## 1. Situating Dewey's Political Philosophy



From a very early point of his intellectual development, Dewey, like
the British idealist T. H. Green (on whom he wrote several essays),
accepted that traditional liberalism in part rested on a false
conception of the individual, which was ethically pernicious in its
effect on liberal thought. Accordingly, many of the themes that
characterised Dewey's thinking about social and political theory
after his turn to "experimentalism" were present in his
earlier, overtly idealist political philosophy. In texts such as
"The Ethics of Democracy" (*EW*1) and
"Christianity and Democracy" (*EW*4), Dewey
elaborates a version of the idealist criticisms of classical liberal
individualism. For this line of criticism, classical liberalism
envisages the individual as an independent entity in competition with
other individuals, and takes social and political life as a sphere in
which this competitive pursuit of self-interest is coordinated. By
contrast, the idealists rejected this view of social and political
life as the aggregation of inherently conflicting private interests.
Instead, they sought to view individuals relationally: individuality
could be sustained only where social life was understood as an
organism in which the well-being of each part was tied to the
well-being of the whole. Freedom in a positive sense consisted not
merely in the absence of external constraints but the positive fact of
participation in such an ethically desirable social order. On this
foundation, Dewey rebuts Henry Maine's bleak assessment in
*Popular Government* that democracy is the rule of the ignorant
majority. While it is important that voters can reject their rulers
and so control them to some extent, democracy is not simply a form of
government defined by the distribution of the franchise or majority
rule. Rather what matters, as Dewey puts it, is the way that the
majority is formed. To understand that requires grasping what Maine
misses, in Dewey's view: that "men are not isolated
non-social atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations"
to one another, and the state in turn only represents them "so
far as they have become organically related to one another, or are
possessed of unity of purpose and interest" ("The Ethics
of Democracy", *EW*1, 231-2). Democracy is a form of
moral and spiritual association that recognizes the contribution that
each member can make in his or her particular way to this ethical
community. And each of us can contribute to this community since we
each only become the individuals we are through our engagement in the
institutions and practices of our society.



Other important themes also appear in these early statements. Dewey is
anti-elitist, and argues that the capacity of the wise few to discern
the public interest tends to be distorted by their position.
Democratic participation is not only viewed as a bulwark against
government by elites, but also as an aspect of individual freedom
- humanity cannot rest content with a good "procured from
without". Democracy is not "simply and solely a form of
government", but a social and personal ideal; in other words, it
is not only a property of political institutions but of a wide range
of social relationships. This ideal is common to a range of social
spheres, and should take "industrial, as well as civil and
political" forms ("The Ethics of Democracy",
*EW*1, 246). It also has a religious dimension. Through
democracy in this expansive and ideal sense,



> 
> the incarnation of God in man ... becomes a living, present thing
> ... The truth is brought down to life, its segregation removed;
> it is made a common trust enacted in all departments of action, not in
> one isolated sphere called religious. ("Christianity and
> Democracy", *EW*4, 9)
> 



While the Christian conception of democracy recedes (but does not
entirely disappear) in Dewey's later work, the idea that
democracy should be viewed as a form of relationship that encompasses
and unifies different spheres of social life remains important.
Dewey's later work is more questioning of the traditional
ethical standards and ideals that he appeals to in an essay like
"The Ethics of Democracy". He is also sharply critical of
what he sees as the residual Kantianism in Green's ethics of
self-realization, although the general orientation remains:
individuals are not presocial atoms, and democracy in an ideal sense
is a primarily social and ethical ideal rather than a method of
majority rule through voting.



Three features of Dewey's wider conception of knowledge and
value as he develops them in his later work are particularly important
for his political thinking: anti-absolutism, experimentalism, and
naturalism. The first strand of Dewey's philosophy is his
scepticism about what he calls an "absolutistic"
conception of social and political philosophy. Dewey gathers some
different ideas under this heading but at its core it is the belief
that there are certain ahistorical and foundational features of the
social world and that social and political philosophy should consist
in identifying these features and using them to diagnose and evaluate
social and political problems. This anti-absolutism is expressed in
various ways by Dewey. In one version of this idea is the argument
that "the logic of general notions" provides an idealised
picture of agents and institutions that is too abstract to contribute
to the kind of experimental inquiry that Dewey thinks we need in
social thought (*Reconstruction in Philosophy*, *MW*12,
187). For example:



> 
> We want to know about the worth of the institution of private property
> as it operates under given conditions of definite time and place. We
> meet with the reply of Proudhon that property generally is theft, or
> with that of Hegel that the realization of will is the end of all
> institutions, and that private ownership as the expression of mastery
> of personality over physical nature is a necessary element in such
> realization .... They are general answers supposed to have a universal
> meaning that covers and dominates all particulars. Hence they do not
> assist in inquiry. They close it. They are not instrumentalities to be
> employed and tested in clarifying concrete social difficulties. They
> are ready-made principles to be imposed upon particulars in order to
> determine their nature. (*Reconstruction in Philosophy*,
> *MW*12, 188)
> 



