John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell Paperbacks) Paperback – January 5, 1993

Current debate on the meaning and proper function of - Democracy, Science, Politics, Liberty, Equality, Capitalism, Individuality, Liberalism, Socialism, Religion, Nature, Social Justice, Marxism, and many other basic ideas all either started with Dewey or he addressed them and their supporters. Makes this comprehensive analysis valuable to present readers.

Westbrook's explanation of Dewey's effort to change the older meaning of Liberal (freedom to avoid power) to Liberal (freedom to use power) was enlightening. Present discussion in America uses Dewey's meaning, while Europe does not. Fascinating!

This work does not read as a novel, closer to a philosophy textbook. Nevertheless, Westbrook succeeds in simplifying much (although not all) of Dewey's obscurity.

The change from a theological mind to a scientific one, occurred in Dewey and America together. Therefore his story reveals more than just the change in one scholar, but the development of a culture.

''By rationalizing religion and spiritualizing science, absolute idealists hoped to successfully arbitrate the conflict between science and religion without sacrificing the essential interests of either.'' (21)

Prologue
PART ONE A Social Gospel (1882–1904)
1 The Hegelian Bacillus
2 Organic Democracy
3 Chicago Pragmatism
4 No Mean City

PART TWO Progressive Democracy (1904–1918)
5 Reconstructing Philosophy
6 Democracy and Education
7 The Politics of War

PART THREE Toward the Great Contrary to this prevailing consensus Community (1918–1929)
8 The Politics of Peace
9 The Phantom Public
10 Philosophy and Democracy

PART FOUR Democrat Emeritus (1929–1952)
11 Consummatory Experience
12 Socialist Democracy
13 Their Morals and Ours
14 Keeping the Common Faith
Epilogue

Dewey's influence is noted -

''By virtue of the role Dewey purportedly played in the shaping of modern liberalism, many have claimed for him powers second to none among American intellectuals. According to Henry Steele Commager, Dewey became “the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people: it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no major issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken.”

''His most relentless critic among the radical revisionist historians of education, Clarence Karier, has argued that “the pragmatic ethic which Dewey propounded free of rigid principles provided the moral dexterity so necessary for the intellectuals who became the servants of power within the liberal state in twentieth century America.”

''This consensus regarding Dewey’s influence was perhaps best summed up in the comment of Morris Cohen, one of Dewey’s sharpest critics, that “if there could be such an office as that of national philosopher, no one else could be properly mentioned for it.”

This was eye opening. I recognize many current opinions in the ideas that Dewey either introduced or developed. Some -

“The predicament of liberal democracy is that liberalism denies the logic of democracy and democracy denies the logic of liberalism, but neither can exist without the other.”

Another -

''Socially, democracy has for most liberals come to mean 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, which, even when it works, betrays an identification of the good with the goods.''

Are material 'goods' all the good there is? Morality? Conscience?

Continuing puzzle -

''Whereas Dewey urged maximum participation by a responsible public in the direction of human affairs, other liberals have sought to maximize the responsibility of powerful elites while at the same time insulating these elites from most of the pressures of the benighted “masses.” Still a challenge.

What about Christianity?

''History was defined as “the process by which a divine will, determined by reason, has articulated wants, desires, and ideas, by making them organic to its own reproduction.” Thoroughgoing democracy, Dewey had argued in 1888, was the end toward which this progressive history was moving, for the idea of democracy represented “a society in which the distinction between the spiritual and the secular has ceased, and as in Greek theory, as in the Christian theory of the Kingdom of God, the church and the state, the divine and the human organization of society are one.” (76)

Dewey started his philosophical life as Hegel's disciple. This gave him keen insight into the German soul. -

''It was the post-Kantian idealists, most notably Fichte and Hegel, who put the imprimatur of philosophy on this perversion of the categorical imperative. Unhappy with Kant’s separation of the noumenal and the phenomenal, they joined the two realms and subjected the empirical world to the will of Absolute spirit embodied in the commands of its agent, the State. As a result, Dewey wrote, since the early nineteenth century Germans had been “instructed by a long line of philosophers that it is the business of ideal right to gather might to itself in order that it may cease to be merely ideal.''

