1914, an unusually persuasive philosophical voice. He was optimistic about the potential of society and fiercely critical about the distance between its potential and its actuality. The capacity to be optimistic in general and discontented in particular is one that Americans have always valued very highly. Dewey had it in the most developed possible form. He had a Ruskinian sense of the importance of work in human life that fit into the American self-image readily enough, but with the radical suggestion that work as actually engaged in in the factory or on the stock exchange frustrated the real purpose of work in the moral life and created ugliness rather than beauty. It was not surprising that he voted for Eugene Debs in 1912 but for Woodrow Wilson in 1916: an ideal socialism that closed the gap between utilitarian production and artistic creation was obviously a goal to pursue, but not to the neglect of the here and now. The ideal school was a long way off, but he could easily believe his daughter and Randolph Bourne when they told him “that the ‘Gary Plan’ put into operation by William A. Wirt in Gary, Indiana, was proof that . . . Dewey’s philosophy could be put into practice on a large scale in the public schools.”25 And so it went, more or less across the board. The outbreak of World War I was the beginning of disillusionment.
The war severely damaged Dewey’s poise. It is easy to overlook this, since he published Democracy and Education in the middle of the war, but before the entry of the United States, and ended the war by writing Reconstruction in Philosophy and Human Nature and Conduct with apparently undiminished confidence. But he was overtaken by events in the course of the war. He must, by war’s end, have had grave doubts about his own response to Bourne’s attacks on his views; and his reactions to Versailles and the rise of irrationalist politics in the twenties and thirties were inept. His defense of the “outlawry of war” movement was a pure case of willing the end and refusing to will the means, while The Public and Its Problems was infinitely less persuasive a defense of democracy than Walter Lippmann’s two assaults, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, had been criticisms.
Dewey’s views, it is easy to say in hindsight, were ill adapted to the strains of war, a point that Bourne made with all the ferocity of disappointed discipleship. The vision of society in its “normal” state as a problem-solving organism did not assert, but nonetheless suggested, an evolutionary process in which ordinary social habit would suffice for everyday activities until some shock or crisis jolted us into rethinking our habitual behaviors. But this suggested that society was a unity within which the kinds of strains that were revealed by the “Americanization” programs of the war were invisible; Dewey wanted assimilation but not a “melting pot”; immigration presented the United States with problems of assimilation that might be difficult, but in the long run gave the nation its unique vitality. With the war, it became less easy to believe that American society, jolted out of its everyday existence, would respond imaginatively and productively to new demands. One can see Dewey getting stuck when responding to such militaristic proposals as conscripting all male school students as military cadets; he was, one imagines, simply hostile to it, but in order to oppose it, he largely had to stick to the issue of localism versus nationalism and object to its antifederal aspects. On the other hand, he remained more optimistic than not, and his “What Are We Fighting For?” of 1918 was characteristically upbeat in suggesting that for all the risk of postwar chaos and of a world divided into warring imperialist blocs, the message of the war was the priority of organization over property, the need to employ every able-bodied person when emergency arose, and the ability of nations to cooperate across national divides. If these lessons were incorporated in the peace, there would be a world “made safe for democracy and one in which democracy was firmly anchored.” At this stage, early in 1918, he was optimistic about the possibilities of something like the League of Nations, too; indeed, he was sure that only under such a league would the world become safe for democracy.26
Nor was the war calculated to show pragmatism at its best, at any rate for anyone as intrinsically pacific as Dewey. For, in a situation in which it seemed obvious that American self-interest narrowly construed lay in keeping out of the European conflict, espousing absolute neutrality, and offering good offices as a mediator while the conflict was on and economic aid in reconstruction when it was over, Dewey would swallow neither the idea of an American alliance with the “antimilitarist” powers—czarist Russia looking particularly implausible as a specimen of that class, and imperialist France and Britain looking hardly more persuasive—nor the sort of realism that would have enjoined giving the cold shoulder to Britain. Dewey was reduced to arguing that the war demanded action, but it appeared to be action in general rather than action to achieve some particular end. Bourne was later to profess tremendous shock and outrage at Dewey’s eventual espousal of the U.S. entry into the war on the Allied side, but it was not a surprising result. Once one was committed to the thought that a “cold neutrality” was intolerable, and that the United States had to somehow be active but not active militarily, one was a long way down the slippery slope. For as the war went on, it became harder and harder to see what activity was possible that would not eventually drag the country into the war. But it was not an attractive result, even though Dewey said, once it had happened, that he hoped that the result of engagement would be to speed up social development in the United States.
