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Rescuing Dewey

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Rescuing Dewey

Essays in Pragmatic Nationalism

Peter T. Manicas

LEXINGTON BOOKS

A d i vi s i on o f

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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LEXINGTON BOOKS

A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200Lanham, MD 20706

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v

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction xi

PART I PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

1 Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism 3

2 John Dewey and American Psychology 35

3 John Dewey and American Social Science 63

4 Culture and Nature 81

PART II NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY

5 Naturalism and Subjectivism 101

6 Naturalizing Epistemology: Recent Developments in

Psychology and the Sociology of Knowledge 119

PART III DEMOCRACY

7 American Democracy: A New Spirit in the World 143

8 John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State 187

9 Philosophy and Politics: A Historical Approach to

Marx and Dewey 211

10 John Dewey and the Problem of Justice 237

11 Liberalism’s Discontent: America in Search for Past That

Never Was 251

Contents

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PART IV WHY NOT DEWEY?

12 The Evasion of Philosophy 273

13 Democratic Hope 283

14 Analytic Pragmatism 287

15 Post-Modern Pragmatism 295

Bibliography 305

Index 315

vi Contents

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vii

The original place and time of presentation and/or publication is indicated be-

low. I am grateful to each of the editors and publishers for their permission to

reprint.

Chapter 1, “Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism,”

was read as part of an invited panel, American Philosophical Association,

Boston, December 1986 and appeared in The Transactions of the Charles S.

Peirce Society, Vol. XXIV, No. 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 179–222.

Chapter 2, “John Dewey and American Psychology,” Journal for the Theory

of Social Behavior , Vol. 32, No. 3 (September 2002), pp. 267–94.

Chapter 3, “John Dewey and American Social Science,” in Larry Hickman (ed.),

Reading Dewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 43–62.

Chapter 4, “Culture and Nature,” was the Patrick Romanell Lecture, Ameri-

can Philosophical Association, Portland, March 27, 1992, published in Pro-

ceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1992),

pp. 59–76.

Chapter 5, “Naturalism and Subjectivism,” read at the conference, “The Fu-

ture of Realism in the American Tradition of Pragmatic Naturalism, Univer-

sity of Buffalo, October 20–22, 2000. The essay appeared in John Shook

(ed.), Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,2003), pp. 79–106.

Acknowledgements

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Chapter 6, “Naturalizing Epistemology: Recent Developments in Psychology

and the Sociology of Knowledge,” in John J. Stuhr (ed.), Philosophy and theReconstruction of Culture: Pragmatic Essays After John Dewey (Albany:

SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 151–74.

Chapter 7, “American Democracy: A New Spirit in the World,” Chapter 13 of

War and Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 338–78.

Chapter 8, “John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State,” read at the an-

nual meetings of the Society for The Advancement of Philosophy, Villanova

University, Spring 1980, and appearing in Transactions of the Charles S.

Peirce Society, 18 (Spring, 1982), pp. 133–58. Reprinted in J. E. Tiles (ed.),

John Dewey: Critical Assessments, Vol. II (London and New York: Rout-

ledge, 1992), pp. 407–29.

Chapter 9, “Philosophy and Politics: An Historical Approach to Marx and

Dewey,” originally, “Dewey’s Critique of Marxism,” Society for the Ad-

vancement of American Philosophy, American Philosophical Association,

Eastern Division, New York, December 28, l984 and appeared in W.J. Gavin

(ed.), Context Over Foundation: Dewey and Marx (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988),

pp. 147–75.

Chapter 10, “John Dewey and the Problem of Justice,” The Journal of Value

Inquiry, 15 (1981), pp. 279–91. Reprinted in J. E. Tiles (ed.), John Dewey:

Critical Assessments, Vol. III (London and New York: Routledge, 1992),

pp. 407–29.

Chapter 11, “Liberalism’s Discontent: America in Search for Past That Never

Was,” read at a panel discussion Midwest Political Science Association,

Chicago, April 1998.

Chapter 12, “Evasion of Philosophy,” Review of Cornel West, The American

Evasion of Philosophy, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol.

XXVl, 3 (Summer, 1990), pp. 373–84.

Chapter 13, “Democratic Hope,” Review of Robert B. Westbrook, Demo-

cratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth, in Perspectives on Poli-

tics, Anerican Political Science Association, Vol. 4, No, 2 (June 2006),

pp. 373–75.

viii Acknowledgements

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Chapter 14, “Analytic Pragmatism,” Review of Mathew Festenstein, Prag-

matism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, Vol.

XXXV, No. 1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 203–14.

Chapter 15, “Post-modern Pragmatism,” Review of Baert, Philosophy of the

Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), forth-

coming in Journal of Critical Realism.

Acknowledgements ix

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xi

There may be no philosopher who has provoked more books and articles than

John Dewey, who, of course, may also have set a record in producing books

and articles. (The Collected Works, now complete, number some 37 volumes.)

One wonders if anyone has read all of it. Indeed, one strategy, perhaps too fre-

quently adopted, is to ignore all the critical literature and try to stick to his

published texts—sometimes, not even to all of them! Nor, it may be sup-

posed, is any philosopher less in need of “rescuing.” He has been the subject

of several biographies, including two excellent recent biographies and his

name continues to reappear in all sorts of contexts, Moreover, Dewey’s many

critics ranged pretty much across the philosophical spectrum and, to be sure,

there were plenty of sympathetic philosophers who responded to these critics.

But the guiding idea in this volume is not to try to rescue Dewey from his crit-ics (although that is sometimes also a consequence), but to rescue Dewey

from his friends.

The friends that he needs rescuing from fall into two main groups. On the

one hand, there are those who either play down or ignore the implications of

Dewey’s naturalism. For these philosophers, his version of pragmatism broke

new ground precisely because it overcame the fundamental impasses of tradi-

tional metaphysics. Viewed from the perspective of academic philosophy,

these philosophers have labored hard to preserve and extend Dewey’s prag-

matism as an original and distinct American philosophy. While still marginal

in the academy, they have made many important contributions. Prominent in

this group are philosophers who speak of Dewey’s “metaphysics of experi-

ence.”1

For these philosophers, James’s radical empiricism is often taken asDewey’s point of departure. These philosophers see rightly that Dewey re-

jected atomistic empiricist versions of experience and that, for him, experience

Introduction

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was rich and informing, and included not only “relations” of all sorts, but both

“doings” and “sufferings.” But as Tiles has recently remarked, while Deweyinsisted that in his Experience and Nature, he sought to provide an “empirical

naturalism” or a “naturalistic empiricism,” he saw also that many philosophers

would find these expressions to be oxymoronic, like “talking of a round

square.”

These philosophers take seriously the problem set out by Kant and hold,

not without reason, that Dewey is suspicious of metaphysics in Kant’s sense:

claims about that which is not in experience. The problem here, as Ralph Bar-

ton Perry saw, was the slip into philosophical idealism. He argued: “It would

appear that while Dewey . . . rescues reality from dependence on intellect, he

is satisfied to leave it in the grasp of more universal experience which is ‘a

matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, of

coordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness.” (Perry,

1955: 315). Some defenders of Dewey would, I think, also be satisfied. Perry

was not, of course, since he persisted that “a thoroughgoing realism must as-

sert independence not only of thought, but any variety of whatsoever of ex-

perience, whether it be perception, feeling, or even the instinctive response of

the organism to its environment” (315).2

There was something radical and important about insisting on the rejection

of a “subject/object dichotomy” but on the usual terms, if existence is re-

stricted to what can be experienced, it is hard to see how idealism is to be

avoided. There is an alternative, a form of critical realism, which makes

Kant’s thing-in-itself knowable. That is, the causes of our experience cannot

themselves in be in experience. There is a real tension in Dewey on this, a ten-

sion examined in several of the papers in this volume. On the present view,

the critical point is that, for Dewey, contrary to modern epistemology, theproblem of the external world was not a problem—for good reason; but even

so, there remained not only the question of the causal role of an independently

existing nature, but as part of this, the causal role of the theoretical entities of

science. For the whole of Dewey’s long life, positivism was surely the un-

challenged view on such matters (Manicas, 1989) and while recent pragmatic

philosophies of science were not particularly influenced by Dewey, they have

helped to promote the idea that Dewey could be enlisted in their cause. Thus,

pragmatic philosophy of science rejects “realism” as an untenable and un-

necessary metaphysical commitment. But this seems inconsistent with the ac-

tual practices of the successful sciences (Manicas, 2006). Thus, while it may

seem obvious, we can only explain the rusting of iron if we have a theory that

postulates the independent existence of Fe and which details the processcalled oxidation.

xii Introduction

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Similarly, while it is clear that Dewey was a powerful advocate of “the

method of intelligence,” and that plainly, the practices of the sciences werepertinent to seeing what was involved in this, these philosophers have tended

to be uncritical of what might somewhat anachronistically be called Dewey’s

philosophy of science. Partly because Dewey wrote no explicit philosophy of

science and partly because these philosophers have been rightly suspicious of

Vienna-inspired Anglo-American philosophy of science, they have paid al-

most no attention to Dewey’s original—but confusing—theory of science, in-

cluding his vision of its role and relation in society. This is an important la-

cunae from the present point of view. Dewey is rightly associated with

“science” and “scientific method,” but neither idea can be taken for granted.

For example, as Dewey made clear: the social sciences need to function in a

democratic society, but as he insisted, “the prime condition of a democrati-

cally organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet

exist” (Dewey: 1954: 166; my emphasis). Quest for Certainty (1929) is

hardly the key text for getting a handle on Dewey’s theory of science. As it

turns out, Experience and Nature (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)

and many disparate essays are both far richer and much more clearly provide

the main outlines of his distinctive views on the critical issues in philosophy

of science.

These philosophers also see American pragmatism and especially Dewey

as creating “an image of America” which made him a critical player in what

has been termed the “reformist left.” These writers may acknowledge

Dewey’s vision of a democratic society, but hold that, for him, problems in

American society “could be corrected using the institutions of constitutional

democracy”: elect the right politicians and enact the right laws. Thus, he is

seen as left-liberal who put his trust in American exceptionalism: the historyof the United States was moving progressively toward a distinct American vi-

sion. While it is true that Dewey rejected an insurrectionary politics and was

no “fire-eating leftist,” his analysis of the present was radical in the sense that

it went straight to the roots. This put his politics close to Marx’s in critical

ways. The interpretation of Dewey as a left-reformist is best articulated by the

second group of Dewey’s “friends.”

Rorty and those who follow him constitute this second group of friends

from whom Dewey needs rescuing. Again, speaking from the point of view

of academic philosophy, these philosophers are typically “Anglo-American

analytic philosophers.” While their style of philosophy has somewhat waned,

it is fair to say that they continue to dominate academic philosophy in the US,

if less so in other places. A good deal of recent Dewey scholarship falls intothis mode.

Introduction xiii

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Rorty, of course, is key here. Himself a well-established analytic philoso-

pher, his “discovery” of Dewey led him to a more general attack on the claimsof philosophy. He was correct to insist that epistemology is a modern sub-

discipline of philosophy generated by the problem of legitimating the claims

of the new science (Rorty, 1979). And given this understanding of the history

of Western philosophy, he was correct also to see strong parallels between Ni-

etzsche, James, Heideggar, Derrida and Foucault. Thus, contemporary “tex-

tualism,” the idea that there are nothing but texts parallels the idealist notion

that there are nothing but ideas (Rorty, 1982: 139). But there is, he insists, a

critical difference between current textualism and classical idealism. In repu-

diating the tradition, textualists rejected the framework that allow for episte-

mology and ontology. Thus, unlike idealists (or naturalists or materialists) so-

called “post-modern” writers reject the idea that what is important is not

whether what we believe is true, but what “vocabulary we use.” Finally, then,

for Rorty, pragmatism joins post-modern thinking in repudiating metaphysi-

cal argument between idealist/naturalists and the epistemological idea of truth

as correspondence with reality. But if Dewey was committed to naturalism,

there would seem to be no escaping ontological commitments—including a

naturalistic account of consciousness. Similarly, philosophical realists—as

most ordinary people, believe that true means “correspondence with reality.”

But even if one assents that we can have no unmediated access to reality as it

is itself, it does not follow that we cannot discriminate between true and false.

Indeed, it is a scandal to think otherwise.

Rorty sees problems with postmodernist moves to escape traditional phi-

losophy. But he sees also that Dewey does not exactly fit his larger picture. In

agreement with Santayana, Rorty insists that Dewey’s efforts at a “naturalis-

tic metaphysics” betrays “a recurrent flaw in Dewey’s work: his habit of an-nouncing a bold new positive program when all he offers, and all he needs to

offer, is criticism of the tradition” (1982: 78). To be sure, Dewey does offer

“a bold new positive program”—a naturalistic metaphysics with epistemol-

ogy replaced by his version of “logic” (Sleeper, 1986). And he needed to do

this because he could not step out of history and argue, as Rorty does, that

knowledge and truth are pseudo problems that will go away once we abandon

the claims of philosophy. Indeed, it is quite one thing to try to convince us

that “warranted assertability” could replace “truth,” understood as certainty,

and quite another to say that, for pragmatists, “there are no constraints on in-

quiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the

nature of objects, or the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints

provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers” (1982: 165). Worse, “theSocratic virtues—willingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the

consequences of actions on other people—are simply moral virtues . . . The

xiv Introduction

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pragmatists tell us that the conversations which it is our moral duty to

continue is merely our project, the European’s intellectual form of life” (1982:172).

As several of essays in both Part I and Part II try to make clear, there are,

for Dewey, considerable constraints on inquiry, beginning with a taken-for-

granted independently existing nature, our embeddedness in it, our history

and indeed, those ongoing institutional arrangements which often make im-

possible the required “conversation.” Thus, the inquiry which produced mo-

lecular chemistry as we now understand it very much depended both on the

nature of the independently existing world and the practices which show that,

as Peirce argued, there is a preferred mode of fixing belief about it. Similarly,

our embeddedness in nature and history both enables and constrains us in ac-

tion. Thus, for example, as Part III (below) tries to show, there are good rea-

sons to believe that Dewey was fully aware that there were enormous obsta-

cles to having the kind of knowledge that he thought was essential to a

democratic society and a humane life.

The writer who is the inspiration for the main thrust of most of the essays

in this volume is Ralph W. Sleeper, my former colleague at Queens College.

His wonderful The Necessity of Pragmatism (1986) provides a systematic ef-

fort to respond to both sets of the friends of Dewey. The reader might notice

here that for many years five members of the Queens department had contin-

uing conversation about Dewey and, more generally, about pragmatism.

These include John J. McDermott, Jack B. Noone, and Eugene Fontinell. Our

conversations never lacked passion but never approached violence.

Because Dewey’s thought was both rich and provocative, it is hoped that

the essays of this volume, written over a period of some twenty-five years,

provide a contemporary refocusing of current problems, both philosophicaland political. The essays are easily organized under four main headings.

PART I: PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

David Hollinger has rightly argued that the critical role played by the prag-

matists was “to find and articulate” a “way of life consistent with what they

and contemporaries variously perceived as the implications of modern sci-

ence” (Hollinger, 1985: 93). Part I, finds a deep irony in this. It is widely held,

by friends and enemies, that the pragmatists succeeded. On this interpreta-

tion, the pragmatists adopted an “instrumentalist” view of science in which

successful prediction and control-vindicated inquiry. By subordinating all in-quiry to “practical ends,” they could show that a belief was warranted only in-

sofar as it was “scientific.” Finally, they could then vindicate a culture whose

Introduction xv

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“social motor” was science. But there is a deep irony in this: As Chapter 1,

“Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism,” tries toshow, this “victory” was pyrrhic: In this chapter, I argue that the foregoing in-

terpretation is a stunning distortion and that the pragmatists failed utterly in

their quest to set a new course for a “scientific” civilization. Not only were

the forces at work resistant to their criticisms, but their fundamental insights,

in a paradoxical inversion, became absorbed in distorted forms. This was es-

pecially critical as regards psychology and the social sciences—as Chapters

2 and 3 try to show.

By looking at the views of Peirce as well as James, we can see more clearly

Dewey’s distinctive and original response. Chapter 1 provides, as well, a gen-

eral introduction to themes and issues taken up in subsequent chapters and

parts of the volume. Thus, Chapter 2 turns to Dewey’s relation to the history

of American psychology and argues that contrary to much established opin-

ion, not only did Dewey have no influence in the path taken, but that as early

as 1896, he marked out a path which today offers considerable promise for a

genuinely scientific psychology.

The key is a proper understanding of his much ignored and when noticed,

misunderstood, ideas on logic, understood by him as the theory of inquiry. It

not only points the way to a powerful conception of an “ecological psychol-

ogy,” but as Part II argues, it is at the heart of Dewey’s rejection of traditional

epistemology.

It is striking here that his enemies, for example, Bertrand Russell, found it

to be confused mess and that most of his friends have paid no attention to it.

Striking here also is the fact that the two most recent and otherwise very use-

ful overall accounts of Dewey, Robert Westbrook’s John Dewey and Ameri-

can Democracy (1991) and Alan Ryan’s John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995), almost entirely ignore it. Ryan, surely a compe-

tent philosopher of science, refers to the Logic as “vast and somewhat baf-

fling” (309). Following on the excellent work of Tom Burke (1994), Chapter

2 develops the central role and key ideas of the Logic as the critical part of

the misunderstanding of Dewey’s relation to psychology as a science. I con-

clude by arguing that, versus the dominant “Cartesian” varieties associated

with a good deal of what is termed “cognitive science,” the Logic provides

excellent philosophical ground for an ecological psychology. Thus, as Burke

writes, “in contrast with a classical empiricist view of perception (involving

so-called, sense data, sense impression, stimulations or nerve endings, irrita-

tions of body surfaces, and so forth), ecological psychology emphasizes a dif-

ferent array of theoretical concepts; one being the concept of ‘invariants’ andanother the concept of affordances . . .” (1994: 84). The pertinence of these

ideas for a critical realist theory of science are picked up in Chapter 5.

xvi Introduction

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Chapters 3 and 4 extend the argument to the social sciences. From the per-

spective of naturalism, Dewey could easily respond to the fundamental prob-lems of the social sciences, but especially the series of invidious dualisms:

subjectivism/objectivism, agency/structure, nature/culture, the idiographic

and the nomothetic. In this context, of special note, is his usually ignored or

misunderstood theory of meaning, a theory shared by his Chicago colleague,

G. H. Mead. But while there is an independently existing external world, it is

striking that as social forms do not exist independently of the beliefs and ac-

tions of situated agents, only a naturalism can escape the poles of subjec-

tivism and materialism.

PART II: NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY

This part picks up another central theme raised in Chapter I, the central po-sition in Dewey’s naturalism of his remarkable and much ignored Logic:

The Theory of Inquiry (1938), which, as he insisted, was “not another epis-

temology.” Chapter 5 considers the broader context of “naturalism” and

“subjectivism,” and seeks to locate Dewey in this context. Chapter 6 as-

sumes the main thrust of the Logic, and considers critically some compet-

ing efforts at “naturalistic epistemology,” including the work of Quine,

Rescher, and Laudan.

Two problems stand out. First, all of the many varieties of contemporary

analytic epistemology share in what can be termed an “epistemological in-

dividualism.” This is a legacy of ruggedly anti-ecological individualistic

traditional epistemology, a legacy which, it is critical to emphasize, also

profoundly effects a great deal of work in current cognitive psychology(Chapter 2).

Quine, whose version of “naturalistic epistemology” has nothing in com-

mon with Dewey’s, despite suggestions to the contrary, gives an exemplary

characterization of “epistemological individualism”: Thus:

This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input— cer-

tain patterns of irradiation in certain frequencies, for instance—and in the full-

ness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional

external world and its history (Quine, 1969: 77).

It is hardly clear how we get from “patterns of irradiation” to concepts, or

whether, finally, the “output” which is a “description of the three-dimensional

external world” can be established as true. The same problems arise for thosewho identify themselves as pursuing alternative epistemologies. “Internal-

ists” and “reliabilists” like William Lycan and Alvin Goldman, but also

Introduction xvii

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“externalists” and “naturalists” of various stripes, for example, Hilary Korn-

blith and Philip Kitcher. On these views, the social is not denied; but it entersonly as regards either the explanation of false belief or “the social organiza-

tion of knowledge”—with Robert K. Merton identified as having authored

“the most important twentieth century work.” Remarkably, no attention is

paid to the important work in recent sociology of science, including here

work by the so-called “strong programme,” and work by Latour, Pickering,

Hacking and many others.

I said that there are two problems. Even we acknowledge the role of the so-

cial in perception and understanding, it is hardly clear whether we can, fol-

lowing Dewey, simply ignore the problem of Pyrhonian skepticism. The

problem is not justifying the existence of an external world, or whether that

world is structured in some fashion or other, but whether, given “the natura-

listic equivalence of the knowledge of different cultures,” we can justify

claims to even warranted belief while at the same time avoiding either circu-

larity or dogmatism. Thus, can we say that when the Karam utters

“I see a kobity now” he is wrong, that what he see is really a cassowary?

Quine’s version of naturalistic epistemology, as well as most traditional epis-

temology, either assume that some privileged beliefs are true or they assume

that something vaguely identified as “science” yields truth. In Chapter 6, at

least in the spirit of Dewey, we consider three pragmatic approaches to the

problem of privileging the claims of science without circularity or dogma-

tism. I suggest that instead of seeking to warrant pragmatically assertions or

methods, we take practices as our point of departure. This provides a far more

plausible even if modest outcome.

PART III: DEMOCRACY

There is perhaps no term so badly abused as “democracy.” Originally, of

course, it meant (literally) that the people rule. While not all those living in

Athens were citizens, citizens actually met and made decisions, which af-

fected them all. When the US Constitution convinced the world that the peo-

ple could be sovereign and still be entirely excluded from participation in

decision-making—exactly as Madison made clear, liberal republics became

“democracies.”3 With this move, not only did capitalism become consistent

with democracy, it became the ideal arrangement! “People’s democracies”

accepted Aristotle dictum—and Madison’s, that if the demos who are poor

achieved power, they would abolish private property as contrary to their in-terests. The people’s democracies could be one-party states as long as they

made the effort to realize the democratic value of equality. After all, as Mar-

xviii Introduction

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shall Tito liked to point out, since the people did not rule in either the (now

gone) Yugoslavian state or in the US, the difference was really only one partyas against two!

The problem of democracy in the era of the modern nation-state was bril-

liantly posed in the 1920s in a remarkable debate between Dewey and Walter

Lippmann who argued that in the US, tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee best

characterized our party system. The debate, considered in Chapter 7, remains

of profound relevance especially given the nearly complete capitulation to the

idea that “there is no alternative” to the liberal capitalist democracies of the

advanced industrial societies. Dewey surely thought otherwise.

The occasion for this debate was World War I. But it is critical to notice

that the war changed the minds of both parties and that war remains the gen-

erally unacknowledged problem for “democracy” in the modern world. That

is, until the Great War, Dewey’s perception of American democracy was

largely uncritical and we cannot begin to understand him on the subject of de-

mocracy until we locate his maturing ideas against the background of the war

and of the writings of Walter Lippmann. Chapter 7 attempts an analytical/

historical consideration of the conditions and content of this debate.

Briefly, Dewey fully grasped the power of Lippmann’s brilliant critique,

but he could not accept Lippmann’s solution. Lippmann made two funda-

mental moves. First, he insisted that the citizen cannot know what is happen-

ing or what ought to happen, and even if they could, there is a structured in-

capacity to constitute any sort of coherent “public opinion.” Only “mystical

democrats” could believe that the people had “a will” and that this was—even

could be—actually realized.

But Lippmann was not threatened by this outcome, since he also insisted

that the critical question of government was not whether citizens actually“participated,” or whether it sought and realized “the will of the people,” but

whether “it is producing a certain minimum of health, of decent housing, of

material necessities, of education, of freedom, of pleasures, of beauty “(1954:

196–97.). Accordingly, “the essence of popular government,” notwithstand-

ing tweedle dum and tweedle dee, is a choice between supporting “the Ins

when things are going well” and supporting “the Outs when they seem to be

going badly” (126).

The capacity to “throw the bums out” does give a minimum of accounta-

bility and this should not be discounted,4 but Lippmann’s criteria are empty

of rational content. If the citizen is to appraise the success or failure of a

regime in power, then she has to make impossible counterfactual judgments

and to find some way for these to congeal into a coherent majority vote. Lipp-mann gave a host of reasons why, under present institutional arrangements,

this is impossible. But if so, there is simply no rational ground for applying

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Lippmann’s criteria. What indeed is “minimum of health” or “freedom” and

how can know if the Outs would have done better? Lippmann fell back on athoroughly elitist version of his argument regarding science. “Gradually . . .

the more enlightened directing minds have called in experts who were

trained, or had trained themselves, to make parts of this Great Society intelli-

gible to those who manage it” (370). Though these “enlightened directing

minds” knew that they needed help, they were “slow to call in the social sci-

entist” (371). Lippmann hopes that the lesson has been learned. What is

needed, he opines, is presidential leadership responsive to the best of “social

scientific knowledge”!5

This is an unembarrassed technocratic solution to the problem of democ-

racy. But, obviously, it assumes that “experts” can have the requisite knowl-

edge, and it still confronts the problem of assessing counterfactuals. More-

over, even assuming that “experts” make no mistakes, actions have

consequences that generally cannot be undone. War is surely the most obvi-

ous instance.

Perhaps the recent Bush dominance of American politics is the best and

worst case for Lippmann. The capacity to “throw the bums out” is a test of

“democracy,” but we need to see clearly what democracy thus amounts to.

Put aside the fact that mechanisms of opinion formation allow those with

huge sums of money to manipulate the opinions of citizens. Put aside also that

it is relatively easy to disenfranchise voters, that there are serious problems

with the electoral system, including the electoral college and the US system

of “representation.” Put aside also that, as we more recently have discovered,

with electronic voting, there is no way to know if the results of voting using

the new electronic technologies are even truthful!6

In the mid-term election of 2006, it seems clear enough that American vot-ers did repudiate at least some of the policies of President Bush and the Re-

publican controlled Congress. But not only is there no way to weigh the rel-

ative importance of the many policies adopted (and rejected) and to identify

some coherent alternatives, but these decisions and their consequences have

inalterably reshaped the world. While this is always the case, decisions are

not all equally monumental. The most obvious case is the war in Iraq where

the consequences include the death of thousands, the waste of billions of dol-

lars, a civil war, and likely the promotion of global terrorism. By January

2007, it seemed that the clear message of the voter on the war in Iraq could

be ignored. Indeed, confirming Lippmann on tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee,

the leaders of the Democratic party comfortably took positions remarkably

similar to those of the sitting President! Moreover, there is already an argu-ment about which of the President’s legacies will be more important: the war,

the inattention to the environment, the attack on the division of powers and

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civil liberties, the huge deficit or the stunning decline in America’s standing

in the world.Indeed, the main argument for self-determination is precisely that if inter-

dependent persons must live with decisions that affect them all they must

have a hand in making them.7 But Dewey went further. For him, the problem

of democracy and social science were intimately connected. Lippmann and

the technocrats failed to realize that “experts” could indeed provide “infor-

mation,” but policy needs also a clear idea of the present situation of persons

and of goals to be pursued. That is, generating coherent policy that affects the

lives of interdependent individuals requires the direct participation of these

individuals. Lippmann earlier had it right: “The scientific spirit is the disci-

pline of democracy, the escape from drift, the outlook of the free man” (1961:

151). But this requires not experts but a democratic social science. As Dewey

insisted, what is required is “the perfecting of the means and ways of com-

municating meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of

interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct ac-

tion” (1954: 155). A “public” which satisfied this goal would still make mis-

takes and would still suffer the consequences of these; but they would be, at

least, their mistakes.

Dewey recognized full well that the conditions for realizing a democratic

social science that could constitute a public required radical change in exist-

ing institutions. And this was not merely a change in our electoral politics—

important as these may be, but a change that acknowledged that in capital-

ism, decisions of major social importance are legitimately made by persons

entirely unaccountable to the electorate. If democracy means that persons

have a say in determining the conditions of their everyday lives, then de-

mocracy required some form of socialism. Dewey was never clear abouthow socialism was to be institutionalized, and there is evidence that he be-

lieved, wrongly on my view of the matter, that “the difference and choice be-

tween a socialism that is public and one that is capitalist” regarded a choice

between markets versus planning.8 But however that may be, the problem of

realizing democracy pushed him to what is easily read as an anarchist vi-

sion!9 Chapter 8 considers this by looking carefully at what Dewey actually

said against the background of actual anarchist thought. Yet, at the same

time, Alan Ryan observes rightly: “He was not a fire-eating leftist, and never

became one” (1995: 117).

Unfortunately, not only was anarchism a dirty word by the time Dewey

wrote The Public and Its Problems—Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in

1921 for their beliefs and not the unproven charges against them, but the left-ism of the day was inevitably connected to Bolshevism and a version of Marx

which was rooted in Engels (Manicas, 2000) and in the 2nd International,

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and, subsequently, with what became the standard, but also contestable ver-

sion of Lenin (Lewin, 2005). Indeed, it is absolutely crucial to notice thatDewey had read little of Marx and that his anti-communism was squarely di-

rected at the Stalinism that had solidified in the 1930s. Similarly, a very dif-

ferent reading of Marx became possible only in the 1930s with the publica-

tion for the first time of the early writings of Marx (in German), the complete

German Ideology and The Grundrisse. Chapter 9 offers an historical reading

of Marx and Dewey and shows that understanding Dewey requires posing

his thought against the Stalinist version of “Marxism/Leninism.” Dewey

had no patience with the pseudo science of a vulgar dialectical or historical

materialism—mostly for good reasons, even if this leaves open the question

of whether as Chapter 9 argues, some other version of Marx was easily com-

patible with Dewey and whether some patent shortcomings in Dewey’s analy-

sis might be filled with some pertinent Marx. It is acknowledged by a num-

ber of important writers that Dewey and Marx shared fundamental

philosophical premises, but it is not always noticed that they also shared in

their vision of a good society and in thinking that a “gradualist” politics need

not be anti-revolutionary (Chapter 9) 10 The point, more generally, is that

Dewey tried to find a politics between liberals who insisted on parliamentary

means but who saw no need for radical change in the existing social structure,

and the “scientistic,” eschatological and insurrectionary versions of the Marx-

ists. The problem remains— assuring the continuing relevance of Dewey.

Finally, then, Dewey would insist that a politics without vision is merely

an unprincipled opportunism. But Dewey’s vision of democracy is not

merely an abstraction. As a practice and a process in which action is informed

by a recognition of our inevitable interdependencies, it is a realizable ideal.

As Rousseau, Marx and Dewey saw, interdependency is inevitable, and in-terdependency does establish the conditions of injustice and tyranny. But de-

mocracy is its only solution. There are no assurances, to be sure, but as Emma

Goldman observed “The night cannot last forever.”

The final two chapters of Part III consider Dewey’s political theory in con-

trast to three more recent and influential interventions. The publication of

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) generated a veritable industry. For

the first time in a very long time, here was philosopher doing normative po-

litical theory. Rawls articulated a liberal theory which had a New Deal look

about it, progressive without being radical. It was quickly responded to by

Rawls’s Harvard colleague Robert Nozik. His book, Anarchy, State and

Utopia (1974) was a criticism of Rawls from the Libertarian Right. It earned

him a cover in the New York Times Magazine.It is critical to notice that neither Rawls nor Nozick had much to say about

democracy. Rawls assumed some form of “representative regime” and (with

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J. S. Mill) even defended plural voting. While democracy is not indexed in

Rawls’s book, Nozick surely went further. After acknowledging that democ-racy is the idea that “people have a right to a say in the decisions that impor-

tantly affect their lives,” Nozick asserted, remarkably: “After we exclude

from consideration the decisions which others have a right to make and the

actions which would aggress against me, steal from me, and so on, . . . it is

not clear that there are any decisions remaining about which even to raise the

question” (1974: 270). For both, accordingly, justice was the key concept.

Dewey is quite the opposite. As argued in Chapter 10, if one surveys the

voluminous writings of Dewey, the first thing that one notices is the relative

inattention paid by Dewey to the problem of justice. Altogether, there are per-

haps not more than a dozen pages of sustained discussions devoted explicitly

to the topic. These discussions are little gems, and they offer what are, I think,

fatal criticisms of the liberal theories of both Rawls and Nozick. This, too, is

generally ignored.

Dewey, always concrete and historical, recognized that what we call “lib-

eral democracy” emerged at a specific time and place in world history, that it

did not have democracy as one of its goals, and that while it celebrated the

autonomous individual—a prerequisite for the ideology of market capitalism,

it offered a false picture of individuals and their relations. Not only were per-

sons social beings, deeply interdependent and “encumbered” (to borrow a

term from Sandel), but “the control of the social environment which is fur-

nished by the institution of property” makes the idea of equal freedom in lib-

eral democracies “a pure absurdity” (Dewey, 1954: 271).

It is not that Dewey did not care about justice. Rather, he insisted that de-

mocracy was the primary problem and that because the fundamental assump-

tions of associated life were misconceived by liberal theories, it disvalued de-mocracy. Liberal theory thus shares with Lippmann the idea that

“participation” was not an issue and that as long as the quality of everyday

life was as good as could be expected, all was well enough. For liberal the-

ory, securing political and civil rights, some measure of opportunity for all,

unimpeded markets and private property was all that “democracy” demanded.

It is striking that when, in 1928, Dewey traveled to the New Soviet Union, he

observed: “I was certainly was not prepared for what I saw; it came as a

shock.” (LW, Vol. 3: 217). For him, the “experiment” had two goals. First,

there was what had concerned Lippmann—security against want and illness,

and for health, recreation and “a degree of material ease.” The other was the

“familiar democratic ideals, familiar in words at least—of liberty, equality

and brotherhood.” The hope was that both will be “more completely realizedin a social regime based on voluntary cooperation, on conjoint worker’s con-

trol and management of industry, with an accompanying abolition of private

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property as a fixed institution” (LW, Vol. 3: 244). Dewey soon enough came

to see that “the experiment” which, under the prevailing conditions, could nothave succeeded, had turned to disaster (Manicas, 1989 , Chapter 11). Since

then we have been left with the idea, inherited from Wilson and currently pur-

sued by Bush, that making the world “safe for democracy” really means mak-

ing the world “safe for liberal capitalism.”

Apart from “Marxist” criticisms of liberal theory, there is a currently fash-

ionable critique of “rights-based liberalism” often termed, “republican-

communitarianism.” It is clear enough that Rawls and Nozick (along with

Flathman, Dworkin, Feinberg, Gewirth, Sen, and many others) are, despite

differences, “rights-based liberals.” The other side is a much less clear group

and might include any number of diverse writers who have criticized liberal

philosophy and promoted some version or other of “community,” including

Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Robert Paul Wolff, Charles Taylor, Roberto Man-

giabera Unger, Michael Walzer, Carol Gould, Hannah Pitkin, Amitai Etzioni,

and some others besides. The relation to democracy of these writers is also

very diverse. But “republican-communitarism” is well represented by

Michael Sandel’s , Democracy’s Discontent: American in Search of a Public

Philosophy (1996), discussed in Chapter 11. Of particular interest here is

Sandel’s effort to link his views to those of Dewey.

There are two related features of Sandel’s position. First, he claims to

have a version of “self-rule” and second—the heart of his critique of

liberalism—the real problem of government is not securing liberal justice

as defined by either Rawls or Nozick, but the cultivation of “civic virtue.”

To be a citizen requires “a sense of belonging,” the existence of “a moral

bond with the community whose fate is at stake.” On this view, govern-

ments have legitimate concerns with “soulcraft,” what he elsewhere calls“the formative project.”

Sandel is quite right, of course, to say that Dewey was a critic of liberal in-

dividualism, but Dewey called for radical version of the alternative, not as in

Sandel, a reactionary version of “encumbered selves” who, like Robert E.

Lee, concluded that his obligation to Virginia (and to the institution of slav-

ery?) was not merely of sentimental import, but had “moral force” (Sandel,

1996: 15). For Dewey, “community” was essential, but for him, in contrast to

Sandel, it was grounded on recognition of interdependence not on blood,

habit, religion or language. Similarly, Sandel seeks to capture the essential in-

gredient of democracy by speaking of “self-rule,” but in sharp contrast to

Dewey, there is simply no attention paid to what this means institutionally.

One wishes that he had read Lippmann, or more lately, Robert Dahl. Thisabsence is explained, in part at least, by his distorted view of American his-

tory—a history that, as noted, was well understood by Dewey and Lippmann.

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Worse, perhaps, for Dewey, in contrast to Sandel, the problem of American

democracy was not “moral” but institutional and structural: In conditions of alienation, “publics” cannot exist.

PART IV WHY NOT DEWEY?

The problem of American democracy is well understood by Cornel West in

his important The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), discussed in

Chapter 12. In the spirit of Rorty, he wishes that Dewey had been “a more

consistent historicist pragmatist,” instead as I would have it, “a more consis-

tent naturalist,” exactly in Marx’s sense. West, sympathetic to Marxian ideas,

sees the radical and unfinished character of Dewey’s emancipatory project.

While one may have some misgivings about both his account of Emerson and

his efforts at tapping American cultural materials, his critical reflections on

the failure of Dewey’s project are especially provocative and suggest the deep

reasons for what remains an unsolved dilemma: How to be both radical and

committed to democratic processes.

A useful comparison to West’s book is Robert Westbrook’s Democratic

Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (2005), discussed in Chapter 13.

On his version, Dewey neither “evaded” nor transformed philosophy. Rather

he holds that Dewey should be read as offering an epistemological defense of

democracy, something which he recognizes Dewey did not do. For West-

brook, the “argument” has been filled in by the recent pragmatisms of Putnam

and Misak. But the project is both alien to Dewey and, in contrast to his well

informed book (1991), ignores the arguments that Dewey actually did make

(see above).Westbrook admits that he gave Dewey’s logic “short shrift” and he en-

dorses Kloppenberg’s view that “ Dewey was taking the challenge of ‘con-

structing a democratic political culture on the quicksand of instrumentalist

logic’” (2005: 177). This is half-right: the Logic was the ground of his vision

of a democratic culture, but one needs to overcome a good deal of the philo-

sophical tradition before one can see that it can hardly be characterized as

“quicksand.”

Similarly, Westbrook’s suggestion that Dewey never leaves the “populism”

of late nineteenth century “producer-republicanism” is a fairly typical criti-

cism that fails to account for the changes in his views following the Great

War. While Dewey’s socialism contradicted all “actually existing socialisms,”

it was fully consistent with Marx’s idea that “producers” in capitalist societyare alienated, that neither wage workers nor “independent producers” on the

Jeffersonian model, are capable of what Marx termed, “free production.”

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Again, one must see that Dewey’s critique was not nostalgic, but radical in

just the ways that Marx would have endorsed.The temptation to assist Dewey by constructing “arguments” which he

lacked is the central task of Festenstein’s Pragmatism and Political Theory

(1997), discussed in Chapter 14. Like Westbrook, Festenstein writes solidly

within the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy and, viewed

through these lens, he finds fatal problems in Dewey’s naturalistic ethical

framework (62, 99, 145). He concludes that Dewey had “a scientistic hope for

a physics of problem-solving” (45) and that his “empirical theory of valuation

seems to rest on the possibility of a prior science of problems and their reso-

lution, which does not exist” (44). But inquiry, as Dewey understood it, was

not some “prior” science of problem solving. It was the only defensible way

to address all problems, scientific and otherwise. Dewey did not, of course,

embrace the prevailing “fact/value” dichotomy and he often spoke of “alleged

scientific social inquiry,” The following text neatly sums up a theme which

he pursued throughout his long life.

The sociologist, like the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower

of genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing

them together in somewhat aimless fashion . . . But social ethics is the change

from inquiring into the nature of value in general to an inquiry of the particular

values which ought to be realized in the life of everyone, and of the conditions

which shall render possible this realization ( Early Works, Vol. 5: 23).

Chapter 15, the final chapter, rejoins the question of Dewey and social sci-

ence and argues that the currently fashonable post-modern reading of prag-

matic social cience will not do. So why not Dewey?

NOTES

1. As Sleeper (1986) remarks, we need to resist “the almost universal habit of

taking for granted that experience is the subject matter of [Dewey’s] metaphysics”

(1986: 6)

2. Perry’s version of direct realism is, to be sure, untenable. See Shook, Dewey’s

Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. But see Roy Wood Sellar’s “Material-

ism and Human Knowing,” in R.W. Sellars, V.J. McGill and Marvin Farber (eds), Phi-

losophy for the Future (New York: Macmillan, 1949).

3. See my War and Democracy, especially Parts I and III. Lippmann and Dewey

well understood the consequences of this shift in the meaning of democracy. Lipp-mann wrote: the fiction that the US is a democracy owes “to the victory of Thomas

Jefferson. . . It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as

did the authors of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because

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loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompati-

ble” (Lippmann, 1954: 284). Dewey, who was never a “mystical democrat,” offered

similar sentiments.

4. Most Americans believe, it seems, that one has a democracy if there are “free

elections,” but “free elections” require political and civil liberties and it is these, not

“free elections” that mark the important difference between tyrannies and non-

tyrannies. For this reason, as well, liberalism is often confused with democracy. See

Part IV below.

5. Rorty remarks: “Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey

is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory democracy

against Walter Lippman’s insistence on the need for expertise” (1998: 104). Compare

Westbrook’s very useful Epilogue (1991) and his later account in Democratic Hope

(Chapter 14 below) which seems, at least, to capitulate to a Rortyean problematic.

6. While they have been under attack by the Bush regime, political and civil lib-

erties are not yet utterly compromised. People can still inquire, speak out, and organ-

ize, even if this has little effect on policy. Accordingly, if democracy in the US (aselsewhere) is profoundly constrained, the US is not a tyranny.

7. There is, of course, absolutely no democracy as regards what is hypocritically

called “the community of nations. See Dewey’s remarkable and much misunderstood

efforts in the campaign to outlaw war (Chapter 8, below).

8. It is easy enough to show that centralized planning, Soviet style, cannot be the-

oretically sustained and is disastrous practically. As Mandel, for example, sees, one

must assume the whole of general equilibrium theory. But there are fatal objections to

this theory—as argued by Hayekians among many others. There are variant forms of

market socialism, but surely a vision to be pursued was laid out in the much ignored

essay by Diane Elson, “‘Market Socialism or Socialism of the Market’ (1988).

9. Once we are clear about misconceptions of anarchist politics including the idea

that anarchists were terrorists and utopian in the worst sense, there is nothing prepos-

terous about seeing Dewey as an anarchist. At the time of the Pullman strike, he wroteto Alice Dewey that he had realized “how ‘anarchistic’ (to use the current term here)

our ideas and especially feelings are” (quoted by Westbrook, Democratic Hope: 86).

See also Hook’s extremely useful account of the Marxian theory of “the state” Hook

(1933) distinguishes “society,” “government” and “state,” and argues that “where the

government represents the needs and interests of the entire community, it does not

need [the state,] special and coercive force behind it” (214). Hence, for Marxists, if

democracy is to prevail, the state must be “smashed.” Indeed, Lenin’s State and Rev-

olution (1905) is an anarchist tract and a proper reading of “What is to be Done” and

of the period from the October Revolution to Lenin’s death, shows that while Lenin

made many mistakes, including, for example, destroying the Constituent Assembly,

he never wavered in his defense of the soviets, the most democratic of the institutions

in the evolving USSR (Lewin 2005).

10. During the much-misunderstood period following the abdication of the Kaiser,the revolutionary goals of Social Democracy, as understood by Marx, Engels and the

“revisionists” were betrayed by SPD leadership. After this betrayal, with the help of

Bolshevik revolutionary practice, Social Democracy was redefined as consistent with

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a capitalism “with a human face.” Similarly, the highly restricted choices of the

Bolsheviks in Russia generated a very distorted view of socialism. See Manicas, War

and Democracy (1989), Chapters 11 and 12. In both the German and Soviet case, the

critical question is: “could it have been otherwise”? As Hook insisted, following

both Marx and Engels, to be a socialist, one had to be a democrat. In our Orwellian

world, the meanings of “anarchism,” “socialism” and “democracy” are thoroughly

corrupted.

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Part One

PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

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3

INTRODUCTION

By the turn of the century, it was clear to William James, Thorstein Veblen

and John Dewey that science was giving “its tone to modern culture.” But for

them, the consequences were more than uncertain. The most well known ad-

vocates of science, Spencer, Clifford, Huxley and others, were not only de-

fending agnosticism and positivism, but a view in which science was to be

immunized from the biases and interests of human communities. James,

Veb1en and Dewey were anything but enthusiastic about the situation as they

saw it. Indeed, James’s criticisms hinged on ideas about the foundations of

science which were completely novel, and Veblen and Dewey were clearest

in seeing that science was being shaped by changes “in industry and in theeconomic organization of society.” Science, pretender to transcendent au-

thority, was becoming industrialized, technocratic.

David Hollinger has rightly argued that the critical role played by the prag-

matists in American culture was “to find and articulate” a “way of life consistent

with what they and their contemporaries variously perceived as the implications

of modern science” (Hollinger, 1985: 93).l It is widely held, by friends and ene-

mies, that they succeeded. On this interpretation, the pragmatists adopted a view

of science in which successful prediction and control-vindicated inquiry. By sub-

ordinating all inquiry to “practical ends,” they could show that a belief was war-

ranted only insofar as it was “scientific.” Finally, they could then vindicate a cul-

ture whose “social motor” was science.2 In what follows, I suggest that the

foregoing interpretation is a stunning distortion and that the pragmatists failedutterly in their quest to set a new course for a “scientific” civilization. Not only

were the forces at work resistant to their criticisms, but their fundamental in-

sights, in a paradoxical inversion, became absorbed in distorted forms.

Chapter One

Pragmatic Philosophy of Scienceand the Charge of Scientism

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But they were not entirely blameless. The problem is not merely that the

language they employed, including, of course, the term “pragmatism” itself,made it easy to misunderstand their views—a1though this was certainly true.3

Rather the problem was deeper. In particular, it regarded pragmatist views of

the nature of philosophy and its relation to science. While the pragmatists

were correct in seeing themselves as innovators, and while, finally, they may

well have agreed on less than they disagreed, they did not wholly escape pre-

vailing anti-metaphysical attitudes. Indeed, the nature of their commitment to

experience made it easy to distort the nature of their commitment to practice.

If I am correct, the deep problem in pragmatist thought is the turn away from

“the epistemological question,” explicitly taken by Dewey. The troubles be-

gin with Peirce’s verificationism and are enormously exacerbated by James’s

shift from the philosophy of his Principles to his radical empiricism. The dif-

ficulties in getting a handle on Dewey’s philosophy can hardly be overstated.

My treatment, which relies heavily on R. W. Sleeper’s recent and important

study (1986), is but a sketch. In Sleeper’s useful terms, if I am correct,

Dewey’s “logic of experience” and “metaphysics of existence” made his nat-

uralism precarious and incomplete, a feature of his philosophy noticed, for

example, by Woodbridge and Santayana. For me, his logic of experience

needed what his metaphysics of existence would not allow, an indirect real-

ism which affirmed that there is a causally efficacious non-experienceable

world sufficiently structured to be inferentially knowable. Peirce struggled

with the idea, and surely in Principles, James had held to such a view. But for

reasons that I try to make clear, James and then Dewey supposed that it could

be dispensed with. Spurred on by an emerging consensus over the nature of

science, Peirce’s “doubt-belief” theory of inquiry allowed Dewey to dissolve

both “the problem of the external world” and “the mind/ body problem.” Forhim, there was no problem of knowledge überhaupt, even if there were par-

ticular and concrete questions which cried for resolution, questions which

persistent inquiry could answer. This meant, on Dewey’s view, how might the

methods of science be turned to human use? Yet, if as a consequence of the

turn away from the epistemological legacy of modern philosophy, the idea of

science which he assumed had positivist elements, then it became easy to see

pragmatism as a technocratic philosophy.4 The story I have suggested is com-

plicated, of course, and this essay must be considered but a sketch.

PEIRCE’S PRAGMATISM

As everyone knows, what came to be called “pragmatism” was first set out

by Peirce in two remarkable essays published in Popular Science Monthly in

4 Chapter One

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1877–78. In the first, “The Fixation of Belief,” he put forward his genuinely

original “doubt-belief” theory of inquiry, what I shall take to be the core of “pragmatism.”5 Insisting that “that sole object of inquiry is the settlement of

opinion”—not as the tradition had held, the securing of truth, and that “belief

is of the nature of a habit,” he offered that of the possible modes of fixing be-

lief, while all “do have their merits,” the method of science had, finally, to be

the one we must chose. Unlike “tenacity,” but like “authority,” it is consistent

with the fact that humans are social beings. On the other hand, while the

method of science can give us “a clear logical conscience,” as with “all that

we cherish,” it “costs us dear.” The other methods, indeed, are psychologi-

cally satisfying and easy. The a priori method, e.g., allows “the action of nat-

ural preferences” to be “unimpeded” and “under their influences” lets people

“conversing together and regarding matters in different lights, gradually de-

velop beliefs in harmony with natural causes” (Peirce, 1950: 105)—Peirce’s

version of philosophy as “conversation.” Similarly, the method of authority is

not only propelled by our natural feelings of “sympathy and fellowship,” but,

striking a skeptical note, if for “the mass of mankind” it is “their highest im-

pulse to be intellectual slaves,” then “slaves they ought to remain.”6 Never-

theless, as with the mate one has selected, one must “work and fight” for the

method of science, never complaining that “there are blows to take, hoping

that there may be as many and as hard to give . . .” (112). Why this effort?

Exactly because the method of science alone “presents any distinction of a

right and a wrong way” (108–9). Its “fundamental hypothesis” is that

there are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions

about them; these realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and,

though our sensations are as different as our relations to objects, yet, by takingadvantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things

really are . . . (l07–8).

I want to emphasize that (1) for Peirce, the “doubt-belief” theory rules out the

question of the existence of an “external world “ as a sceptical question, even

if versions of “realism” and “idealism “ remained open questions. That is, nei-

ther solipsism nor the problem of other minds can be taken seriously. Peirce

cannot “prove” that there is something “which affects or might affect every

[one], “ but “upon which our thinking has no effect.” Yet there is no reason

that a genuine doubt should arise in the practice of the method; indeed, “no-

body . . . can really doubt there are realities, or, if he did, doubt would not be

a source of dissatisfaction” (Peirce, 1950: 108). (2) We can know “how things

really are” even if the effects of reality on us “are necessarily as various as

are individual conditions.” We can because we can assume that there are “reg-

ular laws” involved in our transacting with “real things.” As Peirce later

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makes clear, this guarantees that given infinite time, there will be agreement

on the part of all inquirers. Finally, (3), not only does “everybody use themethod,” hesitating only when “he does not know when to apply it,” but “sci-

entific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of set-

tling opinion” (108). More generally, then, I am suggesting that the “doubt-

belief” theory is a psycho-social—and thus scientific—theory of belief, but

that Peirce aims to provide a philosophical defense of a particular method of

fixing belief, the scientific method, the foundations for which are in common

sense. To put the matter briefly (if cryptically), Peirce recasts the “epistemo-

logical problem” by accepting the Kantian “insulation” against scepticism,

but by rejecting Kant’s transcendental move.7

This enormously rich beginning was followed by “How to Make Our Ideas

Clear,” the essay which contains Peirce’s famous “pragmatic maxim.” Usu-

ally read as the earliest—and clearest!—expression of the “operationalist”

theory of meaning, the essay addressed a problem which a host of writers had

begun to address: the distinctive character of the terms of science. Peirce, and

of course, James and Dewey, began their inquiries at just the time that a host

of philosopher/physicists were producing books and articles in what we

would now call “the philosophy of science.” These included G. R. Kirchoff,

Wilhelm Ostwald, Ludwig Boltzmann, Hermann Helmholtz, his pupil, Hein-

rich Hertz, Ernst Mach, W. K. Clifford and his student, Karl Pearson, Henri

Poincaré and Pierre Duhem. These men all spoke with enormous authority

exactly because, by then, science was rapidly becoming an evident force in

the daily lives of people. More- over, all of these men have been called “pos-

itivists” in that, following Kant, they held, first, that scientific explanation

must eschew appeal to what in principle is beyond experience, that to do so

takes one into metaphysics, and second, following Berkeley and Hume, that“laws of nature,” are but empirical invariances.8 This thesis was related to the

first, and, as we shall, it was a critical one.

In his Analytic Mechanics, then, Kirchoff had said that we understand the

effect of force, but do not understand what force is. Peirce found this self-con-

tradictory: “the idea which the word ‘force’ excites in our minds has no other

function than to affect our actions, and these actions can have no reference to

force otherwise than through its effects” (Peirce, 1950: 129). It surely seems

here that, as Ostwald and Mach argued, force is not some “mysterious power”

but is nothing other than its “sensible effects.” Peirce illustrated his famous

principle by asking if one could say of a diamond that had been crystalized in

the midst of a cushion of cotton and had remained there until it was burned

up, whether it was really hard? He responded confidently “the question of what would occur under circumstances which do not actually arise is not a

question of fact, but only of the most perspicuous arrangement of them.”

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We know that Peirce came to see that his initial attempt to reconcile realism

and phenomenalism, the characteristic drift of positivist philosophies of sci-ence, foundered on the assumption that nothing is possible which is not actual

or will not become actual. The issue was not merely whether unscratched dia-

monds are hard, but more generally, there was the question of that Reality

which he had posited as so essential to the method of science. When Peirce ap-

plied his principle to the meaning of “the real,” he was led, as everyone knows,

to assert that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who

investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this

opinion is the real” (133). Against himself, he asked whether this was consis-

tent with the definition given in his fixation essay? Did it not, in idealist fash-

ion, make “the characters of the real depend upon what is ultimately thought

about them.” He answered that “reality is independent, not necessarily of

thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may

think about it” (133). Murray Murphey was surely correct to conclude:

In Peirce’s system, the infinite future plays the part of the philosopher’s stone;

it transforms possibility into actuality without compromising either the inex-

haustibility of the possible or the limitations of the actual. On the one hand, the

real must be a permanent and inexhaustible possibility of sensation; on the other,

it must be wholly cognized (1961: 169–70).

But if “the real” is to provide a constraint on current belief adequate for epis-

temic purposes, will this do?

In The Monist of 1905, he returned to these problems. In the first of two es-

says, he made clear that “instead of merely jeering at metaphysics, like other

prope-positivists, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, whichwill serve to give life to cosmology and physics” (Peirce, 1950: 192). This

“precious essence” was his “scholastic realism”—and precious it indeed was.

But if pragmatism was “prope-positivist,” what did this mean? He began

the essay with an anecdote about an “experimentalist.” He wrote:

If you talk to him as Mr. Balfour talked not long ago to the British Association

saying that “the physicist . . . seeks something deeper than the laws connecting

possible objects of experience,” that “his object is physical reality” unrevealed

in experiments, and that the existence of such non-experienceable reality is “the

unalterable faith of science” . . . you will find the experimentalist mind to be

color-blind (182).

Although the phrase, “unrevealed in experiments,” is more problematic thanmay appear, this could have been written by Ostwald or Mach, Poincaré or

Pearson: Science aims at discovering laws which connect possible objects of


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experience, where this means, laws of invariance between phenomena. But in

that same essay, Peirce was as emphatic about his scholastic realism as he wasemphatic about what for him was the real novelty of the new pragmatic the-

ory: “its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition

and rational purpose,” the connection which James will be so pleased to

develop.

Whatever Peirce intended by his scholastic realism, it is clear enough to

see that it is inconsistent with all the positivisms, Comte’s, Mill’s, Mach’s or

later Vienna varieties. While for Peirce, there was no “non-experienceable

reality”—in this he agreed with Kant and the positivists, “there are real ob-

jects that are general, among the number being the modes of determination of

existent singulars.” The article of 1878 had either glossed over this point as

“unsuited” to the public there addressed or, he noted, “perhaps the author

wavered in his own mind” (215). In that essay, he had written: “it would be

merely a question of nomenclature whether that diamond should be said to

have been hard or not.” This is, he now writes, no doubt true, “except for the

abominable falsehood in the word ‘merely,’ implying that symbols are un-

real.” “Nomenclature involves classification,” he continued, “and classifica-

tion is true or false.” Thus, “the generals to which it refers are either reals . .

. or figments” (215). In this case, the “generals” are real: There are diamonds

and anything which is really a diamond is really hard because being hard is

an inseparable property of at least some of those other properties which make

a diamond what it really is. It must be hard. He wrote:

Being a diamond, it was a mass of pure carbon, in the form of a more or less

transparent crystal . . . it could be found to be insoluble, very highly refractive,

showing under radium rays . . . a peculiar bluish phosphorescence, having ashigh a specific gravity as realgar . . . and giving off during its combustion less

heat than any other form of carbon would have done. From some of these prop-

erties hardness is believed to be inseparable. For like it they bespeak the high

polemerization of the molecule. (219)

The point must not be missed. On positivist versions, laws of nature are

construed as universal conditionals of the form (x) (Fx→Gx) where ‘→’ is

“suitably” interpreted. That is, a law is construed as a contingent relation-

ship between the extensions of its terms, “all F’s are G’s”. But on Peirce’s

view of the matter, a law expresses a nomic relationship between properties,

between F-ness and G-ness, properties to which we refer with correspon-

ding abstract terms.9 The reality of the diamond is expressed in the truth of

“general conditional propositions,” but these are not construed in a Humeanfashion, for as Peirce saw (and Kant before him), on such a view, science is

not possible.

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In an unpublished manuscript, “Laws of Nature and Hume” (1901),

Peirce’s criticism of Hume (and the Humeans) is decisive. He writes:

. . . we do not say that the alternation of day and night is necessary, because it

depends upon the circumstance that the earth continually rotates. But we do say

that by virtue of gravity every body near the surface of the earth must be con-

tinually receiving a component downward acceleration . . . Nor do Hume or his

followers dream of denying that. But what they mean when they say there is not

“necessity” in gravitation is that every “event” which gravitation formulates is

in reality totally independent of every other; just as Hume supposes the differ-

ent instances of induction to be independent “evidences.” One stone’s falling

has no real connection with another’s fall . . . The objection to Hume’s concep-

tion of a Law of Nature is that it supposes the universe to be utterly unintelligi-

ble, while, in truth, the only warrant for any hypothesis must be that it renders

phenomena intelligible. (Peirce, 1950: 310)

Abduction leads us to conclude that gravity is a structural property of all bod-

ies; hence, d ϭ 1/2 at2 is a law. It is a contingent fact that the world is con-

stituted such that gravity is true of all bodies and it is a contingent fact that

some particular body be near the earth, but if the theory is true, then that body

“must be continually receiving a component downward acceleration”; in free-

fall, it must fall as 1/2 at2. Science needs real connectedness; but such con-

nectedness is not the product of constitutive features of the mind, as Kant had

it. Connectedness is in the mind-independent world. It is thus that for Peirce,

there are “objective possibilities,” unactualized, but real.

Plainly, I cannot here do any sort of justice to Peirce’s complicated and

ingenious philosophy of science. Murray Murphey has, I think, caught its

most fundamental premises in his account of the “material aspects” of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Briefly, Firstness and Secondness in-

volve, critically, a psychological theory of perception. The phenomenal

suchness of a percept, Firstness is a product of unconscious inferences of

neural stimuli—as Helmholtz had argued. Secondness is the stubbornness

or compulsory character of sensation. Thirdness, then, is lawfulness. As

Peirce wrote:

Whatever is subject to law is capable of representation by a sign of which that

law is the meaning, and whatever is subject to law is itself a sign of the law to

which it is subject. It is in this sense that Thirdness is at once the category of law

and of rationality and intelligibility. (Quoted by Flower and Murphey, 1977:

604).

Since the pragmatic theory of meaning holds that “what a thing means is sim-

ply what habits it involves,” and since “habits” are themselves analysable as


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conditionals supporting expectations—realistically understood—we can see

how critical is Peirce’s anti-Humean concept of law.There are all sorts of questions that might be asked here, not least

whether, in whole or in part, Peirce’s philosophy of science can be sus-

tained? I forego the temptation to engage this question. Instead, I merely

emphasize that Peirce packed a great deal of empirical science into his the-

ory of knowledge and that because all of the usual categories, positivist,

realist, idealist, fit his thought, none of them did. He did deny with the pos-

itivist that there was a “nonexperienceable reality,” a consequence of his

ingenious, if unsuccessful, effort to combine realism and phenomenalism.

No doubt this fostered confusion. Moreover, like them, he offered a verifi-

cationist theory of meaning, but unlike them, he tied this to a psycho-

social theory of belief and a strong version of lawfulness, a version which

was under-girded by his scholastic realism. His conditionals were not ex-

hausted by the material conditionals of later verificationist theories. For

Peirce, Thirdness was a critical ontological category guaranteeing his

semiotic. The ideologists of “scientific method “ liked the “operationist”

part of the story and at least in part because so much of Peirce’s work was

unpublished, the very complicated metaphysics that sustained it was ig-

nored. Aided and abetted by the loose language of James’s Pragmatism,

the former came to fit neatly into the Weltanschauung of the times, initiat-

ing the myth of Peirce, the seminal American pragmatist cum positivist.

James and Dewey each found different things in Peirce, but it is fair to say

that they both liked what Peirce saw to be the genuine novelty of “prag-

matism,” namely, the “inseparable connection between rational cognition

and rational purpose.” Although James had arrived at a similar notion at

about the same time as Peirce, it found its most developed expression inJames’s Principles of Psychology (1890).10

JAMES’ PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

James’s Principles is perhaps one of the two or three greatest books in the his-

tory of psychology. Yet contrary to the conventional wisdom, it had practi-

cally no influence on the development of American psychology. It would take

another essay to begin to show this, but since the problem is germane to the

present argument, something needs to be said. (For a fuller account, see

Chapter 2, below.)

We can notice, first, that Principles was published when the subject matterand method of psychology as a science were still very much unsettled (Man-

icas, 1987, Chahpter 9). For example, was psychology concerned with the

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“laws of the mind” (as in Mill, Bain, the later Wundt)? Or with giving a neu-

rophysiological account of the phenomenon of mind, including the physiol-ogy of sensation and the genesis of “reasoning” (as for example, in Helmholtz

or Spencer)? What was its relation to “logic” (as in Venn or Lotze)? Or per-

haps the task of psychology was “practical,” in “behavior”? Was its concern

“the generalized, normal human adult mind” or the psychology of individual

differences? And finally, what of its methods? Was introspection part of “ex-

perimental psychology,” independent of it, or to be completely rejected?

James offered, modestly and misleadingly, that the originality of his Prin-

ciples consisted in its “strictly positivist point of view” (James, 1981, Vol. 1:

6). It is important first to see what James did not mean by this.

He was clear that the results of scientific inquiry were in no way the “imme-

diate results of experience” nor were “scientific objects” restricted to what is

found in experience. Thus, “the essence of things for science is not to be what

they seem, but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other ac-

cording to strange laws . . . What we experience, what comes before us, is a

chaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each other; what we think is an

abstract system of hypothetical data and laws” (1981, Vol. II: 1230–31).

Plainly, we do something with “what comes before us.” But there are two

aspects of this. There is first what we all do if we are to have coherent expe-

rience, if we are to convert “the chaos of fragmentary impressions” to a grasp

of the “habitudes of concrete things.” The grasp of these, the “proximate laws

of nature,” for example, that heat melts ice and salt preserves meat, form “an

enormous part of human wisdom.” These “empirical truths” are “practical.”

Indeed, they are indispensable to the continued reproduction of human com-

munities. In James’s view, getting an understanding of how we come to have

such knowledge was the first problem for a scientific psychology. But thereis, as well, what as scientists we do: The effort to explain these “proximate

laws” by means of theories that, for example, speak of polemerization or

gravitation. For James, such theories have an entirely different aim and

ground. “The popular notion that ‘Science’ is forced on the mind ab extra,

and that our interests have nothing to do with its constructions, is utterly ab-

surd.” But James emphatically denied that the “interest, “ which generates

science is “practical.” Picking up a theme he had advanced in “The Sentiment

of Rationality,” he insisted that “the craving to believe that the things of the

world belong to kinds which are related by an inward rationality together, is

the parent of Science as well as of sentimental philosophy. “ Moreover, “the

original investigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic the ma-

terials are in his hands” (1260).Scientific inquiry might yield technologies, but James was clear that this

was neither its motivation nor its vindication—a point that Veblen put to such


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good work in his “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization.” In contrast

to the “proximate laws of nature,” scientific theories are “abstract systems of laws.” They “have to harmonize” with the “proximate laws of nature,” yet

they are tested not in the course of everyday experience, but in “artificial ex-

periments in the laboratory.” James seems to see that, in order to set up an ex-

periment, we need to “conjecture” that there is some unobservable mecha-

nism whose processes have predicted effects. We contrive the experiment,

then, so as to eliminate conditions that, in uncontrolled common experience,

would interfere with its un- complicated operation. That is, “experience,” in

Baconian fashion, does not “engender” the “inner relations.” Rather, in ex-

perimentation, we generate experiences that give us evidence of the reality

postulated by the theory.11

Accordingly, what is pertinent to defining success will differ as well. Prac-

tical purposes offer practical tests; the interests of theoretic rationality, the

“constructions” which bring “a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest,” the “lively

relief” which comes with “rational comprehension,” answer to “the aesthetic

Principle of Ease” (James, 1978: 35), what Veblen termed, “the test of dra-

matic consistency. “

In Principles, James’s selected example is a long text from Helmholtz’s

Die Efhaltung der Kraft. Helmholtz had it right: Theoretical science “tries to

discover the unknown causes of processes from their visible effects; tries to

understand them by the law of causality . . . The ultimate goal of theoretical

physics is to find the last unchanging causes of the processes of nature”

(1981 , II: 1261).12

To be sure, James gave this a novel twist: “What makes the assumption [of

unchanging causes] ‘scientific’ and not merely poetic, what makes a

Helmholtz and his kin discoverers, is that the things of Nature turn out to actas if they were of the kind assumed” (1261). Over metaphysics, aesthetics and

moral philosophy, science has an advantage:

. . . Though nature’s materials lend themselves slowly and discouragingly to our

translation of them into ethical forms; but more readily into aesthetic forms; to

translation into scientific forms they lend themselves with relative ease and

completeness. The translation, it is true, will probably never be ended. The per-

ceptive order does not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it arise

at our bare word of command. It is often a deadly fight. (1981, II: 1236)

This is perhaps the basis of James’s most profound ethical claim, repeated in

many different formulations, that “the inmost nature of . . . reality is congenial

to powers which [we] possess.” Moreover, saying that “the translation . . . willprobably never be ended” suggests that James would reject, as I think he should,

the Peircean notion that in the end, there will be some one true “description” that

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is the product of persistent inquiry. Indeed, this would seem to be the case, as

well, as regards ethical and aesthetic matters. Yet, the belief that there are “atomsand molecules moving to and from each other according to strange laws” is a be-

lief about the nature of a hidden reality. Indeed, in his notes for the 1879 “The

Sentiment of Rationality,” there is a brilliant argument for the pragmatic perti-

nence of the idea of a non-experienceable reality. James says:

The principle of “pragmatism” which allows for all assumptions to be of iden-

tical value so long as they equally save the appearances will of course be satis-

fied by this empiricist explanation . . . [viz., as according to Mill, that no mys-

terious “outness” needs to be postulated]. But common sense is not assuaged.

She says, yes, I get all the particulars, am cheated out of none of my expecta-

tions. And yet the principle of intelligibility is gone. Real outness makes every-

thing simple as the day, but the troops of ideas marching and falling perpetually

into order, which you now ask me to adopt, have no reason in them—theirwhole existence is de facto and not de jure (James, 1978: 374).

Nevertheless, if British phenomenalism did not suffice, neither could he ac-

cept a “more” beyond the actual as it functioned in Spencer and Kant. Ap-

pealing to Peirce’s arguments, he first notes that “most scientific readers of

Spencer wholly fail to catch the destructive import of his theory . . . They are

willing to believe with the Master that the deepest reality is the absolutely ir-

rational, because that reality is unknowable, but few of them ultimately real-

ize that the knowable of their philosophy forms a world of Chance pure and

simple” (1978: 369). Spencer’s “unknowable” cannot function to give order,

since to do this it must be known to have properties which could explain the

orderliness of experience. It was thus that the “plus ultra in many philoso-

phies—in Mr Spencer’s and in Kant’s e.g., the noumenon is a dog in the

manger, it does nothing for us itself but merely stands and blasts with its

breath the actual” (371).

James was haunted by the apparent intractability of making sense of a re-

lation between “outer” and “inner ,” between mental facts and facts in the

world independent of mind. At this point at least, none of the inherited forms

of phenomenalism would suffice. Moreover, so as to be clear, they did not

suffice not because, or only because, of flaws in the associationist treatment

of the connectedness of experience, but because “the troops of ideas . . . have

no reason in them.” James agreed here with Peirce that the real could not be

reduced to the actual: “There are still other forces at work in the mind which

lead it to suppose something over and above the mere actuality of things.”

These include “the sense of futurity, the power of expectation” and our moral judgments, which “also involve [. . .] the notion of something related to the

instant representation and yet lying beyond its mere actuality” (369–70).


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The “Sentiment of Rationality” is important in another way. In holding that

“conceptions, ‘kinds’are teleological instruments,” serving the needs of “the-oretic rationality,” he hinted at an utterly novel solution to some age-old prob-

lems, problems given a full-blown naturalistic treatment in Principles in the

chapters on conception (XII), reasoning (XXII) and necessary truths

(XXVIII).

On this view, classification, judging and predicating presuppose “a rather

intricate system of necessary and immutable ideal truths of comparison.” The

“empiricists” are wrong in supposing that necessary truths are merely the re-

sult of “experience” or as Spencer had it, of “mere paths of ‘frequent’ associ-

ation which outer stimuli . . . ploughed” into the brain. But the apriorists are

also wrong since the “eternal verities” which “our mind lays hold of do not

necessarily themselves lay hold on extra-mental being, nor have they, as Kant

pretended later, a legislating character even for all possible experience.”

Rooted “in the inner forces which make the brain grow,” and therefore not

transcendental, they can be given a wholly naturalistic explanation. More-

over, psychology shows that classification is functional in the sense that es-

sential attributes are nothing more than abstracted properties which serve in-

ference. While “universals” need not be grounded in “reality,” if we are to

think at all, they are nevertheless indispensable.

It is not surprising, accordingly, that if Mill et al “begin with a clear nom-

inalist note, they are sure to end with a grating rattle which sounds very like

universalia in re, if not ante rem” (James, 1978: 49). As Peirce had already

insisted, if “particulars” are wholly independent, inference is impossible. But

on James’s view, Peirce’s “generals” did not need to have ontological status,

either ante rem or in re. “The only meaning of essence is teleological . . . clas-

sification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind” (1981 ,II: 961).

Yet it is critical to see also that James’s “pragmatic” account presupposes—

as he sees—that there are relatively enduring “things,” that “the world” which

is independent of mind is not Heraclitean: “This world might be a world in

which all things differed, and in which what properties there were were ulti-

mate and had not farther predicates.” Fortunately, our world “plays right into

logic’s hands. Some of the things . . . are of the same kind as other things;

some of them remain always of the kind which they once were; and some of

the properties of them cohere indissolubly and are always found together”

(1981, II: 1246–47.). That is, as Peirce had insisted, the “objects” of the ex-

ternal world have some “character” or other, even though they need not be

self-identifying to be cognized. If they are not self-identifying, however, theway they got identified can be largely a function of human purposes, generi-

cally understood. H2O is not “more deeply and truly” the essence of water

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than it is “a solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirst”—since “it is all of these

things with equal reality” (II, p. 961, note). Still, for scientific purposes, H2Ois primary, exactly because the scientific interest in “the interest of theoretic

rationality.” The foregoing shows, I believe, that James offered a powerful

philosophy of science that was not vulnerable to the difficulties in Peirce’s

more speculative view. And it was not a positivism: “All ages have their in-

tellectual populace. That of our own day prides itself particularly on its love

of Science and Facts and its contempt for all metaphysics (1978: 56). Posi-

tivists fool themselves if they suppose that they dispense with metaphysics.

Indeed, “Metaphysics of some sort there must be. The only alternative is be-

tween the good Metaphysics of clear-headed Philosophy and the trashy Meta-

physics of vulgar Positivism “(57).13 James’s philosophy of science was no

“trashy metaphysics of vulgar Positivism.” Yet, James prefaced Principles by

insisting that in writing it, he had adopted “a strictly positivist point of view.”

If I am correct, the nature of James’s “positivism” is centrally connected to

the problem acknowledged by James, that Principles was confusingly a psy-

chology and an epistemology.

PSYCHOLOGY OR NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY?

