Robert Westbrook's John Dewey and American Democracy

...Dewey himself never saw it quite like this...

...On such complications, Dewey was silent...

...Again, he never thought much about how to introduce industrial democracy...

...Does any of this even begin to meet the case made in, say, the Frankfurt School's critique of "mass society" and its stupefying effect on taste...

...We must not exaggerate...

...What Dewey devised was a powerful intellectual apparatus for his own purposes...

...Dewey was brought up a devout though liberal Congregational276 • DISSENT ist...

...Nobody suggests that Dewey's work can wholly fill this gap, but it seems to fill a surprising number of American intellectual needs...

...its basic tenet was that thought was not so much a means to action as an aspect of it...

...Dewey certainly did not...

...But it does not yield any particular institutional results...

...The anxieties articulated by Mill and de Tocqueville vanish...

...Randolph Bourne condemned this as silly...

...It was not a conversion out of the religious mode of thought, however...

...For all his demands that philosophers turn from "the problems of philosophy" to "the problems of men," most of Dewey's arguments are leveled at other philosophical systems and meant to repudiate views that made a fetish of one-half of a contrast by claiming, say, that individuals were nothing but facets of society or that society was nothing but a collection of individuals...

...Christopher Lasch attacked Dewey as the theorist of corporatist manipulation in The New Radicalism in America and writes him off as a naive optimist in The True and Only Heaven...

...lthough it cannot compare with the collapse of the theory and practice of Marxian socialism in intellectual interest or geopolitical significance, the current revival of interest in the life and work of John Dewey is an astonishing phenomenon...

...Richard Rorty admires Dewey's philosophical radicalism but preaches "post-modern bourgeois liberalism...

...mere physical interaction between organism and the world was not experience, only those interactions that we actively organize in order to promote our purposes...

...The "back to Dewey" movement is fueled by more than a search for a distinctively American socialism...

...The same procedure showed that capitalism was not the fulfillment of industrial organization but at odds with its true meaning...

...Westbrook is right to emphasize the way Dewey self-consciously meant his philosophy to represent a modern democratic society thinking out loud...

...Dewey's concrete examples outside the pages of Art as Experience boil down to little speeches praising the Post Office for painting murals on local post office walls...

...The critically minded—Professor Westbrook is not among them—might complain that Dewey tended to dissolve every subject into an amorphous stew...

...This was Dewey's invariable response to criticism from the communists all through the 1930s and 1940s...

...It also allowed him to say that philosophy was essentially cultural criticism without belittling philosophy...

...His natural bent is toward the formal and the abstract...

...nonetheless, his only practical interventions in those years were in Jane Addams's Hull House and in the Laboratory School that he founded...

...In his engaging autobiographical essay "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," he says his readers' impression that he is naturally a concrete and "applied" kind of philosopher is a mistake...

...It was, as commentators have said, a move toward "adjectival religion...

...We ought not to concentrate on Dewey's failure to tell us whether a system of proportional representation, properly engineered to escape the familiar difficulties, would allow for the representation of unpopular opinions, intellectual elites, or whatever else...

...Dewey loathed all this, but remained conventionally Christian until he was nearly forty— his early philosophical writings are full of the diluted Christian apologetics that were the common currency of the time...

...His politics and Dewey's were almost indistinguishable, but he was infinitely more bloody minded about the uncomfortable nature of modern philosophy...

...Indeed, the episode did little to cool his own inflammatory attacks on pacifists and dissenters, though it may have led him to urge Americans not to fight Hitler two decades later...

...Dewey's extraordinary standing as more or less the embodiment of American thought owed more than Westbrook quite allows to the care Dewey took not to disturb the continuity between nineteenthcentury theology and twentieth-century phiSPRING • 1992 • 277 losophy...

...Both in Britain and in the United States, Green appealed to readers who wished to square their philosophical and political views with "religion" but did not want to carry the metaphysical baggage of traditional Christianity...

...government by numbers" was no doubt at odds with "government by intelligence," but "government by numbers" was not a proper rendition of democracy...

...Nor is Dewey much more convincing about the connection between art and politics...

...It didn't follow that his enthusiasm for organic metaphors in every area of intellectual, cultural, and political life was as scientific as he supposed...

