IN THIS ESSAY, I discuss the connection between Dewey’s educational ideals, his philosophy more broadly, and his account of American identity. I contrast Dewey’s ideas with those of some other pluralist writers of the period of World War I, not to say a great deal about these other writers, but to render Dewey’s ideas more distinctive in their American political context. I should draw attention to a contrast implicit in what follows, but one I cannot here spell out in the detail it deserves. The contrast is between Dewey’s conception of identity and that of German philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s. The contrast is interesting inasmuch as it is sometimes said that Dewey and Heidegger held similarly nonfoundationalist views of philosophy, held similarly skeptical views about traditional metaphysics, and in a sense agreed that philosophy had become the criticism of culture. The interest of the comparison, however, is that they were wholly at odds about what followed from this.
Just as Heidegger regarded Germans as a peculiarly philosophical people with a cultural mission to twentieth-century humanity, so Dewey, one might say, regarded Americans as the bearers of a special philosophical revelation; but the revelation was the antithesis of Heidegger’s, for it was the revelation that there was no deep truth about the world or man’s relations to Being. It was the success of Americans in constructing an identity and a world in which they could be at home that Dewey’s pragmatism celebrated. Philosophically, this was what one might not implausibly describe as a “technological” view of our psychic and political situation and, therefore, the polar opposite of Heidegger’s view of what philosophy taught about the mission of the German people and German culture.
The contrast could be elaborated at length. Whereas Heidegger and his followers detested modern science and its technological fruits, Dewey celebrated modern science and looked for a humane, nonexploitative form of social technology to build a better world. Whereas they thought of mankind as “thrown” into the quotidian world, forgetful of Being, Dewey thought of mankind as the builders of their own being, certainly looking for satisfactions deeper and more lasting than those that the utilitarians had spoken of, but insisting that here or nowhere is where we must build our new Jerusalem. Heidegger moved between two dramatically different views of politics: first hoping that a führer in politics might realize the vision of the philosophical führer that he aspired to be, and then wholly abandoning the political realm in favor of a quietist attachment to poetry and art. Dewey never deviated even momentarily from the view that liberal democracy was the only tolerable political creed in the modern world. He never thought that philosophers should turn their backs on politics. He never believed that they could do so, since philosophy inescapably reflected the political conditions of its creation. Yet this did not mean that the philosopher was more than a good citizen among other good citizens. In particular, he resisted any idea that we should look for a philosopher king and hand him absolute authority when we had found him.
For the purposes of this essay, however, the central contrast is ideological rather than personal. It is the contrast between a view of personal, social, and political identity that is forward looking, pluralist, this-worldly, and, in a broad sense, “constructivist” on the one side, and a view that is backward looking, unitary, otherworldly, and, in a broad sense, essentialist on the other. The German attachment to a conception of themselves as a “primordial” people, like the Greeks of the classical age but quite unlike the mongrelized English or French, was the sort of account of identity that Dewey deplored. But this is very far from being a contrast between Americans’ and Germans’ views of themselves; it is no part of this essay’s case that Dewey embodied the American vision and Heidegger the German vision. In many ways, Dewey’s views were always a minority taste in the United States. The contrast lies more importantly—more importantly for someone whose interests lie where Dewey’s lay in American politics—between different understandings of American identity. Having set out these accounts of American identity, I shall end somewhat paradoxically, for I shall end by suggesting that Dewey showed that we might do better to stop thinking about identity altogether, that he offered a way for Americans to be more secure in their identity by not taking the concept of identity seriously.
Pragmatism is often said to be peculiarly American; this is usually said by way of abuse, and has often been a complaint based on the vulgar idea that pragmatism is the philosophy of utilitarianism and big business—this was the charge leveled by Bertrand Russell and later by Julien Benda, for instance. It was much resented by Dewey, and quite properly, for he was an unrelenting critic of American capitalism; and even in his mild, prepragmatist, Idealist young manhood, he had insisted that the achievement of political democracy was both a nonstarter and a morally inadequate goal unless it was accompanied by a “democracy of wealth.” Marxists denounced pragmatism for much the same reasons and induced the same irritated reaction in Dewey. It is, even on its face, a slightly mad complaint to make against Dewey. It would be almost equally absurd as a complaint against C. S. Peirce and William James, however. Peirce was anything but an efficient manager of his own and others’ affairs, while James denounced the cult of bigness and complained memorably about the “bitch-goddess success.” My reading of pragmatism characterizes it as American only in the sense that it is a distinctively late or post-Hegelianism originating in the United States; but the affinities of pragmatist social theory with the ideas of L.T. Hobhouse, Émile Durkheim, and, more recently, Jürgen Habermas are not difficult to spot. I have argued elsewhere, and I shall argue here, that pragmatism is “modern” and “North Atlantic” rather than uniquely “American.” Certainly, Dewey drew conclusions about the peculiar fate of twentieth-century Americans from these more universal premises, and he was a devout, unreflective believer in American exceptionalism. Nonetheless, his intellectual focus was on modernity rather than on “being American.”