Dewey diagnoses the same defect of absolutism in the more
"professedly empirical" social theory of J. S. Mill
(1843), for whom certain "social laws, normative and regulative,
at all periods and under all circumstances of proper social life were
assumed to exist" (*Public and Its Problems*,
*LW*2, 357). On this view, society is an aggregate of
individual human minds and the purpose of social science is to derive
the laws governing these aggregates. Dewey argues that this ignores
the extent to which the content of individual beliefs, desires and
purposes are given by the social context in which individuals live and
selves are socially constituted: the individual should not be
"regarded as something *given*, something already
there" - social institutions are "means for
*creating* individuals" (*Reconstruction in
Philosophy*, *MW*12, 190, 192). Mill's individualism
exemplifies what he describes as "the most pervasive fallacy of
philosophical thinking" ("Context and Thought",
*LW*5, 5). This is the tendency to divide up experienced
phenomena, and to take the distinct analysed elements to be separate
existences, independent both of the analysis and of each other. That
this abstraction is in particular circumstances essential for inquiry
is an important theme in Dewey's philosophy. But this
abstraction goes wrong "whenever the distinctions or elements
that are discriminated are treated as if they were final and
self-sufficient" ("Context and Thought",
*LW*5, 7), as when classical liberalism treats the individuals
as "something *given*", ontologically prior to the
social groups of which they are members. His anti-absolutist point,
however, is not to claim the universal explanatory primacy of the
social (a position associated with Hegel and the idealism of Green and
F. H. Bradley that he had come to reject) or to object to the idea
that the individuals can be abstracted from their social context for
certain analytical purposes but with the idea that this abstracted
individual provides the firm foundation for a fixed and ahistorical
explanatory framework for social theory.



A second sort of absolutism that Dewey rejects is the idea that there
is a fixed and ahistorical standard of social evaluation using
critical standards derived from "consideration of the ultimate
nature of things - God, the Universe, Man, Reason"
(*Syllabus Social Institutions and the Study of Morals, MW*15,
233). The group of philosophers guilty of this kind of
absolutism includes Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Hegel.
He also diagnoses this absolutism in philosophers who define the good
with reference to the psychology of personal and private
consciousness, encompassing not only hedonistic versions of
utilitarianism but also theories of personal conscience associated
with Protestantism. These standards gain "outside
leverage" only by being "absolutistic and non-historical,
and, in effect, partisan, since they choose their outside standard to
serve the purpose they have in mind, and there is no objective check
upon their choice". Dewey develops a kind of ideological
criticism of traditional philosophy as prone to mistaking contingent
(and convenient) social products for unchangeable features of human
nature. Famously, for example, he thinks that the philosophical
preference for "intrinsic" goods of contemplation and
related values such as aesthetic purity originally reflect a form of
Greek society structured around a slave class and a leisured class but
is reproduced (with increasing difficulty) in other class-divided
societies. Instead, what Dewey says that social criticism should be
governed by what he calls "an immanent standard":
"this is relative to phenomena but at the same time it is
experimental and hence it is checked up by social processes similar to
those which suggest it" (*Syllabus Social Institutions and
the Study of Morals, MW*15, 234). This is not an appeal to a
conventionalist or relativist idea that the standards for judging a
practice are whatever happens to be prevalent or identifiable in a
community since, unless we define social groups in a moralistic way,
these can include groups "banded together in a criminal
conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while
serving it, political machines held together by the interests of
plunder" (*Democracy and Education*, *MW*9, 88):
so not just any set of standards is valuable. Dewey's
experimentalism and his naturalism each form parts of his alternative
to this conventionalist interpretation of immanent standards.



The experimentalist conception of what he calls intelligence or
inquiry as problem-solving is intended as an account of human
epistemic practices. We don't chase the impossible goal of
certainty, he thinks, and there are no epistemological foundations
available to guarantee that we have achieved it. The goal of an
inquiry is not to arrive at a certain picture of the nature of things,
but to come up with what is an inevitably provisional solution to the
practical and intellectual problem that sparked it. Inquiry has
reached its apogee in the successes of modern science, medicine, and
engineering but is continuous with, and arises from, mundane processes
of inquiry and problem-solving or, as he put it in a text for
educationalists, with *How We Think* (*MW*6,
*LW*8). Inquiry should be understood as part of our struggle
with an objectively precarious but improvable environment. Inquiry is
demanded by what he calls an "incomplete" or
"problematic" situation, that is, one in which our
inherited habits and standard ways of doing things run into trouble,
perhaps through our actions' having unexpected consequences,
through our having developed new needs and desires that are unmet in
current circumstances, or through conflict among our own goals and
projects or with those of others. These challenges prompt us to step
back, identify the problem that confronts us, and reflect on what to
do next. Modern societies have an awesome exemplar of successful
inquiry, in the natural sciences which, Dewey argues, have been
progressive and cumulative, giving us greater and greater
understanding and control of the natural world. This has above all
been the result of their *experimental* character, in which no
intellectual element is taken to be beyond rational scrutiny. Theories
and hypotheses are invented, used, tested, revised, and so on. At the
same time, new methods for the invention, use, testing and revision of
theories and hypotheses are developed and refined, and so are new
standards for evaluating theories and hypotheses. What counts as
success in inquiry is some practice's meeting these standards,
but these standards themselves may be judged in the light of how they
square with ongoing practices of inquiry. In this way, the methods
used by science are not fixed but themselves have a history and
develop progressively and sometimes in unexpected ways. A crucial
dimension of the experience that has established these standards and
practices is social or communal, as we must look to the community of
our fellow inquirers for testing and confirmation of our findings.