James insisted that a psychology which takes “the natural science point of

view,” must assume as data (a) mental states of humans (experience) (b)

physical things and states in a spatio-temporal environment and (c) knowl-

edge by humans of things of type (b) (1981, Vol. 1: 6, 184). But he also as-

serted that “the relation of knowing is the most mysterious thing in the

world,” that “if we ask how one thing can know another we are led into theheart of Erkenntnisstheorie and metaphysics” (1981 , I: 212). A moment’s

consideration will show, however, that if the latter is true, there are some se-

rious problems for psychology as a science. Indeed, it was the fear of meta-

physics which had led Mill, for example, to restrict psychology to investiga-

tion of mental states,14 just as it led the behaviorists to redefine the goals of a

scientific psychology. James nevertheless insisted that while psychology was

“the Science of Mental Life,” this necessarily committed the psychologist to

investigation of not just its “phenomena,” e.g., consciousness and the stream

of thought, but to investigation of its “conditions,” physiologically and in the

“outer world.”15

Similarly, while he seems to deny that psychology, approached from “the

natural science point of view,” needs to solve the mind/ body problem, he at-tacked materialism, spiritualism, parallelism and epiphenomenalism. For

him, “mental phenomena are not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily


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process, but they lead to them a parte post” (I: 18). That is, although brain

activity is a necessary causal condition for mental phenomena, for James, itseemed obvious that mental phenomena were themselves irreducibly real and

had causal efficacy. Not only do they lead to acts— ”of course the most fa-

miliar of truths”—but mental states “occasion . . . changes in the calibre of

blood vessels . . . or processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera.” His

emergent naturalism recurs throughout Principles. The following brilliantly

suggests his notion of this:

What happens in the brain after experience has done its utmost is what happens

in every material mass which has been fashioned by an outward force . . . The

fashioning from without brings the elements into collocations, which set new in-

ternal forces free to exert their effects in turn. And the random irradiations and

resettlements of our ideas, which supervene upon experience, and constitute our

free mental play, are due entirely to those secondary internal processes, whichvary enormously from brain to brain . . . The higher thought-processes owe their

being to causes which correspond far more to the sourings and fermentations of

dough, the setting of mortar, or the subsidence of sediments in mixtures than to

the manipulations by which these physical aggregates came to be compounded.

(II: 1234–35)

James was not, however, clear on how such a non-reductive naturalistic re-

sponse to the mind/body problem had to be worked out. 16 Indeed, one might

say that the Cartesian (ontically dualist) formulations which also occur in

Principles suggest more than unclarity, that they reveal tensions not resolved

in James’s own mind. James’s 1894 Presidential address to the American Psy-

chological Association, “The Knowing of Things Together”(1978: 71–89)

was a clear step in the resolution of the tensions of the Principles. In that es-say, he considered a host of theories in response to the psychological problem

of “the nature of the synthetic unity of consciousness” and concluded that for

various reasons, none of the theories can be accepted. But what of his own

view in the Principles? He there had proposed “to simply eliminate from psy-

chology ‘considered as a natural science’ the whole business of ascertaining

how we come to know things together or to know them at all” (1978: 87, my

emphasis). “That we do know things, sometimes singly and sometimes to-

gether, is a fact. That states of consciousness are the vehicle of knowledge,

and depend on brain states, are two other facts.” At that time he supposed that

“a natural science of psychology might legitimately confine itself to tracing

the functional variations of these three sorts of fact” (1978: 87).

It was precisely, then, in his claim that a science had to restrict itself to“functional variations” between “facts” that James was a positivist. For de-

spite texts that suggest the opposite, for example, his willingness to counte-

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nance Helmholtz on the search for hidden causes, he more generally seems to

agree with the positivists that all talk about causes as productive powers ismetaphysical. Science aims at but “functional variations.”

The point is critical. The clearest statement is in Vol. I, of Principles, in his

criticism of “the automation theory.” James insisted “the whole question of

interaction and influence between things is a metaphysical question . . . It is

truly enough hard to image the ‘idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules to-

gether;’ but since Hume’s time it has been equally hard to imagine anything

binding them together” (1981, I: 140). The problem is not merely mind and

matter as different “stuffs,” but of the causal interactions between molecules

constituting a beefsteak! The whole idea of “binding,” he wrote, “is a mys-

tery, the first step towards the solution of which is to clear scholastic rubbish

out of the way.” It was true that “popular science talks of ‘forces,’ ‘attrac-

tions’ or ‘affinities’ as binding the molecules,” but while such words may be

used “to abbreviate discourse,” “clear science [Mach, Pearson, Ostwald!] . . .

has no use for the conceptions, and is satisfied when she can express in sim-

ple ‘laws’ the bare space-relations of the molecules as functions of each other

and of time” (1981, I: 140).

The automatists “pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . .

and say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one

dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never

been born” (I: 140). James insists that one must be “either impartially naif or

impartially critical,” either “pull the pall” over the whole business or admit

both physical and psychic causation: If the latter, the reconstruction must be

thorough-going or “metaphysical,” and will probably preserve the common-

sense view that ideas are forces, in some translatable form. But Psychology is

a mere natural science, accepting certain terms uncritically as her data, andstopping short of meta-physical construction (I: 141).

He had defined psychology as “the Science of Mental Life, both of its

phenomena and their conditions,” and as he says many, many times, he is

interested in ascertaining all sorts of “conditions”—of e.g., memory, I: 17;

of discrimination, I: 494–98; of thinking that what we believe is real, II:

917–35, etc. But not only is he never bashful about employing causal lan-

guage and in implying that it is explanatory—no scientist is!—but one may

reasonably wonder what are the conditions for something existing or hap-

pening if, taken together, they are not its causes and do not explain ? More-

over, it was clear to James, even if amazingly missed by so many, that one

cannot experience the causes of experience. Indeed, there had to be com-

plicated causal relations between the three sorts of “facts” involved inknowing. Even the “spiritualist” and the “associationist” are “cerebralists”

since they must admit, “certain peculiarities in the way of working of their


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own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws

are a codeterminant of the result” (I: 18, my emphasis).Nevertheless, for good historical reasons, James, like Spencer, remained

trapped in the idea that scientific causation was merely empirical invari-

ance. But if so, then if he were consistent, psychology, as James had de-

fined it, was not likely to achieve its goals. It is true that one begins

“naively,” by taking for granted that people have minds, that there is a

physical world and that people have knowledge of it, but if one then re-

fuses to consider how, one is surely not going to explain perception, con-

ception, reasoning, learning, memory or anything else. On the positivist

view, of course, explanation is either subsumption (deduction, inclusion in

“a class already known”) or it is “metaphysical”—appealing to “occult

forces,” “substances,” “powers.”17 James offered no deductions and he

produced no empirical invariances between the three sorts of “facts,” be-

tween, for example, the experience of red tomato, some discharge of neu-

rons and some ‘thing’ in the external world. Indeed, exactly because an

enormous number of very different kinds of causal mechanisms are in-

volved in my experiencing red tomato—are “codeterminant of the re-

sult”—it is hard to see how this could be possible! On the other hand, when

in terms of “conditions,” he did propose an explanation, for example, of

memory, he was then well on his way to that “thorough-going,” “meta-

physical” reconstruction which would have been at least part of naturalis-

tic epistemology. An excellent example of this tension is James’s discus-

sion of memory. The reader has been led to believe that he is getting some

explanations, but just before James concludes his brilliant account, he

asserts:

A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved in remembering. According

to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brain’s workings, and

those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole creation is one, which we

can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of

it is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to knowing consciousness at all,

this is the one mystery, which always returns, no matter of what sort the con-

sciousness or of what sort the knowledge may be. (1981, I: 647)

It is a remarkable fact, but nonetheless a fact, that positivist assumptions

about causality and lawfulness are adequate to a scientific psychology, which

denies that it is “the Science of Mental life, both of its phenomena and their

conditions.” By taking “prediction and control” as its “theoretical” (sic) goal,

such a psychology avoids the troublesome “metaphysics” of mind/body, and of knowledge and reality. Or better, as James had it, it assumes “the trashy

Metaphysics of vulgar Positivism.”

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RADICAL EMPIRICISM

By the 1894 “Knowing of Things Together,” James “became convinced . . .

that no conventional restrictions can keep metaphysical and so-called episte-

mological inquiries out of the psychology books” (1978: 88). But this did not

lead him in the direction of a metaphysical reconstruction, which would have

allowed a full-blown non- reductive, physiological psychology replete with

physical and psychic causation as a replacement for some of the central prob-

lems of traditional epistemology. It led him, instead, to “radical empiricism,”

as John McDermott rightly says, to a novel metaphysics of experience.

This then is the heart of the problem. Was it possible to have both a phys-

iological psychology, which displaced traditional epistemology and a meta-

physics of experience, or indeed, are the two ideas at bottom inconsistent?

From the beginning, James had sought to transform empiricism. As

Hollinger says, his previous efforts had been in work which James himself

called “practical and psychological.” Thus, the idea that relations as well as

particulars come to us as part of a single “stream” was offered in response to

both “associationist” psychology and to neo-Kantian alternatives. As I have

suggested, this attack was fully consistent with the indirect realism of Princi-

ples. Still, the problem of the relation of knower to known and of mind to

body haunted James. He made the break with “radical empiricism.” It seems

that, originally, “radical empiricism” was, for James, merely a name of “an

attitude.” But increasingly he came to think of it as the name for a technical

position in epistemology and metaphysics, a “doctrine” that allowed him to

overcome the limitations of conventional empiricisms and to dispense with

the “inclusive mind” of the idealists. Nothing could be clearer, I believe, than

that James overcame with the new doctrine of pure experience what, for him,were ultimately invidious dualisms in his own psychology. What, in Princi-

ples, he had called “the most mysterious thing in the world” was now, re-

markably, fully intelligible.18

If we start with the supposition that there was only one primal stuff or material

of the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff

“pure experience,” then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of

relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.

(1978: 4, my emphasis).

Yet I do not see how to square radical empiricism with any vision of an indi-

rect realism. Thus the well-known “postulate” of radical empiricism asserts:

. . . the only things that shall be debateable among philosophers shall be things

definable in terms drawn from experience. Things of an unexperienceable


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nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic

debate.

If what is not definable “in terms drawn from experience” cannot be a matter

of rational debate, it is hard to see how this is not a phenomenalism.19

One might hold here that this takes James too strictly or that it reads James

in the light of developments in epistemology and the philosophy of science

with which he had little concern. Why, for example, hold James to the logi-

cian’s sense of “definable in terms drawn from experience”?

There is, I believe, an important case to be made here. James as a philoso-

pher was a “popular” writer whose concerns far outran the concerns of the

professional community (including the present writer!), who now struggle to

get straight his “epistemology” and “metaphysics.” James could applaud

Mach and influence Russell, but the James who left the psychological labo-

ratory was ambivalently an “epistemologist” and a trenchant cultural critic.As Hollinger has argued, “especially did James fear that his contemporary in-

tellectuals were forming a culturally destructive idea of what it meant to be

‘scientific.’”(Hollinger, 1985: 5).20 Thus, the tragic irony: Because his scien-

tific psychology seemed to him to involve an invidious dualism, James opted

for an innovative metaphysics of experience. This theory, he hoped, gave log-

ical rights to those “too tender to give up religion, but too tough to give up

science.” But unnoticed was the fact that this theory also undercut the theory

of science he so brilliantly sketched in Principles. Because it has been diffi-

cult not to read radical empiricism as a phenomenalism, James’s pragmatism

was plagued by an incipient subjectivism, and by the collapse of realism into

actualism, the problem which haunted Peirce, and if I am correct, haunted

Dewey, as well. The issue is not, so as to be clear here, the status of “essences” or universals, for James’s own psychological account of these is

fully consistent with his own earlier indirect realism. Nor does it regard

James’s life-long criticism of the correspondence theory of truth, for rejection

of it is also consistent with forms of indirect realism. James’s most penetrat-

ing text on this score is his very early “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of

Mind as Correspondence.” James there wrote:

. . . the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and pas-

sively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The

knower is an actor, and co-efficient of truth on one side, whilst on the other he reg-

isters the truth, which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates,

so far as they are bases for human action—action which to great extent transforms

the world—help to make the truth which they declare . . . The only objective crite-rion of reality is coerciveness, in the long run, over thought. Objective facts,

Spencer’s outward relations, are real only because they coerce sensation (1978: 21).

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But if this is true, as I think it is, then “outward relations” are real enough,

even though all we can experience are the effects of a world which is neverexperienced as it is in itself. This means that no sense can be made of test-

ing truth by “correspondence;” but it means as well that as James had as-

sented, the “world “ contains relatively enduring “things” which exist in-

dependently of us, and that these are the “objects” at the object end of the

“subject/object” dichotomy. From the point of view of science, these are the

theoretized objects of physical science, just as so much in Principles sug-

gested. Accordingly, foundationalist epistemology can give way to a natu-

ralized epistemology in which a critical part of the story will be showing

how, for example, theorized photons, being emitted from “things” not in ex-

perience affect our retina, and how, through some very complicated causal

process, “things” in the “outer world” become the “things” of ordinary ex-

perience.21 That is, either we admit the existence and causal powers of pho-

tons which are in principle not “definable in terms drawn from experience,”

or as radical empiricists, we merely accept, unexplained, the de facto relat-

edness of experience.22

DEWEY’S REJECTION OF TRADITIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY

This is, if I am correct, another way of saying, as John Smith said of Dewey,

that the essence of his well-known rejection of the epistemological problem

was his unwillingness to countenance that there was a theoretical subject/

object problem, that “in effect all attempts at making knowledge itself intel-

ligible are greeted by pointing out that science is a fact and that is the end of

the matter”(Smith, 1970: 2). Dewey was right in rejecting “the spectator the-ory of knowledge”—the kernal of pragmatic cognition , and right also in in-

sisting that inquiry had a biological and a social “matrix”—as Peirce had

seen. His theory of inquiry was a naturalist epistemology, but it was incom-

plete because he finally rejected “the problem of an external world” and “the

mind/body problem” as non-problems. (See Chapter 5 below).

Dewey did, of course, struggle with these problems, from his explicitly ide-

alist beginnings until perhaps the exhaustion of the heated realist controver-

sies at the end of the second decade of the last century. As Sleeper has con-

vincingly demonstrated, Dewey generated an entirely novel metaphysics,

rejecting both classical realism, even as that had lingered in the thought of

Peirce, and the Jamesian metaphysics of experience. Neverthless, in my view,

Dewey’s rejection of traditional epistemology was insufficiently radical; in-deed, it was conservative insofar as his “metaphysics of existence” satisfied

Kantian strictures about metaphysics.


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The issue of realism was particularly bothersome since critics of pragma-

tism persistently said that it was an idealism. Consider but these few transi-tional texts: In “Reality as Experience” (1906), he offered, cautiously, that

“early reality”—reality which lacked “conscious organisms,” is “at any and

every point on its way to experience” (MW, Vol. 3: 102). The answer could

hardly be satisfactory. One might admit that if minded beings had not arrived

on the scene, there could be no knowledge of “early reality,” but surely this

reality would still have existed independently? In “The Realism of Pragma-

tism,” (1905) he wrote that “ideas, sensations, mental states, are, in their cog-

nitive significance, media of so adjusting things to one another, that they be-

come representative of one another. When this is accomplished, they drop

out; and things are present to the agent in the most naively realistic fashion

“(MW, Vol. 3: 153). His defense of a kind of operational naive realism recurs

in “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” (1905), where he asserts: “Im-

mediate empiricism postulates that things—anything, in the ordinary or non-

technical use of the term ‘thing’—are what they are experienced as (MW, Vol.

3: 158). In “Experience and Objective Idealism” (1906), he defended the em-

piricism of (absolute) idealism but rejected its rationalism, the idea that

“thought or reason” provides objectivity to sensory data. But he left open

what did. It was thus that R. B. Perry was happy to accept Dewey’s rescue of

reality “from dependence on intellect,” but was not happy that Dewey was

“satisfied to leave it in the grasp of that more universal experience which is

‘a matter of functions and habit, of active adjustments and readjustments, of

coordinations and activities, rather than states of consciousness.”‘ For Perry,

“a thoroughgoing realism must assert independence not only of thought, but

of any variety whatsoever of experiencing, whether it be perception, feeling,

or even the instinctive response of the organism to its environment”(Perry,1912: 323–24).23

Dewey’s earliest writings on mind and body are patently dualist and, as in

his 1884 “The New Psychology,” he is at pains to deny that physiology can

give any sort of explanation of “psychical events.” Following Wundt, he was

at that time insisting that “of itself,” physiology “has no value for psychol-

ogy”(EW, Vol. 1). The justly famous “Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”

(1896) has often been taken as Dewey’s solution to the mind/body problem.

But though it does mark a decisive break from his earlier dualism, its key fea-

ture is the way that Dewey preserves, in a biological setting, the teleology of

his earlier idealism. He firmly and rightly rejects mechanistic biology as in-

adequate to the facts, then generalizes this to include the psychical. To be

sure, the mechanistic view did assume that “the sensation is an ambiguousdweller on the borderland of soul and body, the idea (or central process) is

purely psychical, and the act (or movement) is purely physical,” but it was no

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answer to assert merely that “the reflex arc formulation is neither physical (or

physiological) nor psychological: it is a mixed materialistic-spiritualist as-sumption” (EW, Vol. 5: 104).

Had Dewey been more critical of the new “behaviorists” in American psy-

chology, he would have seen—and might have taught them, that his brilliant

critique of mechanism utterly undermined their research program. But in fact,

his easy “functionalist” solution to the ontological issue surely contributed to

the view, shared by all the behaviorists, here including Skinner, that mind/

body was a non-issue. See Chapter 2, below.

Finally, while there are texts that support the view that Dewey assumed that

psychology (along with sociology) had displaced traditional epistemology, he

seems not to have noticed there that there were matters left unfinished, mat-

ters which rightly puzzled his critics. Here is one example: “. . . when a writer

endeavors to take a frankly naturalistic, biological and moral attitude, and to

account for knowledge on the basis of the place it occupies in such a reality,

he is treated as if his philosophy were only, after all, just another kind of epis-

temology.” (See Part II of this volume, below). For Dewey, of course, the root

fallacy of all epistemology was “the failure to recognize that what is doubtful

is not the existence of the world but the validity of certain customary yet in-

ferential beliefs about things in it” (MW, Vol. 8). Presumably, once this be ad-

mitted, one ought to get on with the real questions of which inferred beliefs

were valid—a wholly scientific problem.

But it hardly satisfied his critics to treat them as if they failed to understand

that their problems were non-problems and to assert that “[pragmatism] oc-

cupies a position of an emancipated empiricism or thoroughgoing naive real-

ism,” that “[it] is content to take its stand with science . . . [and] daily

life”(MW, Vol, 10: 39). By doing this, Dewey simply took for granted bothcommon sense and science and thus refused to acknowledge with Hume and

Kant, that there was a problem of knowledge, not merely of certain knowl-

edge, but of how we can at all connect “subjectivity” to “the world.”

Nevertheless, innocence once lost cannot be regained. Even if Dewey did

show that the skeptical objections of modern philosophy foundered on a mis-

construal of “experience,” there remained the problem of “reconciling the re-

ality of the physical object of science with the richly qualitative object of or-

dinary experience.” Dewey, who I quote here, called this problem “factitious”

(1960: 131). Yet however much the problem was “unnatural,” an “artifact” of

some accidental developments in the history of Western civilization, it was, if

unfortunately, a genuine theoretical problem—as James surely would have

acknowledged. In the present view, the much heralded over-coming of subject and object, the duality bequeathed by modern philosophy, is “overcome”

only by eliminating one or the other: reductive materialism (the “naturalism”


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of Rorty), or (“basement”) idealism, the metaphysics so frequently imputed

to Dewey.24

The other alternative, recommended here, is to insist that even if there is no duality between knower and cognized object, the famous “ego-

centric predicament,” there must be a duality between knower and that

“world” which exists independently of knowers. Indeed, it is just this that

makes possible that naturalized epistemology which James was so reluctant

to pursue, but which, if I am correct, Dewey took for granted.

DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

James and Dewey had rich doctrines of experience. There is no doubt of that.

Yet if I am correct, they became convinced, with Ostwald and Mach, and

later, as regards Dewey, with Bridgman, Schlick and Carnap, that scientific

knowledge could dispense not only with “essentially metaphysical” causal

talk, but with talk of any non-experienceable reality. But if so, both “radical”

and “emancipated empiricism,” can get only to positivist versions of science.

That is, James and Dewey had to give a thoroughgoing instrumentalist read-

ing to the theoretical terms of science and thus to accept the idea that an ex-

planation was “subsumption,” explanation and prediction were symmetrical.

Peirce’s “How To Make Our Ideas Clear,” now shorn of his realism, was,

of course, the original inspiration for the pragmatic treatment of theoretical

terms. Thus Dewey writes “the resolution of objects and nature as a whole

into facts stated exclusively in terms of quantities which may be handled in

calculation . . . is a declaration that this is the effective way to think things . .

. to formulate their meanings.” Conceptions are either to be defined “opera-

tionally” or they are “purely dialectical inventions” (1960: 118). Dewey as-serts that most of Newton’s analytical work “would remain unchanged, if his

physical objects were dropped out and geometrical points were substituted”

(118–19). But this could only be so if, to quote Duhem, “a physical theory is

not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from

a small number of mathematical principles, which aim to represent as simply,

as completely, and as exactly as possible a set of experimental laws.”

Once Dewey assented to this, it was easy to waffle over the goals and vin-

dication of scientific theory. Did science aim at understanding or at prediction

and control? Was a theory “valid” if and only if it “predicted?” Dewey was

not, to be sure, alone in not seeing how critical these questions were. In fact,

he seems to have anticipated Ernest Nagel’s influential view that the differ-

ences between realist and instrumentalist construals of theory reduce to but “aconflict over preferred modes of speech”(Nagel, 1961: 153). Yet, the differ-

ences are fundamental—as Hempel’s “theoretician’s dilemma” shows

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(Hempel, 1965). Thus, if theoretical terms “serve their purpose” and “estab-

lish definite connections among observable phenomena,” then they are un-necessary. If, on the other hand, they lack such connections, then as but “di-

alectical inventions,” to use Dewey’s terms, they are surely unnecessary. As

Hempel came to see, however, the dilemma depends upon holding that “the

sole purpose of a theory is to establish deductive connections among obser-

vation sentences.” If this were the case, then theoretical terms would indeed

be unnecessary. But theory has other purposes. As James of Principles had in-

sisted, theory satisfies “the interest of theoretic rationality—just as had “sen-

timental philosophy.” Prediction and technical control is one thing, the satis-

faction that comes with understanding quite another. On the positivist view,

since explanation and prediction are symmetrical, this distinction is col-

lapsed; and if so, prediction and control can be taken to define science—a

thoroughly technocratic view.25

THEORETIC JUDGMENTS AND JUDGMENTS OF PRACTICE

Pragmatism had the burden that Americans could never accept that praktiche

and pragmatisch were, as Peirce said, ‘‘as far apart as the two poles.” When this

confusion is joined to some confusions over science, one easily produces the

characteristic misunderstanding of Dewey’s profound analysis of “the logic of

judgments.” By developing in an original way the pragmatic insight which had

linked rational cognition with rational purpose, Dewey tried to show that practi-

cal judgments answered to norms and conditions which made them as war-

rantable as “theoretic” judgments; but not because the justification of theoretical

judgments is that they have some “practical” use, but because all inquiry is con-strained by similar conditions, the indeterminate situation in which inquiry be-

gins, the inherited materials with which it works, a “reality” which imposes its

own limits, and consequences which are produced by acting on “hypotheses,”

consequences whose pertinence will be a function of the rational purpose of the

inquiry. There could still be differences in practices aimed at satisfying theoretic

rationality and those aimed at solving “practical” problems. Fully following

Peirce and James, Dewey held that the “peculiarity of scientific abstraction lies

in the degree of its freedom from particular existential adhesions” and that “in

scientific inquiry . . . meanings are related to one another on the ground of their

character as meanings, free from direct reference to the concern of a limited

group”(1938: 119). It was not, that is, that scientific inquiry was freed of its ex-

istential conditions and purposes, for it was exactly the pragmatist’s point that noinquiry was or could be. Rather, the words to emphasize in the foregoing are

“particular” and “limited,” just as Peirce would have insisted.


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SCIENCE AND CULTURE

Finally, there was Dewey’s well-known emphasis on science and scientific

method. It is a persistent theme of all the pragmatists that although knowledge

is fallible, inquiry has an integrity. Likewise, James and Dewey were em-

phatic that the world was “responsive to human purposes,” that inquiry could

change the world. But it was profoundly easy to miss the real force of this,

especially if, as I have been arguing, there was an incipient subjectivism and

idealism in pragmatist ontology, and in consequence, an inevitable instumen-

talism in their conceptions of science. But adding to this, as Hollinger points

out, it is a “striking feature of the history of pragmatism” that the detailed de-

velopment of Dewey’s pragmatic theory of inquiry, in his 1938 Logic, “ap-

peared long after his more vague and question-begging pronouncements had

helped win for his reconstructionist vision a following greater than it has en-

joyed during the more than forty years since he did his best to justify it philo-

sophically”(Hollinger, 1985: 98).26 (See Chapter 5, below.)

Nevertheless, Dewey was sufficiently clear on other matters that are es-

sential. First, like Veblen, he believed that science was a critical part of the

problem now being faced by inhabitants of “modern civilization.” Unlike

Comte, Spencer and a host of nineteenth century writers, Dewey did not hold

that as science gave us new knowledge, there would be continuous improve-

ment in human life. In an 1893 assessment of Renan’s The Future of Science,

Dewey endorsed Renan’s view that “the definition of science . . . is to know

from the standpoint of humanity; its goal is such a sense of life as will enable

man to direct his conduct in relation to his fellows by intelligence and not by

chance.” But he was sympathetic to Renan’s “loss of faith in science,” ac-

knowledging that “the forty years since Renan wrote have not done much toadd to the human spirit and the human interpretation to the results of science;

they have gone to increase its technical and remote character.” To be sure, he

affirmed that “any lasting denial of dogmatic authority is impossible save as

science itself advances to that comprehensive synthesis which will allow it to

become a guide of conduct, a social motor” (EW, Vol. 4: 12, 17). In this es-

say, he did not say what needed to happen if science was to become a “social

motor” for human progress. He returned to this theme in 1900, pointing out

that “the anomaly of our present social life is obvious enough.” He went on:

With tremendous increase in control of nature, in ability to utilize nature for the

indefinite expansion and multiplication of commodities for human use and sat-

isfaction, we find the actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values grow-

ing unassured and precarious. At times it seems as if we were caught in a con-tradiction; the more we multiply means, the less certain and general is the use

we are able to make of them (MW, Vol. 1: 76).

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If science were to become a “social motor” for human progress, there was, as

Veblen was insisting, the need to gain “knowledge of the conditions throughwhich possible values become actual in life. “ Lacking an understanding of

the causes of outcomes, we are “at the mercy of habit, of haphazard, and

hence of force.” Physical science had out-distanced human science. We have

applied “intelligence” to “the control of nature” but we have not put it to use

to make a human world, to structure society so that our technologies are used

for the realization of human values. (See Chapters 3, 4. below).

Secondly, Dewey was also clear that the problem was essentially political.

When he wrote the foregoing words, the social sciences were just then be-

coming institutionalized as specialized “disciplines,” each struggling to

achieve that “expertise” which would make them authoritative in a civiliza-

tion being shaped by industrialized science (Manicas, 1987). Dewey and Ve-

blen agreed both on what was happening and why. Veblen was pessimistic

that much could be done. In his view, American social science could not help

but succumb to the temptations and atmosphere of the times. As he saw, it was

easy to reject the idea that social science was “inquiry into the nature and

causes, the working and outcome of [the] institutional apparatus.” Such in-

quiry was dangerous, since even if it “should bear no colour of iconoclasm,”

its outcome “will disturb the habitual convictions and pre-conceptions on

which they rest.” In the spirit of middle class reform, social science could

concentrate “on what ought to be done to improve conditions and to conserve

those usages and conventions that have by habit become imbedded in the re-

ceived scheme of use and wont, and so have been found to be good and right”

(Veblen, 1957: 132). So as Veblen saw it, “habit, the haphazard and force”

were being reinforced by social science.

Dewey, always hopeful, believed that the new social sciences could be partof the solution. Yet, in that early review of Renan, he had himself suggested

an analysis that could have been endorsed by a Marxist, just as it became the

point of departure of Veblen’s later trenchant analysis. Dewey wrote: “Renan

does not seem to have realized sufficiently the dead weight of intrenched

class interests which resists all attempts of science to take practical form and

become a ‘social motor’” (EW, Vol. 4: 17) (See Chapter 10, below).

His most significant treatment of the critical issues is perhaps his 1927 The

Public and Its Problems. Dewey there offered a radical critique of the prob-

lem of democracy and concluded his account with a chapter entitled “The

Problem of Method.” He affirmed some characteristic Deweyan themes, e.g.,

the “absolutist” character of political philosophies and the diversion of

thought away from fruitful questions. In this context, he affirmed Veblen’spoint, that while we willingly spent money responding to “results of bad

conditions,” we needed to identify the causes of our problems. Forgetting his


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earlier insight, he argued that the reason for this “anomaly” was “clear

enough:” “There is no conviction that the sciences of human nature are farenough advanced to make public support of such activities worthwhile.” Yet,

if on this issue he had been nearer to the truth earlier, there was a deeper prob-

lem. It was the problem of democracy, “the problem of the public,” the inca-

pacity of citizens to communicate freely, to overcome “secrecy, prejudice,

bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance,” to re-

place these “by inquiry and publicity,” and thence to act so as to overcome

present problems. This was the deep problem, since for Dewey, if social sci-

entific knowledge of the causes of our problems was the work of “experts,”

the problem of putting such knowledge to work so as to make possible values

actual in life, was the problem of the Democratic Community. If people were

unable to act “intelligently,” it was because they lacked the means. If people

were now incapable, it was because they were incapacitated by the conditions

of life, economic, political and pedagogic.27 Nor did people need to be “ex-

perts:” “what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing

of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns.” It was in this

sense, indeed, that “scientific method” had to be the method of all, and it was

in this sense that it was part of the democratic mode of life. (See Chapter 8).

Dewey tried desperately to convince us that we must “apply science to life,”

but even given the difficulties in his conception of science and even given his

frequent use of “control” metaphors, his commitment to democracy kept his

vision from being technocratic (See Chapters, 14, 15).

In this paper I have suggested that pragmatism was a novel and liberating

philosophy but that its fundamental insights became distorted as they became

absorbed. The epigones and enemies of American pragmatism have been

pleased to make it into the American philosophy of technocracy, celebratingpositivist science and bourgoise society. This is profoundly ironical. Al-

though, of course, there are very large differences in their philosophies, it

would be fairer to say that the project of the pragmatists, like Marx’s, was to

assist us in de-alienating our increasing alienated world. (See Chapter 9).

NOTES

1. The many revisions of my essay have profited from Hollinger’s work.

2. It is also customary to hold that Veblen’s essay was a direct critique of Dewey

and of pragmatic philosophy. This is symptomatic. Since Henry Waldgrave Stuart’s

review of Veblen’s remarkable “The Place of Science in Modern Civilization” (1906),Veblen’s “idle curiosity” has been widely interpreted as offered, as Diggins writes, in

opposition to “both the Deweyite determination to make all knowledge expedient and

the Jamesian desire to allow man to believe what he wills to believe.” But it is clear

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enough that “idle curiosity” is a direct and acknowledged appropriation from James.

Moreover, Veblen put to work Dewey’s important reflex arc paper in his argument,

and as I argue below, Veblen and Dewey fully agreed that as “science” was part of the

problem, science was also part of the solution. As Diggins sees, Veblen “is careful to

express great respect for John Dewey and William James,” but he fails to see, oddly,

that this is exactly because Veblen is not attacking their pragmatism, but the already

persuasive technologism of American culture. For an example of the misunderstand-

ings on these critical points, see John Diggins, The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Ve-

blen and Modern Social Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1978): 30, 82f. and 182.

Perry Miller is more cautious. See his “Introduction,” American Thought, Civil War

to World War I (New York: Reinhart, 1954): xlviii. More recently, see Dorothy Ross,

“American Social Science and the Idea of Progress,” in Thomas L. Haskell (ed.), The

Authority of Experts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984): 165 and Dorothy

Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991).

3. James’s 1907 Pragmatism contributed greatly to confusion here. It is, of course,an exciting book which squarely faced “the present dilemma of philosophy”: “Our

children . . . are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in

us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious.” Yet, James let his language carry him

away, as Dewey was quick to point out. See Dewey’s review, “What Pragmatism

Means by Practical” (1908), John Dewey: The Middle Works, Vol. 4 (Carbondale, II.:

Southern Illinois Press, 1977).

4. While it is not part of the present argument, if I am correct, Richard Rorty’s in-

terpretation of Dewey falls into the family of misinterpretations which stem from the

problem discussed in what follows. Versus Rorty, Sleeper is correct in seeing that (1)

Dewey did not try to overcome the tradition, but to transform it and (2) Dewey did

not try to make everything scientific if by “science,” one means what Rorty means.

Dewey’s conception, as I argue, was faulty, but not quite as faulty as the one promoted

by Rorty and imputed to Dewey by him. Sleeper, John McDermott and Abraham Edelhave considered Rorty’s views of pragmatism in the Winter, 1985 issue of The Trans-

actions of the Charles s. Peirce Society, Vol. XXI, No.1. See also James Campbell’s

excellent treatment, “Rorty’s Use of Dewey,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXII,

No.2 (Summer, 1984).

5. More generally, the idea that there is an “inseperable connection between ra-

tional cognition and rational purpose,” is held by all the pragmatists. Remaining cita-

tions from Peirce are from P. P. Weiner (ed.), Values in a Universe of Chance (New

York: Doubleday, 1950),

6. The text looks elitist, of course, but this is doubtful. Not only must we accept

Peirce’s mix of irony and seriousness, but he was no doubt correct in judging both the

effectiveness of the method of authority and its “psychology.” Yet he may well be of-

fering here that, if we chose, we can all always use the scientific method. As I note be-

low, he says “everybody uses the scientific method about a great many things.” Forsome interesting discussion, see Thomas L. Haskell, “Professionalism versus Capi-

talism: R. H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of

Professional Communities,” in Haskell (ed.), The Authority of Experts.


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7. See M. F. Burnyeat, “The Sceptic in his Place and Time,” in R. Rorty et al.

(eds), Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On the

present view, if Peirce recast the epistemological problem and refused the transcen-

dental move, Dewey, and James, in his radical empiricism, refused the transcenden-

tal move and the epistemological problem.

8. For discussion of these figures, see John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Phi-

losophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), chapter 14. My definition of “positivism,”

it should be noted, has two components. The label was not true of Helmholtz, nor

likely of Hertz, nor, as I shall argue, of Peirce or of James in Principles. An enor-

mously useful account of Helmholtz, pertinent to the present essay, is to be found in

M. Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1971).

9. See Fred I. Dretske’s “Laws of Nature,” Philosophy of Science, 44 (1977). If

the properties are real and abstract, that is, sui generis real, we have a Platonism. On

the other hand, as Peirce also suggests, if they are but abstracted real properties of

complexes, we can have a far more modest realism.

10. See Elizabeth Flower, “The Unity of Knowledge and Purpose in James’s Viewof Action,” in W.R Corti (ed.), The Philosophy of William James (Hamburg: Felix

Meiner, 1976).

11. Although it cannot be pursued here, the point is more fundamental than may

appear. Experiment, properly understood, implies that causal laws cannot be se-

quences of events and that causal laws continue to operate under “open” conditions,

when there are no empirical invariances. See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Sci-

ence. 2nd Edition (Atlantic Highlands, N.]: Humanities, 1978): 33–36.

12. There can be no doubt that Helmholtz had a realist view of causality. For ex-

ample, he wrote, “the word Ursache (which I use here precisely and literally) means

that existent something (Bestehende) which lies hidden behind the changes we per-

ceive. It is the hidden but continuously existent basis of phenomena” (Selected Writ-

ings, Russell Kahl (ed.), Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). See es-

pecially 521–26. Veblen concurred. Singling out Karl Pearson, he wrote: “Thoseeminent authorities who speak for a colorless mathematical formulation invariably

and necessarily fall back on the (essentially metaphysical) preconception of causation

as soon as they go into the actual work of scientific inquiry (The Place of Science in

Modern Civilization and Other Essays, New York: Russell and Russell, 1961: 15).

And in a distinctly Jamesian formulation, he noted that “the concept of causation is

recognized to be a metaphysical postulate, a matter of imputation, not of observation;

whereas it is claimed that scientific inquiry neither does not legitimately, nor, indeed,

currently make use a postulate more metaphysical than the concept of idle concomi-

tance of variation . . . ”(35). Dewey is much less clear, offering very positivist sound-

ing utterances. See Chapter 4, below.

13. Compare Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism Without Foundations (Oxford and

New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), esp. 101–4; 284–89.

14. Mill followed Comte in noting that “states of mind are caused either by otherstates of mind or by a state of the body” (Mill, Logic, Bk. IV, ch. 4). This last was

physiology, since “sensation” always has “for its proximate cause some affection of

the portion of our frame called the nervous system.” “The laws of the mind,” then,

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were 1aws regarding “the succession of states of mind”—British associationism, as it

came to be called.

15. In the radically rewritten second edition of his Principles of Psychology

(1870), Spencer defended an indirect realism, which he called “transfigured realism.”

Spencer distinguished physiology, “aestho-physiology,” that is the discovery of

the connections between the data of consciousness and physiology.and psychology.

“. . . That which distinguishes Psychology from the sciences on which it rests [i.e.,

physiology and aestho-physiology] is, that each of its propositions takes account of

the connected internal phenomena (James’s “inner”] and of the connected external

phenomena to which they refer (James’s “outer”] [A psychological proposition] is the

connection between these two connections. (Spencer, Principles of Psychology, New

York: Appleton, I: 132). In his “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Corre-

spondence,” James gave a devastating critique of Spencer’s principle, the “adjustment

of inner to outer relations,” a principle offered to explain both life and “the entire

process of mental evolution.” James argued that if “the ascertainment of outward fact”

is supposed to be the evolutionary task of organisms, then the principle cannot be true:“ ‘Mind,’ as we actually find it, contains all sorts of laws—those of logic, of fancy, of

wit, of taste, decorum, beauty, morals, and so forth, as well as perception of fact” (8).

But if “correspondence” is loosened to avoid absurdity, the principle is quickly seen

to be vacuous: “Everything corresponds in some way with everything else that co-

exists in the same world with it” (10). What James seems not to have seen is that the

flaw he correctly diagnosed was itself a result of Spencer’s commitment to Humean

causality, “causes” as empirical invariances. Mach’s influential physiological psy-

chology, it might here be mentioned, made the same assumption. For discussion of

Spencer and Mach on these critical themes, see Manicas, History and Philosophy of

the Social Sciences, Chapter 9.

16. Owen Flanagan Jr. has provided a reading of Principles along the lines of an

non-reductive neuropsychology in his The Science of the Mind (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT

press, 1984). See also my “Whither Psychology?” in J. Margolis, R. Harré, P. T. Man-icas and P. F. Secord, Psychology: Designing the Disci pline (Oxford: Basil Black-

wel1, 1986); Manicas, A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, chapter 14

and below, Chapter 2.

17. For evidence that James was sensitive to the problems about explanation which

had emerged at just this time, see his note for “the Sentiment of Rationality,” in Es-

says in Philosophy: 340–41. Abrilliant summary of twenty-five years of debate on the

question is Pierre Duhem’s 1906 La Theories Physique; Son Object, Sa Structure

(translated as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton University Press,

1954). “To explain,” Duhem said, is “to strip reality of the appearances covering it

like a veil.” Explanations, accordingly, are always metaphysical. In agreement with

Ostwald and Mach, then, “a physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of

mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of mathematical principles,

which aim to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a set of experimental laws” (19).

18. See John J. McDermott, “Introduction,” Essays in Radical Empiricism,

The Works of William James (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1976), and


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Gerald Myers’s introduction to James’s Principles of Psychology, Works: xi–xl. My-

ers offers that James “had set out to write a book that introduced psychology as a nat-

ural science. . . . But the project forced him, he confessed, to operate with an as-

sumption that the philosopher in him seriously mistrusted” (xiii).

19. See Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1986), Chapter 11. Myers comments, “the view that physical things

are merely collections of sensations or sensible qualities (sometimes called phenom-

enalism, sometimes Berkeleyan idealism) might be hard to defend on the dualist

premise of Principles, but it fits neatly into the scheme of radical empiricism, where

everything is made of sensations or sensible qualities” ( 319). Myers notes also “if we

examine the eight essays that represent James’s radical empiricism, we cannot detect

any effort to work out in technical detail the vague blueprint of pure experience”

(316). Myers’s suggests an explanation of this in citing James’s view that “philoso-

phies are only pictures of the world which have grown up in the minds of different in-

dividuals” (317). Do “pictures” need philosophical argument? Or perhaps, was James

satisfied to leave this to “epistemologists”?It is true that James denied, as per most phenomenalisms, that physical objects are

“constructions” from private particulars. See Edward H. Madden and Peter H. Hare,

“James’s View of Causality,” in Corti (ed.), 1976: 113ff. It was thus that as James

said, “radical empiricism has more affinities with natural realism than with the views

of Berkeley or Mill . . . ” Yet, as Madden and Hare argue, James’s commitment to the

privacy of the particulars of direct experience was fatal, exactly because he then could

not provide an adequate account of potentiality.

20. Dewey shared Hollinger’s view. In his own “Development of American Prag-

matism,” Dewey wrote, “Peirce was above all a logician; whereas James was an ed-

ucator and a humanist and wished to force the general public to realize that certain

problems, certain philosophical debates, have a real importance for mankind, because

the beliefs which they bring into play lead to very different modes of conduct.”

The premature narrowing of context, audience, “discipline” and definition of prob-lems in reading James has hermeneutic implications which are far more important

than one is likely to think.

21. The psychological story will be but part of the story because it will need to be

supplemented by a sociology of knowledge and a philosophical argument. See below

Chapter 6. For the pertinence of sociology of knowledge to Dewey’s naturalistic epis-

temology, see Thelma Lavine, “Naturalism and the Sociological Analysis of Knowl-

edge,” in Y. H. Krikorian (ed.), Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York: Co-

lumbia University Press, 1944).

22. W. Donald Oliver remarks that “in the world of pure experience there are no

mysteries.” Once the distinction between mental and physical is expressed in terms of

two set of relations, “no explanation need be sought for the occurrence of an item of

experience in the one or the other set of relations. Indeed, the very notion of expla-

nation is deprived of meaning, hence to seek one is to fail to understand the import of James’s radical empiricism” (“James’s Cerebral Dichotomy,” in Corti, 1976: 36).

One might hold, equally, that James wanted to keep the basis of the relatedness

of experience mysterious so as to make possible a source of order, which is non-

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naturalistic. See Eugene Fontinell, Self, God and Immortality: A Jamesian Investiga-

tion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

23. A useful volume in this regard is S. Morgenbesser (ed.), Dewey and his Crit-

ics (New York: The Journal of Philosophy, 1977), esp. Sections II and III.

Sleeper argues that Dewey held to what he calls “transactional realism,” but sees

that Dewey “seems unable to recognize that what bothers Woodbridge is the conclu-

sion that . . . real objects are not merely antecedent to being known, but antecedent to

being had in experience, antecedent to experience altogether” (1986: 115).

24. The term “basement idealist” in reference to Dewey is T. V. Smith’s, my

teacher at Syracuse.

25. Morgenbesser notes “Dewey need not be interpreted to argue against a realist

view of the nature of theoretical entities, to argue against their reality. His argument

was rather that we can understand the significance and point of postulating theoreti-

cal entities or understand the role a theoretical term plays in a theory only if we un-

derstand the use to which the theory will be put and the specific problems to which it

is addressed” (1977: xvi). This is substantially the interpretation I have offered of James. While Dewey can be read in this way, Dewey sometimes seemed willing to

accept a straightforward instrumentalist view of theoretical terms.

We should note also here that to say this is not to say that Dewey’s philosophy of

logic or of language has much in common with recent empiricism. See Chapter 2 and

4 below).

26. Sleeper rightly puts the Logic in the center of his interpretation of Dewey and

shows that its ideas had antecedents as early as Dewey’s 1892 syllabus for “Course

5.” But, of course, Sleeper had the advantage of reading the Logic while Dewey’s

early followers did not. As Ernest Nagel’s near dismissal of the doctrines of the Logic

shows, by the time it was published, the philosophers could no longer welcome its

central message—when it was understood. See Nagel’s “Introduction” to the Carbon-

dale edition of Logic.

27. Although Dewey had considerable influence on public education in the US, theresult was, for the most part, a caricature of his views. The appropriation of Dewey

by interests antithetic to his was possible, at least partly, because he failed to com-

municate that his pragmatism was not, despite his protests, a scientism. One example

must suffice: When educationists began to seek professional status within the univer-

sity, the question arose, Is there a science of education? James, Royce, and Dewey

were clear in insisting that the answer was in the negative. But as Silberman argues,

“most educationists ignored Dewey’s insistence that the study of education be rooted

in philosophy and the social sciences.” Instead, teacher education alienated itself

within the university and, in an orgy of empiricism, “the survey became the founda-

tion on which the entire study of education and training of teachers was built”

{Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom, New York: Random House, 1970:

428–29). Thus, just as Dewey could be associated with Watson’s behaviorism, edu-

cationists could absorb Dewey into their Taylorism and scientism.


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35

INTRODUCTION

John Dewey is always included as critical player in the development of psy-

chology in America. But his relationship to this development is complicated

and, for this reason—and others, too, nearly always misunderstood. More-

over, there is a double irony in this.

First, it is often assumed that he played a significant role in the develop-

ment of behaviorist psychology, which quickly came to dominate American

psychology. In part, this depends upon the view, that as Boring put it, Amer-

ican psychology “got its mind from Darwin” and dealt with “a mind in use,”

and, as “an experimental science,” was to be pursued in terms already well

established in the biological sciences (1950: 553). It also depends on the as-sumption, related to this, that Dewey gave Progressivism its voice that “as

the twentieth century went on, psychologists would fulfill Dewey’s hopes.

Psychologists would increasingly move out into society, remaking its mis-

fits, its children, its schools, its governments, its businesses, its very psy-

che”(Leahy, 1992: 277). Finally, the misunderstanding depends upon a dis-

tinctly positivist reading of pragmatism, the genuinely distinctive American

family of philosophies. Thus Hilgard writes of “a conception of scientific

method that was continuous with the pragmatism of James and the instru-

mentalism of Dewey” that “continued to influence the nature of psycholog-

ical investigations in America even after Watson had dropped conscious-

ness in favor of behavioral measurement” (Hilgard, 1987: 778). Dewey,

the functionalists, and the behaviorists resisted mind/body dualism andfocused in “adaptive behavior.” This allowed an easy collapse of the

Chapter Two

John Dewey and American Psychology

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“functionalism” of James, and then of Dewey, into later versions of func-

tionalism, the “characteristic American psychology” and from there to later“operationalist” versions of behaviorism.

Indeed, Dewey was powerfully influenced by Darwin and was a strong

advocate of “experiment,” and he often spoke not only of “the mind in use”

but also of “control” (Hickman, 1992). But while Dewey was a leading

voice in Progressive thought, it is easy to demonstrate that he was a stren-

uous critic of the sort of scientism so well expressed in the text cited from

Leahy. (And see Chapter 1). And, it was easy but wrong to think that the

differences between positivism and variant forms of pragmatism were of lit-

tle importance to the idea of “a scientific psychology.” Dewey was com-

mitted to an empirical approach to mind and did reject dualist psychology,

but his “instrumentalism” was no positivism. Indeed, it is not difficult to

show that he played nearly no role in the development of mainstream Amer-

ican psychology. Part I of this essay addresses these confusions. It requires

providing a reconstruction of the development of American psychology, if

only in sketchy fashion, assaying what Dewey actual did and said, and clar-

ifying some key concepts.

What, then of the second irony? Although as I shall argue, Dewey had

great hopes for “the new psychology,” and early on in his career, he identi-

fied himself as a psychologist, but he subsequently abandoned psychology

and came to believe that it ill served what became his primary intellectual

goal, that philosophy must address not the problems of philosophy, but the

problems of humankind. While he continued to argue that “the nature of all

objects of philosophical inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what experi-

ence has to say about them,” instead of getting answers from “scientific

psychology,” problems he was interested in addressing would respond to anew conception of inquiry, work which culminated in his 1938 Logic: The

Theory of Inquiry. This profound shift is missed primarily because Dewey’s

theory of inquiry is so fundamentally in opposition to the dominating logi-

cal empiricist theory of science, which had by then captured psychology,

that it was misunderstood and then ignored. The second irony then is this:

Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the cutting

edge of current work in psychology is so-called “cognitive psychology.”

But, remarkably, not only does Dewey’s Logic, misunderstood when it is

not ignored, give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these ap-

proaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive sci-

ence, but shows us decisively why “symbolic” AI models must fail. One

wonders whether Dewey will be ill served once again? Part II of this essayaddresses these complicated issues.

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DEWEY AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY

“The New Psychology”

One of Dewey’s earliest essays was an examination of “The New Psychol-

ogy” (1884). Historians agree that “the new psychology” derived from Wil-

helm Wundt who founded the first psychological laboratory in 1879 and

whose Gründzüge der physiologishe Psychologie (1st Edition, 1873) was an

enormous success. But Wundt’s psychology was complicated and offered

many not always clearly consistent strands. Drawing on all the recent ad-

vances in physiology, neurology and psycho-physics, Wundt seems to have

put it all together: brain localization, sensory psychology, will, memory and

cognition. Moreover, in contrast to the reigning British tradition, mind was

conceived as both active and unitive. Thus “apperception,” a central idea, was

a psychic mechanism, which gave us the power of “selective attention” and“discriminative judgment.” “Introspection,” which for Wundt was the “foun-

dation of psychology,” licensed this view. Third, for Wundt, mind also was

social, an idea thoroughly developed in his massive Volkerpsychologie

(1900–1920). Finally, psychology earned its credential as a science (and not

a branch of philosophy) because it was “experimental” and because it dis-

claimed irrelevant metaphysical issues, e.g., the relation of mind and body. To

be sure, this made problematic the question of the relation of physiology to

psychology, a question that still haunts inquiry.1

The entirely new American universities provided ample opportunity to in-

stitutionalize the “new,” scientific psychology (Manicas, 1987: Chapter 10).

In short order, American psychology would pre-empt all others. By 1900,

some 42 psychology laboratories were established in American colleges anduniversities; by 1926, there were 117. Of the first of these, thirteen of the

founders had taken degrees with Wundt.

We get a clear picture of Dewey’s assessment of the high importance of the

“new psychology,” by looking at his essay, so entitled. Dewey first notes that

the new psychology is part of the new Zeitgeist of the new sciences, includ-

ing the advances in physiology, but Dewey sees a confusion. The common

view is that “some or all the events of our mental life physically conditioned

upon certain nerve structures, and thereby explains these events.” But, he in-

sists, “nothing could be further from the truth” ( Early Writings, Vol. 1: 52).

According to Dewey, “all the leading investigators clearly realize that expla-

nations of psychical events, in order to explain, must be psychical and not

physiological” (52). Professor George Ladd was an exception. In Dewey’s re-

view of Ladd’s Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), Ladd is

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charged with holding to both “the older opinion” that physiological psychol-

ogy is the science of the relations of mind and body; of the correlations of thephysical and the psychical” (EW, 1: 200) and to the new view, promoted by

Wundt, of “physiological psychology as a method, whose end in not the par-

allelisms between the brain and consciousness, but the investigation of con-

sciousness itself by physical methods” (200). This very well characterizes

nearly all the Wundtian inspired work then going on in America, for example,

as represented by the influential work of Dewey’s teacher at Johns Hopkins,

G. Stanley Hall, and of E.B. Titchener, fresh from his PhD under Wundt. It

was “experimental” but it relied heavily on introspection and its primary goal

was investigation of “consciousness.”

But, according to Dewey, advances in the biological sciences have had an-

other direct effect on the new psychology: “To biology is due the conception

of organism . . . In psychology this conception has led to the recognition of

mental life as an organic unitary process developing according to the laws of

all life, and not a theater for the exhibition of independent autonomous facul-

ties, or a rendezvous in which isolated, atomic sensations and ideas may

gather, hold external converse and the forever part” (EW, I: 56).

This, of course, is directed at British-style associationist psychology, but as

part of this, Dewey, still the Hegelian, endorses an ecological conception and

the Wundtian premise that mind is social. Thus, “the idea of environment is a

necessity to the idea of organism, and with the conception of environment

comes the impossibility of considering psychical life as an individual, iso-

lated thing, developing in vacuum” (56).

But there is more. As a “movement” the new psychology has certain

general features: “The chief characteristic distinguishing it from the old

psychology is undoubtedly rejection of a formal logic as a method and test.The old psychologists almost without exception held to a nominalist logic”

(EW, I: 58), a pronounced tendency especially among those “who pro-

claimed that ‘experience’ was the sole source of all knowledge” (EW, I:

59). Hume destroyed all relations except as “accidents” and “denied all

universality.” But he did this on the basis of “purely logical models,” “ab-

stract principles of difference and identity . . . put in the guise of psycho-

logical expression.” The reaction to this, as in Kant, was to “fall back on

certain ultimate, indecomposable, necessary first truths immediately

known through some mysterious faculty of mind . . . Such intuitions are

not psychological; they are conceptions bodily imported from the logical

sphere” (59). These ideas are, of course, familiar Deweyan themes, to be

re-articulated and developed in the remainder of his long life—even if, aswe shall, see, they will have negligible impact on the psychology, which

comes after “the new psychology.”

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Dewey’s hopes for “the new psychology” were not restricted to psychol-

ogy only; he believed that it held enormous promise for philosophy itself. Inthree essays published in 1884 and 1886, Dewey offered a redefinition of phi-

losophy and a new role for psychology: “in the ordinary way of putting it, the

nature of all objects of philosophical inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what

experience has to say about them. And Psychology is the scientific and

systematic account of this experience” (EW, I: 123). To be sure, not any

psychology will do. Dewey’s first effort was his 1886 Psychology, published

four years before James’s Principles of Psychology.

Dewey intended the book to be an introductory text in psychology, but

wanted also that it be an introduction to philosophy. In his Preface, he re-

marks: “How shall we make our psychology scientific and up to the times,

free from metaphysics—which, however good in its place, is out of place in

a psychology—and at the same time make it an introduction to philosophy in

general?” (EW , 2: 4). In good Wundtian fashion, the book covers all the char-

acteristic topics, but despite the disclaimer of the preface, the argument is

couched thoroughly within a Hegelian frame.

The ground for this was set in the three programmatic essays just men-

tioned. In “Kant and Philosophic Method” (1884), Dewey challenged the

“method of ‘intellectualism’ begun by Descartes” (EW, I: 34) and he argues,

as before, that Humeans, avowedly empirical, distorted experience. Kant’s at-

tempted repair failed: “Though the categories make experience, they make it

out of foreign material . . . They constitute objects, but these objects are not

such in universal reference, but only to beings of like capacities of receptiv-

ity as ourselves. They respect not existence in itself, but ourselves as affected

by that existence” (EW, I: 39). Again, “the only conception adequate to ex-

perience as a whole is organism,” a conception which Dewey found inHegel’s Logic (EW, 1: 42, 43).

The rational for Absolute Idealism emerges more clearly in “The Psycho-

logical Standpoint” (1886). “The fact that sensations exist before knowledge

and that knowledge come about by their organic registration and integration

is undisputed” (EW, I: 127). If one accounts for this by something not in con-

sciousness, then it is not known and we have abandoned “the psychological

standpoint” for “an ontological standpoint”(EW, 1: 128–29). But “either this

matter is unknown, is a thing-in-itself . . . or is known, and then becomes one

set of the relations which in their completeness constitute mind—when to ac-

count for mind from it is to assume as ultimate reality that which has exis-

tence only as substantiated by mind” (EW , 1: 129).

The argument is straightforward: “From the psychological standpoint therelation of subject and object is one which exists within consciousness”

(EW, 1: 131). Hence, materialism and all forms of dualism, as for example,


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the “Transfigured Realism” of Spencer, all fail. But so too does Subjective

Idealism.

The essence of Subjective Idealism is that the subject consciousness or mind,

which remains after the ‘subject world has been subtracted,’ is that for which af-

ter all this object world exists. Were this not so—were it admitted that this sub-

ject, mind, and the object, matter, are both but elements within, and both exist

for , consciousness—we would be in the sphere of an eternal absolute con-

sciousness, who partial realization both the individual ‘subject’ and the ‘exter-

nal world’ are (EW, I: 135).

Similarly, in “Psychology as Philosophic Method,” Dewey writes: “The rela-

tion of Psychology to Philosophy now stands, I suppose, something like this:

There is an absolute self-consciousness. The science of this is philosophy.

This absolute self-consciousness manifests itself in the knowing and acting of individual men. The science of this manifestation, a phenomenology, is psy-

chology” (EW, I: 136).

Before the century had ended, Dewey did become uncomfortable with his

Hegelianism, abandoning it for the variety of naturalism, which now so

strongly identifies him, but it is essential to see that while he abandoned

Hegel and psychology, he never did abandon the seminal psychological in-

sights that his Hegelianism afforded .2

William James and the Problem of a Scientific Psychology

But before we pursue the divergence between Dewey and the development of

academic psychology, we need here to bring in the work of William James.Along with Wundt, James is often credited as being one of the founders. As

with Wundt, James’s psychology was complex, freely drawing from a wide

variety sources and orientations. And like Wundtian psychology, it was also

to be rejected.3

James himself played a role in this. Despite his extremely rich and

provocative beginning,4 there were some genuine tensions in his account, ten-

sions which led him, ultimately to despair of the very idea of a scientific psy-

chology. The center of this was precisely the problem that had led Wundt and

Dewey to abandon physiology. In James’ terms (in criticism of Spencer) if

there was no “correspondence” between “inner” and “outer” relations, then

the problem of knowledge was insoluble!5

In his 1894 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Associa-

tion, “The Knowing of Things Together,” James returned to the problem of

“the nature of synthetic unity of consciousness” and concluded that none of

the available theories could be accepted. What of his own account in the Prin-

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ciples? He there had proposed “to simply eliminate from psychology ‘con-

sidered as a natural science’ the whole business of ascertaining how we cometo know things together or to know them at all” (James, 1978: 87). As Dewey

had earlier also noted, “That we do know things, sometimes singly and some-

times together, is a fact. That states of consciousness are the vehicle of knowl-

edge, and depend on brain states, are two other facts.” At the time of the writ-

ing of the Principles, he believed that “a natural science of psychology might

legitimately confine itself to tracing the functional variations of these three

sorts of fact.” But he now believed that this was a dead-end. Remarkably, af-

ter struggling for some twelve years to write his great book, James concluded

that it was “a loathsome, distended, tumified, bloated dropsical mass, testify-

ing to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of

psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable”6

One must dismiss James’s self-deprecation. But could he be right: There is

no such thing as a science of psychology? Well, at least not quite in the way

that either Dewey or James conceived it. The last piece of our account regards

the prior question: What would count for psychology to be a science?

Two things may immediately be said: It had to be experimental and it had

to be free of metaphysics. But what were to be the data of experiment? In-

deed, this could not be answered without first deciding what was to be in-

cluded as not metaphysical. Some experimental psychologists were interested

in establishing “functional relations” between physiological events and men-

tal events. As noted, this was essentially the position of Ladd and James, but

also of the earlier psycho-physicists, Fechner, for example, and of some of the

“old psychologists,” Helmholtz and Spencer, e.g. Moreover, there was cur-

rently available a powerful argument that such inquiry was not metaphysical.

Ernst Mach, the eminent philosopher/physicist whose enormously influential Analysis of Sensations (1883) provided a clear and forceful statement of a

“positivist”—anti-metaphysical—theory of science which did this. He held

that “sensations” are the data of all science. Versus the metaphysicians, in-

cluding here Kant, and realist and dualist versions of Kant, Mach asserted:

For us, the world does not consist of mysterious entities which by their interac-

tion with another, equally mysterious entity the ego, produce sensations, which

alone are accessible. For us, colors, sounds, spaces, times, . . . . are provision-

ally the ultimate elements, whose connexion (sic) it is our business to investi-

gate” (Mach, 1959: 29f.).

Since following Hume, “causes” are not “productive powers,” on this view of

science, scientific laws are merely “connexions.” As Comte (who both intro-

duced the term positivism and ably defined it) had argued, they are merely

“invariant associations,” taking the form, “if this, then that.” This idea was


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powerfully propelled by Mach and his followers, including Karl Pearson and,

at just about the same time, by Francis Galton, “the pioneer of a ‘new’ psy-chology in Great Britain” (Boring, 1950: 482). Galton accepted the idea that

quantitative measurement is the mark of a science and following Adolph

Quetelet, applied the “law of error” to biological and psychological data, in-

cluding, of course, “mental inheritance” (Boring, 1950: 476). At this point,

“experimental psychology” and “the psychology of individual differences,”

which employed the new statistical methods, were developing independently

of each other. In the following decades, fully legitimated by a positivist the-

ory of science, these research programs would converge.7

Or one could deny the explanatory relevance of physiology, as Dewey had

suggested, and argue, with Titchener, for an experimental science of con-

sciousness which included data gained by “trained” introspective experi-

menters. Titchener also was deeply influenced by Mach. Indeed, as Hilgard

says, “because sensation was the unit out of which mental processes were

built, Titchener’s position was called structuralism, with its emphasis on the

what of consciousness with somewhat less concern for the how or why (Hil-

gard, 1987, 73–74). Attention to “function” would be the response to Titch-

ener’s “structuralism.”

Pragmatism and Functionalism

In all the standard histories, “functionalism,” “the distinctive American psychol-

ogy” figures heavily in the subsequent development. Moreover, the “pragma-

tists” figure heavily in the development of fumctionalism from its beginnings in

Chicago to its variant forms elsewhere (Boring, 1950: Chapter 22; Hilgard and

Bower, 1966: Chapter 10; Hilgard, 1987: 73–103; Leahy, 1992: 285–90; Ben- jamin, 1988; Murray, 1983; Schultz, 1987)8. The so-called “functionalist” school

included James Mark Baldwin, James McKeen Cattel, both trained by Wundt,

and James Rowland Angell, who did an MA under Dewey and took on James as

his mentor at Harvard. In these histories, the “pragmatists” figure heavily in the

development of “functionalism.” While Hilgard regards James as the guiding

spirit, Boring remarks, “it was the philosopher, John Dewey . . . who was the or-

ganizing principle behind the Chicago school of functional psychology” (Bor-

ing: 539). Leahy holds that Dewey’s “important but tediously written” mid-

1890s papers “furnished the central conceptions of America’s native psychology,

functionalism” (Leahy, 1992: 281),

In these histories, the path from “functionalism” to “behaviorism is less clear,

even if Dewey, as the mentor of Angell, Watson’s dissertation supervisor andthe premier functionalist, remains in the fuzzy background. Boring could note

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that “Watson was a functionalist (with a small f) but he could not tolerate for

long the requirement of the Chicago school that even the animal psychologistmust take time to translate (sic) positively observed behavior into the vague

terms of inferred consciousness” (1950: 641). Indeed, with this not subtle era-

sure of differences between pragmatism and positivism, Boring could conclude

that “[operationism] was there all along,” recognized well before Percy Bridge-

man and Vienna positivism offered their putative “advances” over the views of

American psychologists. Similarly, Willard Day, Jr. notes, in his otherwise very

helpful account (1998) of the antecedents of behaviorism, that “James was . . .

concretely influential in the thinking of certain individuals who are important

in the history of behaviorism” and goes on to name John Dewey and William

McDougall. But he provides no argument as to how these two figure in this his-

tory. Hilgard offers that “it would be a mistake . . . to think of Dewey’s influ-

ence upon the psychology of learning as limited to the work of those who de-

veloped functional psychology within the laboratories (1966: 299). He sees

three additional lines: learning as the “product of schoolroom practices, “soci-

ological social psychology” “by way of Mead,” and Dewey’s influence as a

philosopher “carrying on the pragmatic tradition (300). In his later history, Hil-

gard notes that Dewey-inspired Chicago functionalism became, with E.L.

Thorndyke’s “connectionism,” a “stimulus-response psychology.” Thorndyke,

whose later work in educational psychology would cross paths with Dewey,

had begun his animal studies in William James’s Cambridge basement and,

contestably, was already a behaviorist. His influential “law of effect” is also

termed “functionalist.” As Hilgard sees matters, although functionalism “de-

clined as a recognizable school, it was destroyed by its own success, and in part

by the success of its intellectual progeny,—behaviorism” (Hilgard, 1987:

87–88). Leahy see “functionalist” controversy, especially as regards the “motortheory of consciousness playing a key role. He offers that Thaddeus Bolton

(1902) “integrated theoretical development since James, including the motor

theory of consciousness and Dewey’s account of the reflex arc, into a theory of

perception embodying the coming behaviorist psychology (Leahy, 1992: 286).

For Leahy, Angell’s APA Presidential address (1906) was a “milestone on the

road to behavioralism” (288). As Angell later concluded:

There is unquestionably a movement on foot in which interest is centered in the

results of conscious, rather than the processes themselves. This is particularly

true in animal psychology; it is only less true in human psychology. In those

cases interests in what may for lack of a better term be called “behavior;” and

the analysis of consciousness is primarily justified by the light it throws on be-havior, rather than vice-versa (cited by Leahy, 1992: 305).


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Boring was probably correct: “Watson touched a match to this mixture, there

was an explosion, and behaviorism was left” (Boring, 1950: 506). “Watsonfounded behaviorism because everything was ready for the founding. Other-

wise, it could not have been done” (ibid.). With Watson’s behaviorism, sci-

entific psychology had not only expunged all talk of “consciousness” but in-

deed, had become a technocratic science of prediction and control.

Considering stereotypes of American pragmatism, its talk of the “cash

value” of ideas, and Dewey’s association with Progressive political an social

theory, it is easy to understand the taken-for-granted role of Dewey in the de-

velopment of American psychology, especially when his remarkable 1896 es-

say, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” is taken, remarkably, to be “one

of the most important arguments for the functional attitude toward the inter-

actions (sic) between stimulus and response” (Hilgard: 81), and even more re-

markably, when we recall that in 1943, this paper “was chosen as one of the

most important articles ever published in Psychological Review” (Leahy,

1992: 282).

The confusions will take some unpacking. First, it is hardly clear what

“functionalism” meant for those writers who got the label pinned on them.

The distinction and labels evidently came from Titchener who got the idea

from James (Boring. 1950: 542). Dewey’s orientation surely was “function-

alist,” but that term carries a host of meanings. For Dewey (as for James),

“functionalism” in psychology implied that there was an essential relation be-

tween cognition and purpose. Indeed, this idea may be taken to be a defining

idea of pragmatism. But more than this: For James and Dewey, it meant, as

with Wundt, that intentionality was the critical feature of minded behavior.

Finally, functionalism entailed that mechanism in biology will not suffice.

These come together, to be sure, in the remarkable essay on the reflex arc, tobe considered shortly.

But other senses were very much in the air. In addition to the mathemati-

cal sense of “function,” Boring offers that Angell’s 1906 paper to the APA is

useful in this regard. Angell distinguished three conceptions of functional

psychology. First, it may be regarded as “a psychology of mental operations

in contrast to the psychology of mental elements” (Boring: 543, quoting An-

gell). Second, it may be thought of as the “`psychology of the fundamental

utilities of consciousness,’ in which mind is ‘primarily engaged in mediating

between the environment and the needs of the organism’” (543). Finally,

“there is a broader view of functional psychology as psychophysics, that is to

say, the psychology of the total mind-body organism. Such a view leaves psy-

chology room for the consideration of well-habituated acts, where conscious-ness has almost or entirely lapsed” (544). All three conceptions are open to

diverging interpretations, from a mentalism to a dualism to a radical behav-

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iorism. All, I think, would have made Dewey uncomfortable, even if the sec-

ond, at least, gives attention both to the purposiveness of “mind” and of therelation of the “needs” of the organism in relation to its environment.9

Dewey’s 1896 Essay on the Reflex Arc

But the critical point is the failure to recognize the philosophical background

and fundamental point of Dewey’s famous essay on the reflex arc. It is true

and important that between perhaps 1891 and 1903, with the Studies in Log-

ical Theory, Dewey had made a conversion to his distinctive version of natu-

ralism. But it is equally true and important that this was as naturalism, which

carried a huge Hegelian residue. Flower and Murphey say it well:

It is almost as if Dewey held off from naturalism until he should be able to in-

tegrate with it those aspects of idealism which he regarded as philosophicallyimportant: the view of knowledge as organic and relational, the social character

of both self and knowledge, the unifying and purposive character of judgment.

Dewey could not bring together those features with naturalism as long as the

dominant model of the latter was atomistic . . . (1977: 820).10

This was precisely the burden of the reflex arc essay. Dewey acknowledges

that “the idea of a reflex arc has upon the whole come nearer to meeting the

demand for a general working hypothesis than any other concept (EW, Vol. 5:

96) and his essay is not intended “to make a plea for what it replaced.” But

the new account, best intentions notwithstanding, suffered from all the fea-

tures of the older account. “The dualism between sensation and idea is re-

peated in the current dualism of peripheral and central structures and func-

tions; the older dualism of body and soul finds a distinct echo in the currentdualism of stimulus and response” (96). Thus, “the sensory stimulus is one

thing, the central activity, standing for the idea, is another thing, and the mo-

tor discharge, standing for the act proper, is a third.” But if so, it impossible

see how action can be thought-guided or how we can learn? Experience

shows not only that we do, but what is amiss: the reflex arc is not “a patch-

work of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes.” It

was not to be understood “mechanically” but “functionally.” Rather, it is “a

comprehensive or organic unity” (97). Dewey could now reject mechanism

and atomism from a fully naturalistic point of view.

Consider James’s familiar child-candle example. First, contrary to the pre-

vailing view, it does not begin with a “stimulus.” The real beginning is an act

of seeing. This act stimulates another act, the reaching, but both are bound to-gether, subordinate elements of a larger coordination so that the seeing

controls the reaching and the reaching, in turn, stimulates and controls the


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seeing. It is now “seeing-for-reaching purposes.” At the next stage, there is

another sensori-motor coordination: Indeed, “only because the heat-painquale enters into the same circuit of experience with the optical-ocular and

muscular quales, does the child learn from the experience and get the ability

to avoid the experience in the future.” The act has become not merely seeing,

but “seeing-of-a-light-that-means-pain-when-contact-occurs” (98).

Dewey has given a description, a point of departure for a psychology. But

he has not given us a psychology. While for Dewey, intentionality is a funda-

mental feature of all learning, he surely has not given us an account which

provides the mechanisms for this.11 Siurely, it will be a very messy psychol-

ogy including as it does a revisioning of the role and relationships of the all-

critical elements. And it can be naturalistically implemented. But that is not

the point here. The point rather is that while subsequent S-R psychology

adopted the language of “function,” it failed utterly to take seriously Dewey’s

1896 criticisms, and continued, happily, with the development of an atom-

istic, mechanical and, ultimately, mindless psychology.

It is striking that Boring’s account of Dewey’s paper is both sympathetic

and generally accurate, but that he fails to see the consequences of Dewey’s

criticism for all later functional and behaviorist thinking. Instead, he remarks

“Dewey was anticipating the position of Gestalt psychology” and “occupying

a position in the history of dynamic psychology (Boring, 1950: 554). Of per-

tinence here is Boring ‘s view that American psychology protested Wundt,

first with functionalism and then with behaviorism, while German psychol-

ogy protested and got Gestalten. Boring concludes, “given everything else in

America as it was in 1920, the year of James’ death, you could not have had

a protest against Wundt developing as Gestalt psychology—not there and not

then” (1950: 643f). Nor indeed on the present argument, does it seem thatDewey’s far more radical alternative protest could have been grasped and

taken seriously.

Others are even less clear as regards the radical character of Dewey’s po-

sition. Hilgard in assessing the very much later loss of hegemony of S-R psy-

chology, writes that “some dissatisfaction with the stimulus-response concept

had been expressed as early as Dewey’s (1986) criticism of the reflex arc con-

cept and that Thurstone had reiterated some of Dewey’s points in 1923

against behaviorism (Hilgard, 1987: 224), but Hilgard does not reconsider the

opinion expressed earlier that this paper “gave one of the important argu-

ments for the functional attitude” (81) Given the flabbiness of the category

“functionalist psychology,” one might be tempted to hold, with Leahy, that

the ideas of reflex arc paper were “the commonplaces of functionalism.” Butthe temptation should be resisted, especially since, more important, Leahy

goes on to conclude that “Dewey’s formulation was centrally important to

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later American psychology” (1992: 282). His grounds for this claim are of in-

terest. Dewey showed, he wrote, that psychology could dispense with an “aninaccessible ego” and instead “account for the control of perception and de-

cision in terms of coordinated, ever-changing adaptive behaviors (282). There

is a sense in which Dewey did show this, but unfortunately, nobody followed

his sort of solution. Indeed, in the effort to sustain a genuinely “scientific”

psychology, anything that hinted that “mind” was doing the coordinating

would be either eliminated, or as Boring had noted, made safe by appropriate

“translation.”12

Scientism and Scientific Psychology

J. B. Watson’s “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” (1913) is generally

taken to be the founding document. Watson had little patience for philosophy

and was a diligent experimenter. For him, the “new psychology” had pro-

duced no systematic body of knowledge (Boring, 1950: 642) and introspec-

tion was incapable of producing consensus on anything. It was “more inter-

esting to study behavior for its own sake, describing it and noting its

functional use to the behaving organism” (1950: 641). One could observe

“discriminatory behavior” in both animals and humans. All reference not

merely to “will” or “attention” could be dispensed with, but so too “sensa-

tion” and “perception.” All could be restated in terms of “discriminatory re-

sponse.” Imagery and feeling were another matter. Watson denied both. 13

In the ensuing years, “stimulus” will be employed to suit nearly any pur-

pose, from a physical input or physiological event to “a situation or an in-

volved object with meaning encrusted on it” (Boring, 1929: 586). All of this,

to be sure, was “scientific” defined exactly in positivist terms. By the 1930s,Percy Bridgman’s notion of an “operational definition” was absorbed by the

reigning “logical positivism. Thus, propelled and legitimated by the wedding

of traditional Humean empiricism and the extensionalist logic of Principia

Mathematica, “logical positivism” could vindicate the so-called “Age of

Theory. ” With “intervening variables” and “hypothetical constructs, S-R

psychology could even offer gestures in the way of central processes (Koch:

1964). Indeed, it was during the heyday of the Age of Theory that the Psy-

chological Review applauded Dewey’s reflex-arc essay, exactly because it

seemed at least to allow for both central processes, as per Hull-Spence and

teleology, as per Tolman, of course, all properly “operationalized.”14 If it

seems unlikely that the judges could have misunderstood Dewey’s paper, we

can note also that Watson fully admitted being perplexed by Dewey. Al-though he had been drawn to Chicago to study with Dewey, in his autobiog-

raphy Watson wrote: “I never knew what he was talking about then, and


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unfortunately for me, I still don’t know (cited by Fancher, 1979: 312; Robin-

son, 1981),Philosophically grounded in nominalist logic and Humean empiricism,

psychology has become “objective” and “instrumental” with a vengeance.