Not all objectors to pragmatism have thought that its objectionable features reflected the essence of American culture. In the 1910s and 1920s, an American version of Russell’s complaint was leveled against Dewey, but this complaint was that Dewey’s pragmatism accepted the bad, capitalist, conformist surface of American culture and failed to do justice to its livelier and more oppositional depths. Lewis Mumford and Waldo Frank, in much the same frame of mind in which Randolph Bourne had assailed Dewey’s support of the U.S. entry into World War I, denounced what Mumford called “the pragmatic acquiescence,” a phrase that caught their common conviction that pragmatism was a philosophy of means rather than ends and that it took an unexamined conception of its ends, such as they were, from the surface of American capitalist culture.
The thought of these cultural critics was that pragmatism was disabled by its relentless emphasis on practice and “adjustment” from giving an adequately critical account of its relationship to the surrounding culture. In that view, pragmatism’s overemphasis on the “practical” left pragmatists unable to stand back from their times in order to criticize them as savagely as they demanded. This is a sharper and more interesting criticism than the misdirected attack on pragmatism as an ideological prop to capitalism. These complaints and rebuttals raise a doctrinally interesting question that the work of Hegel many years before Dewey, and the work of our own contemporaries like Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor today, also raises: how far can we be as emphatic as the pragmatists were, and as Walzer and Taylor today are, about the social debts of social critics—about what Hegel posed as the demand that we find the rose in the cross of the present—while still stressing their role as critics? In what sense is it true that we must find our ideals in our existing social setting?
There are thus three themes in this essay. The first is the background of Dewey’s discussion of “Americanization” and American identity, which I sketch briefly by rehearsing some of the anxieties of Randolph Bourne, Herbert Croly, and Horace Kallen, against which Dewey’s views become clearer and more intelligible. I suggest here that Dewey offers a philosophical rather than a simply sociological account of national identity in a culturally pluralist society and try to say to what that amounts. My second aim is then to raise some questions about how far Dewey’s pragmatism, with its emphasis on the sociality of thought and individuality, can sustain a loyal but critical stance toward our “own” society. I argue that Dewey’s pragmatism is a form of “naturalized left-Hegelianism” that sustains the same project as Habermas’s defense of modernity and, on the same basis, of a communicative account of the self. It is, for that reason, less American than “modern,” less midwestern than mid-Atlantic. American identity, therefore, is to be understood in terms of a modern rather than a more local identity. It thus appears that the “society” from which we derive our ideals and in terms of which we criticize local cultural, economic, and political practices is not the here and now of any particular nation-state, but the latent community of self-aware and productively intelligent persons that any particular state shelters only partially. Modernity is inescapable; Chicago is rather easily escapable, and the 1915 United States hardly less so. My third aim is to end self-destructively or perhaps on a note of self-transcendence: I shall argue that we should not ask questions about American (or any other) “identity,” even though I agree that the inhabitants of the United States should devote themselves to the realization of the American project—as one local and admirable instance of the project of modernity. I claim that this is, in fact, Dewey’s argument, too. This essay thus combines history, philosophy, and lay sermon—a mode practiced with some success by all the writers I discuss here.
Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life is often described as the manifesto of Progressivism, but this is not wholly apt. When it was published, in 1908, the Progressive movement had already achieved most of the reforms for which it was known: improved city government, meritocratic civil service recruitment, and anticorruption measures. Croly was more plausibly described—by Theodore Roosevelt—as a theorist of “new nationalism.” New nationalism was not nationalism at all in the European sense; it had nothing to do with trying to make the nation coextensive with the ethnos; nothing to do with blood, race, and soil; and except for one unguarded remark, nothing to do with the thought that the nation gave military expression to a particular culture. It was an essentially liberal nationalism. Its guiding thought was—as its title suggested—that the United States existed more as a promise than as a fact; hence, that there was indeed a project of Americanization yet to be accomplished, though not the project that nativists and anti-immigrant groups proposed. They wanted to impose an image of Americanness on new arrivals and to shut out those whom they thought unfit for that treatment. He thought that the vast territory of the United States had yet to be permeated by an American culture, economy, and politics. That there was in existence a project of this sort, he did not doubt, but American life was a promise, not a manifest destiny. The outcome of American social, political, and economic history was anything but manifest. Most importantly, the fulfillment of the promise was threatened by the nature of the promise itself. The promise was a promise of individual emancipation, and it was an egalitarian promise; its aim was to allow each individual to realize himself or herself in this new and astonishingly open environment. It thus bypassed questions of identity by assuring everyone who came to this new nation that he or she could make of himself or herself whatever the heart desired. But how the American was to know what to desire or how the promise was to be fulfilled was another matter.