A good deal of Dewey’s commentary while the war was on was unpersuasive, though this aspect of it was not, and in fact became commonplace about World War II. But his reactions to the illiberal, militaristic, chauvinistic, and antisocialist doings of the government, universities, mobs, and the press were deeply depressing. His first thought was that American illiberalism was “puppyish”; the country was not used to fighting major wars (itself an odd thought from someone whose father had served in the Union army), and so people got boisterously aggressive when pacifists protested.27 He nearly lost the twenty-year friendship of Jane Addams by making silly remarks about the pacifists’ lack of moral fiber, and did not much appease her by insisting that she did not lack moral fiber but most of her fellow pacifists did.28 The activities of the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, who sacked dissident faculty without the least pretence of going through the procedures established for such purposes, woke him up to a degree, but whereas Charles Beard resigned from the university, Dewey limited himself to resigning from the disciplinary committee that had been slighted by his president. Late in the day, he saw that the effect of the war on American intellectual life really was disastrous, and said so boldly enough. Still, he seems even then not to have protested against such monstrous actions as the ten-year sentence imposed on Eugene Debs, nor thought that Wilson’s refusal to commute it was as vindictive as it obviously was.
Once disillusioned, he swung to extremes. He opposed the Versailles Treaty on entirely decent and rational grounds, but also opposed American membership in the League of Nations and became a propagandist for the “outlawry of war” movement launched by Salmon Levinson. This proposed to make war an international crime, but as all its critics observed, it lacked any means to enforce the world’s judgment of the criminal’s misdeeds. Lippmann and others kept urging that only a system of collective security would be effective in repressing warmongering, but Dewey’s response was that it was “contradictory” to employ war to put down war, an argument that, applied to domestic politics, would suggest that it was contradictory to give police the means forcibly to restrain muggers and murderers. His isolationism remained unwavering until Pearl Harbor; as late as 1940, he wrote an essay entitled “Whatever Happens, This Time Keep Out,” which argued, rather as Russell’s Which Way to Peace? had done, that the democracies would only lose their own civil liberties by embroiling themselves in war. Dewey had more than a touch of the traditional American contempt for the politics of the European states; World War I was an imperialist squabble that had lured America into what was falsely billed as a war for democracy, and his was very much a case of once bitten, twice shy. Once the war was on, he wrote nothing on its conduct or on the postwar settlement; interestingly enough, his most active contribution was to try to disillusion his countrymen about the Soviet Union: alliance with it might be needed to win the war, but this was a far cry from requiring us to think that Stalin was anything other than a murderous tyrant and the Soviet Union anything other than a slave society. That, on the whole, seems well judged, but it cannot be said that international relations were Dewey’s strong suit.
Nonetheless, Dewey’s ideas about the demands of a modernized liberalism were as rational as anyone’s could be. He swallowed too much of a too-simple class analysis and a too-simple materialism, and was thus ready to blame an ill-defined capitalist culture for just about everything he disliked, but he was steadily anti-Marxist, thinking that neither revolution nor violence was an effective means for the ends radicals had in mind. In this, he was much like Russell once more, as he says in his contribution to “Why I am Not a Communist.” Unlike Russell, he had solid philosophical reasons for holding that view; because he refused to draw a sharp distinction between means and ends, it was easier for him than for Russell to insist that evil means corrupted the ends they were supposed to serve. The fundamental thought of most of his 1930s writing was that liberalism needed to be modernized. There were new threats to liberty, and therefore there were needed new forms of organization to overcome these threats. This is the argument of both Individualism Old and New and Liberalism and Social Action. It is often rather thin, but it is never silly nor hysterical. Nor is it vulnerable to charges of wishful thinking. The worst that one might have claimed a quarter century ago was that all of Dewey’s opponents had died and that his work was therefore rather unsurprising. He had spent his energy attacking Marxist revolutionaries to his left and laissez-faire conservatives to his right, and in 1975, say, one might have thought both of them sufficiently discredited by events. After the Reagan counterrevolution, one might reasonably think differently. Even had there not been a Reagan counterrevolution, there is still some vitality in Dewey’s implicit criticism even of the non-laissez-faire liberalism of theorists like John Rawls. Dewey complained that Lippmann, himself a critic of laissez-faire, failed to see what new liberalism demanded; that is, Lippmann’s conception of freedom was too narrowly political. It did not look for freedom in the workplace as well as the polling booth. This is a charge that one might launch against modern non-laissez-faire liberals who are rightly impressed by the difficulties of squaring industrial democracy and civil liberties but who are too quick to renounce the former.
