INTRODUCTION
1. Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), xv, 317–318, 433–454; see also Alfonso Damico, Individuality and Community: The Social and Political Thought of John Dewey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1979), chap. 5; Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995).
2. See, for example, Richard Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Michael Brint and William Weaver (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 217–243; Robert Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), chaps. 1, 3–4; Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Axel Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today,” Political Theory 26.6 (1998): 763–783; James Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 6; James Bohman, “Democracy as Inquiry, Inquiry as Democratic: Pragmatism, Social Science, and the Cognitive Division of Labor,” American Journal of Political Science 43.2 (1999): 590–607; William Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
3. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922; New York: Free Press, 1965); Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1927; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), pt. 4; Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Dahl, “Hierarchy, Democracy, and Bargaining in Politics and Economics,” in Political Behavior, ed. H. Eulau et al. (New York: Random House, 1956), 66–89; Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962); Adam Przeworski, “Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense,” in Democracy’s Value, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–55.
4. See generally John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–94; Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in the same volume, 95–119; Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 67–93; James Bohman, “Survey Article: The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6.4 (1998): 400–425.
5. Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 110.
6. John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 304.
8. Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chaps. 1–2, 6. See also Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), chap. 3; Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932; New York: Scribner’s, 1960); Niebuhr, “The Pathos of Liberalism,” The Nation 141 (1935): 303–304; Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991).
9. Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” 235–238. See also Raymond Boisvert, “The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Deweyan Pragmatism,” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey Haskins and David I. Seiple (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 151–168; Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 112–113.
10. MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason, 136. See also Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, “John Dewey and the Liberal Science of Community,” Journal of Politics 46.4 (1984): 1152; Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 163–169.
11. C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 418–419; Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York: Vintage Press, 1965). See also Waher Feinberg, “The Conflict Between Intelligence and Community in Dewey’s Educational Philosophy,” Educational Theory 19.3 (1969): 234–248; Joseph G. Metz, “Democracy and the Scientific Method in the Philosophy of John Dewey,” Review of Politics 31.2 (1969): 242–262; Clarence Karier, “Making the World Safe for Democracy: An Historical Critique of John Dewey’s Philosophy of the Warfare State,” Educational Theory 27.1 (1977): 12–47.
12. Judith Green, Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 19, 31–33; see also Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Visions, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 516–517.
13. As far as my argument goes, nothing hangs on the linguistic difference between “ontology” and “metaphysics” and so I shall use them interchangeably. Depending on how one pursues the matter, the study of Being can be understood as yielding concepts or categories that unite all of natural philosophy (understood, more or less, as “science” in our time) and as serving as the final place for epistemic justification. “Metaphysics” may in fact refer to something beyond the sensible that is inferred from existence or it may appeal to something materially ascertainable by the senses. There are reasons one might want to distinguish between the metaphysician’s quest to ascertain what is beyond the sensible but that cuts across natural philosophy, and the scientist’s desire to find what is materially ascertainable. The scientist may then be seen as having a materialist ontology but being silent on metaphysical claims. Nonetheless, historically there is, in my view, too much of a preoccupation with outlining the boundaries of existence and reality in both accounts, and attempting to secure certain knowledge within to allow for this distinction. For assistance on this point see Barry Smith, “Ontology,” in A Companion to Metaphysics, ed. Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 373–374; Peter Simons, “Metaphysics,” in the same volume, 310–312; also W. H. Walsh, “Nature of Metaphysics,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, vol. 5 (New York: MacMillian, 1972), 300–306.
14. MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason, 130. See also Deneen, Democratic Faith, 51.
15. I will elucidate this point more carefully below with reference to textual evidence. My only intention here is to indicate that at certain moments the criticisms they advance against Dewey carry implications about his understanding of reality that often fit with the description above.
16. Ralph Ketcham, The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), chap. 6; Hilary Putnam, Enlightenment and Pragmatism (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2001).
17. Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 218. See also Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 2; Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
18. Further historical evidence of this earlier continuity can be found in Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 6.
19. Paul Jerome Croce, “Probabilistic Darwinism: Louis Agassiz vs. Asa Gray on Science, Religion, and Certainty,” Journal of Religious History 22.1 (1998): 40; see also Ralph Bates, Scientific Societies in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 28–84; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pt. 2.
20. See on this point the excellent four-volume edition Frank X. Ryan, ed., Darwinism and Theology in America: 1850–1930 (Bristol, England: Thoemmes, 2002).
21. See Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingston, “Introduction: Charles Hodge and the Definition of ‘Darwinism,’” in Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? and Other Writings on Science and Religion, ed. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingston (1874; Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994), 18; see also W. Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians: Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and Benjamin Warfield (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1981), 55–81; Bruce Kuklick, “The Place of Charles Hodge in the History of Ideas in America,” in Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, ed. John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 63–101.
22. James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 23. See also Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2001), chap. 6.
23. These thinkers are of particular consequence because of their explicit confrontation with Darwin and theories of evolution that are consistent with the account here sketched. This does not, however, exhaust other articulations of liberal theology. In many respects I have left out the most important figures among liberal theologians, such as Horace Bushnell and Walter Rauschenbusch. In this regard, I do not mean to understate their importance, but rather to draw attention to the individuals whose effort to reconcile science and religion are wrought by complexity owing to their encounter with Darwinian evolution.
24. Dewey’s understanding of the matter is overdrawn here. On this point see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory.
25. D. H. Meyer, “American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walter Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 69. See also George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992), intro., chap. 1.
26. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1919; New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–156; Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in the same volume, 267–301.
27. Bert James Loewenberg, “Darwinism Comes to America, 1859–1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28.3 (1941): 341; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (1944; Boston: Beacon, 1955), chap. 1; James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), chaps. 3–6; James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pts. II–III.
28. William James, Pragmatism (1907; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 31.
29. James’ concerns are captured in Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Menand, Metaphysical Club, pt. 2.
30. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 139.
31. Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmations: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–7.
34. Charles Peirce, “Notes on Scientific Philosophy,” Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 1, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (1905; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 52.
35. Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 488, but see also chaps. 3–6.
37. See also Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 69.
38. See also Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), chap. 5; Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gains and Paul Keast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Steven Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), chap. 4. I am sympathetic to the insights expressed by these thinkers regarding the aesthetic dimension to action, but I develop these insights in a different way.
39. I will not take up Rorty’s specific worries over Dewey’s use of scientific inquiry and method, which are quite distinct from the concerns above. For responses to Rorty’s challenge see Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 19–54; Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 258–292; Westbrook, John Dewey, 539–542; Democratic Hope, 5–11, chap. 6; Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and Liberalism: Between Dewey and Rorty,” Political Theory 22.3 (1994): 391–413; James Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 83–127.
40. Raymond Boisvert, Dewey’s Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), chap. 2; James Campbell, Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), chap. 2.
41. Boisvert, “Nemesis of Necessity,” 151–168.
42. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
43. Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 10; see chaps. 5–6.
44. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 97.
45. For ambivalence see Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 112; Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, 3, 129. For denial see Putnam, “Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” 230–234; MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason, chap. 5.
46. Of course, Sidney Hook advances this argument about pragmatism (Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life [New York: Basic Books, 1974], chap. 1), but he fails to textually substantiate his claims. My account here, which picks up on some of my earlier reflections, has the closest affinity to Eddie Glaude’s argument (Melvin L. Rogers, “John Dewey and the Theory of Democratic Deliberation” [M.Phil. diss., Cambridge University, 2000], chap. 3; see also Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007], chap. 1).
47. This position is similar to the one articulated by Shapiro and MacGilvray. The latter, however, treats this argument in a separate chapter from the one where he discusses Dewey’s view of democracy. See Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), chaps. 1–2; MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason, chaps. 4–5.
48. Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 30–58; “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31–45; “Transgression, Equality, Voice,” in Dēmokratia, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 63–90; Politics and Visions, 600–606.
1. PROTESTANT SELF-ASSERTION AND SPIRITUAL SICKNESS
1. See George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), chaps. 7–8; cf. Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chaps. 3–6; Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), bk. 2; James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chap. 13.
2. Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
3. Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, trans. Gregory Moore (1997; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 121, and 122–123.
4. Block, Nation of Agents, 534. See also Patrick J. Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 75–77, 174–178.
5. Willian James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Modern Library, 1999), 151; cf. “The Will to Believe” (1897), in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), 40–41.
6. James, “Will to Believe,” 1–32.
7. See the example of Leo Tolstoy in James, Varieties, 167–184; cf. Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), intro. and concl.
8. For accounts that substantiate these claims in greater historical detail see D. H. Meyer, “American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walter Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 59–77; George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992), chap. 1; James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), chaps. 3–6; Gary Scott Smith, The Seeds of Secularization: Calvinism, Culture, and Pluralism in America, 1870–1915 (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1985), chaps. 6–7; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chap. 1.
9. James, Varieties, 535–538.
10. In emphasizing this alternative, I do not mean to suggest that this was the only option of the day. There are the earlier movements of transcendentalism and idealism, both of which precede the impact of Darwinism. My point in focusing on this approach is to underscore the importance of its encounter with Darwin. Transcendentalism and idealism are not preoccupied with Darwinism in any significant sense largely because natural selection challenges cognitivist rather than “experiential-expressive” approaches to theology. On this distinction see George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 16–17.
11. Although I have relied on Hans Blumenberg’s account of self-assertion at certain points, the concept as I use it here is not completely consistent with his. The reason for this is that much of what Blumenberg says in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age on the topic of self-assertion rejects the Platonic feature that I want to retain (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983], pt. 2, chap. 5; cf. Plato’s discussion of the creator God in his Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 1234–1242; Luciano Floridi, “Two Approaches to the Philosophy of Information,” Mind and Machine 13.4 [2003]: 464). So although there is some continuity between this conception and mine, we should not confuse the two. For an insightful discussion of Blumenberg on which I have relied see Robert B. Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chaps. 10–11. Nor should my use of the Promethean image be confused with that description employed by David E. Cooper’s The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The reason for this is that we can, pace Cooper, hold on to the Promethean outlook without simultaneously believing that human will wholly constitutes the world of meaning and value. Believing that one has greater room to shape the world is different from believing that one has constituted it ex nihilo.
12. T. J. Jackson Lears nicely captures the sense of emotional and psychological emptiness that secularism wrought and that prompted a turn toward “mental hygienists” (Lears, No Place of Grace, 55, see also chap. 4; cf. James, Varieties, 110–143).
13. Westbrook, John Dewey, chap. 3.
14. Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), chap. 2; cf. Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science: 1846–1876 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
15. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; New York: Modern Library of America, 1936), and in the same volume The Descent of Man (1871).