Croly’s argument throughout Promise was that the individualism of a rights-based political system had thus far thwarted the achievement of the goals that the founders had set out, a thought in which he anticipated the so-called communitarians of the 1980s by seventy years. The founders had, as every American schoolboy knew, split over the question of the national government’s role in controlling and promoting economic activity and the development of the vast unexplored hinterland of the thirteen states. Croly’s genius as a publicist was to coin the thought that we must “pursue Jeffersonian goals by Hamiltonian means.” The villain of American political life was Andrew Jackson, who had treated the ideal of equality as the principle that every snout should have equal access to the public trough, and the only political leader adequate to American life had been Abraham Lincoln, who alone saw how to employ the entire force of the federal government in pursuit of an ideal of equal membership of the American people. An individualism that asked only to be left to one’s own devices was morally obnoxious and increasingly at odds with the industrialized and urbanized place that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America had become. Croly had been brought up in a Comtist household and had been a student of Josiah Royce at Harvard; rugged individualism would have been repudiated in both places, though it was only from Royce that he could have learned that the life of personality was a moral goal.
An interesting and complicated aspect of Croly’s work, in light of Dewey’s semi-socialism, was his reaction to the tensions between capital and labor that were a marked feature of American economic and social life in the last years of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth centuries. Where many critics of capital hankered after a return to the agrarian simplicities of the eighteenth century or wanted the breakup of the new corporations, Croly followed in the track marked earlier by the work of Edward Bellamy: the new corporate forms were a response to the need for the organization of production and should not be destroyed, but nationalized. The struggling trade unions that had been hampered by means both legal and extralegal and had found themselves constantly in the middle of the most violent conflict with the employers should neither be destroyed nor be encouraged to wage class warfare; they should be understood as the latent form of a national organization of labor. When Croly looked at the way the contemporary railroads conspired to fix their charges, he did not suggest trust-busting to force competition on the railroads, but a national railroad system.
That still leaves the question of what sort of nation was this project to sustain. What was American about American life and its promise? How did Croly’s “new” nationalism relate to the nationalism with which Europeans are all too familiar? The answer is surprisingly hard to come by. At one level, there is no difficulty; the slogan “Jeffersonian goals by Hamiltonian means” sums up the project in a simple though mildly vulgar fashion. But Promise does something difficult and perhaps slightly incoherent. Croly told Americans that the American state was fifty years behind the times and absurdly slow to attend to tasks that European states had long been performing. But he wanted, in the process, to emphasize the need for a distinctively American form of national consciousness. The United States was not to play “catch-up,” but to overleap its time. Still, the image of what the United States might be was European in one important respect: Americans had to bring their own energies to achieving a national culture whose character was modeled on what Croly admired about France and Germany.
Croly was, thus, not a theorist of the peculiarity of American identity in quite the same way as Bourne, Kallen, and Dewey—all of them good friends at various points and all of them contributors to Croly’s New Republic. He was not a pluralist in the ways they were. Croly’s vision of American nationality emphasized the thought that the American nation would become more a nation as the activities of the state become more intense and more adequate to the needs of society. What matters about that thought is essentially negative: Croly did not raise the question whether the strikingly multiethnic and multicultural quality of the United States ought to be brought into the center of his picture of American life and its ambiguous promises. He was not a theorist of the melting pot nor a conservative inclined to complain about the hyphenated quality of the Americanness of new immigrants. Nor was he simply a believer in the old picture of the United States as a branch operation of the English mission civilisatrice. Not forced assimilation, the melting pot, or multiculturalism, but the interesting thought that the American contribution to national identities ought in some fashion to be the creation of a modern nationalism in the country that of all great nations had thus far been able to avoid thinking of itself in such terms. The terms of this argument, however, were functionalist rather than pluralist. This is worth emphasizing here because Dewey, too, was as much a functionalist as Croly about the relationship of the state to social life, but was a much more deeply committed pluralist about the nature of that underlying social basis. If nothing else, that set Dewey a more difficult task than Croly when the time came for him to explain in what sense the United States could be e pluribus unum, could build a common life out of strikingly diverse elements.