Dewey's conception of inquiry is intended as a general model of
reflective intelligence: we struggle with problems in all sorts of
areas of human experience, including art and ethics. Accordingly he
rejects non-cognitivism about values and holds that values can be true
or false in his pragmatic sense, responsive to reasons and corrigible
in the light of experience. He argues that we should generally think
of values or ideals as hypotheses about what course of action to take,
forged reflectively in response to problematic situations, with the
aim of providing means for what Dewey calls their "directed
resolution" (most fully in these terms in the late work,
*Theory of Valuation* (*LW*13)). Practical inquiry
encompasses instrumental reasoning about means: so if we our path to
the beach is blocked by a giant rock (the problematic situation) we
can reflect on what it would involve to take another route, to climb
the rock, to dynamite it, etc., and can imaginatively rehearse the
options. This inquiry also includes reflective criticism of ends: if
the journey now has to include arduous rock-climbing, we may
reconsider how important our end of getting to the beach is, or of the
value we attach to it. Inquiry as practical judgment involves
reflecting on, criticising and revising our ends, in the light of what
is involved for us in achieving them, and this often leads us
creatively to transform our values and to develop new ends.



In this context, Dewey develops a particular conception of moral
theory. Deliberation as inquiry is concerned with judging ends and
choosing means to achieve those ends. There are situations, though, in
which an agent is presented with a conflict of ends or goals which is
not straightforwardly susceptible to being settled by reference to
some higher order end possessed by the agent. In the case of ethics, a
moral problem presents "alternative ends so heterogeneous"
that they appeal to different kinds of disposition in the agent
(*Ethics*, first edition, *MW*5, 192). Dewey and Tufts
give as an example a pacifist citizen whose state goes to war:



> 
> He is deeply attached to his own state. He has formed habits of
> loyalty and of abiding by its laws, and now one of its decrees is that
> he shall support war. He feels in addition gratitude and affection for
> the country which has sheltered and nurtured him. But his believes
> that this war is unjust, or perhaps he has a condition that all war is
> a form of murder and hence wrong. One side of his nature, one set of
> convictions and habits, leads him to acquiesce in war; another deep
> part of his being protests. He is torn between two duties: he
> experiences a conflict between the incompatible values presented to
> him by his habits of citizenship and by his religious beliefs
> respectively. Up to this time, he has never experienced a struggle
> between the two; they have coincided and reenforced one another. Now
> he has to make a choice between competing moral loyalties and
> convictions. The struggle is not between a good which is clear to him
> and something else which attracts him but which he knows to be wrong.
> It is between values each of which is an undoubted good in its place
> but which now get in each other's way. He is forced to reflect
> in order to come to a decision. Moral theory is a generalised
> extension of the kind of thinking in which he now engages.
> (*Ethics*, 2nd edition, *LW*7, 165)
> 



In spite of his doubts about moral theory as an external standard for
judging social institutions, Dewey isn't a sceptic about
inherited moral theory. Rather, he interprets it as as a repertoire of
conceptual resources and tools that we have for dealing with the
problems of value judgement in a world of plural and changing values.
In *Ethics*, Dewey and Tufts offer an interpretation of
different canonical value theories, teleology, deontology and virtue
ethics as providing contrasting methodological orientations for
identifying, describing and solving problems. Moral theories are
generated in contingent historical circumstances, are responsive to
the particular needs and conflicts of those circumstances, and reflect
their prejudices and assumption. Ideals and values that were
functional for a particular social order can cease to make sense or
become dysfunctional as that order changes. Instead of asking which of
these approaches best captures "our intuitions" and so
should be used as an unvarying standard to guide decision-making in
concrete situations, Dewey argues that no one approach constitutes a
theoretically adequate guide to how to act in particular situations.
Instead, these provide standpoints from which agents can identify and
analyze problems, sift important from unimportant considerations, and
work out whether what we desire or value is really desirable or
valuable. Conflict among these approaches cannot be resolved in
theory, only in practice and in particular contexts, if at all, where
an agent must make "the best adjustment he can among forces
which are genuinely disparate" ("Three Independent Factors
in Morals", *MW*5, 288). Recall his claim that immanent
criticism has the virtue of being "experimental and hence ...
checked up by social processes similar to those which suggest
it". Experimentalism is immanent in the sense that it is carried
out and embodied by particular agents confronted with the particular
problems they grapple with, agents who are themselves constituted by
the social habitat they grapple with, and uses the criteria of
judgment provided by that habitat. At the same time, it is
experimental in the sense that the exercise of intelligence does not
involve unreflectively applying these criteria but reflectively
testing and challenging them in the light of experience. At the social
level, the model of ethical deliberation is not that of trying to
implement a given standard:



> 
> the process of growth, of improvement and progress, rather than the
> static outcome and result, becomes the significant thing. Not health
> as an end fixed once and for all, but the needed improvement in health
> - a continual process - is the end and good. The end is no
> longer a terminus or limit to be reached. It is the active process of
> transforming the existing situation. Not perfection as a final goal,
> but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the
> aim in living ... Growth itself is the only moral "end".
> (*Reconstruction in Philosophy*, *MW*12, 181)
> 