His view of politics was even then frequently inept; defending Dewey against the charge that he underestimated the novelty and effectiveness of the New Deal is a thankless task. It can be done: there is something to be said for the thought that Roosevelt’s unprincipled willingness to try anything that would dig the United States out of the slump was not an example of Deweyan experimentalism but simply thrashing about. But to hold this view in the way Dewey did involved much more than pointing to a methodological crux. Dewey, for instance, believed as firmly as anyone that capitalism was simply doomed; nor was this the belief that capitalism defined just in simple nineteenth-century laissez-faire terms was doomed; rather, it was the belief that the capitalism of large, modern, government-assisted and government-regulated corporations was also doomed. Whether one ascribes the survival of this economic form to Roosevelt, Keynes, or the military buildup to World War II and the subsequent Cold War, its survival is hard to dispute. Against this sort of disproof by history, philosophical arguments must look thin.
All of this is without regard to his actual political good works. Here we may think the People’s Lobby not particularly impressive, Westbrook notwithstanding, and Dewey’s persistent hope for a third-party breakaway led by people like the Republican senator George Norris simply misguided. And one might wonder how to evaluate the adventures into which Sidney Hook led him; the Trotsky trial in Mexico City was a heroic adventure, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom a good idea in the late thirties, whatever it turned into after the war. But, Dewey’s constant defense of liberalism in education was always admirable, and even if a great deal of what he wrote in the thirties and forties is of more or less antiquarian interest, one never feels embarrassed on his behalf.
In the end, the point we must cling to is that Dewey was a philosopher rather than a political activist; Dewey’s philosophy is in all sorts of ways practically minded, and it is in some ways antiphilosophical; that is, it largely eschews what Dewey thought of as metaphysical inquiries, and it never allows the traditional formulation of philosophical issues to dictate present analysis. His claim that philosophy was a form of cultural criticism—in fact, the criticism of criticisms—conveys a sense of what he was after. Nonetheless, the obvious contemporary figures with whom he is to be compared would be Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor.
Dewey’s conception of the demands of modernity is strikingly like Taylor’s discussion of the ethics of authenticity: there is a form of individualism in ethics that is simply inescapable, but it is inescapable because we learn it in a particular sort of society, not because one could not imagine a different world, nor because it reflects a deep metaphysical loneliness or alienation from our fellow creatures.
Toward the end of his life, Dewey said that he wished he had emphasized the role of individuals in social and political life more than he had done; he felt that he had understated the role of individuals in innovating, and underestimated their role in reforming social and intellectual practices of whatever sort. One can hardly quarrel with his own assessment of his ideas, but it is not clear that he had very much for which to apologize. His argument had never been that reason works behind the backs of individuals, and for that kind of Hegelian teleology, he had no taste at all. It had always been that individual projects embody social resources; the individual must either be sheerly unintelligible to himself and to others or must appeal to a stock of concepts and a view of the evidence that he shares with others in his society. The modern project puts upon individuals the burden of making choices about the use of those resources that former societies may not have done, and certainly offers fewer transcendental comforts than the moral projects of earlier ages. But this is not to say that the society supplies the modern project with no resources; the point of an essentially comforting philosophy like Dewey’s is to say what those are.