The discussion of pluralism occurred some seven or eight years after the publication of Promise. It took place in the context of the panic-stricken “Americanization” campaigns that were sparked by the outbreak of World War I. Although the United States was not involved and initially seemed unlikely ever to become involved, the almost-immediate effect of the war was to raise questions about the loyalties of the vast flood of immigrants that had poured into the country between 1880 and the beginning of the war. This caught Croly and the friends who were about to work on the New Republic entirely off guard. I say only a very little about Dewey, Kallen, and Bourne in this connection, since our subject is not the war, but what the war provoked—Americanization. Descriptively, Dewey is the least interesting of the trio because he is the least concrete; Kallen later and rightly observed that Dewey was a less compelling observer of cultural diversity than Bourne. Analytically, and theoretically, he was more ambitious and more complicated than they, and he raises more puzzling questions than they. It is simplest to follow the argument in three set-piece discussions: Randolph Bourne’s “Transnational America,” published in the Menorah Journal in 1916; Horace Kallen’s “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” published in two installments in the Nation in 1915 (though his postwar “Americanization” in Culture and Democracy, where the essay is reprinted and expanded, is in some ways even more striking); and John Dewey’s “Nationalizing Education,” published in the Journal of Education in 1916.
Their interests and views overlapped but were not identical. Bourne was a cultural critic in a way that Dewey hardly could have been; he was interested in popular culture in a way Dewey was not, and he was violently hostile to the humdrum existence of the American lower middle class in a way that Dewey would have thought snobbish. Still, he was a student of Dewey’s and a great admirer until they quarreled over America’s entry into the war. Like Croly, Dewey, and Kallen, Bourne agreed that what the United States offered its new arrivals was above all freedom—emancipation from an old life, and opportunity to do what they could in a new world. What Bourne feared was that immigrants had found only an “external” freedom; they were for the first time able to do as they liked, but they did not have the internal and expressive freedom that could come only from living out their own cultural life. In other words, they got their freedom only on terms, and the terms were acquiescence in the dominant culture of the country they entered. Bourne was a sharp critic of the monolithic quality of existing “English” culture: “The Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is guilty of in every European country, the imposition of its own culture on the minority peoples.” No liberal-minded person wanted this monolithic result, as Bourne took for granted. He slyly observed that the most purely Anglo-Saxon and untouched part of the country was the South; and writing for a Jewish journal, he could take it for granted that his readers did not think of the South as a moral ideal. To drive the point home, he asked them to compare the southern states with Wisconsin, where a combination of German culture and “outwardly and satisfactorily American” habits prevail.
This led Bourne to the claim that haunts observers of American life still as they look at the effects of migration on migrants from the poorer regions of Latin America and Asia. America, said Bourne, knows how to deculturate but not how to acculturate. This was not a wholly original thought with Bourne. Although Bourne’s interests lay in literary and other forms of culture in a way that Dewey’s did not, it was still true that Jane Addams and John Dewey had observed in Chicago during the 1890s that deracination had happened, but not a corresponding process of reracination. Much of Dewey’s educational theory, formulated as it was under the impact of those years in Chicago, reflected a concern for what you might call the reracination of urban children and migrant children alike. Although Dewey was by no means reactionary, nor a conservative filled with nostalgia for rural life, he nonetheless believed that compared to an urban child, a farm child had an easier time growing up—learning the rhythms of life, the skills of the farmer, and, along with these, the emotional and moral attachments that made farm life so satisfying. The urban child, thought Dewey, had a much harder time of it; industrial life had a much less visible unity and coherence, the linkage of production and consumption was more indirect, and much of daily life was conducted out of sight and far away. It was for that reason that he so emphasized the role of the school in socializing the urban child into an understanding of his or her society’s material existence and so emphasized the need to integrate work and play at school.