16. For a good analysis of earlier evolutionary doctrine see Moore, Post-Darwinian Controversies, pt. 2; Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chaps. 2 and 4.
17. Keith Ward, Religion and Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 129.
18. Darwin, Origins, 373.
19. Another reason to believe that the previous passage cited from Darwin is a dubious example of his belief in human perfectibility is that he really means this to refer to incredible adaptations of specific organs within living creatures and not creatures in their totality. For more on this point see Derek Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” in Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, ed. John Offer (1974; New York: Routledge: 2000), 2:19–20; cf. Darwin, Origins, 133–135.
20. Darwin, Origins, 149; cf. 129.
21. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1919; New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 152–153.
22. This is not particularly new even in a pre-Darwinian world. We need think only of Job.
23. John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), chap. 2.
24. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 70 (original emphasis).
25. For some helpful characterizations of modernity on which I have relied, see Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Toulmin, Cosmopolis, chap. 2; Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), chaps. 1–5; David Carrithers, “The Enlightenment Science of Society,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 236–247; Henry, Scientific Revolution, chaps. 5 and 7; Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
26. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 10, see also chaps. 3–4, 8; cf. Seigel, Idea of the Self, chaps. 2–3.
27. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1872–1873; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 1:16.
29. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingston, “Introduction: Charles Hodge and the Definition of ‘Darwinism,’” in Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? and Other Writings on Science and Religion, ed. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingston (1874; Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994), 18. See also Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 317–319; W. Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians: Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and Benjamin Warfield (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1981), 55–81; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 18.
30. Hodge, What Is Darwinism?, 156. See also John T. Duffield, “Evolutionism Respecting Man, and the Bible,” Princeton Review 54 (1878): 150–177; Robert Dabney, Syllabus and Notes of the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1890).
31. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:10.
33. See Hodge, What Is Darwinism?, 89–124; cf. Systematic Theology, 2:12–30.
34. Theodore D. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), chaps. 1 and 5; Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America; Curt J. Ducasse, “Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science,” in Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance Through the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ralph M. Blake et al. (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1989), 50–74.
35. Hodge, What Is Darwinianism?, 130. On Darwin’s naturalism and the novelty of his methodology see John Green, Darwin and the Modern World View (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961).
36. Thomas Reid, Inquiry and Essays, ed. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (1785; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983).
37. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 13.
38. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:266; see also 1:237–240.
41. Ibid. (emphasis added). Of course, for Hodge and others there is much in Darwin that indicates the remoteness of his evidence and the strong conjectural character of his proofs that leaves him open to attack. See Croce, “Probabilistic Darwinism: Louis Agassiz vs. Asa Gray on Science, Religion, and Certainty,” Journal of Religious History 22.1 (1998): 43; cf. Michael T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 55; David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 16–36; Moore, Post-Darwinian Controversies, 194–196.
42. For a very helpful analysis of Descartes and Newton respectively see Seigel, Idea of the Self, pt. I; Israel, Enlightenment Contested, chap. 8; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (New York: Humanity Books, 1998).
43. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:9.
44. Bert James Loewenberg, “Darwinism Comes to America, 1859–1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28.3 (1941): 341; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (1944; Boston: Beacon, 1955), chap. 1.
45. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 129–156.
46. Lawrence A. Scaff, “Weber on the Cultural Situation of the Modern Age,” in The Cambridge Companion to Weber, ed. Stephen Turner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 105.
47. Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber, 293; see also Economy and Society, ed. Buenther Roth and Claus Wittich (1922; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), vol. 2, chap. 11, pp. 1001–1002.
48. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 1.II–III, 2.V; John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
49. James, “Lectures and Essays and Seeing and Thinking, by William K. Clifford” (1879), in Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 357.
50. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:235–240, at 235; cf. 1:339–346.
52. Theodore T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1883), 6.
53. Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1855), in The Portable Matthew Arnold, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York: Viking, 1949), 151.
54. Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1867), in Portable Arnold, 166.
55. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 139.
56. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:172.
57. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 155.
58. Eyal Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 69.
59. Hodge, What Is Darwinism?, 87. On Hodge’s precise formulation of what our moral and religious natures consist in see Systematic Theology, 1:341–344.
60. Interestingly enough, James offered a similar claim that is worth mentioning here. In his 1891 essay, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James argues in contrast to the position of Hodge that independent of God, life is an ethical universe by virtue of the presence of human beings. Yet toward the end of the essay James seems to say that something else is needed if that ethical universe is to appear as more than mere subjective preference—as having depth and levels of value: “This is why in a solitary thinker this [strenuous] mood might slumber on forever without waking. His various ideals, known to him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same denominational value: he can play fast or loose with them at will. This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite scale of values fails to open up…. When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged” (James, “The Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life,” in Will to Believe, 212).
61. Thus: “In these laws are included some which have no direct application to the natural sciences. Such, for example, as the essential distinction between right and wrong; that nothing contrary to virtue can be enjoined by God; that it cannot be right to do evil that good may come … and other similar first truths, which God has implanted in the constitution of all moral beings” (Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:10).
62. Ibid., 3:260; cf. 3:348–360.
63. Of course, religious belief does not simply go out the window with the appearance of Origins of Species. Nor are individuals at a lost for how they ought to conduct themselves vis-à-vis each other. There are, however, other forces at work, including the rise of the historical and hermeneutical criticism of the Bible, as well as anthropological investigations into the origin of extant and extinct religions (see Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971], 28–41).
64. Munger, Freedom of Faith, 6.
65. James, Varieties, 90–144, at 144.
66. Henry Ward Beecher, “Progress of Thought in the Church,” North American Review 135.309 (1882): 106. See also John Fiske, The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1884); Munger, Freedom of Faith; James McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution (1890), in Darwinism and Theology in America: 1850–1930, ed. Frank X. Ryan (Bristol, England: Thoemmes, 2002), 2:1–49; Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (New York: Outlook Company, 1892); Abbott, The Theology of an Evolutionist (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1897); George Harris, Moral Evolution (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1896).
67. Fiske, Through Nature to God (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1899), 128.
68. Henry Ward Beecher, “The Study of Human Nature” (1872), in American Protestant Thought: The Liberal Era, ed. William R. Hutchison (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 42.
69. Beecher, Evolution and Religion, Part I and 2 (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1885), 1:26.
70. Ibid., 1:26; cf. Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, 41–42.
71. This formulation already betrays Darwin and seems to be a throwback to the Lamarckian idea that there exists an inherent progressive element living within nature (compare, in this regard, Moore’s analysis of Lamarckian theory with my discussion: Post-Darwinian Controversies, 142–146). But as Young points out of Darwin, Robert Chambers, Charles Lyell, Herbert Spencer, and others: “All of these theorists confused metaphysical, methodological, and scientific levels of analysis, but as they retreated from specific scientific explanations, there remained the influence of their work as contributions to the mainstream of nineteenth-century naturalism [and theological naturalism], leading to a growing acceptance of the philosophical principle of the uniformity of nature, a principle which could be harmlessly identified with the intentions and the nature of the Deity” (Young, Darwin’s Metaphor, 90). So for Young it makes sense that we find interpretations of evolution that are reconciled with religion, even though John Dewey faults such accounts for excluding the central claim upon which Darwin’s account of evolution is based—namely, chance and contingency—in order to retain a metaphysical belief in progress.
72. Beecher, “Progress of Thought,” 113.
73. Ibid., 113. See also Munger, Freedom of Faith, 13–25.
74. Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 1:34–37.
75. Ibid., 1:139. See also H. Shelton Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin: A Study in American Theology Since 1750 (New York: Scribner, 1955), specifically chaps. 7–8.
76. Christ is consistently invoked in these works, but the lesson to learn is that he is a teacher of moral character, rather than a redeemer of humanity proper (see, for example, the invocation of Christ in Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 2: chap. 1; Abbott, Theology of an Evolutionist, chap. 5; Munger, Freedom of Faith, chaps. 4–6). To suggest that this is indicative of a secular turn obscures the tradition in Christian thought in which the power of God is seen as working within history, revealing itself in the temporal horizon as a way to guide humanity. The line between the infinite sacred and the finite secular blurs. On this see William Dean, “Pragmatism, History, and Theology,” in Pragmatism and Religion: Classical Sources and Original Essays, ed. Stuart Rosenbaum (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 153–175.
77. Abbott, Theology of Evolutionist, 42.
78. Beecher, “Human Nature,” 43. See also “Progress of Thought in Church,” 113.
79. Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 1:18.
80. Beecher, “Human Nature,” 43. See also “Progress of Though in Church,” 113.
81. Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 1:80 (emphasis added).
82. McCosh, “Natural Selection and the Origin of Man” (1871), in Darwinism and Theology in America, ed. Ryan, 2:70.
83. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 39–40.
84. William Clebsch, American Religious Thought: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 8. See also Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930; New York: Routledge, 1992), chap. 5.
85. See also Charles S. Peirce: “We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has taken up…. A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts” (Charles S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” [1868], in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], 1:28–29).
86. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 152.
87. James, Pragmatism (1907; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 37.
88. For analysis of this see John R. Shook, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), chap. 6.
89. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xiv.
92. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pt. 1 and chaps. 24–25.
93. Connolly describes this as a kind of “compensatory” ontology which, in my narrative, is therapeutic reedification. But the implication is the same, that is, they are compensations for the “modern ‘loss’” which then secure themselves by denying the threat from the outset; see William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), chap. 1, at 24.
94. Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 21 (original emphasis).
95. Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (New York: Routledge, 2000), 52. See Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), chap. 8, §§IV, VI; John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 109–123; Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, chaps. 9–11; Stout, “On Our Interests in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism Without Narcissism,” in New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7–31.
96. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1883–1885; New York: Penguin, 1978), “Zarathustra’s Prologue”; cf. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1886; New York: Vintage, 1989), pt. 3, esp. aphorism 56.
97. See also George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905–1906; New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 258; Stout, Democracy and Tradition, chap. 1.
98. For contemporary iterations of this point see Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, chap. 1; Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 1; Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 8.
99. Cited in Douglass R. Anderson, “Theology as Healing: A Meditation on A Common Faith,” in Dewey Reconfigured, 86; cf. Dewey, EKV (LW14:79–80).
100. Thus, when Dewey remarks in his autobiographical reflections four years before A Common Faith that he has “not been able to attach much importance to religion as a philosophic problem; for the effect of that attachment seems to be in the end subornation of … thinking to the alleged but factitious needs of some special set of convictions,” he means this for a specific rather than a general account of religion, one which undermines inquiry and distorts the meaning of piety and faith (AE1 [LW5:153]; see also Richard Bernstein, John Dewey [New York: Washington Square Press, 1967], 161–165).