And in that same 1913 programatic statement, having redefined “experimen-

tal psychology” in behaviorist terms, Watson could also see the future of

American psychology.

Those branches of psychology which have already partially withdrawn from the

parent, experimental psychology, and which are consequently less dependent

upon introspection are today in the most flourishing condition. Experimental

pedagogy, the psychology of drugs, the psychology of advertising, legal psy-

chology, the psychology of tests, and psychopathology are all vigorous growths

(Watson, 1963: 158).

It should be emphasized that it mattered less that introspection had been ex-

punged, but that “atomism” had prevailed, and that the theoretical (sic) goal

of scientific psychology had been transformed from an effort to understand

“the mind in use” to “the prediction and control of behavior”(Samelson,

1979; Manicas, 1987; Danziger, 1990) We can this most clearly in the case of

“experimental pedagogy” and “the psychology of tests.”

Although the tools were created in Europe, Boring is correct to argue, “the

psychology of tests is essentially American.” And, as Lewis Terman insisted,

it “brought psychology down from the clouds and made it useful to men”

(quoted by Samelson, 1979: 106). Poor Dewey would be again credited, if not

directly, at least by innuendo.15 In 1929, Boring was clear that it was the func-

tional psychology of G. Stanley Hall and Cattell that prepared “the psycho-

logical soil” for tests and measurements, but as with educational psychology,it was James and Dewey who provided “its philosophical sanction” (Boring,

1950, 570). Indeed, in the pages preceding this remark, Boring presumes to

have shown “how this spirit of America was crystallized by Dewey and An-

gell at Chicago” (545–46)!!

Similar confusions attend Dewey’s work in educational psychology, espe-

cially as that is often confounded with the work of his colleague at Columbia,

E. L. Thorndyke. Unfortunately, space forbids an extended discussion of

Dewey’s contributions—and the misunderstandings of them. Briefly, every-

one recognizes that Dewey emphasized “intelligent problem solving, in

which each child solves the problems that are confronted by selecting appro-

priate materials and methods and by learning to adapt these materials and

methods to his or her needs” (Hilgard, 1987: 674). This emphasis derived di-rectly from insights already set out in his early psychological writings, and,

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of course, they were developed extensively in the work in experimental logic.

It is also recognized, remarkably perhaps, that his “intellectual heritage” of Dewey’s views on education was a critical appropriation from European

thinkers, including Rousseau, Pestalozi, Froebel and Herbart, “particularly

the doctrine of interest, which he apparently permitted to cover also the

Herbartian concept of apperception” (Hilgard, 1987: 674). Indeed, as Hilgard

appreciates, although both preached “scientific method,” in marked contrast

to Dewey, Thorndyke was conservative, aiming not at innovation in the

schools, but at “quality control,” a consequence of the fact that “Thorndyke

was first of all an experimenter and measurer who valued data above all else”

(671). This was a result, of course, of his version of “functionalism,”—S-R

“connectionism,” and made him an ally of the more general movement in

testing. As Hilgard remarks: “Largely as a consequence of Thorndyke’s in-

sistence on measurement of all aspects of education, supported by the promi-

nence that intelligence and achievement testing had received just before and

after World War I, the decade of the 1920s was one in which educational psy-

chology flourished” (Hilgard, 1987: 682). But to repeat: this was emphati-

cally not an educational psychology that was in any sense Deweyan. To be

sure, adding to confusion, Dewey’s efforts at reform went in parallel to this

development—even if in fundamental ways, they were at odds.

The fundamental problem here, as with “functionalism,” is the flabbiness

as regards “pragmatism,” especially its relation to “positivism.” For example,

Boring is good on the early relation of psychology to Machist positivism, and

properly identifies the importance of 1930s positivism as regards behavior-

ism, but he makes no mention, in either edition of his influential book, of

Dewey “instrumentalism.” Hilgard discusses positivism and pragmatism, but

is not at all clear, offering both that “there are distinctions to be made amongvarious forms of positivism and pragmatism” (Hilgard, 1987, 777) and that

the conception of “scientific method” of later behaviorism was “continuous

with the pragmatism of James and the instrumentalism of Dewey” (778).

Leahy links James to Mach and thence to the logical positivists who influ-

enced behaviorism” (Leahy, 1992: 148), but omits reference here to Dewey.

Despite his welcome concern with the philosophy of science, Leahy pays no

attention to Dewey’s theory of inquiry nor to his views of science. More gen-

erally, for him, the dominant influence of pragmatism was its role in promot-

ing a scientistic Zeitgeist for America: “American psychologists . . . offered a

science with pragmatic ‘cash value.’ Pragmatism demanded that ideas be-

come true by making a difference in human conduct.” For him, this entailed

that psychology be applied: adjustment, testing and control (Leahy, 1992:342).


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Dewey and Academic Psychology Part Ways

After the mid 1890s, Dewey wrote nearly nothing, which could be said to finda place in the emerging discipline of American psychology.16 Several reviews

give us some additional insight into why this was so. His 1898 review of

Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development , offers

a critical distinction: between examining the individual from the standpoint

of psychical process and determining what of this is social, and examining not

the process but the content of the individual’s experience to discover what

this has in common with others (EW, 5: 385–86). For Dewey, the first belongs

to psychology, the second to sociology. Baldwin confuses these question be-

cause he falls into a trap: Both “the individual” and “the society” are taken as

given. Accordingly, “when we want to know about the individual we are re-

ferred to society; when we want to know about society we are referred to the

individual” (388).17

This theme is elaborated in the address, “The Need for Social Psychology”

(MW , Vol. 10), given in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the APA in

1916. Ludy Benjamin (1988: 419) well captures the characteristic misunder-

standing of Dewey’s essay. He notes that the address, given shortly after Wat-

son’s manifesto, “linked behaviorism with the development of social psy-

chology in the service of social control.”18 This not only capitulates to myth,

but utterly misses Dewey’s central point. Arguing that “anything which may

properly be called mind or intelligence is not an original possession but is a

consequence of the manifestation of instincts under the conditions supplied

by associated life” (MW, 10: 59), Dewey endorses Tarde’s view that “all psy-

chological phenomena can be divided into the physiological and the social,

and that when we have relegated elementary sensation and appetite to the for-mer head, all that is left of our mental life is, our beliefs, ideas and desires,

falls within the scope of social psychology” (MW, 10: 54).

Although both “the application of statistical methods” and “the behav-

ioristic movement” were just getting started, Benjamin would seem to have

been misled by Dewey’s optimistic belief that both would contribute to

what, he believed, was needed. Thus: “Social phenomena are of a kind

which demand statistical mathematics” and the behavioristic movement

“transfers attention from vague generalities regarding social consciousness

and social mind to the specific processes of interaction which take place

among human beings” (Dewey, MW, 10: 57). Indeed, Dewey (remarkably!)

foresees “a great reflex wave from social psychology back into general psy-

chology” (58). “The net outcome of the newer type of psychological

method” will then be “an unexpected confirmation of the insight of Tarde

that what we call ‘mind’ means essentially the working of certain beliefs

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and desires, and that these in the concrete –in the only sense in which mind

may be said to exist –are functions of associated behavior . . .” (59). Weneed to be clear that his suggestion that “from the point of view of the psy-

chology of behavior all psychology is either biological or social psychol-

ogy” (63), was both radical and unheard.

Dewey’s optimism regarding the future of psychology should have been

tempered. Indeed, just three years earlier, in a paper read at a joint session

of the American Philosophical and American Psychological Associations

on “The Standpoint and Method of Psychology,” he expressed fears about

the direction of “the behavioristic movement.” It was quite thing to throw

out “consciousness” as private and open only to introspection. It was quite

another thing to throw out “mind” in the sense just noted. “To conceive be-

havior exclusively in terms of the changes ongoing on within an organism

physically separate in space from other organisms is to continue that con-

ception of mind which Professor Perry has well termed, ‘subcutaneous’”

(MW , 7: 54). His criticisms paralleled those made against S-R psychology:

“In so far as behaviorists tend to ignore the social qualities of behavior,

they are perpetuating exactly the tradition against which they are nomi-

nally protesting” (54).

So far as I can tell, Dewey explicitly discussed ongoing work in psychol-

ogy only twice more. In 1927, in his essay, “Body and Mind” (LW, Vol. 3),

he argued that in consequence of neglecting the development and historical

career of an individual, “an account of the mechanism of a particular move-

ment of behavior is converted into an account of behavior itself and of be-

havior in its entirety” (LW, 3: 33). “The criticism may be broadened to take

in the whole reduction of mental phenomena to the stimulus-response type as

that reduction obtains in current psychological theory, even among those whodo not call themselves behaviorists” (3: 33–34, my emphasis).

By this time it was clear to Dewey that there was very little about academic

psychology that he could endorse. Already by 1903, he saw that what he

wanted to say did not need psychology—at least as it was then conceived, that

“logic,” articulated within a thoroughgoing naturalism was the way to go. Of

course, “logic” for Dewey did not mean what it meant for most. It was, as I

shall insist, a strong form of an ecological psychology.

We need not review the development of Dewey’s views on logic, which

includes not only the The Studies in Logical Theory (1903) and How

We think (1911), but Human Nature and Conduct (1922) and Experience

and Nature (1926), along with a host of pertinent essays. Instead, we can

directly consider his 1938 Logic, the text, which is the culmination of thisdevelopment.19


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PART II “LOGIC” AND THE NEW

“COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY”

Principia Logic and Empiricist Epistemology

“Logic” for Dewey regarded the theory of inquiry and inquiry, for him, was

a problem-solving activity. In 1958, Allen Newell, Clifford Shaw and Herbert

A. Simon published “The General Problem-Solver,” a computer “simulation”

of human problem solving. This provoked an entirely new direction for sci-

entific psychology. Behaviorism in the form that Skinner had taken it had ut-

terly discounted “central processes.” “Age of Theory” S-R psychology, from

Hull-Spence to Tolman to Estes, had made gestures in the direction of these,

but with the new technologies, an entirely different approach was possible:

“an information-processing paradigm that has generality across artificial and

natural problems-solving systems” (Wagman, 1998: 11).Remarkably, Dewey’s remarks in 1884 regarding his hopes for the “the new

psychology” expressed a prophetic caution: Would the new cognitive psy-

chology make “mental life” “a theater for the exhibition of independent au-

tonomous faculties, or a rendezvous in which isolated, atomic sensations and

ideas may gather, hold external converse and then forever part”? (EW, I: 56).

Indeed, would it, like “the old psychology” hold to “a nominalist logic” and

re-institute” formal logic as a method and test” (I: 58), As with Hume, would

it proceed “on the basis of “purely logical models,” “abstract principles of dif-

ference and identity . . . put in the guise of psychological expression”?

Amazing as it might seem, this is exactly what it did. And the reason for

this turns precisely on the question of whether we should or should not accept

the still dominant empiricist epistemology of which the logic of Russell andWhitehead is an essential element. For Dewey “logic” is the theory of inquiry,

naturalistic envisaged. It is sufficiently general “to explain the behaviors of

simple biological systems but also those of, say, a human scientific commu-

nity” (Burke, 1994: 23). It was intended to replace “epistemology” as that had

been conceived. Nor was there a “foundation”of knowledge problem.

“Logic” or “inquiry into inquiry” was for him “autonomous” in that it was “a

circular process” which did not need “foundations,” either in epistemology,

metaphysics or psychology. Indeed, it was the supposition that it did that had

forestalled an adequate understanding of knowing. In a wonderful under-

statement, he notes that “a sound psychology” may be a great advantage and

that “unsound psychology has done great damage” (LW, 12: 29).

For the standard view, logic is basically a formal theory of linguistic syn-

tax and insofar as “true belief” is a function of both the “knowledge base” and

the “inference mechanisms,” it plays an essential role in epistemology. In

sum, it is the aim of traditional epistemology to establish the grounds for dis-

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criminating beliefs as either true or false. Thus, the primary vehicle is the sen-

tence. Second, the problem of the “knowledge-base” takes the form of iden-tifying “the proposition or meaning of a sentence with the information con-

veyed.” Quine notes “some epistemologists would catalog [the] alternatives

by introspection of sense data. Others, more naturalistically inclined, would

look to neural stimulation.” Third, “if logic is to be centrally concerned with

tracing truth conditions through the grammatical constructions, an artificial

grammar designed by logicians is bound to assign the truth functions a fun-

damental place among its constructions . . . The simple sentences are got by

predication, and all further sentences are generated from these by negation,

conjunction, and existential quantification” (Quine, 1970: 35–36). That is,

standard logic is extensionalist logic. A consequence of this is the incapacity

to deal with intentionality or to provide a convincing analysis of causality and

of lawfulness.20 Finally, empiricist epistemology is epistemologically indi-

vidualist in holding that there are beliefs for which social causes are wholly

irrelevant. (See Chapter 6, below.)

I specifically select Quine here to represent current empiricist epistemol-

ogy since the point to be made holds whether one is positivist, logical em-

piricist (neo-positivist) or post-positivist, a la Quine, whether or not, that is,

one holds to a firm analytic/synthetic distinction, to a non-holist verification

theory of meaning or indeed, to one of the more recent varieties of “reliabil-

ism,” “internalism or “externalism.”21 It can hardly be doubted that the blos-

soming of AI (“artificial intelligence”) was profoundly constrained by as-

sumptions taken uncritically from standard empiricist epistemology. Here is

an early formulation:

The human brain is an information-processing system whose memories hold in-terrelated symbol structures and whose sensory and motor connections received

encoded symbols from the outside via sensory organs and send encoded sym-

bols to motor organs. It accomplishes its thinking by copying and reorganizing

symbols in memory, receiving and outputting symbols, and comparing symbol

structures for identify and difference.22

And this depends upon logic. As Zenon Pylshyn argues, ‘there is good reason

why computers can be described as processing knowledge.” This good rea-

son, which owes, he says, to Hilbert, Gödel, Russell and Whitehead, Turing

and Church, was this:

Reasoning about meaningful things—about things in the world or in the

imagination—could be carried out by a process that itself knew nothing of theworld or of meanings, did not know what ‘thoughts’ were about . . .

The idea that logical inference can be carried out by a process of examining

meaningless symbols leads directly to the foundational assumption of cognitive


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science, which is that thought is species of computing . . . The bridge from for-

mal symbol manipulation to computing was completed in 1936 by the mathe-

matician Kurt Gödel who showed that anything that could be described in terms

of manipulations of symbols could be carried out by a simple machine (later

called a Turing machine), which became the defining property of reasoning and

later of intelligent action” (Lepore and Pylshyn, 1999: 6–7).

For AI theory, “the intelligent organism is a sentential automaton, whose be-

havior is the outcome of a sequence of mental states (beliefs that p, desire that

p, etc.) and the processing will be described in terms of the semantic and syn-

tactic relations among the content-specifying sentences” (Churchland, 1980:

188; Wagman, 1998: 25). Accordingly, AI inquiry can proceed, not only in-

dependently of organism/environment relations, but independently of neuro-

physiology as well.

This paradigm has not, to be sure, proceeded without criticism.23

An im-portant challenge comes from the so-called “connectionist” or neural network

paradigm. This approach assumes that sensory, motor and, ultimately, cogni-

tive processes are explained in terms of inhibitory or excitatory connections

between “nodes” which differ in strength. “The language of connectionism is

differential equations rather than mathematical logic” (Wagman: 26). A brain

model of the mind replaces the computer model of mind. Cognition is viewed

as “the emergence of global states in a network of simpler components. In-

stead of symbols, meaning resides in these emergent global states. Instead of

processing “information” provided to mind by senses, minds create informa-

tion for their own uses (Varella, Thompson and Rosch, 1991).24

An Ecological Psychology?

It is clear that while “the symbolic” approach is wholly inconsistent with a

Deweyan approach, the connectionist approach is not inconsistent with such

an approach. I will round out this discussion with some brief remarks on this.

First, and critically, in connectionist theory,

there will be nothing that corresponds to the classical symbolic data-structures.

Instead, context-sensitive shifting coalitions of units will correspond to single

classical representations . . . Since there are thus no neat analogues to the clas-

sical symbolic structures, the system cannot (not even tacitly) embody knowl-

edge of transition rules defined over these very structures”(Clark, 1990: 297).

Put bluntly, the constraints on an intelligent problem-solving device are “nolabels in the world, no external semantics, and no internal, unexplained ho-

munculus in the loop to provide meaning” (Franklin, 1995: 301, explicating

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the work of Edelman, 1992). These constraints were all fully articulated and

defended by Dewey.Second, as Dennett has argued, there is nothing in connectionist theory, nor

in Dewey, which forbids that human symbolic capacities are a “recent addi-

tion,” an evolutionary “enhancement” of mammalian cognitive architecture”

(Dennett, 1991: 28). Finally, there is the question of whether attention to neu-

ral networks will be sufficient to glean an understanding of problem-solving

intelligence.

The early chapters of Dewey’s Logic set out the naturalistic basis for

“logic” in his sense, beginning with the obvious fact that when people in-

quire, they “employ their eyes and ears, their hands and their brains” and that

“these organs, sensory, motor or central are biological” (LW: 12: 30). Huge

chunks of this read as if they had come directly from his reflex arc essay. For

example, in decided contrast to the then current S-R theory, he wrote:

When the stimulus is recognized to be the tension in the total organic activity

(ultimately reducible to that between contact activities and those occasioned

through distance receptors), it is seen that the stimulus in its relationship to spe-

cial activities persists throughout the entire pursuit, although it changes its ac-

tual content at each stage of the chase. As the animal runs, specific sensory ex-

citations . . . alter every change of position . . . (LW, 12: 37).

That is, there is no way to disconnect seeing and acting, nor to disconnect

these from the situation which is changing as the consequences of acting.

Other passages sound like arguments in Human Nature and Conduct .

Habits are the basis of organic learning. According to the theory of independent

successive units of excitation-reaction, [both then current S-R and later learning

theory] habit formation can mean only the increasing fixation of certain ways of

behavior through repetition . . .

Developmental behavior shows, on the other hand, that in the higher organ-

isms excitations are diffusely linked with reactions that the sequel in affected by

the state of the organism in relation to environment. In habit and learning the

linkage is tightened up not by sheer repetition but by the institution of effective

integration of organic-environing energies—the consumatory close of activities

of exploration and search (38).

And:

Even the neuro-muscular structures of individuals are modified through the in-

fluence of the cultural environment upon the activities performed . . .This modification of organic behavior in and by the cultural environment ac-

counts for, or rather is, the transformation of properties with which the present


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discussion is concerned . . . Any theory that rests upon a naturalistic postulate

must face the extraordinary differences that mark off the activities and achieve-

ments of human beings from those of other biological forms (49).

As Dewey rightly emphasized, while lower organisms are proficient problem-

solvers, there was no problem acknowledging that much human problem

solving does require “symbols” (and thus, linguistic capacities). But as he in-

sisted, it was an “intellectualist” fallacy to impose this on all problem-solving

activity. Moreover, as part of his powerful account of language, Dewey (and

Mead) insisted that the plateau of coordinated animal behavior is not irrele-

vant to communication at the linguistic level even if it cannot be reducible to

it. (See Chapter 4).

As these quoted texts imply, Dewey’s approach is not “psychologistic” if

that means (as it usually does) that “mental life” is “a theater for the exhibi-

tion of independent autonomous faculties, or a rendezvous in which isolated,atomic sensations and ideas may gather, hold external converse and the for-

ever part” (EW, I: 56). It is thus, if anything, an “ecological psychology.” As

Burke rightly notes, Dewey’s views compare to J.J. Gibson’s theory of per-

ception, which stands in marked contrast to standard “psychologistic” theo-

ries. “Ecological psychologists and Dewey share the view that perception is

not mediated by internal representational processes, which is not to hold that

it is not mediated by something. Perception is mediated, rather, by established

attunements to lawlike relations among ways of acting in the world, that is by

habits . . . ” (Burke, 1994: 93); and more generally: “Perception and cogni-

tion in general do not happen somewhere up in the head, but rather they in-

volve an interactive information-processing mesh that cuts across a simplis-

tic organism/environment distinction” (95). As cognitive scientist StanFranklin notes (following Skarda and Freeman, 1987, Edelman, 1992 and

Varela, et al, 1996), information is created not from sensory input but from

structural coupling, the dynamical relations between “subsumption architec-

ture,” accomplished by “competences,” “a series of incremental layers, each

layer connecting perception to “action” (Franklin, 1997).25

As the foregoing suggestions, not all-current connectionist inquiry would

seem able to deal with the problem initially posed by Dewey’s reflex-arch es-

say. As Hanson notes: “Connectionist models have been fundamentally about

system-level brain accounts.” And, indeed,

Without appreciating that commitment, it is hard to understand how a simpli-

fied neuron model and synaptic connectivity could be informative for actual

brain function . . . It is a common experience in the neurosciences to discover

cells that behave in some orderly way without at the same time understanding

what their larger purpose might be in terms of system-level function, which in

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turn requires a deep understanding of the way cells interact and what emergent

properties might arise when millions of cells that code for spatial, temporal or

structural properties of the world begin to compute something (Hanson, 1999:

425).

Hanson is surely correct that this problem does not go away by measuring

more cells, measuring them more precisely or measuring the molecular prop-

erties of cells. But he is overly optimistic in supposing that the problem is suf-

ficiently addressed by a systems-level theory “that takes into account some

simplified assumptions about systems of cells and simplified self-organizing

principles such as learning.” That is, if Dewey is correct, we need to be talk-

ing about an intact organism with a brain, including, ultimately, an organism

with a mind in Dewey’s sense, acting in an environment. 26 This cannot be

simulated by a computer. But it might be simulated by a robot, which could

“explore, work in, and communicate results of its ongoing activities in distantplanetary environments” (Burke, 1994: 262). Burke offers that Dewey’s log-

ical theory cannot tell us how to build such a machine, “but it does offer a

number of design principles which would, in his view, have to be treated as

fundamental, not as goals to be achieved later, once other preliminaries are

taken care of” (263). Indeed, “such an approach to AI and robotics is actually

not so foreign to work lately found in the cognitive science literature.”27 Fi-

nally, “one might want to claim that

Whether or not Dewey’s theory of knowledge is acceptable in every detail, his

type of theory, namely, a naturalistic operation-based theory geared to explain-

ing problem solving in concrete contexts, is the only one which holds any prom-

ise for handling issues in the cognitive sciences which hinge on our knowingwhat knowledge is (265).

This essay argued that there are two ironies as regards Dewey’s relation to the

discipline of psychology. The first regards the belief that his pragmatism in-

fluenced the development of psychology in American. The second irony then

is this: Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the

cutting edge of current work in psychology is so-called “cognitive psychol-

ogy.” But, remarkably, not only does Dewey’s Logic, misunderstood when it

is not ignored, give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these ap-

proaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science,

but shows us decisively why “symbolic” AI models must fail. One wonders

whethe Dewey will be ill served once again? More generally, Dewey’s type

of theory would seem to be the only one that holds any promise for under-standing the remarkable capacities of sentiment beings—including homo

sapiens sapiens.


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NOTES

1. That Wundt ultimately divorced psychology form physiology is now generally

agreed. See my account, A History of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, (Oxford:

Basil Blackwell, 1987), 182f. which follows S. Diamond, “Wundt before Leipzig,” in

R. E. Reiber (ed.), Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology (New

York: Plenum, 1980). In the last edition of the Gründzüge, he wrote:

Of the two tasks that are . . . implied by the name of physiological psychology—one

methodological, relating to the use of experiment, the other amplificatory, relating to the

corporeal basis of mental life—it is the former that is more essential to psychology itself,

while the later has value chiefly with respect to the philosophic question about the unity

of life processes” (quoted by Diamond, 1980: 169).

2. Flower and Murphey (1977) see rightly that his essay, “The New Psychology,”

“reads like a preliminary comment for Experience and Nature and that “armed withpost game wisdom,” all the “idealist” works have the promise of “the thoroughly nat-

uralistic direction of his pragmatism” (820).

3. Hilgard refers to a Berlin newspaper account of the 1896 Third International

Congress of Psychology in Munich which described Wundt as “the psychological

Pope of the Old World” and James as “the psychological Pope of the New World”

(Hilgard, 1987: 37). He offers a useful comparison of the two and rightly concludes

also “neither the psychology of Wundt nor the psychology of James persisted in

America in anything like their original forms” (1987: 65).

4. Owen J. Flanagan, Jr. (1984) gives a sympathetic reading of James’s Principles

as “the first formulation of the naturalistic position in the philosophy of mind”

(23–24).

5. Spencer’s “Transfigured Realism” (developed in his Principles of Psychology,

first edition, 1855, and many thereafter) also had no influence in the development of a scientific psychology for reasons similar to those that explain the rejection of Wundt

and James. Briefly, Spencer distinguished sharply between physiology, an “objective

science” and psychology whose data were “subjective.” But contrary to the mental-

ism of associationist (and Wundtian psychology), and to materialism, inquiry could

not be restricted to the laws of successive states of the mind. One needed also to know

how these were connected with changes in the central nervous system (“inner rela-

tions ”) and then to the external environment (“outer relations”). He called this

“aestho-physiology.” Similar moves were made by Gustav Fechner’s Psychophysics

(1860). For James’ decisive criticism of these, see above, Chapter 1, note 15, and my

“Modest Realism, Experience and Evolution,” in Roy Bhaskar (ed.), Harré and His

Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 23–40.

6. Letter to Henry Holt, his publisher, May 1990, quoted from Ralph Barton Perry,

The Thought and Character of William James, Two Vols. (Boston: Little, Brown,1935). Hilgard usefully discusses Gordon Allport’s 1943 article, “The Productive

Paradoxes of William James.” He sees six: the relation of mind and body, positivism

and phenomenology, the self, freedom and determinism, association and individual-

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ity. James, suggested Allport, “did not make them productive by synthesizing his con-

tradictory views, at least not the Principles, but left them as unsolved paradoxes”

(Hilgard, 1987: 59). Chapter 1, above, argued that “radical empiricism” was, ulti-

mately, James’ preferred solution, a solution similar to the one offered by Mach. But

this “solution” similarly had no effect on the development of American psychology.

7. The history of the use of “variable” in psychological discourse was critical

here. See Kurt Danziger (1997: 163–79). Causal relations (and hence lawfulness)

could now be construed extensionally, as “relations of variables,” or “functions” in

the mathematical sense.

8. There is now available a three volume collection, The Chicago School of Fun-

tionalism, edited by John R. Shook (Bristol: Thoemes Press, 2002).

9. Dewey must take some responsibility. In his 1922/25 “Development of Amer-

ican Pragmatism” (LW, Vol. 2), he did associate pragmatism with behaviorism, but

as the context makes clear, it was the idea that the brain was “an organ for the co-

ordination of sense stimuli” which led him to make the association. “Functionalism

/mechanism” are still unsettled issues. See the essays by Stephen Jay Gould, Christo-pher Bourse and William Wimsatt in Eliott Sober (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolu-

tionary Biology (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1984).

10. On their view, the “drift” he reported in his autobiographical essay was “an

eminently reasonable one in terms of the very ‘new question’ of the relation of psy-

chological methods to philosophy” (Flower and Murphey: 819). In addition to the

psychological articles, including several not discussed here, e.g., “The Theory of

Emotion”(1884, 1885), “The Psychology of Infant Language”(1894) and “Interpreta-

tion of the Savage Mind” (1902), Flower and Murphey trace the “drift” also in the re-

vised Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (1894), propelled by James’s Principles. The revi-

sion, remarked Dewey, was “in no sense a second edition . . . On the contrary, [the

new studies] undertake a thorough examination of the process of active experience,

and a derivation from this analysis of the chief ethical types and crisis—task , so far

as I know, not previously attempted” (EW, 4:221).11. Mead was fully in agreement with the central issue. Similarly, in arguing

against both Wundt and Watson, his problem was precisely to explain “mind” and

meaning in terms consistent with Darwin. See Chapter 4, below.

12. That is, if “behavior” is not merely “movement” then it involves intentional de-

scriptions: reference to the object, goal or meaning that it has for the agent (Taylor,

1964; Margolis, 1985). As we now appreciate, efforts to eliminate intentionality (as

in Watson) or to “operationalize” it (as in Tolman, not only failed, but must fail.

Hilgard argues “there is a family resemblance between Dewey’s position and Skin-

ner’s operant behavior, in which responses are coordinatd with the stimuli to which

they lead (Hilgard, 1966: 298 note). But, of course, Skinner’s “reinforcers” are vacu-

ous. As Taylor writes: “But although the property of having been reinforced is cer-

tainly a property of the object itself separate from other properties of size, shape, etc.,

it cannot as a stimulus property be separated. For in order for it to hold as a stimulusproperty the animal has to recognize the object as that object which was in fact rein-

forced, one has to know some other description true of it beside simply that of ‘hav-

ing been reinforced’”(Taylor, 1964: 133).


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13. It is true that many were not attracted to the more extreme physicalism of Wat-

son. They could be “experimentalists” who, employing the standard S-R jargon could

deal with “behavior” ambiguously understood. See Kurt Danziger, 1997, Chapter 9.

14. See Estes, et al, 1954 and for critique, S. Koch, 1964, “Psychology and Emerg-

ing Conceptions of Knowledge as Unity.”

15. To my knowledge, Dewey never offered his views on the psychology of men-

tal tests. There is an 1889 review of “Natural Inheritance, Galton’s Statistical Meth-

ods,” in which Dewey both encourages the use of the new techniques and notes its

limitations.

16. One might want to include Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922),

which attracted some attention from mainstream psychologists. But the combination

of Allport’s individualist social psychology, laboratory experimentation, for example,

as in Thurston, 1928 and Freud was sufficient to marginalize Dewey’s book among

psychologists.

17. This, it may be noticed, is Dewey’s version of the rejection of what is now

termed, “agent/structure dualism.” See Chapter 4, above.18. See also Leahy’s comments on this paper.”[Dewey] offered his pragmaticist

conception of mind as a social creation as the proper foundation for an experimental

psychology. Since, on Dewey’s view mind was created by society, it could be delib-

erately molded by society, and psychology, the science of the mind, could take as its

goal, the scientific management of society” (1992, 342).

19. The fundamental work has been done, by Tom Burke, in his groundbreaking,

Dewey’s New Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

20. See my essay “W. V. Quine” (2004), and M.T. Turvey, R. E. Shaw, E. S. Reed

and W. M. Mace, “Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and

Pylyshn (1981), Cognition, 9 (1981): 237–304.

21. See Susan Haack (1995) for the most thorough assessment of variants of “an-

alytic epistemology.”

22. Morton Wagman, Cognitive Science and the Mind-Body Problem (Westport:Praeger, 1998): 11, quoting J. A. Anderson, The Architecture of Cognition, 1983. In

a an earlier pertinent context, Dewey had wisely remarked, “Those who are con-

cerned with ‘symbolic logic’ do not always recognize the need for giving an account

of the reference and function of symbols . . . Any theory of logic has to take some

stand on the question of whether symbols are ready-made clothing for meanings that

subsist independently, or whether they are necessary conditions for the existence of

meanings . . .” (LW, 1938: 27). The former view neatly characterizes “symbolic AI

theory,” the latter idea is developed both in Dewey’s Experience and Nature and in

Mead’s Mind, Self and Society. See Chapter 4, below.

23. This is hardly the place to review this. For an excellent review, see Franklin,

1995. In addition to the various writings of Churchland, 1980, see Flanagan, 1984 and

Searle, 1992.

24. This approach has the much longer lineage going back to late nineteenth cen-tury neurophysiological speculations underpinning “associationist” psychology.

Hebb’s account (1949) is “purely associationist and, in the form of simple vector dot

potentials, takes on the presumption of neuronal activations and synaptic potentials”

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(Stephen Jose Hanson, “Connectionist Neuroscience: Representational and Learning

Issues in Neuroscience,” in Lepore and Pylyshyn (eds.), What is Cognitive Science?:

404). McCulloch and Pitts (1943) offered a model of the brain as a specialized com-

puting device and Rosenblatt developed a perception-learning machine, the Percep-

tron, 1962.

AI inquiry (in contrast to “natural intelligence”) in the 1970s and 80s overwhelmed

these beginnings which more lately have been rediscovered and have issued in a va-

riety of new efforts, including so-called “hybrid symbolic, connectionist” models.

25. See Rodney A. Brooks, Flesh and Machines (New York, Vintage, 2003). See

also his website: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/. Brooks’ work is discussed in a

useful essay by Robin Marantz Henig, “The Real Transformers,” The New York Times

Magazine,7 July 2007.

26. For an account of the limits of connectionism see Hans Radder, The World

Observed/The World Conceived . Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2006.

27. See the review by Judith Effken and Robert E. Shaw, “Ecological Perspectives

on the New Artificial Intelligence,” Ecological Psychology 4, (1992): 247–70. Seealso references to Rodney A. Brooks and the review in Wagman (1998: 83–95).


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63

It has not been an easy matter to judge John Dewey’s relation to the social sci-

ences in America. Most writers have held that his influence was significant.

Some of these think that this influence was a good one; others are critical,

since for them it contributed to what is seen to be a technocratic version of

social science.1 It is easy to infer what seems to have propelled this view:

Pragmatism was an important and culturally influential philosophical move-

ment in the U.S. Dewey was at Michigan and then at Chicago (with G. H.

Mead) at what was the crucial period in the genesis of the social sciences in

America; Dewey was distinctly interested in promoting a view which incor-

porated science and the scientific frame of mind; hence, Dewey’s pragmatism

must have left its mark on American social science. Those who find that this

‘influence’ was salutary also believe, I think, that on the whole academic so-cial science provides us with much needed knowledge.2

Although the premises are all true, the argument doesn’t work. It doesn’t

mainly because the key ideas are mostly either mushy or ideological (or

both?). To see this, one must be clear not only about Dewey’s version of prag-

matism, still very much contested but also about the character of social sci-

ence in America. This last requires some concrete history governed by a

philosophically sophisticated understanding of science and its possible goals.

For me, what may be termed “mainstream” social science is generally a dis-

aster for substantially the reasons pointed to by Dewey’s erstwhile colleague,

Thorsten Veblen. Veblen insisted that social science had as its task, “inquiry

into the nature and causes, the working and the outcome, of [the] institutional

apparatus.”3

Such inquiry need bear “no colour of iconoclasm,” since even if it did not, its outcome “will disturb the habitual convictions and preconcep-

tions upon which they rest.” Instead, “usages and conventions that have by

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habit become embedded in the received scheme of use and wont, and so have

been found to be good and right” are given scientific legitimation. The resultis “a `science’ of complaisant interpretations, apologies, and projected reme-

dies” (1957: 136). Veblen’s objection, like mine and Dewey’s, is not that so-

cial scientists were reformers but rather that they were not good scientists.

As regards Dewey, we are just now, I think, beginning to get clearer about

his instrumentalism, despite the ill-conceived effort to appropriate it for post-

modernist purposes, and even if the two most recent full length accounts, one

by an historian, the other by a philosopher, say precious little of any use about

how it bears on Dewey’s conception of science, including social science.4 In

this essay, accordingly, I want to develop Dewey’s scattered views on social

science, both as he came to understand what they had become, and what they

might be. Much of what he did say gave ample room for both misunder-

standing and misappropriation.5 Still, there remains in Dewey’s philosophy

some untapped resources for reconstituting social science.

The Origins of Social Science in America

It is of considerable importance to notice that the modern disciplines of the so-

cial sciences are an American invention that European Universities had nothing

like what we now take for granted as social science. Indeed, some of the disci-

plines were not part of European higher education until after World War II

when, as with so much else, Americanization became the order of the day. 6

America provided the nearly perfect conditions for the modern idea of the

social sciences.7 There was, first of all, “the social problem” produced during

the Gilded Age by rapid industrialization, urbanization and massive immi-

gration. Second, America had a “weak state” in the sense that it lacked bothsignificant state bureaucracies and a strong central government. This pro-

moted responses from “civil society,” but especially from the private colleges

and universities. Third, lacking a feudal past, America was “bourgeois” from

its beginnings: As Bledsoe put it, “Americans lacked tradition as a source of

authority, but they did not lack `science.’” Before Johns Hopkins became a

university in 1876, there were no universities in America—the educational

upshot of the absence of a feudal past. Educational enterpreneurs could con-

vince the John D. Rockefellers, Carnegies and Mellons that science was just

what was needed and that it could be produced with good effect in the new

institutions. Finally, as science had itself been industrialized, a group of Eu-

ropean philosopher/physicists had articulated a thoroughly positivist under-

standing of the successful sciences, from the practically irrelevant idea of “science” as theoria, to a practically relevant productive and predictive in-

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strument whose ultimate vindication was its capacity to generate technologies

“for the relief of man’s estate.”Indeed, for the men (sic) in “the institutions of higher learning,” the prob-

lem was not class war, but ignorance. Social problems surely were no less

subject to “scientific” solutions than other problems. Moreover, since for

them there was nothing fundamentally wrong with America’s basic institu-

tions, these problems could be dealt with as technical questions in a piece-

meal, ameliorative fashion. But if social scientists were to be professional

with legitimate claims to authority and autonomy, they must mark out their

scientific territories, clear away all that was non-scientific, and establish their

own system of credentialing. What this meant was clear enough: It meant es-

tablishing distinct disciplines exactly in the terms which they believed any

true science must be constituted. The outcome, settled between the wars, was

the disciplines of the social sciences, as we know them today. This was, then,

the context in which Dewey reflected. Where, we may ask, did he fit in?

DEWEY AND THE ORIGINS OF ACADEMIC SOCIAL SCIENCE

Dewey said very little about the social sciences and although one finds

throughout the corpus references to science, one finds too little in the way of

a systematic account of science. Most of the terms descriptive of science and

in general use were—and are—vague and uncritically employed: for exam-

ple, cause, law, theory, explanation and experimental method. Dewey, like

most writers today could take these terms for granted even if, as I would in-

sist, one can get contradictory conceptions of science from different analyses

of them. This unclarity should not surprise us. What we now think of as animportant sub-discipline of philosophy, philosophy of science, emerged only

in the 1950s and it is only in the 1970s that there has been a genuine com-

petitor to the positivist interpretation of science.

Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, published in 1938, is surely the main excep-

tion to the overall absence of texts on Dewey’s theory of science. What is

there is very important, but there are many important questions which Dewey

did not address and, typically, he does not make much effort to place his ef-

fort in the context of other writers on science, Vienna positivism, for exam-

ple. When the Logic was published, As Ralph Sleeper has argued, it was both

ignored and misunderstood, so thoroughgoing were entrenched assumptions

about logic and science. Moreover, by this time, systematic misunderstanding

of Dewey was also well entrenched.8 Accordingly, it was not then and is notnow a genuine competitor for the received view.

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At bottom is an ill-developed conception of science, which is distinctly

Deweyan. On the positivist, technocratic conception, the aim of science isprediction and control. To achieve this one needs only confirmed regularities,

laws or law-like statements. On this view, since they can be no part of sci-

ence, ends are given or assumed and the only question is means. Since it is

not within the realm of social science to decide on goals, the social scientist

(qua social scientist) is “neutral” regarding who his work serves.

For Dewey, none of the foregoing was true, but for reasons noted, is not an

easy matter to get a firm grip of Dewey’s alternative view. There is a sense in

which it is utterly unique, the consequence of his radical position in episte-

mology. His “instrumentalism” involves a rejection of the “epistemological

problem,” and thus of the fact/value dichotomy. It offered a unique concep-

tion of “control” and a confusing conception of the character of theory and of

the goals of science. I try to keep my account focused, as much as possible,

on what Dewey had to say about social science.

DEWEY’S REJECTION OF THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM

Modern philosophy, responding to the new science, has been haunted by “the

epistemological problem,” the problem of justifying true belief. As argued in

Chapters 1 and 2, Dewey rejected the assumptions, which generated the prob-

lem. Failure to see this has misled many otherwise astute commentators.

Dorothy Ross, for example, singles out Dewey’s (1897) lecture, “The Signif-

icance of the Problem of Knowledge” as a critical intervention on the side of

the technocrats. But this is far from being the case: Its thrust is against tradi-

tional foundationist epistemology: rationalist, sensationalist and Kantian.Dewey writes:

Knowledge can define the percept and elaborate the concept, but their union can

be found only in action. The experimental method of modern science, its erec-

tion into the ultimate mode of verification, is simply this fact obtaining recog-

nition (EW, Vol. 5: 21).

Contrary to the epistemologists, there is no problem of knowledge in gen-

eral: philosophy is “not an original fountainhead of truth.” And this means

that for answers to questions about how knowledge is possible we need

to look to psychology and social ethics—“including in the latter term all

the related concrete social sciences, so far as they may give guidance toconduct” (22). Dewey’s project was to naturalize epistemology and moral

theory.9

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Psychology is naught but the account of the way in which conscious life is . . .

progressively maintained and reorganized. Psychology is the attempt to state in

detail the machinery of the individual considered as the instrument and organ

through which social action operates (23).

Similarly,



them together in somewhat aimless fashion . . . But social ethics represents the

attempt to translate philosophy from a general and therefore abstract method

into a working and specific method; it is the change from inquiring into the na-

ture of value in general to an inquiry of the particular values which ought to be

realized in the life of everyone, and of the conditions which shall render possi-

ble this realization (23).

This is stunning research program for social science, stunningly ignored. We

need to be clear about this. Dewey believed, rightly, that human sciences

could help us to understand ourselves: how we think and inquire and why,

when thinking and inquiry is successful, it is successful. They would give us

insight into what were our genuine interests and purposes and their relations,

and most obviously, they would give us an understanding of the obstacles in

present arrangements, which keep us from realizing our genuine interests and

purposes. The human sciences would be emancipating in exactly the sense

that they would clear away misconceptions about ourselves and our arrange-

ments and empower us to reconstruct the social world more in accordance

with our wants and aims.

Central to this project was the rejection of the bifurcation of fact and value,a further consequence of the mistaken assumptions that had generated “the

epistemological problem.” In his Logic, Dewey argued that “most current so-

cial inquiry” was marked by “the separation of theory and practice” (LW, 12:

487). It is sound principle, Dewey says, that one should avoid making social

judgments “on the ground of moral preconceptions, conceptions of what is

right and wrong, vicious and virtuous” (489). But this is mistakenly converted

to the principle that one should make no evaluations about ends. These are,

accordingly, precluded from inquiry. But “only recognition in both theory and

practice that ends to be attained (ends-in-view) are of the nature of hypothe-

ses and that hypotheses have to be formed and tested in strict correlativity

with existential conditions as means, can alter current habits of dealing with

social issues” (491).If one wants a ready current example, consider poverty. What indeed, are

the possible ends-in-view of current policy and what, accordingly, are the


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existential conditions that are demanded for their satisfaction? It is easy to

deal here with high abstractions, “getting people off welfare,” “getting peo-ple to work,” “ensuring that people can acquire skills and knowledge which

will make them employable,” and to leave up in the air, unexamined, the req-

uisite “existential conditions.” Although I cannot prove this here, I would in-

sist that the modern social sciences must take large measure of responsibility

for the shallowness of the usual understanding of problems like poverty and

crime.10

Moreover, it is easy to assume that “the problems which exist are already

definite in their main features,” and if so, then inquiry could be aimed at find-

ing the best methods of solution. The result is that “methods for resolving

problematic situations are proposed without any clear conception of the ma-

terial in which projects are to be applied and to take effect,” with often a

worsening of the situation which generated the inquiry (LW, 12: 487). The

analogy between current modes of inquiry in social science and pre-scientific

medicine was apt. As Dewey noted elsewhere, such practice was a combina-

tion of empiricism and quackery: Without analysis, symptoms were re-

sponded to in terms of handed down remedies. Of course, these sometimes

worked. But as regards medicine at least, “it is now recognized that choice of

remedial measures looking to restoration of health is haphazard until the con-

ditions which constitute the trouble or disease have been determined as com-

pletely and accurately as possible” (488).

The poverty example again illustrates this: It is held that people are not

working and that present arrangements make them welfare-dependent. The

solution is obvious: eliminate welfare. But it does not take much to see that

the conditions which constitute the trouble begin with the absence of jobs

which would pay enough to take a family out of poverty and that one wouldneed here to be clear about a host of other attending steps and conditions to

make this possible.

The self-imposed constraints of “allegedly scientific social inquiry” also

explain the positivist penchant for “fact-gathering.” Dewey had attacked this

idea in his 1931 essay, “Social Science and Social Control.” Dewey offered

“the existing limitations of `social science’ (Dewey’s quotation marks) are

due mainly to unreasoning devotion to physical science as a model, and to a

misconception of physical science at that” (LW, 6: 64). In the Logic, Dewey

held that methods adopted “in the professed name of social science” are

merely the form of genuine science since they fail “to observe the logical con-

ditions which in physical science give the techniques of observing and mea-

suring their standing and force” (LW, 12: 492). There are many places whereDewey assessed current social science as deficient. Moreover, it is surprising

that the foregoing explanation of the deficiency is overlooked by Ross and

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other writers who accuse Dewey of contributing to “scientism.” In this essay

(as in the Logic), Dewey held: “. . . [T]he facts of social ‘fact-finding’remaina miscellaneous pile of meaningless items.” “Since their connections with hu-

man wants and their effect on human values are neglected, there is nothing

which binds them together into an intelligible whole” (LW, 6: 65).

Dewey was surely aware that his colleagues, among them Merriam at

Chicago and Ogburn at Columbia had by then established “fact-gathering” as the

goal of social science.11 This was, of course, a main target of Robert Lynd’s

Knowledge for What? (1939), a book that was both very Deweyan and very

much out of the mainstream. Indeed, in a related section of the Logic, Dewey de-

veloped an argument that C.W. Mills will pick up in his 1959 Sociological Imag-

ination. Dewey saw two one-sided distortions. The “positivist” school (his term)

singlemindedly directs itself as “fact-finding”—what Mills had called “ab-

stracted empiricism.” But the opposing tendency “places its entire emphasis on

conceptions” (LW, 12:497)— what Mills called “Grand Theory.” “Facts are sub-

sumed directly under `principles,’ the latter being regarded as fixed norms that

decide the legitimacy or illegitimacy of existing phenomena and that prescribe

the end toward which endeavor should be directed” (497).

There is another issue, part of his more general instrumentalist theory of in-

quiry that needs to be introduced if we are to have any hopes of grasping

Dewey’s thoughts on science.

INSTRUMENTALISM AND SCIENCE

Dewey’s commitments to scientific method, his persistent attacks on inquiry

detached from human concerns and his extensive use of technologicalmetaphors have caused enormous confusion, almost certainly because as

Dewey himself saw, modern science had not been the salvific force that it was

once hoped to be. (See Chapter 1).

Surely the most far-reaching attempt to illuminate Dewey’s philosophy is

terms of “technology” is Larry Hickman’s John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technol-

ogy (1990). It may be that Hickman goes too far in asserting that “late in his

life, technology became a synonym for the very method of inquiry” (1991: 1);

but Hickman wisely glosses Dewey’s “instrumentalism” by arguing that

“Dewey goes beyond theory and beyond praxis to production: his concern is

with the making and testing of new entities including extra-organic tools as

well as goals and ideals” (15). “Science” in this sense is a more refined and

developed form of all inquiry.Thus, in the Logic, Dewey insists, “there is no sharp dividing line between

common sense and science.” “Gradually and by processes that are more or less


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tortuous and originally unplanned, definite technical processes and instrumen-

talities [were] formed and transmitted.” It was just these, which allowed for“control.” “Control”—as Hickman says, a synonym for knowledge—does not

refer to the subordination or domination of something. Rather, as Dewey

makes clear enough, “control” refers to our capacity to apply intelligence suc-

cessfully: to produce, adapt, adjust, accommodate, achieve, institute, identify,

order, discriminate, and to “resolve” problems in many other sorts of ways.

“Control” has been achieved when the problem, which generated inquiry, has

been resolved.

It is in this sense, also, that “practical” must be understood. These “techni-

cal processes and instrumentalities” then become “the background of materi-

als and operations which we term science” (LW, 12: 77). And, indeed,

Genuine scientific knowledge revived when inquiry adopted as part of its own

procedure and for its own purpose the previously disregarded instrumentalitiesand procedures of productive workers. This adoption is the radical characteris-

tic of the experimental method of science (LW, 12: 99, 388–89).12

But this does entail a collapse of science into technology in the sense that all

inquiry has some immediate practical aim and surely not in the sense that we

can and should seek to dominate nature. All knowing is technological in the

sense that if the problematic situation is to be brought under “control,” lan-

guage, mathematics and/or artifacts of various kinds are required. Indeed,

more generally, this is consequence of Dewey’s attack on the “spectator the-

ory of knowledge.” But the difference between science and common sense is

exactly that while commonsense inquiry “occurs for the sake of settlement of

some issue of use and enjoyment,” scientific inquiry occurs “for its own sake”(LW, 12: 66–67.)

Dewey’s position here is almost always overlooked. Dewey did not reject

the (Greek) idea that inquiry could be aimed solely at understanding. He re-

jected the bifurcation of theory and practice, the idea that one could under-

stand anything without “tools” and without “experimental operations, involv-

ing definite techniques” (LW, 12: 151, 420, 455). Of course, it would be hard

to deny that understanding may well promote the development of technolo-

gies—a key feature of late nineteenth century industrialized science. This

leaves open the question of whether this was, as Dewey would sometimes at

least seem to suggest, the ultimate justification of science.13

I want to say more about “experimental operations,” but we need here to

notice that the continuity between science and commonsense creates a very

special burden for social science. Cultural conditions impact all inquiry—a

critical point for a sociology of science, but because “the physical” is “rela-

tively independent of social issues,” “the influence of cultural conditions” is

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“indirect.” For example, “it is not possible . . . to separate nineteenth century

devotion to exclusively mechanical conceptions from the needs of industry of that period.” In social science, by contrast, “prejudices of race, nationality,

class and sect play such an important role that their influence is seen by any

observer of the field” (LW, 12: 482). It is, however, more than annoying to

notice that Dewey did not, as far as I can tell, say much about how such prej-

udices were influencing the social sciences.

SCIENTIFIC LAWS AND CAUSALITY

Critical to any understanding of science is the conception of law and causal-

ity. We can here briefly summarize the relevant conclusions of the previous

chapters of this volume. First, Dewey rejected the most characteristic, evendefining features of empiricist philosophy of science: that “scientific laws are

formulations of uniform and unconditional sequences of events,” and that

causality must be defined in terms of such sequences (LW, 12: 437). Of all the

doctrines, which currently inform mainstream social science, these are surely

the most pernicious. Once accepted, we are committed to an event ontology

and a regularity determinist view of the universe: Whenever this, then that. It

is then also easy to assume a covering law model of explanation, and thus to

hold also that prediction and explanation are symmetrical. One final conse-

quence is the inability to conceptualize agency: the fact that persons make

things happen. But as Dewey rightly sees, “there are no such things as uni-

form sequences of events” (LW, 12: 445).

Second, he argued, “atoms and molecules show a selective bias in their in-differences, affinities and repulsions to other events” (LW, 1:162). These “se-

lective biases,” he says, define their “essence,” a term Dewey used without

prejudicing his fully processual view of the universe. But since on a realist

view, the “things” of the universe are always related to other “things,” out-

comes are never guaranteed. Thus, “iron as such exhibits characteristics of

bias or selective reactions,” but “iron as a genuine constituent of an organized

body acts so as to end to maintain the type of activity of the organism to

which it belongs” (195). In a living organism, it functions not to produce iron-

oxide—as it would in a hinge—but to contribute to metabolism.

Moreover such moves are quite consistent with his idea that commonsense

inquiry is continuous with advanced science. Dewey gives some examples:

“A good rain will cause the seeds that have been planted to grow.” The ex-

pectations are “explained” by the unscientific person by attributing a power

to rain. The empiricist disallows this, but content with an effort to establish

the validity of the expectations, he does not seek to understand the “power.”


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Dewey sees, rightly, that “from the standpoint of scientific inquiry, these ex-

pectations are but material of problems” (LW, 12: 446). He may, however,miss the main point. That is, if the scientific problem is to try to provide a

more refined regularity or to fill in ever-larger numbers of “variables,” then

he has succumbed to the regularity determinist conception.14 On realist

grounds, the scientific problem is not, as positivists would have it, to close the

system in order to make better predictions. Rather the scientific problem is to

identify what is about the nature of water and of seeds such that a good rain

will (ceteris paribus) cause the seeds to grow. One needs a theory about per-

tinent causal mechanisms, not a better analysis of the “variables.”

In Quest for Certainty, he argued against empiricist ontology, both of the

naive realist sort characteristic of Greek science and of modern sensationalist

versions. “The experimental method,” he writes, “substitutes data for objects”

(LW, 4: 79). “By data is signified subject-matter for further interpretation;

something to be thought about . . . Hot and cold, wet and dry, light and heavy,

instead of being self-evident matters with which to explain phenomenon,

were things to be investigated; they were ‘effects,’ not causal principles’(LW,

4: 80). Hot, for example, is surely an effect of what is a most complicated

“causal nexus,” a nexus that includes not only the properties of bodies, but or-

ganisms, which experience.

Nevertheless, Dewey’s view needs to be distinguished from a scientific real-

ism, which holds that “things” have “causal powers.” For Dewey, causality is a

logical category, not an ontological one. For Dewey, the empiricist rightly ruled

out “occult” qualities, but then offered “a hybrid notion which took from com-

monsense the idea of succession and from the science the idea of invariability of

conjunction.” But “the contents which are invariably related in a law are not

events, and . . . their relation is not one of sequence” (LW, 12: 446). As a rejec-tion of regularity determinism, this seems right. And while I do not think that

Dewey’s positive account of causality is satisfactory, his rejection of regularity

determinism was all that is needed to distinguish his views from the prevailing

positivisms in social science. This is generally missed.

For example, Ross (1991: 253) holds that Dewey’s “Psychology and Social

Practice” is another place where he endorses technocracy. Dewey argues that

the teacher has a psychological theory, like it or not. “Teachers tell you that a

child is careless or inattentive in the same final way that they would tell you

that a piece of paper is white.” But, insists Dewey,

it is only through some recognition of attention as a mechanism, some aware-

ness of the interplay of sensations, images and motor impulses which constituteit as an objective fact that the teacher can deal effectively with attention as a

function (139).

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Dewey’s point is exactly that unless teachers have an understanding of the

student as a psycho-social being, all their efforts are bound to be misdirected,ineffective, even destructive. It is only by understanding the psychological

“mechanisms” of attention, memory, cognition and judgment and the social

“mechanisms” implicated in all experience and behavior that the teacher can

cultivate the powers of the student.15 This is for Dewey a research program to

be satisfied. We are, he says, discussing the question of the role of psycho-

logical science in education only because “we have as yet made so little head-

way” (144).

Dewey’s use of the term “mechanisms” here is notable and suggests how

far he is from a regularity determinist view. This is made even clearer in a

1918 essay entitled “ A New Social Science,” one of the very few places

where Dewey explicitly discusses social science. (The Logic is the other no-

table place.) Dewey argues against the idea, inherited from Comte and

Spencer—and still current—that “the existing social order is the product of

natural laws which are expounded in a rational, scientific way” (MW, 11: 89).

Dewey insists that World War I should finally have exposed this idea as myth:

“. . . The war has revealed that our existing social situation is in effect the re-

sult of a convergence of a large number of independently generated historic

accidents” (90). Indeed,

Any science which pretends to be more than a description of the particular

forces which are at work and a descriptive tracing of the particular consequences

which they produce, which pretends to discover basic principles to which social

things conform, and inherent laws which ‘explain’ them is, I repeat, sheer

mythology (90).

Dewey acknowledged radical contingency in the universe, a universe that

was both “precarious and stable.” There were uniformities— a consequence

of “selective biases” and there were plenty of surprises, a consequence of the

open systematic character of the world. But such a metaphysic calls for a his-

torical and concrete social science. The “description of particular forces” at

work are the analogue of the “selective biases” discoverable by physical sci-

ence. The “particular consequences” which they produce are not guaranteed

in advance because the relations of such “mechanisms” are complex and his-

torically contingent. There are no “general laws” under which we can sub-

sume and thereby explain wars, revolutions or, for that matter, hurricanes or

the genesis of a species (Manicas, 2006, Chapter 5).

Dewey concludes this brief but rich essay by remarking, “there is . . . animmense amount of empirical subjectmatter contained within the confines of

existing social sciences. The only trouble is that it has been ‘framed up’ and


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betrayed by its mythical and apologetic setting” (MW, 11: 91). He does not,

unfortunately, elaborate on this very pregnant idea.

DEWEY ON EXPERIMENTATION

Dewey’s views on experimentation certainly did not help clarify his position.

I noted that, for Dewey, one could not understand anything without “experi-

mental operations, involving technique.” There is, of course, a paradigm,

characteristic of the laboratory, but how far can this be extended? A long way

it seems.16 Thus, he insists “there is no ground whatever upon which a logi-

cal line can be drawn between the operations and techniques of experimenta-

tion in the natural sciences and the same operations and techniques employed

for distinctly practical purposes” (LW, 12: 434). But what counts here as the

“same operations and techniques”? This text continues with what may be his

most general definition:

. . . Experimentation is a form of doing and making. Application of conceptions

and hypotheses to existential matters through the medium of doing and making

is an intrinsic feature of scientific method (ibid.)17

As before, if this is a consequence of his general criticism of the spectator the-

ory of knowledge, there is no problem. On the other hand, Dewey did not, I

think, have a clear understanding of the laboratory experiment as it is actu-

ally practiced in the successful sciences and this allowed him to give the idea

a very extended sense. Only sometimes does he suggest that the main use of

an experiment is to test a well-articulated theory. On this realist view, theidea, roughly, is to deduce what the theory entails and then to establish ex-

perimental closure to see if what was “predicted” by theory under closure

does, in fact, obtain.18

But if we think of an experiment in this sense, as a situation in which a the-

ory of a “mechanism” is to be tested, then, as is very plain, this is never pos-

sible in social science—putting it at a distinct disadvantage. This is not, how-

ever, what Dewey seems to have in mind when he speaks of experimenting in

social science. In the Logic, he remarks, “every measure of policy put into

operation is, logically, and should be, actually, of the nature of an experi-

ment” (LW, 12: 502; see also LW, 12: 486). Insofar as we should make the ef-

fort to see as clearly as we can what consequences obtained after a policy was

introduced, there is good sense to this. We know, for example, that people

didn’t stop drinking alcoholic beverages when prohibition was enforced. But

this is a test of a policy not of a theory of social behavior, exactly because, as

Dewey clearly recognized, there are always a host of connected and interact-

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ing processes involved which conjointly produced the actual outcomes. In

this case, as we now know, “demand” for alcohol was satisfied by illegal pro-ducers and distributors so that, if anything, the policy served to create crimi-

nals—including law enforcement officers—and to deprive the society of any

effective control of the production and distribution of alcohol.

In his 1931 “Social Science and Social Control,” alluded to earlier, Dewey

did indeed sound technicist. He there offered that “The Five Year Plan of Rus-

sia . . . whether noble or the reverse, has many of the traits of a social exper-

iment, for it is an attempt to obtain certain specified social results by the use

of specified definite measures, exercised under conditions of considerable, if

not complete, control” (LW, 6: 65). This is, in my mind, so much nonsense:

Despite totalitarian methods of “control,” the outcomes were, as they must be,

conjoint products of a myriad of interacting activities of which some, at least,

were directly contradictory to the intentions of the planners. Here “experi-

ment,” and “control” get Dewey into unnecessary difficulty.

The example raises, as well, the question of the relation of democracy to

social scientific knowledge. For the technocrats, one “controls” the condi-

tions and gets “predictable results.” More, because “experts” have knowledge

that the “masses” lack, democracy must give way.

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY

It is easy enough to establish that World War I had a tremendous impact on

Dewey and that one of the consequences was his readiness to believe that the

war had brought forward “the more conscious and extensive use of sciencefor communal purposes.” (See Chapter 7, below). It had “made it customary

to utilize collective knowledge and skill of scientific experts of all kinds, or-

ganizing them for community ends.” The warfare state, remarkably, had laid

the foundations for the Nationalist Liberalism, which became the political

agenda of Dewey’s associates at the The New Republic. But when Walter

Lippman, already persuaded of a technocratic version of social control, pub-

lished his Phantom Public in 1925, Dewey finally came to grips with the

problem of scientific knowledge and democracy.

In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey agreed that there were a

host of “technical” questions which could be answered by “experts”: sanita-

tion, public health, healthful and adequate housing, transportation, planning

of cities, regulation and distribution of immigrants, selection and manage-

ment of personnel, right methods of instruction and preparation of competent

teachers, scientific adjustment of taxation, efficient management of funds

and so on” (LW, 2: 313). But the idea that such knowledge was sufficient was


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profoundly in error. Those who hold to such views “ignore forces which have

to be composed and resolved before technical and specialized action cancome into play” (LW, 2: 313). The problem is deep: “It is in the first instance

the search for conditions under which the Great Society may become the

Great Community” (327). The public is lost, eclipsed, inchoate, bewildered,

caught in a drift, which it cannot grasp and therefore cannot overcome. Lipp-

mann (and later C.W. Mills) was not wrong in diagnosing that the American

public was a mass, but he was wrong in thinking that social scientists should

now rule. Dewey was clear that such “experts” lacked the knowledge that was

needed. Indeed, “the prime condition of a democratically organized public is

a kind of knowledge and insight which does not exist” (339). Citizens needed

to understand what was happening and why. Some technical knowledge was

needed, to be sure, but in the absence of a widely shared understanding of the

“forces” at work, no democratic public could emerge.

Dewey is clearly correct in this analysis, but he is not as radical as he might

be in assigning the causes of this. I put aside here the problems of distribut-

ing “the kind of knowledge which does not exist,” for example, problems of

the corporate control of mass communication, and concentrate here on the

role of the social sciences themselves. In particular, while he acknowledges

the limits of the special sciences in generating such knowledge, he does not

seem to see that they contribute mightily to the mystification of what needs

to be known. Instead of illuminating and emancipating, too much contempo-

rary social science obscures and misleads.

Dewey gets his hands on some of the reasons for this. He notes that the

“backwardness of social knowledge is marked in its division into independent

and insulated branches of learning” (171).19 But this is more than a “mark” of

its “backwardness”: It guarantees backwardness. It is not merely, as he says,that there is lacking “continuous cross-fertilization,” but that fragmentation

prevents us from grasping causes and connections. Thus we are told that

poverty is a “psychological” or “cultural” problem: People lose initiative,

lack ambition, look for the easy way. The sociologist assumes that this is

“fact” (it is not!) and then tries to explain it. We are told the cause is “the

breakdown of the family” or to “welfare dependency.” Moreover, our social

scientist can, without risk, ignore an economic or historical analysis. She can,

for example, altogether ignore the lack of decent-paying jobs and the reasons

for this. The reasons can be left to the economists who tell us that markets are

self-correcting and that, accordingly, a political analysis which calls for state

intervention is self-defeating.

Dewey notes also that specialized knowledge aims to be “abstract” whichpractically means that “it is not conceived in terms of its bearing on human

life” (171). Plainly, the commitment to value-neutrality requires this. The up-

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shot, of course, is not value-neutrality, but as Veblen insisted, scientific legit-

imation of “usages and conventions that have by habit become embedded inthe received scheme of use and wont, and so have been found to be good and

right.” Social science happily conspires in persuading us that the poor have

only themselves to blame.

He argues forcefully that what counts as “news” in our daily papers is ren-

dered completely unintelligible in terms of its connections but fails to argue

that this tendency is reinforced by “fact-gathering” social science. He is cor-

rect that “a genuine social science would manifest its reality in the daily press,

while learned books and articles supply and polish tools of inquiry” (347), but

of course, it is precisely because “we” are not journalists but “social scien-

tists” that we write jargonized “learned” books and articles. As Lynd said, we

are either “scholars” or “technicians”—working for whoever will pay the bill.

Finally, for all of Dewey’s interest in education, he makes no mention of

the disastrous consequences of current patterns of education in the social sci-

ences. Instead of cultivating what Mills called “the sociological imagination,”

we offer student’s textbooks, which guarantee disciplinary fragmentation,

empty abstractions and uncritical thought. Instead of seeking causes and in-

sisting on making connections, we require “disciplinary” integrity. Instead of

raising questions about “habits embedded in the received scheme of things,”

we seek “relations of variables.”

Dewey was surely on the right track when, as early as his essay on Renan

(See Chapter 1, above), he offered some reasons for these patterns of ideol-

ogy and disinformation. He then wrote that we do not yet appreciate “the dead

weight of class interest which resists all attempts of science to take practical

form and become a “social motor.” I conclude by saying that we still do not—

itself a function of the failure of the present practices of the social sciences.

NOTES

1. For evidence that Dewey is often charged with holding to a technocratic version

of psychology and the social sciences, see Chapters 1 and 2, above. As regards Dewey

and social science more generally, see, most recently, Dorothy Ross, The Origins of

American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For Ross,

Dewey’s position was “scientistic.” See the note that follows.

2. Ross does not celebrate academic social science in America. She argues that it

is “scientistic.” “[Scientism] was the result of a long-standing commitment perenni-

ally deferred, an effort to make good on the positivist claim that only natural science

provided certain knowledge and conferred the power of prediction and control. Withscience now defined by its method, scientism demanded that the requirements of nat-

ural scientific method dominate the practice of social science (Ross, 1991: 390).


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While I very much agree with Ross as regards much academic social science, her

explanation is very different that the one I offered in my History and Philosophy of

the Social Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). She seems wrongly to assume

that the positivists provide a generally correct understanding of natural science. For

her, scientism arises only when the social sciences are constituted in positivist terms.

Ross seems to favor interpretative models “available in history and cultural anthro-

pology” or “the generalizing and interpretative model offered by Max Weber” (Ross,

1991: 473). I argued in my 1987 book that there was a third, realist alternative. It al-

lows us to incorporate the historical and hermeneutic and also to give social science

an emancipatory role. See also my A Realist Philosophy of Social Science (2006). I

suggest in what follows that Dewey seems to have stumbled toward a fourth alterna-

tive, neither positivist, realist nor “interpretative.”

3. Thorsten Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum On the

Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (New York: Sagamore, 1957: 132). This was

written before World War I and published in 1918. It remains a wonderful account.

Indeed, things have changed little. Dewey and Veblen agreed on much but it is hardto discern how the influences ran. Both had struggled with the views of Peirce.

4. See Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cor-

nell University Press, 1991) and Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of Amer-

ican Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995). Westbrook and Ryan are helpful as re-

gards Dewey’s views on democracy and politics. It is a bit surprising that Ryan pays

so little attention to issues in the theory of science, given his interests. Ryan finds

Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry “somewhat baffing”(1995: 309). This is a bit

remarkable (though not unusual) since this is the place where Dewey makes his most

fundamental assault on the conventional wisdom.

5. I think also that his influence was minimal and even though many parties, often

conflicting, were fond of drawing on him to suit their purposes. Early Chicago school so-

ciology has some Deweyan marks, but it too moved toward positivism. See Lester R.

Kurtz, Evaluating Chicago Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).G. H. Mead, of course, was the direct influence on symbolic interactionism and Mead’s

relations to Dewey remains unclear. Symbolic interactionism, in any case, was always a

minor competitor to mainstream social science. Perhaps C. W. Mills, for his all unhappi-

ness with Dewey—for many of the right reasons—is the most Deweyan social scientist.

6. The most comprehensive comparative overview of the emergence of modern so-

cial science is Wagner, P., Wittrock, B., and R. Whiteley (eds.), Discourses on Soci-

ety: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines, Sociology of Sciences Yearbook,

1991 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).

7. See my account, A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Chapter 11,

and Ross, Origins, Chapter 3.

8. See Ralph W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale Univer-

sity Press, 1986), especially Chapter 6, and Thomas Burke, Dewey’s New Logic

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).9. For a very useful account of Dewey’s theory of inquiry as epistemology see,

H. S. Thayer, “Objects of Knowledge,” in John J. Stuhr (ed.), Philosophy and the Re-

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construction of Culture (Albany: State University of New Press). See Chapter 6,

below.

10. See Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) and Her-

bert Gans, The War Against the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 1995) for review and

criticism of the contribution of recent mainstream social science to this impoverish-

ment. More recently, see Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social

Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth Century History (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2001 and my brief essay, “The Sociology of Poverty,” in Encyclopedia of

Poverty (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 2006).

11. In 1929, Herbert Hoover assembled a distinguished group of social scientists

“to examine the feasibility of a national survey of social trends . . . to undertake the

researches and to make . . . a complete impartial examination of the facts.” This was

funded by the Rockefeller foundation with support from the SSRC, one of Merriam’s

inspirations. Four years of work by hundreds of social scientists filled 1600 pages of

quantitative research. The document called “the Ogburn Report” after its director,

William F. Ogburn of Columbia, may be taken to signal the full maturation of Amer-ican-style social science.

12. It is not altogether clear what Dewey has in mind here. He may assume that the

scientific revolution of the seventeenth century owed to incorporation of techniques

derived from the workshops of craftmen. But it has been argued by Koyre, Butterfield

and Kuhn that as regards the development of the classical sciences: physics and as-

tronomy, the scientific revolution was not a consequence of new experimental tech-

niques, but of “new ways of looking at old phenonena.” Baconian experiments did,

later, give rise to a large number of newer scientific fields which had their roots in the

crafts and in alchemy. See Kuhn, 1977.

13. Having abandoned the quest for foundations, Dewey had to justify science as

a mode of fixing belief “pragmatically.” But this need not give technology a privi-

leged position. For discussion, see Chapter 6, below.

14. He writes “scientific inquiry proceeds by introducing qualifications. Theamount of arsenic has to be specified . . . The conditions of the system into which it

is taken have to be determined . . . The presence or absence of `counteracting condi-

tions’ has to be taken into account . . . ’ (LW, Vol. 12: 446–47.).

15. Dewey very early on insisted that all behavior and experience was social, but

he did not say much about what this meant or entailed. See Chapter 4, below. For

some alternative conceptions, see John Greenwood (ed.), The Mark of the Social

(Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).

16. In some places, he suggests that a mind experiment may be quite sufficient; in

others he seems at least to deny this. For example:

Experimental operations change existing conditions. Reasoning as such, can provide

means for effecting the change of conditions but by itself cannot effect it. Only execution

of existential operations directed by an idea in which ratiocination terminates can bringabout the re-ordering of environing conditions required to produce a settled and unified

situation (LW, 12: 121).


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17. See also LW, 12: 458. As a consequence of his rejection of “the spectator the-

ory of knowledge,” it is clear that all inquiry requires experimentation for Dewey. He

says also that there are at least three needs satisfied by experimentation: the institu-

tion of data, the elimination of material that is irrelevant to the problem at hand, and

the generation of new existential materials.

He generally seems to have in mind something much like the “methods” that Mill

had provided in his Logic (LW, 12: 190). But sometimes, experiment seems to be ex-

ploratory in its aim (LW, 12: 317), close indeed to the Baconian idea of “twisting the

tail of the lion.”

18. For a systematic discussion of “experiment” see Roy Bhaskar, A Realist The-

ory of Science, 2nd Edition (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1978).

19. This feature of Dewey’s concern with the existing “disciplines” of social sci-

ence is rarely acknowledged. See also Logic (LW, 12: 501–2).

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81

INTRODUCTION

My title intends to associate my effort with Dewey’s Experience and Nature,

better titled, he later thought, Culture and Nature. My main interest is to re-

consider naturalism in the light of recent debate in the philosophy of the so-

cial sciences. Since at least Dilthey, the question of a human science had been

very much contested. Could one hold, for example, that as there were physi-

cal laws, there was social laws? Could one argue that explanation proceeded

in terms of these, just as, presumably, it does in the physical sciences? Could

one hold that, even ideally speaking, the terms of the social sciences could be

“reduced” to terms in the “physical language?”