Dewey was nothing like as eloquent as Bourne about the conditions of the unintegrated adult. One might, for all that, complain that Bourne’s statement of how the multicultural, or, as he said, “transnational,” life was to be led was decidedly thin: the goal must be “the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community,” said Bourne, and it was the task of the younger intelligentsia of America to give an account of it. It is obviously not to be laid against Bourne that he fell victim to the influenza epidemic that ravaged the United States and most of the rest of the world at the end of the war. All the same, this gesture toward the notion that Josiah Royce had put into circulation, as though it was as usable by radical young intellectuals as it had been by the much more conservative Royce, raised more questions than it answered. Thin as this vision was, it made it quite clear that as against European nationalisms and European cultural unity, the American promise and the American task was to develop unity in pluralism. America’s distinctive contribution to the world was to be a coherent cultural pluralism.
Horace Kallen, too, struck some convincing blows during a very rough time, though he was neither as philosophically imaginative as Dewey nor as culturally imaginative as Bourne. His essay “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” was a head-on assault on the political aspect of Americanization. By 1915, it had long been a complaint against the newcomers to the United States that they refused to assimilate, refused to give up their original languages, eating habits, religions, and the rest of it; they were, it was said, “hyphenated Americans” rather than real Americans. Italian-Americans or Jewish-Americans were not good enough for the advocates of 100 percent Americanness. It was hyphenation that Kallen defended against the enthusiasts for a monolithic America. Critics of unfettered immigration also objected to the squalor of immigrant communities and to the way the presence of immigrants allowed unscrupulous employers to drive down wages and force their workers to work in hideous and unsafe surroundings. Kallen claimed that this kind of humanitarianism was skin deep, that what troubled the critics of immigration was “not really inequality; what troubles them is difference.”
Kallen argued that the fact of being an immigrant community—or a community of immigrant communities—was what set the American political agenda. Radical pluralism was the only hope of the Left. The socialist wish to use the power of the state to reduce economic inequality made sense in Europe but much less sense in the United States, where the entire political culture was against it. Socialist ideals were beside the point in the United States: the interesting line of cleavage on the liberal side of politics lay between people who thought the problem was the battle between monopolistic captains of industry and old American ideals of equal opportunity (so that the issue was only that of getting immigrant workers into decent jobs with decent pay and conditions) and those who thought that change, even that sort of change, hung on accepting cultural pluralism as a fact of life to live with and make something of—Kallen, of course, belonged to the latter persuasion. He did not oppose meliorist class-based politics, but insisted that they must be practiced differently from anything offered by Woodrow Wilson on one side or his socialist critics on the other. Kallen felt some ambivalence about “Americanness.” He took up the conservative complaint against hyphenated Americans and turned it into a term of praise. German-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans were all of them entirely acceptable Americans. The interesting question is how long a productive balance between the two sides of the hyphen can be preserved; if it is only a transitional state that will give way to something more monolithic, how much attention does it deserve? If it is what makes American identity distinctive but is doomed to perish, what should we think of “American-American” identity?
A few years ago, Michael Walzer followed in Kallen’s footsteps and gave a cheerful account of American identity as such a hyphenated identity, later embodied in his What It Means to Be an American. In Walzer’s view, much like Kallen’s, the cultural attachments of hyphenated Americans lay to the left of the hyphen, and their political attachments to the right. So long as hyphenated Americans subscribed to the political rules, they might lay their cultural allegiances where they chose. This is the note struck by Kallen in his optimistic moments. But Kallen also shared the anxieties of Bourne and Croly, Dewey and Jane Addams. He feared that the necessities of everyday life would steadily erode immigrants’ attachments to the languages, religions, cultures, and family life they brought with them and provide nothing with the same richness and depth in return. If the common elements of American life—the English language, mass media, public school education, and an unspecific spirituality—are used only for instrumental reasons by groups that need to get on in the world, immigrant communities will lose the attachments that gave their lives shape before and will be no better than illiterate in the adopted culture.
Dewey was less anxious than Kallen and Bourne—than Croly, too, for that matter—because he had more confidence that twentieth-century America could weave a new culture out of the ingredients it had acquired from elsewhere and had generated from within in the previous two and a half centuries. Its relations with the cultures of Europe and Asia would no doubt be intricate, but that was the nature of the modern world and not something to be flinched from. One point worth bearing in mind is the need to keep some grip on the facts about cultural loss and gain. Those of us who have derived pleasure from the literary criticism of Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom will surely wish to say that the United States has, at any rate, permitted the offspring of immigrant European Jews to do great things with English writers. Too much discussion of simple deculturation ignores the reality that people who lost the cultural resources of deprived eastern European villages acquired in due course the resources of the whole English-speaking world. By the same token, the villages doubtless lost something with the departure of their brightest inhabitants, but lost far more from the economic and political changes that swept through their world in the first half of this century. Moreover, the immigrants whose deracination was lamented may well have had a pretty tenuous attachment to the culture of their native countries. The children of former peasants almost certainly became more literate in English than they had been in their native tongue, and the children of already cultivated aliens added another culture to the ones to which their parents were attached. Dewey was probably right to devote about as much attention to the children of the American cities as to migrants.