2. AGENCY AND INQUIRY AFTER DARWIN
1. By philosophy of action, I do not mean the view prevalent among analytic philosophers that begins with the premise that when we say “action” we mean it to denote an isolated event that proceeds from an independent psychological state. Dewey’s “transactionalism” mentioned in the last chapter immediately bars this premise.
2. There is a substantial body of literature on Dewey that explicates his account of inquiry rather than his philosophy of action, of which it is a part. See in this regard J. E. Tiles, Dewey (New York: Routledge, 1988); Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997); Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); James Campbell, Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (Chicago: Open Court, 1995); Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); William R. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); John R. Shook, Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). The exceptions are Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), chap. 3; Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gains and Paul Keast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chaps. 2–3.
3. The exceptions here include Ralph W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Raymond D. Boisvert, Dewey’s Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988).
4. For contemporary revisionists reading of Aristotle that would take issue with this account see Richard G. Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory: An Introduction for Students of Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 7; Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 10; Stephen Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. 1; Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), intro.–chap. 1.
5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [hereafter Ethics], bk. 6, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941); see also bk. 10.7–9. All references will be to the Basic Works unless otherwise noted.
For helpful works on which I partly rely in elucidating these distinctions see Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), chaps. 1–4; Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: “Phronesis” and “Techne” in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pt. 2; Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73–91; Christopher P. Long, “The Ontological Reappropriation of Phronēsis,” Continental Philosophy Review 35.1 (2002): 35–60; Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 377–395; Nussbaum, Fragility, chap. 10, and 373–378; John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pt. 1. I use the word “partly” because there are revisionist aspects to some of these readings of Aristotle that I have not endorsed in the context of my reading. My argument here is about Dewey, not Aristotle.
6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. rev., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1960; New York: Continuum, 1989); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 21–38, 69–88, 151–171; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
7. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 6; cf. bk. 10.7–9.
8. Ibid., bk. 6.3 [1139a]–6.5; cf. Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett in Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon, bk. 1.4 [1254].
9. Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1.3.
10. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 6.7 [1141a20–b9], 10.7–9. To be fair, Aristotle recognizes composite practices that involve both phronēsis and technē and so muddle the distinction. Nonetheless, he seems especially concerned to see these elements as distinct when discussing ethical and political practices. In other words, he does not allow the composite practices to destabilize his commitment to firm ontological distinctions.
11. This claim is compatible with contingency, for if one was constantly subject to bad fortune, it would allow us to construct predictive models of failure. Part of what makes contingency unsettling is our inability to construct predictive models in just this way. As such, we ought to believe that the person’s problem is that they lack practical wisdom.
12. Only rarely do we attribute wisdom to judgments that do not have fruitful results, and this is usually in cases where the realization of the judgment’s content is beyond our control. Here Dewey uses the example of the surgeon, so that we “would not say that the act of a surgeon is necessarily to be condemned because an operation results in the death of a patient … morally his act was beneficent, although unsuccessful from causes which he could not control” (E3 [LW7:173–174]). Notwithstanding, Dewey’s point nonetheless rejects Aristotle’s contention that “in the variable are included both things made and things done; making and acting are different (for their nature we treat even the discussions outside our school as reliable); so that the reasoned state of capacity to act is different from the reasoned state of capacity to make” (Aristotle, Ethics 6.3 [1140a] [emphasis added]).
13. Robert B. Brandom, “The Pragmatist Enlightenment (and Its Problematic Semantics),” European Journal of Philosophy 12.1 (2004): 2; see also Ralph Ketcham, The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), chaps. 4–6; John P. Anton, “John Dewey and Ancient Philosophies,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 25.4 (1965): 497; Bernstein, Praxis and Action, 213–219. On the importance and rise of probability and statistics in late-nineteenth-century America see Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), intro. I recognize that the origin of this experimental approach predates Darwin. For Dewey, however, experimentalism in the context of Darwin’s biological paradigm solidifies an important way of understanding inquiry.
14. For more on these two competing dimensions within modernity see Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), chap. 2.
15. Thus he says: “Were we to define science not in the usual technical way, but as a knowledge that accrues when methods are employed which deal competently with problems that present themselves, the physician, engineer, artist, craftsman, lay claim to scientific knowing” (QC [LW4:159]).
16. The term is appropriated from Anthony Giddens, although I do not depart significantly from what he means; see Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991), 36–47, at 36–37.
17. A good example of this is suggested by David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (1740; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 87.
18. To be sure, Dewey offers more careful investigations of these thinkers elsewhere (RIP [MW12: chaps. 1 and 2]; QC [LW4:47–53]; PWHS [MW3:193–202]). And it can scarcely be denied that there is some interpretative violence being done, for those “interested in philosophy may object that the criticisms passed are directed … at a man of straw,” Dewey observes (QC [LW4:23]). But it is important to understand that Dewey’s treatment of these thinkers and the traditions to which they belong does not seek accuracy of their thought in toto. His approach is that of the historian of ideas, wherein he searches after the development of ideas and their impact through succeeding generations. For ideas, as he explains, “have an empirical origin and status” (QC [LW4:91]). That is, they are “plans of operations to be performed” and therefore are “integral factors in actions,” orienting us one way rather than another. He is thus after the ways in which these ideas of knowledge, experience, and science orient us to and make specific claims about the world (QC [LW4:111]). Dewey does not deny the translatable quality of ideas across generations of thinkers, and indeed believes that this possibility builds up a history of philosophy. He accepts in this regard that such ideas are funneled through problems generated in specific contexts, but he believes that those problems can come to be described in one way rather than another owing to the philosophical baggage we carry.
19. With Jonathan Israel’s recent study there is good reason to believe that Dewey’s argument is of genuine historical worth; see Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, 3rd ed. (1788; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 31; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (1787; Boston: Bedford Press, 1965), chap. 3; cf. Dewey QC (LW4:47–50).
21. This term is not meant to carry any special meaning or to indicate a deep connection with the ethic of care movement in moral philosophy.
22. Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 51; cf. Dewey, LJP (MW8: §§III–IV, at 39).
23. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 131.
24. In emphasizing the importance of Darwin, my account is consistent with John Shook’s insistence on the priority of Hegel to Dewey’s philosophy precisely because I am not trying to explain “the transformation of his absolute idealism into instrumentalist empiricism” or to answer the question, “When did Dewey stop being an idealist and become a pragmatist?” (Shook, Dewey’s Empirical Theory, chaps. 1 and 5, at 202 and 210). The settlement of this issue is to be found in a remark by John Herman Randall: “John Dewey is a cardinal illustration of the fact that Darwin seemed to bring biological, that is, ‘scientific’ support to an essential Hegelian ‘mode of thinking.’ Darwin forced Dewey to reconstruct many of the Hegelian ideas, to be sure: he compelled a basic pluralizing of Hegel, and a putting of his thought upon an experimental basis” (Randall, “The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22.4 [1961]: 450). Unfortunately, Hegel did not have an understanding of the naturalistic mechanics of evolution.
25. Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 109. See also James Bohman, “Realizing Deliberative Democracy as a Mode of Inquiry: Pragmatism, Social Facts, and Normative Theory,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.1 (2004): 23–43.
26. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 226, and cf. chap. 3; Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107–118.
27. Raymond D. Boisvert, “The Nemesis of Necessity: Tragedy’s Challenge to Deweyan Pragmatism,” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey Haskins and David I. Seiple (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 158. See also Patrick J. Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 77–75, 176–180, 182–185.
28. That Boisvert would say this of Dewey in the first instance is very strange, since he writes elsewhere: “Unlike the philosophers he criticizes, Dewey does not begin with a prior commitment to achieve absolute certainty. Human knowing is provisional, incomplete, and probabilistic. We rarely act with the absolute security that our choices are the absolute appropriate ones” (Boisvert, John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998], 16; cf. 25). In the essay of his to which I referred in note 27, Boisvert often speaks of Dewey incorporating “elements central to the tragic,” but he then concludes that “whereas the tragedian realizes that mind will always be in some ways blind to the multifarious working of necessity, Dewey’s reformist faith leads him to lean in the opposite direction. For him mind can come to dominant necessity” (Boisvert, “Nemesis of Necessity,” 163). That mind can come to dominant necessity does not mean it will. This claim seems to me completely consistent with acknowledging the fact that we are blind to the multifarious workings of necessity, which may intervene to our disadvantage.
29. West, American Evasion, 100–102; Boisvert, “Nemesis of Necessity,” 151–168.
30. Boisvert, “Nemesis of Necessity,” 158.
31. Arendt, Human Condition, 222. For helpful analysis of this in Arendt see Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 82–89; cf. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 3, at 64.
32. John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 304. See also James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chap. 13; Deneen, Democratic Faith, 75–77, 174–178.
33. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (1892; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. 10; George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (1934; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pts. 3–4.
34. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1–23; Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 148–158; Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chap. 7; Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15–22.
35. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 78–86. See also Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 2; Sabine Lovibond, Ethical Formation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 25.
36. Robert B. Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 182 (original emphasis). See also McDowell, Mind and World, 82.
37. John McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 118.
38. Herbert W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 556.
39. McDowell, Mind and World, 78.
40. Obviously Dewey’s remarks overlap with Arendt’s much later reflections on action, in particular the concept of “natality.” For Arendt, this constitutes our second birth, and is coextensive with the emergence of our distinctiveness as individuals. But some confusion seems to emerge at precisely this point. For our insertion into the world, on Arendt’s view, “is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them” (Arendt, Human Condition, 176–177). Yet insertion seems to be bound up with “beginning something new on our own initiative” (ibid., 177). What needs now to be explained by Arendt is why individuals feel the need to begin something new. What prompts initiative? Her answer cannot simply be the fact that one has speech and can act, because individuals may simply be speaking the language of their community, engaging in the acts of those with whom they are associated. Note, she says in the example of joining a group, that one is stimulated to do so. But wherein lies the source of stimulation? Speaking and acting, Dewey would say, comprise the potential source of beginnings, but the very existence of agents does not yet constitute a beginning—that is, as understood by Arendt. In short, something must precede initiative. This will often, in Dewey’s view, be prompted by necessity or utility, although I think what those terms mean for him will be far more expansive than what we find in Arendt.
41. Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint”; McDowell, Mind and World, lecture I.
42. Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint,” 185 (original emphasis). See also McDowell, Mind and World, lecture IV.
43. Dewey to James, cited in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935), 2:522–523.
44. See also William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912; New York: Longman, Green, and Company, 1922), 10.