...If writers like David Miller are right, the theoretical possibility that an economy of workers' cooperatives can be as efficient as an economy of capitalist-owned firms is not enough to ensure that cooperatives can survive in competition with capitalistowned firms...

...But it is not a substitute for cashing out the institutional implications of this hankering after "democracy...

...In particular, there is a dearth of nonutopian, nonnostalgic, institutionally serious radical thinking...

...It is certainly all to the good that he no longer holds that erroneous view...

...but all his life he has tried to work against it...

...He helped to found the American Association of University Professors, and played a small role in founding the American Civil Liberties Union, when freedom of speech was threatened by the passions of the First World War...

...A central element of our culture is supplied by modern science, and a central part of Deweyan cultural criticism had to be about how we—modern, secular, North American "we" —organized our dealings with the world and one another...

...Perhaps the most pertinent suggestion one could make to help stem the decay of democracy in concluding a book I am painfully aware is likely to find an audience made up mostly of professors is to call on the audience not only for more Deweyan theory but also for more Deweyan practice...

...His great claim was that so far from good ends justifying bad means, bad means would infallibly corrupt the good end...

...That is, everything—or almost everything—in Dewey's work is an answer to the question of how to institutionalize democracy...

...we need not worry whether democracy is sufficiently mindful of excellence because it is democracy only when it is sufficiently mindful of the need to expand the ways in which experience is richly, complexly, and consciously understood...

...Dewey was right to say his philosophical career had been built around his hatred of absolutes...

...In rejecting it, however, he has emulated the hero of Thurber's famous tale of "The Bear Who Could Take It or Leave It Alone...

...Al creatures cope with the world by reacting to the "problems" it sets them, and thereafter to the problems that the world they have modified now sets them...

...He also had a strong sense that philosophers as such had no particular expertise, no party line that Truth or Reason told them to follow...

...This is that Dewey's obsession with grounding democracy in the culture and the psyche of modern Americans is a sort of answer to the question of how to institutionalize democracy, but it is an answer that takes an unfamiliar view of institutions...

...in the process, it conveyed a tremendous sense of intellectual bustle...

...It is a platitude that the end of the cold war has left losers but no winners, and so leaves a sort of ideological vacuum...

...They may agree that it is fair enough to claim that we must go beyond institutions to their cultural and psychological supports...

...When Russell teased him about the residually Hegelian elements in his work, Dewey responded grumpily by repeating (almost endlessly) his aversion to "absolutism...

...At times this had politically ludicrous results...

...He SPRING • 1992 • 275 gives the impression that he feels he hasn't been wholly successful...

...He so wants Dewey to be a member of SDS that he never wonders whether Dewey could simultaneously be a sort of socialist and a thoroughgoing American liberal, and by the same token never finds an unkind word to say about the glorious unrealism of Dewey's complaints against Roosevelt's New Deal—which certainly fell far short of socialism, but also went a lot further than anyone could have predicted in 1933...

...The contrast is overdone...

...Nor have those who thought ill of Dewey thirty years ago changed their minds...

...In the 1930s conventionally Christian critics complained that Dewey eviscerated faith by rejecting supernaturalism, and it is hard not to feel some sympathy for them—though Professor Westbrook feels none...

...What he calls "renascent liberalism," and anyone else might have called social democracy, just is intelligent action...

...Much like Green, and a little like the early Marx, Dewey thought that the capitalists, also, got less out of capitalism than they should...

...mankind was not "thrown into the world" in the way Heidegger described...

...He could not be happy with a view of democracy that saw it as merely a voting device whereby a numerical majority got its way...

...Dewey loaded the odds in favor of his own political preferences by insisting that there were only three ways of dealing with the world: habit, coercive violence, and intelligent action...

...Democracy" in the American sense was a new way of adjusting the social organism to its environment...

...but, as Westbrook points out, the University of Chicago was the child of John D. Rockefeller, and Rockefeller did not take kindly to professors who bad-mouthed the capitalist order and those who profited from it...

...Westbrook's other answer is given implicitly rather than explicitly, and it is given throughout the book...

...Westbrook confesses in a footnote that he began by thinking, as Christopher Lasch did, that Dewey was a lackey of "corporate liberalism," and his educational and political theories more or less consciously put forth as techniques of social control...