When Dewey contemplated the issue of Americanization, he distinguished good and bad nationalism, very much as Bourne had done before him: good nationalism would create a distinctively American culture and be consistent with internationalism; bad nationalism would repress internal differences and be bellicose. Dewey was, of course, perfectly aware that in real life the phenomenon of nationalism does not come so neatly labeled. His philosophy was, after all, built around a refusal of what he described as “apart thinking.” That, however, allowed him a useful opening; bad nationalism was a form of apart thinking, dividing the world into ourselves versus foreigners, the loyal versus the disloyal, and so on. A characteristically Deweyan touch was his claim that American nationality was actually constituted by democracy; an undemocratic America would be a contradiction in terms. This was a doubly elegant stroke; on the one hand, it meant that American ultranationalists, who were prepared to use undemocratic means to enforce one national character, literally did not know what they were doing, since an undemocratic nationalism destroyed just what it sought to create, and, on the other, it meant that democrats need not fear a proper American self-assertion. A second Deweyan stroke was his insistence that the hyphen is “good when it attaches, bad when it separates.” This was an obvious implication of Dewey’s deepest methodological allegiances and his hostility to “apart thought.” Separating what ought not to be separated was the characteristic vice of philosophers: mind versus matter, ethics versus prudential calculation, logic versus empirical inquiry were some of the dichotomies he tried to subvert. Now, as we see, he could apply it to political attachments. By this time—1916—Dewey was the world’s most famous educational theorist; it was anxiety about the misuse of the educational system for polemical and propaganda purposes that led him to write this essay and others in defense of pluralism in American education.
The role of education, Dewey argued in “Nationalizing Education,” was not to inculcate one canonical image of American identity, but to foster mutual respect among the diversity of cultures and peoples that make up the American people. As to how to do it, he had nothing very surprising to say, as he himself was at some pains to emphasize. It was not, after all, an arena in which very astonishing ideas were to be looked for; what was needed was a commitment to a humane pluralism. So far as curriculum and pedagogy are concerned, Dewey suggested, plausibly enough, that one obvious way ahead was to teach a view of American history that stressed the positive contributions to American society of the successive waves of immigrants. Eighty years later, this seems absolutely right, even though it raises some exceedingly awkward questions about just what tone we must adopt in encouraging this mutual exchange of narratives. “Immigration” is not exactly what happened to Africans who were brought to America as slaves, and even Dewey would have been hard put to find a wholly convincing way of telling the story of the African American contribution to American history in such a way that it was neither a tale of passivity and victimization nor a Pollyannaish celebration of the successes of the downtrodden.
The object, however, was clear. Other nations formed their conceptions of national identity around descent, commonality of blood, language, or residence. They defined their position in the world by contrast with their neighbors and (generally) enemies. American identity was not so formed. It was future oriented rather than past oriented; it could not be based on commonalities of kinship, residence, or even—initially—language, since no such commonalities existed. It had to be formed out of a conscious intention to combine for the purposes for which the United States was an apt setting. Hence, Dewey’s view that the classroom would be a plausible setting for the various tribes that make up the American people to bring their contributions to the common table. I mention now what I shall argue later, that if identity is essentially a backward-looking concept, Dewey’s forward-looking conception of philosophy suggests that what others interpret as identity, he has reinterpreted as a commitment to a particular conception of the future. In short, American identity is a question of the American project.
If our evaluation of these ideas turned on the liveliness of their accounts of the multiplicity of cultures that migrants brought to the United States, Bourne would surely catch our eye. If we were concerned only with giving a cogent defense of moderate pluralism, Kallen would bear off the prize—he did not fear the cultural incoherence that hyphenation brings with it, and he had a lively common sense and a splendid hatred of oppression and bullying, a combination that can take one a long way. To see why Dewey is the most philosophically interesting of the four writers I have mentioned, one must understand that Dewey tried to do something harder than Bourne, Kallen, or Croly. Dewey believed in Americanization and in multiculturalism simultaneously. That is, he believed it was possible to create an American identity that was distinctive and yet not at odds with the plural cultural resources on which it would draw. He found it possible to believe this because he understood all forms of identity as the production of relative unity from plural ingredients, and individual personal identity as an interpersonal and indeed a social construct. This allowed him to escape the usual questions about identity; and it gave him not only an antiessentialist sociology, but also a communicative and plural ethics.