45. We should note that Dewey is referring to those moments in which experience is distinguished from nature proper. This requires a cognitive operation, the emergence of which is a self-contained process, causally aimed at meaning. Here the distinction between mind and world is necessary in his account, but it is a functional distinction. On this reading, then, his criticism of traditional philosophy relates to the fact not that this distinction holds, but that it is allowed to ossify in a specific way that rejects from the outset the original union and so undermines a basic naturalism. In such instances, the response consists in trying to find the appropriate bridging operation—a move that Dewey does not need to pursue.
46. McDowell formulates the same point as such: “The conceptual capacities drawn into play in experience belong to a network of capacities for active thought, a network that rationally governs comprehension-seeking responses to the impacts of the world on sensibility. And part of the point of the idea that the understanding is a faculty of spontaneity—that conceptual capacities are capacities whose exercise is in the domain of responsible freedom—is that the network, as an individual thinker finds it governing her thinking, is not sacrosanct. Active empirical thinking takes place under a standing obligation to reflect about the credentials of the putatively rational linkages that govern it. There must be standing willingness to refashion concepts and conceptions if that is what reflection recommends” (Mc-Dowell, Mind and World, 12–13).
47. Arendt, Human Condition, 236.
49. Indeed, as he says later on in that work: “Men who devote themselves to thinking are likely to be unusually unthinking in some respects, as for example in immediate personal relationships. A man to whom exact scholarship is an absorbing pursuit may be more than ordinarily vague in ordinary matters. Humility and impartiality may be shown in a specialized field, and pettiness and arrogance in dealing with other persons” (HNC [MW14:137]).
50. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 79. That he attributes this to Aristotle does not seem problematic given the argument Dewey advances against Aristotle, since Markell is discussing this issue in the context of moral and political matters and not human action in toto.
51. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 20.
52. Thomas Alexander, “Dewey and the Metaphysical Imagination,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28.2 (1992): 212; Alexander, “The Art of Life: Dewey’s Aesthetics,” in Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 8; cf. James Campbell, The Community Reconstructs (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 91–110.
53. Richard Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Dewey: On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. Richard Bernstein (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), xviii. There is a longstanding debate between those who read Dewey as offering a metaphysics of existence and those who see him as offering a metaphysics of experience. See Sleeper, Necessity of Pragmatism; Thomas Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), chap. 3; John Stuhr, “Dewey’s Reconstruction of Metaphysics,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28.2 (1992): 161–176; Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 126–130; Raymond Boisvert, “Dewey’s Metaphysics: Ground-Map of the Prototypically Real,” in Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 149–165.
54. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 6.4 [1140b20]; 6.10 [1143a8–15].
55. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 3.3 [1112a30–b13] (emphasis added); cf. 6.5 [1140a30–35].
56. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 6.5 [1140a25]; 6.7 [1141b15]; 6.8 [1142a12]; 6.11 [1143a29–34].
57. Once again, the revisionist account of Aristotle would want to take issue with this reading. On this see Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, chap. 7; Nussbaum, Fragility, chap. 10; Salkever, Finding the Mean, chap. 1; Frank, Democracy of Distinction, intro.–chap. 1.
58. In this case the situation would be cognitively inaccessible.
59. Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint,” 180.
60. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, 51. See also Lovibond, Ethical Formation, pt. 1. It is important to note that although sympathy is used in this context to denote what appears to be solitary reflection, it would be a mistake to conclude this. Dewey intends for sympathy to function during dialogical exchanges, making us receptive to the other and their perspective. I explore this issue in chapter 4.
61. Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), vol. 2, chap. 5; Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); cf. Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (Malden, MA: Routledge, 2000).
62. See also Brandom, Making It Explicit, xiv, 245–255; Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 231–237; Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 43–115; Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 94–106.
63. This reading borrows from Lovibond, especially when she writes: “Such evaluative distinctions suggest the further thought that there is such a thing as a best possible condition of the individual deliberator with respect to the appreciation of objective reasons” (Lovibond, Ethical Formation, 8).
64. Cited in Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry Into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 85.
65. Ibid. (original emphasis).
66. We should note in this regard that Dewey is not particularly interested in whether individuals denote the ends of inference as hypotheses, ideas, conjectures, guesses, suggestions, theories, or beliefs. Let the domain determine the appropriate idiom.
67. As Joas nicely writes of the pragmatists: “Hypotheses are put forward: suppositions about new ways of creating bridges between the impulses to action and the given circumstances of a situation. Not all such bridges are viable” (Joas, Creativity of Action, 133).
68. I take this to be a Peircean insight that Dewey never abandons. For this reading of Peirce see Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality; Robert Talisse, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2007), chap. 3; see also Dewey, L (LW12:17 n.1; cf. 343 n. 6).
69. I say “expansion” because Annas is clear that she needs to go beyond Aristotle at this juncture of her argument; see Annas, Morality of Happiness, 67–73.
73. Richard Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” in The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 72–90.
75. Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
76. West, American Evasion, 101.
3. FAITH AND DEMOCRATIC PIETY
1. For a more historical account on the debate surrounding A Common Faith see Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 512–540.
2. For views that deemphasize the importance of religion to Dewey see Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 168; Jerome Paul Soneson, Pragmatism and Pluralism: John Dewey’s Significance for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 127; cf. Horace Friess, “Dewey’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Guide to the Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 202.
3. Dewey is very clear that William James seems to abandon his critical eye when “theological notions are under consideration” (WPP [MW4:109]). For a helpful text on James’ religious thought see Henry S. Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Charles S. Peirce seems to work from a standard design argument in matters of religion; see Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 434–450.
4. Here I am drawing on language from Rainer Forst in Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism, trans. John M. M. Farrell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), chap. 3, at 88.
5. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20. See also Beth Eddy, The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 1; Dewey, CF (LW9:18).
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address” (1838), in Emerson: Essays and Lectures / Nature: Addresses and Lectures / Essays: First and Second Series/ Representative Men / English Traits / The Conduct of Life, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 91. All citations of Emerson’s essays will come from this collection, unless otherwise noted. Compare Walt Whitman’s remark in “Democratic Vistas” when he says: “Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than popular superficial suffrage” (“Democratic Vistas” [1882], in Specimen Days and Collect [New York: Dover, 1995], 203–257, at 205–206).
7. Cf. Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 260–266; James Campbell, Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 152–155.
8. John Dewey to Max Otto, January 14, 1935, in The Correspondence of John Dewey, ed. Larry Hickman, Barbara Levine, Anne Sharpe, and Harriet Furst Simon (Intelex Past Masters, electronic edition, 2004).
9. Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841), 275; cf. “The American Scholar” (1837), 53–71. Dewey himself invokes the term in precisely this way in several contexts (E2 [MW5:422]; CC [LW5:139]; E3 [LW7:327, 377]).
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835/1840; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), bk. 1, pt. 2, chap. 9, 282.
11. The parenthetical insertions are my own, and are meant to clarify the distinctions that will be explained in greater detail below.
12. Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, trans. Gregory Moore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 123.
13. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995), 219–220.
14. See especially Bernard Yack’s comments on this distinction in The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 13–15, 30–32; cf. Stout, Democracy, 278–283; cf. Campbell, Understanding John Dewey, 173–174; James Campbell, “Community Without Fusion: Dewey, Mead, Tufts,” in Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, ed. Robert Hollinger and David Depew (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 56–71.
15. Here I am appropriating Ian Shapiro’s language, but amending the imagery of democracy as a subordinate foundational good; see Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 21–24, at 21; “Revisiting Democratic Justice: A Response to Critics” The Good Society 11.2 (2002): 92.
16. I have no doubt that in his self-description, democracy would be Dewey’s religious faith—that is, it is the source of his pious allegiance and unifies him in imagination (see also Robert B. Westbrook, “An Uncommon Faith: Pragmatism and Religious Experience,” in Pragmatism and Religion: Classical Sources and Original Essays, ed. Stuart Rosenbaum [Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003], 190–205). This is clear from his life as a social reformer. But a psychoanalytic interpretation of Dewey must be careful not to read this as the point of A Common Faith as such, for it is simply inconsistent with his claim that the term “religious” can be a property of any feature of experience (DR [LW9:218–219]).
17. Cf. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 208; Stout, Democracy, 27; Thomas M. Alexander, “John Dewey and the Roots of Democratic Imagination,” in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 131–154.
18. Emerson, “Man the Reformer” (1841), 137–138.
19. Emerson, Nature (1836), 10.
22. Whitman says in agreement: “We shall, it is true, quickly and continually find the origin-idea of the singleness of man, individualism, asserting itself, and cropping forth, even from the opposite ideas. But the mass, or lump character, for imperative reasons, is to be ever carefully weigh’d, borne in mind, and provided for. Only from it, and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other, comes the chance of individualism” (Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 213; cf. 228).
23. For this criticism see Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (New York: Knopf, 1971); Sacvan Bercovitch, “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lawrence Buell (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 101–129; Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). We also see this in Cornel West, although he does gesture toward the social quality in Emerson’s philosophy (The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989], 12–13, 19, 36).
24. Stout, Democracy, 31.
25. Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” 135; cf. “The American Scholar,” 63.
26. Thus Dewey writes of liberalism: “Born in revolt against established forms of government and the state, the events which finally culminated in democratic political forms were deeply tinged by fear of government, and were actuated by a desire to reduce it to a minimum so as to limit the evil it could do. Since established political forms were tied up with other institutions, especially ecclesiastical, and with a solid body of tradition and inherited belief, the revolt also extended to the latter. Thus it happened that the intellectual terms in which the movement expressed itself had a negative import even when they seemed to be positive. Freedom presented itself as an end in itself, though it signified in fact liberation from oppression and tradition…. Thus ‘individualism’ was born, a theory which endowed singular persons in isolation from any associations, except those which they deliberately formed for their own ends” (PP [LW2:288–289]).
27. That it is an ambivalent conception of selfhood means that liberalism’s notion of freedom need not be understood in such narrowly negative terms. Indeed, we find in thinkers like John Locke, J. S. Mill, and Thomas Green (thinkers with whom Dewey was obviously familiar) and in more contemporary thinkers like John Rawls a view that reconciles freedom and authority. So convinced that, once historicized, he can expand the normative dimension of liberalism’s account of freedom, Dewey describes himself as working within that tradition. But if this view is right, then the revival of republicanism (à la Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit), which distinguishes itself from liberalism, should be cautiously embraced. See Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); cf. Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For my specific worries about neo-republicanism see Melvin L. Rogers, “Republican Confusion and Liberal Clarification,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34.8 (2008).