Dewey blames Kant, Fichte and Hegel for German devotion to the Prussian State. Others agree, including Isaiah Berlin. Ironically, Dewey spent decades preaching a similar attitude toward ''Democracy''.

''The State represents exactly this incarnation of ideal law and right in effective might”. Since the State was “God on earth,” patriotism was a religious obligation, and a willingness to engage in the sacrifice of war was “the final seal of devotion to the extension of the kingdom of the Absolute on earth”.

This was the German view. Then later Dewey -

''When Wilson declared that this would be a “people’s war,” a war to make the world safe for democracy, Dewey jumped on the bandwagon. “Ever since President Wilson asked for a breaking of relations with Germany and afterwards for war against that country, more and more as he has stated why we are in this war,” Dewey said, “I have been a thorough and complete sympathizer with the part played by this country in this war and I have wished to see the resources of this country used for its successful prosecution. As has been said over and over again, this is not merely a war of armies, this is a war of peoples.”

Not just war, but 'Nation against Nation and Kingdom against Kingdom.'

Westbrook provides more than just Dewey's thought. He presents other thinkers - for example -

''This situation had brought some secular intellectuals to the brink of existential despair, perhaps most evident in Joseph Wood Krutch’s book The Modern Temper (1929), a widely discussed meditation on the crisis of belief engendered by modern science published the same year as Dewey’s Quest for Certainty. Few captured better than Krutch the apparently stark consequences of the triumphs of scientific knowledge and the failures of religion and philosophy to provide human values with the certainty demanded by the metaphysical paradigm established by the Greeks:

''We went to science in search of light, not merely upon the nature of matter, but upon the nature of man as well, and though that which we have received may be light of a sort, it is not adapted to our eyes and is not anything by which we can see. Since thought began we have groped in the dark among shadowy shapes, doubtfully aware of landmarks looming uncertainly here and there—of moral principles, human values, aims, and ideals.''

Science did not give the ''light'' that was expected!

''We hoped for an illumination in which they would at last stand clearly and unmistakably forth, but instead they appear even less certain and less substantial than before—mere fancies and illusions generated by nerve actions that seem terribly remote from anything we can care about or based upon relativities that accident can shift.''

Scientific certainty does not exist.

''We had been assured that many troublesome shadows would flee away, that superstitious fears, irrational repugnances, and all manner of bad dreams would disappear. And so in truth many have. But we never supposed that most of the things we cherished would prove equally unsubstantial, that all the aims we thought we vaguely perceived, all the values we pursued, and all the principles we clung to were but similar shadows, and that either the light of science is somehow deceptive or the universe, emotionally and spiritually, a vast emptiness.'' (353)

Scientific light 'is somehow deceptive'!

Dewey was a philosopher. His effort to connect religion, science, history, reason, developed during his lifetime. Many of these opinions are still in the mind of many. So are the puzzling questions.

Fast delivery, well packed, and the content is good, but oh, the way it is written. It is like slogging through a muddy field.

As advertised

Robert Westbrook's intellectual biography is one of the very best studies on Dewey's life and work. In my view, it's more balanced and carefully researched than Alan Ryan's "John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism", the most obvious competing book. What Westbrook achieves is a happy combination of historical research and insightful theoretical analysis. And that's what any intellectual biography is all about, right? In a nutshell: this book is definitely worth buying if you are interested in expanding your knowledge on Dewey.

I don't think there is a better introduction to John Dewey available. This great book traces the intellectual development of every major aspect of Dewey's thought in thoughtful detail - his metaphysics, his psychology, his thought on education and democracy, his aesthetic theory. It gives a reader a full overview of Dewey's thought in their historical and intellectual context and leaves him with a sense of the greatness (and present relevance) of Dewey as a thinker. Ive gone on to read several of Dewey's works since because of the interest stirred by this book. I would get a copy soon before it goes out of print