Indeed, anti-naturalism could be defined as the view that epistemologicaland ontological differences in the domains of nature and culture demand a

wholly different methodology. Beginning with the Kantian cleavage between

an empirical (phenomenal) realm subject to knowable law and an intelligible

realm where agents are free, late nineteenth century thought dichotomized

eklaren (causal explanation) and verstehen (interpretative understanding), the

nomothetic and the idiographic, the domain of nature and the domain of his-

tory. For anti-naturalists, then, even if the methods of the natural sciences are

apt for the investigation of nature, by virtue of the meaningful, linguistic or

conceptual character of the human sciences, the methods of the human sci-

ences need to be toto coelo different. They require a hermeneutic, phenome-

nological approach.

Chapter Four

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“OBJECTIVE” VS “SUBJECTIVE” WELTANSCHAUUNGEN ?

This bifurcation was the operative idea behind Maurice Natanson’s 1963

much used anthology, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences. In his forward,

Natanson wrote:

Two distinctly opposed philosophical attitudes are taken as polar positions un-

derlying the social sciences: let us, for want of satisfying alternatives, call them

“objective” and “subjective” Weltanschauungen (Natanson, 1963: viii).

As the book unfolds, sociologist and naturalist, George Lundberg is put

against Simmel’s neo-Kantianism, essays by Ernest Nagel and C. G. Hempel

on concept and theory formation in the social sciences are paired with one on

the same topic by Alfred Schütz, an essay by A. J. Ayer is juxtaposed with one

by Merleau-Ponty. But perhaps most striking was the exchange generated byThelma Lavine’s incisive essay, “Note to Naturalists on the Human Spirit.”

Lavine sharply criticized any naturalism that was “content to be defined by

a principle of continuity of analysis conceived of in terms of experiment and

empirical verifiablity. . . .” This amounted, she insisted, “to forfeiting its sta-

tus as a positive, i.e., constructive philosophy” (In Natanson, 1963: 252). Nat-

uralists not only exaggerated experimentalism but they confused the method

of naturalism with methods stipulated by naturalism for inquiry into all types

of subject matter. Finally, Lavine charged that naturalists had “thus far been

able to satisfy its new-found concern with the human spirit by recommending

the method of experimentation to the social sciences.” By default, they had

failed to show that naturalisms were not, finally, materialisms. On her view,

these weaknesses could be overcome, but only if naturalists developed a nat-uralistically reconstructed method of verstehen (254, 258).

Lavine’s essay brought sharp rebuttals from both Nagel and Natanson.

Nagel found that “the ‘difficulties’she claims to find in current naturalism are

only doubtfully genuine; and the specific recommendation . . . of question-

able worth” (262), Natanson much approved of Lavine’s criticism but found

that her recommendation was, finally, incoherent: “To reinvoke naturalistic

criteria as correctives for a reconstructed naturalistic method is to take a step

forward and follow with a step back” (282). For Natanson, since verstehen

was “foundational,” the “way out” was “the transcension of naturalism in fa-

vor of a phenomenological standpoint” (283). Indeed, after saying that W. I.

Thomas, Cooley and Mead were “all representatives of the phenomenologi-

cal standpoint,” Natanson offered that this “transcension” could be achieved

by adopting the phenomenological stance of Edmund Husserl.

In what follows, I argue that both Nagel and Natanson were wrong and that

Lavine was correct. But to do this requires rejection of mainstream, empiri-

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cist, neo-positivist philosophy of science, including especially its characteris-

tic philosophy of language and the (still dominating idea) that explanationproceeds by subsumption under law. Instead, I draw on Dewey and recent

work in the realist philosophy of science.1 In turn, I offer that in terms of this

view of science, a human science may be secured with a robust naturalism of

the sort defended by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.2 On the present

view, anti-naturalisms thrive because, beginning with the debates of the last

decades of the nineteenth century, both sides of the argument have shared in

assumptions about both nature and culture and about what natural science is.

They still do.

NATURE AND CULTURE

Nature exists independently of human activity. Society (and, not trivially,

knowledge of nature) does not.3 On the present view, society is best con-

strued as a relatively enduring ensemble of social relations, relatively en-

during because social relations are incarnate in the activities of persons

(Manicas, 2006; Giddens, 1984). There would be no society without hu-

man activity. There would be no human activity without “culture,” broadly,

everything which has meaning, including then, language and “the total

range of material objects that are regularly used by people in mediating

both their social and their environmental actions” (Byers, 1991: 3). Al-

though the activity-dependent character of society has implications for in-

quiry in the social sciences, this fact does not, emphatically, call for anti-

naturalism.The philosophical basis for such a naturalistic (yet, non-reductive) view of

society is hinted at by Marx (especially in The German Ideology), and devel-

oped by G.H. Mead and Dewey. Alternative—and on the present view, badly

mistaken “naturalisms”—are offered in the nineteenth century positivist for-

mulations of Spencer, Haeckel and Engels and in more recent “eliminative

materialism.”4

For Dewey and Mead, life and mind are emergent evolutionary products;

but as Tiles has argued, it is critical to see that most theories under this ban-

ner amount “to little more than dualism back from the laundry” (Tiles, 1988:

49). Characteristically, it is acknowledged that life and mind evolved, but

then argued that mind is consciousness and that its contents are ‘ideas’ (or in-

tentions), qualities directly known only to “subjects.” Within, then, this Carte-

sian framework, meaning and communication require either reductionist

strategies, for example, verificationism, behaviorism, or they remain miracu-

lous, at the very least wanting of some non-naturalistic solution.

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A fully naturalistic posture will not merely allow mind (culture, meaning

and society) an evolution from the sentient, but will reject what Dewey called“intellectualism,” the two-fold error of operating with an incomplete (ab-

stracted) picture of what is to have [an] experience of seeing and recognizing,

and on the other hand, [imposing] on all experience, specifically sentient ex-

perience, a structure which is present only in sophisticated (cognitive) devel-

opments of sentience” (Tiles, 1988: 55).

On cannot, I think, underestimate the hold of “intellectualism” on philoso-

phers, psychologists and social scientists that seek an understanding of hu-

mans and society. Semantic theories of language, current “cognitive science,’

talk about “the cultural system” as in Parsonian-influence theory or more rad-

ically, in the cultural work of Geertz or his opposite, Lèvi-Strauss, is anti-

naturalist, even platonist in this way. Similarly, the Parsonian conception of

the affective as providing only motivating, non-cognitive role in action, re-

cent rational choice theory and the idea that all knowledge is discursive

knowledge each thrive on “intellectualism.”

For Dewey, three general “plateaus” are easily—and empirically—

discerned, “each of which incorporates the function and relations of those be-

low it, and is such that it cannot be understood in isolation from the level (or

levels) below it . . . ”(Tiles, 1988: 56) The first plateau is inanimate nature. In

strongly realist terms, Dewey writes “atoms and molecules show a selective

bias in their indifferences, affinities and repulsions, when exposed to other

events.” 5 Following James in his Principles, Dewey argues that “things are

defined by means of symbols that convey only their consequences with re-

spect to one another. ‘Water’ in ordinary experience designates an essence of

something which has familiar bearings and uses in human life . . . But H20

gets away from these connnections, and embodies in its essence only instru-mental efficacy in respect to things independent of human affairs’ (E&N:

160). In the foregoing terms, H20 is represents a theoretical entity, real but not

“empirical.” For realist theory of science, “things,” both the things of ordi-

nary experience and the highly abstracted theoretical things of advanced sci-

ence, are metaphysical “compounds.” Ordinary table salt is a compound of

different kinds of molecules even while it is mostly NaCl. NaCl, of course, is

a theoretical entity, an item of the current ontology of science. Realist philos-

ophy of science is strongly naturalistic in holding that “nature” exists inde-

pendently of mind, even if the nature of nature is a scientific problem, to be

settled by inquiry.6

In contrast to empiricisms, “laws” are not statements about empirical reg-

ularities but assertions about the dispositional powers of things—their “se-lective bias’s”—and these are understood as “natural necessities,” in Dewey’s

terms, “essences.” Theories are conceived as representations of enduring

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structures or mechanisms. On this view, theories have essential non-senten-

tial dimensions, what Harré termed “imagined paramorphs,” models of causalmechanisms at work in the world.7

The second general plateau, life, is distinguished by “the way physico-

chemical energies are interconnected and operate. Animate bodies seek “to

maintain a temporal pattern of activity . . . to utilize conserved consequences

of past activities so as to adapt subsequent changes to the needs of the inte-

gral system in which they belong.” Thus, “iron as such exhibits characteris-

tics of bias or selective reactions” but “iron as a genuine constituent of an or-

ganized body acts so as to tend to maintain the type of activity of the

organism to which it belongs.”(E&N: 192). In an organism, it functions not

to become iron-oxide (as it would in a hinge), but to contribute to metabo-

lism. As Dewey sees, how some element of a concrete composite behaves de-

pends upon its (theorized) dispositional properties, on how in the integrated

system, it is related to other “things,” and on how the composite is related to

“things” external to it. It is because iron—Fe—is what it is that it has prop-

erties, which enable it to function differently in different relations. Compare

here hinges in New Mexico and Honolulu.

We experience patterns not invariances. Patterns are the result of relatively

stable configurations of causal mechanisms. Salt (usually) dissolves in water;

for human percipients, gold is—almost always appears—yellow; and to shift

the example to the domain of society, there is a strong positive correlation be-

tween poverty and one-on-one crime. Indeed, it terms of Dewey’s most basic

metaphysical category, there is both precariousness and stability because ‘the

world’ is not, as empiricists have it, a determined concatenation of contingent

events but a contingent concatenation of ensembles of complexly related nat-

ural necessities, a world of genuine change and novelty. The implications of this for a proper understanding of science are, without exaggeration, simply

enormous.

MEANING, MIND AND SOCIETY

But if vitalism in biology is no longer persuasive, mind remains a problem,

not only in the persistent mind/body dualism (and epistemological individu-

alism) of most general psychology, but also in the social sciences, in what is,

effectively, a radical bifurcation of nature and culture. As Dewey says, “upon

the whole, professed transcendentalists have been more aware than have pro-

fessed empiricists of the fact that language makes the difference betweenbrute and man. “The trouble is,” he continued, “that they have lacked a natu-

ralistic conception of its origin and status.”(E&N: 140). For Dewey (and


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Mead), society, meaning and mind are tightly linked and a genetic account is

indispensable if we are not to fall into “the philosophic fallacy,” the conver-sion of “eventual functions into antecedent existence.” “The fallacy converts

consequences of interactions of events into causes of the occurrence of these

consequences” (200). As Dewey recognized, this fallacy is widespread, but

nowhere more vivid than in accounts of mind and of society. The former are

epistemologically individualist in positing as given, an available language,

beliefs expressed in this language and rationality independently of the social

relations, which generate these. Accounts of society are methodologically in-

dividualist in believing that social relations are not presupposed in action.

Dewey’s move, to shift the problem of mind to the problem of language,

sounds remarkably au courant . But his naturalistic account of its origin and

status has yet to taken seriously. We can usefully supplement Dewey’s ac-

count with G. H. Mead’s.

Creatures that lack language nevertheless “gesture.” Thus the perception

by a dog that another “is ready to attack becomes a stimulus . . . to change his

position or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this than the change of at-

titude . . . causes the first dog to change his attitude.” “We have here,” Mead

notes, “a conversation of gestures” (Mead, 1867: 43). To be sure, it would be

an error to say these acts have meaning for the animals. Dewey and Mead in-

sist that meanings do not come into being without language” and these crea-

tures lack language (Dewey, E&N: 212), On the other hand, as Tiles writes,

“animals which do not already respond to each other’s behavior cannot re-

spond to each other’s intentions to produce modifications in their behav-

ior.”(Tiles, 1988: 89). The plateau of co-ordinated animal response is not ir-

relevant to communication at the linguistic plateau even if it is not reducible

to it. Consider, then, a linguistically apt creature.8

Gestures can become “significant symbols.” That is, vocal gestures can

arouse in an individual making them the response that they explicitly arouse,

or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals (Mead, 1934: 71). They can

come to “stand for” a particular act or response. Significant symbols are

meanings. Mead wrote that the difference between a gesture and a significant

symbol is that “the individual is conscious of the meaning of his own ges-

ture.” Indeed, Mead often refers to intentional acts, which “entail an elaborate

mental process.” David Rubenstein (1977: 212) calls this an inconsistency in

Mead and says that it was the reintroduction of the “psychical entities” he

tried to eliminate which invited interpretation of him as a phenomenologist.

But this (not uncharacteristic) reading is a huge error, in Dewey’s terms, a

straightforward product of “the philosophic fallacy.” Neither Dewey norMead deny that persons are conscious or that they have intentions. Rather, it

is their claim that meaning cannot be explained in terms of intentions (or in-

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tentional objects, psychic or otherwise). Thus, if someone is to be taken as,

e.g., making a request, as Tiles writes:

he has to be taken to have responded to the object not as a stimulus but from the

standpoint of the [other]. And what establishes the possibility of thus adopting

the standpoint of the other is the recognition of the regularity of the relationship

holding between gesture and completed act (1988: 93).

These perceived “regularities” are the foundation of socially constructed lin-

guistic universals. In the absence of this plateau, meaning cannot be made in-

telligible. Thus, semantic theories that try to define meaning in terms of truth

conditions without acknowledging that linguistic acts (or their vehicles) pre-

suppose social activity fail to explain how a linguistic vehicle could get

meaning. They must, finally, either beg the question or postulate meanings.

It is also to deny nominalism, the dominating posture of Hume-inspired

empiricist philosophies of language. As consequences of social interactions,

which depend upon regularities that can become habitualized and standard-

ized, neither meaning nor essence is “adventitious and arbitrary.” Yet, as im-

portant, linguistic universals are not platonic entities or formulae, which pre-

scribe their application. By explaining meaning, Dewey can also account for

philosophy’s enduring fallacies regarding it: Thus, “meanings that were dis-

covered to be indispensable to communication were treated as final and ulti-

mate in nature itself. Essences were hypostatized into original and constitu-

tive forms of all existence”—the philosophic fallacy at work (E&N: 155).

There is no objection to talk about either meanings or essences—as long as

one fully appreciates them to be nothing more than relatively enduring social

products.On the other hand, exactly because meanings (and essences) are grounded

in regularities of interaction and are the product of these, they are both ob-

jective and remain revisable. Thus, meaning is not “a peculiar kind of thing,”

a Platonic Idea, a “subsisting concept” or “‘logical’ in a style which separates

logic from nature.” For Dewey, “meanings are rules for using and interpret-

ing things; interpretation being always an imputation of potentiality for some

consequence.” As before, gestures depend upon expected outcomes that pre-

suppose the regularities of past experience. Accordingly, use is constrained,

neither “adventitous nor arbitrary,” but because in acting, agents decide, use

is revisable. In noting “the scope and limits of application are ascertained ex-

perimentally [practically] in the process of application”(E&N: 156). Dewey

anticipates what has come to be called a “finitist” conception of rules, the ideathat since there is no universal or “natural’ scale for weighing similarity

against difference, the application of rules (including meaning-rules) are


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contingent judgments by actors using materials at hand.9 As I argue subse-

quently, the implications of seeing that meanings are both “objective’” and reproduced and transformed by practice are critical for social science.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM

The failure to see that meaning is to be found in transactions is propelled by

the failure to see that there is a radical difference between “individuals with

minds” and “individual minds,” the characteristic posture of epistemological

individualism. To avoid a solipsism of the present moment, epistemological

individualists need to hold that the experienced world is shared by individu-

als; but if is not a social product, this world needs to be the world of the naive

realist where things are, pretty much, as they appear. Thus, in the mind inde-

pendent world, there are red apples, even if we must learn to call them “red

apples.” If, however, we take modern physical science and the evidence of

history and anthropology seriously, we need to acknowledge that the capac-

ity to identify the most mundane things of experience requires, in addition to

our evolved natural capacities, a massive system of meaning which has been

historically, regionally, and locally bequeathed. Indeed, the failure to ac-

knowledge this would seem to be consequence of both “intellectualism’ and

the conversion of eventual functions into antecedent causes. As Dewey

insists,

The whole history of science, art and morals proves that the mind that appears

in individuals is not as such individual mind. The former is in itself a system of

belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and rejections, of expectan-cies and appraisals of meanings, which have been instituted under the influence

of custom and tradition (E&N: 180).

A more esoteric example may make the point clearer and show also its rele-

vance to the present essay. According to Bulmer, the terminal taxa of the Karam

correspond very well with some 70% of the cases with species identified by a

scientific zoologist.10 The cassowary is an instance of non-correspondence.

Karam have the taxon “yakt” for birds and bats, but the cassowary in not placed

in this taxon. Instead, it appears in a special taxon, ‘kobity,’ making it a non-

bird/non-bat. For Bulmer, this is an error explained by Karam willingness to al-

low “culture” to supercede “objective biological facts.” But on the present view,

what counts as an objective scientific fact depends upon practices which may

differ from culture to culture. If we think that Karam taxonoy is wrong, it is be-

cause we have reason to think that the practice of science generates taxonomies,

which better serve our purposes.

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It should be clear enough that the text just quoted from Dewey does not be-

tray an Hegelian, objective idealist prejudice. On such views, mind is severedfrom natural existence and individuals merely “participate” in mind. Here I

refer you to the customary bifurcation of cultural system and social system,

to the standard notion of socialization wherein selves are empty vessels into

which meaning is poured, and to the normative determinism so characteristic

of mainstream sociology. The foregoing account of meanings gives us the

resources to hold that the idea of “individuals with minds” admits of a fully

naturalist interpretation. The difference between it and an idealist alternative,

unfortunately, is easily missed.

The idea of social super-mind is a philosophical nightmare because it

precludes agency. It makes agents merely “bearers” of cultural systems that,

in the last analysis, determine action. By contrast, for Mead and Dewey, be-

cause meanings are “modes of natural interaction,” culture is the continu-

ous evolving product of recognitions and ignorances, acceptances and re-

jections, and expectancies and appraisals that are themselves the medium

and product of conscious activity. Mind is social, not in the sense that

cultural meaning is intersubjective—between subjectivities—but in the

sense that meanings are public, in the world, and not (only or merely) in our

consciousness.11

EMPIRICISM, PHENOMENOLOGY AND ANTI-NATURALISM

Philosophical positions have never been irrelevant to the practice of social

science—most often, I am afraid, for ill. Attacks on empiricist philosophy of science, beginning in the 1950’s joined with phenomenological criticisms of

empiricist social science. Both were unsettling to the mainstream, dominated,

then—and still, if less so, by the “objectivist” Parsonian synthesis. But these

criticisms did not encourage a re-thinking of naturalism in non-empiricist

terms. Rather, they encouraged anti-naturalism. I must be brief.

The work of Schütz, no doubt, was critical. On the one hand, his work con-

tained many valuable insights, for example: that sociological constructs are

constructs of social constructions, that the “stock of knowledge” is held in

“typfied form” and dispersed, and that common-sense knowledge is “a patch-

work” in which “clear and distinct experiences are intermingled with vague

conjectures; suppositions and prejudices cross well-proven evidences; mo-

tives, means and ends, as well as causes and effects, are strung together with-

out clear understanding of their real connections.”12 This contributed heavily

to undermining the Parsonian theory of action, including, critically, the still

standard theory of rationality.13


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Similarly, Schütz’s idea, derived and extended from Husserl, of a “life-

world’ which is the taken-for-granted beginning for inquiry (the epoché of “the natural attitude”), was a strong solvent for the naive realism of main-

stream social science.14 On the other hand, as Farber insisted, the life-world

fell “like manna from heaven, as an unexpected answer to the prayer of per-

sons seeking an alternative to the worldview of a scientific philosophy, but for

whom the existentialist bill of linguistic fare [was] inpalatable”(Farber, 1967:

122).15 Even a “mundane phenomenology” could not (as Natanson agreed)

consistently be grounded in naturalism. The trouble was not that Schütz re-

mained committed to Husserl’s transcendental project, but that he retained, as

Giddens noted, “the unbilical tie to the subjectivity of the ego. For Schütz the

social world is “strictly speaking, my world.” (Giddens, 1976: 31). Schütz did

acknowledge that to study the social world, it was necessary to “abandon the

strictly phenomenological method.” But while he was comfortable to assume

the existence of the social world, not only did intersubjectivity remain, philo-

sophically, a problem, but the social world seemed, at least, to be nothing

more than a construction of consciousness. Put in other terms, it was difficult

see how to incorporate either the “natural” context or the relatively enduring

consequences of action into the account. Moreover, interpretative social sci-

ence was restricted to describing and clarifying “what is thought about the so-

cial world by those living it.” This thoroughly descriptivist, ethnographic ori-

entation, even in the hands of sensitive inquirers, lost even the hint of causal

explanation and in consequence, any capacity for critique. Finally, while

Schütz often said that it was the aim of sociology to obtain organized knowl-

edge about “the world of cultural objects and social institutions”—leaving

unclear what exactly this meant, the discovery of “in order to” motives be-

came central task for sociological explanation. That is, phenomenology en-couraged a highly psychologized notion of social science.16

Garfinkel, a student of Parsons, seems to have begun with Schütz, and before

he was finished, offered a radical and powerful alternative to the Parsonian “ac-

tion frame of reference.” This included a strong emphasis on agency, and re-

jection of “motive analysis” in favor of inquiry into “situated actions.” This was

profoundly propelled by his generalized use of “indexicality” (indirectly owed

to Peirce) and by finitism (derived from Wittgenstein).

Garfinkel, however, was but ambivalently naturalistic. On some readings,

e.g., his principle of “ethnomethodological indifference” was not merely a

recommendation to bracket temporarily aspects of the empirical world, but

was converted into an ontological commitment wherein, as Giddens wrote,

“social phenomena ‘exist’ only in so far as lay actors classify or identify themas ‘existing’”(Giddens, 1976: 42)—an intellectualist dip into voluntarism and

idealism. Moreover, like Schütz, Garfinkel was preoccuppied with the condi-

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tions of action, ignoring almost utterly the consequences of action, intended

and unintended. Thus, neither could he sustain an adequate notion of socialstructure. While he acknowledged that actors had resources which were the

medium of their actions, his actors became so thoroughly disconnected from

their bodies and the larger pre-existing contexts in which they acted that these

resources reduced to abstractly detached meaning-rules. In effect, his intel-

lectualism led him to ignore the fact that his agents were fleshly, interested

actors contexted in a geographical environment and embedded in a socially

sustained, but not always transparent social relations of power. Worse, be-

trayed by epistemologically generated worries, he often suggested that these

meaning rules were not “about” anything. As in current anti-realisms, partic-

ipants could cooperatively reconstitute them at will.

By the 1970’s, phenomenologically inspired social science remained on the

margin, but the unsatisfactory character of both mainstream and Marxist ap-

proaches was more than noticed. The response was “cultural studies,” in-

spired by the structuralism of Lèvi-Strauss and Saussure and then, in response

to this, both post-structuralism and the hermeneuticial approach of Clifford

Geertz, and, finally, by Marxists writers responding to Althusserian struc-

turalism.17 Powerfully encouraged by the epistemological criticisms of em-

piricism, including here Kuhn’s ambivalent Structure of Scientific Revolution,

the work of Schütz, Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, the hermeneutics of Ri-

coeur and Gadamer, and the more radical post-structuralism of Foucault and

Derrida, cultural studies betrayed a decided shift toward idealism. As Alexan-

der rightly pointed out,

Insofar as [sociological theory] seeks a purely hermeneutic analysis—not only

is there always cultural reference for every action but . . . there is only a cultural

reference. Every change in action, every source of stability, everything that

works for the good, everything that works for the bad—all must be explained in

terms of the search for meaning itself. Every culturalist theory is . . . a form of

sociological idealism (Alexander, 1987: 311–12).

Nor did Marxists escape the drift toward idealism—especially those taken by

strong readings of Gramsci (a student of Croce) and by post-modernist epis-

temology.18 The response, in my view, is neither a return to materialism, nor

to some pseudo-solution that demands that we think “dialectically” about cul-

ture and “material life.”19 On the present view no such dialectic is possible

because divorced of culture, material life is utterly empty. Here we are be-

trayed by systematic ambiguity as regards the very idea of “culture.” At onetime, culture was used inclusively to refer to forms of life, to ensembles of

meaningful patterns of activity that included work, play, marriage, worship.


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More recent cultural studies, however, have conceived culture far more nar-

rowly, in terms of “mentalitiés,” “values,” “symbolic codes,” “signs,” “texts,”and “discourses” that are effectively, if not explicitly autonomous.20 We need

to return to the older idea; but we need to do this, as already suggested, with

a strong agent centered naturalistic conception of mind and society. That is,

instead of supposing that meanings have independent existences, we need to

see them in contexts of action.

A NATURALISTIC ALTERNATIVE

More particularly, we move in the right direction by putting the insights of

Schütz and Garfinkel onto the naturalistic footing provided by Dewey and

Mead. As Rubenstein rightly said, it was a major motive of phenomeno-

logical and verstehen approaches to social science to describe action in

terms of mental components in order to combat the naturalistic inclination

to treat action and social phenomena in the same way one treats the mean-

ingless properties and events of nature. On the other hand, it was a major

motive of empiricists to argue, “reliable knowledge cannot be established

about what is essentially private to the actor.” (Rubenstein, 1977: 232). But

if the foregoing is sound, there is no reason to be suspicious of an approach

that insists that the category of meaning is indispensable to the under-

standing of human behavior, and for the same reason, there is reason to be

suspicious of those philosophies of language which inform empiricist phi-

losophy of science. As work by Kuhn, Polanyi and more recent sociology

of scientific knowledge make clear enough, the meaning of scientific terms

depends not on “operational definitions” and other semantic devices, but intaking account of science as a social activity in the sense of Dewey and

Mead.

First, with Schütz, we can endorse verstehen and the idea that sociological

terms are constructions of what are already social constructions, what Gid-

dens has called “the double hermeneutic.” Social science (in contrast to the

physical sciences) is involved in theorizing and communicating about an al-

ready meaningful social world. But because verstehen is not some form of

empathetic understanding—indeed, is a presupposition of any human activ-

ity, including, then the practices of natural science, social science requires no

special observational methods.

Second, pace Garfinkel, instead of a one-sided emphasis on action as

meaning, we can shift to action as praxis, as Giddens writes: “the involve-ment of actors with the practical realization of interests, including the mate-

rial transformation of nature through human activity” (Giddens, 1976: 53). So

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construed, “culture” is not bifurcated from “material activity,” but is under-

stood as inseparable, substantively and analytically, from it.21

Third, in consequence, “all social research has a necessarily cultural,

ethnographic or ‘anthropological’ aspect to it.” (Giddens, 1984: 1984). In

other terms, qualitative research is an indispensable component of social sci-

ence. This will be largely descriptive, even though, inevitably, it will theoret-

ically informed, and thus, not only is literary style not irrelevant to the accu-

racy and communicability of such descriptions, but social scientists must

draw on the same sources of “mutual knowledge” drawn on by novelists and

journalists.22

But, fourth, because meaning is not “in the head, and “experience” is not

reducible to conscious contents, we need to distinguish practical knowledge

from discursive knowledge. That is, while the present view centers agency

and, unlike most mainstream and Marxist views, acknowledges that actors

have complex skills and knowledge which they employ in acting and inter-

acting, if we are to avoid the intellectualist fallacy, much of this knowledge is

not discursively available. As Bhaskar says, it is “tacit and implicit, sponta-

neous and not reflective, a matter of know-how rather than know-

that.”(Bhaskar, 1986: 163). Accordingly, even if what is discursively avail-

able (or made available) is true, acquiring knowledge of the beliefs of actors

will not be sufficient to establish an understanding of their social world. That

is, even a good ethnography must go well beyond “what people think about

their world.”

Of course, since social activity cannot be described at all unless the in-

quirer knows what actors know, accounts from actors are necessary and play

a critical role in enabling us to assess accounts offered inquirers. But indeed,

there is good reason to hold that beliefs discursively available are not alwaystrue! While practical activity is skillful and intended, it does not require true

belief as regards the conditions of action. In part this is because action always

has an unintended consequence, viz., the reproduction and transformation of

the very conditions of action. We do make history but, as Marx insisted, not

with a plan and not with materials of our own choosing. Unacknowledged

conditions, unknown and unintended consequences, self-deception and other

obstacles limit our ability to cognize fully and accurately the social world

which our own actions sustain. Were it otherwise, there would hardly be a

point to human science.

This means, sixth, not only that social science can enlarge the understand-

ing of members, but by so doing, it can have a critical and emancipatory di-

mension. That is, because the domain of the social sciences comprises socialobjects, e.g., institutions, social practices and social relations which are the

product of social activity, and because this domain includes beliefs about


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these activities, when these beliefs can be shown to be false, distorted or oth-

erwise inadequate, agents have grounds to change these social forms. Con-sider the belief that males are superior. If this belief is constitutive of the re-

lations which define the nuclear family, then if (as women increasingly

appreciate!) this belief is false, people have good reasons for altering these

relations—as indeed, they have been doing! That is, eklaren, the effort to

explain how these forms have come to be and why people have the beliefs

they have is an essential part of the task of social science.

Seventh, such explanation is not via subsumption under law. On the pres-

ent, realist view, success in the theoretical sciences depends upon the capac-

ity to abstract a strata of the world and to identify, theoretically, causal mech-

anisms within that strata. Such theory gives us an understanding. We gain,

thus, an understanding of tensile strength by appeal to physical theory. But

because the theoretical powers of “things’ are never operating in a closed

system—other causes are always operating on them—there are patterns, but

no invariant empirical regularities. Everything that happens is caused, but it

is complexly caused, a function of the causal powers of the ‘things’ of the

world and their continuously changing relations and configurations. For ex-

ample, one explains the collapse of a landing gear by appeal to the tensile

strength of the materials and a host of other pertinent causes, including, per-

haps, the historical effects of the maintenance schedule and the decision to

make an emergency landing on a field not heretofore used by such aircraft.

Because causal conjunctures are contingent, we are often in a position to ex-

plain something that happened when we could not have predicted it. Stellar

mechanics is the worst possible paradigm for a science exactly because, as re-

gards the pertinent ‘variables,’ the solar system is relatively closed.

Explanation in social science has the same form, involving, on the onehand, the effort to identify the social mechanisms or structured processes be-

ing sustained by the activities of agents, and on the other, the effort to grasp,

concretely, the capacities which they have and the constraints to which they

subject, what they know and understand, and, finally, the uses to which they

put their capacities and knowledge. Because all these are historically variable,

social science, in contrast to the most successful of the physical sciences, is

inevitably concrete and historical—and for the same reasons, it could never

be finished (Manicas, 2006).

For example, one begins to understand a capitalist society by identifying

the “logic’ of capital. That is, given the (very different) resources made avail-

able by capitalist social relations, as a consequence of their actions, intended

and unintended, actors will promote a tendency toward over accumulation. Tobe sure, because between Japan and the United States, or between the US in

1929 and the US today, there will be immense differences in the concrete

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forms of these relations and their relation to other structured practices, there

will be differences in the capacities, constraints, and forms of knowledge-ability between actors in these different times and places.

On the other hand, the tendency to over accumulation will surely figure in

any account of the Great Depression, even if, as noted, any plausible account

will need to integrate a host of other processes, contingent events, and deci-

sions by persons, acting and interacting, as always, as cultural beings with be-

liefs and a range of meaningful material objects.

I conclude with what for me is the most important idea: The foregoing im-

plies that the anti-naturalistic Kantian bifurcation of “freedom” and “deter-

minism” needs to be thoroughly rejected. The problem of human freedom,

naturalistically understood, is the problem of possessing the capacity to act in

realizing one’s genuine interests; and this involves understanding the sources

of constraint and limitation, and then transforming these to “needed, wanted

and empowering sources of determination.” Indeed, it is to generate a social

science that would have satisfied Dewey.

NOTES

1. To be clear, the realism assumed here is not of the variety associated with Hilary

Putnam or Richard Boyd. It is, roughly, the “policy realism” of Rom Harré, an explicitly

pragmatic version of realism, still too little appreciated in the USA. See Rom Harré The

Principles of Scientific Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Rom

Harré and Edward Madden, Causal Powers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975) and most

recently, Harré, Varieties of Realism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). See also Roy

Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd Edition (Brighton: Harvester, 1979) and ThePossibility of Naturalism (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), my A History and Philosophy of

the Social Sciences (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987) and A Realist Phi-

losophy of Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

2. I say “of the sort” here since my interest is not primarily to represent either Dewey

or Mead. I use them to develop a position that is both naturalistic and realistic. Although

influenced by R.W. Sleeper’s defense of Dewey as a “transactional realist,” I am not clear

whether Dewey would be entirely happy with the sort of realism defended here. See R.W.

Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

3. It thus that naturalisms need to be committed to strong versions of the sociology

of knowledge. See P. T. Manicas and Alan Rosenberg, “Naturalism, Epistemological

Individualism and ‘The Strong Programme’in the Sociology of Knowledge,” Journal

for the Theory of Social Behavior , 15 (March 1985). See Chapter 6, below.

4. Thus Rorty’s physicalist idea that

every speech, thought, theory, poem, composition, and philosophy will turn out to be com-

pletely predictable in purely naturalistic terms. Some atoms-and-the-void account of


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micro-processes within individual human beings will permit the prediction of every sound

or inscription which will be uttered (Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979): 387.

5. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, The Later Works, 1925–1953 (Southern

Illinois Press), hereafter E&N.

6. We need to distinguish philosophical ontology, what is presumed by inquiry,

from scientific ontology, the result of (ongoing) inquiry. See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist

Theory of Science.

7. See Harré, Principles of Scientific Thinking, 1970 and Varieties of Realism,

1986. On the present view, it is an error of considerable importance to think of theo-

ries as “interpreted” deductive systems.

8. See Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1990) for a superb evolutionary account of the genesis of linguistic capacity.

9. The idea is also critical to Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, al-

though it may well be that Wittgenstein’s version is not entirely free of nominalist fan-tasy. As we note below, finitism is a central part of Garfinkel’s theory of action. My

criticism of his use of the idea is that he ignores the powerful constraints of enduring

social relations, well recognized by Dewey and Mead.

10. I take this example from Barry Barnes, “On the Conventional Character of

Knowledge and Cognition, “ Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1981): 303–33.

See R. Bulmer, “Why is the Cassowary not a Bird?” Man 21 (1967: 4–25.

11. On the other hand, to say that mind is social is not deny the individuality of in-

dividuals with minds. “Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual functions that

emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social” (E&N: 71). As

Dewey wrote:

Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of or-

ganic life; consciousness in a being with language evolves denotes awareness or percep-

tion of meanings . . . The greater part of mind is only implicit in any conscious act or state;

the field of mind—of operative meanings—is enormously wider than that of conscious-

ness . . . Mind is, so to speak, structural, substantial, a constant background and fore-

ground; perceptive consciousness is process, a series of heres and now ( 247).

12. See John Heritage, “Ethnomethodology,” in A. Giddens and J.H. Turner (eds.)

Social Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987): 230, quoting Schutz.

13. Roughly, actors are rational in the sense that they distinguish means and ends,

articulate consequences of alternative courses of action and assess their costs and ben-

efits. As rational, they optimize benefits and minimize costs.. For some discussion,

see John Heritage, 1987.

14. More recently, of course, “deconstruction” has been an even more powerful

solvent.

15. It is some interest to note that Farber and Schütz were very close colleaguesduring the early years of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Schütz’s biog-

rapher writes: “. . . it was the close connection and collaboration with Farber, more

than anything else, that was responsible for the early realization of Schütz’s intention

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to establish contacts with American philosophers and find an opportunity to address

American philosophical audiences” (Helmut R. Wagner, Alfred Schütz: An Intellec-

tual Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). One can give at least

Schütz’s later writings a naturalistic reading.

Peter Hare reports that the archives of PPR show that Farber struggled hard to keep

the pages of the journal open.

16. Some avowed followers of Weber also often express what is at least a tension

here, between a psychologistic explanation of some act and a sociological explanation

of acts of that sort. Thus, one may need an ‘in order to’ motives to explain why some

particular person commits a crime, but understanding what structures criminal be-

havior will require more and other than this. See my A Realist Philosophy of Social

Science (2006).

17. For a useful critical overviews, see Anthony Giddens, “Structuralism, Post-

structuralism and the Production of Culture,” in A. Giddens and J.H. Turner (eds.),

Social Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). For Geertz, see The Interpre-

tation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and criticism by Jeffrey Alexander,Twenty Lectures, Lectures 16, 17. As regards Marxism, see Perry Anderson , Argu-

ments within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies:

Two Paradigms,” in T. Bennett et al (eds.) Culture, Ideology and Social Process (The

Open University Press, 1981). See also my “The Rise and Fall of Scientism”, in Wil-

iiam Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner (eds), Handbook of Social Science Methodol-

ogy (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007). This essay includes discussion of other critical fig-

ures including Bourdieu, Giddens and Foucault.

18. On Gramsci, see Paul Piccone, Italian Marxism (Berkeley: University of Cal-

ifornia Press, 1983). A useful compendium is Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg

(eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of

Illinois Press, 1988). As the editors note, ‘as little as twenty years ago, it would have

been impossible to imagine such a project and such a volume’ (2). See especially the

essays by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau.19. The most powerful non-reductionist Marxisms come from Raymond Williams

and E.P. Thompson. On the present view, Williams’ Marxism is far and away to be

preferred. Hall (“Cultural Studies”) quotes Thompson that “the dialectical intercourse

between social being and social consciousness—or between ‘culture’ and ‘not cul-

ture’—is at the heart of any comprehension of the historical process within the Marx-

ist tradition . . . The tradition inherits a dialectic that is right but he particular me-

chanical metaphor through which it is expressed is wrong.” But it is hard to see how

the “dialect” is right in the absence of clarity about could be the “right” metaphor?

On the other hand, Thompson is quite correct to bring together “the two elements—

consciousness and conditions—around the concept of experience.”

For Williams, there is no interesting sense of “dialectic.” Indeed, it nowhere ap-

pears in his important book, Marxism and Literature (1977). Instead, Williams insists

that talk about “base/superstructure,” “economy,” “culture,” and then, problemsof “determination” and “mediation” are predicated on reifying abstractions. This is,

he insists, particularly ironic since Marx’s central emphasis was on a conception

of productive activity in which “labour and language, as practices, can be seen as


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evolutionary and historically constitutive” (33). As Hall says, disapprovingly,

“Williams so totally absorbs ‘definitions of experience’ into our ‘ways of living’, and

both into an indissoluble real material practice-in-general, as to obviate any distinc-

tion between ‘culture’ and ‘not-culture’ (26) This is, of course, very reminiscent of

Dewey.

20. As Roy D’Andrade has remarked: “When I was a graduate student, one imag-

ined people in a culture; ten years later culture was all in their heads (Andrade, “A

Colloquy of Cultural Theorists,”in Richard A. Schweder and Robert A. LeVine (eds),

Culture Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987: 7.

For a representative sample of work that puts culture “all in their heads,” see K.C.

Alexander and S. Seidman (eds.), Culture and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1990). The conjunctive “and” in the title betrays the problem of much

recent work.

21. As Paul Willis has insisted, “there is no question . . . of counterposing the ‘cul-

tural’ with the ‘productive’ or the ‘real,’as if the former had no actual constitutive role

in the basic social relations which govern the form of . . . society” (in Alexander andSeidman (eds.), Culture and Society: 84). Thus, the class relations of British prole-

tariat toward the end of the century and of jute workers in British India in this century

were fundamentally different. See Dipesh Chahkrabarty, Rethinking Working Class

History: Bengal 1890–1940 (London: Verso, 1991). In a nutshell, the jute workers of

Bengal were wageworkers but were culturally not proletarian in Marx’s sense.

22. Indeed, it is far to say that as regards communicating an understanding of

cultural milieu, novelists and journalists often do a better job than do academic social

scientists!

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Part Two

NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY

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101

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST

In order, eventually, to make some claims about realism and naturalism, I be-

gin with a view of philosophy and with a very brief sketch of “the philosophy

of the recent past.” For me, philosophical labels, like the term “philosophy”

itself, do not discriminate natural kinds. Accordingly, with Jonathan Ree, I

think of philosophy as part of literature and general history (Ree, 1988).1 And

with Rorty, I think that we need to appeal to “contingent arrangements” to ex-

plain both what counts as philosophy and its “problems” and to understand

the meaning of philosophical terms of art in use at any given time and place

(Rorty, 1984). Even given some historical continuity in the use of some terms,

this implies that what counts a philosophical problem in one period needs notbe one in some other. The present period owes directly to “contingent

arrangements” in the late nineteenth century—as I shall argue, and it is im-

portant to acknowledge this if we are to understand philosophy’s current sit-

uation. Rorty comments: “We need to realize that the questions which ‘the

contingent arrangements’of the present time lead us to regard as the questions

are questions “which may be better than whose which our ancestors asked,

but need not be the same.” Of course, they may be better, but they may also

be worse.

I would not go so far as to say that there are no perennial philosophical

problems, but they are ethical and political. Dewey had something like this

mind, I would guess, in urging philosophers to forego struggle with “prob-

lems of philosophers” for struggle with the problems of humans.Many who are not recognized by anybody’s canon as “philosophers”

have spoken, sometimes wisely, to my two perennial problems. But those

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traditionally deemed philosophers have tended to provide a ground for their

views on questions in ethics and politics, generally metaphysics and some-times an epistemology. Two further observations: First, recent philosophy

has tended to be anti-metaphysical, and much more interested in epistemol-

ogy than in ethics or politics. In the limiting case characteristic of much

“analytic” philosophy, ethical and political claims are deemed, on episte-

mological grounds, “non-cognitive.” I am especially interested in denying

this, but here I only assume that the arguments of “naturalists” like Dewey,

Abraham Edel and Marvin Farber can be sustained. Second, by virtue of

this, it is not implausible to follow Farber and assert that the only serious

alternatives for philosophy are “naturalism”—or alternatively, “material-

ism,” and “subjectivism”—in his special senses.2

Farber used materialism and naturalism interchangeably, “having the ad-

vantage of flexibility” and acknowledged, of course, that there are alternative

versions of both. He included as “subjectivisms,” all forms of idealism, in-

cluding absolute idealism and phenomenology, and various types of existen-

tial philosophy. But what is most striking about his dichotomy is the absence

of reference to positivism. We need some history.

IDEALISM

Mandelbaum argued that during the nineteenth century, there were “only two

main streams of philosophical thought, each of which possessed a relatively

high degree of continuity, and each of which tended to deal with similar prob-

lems, although from opposed points of view”(Mandelbaum, 1971: 5). The

problems regarded “knowledge” but especially the nature and role of “sci-

ence.” The two positions were “metaphysical idealism and positivism.” His

definition of idealism is useful: “metaphysical idealism holds that within

natural human experience one can find the clue to an understanding of the ul-

timate nature of reality, and this clue is revealed through those traits which

distinguish man as a spiritual being” (1971: 6). Epistemology, a new philo-

sophical discipline that derived from Kant, was the critical feature of the

forms of argument of idealism but as Mandelbaum argues, the movement was

“part of a more general rebellion against the conceptions of man and nature

which characterized the Enlightenment” (1971: 7). As in Kant, idealism was

motivated by distress that God, freedom and immortality were being under-

mined by the new “science.” Neither the forms of argument nor “the general

rebellion” have gone away, even while, especially as regards the “rebellion,”

there are now at least two important anti-Enlightenment postures, pre-modern

theisms which, for the most part, are not defended by academic philosophers,

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and ethical nihilisms, aided and abetted both by positivist epistemology

and subjectivist “post-modernisms,” very much academic positions. But weneed to fill in positivism, and to get back to Farber, to define materialism and

naturalism.

POSITIVISM

The 19th century battleground was over science and what it had to say about

man and nature. Positivisms and materialisms both stood on “science”—

critically, a very much-contested concept until very late in the century. And

both positivisms and materialisms were opposed to traditional theologies. But

it would be wrong to suppose that nineteenth century positivisms were all ma-

terialisms.3 Engels and then Lenin, who had an anti-positivist conception of

science, was closer to the truth in asserting that positivists were each covert

idealists.

Farber’s dichotomy, of course, follows Engels who had argued that there

are but “two great camps” in philosophy: idealists and materialists. “Those

who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance,

assumed world creation in some form . . . comprised the camp of idealism.

The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of

materialism”(Engels, 1935: 32). For Engels, “the great basic question of all

philosophy, especially of modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation

of thinking to being.” Engels’s dichotomy was Lenin’s point of departure

against the Machists, and the entire cast of “empiricist” philosophers of

science of the period. In his infrequently read Materialism and Empirio-

criticism (1908), Lenin defended Engels’s materialism against those “boldwarriors, who proudly allude to the ‘modern theory of knowledge,’ ‘recent

philosophy’ (or ‘recent positivism’), the ‘philosophy of the natural sciences’

or even more boldly, ‘the philosophy of natural science of the twentieth cen-

tury’”(Lenin, 1970: 7).4 Lenin was quite correct to identify positivist theory

of science as hegemonic, to link it with “modern theory of knowledge,” and

to see that it rejected the realism of materialisms, of which more in a moment.

Mandelbaum well summarized the distinct feature of positive philosophy.

Since positivism confines all human knowledge to what has been experienced

or can be experienced, it claims that a science which has freed itself from meta-

physical preconceptions will restrict itself to discovering reliable correlations

within experience . . . According to this view, a scientific explanation does not

involve appeal to any immanent forces nor to any transcendent entities; to ex-

plain a phenomena is to be able subsume it under one or more laws of which it

is an instance”(1971: 11.)

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Positivists are manifestly empiricists, and it is easy enough to see how, as

Mandelbaum put it, the positivist interpretation of science “even came to beabsorbed into the idealist tradition” (11). As he notes in another place, com-

mon to all forms of idealism and phenomenalism is “subjectivism,” under-

stood as the idea that all we can know are the contents of consciousness (what

Rorty later referred to as the “veil of ideas”). If, then, reference to “transcen-

dent reality” is to be rejected and all knowledge is restricted to what is “in ex-

perience,” then what is to be gained by holding that “the objects” of experi-

ence exist independently of it? As Farber well said: “the methodological

restriction of the objects of reality to a relationship with an experiencing sub-

ject—the subject-object limitation—serves as a wheelhorse for idealistic ar-

guments at critical points” (Farber, 1984: 130).

It is very critical to see also that causality figures hugely in the positivist

vision. What is rejected as causation, of course, is any sort of “metaphysical”

notion of causes as productive powers. Instead, we have a Humean concep-

tion of causality as an empirically available constant conjunction. Hence even

in the “transfigured realism” of Spencer, reality was “unknowable” exactly

because, on his empiricist premises, there was no way to get from “objective

reality” to “experience.” As Mandelbaum summarizes:

Science would be transcended and metaphysics would set in if one tried to form

any conception of how motions in the nerves “produce” sensations, or how com-

plex associations of ideas can lead to those efferent nerve-impulses which even-

tuate in action. To attempt to go beyond the verifiable correlations between these

utterly different types of concept would be to introduce notions, which it is not

in any way possible to verify within experience (1971: 304). 5

Accordingly, despite large differences between them, British empiricists,

for example, J. S. Mill, and Spencer, Kirchoff, Mach, Avenarius, Duhem

and Poincaré, and, of course, the “logical positivists,” “logical empiricists,”

“neo-positivists” and “anti-realists” of today are all “positivist” (in Comte’s

sense). Indeed, since their conception of science is perfectly comfortable

with the extensionalist logic of Whitehead and Russell, it came to define

“logical positivism;” and despite fatal challenges, remains the unquestioned

assumption of both most current discussions in epistemology and the phi-

losophy of science. “Naturalists” takes their stand with science, but the crit-

ical point then is precisely how science is to be understood. To anticipate,

the naturalism (and realism), which I will defend, follows Rom Harré and

Ed Madden’s groundbreaking, Causal Powers and Harré’s revolutionary as-

sault on “deductivism” in the philosophy of science.6 But before pursuingthis idea, we need to comment on the third nineteenth century contender,

materialism.

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MATERIALISM

Although materialism was a widely held view in the 18th century, Mandel-

baum notes that despite some confusion on this issue, there were very few

materialists in the 19th century, and most of them were German. The obvious

materialism, and from the point of view of later global philosophy, is, of

course, Marxism. We can usefully begin with Mandelbaum’s definition:

Taken in its broadest sense, materialism is only committed to holding that the

nature of that which is self-existent is material in character, there being no enti-

ties which exists independently of matter. Thus, in this sense, we would class as

a materialist anyone who accepts all of the following propositions: that there is

an independently existing world; that human beings, like all other objects, are

material entities; that the human mind does not exist as an entity distinct from

the human body; and that there is no God (nor any other non-human being)whose mode of existence is not that of material entities (1971: 22).

This is plainly Farber’s sense and explains why naturalism and materialism

are usefully interchangeble. Thus, “reductionist” forms of materialism, as in

Ernest Haeckel, or Moleschott and Büchner, are easily distinguished from En-

gels’s “dialectical” reading of science—and even more important from the

present point of view from the non-reductionist naturalisms of Marx and

Dewey.

As important, the definition leaves open questions about the nature or char-

acter of the material world, including whether “matter” is a “substance” (as

per Descartes) or an underlying “substratum” (as per Locke). As is well

known, these positions are subject to Berkeleyan criticisms. But the nature or

character of the “material world” may be understood as an entirely scientific

question. If so, a “realist” and anti-positivist theory of science will be re-

quired, of which more below. Materialisms, of course, are realisms in the first

important sense that, in contrast to “idealisms” which make “reality” mind-

dependent, for the materialist, the world exists independently of minds, God’s

included.

RESIDUAL PROBLEMS OF THE DEBATE OVER IDEALISM

As the twentieth century began, positivism had won the battle over the char-

acter of the physical sciences.7 But the existential status of “the external

world” had not been resolved. It informs, of course, the problem articulationof Moore and Russell, James and Dewey, and all the American realists (in

their several varieties), with variant forms of positivism confounding matters


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further. I shall not attempt a review of the often-puerile debates that charac-

terize this battle and why it has been so difficult to be clear about the perti-nent issues.

But I would insist that this debate is a philosopher’s problem in the sense

that first, “the things that we see, hear, and touch—and to a significant degree

also what we taste or smell—appear as independent of our seeing, hearing, or

touching them” (Mandelbaum, 1964: 222).8 Only a philosopher could raise

questions about this. Second, we cannot doubt that we can learn from experi-

ences in this world, even if philosophy and science remain puzzled as to just

how this occurs. Thus, in no human community, however different, have per-

sons failed to make judgments about the resources and dangers of this world.

Papaya was identified as nourishing before there was any understanding of

metabolism and cold was avoided before we understood the mechanisms. But

even more than this, only a philosopher could doubt that the modern natural

sciences produce genuine knowledge of this world. I take it as fundamental

not merely that nature exists independently of at least human experience, but

that it is structured in some way independent of human inquiry and that we

can have some knowledge of it.9

But this does not mean that debate between idealists and their opponents

left no no residual problems. I find two, the one that motivates Farber and the

other, the paradigmatic philosopher’s problem (or nest of philosophers’s

problems). I begin with the latter.

EPISTEMOLOGY:THE PHILOSOPHER’S PROBLEM PAR EXCELLENCE

Epistemological problems, either in traditional “foundationist” or in more re-

cent non-foundationalist, “analytic” variations, are philosopher’s problems.

The “discipline” is of recent vintage, achieving self-consciousness only after

Kant, indeed, as part and parcel of the emergence of metaphysical idealism.

Since eighteenth century thinkers did not distinguish science and philosophy,

in the Enlightenment vision of man and nature, metaphysics and physics were

not distinguishable. Thus Newton, Boyle and Locke could assume that scien-

tific inference could offer evidence that there were non-perceivable, indepen-

dently existing objects, which could be known.10 And since they worked prior

to the development of empiricist criticisms of causality, they could also seek

causal explanations of experience. Evidently, these could not be understood

as “correlations” of directly observed sequences.After Kant, claims about knowing would pre-empt claims about being

(what Roy Bhaskar called “the epistemic fallacy”) leaving room only for an

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idealistic metaphysics or a positivism, including forms of Kantianism, phe-

nomenalism, naïve realism, or doctrines of “pure experience.” And, as part of this, despite struggles by Helmholtz, Spencer and James (in his Principles),

“science” could offer nothing of interest about knowing. The question, “How

is our knowledge possible?” was, thereafter, nothing like the question: “How

are telephones possible.” As a philosophical problem, it could be answered in

either one of two ways: Either by taking a “transcendental turn” (phenome-

nology) or in terms of evidential relations between basic and non-basic

propositions (Rorty, 1979).11

DEWEY AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY PROBLEM

There have been some modern philosophers who tried to avoid this regressive

pursuit. Indeed, one can argue that this is what is most distinctive about

American pragmatism, from Peirce to Dewey.12 But none, including Dewey,

entirely escaped the Kantian epistemological problematic. This explains the

odd character of Peirce’s philosophy, James’s shift to “radical empiricism,”

the frustrating debates that Dewey had with the American realists of various

sorts, his frustration with them, on grounds that he was not offering but an-

other “epistemology,” and the failure to see also that he was not offering just

another “scientism.” (See Chapter 1).

Dewey was surely correct to reject “the spectator theory of knowledge”

and to deny the idea that truth was to be determined by its relation to the in-

dependently existing reality—the assumption of at least some “realisms,” and

he was correct in his effort to displace epistemology for “inquiry into in-

quiry,” comprehended as a practical, social activity which made science con-tinuous with common sense. But his “naturalism” was burdened by his com-

mitment to “experience.” The problem was not, however, his defense of

“naïve realism” or even his “postulate or criterion of immediate empiricism”

(properly understood). Rather the problem was his unwillingness to accept a

strong version of scientific realism, necessary if I am correct, to carry out the

program of his groundbreaking and little understood Logic: The Theory of In-

quiry. And this amounts to saying that he could find no grounds on which to

assert that the “thing-in-itself” was knowable and causally pertinent.

“Experience” had been corrupted by the tradition, which gave us episte-

mology. As John Shook points out, by the time he was ninety-one years old,

Dewey saw this. As a good empiricist, he had intended “to liberate philoso-

phy from desiccated abstractions” (a task also set by Marx.) But “experience”“had become effectively identified with experiencing in the sense of the psy-

chological, and the psychological had become established as that which is


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intrinsically psychical, mental, private.” Accordingly, his insistence that “‘ex-

perience’ also designates that what is experienced was a mere ideologicalthundering in the Index for it ignored the ironical twist which made this use

of ‘experience’ strange and incomprehensible” (LW, 1: 362). If indeed

Dewey’s instrumentalism was an epistemology, then this move was “strange

and incomprehensible” exactly because it denied the starting point of “the

epistemological problem.” Either Dewey, like Moore in his famous refutation

of idealism, missed the point or he was a covert idealist, perhaps a Hegelian

of some sort.13

There is nothing fatal about the “postulate of immediate empiricism,” that

“things—anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the

term ‘thing’—are what they are experienced as” (MW, 3: 159). The postulate

not only allowed for, but required that we recognize that the experiences of

individual’s may well differ, so “if it is a horse which is to be described, or

the equus which is to be defined, then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or

. . . the paleontologist tell us what the horse is which is experienced.”“ These

accounts may differ, but none is privileged as “real” against others, which are

deemed “phenomenal.” For Dewey, it is clear that each account is from some

point of view and that the conditions necessary for understanding the differ-

ences as well as the agreements can be provided. This plainly will be prob-

lem for psychology and the sociology of knowledge—an inquiry demanded

by Dewey’s theory of knowledge and welcomed by me. But, presumably,

there is something independent of each of these experiences which is causally

pertinent to the having of them—and, if so, why not independent of any-

body’s? And if not, why was this not an idealism? Indeed, on Dewey’s own

naturalistic premises, cats, bats, and beetles each have “worlds” which are en-

abled and constrained by their particular sensory (and “mental”) capacities.14

NATURALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM

Tom Burke is quite correct, I think, to argue that the naturalism of Dewey’s

Logic joins with the ecological psychology of J.J. Gibson (Burke, 1994:

83–96). Burke summarizes:

In contrast with a classical empiricist view of perception (involving so-called,

sense data, sense impression, stimulations or nerve endings, irritations of body

surfaces, and so forth), ecological psychology emphasizes a different array of

theoretical concepts; one being the concept of “invariants” and another the con-

cept of affordances . . .

Ecological psychology treats the perceiving agent as a dynamic organism/

environment system, continually engaged in various sorts of actions designed

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for exploring the world and utilizing its resources. Controlled sampling of the

world gives evidence of possible uses of things (and of ways to orchestrate sub-

sequent actions) by virtue of the agent’s being attuned to lawlike relations which

involve stable associations of different sorts of possible experiences (84).

Now, my point is just this: the idea of “invariants”—lawlike relations, and the

concept of “affordances”—possibilities as determined by invariants require a

realist theory of causal powers.

Affordances are dispositional properties of things, which refer to a thing’s

powers construed as per Harré and Madden (1974) and Bunge (1970). It is to

assert a categorical referring to the nature (structure) of the thing and to “ten-

dencies” true of the thing by virtue of its nature. Dispositions manifest them-

selves (minimally) in pairs: salt dissolves in water, clay is molded with the

hands. Affordances are dispositions in an organism-populated world. As Tur-

vey et al write: “Possibilities for action, or more precisely, things with possi-bilities for action, are among the kinds of things that populate an animal’s

niche and are, contrary to received wisdom, things to be heard, or smelt, etc.”

This is most easily seen with an example:

Sharks electrically detect things to eat and things that impede locomotion . . . An

edible thing such as flatfish differs in ionic composition from the surrounding

water, producing a bioelectric field partially modulated in the rhythm of the liv-

ing thing’s respiratory movements. A flatfish that has buried in the sand will be

detectable by a shark swimming just above it. Reproducing the bioelectric field

of the flatfish artificially, by passing a current between two electrodes buried in

the sand, invites the same behavior. The shark digs tenaciously at the source of

the field departing from the site when the act fails to reveal an edible thing . . .

Now there is no intelligible sense in which it can be claimed that the source

ought to have appeared edible if the shark’s perception of affordances were di-

rect. In the niche of the shark, ‘edible thing’ and ‘electric field of, say, type F’

are nomically related. To predicate of the shark (a) ‘detects electrical field of

type F’ and (b) ‘takes to be an edible thing’ is not to refer to two different states

of affairs, one (viz. (b)) that is reached from the other (viz. (a)) by an inference.

Rather, it is to make reference to a single state of affairs of the shark-niche sys-

tem. The linking of (a) and (b) is not something that goes on in the “mind” of

the shark, as the Establishment would have it. The linking of (a) and (b) is in the

physics of an ecological world . . . (Turvey et al, 1981: 276–77).

Dewey would, I think, strongly agree that ecological psychology picks up on

themes that he articulated, especially, in the Logic. And it is perfectly clear

that for Dewey, even perception is profoundly affected by the fact that hu-

mans are social beings, a fact which raises immense problems for empirical

psychology (Manicas and Secord, 1984). But we need to ask: How did


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Dewey stand on what is now termed “scientific realism?” Unfortunately, as

with earlier “realism” debates, it is not perfectly clear what this implies. Alarge part of the problem, moreover, turns on whether the claims mean to pro-

vide an account of the actual practices of the physical sciences, especially

physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and whether if they do, the accounts are

constrained by traditional epistemological assumptions, for example, as in

Quine, whose understanding of “empirical” and of “logic” (as extensional

and providing the canonical form of scientific sentences) gives his under-

standing of “scientific realism” a most distinctive “empiricist” caste (Mani-

cas, 2004). So as to be as clear as possible on my position, let me merely as-

sert one of Margolis’s conclusions (as I understand them.)

Margolis has argued convincingly, I think, that a strong form of scientific

realism need not be either “foundationist” or “cognitivist” as he explicates

these. To do this, one needs to assert “ontic externalism, the view that ‘the

world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects,” that “the

question the way the world is” makes sense “relative to one conceptual theme

or another,” and finally, that “objectivity in the cognitive sense is only ‘ob-

jectivity for us’” (Margolis, 1986: 285). Dewey would, I think, agree with all

three, even while taking what amounts to an anti-realist position regarding

unobservables and even if he denies that causality is an ontological category.

We can notice, first, that Dewey’s prose leaves us with some questions on

the pertinent issues. This results, in part at least, from his willingness to in-

corporate into his own highly idiosyncratic theory of science, elements from

competing historical traditions, but especially “empiricism” and “rational-

ism.” Thus, it is clear enough that he was not a Humean (although Mill is

usually his target), that he joined “nominalism” and “realism,” and that he

supposed that one could settle most of the questions about inquiry, and, ac-cordingly, about science, by paying close attention to the function of proposi-

tions in use in science.

He clearly rejected the “regularity determinist” ontology of events so char-

acteristic of Hume and positivism. For him, “there are no such things as uni-

form sequences of events” (LW, Vol. 12: 445) and hence “scientific laws” could

not be “formulations of uniform and unconditional sequences of events” (LW,

12: 437. This would seem to encourage the view that, for him, science assumed

an ontology of “things.” Similarly, in Experience and Nature, he held that

“atoms and molecules show a selective bias in their indifferences, affinities and

repulsions . . . to other events” (LW, 1: 162). “Selective biases” are surely “ten-

dencies” in the sense of Harré and Madden, and “atoms,” if not molecules, are

not “observable”—at least as ordinarily understood.On the other hand, he denies explicitly that causality is an ontological cat-

egory; for him, it is a “logical category” (in his special sense) and “the term

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‘causal laws’ is, . . . in spite of its general use, a figure of speech,” “a case of

metonymy” (LW, 12: 440). Indeed, he gave an account of what he took to bethe “confusion” regarding causality. There is, upon reflection, “a qualitative

gap” between “gross qualitative objects (which are the objects of direct per-

ception),” for example,, the lighted match and the burning of the paper.

““Forces” were introduced to get over this difficulty. Thus, “the match was

supposed to have a certain calorific power” (LW, 12: 445). But “the time

came when it was seen that forces by definition are such as to be incapable of

scientific observation. They were then ruled out of science . . . ”15 “Then there

grew up the hybrid notion which took from common sense the idea of suc-

cession and from science the idea of invariability of conjunction” (LW, 12:

445). If Dewey is not a Humean, neither, it seems, would he accept the idea

that “things” have causal powers.

But if so, his alternative is anything but clear. It turns, I think, on his criti-

cal distinction between “generic propositions” and “universal propositions.”

Generic propositions, for example, “sugar is sweet,” “iron rusts,” are “exis-

tential” and (as with singular propositions, for example, “this is sweet’)

“predicates represent potentialities which will be actualized when certain fur-

ther operations are performed . . .” (LW, 12: 251). “Universal propositions”

for example, “if a particle at rest is acted upon by a single moving particle,

then . . . .” (LW, 12: 254) and, ambiguously, sentences of the form, “All A is

B” (rendered as in modern logic as conditionals) lack existential import. They

are “valid, if valid at all,” because they express “a necessary relation of ab-

stract characters” (LW, 12: 255).

Ernest Nagel was correct, it seems, in saying that the “function” of

generic propositions “is to organize perceptual materials . . .” (LW, 12: xvi).

They are, accordingly, the heart of our commonsense understanding of na-ture. The formulation just quoted suggests a reading of them as dispositions,

non-realistically analyzed: If X is tasted, then if X is sugar, X will taste

sweet. But “will be actualized ” (even ceteris paribus) suggests also that

there is some sort of necessity attached to them. If so, this is an odd mix. It

is easy to see how one could have “natural necessity” if generic proposi-

tions are analyzed realistically.16

“Universal propositions,” by contrast, formulate “necessary relations” be-

tween “abstract characters” and “their function in inquiry is to propose possi-

ble operations which, if carried out, might solve the problem under inquiry”

(LW 12: xvi). This, of course, grapples with the medieval problem of real-

ism/nominalism. Nagel quite understandably is puzzled by the putative “ne-

cessity” in such “laws.” Such necessity surely is not a priori for Dewey, evenwhile he terms the relation “logical” and “definitional,” nor does it seem

to square with standard “logicist” efforts (unsuccessful!) to discriminate


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between “accidental generalizations” and “laws.” But neither does it represent

what Harré and Madden termed “natural necessity,” for this is ontological.Dewey seems to think that the pertinent issues are resolved once we accept

that “conceptual subject-matter is [to be] interpreted solely and wholly on the

ground of the function it performs on the conduct of inquiry” (LW, 12: 462).

We can, he says, then reject as spurious an exclusive dichotomy between

“conceptions [as] mere devices of practical convenience,” or as “descriptive

of something actually existing in the material dealt with” (462). The former

is an “instrumentalist” reading; the latter, realist. And, of course, depending

on what they are “devices” for , they may be both “descriptive” and “of prac-

tical convenience,” perhaps useful also as guides to inquiry. But are these

conceptions “descriptions”? And if so, what are they descriptions of?

Dewey sees rightly that the notion of “abstraction” is part of the problem.

As he sees it, if conceptions are “descriptions,” “abstract characters” are “ab-

stracted” from “existents” in the sense of “selective discrimination.” But, he

insists, this is quite impossible as regards an abstract character as a “scientific

conception.” He gives an example: “smoothness, as an instance of a scientific

conception, is not capable of observation and hence of selective discrimina-

tion” (462). Hence, as scientific conceptions, such “abstract characters” are

not descriptions.

But the scientific realist, not bound by positivist predilections, will agree

that while “abstraction” is part of the problem, we should not be looking at

“abstract characters” at all, but at models of “things” as abstractions from the

real, concrete. We experience water as fluid and clear and capable of many

sorts of transactions. H2O, an abstraction, identifies the model for a molecule

of water, and molecular chemistry develops the theory, which explains these

powers. The model is not a fiction, but an abstracted real structure. Experi-enced water is H2O but it is not only H2O. The water of immediate experience

does what it does by virtue of being H2 O. Hence, ceteris paribus, because it

is NaCl, ordinary (experienced) table salt must dissolve in the water in my

boiling pot.17

Perhaps Dewey’s account can be rescued, and perhaps it is sound as it

stands. John Shook18 seems to bite the bullet. He has argued that while Dewey

allowed, “the sciences should be permitted to postulate unexperienceable,

transcendent entities that permit scientific explanation of experienced

events,” he also “refuses to take a realistic stand towards such ‘objects,’ while

Quine [e.g.,] encourages realism here.” But if as he says, “scientific theories

are used to guide inferences toward predictions,” and universal propositions

“function in science regardless of whether their terms actually refer to any-thing at all,” then as Mach, Poincaré and Duhem each insisted, why cling to

the idea that science seeks to explain? It is the core of realist theories of sci-

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ence that science explains and could not unless we accept that inquiry gives

us knowledge of the causal powers of the things, which exist independentlyof us.

HUMAN PROBLEMS

I noted that there were two residual problems of the idealism/realism debate.

The second regards not philosopher’s problems, but problems of how we

should live. I want to support Dewey’s theory of inquiry as a naturalism be-

cause, as Farber insisted, there are only two ways to address these problems.

One is either a naturalist who holds that naturalist inquiry can answer these

questions or one is anti-naturalist and denies this. Today, anti-naturalism has

two main forms: the appeals to authority of traditional theology, and the sub-

jectivisms of positivism and post-modernist theory.

Our daily papers are filled with examples of the first.19 But a central issue

is identified by Hare and Madden in their little book, Evil and the Concept of

God (1968). They argue that, however understood, evils should be eliminated

as far as humanly possible; but if indeed, they are not remediable, and if,

worse, they serve some theological values not obvious to us, then why make

the effort? Or as Parry writes in his short rejoinder to Father Clark’s defense

of theism:

There is no need to blame Jupiter for the lightening, nor a jealous god for natu-

ral death. Violent homicide is indeed blameworthy, especially wholesale slaugh-

ter. Though “the system” is undoubtedly faulty, yet it operates only through in-

dividuals, who must be held morally responsible. The rulers of the world, on myview, must be held primarily responsible for such horrors as burning civilians by

gas chambers, atom bombs, and napalm; and all of us are jointly responsible to

the extent that we support our rulers (Parry, 1968).

That this needs saying is, itself, shameful.

Positivisms accept science, but on its understanding of knowledge, science

becomes irrelevant to questions of morals and politics. So, for example, the

eminent Harvard zoologist, Stephen Jay Gould, argues that “religion” and

“science” are complementary: “Science tries to document the factual charac-

ter of the natural world . . . Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally

important, but utterly different (my emphasis) realm of human purposes,

meanings and values . . .”20

Postmodernisms deny nature and hold that “science”—generallymisunderstood—is but one among many “discourses,” including, then, the

“discourses” of multiplied “communities,” “faith,” “ethnic” and otherwise.


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Like the “New Age” quest for a new “inwardness” with its “metaphysical

dissolvent,” “Transcendental Individualism,”21

the postmodernist obliter-ates “objectivity” and licenses equally whatever beliefs are shared by these

self-defined communities, however belief gets fixed. Moreover, positivism

and postmodernism are consistent with and propelled by “capitalist am-

biance,” “flexible accumulation” and consumerism.22 Marvin Farber had it

right:

The philosophical Pandora’s box [of subjectivism] is one more fairy tale . . . It

is, however, a fairy tale with sociohistorical linkage and consequences, for it is

an ingenious philosophy of renunciation that leaves the status quo unexamined

and unchallenged and that may even be accommodated to reactionary ideas

(1984: 130).

Dewey is pertinent here. But bringing me full circle back to Marvin Farber,the naturalism of Marx is even more pertinent:

The great thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology . . . is simply that Hegel grasps the self-

creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and

transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the nature of work , and com-

prehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work .

The actual, active relation of man to himself as a species-being or the confirmation

of his species being as an actual, that is, human, being is only possible so far as he

really brings forth all his species-powers— which in turn is only possible through

the collective effort of mankind, only as the result of history. . . .

We see here how a consistent naturalism or humanism is distinguished from

both idealism and materialism, as well and at the same time the unifying truth

of both. We also see that only naturalism is able to comprehend the act of worldhistory . . . (Marx, 1967: 321–25).

Evidently, although I would need at least another paper to elaborate these

most pregnant insights and to demonstrate their connection to alienation, the

problem of democracy and the analysis of capitalist society, nothing that I am

likely to say would add much to what is, by now, a rich and still relevant lit-

erature. (See Chapter 10, below).

NOTES

1. In his review of the multi-volume Dictionary of Eighteenth Century BritishPhilosophers, James Harris remarks: “just as it is usually hard to distinguish “philos-

ophy” from science in the eighteenth century, then so also it is difficult to hold apart

science and theology for long. That is why, if the character and significance of their

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work is to be properly understood, men such as Hume and Reid have to be surrounded

by so many relatively obscure figures from disciplines which today have little or noth-

ing to do with philosophy. For the truth is that there are no ‘purely philosophical ques-

tions in eighteenth century Britain’” (Times Literary Supplement , May 5, 2000). See

below as regards Locke, Boyle and Newton.

2. Especially, Marvin Farber, Naturalism and Subjectivism (Springfield, IL.: C. C.

Thomas, 1959); The Search for an Alternative (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-

vania Press, 1984). The extraordinary volume, Philosophy for the Future (New York:

Macmillan Co., 1949) edited by Roy Wood Sellars, V.J. McGill and Farber, was on

the reading list of Farber’s marvelous lecture course, “The Philosophy of the Recent

Past.” A defense of materialism, the essays, many authored by the distinguished list

who contributed regularly to Science and Society, are remarkably pertinent.

3. Mandelbaum notes that the confusion persists despite explicit disavowals on the

part of Comte, Spencer, Bernard, Huxley, and Mach—and the positivists of the very

recent past.

4. Farber and I would agree with Lenin’s attack on the Machists, but it seems clearthat neither Engels nor Lenin provided a plausible answer to the question of the rela-

tion of thought to being: the “reflection theory” surely will not do. Nor, tragically in

my view, did either Engels or Lenin provide a convincing alternative philosophy of

science. I have discussed this, along with Engels’s relation to competing materialisms,

in my “Engels’s Philosophy of Science,” in Terrell Carver and Manfred Steger (eds.),

Engels After Marx (College Station: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

For a beautifully wrought criticism of logical positivism—from a Marxist perspec-

tive, see V. J. McGill, “An Evaluation of Logical Positivism,” in Volume 1, Number

1 of Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly (Fall, 1936). Parry and Albert Blum-

berg are thanked by McGill who was, of course, a close associate of Farber’s. See also

Lewis Feuer’s excellent account, “The Development of Logical Empiricism,” Science

and Society, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer, 1941).

5. See my “Modest Realism, Experience and Evolution,” in Roy Bhaskar (ed.), Harré and His Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1990), 23–40, and the discussion of

James, Chapter 1, above, who was caught in the same dilemma. Mandelbaum notes,

correctly, that having established that science had demonstrated that what we directly

experience never gives us the characteristics of what exists independently of us, both

Spencer and Helmholtz “reversed themselves and spoke as if it were a defect in

knowledge that we do not directly experience the world as it exists independently of

us” (1971: 362). The solution, available to both, was to admit that “transdiction, or in-

ference to what is in principle not experienceable is scientifically justified. McGill

gave a very similar argument, briefly that one cannot argue coherently from the causal

argument that “sensations cannot be regarded as copies or direct representations of

. . . the material object” (which McGill holds to be true) to either “agnosticism” or

“phenomenalism.”( 1936: 51).