As Dewey and Tufts put it, this experimentalism tells us about
"the method by which the criterion should be reached and the
spirit in which it is employed, namely, the *experimental.*That
statement concerns the form of the criterion rather than its content
or substance" (*Ethics*, 2nd edition, *LW*7, 343). This is not all that can be said about the
content of a criterion of social judgment, however: Dewey and Tufts go
on to explain that "their position is that past experience
enables us to state a criterion of judgment which is sufficiently
definite to be usable and sufficiently flexible to lead to its own
reinterpretation as experience progresses" ((*Ethics*,
2nd edition, *LW*7, 343) - to tell us
something about content or substance, in other words. Dewey provides a
historicised form of ethical naturalism, which fleshes out the
criterion of social judgment. In this vein, Dewey says that "the
measure of the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic,
political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and improving
experience" (*Democracy and Education*, *MW*9, 9).
One way in which we can see Dewey's account as substantive is in
the practical virtues that he thinks accompany the commitment to
experimentalism. Social practices that promote free and open learning
have the instrumental epistemic benefits of growing knowledge and
understanding, increasing the capacity to control experience, and
providing a richer and more dynamic environment, and we benefit if we
are prepared to be open-minded in dealing with this environment.
Beyond this, though, Dewey has a conception of what it is to judge a
social group based on its relationship to its members. For example, he
writes in *Democracy and Education*:



> 
> Now in any social group whatsoever, even in a gang of thieves, we find
> some interest held in common and we find a certain amount of
> interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these
> two traits we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the
> interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the
> interplay with other forms of association? If we apply these
> considerations to, say, the members of a criminal band, we find that
> the ties which consciously hold the members together are few in
> number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and that
> they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other groups
> with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence the
> education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take,
> on the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the
> standard, we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic
> interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member
> has worth for the experience of other members - it is readily
> communicable - and that the family is not an isolated whole, but
> enters intimately into relationships with business interests, with
> schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other
> similar groups, and that it plays a due part in the political
> organisation and in return receives support from it. In short, there
> are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are
> varied and free modes of association with other modes of association.
> (*MW*9, 89)
> 



Authoritarian or anti-social groups have to stunt their members'
interests and allegiances in order to maintain their hold over them.
As Dewey puts it, reflecting on the gang of thieves in *The Public
and Its Problems*, it is possible for a member of the gang
"to express his powers in a way consonant with belonging to that
group and be directed by the interest common to its members" but
he can do so "only at the cost of repression of his
potentialities which can be realized only through membership of other
groups" and through "the free give-and-take" that is
the condition for "the fullness of integrated personality"
(*LW*2, 328). The free communication of interests and open
interaction within and beyond a group provide a standard for judging
social groups. This is also in a certain sense formal, since as a
criterion it is not a moral demand with a particular determinate
content but is itself a tool for dealing with experience to be used or
applied experimentally by the individuals involved.


## 2. Reconstructing Liberalism



One of the legacies of Green's idealism and of Dewey's
engagement with the New Liberals was the project of recasting
liberalism in an appropriate form for modern societies. The core or at
least viable component of liberalism is a commitment to"liberty
and the opportunity of all individuals to secure full realization of
their potentialities" (*Liberalism and Social Action*,
*LW*11, 38). Moral theories, as we have seen, can be viewed as
constructs to solve practical problems. Like an outmoded piece of
technology, a past value which was once constructed to address a
problem in one set of circumstances can outlive its usefulness, and
become a hindrance to the capacity of those in the present to deal
with their practical needs and worries. This, Dewey believes, is the
case with the theory of classical or *laissez-faire*
liberalism. As he puts it, "the slogans of liberalism in
one period can become the bulwarks of reaction" in the next
("Logical Method and Law", *MW*15, 76). For Dewey
this does not provide a reason to reject liberalism, however although
he is sensitive to the allure of anti-liberal thought. Rather,
liberalism it for modern societies, usually in a more socialist
and radical direction. Throughout his political writings, he develops
this thought in discussing the relation of individual and society, the
character and value of freedom, and the scope of legitimate social and
political action.



Dewey's treatment of the genealogy of classical liberalism is
nuanced but in summary he sees it as a doctrine committed to the
universal moral primacy of the individual possessed of pre-societal
rights, including liberties of thought and action, which it is the
sole business of the state to protect (*Liberalism and Social
Action*, *LW*11, 7). This meant that the main opponent of
liberty was seen as government because of its tendency to encroach on
these innate liberties. The abstraction of the individual from social
context in classical liberalism shapes its normative theory. If the
individual is thought of as existing prior to social institutions,
then it is easier to envisage securing freedom for the individual in
purely negative terms as solely consisting in the removal of external
impediments on individual action, such as legal restrictions on
freedom of speech. For classical liberalism or "old
individualism", freedom is taken to consist in the absence of
some intentional constraint on the individual's ability to
pursue his or her chosen goals and the individual is viewed as
surrounded by a protective cordon of rights, which define his or her
freedom. While removal of external constraints may sometimes be very
important for supplying the conditions of liberty, liberty in the
sense in which it is a value for liberals does not consist in the mere
absence of external constraint. For Dewey, this negative view of
freedom is at the root of the wider social, ethical and political
defects of this form of individualism ("Religion and Morality in
a Free Society", *LW*15, 181). While the anti-historical
character of classical liberalism at one point provided it with a
certain ideological advantage, since it allowed it to attack appeals
to tradition, it meant that it failed to see the historically
conditioned character of its interpretations of liberty and
individuality. This failure of historical self-awareness means that
classical liberalism neglects or suppresses an understanding of the
central challenges to liberty and in effect becomes an instrument of
plutocratic interests.



