John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism
By Alan Ryan
Norton, 414 pages, $30
John Dewey is back. Dewey was the most famous and most revered philosopher in America during the first half of this century. Then, about a decade before his death in 1952, Dewey’s reputation quietly entered a phase of near-total eclipse. Now, a half-century later, many people are reading Dewey again and discovering why so many once looked to him for inspiration and guidance.
Dewey thought of philosophy not as a narrow technical discipline but as a guide to every aspect of life, spiritual and practical alike. He was probably most widely known for his ideas about how to improve America’s schools, but he also made important contributions to thinking about art, ethics and politics.
In Chicago, Dewey is remembered as the founder, in 1896, of the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. In his enlightening new book on Dewey, Alan Ryan makes clear that Dewey had to be a liberal saint to cope with all the problems–financial, political and administrative–that he faced as head of the school. But in his Chicago decade (1894-1904), Dewey still found time to set out the main ideas he would develop during the remaining half-century of his life. Dewey died at the age of 92. His philosophical writings take up 37 substantial volumes in the “Collected Works.” That Chicago phase had to have been fateful to have provided the foundation for so long and productive a career.
For Dewey philosophy was not a body of knowledge but an attitude, an approach, that might be taken to all problems. He referred to that approach variously as pragmatism, instrumentalism, experimentalism. Dewey wasn’t the first theorist of pragmatism–C.S. Peirce and William James were there before him. But it was Dewey who brought pragmatism into the great world. He showed how it might provide a working method and spiritual basis for democratic citizenship, a topic of central concern in the 1920s that has returned to the top of the American agenda. From 1910 to 1940 Dewey provided orientation to successive cohorts of liberal-minded, middle-class Americans: teachers, lawyers, civil servants and many more whose lives were organized around ideas felt by them to be “progressive.”
The return to Dewey owes a great deal to his most exciting philosophic continuator, Richard Rorty, who announced in an early book that for him Dewey was, along with Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the best model for contemporary philosophy–and topped that by saying in a subsequent book that Dewey alone was the great precursor. It’s ironic that Dewey, a down-to-earth and self-effacing man, owes his revival partly to a philosopher, Rorty, who takes such pleasure in shocking the philosophical bourgeoisie.
Alan Ryan is unlucky in that his book will inevitably be compared with Robert Westbrook’s “John Dewey and American Democracy” (1991), which is surely one of the best books about a great American to have been published in recent years. But Westbrook had a special take on Dewey, as a theorist of “participatory democracy.” Himself a product of 1960s radicalism, Westbrook tried to appropriate Dewey as a godfather of ’60s New Left politics. Ryan has found in Westbrook’s passionate anachronism his opportunity to be different.
Ryan is an Englishman of an older vintage than Westbrook and a former don at Oxford who now teaches politics at Princeton. One would not have thought it possible, but he comes pretty close to wresting Dewey from an exclusively American context in order to recreate him as a moderate, rather British “North Atlantic” thinker. For Ryan, Dewey “was not a fire-eating radical, and he never became one.” If anything, Dewey appears in Ryan’s book as rather like Ryan himself: reasonable-minded, an exponent of the middle way, above all “sensible.”
Ryan reminds us that Dewey started out as a conventionally pious college instructor who taught Bible classes and lectured students on such topics as “The Motives of the Christian Life.” Ryan’s point is that in many ways Dewey never ceased to be a lay preacher; even after he lost his faith, around 1890, he remained a Protestant in the direction his atheism took. His secular emphasis on uplift and public service reflected the legacy of his earlier Christianity. Ryan summarizes the motive of the later Dewey as an aspiration to a unitary human community, a secular ideal that is continuous with his earlier religious belief in the possibility of the heavenly kingdom on Earth. A traditional religious piety reappeared, in secular-democratic form, as a “piety of the actual.”
In emphasizing the religious component in Dewey’s political writing, Ryan gives us the man in his own time, “keeping as much of the old as could in the face of the new.” This formula has been applied to so many illustrious Englishmen that an American reader can only wonder if there has ever been an eminent Briton who welcomed the new and said to hell with the old. Ryan never vulgarly overplays his British strategy. But a reader would have to be unusually obtuse not to perceive that whenever Ryan institutes a comparison between Dewey and someone else, that someone else often turns out to be an Englishman. Not that it isn’t interesting to learn about the Oxford moral philosopher T.H. Green, who was so great an influence on Dewey’s early ideas. And it does illuminate Dewey’s politics to suggest the similarity of his ideas to those of the British guild socialist G.D.H. Cole. And it is legitimate to urge, as Ryan does, that Dewey would have been far more comfortable in the 1930s among centrist Labour Party intellectuals in London than he was among American Communists in New York.
But it is possible to overdo this reading of Dewey as a North Atlantic moralist. Yes, Dewey was like T.H. Green in being a friend to those who live in the spirit. Dewey’s influence on social workers and government reformers in America has something in common with Green’s influence on the future bishops and imperial administrators who passed through Balliol College, Oxford. But Dewey was more radical than that comparison suggests. His austere personal habits keep us from seeing just how much he wanted us to change. Gertrude Stein once spoke about the difference between the sweep of these United States and the tidiness of England’s “daily island life.” John Dewey is one of ours, and he speaks still to the radical sense of possibility of our own, untidy, continental nation.
