John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, by Alan Ryan:
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
LIBERALISM'S PHILOSOPHER JOHN DEWEY AND THE HIGH TIDE OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM Alan Ryan W. W. Norton, $30,448 pp. Jean Belhke Elshlain Political philosopher Alan Ryan has written a brisk,...
...But it must, for Dewey, be a meaningful unity, based on a secular, twentieth-century faith...
...Dewey's involvement in the Trotsky affair is surely a bit bizarre-a peculiar episode that shows, more than anything else, the enthrallment of much of the American Left with the Soviet experiment...
...For Ryan, Dewey was not only "immensely long-lived and immensely prolific," he was the premier public philosopher of his time, indeed of America in the twentieth century...
...For Dewey, life consisted in various "problems" requiring the undertaking of many different sorts of "experiments"- in schooling, social provision, democratic governance generally, even international relations...
...But, more importantly, Dewey first lurched for the war and its potential "social possibilities...
...But I am more troubled than Ryan by a number of things...
...One could, that is, absorb without remainder whatever was of value in Christianity, distill the pure social essence...
...He does say that Dewey wrote some silly and cruel things about pacifism and opened up a rift with Addams...
...Thus he set about in all his works softening the contrasts in which various practitioners specialized, whether philosopher, theologian, or cultural critic...
...But doing away with each means doing away with grace and, as we now know from the perspective of the long haul, constituting human beings as victims of syndromes rather than culpable actors...
...Even more bitter, however, is Dewey's deep and abiding animus against things Catholic...
...Ryan thinks Dewey can help us now because we face so many similar anxieties about our schools and our streets and our civic life-similar, that is, to those that plagued the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century with that period's influx of immigrants and exponential growth in cities and in industry...
...Even those who dissented from Stalinism still felt they had a huge stake in the success (or not) of the Russian Revolution...
...Democracy then becomes a kind of social gospel only, preferable to Marxism because it doesn't preach violence...
...Of course, he would have hated the attacks on modernity...
...I find the attempt itself troubling, an urge to unify or to systematize that is bound to do violence to life's richness and variety and plurality...
...Much of Dewey's continued use of the "language of traditional Christianity" after he had himself given up traditional Christian belief was strategic: it helped Dewey communicate "with a public that would have turned away from a more aggressively secular or skeptical writer...
...Ryan credits Dewey with a powerfully important move from a "distinctive Christian idiom" to a "secular faith in democracy," although Dewey was always happy to deploy a religious idiom when it served his purposes...
...This is risible on the face of it...
...Ryan's criticism is a bit tentative on this...
...I agree wholeheartedly and for this lesson Jane Addams, in her essay on "Filial Relations," is a surer and more trustworthy guide than Dewey...
...There isn't even a glimmer of geopolitical recognition here...
...Both sides of the tension have proper claims on us, and we cannot collapse virtues of different activities and spheres of life into one another...
...This strategic use of Christian rhetoric is potentially troubling, but one gets the sense that Dewey was never merely strategic and was certainly never cynical...
...I'm prepared to believe that Dewey was less gulled and more responsible than most...
...Ryan rejects the view of those Dewey critics who see him as an "aggressive rationalist" who wanted to drive out other ways of thinking entirely...
...But the whole thing does leave a rather sour taste in one's mouth...
...He helps the reader to appreciate her own differences with Dewey...
...An "experimental" rather than a dogmatic approach to life was the ticket to a unified democracy...
...He calls Dewey's position "elusive...
...In unpacking the strengths, and alerting us to the weaknesses, of Deweyean liberalism, Ryan has done a great service...
...Dewey wanted to direct America the way he thought Kant-disastrously (on Dewey's view)-was really to blame for the rise of German nationalism...
...That Dewey pandered to, rather than challenged, deep and often nasty prejudices is a pity and it surely speaks to a deficiency in his version of liberalism...
...Similarly, although Dewey had given the Soviet Union rather good marks when he toured there in 1928, he never justified Stalinism...
...Ryan ends by offering his sense that the world is filled with more tensions and dualities than can reasonably be removed, not just because we don't think hard enough or try hard enough, but because .. .the need for privacy and the need to belong, the need for dispassionate and instrumental behavior at work, and the need for passionate involvement in play and the enjoyment of culture-are irreducible...