By contrast, as we have seen, Dewey rejects the philosophical
absolutism of a fixed and ahistorical conception of the self and
argues that a genuine liberalism views the individual as
"nothing fixed, given ready-made. It is something achieved, and
achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions,
cultural and physical: - including in 'cultural',
economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and
art" ("The Future of Liberalism", *LW*11:
291). One argument Dewey makes is for the "historic
relativity" of what constitutes a constraint on individual
liberty. At one time it made sense to say that dynastic despotic rule
or inherited legal customs were the main obstacles to individual
freedom. Today, however, liberty signifies "liberation from
material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that
prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources
that are to hand" (*Liberalism and Social Action*,
*LW*11, 38). It is a historically relative matter what
constitutes a constraint on individual freedom, however. By
attempting to mask this as well as by promoting an outdated conception
of what these constraints must be, classical liberalism has come to
subvert liberalism's core commitments to liberty and
individuality.



Dewey goes beyond this historicization, however. In the sense in which
freedom is a substantive value for liberals, what is valuable about it
is not the negative absence of constraints but the positive
"power to be an individualized self" (*The Public and
Its Problems*, *LW*2, 329). Individuality in what we may
call a weak sense is universally possessed and consists in the
particular patterns of response to the environment that each person
displays, "a distinctive way of feeling the impacts of the world
and of showing a preferential bias in response to these impacts"
(*Individualism Old and New*, *LW*5, 121). In the
stronger sense in which it is a value for liberals, according to
Dewey, individuality consists in the personal capacity for
*choice*, "the most characteristic activity of a
self" (*Ethics*, 2nd edition, *LW*7,
285). This is not a matter of having the capacity only for arbitrarily
or whimsically plumping for one option rather than another. Rather,
choice that is expressive of your individuality in the strong sense
involves your intelligent criticism and appraisal of options.
Accordingly, we can understand why Dewey claims that "to foresee
future objective alternatives and to be able by deliberation to choose
one of them and thereby weigh its chances in the struggle for future
existence, measures our freedom" (*Human Nature and
Conduct*, *MW*14, 210). The alternative to intelligent
self-direction is action according to whatever notions individuals
have picked up from their environment, including not only unreflective
impulses but propaganda (the "flood of mass suggestion"
that he identifies with the media revolution of the early twentieth
century), class ideologies and "the monotonous round of imagery
flowing from illiberal interests, broken only by wild forays into the
illicit" (*Ethics*, 1st edition, *MW*5, 392). It
follows that possession and exercise of this capacity for individuality
require the right social conditions. Throughout his writings he
argues that education to produce undocile, unservile, creative
citizens is essential. Further, he views this capacity for
critical reflection as supported by democratic institutions and
culture, since, at least in principle, these allow for openness,
epistemic diversity, experiment, contestation and revision that
supports freedom as individuality (*The Public and Its
Problems*, *LW*2, 329; *Ethics*, 2nd
edition, *LW*7, 358).



Dewey goes further still, though, in situating the free individual:
freedom doesn't only consist in the development
of reflective individuality, which requires supportive social and
political conditions. It also includes participation in a community
(here tweaking an idea he found in Green and the New Liberals). As he
puts it in *The Public and Its Problems*, liberty "is
that secure release and fulfilment of personal potentialities which
take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the
power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution
and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association" (*The
Public and Its Problems*, *LW*2, 329). You are free not
only in reflectively choosing among a set of options but in having
available a rich set of worthwhile options; without these options, you
aren't free, or as free, as someone who does enjoy a rich and
manifold association with others. You are also free only when you are
making your own distinctive contribution to the society. Dewey is
the kind of positive liberty theorist for whom individual freedom is
achieved through participation in the process through which the
individual's society exercises collective control over its own
affairs. I'll return to this in the next section, since it
shapes Dewey's conception of democracy.



What should be underlined here is that this account of freedom is the
basis of a critical assessment of capitalist
society: "[t]he direct impact of liberty always has to do
with some class or group that is suffering in a special way from some
form of constraint exercised by the distribution of powers that exists
in contemporary society" (*Liberalism and Social
Action*, *LW*11, 38). Liberals agree that the state
has an important role in maintaining the conditions for individual
freedom. For Dewey, the character and value of freedom, as for
the Hegelian idealists and New Liberals on whom he drew and for later
writers on negative and positive liberty such as Isaiah Berlin, flowed
into a debate about the proper scope of social and political action.
The scope of legitimate social and political action had to be
determined experimentally and in the light of the needs of his
conception of freedom as individuality: *laissez-faire* should
not be assumed to be the default position for a liberal. For earlier
liberalism, the opposition of the individual and government may have
made sense, in an era characterised by political despotism. In
circumstances of popular government and where there is a need to track
and regulate the complexities of modern industrial conditions,
however, the nostrums of *laissez-faire* liberalism only
serve to provide ideological support for plutocracy. Dewey
drew on a wide range of sources to flesh out his conception of social
action or social control, including the utopian Edward Bellamy and
British guild socialist G. D. H. Cole, and argued for social
reforms that tended to strengthen workers' rights, including
rights to form and join unions, and to take strike action, and the
extension of democratic control in the workplace, and a welfare
state, in the name of freedom as individuality. More
pointedly, Dewey argued, particularly in the 1930s, that a socialized
economy was necessary to maintain the liberal value of freedom.
Unsurprisingly, this drew a hostile reception from advocates of a
negative concept of liberty such as F. A. Hayek (1960), who viewed
Dewey as profoundly destructive of liberalism.



