A Paradigm for Intellectuals

...Liberal realists, Westbrook continues, reduce "the good life, both morally and esthetically, to a set of more or less arbitrary preferences among bundles of signifying commodities...

...Neither has anybody subsequently—including, conspicuously, the Foucauldian, "politically correct" academic Left...

...When he gets to 1948, Westbrook assumes his readers will agree that President Harry S. Truman's foreign policy (which Dewey supported) was wrong-headed and duplicitous, and he rebukes the "obsessive anti-Communism" of that notorious "hotbed of anti-Communist emotionalism," The New Leader...

...For Dewey had articulate, detailed views about practically everything: truth, the primary school curriculum, beauty, the League of Nations, God, social work, the student movement in China, the distinction between fact and value, the relative merits of Browning and Arnold, the difference between Aristotelian and Galilean science, French Impressionism, Trotsky, the relative merits of Kant and Hegel...

...Dewey's curiosity and energy were so great that no one before Westbrook dared try to deal with his entire career...

...In Westbrook's place, I would have summed up Dewey's role as follows: Dewey recognized, long before most other American liberal intellectuals, that a lot more than a minimal level of welfare, and something very different from a corporate capitalist economy, was needed...

...The list could go on for pages...

...Dewey did not (as Westbrook himself confesses) spell out very clearly what sort of economy we should have, nor just how the necessary reforms could be made...

...What they would not find would be wholesale denunciations of America as imperialist, racist, militarist, sexist, etc.—the sort of denunciation that makes the denouncer feel deliriously brave and pure, washed clean of complicity with power, and that renders him or her ineffectual as a citizen...

...The latter, he says, asks only for "the provision of a minimal level of welfare to every member of a society through a corporate capitalist economy regulated by a centralized state directed by administrative experts...

...Although I admire the people he lists as contemporary "theorists of participatory democracy" (e.g., Michael Walzer, William Sullivan, Amy Guttman, Sheldon Wolin), I find it hard to see their opponent as "liberal realism" rather than the same old gang of greedy rich people and cynical, bought politicians that was running America in Dewey's time, and that continues to run it today...

...To write this book Westbrook not only had to read through all of Dewey's collected published writings (the 37th volume has just appeared, in Jo Ann Boydston's magnificent standard edition) and his unpublished correspondence...

...He helped free up our moral and political imaginations...

...Recently, however, a Dewey revival has gotten under way, and it has now resulted in the publication of far and away the best book on him yet...

...Westbrook is so concerned to defend Dewey to friends on the Left that he has to pretend their caricature is an accurate portrait...

...The danger Westbrook ran in attempting to touch every base was that he would produce a boring, dense miniencyclopedia...

...Alas, he feels duty-bound as well to argue that Randolph Bourne was obviously right in 1917, and that Dewey should have known better than to share Woodrow Wilson's hopes...

...On the Left, especially among those who identify themselves as "radical" and "postmodern, pragmatists such as Dewey are thought incapable of criticizing "hegemonic discourse...

...The author also had to plow through tangled arguments about epistemology in back issues of the Journal of Philosophy, familiarize himself with the secondary literature on Leibniz, understand the controversies surrounding the Washington Conference (on the Far East) of 1921-22, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the Moscow Trials of the mid-'30s, learn about the politics of teacher-training colleges and schools of education, and poke around many other dusty attics...

...Not since Dewey has a philosophy professor in this country become a moral exemplar, asource of inspiration to generations of idealistic young people...

...Henry Steele Commager said of him, "no public issue was clarified until he had spoken"—the sort of thing that once might have been said of Jean-Paul Sartre in France or Bertrand Russell in Britain, and today might be said by Germans about Jürgen Habermas...

...How many recent "liberal intellectuals" can you think of who have been against participatory democracy...

...And he is not buffaloed by any of the usually rather dismissive judgments about Dewey's contributions to philosophy...

...But then, who hasn't wanted that...

...He writes: "Among liberal intellectuals of the 20th century, Dewey was the most important advocate of participatory democracy, that is, of the belief that democracy as an ethical ideal calls upon men and women to build communities in which the necessary opportunities and resources are available for every individual to realize fully his or her particular capacities and powers through participation in political, social and cultural life...

...people like Allan Bloom protest that he offers no fixed goals, no unconditional imperatives, only a fuzzy vision of a pluralistic, sprawling utopia...

...This splendid book will do a great deal to make Dewey more available and plausible, and to help his writings shape the imagination of a new generation of Americans...

...Reviewed by Richard Rorty University Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia...

...No American intellectual of the next four decades has managed to fill his shoes...