...One purpose was to escape the traditional philosophical battles between idealists and materialists, empiricists and transcendentalists, and write a new kind of philosophy, philosophy as "cultural criticism...

...Although this allows Westbrook to do a nice job of linking Dewey's approach to religion and the aesthetics of Art as Experience, one sorely misses a touch of skepticism about the project...

...American democracy was a "religious" creed—not because democrats had to believe the dogmas of some particular faith but because they had to believe in the potentialities of the common man and in the possibility that a community of democratic individuals could govern its common affairs by drawing on the intelligence of everyone, not a favored few...

...The critically inclined will not be appeased...

...Stagnation and violence are foreign to a community that can achieve its ends by self-conscious reflection on what its "endsinview" are, and by intelligent action to achieve them...

...The bear of the title gets drunk, turns cartwheels in the front hall, and terrifies his wife and family...

...Dewey, of course, was eager to defend the attractions of what he aptly titled A Common Faith, and Westbrook admires the way Dewey borrowed Wordsworth's "natural piety" to describe the proper attitude to nature and society...

...It was not that there were conclusive moral arguments against either habit or violence, though violence is morally obnoxious...

...The universe was not the cold, bleak place that Russell's lachrymose essay on "A Free Man's Worship" had described...

...Experience," a key term of Dewey's worldview, was itself explained in these activist terms...

...rather, we could do better than that...

...There are some familiar areas of Dewey's work where this approach shows Dewey to advantage...

...How much more than a sleight of hand links democracy and aesthetic appreciation...

...It is a bit of a joke to speak of the death of the Marxist project and the rebirth of a respect for Dewey in the same breath, but they are to a degree connected...

...Certainly that philosophy anathematized disengagement...

...Westbrook agrees with him, as have most commentators...

...capitalism involves the tyranny of owners over workers, while a modern view of production would emphasize the workers' capacity for intelligent self-direction...

...before the war, he had defended the right of schoolteachers to form their own union and had been honorary president of the New York Teachers Union...

...Dewey stressed the doing pretty intensely...

...Philosophy offered methodological insights rather than immediate instructions, and Dewey's passionate but arm'slength engagement with the politics of his day was deeply rooted in his philosophy...

...Most of Dewey's career was passed in universities where overt partisanship would have cost him his job...

...Still, Robert Westbrook's splendid—if starryeyed —new book on John Dewey and American Democracy offers many reasons to see Dewey as the spokesman of a distinctively American socialism, and to take him seriously as a man who played an exemplary role as an intellectual in politics and was a lively source of inspiration...

...But they provoke a larger anxiety...

...Without taking sides over the intrinsic persuasiveness of Dewey's account, we may still wonder whether Westbrook has struck the right balance in his treatment, whether he has not over-politicized Dewey...

...If politics had occupied the primary place in Dewey's work that Westbrook suggests, he would surely have been seen by the public as the dangerous radical that Westbrook thinks he was, and he would not have died in the odor of sanctity he did...

...there was no gap between thought and activity because thought was bundled up into activity...

...In Green he found a philosophy that—to put it vulgarly—treated Christianity as a metaphor for membership in a community of mutually concerned citizens...

...there was no mind-body duality, no fact-value gap, no conflict between science and religion or between democracy and a regard for the claims of intellect rather than numbers...

...That was how he satisfied his own injunction to turn from the problems of philosophy to the problems of men...

...All the usual dualisms were brushed under the metaphysical rug...

...Democracies are, by definition, intelligently organized and governed...

...274 • DISSENT In the end, Dewey decided that even diluted supernaturalism was too much...

...Or we would have to think how to persuade them not to do it when they were tempted to...

...His mother was a proselytizer anxious to see that her neighbors and her children should be "right with Jesus...

...we ought to concentrate on the way he connects narrowly political issues in democratic thinking to wider issues of cultural, educational, and intellectual democracy...

...During the First World War, Dewey shared the New Republic's conviction that the United States should be "active" —though not so active that it should join in the fighting...

...To say that democracy is failing to live up to its potential when it behaves unintelligently leaves us where we were...

...Democracy was education in action...

...Dewey's life doesn't suggest he found it easier than we do to combine the academy and the hustings...

...Westbrook is much struck by the contrast between what Michael Walzer dismissed as the radicalism of "professors writing for professors" and Dewey's own work...