Since both positive liberty and the idea of social control have been
thought to have worrying authoritarian implications, and Dewey is
sometimes thought of as a technocrat, it is worth emphasising the
liberal and democratic character of Dewey's conception of social
action. Individuality as an ethical ideal requires that individuals
find their own way, and not have particular doctrines or social roles
imposed on them: it is only "when individuals have initiative,
independence of judgment, flexibility, fullness of experience can they
act so as to enrich the lives of others" (*Ethics*,
2nd edition, *LW*7, 285). Dewey doesn't think
that the liberal rights protected in the name of individual liberty
(such as freedoms of speech, thought, movement, and so on) should be
dispensed with but rather that they are constitutive in part of the
positive liberty he advocates. Indeed, he emphasises that
"direct and violent encroachments on liberty of thought and
speech are perpetrated by police and by organized bands of persons
when suggestions for important change in economic lines are put
forth" (*Ethics*, 2nd edition, *LW*7,
360). Furthermore, viewing liberty through the prism of individuality
only opens up the possibility of political action in the name of
liberty, but it does not itself require it. Finally, and in contrast
to technocratic critics of *laissez-faire* such as Walter
Lippmann, as we will see, Dewey argues that an extensive form of
democracy is essential for social action, and he vests little faith in
experts.


## 3. Democratic Ideals and Realities



While democracy is the key organising concept of Dewey's
political philosophy, it is one that he thinks of in a very unusual
way. As he puts it in *Democracy and Education*, it is
"more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of
associated living, of conjoint communicated experience"
(*MW*9, 93) or, famously, it is a "way of life"
(*Freedom and Culture*, *LW*13, 155; "Creative
Democracy: The Task Before Us", *LW*14, 226). This is a
long way from the conception of democracy as majority rule or as a set
of procedures for the selection of governors.



Dewey views democracy as an ideal of associated life in the sense that
as an ideal he thinks that it reconciles the full expression of
individual potentialities and the common good. In this sense, democracy
sits at the apex of his historicised naturalist account of
individuality and community. "From the standpoint of the
individual", as he puts it, democracy "consists in having
a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the
activities of the groups in which one belongs and in participating
according to need in the values which the groups sustain", while
"from the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the
potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and
goods which are common" (*The Public and Its Problems*,
*LW*2, 327-8). In working out what to do, individuals and
groups are confronted by dilemmas. Some of us (such as a gang of
thieves, in Dewey's example) address these problems in ways that
promote certain kinds of growth and development (you can flourish as a
thief, including feeling solidarity with your gang) but inherently
frustrate ourselves and our goals, since these set us on paths of
activity that necessarily generate conflict with other individuals and
groups, and so the need for coercion. It is only a democratic
community, Dewey believes, which allows each member fully to realize
her potentialities without conflict and coercion, since it does not
inherently generate conflict. Dewey is explicit that this ideal
describes a *problem* that societies confront and a
critical ideal for them to attain, namely, how to harmonize the
development of each individual with the maintenance of a society in
which the individual activities will contribute to the common good
(*Ethics*, 2nd edition, *LW*7, 350), rather
than the blueprint for an institutional solution. Dewey's point
is that (unlike externally imposed moral standards) this ideal is
immanent to democratic societies, since what makes them democratic is
the extent to which they overcome the barriers (of class and race, for
example (*Democracy and Education*, *MW*9, 93)) to free
interaction. As critics point out, this does not furnish a reason for
someone who lacks an interest in overcoming those barriers to do so.
Perhaps, though, Dewey should not be viewed as striving to provide
such a reason, at this very general level, beyond pointing out that
those who are antipathetic to other classes and races should not claim
to be democrats.



An overlapping but not identical fashion in which democracy
constitutes a way of life for Dewey concerns his view of the scope of
democracy: democracy does not only govern what we think of as politics
or administration, in the normal sense. Dewey thinks that this narrow
view misses out the importance of democracy for a much wider range of
social institutions: it is "superficial" to think that
"government is located in Washington and Albany. There is
government in the family, in business, in the church, in every social
group" which regulates the behaviour of its members
("Democracy and Educational
Administration", *LW*11, 221). The scope of democracy, in
the sense of the range of institutions to which it applies, should not
be construed narrowly. If our individuality is shaped by the wide
range of institutions that make up our social habitat, as Dewey
thinks, then the rules and norms governing these institutions are too
important to us to be left to chance, dogma, tradition or inherited
hierarchy. Power and domination are present in all these spheres of
social life so restricting democratic scrutiny and control to a single
sphere of social life would be a mistake. In *The Public and Its
Problems*, Dewey gives the question of the scope of politics some
systematic thought and provides this account of the distinction
between public and private:



> 
> When the consequences of an action are confined, or are thought to be
> confined mainly to the persons directly engaged in it, the transaction
> is a private one .... Yet if it is found that the consequences
> ... extend beyond [those] directly concerned ... the act
> acquires a public capacity ... The line between private and
> public is to be drawn on the basis of the extent and scope of the
> consequences of acts which are so important as to need control,
> whether by inhibition or promotion. The public consists of all those
> who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such
> an extent that it is deemed necessary to have these consequences
> systematically cared for. (*LW*2, 244-6)
> 



What constitutes the public (and private) in particular cases is
relative to range of judgments about what counts as a consequence, who
is concerned, and what is so important as to need control, and the
public is a concept we have to deploy these judgments. So this
conception of the public/private distinction fits with his
experimentalism by leaving very open the content of these judgments.
As we saw in the discussion of liberalism, in part Dewey objects to
classical liberalism because he thinks it has an overly restrictive
view of what constitutes a constraint on individual liberty, grounded
in an ahistorical conception of the individual. If we really
collectively value individuality, Dewey thinks, we should think not
only about how to protect some sorts of act from regulation (so are
"private") but also about where we need to intervene and
regulate in order to support individuality.