...What Dewey did do was help us debunk a lot of socio-political myths that made us see our institutions as fated and alternatives to those institutions as unworkable...

...So trendy Foucauldians tend to hurl the same jibes at him as the Marxists did while he was alive: "apologist for the status quo," "complicit in the mystifications of bourgeois ideology," etc...

...Has anybody ever rebuked William James for "obsessive anti-imperialism," or diagnosed Lewis Mumford's "antifascist emotionalism...

...In particular, although he is a historian rather than a philosopher, he gets all the technical philosophical stuff right...

...He also had the sort of sentimental, petit-bourgeois, love of country that Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, and Truman displayed, and that is misrepresented by Westbrook's occasional dismissive references to "American exceptionalism...

...But he has written a highly readable, beautifully organized narrative: Dewey gradually evolves from a young academic, awkwardly trying to mix evangelical Christianity and Hegelian Idealism with physiological psychology, into a prophet of egalitarian social hope...

...Dewey wanted factories and offices, schools and hospitals, to change drastically, until everybody's life achieved a supple richness of texture—until nobody was condemned to a life of routine, much less of humiliation...

...Already a national figure when World War I broke out, Dewey spent more and more of his time as he grew older discussing national policies and choices, marking out political positions, and trying to organize political movements...

...when Dewey was loose and muddy, Westbrook cheerfully admits it, and shows us where the arguments fail...

...Robert Westbrook's intellectual biography, John Dewey and American Democracy, is scholarship at its finest —a very unusual combination of vast learning, dialectical acuity and literary skill...

...What is most admirable in Dewey, what makes him a paradigm to be imitated, is not his criticism of a stitched-together monster called "liberal realism," but his tone—that extraordinary combination of courtesy and passion, decency and romance, loyalty and skepticism...

...Westbrook quotes Clarence Karier as declaring that Dewey helped provide "the moral dexterity so necessary for the intellectuals who became the servants of power within the liberal state in 20th-century America...

...Obviously, I see contemporary American politics—both cultural and national—from a slightly different angle than does Westbrook...

...author, "Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth," and "Essays on Heidegger and Others" John Dewey died in 1952...

...Despite this, little was heard about Dewey from the time of his death until the past few years...

...In telling this story Westbrook combines dramatic sweep with precision concerning details...

...That is a caricature of a philosophical-political position, not a position anybody explicitly holds and argues...

...He makes up his own mind, case by case...

...Nor has any American academic, in any discipline, been so widely read and discussed...

...The biographer defends Dewey against both Left and Right, but takes pains to show the Left that Dewey was "a more radical voice than has been generally assumed...

...But Westbrook and I are at one in thinking that Dewey remains the best person an American intellectual can take as his or her model...

...The Right views him as an "irrationalist" or as a "naïve populist...

...Lots of the rhetoric has been disingenuous, yet you could no more get elected to office after opposing participatory democracy than you could after burning the flag...

...When Dewey was acute, Westbrook explains why his point was so well taken...

...In addition to not being taken seriously as a philosopher by most contemporary philosophy professors, Dewey has been dismissed as a political thinker by both the Right and the Left...

...But surely the mainstream of American political rhetoric, and of American intellectual life, since World War II has (thanks in part to Dewey himself) taken for granted that participatory democracy, in precisely the sense that Westbrook defines it, is our goal...

...Dewey was so good at this that today's Leftists could, if they would only look inside his books, find anticipations of every criticism they themselves are currently making of American institutions and ways of thinking...

...True, there have always been elitists like Walter Lippmann, individuals who believe the masses incapable of the life and role Dewey imagined...

...Dewey had the sense not to worry much about "complicity" and "strange bedfellows...

...All the other books on Dewey (except George Dykhuizen's pioneering, but comparatively skimpy, biography) either are brief introductions to his thought or else focus on some particular area, dispute or period...

...Few, if any, contributors to The New Leader have brought more luster to its pages, or put them to better use, than Dewey did after World War II when he brushed aside charges of "Redbaiting" to insist that Stalin's Russia had nothing to do with socialism and Stalin's policies nothing to do with the quest for peace...

...Westbrook is certainly correct in saying that Dewey envisaged an America wildly different from anything we had in his day, or have now: a country in which education would be far better and far more widely spread, and thus one in which public policy would not be handed over to anonymous experts, nor political campaigns reduced to competing sound-bites...

...There have always been cynical politicians whose words resemble Dewey's and whose deeds resemble Richard M. Nixon's...

...Westbrook, it seems to me, steps off on the wrong foot when he sets Dewey and participatory democracy against what he calls "the dominant liberal-realist position...