...Put like that, it was no contest...

...Economists who did it were simply sacked...

...He performed the small miracle of grafting Darwin onto Hegel, seeing humanity driven a la Darwin by the needs of organic survival while striving a la Hegel for a greater and greater degree of organic unity...

...But when Nicholas Murray Butler and the Columbia trustees fired colleagues who were against American involvement in the First World War, Dewey didn't follow Charles SPRING • 1992 • 273 Beard in resigning from the university...

...Those of us who make a point of atheism side with the devout, since Dewey's apparent inability to see what the devout were about applies equally to committed disbelievers...

...Even without any direct and immediate institutional implications, they imparted a characteristic flavor to Dewey's view of politics...

...Whether violence and deceit worked or not to achieve immediate power, the price they exacted was too high...

...But part of the trick was to give an account of democracy that made its democratic character intrinsically philosophical—to define democracy in terms of the rich, complex, egalitarian communication of experience...

...As a political moralist, Dewey was eloquent and persuasive...

...Although he somewhat underestimates just how deep the affiliation went, Westbrook does a good job of explaining the importance of T.H...

...That is, it leaves us looking for political institutions that can select competent but accessible specialists, bold but not arrogant political leaders, sensitive but not over-malleable representatives— just as every democratic political theorist has tried to do since a little before the days of Plato...

...and Stephen Rockefeller's hefty biography, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (Columbia University Press, 1991), offers us an environmentalist Dewey of somewhat Buddhist religious leanings...

...Robert Bellah and his colleagues have gone to Dewey in their account of The Good Society for a Durkheimian emphasis on social institutions that is communitarian rather than socialist...

...The stronger objection is that Dewey's reformulation of the standard problem is no improvement on the old formulation of "elite intelligence versus mass gullibility...

...It would be unkind and inaccurate to suppose that Dewey actually meant to hide real intellectual and social conflict or just failed to see the problem...

...He disapproves of Dewey's support of the First World War, blurs the real differences between Bourne and Dewey by playing down both Bourne's radical individualism and Dewey's latent etatisme, has altogether too little to say about Dewey's failure to understand Hitler's threat to the whole of Western civilization, and deplores Dewey's post-1945 support for the policy of containing Stalin's Russia...

...Dewey was the last person to think serious issues could be settled by verbal tricks—and with Walter Lippmann pressing the claims of intelligence against those of "the public," he could hardly have ignored the question...

...It was not merely external pressures that inhibited Dewey...

...their private goals were at odds with their social functions, and this disharmony must breed dissatisfaction...

...These purposes were pretty wide—John Dewey and American Democracy is nearly six hundred pages long, and one never has the sense that Westbrook is descending to needless detail...

...In discussing industrial democracy, for instance, Dewey never tackled such standard issues as how we can reconcile efficient production with democratic management...

...But he abandoned formal church membership and to all appearances any active Christian faith at about the time he found his own philosophical voice...

...He described that position as "instrumentalism" or, more often, "experimentalism...

...Before that, he had not been publicly active outside his own academic field...

...So far as inspiration goes, one of Dewey's chief attractions is that he was the sort of engaged, politically active, publicly visible intellectual that everyone says is an extinct species, and that some professors wish they could revive in their own persons...

...Not even Professor Westbrook suggests that institutional thinking was Dewey's strong suit...

...It is in democracy," wrote Dewey, "that the community of ideas and interests through community of action, that the incarnation of God in man (man, that is to say as organ of universal truth) becomes a living, present thing...

...it was essentially modern, appropriate to the world that Jefferson had hoped to create...

...This seems a pretty thin view of what belief in God amounts to, and Dewey's invocation of Wordsworth only makes more glaring the contrast between his notion of natural piety and Wordsworth's awestruck sense of the divine power that animated the natural world...

...Dewey early decided that a "religious" outlook was valuable but "supernaturalism" irrational...

...For those who want the flavor of the period as well as the logic of its debates, Stephen Rockefeller does an even better job—he is in less of a hurry to get to Dewey the secular social democrat...

...When Dewey's left-wing friends complained that A Common Faith gave aid and comfort to the enemy, Dewey could only reply that if other people got some comfort from using the term "God" to describe those forces in the world that seem to be on the side of goodness, that was enough for him...