Dewey followed George Herbert Mead in thinking that the “I” emerges only by distinction from the “Me,” and that getting clear about this difference is an achievement of which we are capable only in a social setting. Individuality is a social achievement. Only a merely biological identity is a gift of nature, even though it is an important fact that biologically differentiated individuals are experiential centers that can come to reflect on and to “own” their specific streams of consciousness. That is, all sentient creatures experience the world, but only humans “have” experiences. But identity in any interesting sense is an accomplishment, and perhaps a pretty intermittent one; Dewey was an anti-Cartesian who held that for the most part, thought occurs without a thinking ego. Once he turned to social interaction, Dewey anticipated by eighty years Habermas’s move from a problematic of the subject to a problematic of communication. The interesting consequence is that Dewey demands more unity from American identity than many pluralists, while he insists as fiercely as they that this must be a unity in plurality. The idea that Americans can happily be nothing more than hyphenated Americans thus will not satisfy Dewey. But he thought the image of a melting pot was actively repulsive. What he wanted to do, as a good, though lapsed, Hegelian ought to have wanted, was to give an account of unity in difference.
What is sociology in Kallen and Bourne is thus philosophy in Dewey. That is a simple claim. Its elucidation is more difficult. The first element in that elucidation is to take seriously the fact that Dewey thought Democracy and Education was his most important book. He maintained that it was for many years the fullest exposition of his philosophical position that he had produced, and that his critics had failed to understand this. It made the argument (much resisted by philosophers) that all philosophy is the philosophy of education. The proper method of philosophy is genetic and naturalistic, and its aim is to sophisticate our understanding of how we acquire the mature problem-solving competencies of intelligent adults in a great variety of contexts. Which is to say that it inquires into how we have been educated, and it must have at least an implicit concern with how we might be better educated than we are.
This is unexceptionable, but raises a question that leads to the second elucidatory point. How do philosophy and democracy relate to each other? The two most distinguished philosophies of education in Dewey’s eyes were Plato’s defense of the need to train “guardians” to act as good shepherds of their uncomprehending charges, and Rousseau’s insistence that we must protect young Émile from a society that has been corrupted by the growth of the arts and sciences. Dewey’s educational philosophy was avowedly intended as a response to Plato and Rousseau. He wanted neither shepherds nor social isolates, but members of a community. That this was to be a democratic community involved a difficult move. He defined democracy not as a matter of voting systems or political mechanisms, but in social terms, namely, as “organic communication on free and equal terms.” Deep, free, and unfettered communication was the essence of social interaction, so in a fashion oddly reminiscent of the young Marx, we find Dewey explaining democracy not merely as the essence of the political, but as the essence of the social. Dewey thus explains both moral growth and the nature of democracy as functions of our capacity for “associated living”—neither an elite of shepherds nor a scattering of isolated, uncontaminated individuals. Education allows us to draw on our own resources and those of the whole society in order to open ourselves to one another and indeed to ourselves. This is the moral perspective that underlies Dewey’s view that the only goal of moral action is “growth,” just as it underlies his view that the moral motive is always the enhancement of personality.
The third clue to Dewey’s purposes is his emphasis on modernity; we live, like it or loathe it, in the modern world. Just where “the modern world” is is never quite clear in Dewey, since its indicia range from the achievements of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century to the disorganization of the capitalist industrial world of the nineteenth. But the nature of modernity is easy enough to discern: social and geographic mobility, economic and moral individualism, subjectivity, secularism, a faith in the capacity of science to resolve the problems that beset our world, and, on the downside, the thing that Dewey was perhaps most anxious to cure, a sense of being abandoned by God, or, in another jargon, a sense of “alienation.” The one thing Dewey never added to this list separates him from many of his contemporaries: the conviction that our sexual anxieties are deeper and more fundamental than all others was one he never accepted.