6. See Causal Powers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974); Principles of ScientificThinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). One should cite here also,

Mario Bunge’s infrequently noticed, Causality and Modern Science, First Edition,

1959 (Dover, 1979) and Michael Scriven’s essays in Minnesota Studies in the


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Philosophy of Science. Parry is acknowledged by Harré and Madden. As noted, Bill

Parry’s critique of extensionalist difficulties with “entails” and the contrary-to-fact

conditional was a lasting influence on me, but I do not remember whether he raised

this with particular reference to causality. See also Roderick Chisholm, “The Con-

trary-To-Fact Conditional,” (1946), reprinted in Manicas (ed.), Logic as Philosophy

(New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1971).

7. The story of the human or social sciences is different and more complicated.

See my A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19

87).

8. Mandelbaum notes that this, probably, catches the element of truth in Moore’s

famous refutation. “In direct experience we are all realists and cannot avoid being so.”

He insists, rightly, that this only the beginning of an argument, for me, a philosopher’s

argument. Moreover, as part of this, it is not true that “everything we experience ex-

ists precisely as we experience it.” (1964: 2).

9. As Farber many times insisted, “the philosophical problem of existence . . .

arises when a method is adopted that does not proceed from the basic fact of experi-ence” (Phenomenology and Existence: Toward a Philosophy within Nature (New

York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967: 70. It is a “methogenic problem.” Indeed, “the fact

of nondependent existence is basic of philosophical thought. Not to recognize that

fact is to incur the error of illicit ignorance . . .” (72).

See also the work of another student of Farber’s, Wilfred Sellars. But we should not

go as far as Sellar’s “macho-realism” (Roy Bhaskar’s term) and argue that if “the sci-

entific image” in true, then “the manifest image” is false. See Science, Perception and

Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963: 96. Farber might argue thatSellars’s startling conclusion is also a “methogenic” result.

10. It is a serious error to read Boyle and Newton as “positivists.” Their

“corpuscularism” depended on their perfect comfort with “transdictive” in-

ferences: inference to what lies beyond the scope of all possible experience

(Mandelbaum, 1964: chapter 2.)11. See also his useful footnote on the historiography of philosophy: 1979:

132.

12. As argued in Chapter 1, above, Peirce recast the epistemological prob-

lem by rejecting the transcendental move but by accepting the Kantian “insu-

lation” against skepticism. See also, Murray G. Murphey, The Development

of Peirce’s Philosophy (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard, 1961) and the essay by my

former associate at Buffalo, R.G. Meyers, “Peirce on Cartesian Doubt,”

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 3 (1967).

13. See Kenneth R. Westphal’s excellent Hegel’s Epistemological Realism

(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).14. As Burke notes, we must distinguish “operational perspectivity from subjec-

tivity.” The former is impossible to avoid; the latter in a Deweyan frame is not thestarting point, but needs to be explained. See Tom Burke, Dewey’s New Logic: A Re-

ply to Russell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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15. Perhaps it is unnecessary to note here that Dewey endorses this “ruling out,”

and that it was precisely this move which defines positivism and which burdened

Spencer, Helmholtz and James.

16. A power ascription can be analysed as: “X has the power to A” means X can

do A, in the appropriate conditions, in virtue of its intrinsic nature (Harré and Mad-

den: 1974: 86). Empirical investigation is needed to fill in the italicized clause. This

will require theory and, as well, construction of a model, perhaps detailing the micro-

structure of the “thing.” See below. In contrast to non-realist ascription, “things” have

powers even if never exercised—as was held by Peirce. See also Everett J. Nelson’s

powerful “The Category of Substance,” in Sellars, McGill and Farber, Philosophy for

the Future.

17. We need theory to fill in the CP clause, and we experiment to test the model.

See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978). If we

drop the CP clause, this becomes a “tendency.” On models, see Harré, Principles of

Scientific Thinking, esp. Chapter 2.

Derek Sayer has offered a reconstruction of Marx’s theory of science along theselines. Thus, Marx criticizes Ricardo and others as engaging in “violent abstraction.”

He summarizes:

It conveys the idea of precipitate abstraction from manifest phenomena to their alleged

essences, without the mechanisms by means of which the latter cause the former to assume

the forms they do being adequately specified; or, to use different terminology, an idea of

immediate identification of phenomena as supposed instantiations of general laws, when

in fact these laws operate only in mediate fashion through a series of intervening links

which the analysis ought to specify.

‘True abstract thinking’ . . . entails elaborating the mechanisms linking laws and phe-

nomena in such a way that their apparent divergence is consistently explained. (Sayer,

1979: 121–22.)

See also the several essays in Craig Dilworth (ed.), Idealization IV: Intelligibility inScience (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992, including my essay, “Intelligibility and Idealiza-

tion: Marx and Weber” and references therein.

18. In addition to his book, see the extended discussion in his unpublished paper,

“Dewey and Quine on What There Is.” The following quotations are from this man-

uscript, hopefully permitted by Shook.

19. Writing in the New York Times (June 19, 2000), the President of the Southern

Baptist Theological Seminary held that arguments over creation, women’s roles, ho-

mosexuality, abortion, etc. are, for his 16 million parishioners, “settled by the word of

God.”

20. Quoted by Jerry A. Coyne, “Is NOMA a no man’s land?” Times Literary Sup-

plement June 9, 2000). Gould seems not have noticed that the idea that religion and

science “complement” one another is both factually false and founders on the as-

sumption that facts and values can be bifurcated. One may hope that the surveys areflawed, but Coyne notes that “nearly 50 percent of Americans believe that humans

were directly created by God within the past 100,000 years, and 40 percent think that


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creationism should replace [not just be taught!] evolution in the biology classroom.

The New York Times helps this along when it publishes an essay by Richard Rothstein

(June 7, 2000), which argues that “facts are only what we observe.” Evolution is not

a fact: “There could be other theories.” Perhaps Rothstein took a course in philoso-

phy at one of our more distinguished institutions?

21. The term is Irving Kristol’s, an ally here. See his excellent “Faith a¢ la Carte.”

Times Literary Supplement May 26, 2000.

22. The best treatment is David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford:

Basil Blackwell, 1987).

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119

INTRODUCTION

It is surely plausible to think of the histories of humankind as a series of dis-

continuous, and sometimes continuous, intersecting movements marked by

accidents, some benign, some fortuitous, and some disastrous. In this regard,

if nothing else, history is radically contingent—even if looking back, we can

often provide altogether satisfactory explanations of what happened and

why?1 One such legacy is the intertwined conceptual and institutional lega-

cies of science and academic philosophy.

Yet not all is well as regards these. Dewey could lament that we had failed to

replace old habits of thought with more scientific ways. This was one aspect of

the reconstruction in philosophy for which he called. We wonder, not unrea-sonably, whether the authority of science was but Western provincialism, the ra-

tionale for the imperialist obliteration of non-Western cultures. On the other

side, while Dewey was aware that science had been misappropriated and mis-

applied, he remained optimistic that this could be changed, that democratic

processes could be brought to bear on expert claims to authority. This, too, was

an aspect of his call for reconstruction. Yet, as above, Dewey’s hopes strike us

as naive. Wholly disjoined from experts, we stand in terror of their so carefully

considered decisions. What, heaven help us, will be the unintended conse-

quences of genetic engineering or the disaster of Iraq? If the nineteenth century

had Frankenstein, we have energy-obsessed Dr. Strangeloves.

This chapter pursues the idea of reconstructing philosophy; thus, if very in-

directly, of reconstructing culture. With Dewey as both guide and foil, the fo-cus is on the implications of the current debate over the effort to naturalize

epistemology, that is, to study knowledge scientifically. Dewey was surely

Chapter Six

Naturalizing Epistemology:Reconstructing Philosophy

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correct that we need an alternative to dogmatism and to skepticism; but as

perhaps Dewey did not clearly see, we cannot take science for granted. A sec-ond goal of this chapter, then, is to raise some questions both about current

scientific practices and our understanding of these.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM

We can begin with Barry Stroud’s critique of Quine’s influential essay, “Epis-

temology Naturalized.”2 Quine argues that naturalized epistemology is “the

empirical study of a species of primates, or, in the particular case, of an indi-

vidual human subject in interaction with his environment” (in Kornblith,

1985: 77). Thus:

This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled imput—certain patterns of irradiation in certain frequencies, for instance—and in the full-

ness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional

external world and its history? (Kornbilith, 1985: 77).3

The story continues: we observe the subject as she interacts with her envi-

ronment. Given then that we know her environment and have an adequate

psychology, we then explain her “output,” seeing that, in the fullness of time,

what she says is true.

But, of course, the situation just described is not the situation of our natu-

ralizing epistemologist, since, of course, like our knower, she is (as every-

one!) utterly denied that independent, theory-neutral access to the world

which could be the only basis for determining whether inputs from it ever re-

sult in outputs which are true. Stroud concludes that Quine simply fails to ad-dress what he takes to be the traditional question of epistemology: How do

we know that the external world is what anybody says it is?

This problem is not the problem of whether there is an external world or,

for that matter, whether it has some structure. As Peirce and Dewey insisted,

we can call into question any particular version of how the world is, but

Cartesian skepticism cannot be reasonably motivated.4 But as the foregoing

seems at least to show, one can assume an external and structured world, the

method of science, and still ask if what is presumed to be known is known.

Dewey might add there that this “problem” presumes an absolute concep-

tion of reality.5 On this (commonsensical) view, reality means reality as it is

independently of you and me, independently of what it is known as. My skep-

tic demands that we show that knowledge of this reality is possible. If theonly knowledge we can have is from some viewpoint, how can we know

whether it—our or some other—is valid? That is, even given an absolute con-

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ception of reality, it would seem that we are forced to accept a relative con-

ception of knowledge. It may be, of course, that we can justify some view-point. Perhaps (as I argue below) there are modes of fixing belief, which

should be preferred. Such a relationalism and fallibilism could then be con-

trasted to relativism: understood as the thesis that no viewpoint, no mode of

fixing belief, can claim privilege over any other.

It may be doubted that we need an absolute conception of reality. But we

surely do—if we want to avoid relativism and to anchor our fallibilism.6 Even

if we can privilege some mode of fixing belief, we will need to aspire to the

ideal of grasping the world as it is, independently of what you and I might

believe. The problem of historical knowledge is, perhaps, the clearest case.

We must acknowledge that we shall never have more than a fragment of the

possible evidence and that alternative histories are always possible. But

surely what transpired transpired independently of these. It is just this, which

grounds the limits of all perspectives and thus our fallibilism.

More, we need an absolute conception of reality if criticism and persuasion

is not to collapse into sophistry, to be merely a struggle to win opinion. As

rhetoricians know, truth-talk plays a vital role in argument, persuasion, and

criticism. Indeed, if we could dispense with the conception of an absolute

conception of reality, truth-talk might be dispensable, replaced by pragmatic

“works/does not work” or “predicts/does not predict.” Language (and theo-

ries about the world) are surely (our) tools for coping with our world; but for

social animals, they could not serve if they did not have a rhetorical function.7

There is another form of answer to Stroud. We don’t need independent ac-

cess to the world if we can assume there is a necessary connection between

some method, say, the method of science and truth. Thus, with persistent ap-

plication of our method, our (un-Peircean) individual, given a (Peircean) full-ness of time, will arrive at truth. But even this act of faith does not help us.

Since we will always lack independent access, we can never know whether

we have arrived!

Here we can pause to consider, even if too briefly, an argument put forward

by Michael Friedman in his essay, “Truth and Confirmation” (in Kornblith,

1985). He points out (rightly) that there is no necessary connection between

confirmation and truth and that what traditional philosophy of science has to

offer on the relation cannot be sustained.8 In particular, he argues that if sci-

entific method (or any other) is to show that it achieves (or even approxi-

mates) truth, the Tarskian theory of truth (shared by all traditional candidates)

must be supplemented to include a causal theory of reference. Since our

methods cannot guarantee success, “we have to know facts about the actualworld if we are to know which method is best; and we have to know facts

about the actual world to know even that any given method has any chance at

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all of leading to truth!” (Kornblith, 1985: 155–56). To do this in a nonvi-

ciously circular way “we need general laws connecting physics and psychol-ogy [sic] with the theory of truth; and it is precisely this kind of generality

that a theory of reference tries to provide” (161).9

There are two fairly obvious objections. First, even given these laws, it is

by no means clear what scientific method is and thus what and how it is to be

tested (of which more below). But, second, as Friedman says, we lack utterly

such general laws. Worse, I believe that there is little reason to suppose that

such are possible. To anticipate, Friedman’s program seems, at least, to fol-

low Quine’s in being committed to an epistemological individualism.10

EPISTEMOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM

There are, I believe, about nine (or forty?) ways into this. One way is to ob-

serve that experience requires concepts and that most of our concepts—at

least—are social products. Thus, I cannot “see” a tree unless I have the con-

cept “tree” and this is surely learned in a social process.11

The epistemological problem that is at issue here was surely propelled by

modern science, but contrary to what Quine (and Dewey) imply, acknowl-

edging this is no advantage for the naturalizing epistemologist. It is, indeed,

because of modern science that, as William James rightly saw (versus

Spencer), the epistemological problem is so intractable. Naive realism could

(and does!) sustain epistemological individualism: if you don’t believe there

are red apples in the world, then just look and see! But if you take modern

physical science and Dewey’s views of experience seriously (as I think wemust), then it is a rather gigantic system of belief, recognition, and the rest,

which has been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition. Given

this, how can we be so confident that our beliefs correspond to a world that

exists independent of either you or me?

This does not mean that I am deluded in saying “there is a red apple” when

I see a red apple. That is not the issue. Plainly, science did not undermine our

ordinary ways of thinking and speaking. When a G. E. Moore says, “I know

that there are red apples,” and a neuroscientist says “The experience of red

apples is the product of physical and biochemical transactions between some-

thing and us” and the skeptic says, “Nobody could know that there are red ap-

ples,” the same words are being used differently (Stroud: 76). What Moore

and the rest of us say, even if true, is not decisive as regards either the epis-

temological or the scientific investigation of knowledge.

We began with Quine’s psychological program; this is the appropriate

point to refer to recent sociology of knowledge, to the so-called “strong pro-

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gramme” (Manicas and Rosenberg, 1985, 1988). Its key insight is what

Barry Barnes calls “the naturalistic equivalence of the knowledge of differentcultures.”

Naturalism . . . implies the most intensely serious concern with what is real.

. . . Everything of naturalistic significance would indicate that there is indeed

one world, one reality, “out there”; the source of our perceptions if not their to-

tal determinant [that is, though not their total determinant], the cause of our per-

ceptions being fulfilled or disappointed, of our endeavors succeeding or being

frustrated. But this reality should not be identified with any linguistic account of

it, or needless to say, with any way of perceiving it, or pictorial representation

of it. Reality is the source of our primitive causes, which, having been presup-

posed by our perceptual apparatus, produces changes in our knowledge and the

verbal representations of it which we possess. All cultures relate symmetrically

to this reality. Men [sic] in all cultures are capable of making reasonable re-

sponses to the causal inputs they receive from reality—that is, are capable of

learning. That the structure of our verbal knowledge does not thereby necessar-

ily converge upon a single form, isomorphous with what is real, should not sur-

prise us. Why should we ever expect this to be a property of our linguistic and

cognitive capacities? (Barnes, 1977: 25).

Because, like Quine, Barnes and Bloor take science seriously, they believe (a)

there is an independently existing world, but (b) they also believe with Dewey

that human cognition is always socially mediated. (See Chapter 4).

The idea that knowledge of different cultures is naturalistically equivalent

is both a premise and a conclusion of strong program science. 12 Strong pro-

grammers are interested in understanding belief, and therefore, for scientific

purposes, beliefs which we think of as rational—including accordingly, thosewhich are fixed scientifically—must be treated as on the same footing as all

others.13. The belief “I see a Panda now” involves language. Hence social

considerations are relevant. Just because our only access to a world is causal,

and epistemological individualism cannot be sustained, a naturalistic episte-

mology interested in explaining knowledge must appeal to social facts. Not

only do these enter into concept formation (enormously complicating empir-

ical psychology), but we need to acknowledge that the problem of reproduc-

ing the cognitive order could not possibly be explained without a sociologi-

cal understanding of the relevant social mechanisms, for example, how belief

is authorized and stabilized.

On the other hand, because our best science implies that all we can have is

a representation of reality, and because there is no way to measure any repre-

sentation against reality-in-itself, we cannot escape a relationalism. But it

does not follow from this that all truth claims are equally good. At this point,

we can turn to Dewey.


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DEWEY’S PROGRAM

It is not perfectly clear what Dewey would say to a Karam defender of his

system of classification. Who here has the truth? He might say that the

question is badly posed. He might say that since “true” presupposes an ab-

solutist conception that is neither necessary nor possible, both are right.

Although the world is structured, it does not allow us to discriminate be-

tween contrary taxonomies. It does constrain these: A culture could not, for

example, treat what we have identified as poisonous as foods, for their bi-

ology will not allow them to survive. But there is nonetheless plenty of

room for alternative and contrary schemes depending on a host of alterna-

tive contingent factors regarding beliefs about the gods, the good, etc. On

this view of the matter, there are too many truths and it is idle to suppose

that any can be privileged.

There is an attractive aspect to this move. Given that peoples have differ-

ent interests and different ideas about the gods and the good, we need to ac-

knowledge that they may very well be able to justify their beliefs about the

way the world is—however strange these may seem to us. There is, unfortu-

nately, an unattractive aspect to this posture. Not only does it disavow an at-

tempt to give any special credence to the claims of science (perhaps not such

a bad thing?), but it disavows any effort to provide guidance about how we

ought to go about finding out what to believe, including here, lest we forget,

beliefs about what is good and right. I think that we can do better. So, too, did

Dewey.

DEWEY’S NATURALIZING OF EPISTEMOLOGY

Dewey wrote that “the methods of knowing practiced in daily life and science

are excluded from consideration in the philosophical theory of knowing”

(MW, Vol. 10: 37). Presumably, “the actual process of knowing;” involves

“operations of controlled observation, inference, reasoning, and testing.”

While this seems true enough, it does not help us in the present instance.

Surely, Karam do all these things even as they are arriving at a different tax-

onomy than ours. Are the Karam going about the business of inquiry

wrongly? Perhaps what is needed is a more systematic attempt at discrimi-

nating the special features of successful knowing. Dewey set this as the goal

of inquiry into inquiry. Thus, he writes:

The position here taken holds that since every special case of knowledge is con-

stituted as the outcome of some special inquiry, the conception of knowledge as

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such can only be a generalization of the properties discovered to belong to con-

clusions which are outcomes of inquiry. Knowledge, as an abstract term, is a

name for the product of competent inquiries (LW, 12: 16).

That is, by examining the outcomes of inquiries, we can discover why these

are knowledge and, conjunctively, by examining inquiries we can discover

what makes for competence. As Dewey insisted: “Through examination of

the relations which exist between means (methods) employed and conclu-

sions attained as their consequence, reasons are discovered why some meth-

ods succeed and other methods fail” (LW, 12: 17).

It is important to see what this program is and is not. Not only was Dewey

not altogether clear regarding what is involved, but more troublesome, the

program does not neatly join with work being carried on today in philosophy,

psychology or sociology as they are generally practiced in today’s academic

disciplines. Perhaps Dewey was off the mark, or perhaps the fault is with thedisciplinary division of labor.

INQUIRY INTO INQUIRY: I

It may be best to proceed indirectly and to begin by noting that Dewey’s pro-

gram is not akin to the psychologically oriented programs of Quine or, for ex-

ample, William Lycan (1988). Quine has not said very much about the sort of

psychology he assumes will explain how we know, but we may guess that it

is some sophisticated version of behaviorism. By contrast, Lycan is very clear

in his commitments to a Fodor/Dennett-inspired homuncularism, a currently

fashionable version of cognitive psychology.14

But in either case, Quine, Lycan, and the psychologies they presume are

epistemologically individualistic and Dewey’s psychology was not. More-

over, these writers and the psychologies they want to include are committed

to a logical theory which Dewey found to be misdirected.

Throughout his career, from his brilliant essay on the reflex arc, through

the 1903 studies in experimental logic, to How We Think (1910), to his ill-

understood Logic, Dewey developed a naturalistic theory of inquiry that to-

tally went against the dominating and now taken-for-granted Frege-Russell

conception of logic.15 In this view, logical relations hold between abstract

predicates and inference (deductive and inductive) depends on there being

some sort of objective relation between propositions.16 Because this as-

sumption was a feature of what Dewey called “intellectualism;” he lookedat the matter entirely differently. As Thomas Burke says, Dewey’s concep-

tion of inquiry “has to be understood not so much as cognitive problem


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solving but more generally in terms of an adaptive stabilization propensity

of organism/environment relations.”17

This basic naturalistic starting pointled Dewey to totally refashion “inference,” “propositional content,”

“kinds,” and other critical terms in standard logical theory. Thus, as I un-

derstand Dewey, “inference” is fundamentally a way of handling informa-

tion, which does not require human language. The logician’s concept of in-

ference is not, of course, to be abandoned; it is rather to be seen as a highly

useful abstraction, regimented for particular purposes.18

This is hardly the place to develop the radical implications of Dewey’s re-

vision. Continuing along lines just suggested, one example will have to suf-

fice. Enormous effort in psychology has been directed at solving Meno’s par-

adox: “If inputs require concepts to be meaningful, then concepts must

precede ‘inputs’ as in nativism; but if concepts (to be at all useful in the real

world) require ‘input’ for their content, then ‘inputs’ must precede concepts

as in empiricism (either of the ontogenetic or phylogenetic variety).”19 For

example, behaviorist-learning theory needs to assume that the organism has

made the relevant abstraction if it is to be reinforced. But this assumes exactly

what needs to be explained. On the other hand, recent cognitive psychology,

by conceiving of mind as an information processing system, assumes that in-

formation comes sententially prepackaged, ready-made for use by the lin-

guistically apt learner.

If I am correct we can now identify three obstacles to an adequate under-

standing of knowing: a pervasive intellectualism, an epistemological individ-

ualism, and third, a pervasive assumption, shared by the main contending

views, that, as Kelly and Kreuger put it “the only relations between contents

of cognitive states which makes a process involving those states a cognitive

process are the sorts of logical functions used in classical experiments”(Kellyand Kreuger, 1984: 64). But, of course, on the standard view of logic, logical

functions can hold only between abstract predicates. Meno’s dilemma is then

inescapeable! Indeed, until psychology breaks from those philosophical dog-

mas that have formed it, we shall not have an adequate psychology of learn-

ing, and we shall not naturalistically understand knowing. Dewey’s path, if I

am right, was the right one.

But even if we accept completely Dewey’s picture of inquiry (including a

host of details yet to be filled in), this would not, of itself, respond to the prob-

lem of judging between the belief systems of the Karam and the Western zo-

ologist. Presumably, Dewey’s account applies to both. If only the zoologist

gets it right, then something more is being assumed, likely that something

called the method of science privileges the findings of the zoologist. But wehave yet to see the argument for this.

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INQUIRY INTO INQUIRY: II

There is an entirely different program that is rightly construed as inquiry into

inquiry. Dewey offered (as we noted) that “through examination of the rela-

tions which exist between means (methods) employed and conclusions at-

tained as their consequence, reasons are discovered why some methods suc-

ceed and other methods fail “(LW, 12: 17). This might be understood as

meaning that the task is not only to frame theory which describes and ex-

plains the general feature of inquiry, but consistent with this, to consider em-

pirical science empirically. It might then be possible to generate warranted

methodological rules, thus satisfying the demand that we be able to judge be-

tween contrary beliefs and belief systems. This version of a naturalistic pro-

gram has had some recent advocates, among them, most outstandingly,

Nicholas Rescher and Larry Laudan. There are, I think, three main features,

which distinguish this approach.

First, the Deweyan inspiration is in the effort to avoid a vicious circularity

in which one either justifies outcomes by assuming that means are competent,

or warrants the means by assuming the truth of the outcomes. If as Rescher

puts it, “justification is here an essentially two-way process—its results legit-

imate the method as proper and appropriate, and the method justifies its re-

sults as ‘correct’ “ then one needs either to break the circle or to show that it

is nonvicious (Rescher, 1975: 27).

Briefly, Rescher argues that “any experiential justification of a truth crite-

rion must pull itself up by its own bootstraps—it needs factual inputs, but yet

factual inputs cannot at this stage already qualify as truths.” To meet this

need, accordingly, Rescher appeals to “truth candidates;” “data which are no

more truths than candidate-presidents are presidents. . . .”(28)20 Rescher thenenvisages “a feed-back loop” in which “the reasonableness of the over-all

process . . . rests not only on the (external) element of success inherent in the

factor of pragmatic efficiency, but also on the (internal) factor of intrinsic co-

herence and the mutual support of self-substantiation that the various stages

of the whole are able to lend to one another”(36).

Laudan offers what he calls a “reticulated model of scientific rationality”

which explicitly introduces values:

The reticulational approach shows that we can use our knowledge of the available

methods of inquiry as a tool for assessing the viability of proposed cognitive

claims. . . . Equally, the reticulated picture insists that our judgments about which

theories are sound can be played off against our explicit axiologies in order to re-veal tensions between our implicit and explicit value structures (Laudan, 1984: 62).


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For Laudan, fully in the spirit of Dewey, “axiology, methodology, and factual

claims are inevitably intertwined in relations of mutual dependency” (63).Second, both writers (Rescher explicitly, Laudan implicitly) reject a thesis

(or propositional) pragmatism in which the problem is to vindicate particular

truth claims. Instead, they opt for a methodological pragmatism in which the

problem is to justify methods. Thus, “pragmatic considerations are never

brought to bear on theses directly. The relationship becomes indirect and me-

diated; a specific knowledge claim is supported by reference to a method,

which in turn is supported on pragmatist lines” (Rescher, 1975; 73). Beliefs

arrived at with warranted methods may very well be false. The aim, however,

is to find methods which are reliable in the sense that they answer to human

purposes, critically assessed.

Thesis pragmatism is highly vulnerable to a wholly idiosyncratic mode de-

termining what counts as warranted assertibility. This is, of course, a long-

standing objection to pragmatism. Methodological pragmatism offers hope

since beliefs are warranted only insofar as they are the outcome of an explicit

method that has been warranted independently of this or that particular belief.

As Rescher points out:

Considerations of the suitability and effectiveness of methods introduce an inher-

ently rational orientation, which serves to assure the logical properties. Moreover,

methods are intrinsically public, interpersonal, and communal. A method is not a

successful method unless its employment is generally effective—otherwise we are

talking about a knack or skill rather than a method. A skill can only be shown, it

cannot be explained. . . . This line of thought indicates the fundamentally social di-

mension of methods. . . . They can be examined and evaluated in abstracto, with-

out any dependency on particular practitioners (Rescher, 1975; 73).

These are certainly desirable features of this program, even if as I shall sug-

gest, instead of methods, we are better advised to try to warrant practices. But

we should first notice that if the program carries, we will have escaped sub-

jectivism, we will have warranted our method and thus beliefs which are de-

termined by means of these methods, but we will not have secured truth. But,

of course, Dewey’s shift to warranted assertibility was a rejection of the

search for truth (understood, as always, in the absolutist sense).21

EXCURSUS: TRUTH ABOUT THE WORLDAND MORAL TRUTH

It will be important to notice the bearing of the foregoing on the question of

moral relativism. In my view, this is surely the most important of the trou-

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blesome questions raised by relativism. Plainly, I cannot pursue this here. Yet,

it seems to me that it is just here that the foregoing is most helpful. The rea-son is clear enough. The skeptical objection forecloses the possibility of se-

curing a perspectively neutral truth about a world, which exists independently

of you and me. But since on naturalistic grounds, our ideas about what is good

and right are our ideas, the skeptical objection has no force. All that we need

as regards questions of the good and the right is warranted assertibility. More-

over, in this context, the public, interpersonal, and communal aspects are fun-

damental. While the effort to secure ever-inclusive representations of the ex-

ternal world cannot secure truth about it, the effort to secure ever-inclusive

goods is exactly what is called for as regards moral matters.

METHODOLOGICAL PRAGMATISM

There is a third aspect to methodological pragmatism. It presumes that an em-

pirical study of science will yield clarity about aims and methods, and that

there is a way to reflexively test methods against aims, once identified. As far

as I know, Laudan (and his associates), have been in the forefront of actually

engaging in such research.22 But I think that on this count, there are some very

difficult problems.

First, there is the abstraction science. It is easy to suppose that although

there are manifest differences in the sciences, the term, “science” is mean-

ingful because the sciences share in goals, for example, prediction and

control, and/or because there is something called “scientific method,”

again, usually defined in terms of a series of abstractions about the forma-

tion, deductive elaboration, and testing of hypotheses. Dewey was, I be-lieve, utterly uncritical in this.23 Laudan acknowledges that goals do differ

and that, pertinent to this and to subject matter, methods (not merely tech-

niques) may vary. Still it would seem that an adequate empirical picture

would show some fundamental differences, not only in the sites and goals

of the practices of the sciences, but in their methods and standards as

well.24

Consider first the idea of the goals of these practices. Even a cursory ex-

amination would show, I believe, that there are at least four fundamentally

different goals currently operative in the sciences.

1. Description: for example, ethnographic work in anthropology; quantita-

tive research in economics or demography; much geography; and taxo-nomic work in botany and zoology (motivated, I believe, by very different

goals than the pre-scientific taxonomy of the Karam!).


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2. Prediction and control: behavioral social science, most psychology, mete-

orology, the engineering sciences, and applied sciences.3. Understanding: basic science, including work in space/time theory, quan-

tum mechanics, evolutionary theory, some (but surely the smallest part) of

theoretical work in psychology and the social sciences.

4. The explanation of concrete events: history and the historical sciences (in-

cluding here, some social science, some geology, some evolutionary biol-

ogy, some psychology).

It has been easy to collapse these cognitive goals. For example, by means of

the idea that the discovery of laws is the goal of science, it has been easy to

believe that explanation, understanding, and prediction are of a piece. But

while the point cannot be pursued here, it is easy to show that these are con-

ceptually, and in practice, distinct aims (Manicas, 2006). Empirical examina-

tion of practice would show, I believe, that those practices which aim at pre-

diction and control (implicitly or explicitly) offer nothing in the way of

understanding or in the explanation of concrete events. For example, behav-

iorist psychology gives no understanding of learning; and it cannot explain

the most elementary concrete act, for example, my response, “fantastic,” to

seeing Guernica for the first time. But—and this is not to be minimized—be-

haviorist psychology has been an effective tool for manipulation and control.

But the point of this sketch is not to settle issues, but to raise questions for the

empirical program that I have called “Inquiry into Inquiry: II” Speaking now

within its frame of reference, if the goals are different, then we can expect the

methods to be different. For any particular goal, there still will be methods that

are most effective and suitable. And we can still endorse the basic Deweyan ef-

fort to self-referentially bootstrap. But not all these goals will be pertinent to theproblem with which we began. The skeptical objection is plainly irrelevant if

the aim is prediction and control. Moreover, it is very easy to justify science as

the preferred mode if prediction and control is the goal. Indeed, this is a major

motive for continuously attractive instrumentalist theories of science. If, how-

ever, one is interested in understanding or in explaining what happens, then in-

quiry into the practices of sciences with those aims will be pertinent. Laudan and

his colleagues look at the “basic” natural sciences (despite their antirealism). If

they had looked at most mainstream psychology, indeed at most mainstream so-

cial science, things would look very different.

But let us assume that the intention is to get an “empirically well-grounded

picture” of those practices that in fact (and not merely in intention) aim at giv-

ing an account of how the world is. Of course, it will not do, as Laudan hashimself so strenuously insisted, to accept those descriptions of science that

are written with manifest assumptions imported from Carnap or Popper, the

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two dominating traditions of twentieth-century philosophy of science. These

studies cannot count as tests because they are self-authenticating. Nor can we,uncritically, accept what practitioners say are their methods (or for that mat-

ter, their standards and goals). As Einstein remarked, “If you want to find out

anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise

you to stick closely to one principle: Don’t listen to their words, fix your at-

tention on their deeds.”25 We have the best chance of getting some under-

standing about what they do if we can study activities directly. For standard

historiographical reasons, things get much more difficult when we consider

past practices. Indeed, in the face of these problems, there may be a tempta-

tion to assume methods and then to assume that they determine outcomes. We

then enter history less problematically, with an eye merely to these.

Laudan’s program risks this. Thus, he seems (at least) to begin with hy-

potheses regarding methodological rules that derive from philosophies of sci-

ence. The idea then is to enter into history and seek either confirmation or dis-

confirmation of these. But there are now two additional problems. First, if as

Laudan asserts, science changes, it is not clear how much generalizing will be

possible 26 and thus, to what degree we can regard conclusions drawn from

such inquiry as tests. For example, consider but the institutional differences

between Newton’s scientific research and the big science of today. Assuming

(what is likely contrary to fact) that the goals are comparable, can we be

confident that abstracted methodological rules effective then would now be

effective?

Second, as recent studies surely show, agents making decisions in science

are complexly affected. Not only are they capable of self-delusion (like

everyone else), but rules, even if they are crisply formulated and form a con-

sistent set, need to be applied concretely. This is hardly to say that methodsare irrelevant. Rather it is to assent to Kuhn’s view, rejected by Laudan, that

methodological criteria rarely if ever determine choices between rival theo-

ries. As Kuhn (and strong program writers) have insisted, this is not to deny

rationality; it is to affirm that rationality is both changing (as Laudan admits)

and concrete, exactly in a more Deweyan sense that we cannot explain

choices by subsuming them under rules.

One thrust of my argument has been against philosophers (and those influ-

enced by these) who, despite the best intentions, have been unable to free

themselves from the shackles of traditional epistemology. Another thrust has

been to sympathize warmly with pragmatic approaches, but to suggest that

among the most outstanding of these, there are serious problems to be faced.

Before concluding, I summarize:First, if we are to understand knowing naturalistically, we need to rethink,

in Deweyan terms, the psychology and logic of knowing. This will require, if


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I am correct, some important changes in the mainstream practices of empiri-

cal psychology. See Chapter 2, above.Second, since knowledge is inescapeably a social product, we need to wel-

come the efforts of recent sociology of scientific knowledge. Our “natural-

ism” cannot be “half-hearted” (See Chapter 4.)

Third, having achieved a better understanding of the production of

knowledge, if we are to seek warrant for beliefs (or to prescribe norms for

belief), we will need to embrace a Deweyan approach to the fact/value di-

chotomy. We need to acknowledge, straight out, as Sleeper puts it, that

since “all judgment is practical... there is no gulf between intellectual and

practical judgment.”

Fourth and finally, instead of trying to warrant methods, we will be better

advised to try to warrant practices. I conclude with a sketch of what I mean

by this.

THE WARRANTING OF PRACTICES

Practices are, roughly, ways of doing. Practices include the beliefs of practi-

tioners, the tools they use, their explicit goals, and much else besides. Prac-

tices are institutionalized (structured) activities, activities that presuppose

habits in Dewey’s sense, dispositions that carry the legacy of training and cus-

tom. The shift from methods to practices has consequences:

First, we will not be stymied if, as seems to be the case, much of what is

known by practitioners is not formulable in terms of rules, but is tacit, craft-

like, and learned at the side of experienced mentors. One learns how to use

the tools, not merely the instrumentation, but the special languages, for ex-ample, the mathematics, and the standards for employing them. One learns

what counts, what are the pitfalls, what are the ongoing standards of ade-

quacy. Indeed, understanding these is precisely what would count as under-

standing a practice.27

Second, the shift to practice allows us to acknowledge that structured ac-

tivities have unintended consequences. This includes not merely the uses to

which basic work can be put, but the potential that outcomes may be surpris-

ing and hence not subject to control, and that intentions may be frustrated and

transformed. Third, as part of the picture, we can include the real possibility

that actors engaged in a practice can have false consciousness: they may have

beliefs which are essential to the practice in the sense that if they have

believed otherwise, they would not do what they do, but these beliefs mightbe false in the sense that actors may not fully understand just what they are

doing. For example, they may believe that they are Popperians or instrumen-

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talists when in fact they are not; they may believe that they are explaining

when they are merely controlling; they may believe that their research is un-contaminated by interests foreign to their aims, etc.

A fourth advantage of this shift is that it allows us to incorporate as critical

the fact that scientific practices are enmeshed in, effecting and effected by, a

host of other practices: economic, educational, and political. Thus, the polit-

ical economy of “big science” is critically relevant to understanding how its

problems get defined and how it approaches and resolves them.28 The issue is

not merely that the goals and methods of the practice of big science are not

autonomous, but that nonscientific factors are playing critical roles in consti-

tuting these practices.

Finally, we can be sensitive to the fact that scientific practices are very dif-

ferently constituted, not merely between and among disciplines, but across

time. Given this, a global defense of science may not be possible. On the

other hand, we do not need a global defense. We need only to learn by inquiry

what it is that makes a practice warrantable.

HARRÉ’S JUSTIFICATION OFTHEORETICAL/EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS

With these considerations in mind, there is at least one recent work to which

we can point. Rom Harré is a trained physicist/philosopher who takes fully to

heart the idea that (a) we had best look at scientific practices, (b) that a de-

fense of practice in theoretical/experimental physics is not, tout court , a de-

fense of science or of scientific method and (c) that such a defense must rec-

ognize the skeptical challenge with which we began. Plainly, this is not theplace to detail Harré’s important work, but I believe that (with some minor

emendations), it is entirely congenial to the views of this chapter.

Begin with (c). Harré rejects what he calls “truth realism;” roughly that a

belief is true if and only if it corresponds to reality. Sensitive to arguments

from Hume to Laudan, he defends “referential realism;” roughly, the idea that

“some of the substantive terms in a discourse denote or purport to denote be-

ings of various metaphysical categories such as substance, quality or relation,

that exist independently of that discourse (Harré, 1986: 67). In terms of our

earlier discussion, not only is there an external world, but given what we

know, the most plausible causal theory of perception is Gibsonian. That is,

“while one must concede that there could not be psychological laws which

explain how someone came to see a pencil, it does not follow that there couldnot be psychological laws which explain how someone came to see long, thin

things, causal sequences, and other generic perceptibles”(154). On this view,


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these are natural “affordances,” possibilities of action ecologically offered to

naturally evolved species and found in the exploration of the ambient array.But plainly, this story will not suffice to explain our relevant taxonomies

since, as above, Karam see (mediately) kobity and we see birds (or if we are

birdwatchers, we see cassowary).

We need to make room for the social component of knowledge. Harré ex-

ploits Dretske’s explication of “seeing that . . .” Thus,

1. S sees b.

2. The conditions under which S sees b are such that it would not look the

way it does look, say L, unless it were P.

3. S, believing 2, takes b to be P.

Here, b is a Gibsonian invariant; condition 2 introduces S’s corpus of prior

belief. That “b is P” is knowledge, but, plainly, it is relative to the corpus of

beliefs held by S, and there is no way to find some original, terminal, or foun-

dational belief! We have found a toehold on the world, but we have not se-

cured an absolutist conception of knowledge. Nor have we secured science.

We can imagine a discourse, Harré calls it Realm I discourse, which made

reference only to the states and relations of beings known in actual experience

(the heaven of empirical realisms!). Could such a discourse sustain a science?

No doubt, human communities have put considerable attention on classifying

beings in Realm I discourse, but as is now sufficiently clear, the boundaries

“which serve to maintain discrete groupings in any human classificatory prac-

tice cannot be justified without reference to unobservable properties and

structures of the beings in question”(179).29

Harré’s problem is now clear. Can he justify theoretical/ experimentalphysics as a preferred mode of fixing belief about the external world?

Grasping fully the idea that “the science we consume, so to speak, is the

final product of the complex interplay of social forces and cognitive and

material practices” (and not the product of a “logic engine”), he argues that

one must acknowledge that scientific communities control their products

“by the informal yet rigorous maintenance of a moral order”(12). Indeed,

on Harré’s view, a great deal of the best work by philosophers of science

is most usefully understood as sketching an ideal moral order, not an ideal

(or still less, real) epistemic order. On this reading, the (epistemic realist)

manifesto, “Scientific statements should be taken as true or false by virtue

of the way the world is” as a moral principle becomes: “As scientists, that

is, members of a certain community, we should apportion our willingnessor reluctance to accept a claim as worthy . . . only to the extent that we sin-

cerely believe that it somehow reflects the way the world is.” Similarly, the

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idea that we should seek falsification cannot be sustained as an epistemic

principle. But it has manifest merits as encapsulating moral injunctions:for example, “However much personal investment one has in a theory, one

should not ignore contrary evidence” (90).

For Harré, then, “facts” are socially constructed, but not only are they

not constructed from whole cloth (the burden of referential realism), but to

the extent that the ideal moral order is functioning, then the results are to be

preferred—on strict pragmatic grounds.

WHY WE ARE EPISTEMICALLY IN TROUBLE

Harré appeals to empirical studies of scientific practices to identify what, per-

tinent to the problem of knowledge, is distinctive of these and, then, why, ide-

ally speaking, they should be preferred. Speaking as a naturalizing episte-

mologist, this is all that we can demand. He does not, to be sure, say very

much about the social conditions that would seem to be requisite to sustain-

ing the ideal moral order. In general terms, these are the ideas that we famil-

iarly associate with Peirce and Dewey, critically, the ideas of publicity and ac-

cess.30 But it is also clear that under conditions of industrialized science, it is

just these conditions that are now under threat.

“Shoddy science” becomes possible when published papers are not be-

ing read and thus not subjected to critical scrutiny.31 But since they easily

become part of the construction of facts, how can we know what to trust?

“Entrepreneurial science” allows contractors to establish huge mission-ori-

ented, capital-intensive enterprises in which researchers lose all indepen-

dence and everyone else is denied access. Since these products are not as-sessed by consensus, why should they be trusted? “Runaway technology”

can produce “reckless science.” Here ready access to millions of dollars

aimed at some specific technical power, for example, the manipulation of

genetic materials, can produce shoddy science now accompanied by the

risk of catastrophic consequences. Finally, there is “dirty science” in which

opportunities to fund research projects aimed at realizing understanding

are converted into technologies for state purposes of destruction, or con-

trol, or manipulation.

We thus come full circle. We are stuck with our history. With the invention

of modern philosophy as a discipline pretending not only autonomy but a

privileged role in the intellectual division of labor, philosophers unwittingly

conspired in mystifying a world in which science has played a profoundly im-portant role. Seventy years after Dewey’s called for reconstruction, the need

is, if anything, even more urgent.


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NOTES

1. I have made two efforts at this, in A History and Philosophy of the Social Sci-

ences (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) and War and Democracy (New

York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

2. Quine’s 1969 essay and Stroud’s 1981 “The Significance of Naturalized Episte-

mology” are reprinted in Hilary Kornblith’s influential anthology, Naturalizing Epis-

temology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), cited in what follows.

3. Quine’s picture, presumably, is that, in Carnapian fashion, our knower can con-

tinually revise C-functions or in Popperian fashion, she can continue indefinitely to

conceive hypothesis, which she tries to falsify. Note also the epistemological individ-

ualism. See below. These two programs in philosophy of science have been the most

influential epistemologies in our century, but, as Laudan observes in a wonderful un-

der-statement, they “have run into technical difficulties which seem beyond their re-

sources to surmount” (“Progress or Rationality: The Prospects for Normative Natu-

ralism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 14, 1 (January 1987): 19.

4. See John Dewey, “The Existence of the World as Logical Problem” ( Middle

Works, 8: 94–95). Of course, there are other forms of skepticism. See, for example,

Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986):

71. J. E. Tiles, in Dewey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), quotes Russell’s

complaint that ‘Professor Dewey ignores all fundamental skepticism. To those who

are troubled by the question: ‘Is knowledge possible at all?’ he has nothing to say”

(14). Tiles retorts that this is not fair: “what Dewey had to say was that the question

lacked foundation” (14). But “the question” is ambiguous. Whether there is an exter-

nal world that is at least partly structured cannot be motivated. But whether knowl-

edge is possible, given our history, does have a point. See below.

5. See Tiles, Dewey: 70–76, 116–23, 127–29. My account departs, however, from

Tiles (and from Dewey?). Holding to an absolute conception of reality does not com-

mit one to an absolute conception of knowledge. It is not my contention that we coulddescribe the world “from no point of view.” Knowing is necessarily a relation be-

tween a situated knower and “the world.” But unless being depends upon knowing,

this does not make whatever is at the object end either featureless or unknowable. On

the other hand, Dewey was correct to insist that objects of knowledge (the character

of things as known) were produced by inquiry. But because they are not produced

from whole cloth (either by individuals or groups!), the skeptical problem arises.

6. Fallibilism, according to Nagel in The View from Nowhere, holds that our beliefs

“go beyond their grounds in ways that make it impossible to defend them against

doubt” (68). Nagel here is defining skepticism, not fallibilism! It is hard to say how

much disagreement in epistemology turns on different usages.

Peirce’s limit conception of truth provides an anchor, but at a cost. See below.

Dewey seemed at least to subscribe to Peirce’s conception. See John Dewey, Logic:

The Theory of Inquiry (LW, 2: 345).7. See David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1974): 32–33; Barry Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977). In his Dewey, Tiles holds that Dewey’s

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fallibilism was secured by the idea that inquiries comprise a continuum and suggests

that Dewey was correct to de-emphasize Peirce’s limit theory (Tiles, 1988: 106–8). I

doubt this. Where there is no doubt, there is no inquiry. But the limit notion of truth

does, at least, give the dissenter a rhetorical tack that is otherwise lacking.

8. Friedman offers what seem to me to be fatal objections to positivist views and

to those views, like Peirce’s, which seek to ensure a connection between confirmation

and truth by giving a special meaning to truth. This would include Popper and at least

some contemporary versions of instrumentalism—perhaps Larry Laudan. As regards

the theory of reference, see my sketch of Harré’s approach, below.

9. Notice that sociology is omitted. Presumably, what it has to offer is irrelevant

to epistemology?

10. Quine waffles on just what he is claiming. Susan Haack holds that Quine is

“ambivalent” between a reformist “Modest Naturalism” in which epistemology is an

integral part of empirical belief and a revolutionary “Scientistic Naturalism” “ac-

cording to which epistemology is be conducted wholly within the natural sciences.”

See her “The Two Faces of Quine ‘s Naturalism,” ms, nd. On his more notorious am-biguities regarding the “validation” of claims to knowledge, see Ken Geme, “Episte-

mological Vs. Causal Explanation in Quine, or Quine: Sic et Non,” ms, nd.

11. Another way into epistemological individualism is to observe (versus Quine)

there is no way (as far as we can know) to go from “molecules upon our sensory sur-

faces” to the rat perception of, e.g., an edible object, to the (linguistically modeled)

belief that there are red apples in the world. We return to this.

12. There are important differences between those doing sociology of science as

regards questions in philosophy, between (say) Barnes, Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar,

and Latour. Confusion over the claims of Barnes and Bloor is now joined by confu-

sion over these differences. See also the excellent more recent collection of essays ed-

ited by Andrew Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1992).

13. Thus drawing the rage of philosophers. It is presumably one thing to explain irra-tionally fixed belief by appeal to sociological facts; it is quite another thing to suppose

that rational belief needs these. Presumably, one must contrast my belief that some fig-

ure presently in my vision is the Virgin Mary with my belief that some figure presently

in my vision is a panda. Anthony Flew, now speaking for countless epistemological in-

dividualists, thinks that the former belief admits of a sociological explanation, but that if

it is being argued (and it is!) that “intrusive, non-social, physiological, and biological

facts” are not sufficient to explain this latter belief, then the view is “manifestly prepos-

terous and in its implications, catastrophically obscurantist” (Anthony Flew, “A Strong

Programme for the Sociology of Belief;’ Inquiry 25 (1982): 366–67).

14. According to Lycan, “occurent beliefs are sentencelike representations stored

and played back in our brains” (1988: 6). A belief, then, “is epistemically justified if

and only if it is rated highly overall by the set of all-purpose, topic neutral canons of

theory-preference that would have been selected by Mother Nature for creatures of our general sort . . .” (160).

15. See Ralph W. Sleeper’s important The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven,

Yale University Press, 1986); and Thomas Burke, “Dewey on Defeasibility,” in Situation


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Theory and Its Applications, eds. R. Cooper, K. Mukai, and J. Perry, (Stanford: CSLI

Publications, 1990): 233–68 and Chapter 2, above.

16. Confirmation theory is the skeleton in the closet of empiricist epistemologies

of this century. For some of the key papers, see P. T. Manicas, ed., Logic as Philoso-

phy (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1972).

17. As Burke writes:

The basic scenario is that a given organism/environmental system is constantly perform-

ing certain operations as a matter of course employing sensory mechanisms, scanning,

varying, probing, and otherwise moving about and altering things. Inquiry is initiated by

some unsettling perturbation. . . . None of this needs be “deliberate:’ Dewey’s picture of

inquiry is supposed to describe general architectural and dynamic features of virtually any

constituent subsystem of living animals, characterizing the simplest cellular life-functions

as well as the most complex motor activities.” (1990: 236).

Classical epistemology is intellectualist in that it miscontrues “experience” and

then conflates “having of an experience” with knowledge. Experience is “an affair of

the intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment”; it is not

primarily “psychical;’ nor “a knowledge affair”; and it is “pregnant with connexions”

and “full of inference” (MW, 10: 6).

18. Compare Barnes and Bloor, “Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge,”

in Rationality and Relativism eds. Hollis and Lukes, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

1982): 44. For a provocative treatment in the context of recent philosophy of mathe-

matics, see Mary Tiles, Mathematics and The Image of Reason (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1991).

19. M. T. Turvey, R. E. Shaw, E. S. Reed, and W. M. Mace, “Ecological Laws of Per-

ceiving and Acting: In Reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981), Cognition 9 (1981): 285.

See also W. B. Weimer, “The Psychology of Inference and Expectations: Some Prelimi-

nary Remarks,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Eds. G. R. Maxwell

and A. R. Anderson vol. 6 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975).20. See Guy Axtell, “Logicism, Pragmatism and MetaScience,” in Philosophy of

Science, 1990.

21. Of course, the pragmatist, rejecting the problem of knowledge überhaupt and

alive to differences in aims, cognitive and otherwise, is open to the possibility that dif-

ferent communities with different aims, cognitive and otherwise, might well be justi-

fied in their beliefs about the world. Thus, it is not clear that Karam methods, perhaps

informed by and tested against goals that, for example, emphasize harmony with the

natural world, are not justified.

22. Expanding on work in his Progress and Its Problems, Laudan has provided a

“test” of “realist axiology and methodology” in his Science and Values, Chapter 5. He

construes realism as a truth-realism and then argues that a great deal of what physi-

cists have believed to be true has been given up. Accordingly, realist methodological

advice cannot be historically vindicated. However, as Harré says, this conclusion isvulnerable to a “modest” objection: “While physicists perhaps have not been able to

keep their stock of deep fundamental theories unscathed by later developments, there

has been a continual refinement and growing repertoire of very plausible items of in-

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formation about many kinds of being whose existence can no longer be seriously

called into doubt.” (Varieties of Realism, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell,

1987: 41). Indeed, once realism is construed as by Harré, not only can Laudan’s bul-

let be dodged but an excellent case for what Harré calls policy realism can be made:

“If a substantive term seems to denote a being of certain natural kind (and some spe-

cial conditions are satisfied by the theory in which that term functions) it is worth set-

ting up a search for that being” (59). That is, by including in their working vocabu-

lary a robust referring expression, there are “features of theories which historical

experience shows are good bets for having anticipated experience . . .” (60).

For other suggestions for rules worth testing, see Rachel Laudan, Larry Laudan,

and Arthur Donovan, Scrutinizing Science (Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers,

1988).

23. Dewey inconsistently offered an instrumentalist theory of science in which

prediction and control were emphasized as the goals of the sciences. See Chapter 1,

above. In his antirealism as regards theoretical terms, he shares much with my former

colleague, Larry Laudan. See Chapter 5.24. Think of astrophysics at Princeton’s Advanced Institute and at Rome ARDC,

research in solid state physics at Stony Brook or at Roswell, N.M., DNA/RNA re-

search at Cold Spring Harbor and at Texas Medical Center; biochemists working at

Max Factor, or on bonding metals ions to antibodies at Scripps Clinic, or neurotrans-

mitters at the University of Hawai’i; economists at the Bureau of Labor, the Ameri-

can Enterprise Institute, or Cambridge University, England; psychologists at Merrill

Lynch, in the social welfare services of the City of New York, at the New School for

Social Research, at MIT; unfunded anthropologists in Thailand and anthropologists

working for AID in Thailand. One could easily go on.

25. Quoted by G. Holton, “Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality.” in Ernst

Mach, Physicist and Philosopher , eds. R. S. Cohen and R. J. Seeger (Dordrecht: Rei-

del, 1970). The text is from Einstein’s 1933 Herbert Spencer Lecture.

26. Feyerabend surely goes too far here. Harré points out that Feyerabend aims hisguns at “the logicisms of the alleged inductive method and the fallibilism of Popper,”

but this target is too restricted. More importantly as regards the present context, “there

may be more than one but not indefinitely many contexts of enquiry, in each of which

different methodological and metaphysical principles, each cluster of which could be

taken as defining a scientific inquiry, could be rationally defended” (Varieties of Re-

alism: 24–25). This would, I think, still undermine Laudan’s program.

27. Compare, of course: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Rout-

ledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); Jerome Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social

Problems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

28. Merely by way of illustration, what are we to make of the fact that sixty bil-

lion dollars will be spent in the 1990s on a half-dozen projects—a space station, a hu-

man genome project, a supercollider. And what are we to make of the criticism that

“big science has gone berserk, “that “good minds and a lot of money are going intoareas that are not relevant to American competitiveness, American technological

health, or even the balanced development of American science” ( New York Times,

Sunday, May 27, 1990: 1).


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29. They will, for example, require dispositional attributions. The clearest exam-

ples are in everyday discriminations, for example, salt and sugar. But consider also

classifications of modern zoology, sustained (or not) by appeal to beliefs deriving

from neo Darwinian theory (just as the Karam classifications are sustained [or not] by

appeal to beliefs which run past Realm I discourse).

30. See Dewey’s remarkable The Public and Its Problems (LW, 2) and Chapter 3,

above. Dewey pointed out that the conditions for assessing claims were, in general,

being eroded. Thirty years later, C. W. Mills picked up this theme: As “experts” con-

strained dialogue, “publics” were being converted to “masses.”

31. The term “shoddy science,” the analysis, and the other categories that follow

are owed to Jerome Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems, Chap. 10.

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Part Three

DEMOCRACY

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143

John Dewey believed that Americans “were not an over-agile peoplemorally” ( Middle Works,Vol. X: 261).1 Like many, then and since, he wasstruck by the stunning turn in their attitudes toward the Great War in Europe.

Our remoteness from the immediate scene of international hatreds, the bad af-

ter-taste of the Spanish American war, the contentment generated by successful

industrialization, the general humanitarianism of which political progressivism

was as much a symptom as social settlements, the gradual substitution of calcu-

lating rationalism for the older romantic patriotism, all these and more had cre-

ated an American sense that war was “the supreme stupidity” (MW, X: 260).

When the Great War came, some managed the shift in attitude easily. It was,

in fact, depressing that so many “who when war was actually declared merelyclumsily rolled their conscience out from under the imperative of ‘Thou shaltnot kill’ till it settled under the imperative of ‘Obey thy law,’”—and this de-spite the fact that “they still saw the situation exactly as they had before”

(MW, X: 263). For others, seeing the situation exactly as they had before, “thepacific moral impulse” remained steady. Now a troublesome minority, Deweyworried that they were being treated badly. Not yet clear that this was but atip of the iceberg, he wrote that they deserve “something better that accusa-tions, varying from pro-Germanism and the crime of Socialism to traitorousdisloyalty” (MW, X: 61).

For others, a “moral wrench” had been necessary, a “moral adjustmentwhich if not involving a tragedy of the inner life has been effected only with

some awkward trampling of what has been cherished as the finer flowers of the soul.” Indeed, Dewey could “hardly believe [that] the turnover could havebeen accomplished under a leadership less skillful than that of President

Chapter Seven

American Democracy:A New Spirit in the World

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Wilson, so far as he succeeded in creating the belief that just because the

moral impulse retained its full validity Germany must be defeated in order tofind full fruition”—the war to end all war.Dewey’s view that it took the “skillful leadership” of Wilson must not be

taken lightly. It may be that few others could have so successfully fostered

the belief among Americans that by entering the war they could fulfill aunique historical task. Moreover, in these passages, Dewey was not suggest-ing that Wilson had created a false belief. On the contrary, right along Deweyhad been insisting that “this is not merely a war of armies, this is a war of peo-ples.” Accordingly, “there is no aspect of our lives to which this war does notcome home or which it does not touch.” In his judgment, “we ought not to beneutral when the war comes home in one form or another and to talk of be-ing neutral is to talk foolishness” (MW, X: 158). “There is,” he insisted, “sucha thing”“ as interests being vitally affected without a vital interest being af-

fected” (258).Unlike most Americans, Dewey had convinced himself early on that the

United States had to be in the war. He was also confident that the Allieswould win the war. But he was not thoroughly convinced that the aims of American entry would be realized. The United States could not enter the war“with full heart and soul though we join with unreserved energy.” “Not un-til the almost impossible happens,” he continued, “not until the Allies arefighting on our terms for our democracy and civilization, will that happen”

(259; my emphasis).That Dewey should himself have believed, with Wilson, that this war was

a great opportunity to further “our democracy and civilization” is stunning,given what we now know. The texts quoted above are from Dewey’s “In Time

of National Hesitation,” written with relief that “at last we were in it our-selves.” Dewey concluded this remarkable text by offering that “the war hasshown that we are no longer a colony of any European nation nor of them allcollectively.” “We are,” he continued, “a new body and a new spirit in theworld” (259). This was surely true. But as he later came to see, he had mis-

read that “new spirit.” Dewey did not then know that “our democracy” “ and“our civilization” were not what he had thought them to be. He did not thenappreciate that this Great War would prove that the chauvinists, pacifists, in-ternationalists, and cynics were correct. The “new body” would be a globallypowerful America, which would occupy its “rightful” place in what Deweywas to call “the war system.”

In this chapter, the focus is on the role and thought of two of America’s

most important political philosophers and analysts, John Dewey and WalterLippmann. The idea is to use them to recover a critical moment and argumentin American history over democracy in the epoch of modern war. The perti-

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nence of this moment to the present cannot, perhaps, be overstated. Dewey

and Lippmann played important roles as regards American entry into the warand, in different ways, as regards the terms of the peace. Although little hasbeen made of this, for Dewey the war was a transforming experience. Itforced him to articulate a philosophy of democracy, which was profoundly

radical. Lippmann was not transformed; but the war forced him to becomeclear on some critical themes, which he had previously left unclear. In theprocess, the two of them came to share a diagnosis of the problems of Amer-ican society, even if their prescriptions were leagues apart. Their positions onscience, government, mass society, democracy, and war say much aboutAmerica, before and after the Great War.

THE NEW REPUBLIC

The first Republic, of course, had been written by Plato. Reflecting on theproblem of war in his world, Plato had envisioned a radically reformed polis,

capable of dealing with both war and, of even greater importance, “civilstrife” (stasis). The second republic was that of Cicero, who, while approvingof empire, nonetheless wanted Rome to return to its more virtuous republicandays. The “New Republic” referred to in this part of the book, however, isneither Athens nor Rome, but, with appropriate equivocation, the magazine

which was created in 1914 by Herbert Croly and funded by Willard Straightand his wife, Dorothy. Straight was a Morgan banker and an “arch-exponentof American imperialism”; Dorothy Straight was a Whitney with the benefitsof ample Standard Oil royalties. The young Walter Lippmann—he was but

four years out of Harvard College, the first president and founder of its So-cialist Club—was a key member of the magazine’s original staff. The mucholder John Dewey, born in 1859, was an enthusiastic contributor. There werea host of other notables who were close to die new magazine, including as aneditor, Walter Weyl, author of The New Democracy (1912) and Felix Frank-

furter, who was then teaching at Harvard Law School. Among the first con-tributors were Van Wyck Brooks , the youthful author of America’s Coming of

Age (1915). Indeed, the list of early contributors reads like a who’s who of English-speaking intellectuals. More interesting, perhaps, Theodore Roo-sevelt looked on the magazine—with the encouragement of its editors—“ashis own personal stepping-stone back to the White House.”2

On the face of it, this array of personalities seems like a disparate group;

but they shared in thinking that the United States was to be a new republic.Croly had been a Harvard philosophy student and had become instantly fa-

mous with his The Promise of American Life (1909), the perfect title for a new

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vision of American liberalism, a “nationalist liberalism” which would give “a

democratic meaning and purpose to the Hamiltonian tradition and method”(Forcey: 129). Croly had savaged the ]effersonians as individualists, isola-tionists, and defenders of a bankrupt laissez-faire economic philosophy. Hehad argued that Big Business was here to stay, but that with Big Government

and Big Labor, there were totally new possibilities. He had insisted that thiswould call for strong leadership—the answer to the “devil-take-the-hind-most” individualism of the Jeffersonians (38). As Forcey notes, although“clouded by a certain horror of the former Rough Rider’s lusty militancy,”Croly had a “deep and abiding admiration of Theodore Roosevelt” (40). Butthen there are always trade-offs in politics.

Lippmann’s first book was his 1913 A Preface to Politics. It was an icono-clastic book, influenced by Croly and by his old teachers at Harvard, WilliamJames and especially Graham Wallas, the famous British Fabian and political

theorist. But the then fashionable Freud, along with Nietzsche and Sorel, wereeven more in evidence. In the background, usually unnoticed, is WoodrowWilson’s new theory of democracy.

Lippmann distinguished between “routineers” and “inventors” and arguedthat government, dominated by “routineers,” had failed. “The trusts had ap-peared, labor was restless, vice seemed to be corrupting the vitality of the na-tion. Statesmen had to do something” (Lippmann, 1913: 35). Their trainingwas legal and therefore “utterly inadequate.” But it was all they had. As “rou-

tineers,” they panicked and “reverted to ancient superstition. They forbadethe existence of evil by law.” Lippmann insisted that what was needed was anentirely different approach. It was necessary to put this restless, untamed en-ergy to work. The impulses were “like dynamite, capable of all sorts of uses.”

“Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them” (49–50). Accord-ingly, the United States needed a “real government that has power and servesa want, and not a frame imposed upon men from on top” (45).

But the United States was no Greek polis:

Plato and Aristotle thought in terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we

have to think in terms of a hundred million people of all races and all traditions,

crossbred and inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before,

plumped down on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. . . . Nor can

we keep the problems within our borders. Whether we wish it or not we are in-

volved in the world’s problems, and all the winds of heaven blow through our

land. (105)

In the face of this, “improvements in knowledge seem meager indeed.” Whatis demanded is a different conception of government and different kind of statesmen.

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Princeton political scientist Woodrow Wilson had been concerned since the

1890s with “leaderless govemment.”3

He was correct in arguing that theAmerican Founding Fathers, “with genuine scientific enthusiasm,” had fol-lowed Montesquieu in yearning for “equipoise and balance in a machine- likesystem” (“Constitutional Government”: 56). But on his view, if what had

been wrought by them had been good enough for their sons, it was not goodenough for the sons of their sons or, presumably, for their daughters either.Sharply critical of a disjointed, hence incapacitated government, Wilson re-sponded to the same currents that had moved Max Weber; but he seemed toendorse what Weber had feared. Modern societies were mass societies, com-plex and inchoate. Wilson offered that “policy—where there is no absoluteand arbitrary ruler to do the choosing for the whole people—means massedopinion, and the forming of massed opinion is the whole art and mastery of politics” (“Leaderless Government”: 339).

This was truly a remarkable idea, pregnant with implications that Lipp-mann was shortly to pursue—with a vengeance. Wilson argued that since thepresident was the only official with a national mandate, he had this specialrole. The air of German philosophy still present in America surely influencedhis next move. In a text that Hegel could have endorsed, he argued that lead-ership is “interpretation:” “The nation lay as it were unconscious of its unityand purpose, and [the leader] called it to full consciousness. It could neveragain be anything less than what he had said it was. It is at such moments and

in the mouths of such interpreters that nations spring from age to age in theirdevelopment” (Constitutional Government : 21).4

In A Preface to Politics, Lippmann fully shared in rejecting “the machineconception of government”(Lippmann, 1913: 13). He insisted that “the object

of democracy is not to imitate the rhythm of stars but to harness politicalpower to the nation’s need” (21). “Our choice,” he maintained, “lies betweena blind push and a deliberate leadership, between thwarting movements untilthey master us, and domesticating them until they are answered” (286). Butif Wilson had grasped what was needed, Lippmann was unsure about whether

Wilson could fill the bill. “Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is [WilliamJennings] Bryan’s chief defect -the scientific habit of holding facts in solu-tion” (102–3). On the other hand, “Wilson understands easily, but he does notincarnate: he has never been part of the protest he speaks. You think of himas a good counselor, as an excellent presiding officer.” “Roosevelt hasseemed to me the most effective, the most nearly complete. . . . He is a fore-taste of a more advanced statesmanship” (103). Indeed, “Roosevelt in his

term did much to center government truly. For a time natural leadership andnominal position coincided, and the administration became in a measure a

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A Preface to Politics is surely criticism of “tradition”—the “record and ma-

chine-like imitation of the habits; that our ancestors created”—and of the tra-ditional view of politics in a republic. Lippmann criticized the “mystical dem-ocrats” who believe that “an election expresses the will of the people, and that

that will is wise” (115). Like Wilson, he was struggling to rearticulate de-mocracy for a complex mass society. But he stepped back from the Niet-zschean implications of the new language of masses and urged instead a“break-up of herd politics.” What was needed, on his view, was a more robustpluralism. Accordingly, he saw the reformation of party politics somewhatdifferently from either Wilson or Max Weber. He condemned “the rigidity of the two-party system.” For him, it “ignores issues without settling them, dullsand wastes the energies of active groups, and chokes off the protests which

should find a civilized expression in public life” (262). And he appealed to just those mechanisms, which Weber had rejected, saying that “the initiativeand referendum will help” (263).

Like Wilson, Lippmann wanted leadership and saw the leader as an “inter-preter;” although for him the relation of leader to mass was more dialecticalthan it had been for Wilson. “Social movements” had tendencies and energy,but they needed an “inventor” if they were to be “imbued with life” (Lipp-mann, 1913: 63). At the same time, “to govern a democracy you have to ed-ucate it: . . . contact with great masses of men reciprocates by educating the

leader.” He was optimistic, indeed enthusiastic. “In a rough way and withmany exceptions, democracy compels law to approximate human need”(116). Given all that he himself said, it is not clear what could possibly be themechanism for this.

Lippmann’s second book, Drift and Mastery, published in 1914, represents

a decided shift. It carries forward some of the earlier themes, but in manyways it is a more democratic book; and, with its enormous emphasis on theapplication of science to politics, it is much closer to the vision which we now

associate with Dewey. Indeed, one is tempted to say that if James had everwritten a political book, it would have been Drift and Mastery! Both the titleand the main argument are Jamesian: “A nation of uncritical drifters canchange only the form of tyranny, for like the Christian’s sword, democracy isa weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and skill to wield it; inall others it is a piece of junk” (Lippmann, 1961: 16). The book “begins withthe obvious drift of our time and gropes for the conditions of mastery” (19).

What is this “obvious drift”? “We have lost authority. We are ‘emanci-pated’ from an ordered world” (111).

We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world, and we have no authority to

lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche. As a

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nation we have all the vulgarity that goes with that, all the scattering of soul. The

modern man is not yet settled in this world. It is strange to him, terrifying, al-

luring, and incomprehensibly big. . . . We make love to ragtime and die for it.

We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps

of undigested experience (118).

Worth emphasizing is the fact that for Lippmann, America is “the modernworld,” the land of immigrants and the land where “all of us are immigrants

spiritually.” Surely industrialization and urbanization are part of this; but of themselves, they do not make a people “modern.” Americans, we are askedto believe, are modern because they are the first people to acknowledge thefailure of all absolutes. The theme runs throughout the book: “Our ancestorsthought they knew their way from birth through all eternity: we are puzzledabout the day after tomorrow.” “The guardianship of the master and the com-

fort of the priest” have evaporated. “The iconoclasts didn’t free us. Theythrew us into the water, and now we have to swim” (112).

But this remarkable diagnosis, along with its “existential” tone, is Jame-sian, in that it allows for the most characteristic of Jamesian themes: the pur-posive effort to shape the environment, to make relations, to create and recre-ate an unfinished world. “Mastery,” an ill-chosen word, is possible; but wemust be clear about what it means:

When we cultivate reflection by watching ourselves and the world outside us,

the thing we call science begins. We draw the hidden into the light of con-

sciousness, record it, compare phases of it, note its history, experiment, reflect

on error, and we find that our conscious life is no longer a trivial irridescence,

but a progressively powerful way of domesticating the brute.

This is what mastery means: the substitution of conscious intention for un-conscious striving. . . . You cannot throw yourself blindly against unknown facts

and trust to luck that the result will be satisfactory (148).

This is a distinctly Jamesian view in which there is nothing “inhuman aboutthe scientific attitude” (158). By now the idea has all but been lost, a victimof the distance of esoteric language, unintelligble to all but specialists, the im-

age of anonymous men in white coats “experimenting,” the modem magic of technology and the Bomb. For James, as for Lippmann, there was nothingabout science properly understood which “need make it inevitably hostile tothe variety of life” (161), nothing putting the scientific attitude at odds withimpulse, intuition, imagination, creativity, or indeed, religious belief:

There have been hasty people who announced boldly that any interest in the im-

morality of the soul was “unscientific.” William James, in fact, was accused of

treason because he listened to mystics and indulged in physical research. Wasn’t


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he opening gates to superstition and obscurantism? It was an ignorant attack.

For the attitude of William James toward “ghosts” was the very opposite of

blind belief. He listened to evidence. No apostle of authority can find the least

comfort in that (161).

This was no scientism or positivism. Science was controlled inquiry; but, aswith Dewey, it was “creative intelligence,” purposive, and in the service of human impulses. Neither was it a technologism.5

Accordingly, it did not call for a technocracy. “The method of a self- gov-erning people is to meet every issue with an affirmative proposal which drawsits strength from some latent promise” (174). For Lippmann, “mastery,whether we like it or not, is an immense collaboration, in which all the prom-ises of today will have their vote” (75). Indeed, “there is nothing accidental

. . . in the fact that democracy in politics is the twin-brother of scientific think-

ing. They had to come together. As absolutism falls, science arises. It is self-government. . . . The scientific spirit is the discipline of democracy, the es-cape from drift, the outlook of the free man” (151). To be sure, Lippmann isusefully unclear here as to exactly how the leadership which was so impor-tant in Preface functions in this scheme of things; and as before, he is unclearabout the mechanisms which might join the scientific spirit with the machin-ery of a democracy. Moreover, as he became clear, after the war, he also

changed his mind.This vagueness, as well as certain other strands in the book, make it easy to

see a continuity which has thrown off more than one commentator. It also makesit easy to see why the book could receive adulation from almost all sides. Lipp-mann had not given up on Croly’s notion that organized labor could be a “coun-

tervailing power,” to adopt Galbraith’s term. To this he added the idea that con-sumers would be a power to be reckoned with; but, more than that, inanticipation of Adolf Berle, he argued that “the real news about business . . . isthat it is being administered by men who are not profiteers” (42). The “estab-

lished” magazines and newspapers, ready to accept Lippmann’s deflation of so-cialism and his celebration of America’s uniqueness could easily be enthusiastic.

So too could the women of America. In a chapter devoted exclusively tothe topic of “the Women’s Movement,” Lippmann saw that there had to beconfusion and conflict within the movement, precisely because “every step inthe woman’s movement is creative” (123). Randolph Bourne, who wasshortly to lay blame for America’s entry into the war on “the war intellectu-als,” said that he would have given his soul to have written Drift and Mastery.

And with much less good reason, even the revolutionary magazine, The

Masses, concerned perhaps with the good relations between Reed and Lipp-mann, received it with warmth.6

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Drift and Mastery was a “pragmatist’s” political book and important; but it

was anything but Lippmann’s last word on the topic under discussion. Weneed first to see what, during this same period, the active, influential prag-matist, John Dewey, was up to. For some time prior to the publication of Drift

and Mastery, Dewey had been insisting on the application of “experimentalmethods” to social change, arguing that in crucial ways the problem of a bet-ter society was a problem of knowledge. Yet the most striking thing aboutDewey’s thought up to World War I was the absence of a political philosophy.Until that time, as an intellectual and a theorist, Dewey was a psychologist, amoral philosopher, an educationist, a defender of his new “instrumentalist”version of pragmatism, a “philosopher” engaged in philosophical problemswhich, if they would touch “the problems of men,” had not yet issued a clear

vision of the good society.7

One here suspects a kind of characteristic American innocence. Dewey,reared in the town-meeting atmosphere of Vermont, had no reason to doubtthat if there were problems in America, “the American way,” erected on solidfoundations, was essentially sound. Of course, he had always been more thana theorist. He had always been involved practically, in Chicago with the workof Jane Addams and the experimental lab school at the University of Chicago,and in New York, especially with the schools.