...It was not squeamishness to repudiate violence and deceit, it was morally prudent...

...Certainly he produced a philosophical system that repudiated most of the familiar philosophical dualisms—mind and body, thought and action, individual and society...

...His philosophy was essentially activist, committed to the unity of theory and practice—though he took Jefferson, not Marx, as his philosophical hero...

...One is Dewey's treatment of religion...

...Green to the young Dewey who read him in the 1880s, when he was working his way out of the Congregationalism in which he had been reared in Vermont, first to the "social gospel" and then to the social democratic "experimentalism" he espoused thereafter...

...conversely, education at its best turns out to be democracy...

...Bertrand Russell broke that continuity much more brutally than Dewey, and alarmed the public accordingly...

...Everything was explained in terms of the individual or social organism confronting its "problems," nothing needed explaining in terms of unbridgeable metaphysical chasms...

...He took an active part in politics only after he had retired from Columbia University in 1929...

...This had a practical purpose...

...This was a defense against a blow not struck...

...Supernaturalism" was fended off, while its attractions were not forgone...

...upon giving up the booze, he takes up calisthenics, displays his new-found health by turning cartwheels in the front hall, and terrifies his wife and family...

...Dewey produced a seamless web of theory, ranging from manifestos such as Reconstruction in Philosophy and The Quest for Certainty by way of Experience and Nature, or Nature and Conduct to Democracy and Education and The School and Society, where he spelled out his view of how we know what "intelligent action" is, how it applies to science, ethics, politics, and education...

...Philosophical posturing of this sort simply got in the way of "adaptation...

...This suggests that Dewey, so to speak, got away with his political radicalism by wrapping it in an essentially cozy philosophy...

...He agrees that Dewey was vague about the institutional future of democracy...

...Professor Westbrook has come to think that Dewey was a radical democrat with much in common with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...

...His national reputation as a philosopher and educational reformer dated from the years — 1894-1904 — he spent in Chicago...

...To put it slightly differently, one reason Dewey is not recognized as the grand old man of a distinctively American socialism is that, for all his many virtues, he wasn't anything of the sort...

...Humans do it more thoughtfully than other creatures, but problem solving for the sake of organic survival is common to all organisms, and Rorty aptly describes Dewey's view of human existence as "one more species doing its best...

...Not only his political writings, academic and popular, but Art as Experience, his textbooks on ethics, Nature and Experience as well as Nature and Conduct, his logic as well as A Common Faith, are all of them part of the answer to the question of how we can institutionalize democracy in such a way that Jefferson's fears about majority tyranny and Mill's fears about mass stupidity are unfulfilled...

...This is hard to deny, but it still leaves open how to institutionalize the restraints on misbehavior that such principles commend...

...The moral is that it is as bad to fall flat on your back as to fall flat on your face...

...One of Westbrook's many merits is that he is decently ambivalent about the answer to such complaints...

...The "religious attitude" was important, even though "supernaturalism" was superstitious...

...If that is true, industrial democracy might cost us nothing in efficiency, but it would cost us a good deal in freedom, if we had to forbid people from setting up capitalist-owned firms in competition with worker-owned firms...

...Dewey's letters to his children are full of acerbic observations about the battles between employers and workers that rocked Chicago in the eighties and nineties, and his sympathies are invariably with the workers...

...Generally, it meant that Dewey escaped or—to use Cornel West's nice term "evaded" —the traditional problems of philosophy...

...One of his answers is that Dewey is guilty as charged...

...MarxismLeninism-Stalinism" is plainly dead, but neither laissez-faire nor the untidy compromise of the postwar welfare state seems terribly healthy...

...He ends John Dewey and American Democracy on a note of somewhat gloomy defiance: Very little of the sort of public philosophy that Dewey advocated and exemplified is being done these days, and we have no public intellectuals who can match him—or, indeed, his adversaries Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, Lewis Mumford, and Reinhold Niebuhr...

...Much of this might have been borrowed from the late nineteenth-century English Idealists, and some of it was...

...They were illusions...

...Dewey was highly critical of the unintelligent conduct of American government, and vigorously said so in such famous essays as Liberalism and Social Action...

...These are for the most part blemishes on a splendid book...