28. Cf. George Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage, 1995), 171; Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 273.
29. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 1, especially at 58–62; cf. chap. 4.
30. Sandel, Liberalism, 150.
31. In fairness to Sandel, he does want to distinguish between a “situated” and “radically situated subject,” but without giving us an account of why revision is and may be possible, it is unclear how he can sustain this distinction (Sandel, Liberalism, 20–21; see also 179–183). Moreover, because the identity of the subject (not resources for identity formation, as pointed out in the last chapter) is so thoroughly dependent on the community’s self-understanding, Sandel appears to have made the claims of the community vis-à-vis its members both antecedent and therefore absolute. The tension is obvious when Sandel says that individuals do not “choose” their identity, they “find” it, which betrays his claim that individuals “participate” in the constitution of their identity (Sandel, Liberalism, 153; see also 179–180). For a similar critique see Forst, Contexts, chap. 1.
32. Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Pathos of Liberalism,” The Nation 141 (September 11, 1935): 303.
33. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Human Nature (1941; New York: Scribners, 1964), 1:111.
34. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932; New York: Scribners, 1960), chaps. 1 and 10; Nature and Destiny of Man, chaps. 7–9; The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Scribners, 1944), chap. 1. For an excellent biography, which details Niebuhr’s political activism, see Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
35. Eldridge, Transforming Experience, 61.
36. Niebuhr to Morton White, New York, 17 May 1956, in Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr: Letters of Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr, ed. Ursula Niebuhr (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 378–379; cf. Robin W. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 46–56.
37. In saying this, I am unconvinced that the mythical character Niebuhr attributes to the divine is proof that he parts company from the standard Christian outlook.
38. Niebuhr, Children of Light, 16–17; cf. Nature and Destiny of Man, chap. 7.
39. Niebuhr, Moral Man, 19; cf. Nature and Destiny of Man, 178–179. For the all-important reception of Moral Man see Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 132–150.
40. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, 100–103.
41. Niebuhr, Children of Light, 80–85, at 84; cf. 70–71. It is no surprise then to find Niebuhr saying that, “I stand in the William James tradition. He was both an empiricist and a religious man, and his faith was both the consequence and the presupposition of his pragmatism” (quoted in Jane Bingham, Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr [New York: University Press of America, 1993], 224). For an interesting set of reflections on Niebuhr’s Jamesian moment see West, American Evasion, 150–164; cf. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), chap. 4, at 96–105; Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 84.
42. I borrow the phrase from Judith Shklar’s essay, “Emerson and the Inhibitions of Democracy,” in Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 49–65.
43. As he says later on: “Those contemporary theologians who are interested in social change and who at the same time depreciate human intelligence and effort in behalf of the supernatural, are riding two horses that are going in opposite directions” (CF [MW9:52]).
44. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 146.
45. Against this Niebuhr seems to argue that sin is produced, as if to indicate its historical character (Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 251–260). The paradox, however, is that this is the result of our freedom, which is why he says all achievement is tainted by pride. But if freedom is a fundamental feature of being human that always leads us to sin, then the historical analysis is read back into an ontological contention about human nature as such. Cornel West seems to think otherwise, believing that even after Niebuhr “turned to the Pauline and Augustinian traditions he remained a liberal Christian … [unwilling] to decenter human creative powers” (West, American Evasion, 155). While I believe his political activism may suggest this, I do not believe it can flow coherently or consistently from his theological position.
46. Emerson, Conduct of Life (1860), 945.
47. Compare Dewey’s self-description in the 1930s after confronting his own disappointments as a reformer. It carries more than a hint of caution: “Forty years spent wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land” (Dewey, AE [LW5:160]). As Robert Westbrook rightly notes in this regard: “Dewey never believed that American democracy was out of the woods” (John Dewey and American Democracy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991], 462; cf. Ryan, John Dewey, chaps. 7 and 8). Stanley Cavell thus misses the Emersonian voice in Dewey, reducing his understanding of inquiry to scientism (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], intro.). For several good responses to Cavell with which I agree, see Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophic Life (New York: Routledge, 1997); Philip W. Jackson, John Dewey and the Philosopher’s Task (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), chap. 5; Vincent Colapietro, “The Question of Voice and the Limits of Pragmatism: Emerson, Dewey, and Cavell,” in The Range of Pragmatism and the Limits of Philosophy, ed. Richard Shusterman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 174–196.
48. Emerson, “The Conservative” (1841), 177 (emphasis added); cf. Dewey, AE2 (LW10:34).
49. For a more generous comparison between Niebuhr and Dewey specifically see Daniel Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
50. Santayana offers similar reflections that have a somewhat different inflection, but parallel and deepen the themes found in Emerson and Dewey: “Now man is part of nature and her organization may be regarded as the foundation of his own; the word nature is therefore less equivocal than it seems, for every nature is Nature herself in one of her more specific and better articulated forms. Man therefore represents the universe that sustains him; his existence is a proof that the cosmic equilibrium that fostered his life is a natural equilibrium, capable of being long maintained…. But even if this equilibrium, by which the stars are kept in their courses and human progress is allowed to proceed, is fundamentally unstable, it shows what relative stabilities nature may attain. Could this balance be preserved indefinitely, no one knows what wonderful adaptations might occur within it, and to what excellence human nature in particular might advance…. I am not sure that a humanity such as we know, were it destined to exist forever, would offer a more exhilarating prospect that a humanity having indefinite elasticity together with a precarious tenure of life. Morality has its compensations: one is that evils are transitory, another that better times may come” (George Santayana, The Life of Reason [1905–1906; New York: Prometheus Press, 1998], 84–85).
51. On this distinction see John Smith, Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 224–225, n. 86; cf. P. Eddy Wilson, “Emerson and Dewey on Natural Piety,” Journal of Religion 75.3 (1995): 336.
52. The claims articulated thus far depart from both Patrick Deneen’s criticism of Emerson and Dewey and his cautious praise of Niebuhr in his recent book (see Democratic Faith [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], chaps. 1, 2, and 9, at 246–260). The fundamental problem at the core of his reading has to do with the implicit or explicit meaning of “transformation” for both Emerson and Dewey. But unlike the conception of transformation we find in Rousseau, Emerson and Dewey do not mean a species-wide change, a fact that Deneen seems not to recognize (Deneen, Democratic Faith, intro., chap. 5). To say it differently: Emerson’s and Dewey’s conception of transformation is not located at the ontological level, and so is able to account for the recalcitrant features of human nature that cut against democratic governance and our natural sociality. As I have argued, Niebuhr seems unable to serve as a potential corrective to the emergence of “mean egotism” without making an ontological claim about humans as fallen creatures. This ontological (specifically theological) argument undermines any belief that human intervention may potentially bring about change in the world. Contra Deneen, both Emerson and Dewey are capable of showing us how to be humble—of understanding the potential limitations of being human and engaging the natural world that may undermine democratic possibilities—without making a theological claim.
53. Stout, Democracy, 28.
54. The phrase “unseen higher” should actually be “higher unseen” (see the substantive variants in quotations, MW9:519).
55. For this claim see Edward L. Schaub, “Dewey’s Interpretation of Religion,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1939), 398–399; cf. Friess, “Dewey’s Philosophy of Religion,” 209–210; John Herman Randall Jr., “The Religion of Shared Experience,” in Philosophy After Darwin: Chapters for the Career of Philosophy, Volume III, and Other Essays, ed. Beth J. Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 261; Willard E. Arnett, “Critique of Dewey’s Anticlerical Religious Philosophy,” Journal of Religion 34.4 (1954): 256–266.
56. Thus Dewey is clear that even the symbols and rites of religions that “have so often claimed to be realities and which have imposed themselves as dogmas and intolerances” often carry “some trace of a vital and enduring reality, that of a community of life in which continuities of existences are consummated” (HNC [MW14:226]).
57. See passage cited from Dewey on page 124 of this chapter.
58. Emerson, “Circles” (1841), 412; cf. Dewey, CF [MW9:27].
59. This theme figures prominently in Eddie Glaude’s skillful application of pragmatism to the contemporary problems of black politics; see Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. chap. 3.
60. Santayana, Life of Reason, 258.
63. This phrase is understood by Rawls in the context of an “overlapping consensus” on principles that “persist over generations” and which “gain a sizable body of adherents in a more or less just constitutional regime, a regime in which the criterion of justice is that political conception itself” (John Rawls, Political Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 13–15, at 15; cf. 133–172).
65. Stout, Democracy, 98. In many ways, I read Stout as providing us with an updated version of what Dewey was up to. Yet he reads A Common Faith as being “too militant, too sure of its ability to debunk traditional forms of faith as irrational, to play the role Dewey wanted it to play in his public philosophy” (Stout, Democracy, 32). As he says earlier: “The question is whether his denial of supernaturalism can be an essential component of the common faith he proposes for democratic citizens” (Stout, Democracy, 23–24). But I do not believe it is right to read Dewey’s political project as expressing an aversion to supernaturalism as such. He is concerned, in precisely the way Stout is, about it disqualifying public claims that do not proceed from the same starting point. One basic reading of Stout’s argument is that he is providing us with an answer to the following question: If a theological perspective is no longer the assumed starting point of public dialogue, how then are we to proceed? If what I have been saying is accurate, then surely we can read Dewey as his ally, as agreeing with him that “the mark of secularization … is … that articipants in a given discursive practice are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are” (Stout, Democracy, 97).
66. Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 26.
67. Cf. “When a man desires ardently to know the truth, his first effort will be to imagine what the truth can be. He cannot prosecute his pursuit long without finding that imagination unbridled is sure to carry him off the track…. He can stare stupidly at phenomena; but in the absence of imagination they will not connect themselves together in any rational way” (Charles S. Peirce, “Lessons from the History of Science” (1896), in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931], 1:20).
68. Cf. “To put the issue in theological terms, a faith that excludes critical examination is a form of idolatry” (Richard J. Bernstein, “Pragmatism’s Common Faith,” in Richard J. Bernstein, Pragmatism and Religion: Classical and Original Essays, ed. Stuart Rosenbaum [Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003], 135).
69. Here Dewey has in mind Locke’s claim that: “Faith … is the Assent to any Proposition, not thus made out by the Deductions of Reason; but upon the Credit of the Proposer, as coming from GOD, in some extraordinary way of Communication. This way of discovering Truths to Men, we call Revelation.” And then again: “Reason is natural Revelation, whereby the eternal Faith of Light and Fountain of all Knowledge communicates to Mankind that portion of Truth, which he has laid within the reach of their natural Faculties: Revelation is natural Reason enlarged by a new set of Discoveries communicated by GOD immediately, which Reason vouches the Truth of, by the Testimony and Proofs it gives, that they come from GOD” (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [1690; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979], bk. 4, chap. 18, ¶2; cf. bk. 4, chap. 19, ¶4 [original emphases]).