The Great War prompted Dewey’s first systematic political work, German

Philosophy and Politics (1915). But if the book was motivated by the war, itwas guided by Dewey’s conviction that there is a “mutual relationship of phi-losophy and practical social affairs” (Dewey, 1915: 13). As the title suggests,the book is an effort to grasp the German politics of “World Policy” by astudy of German philosophy, from the esoteric inquiries of Kant’s Critique of

Pure Reason to the philosophy of history, the state, and of war in the philos-ophy of Hegel.8 Both German philosophy and politics come off badly. LikeMarx, Dewey had been nurtured on Hegel, but had long since broken withthat tradition. So far as politics is concerned, German Philosophy and Politics

is Dewey’s German Ideology.At the root of German politics, Dewey finds the “two worlds” of Kantian

philosophy and its subsequent “correction” by Hegel. Thus:

The division established between the outer realm, in which of course acts fall,

and the inner realm of consciousness explains what is otherwise so paradox-

ical to a foreigner in German writings: The constant assertion that Germany

brought to the world the conscious recognition of freedom coupled with the

assertion of the relative incompetency of the German folk en masse for po-litical self-direction. To one saturated with the English tradition which iden-

tifies freedom with power to act upon one’s ideas, to make one’s purposes


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effective in regulation of public affairs, the combination seems self-

contradictory. To the German it is natural. (34)

General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s frank and immodest Germany and the

Next War of 1912 is extensively quoted. Drawing on the Reformation and

Kant, Bernhardi had concluded: “To no nation except the German has it beengiven to enjoy in its inner self ‘that which is given to mankind as a whole.’. . . It is this quality which especially fits us for leadership in the intellectual

domain and imposes upon us the obligation to maintain that position”

(quoted by Dewey: 1915: 35, emphasis in the original). This was nometaphor, of course. In this book, Bernhardi had called for “the eliminationof France” (die Ausschaltung Frankreichs), the foundation of a Central Euro-pean federation under German control, and the acquisition of new colonies.

In a masterful understatement, Dewey comments: “Outside of Germany,

cavalry generals who employ philosophy to bring home practical lessons are,I think, rare. Outside of Germany, it would be hard to find an audience wherean appeal for military preparedness would be reinforced by allusions to theCritique of Pure Reason” (35). Dewey does not stop at bashing German phi-losophy, however. He draws more general conclusions. There is a real differ-ence between “a theory which is pinned down to belief in an Absolute beyondhistory and behind experience, and one that is frankly experimental. For anyphilosophy that is not consistently experimental will always traffic in ab-

solutes no matter in how disguised a form. In German political philosophy,the traffic is without mask” (89). America, unsurprisingly, is said to be ex-perimental: “America is too new to afford a foundation for an a priori philos-ophy. . . . For our history is too obviously future” (129). On the other hand,

“our country is too big and too unformed . . . to enable us to trust to an em-pirical philosophy of muddling along. . . . We must have system, constructivemethod. . . . I cannot help but think that the present European situation forceshome the need for constructive planning” (129–30).9

Indeed, there is a pressing need “to clarify and guide our future endeavor;”

but to do this, we need to “articulate and consolidate the ideas to which oursocial practice commits us” (130). Current American social practices weresound. They needed to be discerned so as to provide leverage on the future.He allows himself one “illustration:” “The present situation presents the spec-tacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political,racial and cultural” (130). The philosophy of “isolated national sovereignty”will no longer suffice. But just for that reason, neither will those remedies

which were then in the air.” Arbitration treaties, inter-national judicial coun-cils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace move-

ments are all well in their way. But the situation calls for more radical think-

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ing” (130–31). There is an unacknowledged “depth and width of human in-

tercourse,” and this needs to be applied “without and within our national life.”As to the remedies just mentioned, “an international judicial tribunal willbreak in the end upon the principle of national sovereignty” (131).

For Dewey, political, racial, and cultural nationalism will take on an in-

creasing prominence and urgency during the next three years. We find thetheme in Democracy and Education, published in 1916. Because it is rich inthe philosophy and practice of education, readers usually fail to notice the un-derlying tension created by Dewey’s insight into the problem of nationalistand statist politics. He asks, “Is it possible for an educational system to beconducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educativeprocess not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted?” (Dewey, 1966: 97).The problem is plain enough. As Plato knew, no polity can escape from thedemands of creating citizens, and no educational system can escape from the

fact that to be a citizen is to value and honor the distinct features of the polity.In Gernan Philosophy and Politics, Dewey had both applauded and con-demned the German system of education: “Germany is the modern statewhich provides the greatest facilities for general ideas to take effect throughsocial inculcation. Its system of education is adapted to that end” (14–15).Surely, American schools had to make Americans. But what was an Ameri-can? The solution presented itself. If we are talking about education “in andfor a democratic society,” then it is possible for an educational system to be

conducted by a national state without a corruption or restriction of “the fullsocial ends of the educative process.” While the “if” was a big one, Deweydid not yet have any doubts that education in America was in and for a dem-ocratic society, and that in this regard America was leading the way.

Democracy and Education introduced a critical Deweyan distinction, thatbetween democracy as “a mode of associated living” and democracy as “aform of government.” He had little to say about the latter except to notice thatthe two ideas went hand in hand. Education in a political democracy has asits aim “sustaining and extending” democracy as a mode of associated living,

of “conjoint communicated experience.” As a way of life, democracy was“the extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an in-terest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to considerthe action of others to give point and direction to his own” (87).

There was an unnoticed difficulty. Given the increasing “depth and widthof human intercourse,” it would seem that democracy as a way of livingwould present an increasingly difficult—perhaps even intractable—problem.

This surely was the conclusion Lippmann had already come to. It would, in-deed, be the basis of Lippmann’s incisive analysis of the postwar Americanpolity. But in 1916, at least, Dewey seems not to have been in the least


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disturbed. He noted that there was definitely a “widening of the area of shared

concerns.” He concluded, optimistically, that these would break down “thebarriers of class, race and national territory.” Moreover, such widening wasnot “the product of deliberation and conscious effort.” On the contrary, it wasthe result of “the development of modes of manufacture and commerce,

travel, migration and intercommunication which flowed from the commandof science over natural energy” (87). Like Lippmann, he saw that “all thewinds of heaven blow through our land”; or, to adopt Graham Wallas’s influ-ential term, that there was now a “Great Society” which was international andinterdependent. For Dewey, as for Marx and Engels in the Communist Mani-

festo, if for different reasons, the implications of this were entirely hopeful.We can, no doubt, instantly agree with Dewey that these forces were giv-

ing rise to problems whose solutions were increasingly intractable to local in-strumentalities; but it was far from clear that these forces were in fact gener-

ating the appropriate instrumentalities for their own solution. As he came toappreciate, the problem of democracy was to provide ways whereby prob-lems could be recognized as shared concerns and to provide the means andthe instruments for dealing with them as shared. In 1916 he seems still to havebeen a victim of an element of that same German philosophy which had vic-timized Marx. Just as Marx had supposed that capitalist modes of productionwould destroy national boundaries, make for international proletarian soli-darity, and politicize workers, so Dewey seems to have thought that “the ma-

chine age,” once hooked to genuine American experimentalism, would pro-pel democracy as a way of life.10

The United States, forced to invent, had invented well. The idea that theOld World was just that—old—had always been a feature of American

thought, to be sure. But the new psychology, new experimental philosophy,new nationalism, new democracy, new freedom, and new internationalism of-fered a new promise. When America entered the war, Wilson and the “war in-tellectuals” were ready to commit Americans to a fight for “our democracyand our civilization.”11

“ARMED NEUTRALITY,” “PREPAREDNESS,” AND WAR

The editors of The New Republic were democratic nationalists, not demo-cratic socialists. But, as Forcey comments, “to be a nationalist amidst the car-nage that followed Serajevo [sic], . . . was no longer so easy as it had been in

the innocent days that gave birth to the new liberalism” (Forcey, 1961: 221).This was especially difficult, since it was hard for anyone to imagine whyAmerica should have entered the war.

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We cannot here review the difficulties on this score faced by the New Re-

public nationalists, except to notice that, to begin with, they probably did bet-ter than most of the violently partisan press (Forcey, 1961: 231). Theyridiculed the pacifists, to be sure, and on this they got ample assistance from

Dewey. In the January 19l6 New Republic, Dewey offered the classic prag-matist response to pacifism: “Until pacifism puts its faith in constructive, in-ventive intelligence instead of its appeal to emotions and in exhortation, thedisparate unorganized forces of the world will continue to develop outbreaksof violence” (MW , X: 214). In any case—and more fundamentally—the is-sue of whether force was justified depended on the consequences. If war can-not be shown “to be the most economical method of securing the resultswhich are desirable with a minimum of undesirable results, it marks waste

and loss” (X: 214–15). But plainly, it might be so shown.12

The editors also resisted Roosevelt’s shrill calls for “preparedness,” asking,reasonably, “Preparedness for What?” In this they also got considerable sup-port from Dewey, who wrote a series of essays against the idea that compul-sory military service would overcome the admitted “defects” in our educa-tional system. Indeed,

when Mr. Roosevelt writes with as much vehemence about national aid to vo-

cational education, national aid to wipe out illiteracy, and national aid for

evening and continuing schools for our immigrants, as he now writes in behalf

of military service, I for one shall take him more seriously as an authority on the

educational advantages of setting-up exercises, firing guns and living in camp

(X: 186).

But most striking, perhaps, are the Orwellian terms which the men of the New

Republic helped to create and promote as they moved closer and closer tomilitancy. They called for “differential neutrality.” Their “constructive radi-calism” became “constructive patriotism.” With the sinking of the Lusitania,

they called for a “new kind of war,” “armed neutrality,” forgetting that theyhad only recently been telling Americans who sailed on British ships that they

did so “at their own risk.”13 It was now perfectly justifiable for the United

States to use defensive convoys, confiscate German assets, and intern its ship-ping. Wilson’s actions showed that he appreciated that the option was not todo nothing. Similarly, the New Republic men had been ecstatic when Wilsoncalled for “Peace without Victory,” believing, with good cause, that Wilsonhad got the idea from them (Forcey, 1961: 365–68). The only question waswhether Wilson really understood “Aggressive Pacifism.” It turned out that

he did.Historians remain in disagreement over the explanation of America’s entry

into the Great War: whether, as American schoolbooks have it, the United


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States (by which they must(?) mean the President and the Congress)

was forced into war,14

whether there were “deep causes” having to dowith securing imperial interests, or whether, as Randolph Bourne had sug-gested, it was the result of failure of some distinct aspects of the American

Weltanschauung.

However, there are some facts upon which everyone can agree. For one, asMorison writes, “No citizen of a neutral state lost his life as a result of theBritish blockage, and all neutral cargoes seized were paid at war prices.” Onthe other hand, “U-boat warfare took a toll of some 200 [actually 118] Amer-ican lives on the high seas while America was still neutral” (Morison, 1965:851). And it is surely the case that the infamous Zimmerman telegram15 wascritical as regards Wilson’s final decision—whether as the last straw or the

perfect excuse. Still, it is hardly self-evident that the German proposal of aGerman-Mexican alliance was good reason to send troops 3,000 miles acrossthe Atlantic to France.

Nor could there be any doubt that some Wall Street interests were servedby war, and that many of their spokesmen, such as Teddy Roosevelt andWillard Straight, wanted war. Still, unless we assume that Wilson was a dupefor these interests, more needs to be said.16

But however this may be, although it is often supposed that in the 1916campaign Wilson was “the peace candidate,” this is very far from being the

truth. The slogan “He kept us out of war” was part of the campaign, to besure; but not only was no promise ever made that Wilson would continue tokeep the United States out of the war, but the importance of the slogan hasbeen magnified by Republicans who, retrospectively, like to believe that theywere right all along and that Wilson had played a game of duplicity (Paxson,

1966, I: 347). After all, nearly everyone was for peace, motherhood, and ap-ple pie. Even those who, like the editors of the Chicago Tribune, were vigor-ous in their support of Teddy Roosevelt were saying that “preparedness” was

the only hope for peace.

DOMESTIC POLITICS AND AMERICA’S ENTRYINTO THE GREAT WAR

We need here to look, if only briefly, at American domestic politics. By thetime of the 1912 presidential campaign, the Republican party, whose right torule had scarcely been questioned since the Civil War, had collapsed into

open schism. The result had been the election of Wilson as a minority presi-dent over William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt’s splinter ProgressiveParty candidacy. Wilson’s presidency had not satisfied the Progressives, and

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the war had not made things any easier for Wilson. For one thing, ethnic pol-

itics had taken on entirely new dimensions.The census of 1910 showed some 91,972,266 Americans of whom9,827,763 were Afro-Americans. Politicians could safely ignore them. Of the remaining 82,144,503, 32,413,723 were foreign-born or had a foreign-

born parent, and 10,984,614 had either been born in Germany or Austro-Hungary or had a parent who had—that is, around one in eight. But therewere also 4,505,360 who were Irish-born or of Irish parentage. Displeasedwith Wilson’s policy of “differential neutrality,” they joined a chorus of anti-British sentiment, which grew louder after the unsuccessful Irish Rebellionat Eastertime of 1916. Wilson had never been happy with the “hyphenatedmovement,” and he probably did as much as anyone to give currency to theterm. In his widely quoted May 1914 remarks at the unveiling of a statue inmemory of a revolutionary hero, he said impatiently: “Some Americans need

hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over. But whenthe whole man has come over, heart and thought- and all, the hyphen dropsof its own weight out of his name”(Paxson, 1966, I: 205). In his “LeaderlessGovernment” address to the Virginia Bar Association, an address which,with appropriate changes, he evidently repeated many times, he was dis-tressingly frank: “We have the immemorial practice of the English race it-self, to which we belong. Nowhere else has the pure strain of the nationwhich planted the colonies and made the independent government under

which we live been kept so without taint or mixture as it has been in Virginia,and hitherto in all the South” (Public Papers: 337). Of course, Americans of less “pure strain” could find little to attract them in Roosevelt either, an atti-tude then shared by the big-shots in the Republican party who were not about

to forgive Roosevelt’s recent, disastrous bolt of the party. Nonetheless,Roosevelt’s hopes were decidedly boosted by the vocal—if minority—“preparedness” sentiment.

When the Republicans met for their convention, there were those whocounted on a stampede for Roosevelt. This group almost certainly wanted war

and knew that Roosevelt would not disappoint them. When the movement toRoosevelt did not materialize, efforts to seal the schism led, on the fourth day,to the nomination of Charles Evans Hughes, who at least seemed electable.Roosevelt’s well-publicized dislike of him, along with his ancestry, made hima plausible friend of the Germans. Moreover, since he had said nothing to in-dicate that he leaned toward the cause of the Allies, the Irish might go alongas well. So might Catholics and others who were angry with Wilson’s con-

fused interventions in the Mexican civil war and pacifists and militarists un-happy with “armed neutrality.” More than that, he might appeal to the Pro-gressives, the “hyphens,” and the non-hyphens. After all, Hughes had been


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“one of the craftsmen of the movement” (Paxson, 1966, I: 342), Dewey, writing

in the New Republic, seems to have got it right: “Were one to judge from thestyle of campaign undertaken by the Republican managers, one would concludethat there are no issues in the present campaign—unless the business of oustingMr. Wilson from the Presidency be called an issue” (MW , X: 252). As Dewey

saw, Hughes’s “undiluted Americanism” was but “the mask” for a “contradic-tory medley.”17 Nevertheless, this perfectly clear perception of the nature of American party politics seems not to have disturbed Dewey. Or at least, it didnot disturb him enough to deter him from saying, “I find myself, along withmany others who have not been especially enthusiastic in the past about Mr .Wilson, warming up to him more and more every day” (X: 253).

Worth noting, the Socialists did not even have a convention. For them amail primary was sufficient. Senator Bob La Follette optimistically prophe-sied, in April 1916, “the day is coming when the people, who always pay the

full price, are going to have the final say over their own destinies. . . . Theywho do the fighting will do their own deciding” (Quoted in Paxson, I: 274).Wilson’s campaign was a combination of exploiting “undiluted American-ism” and a belated, energetic shift to progressivism. Jeremy A. O’Leary’s“American Truth Society” had been saying, reasonably, that Wilson’s neu-trality was fraudulent. Knowing that the group had been cultivated by Countvon Bernstorff, the German ambassador, Wilson’s response to O’Leary wasbrief: “I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for

me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I willask you to convey this message to them”(Quoted in Paxson, I: 350). But thatwas still not the end of the matter. The Democratic National Committee dis-covered that Hughes “had been in conference” with O’Leary’s group. With

good effect on the campaign, they accused Hughes of being in secret alliancewith disloyal “hyphens.” On the other side, Wilson nominated the notoriouslypro-labor Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court; and in the few closing weeksof the congressional session, a raft of Progressive measures, stemming frompresidential initiative, got passed: the Federal Farm Loan Act, the creation of

the United States Tariff Commission, an important new labor bill restrictingchild labor, and the Adamson Act, a novel piece of legislation which had beenthe favorite of railroad labor. Still, Wilson won only barely. In the electoralcollege, the victor needed 266 out of 531 votes. With California still out,Hughes had 254 and Wilson 264. The thirteen California electoral votes madethe difference. Paxson comments: “Indeed, with a well-placed smile Hughesmight have won the needed four votes in a thousand from the opposition,

nearly half of them Republican at heart, but they had been snubbed” (Paxson,I: 363). The fact that Governor Johnson of California had combined the non-Democratic vote to win in that state makes this a convincing argument.18

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Nevertheless, it had been clear enough to Lippmann that Wilson would be

a war president. Steel reports a summer 1916 interview granted to him byWilson, then strenuously cultivating Progressive support. After almost twohours on domestic questions and “benevolent neutrality,” the discussionturned to war. Steel writes:

Wilson knew what Lippmann wanted to hear. Neutrality,”benevolent” or other-

wise, Wilson said, was becoming more difficult. “Let me show you what I

mean,” he added, and dramatically pulled out a cable from the embassy in Berlin

predicting that the Germans would resume unrestricted submarine warfare after

the American elections in November. “It’s a terrible thing to carry around with

me.” The implication was clear. When the Germans sank the Sussex five months

earlier, Wilson had said that he would break relations if they resumed unre-

stricted submarine warfare. Now he had to either back down or go to war.

Lippmann hurried back to New York to meet Croly and Straight. “Now we’ll‘have to face it,” Lippmann told them. “What we’re electing is a war Presi-

dent,—not for the man who kept us out of war. And we’ve got to make up our

minds whether we want to go through the war with Hughes or with Wilson

(Steel: 1980: 106–7).

We shall never know, of course, whether Hughes, too, would have been

“forced” into the war—any more than we can be sure about Wilson’s true mo-tivations and beliefs either prior to the election or up to his call for war. His-torically, these are of little consequence. Far more important is the fact thatup to the day on which Wilson delivered his stirring war message to Con-gress, 2 April 1917, few Americans could have found any reason to enter thewar in Europe. Wilson himself offered but one reason, and that one reason,

ironically, had been a gift of the Russian Provisional Government just onemonth before: “We desire,” he declared, “no conquest, no dominion.” “We

are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. . . . America is privi-leged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth.”“The world must be made safe for democracy.”

As important, surely, is the fact that he decided that America should go towar, and that he could have decided otherwise. But this is not a statement thatWilson had “free will.” Rather, unlike the similar judgment by Thucydides inreference to the Spartans, it is to say that he could have decided otherwisewithout in any obvious way compromising the “interests” of the UnitedStates. Of course, this claim may be contested. One might argue, for exam-

ple, that a victorious Germany would have been a threat to the United States

and to its interests. It is hard to know what sense to make of this sort of de-fense, especially in light of the fact that Germany was defeated and Hitler hadeven greater aspirations than the Kaiser!


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The German High Command had blundered disastrously in believing that

America was not disposed to enter the war and that therefore it could renew thesubmarine campaign with impunity.19 This gave Wilson all the justification—or excuse?—he needed. To be sure, America could have adopted a consistentlyneutral stance, could have abided by the principles of a neutral country under

international law, marked her ships appropriately, and engaged only in shippingthat was pacific. Wilson knew that he was within his authority in protectingAmerican rights at sea, even if that meant abandoning a consistently neutralposture and, thus, encouraging war. But he preferred “not to act upon generalimplication”(quoted in Paxson, I: 399. Nonetheless, his request for an immedi-ate bill arming merchant ships was blocked in committee by La Follette. OnWilson’s view, “a little group of willful men representing no opinion but theirown, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless andcontemptible”(quoted in Paxson, I: 401). Indeed, this same “little group of will-

ful men” had been doggedly demanding a national referendum on war beforeany further step toward war be taken. We can only guess what its outcomemight have been. But there is no doubt that the Congress supported Wilson: thedeclaration passed 82 to 6 in the Senate and 373 to 50 in the House. With lessgood reason than the German Social Democrats, these men were not going tobe parties to a posture of cowardice which would make the United States look“helpless and contemptible.”

Finally, and not to be overlooked, it is by no means clear that they did the

right thing in endorsing Wilson’s war policy. They could not know, of course,the consequences of the American entry; nor can we make any sort of sensi-ble judgment about the consequences of that war had they acted otherwise.But surely it was as clear then as now, that the proffered reason for war was,

at best, highly dubious.

THE NEW REPUBLIC?

Dewey was instantly distressed by official and unofficial responses to the ex-igencies of war. In December 1917 he addressed a group at DeWitt ClintonHigh School in New York City. Three teachers had been charged with disloy-alty and suspended. Dewey saw that it was no coincidence that the three hadbeen active in promoting the new Teachers’ Union. There had been no trial,no opportunity to present evidence or weigh testimony. It was, said Dewey,an inquisition. He offered that he was pro-Ally; but to be so, it was not nec-

essary “to be in favor of establishing Prussianism in New York City” (MW,X: 159). Repression justified by war was not a novelty in the liberal democ-

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racies and had not been so in America. What was new was a new capacity to

use repression, now coupled with a fantastic new ability to obliterate the dis-tinction between “information” and “propaganda.” It is not clear whether atthis time Croly, Lippmann, Dewey, or indeed anyone, appreciated this or itsimplications or how far it would go. But as the repression increased, so did

the protest that issued from these men, especially from Dewey. The Espi-onage Acts (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), aided by Justice Holmes’s fa-mous articulation of a “clear and present danger,” provided the “legal”ground for slapping a ten-year jail sentence on Eugene Debbs for an anti-warspeech and for the mass indictment of the leaders of the IWW and othersequally protected by “due process.” The editors of the Masses went on trial;an issue of Oswald Garrison’s Nation was suppressed; the Jewish Daily For-

ward was threatened; and Simon Patten and Charles Beard joined the list of academics who lost their posts. The atmosphere of suspicion resulted in the

withdrawal of the subsidy that had kept Bourne’s The Seven Arts in print.Even the New Republic came under government surveillance until GeorgCreel, the chief of President Wilson’s new propaganda bureau, the Commit-tee of Public Information, pointed out to federal agents that the magazine wasa supporter of the Administration!20

In order to satisfy the need for “an authoritative agency” for the dis-semination of “facts about the war,” the Committee of Public Information(CPI) had been created seven days after the declaration of war. It had nocongressional authority and was primarily supported out of the President’s

fund. Its efforts were monumental. Not only did Creel’s office “release thenews,” which meant that it had control over what Americans learned aboutthe war; but, as Creel said, there was “no medium of appeal that we did not

employ”: films, posters, cartoons, prepared speeches, and widely distrib-uted pamphlets. A sample of their titles gives the flavor: How the War

Came [sic] to America, The War Message, [Wilson’s speech before Con-gress] and the Facts [sic] Behind It, Why Working Men [sic] Support the

War, and the Official Bulletin, a novel experiment in “government journal-

ism.” In his summary Paxson concludes that “the Wilson doctrine was thedoctrine of his C. P. I. It was elaborated in the war of pamphlets and wasexplained out of the history of the United States and of the world. Itwas rationalized as a reasonable outgrowth of United States experience. Itwas grounded in the ideas implicit in the phrase, ‘a world safe for democ-racy.’“(Paxson, II: 48). Plenty of people saw the films, read these tracts,and passed on what they had read. Still more were influenced by the CPI

effort at disseminating “information.” The pieces of printed matter andpresentations number in the millions.


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Moreover, with the Government providing the example, private organiza-

tions, especially hate mills like the National Security League, could go towork. Seeing traitors everywhere, their strident, irresponsible publications at-tacked “liberals” as traitors, especially those with Teutonic names, at the sametime giving the CPI a benign, centrist, responsible look.

The February Revolution in Russia had made Wilson’s war for democracyplausible, but the Bolshevik Revolution now gave the defenders of reactionwonderful new fuel. Because it was quite impossible to get any clear pictureof what was happening in Russia; because, since at least the Haymarketbombing, American WASPs had associated socialism with “foreigners,” es-pecially Slavs and Jews; because, in turn, these were “terrorists;” because theGerman High Command and German “Social Democrats” had chimed in withthe threat of “Bolshevism,” it was easy for Americans to believe whateverthey were told about the Russian Revolution. Lippmann, who surely knew

this, could observe that “the people are shivering in their boots over Bolshe-vism, and they are more afraid of Lenin than they ever were of the Kaiser.”He concluded by noticing what may be a characteristic trait of American cul-ture in this century: “We seem to be the most frightened lot of victors that theworld ever saw”(quoted by Steel: 156). Nor have those “truths” about Rus-sian history been erased.

The Red scare had by then begun. The Palmer raids and the mass deporta-tions of “dangerous” Americans—without trial—made previous efforts at re-

pression seem sweet. Lippmann had confessed to Colonel Rouse that he had“no doctrinaire belief in free speech,” but that he could not be sanguine overthe hysteria. Dewey, who had been on platforms with many of the “radicals,”including the deported anarchists Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman,

responded, in 1920, along with Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, andClarence Darrow, by forming the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).Dewey had insisted that Goldman’s “reputation as a dangerous woman wasbuilt up by a conjunction of yellow-journalism and ill-advised police raids.”The “trial” of Sacco and Vanzetti, in 1921, propelled Dewey to the conviction

that the ACLU was anything but sufficient, a discovery that would motivatehis thought from then on.

But there were other unintended consequences of the war. One was the re-alization of at least the main features of the New Republic image of a nation-alist liberalism. Perhaps Dewey was in the best position to see this clearly. Ina remarkable essay entitled “What are we Fighting For?” of June 1918, hespelled it out. The war had brought forward “the more conscious and exten-

sive use of science for communal purposes.” It had “made it customary to uti-lize collective knowledge and skill of scientific experts of all kinds, organiz-ing them for community ends.” This was, he concluded prophetically, “the

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one phase of Prussianism . . . which is likely permanently to remain” (XI:

98–99). The warfare state had laid the foundations for the new liberalism!Still, “Prussianism” was hardly a democratic image.Further consequences of the war were “the formation of large political

groupings” (MW, XI: 99) and “domestic integration within each unit” (XI:

101). But this too seemed to propel democracy. “Production for profit” hadbeen “subordinated to production for use.” On Dewey’s view, “the war has .. . afforded an immense object lesson as to the absence of democracy in mostimportant phases of our national life, while it has also brought into existencearrangements for facilitating democratic integrated control” (Xl: 102). It didnot matter what you called this, “state socialism,” “state capitalism,” “social-ization,” or something else. The fact of “deeper import” was “the creation of instrumentalities for enforcing the public interest in all the agencies of mo-dem production and exchange” (XI: 102). This was the key. At this time,

Dewey surely believed that the instrumentalities of representative govern-ment were being extended and that they could do the job. But he was incred-ibly vague on the possible dangers.

He did not deny that the “absorption of the means of production and dis-tribution by government” and “the replacement of the present corporate em-ploying and directive forces by a bureaucracy of officials” led to centralizedgovernment. Moreover, “so far as the consequences of war assume this form,it supplies another illustration of the main thesis of Herbert Spencer that a

centralized government has been built up by war necessities and that such astate is necessarily militaristic” (XI: 104). Dewey did not even comment onthe idea that “such a state is necessarily militaristic.” He seemed satisfied topoint out merely that

in Great Britain and this country, and apparently to a considerable degree even

in centralized Germany, the measures taken for enforcing the subordination of

private activity to public need and service has been successful only because they

have enlisted the voluntary cooperation of associations which have been formed

on a non-political, non-governmental basis (XI: 104).

The workplace too was being “democratized”: “The wage-earner is more likelyto be interested in using his newly discovered power to increase his own shareof control in an industry than he is in transferring that control over to govern-ment officials” (XI: 105). Still, these words, published just as the workers’ and

soldiers’councils in Russia had begun to solidify and just before a workers’rev-

olution had come to Germany seemed hardly true of America.Indeed, Randolph Bourne’s appraisal of the situation was very much closer

to the truth. In a series of articles published between June and October 1917,


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Bourne had offered an extraordinary criticism of “the war intellectuals,” and

especially of Dewey’s New Republic articles.21

Bourne had noted that for“war intellectuals,” “democracy remains an unanalysed term, useful as a callto battle, not as an intellectual tool, turning up fresh sod for the changing fu-ture” (Bourne, 1919: 123). He asked, rhetorically, “Is it the political democ-

racy of a plutocratic America that we are fighting for, or is it the social de-mocracy of the new Russia? Which do our rulers really fear more, the menaceof Imperial Germany, or the liberating influence of a socialist Russia?”(123–24).

“To those of us who have taken Dewey’s philosophy almost as our Amer-ican religion,” he noted that “it never occurred that values could be subordi-nated to technique.” He agreed that “the young men in Belgium, the officers’training corps, the young men being sucked into the councils of Washingtonand into war organization everywhere have among them a definite element,

upon whom Dewey, as veteran philosopher, might well bestow a papal bless-ing” (128). Liberal and enlightened, they had “absorbed the secret of scien-tific method as applied to political organization.” “Creative intelligence” wasindeed “lined up in the service of war technique.”

“We were instrumentalities,” he admitted; “but we had our private utopiasso clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place as con-tributory You must have your vision and you must have your technique. Thepractical effect of Dewey’s philosophy has evidently been to develop the

sense of the latter at the expense of the former” (130–31).Bourne was a pragmatist. He began his essay “Twilight of Idols by evok-

ing James and concluded by again evoking him:

A more skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood may actually be the signof more stirring life fermenting in America today. It may be a sign of hope. That

thirst for more of the intellectual “war and laughter” that we find Nietzsche call

us to may bring us satisfactions that optimism-haunted philosophies could never

bring. Malcontentedness may be the beginning of promise. That is why I evoked

the spirit of WIlliam James, with its gay passion for ideas, and its freedom of

speculation, when I felt the slightly pedestrian gait into which the war had

brought pragmatism. It is the creative desire more than the creative intelligence

that we shall need if we are ever to fly. (138–39)

Bourne’s remarks are, perhaps, a confession of his rude awakening, not somuch to the traps and ambiguities of instrumentalism, but to the nature of those “nebulous ideals” which so many had presumed to be instantiated in

American democracy. It would take Dewey a bit longer before he would getclear on the critical issues. But, contrary to many of his later critics andepigones, get clear he eventually did.

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TWO INQUIRIES

As the war labored to an end, Lippmann and then Dewey had the chance to

be engaged in projects, which put their pragmatic philosophies to work. Lipp-mann’s project was an enormous success; Dewey’s was not.

Colonel House, Wilson’s powerful man for all seasons, initiated Lippmann’sproject in September 1917. So secret that it had no name, the group whichformed its directorate decided on “the Inquiry.”22 The name, a member noted,would be “blind to the general public, but would serve to identify it among theinitiated”(Steel, 1980: 128). The directorate included Sidney Meses,

House’s brother-in-law and a philosopher who was then president of CityCollege, David Hunter Miller, a law partner of House’s son-in-law, Gordon

Auchincloss, Columbia historian James T. Shotwell, and geographer IsaiahBowman. Eventually it came to number some 150 academic experts, includ-ing Samuel Eliot Morison; but Lippmann was its general secretary and, as itturned out, its motivating spirit. Evidently, Dewey was tempted by Lippmannto head a Moscow branch, but in the end decided against the plan. It is inter-esting to speculate on how that experience might have affected his politicalphilosophy.

The mandate of the inquiry was broad. It was to consist “not only of a study

of the facts but of quiet negotiation, especially among the neutrals, so thatAmerica could enter the peace conference as the leader of the great coalitionof forces”(129). It was just at this time that the Bolsheviks published the se-cret treaties. Because Wilson feared, rightly, that these would adversely affectAmerican public opinion—how would Wilson maintain the fiction that thewar was not “an unholy alliance of bribes and rewards”?—he tried, but failed,

to prevent their publication in America. In consequence, there was an urgencyin House’s early December invitation to Lippmann to come to his home. Wil-son had to disconnect himself from the manifest imperialism of his Allied

partners and to set out a peace of his own. The terms had to “purge andpacify” the Allied cause and, at the same time, be so tempting to the Germanpeople that they would reject their own leadership.

This rather incredible mandate was brilliantly managed by Lippmann. On22 December 1917, Lippmann presented House with a document entitled“The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests.” The President got it on Christ-mas Day. On January 2, Lippmann responded to requests for clarificationwith a revised memorandum. Wilson accepted the recommendations, adding

six points of his own, and on January 8 he assembled Congress to offer them

his historic Fourteen Points. Lippmann was rightly exultant.Dewey’s inquiry, by contrast, bore absolutely no fruit. It had been initiated

in the summer of 1918 by Albert Barnes, a self-made millionaire who had


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been a student in Dewey’s social philosophy course at Columbia. Barnes had

asked Dewey “whether he would like to come down to Philadelphia and at-tempt to put his social theory into practice,” to address a large group of Pol-ish immigrants on questions of national identity and democratic pluralism. Itturned out that Philadelphia was just the starting place for a “the-ranging in-

quiry with direct pertinence to the terms of the peace.”Dewey and his graduate students quickly discovered that Poles in America—

like other groups, presumably—were caught in a set of intractable dilemmas. Byvirtue of their understandable affection for their own language and traditions,they quickly became isolated, reinforcing their otherness versus the mainstream.This prevented them, as the Handlins remark, “from getting their fair share of [America’s] rewards.”23 At the same time, it made them vulnerable to exploita-tion and manipulation. As Dewey said, “We discovered much fear and intimida-tion in a certain part of die Polish population, much manipulation and exploita-

tion in another part, together with much criticism of leaders who they werenominally following with much enthusiasm” (MW, XI: 260–61). To get at thiscomplex web of fear, manipulation and exploitation, and contradictory responsesto leadership, however, Dewey saw that it would be necessary to extend thestudy “to European and international relations.”

The problem was focused by a forthcoming convention in Detroit, whichaimed to unite the Poles in America behind the faction of IgnacePaderewski, the famous pianist and prospective first president of the new

Polish Republic. The United States had already set in motion its plans tomake Paderewski’s group, exiled in Paris, “the official representatives of the Polish people.” But Dewey quickly came to believe that this factionwas not terribly interested in democracy, that Paderewski represented a

tiny minority in his homeland, and that the leaders of the KON—theacronym (from the Polish) of the Congress (or Committee) of National De-fense which opposed Paderewski—had a far broader democratic base. ThePoles in America were being manipulated with the full, if unintended, co-operation of American media and officialdom.

As to the European aspect, Dewey saw that the struggle went way back intohistory. It was between a party “whose chief policies were monarchical, re-actionary and clerical and a party which was radical, often revolutionary andsocialistic, anticlerical and republican” (XI: 262). This, of course, was thecharacteristic form of struggle going on in all those “nations” which, throughno fault of their populations, had achieved neither modern, industrial civi-lization nor, in consequence, republican institutions.

Neither side was “especially favorable to the cause of the Jews but therecord of the conservative party is much the more aggressively anti-Semitic.”Similarly, “both parties share the tendency among all Poles to exaggerate ter-

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ritorial claims based upon events of past history, some of them as old as the

twelfth century.” Still, Dewey continued, “the conservative party is the moreimperialist and extreme, being ‘Pan-Polish.’ Since the Russian revolution par-ticu1ary, the radical party has moderated its claims” (XI: 262).

As to the American aspect, there existed an alliance between Polish clergy,

“opposed to and admittedly afraid of Americanization,” and the conservativeEuropean faction. The radical group, on the other hand, had suffered contin-uous accusations of pro-Germanism, anarchism, Bolshevism, and antidemoc-racy, all this despite the fact that one of their leaders, General Pilsudski, wasthen in a German prison, and that “the adherents of K.O.N. in this countryhave been officially expelled from the socialist party” (XI: 293)! Indeed,based upon his personal knowledge of the leadership, Dewey asserted that hecould not “speak too strongly of the malicious campaign of insinuation, mis-representation and personal attack carried on against the leaders of the

K.O.N.” (XI: 294).The problem, or better, the set of problems, which Dewey had diagnosed,

were anything but unique in domestic and international American politics.They have re-occurred steadily, from World War I to the present. (Compare,more recently, immigrant Salvadoreans, Vietnamese and Iraqis.) The officialresponse to Dewey’s efforts is perhaps typical. Dewey tried desperately to gethis detailed seventy-five-page report into the hands of pertinent officials, andeventually to House himself. Yet, although he finally managed this, he did not

have Lippmann’s success. This is hardly surprising, for Dewey said nothingthat House wanted to hear. Indeed, House was later to write: “He[Paderewski) came as the spokesman of an ancient people whose wrongs andsorrows had stirred the sympathies of the entire world. This artist, patriot, and

statesman awakened the Congress to do justice to his native land, and soughtto help make a great dream come true” (quoted in XI: 406).

The “great dream come true” is summarized by the conservative historianPaul Johnson: “Of the beneficiaries of Versailles, Poland [the Paderewski fac-tion?] was the greediest and the most bellicose, emerging in 1921, after three

years of fighting, twice as big as had been expected at the Peace Conference.”The Polish government had, of course, exploited Western fears of Bolshevismand interests in a cordon sanitaire around Russia. But now, with the largestminorities problem in Europe, “with a third of her population treated as vir-tual aliens,” it would not be long before “she maintained an enormous policeforce, plus a numerous but ill-equipped standing army to defend her vast fron-tiers” (Johnson, 1985: 39).

There is no doubt that Dewey’s inquiry was, for him, a profoundly educa-tive experience, perhaps, indeed, the decisive turning point as regards hishopes for a more democratic world. Lippmann’s direct experience in Europe


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as a propagandist for the Military Intelligence Bureau had already given him

all the education he needed when, in Public Opinion, he returned to the topicof democracy. But before turning to this Lippmann-Dewey argument, weshould look at another Lippmann-Dewey argument, this one regarding theLeague of Nations and the campaign to outlaw war.

THE LEAGUE AND THE OUTLAWRY OF WAR

As Lippmann quickly saw, the Versailles Peace was a sham, whatever hemight at one time have hoped, With Allied troops on their way to intervene inRussia, the Fourteen Points was a vehicle for constructing a cordon sanitaire

around Bolshevik Russia. “We’ve got no business taking part in unauthorizedcivil war in Russia. We’ve got no business either in law or morals or human-

ity trying to starve European Russia in the interests of Kolchak, Denikin andthe White Finns”(quoted in Steel: 164).

Central Europe was “balkanized;” but millions of people, including Ger-mans, were forcibly put under alien rule. The reparations imposed on Ger-many were contrary to anything Lippmann had expected, and the League of Nations, although it was not a defense pact, incredibly excluded an unarmedGermany. “For the life of me I can’t see peace in this document,” he wrote(quoted in Steel: 158). Lippmann got it exactly right: “Unless the bridges to

moderate radicalism are maintained, anarchy will follow.” It was not just thatAmerican policy was illegal and immoral; it was also counterproductive.Now Lippmann found himself saying things that no one wanted to hear.

But surely he had to share the blame. Like Dewey, he had contributed to

Wilson’s ideological war politics, now so successful that those who were stillable to distinguish between reality and ideology were suspect—if not accusedof downright disloyalty. Nor has it become easier since then to distinguish re-ality from ideology. After a hostile Senate committee caught the administra-tion in a host of highly dubious claims and outright lies, the Treaty, with its

provision for the League, might still have passed had Wilson , its creator, beenwilling to compromise. In any case, it is clear that Europe got a League whichit did not want, and that Wilson, who seemed to believe throughout that theLeague was as he said it was, was thoroughly discredited.

In Dewey’s first comments on the League, he was enthusiastic about theidea of “permanent international government whose powers shall be evenmore executive and international than judicial” (MW, XI: 138). In another es-

say, of November 1918, he had argued that the League was not, as he under-stood it, merely to “enforce peace.” This betrayed the same logic of the “oldmilitary-political system.” What distinguishes Wilson from the “other states-

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men of the epoch,” he said, was “his prompt recognition that, given the con-

ditions of modern life, no adequate defense and protection of the interests of peace can be found except in a policy based upon positive cooperation for in-terests which are so universal as to be mutual” (XI: 128). This was not merelya shared interest in peace, of course. Rather, it involved interests which “grew

out of common everyday necessities, and which operated to meet the com-monplace needs of everyday life with respect to food, labor, securing raw ma-terials . . . and so on.” He continued, “ An organization which grew out of wants and met them would, once formed, become so indispensable thatspeedily no one could imagine: the world getting on without it” (XI: 129).The idea had been important to Dewey since at least his German Philosophy

and Politics.

Dewey was surely correct about the limits to the idea that peace could beenforced. But, as with his remarks regarding shared concerns in Democracy

and Education, because global interdependence had accelerated and mecha-nisms were needed to respond to the new problems generated by inter-de-pendence, were we to suppose that the League proposed by Wilson would besuch an instrument? Might we not suppose that “sovereignty” would standequally in the way of what Dewey had hoped for?

In another essay of the same month, he linked the League to “the NewDiplomacy” and argued that the question was whether the end of the war willreverse the “relative eclipse” of democracy, whether “the efforts of a nation

that entered the war to make the world safe for democracy will effect a trans-formation of sentimental valuations.” In particular, the question was whetherwe continue with “an unconscious adoption of the older morale of honor anddefense of status,” or whether the democratic movement has “the intellectual

courage to assert the moral meaning of industry, exchange and reciprocal ser-vice” (MW, XI: 132).

For some time, Dewey was relatively silent in judging which of the tworoads had been taken. But by March 1920, he had decided. “There is no usein blinking the non-democratic foreign policy of the democratic nations of

France and Great Britain.” Did Dewey forget to include the United Stateshere, or was this simply taken granted? He continued, “The Versailles Con-ference was not an untoward exceptional incident. It was a revelation of standing realities” (MW, XII: 5). “Diplomacy is still the home of the exclu-siveness, the privacy, the unchecked love of power and prestige, and one maysay the stupidity, characteristic of every oligarchy. Democracy has nottouched it” (XII: 7). The distinction between peoples and governments was

important, but by 1923, he could write that “the League of Nations is not aLeague of Nations but of governments, and of the governments whose poli-cies played a part in bringing on the war and that have no wish to change their


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policies” (MW, XV: 79–80). Like Lippmann, he seems not to have remem-

bered that he was once an important soldier in the army of writers whosewords had served to obscure these important facts.His whole posture had indeed changed. One shift regarded the little

understood—and now forgotten—campaign to outlaw war.24 The idea de-

rived from Salmon O. Levinson, and by 1923, in addition to Dewey, it hadpicked up the support of Senator William Borah, Republican leader of the as-sault on the League and sponsor of Senate Resolution 411 (introduced Feb-ruary 14, 1923). Borah’s Resolution had three parts: a universal treaty mak-ing war “a public crime,” the creation of a “code of international law of peace,” and the creation of a “judicial substitute for war . . . in the form of aninternational court” (XV: xvi). At first blush, the idea seems incredibly naiveand utopian. To most of its critics, it also seemed impossible that its support-ers could at the same time be such adamant opponents of the League and the

Hague World Court. Yet the idea was neither naive nor utopian; nor were itssupporters inconsistent. Indeed, the main idea is startlingly reasonable.

“There is no such thing as an illegal war” except the kind of war thatappears to most persons the most justifiable from the moral standpoint—internal wars of liberation” (XV: 62).25 In denying the sovereignty of an im-perial power or the authority of a regime, a group or a people must makethemselves “outlaws.” But for a sovereign state in its relation to other states,“war is the most authorized method of settling disputes between nations

which are intense,” the “ultima ratio of states” (54).Yet we insist that individuals in conflict face some sort of mechanism for

nonviolent resolution that they engage in some kind of negotiation adjudica-tion. The point has nothing to do with the justice or injustice of a particular

war. The point is that by not making war illegal, we utterly abandon the ideaof nonviolent resolution of conflict. Nor is Dewey saying that a law makingwar illegal, signed by all, will end war. Even given the heavy sanctions avail-able to lawmakers within states, crime does not cease. Nor is Dewey sayingthat the international mechanisms to be created should include coercive sanc-

tions. “The measure is logical—not merely formally logical but substantiallylogical in its adherence to the idea that war is a crime” (XV: 94). The use of police power against an individual is not at all like its use against a nation.“The latter is war, no matter what name you give it. . . . You cannot coerce anentire nation save by war. To outlaw war and in the same measure to providefor war is to guarantee the perpetuation of the war system” (XV: 94). This, of course, is one of the implications of Dewey’s old objection to the League, one

which also applies to the court at The Hague. Both lack coercive sanctions.Yet, incredibly, if one thinks about it, “they operate under an international lawwhich sanctions recourse to war” (XV: 96).

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Nor is this a form of pacifism. It is not claimed that force is never to be

used or that nations should disarm. On the contrary, they may well have tofight a war. It is to say, by contrast, that unless and until war is outlawed andthere are alternative mechanisms for settling disputes, we will not have takenone single stride toward lasting peace. Indeed, all “steps” taken within “the

war system” are useless; for “it is not a step we need, it is a right-about-face”(XV: 98).

The choice, then, is between “political methods based upon a system whichlegalizes war, and political methods which have as their basic principle that waris a crime, so that when diplomacy and conferences cannot reach agreement thedispute shall be submitted to a court” (XV: 119–20). But isn’t this naive?

Consider the possibilities. Suppose that we choose the second alternativeand outlaw war and create an international tribunal. Then there are three al-ternatives: first, issues are settled by the open inquiry of the court; second,

one party (or both) refuses to assent to the court’s decision; or third, one party(or both) refuses to even submit the dispute to the court. In the latter case,then, assuming that there are mechanisms for publicity, it should be clear tothe people of the world, including the people of the nations involved, that theparty has no case, that the regime’s rationale for war cannot stand up to thepublic scrutiny. The refusal to submit to publicity indicts them. In the secondcase, the world, including the people of the recalcitrant regime, can judgewho, if anybody, has right on their side. Dewey argues that the proposition to

outlaw war has never been put to the people of the world. If they do not wantwar, they will respond. Similarly, if such a mechanism existed, the peoplecould decide whether they wanted the particular war, which they were beingasked to fight.

At the risk of pedantry, I have tried to make the foregoing absolutely clear.But Walter Lippmann, surely one of the most perceptive men around, neverseemed to quite grasp what Dewey and the others had in mind. This is strik-ing. Dewey’s position is open to criticism, of course; but Lippmann’s criti-cisms are utterly off the mark. He argued, for example, that Dewey’s proposal

was a plan to “enforce peace” (XV: 405), that it committed people “to a codeso radical that it destroys the patriotic code which they are accustomed to as-sociate with their security and their national destiny,” that nations couldnever. agree on the code to which they would be bound (XV: 409–10), thatany test would require an abrogation of sovereignty (XV: 411), that the ad-vocates “propose to continue to legalize all kinds of wars” (XV: 412), that theidea calls for the elimination of diplomacy and other voluntary mechanisms

of adjudication (XV: 414), and more.Dewey fielded these objections in two essays in response to Lippmann’s

polemic, and in each instance it was easy to show that Lippmann had been


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mistaken, that he had distorted the text or missed the point.26 The main ob-

jection to Dewey’s plan, of course, was that no government, not even in thedemocracies, was willing to submit its foreign policy aims to anybody’sscrutiny, still less the scrutiny of its own people. It seems fair to say that Lipp-mann simply took this for granted.

There was nothing wrong with Dewey’s logic, even if his position madehim a holdout for the “new diplomacy.” Perhaps he did not see that in thisworld, vested interests were, if anything, more powerful than they ever hadbeen; that, if anything, people would have less say with regard to war thanever in the past. By 1923 there was urgency in his posture. In his 1927 re-

sponse to Lippmann’s mature views on democracy, he converted urgency intoradical analysis.

PUBLIC OPINION AND DEMOCRACY

It is no exaggeration to say that Lippmann’s Public Opinion is one of the mostimportant books in modern democratic theory. Published in 1922, it is a mas-terful account of the epistemology, conditions, and mechanisms of mass-

opinion formation in a modern mass society. It also includes a brilliant chap-ter that annihilates the individualist’s image of democracy, of “theself-centered man” and the “self-contained community.” As Dewey saw, theonly disappointing aspect of the book was Lippmann’s constructive sugges-tions. In Public Opinion Lippmann did not draw the deep implications of hisanalysis for democracy, although they were clear enough. He did this in hisThe Phantom Public of 1925. And this is the book that prompted Dewey to

his full-dress response, in The Public and Its Problems of 1927.Part I of Public Opinion sets the parameters: “The World outside and Pic-

tures in our Heads.” Lippmann does not doubt that there is “a World outside,”and that in some sense it is knowable. People in modern mass societies have“direct acquaintance” with their milieus; but even the latter involve “the se-lection, the rearrangement, the tracing of patterns upon, the stylizing of, whatWilliam James called `the random irradiations and resettlements of ourideas’” (Lippmann, 1954: 16). Knowing is through “the medium of fictions.”But fictions are not lies. A fiction is “a representation of the environmentwhich is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself.” It may have “al-

most any degree of fidelity,” depending on its construction. The “persistentdifficulty,” he concludes, “is to secure maps on which their own need, or

someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia” (16). Theproblem is that most people believe that they have a good map without hav-ing any way to know this.27 The materials of “public opinion” are the “pic-

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tures inside the heads . . . of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes,

and relations.” “Those pictures which are acted on by groups of people, or byan individual acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capitalletters” (19).

In successive chapters, Lippmann develops the mechanisms for the forma-

tion of public opinion. Part II, “Approaches to the World Outside,” has chap-ters on “censorship and privacy,” “contact and opportunity,” “time and atten-tion,” and “speed, words and clearness.” Members of modern mass societiesare not polis-dwellers directly engaged in a world where the causes and con-sequences of acting can be used to check one’s maps. Nor have they the timeor the opportunity to range across the spaces of indirect involvement. Alwayssubject to mediation by others, from the childhood books put into their handsto the representations of the Official Bulletin, they have no way to discrimi-nate among the representations set before them or to judge whether some-

one’s need has not “sketched in the coast of Bohemia” on their map. More-over, it has now become possible, when necessary, to create something “thatmight almost be called one public opinion all over America” (47).

Lippmann gives a devastating account of the Committee on Public Infor-mation and its unwitting conspirators in manipulation. He argues that theCommittee drew in a host of willing helpers, from the Boy Scouts who de-livered the President’s annotated addresses to doorsteps to the 600,000 teach-ers who received the fortnightly periodicals and passed on the “information”

contained therein to their pupils to “Mr. Hoover’s far reaching propagandaabout food” to the Red Cross, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, and othergroups who carried out the campaigns. Largely voluntary, the Committee’seffort was insidious, an achievement which far outran the hopes of the small

group who sat at its center.In Part III, Lippmann illuminates the overwhelming role of stereotypes in

forming thought. “We see a bad man. We see a dewy mom, a blushingmaiden, a sainted priest, a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a care-free bohemian, a lazy hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile Irish-

man, a greedy Jew, a 100% American” (119–20). Taken as an ordered en-semble, they provide “a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted.”“No wonder,” Lippmann concludes, that “any disturbance of the stereotypesseems like an attack upon the foundation of the universe” (95). Indeed, whenthese are reproduced ad nauseam, in authoritative histories, magazines, sto-ries, cartoons, movies, radio shows, television productions and more,—theirgrip is irresistible.

Part IV is an insider’s account of the role and limits of newspapers. Theydeal with news, not truth. “The news does not tell you how the seed is ger-minating in the ground, but it may tell you when the first sprout breaks


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through the surface” (341). Moreover, where there is a good machinery of.

public record, statistics on crime, stock prices, election returns, and the like,the modem news service is excellent. But where information is “spasmodi-cally recorded,” unclear, explanatory, contestable, or “hidden because of cen-sorship or a tradition of privacy,” the service fails.

Worse, “news and truth are not the same.” “The function of news is to sig-nalize an event, the function of truth is to light the hidden facts, to set themin relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men canact” (358). The Press is “like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlesslyabout. . . . Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone.” And, crit-ically, the press cannot do otherwise. The newspaper is neither a church nora school. It is a business. Indeed, “the citizen will pay for his telephone, hisrailroad rides, his motor car, his entertainment. But he does not pay openlyfor his news” (322). Unreported scandals by dry-goods merchants who ad-

vertise are not the problem. “The real problem is that the readers of a news-paper, unaccustomed to paying the costs of newsgathering, can be capitalizedonly by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers andmerchants” (324. Lippmann neatly summarized the point. He wrote: “To getadvertisers [a paper] must get readers. To get readers it must defer to theirown experiences and prejudices as setting the standard; it must adapt itself tosell newspapers” (341). Dewey thought that Lippmann had given up tooquickly. But the problem is not the immorality of editors or publishers. It is

structural, a self-reproducing, closed, causal loop. Indeed, it may be a loop,which is well nigh impossible to break!

Lippmann illustrates the mechanisms of the “making of a common will”with a case study of the building of the Wllsonian picture of the Great War. It

joins all the previous themes and deserves a full airing here. We must settle,however, for only its flavor. Well before the Committee of Public Informationgeared up and well before Wilson’s dramatic congressional speech, the Re-publican candidate Hughes unwittingly contributed. At the critical moment of the campaign of 1916 he did what was expected of him. He played politics.

His first speech set the tone. Lippmann summarizes it thus: “On the non-con-tentious record, the detail is overwhelming; on the issue everything is cloudy”(210). “What cannot be compromised must be obliterated, when there is aquestion on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend that itdoes not exist” (201). With regard to Wilson, the “experiment” of the Four-teen Points, “addressed to all the governments, allied, enemy, neutral, and toall the peoples,” would have been impossible “without cable, radio, telegraph

and daily press” (207). And there was the opportunity. By the end of 1917,“the earlier symbols of the war had become hackneyed, and had lost theirpower to unify. Beneath the surface a wide schism was opening in each Al-

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lied country” (209). Moreover, “the whole Allied cause had been put on the

defensive by the refusal to participate in Brest-Litovsk” (210). Wilson filledthe gap. But, of course, the Fourteen Points served precisely because “no onerisked a discussion.” Indeed, on pain of exposing their roles, they could not“The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the civilized world,

were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but they evoked a commonemotion” (215).

Lippmann then turns to democracy. The never true, fanciful, democraticimage of “the self-centered individual” autonomously and directly con-fronting the world as it is makes no sense. Nor does the idea that the com-munity is “self-contained,” and that, accordingly, there is no “unseen envi-ronment” which escapes everyone’s “direct and certain knowledge.” We arenot polis-dwellers. We are a mass.

Yet Lippmann does not for a second pretend that the Founding Fathers

were democrats, mystical or otherwise. On the contrary, “when they went toPhiladelphia in May 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles of Confederation,they were really in full reaction against the fundamental premise of Eigh-teenth Century democracy” (277). They were “determined to offset as far asthey could the ideal of self-governing communities in self- contained envi-ronments. The problem, as they saw it, was to restore government as againstdemocracy” (278). To be sure, “the American people came to believe thattheir Constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such.” More-

over, “they owe that fiction to the victory of Thomas Jefferson, and a greatconservative fiction it has been. . . . It is a fair guess that if everyone had al-ways regarded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution wouldhave been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and loy-

alty to democracy would have seemed incompatible” (284). (See Manicas,1989, Chapters 6, 7 and 8.)

What then is the upshot? What is the solution? One might guess here thatLippmann believes that all is well, on the grounds that, mythology notwith-standing, the people do not rule anyway. Representatives rule, and surely they

have good maps. But Lippmann thinks otherwise. Everywhere in the world,he says, representative bodies are discredited. And there is a good reason: “Acongress of representatives is essentially a group of blind men in a vast un-known world” (288). Indeed, for Lippmann, one of the preconditions of a“strong parliament” can never by satisfied: “There is no systematic, adequate,and authorized way for Congress to know what is going on in the world.” Thepresident “tells Congress what he chooses to tell it” (289).

Recurring now to his earlier views, he concludes that this is why the pres-tige of presidents has grown in modem democracies. He seems to throw abouquet to the Congress, but it ends up being more like a crumb. He writes,


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“There is no need to question the value of expressing local opinions and ex-

changing them.” Accordingly, “Congress has a great value as the market-place of a continental nation” (288). But since the president, “presiding overa vast collection of bureaus and their agents, which report as well as act,”frames and directs policy, the congressional “market- place” is effectively the

congressional talking shop!Although it would appear that Lippmann did not know what Max Weber

had recently said on the subject, he has further limited the capacities of a rep-resentative body and, without any apparent fear of the consequences, has cel-ebrated the singular importance of leadership in the modem mass state. As anAmerican, he could still have special faith in experts. Predictably, this was the“entering wedge” which allowed him to join “knowledge” and power.

As Dewey and the pragmatists had been saying all along, the problem of the modern state was the problem of “organized intelligence.” Lippmann,

having forgotten his William James, now gives an unabashed elitist, techno-cratic version of this. “Gradually . . . the more enlightened directing mindshave called in experts who were trained, or had trained themselves, to makeparts of this Great Society intelligible to those who manage it” (370). Thoughthese “enlightened directing minds” knew that they needed help, they were“slow to call in the social scientist” (371). Lippmann hopes that the lesson hasbeen learned. What is needed is presidential leadership responsive to the bestof “social scientific knowledge”!28

Lippmann ended Public Opinion by referring to Plato’s parable of the shipat sea. “In the first great encounter between reason and politics, the strategyof reason was to retire in anger,” “leaving the world to Machiavelli” (1954:412). Whenever one makes an appeal to reason in politics, the parable recurs.

But Lippmann’s answer is not the one just given. His answer is to combinePlato and Machiavelli: “Even if you assume with Plato that the true pilotknows what is best for the ship, you have to recall that he is not so easy torecognize, and that uncertainty leaves a large part of the crew unconvinced,’(413). Worse, during a crisis at sea there is no time “to make each sailor an

expert judge of experts.”

It would be altogether academic, then, to tell the pilot that the true remedy is,

for example, an education that will endow sailors with a better sense of evi-

dence. . . . In the crisis, the only advice is to use a gun, or make a speech, utter

a stirring slogan, offer a compromise, employ any quick means available to

quell the mutiny, the sense of evidence being what it is.29

Indeed. By the time of The Phantom Public, Lippmann had groped his wayto a clearly articulated, novel conception of democracy. He could now insistthat the democratic ideal is a false ideal because it is unattainable, “bad only

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in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer”(39). Things

are too complicated, too changing, too obscure, and too difficult; and ordinarypeople simply have no time to get the information they need in order to makeintelligent judgments. Even if each person is equipped for 1925, this “will notequip him to master American problems ten years later.” “That is why the

usual appeal to education as the remedy for the incompetence of democracyis so barren” (26).

The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not

know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it

is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and

there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought,

that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people can produce

a continuing directing voice in public affairs (39).

What, then, is democracy?

To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they

seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum

and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government. Even the most intelligent

large public of which we have any experience must determine finally who shall

wield the organized power of the state, its army and its police, by a choice be-

tween Ins and Outs (126).30

But is there, then, any important difference between democracy and dictator-ship? “ A community where there is no choice [between Ins and Outs] does

not have popular government. It is subject to some form of dictatorship or it

is ruled by the intrigues of the politicians in the lobbies” (126).

THE PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS

Tweedledum and Tweedledee did not satisfy Dewey. Eleven incredible yearshad separated Democracy and Education from The Public and Its Problems,

Dewey’s direct response to Lippmann and almost certainly the best twentieth-century defense of the idea of democracy. The distinction between democracyas a way of living and democracy as a form of government remained. How-ever, not only had Dewey developed a critique of democracy as a form of government, but, aided and abetted by Lippmann, he had come to see that de-mocracy as a way of life was not being fostered by the new interdependen-

cies and the new capacities of technological society. On the contrary, democ-racy as a mode of associated living was being profoundly undermined bythese forces. Since the problem was deep, Dewey was driven to a radical


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solution. Indeed, as Chapter 9, below, argues, Dewey’s version of democracy

is so strong that it bears little comparison to the very weak forms of what isnow called democracy. Dewey did not give up the simple and fundamentalidea that democracy requires that interdependent individuals must actuallyparticipate in decisions that affect them all. Indeed, here comparison is best

made to both some versions of anarchism (Chapter 8) and to the version of socialism sketched in the writings of Marx (Chapter 9). In sum, Dewey sawthat he had erred in supposing that the institutions created in the AmericanFounding were adequate to the new property relations, the new forms of com-merce and industry. These had indeed brought about the forms of democraticgovernment—general suffrage and executives and legislators chosen by ma-

jority vote—but these same forces have thrown huge barriers in the way of the realization of democratic publics. Woodrow Wilson’s “‘new age of humanrelationships’ has no political agencies worthy of it” (Dewey: 1954: 109).

Lippmann’s analysis of the mechanisms of the formation of public opinionwas surely not wrong; but in describing the public as “a phantom,” he drewthe wrong conclusions. As Dewey had it, “The democratic public is inchoateand unorganized”; it is “lost,” “eclipsed,” “confused,” and “bewildered.”There is a Great Society, but organized into a war system of states, individu-als, who are impersonally dependent, commodified, alienated, and disem-powered, are prevented from identifying themselves as members of publics:

“Where extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of

the conjoint activity of comparatively few persons traverse the globe,” the ab-sence of publics is a catastrophe. Surely the Great War is “a convincing re-minder of the meaning of the Great Society” (128).

The problem admitted no easy solutions; for surely it did not involve per-

fecting the institutions of political democracy. “The old saying that the curefor the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evilsmay be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as thatwhich already exists, or by refining or perfecting that machinery” (1954:144). The problem was much deeper and concerned the disintegration of the

conditions for democracy as a way of life: the incapacity of interdependentpeople even to perceive the consequences of “combined action,” still less toperceive shared goods and to act on them.

Dewey is at pains to emphasize the role of knowledge and participation inthe constitution of democratic community. Although as individuals we are in-terdependent, there is at present no way for the countless “I’s” to become“we.” Moreover, as Rousseau and then Marx had discerned, “interdepend-

ence provides just the situation which makes it possible and worthwhile forthe stronger and abler to exploit others for their own ends, to keep others in astate of subjection where they can be utilized as animated tools” (115).

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Community requires both communication and knowledge; but Lippmann

and the technocrats failed to realize that the kind of knowledge which is “theprime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge

and insight which does not yet exist” (166: my emphasis). For Dewey, suchknowledge is knowledge of the causes and consequences of activity; but it is

knowledge which funds experience by transforming needs and wants intomutually understood ends, knowledge which can be used in the conscious di-rection of conjoint activity.

War is surely the clearest case. It takes the combined energies of many,and the sufferings of many, many more; but unless there is someone—thephilosopher-king—who knows what all the rest cannot know, they have arightful claim to the requisite information and to being parties to the decision.It is one thing to argue that the people lack the knowledge they need to makea decision, quite another to argue that they cannot have it. In rejecting the

democratic ideal as a false ideal, Lippmann, like so many before and afterhim, takes everything as it is and offers us, dangerously and naively, an un-accountable technocracy. By contrast, Dewey refuses things as they are. Heis a democrat, and his vision is immense. Assuming that

The Great Society is to become a Great Community; a society in which the ever-

expanding and intricately ramifying consequences of associated activities shall

be known in the full sense of the word. . . . The highest and most difficult kind

of inquiry and subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must

take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and

breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it

will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its

own, for democracy is the name for a life of free and enriching communion. It

had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social in-

quiry is dissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication (184).

This vision is Jeffersonian and cosmopolitan.If today it seems utopian in a vicious sense, it is worth remembering that

not long ago, it seemed not only possible, but imminent! On the other hand,Dewey remained hopeful that people could find one another and act for them-selves. The Soviet Union provided a fatal test.

THE SOVIET UNION: DEWEY AND LIPPMANN

The year after the publication of The Public and Its Problems, Dewey visitedthe Soviet Union. In a series of six articles published in the New Republic, heoffered his impressions (LW, Vol. 3). In the first, “Leningrad Gives the Clue,”


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in terms reminiscent of Tocqueville, he wrote that he was “inclined to think that

not only the present state of Communism (that of non-existence in any literalsense), but even its future is of less account than is the fact of this achieved rev-olution of heart and mind, this liberation of a people to consciousness of them-selves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate” (204). The

spirit of democracy remained irresistible. Here, as throughout these essays,Dewey notes right away that, given conventional beliefs about Bolshevism andBolshevik Russia, what he says may “seem absurd.”

In the second essay, “ACountry in a State of Flux,” he insists that anythingsaid about Russia must be dated, since Russia was, again, rapidly undergoingchange. “From the World War, the blockade and the civil war,” the govern-ment did “practically take over the management of co-operatives,” evenwhile, as he remarks parenthetically, the legal forms of the cooperatives were“jealousy guarded.” But, he reports, “this state of affairs no longer exists: on

the contrary, the free and democratically conducted cooperative movementhas assumed a new vitality—subject, of course, to control of prices by theState” (209–10).

In the third, “A New World in the Making,” he writes of “the sense of en-ergy and vigor released by the Revolution . . . a sense of the planned con-structive endeavor which the new regime is giving this liberated energy”; andhe says, “1 certainly was not prepared for what I saw; it came as a shock”(217). And in his concluding essay, “The Great Experiment and the Future,”

he sees an “experiment” with two purposes:

The first and more immediate aim is to see whether human beings can have such

guarantees of security against want, illness, old age, and for health, recreation,

reasonable degree of material ease and comfort that they will not have to strug-gle for purely personal acquisition and accumulation, without, in short, being

forced to undergo the strain of competitive struggle for personal profit. In its ul-

terior reaches, it is an experiment to discover whether the familiar democratic

ideals—familiar in words, at least—of liberty, equality and brotherhood will not

be most completely realized in a social regime based on voluntary cooperation,

on conjoint workers’ control and management of industry, with an accompany-

ing abolition of private property as a fixed institution -a somewhat different mat-

ter, of course, than the abolition of private possessions as such (244).

Dewey must have known that the Western democracies had played nosmall role at a critical moment in 1918 in derailing the “experiment.” He hadgone to Russia almost indifferent to this. Now in language as strong as he can

find, he expressed his altered perception: “1 came away with the feeling thatthe maintenance of barriers that prevent intercourse, knowledge and under-standing is close to a crime against humanity” (249).

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In 1933, Lippmann also commented on the future of the Soviet Union. If

Dewey’s hopes for democracy were crushed by the experience of the SovietUnion, Lippmann’s understanding of this failure has perhaps not been sur-passed. For Lippmann, while the Bolsheviks made errors, the existence of powerful enemies was the decisive fact:

This is, I believe, a crucial point in any and every effort to understand the in-

wardness of the communist regime. The circumstance which compelled Lenin

to depart from the Marxian idea of controlling the economy organized by capi-

talists, and to adopt the idea of organizing a new economy, was the civil and in-

ternational war which broke out in July 1918 and lasted until November 1920 .

. .

The proof is to be found in the fact that the two Five- Year Plans have had as

their primary objective the creation of heavy industries in the strategically in-

vulnerable part of Russia, and that to finance this industrial development theRussian people have been subjected to years of forced privation . . .31

Of course, people are “more afraid of Lenin than they ever were of theKaiser” (quoted by Steel: 156). And, of course, as he had also so powerfullyargued, it had become easy to provide people maps, which satisfied some-body else’s need.

NOTES

1. Unless otherwise indicated, citations from Dewey are from John Dewey, The

Collected Works (ed.) Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois

University Press, 1976–83), cited by volume and page numbers in parentheses in thetext.

2. The foregoing draws on Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Cen-

tury, Ch. 6, 7, and Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Cro/y, Weyl, Lipp-

mann and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press,

1961). Ch. 5. The New Republic was to be “radical without being socialistic.” How

radical is arguable, of course. The magazine ran a deficit, except toward the end of the

war, when it was selling more than 40,000 copies. For four years, the Straight subsidy

ran to $100,000 per year.

3. This is the title of an oft-given speech and essay. A version may be found in Ray

Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (eds), The Public Papers ofWoodrow Wilson

(New York: Harper and Row, 1925). See also Wilson’s very influential Congressional

Government: A Study in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), which,

by 1900, was in its fifteenth edition; and his later Constitutional Government in theUnited States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908). These are cited in the

text respectively as “Leaderless Government,” Congressional Government, and Con-

stitutional Government.


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According to Wilson, “we have in this country . . . no real leadership; because no

man is allowed to direct the course of Congress, and there is no way of governing the

country save through Congress which is supreme” (ibid: 205).

Jeffrey K. Tulis has given an excellent account of Wilson’s transformation of the

presidency. See his The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1987). The Great War gave Wilson the chance to bring to realization his idea that the

systemic difficulties of “mechanical government” could be overcome by a president

who had the capacity to form mass opinion. See below.

4. The idea of the leader as “interpreter” has a distinguished German history. It

runs from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Hegel, Ranke, Droysen, Treitschke, Dilthey, and

Meinecke. The fundamental premise is well expressed by Ranke: “No state ever ex-

isted without a spiritual basis and spiritual content. In power itself a spiritual essence

manifests itself. An original genius, which has a life of its own, fulfills conditions

more or less peculiar to itself.” By means of “interpretation,” the historian discerns

this “genius” and thereby makes history intelligible; and the leader (Der Führer) who

“expresses” it becomes, as for Hegel, a “World-Historical Individual.” I have dis-cussed these remarkable notions in my A History and Philosophy of the Social Sci-

ence: 86–96, 117–24.

On General von Bernhardi’s use of these ideas, see below. We do not need to be re-

minded here that these ideas also had a remarkable future in fascist and Nazi ideol-

ogy. See e.g., Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome: “Ardita,”

1935).

5. David Hollinger properly insists that James had an importantly distinct notion

of science and its relation to culture, a notion thoroughly grasped by Lippmann. See

Hollinger’s “Science and Anarchy: Walter Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery,” American

Quarterly (1977), and idem “William James and the Culture of Inquiry,” Michigan

Quarterly Review (1981), both repr. in Hollinger, In the American Province (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1985),

6. Reed and Lippmann, friends since Harvard, had been part of a group which had re-cently put on a Madison Square pageant dramatizing the situation of striking IWW silk-

workers in Paterson, New Jersey. But in Drift and Mastery, Lippmann had applauded

“conservative unions” and condemned the IWW as preferring “revolt to solidarity” and,

in practice, being “ready to destroy a union for the sake of militancy” (p. 62).

7. The 1908 Ethics, a collaboration with James H. Tufts, contains much social

philosophy and sensible social philosophy at that. Still, these parts were Tufts’s con-

tribution. See my discussion, Chapter 10.

8. Dewey seems to have liked Marx’s little joke which he cites in a note attached

to Hegel’s famous reference to “the bird of Minerva which takes its flight only at the

close of day”: “Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and economics that

to them, as Jehovah to Moses at Mt. Sinai, the divine showed but its posterior side”

(ibid .: 110)!

9. The text is worth calling to die attention of critics of Dewey who say thatDewey’s experimentalism kept him from insisting on the need for an inclusive plan.

The idea stayed with him throughout. But, like his associates at the New Republic, he

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was no socialist—at least until later. Accordingly, he waffled regarding the key fea-

tures of a “constructive plan”.

10. Dewey was reluctant to refer to the capitalist epoch by its name, preferring in-

stead “machine age,” “industrial order,” “new forms of commerce and industry,” and

so forth. This had some severe consequences, especially after his “radical turn.” See

Chapter 9 below.

11. For the early period in American culture, see Sacvan Berkovitch, The Ameri-

can Jeremiad (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

12. See also Dewey’s April 1916 essay for The International Journal of Ethics,

“Force and Coercion” (Middle Works, X. 244–51). In terms of Dewey’s altogether

sensible moral posture, the pacifist case against World War I, of course, was much

stronger than it was against World War II.

13. In June 1915, the issue had brought about the resignation from Wilson’s Cab-

inet of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Bryan had wanted the United

States to bring all disputes between it and the thirty countries with which it had

treaties before an international commission. He wondered, moreover: “Why shouldan American citizen be permitted to involve the country in war by travelling upon a

belligerent ship when he knows that the ship will pass through a danger zone?” Fi-

nally, he could not understand how American passenger ships were permitted to carry

cargoes of ammunition, a policy that plainly and provocatively threatened the ships

and encouraged war. Wilson would not submit the issue to impartial inquiry; nor

would he disclaim responsibility for the precipitous actions of private citizens. See

“Bryan’s Letter of Resignation, “ in S. Cohen (ed.), Reform, War and Reaction:

1912–1932 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972): 58.

14. Forcey, Crossroads: 265–68. The conventional opinion regarding the Ameri-

can entry is ably represented by Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the

American People: 851–56. See also Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the

World War, 3 vols (repr. New York: Cooper Square, 1966).

15. In January 1917 Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Minister, had senta telegram to Mexican President Carranza which had been intercepted by British in-

telligence. It read (in part):

We intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on the first of February. We shall en-

deavor in spite of this to keep the United States neutral. In the event of this not succeed-

ing, we make Mexico a proposal of an alliance on the following basis: make war together,

make peace together, generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that

Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Given the circumstances, the idea was hardly shocking. Not only was the United

States arming ships that carried munitions to Britain; but also if the United States were

to be in a full-scale war with Germany, then Germany would obviously hope for all

the help she could get. For anyone wanting war, of course, the note was a gift from

heaven. Wilson released it on 28 Feb and in April received a vote in favor of war. See

below.