...He lives in Waupaca, Wisconsin...
...But he did hope to do away with "sin" and "guilt...
...Let's take up the pro-Dewey case, first, and it is a case this book aims to make...
...A second major problem is Dewey' s extraordinary naivete and gullibility about war...
...Dewey seems really to have believed that if people just thought about the matter clear-headedly enough, many of the differences that divided them from one another could be overcome...
...This wielding of influence is nastier than Ryan allows...
...Ryan insists that Dewey was a determined rationalist of a certain sort who hoped over time to shrink the area of disputation and to enhance the area of agreement...
...Thus, he wildly overestimated the power of philosophers to determine a country's policies...
...Let me turn to these, acknowledging as I do so that a great strength of this volume is Ryan's vivid prose and his lucidity...
...I have no problem with his refusal to offer tight institutional recipes...
...REVIEWERS STEVEN ENGLUND is a free-lance writer who specializes in French history and culture...
...I say "almost" because the reservations Ryan winds up expressing about Dewey's project, in a charmingly muted way, can be pressed rather more robustly and, if one does that, Dewey comes off a bit less well...
...But this throws theology out the window, more or less...
...He saw Catholicism as antiAmerican, as absolutist and authoritarian, a "threat to science," a "threat to individual liberty," a threat to "social reform...
...Institutionally and theologically, Catholics just didn't fit...
...He seems not to have engaged the work of Jacques Maritain...
...ROBERT WORTH is a graduate student in English at Princeton University...
...Here is one vexing issue...
...Quite extraordinarily, Dewey "claimed that what lay behind German nationalism was Kant's dualism of fact and value...
...All such distinctions were, for Dewey, "illusory...
...And when that didn't happen, he turned isolationist and urged the United States to stay out of World War II altogether...
...nor does he seem to have acknowledged the role of Monsignor John A. Ryan and the lopsidedly Catholic labor unions in "progressive" American politics...
...The tribunal came to the not-too-decisive conclusion that, although the committee could not "affirm Trotsky's innocence or guilt," it did "affirm that he had not been convicted or even tried...
...We can be rid of them only at a price not worth paying...
...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at The University of Chicago, is the author, most recently, of Democracy on Trial, (Basic Books...
...Dewey certainly addressed these concerns and he did this by articulating a democratic faith and eschewing detailed institutional prescriptions...
...Ryan hits the nail on the head when he emphasizes, from the beginning to the end of this icily historical and theoretically sophisticated book, that Dewey really thought all sorts of distinctions, divisions, and contrasts need not exist, including those "between science and art, science and ethics, science and religion...
...But the notions of mediating institutions might have struck a chord...
...Although Ryan winds up being dubious about Dewey's attempt to "unify opposites," he very much admires the attempt...
...Yet, Dewey became part of an ad hoc tribunal that actually went to Mexico to undertake a 'Trotsky Trial"- a sort of mock court...
...Jean Belhke Elshlain Political philosopher Alan Ryan has written a brisk, compelling, and almost persuasive book about the enduring greatness, decency, and relevance of the influential American philosopher, John Dewey...
...When that good didn't materialize, Dewey joined the ranks of the antidiplo-matists and pushed to "outlaw war...
...It's a pity, in part, because he would have found savvy and sympathetic arguments if he had ever bothered to read the social encyclicals...
...Dewey really believed that "everything of value in particular religions" could be turned "to new uses" without losing anything of significance in the process...
...He broke with Randolph Bourne and Jane Addams and other friends and fellow Progressives over World War I. Worse, he saw to it that Bourne was removed from the editorial board of Dial and that the pages of the New Republic were closed to him...
...Although he never embraced a bloodthirsty Hegelianism about the glories of the war-state, Dewey did work himself up into a fine lather about the domestic good that would come from war...
...But it was more and far worse...
...Dewey seems rather stunningly unaware of the terrible ironies of history and the terrible necessities of statecraft...
...To Dewey's credit, and in contrast to many on the left in the decades between World Wars I and II, he never became romantic about violent revolution...
Vol. 122 • August 1995 • No. 14