How did Dewey integrate his account of modern identity and his account of the stresses of modernity? The answer is that his entire career was an attempt to do it; both his more arcane philosophical work and his political journalism preach his vision of how to make ourselves at home in the modern world by making the world fit to be our home. “Modern society” is the fundamental analytical category of this enterprise; “democracy” is the cultural—and then, by inference, the political—character of such a society. America is not the only home of modern society, but it has a privileged position in one respect. It is where the modern condition is least obscured by everything else we have inherited. This is not an unmixed blessing: in the 1930s, Dewey wished that the United States had possessed a Labor Party like the British Labour Party so as not to have to submit to the distracted lunging and retreating that he thought Franklin Roosevelt engaged in during the implementation of the New Deal. Still, it was only a passing hankering, for his considered view was always that the politics of the Labour Party would not work in the United States. Nor did he regret this. Class politics seemed to him to be bad for a society, so he would not have thought the United States would have done better to inherit the British class system even if it had brought the Labour Party with it.
Modernity is, however, a philosophical as much as a sociological concept, because the investigation of modern thought is a philosophical activity—it is a large part of the social criticism of social criticisms that Dewey decided philosophy had now become. The implication for a pluralist conception of the social world now becomes clearer, but it still remains hard to make fully articulate: against his Hegelian youth, Dewey repudiates the search for an Absolute; but in the spirit of that youth, he hangs on to the aspiration after a society in which fully transparent self-understanding and communication are possible. Such a world does not obliterate differences of perspective and contribution, but it possesses a kind of unity in which devotees of a cheerfully empiricist and sociological pluralism might take little interest. In that sense, Dewey really was a theorist of Americanization, since he wanted to identify the American project with the achievement of a novel form of emancipation, one that did not threaten to leave us deracinated even while it enabled us to think more coherently and scientifically about just what sort of soil we were rooted in.
Since the mid-1980s, arguments over “identity” and “difference” have spread into every area of American political discussion. Their original academic home was commonly in literary theory rather than political theory, but issues of cultural attachment came to have considerable political resonance during the 1980s. In Canada, there has been the perennial issue of Quebec’s “particularity” and the new demands of Inuits and other aboriginal peoples. In the United States, old anxieties over immigration have revived, but they have now been linked to a new despair over the difficulties of the African American poor. A new assertiveness on the part of women, and more marginally on the part of gays and lesbians, has made up in intellectual passion for anything it has lacked in political consequence. From the perspective of such cultural conflicts, the philosophical defense of human rights offered by conventional liberalism, whether John Rawls’s or Robert Nozick’s, seems sociologically unsophisticated. The most interesting account of these strains, however, has not been offered from either of the extremes—that is, by writers defending an “old” universalist liberalism against the theorists of difference or by the defenders of the “new” politics of difference themselves. The most interesting response is Richard Rorty’s claim that the existence of cultural diversity is a brute fact about our sort of society, but that it should not, for all that, be allowed to subvert the politics of the “old” liberalism.
In a 1993 essay in the New York Times and in a longer and more considered earlier essay, “Two Cheers for the Cultural Left,” Rorty has argued that the American academy is American, that the professoriate has a patriotic duty to articulate the “uplifting stories” of traditional American historiography. This distresses critics on the left, against whom, of course, this claim is directed. Dewey had a good many resources with which to deal with the difficulty of finding a position from which to acknowledge an American identity—or rather to finesse the question of its existence and its character—while retaining a critical stance toward American practice. Rorty has fewer. The critics’ question is simple enough: how do we give sufficient weight to the less uplifting elements in the American narrative, and how do we square our belief in the rights of all manner of people who do not feel that theirs has been a particularly “uplifting” story with the patriotic and friendly wish that the American story should be their uplifting story, too? My view, for what it is worth, is that the late twentieth-century United States needs a large dose of old-fashioned social democracy, and that this would do much more to make the “uplifting story” acceptable than any number of stories about stories; this was, of course, Dewey’s view, too.
The American project, to which Dewey was devoted, is the project of making the uplifting story come true. It is a story about the possibility of combining cultural plurality with political unity, allowing the widest opportunity the world has known thus far but somehow escaping anomie and alienation, and so familiarly on. One virtue of Dewey is that he does not divert the defense of the American project through anxieties about American identity. Identity is an unnecessary intervening step in the argument from the virtues of the American project to its claim on our allegiances. I share Rorty’s irritated conviction that prosperous American professors should speak more kindly of their country’s ambitions—and as harshly as is proper about its failure to live up to them. But as a resident alien who is anything but an alienated resident, I emphasize in conclusion that it is not because Rorty’s readers are Americans that they should join in, but because the project is rationally and morally compelling, and they happen to be geographically well-positioned to promote it, and they are supported by the taxes and tax concessions of large numbers of people whose consent to what the intelligentsia gets up to was never asked, and they ought to feel some reciprocal obligation.