Further, "[d]emocracy is only estimable through the changed
conception of intelligence that forms modern science"
("Intelligence and Morals", *MW*4, 39); it is a
kind of social embodiment of his conception of experimentalism.
"The very heart of political democracy is adjudication of social
differences by discussion and exchange of views", he writes in a
late essay. "This method provides a rough approximation to the
method of effecting change by means of experimental inquiry and
test" ("Challenge to Liberal Thought",
*LW*15, 273). Democracy is a method for identifying and solving
the common problems confronted by communities. Robust inquiry requires
that we must have access to all the available evidence and arguments.
If we want our inquiry to be successful, we should not prejudge its
outcomes, by excluding sources of experience that allow us to explore
and correct our hypotheses. By contrast,



> 
> [e]very authoritarian scheme, ... assumes that its value may be
> assessed by some prior principle, if not of family and birth or race
> and color or possession of material wealth, then by the position and
> rank the person occupies in the existing social scheme. The democratic
> faith in equality is the faith that each individual shall have the
> chance and opportunity to contribute whatever he is capable of
> contributing, and that the value of his contribution be decided by its
> place and function in the organized total of similar contributions:
> - not on the basis of prior status of any kind whatever.
> ("Democracy and Educational Administration",
> *LW*11, 220)
> 



Although the "democratic faith" suggests that we are all
capable of meaningfully contributing to critical inquiry, the
development of habits of intelligent conduct isn't taken for
granted: they can be degraded by social disempowerment, propaganda and
ideology. And, as we've seen, they are in any case viewed as
hard-won achievements of schooling and a generally supportive society.
Democratic societies are thought of as both seeking to attain
desirable goals, and arguing over how to do so, and also as arguing
over what a desirable goal is. In other words, democratic politics is
a mode of activity in which we can arrive at a conception of what our
interests are. Accordingly, like recent deliberative democrats, Dewey
ascribes a central importance to discussion, consultation, persuasion
and debate in democratic decision-making. As the experimentalist
conception of inquiry insists, this does not imply that we need *a
priori* criteria in order to establish if this process has been
successful. Rather, criteria for what counts as a satisfactory
solution may be hammered out in the process of searching for one.
Democracy is experimental for Dewey in that it allows, or should
allow, a profound questioning of the *idees fixes* of
the established order, even if, of course, much democratic politics
will not take the form of such questioning. Further, it is worth
underlining that Dewey does not conflate this kind of
deliberative politics with the elimination of social conflict, and so
with the critical ideal of democracy in his social ontology. He
doesn't imagine away differences of opinion, conflicts of
interest and value pluralism as ineliminable features of social and
political life. Even where there is open public discussion,
"[d]ifferences of opinion in the sense of differences of
judgment as to the course which it is best to follow, the policy which
it is best to try out, will still exist" (*The Public and Its
Problems*, *LW*2, 362). Democracy as public discussion is
viewed as the best way of dealing with the conflict of interests in a
society:



> 
> The method of democracy - inasfar as it is that of organized
> intelligence - is to bring these conflicts out into the open
> where their special claims can be discussed and judged in the light of
> more inclusive interests than are represented by either of them
> separately. (*Liberalism and Social Action*, *LW*11, 56)
> 



A concern with the epistemic costs and risks of social and political
hierarchy runs through Dewey's work: such "social
divisions as interfere with free and full intercourse react to make
intelligence and knowing of the separated classes one-sided"
(*Democracy and Education*, *MW*9, 354). It is not only
that some classes are excluded from cultural capital and education or
subjected to propaganda: "all special privilege narrows the
outlook of those who possess it, as well as limits the possibilities
of development of those not having it" (*Ethics*,
2nd edition, *LW*7, 347). Rationalization of your
own superior position as well as wilful ignorance of others'
situation are central epistemic vices of this kind of hierarchy. This
anxiety about hierarchy underlies the response to Walter
Lippmann's influential sceptical attack on democratic theory in
books such as *Public Opinion* (1922) and *The Phantom
Public* (1925). Lippmann (who like Dewey was influenced by William
James and who shared many philosophical and political commitments with
Dewey at an earlier stage of his career) agrees that contemporary
moral and political thinking has not caught up with the modern world.
Unlike Dewey, however, Lippmann thinks that understanding the
complexity and opacity of modern societies requires us to set aside
the illusion entertained by classical democratic theorists that
citizens are "omnicompetent", capable of arriving at
informed judgments about politics, and instead embrace the legitimacy
of decision-making by qualified experts. The force of this critique of
democracy for Dewey in part derives from its deployment of his own
intellectual strategy for ends with which he vehemently disagrees. In
this context, although Dewey can sometimes appear to sound dismissive
about what he calls the "political machinery" of democracy
such as the vote and majority rule, he never regards this as
inessential or disposable. At the minimum, for Dewey, this machinery
helps to protect individuals from putative experts about where the
interests of people lie. Dewey's response to this is to point
out that experts have their own biases, and need correction from those
who have to live with the consequences of their decisions: "in
the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses, the best
do not remain the best, the wise cease to be wise .... In the
degree to which they become a specialized class, they are shut off
from knowledge of the needs they are supposed to serve". So the
merit of even existing "rudimentary" forms of democracy is
that they compel "recourse to methods of discussion,
consultation and persuasion" and in so doing provide the
opportunity to improve decisions (*The Public and Its
Problems*, *LW*2, 364; cf. *Reconstruction in
Philosophy*, *MW*12, 164). Taken in isolation, this way of
viewing the desirability of democratic political machinery seems
instrumental and minimal; instrumental, in that the desirability of
democracy derives from its protecting the interests of each individual
against the depredations of an elite class, and minimal, in that the
rationale for popular participation is limited to the need to keep the
elite informed about where the shoe pinches, if its policies are not
to be misguided. In spite of his scathing tone, Dewey is committed to
improving this machinery (by supporting the equal distribution of the
franchise, for example) rather than merely dismissing it as
unimportant. The real target of his ire is the exclusive
identification of democracy with a particular current set of political
institutions, particularly only with elections and majority rule. As
in the case of the defunct idea of liberalism, Dewey thinks of this as
a once liberating conception that now contains an inbuilt conservative
bias that prevents us from seeing the relevance of democracy to wider
social terrain, such as the workplace, and constrains more imaginative
institutional thinking.