70. He provides us with a helpful example: “[Sherwood Eddy] says: ‘I broke down from overwork and soon came to the verge of nervous prostration. One morning after a long and sleepless night … I resolved to stop drawing upon myself so continuously and begin drawing upon God. I determined to set apart a quiet time every day in which I could relate my life to its ultimate source, regain the consciousness that in God I live, move and have my being. That was thirty years ago. Since then I have had literally not one hour of darkness or despair.’ This is an impressive record. I do not doubt its authenticity nor that of the experience. But it illustrates also the use of that quality to carry a superimposed load of a particular religion” (CF [LW9:9]). The example and commentary nicely capture the picture Dewey wishes to paint when he simultaneously says that the specificity of the experience indicates the religious aspect, but that this aspect receives a superimposed load because of the particular religion through which the experience is mediated. “Superimposed” suggests that somehow the experience as religious can be had without it. But that would not make sense given how he thinks of the social constitution of the self. Dewey must mean that the effect should not be reduced to the specificity of the meditated experience, since the tendency will then be to say that to achieve results of this kind requires situations of this character or objects of this kind.
71. Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Michael Brint and William Weaver (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 235–238; cf. James, “The Will to Believe” (1897), in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), 1–32.
72. Putnam, “Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” 233–237.
73. Cf. James, “Will to Believe,” 24–25. Eric MacGilvray nicely explicates this position in the context of James’ provocative essay. Unlike Putnam, he believes that Dewey is in agreement with James (MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004], chap. 2, at 67–68). But the central focus of MacGilvray’s chapter is James’ famous essay, and substantive references to Dewey’s work are too few in number to do justice to the identification.
74. For a problematic interpretation with which I disagree see Victor Kestenbaum, The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 183–184. In brief, Kestenbaum reads in Dewey a radical distinction between the kind of faith that underwrites ideal formation on the one hand, and belief formation on the other. But this misses the importance of inquiry to both.
75. James, “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1880) in The Will to Believe, 90.
76. James, “The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life” (1891), in The Will to Believe, 198. As mentioned before, however, James takes a more theological turn at the end of that essay.
77. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 82.
4. WITHIN THE SPACE OF MORAL REFLECTION
1. Note that I shall use capitals “G,” “R”, and “V” when discussing the good, right, and virtue in expansive terms. I shall revert to lower case when discussing specific goods, rights, and duties, or virtues and their relationship to action. For contemporary debates regarding which of these is more fundamental to moral life see the following: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), §18, §23, §68; Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action” (1983), in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 116–195; Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981); Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26–45; Michael Stocker, “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories” (1976), in the same volume, 66–78.
2. See Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Michael Brint and William Weaver (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 217–243; Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 135–136; Henry S. Levinson, “Stuck Between Debility and Demand: Religion and Enlightenment Traditions Among the Pragmatists,” in Knowledge and Belief in America: Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought, ed. William M. Shea and Peter A. Huff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 270–298. For a positive assessment of this argument that is then used against theorists of moral conflict see Isaac Levi, “Conflict and Inquiry,” Ethics 102.4 (1992): 814–834. William Caspary is unique among these thinkers in recognizing the importance of conflict, but he nonetheless believes that Dewey’s position needs to be supplemented (see Caspary, Dewey on Democracy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000], 3, 129).
3. The Ethics of 1932 with which I am concerned differs in a number of respects from the much earlier version of it that was published in 1908. Both versions were written in conjunction with James Hayden Tufts. The work is divided into three parts, “The Beginnings and Growth of Morality,” “Theory of the Moral Life,” and “The World of Action.” The second, and more theoretical, section of the work bears the ink of Dewey’s pen. Although attentive to the claims of sections 1 and 3, I shall rely primarily on the second section. For a more historical discussion of Dewey’s Ethics, including the revisions between the 1908 and 1932 versions, see Abraham Edel and Elizabeth Flower, “Introduction,” to Ethics (LW7:vii–xxxv); Abraham Edel, Ethical Theory and Social Change: The Evolution of John Dewey’s Ethics, 1908–1932 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001).
4. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (1934; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 78. See also “The Social Self” (1913), in Selected Writings, ed. Andrew J. Reck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 142–149.
5. The importance of Mead to Dewey’s self-understanding cannot be ignored. As his daughter recounts in a biographical piece she edited with materials provided by him, Dewey did not attempt a full-blown social psychology but rather “took [elements] over from Mead and made them a part of his subsequent philosophy, so that, from the nineties on, the influence of Mead ranked with that of James” (“Biography of John Dewey,” ed. Jane Dewey, in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul A. Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1939], 26). Speaking directly to this issue at Mead’s memorial service in 1931, Dewey candidly remarks: “One would have to go far to find a teacher of our own day who started in others so many fruitful lines of thought; I dislike to think what my own thinking might have been were it not for the seminal ideas which I derived from him” (GHM [LW6:24] [original emphasis]). For helpful commentary on this relationship see Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, trans. Raymond Meyer (Cambridge: Polity, 1980), 60–61; Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chaps. 4–5.
6. I take Putnam as intending something like this distinction when he says of pragmatism: “Pragmatism anticipated an idea that has become a commonplace in contemporary moral philosophy, the idea that disagreement in individual conceptions of the good need not make it impossible to approximate (even if we never finally arrive at) agreement on just procedures and even agreement on such abstract and formal values as respect for one another’s autonomy, non-instrumentalization of other persons” (Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” in Words and Life, ed. James Conant [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994], 155).
7. Here I am borrowing from, although not remaining completely consistent with, Sabina Lovibond’s outlook in Ethical Formation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 8.
8. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 1.3, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941); Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 26–27; Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 5.
9. Cf. Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 414–416; Steven Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), chaps. 3–4; Donald Morris, Dewey and the Behavioristic Context of Ethics (Bethesda, MD: International Scholars Publication, 1996), 87–89; Thomas Alexander, “John Dewey and the Roots of Democratic Imagination,” in Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 133.
10. Cf. Alexander, “John Dewey and the Roots of Democratic Imagination,” 131–154; Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination, pt. 2.
11. In using this language, Dewey is obviously indebted to Adam Smith, but to what extent he differs from Smith or David Hume in that matter I do not pursue. See generally Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Gigge, rev P. H. Nidditch (1739–1740; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; New York: Prometheus Books, 2000).
12. Quoted in Jane Dewey, “Biography of John Dewey,” 18. For a similar set of considerations see Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974), chap. 1; Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 2.
13. William James, “The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life” (1891), in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), 198.
14. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 82. Cf. Lovibond, Ethical Formation, pt. 1.
15. The most recent explication of this within the tradition of pragmatism is found in Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 12.
16. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 78 (emphasis added). Cf. HNC (MW14:41); EN (LW1:140).
17. Lovibond makes a similar claim when she says: “Human beings are a species to whom it is natural—at the level of ‘first,’ or biological, nature—to undergo initiation into a culture; this initiation may or may not have an official, legally regulated aspect, but in any case depends upon learning to talk and to take part in a variety of social activities, as envisaged by Wittgenstein under the head of ‘language-games.’ Over time, our participation in these activities … gives rise to a ‘second,’ or acquired, nature. This second nature is manifested in behavior which, though learned, is largely unreflective (like the speaking of a first language); and which, if we do make it into an object of reflection, usually produces in us a sense of inevitability” (Lovibond, Ethical Formation, 25 [original emphasis]); cf. McDowell, Mind and World, 94–96.
18. Although Dewey’s language is different and he would want to emphasize the ongoing process of habituation, he nonetheless agrees with Aristotle’s remark that: “[I]ntellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ethike is one that is formed by a slight variation from the world ethos (habit)…. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit” (Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 2.1).
19. This is a deliberate play on McDowell’s claim that if we take our second nature seriously, we are left with “no genuine questions about norms, apart from those that we address in reflective thinking about specific norms” (McDowell, Mind and World, 95).
20. While I agree with David Bakhurst that McDowell’s account of Bildung is austere, I think it is a mistake to conclude that there are “few resources in Dewey’s treatment of habits” for us to understand the dynamism of what it means to be initiated into the moral point of view (Bakhurst, “Pragmatism and Ethical Particularism,” in New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 134–136).
21. Cf. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 148–164.
22. This description captures Dewey’s way of seeing a sign as a “fence” (a way of abstracting and detaching meaning among diversity), as a “label” (a way of retaining and storing meaning), and as a “vehicle” (a way to transport meanings to other areas of experience to achieve comprehension) (HWT2 [LW8:303–305]; Alexander, “John Dewey and the Roots of Democratic Imagination,” 143–147).
23. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 60.
24. The importance of problem-solving that we have considered throughout this work undoubtedly emerges in some rudimentary form to move language’s development. There is a connection between this and Dewey’s philosophy of action. When he uses social acts as the beginning point for thinking about action, he does so to emphasize the importance of socialization for the emergence of self-understanding. “Thus man,” he writes, “is not merely de facto associated, but he becomes a social animal in the make-up of his ideas, sentiments and deliberate behavior. What he believes, hopes for, and aims at is the outcome of association and intercourse” (PP [LW2:251] [original emphases]). Dewey does not begin, as Habermas argues, with an “isolated actor’s instrumental dealings with things and events” (Habermas, “Individuation Through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996], 174). Thus language becomes the paradigmatic case from which he examines the organizing principles of conduct—i.e., morality. Stephen White is on to something when, drawing from pragmatism, he says: “Communicative rationality has to be understood finally as a practice of coping with the emergence of problems within a context of intersubjectivity” (“The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 319 [original emphases]). In this regard, Mead never needed, as Habermas encourages us to believe, to free himself from “Dewey’s model of an isolated actor’s … dealings” because this was never Dewey’s beginning point. For a similar argument, although in response to James Hoopes, see Robert Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 42–45.
25. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 155–156.
26. Stout, Democracy, 270. Hence Dewey says: “Because of converse, social give and take, various organic attitudes become an assemblage of persons engaged in converse, conferring with one another, exchanging distinctive experiences, listening to one another, over-hearing unwelcome remarks, accusing and excusing” (EN [LW1:135]).
27. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 168.
28. McDowell, Mind and World, 184. It should be noted that although McDowell is speaking about language in this instance, he does so to indicate the extent to which the moral life is constitutively tied to language use.