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16. It is certainly true that American foreign policy was imperialist. It had been so

from the beginning. But its imperialist designs had been confined to the western

hemisphere and, more recently, to the Pacific.

17. Ronald Steel quotes a “spleen-filled passage” from Lippmann’s report of the

Republican convention. A piece of this gives the flavor:

I think that there were fifteen nominations plus the secondary orations. It was a nightmare,

a witches’ dance of idiocy and adult hypocrisy . . . The incredible sordidness of the con-

vention passes all description. It was a gathering of insanitary callous men who blas-

phemed patriotism, made a mockery of Republican government and filled the air with sod-

den and scheming stupidity (Steele: 103).

Lippmann gives a brilliant analysis of Hughes’s speech in his Public Opinion. See

below.

18. The foregoing is influenced by Walter Karp, even though it departs from his ac-

count. See Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered For-

ever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920) (New York: Harper

Colophon, 1980). Karp argues: “If the interests of the country or even the desire to win

the elections had shaped the policy of the Republican Party leaders, Wilson’s diplomacy

would have provided a political target impossible to miss” (216). No doubt it is true that

for the Republicans, “straightforward warmongering was out of the question. It would

have brought not war, but political disaster to the agitators” (220). “Wilson’s diplomacy,”

he writes, had “opened up the prospect for war, and war was what the Republican oli-

garchy wanted and needed” (216–17). But they wanted war “to undo the deep damage

of the preceding ten years.” As Bourne saw, “they wanted war . . . because they saw in

war the opportunity to become the great captains of an industrial war machine and part-

ners, once again, in the governance of the country” (219).

19. Commentators agree that the German High Command were completely confi-

dent that the United States government would not confound its plans, and that even if

it choose to do so, America would be unable to raise, train, and send much of a force.See Paxson, American Democracy, I: 394, and Fritz Fischer, Germany’s War Aims in

the First World War : 307. These views were very much the product of German think-

ing about the war-making capacity of democracies!

20. Since “exclusion from the mails was near-equivalent for silencing,” the Espi-

onage and Trading-with-the-Enemy Acts permitted Postmaster-General Burleson to

repress by administrative fiat (Paxson, American Democracy, II: 286). Not only did

second-class mail come under his autonomous purview, but he had the power to ex-

amine private correspondence as well. Even before the war had begun, the Attorney

General had developed a vast network of agents, law-enforcement officers, and vol-

untary coadjutors, who persistently prosecuted complaints, sometimes malicious,

sometimes hysterical, against accused “saboteurs”, and “traitors.” The Sedition Act

prescribed language that was “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive.” It did not

take many successful prosecutions before Americans got the idea.It is still very much worth reading George Creel’s enthusiastic How We Advertised

America (New York: Harper and Row, 1920).

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21. Randolph Bourne, Untimely Papers (New York: Huebsch, 1919). These beau-

tiful essays, so Jamesian—and Sartrean!—in style and thrust, have been too soon for-

gotten. Page references are given in the text in parentheses.

22. See Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace,

1917–1919 (New Haven: Yale Universit,y Press, 1963).

23. Dewey, Middle Works, vol. XI, contains the full materials on Dewey’s study of

Polish conditions, including a valuable note, presumably by Lillian and Oscar Han-

dlin, who introduce the volume.

24. Middle Works, vol. XV, contains all Dewey’s essays on the campaign to outlaw

war, along with Walter Lippmann’s polemical rebuttal to Levinson and Dewey. Carl

Cohen’s introduction to the volume is also most useful.

25. After World War II, the United Nations made both war and imperialism illegal.

In terms of the UN code, wars of national liberation are the only legal wars. The up-

shot, not foreseen by Dewey and Levinson, was that thereafter there would be no de-

clared wars, only “police actions” sent to suppress national liberation movements!

26. See Lippmann’s “The Outlawry of War” (XV: 404–17) and Dewey’s rejoin-ders: “What Outlawry of War Is Not” (XV: 115–21) and “War and a Code of Law”

(XV: 122–27). Sovereignty is not denied, since the state will decide whether to sub-

mit its claims and whether to abide by the judgment of the court. No third party ex-

ists to enforce decisions. No complicated code is required beyond the ordinary, vague

conventions governing international law. The plan hardly denies that diplomacy is

necessary for maintaining peace.

27. Dewey was later to make the point vividly:

Schooling in literacy is no substitute for the dispositions which were formerly provided by

direct experience of an educative quality. The void created by lack of relevant personal ex-

periences combines with the confusion produced by impact of multitudes of unrelated in-

cidents to create attitudes which are responsive to organized propaganda, hammering in

day after day, the same few and relatively simple beliefs asseverated to be the ‘truths’ es-sential to national welfare. (Freedom and Culture (New York: Capricorn, 1963), p. 46)

28. It is not irrelevant here that the social sciences as we now know them had just

then completed their institutionalization in the universities of America. See my A His-

tory and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Pt II. Perhaps thinking here of Veblen’s

critique of the social sciences, Lippmann writes that if so much social science is

“apologetic rather than constructive, the explanation lies in the opportunities of social

science, not in ‘capitalism”‘ (Public Opinion: 373). Lippmann, who usually sees the

pertinence of the fact that practices are influenced by conditions external to them,

clearly forgets this here.

29. Lippmann’s unabashed Machiavellianism is also clear in The Phantom Public

(New York: Harcourt,Brace and World, 1925). There he writes:

We do know, as a matter of experience, that all the cards are not laid face up upon thetable. For however deep the personal prejudice of the statesmen in favor of truth as a

method, he is most certainly forced to treat truth as an element of policy In so far as he


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has power to control the publication of truth, he manipulates it to what he considers the

necessities of action, of bargaining, morale and prestige (158)

30. Compare Robert A. Dahl’s important Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago;

University of Chicago Press, 1956). Dahl agreed with Lippmann that there is no way

for populations in democratic mass states to influence policy; yet he supposed that he

had shown that “elections are a crucial device for controlling leaders,” and thus that

“the distinction between democracy and dictatorship still makes sense” (131–32). But

what, apart from what Lippmann says, can “control leaders” mean? It is true, I be-

lieve, that two-party representative systems are important in preserving hard-won

civil liberties, and that these are fundamental and not to be scorned. Nevertheless, we

should not confuse civil freedom with democracy. Compare Dewey, below.

31. Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (Boston; Little, Brown, 1936: ix). See

also Manicas, War and Democracy, Chapter 11. Indeed, in his 1936 book, Lippmann

provided convincing grounds that it was already “evident” that “the world was mov-

ing toward a gigantic war.”

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187

INTRODUCTION

John Dewey’s social and political philosophy has been as much interpreted as

it has been praised and condemned. Thus, to merely illustrate the spectrum of

opinion, his philosophy of democracy has been called “a Jeffersonian provin-

cialism,” nostalgic and irrelevant, and a pluralist federalism fully pertinent to

the prevailing American political order. His theory of inquiry is construed as

essential to his social philosophy, as independent of it, and as inconsistent

with it. Finally, his basic philosophy is understood as an independent elabo-

ration .of “the best elements in Marx’s thought” and, remarkably, as “the phi-

losophy of American imperialism.”l

Dewey is not altogether blameless. There are many strands in his thought,sometimes conflicting strands. He is sometimes unclear, sometimes just

where one wants a clear statement most of all. But these are not the main

problems in coming to grips with Dewey as a social philosopher. Rather, most

of the difficulty derives from the style and range of his thought. This makes

it difficult, if not impossible, to associate him in a clear way with any of the

“isms” by which we tend to identify a political and social theory. And, in turn,

this makes him fair game for ideological purposes. Political writing, after all,

is itself a political act.

Dewey was, of course, both a liberal and a democrat, and he was not a

Marxist. Yet, as I shall argue, his liberalism and democratic philosophy were

decidedly radical, more socialist than libertarian, indeed, more anarchist than

communist or liberal. But let me not be misunderstood. Dewey was no anar-chist (however amusing it is that Sidney Hook should have written that, in

looks at least, Dewey resembled “a cross between a philosophical anarchist

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and Robert Louis Stevenson”). Dewey was not, for example, exact1y clear

on the future role of the state and he seems to have had little taste for anar-chist “direct action”—however peaceful. I do not argue, accordingly, that he

was an anarchist without knowing it or that anarchism is itself so vague that

his thought, as he worked it out, is easily subsumed. Nevertheless, we can

advance our understanding of Dewey and of the problems of political

philosophy, if we take a fresh look at his writings from the vantage point of

anarchism.

This will be the main aim of this paper. Still; there is a historical argument

to be made, an argument that seems to me to be very important, but which can

be but hinted at here. That is, not only is it not farfetched to juxtapose Dewey

and anarchism, but perhaps more fundamentally, on the present view, the First

World War and the period immediately following were crucial years for rad-

ical political thought. Dewey was caught up in this, and as Chapter 7 has ar-

gued, it left decided marks on his thought.

We need, perhaps, to be reminded that Dewey was twenty-seven when the

bomb was thrown at Haymarket Square (1886), already fifty-eight when the

Great War was coming to an end and the Bolshevik revolution erupted. Ac-

tive in public issues at least from his Chicago days (from1894–1904), Dewey

nonetheless wrote no political philosophy until perhaps 1908, the several

chapters that he wrote as part of Ethics, with James H. Tufts. World War I

seems to have been critical for him as for many others.

In German Philosophy and Politics (1915), his first systematic political

work, Dewey traced the philosophic basis of patriotic statism in Germany and

concluded that “the present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown

of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural” (GPP:

130).2 Opening a theme to which he returned repeatedly, he attacked the ideaof “national sovereignty” and argued that “the situation calls for a more rad-

ical thinking,” more radical than “arbitration, treaties, international judicial

councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace

movements” (130). Dewey was correct in calling for “more radical thinking”

of the problems, but unfortunately, he was entirely wrong if he hoped that sta-

tism was dead. As is well known, of course, Dewey supported the allied war

effort, as did Kropotkin and a host of other “internationalists” in the radical

parties of Europe. Indeed, patriotic statism and imperialist war had hardly run

its course.

In 1919, a host of radicals, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and

Alexander Berkman, became the victims of a virulent Americanism and were

deported. With Dewey, Norman Thomas, Clarence Darrow, Roger N. Bald-win and others as founders, the American Union Against Militarism became,

in 1920, The American Civil Liberties Union. The Red Scare was by now in

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full flower. Dewey had known Goldman and Berkman, having shared plat-

forms with them on several occasions. Baldwin has reported that “she had avery high regard for [Dewey’s] ideas,” a view which, as I shall argue, is

hardly surprising given the coincidence of so many of their ideas. For his part,

Dewey found that Emma Goldman’s “reputation as a dangerous woman was

built up by a conjunction of yellow-journalism and ill-advised police raids”—

a fact which Dewey would find increasingly ominous as the decade pro-

ceded.3 It was during this time, as Hook has noted, that Dewey “made the

great turn” and came to believe in the essential correctness of socialist diag-

noses of America’s ills.4

The ACLU was hardly sufficient. The 1921 trial of the acknowledged an-

archists, Sacco and Vanzetti, and their subsequent execution in 1927—for

their beliefs and not for the unproved charges against them—had a pro-

found effect on Dewey. As he saw it, the events had put America on trial. 5

Almost certainly, they forced him to considerably temper whatever opti-

mism he might have had regarding the use of intelligence in conditions

where emotions are so easily mobilized and manipulated in the service of

reactionary politics. As I shall develop, these considerations became an in-

creasingly important part of Dewey’s incisive analysis of the failures of

present arrangements.

In 1928, Dewey visited the Soviet Union and reported that his “own an-

tecedent notions—or, if you will, prejudices, underwent their most complete

reversal” (C&E, I: 425). Assessing the revolution as “an experiment to dis-

cover whether the familiar democratic ideals—familiar in words, at least—

will not be most completely realized in a social regime based on voluntary co-

operation, on conjoint workers’ control and management of industry. . . .”

Dewey concluded enthusiastically that “its future is of less account than is thefact of this achieved revolution of heart and mind, this liberation of a people

to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their

ultimate fate” (424, 380).

Two key books were written during this period, The Public and Its Prob-

lems (1927) and Individualism Old and New (1929). But with the Great De-

pression and the failure of the existing major political parties to respond to the

challenge, Dewey—as a radical—faced a dilemma.

The socialist and anarchist radical traditions, reflective of their nineteenth

century European roots, had always been revolutionary in the sense that rad-

ical social change was seen to involve a mass insurrection against the pre-

vailing order of things. But in contrast to socialists, communists, anarchists

and most American radicals of the 1920s and 30s, Dewey saw no evidence forthis view. As he put it, “I do not . . . hear the noises of an angry proletariat”

(ION: 78.). But—and this must be understood—it was not because they were

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drowned out by “shouts of eagerness £or adventurous opportunity”—however

much this was the official gospel of America. Rather, for Dewey, “the murmursof discontent are drowned” by “the murmurs of lost opportunities, along with the

din of machinery, motor cars and speakeasies” (78).

These are powerful metaphors and suggest an analysis, to be developed be-

low, which is far subtler than the ones offered by the mechanical formulas of

the period’s revolutionaries. But if so, then Dewey’s question at this time was,

how to be radical and still be relevant? This question has always been espe-

cially difficult for Americans and it was so for Dewey. His own quandaries on

this score go some way, indeed, toward explaining his efforts—ultimately un-

successful—to generate (beginning in 1931) a genuine radical, mass-based,

third-party alternative. Although it may be now forgotten, Dewey was argu-

ing, by the 1929 writing of Individualism Old and New, that “our presidential

elections are upon the whole determined by fear” and that neither of the ma-

jor parties could be vehicles for radical change—even if this change was to

be incrementally won. On the other hand, Dewey could not align himself un-

ambiguously with the Socialist Party either. Like the anarchists, the socialists

too were isolated.6 Kropotkin’s sadly prophetic letter to Lenin, written in

1920, identified a significant reason, a reason that Dewey fully appreciated.

Kropotkin wrote: “If the present situation continues, the very word ‘social-

ism’ will turn into a curse. . . .” (Kropotkin, 1970: 337). Indeed, in one sense,

the problem of the present essay, and, I believe, still a problem of our time, is

to recover an idea: Dewey referred to it as “the idea of democracy,” but oth-

ers have called it “socialism,” and still others have called it “anarchism.” In

this regard, Dewey’s idea of democracy is neither a nostalgic ]effersonianism

nor a liberal pluralism. I shall argue that it is anarchist insofar as it contains:

(1) a view of an ideal, noncoercive, nonauthoritarian society;

(2) a criticism of existing society and its institutions, based on this antiau-

thoritarian ideal;

(3) a view of human nature that justifies the hope of significant progress to-

ward the ideal; and

(4) a strategy for change, involving immediate institution of noncoercive,

nonauthotitarian and decentralist alternatives.7

Dewey’s Critique of Existing Society and his Vision of theGood Society

In his most systematic work on the state, The Public and Its Problems(1927) , Dewey attempts a generic and empirical approach to the question,

“What is the State?” Disavowing the utility of a series of traditional doctrines,

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he argues that associated action—a universal trait—has consequences, some-

times confined to those who directly share in the transaction and sometimesnot. When those “indirectly and seriously affected . . . form a group,” we can

speak of “The Public” (PP: 35). And when this public “is organized and made

effective by means of representatives” who “care for” its special interests,

then and in so far, we may speak of the state.

This analysis, made rich by Dewey’s knack for illustration and sometimes

brilliant but not immediately relevant asides, is both important and badly mis-

leading. The analysis is important because it allows us to see that “no

two ages or places is there the same public” (33). Moreover, it allows us

to see that State and Society are not the same, that in states, there are

governments—agencies that “represent” individuals in society. Finally, it al-

lows us to see that “a state” is only as good as its public and that there is no

“model pattern” which makes a state a good or true state (45).

But the analysis is seriously misleading insofar as it leads us to think of

states as universal entities. Dewey’s concern, as a long footnote makes clear,

is with functions, not structures. He is thus quite ready to admit that “the

state” is a “very modern institution.” Yet, he insists, “all history, or almost all,

records the exercise of analogous functions” (65–66, note7). In a sense, of

course, this is true. The idea that “special agencies and measures must be

formed” if “extensive and enduring consequences” are to be ‘attended to” has a

general applicability—depending crucially on what is concretely meant by “spe-

cial agencies and measures.” But as Dewey sees, these “special agencies” and

the public that they “represent” are open to an almost infinite range of possibil-

ities. For better or for worse, “state,” “government,” even “public” is very mod-

ern terms with very definite modern connotations. Moreover, while we use the

term “state” to refer indiscriminately to any sort of political body, from primitiveclan organizations to poleis, to the Roman Empire, the word “state” properly de-

notes what are very modern political bodies. However great are the differences

between (modern) states, between e.g., the Absolutist State which emerged in the

17th century, contemporary capitalist or communist states, liberal democratic

states and totalitarian states, all of them are states in the quite clear sense that

they are legally defined entities claiming sovereignty and a monopoly of

legitimate force. Each circumscribes an extended territory and a very large and

heterogeneous population. Each has a centralized organizational apparatus en-

gaged in continuous administration and having both the “authority” and, espe-

cially in this century, the ability to dramatically affect the conditions of life of its

population—for better or for worse.

Now Dewey recognized this. Not every association is a state or even hasstate-like characteristics. At one extreme are associations “which are too nar-

row and restricted in size to give rise to a public” (39). “Immediate contiguity,


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face to face relationships, has consequences which generate a community of

interests, a sharing of values, too direct and vital to occasion a need for polit-ical organization” (39). Indeed, within a community, “the state is an imperti-

nence” (41).

“Villages and neighborhoods shade imperceptibly into a political public”

(43) and there may or may not be agencies which are specifically its instru-

ment. Kropotkin could still refer to the Medieval commune and Dewey to the

early New England town. Further along the continuum of historical associa-

tions is perhaps the polis of the ancient world, where as Dewey says, “much

of the intimacy of the vivid and prompt personal touch of the family endures

while there has been added the transforming aspiration of a varied, freer,

fuller life, whose issues are so momentous that in comparison the life of the

neighborhood is parochial and that of the household dull” (44). Indeed, it was

hardly an accident that the idea of democracy was an invention of the polis

world (Manicas, 1989, Chapters 1 and 2).

Still of a very different sort, we can identify “empires due to conquest

where political rule exists only in forced levies of taxes and soldiers; and in

which, though the word state may be used, the characteristic signs of a pub-

lic are notable for their absence” (43–44). Finally, as Dewey argues, but

which needs emphasis, “for long periods 0£ human history . . . the state is

hardly more than a shadow thrown upon the family and neighborhood by re-

mote personages. . . . It rules but it does not regulate. . . . The intimate and fa-

miliar propinquity group is not a social unity within an exclusive whole. It is,

for almost all purposes, society itself” (41–42).

These points are not peripheral to comprehending the problem of The Pub-

lic and Its Problems, even if Dewey’s effort to treat the state generically

tempts us to treat them as historical asides. As Kropotkin and others in the an-archist tradition often argued, the state as we understand it, is a very modern

phenomenon. And there is nothing necessary about it. Moreover, as Dewey

and the anarchists saw, the development of the modern state meant also the

emergence of an entirely new organization for war, the obliteration of com-

munity and the suffocation of the personal and the intimate. Both were con-

cerned to address the questions and to offer analyses and programs in these

terms. But this need not be a nostalgic irrelevancy—unless, of course, we un-

critically accept the framework assumptions of the modern state and then pro-

ceed to political inquiry.

Methodologically, Dewey was committed to a fully historical and contex-

tual mode of inquiry and he recognized that the problems of contemporary

political arrangements were not those of the past. Nor accordingly would pastsolutions suffice. At the global level, Dewey deeply appreciated the problem

of the modern state. In Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), he extended a

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central theme of German Philosophy and Politics, and diagnosed the failure

of “many schools of thought, varying even more widely in respect to methodand conclusion, [yet] agreed upon the final consummating position of the

state. . . . They do not question the unique and supreme position of the State

in the social hierarchy.” Dewey concluded: “Indeed, that conception has hard-

ened into unquestionable dogma under the title of sovereignty” (RIP: 201).

But perhaps he put matters most graphically in his 1927 essay, “Nationalism

and Its Fruits.” He there wrote:

Patriotism, National Honor, National Interests and National Sovereignty are the

four foundation stones upon which the structure of the National State is erected.

It is no wonder that the windows of such a building are closed to the light of

heaven; that its inmates are fear, jealously, suspicion, and that War issues regu-

larly from its portals (C&E , II: 803).

Except for explicit anarchist thought—and even then, not all of it -no one saw

more clearly than Dewey that for the modern age, the State was not part of

the solution, but was, instead, an essential part of the problem.

The structural dynamics of inter-state relations were not his only concern,

however, for there were effects on the relations within states. This is a funda-

mental concern of The Public and Its Problems, in particular as regards the

most progressive form of the modern state—the Democratic State. Although it

is often overlooked—or downplayed—Dewey had no illusions about it. As in

many other places, he sharply distinguishes democracy as an idea or ideal and

democracy as a mode of government. On Dewey’s analysis, all states have gov-

ernments and all governments “represent” some public. But there are different

institutional arrangements by which governments exist and “represent” somepublic. For Dewey, then, political democracy is “a specified practice in select-

ing officials and regulating their conduct as officials” (PP: 82). Dewey argued

that political democracy emerged at a specific period in the development of

the modern state and that “it emerged as a kind of net consequence of a vast

multitude of responsive adjustments to a vast number of situations . . .” (84).

Indeed, in no sense did Dewey succumb to the mystifying rationalizations of

liberal democratic political theory—to the idea, e.g., that democratic institu-

tions function so as to implement something called “the will of the people.”

He said:

Instead of individuals who in the privacy of their consciousness make choices

which are carried into effect by personal volition, there are citizens who have

the blessed opportunity to vote for a ticket of men mostly unknown to them, andwhich is made up by an under-cover machine in a caucus whose operations con-

stitute a kind of political predestination (120).


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Political democracy, or better, modern political democracy, is a statist form

and, no doubt, it has consequential merits. But as Dewey writes, it is a means,not for realizing the idea of democracy, but “to counteract the forces that have

so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant fac-

tors and . . . to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve pri-

vate “instead of public ends” (83). For Dewey, the “full reality” of political

democracy was not that painted by patriotic publicists, nor did it meet the

goals, limited as they were, which had brought it into existence. His indict-

ment was severe: “In a word, the new forms of combined action due to the

modern economic regime control present policies, much as dynastic interests

controlled those of two centuries ago. They affect thinking and desire more

than did the interests which formerly moved the state” (108).

Even more in the spirit of Marx and left anarchism, Dewey observed that

the fusion of political and economic liberalism, the attainment of political

rights and guarantees of private property which liberal democracy represents,

had “emancipated the classes whose special interest they represented, rather

than human beings impartially” (270). The text continues:

The notion that men are equally free to act if only the same legal arrangements

apply equally to all—irrespective of differences in education, in command of

capital, and the control of the social environment which is furnished by the in-

stitution of property—is a pure absurdity, as facts have demonstrated (271).

Dewey’s analysis of the Democratic State is radical and called for radical so-

lutions. In his terms, the problem was not with the instruments of the public,

but with the public itself. The public was “inchoate and unorganized,” “lost,”

“eclipsed,” “confused” and “bewildered.” This theme, expressed in many dif-ferent ways and in many different places is at the basis of his radical critique

of the political state.

In Individualism Old and New, he attacked the ideology of individualism,

repeating earlier indictments of its mythological character, and he spoke of

“the lost individual,” lost because while persons “are now caught up in vast

complex of associations, there is no harmonious and coherent reflection of the

import of these connections into the imaginative and emotional outlook on

life.” Blunted, if not impossible, is “the give and take of participation, of a

sharing and significance of the integrating £actors.” Instead, we have con-

formity, “a name for the absence of vital interplay; the arrest and benumbing

of communication” (ION: 85–86).

Moreover, here as in other places also, Dewey attributes our “rapacious na-

tionalism” to a situation in which “corporateness has gone so far as to detach

individuals from their old local ties and allegiances but not far enough to give

them a new center and order of life.” While “modern industry, technology and

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commerce have created modern nations in their external form” and “armies

and navies exist to protect commerce, to make secure the control of raw ma-terials, and to command markets, . . . the balked demand for genuine cooper-

ativeness and reciprocal solidarity in daily life finds an outlet in nationalistic

sentiment.” Finally, “if the simple duties of peace do not establish a common

life, the emotions are mobilized in the service of a war that will supply its

temporary simulation” (61–62). Indeed, the windows of our building are also

closed to the light of heaven.

In Freedom and Culture (1939), he spoke of a kind of “molluscan organi-

zation, soft individuals within and a hard constrictive shell without” (F&C:

160). In this text, the problem is put in terms of “culture”: “The problem is to

know what kind of culture is so free in itself that it conceives and begets po-

litical freedom as its accompaniment and consequence” (6). Dewey is clear

that present culture militates against such a consequence and that “the situa-

tion calls emphatic attention to the need for face-to-face associations, whose

interactions with one another may offset if not control the dread impersonal-

ity of the sweep of present forces” (159). Nevertheless, as John McDermott

has rightly noted, “Dewey expresses deep reservations about the external

signs of progress, whether of material or intellectual accomplishment” (Mc-

Dermott, 1973: 679). McDermott calls our attention to the following:

Schooling in literacy is no substitute for the dispositions, which were formerly

provided by direct experiences of an educative quality. The void created by lack

of relevant personal experiences combines with the confusion produced by im-

pact of multitudes of unrelated incidents to create attitudes which are responsive

to organized propaganda, hammering in day after day the same few and rela-

tively simple beliefs asseverated to be ‘truths’ essential to national welfare(F&C: 46).

But this problem, the problem of the public, was not for Dewey to be reduced

to that of private property and to the domination of politics by “the modern

economic regime.” To be sure, “the philosophers of ‘individualism’predicted

truly” when “they asserted that the main business of government is to make

property interests secure” (PP: 108–9). Nevertheless, “economic determin-

ism” was not the whole story for Dewey. On the other hand, the problem was

not to be solved either by changes in the organization of government. “The

problem lies deeper,” he wrote. “The search for the conditions under which

the public may find and express itself “is necessarily precedent to any funda-

mental change in the machinery” (146).

What, then, are the conditions that need to be brought into existence to re-

discover the public? According to Dewey, it is simply democracy. But we must

repeat, this doesn’t mean, “that the evils can be remedied by introducing more


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machinery of the same kind . . . or by refining and perfecting that machinery”

(144). It means democracy “in its generic social sense” (147). Democracy hererefers to the idea of democracy, the idea of democracy as community. What

needs to be done is to identify the conditions of community and to bring them

into existence.

The identification of the idea of democracy and the idea of community may

be Dewey’s most characteristic doctrine. He seems to have arrived at it early

and to have never abandoned it. And he gave it a clear and special meaning.

Democracy and Education (1916) gives one of the better statements of de-

mocracy as “more than a form of government” and as “primarily a mode of

associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (D&E: 87). Dewey

points out “we cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an

ideal society” (83). The problem, rather, “is to extract the desirable traits of

forms of community life which actually exist. . . . ” From two such traits,

Dewey derives “a standard”: “How numerous and varied are the interests

which are consciously shared?” and “How full and free is the interplay with

other forms of association?” (83).8

These themes are more fully developed in The Public and Its Problems

where Dewey reasserts that “regarded as an ideal, democracy is not an alter-

native to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community itself”

(PP: 148). Dewey is here at pains to emphasize the task of knowledge and

participation in the constitution of the democratic community. The complex-

ities and scope of indirect consequence had destroyed communities. Although

as individuals we are interdependent, community exists only when “the con-

sequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of desire

and effort” (151). It is then that “a distinctive share in mutual action is con-

sciously asserted and claimed” (152). It is then that “I” can become “We.”Moreover, as Rousseau had already seen, “interdependence provides just the

situation which makes it possible and worthwhile for the stronger and abler

to exploit others for their own ends) to keep others in a state of subjection

where they can be utilized as animated tools” (155).

But if as Dewey reads Rousseau, the solution is “a return to the condition

of independence based on isolation,” then asserts Dewey, “it was hardly seri-

ously meant” (155)). “The only possible solution” is nevertheless indicated.

It is “the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so

that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities

may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action” (155). This too can

define the idea of democracy:

Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good

by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good

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is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just be-

cause it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear con-

sciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of de-

mocracy (149).

Community requires communication and it requires knowledge, but crucially,

the kind of knowledge which is “the prime condition of a democratically or-

ganized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist”

(166). For Dewey, such knowledge is a knowledge which is shared, which

funds experience with common meanings, transforms needs and wants into

mutually understood goals and which thereby consciously directs conjoint ac-

tivity. As it is, knowledge is merely technique: “knowledge goes relatively

but little further than that of the competent skilled operator who manages a

machine. It suffices to employ the conditions that are before him. Skill en-

ables him to turn the flux of events this way or that in his neighborhood. Itgives him no control of the flux” (166).

Dewey fully recognized, both as ideal and as possibility, that the idea of re-

turning to some barricaded and provincially defined context was miscon-

ceived. On the other hand, he persistently demanded that the basic and fun-

damental locus of life had to be the neighborly community. He asserted:

In its deepest and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of

face-to-face intercourse. . . . The Great Community, in the sense of free and full

communication is conceivable. But it can never possess all the qualities, which

mark a local community. It will do its final work in ordering the relations and

enriching the experience of local associations (211).

Indeed,

Whatever the future may have in store, one thing is certain. Unless local com-

munity life can be restored the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent

problem: to find and identify itself (216).

For Dewey, deliberative participation in conjoint activity, the shared commu-

nication of goals and outcomes of that activity, the communication of mean-

ings that that presupposes, is generalizable to the Great Community, but in-

evitably, at an increasing degree of abstraction and dilution. If “in its deepest

and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face

intercourse”—for there to be genuinely deliberative participation, immediate

recognition of shared meanings, and concrete satisfaction of purposes con-sciously aimed at—then as one moves away from the local community,

“community” becomes increasingly shallow and more watery. On the other


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hand, at every increasingly inclusive level there must be some “ordering” and

some sharing.This, however, is the anarchist image of the good society. Thus Martin

Buber:

The collectivity is not a warm, friendly gathering but a great link-up of eco-

nomic and political forces inimical to the play of romantic fancies, only under-

standable in terms of quantity, expressing itself in actions and effects—a thing

which an individual has to belong to with no intimacies of any kind but all the

time conscious of his energetic contribution . . .

An organic commonwealth—and only such commonwealths can join to-

gether to form a shapely and articulated race of (persons)—will never build it-

self up out of individuals but only out of small and ever small communities: a

nation is a community to the degree that it is community of communities.9

There remains, however, a legitimate question and ambivalence in Dewey,

even given that his image of the Great Community and his criticism of exist-

ing societies is profoundly anarchistic. It is the question, whether and in what

sense; the idea of government may be still relevant? There are two questions.

First, what constitutes an anarchist answer to this question? Second, what

seems to be Dewey’s answer?

Different anarchists have given different sorts of analyses of the relevant is-

sues, but it may be that the main tradition of anarchist thought is best described

not as “anarchy,” but as Buber put it, as “anocracy” (␣␣ ´ ␣)—”not absence

of government but absence of domination.” This cuts two ways, meaning not

only that non-governmental forms of domination are to be rejected, but also that

non-dominating “government” may be tolerated, indeed required. Anarchists

are anti-state insofar as we keep in mind that the state is a particular kind of political entity that because of its nature constricts and disallows democracy

as a mode of life. Its institutions are inherently structures of domination. But

“government” is consistent with anarchist principles if by “government” one

means roughly what the Greeks and Rousseau had in mind; namely “a com-

mission” or an “employment” which serves—now to use Dewey’s extremely

useful language—active and articulated publics. An articulated public could

still use, might very well need, “agencies” in this sense. “Government” a

modern word which in this context must now be stripped of its modern con-

notations will not rule, and the holders of “office” will not be rulers—if by

that one means that they will not be in a position to legitimately dominate

those they “represent.” Indeed, as argued in Chapter 11, below, and exten-

sively developed in my War and Democracy (1989), these ideas were clearlyarticulated by many writers during the so-called “crisis” period in the United

States.

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This position can be re-posed in terms of the question of the legitimacy of

law and government.10

Dewey’s stance in this regard is strikingly similar tothe one advanced by William Godwin in his classic Enquiry Concerning Po-

litical Justice (1793), perhaps the first systematic effort at anarchist theory.

Godwin began with a dialectical criticism of liberal political philosophy,

and especially with the familiar idea that obedience to and the authority of

government derive from contract. Finding unsurmountable difficulties in

this theory, Godwin shifts to a utilitarian ground and finds that justice is

the key. Three kinds of authority are distinguished: to one’s judgment, to

specialized knowledge and to sanctions. On this view, then, if a rule is just,

it should be complied with—but because one can see that the rule is just,

not because of some mythological contract. Similarly, for Dewey, the ques-

tion, “Why should the will of rulers have more authority than that of oth-

ers?” and “Why should the latter submit?” are spurious questions, the “di-

alectical consequence of . . . theories . . . which define the state in terms of

an antecedent causation . . . ” (PP: 53). Dewey was quite correct in hold-

ing that it was these sorts of theories that dominated modern political

thought. But in rejecting the very formulation of the question, Dewey came

preciously close to the anarchist Godwin.

Thus, “the regulations and laws of the State are misconceived when they

are viewed as commands” (53). Commands presuppose a commander. If so,

we can then ask the question, what gives the commander the right to com-

mand? What grounds my duty to him? For Dewey, however, laws are but in-

struments: “the institution of conditions under which persons make their

arrangements with one another” (54). They are “a means of doing for a per-

son what otherwise only his own foresight, if thoroughly reasonable, could

do” (56). Evidently, on this view, as Godwin had also insisted, rules are goodor bad only insofar as they are means for doing what reasonable people would

do and for assisting them in getting those things done. Their justification

needs nothing else. Indeed, it is the spurious theories of law and the state

which lead us to look elsewhere and which, ultimately, cause us to blindly fol-

low rules which are not so justified.l1

“Anarchism,” a transliteration from the Greek, means literally “without a

ruler” and because in some contexts, in the absence of a ruler—a commander

or someone to give orders—there is disorder, anarchy can also denote chaos.

Anarchists do not, of course, assume that this must be so and believe that

ideally at least, individuals can be self- governing. Indeed, they believe that

it is primarily the mystified complexity of the state, as Godwin puts it, “the

craft and mystery of governing,” “the pernicious notion of an extensive ter-ritory,” “the dreams of glory, empire and national greatness” which prohibit

such self-governance. Even worse, it is the myth of popular sovereignty that,


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paradoxically, has so successfully propelled the mystification of the state.

Compare here Godwin and Dewey. First Godwin:

Too much stress has undoubtedly been laid upon the idea, as of a grand and

magnificent spectacle, of a nation deciding for itself upon some great public

principle, and of the highest magistracy yielding its claim when the general

voice has pronounced (Godwin, 1971: 115).

And Dewey:

The familiar eulogies of the spectacle of “free men” going to the polls to deter-

mine by their personal volitions the political forms under which they live is a

specimen of the tendency to take whatever is readily seen as the full reality of

the situation (PP: 101).

Dewey could no doubt agree with Godwin, that in his society, like Godwin’s,

too many revere too many established institutions and bad laws, that “as su-

pernatural matters have progressively been left high and dry . . . the actuality

of religious taboos has more and more gathered about secular institutions, es-

pecially those connected with the nationalist state” (PP: 170). Indeed, “‘if

‘holy’ means that which is not to be approached nor touched, save with cere-

monial precautions and by specially anointed officials, then such things are

holy in contemporary political life” (170).

David Wieck has perceptively observed that “the values which Dewey

hoped to realize in a democracy . . . are realizable only in something ap-

proaching anarchy.” But he may be correct in saying that “about decentralism

. . . Dewey hadn’t paid heed to Kropotkin.”12 Still, we may wonder. As early

as 1918, Dewey wrote that “if we are to have a world safe for democracy anda world in which democracy is safely anchored, the solution will be in the di-

rection of a federated world government and a variety of freely experiment-

ing and freely cooperating self-governing local, cultural and industrial

groups” (C&E , II: 559–60.). Forty years and two World Wars after he had

called for “more radical thinking” about the sovereign state, Dewey wrote (in

his 1946 Afterword to The Public and Its Problems) that “the State is a myth.”

He there offered “as a working principle,” “the idea of Federation as distinct

from both isolation and imperial rule” (255). Dewey did not, it seems, get

clear about what this might mean concretely. Nevertheless, if we take the

restoration of the local community as his point of departure, his vision is in-

deed powerful:

Territorial states and political boundaries will persist; but they will not be barri-

ers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from his fellows; they will

not be hard and fast divisions whereby external separation is converted into in-

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ner jealousy, fear, suspicion and hostility. Competition will continue, but it will

be less rivalry for acquisition of material goods, and more emulation of local

groups to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual and

artistic wealth (PP: 217).

And the material basis for such a Great Community is within reach:

If the technological age can provide mankind with a firm and general basis of

material security, it will be absorbed into a human age (217).

Buber noted that “the socialist idea points of necessity, even in Marx and

Lenin, to the organic construction of a new society out of little societies in-

wardly bound together by a common life and common work and their associ-

ations” (Buber, 1949: 99). But how much more is it true that the main and

most distinctive themes in Dewey’s social philosophy point—of necessity—to such a vision?

In the next part, I will seek to reinforce the foregoing claim by arguing that

Dewey, along with the anarchists, parted ways with the Marxist-Leninists for ap-

proximately the same reasons and with approximately the same conclusions.

HUMAN NATURE AND THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Dewey’s social and political philosophy is close to anarchism as regards his

view of social change. Both sharply contrast with Marxism in rejecting the

idea that a “social revolution” could be made by the few for the many and in

rejecting the idea that the “proletariat” must be the agent of an insurrectionaryrevolution.

The anarchist, as Dewey, does not deny the existence of class division in

society and both affirm that a good society could not be class divided. But it

was a mistake, on both of their views, to suppose that progressive change

could have but one agent or that anyone agent of change could be sufficient.

As Hook rightly pointed out, Dewey spoke of “class struggles in their plural

form.”13 Anarchists tended to speak more vaguely of “the people” or “the

masses.” Marxists will insist, of course, that this offers a dubious politics.

The matter of insurrection is more complicated. In the first place, some an-

archists did believe in insurrection and in the use of such violence as had to

attend insurrection.14 Bakunin saw this in apocalyptic terms; Kropotkin be-

lieved it to be unavoidable, but hoped that the violence could be kept to a

minimum. Tolstoi, at opposite poles from Bakunin, was consistently pacifist.

But more important, anarchists tended to be undoctrinaire about the problems

of revolutionary change, to orient programs to specific contexts and to


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emphasize pedagogic means. These emphases are, of course, wholly congen-

ial to Dewey.The emphasis on pedagogic means was implied by the most characteristic

criticism by anarchists of Marxian politics. For the anarchist, there could be

no separation of the revolution process from the revolutionary goal. Thus,

Alexander Berkman:

It is only by growing to a true realization of their present position, by visualiz-

ing their possibilities and powers, by learning unity and cooperation, and prac-

ticing them, that the masses can attain freedom.15

Or Gustav Landauer:

One can throw away a chair or destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talk-

ers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as afetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a cer-

tain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior between (people);

we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward

one another. . . .We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we

have created institutions that form a real community and society of (persons). 16

All this could be Dewey. But especially noticeable are Dewey’s arguments,

which parallel and often supplement and enrich the anarchist position.

Most anarchists have not been so naive as to suppose that persons are nat-

urally good. Nor have they based their hopes or, more important, their pro-

grams on such a postulate -even if, unfortunately, they are too frequently read

that way. Some, for example, Landauer, were influenced by romanticism and

especially by Nietzsche. Others, for example, Kropotkin, were influenced bythe naturalism of Darwin. While I cannot here assess these different views of

human nature, there is little doubt that Dewey was deeply concerned with the

question and that his approach has considerable force.

Dewey did not think that human beings were naturally good, naturally in-

telligent or naturally free, since as is well known, on his view, human im-

pulses and capacities were always realized socially. This meant that institu-

tional arrangements were decisive: “Social arrangements are means of

creating individuals” (RIP: 194).

But at the same time, Dewey did not find himself caught up in what he

called “a vicious circle.” For him, individuals, beginning from where they

were, could change themselves as they change society. As Arthur Lothstein

has rightly pointed out, Dewey dropped the self-enclosed metaphor of the cir-cle for the dynamic and open-ended metaphor of the spiral. Dewey wrote, for

example:

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We are not caught in a circle; we traverse a spiral in which social customs gen-

erate some consciousness of interdependencies, and this consciousness is em-

bodied in acts which in improving the environment generate new perceptions of

social ties, and So on forever (HNC, in McDermott: 721).

This was possible since, in Dewey’s terms, habits and customs could be de-

liberatively transformed. “Habits,” he argued, were the “mainspring of human

action, and habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the cus-

toms of the group” (PP: 119). We are never “habitless,” to be sure, but cus-

toms are nothing but the social “grooves” which are the result of previous ha-

bituations. At the social-psychological level, habits can be altered through

acting differently; and because custom and social structure are themselves in-

carnate in the repeated and multiplied acts of persons, acting differently

changes them too. Indeed, Dewey well sees that, in Giddens’s terms, acting

differently creates new conditions as it changes our perceptions, beliefs anddesires. And this means also that we need pertinent knowledge of the condi-

tions and consequences of our actions and we need to be clear about our

goals. (See Chapter 4, above.)

For Dewey, the problem was essentially pedagogic. Purposive and pro-

gressive change in society, however, has to be directed and there must be def-

inite goals in mind. Dewey was perfectly clear about this as regards educa-

tion: “The conception of education as a social process and function has no

definite meaning, until we define the kind of society we have in mind” (D&E:

97). And in Human Nature and Conduct as in many, many other places,

Dewey put great emphasis on educating the young:

. . . the cold fact of the situation is that the chief means of continuous, graded

economical improvement and social rectification lies in utilizing the opportuni-

ties of educating the young to modify prevailing types of thought and desire.

The young are not as yet as subject to the full impact of established customs

(HNC: 127).17

Dewey was optimistic in his assessment that the school could be “the chief

means” of social rectification. But on his own premises, the school—like the

experimental anarchist community—was not and could not be independent

and disconnected from the large society. It is inevitable, accordingly, that it

would tend to reproduce the habits and ideas of the larger society, since es-

pecially in the case of the schools, they depended for their existence on insti-

tutions interested explicitly in maintaining the status quo.

But the school was not the only place where changes could be wrought. In-deed, in terms of Dewey’s theory, since all “habits” and all “customs” were

sustained by repeated activities, any of them could be changed by changing


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these acts, which sustain them. Nevertheless, if the alteration of activities and

thence of habits and customs was not to issue in chaos—into merely a break-down of the prevailing order of things, it had to be directed and unified, and

as with the schools, there had to be definite goals in mind. There are but two

alternatives. Either one imposed the change on individuals or one took ad-

vantage of opportunities to encourage and develop tendencies on the part of

those affected to make the changes themselves. The former route, of course,

is the method of revolutionary vanguard parties; the latter is the method of de-

mocracy. Indeed, knowledge is liberating insofar as understanding how we

participate in maintaining oppressive conditions gives us reasons to change

those conditions.

It is possible to discern in Dewey’s writings at least three “powerful objec-

tions to the strategy of imposed change. First, and very generally, for Dewey,

if intelligence is to be brought to bear on progressive social change, not only

must we consider goals, but as well, we must consider the particular condi-

tions and particular context and assess the complex possible consequences of

possible strategies for change. Imposing change may produce the desired out-

come, but even if it does, it doesn’t produce just that outcome. As Dewey

summarized the point:

Doctrines, whether proceeding from Mussolini or Marx, which assume that be-

cause certain ends are desirable therefore those ends and nothing else will result

from the use of force to attain them is but another example of the limitations put

on intelligence by any absolutist theory (PM: 139).

But Emma Goldman—with some of the same “doctrines” clearly in mind,

would seem to concur heartily:

Anarchism is not . . . a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspi-

ration. It is a living force in the affairs of life, constantly creating new condi-

tions. The methods of anarchism therefore do not comprise an ironclad program

to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the eco-

nomic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental

requirements of the individual . . . Anarchism does not stand for military drill

and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form,

against everything that hinders human growth (Goldman, 1969).

A second and related objection regards the difficulty—if not impossibility—

of all-at-once, totalist, attempts at change. Dewey concluded:

The revolutionary radical . . . overlooks the force of ingrained habits. He is right,

in my opinion, about the infinite plasticity of human nature. But he is wrong in

thinking that patterns of desire, belief and purpose do not have a force compa-

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rable to the momentum of physical objects . . . Habit, not original human nature,

keeps things moving most of the time (PM: 190).

Imposed change cannot be sustained because habits cannot be dramatically

altered. That is why revolutionary societies tend to revert to older ways of ac-

tivity, and worse, to reproduce the old structures but in new institutional

forms. Similarly, anarchists write of the “preparation” for the revolution to

anarchistic society and emphasize the pedagogic problem of changing

people—a problem not solvable by “divine inspiration,” by violence and au-

thoritarian tactics. Such changes will take time and if they are to be sustained,

must be deeply rooted. This is suggested by the previous text quoted from

Emma Goldman; it reoccurs with a different emphasis in this earlier text, al-

most in the language of Dewey:

The true criterion of the practical . . . is not whether (some scheme) can keep in-tact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to

leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build as well as sustain, new life (Gold-

man, 1969: 9).

I am suggesting here, of course, that anarchists do not have a utopic concep-

tion of social change, that they realize full well, that their ideal could not

come into existence by means of some totalist transformation, as Goldman

put it, through “divine inspiration.” The idea that anarchists must reject any-

thing short of their ideal as unjustifiable and therefore deserving of immedi-

ate destruction is not anarchism but nihilism. And this means that the new so-

cial forms, new habits and customs will be but painfully and slowly evolved.

Daniel Guerin, a contemporary French anarchist writer notes:

Proudhon, in the midst of the 1848 Revolution, wisely thought that it would

have been asking too much of his artisans to go, immediately, all the way to ‘an-

archy.’ In default of his maximum program, he sketched out a minimum liber-

tarian program: progressive reduction in the power of the State, parallel devel-

opment of the power of the people from below. . . . It seems to be the more or

less conscious purpose of many contemporary socialists to seek out such a pro-

gram (Guerin, 1972: 550)

The anarchist, like Dewey, can have a vision of the good society without be-

ing lacking in programs. And if Dewey and the anarchists are correct, it is not

the doctrinaire revolutionaries who are “practical,” but as Goldman suggests,

those who seek programs which are vital enough “to leave the stagnant wa-

ters of the old, and build as well as sustain new life.”

It is hardly assumed here that the commitment of the anarchist tradition—and

of Dewey—to a revolutionary process consistent with genuine democracy


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settles any of the difficult questions which will still need to be asked, or that

Dewey and particular anarchist writers would necessarily or even likely agreeon particular plans of action. Indeed, there is a very great difference between

Dewey’s emphasis on the methods of political democracy and the anarchist em-

phasis on what is called “direct action.” However, as April Carter has correctly

pointed out, while direct action “must be distinguished from constitutional and

parliamentary styles of activity on the one hand, and from guerilla warfare on

the other,” not only do forms of direct action shade into parliamentary styles, as

e.g., in sit-ins, strikes, and “civil disobedience,” but as well, they may be best

construed as a kind of crude and creative form of direct democracy. Insofar, ac-

cordingly, direct action may be entirely consistent with, indeed, a logical im-

plication of, Dewey’s social philosophy. As anarchists have often argued, such

tactics are essentially pedagogic because they are vehicles by which persons

learn and practice democratic participation (Carter, 1973).

Moreover, there may be considerable disagreement on whether the state is

itself to be used and if so how, whether, e.g., as some anarchists have argued,

one should entirely reject the vote, or political parties, whether one should

seek alternative and parallel forms or whether it is possible to effect progres-

sive change through existing structures.18

Nor finally, need there be agreement on the prospects and probability of

change toward the ideal of democracy. Perhaps Dewey should here have the

last word:

The foundation of democracy is faith in the capacities of human nature; faith in

human intelligence and the power of pooled and cooperative experience. It is

not because these things are complete but that if given a show they will grow

and be able to generate progressively the wisdom needed to guide collectiveagain (D&EA: 402).

NOTES

1. C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1969): 443–44, and more recently, Charles Frankel, “John Dewey’s Social Phi-

losophy,” New Studies in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Hanover, N.H.: University

Press of New England, 1977) found Dewey’s thought to be nostalgic. Alphonso I.

Damico, Individualism and Community, The Social and Political Thought of John

Dewey (Gainesville, Fla.: University Presses of Florida, 1978) discusses some of the

literature relevant to “pluralistic democracy” and some of the problems regarding the

relation of Dewey’s theory of inquiry to his social philosophy, See also Mills on thispoint: 318–20 and Chapters 20 and 21. George Novack in Pragmatism Versus Marx-

ism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975) cites Maurice Cornforth as one example of

the view that “pragmatism, particularly in the form which Dewey has given it, is the

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philosophy of American imperialism” (275). Novack rejects this (silly) view even

though he finds that Sidney Hook’s uneven political career, including his defense of

American imperialism, stems from pragmatism’s “promiscuousness” (82). It was

Hook, of course, who attributed to Dewey “the best elements of Marx’s thought”

(Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1966): 132.

2. References to Dewey’s writings will be indicated with abbreviated titles and

page numbers within parenthesis. See below for abbreviations of Dewey texts cited.

3. Quotations from Baldwin are from Paul Avrich, The Modern School Move-

ment: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton Press, 1980: 38) from

an interview with Baldwin.

4. Sidney Hook, John Dewey:An Intellectual Portrait (New York: John Day, 1939).

See also Arthur Lothstein’s excellent dissertation, “From Privacy to Praxis: The Case for

John Dewey as a Radical Social Philosopher,” New York University, 1979, Ch. 4.

5. For a discussion of Dewey’s response to the trial and execution, see George

Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind Of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbon-

Dale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Press, 1973).6. See Frank A. Warren, An Alternative Vision (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1974). For Dewey’s analysis of the need for a third party, see Bingham and

Rodman (eds.), Challenge of the New Deal (New York, 1934) which reprints Dewey’s

important Common Sense essay, “Imperative Need for New Radical Party.” See James

Campbell’s very useful account, in his dissertation, “Pragmatism and Reform: Social

Reconstruction in the Thought of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead,” SUNY,

Stony Brook, 1979.

7. The foregoing criteria for an anarchist social philosophy are quoted from John

P. Clark, “What is Anarchism?” in Anarchism: Nomos XIX, edited by J. R. Pennock

and J.W. Chapman (New York, NYU Press, 1978): 13.

8. In this book, Dewey identifies the dire consequences of Identifying “the civic

function” of education with The State, and concludes that the very idea of national

sovereignty gives rise to a contradiction “between the wider sphere of associated andmutually helpful social life and the narrow sphere of exclusive and hence potentially

hostile pursuits and purposes” (97).

9. Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949): 42. This indis-

pensable little book may be the best single treatment of the dilemmas of the statist/

anarchist tensions, theoretical and practical, in the radical tradition. Buber and Dewey

have very much in common and, perhaps, not surprisingly; Buber’s anarchism is

overlooked.

10. I have discussed the question of the legitimate state in The Death of the State

(New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1974), chapter II.

11. On this view, the problem of “civil disobedience” is misconceived, as Godwin,

Thoreau—and Dewey, show. That is, whether in any given case, one should or should

not comply with a law depends upon its justness and the consequences of complying

or not. Cf. Dewey’s little essay, “Conscience and Compulsion” (in Characters and Events).

One should also note that Godwin, as most anarchist writers, conceives of the prob-

lem of coercive sanctions in straightforward consequentialist terms and argues that


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only at the limit of the anarchist ideal are they unjustifiable. Cf., for example, God-

win, 1971: Book VII.

12. The first text is from David Wieck, “Anarchist Justice,” in Nomos XIX: 235,

the second is from his review of Paul Goodman’s Drawing the Line, Telos, No. 35

(Spring, 1978),

13. Lothstein carefully examines the pertinent literature in his “From Privacy to

Praxis,” Chapter IV. He rescues Dewey from Dewey’s “right-wing epigones” and re-

sponds with force to some of Dewey’s more mechanically minded left critics. But

Lothstein is himself critical of Dewey.

14. This is as good a place as any to comment on the unfortunate association of an-

archism with terrorism. Terrorism must be distinguished from violence as such. Un-

derstood as the idea that acts of violence against individuals or groups: assassinations,

bombings, kidnappings, etc., are means of revolutionary change, terrorism has been

rejected by almost all anarchist writers, yet it is true that one can identify a period of

terrorist activity in several national histories. On this see, James Joll, The Anarchists

(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964) and Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists(Princeton University Press, 1967). The identification of anarchism with terrorism

has, of course, had enormous consequences and, no doubt, goes some way toward ex-

plaining the discrediting of anarchism. For a perceptive account, see Emma Goldman,

“The Psychology of Political Violence” (1910?), in Anarchism and Other Essays

(New York: Dover, 1969). Dewey, we should recall, argued that “the only question

which can be raised about the justification of force is that of comparative efficiency

and economy of use” and “what is justly objected to as violence or undue coercion is

a reliance upon wasteful and destructful means of accomplishing results” (“Force and

Coercion” (1916) in Characters and Events II: 789).

15. Alexander Berkman, What is a Communist Anarchist? with an Introduction by

Paul Avrich (New York: Dover, 1972), originally published as New and After: The

ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929). This is a very clear exposition of many of the

key points of difference between anarchism and (the prevailing) Marxism.16. Quoted by Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of

Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 197?: 226, translated

from “Schwache Stattsminner, Schwacheres Volk ”‘ Der Sozialist. June, 1910.

17. American anarchists also put enormous emphasis on educating the young. The

Spaniard, Francisco Ferrar, was a more direct influence on early 20th century efforts,

but the pertinence of Dewey’s view were fully recognized. For discussion, see espe-

cially, Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement. It is interesting to notice that

Dewey was not especially interested in educational experiments conducted within an-

archist colonies, although he did visit the Stelton Colony and school in Stelton, N.J.

On the other hand, many anarchists had little confidence in this route. Berkman said,

“I myself . . . have little faith in colonies. You cannot build the new society that way”

(quoted from Avrich: 306

18. Much recent radical theory has come to the conclusion that in the advancedcapitalist states where liberal democracies exist, the only strategy to be pursued—

consistent with a genuine socialism—requires an answer to this question:

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How is it possible radically to transform the State in such a manner that the extension and

deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy . . . are

combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-

management bodies? (Nicos Poulantzas. State, Power and Socialism (London: Verso,

1980).

DEWEY’S WRITINGS, CITED IN THIS CHAPTER:

GPP German Philosophy and Politics (New York: Henry Holt, 1915).

D&E Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1966, Enlarged Edition)

RIP Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

HNC Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt, 1922).

PP The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954).

PF “Philosophies of Freedom,” in R. J. Bernstein (ed.), Experience, Nature and Free-

dom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960).C&E Characters and Events. Two Vols., edited by Joseph Ratner (New York: Henry

Holt, 1929)

LSA Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Capricorn, 1963).

ION Individualism Old and New (New York: Capricorn, 1962).

F&C Freedom and Culture (New York: Capricorn, 1963).

D&EA “Democracy and Educational Administration,” in Joseph Ratner (ed.), Intelli-

gence and The Modern World (New York: Modern Library, 1939),

PM Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).


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211

If we begin with the political calamities of the last one hundred years and add,

as at least part consequence of these, the upheavals in philosophy, literature,

art and science, we can appreciate the present attractiveness of a political phi-

losophy without foundations: There is no truth; only an endless “conversa-

tion” in a self-sufficient linguistic realm which is totally disconnected from

any extra-linguistic reality—if such there be. Because God is dead, “human

nature” has no content, and history is meaningless, the dream of creating a

new kind of human society—the dream of utopian and revolutionary modern

politics—is instead a nightmare. There is no knowable, objective, definable,

transmittable common good; there are only “interests,” not to be judged, still

less to be accommodated. There is no responsible politics which is not impo-

tent: Either we irresponsibly offer “the masses” ungrounded hope or, more re-sponsibly, we reject the quest for “glittering triumph,” perhaps even im-

provement, and settle for “the far more modest, though indispensable,

concern to prevent ‘catastrophes.’” On this view of things, the belief that

“everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be de-

stroyed,” that efforts “to escape from the grimness of the present into nostal-

gia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are

vain.”1 With Camus, anguishing over Algeria, we may wonder how one can

even write, knowing that what is said might provide an alibi for a Pol Pot or

a terrorist willing to throw—or drop—a bomb.

The alternatives would seem to be these: Either one knows what is good

and true, or one does not. If one does, then, must not one act on that knowl-

edge, even if, finally, it turns out that one is wrong? On the other hand, if onedoes not know what is good and true, if perhaps there is no good and true,

then, must we not be unwilling to act in the name of “the people,” or history,

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or of our ideals? Instead, is it not the case that our commitment must be but

to keep the conversation going?2

As “liberal,” the anti-foundationalist alternative has an appeal. Indeed, it is

just this that makes it a useful counter-revolutionary ideology. But the issue

is misformulated. It is not that there is no basis for human solidarity—even if

that basis is not to be discovered but created, or that there is no “truth,” even

if like solidarity, it too is a social product. Nor is violence, as such, the prob-

lem. Like inaction, it is sometimes justified and sometimes not justified. For,

unnoticed by the anti-foundationalist is the possibility of a politics that needs

no foundations, a politics which does not guarantee success and does not pre-

suppose that some person or party has a truth not shared by those in whose

name they.act. Put in other terms, the problem of modern politics is less the

lack of “foundations” and more the absence of a genuinely democratic poli-

tics, a politics which aims at the creation of communities by the active par-

ticipation of interdependent individuals, a politics in which “interests” be-

come shared goods, a politics which insists that truth can only be our truth. In

what follows, I argue that Marx and Dewey offered versions of this. On this

view, we are “sculptors” or crafters, but we lack blueprints. On this view, we

are actors in history, but we can—and must—write our own scripts.

RECOVERING MARX

Marx had some clear and definite ideas about democracy, ideas which remain

unrealized, but which cannot be dismissed as utopian or as youthful extrava-

gances or cynical subterfuge. Marx consistently held that participatory

democracy was the goal of revolutionary transformation, that what we callmodern democracy, though a form of alienated politics, was genuinely pro-

gressive, and finally—and most critically—that there could. be no separation

of revolutionary means from revolutionary ends. While the issues are con-

tentious, I want to suggest that opposing views depend largely on an ahistor-

ical reading of important texts and events. Critical in this regard is the per-

sistent tendency to construe Marx’s politics in terms of a misconstrual of the

differences between Marx and the anarchists and to be anachronistic as re-

gards later debates between revolutionary Marxists and social democrats.3

MARX’S ANALYSIS OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

Characteristically, Marx’ point of departure was criticism of Hegel, but while

he rejected much in Hegel, he also found much of value. Hegel saw that the

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French Revolution had raised the problem of sovereignty in a critical way and

that it was this problem with which “history is now occupied, and whose so-lution it has to work out in the future” (Hegel, 1956: 452). The problem was

critical, because in the fully developed modern state the people could not be

sovereign. On Hegel’s view of the matter, “‘the sovereignty of the people” is

one of the confused notions based on the wild idea of the ‘people.’ “Taken

without its monarch and the articulation of the whole . . . the people is a form-

less mass and no longer a state” (Hegel, 1952: 279).

In the fully developed modem state, there was a bifurcation of civil society

and the state. Individuals live private lives and relate anonymously. It was

thus that, unless articulated, the people are a “formless mass.” On the other

hand, the government, the king, parliament, the bureaucracy and the police

became the mode by which “the whole” was articulated and expressed. Fail-

ing to grasp the full force of the American “solution” to the problem of sov-

ereignty, Hegel opted for a reactionary solution, a constitutional monarchy.

Marx agreed fully with the Hegelian analysis of the bifurcation of civil so-

ciety and the state, but he saw also that the Americans had, in a remarkable

way, already solved the problem that Hegel believed had still to be solved.

That is, Marx saw that the fully realized modem state would be a democratic

state. The “solution,” however, required that in the fully realized modern

state, the alienation of individuals would be fully realized and at the same

time fully obscured. In the democratic state, every adult is a “citizen” with

full civil and political rights. Moreover, in virtue of the mechanisms of rep-

resentative government, the people are “sovereign.” But for Marx the reality

was otherwise: Each citizen is “an imagined member of an imagined sover-

eignty, divested of his actual individual life and endowed with an unactual

universality.” In the democratic state, “liberators reduce citizenship, the po-litical community, to a mere means for preserving [the] so-called rights of

man.” “But this means man in his uncivilized and unsocial aspect, in his for-

tuitous existence and just as he is, corrupted by the entire organization of our

society, lost and alienated from himself, oppressed by inhuman relations and

elements” (Easton and Guddat, 1967: 225–26, 231).

To say that in the democratic state individuals are “uncivilized” and

“unsocial” and that they have “fortuitous existences” is not to say that in-

dividuals are barbaric, or nasty or motivated by greed—though this may

also be true. It is to say rather that they live private lives that they are iso-

lated, that they relate anonymously, that their situations are “accidental”

like their sex or race, and that while their powers are social, they are not

socially realized. This is the result of “the entire organization of society,’’but in particular of the market structure of bourgeois society and the alien-

ating structures of the modern state. As Thomas points out, “the state

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becomes a fetishistic personification of political potential, very much as

the concept of capital designates the separation between the conditions of labor and the producer. Both are the members of society’s own real force

set up against them, opposed to them, and out of control” (Thomas, 1980:

196). The people are sovereign but they have no power over the conditions

of their lives. As sovereigns in an illusory community, they are in reality

controlled by “inhuman relations. A number of critical implications flow

from Marx’ analysis.

First, the problem for Marx is first and last political, of what has to be done

and to happen if people are to gain control of the circumstances—now alien-

ated—which structure their lives. This problem was not to be solved “econo-

mistically” or by perfecting the instrumentalities of the democratic state. This

distinguished Marx’ view from e.g., Proudhon on the one hand, and on the

other, from republicans. Second, to achieve the goal is to overcome the dual-

ity of civil society and the state, and this means, as Marx writes, “in true de-

mocracy, the political state disappears (untergeht).” This view, of course, has

its Rousseauian intimations and suggests the critical point of comparison to

nineteenth-century anarchisms and social democrats. But third, in contrast to

anarchisms which share with Marx the idea that state power must be broken,

if this was to be achieved, it had to be achieved by an agency which did not

reflect the alienated relations of private property. As he wrote, it was the work

of “a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil soci-

ety, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a

universal character because of its universal suffering”(Easton and Guddat,

1967: 263-264).

These ideas lead directly to the 1848 Communist Manifesto where, recur-

ring to the Aristotelian lineage of the idea that democracy was class rule bythe poor, Marx and Engels write “the first step in the revolution by the work-

ing class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish

democracy.” In this democracy, to be sure, “the political state” has not disap-

peared, for as a statist form, this democracy was still a “dictatorship,” albeit

a dictatorship of the majority, the proletariat, against the minority—the own-

ers of the means of production. It was thus that it was but “a first step in the

revolution of the working class” (McClellan, 1977: 237).4

But it was the Paris Commune of 1871 which seems to have given Marx

a paradigm for what might be, a paradigm which, prefigured in actuality,

has earlier intimations of “true democracy.” As he said, the democracy of

the Commune was a “historically new creation” and “the glorious harbin-

ger of a new society.”5 Still, it is vital to be clear about what Marx saw in itand why also that, for him, it was a premature and finally unwise act of

heroism.

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THE COMMUNE AND DEMOCRACY

For us, “democracy” refers to statist electoral politics and “anarchism” refers

either to a silly utopianism or to terrorist politics. If in the nineteenth century,

these terms had not yet been thoroughly appropriated by the enemies of rule

by the demos, it was already the case, as Marx noted, that “it was generally

the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the coun-

terpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they bear a cer-

tain likeness” (Marx, 1971: 73) In what sense, then, was the Commune “a

completely new historical creation”?

On the one hand, it was anarchist in the sense that it broke state power. As

he wrote: “The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary,

to be organized by the communal Constitution and to become a reality by the

destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that

unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but

a parasitic excrescence” (73). But it was not anarchist in the sense of Stirner,

Proudhon or Bakunin. Marx took these writers seriously—with due cause—

but because, on his view, they lacked an adequate understanding of political

economy, they were mistaken both as regards their vision of a good society

and as regards the means of attaining it. Putting the matter as briefly as pos-

sible, for Marx, anarchists were inverted statists. Since on their view the state

was the problem, once rid of it, all would be well. Because for them there was

little point in discriminating between forms of the state, transformative activ-

ity, whether the anti-revolutionary activity of Proudhon or the conspiratorial

activity of Bakunin, had to wash its hands of the state. As Proudhon said, “to

indulge in politics is to wash one’s hand in dung” (quoted by Thomas, 1980:

184).Marx saw the matter very differently. His view of the Commune gives us a

start in seeing how. In the first place, the Commune was

a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government

had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a

working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against

the appropriating class . . . (Marx, 1971: 75).

We must be clear what this means. The Commune had fashioned the first

“government”—the word must be used gingerly-—which aimed at realiz-

ing full control over the circumstances of life by ordinary citizens. It was

in this sense “expansive” in contrast to those forms that took for grantedthe conditions of ordinary life. Even the best case, for example, the de-

mocracy of ancient Athens, took these for granted. Previous democracies,


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like non-democracies, were “repressive” in that they aimed but to replace

the rule of one class for another—without altering the alienating conditionswhich called for class rule in the first place. For example, in the ancient

polis, “politics” regarded the struggle between rich and poor over deci-

sions of law and war, but the poor were not social revolutionaries in the

sense that they either did or could aim at reconstituting society. This idea,

which was owed to the French Revolution, regarded the perception, now

familiar largely through the thought of Hegel and of Marx that human his-

tory was radically unlike natural history in being the product of human ac-

tivity. For Marx this meant that

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis

of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time con-

sciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men,

strips them of their natural character and subjects them to the power of unitedindividuals (McClellan, 1977: 179).

Political democracy was “a great step forward” because it acknowledged “the

sovereign people,” but it was the final form of emancipation only “within the

prevailing order of things.”

Indeed, it was just for these reasons that the Commune could not have suc-

ceeded: “Apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a city under

exceptional circumstances, the majority of the Commune was in no way so-

cialist nor could it be” (Marx, 1971: 293). The “exceptional circumstances”

which produced the Commune left the full machinery of the repressive

French State in place, and insofar, the Communards faced formidable odds.

But in addition, because the Communards were not organized, politically ac-tive workers, their political capacities were undeveloped.

The problem was not that the Communards lacked revolutionary con-

sciousness, for they surely knew how to die on the barricades, nor was the

problem economistic, regarding their incapacity at the existing stage of eco-

nomic development to conquer scarcity, but that an alienated citizenry was in

no position to reabsorb their alienated social powers. They were still isolated,

“private” persons who, as not yet thoroughly interdependent, could not or-

ganize themselves so as to realize fully the powers that they had. As Edwards

says: “the Communards belonged more to the past tradition of Paris revolu-

tionaries than presaging the industrial struggles of the future” (Edwards,

1971: 360). As an alliance of artisans, of workers in craft industries, of petty

bourgeois shopkeepers and traders, it was impossible for them to overcome

“the contradiction between public and private life, between general and par-

ticular interests.” It was thus that “with a modicum of common sense . . . [the

Commune] could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the

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whole mass of the people the only thing that could have been reached at the

time” (Marx, 1971: 293).The anarchists saw and celebrated the fact that the Commune was not made

by “the proletariat” and was instead an alliance of “the people,” and they saw

and celebrated the spontaneity and disorganization that was a critical mark of

the Commune. But, for Marx, their failure to see that unless the Communards

were to have a long period for self-education in self-rule—an impossibility in

the circumstances of Civil War—the Commune had to fail.

A second point of comparison between Marx’s understanding of the Com-

mune and anarchist thought regards the question of “government.” For us, ei-

ther there is a government or there is “anarchy”—no authority, no coercive

organization. The idea was surely reinforced by a great deal of anarchist

polemics—especially in the nineteenth century, but the confusion is deeper,

depending on the eighteenth-century identification of rule with government.

In the ancient polis, there was, strictly speaking, no government; there was

rule by one, few or many. Political power was unmediated. In the modern

state, however, there are always governments, the executive, parliament, bu-

reaucracies and the police, and they always claim to “represent” the “gov-

erned”. It is easy then to suppose that the middle ground between self-rule

and rule by others is modern political democracy, “representative govern-

ment.” But for Marx (and Dewey, as we shall see), this was not the only al-

ternative. The institutional novelty of the Commune was in just this.

There would be “functionaries” of the people, “agents” in the strictest of

senses, and these would be under strict “instructions” from those whom they

represent. These functionaries would not be as in bourgeois democracy

merely “authorized” to rule those who elect them, but would be as ambassa-

dors or military commanders, “responsible” and “revocable” at the pleasureof those who elected them. “Sovereignty”, as in Rousseau, would not be

alienated. Accordingly, it would not be illusory. As Marx wrote:

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class

was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the

people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other em-

ployer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is

well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business gener-

ally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they once make a

mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more for-

eign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hier-

archic investiture (Marx, 1971: 73).6

It is hard to know how to classify this arrangement. Is it a “government” with

power but no authority or with authority but no power? It would “manage”


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but it would be, like the police and the courts—which are not to be abolished—

“elective, responsible, and revocable.” We need to emphasize here that the rejection of bourgeois democracy did not involve the rejection of its patently

most critical democratic features: free elections, free communication, etc.

Marx never questioned their indispensability. His criticism, like Dewey’s,

was that democracy required something more, not something less. For Marx,

it meant a form of real participation consistent with “government.”

We should note also that Marx’s analogy is nearly perfect. A “company”

could be “operated” by “workmen and managers,” and no one supposes that

the owner of the company has lost his “sovereignty”. It was but elitist propa-

ganda to believe that the same principles could not apply to a “commune.”

The only real question was whether a commune, like a company, could agree

on the goals of the association. This problem, of course, relates to the first

point regarding the question of whether the citzenry is or is not alienated.

Finally, as already suggested, we must not assume that a full-fledged de-

mocracy would be totalitarian, that “the people” ruling themselves would

trample “personal freedom.” As Aristotle and Madison both saw, this as-

sumption was warranted where “personal freedom” meant “the rights of prop-

erty,” freedom of the exploiters to exploit the exploited. Insofar as the Com-

mune was “expansive” and not “repressive,” it would be different from

previous democracies. It is true, of course, that Marx did mock liberal con-

stitutional theory and did not himself pay heed to the institutional problems

of true democracy, but it is clear that he profoundly valued “personal free-

dom,” saw, rightly, that “only in community do the means exist for every in-

dividual to cultivate his talents in all directions,” and assumed, optimistically,

that individuals in a community would act so that, in contrast to previous

forms, all would realize “personal freedom.” The absence of concern to insti-tutional detail here stems from his commitment to a democratic politics, to his

repeated contention that no one could write scripts for others—still less for

future others who will need to solve just those problems which they have.7

It is also clear that if “the unity of the nation” was not to be broken, some

sort of federation was involved, and while this was not to be a “federation of

small States, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins,” it is not clear

what Marx has in mind. There are, from Marx’ point of view, two possible ob-

jections to “small States.” First, if they are states, then they still embody an

alienated politics. Second, if they are small, “the unity of the nation is bro-

ken.” This second problem is critical, but it is hard to say whether, as he sug-

gests, “the nation” is the smallest unit for social production in the modern

world, or whether, perhaps as part of this, if we are to think of moving pro-gressively towards the future and be realistic, we need, in a world of aggran-

dizing nation-states, to think in terms of nations?

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The problem is resolvable, however, if we return Marx’s discussion to its con-

text. Marx’s conclusion, that had the Commune shown “a modicum of common-sense,” it would have tried to reach “a compromise with Versailles,” powerfully

reinforces a host of evidence that Marx’politics were gradualist. This means, in

this context, that the best that one could have hoped for, in these circumstances,

was the best possible compromise consistent with the continuing existence of the

French State. To suppose that the Communards could have mapped out and re-

alized the future is the worst kind of utopian thinking.

MARX’S GRADUALIST POLITICS

It may be doubted that Marx’ politics were gradualist. But a gradualist poli-

tics is not necessarily “reformist” nor is it necessarily antirevolutionary. It is

a politics that seeks to realize what is at the time realizable. Marx surely

wanted society to be revolutionized and he surely also believed that, at the

right moment, a revolution would occur; but there is strong evidence that

Marx was never naive about “the right moment” and that, in contrast to anar-

chist-inspired politics, he was always perfectly prepared to work within the

state—if it was a liberal democratic state.8

Already against Stirner, he had argued, “it is only in the mind of the ideol-

ogist that [the ‘will’ to abolish competition and with it the state and law]

arises before conditions have developed far enough to make its production

possible”(quoted by Thomas, 1980: 343). And to emphasize, the conditions

referred to are political, regarding the political capacities of the people whose

activities had sustained “competition” and “law and the state.” But perhaps

the clearest statement of his position is his speech, given upon resigning fromthe Central Council of the Communist League:

The minority have substituted the dogmatic spirit for the critical, the idealist in-

terpretation of events for the materialist. Simple willpower, instead of the true

relations of things, has become the motive force of the revolution. While we say

to the working people, “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty-five years

of civil wars, and wars between nations not only to change existing conditions

but to change yourselves and make yourselves worthy of political power,” you

on the other hand, say “We ought to get power at once, or else give up the fight.”