## 4. Legacies



Dewey's obituarists eulogized him as the authoritative American
philosopher of democracy. Both during his life and subsequently,
however, he has been a more controversial figure than this reputation
would suggest. In part, this reflects his profile and fecundity.
Precisely because he ranged so prominently across such a wide
intellectual terrain, Dewey has been a point of reference and target
for commentators in all the fields he explored: his educational
writings in particular became a default *fons et origo* of the
alleged ills ascribed to schemes of progressive education by their
critics. Further, across a long and active career as a public
intellectual, Dewey adopted bold and controversial political positions
on deeply divisive issues, including (for example) robustly supporting
US entry into the First World War and later opposing intervention in
the Second World War, which also attracted fierce opprobrium as well
as support.



Dewey's pragmatism was always highly contentious. A dominant
view for much of the twentieth century, expounded by such diverse
voices as Lewis Mumford (1926), Louis Hartz (1955), Bernard Crick
(1959), Max Horkheimer (1974), Herbert Marcuse (2011), John Diggins
(1994), and Sheldon Wolin (2004), was that pragmatism is a philosophy
for liberal technocrats, an account of how to think flexibly about the
achievement of socially endorsed parochial goals but with few
resources to think critically about those goals. For others, including
Bertrand Russell and William Elliott, its apparent laxity about
objectivity made it susceptible to capture by darker forces, such as
fascism (a point some fascists were happy to accept). To skeptics in
democratic theory, following in the tracks of Lippmann and other of
Dewey's contemporaries such as Reinhold Niebuhr (1960),
Dewey's radical and unconventional idea of democracy is
extravagantly optimistic about the epistemic capacities of the
individual citizen and of democratic institutions. By the
mid-twentieth century his views had to some extent staled in the face
of stimulating new research programmes, such as logical empiricism,
the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and other approaches. And the
key intellectual antagonist of much of Dewey's political
writing, *laissez-faire* liberalism, occupied a relatively
marginal space.



The philosopher who probably did the most singlehandedly to promote
the recrudescence of interest in Dewey's thinking after this
period of relative marginality, Richard Rorty, found in his work an
historically-minded questioning of epistemological foundations and
aspirations to a God's-eye point of view that of course provided
fodder for Rorty's own project. Yet, in relation to political
philosophy, Rorty's skeptical postmodern liberal ironism glossed
over the detailed architecture of Dewey's ethical and political
theory, and made very little either of Dewey's own naturalistic
confidence in the mutually supportive or his conception of the
progressive character of scientific method and democracy. Even among
those philosophers who have been keen to draw on the pragmatist
tradition as a resource for more positively elaborating a political
theory than Rorty was inclined to there are important figures, such as
Cheryl Misak (2000, 2013), who seek foundations for their view
elsewhere, notably in Peirce's view of the precondition of
belief, and express doubts about what they see as Dewey's less
clearly grounded ethical commitments. However, others such as Hilary
and Ruth Anna Putnam (2017) and Philip Kitcher (2020, 2021) more
wholeheartedly identify with, and try to develop, the commitments of
Dewey's pragmatic naturalism, in thinking through the
relationship between scientific inquiry, ethics and democracy. In
part, recent increased engagement with Dewey's political
philosophy from philosophers across a range of traditions, including
epistemic democrats, such as Elizabeth Anderson (2006), and Frankfurt
School critical theorists, such as Axel Honneth (1998, 2008, 2014) and
Rahel Jaeggi (2018), flows from an interest in developing a fuller
understanding of democracy as a method of social learning. In the
teeth of the neoliberal revival of *laissez-faire*
liberalism, many of these authors, and others, have mined his work
as a resource for contemporary thinking about liberal socialism
and participatory democracy (Medearis 2015, Jackson 2018).
Dewey's political philosophy remains an important reference
point and source of inspiration for thinkers who seek to explore and
develop radical forms of democratic liberalism.