29. John McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 119. I take this also to be Habermas’ point when he says: “By no means do these universal pragmatic presuppositions of communicative action suggest the objectivistic fallacy according to which we could take up the extramundane standpoint of a subject removed from the world, help ourselves to an ideal language that is context-free and appears in the singular, and thereby make infallible, exhaustive, and thus definitive statements which, having neither the capacity nor the need for a commentary, would pull the plug on their own effective history. From the possibility of reaching understanding linguistically, we can read off a concept of situated reason that is given voice in validity claims that are both context-dependent and transcendent” (Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking, 138–139 [emphasis added]).
30. Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1:139.
31. William James, Pragmatism (1907; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 37; cf. Stout, Democracy, chap. 12.
32. Although Richard Rorty has been criticized for denying this point, I think he was far more careful than his critics acknowledge. As he says in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature against problematic notions of Truth: “The aim of all such explanations is to make truth something more than what Dewey called ‘warranted assertability’: more than what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying” (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1980], 176). I understand two points to follow from this statement. First, peers need not be confined to a specific community. Second, the term ceteris paribus (all other things being equal) implies that reason, evidence, and argumentation have not revealed factors that may call the norm into question.
33. This raises an important question. How are we to proceed under conditions that are unfavorable to the practice of reason-giving? The conditions I have in mind include economic inequality that leads to asymmetrical power positions or a simple unwillingness on the part of individuals or a group to engage in reason-giving because various institutional arrangements insulate them from having to take part in deliberation. I will come back to this issue in the next chapter.
34. Habermas, “Individuation Through Socialization,” 184 (original emphasis). See also Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 92.3 (1995): 117–118.
35. F. H. Bradley, “My Station and Its Duties” (1876), in Ethical Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), 160–214.
36. This account does not rule out situations that require moral action, but which are not dependent on reflection. What to do when you see a person who is about to be hit by a car and you are in a position that enables you to push her to safety requires little thought. That situation is not a moral problem in the way Dewey describes. However, the decision to push an individual from harm’s way in a situation in which your own security is in jeopardy will no doubt constitute a problem in Dewey’s sense. That one may have only a split second to think does not undermine the genuineness of the problem (cf. Michael Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], 54).
37. The exception in this regard is Edel, Ethical Theory and Social Change.
38. For the primacy of these two traditions in contemporary moral philosophy see Robert B. Louden, Morality and Moral Theory: A Reappraisal and Reaffirmation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 27.
39. James, “The Will to Believe” (1897), in The Will to Believe, 3.
40. Levi, “Conflict and Inquiry,” 822.
41. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47.
42. Cf. James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891), 184–215; Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–172; Bernard Williams, “Conflict of Values,” in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 71–83; Martha Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chaps. 1–2; Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (New York: Routledge, 2000), 141–144; Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense, chap. 1; Glaude, In a Shade of Blue, chap. 2.
43. In doing so, he rejects two presumptive beliefs about the self that underwrite these two traditional ways of reasoning conflict away. The first is a belief that conflict emerges from a cognitive deficiency; the self is viewed from the outset as not being able to see the situation in its appropriate light. The second belief is that conflict emerges from a weakness of will to follow what obviously seems to be the right course of action.
44. Implicit in this account is a distinction between the Right as an ideal and specific conceptions of it. As James Campbell points out, in Dewey’s view the former is “never fully specifiable. The closest we come to specifiability is in the various conceptions of the term, conceptions that are subject to dispute” (Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence [Chicago: Open Court, 1995], 153). Insofar as examination and criticism are absent, our various conceptions about what the Right embodies “have a tendency over time to usurp the place of [the] more abstract ideal” (ibid., 155).
45. Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), ll. 1170–1173.
46. Ibid., ll. 700–710 (emphasis added).
47. This is precisely why we do not generally see the law as an affront to our freedom, because for Dewey, like neo-republicans, “being unfree consists … in being subject to arbitrary sway,” rather than merely “being restrained” (Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 5; see also Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998], chap. 1). As we observed in the previous chapter, for Dewey, placing restraint as the key element in understanding freedom and its absence is based on a misguided atomistic ontology that underwrites social life.
48. I shall leave to the side the internal homogeneity implied by contemporary understanding, especially among liberals and communitarians, of the Good, which I am here conflating with Dewey’s account. I shall qualify Dewey’s position in the next section. For a helpful survey on the liberal-communitarian debate, which captures this, see Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
49. My thinking about Dewey on this score is owed to a number of works: Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 511–513; Ian Shapiro, The State of Democracy Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
50. Among all Dewey scholars, I think Thomas Alexander is very much aware of the importance of this perceptive condition, although he does not examine it in the context of Dewey’s moral philosophy; see Alexander, “The Art of Life: Dewey’s Aesthetics,” in Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 12–13.
51. Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory, 46.
52. Cf. Lovibond, Ethical Formation, 36.
53. Cf. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, chap. 4.
54. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 208. Cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 52.
55. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 215–216.
56. Taylor, Sources, 47. See also “The Diversity of Goods,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 234.
57. Eric MacGilvray pursues similar themes, although with very different intentions; MacGilvray, Reconstructing, chap. 3.
58. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–158.
59. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 219; cf. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 92–93, 165–166. At other times MacIntyre sounds more like Dewey; see After Virtue, 187–190, 222.
61. Taylor, Sources, 71 (emphasis added).
62. Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, trans. Guy Oakes (1905; New York: Free Press, 1975), 192. Cf. Eyal Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 70.
63. Daniel M. Savage gives an interesting, although more generous, reading of the connection between Dewey and thinkers like Taylor and MacIntyre; see Savage, John Dewey’s Liberalism: Individual, Community, and Self-Development (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).
64. David Miller articulates a similar although much later claim when he remarks that modern identity is “a matter of the radical experience of equally real, but mutually exclusive aspects of the self. Personal identity cannot seem to be fixed…. The person experiences himself as many selves, each of which is felt to have … a life its own, coming and going without regard to the centered will of a single ego,” but one that is, as he says earlier, “surprisingly … not sensed as pathology” (Miller, The New Polytheism [New York: Harper and Row, 1974], 193, 78; cf. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life [New York: Basic Books, 1991]).
65. Obviously this reliance on narrative to understand identity and character need not imply a radical political position. The transformative possibilities that attend inquiry in Dewey’s view here depart from the more conservative position we find in MacIntyre.
66. MacGilvray, Reconstructing, 73.
67. Here I am referring to what are otherwise good works on Dewey’s ethical philosophy: Jennifer Welchman, Dewey’s Ethical Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Gregory Fernando Pappas, “Dewey’s Moral Theory: Experience as Method,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 33.3 (1997): 520–556; Gregory Fernando Pappas, “To Be or to Do: John Dewey and the Great Divide in Ethics,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 14.4 (1997): 447–472; Edel, Ethical Theory and Social Change; Todd Lekan, Making Morality: Pragmatist Reconstruction in Ethical Theory (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003).
68. This marks an important advancement over Dewey’s much earlier treatment of sympathy in his Psychology of 1887, in which it literally meant “feeling someone else’s feelings” and thereby obscured the difference of evaluation one might offer about those feelings (cited in Morris, Dewey and Behavioristic Context of Ethics, 89). Donald Morris takes up this earlier treatment of sympathy as well as the later use of the concept, but does not point us to this crucial shift.
69. Dewey, “Psychology of Ethics,” Lecture XXIX, March 18, 1901, in Lectures on Ethics: 1900–1901, ed. Donald F. Koch (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 241–245, at 245.
70. Westbrook, Democratic Hope, 112.
71. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, 3, 129.
72. Putnam, “Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” 233.
74. Larry Hickman, “Dewey: Pragmatic Technology and Community Life,” in Classical American Philosophy: Its Contemporary Vitality, ed. Sandra Rosenthal, Carl Hausman, and Douglas Anderson (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 107.
75. William James, “The Will to Believe” (1897), in The Will to Believe and Other Essays.
76. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Haskell House, 1948), 38.
77. James, Pragmatism, 141 (emphasis added).
5. CONSTRAINING ELITES AND MANAGING POWER
1. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York: Vintage Press, 1965); see also Waher Feinberg, “The Conflict Between Intelligence and Community in Dewey’s Educational Philosophy,” Educational Theory 19.3 (1969): 234–248; Joseph G. Metz, “Democracy and the Scientific Method in the Philosophy of John Dewey,” Review of Politics 31.2 (1969): 242–262; Clarence Karier, “Making the World Safe for Democracy: An Historical Critique of John Dewey’s Philosophy of the Warfare State,” Educational Theory 27.1 (1977): 12–47.
2. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Buenther Roth and Claus Wittich (1922; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), vol. 2, chap. 11; Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922; New York: Free Press, 1965); The Phantom Public (1925; New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), chaps. 1–3, 11–13.
3. By this phrase I mean nothing more than the belief that individuals ought to be able to participate in the construction of the laws by which they are governed and that this is something we have come to find important in political life and which must find a home in any theoretical or practical reflection on democracy.
4. By “elites,” I mean nothing more complicated than experts or political officials who occupy or can come to occupy a privileged decision-making position because of their presumed knowledge and/or skills of governance.
5. C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 418–419.
7. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 517. See also John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chap. 7; Judith M. Green, Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 31–32; John Stuhr, Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003), chap. 8; Stephen K. White, “The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science: A Pragmatist Turn,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theoryy, ed. Fred Rush (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 314.
8. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 517.
9. See generally, Lippmann, Public Opinion; Lippmann, Phantom Public; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd ed. (1942; New York: Harper and Row, 1950); cf. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Adam Przeworski, “Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense,” in Democracy’s Value, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–55; Richard A. Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chaps. 4–5. Although Dahl seemingly rejects rule by elites, his understanding of the political strata looks very much akin to Lippmann’s class of experts (see Dahl, Who Governs?, 90–91; cf. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 194–195). For helpful summaries and criticisms of this tradition see Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), specifically chap. 1; Quentin Skinner, “The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics,” Political Theory 1 (1973): 287–305.
10. Sheldon Wolin, “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 30–58. Wolin, however, is not alone in understanding democracy’s relationship to regime construction in this way; see also Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 9.2 (1983): 79–115; Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985); Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986); Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Chantel Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005); Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5.3 (2001): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/archive.html#5.3.
11. For some representative texts see the following: Richard Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Pragmatism in Law and Society, ed. Michael Brint and William Weaver (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 217–247; Robert B. Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), chaps. 1, 3–4; Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Axel Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today,” Political Theory 26.6 (1998): 763–783; James Kloppenberg, The Virtue of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 6; James Bohman, “Democracy as Inquiry, Inquiry as Democratic: Pragmatism, Social Science, and the Cognitive Division of Labor,” American Journal of Political Science 43.2 (1999): 590–607; William Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
12. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 456.
13. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Henry S. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning About the Ends of Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pt. 1; MacGilvray, Reconstructing, pt. 2; Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2004). I have said in several other instances that this view has affinities with the neo-republican conception of freedom as nondomination, which I shall explicitly invoke in this chapter (see chap. 3, n. 27; chap. 4, n. 47). Although neo-republicans such as Pettit and Quentin Skinner defend this notion as an alternative to liberalism, I am skeptical of whether this is the best way to understand the distinctiveness of republicanism in relation to liberalism. After all, Dewey is a liberal who concerns himself with expanding liberalism’s conceptual and practical vocabulary for understanding freedom. As far as my argument here goes, nothing hangs on identifying Dewey with this tradition, although I shall indicate the use of domination in understanding what he is after.
14. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 37. Cf. Dewey (FC [LW13:136]).
15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835–1840; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), bk. I, pt. II, chap. 5.
16. My understanding of Lippmann in these passages is owed to Charles Wellborn, Twentieth-Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), chap. 2; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), chaps. 13–17; Barry D. Riccio, Walter Lippmann—Odyssey of a Liberal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), chaps. 3, 5; Westbrook, John Dewey, 294–300.
17. Lippmann, Phantom Public, 10.
18. Ibid., 196; cf. Lippmann, Public Opinion, chap. 10.
19. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 59.
31. Lippmann, Phantom Public, 145. Indeed, precisely because of his suspicion of public opinion he is unconvinced that universal suffrage will improve the quality of democracy: “If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often” (Lippmann, Phantom Public, 26–27).
32. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 284–285; Lippmann, Phantom Public, 47.
33. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (1787–1788: Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), no. 63:428; cf. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,” no. 55:374.
34. There seems to be a difference between the early democratic realists, such as Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, and Charles Merriam, and later thinkers, such as Schumpeter, Dahl, Downs, and Przeworski. The groups appear to be in agreement about the societal obstacles to participation, they diverge slightly in their emphasis regarding the cognitive challenges, and they agree that the procedures under which the elected are made responsive to the electorate should be emphasized more consistently than they have been in earlier accounts of democracy. The fundamental difference, however, revolves around the quality of decision-making. The earlier thinkers seem much more interested in isolating how political decision-making can be made more “intelligent,” less driven by bias. They have a greater preoccupation with political objectivity then the latter set of thinkers. For some help in thinking about this see Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), chaps. 6, 10–11, 13.
35. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 182.
38. Lippmann amplifies this view much later when he suggests that the habits necessary to engaging in experimental intelligence can be obtained by only a few—a position he expands upon in his later work (see, for instance, Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy [New York: Mentor, 1955], bk. 2). This claim sets Lippmann off from the more traditional pragmatists of both his time and ours.
39. James Fishkin, The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century, ed. John Gastil and Peter Levine (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005); Diana C. Muntz, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
40. This is not to say that there will be no trade-offs between the local and the communal perspectives, but such trade-offs (and here I am getting ahead of myself) are measured by the extent to which they do not block the future contestability of their own consequences.
41. Lippmann, Phantom Public, chap. 4.
42. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 43, 31.
43. Wolin, “Norm and Form,” 55.
44. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 38. Cf. Politics and Vision, chap. 17, §§12–14.
45. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 31.
46. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics” (original emphasis).
47. Wolin, “Norm and Form,” 37 (original emphasis).
48. Wolin, “Transgression, Equality, and Voice,” in Dēmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 64.
49. Ibid. Although Wolin does not discuss Lefort’s account of democracy, there seem to be strong affinities between the two, especially when the latter writes: “And the fact that [society] is organized as one despite (or because of) its multiple divisions and that it is organized as the same in all its multiple dimensions implies a reference to a place from which it can be seen, read and named. Even before we examine it in its empirical determinations, this symbolic pole proves to be power; it manifests society’s self-externality, and ensures that society can achieve a quasi-representation of itself…. It would be more accurate to say that power makes a gesture towards something outside, and that it defines itself in terms of that outside” (Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 225 [original emphasis]).
50. It is worth noting that in Wolin’s view these distinctions between normal and revolutionary moments of collective organization, politics and the political, constitutionalism and democracy find their respective embodiments at the moment of the American founding in the federalists and anti-federalists. On this point see Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), chap. 5.
51. Wolin, “Norm and Form,” 35; cf. “Fugitive Democracy,” 34.
52. Wolin, “Democracy: Electoral and Athenian,” PS: Political Science and Politics 26.3 (1993): 476; cf. “Norm and Form,” 32.
53. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 600.
54. Wolin, Presence of the Past, chaps. 1, 3, 5, and 10.
55. Wolin, “Norm and Form,” 39.
56. Indeed, this seems to be the sole purpose, at least as he understand it, for which constitutions were constructed. “Greek theorists,” he explains, “developed a critique of democracy and then constructed a conception of a constitution as a means of demonstrating how democracy might be domesticated, rendered stable, orderly, and just” (Wolin, “Norm and Form,” 35).
57. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 4.
58. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 34.
59. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 602–603.
60. George Kateb, “Wolin as a Critic of Democracy,” in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 39.
61. See generally Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chaps. 1, 5–6, 10–11; John Markoff, Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996), chap. 2; Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004), chaps. 1–2, 5–6.
62. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 27.
63. On the centrality of conflict to decision-making in Dewey’s political thought see Caspary, Dewey on Democracy, chaps. 1 and 4.
64. “Biography of John Dewey,” ed. Jane M. Dewey, in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul A. Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1939), 18.
65. To be sure, in his early writings Dewey often suggests that social conflict results from what MacGilvray identifies as “self-defeating ignorance or blindness” (MacGilvray, Reconstructing, 135–136). But to recall the argument of the last chapter, Dewey is very clear in his mature writings that while these may be the cause of social conflict, we should not begin our inquiry with the thought that conflict is “specious and apparent” (TIM [LW5:280]). In fact, in the context of politics he begins with an adversarial notion of politics, albeit one that encourages us not to see our opponent as the enemy (CD [LW14:228]).
66. Obviously this point has clear affinities with deliberative democracy. For some representative texts, see John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–94; Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in the same volume, 95–119; Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 67–93; James Bohman, “Survey Article: The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6.4 (1998): 400–425.
67. For interpretative and translation difficulties between the lay and the expert public that are in need of remedy see Bohman, “Democracy as Inquiry,” 598–599; Frank Fischer, Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pts. 2–3. Dewey himself was well aware of this issue; see PP (LW2:347–348).
68. Putnam, Enlightenment and Pragmatism (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2001), 24. Cf. “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” 217–243; Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, “Dewey’s Logic: Epistemology as Hypothesis,” in Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 215–218.
69. Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” 217.
70. Dewey himself did not work out what either of these would look like from an institutional perspective, although he provides norms for guidance that I am here fleshing out. For a Deweyan-inspired approach that focuses on institutional reforms see Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, “Introduction,” in Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (New York: Verso, 2003); Fung, “Deliberative Democracy, Chicago Style: Grass-Roots Governance in Policing and Public Education,” in the same volume, 111–143; Gianpaola Baiocchi, “Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre,” in the same volume, 45–76; Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
71. For more on this point see MacGilvray, Reconstructing, chap. 4.
72. As Dewey says: “Something that bears the name democracy existed in Athens but it had little in common with the democratic movement of modern times” (LFW [LW14:316]).
73. For the various faces of power see: Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 201–215; Nelson Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 202–210; Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (New York: Macmillan, 1974). For helpful surveys of the power debate see John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 3–32; Clarissa Rile Hayward, De-Facing Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
74. The most recent explication of this, on which I rely, is in Philip Pettit and Ian Shapiro; see Pettit, Republicanism, chaps. 1–3; Shapiro, State of Democratic Theory, chaps. 1–2; Shapiro, Democratic Justice, chaps. 1–3.
75. Claus Offe, “How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?” in Democracy and Trust, ed. Mark E. Warren (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 42–88; Eric M. Uslaner, “Democracy and Social Capital,” in the same volume, 121–151.
76. James Farr, “Social Capital: A Conceptual History,” Political Theory 32.1 (2004): 6–33.
77. Diggins, Promise of Pragmatism, 304.
78. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy, 71.
80. Bohman, “Democracy as Inquiry,” 595–596.
81. If this reading of Dewey is accurate, he could easily say with MacGilvray that “to the extent that a case is made against this ideal [of inclusion], it is made not by criticizing the norm of inclusion itself but rather by drawing attention to the practical constraints … that stand in the way of its realization. Thus to be engaged as a pragmatist in normative political inquiry is to be concerned with the problem of bringing the experimental intelligence of all citizens to bear in public life to the fullest extent possible” (MacGilvray, Reconstructing, 111).
82. See generally Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (New York: Routledge, 2000); Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Robert Talisse, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2007).
83. Fung, “Deliberation Before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy in an Unjust World,” Political Theory 33.3 (2005): 399.
84. Pettit, Republicanism, 22. Cf. Shapiro, Democratic Justice, chaps. 1–3.
85. Pettit, Republicanism, 69–70 n. 6.
87. Shapiro, Democratic Justice, 42.
88. Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory, 86.
89. Westbrook, John Dewey, 305.
90. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), 300.
91. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 167.
92. Dewey worries about the extent to which democratic institutions can effectively absorb what is essential to their maintenance under conditions of complexity, namely, “a scattered, mobile and manifold public” (PP [LW2:327]). This, for him, was primarily an intellectual problem to which he did not provide an answer. Tentatively, I am inclined to say that the Internet may serve as the structural analogue to face-to-face communication through which discursive claims can be built up and around which people consolidate. For more on this possibility as a solution to the problem Dewey specifically poses see James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 74–83.
93. Shapiro, State of Democratic Theory, 54.
94. Lefort, Political Forms of Modern Society, 279.
95. Westbrook, John Dewey, 305 (original emphasis).
96. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “PostSocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 81 (original emphasis).
97. Here I am drawing generally from the following texts: Tarrow, Power in Movement, chaps. 10–11; Markoff, Waves of Democracy, chap. 2; Tilly, Social Movements, chaps. 5–6; Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 4; Young, Inclusion and Democracy, chap. 5.
EPILOGUE
1. Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7.
2. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), chap. 8.
3. John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 96.
5. Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 39.
6. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–158.
7. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (1932; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), §§2–3.
8. Dana Villa, “Hegel, Tocqueville, and ‘Individualism,’” Review of Politics 67.4 (2005): 684.
9. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), 279.