. . . Just as the democrats make a fetish of the word ‘people’ you make one of

the word “proletariat.” Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for rev-

olutionary action (Quoted by Thomas: 331).

We can be reminded that, writing in 1852, he held that “the carrying of

universal suffrage in England would . . . be a far more socialist measure than


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anything that has been honoured with that name on the continent.” He con-

tinued, optimistically, that “its inevitable result . . . [would be] the politicalsupremacy of the working class” (345). And his mind had not changed, after

the Commune, when in 1871, he wrote that:

The ultimate object of the political movement of the working class is . . . the

conquest of political power for this class; and this naturally requires that the or-

ganization of the working class, an organization which arises from its economic

struggles, should previously reach a certain level of development. On the other

hand, however, every movement in which the working class as a class confronts

the ruling classes and tries to constrain them by pressure from without is a po-

litical movement. For instance, the attempt by strikes, etc., in a particular fac-

tory or even in a particular trade to compel individual capitalists to reduce the

working day, is a purely economic movement. On the other hand, the movement

to force through an eight-hour, etc., law is a political movement. And in this

way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers grows up every-

where a political movement, that is to say, a class movement, with the object of

enforcing its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially

coercive force. While these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous

organization, they are in turn equally a means of developing this organization

(Quoted by Thomas, 347).9

THE REDEFINITION OF MARXIAN POLITICS

Events did not proceed, however, as Marx had thought they would. While, on

the one hand, industrialization in England and then in Germany did promote

an increasingly politicized labor movement, radicals were by no means ableto agree on either strategy or tactics. During his lifetime, Marx had had some

success in negotiating the differences and in maintaining the extraordinarily

diverse elements of the International on a course of gradualist change. But the

events which led to the effective demise of the First international (in 1872,

formally in 1876 in Philadelphia) were critical in the subsequent Internation-

alist movement, in Marxist politics, and in our retrospective understanding of

Marx’s politics.

Oversimplifying a very complicated story, instead of being, as Thomas

puts it, “a form of doctrine having some vague and, as far as Marx was con-

cerned, irksome appeal,” anarchism became a movement “having a consider-

able, and widespread, appeal across national boundaries” (Thomas: 249). Be-

cause Marx wanted not merely that there should be a revolution, but that it bethe right sort of revolution, he fought the anarchists tooth and nail. He did not

fight them, if the foregoing is correct, because he believed in the state, or in

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centralized authority, or worse, in a revolution made by revolutionaries in the

name of the people. For Marx, the First International and the Paris Communedid in fact prefigure the future, yet the repression that the Paris Commune

provoked, itself a critical factor in the demise of the International, and Marx’s

role in this collapse, had serious consequences. Instead of being a pluralist,

ideologically heterogeneous vehicle for the transformation of the interna-

tional order, subsequent Internationals were monolithic and ideologically

doctrinaire. Indeed, Marx’s machinations versus Bakunin became the alibi for

this and at the same time confirmed as “prophetic” the anarchist suspicion

that Marx and Marxism were authoritarian, offering but a new version of ab-

solutist politics. Finally, failing to grasp what the Commune was and why it

failed, instead of being for radicals a premature glimmer into a historically

novel form of society, for some, because it lacked “centralization and author-

ity,” the Commune became an apocalyptic and hopelessly degenerative fit of

revolutionary madness. For others, it was the very model of revolution, “of

the spontaneity of the masses.” For many anarchists, the Commune proved

that revolution did not require a “vanguard working class,” still less, “organ-

ization;” or, quite oppositely, as in Bakunin and the Blanquists, it showed the

need for a conspiratorial revolutionary party to provide the match which

would light the fire of revolution.

But events continued to undermine Marx’ hopes. The destruction of Inter-

nationalism, of social democracy in Germany10 and the collapse of Tsarist

Russia, all sparked by the World War, completed that redefinition of Marxist

politics that had begun with the violent end of the Commune. After the Bol-

shevik Revolution, Marxist struggles to transform society will rapidly col-

lapse into two poles, between a Blanquist-style demand for a revolutionary

conspiratorial vanguard of the working class aimed at “smashing the state”and reformist social democracy, aimed not at a gradualist transformation of

the political conditions for revolution, but at winning economic concessions

from the capitalists.11

By the turn of the century, it had already become clear to Marxists that

while “economic development” was creating the conditions for “socialist pro-

duction,” it was not creating a revolutionary consciousness among the work-

ers. Writing in his enormously influential—and often misunderstood—“What

is to be Done?” (1902), Lenin noted that “‘everyone agrees’ that it is neces-

sary to develop the political consciousness of the working class.” “The ques-

tion was,” he continued, “how is that to be done and what is required to do

it?” For Lenin, “economism”—the effort to win economic concessions—and

terrorism “have one common root, subservience to spontaniety”. For Lenin,both views presumed historical inevitability and were thus apolitical. While

as with Marx and the social democrats, “the working class” remained the


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center of a mass-based social revolution, Lenin insisted that “we must ‘go

among all classes of the population’ as theoreticians, as propagandists, as ag-itators and as organizers”; and while he protested against Blanquism and

against “confining the political struggle to conspiracy,” he also insisted that

this did not deny “the need for a strong revolutionary organization”—if the

workers were to be politicized (Lenin, 1966: 112m 119). But it was easy to

read this tract in the light of the Bolshevik Revolution and to hold that it had

already set out the principles of socialist revolution, not as a movement of

workers, nor of workers allied with other classes, but of an authoritarian

organization of dedicated professional revolutionaries, a minority acting for

“the workers.”12

It is exactly here, then, where we can begin our analysis of Dewey’s ver-

sion of a democratic politics. As we shall see, there are both strong parallels

and some critical differences.

DEWEY’S VISION OF DEMOCRACYAND HIS ANALYSIS OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

Dewey was born in 1859, the year that Marx published the Critique of Polit-

ical Economy, but Dewey did not turn explicitly to political philosophy until

his 1915 German Philosophy and Politics. Moreover, while it is well-known

that Dewey was a critic of Marxism, especially in his writings beginning in

the 1930’s, Dewey could not at that time have read Marx’s critique of Hegel’s

philosophy of state and the tracts on alienation, nor what we call the Grun-

drisse, nor even the critically important German Ideology. For Dewey, Marx-

ism was philosophically what may be called “Second International Marx-ism,” a variant that was powerfully influenced by the monist philosophy of

history of Georgi Plekhanov. Politically, Marxism was, by that time, defined

largely by Lenin—by then understood as the promoter of the “vanguard

Party.” Dewey’s philosophical roots, of course, like Marx’s, trace to Hegel—

a fact of some importance; but his political sensitivities were shaped not by

the revolutions of 1848 or the Paris Commune, but by New England localism

and an understanding of this which in critical ways was Jeffersonian.

In German Philosophy and Politics, Dewey traced the philosophic basis of

patriotic statism in Germany and concluded, “the present situation presents

the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, po-

litical, racial and cultural.” Dewey rejected the sufficiency of “arbitration,

treaties, international judicial councils, schemes of international disarma-ment, peace funds and peace movements.” He called for “more radical think-

ing” of the problem (Dewey, 1915: 130). The problem of statist politics was

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also present in Democracy and Education, published the next year. He asked:

“Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national stateand yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, con-

strained, and corrupted?”(97). Dewey thought that the answer could be yes,

if, to be sure, we were talking about education “in and for a democratic soci-

ety.” In Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), he argued that despite wide dif-

ferences, political philosophies were “agreed upon the final consummating

position of the state” and he concluded that assumptions regarding the

“unique and supreme position of the State in the social hierarchy” had solid-

ified into dogma (201). Just as Marx had supposed that capitalist modes of in-

tercourse would destroy national boundaries, make for international proletar-

ian solidarity, and politicize workers, Dewey hoped that these forces would

propel democracy as a way of life.13

But the critical eleven years that separated Democracy and Education and

The Public and Its Problems forced Dewey to different conclusions. Not only

had he developed a critique of democracy as “a form of government,” but also

it was now clear to him that democracy, as a way of life was not being fos-

tered by the new interdependencies and the new capacities of technological

society. On the contrary, democracy as a mode of associated living was being

profoundly undermined by these same forces.

In terms familiar to the anarchism of Gustave Landauer and Martin Buber,

Dewey argued that democracy was not “an alternative to other principles of

associated life. It is the idea of community itself.” “Within a community, “the

state is an impertinence.”

Turning his attention to democracy as a form of government, Dewey ar-

gued that at best, political democracy “represents an effort . . . to counteract

forces that so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and ir-relevant factors, and . . . an effort to counteract the tendency to employ polit-

ical power to serve private instead of public ends.” But political democracy

had failed even to realize these limited goals. “In a word”, he concluded, “the

new forms of combined action due to the modern economic regime controls

present policies, much as dynastic interests controlled those of two centuries

ago. They affect thinking and desire more than did the interests which for-

merly moved the state” (Dewey, 1954).14

The analysis compares easily to Marx, but especially insofar as it sug-

gests that the constraints on policies, as on “thinking and desire,” are struc-

turally rooted. Accordingly, the problem of constituting democracy as a

way of life had no easy solutions and regarded the incapacity of interde-

pendent people even to perceive the consequences of “combined action,”still less to be able to perceive shared goods and to act on them: What,

then, was to be done?


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DEWEY’S REJECTION OF CLASS POLITICS

Dewey visited the Soviet Union in 1928, the year after he published The Public

and Its Problems. In no sense was Dewey an ideological anti-Marxist. He had

assessed the Bolshevik revolution as “an experiment to discover whether the fa-

miliar democratic ideals—familiar in words at least— will not be most com-

pletely realized in a social regime based on voluntary co-operation, on conjoint

workers’ control and management of industry.” Dewey saw, it is clear, that so-

cialism was inconceivable without democracy and that, as the foregoing sug-

gests, democracy in its complete sense demanded socialism. Nevertheless, his

analysis of the democratic state made it plain to him, though not to the Marxists,

that in the United States, at least, proletarian revolution was not on the historical

agenda. For him, the critical issue was the very idea of class.

A great deal of what Dewey wrote during this period sounded like a Marxian

class analysis. In addition to what has already been noted, consider Individual-

ism Old and New. In that critical text, Dewey argued that the issue that Marx had

raised, “the relation of the economic structure to political operations—is one that

actively persists.” “Indeed”, he continues, “it forms the only basis of present po-

litical questions.” In the pages that follow, Dewey gives an account of the crisis

that could have come from Capital, Vol. III. He writes:

There are now, it is estimated, eight billions of surplus savings a year, and the

amount is increasing. Where is this capital to find its outlet? Diversion into the

stock market gives temporary relief, but the resulting inflation is a “cure” which

creates a new disease. If it goes into the expansion of industrial plants, how long

will it be before they, too, “overproduce” (Dewey, 1962: 85–86).

There is in this text even a clear reference to the upshot of the Marxian labor

theory of value:

That the total earnings of eight million wage workers should be only four times

the amount of what the income-tax returns frankly call the “unearned” income

of . . . eleven thousand millionaires goes almost without notice (109).

Perhaps even more Marxist sounding is his claim that “large and basic eco-

nomic currents cannot be ignored for any length of time, and they are work-

ing in one direction.” Indeed, “economic determinism is now a fact, not a the-

ory.” His account concludes with a text that could have been written by

Engels:

. . . There is a difference and a choice between a blind, chaotic and unplanned

determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profit—the anar-

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chy of capitalist production—and the determination of socially planned and or-

dered development. It is the difference and the choice between a socialism that

is public and one that is capitalistic (119)

Finally, Dewey also sees the relation between this theoretically informed

analysis and the problem of the “lost individual”. “We live,” he writes, “po-

litically from hand to mouth.”

The various expressions of public control . . . have taken place sporadically and

in response to the pressure of distressed groups so large that their voting power

demanded attention. They have been improvised to meet special occasions.

They have not been adopted as parts of any general social policy (114)

It is clear enough .why this is the case. Under present arrangements, “finan-

cial and industrial power, corporately organized, can deflect economic conse-

quences away from the advantage of the many to serve the privilege of the

few.” The political parties themselves, the ostensible vehicles of mobilization

for change, “have been eager accomplices in maintaining confusion and un-

reality” (114).

This analysis, as pertinent today as when it was offered, is not untypical of

Dewey. It suggests that Dewey’s understanding of the political possibilities of

democratic politics in capitalist America was anything but naive, and that, in

important ways, it was close to Marxism. But for all this, there is evidence

that he sometimes lost sight of the critical issue. An instance is the book

which some have taken to be one of Dewey’s more radical political tracts,

Liberalism and Social Action, written in 1935. As is well known, Dewey there

insisted that

Liberalism must become radical, meaning by “radical” perception of the neces-

sity of thorough-going changes in the set-up of institutions and corresponding

activity to bring changes to pass (62).

Dewey emphatically rejected reform that dealt with but “this abuse and now

that without having a social goal based on an inclusive plan,” but he was less

clear what that goal and plan was. One thing was clear: Dewey rejected Marx-

ism, but especially “the idea of a struggle between classes, culminating in

open and violent warfare as being the method for production of radical social

change” (78).

Dewey had a clear and adequate instrumentalist view of violence. In an-

other place he had written that “what is justly objected to as violence or un-due coercion is a reliance upon wasteful or destructful means of accomplish-

ing results” (Dewey, 1929, Vol. II: 785). In Liberalism and Social Action,


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similarly, it was not violence as such that was the issue. He recognized, with

the Marxists, that “force, rather than intelligence is built into the proceduresof the existing social system,” and that even free expression will be tolerated

“as long as it does not seem to menace in any way the status quo of soci-

ety”(63, 64).27 When it does, he wrote, the state will be quick to use official

violence in the name of protecting “the general welfare.” Dewey had learned

from his experience with the Palmer raids and the tragedy of Sacco and

Vanzetti.

What then was his objection to the class war notion of the Marxists?

Dewey might have argued, though he did not, that the Marxist analysis was

substantially correct, but that for good historical reasons, the idea of struggle

between classes, culminating in open warfare, had to be rejected. The argu-

ment for this conclusion would be complicated, but it would be fully consis-

tent with Dewey’s own analysis of the democratic state.

In agreement with the anarchists of his day, for Dewey, “the workers” were

not to be agents of social change. It was not that there was no oppression and

inequality in America, that workers were not exploited, nor that they were

happy with their lot. One did not hear their “angry voices,” Dewey wrote, but

that was not because they were drowned out by “shouts of eagerness for ad-

venturous opportunity.” Rather, “the murmurs of discontent are drowned” by

“the murmurs of lost opportunities, along with the din of machinery, motor

cars and speakeasies”(1962: 78–79). The metaphor, suggestive of the much

later writings of Marcuse or Foucault, was employed in the context of

Dewey’s brilliant analysis of America individualism. It was not roast beef, but

“repressive needs,” “normalization” and “atomization” which had disinte-

grated class-consciousness.

As I argued, Marx knew that the struggle would be long and hard, but hecould not have anticipated the fantastic flexibility of capitalism in the liberal

democracies, and especially in America, the fragmenting effects of race and

ethnicity. In America, then, “workers” had become a politically useless cate-

gory. But if so, then, “class struggle” was, at its worse, a slogan for assuring

the faithful or, at its best, an abstraction at a different level of analysis.

The issue is complicated, but I must be brief. In Marxism, classes are not

defined by a set of empirically given characteristics, e.g., income, social sta-

tus, or occupation. Rather, “class” is a theoretical concept, grounded in the

central concept of mode of production. Marx’s Capital provides a theoretical

and abstract account of the capitalist mode of production. Abstractly consid-

ered, there are but two classes, the owners of the means of production and

the producers of surplus value, the proletariat. This analysis, the core of any Marxism, provides an understanding of capitalism as a mode of produc-

tion. It shows what problems need to be solved if it is to be reproduced—

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including thus an explanation of why capitalist relations need to be mystified,

the famous “fetishism of commodities.” It shows that capitalism is “irra-tional,” that it is subject to periodic crises, and it gives an argument for so-

cialism by showing that as long as the means of production are not jointly

controlled, there is no way to end domination and alienation—including the

alienated politics of the modern state.

But of course the real world is not just a mode of production. It is com-

prised of societies with modes of production. Like all others, societies with a

capitalist mode of production have state structures, churches, gender and

racial conflicts, schools and mass media. They have housewives, “profes-

sionals”, civil servants, and all sorts of “workers” who are not proletarians—

defined as producers of surplus value. But this means that Marx’s projection

into the future of the effects of the capitalist mode of production could well

be wrong—as, indeed, it was.

In the nineteenth century, it was still possible to keep things simple by

identifying the growing class of industrial workers with a growing and in-

creasingly organized proletariat, to suppose, as the Manifesto had it, that “the

small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handi-

craftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat.” “The

workers,” now “the immense majority,” now organized, now pauperized,

would become a revolutionary class. But close as that had come to being

prophetic, just before World War I, that time had now passed. More generally,

then, since Marxist revolutionary class politics was predicated on the as-

sumption of global capitalist transformation, of increasing polarization and

immiseration, and on the consequent development of the political capacities

of organized workers, and since these had not obtained as Marx had hoped,

Marxists might well have abandoned the idea of proletarian revolution. Theproblem, then would not be to find or make a revolutionary class, but as Hin-

dess writes, “to mobilize effective support around socialist objectives out of

the forces, struggles and ideologies operative in particular societies.”15

The Marxists of the inter-war period did not, of course, see this; nor, given

that their Marxism was the monocausal Marxism of the Second International,

was it surprising that Dewey would reject Marxist analysis.

He observed “according to the Marxians . . . the economic foundations of

society consist of two things, the forces of production on one side and, on the

other side, the social relations of production.” Further, for Marxians, scien-

tific technology is part of the forces of production. It is dynamic while the so-

cial relations are static; they “lag behind.” Dewey here was ready to admit

that “what was happening socially is the result of the combination of thesetwo factors,” and thus it would seem that here, as above, Dewey had fully ap-

propriated the extremely influential Preface account of what came to be


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called “historical materialism.”16 But Dewey then insisted that it was but “a

truism” to call this combination “capitalism” and to say that “capitalism is the‘cause’ of all the important changes that have occurred”. On his view,

Colossal increase in productivity, the bringing together of men in cities and large

factories, the elimination of distance, the accumulation of capital, fixed and

liquid—these things would have come about, at a certain stage, no matter what

the established institutional system. They are the consequences of the new

means of technological production (1963: 81).17

The text is a startlingly clear expression of technological determinism, but if

indeed, for “orthodox” Marxists, “technology” produces changes in the rela-

tions of production and thus explains the emergence of capitalism, Dewey

saw what they did not, that once one holds that technology directly defines

the labor process and, through this, the wider social relations, “historical ma-terialism” entails that there need be little real difference between “capitalism”

and “socialism”!18

Dewey’s concrete approach should have put him on guard. While he often

succumbs to the high abstraction, “industrial society,” he seems also to have

seen that the logic and consequences of the accumulation of capital was a fun-

damental cause of the way changes occurred in the West, of the particular ap-

plication of technologies and the particular distribution of wealth and re-

sources, that had capitalism been other than what it is—and here we are

indebted to Marx—technological production could surely have been differ-

ent. Putting the matter as briefly as possible, insofar as the relations of private

property define the accumulation of capital, the state is preferably liberal.

This means not just that private and public are bifurcated but that governmentwill be predictably limited in addressing problems thrown up by the process

of capital accumulation. At the very least, it must be constrained to activities

consistent with the maintenance of the system of private accumulation.

Dewey’s claim that “the release of productivity is the product of coopera-

tively organized intelligence” is correct. As Marxists point out, production is

socialized in capitalism. Moreover, if one wants the productivity associated

with industrial societies, there is no alternative to that. But Dewey’s idea that

“coercion and oppression on a large scale exist” because “of the perpetuation

of old institutions and patterns not touched by scientific method” is patently

fallacious. Indeed, in the text already quoted from Individualism Old and New,

he had it right: “There is a difference and a choice between a blind, chaotic and

unplanned determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profit,

and the determination of a socially planned and ordered development,” be-

tween “a socialism that is public and one that is capitalistic.” This difference,

of course, is exactly the extension of political democracy to the economy, the

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elimination of the contradiction between socialized production and private ap-

propriation, and finally, as Marx insisted and Dewey surely seemed also to see,the reappropriation of social powers by united individuals.

Once Dewey lost touch with the root of the problem, he could no longer of-

fer plausible solutions. In Liberalism and Social Action, he offered:

The question is whether force or intelligence is to be the method upon which we

consistently rely and to whose promotion we devote our energies. Insistence that

the use of force is inevitable limits the use of available intelligence . . . There is

an undoubted objective clash of interests between finance-capitalism that con-

trols the means of production and whose profit is served by maintaining relative

scarcity, and idle workers and hungry consumers. But what generates violent

strife is failure to bring the conflict into the light of intelligence, where the con-

flicting interests can be adjudicated on behalf of the interests of the great ma-

jority (79, 80).

The argument is a bad argument for at least three reasons. First, Dewey’s ab-

solutist either/or, either force or intelligence, is unwarranted. No serious rev-

olutionary, not Marx, not Lenin, not even Bakunin, so tied his hands in the

way that Dewey suggests, even if, for them, violence was inevitable. One

would have supposed that Dewey’s fine understanding of the use of violence

by the state in defense of the status quo would have led him to the conclusion

that as regards radical social change, some violence would, at some point, be

necessary.

Second, whatever the difficulties of a Marxian analysis, Marxists were not

so foolish as to suppose that the lions, the finance capitalists, would sit down

with the lambs and “adjudicate” away their privileged power. The “objectiveclash of interests” which Dewey rightly acknowledged was neither temporary

nor negotiable. Rooted in the capitalist system as such, it left the parties

locked “in a death clutch.”19

Third, Dewey here presupposes that publics exist, for it is only then, as he

here implies, that “cooperative intelligence” can be a mode of social recon-

struction. Immediately after he condemns Marxists for “a rigid logic,” he

says: “The ‘experimentalist’ is one who would see to it that the method de-

pended upon by all in some degree in a democratic community can be fol-

lowed through to completion” (80, my emphasis).

It will not be easy to explain Dewey’s continuing optimism that creative in-

telligence can be effective even where it so patently lacks institutions. It is eas-

ier to explain his decisive turn against Marxism. By 1928 at least, Dewey had

given up on the Socialist Party.20 By this time, the Soviets had already severely

abused, perhaps irreparably, the idea of “socialism.” They would, in the years

coming, disillusion still more. As noted, Dewey’s notion of Marxism was


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essentially the Marxism of the Second International, a Marxism flawed in

more ways than one. In his 1939 Freedom and Culture, Dewey attacked Marx-ism as unscientific on grounds that it had “a monistic block-universe theory of

social causation.” The monistic theory of history was a disaster: Social causa-

tion was plural and reciprocal. As I have suggested in this essay, the actual

course of history is the cluttered product of contingencies that no theory could

assimilate.21 On the other hand, Dewey—like the Marxists—had never him-

self been clear on the causal questions regarding capitalism, industrial society

and the modern state. If anything, he shared with them a tendency toward tech-

nological and economic determinism. Similarly, he was fully correct to charge

that no one was less scientific than the “scientific” Soviet Marxists: “Scientific

method in operating with working hypotheses instead of with fixed and

final Truth is not forced to have an Inner Council to declare just what is the

Truth . . .” (97). Finally, Marxists had all too often argued that capitalism was

the only evil and that therefore, once rid of it, all would be lovely. One would

have thought that the Thirties proved otherwise.

Still, by 1939, Dewey had definitely shifted his emphasis—if not worse.

After reminding his readers that he had “from time to time pointed out the

harmful consequences the present regime of industry and finance had upon

the reality of democratic ends and methods,” and that he had “nothing to re-

tract,” he went on to say that the Marxists were wrong in holding that “gov-

ernment in the so-called democratic states is only the organ of a capitalist

class.” Now if this meant—as by then Marxists had supposed—that the state

could not be used by revolutionary socialists, then Dewey was surely correct.

But as I have argued, Marx would have agreed with Dewey here. Yet Dewey

seems to mean more than this:

the effect of constant criticism of governmental action; of more than one politi-

cal party in formulating rival policies; of frequent elections; of the discussion

and public education that attend majority rule, and above all the fact that polit-

ical action is but one factor in the interplay of a number of cultural factors, have

a value that critics of partial democracy have not realized (94).

Though admittedly “partial”, he was now prepared to defend what he took to

be a characteristic American “looseness of cohesion and indefiniteness in di-

rection of action.”

We take for granted the action of a number of diverse factors in producing any

social result. There are temporary waves of insistence upon this and that partic-

ular measure and aim. But there is enough democracy so that in time any onetendency gets averaged up in interplay with other tendencies. An average pres-

ents qualities that are open to easy criticism. But as compared with the fanati-

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cism generated by monistic ideas when they are put into operation, the averag-

ing of tendencies a movement toward the mean, is an achievement of splendor

(94–95).

But from the fact that what happens in history is the product of complex mul-

tiple factors working in unpredictable ways, it did not follow that American

“pluralist” politics generated some splendid “movement toward the mean,”

that conflicting “interests” somehow get “averaged up,” that “the equilibrium

in social affairs” was desirable. Indeed, how “pluralist” could a politics be

when, as he had argued in 1927, the public was lost? Finally, it was true that

“political action is but one factor,” but does not this mean, as in 1929 he also

had seen, that in a capitalist society, this left a free hand for “financial and in-

dustrial power, corporately organized”?

Dewey could accept “the criticism that much of our political democracy is

more formal than substantial, provided,” he now insisted, “it is placed in con-trast with totalitarian political control.” To be sure, one does not need a very

good society to compare well with Nazism and Stalinism. One might argue

here that the despair of politics, so characteristic of our day, had by then in-

fected Dewey and that, like Sidney Hook and later pragmatists, he was now

prepared to celebrate bourgeois democracy. But this would be most unfair to

Dewey.

Not only was he unflinching in his rejection of the “new kind of Stoicism”

which had gripped post-war Europe, but he was unflinching in his recogni-

tion of the profoundly troubled situation and in his commitment to the idea

that things could be made better—a great deal better. As Lothstein writes:

The central point for Dewey was that while suffering and setback suffused thetotal human endeavor, it was neither daemonic or unremitting. Rather suffering

and celebration . . . were experimental correlatives, happiness supervening upon

their conjoint and dialectical origination. Although nested in a radically contin-

gent and indeterminate world, our situation, Dewey argued, was not that of Sisy-

phus or Job, our fate sealed by divine fiat or historical obsolescence. He saw us

instead as freewheeling sculptors of meaning in a world bereft of ultimate guar-

antees, but open to experimental improvement.22

Nor, despite his unflinching optimism, was it the case that Marx had ever-ex-

pected miracles. There are, he once remarked, “no ready-made utopias to in-

troduce par decret du people, and if so, then surely there were none to be in-

stituted by “a vanguard party” wreaking death in the name of the people. If

we are to be emancipated, we need “to work out our own emancipation” and“to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, trans-

forming circumstances and [people].”


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This returns us to the question of “foundations.” Whatever his blind spots,

Dewey’s was a politics that needed no foundations. While Marxists did finda foundation for politics in an eschatological philosophy of history, I have ar-

gued that this is much less clear as regards Marx. But, however that may be,

what is now needed, it seems to me, is to renew the possibilities of democratic

politics which acknowledges the insights of Marx but yet strips Marxism of

the idea that history is on the side of emancipation. We need, that is, to com-

bine the best in Marx and Dewey.

The public, lost and eclipsed, has not been found. For those of us living in

a democratic state, finding it is the primary imperative. But how to do this?

Dewey’s answer might go as follows: Try, by taking advantage of any oppor-

tunity that presents itself, to bring. into existence publics; try to give direct

experience and educative quality by informing it; try to create from our at-

omized relations incipient communities which can be fostered and enlarged,

and try to do this by identifying common goods which can call for active sup-

port and participation. Of course, this is not to say much, even if, as I think,

it is true and important. Still, armed with a Marxist understanding of what is

happening to us and why, it may be possible to take advantage of opportuni-

ties and to try, as Dewey offered, to build some incipient but progressively

growing democratic publics.

NOTES

1. Cf. Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace, The Functions and Limits of Political

Theory, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. Jacobson’s book is perhaps

the most systematic effort to examine the implications of a foundation-less politics,but his moral is equivocal. See my review, “The Crisis of Contemporary Political

Theory,” Interpretation, 9 (September 1981). The texts quoted are from Arendt, as

quoted by Jacobson, Chapter V, passim.

2. An anti-foundationalist politics need not reflect despair. Rorty suggests a

version when he writes that “we should be more willing than we are to celebrate

bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far, while regretting that

it is irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the population of the planet”

(“Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, Min-

neapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 210). But of course, ideological

certitude is an obvious feature of those American policies which, in the pursuit of

triumph in what can only be called a Holy War, are as limitless in their means as

any which Orwell, Camus or Arendt condemned. Indeed, “bourgeois capitalist so-

ciety” is not “irrelevant” to most of the problems of most of the population of theplanet exactly because it is a large part of the problem of these peoples—whether

the societies are capitalist “miracles”, e.g., Korea, or “socialist” disasters, e.g.,

Nicaragua.

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3. An excellent contextual reading of Marx’s politics is Alan Gilbert’s Marx’s

Politics: Communists and Citizens, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press.

Gilbert, following a path marked by Michael Harrington (in his Socialism, New York:

Bantam, 1973), shows that Marx persistently altered his political strategies in the light

of experience and that he was no economic determinist, inflexibly committed to pat

formulas—unlike most of his later epigones. Paul Thomas’ Karl Marx and the Anar-

chists (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) is an indispensable account of

Marx’s relations, ideologically and politically, to nineteenth-century anarchism. See

also his “Alienated Politics,” in Terence Ball et al (eds.), After Marx, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1984. Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia (Boston, Beacon,

1949) remains valuable. Barry Hindess offers a crisp account of the critical debates

between Lenin, Kautsky, and Bernstein. Unfortunately, he does not discuss Rosa Lux-

emburg, who was perhaps closest to Marx on the critical issues. See “Marxism and

Political Democracy,” in Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy, London,

Lawrence and Wishart, 1980. On Luxemburg, see Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa

Luxemburg, London, NLB, 1976.4. This is not to say that there are not difficulties and ambiguities in Marx’s writ-

ings on the critical issues. An excellent treatment is Frederic L. Bender, “The Ambi-

guities of Marx’s Concepts of ‘Proletarian Dictatorship’ and ‘Transition to Commu-

nism’,” History of Political Thought, II (November, 1981). See also, Harrington:

54–60; Gilbert, Chapter VIII.

5. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in On the Paris Commune, Moscow,

Progress, 1971: 97. As Bender points out, Engels confirmed that for them, the Com-

mune was a new type of polity. In an 1875 letter to Bebel, Engels wrote: “The whole

talk about the state should be dropped [from our party’s statements] especially since

the Commune . . . was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word [because it

was a state in-the-process of dissolving] . . . We would therefore propose to replace

state everywhere by Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well

convey the meaning of the French word ‘commune’“ (cited by Bender: 549).6. For an extended development of these ideas in the American Confederation pe-

riod, see my War and Democracy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, Part V, and “The

Foreclosure of Democracy in America,” History of Political Thought, Vol. 9, (Spring,

1988).

7. Of course, insofar as he ignored the very real dangers of usurpation of power

and violation of individual rights, Marx was, as Bender notes, to this extent “respon-

sible” for later vanguard interpretations.

8. Harrington, Thomas and Gilbert each provides ample evidence on this critical

point.

9. See M. Levin, “Marx and Working-Class Consciousness,” History of Political

Thought, I (Autumn, 1980).

10. Cf. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Develop-

ment of the Great Schism, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard, 1955 and my War and Democ-racy, Chapters 11 and 12.

11. See F. Claudin, “Democracy and Dictatorship in Lenin and Kautsky,” New Left

Review, 107 (Nov./Dec. 1977).


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12. This is hardly the place to survey the literature on Lenin and Leninism. My

views are influenced by Roy Medvedev, Leninism and Western Socialism, London,

NLB, 1981; Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, New York,

Knopf, 1974, Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York: Vintage, 1970). See

also my War and Democracy, Chapter 11.

13. Compare, of course, Marx and Engels: “National differences and antagonisms

between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the developments of

the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the

mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto” (Communist

Manifesto, in McClellan: 235).

14. The most extensive.treatment of Dewey as a “vestibular” anarchist, “in the

American grain,” is Arthur Lothstein’s excellent ‘From Privacy to Praxis: The Case

for John Dewey as a Radical American Philosopher’, PhD Dissertation, NYU, 1979.

See also his ‘Salving From the Dross: John Dewey’s AnarchoCommunalism’, The

Philosophical Forum, 10 (Fall, 1978).

15. Hindess argues that the series of critical debates between Kautsky, Lenin andBernstein, from 1891 to World War I, are “variations on a single theme”, viz., where

to locate the boundaries “for non-economic, non-class determinants of political life

and stop it from getting out of hand” (37). Thus, while none of these writers was sim-

ply class-reductionist and while even Bernstein does not break completely with the

conception that the economy is ultimately determining, they differ enormously on

what and how much of what is political is not determined by the economy. But on

Hindess’ view, the debate between them is irresolvable because “there is no one gen-

eral mechanism of connection between politics and the economy that is characteristic

of capitalism as such—or for that matter, of particular historical phases of its devel-

opment” (41). In other words, as in Marx’ own political practice, political questions

must always be posed concretely, considering the particular details of the particular

society under consideration. A “revisionist” politics becomes plausible, then, at the

point where, in the liberal-democratic state, socialism is no longer primarily a classissue.

16. The phrase “historical materialism” is not used by Marx at all. Engels first em-

ployed the term “materialist conception of history” in a review of Marx Contribution

to the Critique of Political Economy that has the famous Preface that became the au-

thority for Second International versions of “historical materialism.” For a recent de-

fense of this view, see G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, New

York, Oxford University Press and the critique by Andrew Levine and Eric Olin

Wright, ‘Rationality and the Class Struggle’, New Left Review, 123 (Sept./Oct., 1980).

17. Liberalism and Social Action: 81. In Individualism Old and New, Dewey had

chastized Marx for reasoning “too much from psychological economic premises” and

depending “too little upon technological causes” (102).

18. See Phillip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay and Derek Sayer, Socialist Construction

and Marxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique, New York, Monthly Review, 1978;Marc Rakovski, Towards an East European Marxism, London, Allison and Busby,

1978.

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19. The expression is C. Wright Mills’. Mills made a similar critique of Dewey in

his Sociology and Pragmatism, New York, Oxford, 1966.

20. See Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” “Who Might Make a New Party?”

and “Politics for a New Party,” New Republic, Vol. 66 (1931); “The Future of Radi-

cal Political Action’, Nation, Vol. 136 (1933); ‘The Imperative Need for a New Rad-

ical Party.” Commonsense, II (1933). For a general account of the Socialist Party and

its relation to the Dewey-led League for Independent Political Action, see Frank A.

Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930’s, Bloomington, Indi-

ana University Press, 1974, esp. Chapter V.

21. See my A Realist Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2006.

22. Arthur Lothstein, “From Privacy to Praxis,” p. 80. Lothstein points out that the

criticism of “a new kind of Stoicism,” was made a month after Dewey’s eighty-eighth

birthday, in 1947. Dewey argued that on this view, “existence reduces pretty well to

what the individual can make out of it on his own hook,” and added, “I think they are

reactions of people who are scared and have not the guts to face life” ( ibid., p. 60f.,quoting from a letter to William Daniels, “Letters of John Dewey to Robert V.

Daniels, 1946–50,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XX October-December, 1959.


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237

The problem of justice continues to be a topic of lively debate. The continu-

ing struggle over civil rights, our anguish over the war in Iraq and the so-

called “war” on terror, our continuing unease over the economy, immigration

and the environment, skepticism regarding the system of criminal justice, and

doubts about our educational institutions identify the main historical forces

and problems which underlie the current discussion. The symptoms and is-

sues cover a very wide range: attacks on affirmative action, death penalty

legislation and attacks on the rights of the accused, profoundly exacerbated

by the “war” on terror, and, propelled by free market ideology, tax revolt and

cutbacks in education and social services.

At the level of social theory, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, published

in 1971, generated a veritable industry. His difficult and highly praised bookseems to have arrived at exactly the right time, perhaps because it offered a

powerful statement and defense of what was probably mainstream liberal

thinking on justice. Rawls’s theory is individualistic, but his recognition of

“the least advantaged,” coupled with his attention to what he called, “pure

procedural justice,” seemed to confirm our most basic intuitions about justice.

To be sure, there were immediate criticisms of some of the more vulnerable

arguments, but these received a greater response from the right than from the

left. Indeed, Robert Nozick’s critical treatment in his 1974 Anarchy, State and

Utopia gave him a cover of the popular and liberal New York Times Magazine.

Not only was the presence there of a philosopher significant and unusual; but

he was there heralded as the most articulate of the new spokesmen of conser-

vative, individualistic thinking on justice. Indeed, as regards the current stateof opinion, Nozick, seems to have conquered Rawls’s version of “New Deal”

Liberalism.

Chapter Ten

John Deweyand the Problem of Justice

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In this context, it may be useful to consider the writings of John Dewey,

America’s foremost social philosopher. And in this context, if one surveys thevoluminous writings of Dewey, writings which span over seven decades un-

til his death in 1952, the first thing that one notices is the relative inattention

paid by Dewey to the problem of justice. Altogether, there are perhaps not

more than a dozen pages of sustained discussions devoted explicitly to the

topic. These discussions are insightful and important, little gems, and in what

follows, it will be a pleasure to appeal to them. But the first task, really the

main task of this presentation, is to try to explain this apparent imbalance in

Dewey’s attention.

Dewey’s lack of discussion of the theory and problems of justice is not to

be explained by a failure to see problems, nor by an unwillingness to deal

with them at the theoretical or practical level. Indeed, the two most sub-

stantial discussions of justice were written during two periods of acute crisis

in our economy, during the 1890s and again, in 1932. Similarly, Dewey’s ac-

tive involvement in a host of public matters of social and political nature are

too well known to recite here. Several of these, e.g., the trial of Sacco and

Vanzetti, raised serious questions of justice.1 There are, I believe, two sets of

reasons that do explain this imbalance. They are important and give us insight

into both our problems and Dewey’s unique strengths as a social philosopher.

One set of reasons specifically regards this stance. As a social philoso-

pher, Dewey was a writer who aimed not to write a social philosophy—a

doctrine— but who aimed rather to show how we must try to seek solution of

our social problems. The other set regards the very idea of justice. It seems to

me that Dewey, for various reasons to be detailed, sought to displace justice

as the central concept of social philosophy. However, for these same reasons,

he found himself using the term less and less, until ultimately he abandonedit altogether. These two sets of reasons are definitely related, but it may nev-

ertheless be desirable to treat them more or less separately, taking the idea of

justice first.

TWO CONCEPTS OF JUSTICE

It is possible to show that there are two dominating conceptions of justice in

Western Civilization. The first had its home and only full articulation in the

ancient Greek polis.2 Plato and Aristotle, of course, develop it with sophisti-

cation and vigor. The other concept of justice was also first formulated in the

ancient Greek polis, in Periclean Athens. It is associated with the names of Democritus and Protagoras. But this idea of justice did not come into its own

until the modern period, with Hobbes and Locke, Kant, Hume, and 19th-

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century liberal philosophy. We should call it the liberal concept of justice. It

remains the dominating concept in the West, and Rawls and his more conser-vative critics, despite differences, stand in this tradition.

The liberal concept of justice favors atomistic metaphors and voluntary re-

lations, for example, the contract; it is conventionalistic, arguing that justice

and political society are “artifacts” deliberately and rationally constructed; it

is legalistic, emphasizing formal and procedural justice; it employs market

notions of distributive justice, presupposes scarcity and finally, it is “harsh

and hard.” As Hume put it, justice is the “mean virtue.”

By contrast, the Platonic—Aristotelian notion of justice favors organic

metaphors and conceive of human relations and political society as “natural;”

it presupposes natural inequalities, emphasizes morality instead of law, and

thinks of justice very widely. As Aristotle said, it is “the whole of virtue.”

While this is not the place to develop this radical contrast, an illustration of

each concept may be helpful if only to fix our ideas.

Plato’s Republic aimed to answer the question: What is justice? For him, it

will be remembered, justice is a condition of the soul, a “psychic harmony,”

a prerequisite of just acts and, crucially, of well being and happiness (eudai-

monia) itself. Parallel with this analysis, justice is a condition of the polis that

is itself thought of as an organic unity. Each element, “class” or person, has a

task (ergon) which, when performed well, contributes to the well being of the

totality. The four virtues, Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice are each

defined as functions of the social and psychic unities of society and self.

At the very opposite pole is Thomas Hobbes. Where men are in “the natu-

ral condition,” for Hobbes, there is neither justice nor injustice. The consen-

sually introduced mechanism of impersonal law that constitutes political so-

ciety also constitutes the very possibility of justice. Once done, natural equityand justice is replaced by one principle, “performance of the convenant.” The

whole apparatus of customary rights and privileges is similarly reduced: “To

each according to the agreements he has made.”

To be sure, Hobbes’s theory was too extreme, too tough-minded. And no

doubt, subsequent versions of “contract’“ theory from Locke to Rawls re-

sponded with corrections and additions. Nevertheless, there is a clearly iden-

tifiable tradition that must be sharply separated from the earlier one.

Where then does Dewey stand as regards these two concepts and traditions

of justice? In the last analysis, Dewey could not accept either, even if he did

pull strongly toward the Greek.

In his Syllabus of 1884, Dewey noted “in many respects, the discussions

of virtue in Plato and Aristotle are still unequaled.” Indeed, following them,if in his own novel fashion, he argued that that “courage, temperance and

wisdom denote simply phases of every moral act” and that “the name is

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given according to the phase which, in a given case, happens to be domi-

nant.” “Justice, then,” argues Dewey,

is the name for the deed in its entirety. . . . It is not another virtue, it is the sys-

tem of virtue, the organized doing: whose organic members are wisdom, the will

to know; courage, the impulse to reach; control, the acquired power to do. (EW,

Vol. 4: 363, 357).

As this text shows, Dewey is very, very Greek in holding that justice is the

virtue of a unity “organically” related, even if at the same time, Dewey re-

jected the “faculty” psychology which is generally imputed to Greek moral

philosophy. He is Greek, too, in couching virtue in terms of self-development

and self-realization, even if for him in contrast to the Greeks, the underlying

notion of human nature is open, dynamic, and changing; not closed, static,

and fixed.3 Dewey and the Greeks agreed that persons were doers, exerting,developing and enjoying human powers and capacities and that the concern

for “realization” of these powers should be at the center of a moral and social

philosophy.4 But if so, then “justice” could not be reduced to “obedience to

law” or to “just desert.” His text continues:

. . . the current distinction between justice as penal, and justice as concrete

recognition of positive merit by the share awarded an agent . . . is far too rigid.

. . . Unconsciously there is smuggled in the assumption that worth is static; that

what a man has done is somehow complete in itself, and serves to indicate his

merit, and therefore, the way he should be treated. Service is taken as some thing

rendered, not as a function . . . (EW: Vol. 4: 359).

The idea that “worth” is static and that “deserts” and “entitlements” are likecommodities, exchangeable as equivalents for “things” exactly characterizes

the market conception of justice, the dominant mode of modern thinking on

the subject. Dewey struggles in this text, as in others, to drive home the lim-

iting and incomplete nature of this framework for justice. He writes:

When it was said that the ordinary concept of desert concealed a momentous as-

sumption, it was meant that the whole dualism of justice and love is involved.

If justice be conceived as mere return to an individual of what he has done, if

his deed, in other words, be separated from his vital, developing self, and if,

therefore, the ‘equivalent return’ ignore the profound and persistent presence of

self-hood in the deed, then it is true that justice is narrow in its sphere, harsh in

form, requiring to be supplemented by another virtue of larger outlook and freer

play—Grace. But if justice be the returning to a man of the equivalent of hisdeed, and if, in truth, the sole thing which equates the deed is self, then quite

otherwise. Love is justice brought to self-consciousness; justice with a full, in-

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stead of a partial standard of value; justice with a dynamic, instead of a static,

scale of equivalency (361).

Our “ordinary” sense of justice is narrow, is harsh. Recognizing, though am-

bivalently and sometimes incoherently, that persons are dynamic selves relat-

ing humanly to one another and to the world, we think of justice as requiring

supplementation, by mercy, by kindness, by love. But surely that misleads as

well. It is not either justice or love. It is not justice or charity—from caritas,

“love.” This accepts the dualism and allows us to paste over injustice with

gratuities. But how to overcome this dualism? Dewey had it right: Once we

reject the idea that “deeds” are “things” to be exchanged for equivalents, we

undermine the dualism, for then, it is possible to link the deed with the self.

But Dewey remains contaminated by the market theory of justice. Signifi-

cantly, he puts the matter conditionally: if justice be the returning to a person

of the equivalent of his deed. And he lets us muse as to whether he wouldhave preferred to deny the hypothesis altogether. But if we are to think of jus-

tice in these terms, and as moderns, it is hard to see how to do otherwise, then

for Dewey, at least at this point, let us try not to disconnect the deed from the

vital, changing self.

Dewey will return to these themes just twice more, in the Ethics written col-

laboratively with James Tufts, published originally in 1908 and then in substan-

tial revision in 1932. As in the earlier Syllabus, Dewey focuses on the notion that

justice is “hard” and “harsh” and he develops another dimension of this attitude.

Here, he argues that it comes from identifying justice “with the working of some

fixed and abstract law . . .as if man was made for law, not law for man” (MW:

Vol. 5: 373). Although pursuing this idea systematically would take us directly

into Dewey’s problem-centered and inquiry-oriented style of social philosophy,we should pause here if only briefly to emphasize the pervasiveness of the no-

tion, as it bears on the problem of justice.

Dewey clearly saw that alongside the market conceptualization of justice

was another that derived ultimately from Kant. It put heavy emphasis on duty

and obligation and its most austere and rigorous form is captured by the Latin,

Fiat justitia, ruat coelum, “let justice be done, let the heavens fall.” Dewey

took this phrase as the title for a brief, popular essay written for the New Re-

public in 1971. Rejecting the legalism and formalism which so typically char-

acterizes “moral” discussions of justice, whether of war and international re-

lations, as in this case, or of race or sex, Dewey identified such ethics as

“resolutely irrelevant to the circumstances of action and the conditions of

life” (1929: 592). In another and earlier essay, entitled “Nature and Reason inLaw” (1914), Dewey pregnantly characterized “the chief working difference

between moral philosophies in their application to law.” It was, he argued,


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that “some of them seek for an antecedent principle by which to decide; while

others recommend the consideration of the specific consequences that flowfrom treating a specific situation this way or that, using the antecedent mate-

rials and rules as guides of intellectual analysis but not as norms of deci-

sion”(795). This text, we might note here, could well be the point of depar-

ture for an extended analysis of the current debate over affirmative action

programs as, of course, it compresses an entire potential legal philosophy.

For Dewey, this methodological inversion explained in part the limiting

and narrowing conception of justice. And in the 1908 discussion, Dewey

again calls, optimistically, for “the transformation of the conception of justice

so that it joins hands with love and sympathy” (MW: Vol. 5: 373–74).

But one can hardly be heartened by these remarks. The problem seems in-

escapable. The liberal notion of justice was liberating insofar as it made men

indiscriminately subject to impersonal law and insofar as it broke the basis of

“privilege” based on hereditary status, but Dewey saw early on that the lib-

eral notion was far too narrow, too rigid. So he struggled to enlarge it, to rem-

edy its partiality, to supplement it. And if we grant that love and sympathy are

the requisite supplementations, one may legitimately wonder how good a

merely just society or merely just person would be? For the Greek, this could

not be a question. With their notion of justice, the just man and the just soci-

ety had to be good. And, of course, if love and sympathy are the requisite sup-

plementations to our “ordinary” sense of justice, then one may legitimately

wonder how we are to proceed. Indeed, the deeper Dewey looked into the

problems and issues of liberal society, the more disjointed became the effort

to transform and widen liberal justice.

LIBERAL SOCIETY AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

Dewey was never sanguine regarding the mechanisms of distribution in lib-

eral society. Still less was he mystified by the rhetoric of the current theories.

This may be brought out by considering Tufts’s contribution to the collabora-

tive 1908 edition of their Ethics. Dewey must surely have endorsed the perti-

nent pages. Indeed, in the revision of 1932, it seems that Dewey himself

wrote the crucial Chapter 21 that restated the issues and reaffirmed their ear-

lier stance. We may look first at the earlier version, noting well the early date

of the text.

Characteristically, the locus of the critique is “individualism.” They begin

by arguing that if we take a purely “formal” view and make “formal freedomof contract the only criterion, then any price is fair which both parties agree

to” (MW, Vol. 5: 475). This position, characteristic of Hobbes, and of classi-

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cal and neoclassical political economy, is substantially the position argued for

by Nozick in the recent work cited earlier. Although the argument cannot bedeveloped here, Nozick’s “entitlement” theory, while very much enriched by

detail and the sophistication of modern decision theory, is, I would argue,

subject quite precisely to Tufts’s criticism. It is this: If the exchange is to be

fair, the parties to the bargain must be equal. “But in a large part of the ex-

changes of business and services, the two parties are not equal.”5 In other

terms, where some must accept the conditions of the contract, “formal free-

dom of contract” is not a sufficient condition. In his 1932 statement of this

theory, Dewey characterizes it even more economically. Its motto is to each

“what he can get through his ability, his shrewdness, his advantageous eco-

nomic position due to inherited wealth and every other factor that adds to his

bargaining power . . .” Dewey rightly notes that “this is the existing method

under capitalism” (Dewey and Tufts, 1912: 454), as today, owners of baseball

teams, school boards, and the AMA tend to forget.

The “take-advantage-of-your-bargaining-power” theory of justice has an-

other, less rude, version. It is characterized by Dewey by the motto: “To each

what he earns.” This theory, plausible enough on its face, due perhaps to the

multitude of difficulties concealed in the notion of “earn,” does not, argues

Dewey, characterize capitalist distribution. But it must be rejected in any

case, since it cannot be realized. It cannot be realized because production is

social. The point is important but often misunderstood.

In “producing”—toasters, services, skills, or knowledge—individuals em-

ploy knowledge, skills, and instruments that are the legacy of previous gen-

erations of workers. Moreover, and characteristically, “products”—including

knowledge—are jointly produced in the more obvious sense that they are

products of many hands and minds. Suppose, then, we take the Gross Na-tional Product to represent the combined social product—an entirely artificial

measure for the “product” we need to measure, but useful perhaps to fix our

ideas. The earning theory of distribution, then (like its sophisticated relative,

modern productivity theory), presupposes that it is possible to divide up the

GNP and assign to each individual exactly what is hers or his. No part of this

is to be shared on grounds that we can’t disentangle our contribution; no part

is a residue earned by past labor and no part is earned by anyone. The prob-

lem here is not simply whether this division is fair, whether each receives a

just share, but whether, indeed, any coherent sense can be given to the idea

that respective contributions to the social product can be so disentangled. For

Dewey, rightly, it was obvious that they could not.6

But this is not the end of the difficulties for the individualistic theories, foras Dewey and Tufts write, they suffer from a serious moral failure. Achieve-

ment and failure, what one does “contribute,” or “earn” is a function of three


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things: heredity, social advantage and the socially produced conditions of

knowledge and environment and, finally, individual effort. It is not a matterof individual effort alone. It is at this juncture that Rawls’s influential theory

departs from traditional individualisms, for with Tufts and Dewey, Rawls

agrees that accidents of birth—the good fortune to be born rich and hand-

some—are not in themselves morally relevant. And indeed, if so, then one can

ask, as does Dewey and Tufts, “If all men are accounted equal in the State,

why not in wealth?” (Dewey and Tufts, 1932: 359).

It is perhaps here that the contrast in the orientation of Dewey and of Rawls

is most graphic and where, at the same time, Dewey reveals both his greatest

strength as a social philosopher and perhaps, as well, his greatest weakness.

Consider Rawls’s response first. For Rawls, the family is the key problem

and, short of restructuring it, natural talents and social advantages will in-

evitably be rewarded. I think that it can easily be shown that Rawls gives up

too quickly here. Indeed, as we suggest, Dewey and Tufts have a more en-

couraging response. But Rawls’s originality begins at exactly this point, for

his famous “difference principle” is meant precisely to justify inequalities

that, however they come about, had best not be removed. His argument is

quite straightforward. An egalitarian distribution would be inefficient but an

efficient system need not be just. It would be just, however, if social and eco-

nomic inequalities were arranged so that there was “fair equality of opportu-

nity” and, crucially, so that the “least advantaged” were better off than they

otherwise would have been. If Rawls is right, something looking very much

like our system is, in his terms, “nearly just.” To be sure, we have some way

to go in achieving “fair equality of opportunity”—notice that this still rewards

natural ability and that, for Rawls, the family remains (and will remain) a cru-

cial limitation even on this. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that, for Rawls, weare doing perhaps as well as can be expected.

Tufts and Dewey take an entirely different tack. After evaluating the extant

theories, they offer, instead of their own theory, what they call “a working

program.” The gist of it is contained in a short paragraph:

A man’s power is due (I) to physical heredity; (2) to social heredity . . . (3) to

his own efforts. Individualism may properly claim this third factor. It is just

to treat men unequally so far as their efforts are unequal. It is socially desirable

to give as much incentive as possible to the full development of everyone’s pow-

ers. But this very same reason demands that in the first two respects we treat

men as equally as possible (490).

This working program is radical since, ultimately, it means that no unequalbenefits should accrue to persons exclusively on the basis of their natural tal-

ents or on the basis of socially derived advantages. But it is a “working pro-

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gram” in the sense that it leaves entirely open the means by which the ideal

is to be achieved. It does not demand radical revolution in order to achieve aradical restructuring of society, even if the realization of the ideal would in-

volve a radical restructuring of society. And it does not insist on any particu-

lar ameliorative reforms, even if there are steps that could and should be

taken. And it is in this that Dewey’s greatest strength and weakness may be

revealed. For it is not at all easy to judge whether or not Dewey saw how rad-

ical the ideal was or how radical would the changes have to be to bring the

ideal into existence. In both the 1908 and the 1932 discussions, education

characteristically is emphasized as means. But “conditions of food, labor and

housing” and “the importance of private property” are also identified. In the

later discussion, Dewey responded passionately to the notion that because per

capita income had increased greatly—shades of Rawls!—it was “foolish” to

raise the question of distribution. Indeed, in direct contrast to Rawls, he ar-

gued that wealth, not income is the crucial variable: “The individuals or cor-

porations that have great wealth undertake great enterprises. They control for

better or worse the wages and living conditions of great numbers”(454).7

These same sorts of criticisms are found in many of Dewey’s writings and

demonstrate that he was keenly aware of the bearing of the system of private

property not only on the problem of justice, but on the problem of freedom

and democracy as well.8 Yet, many commentators have found grounds for ar-

guing that Dewey was naive in having unwarranted hopes for the efficacy of

education even as an ameliorative factor. This is probably so.9

The backlash on affirmative action and ERA, the decisive, if inevitable

failures of poverty programs and efforts to guarantee equal education for all,

would indeed have been disheartening to Dewey. And as disheartening, per-

haps, is the renewed enthusiasm for what are really quite worn out individu-alistic theories of justice. His own theory could be stated in a sentence, first

written in 1891: “What is due the self is that it be treated as self” (Dewey and

Tufts, 1932:35). In the last analysis, Dewey preferred working programs over

theories. Indeed, this takes us to the final part of our account.

SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

It is another of the commonplaces of commentators on John Dewey’s thought

that he was preoccupied with method, indeed sometimes to the extent that con-

tent altogether seemed to dissolve.10 This is not the place to examine all the dif-

ficult questions which attend this criticism, but as regards our particular prob-lem, the problem of justice, I think that it must be said that Dewey’s social

philosophy does represent a departure from traditional social philosophies and


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that this shift is perhaps best construed as an orientation which displaced the

problem of justice as a substantive theoretical problem and replaced it with anorientation which emphasized problems and ideas that connected more directly

to method and to practice.

This alternative point of departure in Dewey’s thought may be best ex-

pressed in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) although many texts confirm

the idea. Identifying three alternative social philosophies, the individualistic,

the socialist, and the organic, Dewey argued that all “suffer from a common

defect.”

They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific sit-

uations are to be brought. . . . They are general answers supposed to have uni-

versal meaning that covers and dominates all particulars. Hence, they do not as-

sist inquiry. They close it. They are not instrumentalities to be employed and

tested in clarifying concrete social difficulties. . . . The social philosopher,dwelling in the region of his concepts, solves problems by showing relationships

of ideas, instead of by helping men solve problems in the concrete. . . .”(Dewey,

1948: 188, 192).

This is the touchstone idea of Dewey’s emphasis on “inquiry,” “experi-

mentalism,” and “instrumentalism.” Within Dewey’s frame, current debate on

justice would suffer from the same defects of abstraction, from the same ir-

relevance to the actual conditions of education, of work, and of association,

from the same aristocratic detachment that seems presupposed by the idea

that “philosophers” can solve human problems.

Dewey’s critics on the left are also correct, however, in judging that his

experimentalist and method-centered attitude left him vulnerable to two

alternative—and at bottom inconsistent—sorts of readings.On the one hand, Dewey’s efforts to shift the focus of social philosophy

away from “doctrine” led some to see Dewey as advocating an engineering

and scientistic conception of social philosophy and inquiry. This view, in-

spired by Dewey’s repeated assertion that social questions could be treated

“scientifically” and “experimentally,” meant for those readers something like

the sort of practice which presumably goes in “laboratories” manned by per-

sons in white coats and constrained by canons of “efficiency” and “positive”

control. On this view—technocratic and still fashionable—a new breed of

“social scientists” would provide that “expert” knowledge that would speed-

ily solve concrete social problems. (See the account of Lippman, Chapter 7.)

In the last analysis, this reading cannot be sustained, even if Dewey did

give ample room for misconstrual. Perhaps his willingness and openness toincorporate and encourage ideas that seemed congenial to him further con-

fused matters. One might mention here his long association with A.F. Bent-

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ley and his attraction in the late 1920s to the “operationist” views of P.W.

Bridgman.On the other hand, it led others to see Dewey as committed to a kind of un-

principled reformism, to a defense of patchwork suggestions as responses to

the outcropping of crisis. As argued in Chapter 9 above, Dewey was reformist

in his attitude, rejecting consistently the idea that societies could be intelli-

gently transformed by radical and revolutionary programs. His approach was

“piecemeal,” a call to deal amelioratively with concrete and particular prob-

lems. Thus, for him, Marxism was “doctrinaire” in offering “sweeping gen-

eralizations” and “general solutions” to “general problems.” Dewey was

surely sensitive to the problem of the “unintended consequences” of radical

change and to the ease with which progressive movements become appropri-

ated and distorted. But it must be said as well that while his ideals were rad-

ical, as we already noted, his appreciation of obstacles preventing their real-

ization was probably naive. Nevertheless, his reformism was hardly

unprincipled and his shift in focus was both sound and important. Indeed, I

believe that there is much to be learned from him on this score.

For Dewey, the problem of justice, as the problems of freedom and de-

mocracy, cannot be “solved” by “experts” or by philosophers. They could

only be solved—if that is still the right word—by people in the everyday

world in their doings and sufferings. Dewey seems to have grasped this and

that is why, in the last analysis, the “content” of his social philosophy seems

so thin and, finally, so painfully obvious. There are, it seems to me, but two

items in it: First, there is the idea that “the level of action fixed by embodied

intelligence is always the important thing”(Dewey, 1954:166), and second,

the idea that “democracy is a way of life, individual and social.” These cru-

cially related ideas defined the limits of social philosophy. Movement in thedirection of their realization was movement toward an ideal in the only sense

of ideal that Dewey allowed—”the tendency and movement of some thing

which exists carried to his final limit” (148). As with justice, they identified

a “working program” and, crucially, a program that could be implemented

only by people in their individual and collective doings and sufferings.

This did not mean, for Dewey, that philosophy had nothing to do. Indeed,

there was a great deal to be said about both ideals and about their mode of re-

alization. The whole of Dewey’s extensive writings on methods of inquiry

and on education, both in and out of the school, issue in the idea of “action

fixed by embodied intelligence.” As Dewey saw it, the application of “intel-

ligence” to social problems meant not the application of new techniques by

“experts,” however defined, nor did it reduce to the application of an-tecedently derived principles to concrete particular situations. Rather, the

canons had to be generated in inquiry and realized in practice. And this kind


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of social knowledge “does not yet exist” (166). “The only possible solution,”

he wrote, to the problems generated by interdependence require “the perfect-ing of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuine

shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform

desire and effort and thereby direct action” (155). And as this text suggests,

this was both condition and consequence of democracy as a way of life, the

other guiding ideal of Dewey’s social philosophy. Accordingly, the whole of

his writings on democracy, community, freedom, and culture bear on this sec-

ond theme. Keeping this in mind allows us, finally, to grasp the full force of

this wonderful text: “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device

for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, culti-

vated by philosophers, for dealing with the problem of men” (McDermott,

1973: 95).

If it is philosophers who have the task of articulating and “cultivating”

these methods, it is people themselves who must employ them. Dewey was

insufficiently radical regarding the difficulties standing in the way of trans-

forming “The Great Society” into “The Great Community,” but he never fell

victim to pat solutions. He saw that we never begin anew, from scratch, from

nothing. We either1 sustain the inherited forms or we transform them, pur-

posefully and intelligently, whimsically and stupidly, coercively or coopera-

tively. Dewey put his faith in the possibility that action could be conjoint, pur-

poseful, and intelligent. He put the matter crisply in his 1919/20 lectures in

China. Responding to the question, “Where should we start in reforming our

society?” Dewey answered:

. . . we must start by reforming the component institutions of the society. Fami-

lies, schools, local governments, the central government—all these must be re-formed, but they must be reformed by the people who constitute them, working

as individuals—in collaboration with other individuals, each accepting his own

responsibility. . . . Social progress is neither an accident nor a miracle; it is the

sum of efforts made by individuals whose actions are guided by intelligence

(Dewey, 1973: 62–63).

But he also saw, as John J. McDermott has written, that if “the responsibility

is ours and ours alone,” the transformation of the processes and forms of liv-

ing is, at the same time, “laced with chance” (McDermott, 1973: xxi).

NOTES

1. See George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale, IL:

Southern Illinois Press, 1973): 234.

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2. See my “Two Concepts of Justice,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 4 (1977):

99–121.

3. Cf. here, of course, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt,

1922).

4. C.B. Macpherson has argued that J.S. Mill tried to incorporate this fundamen-

tal feature of Greek Idealism into his liberalism, though the result was less than satis-

factory. See his Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

5. Dewey gives the same argument against “classical individualism and free en-

terprise” in his lectures in China. See John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919–1920, ed-

ited and translated from the Chinese by Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen Ou (Hon-

olulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973): 113.

6. It may be noted here that modern price theory employs the fiction that marginal

products are so divisible. This makes for quite a respectable mathematical theory, use-

ful as a praxiology. But it doesn’t follow that a theory of justice that assumes the fic-

tion is intelligible. In this regard, Nozick’s criticism of Rawls is interesting. Rawls

sees, if not clearly, that “social cooperation” does make a difference. By assuming thatmarginal products can be “disentangled,” Nozick argues that Rawls’s account of the

“problem” created by social cooperation is mistaken. Nozick does show, however,

that Rawls’s individualism does not square with his view of “social

7. Rawls obliterates the distinction between income and wealth by inattention. He

persistently refers to “income and wealth” but never addresses the difference. Ac-

cordingly, for him it would seem to be unimportant.

8. See, for example, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press,

1954): 101–2, 107; “Philosophies of Freedom,” in R.J. Bernstein, ed., On Experience,

Nature and Freedom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960): 271; Liberalism and Social

Action, excerpted in John J. McDermott, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey (New

York: G.P. Putnams, 1973), two vols.: 648.

9. For example, R.J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1971): 228; C.W. Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York:Oxford University Press, 1964): 333.

10. See, for example, Charles Frankel, “Dewey’s Social Philosophy,” in New Stud-

ies in the Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. S. M. Cahn (Hanover, NH: University Press

of New England, 1977).


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251

One has to be impressed by the fact that America’s premier University con-

tinues to provide us with people who write “brilliant,” “wise,” “elegant,” “im-

pressive” and “refreshing” books which it needs so desperately. As demo-

cratic theorist Jane Mansbridge put it, Harvard’s Michael Sandel’s

Democracy’s Discontent: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996)

“is bound to change the course of American historiography, political philoso-

phy and legal scholarship.” George Will, not generally thought of as a theo-

rist of democracy, was equally enthusiastic. In his words, “Sandel’s book is a

thinking person’s guide to the current rethinking of the role of government in

America.”

Like Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) that made him a

darling to the minimal government-free marketers who triumphed with Rea-gan and Company, Sandel’s book is aimed at John Rawls’s influential A The-

ory of Justice (1971). It seems well on its way to make him a darling of the

new “republican-communitarians.” I can only hope that some evangelical de-

fender of “soulcraft” does not come to capture the imagination of our deeply

troubled society.

But this gets well ahead of what I want to say. Sandel’s argument is subtle

and deceptive, even if, for me at least, it is a combination of bad philosophy,

bad sociology, bad history and bad politics. I begin with the philosophy.

LIBERAL AND REPUBLICAN FREEDOM

There is a currently fashionable dichotomy between what George Kateb called

“rights-based liberalism” and “American republican-communitarianism.” It is

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clear enough that Rawls and Nozick (along with Flathman, Dworkin, Feinberg,

Gewirth, Sen, and many others) are, despite differences, “rights-based liberals.”The other side is a much less clear bunch and might include any number of di-

verse writers who have criticized liberal philosophy and promoted some version

or other of “community,” including John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Robert Paul

Wolff, Charles Taylor, Roberto Mangiabera Unger, Michael Walzer, Carol

Gould, Hannah Pitkin, Amitai Etzioni, and some others besides. The relation to

democracy of these writers is also very diverse.

Presumably, one of the notable achievements of Sandel is have clarified

this argument, to show us both the limits of “rights-based liberalism” and that

there is a viable alternative well within the American tradition. His main dis-

tinction, accordingly, is between what he calls “the procedural republic”—the

version of liberalism “by which we live” (he offers that the label was sug-

gested by Judith Sklar) and “republican” theory. As regards the procedural re-

public, then:

Its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and reli-

gious views its citizens espouse. Since people disagree about the best way to

live, governments should not affirm in law any particular vision of the good life.

Instead, it should provide a framework of rights that respects persons as free and

independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends. Since this

liberalism asserts the priority of fair procedures over particular ends, the public

life it informs may be called the procedural republic (Sandel, 1996: 4).

This is, of course, a fair statement of both Rawls and Nozick. It is less clear

that it abstracts correctly the prevailing public philosophy, but I pass on that

here. In sharp contrast to “republican theory,” as understood by Sandel, we

should emphasize that neither Rawls nor Nozick had much to say about de-

mocracy. Rawls assumed some form of “representative regime” and (with

Mill) even defended plural voting. While democracy is not even indexed in

Rawls’s book, Nozick surely goes further. After acknowledging that democ-

racy is the idea that “people have a right to a say in the decisions that impor-

tantly affect their lives,” Nozick asserts, remarkably: “After we exclude from

consideration the decisions which others have a right to make and the actions

which would aggress against me, steal from me, and so on, . . . it is not clear

that there are any decisions remaining about which even to raise the question”

(Nozick, 1974: 270).

Both Rawls and Nozick do capture certain strands in the prevailing public

philosophy, but the differences between them are critical—and much of what

might be in this philosophy is not captured in the least. Thus, for example,both positions are certainly too extreme for most Americans. Rawls is too

egalitarian; Nozick is too libertarian. Both Rawls and Nozick should be com-

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plemented for their refreshing reluctance to mostly ignore the critical idea of

democracy. As regards most Americans, it is true to say, I think, that democ-racy is safely understood to be defined by “free” elections (period). Since nei-

ther Rawls nor Nozick reject this idea, their views are safely consistent with

the prevailing public philosophy.

Sandel acknowledges that the prevailing conception of liberal political the-

ory has its roots in Locke, Kant and Mill, but at the same time, he asserts that

it “is a recent arrival, a development of the last fourth or fifty years.” Indeed,

it replaced a rival public philosophy, republican theory. This is characterized

as follows:

Central to republican theory is the idea that liberty depends on sharing in self-

government. This idea is not inconsistent with liberal freedom. Participating in

politics can be one among the ways people choose to pursue their ends. Ac-

cording to republican political theory, however, sharing in self-rule involvessomething more. It means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common

good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community. But to delib-

erate well about the common good requires more than the capacity to choose

one’s ends and to respect others’ rights to do the same. It requires knowledge of

public affairs and also a sense of belonging a concern for the whole, a moral

bond with the community whose fate is at stake. To share in self-rule therefore

requires that citizens possess, or come to acquire certain qualities of character,

or civic virtue (1996: 5–6).

Sandel’s emphasis on “self-rule” makes his version of republican theory

looks like, of course, a version of democracy, but surprisingly absent in this

characterization is any critical sense of what “self-rule” might mean or what

would count as “deliberating” about the common good, or “helping to shape”

the destiny of the political community. His concern, manifestly, is “certain

qualities of character” essential to self-rule.

Indeed, there is nothing in the book that attends to the currently profound

structural limits on “self-rule.” Perhaps the best that he does on this score is

to endorse Tocqueville’s potentially beautiful trivialization of democracy: Lo-

cal attachments enable citizens “to practice the art of government in the small

sphere within [their] reach” (314). Their reach may, of course, be pitiably

small. “Ideally at least, the reach extends as the sphere extends” (314). This

extension is also efficiently discussed: Presumably, “civic capacities first

wakened in neighborhoods and town halls, churches and synagogues, trade

unions and social movements find broader expression” (314). One need not

take a radical stance as regards “self-rule” to wonder about this suggestion.That is, suppose that all decisions of major social importance are made by

either private corporations or governments dominated by two parties who

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fundamentally share a public philosophy? There would be no institutional

means to make even this “broader expression” felt. As long ago as 1925, Wal-ter Lippmann pointed out that “in spite of all that has been said about twee-

dledum and tweedledee,” modern democracy “was purely and simply a mat-

ter of choosing whether to “support the Ins when things are going well, or “to

support the Outs when they seem to be going badly.” (See Chapter 7.)

Moreover, as regards “knowledge of public affairs,” Lippmann saw also—

before television—that public opinion was manufactured, that, to shift the

metaphor, for the ordinary citizen, the problem was “to secure maps on which

their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bo-

hemia.” For Lippmann, even if they were so disposed, ordinary people (in-

cluding representative bodies which he called “a group of blind men”) can-

not get the information they need: “what is happening, why it is happening,

what ought to happen.” We are, as C.W. Mills was later to argue, a mass dom-

inated by mass media. In turn (as everybody knows, but cannot do anything

about), these are dominated by money, both because they need to sell their

products (and ads) and because they are owned by a handful of corporations.

This is, of course, but part of this story.

But if Sandel is not interested in looking at how citizens might effectively

participate in governance, he is deeply interested in looking at the qualities of

character, the civic virtue, which is required if citizens are to be self-ruled. In-

deed, his fundamental (almost exclusive) concern (as with Plato and, more re-

cently George Will), is that, contrary to liberals, government ought not to be

“neutral” (even if it could) and even more, that governments have legitimate

concerns with “soulcraft,” what he elsewhere calls “the formative project.”

His clearest statement of the content of “civic virtue” comes from George

Will. Sandell writes:

Unlike Falwell, who sought America’s salvation in a rebirth of Christian moral-

ity, Will sought to cultivate civic virtue, the “dispositions, habits and mores” on

which free government depends. By virtue he meant “good citizenship, whose

principle components are moderation, social sympathy and willingness to sacri-

fice private desires for public ends” (1996: 310).

Sandel, like Will, Etzioni and many other “communitarians” would seem to

have a theory of society in which problems can be solved by changing the

“morals” of persons. Perhaps it is assumed that until such time that people ac-

quire that “civic virtue” which is the prerequisite of “self-rule,” we need not

worry about either how people are to get the information they need, how to

deconstruct maps with the coastline of Bohemia drawn on them, or how to be-

gin to alter structures so that people can have the power to make decisions

that importantly affect their lives. I return to this in my last section.

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For Sandel, the “formative project” is both inescapable and carries risk

(321). Indeed, “the task of forging a common citizenship among a vast anddisparate people invites more strenuous forms of soulcraft” (319). One has to

be impressed with the ease by which he deflects this “risk.”

We may agree with him that “the civic strand of freedom is not necessar-

ily exclusive or coercive,” that “it can sometimes find democratic, pluralist

expression” (321, my emphases). But first, as liberals have long insisted, the

key virtue in this regard is toleration, reveling in difference, a willingness as

equals to engage disagreement and conflict. Here, as with the question of en-

larging the sphere of self-rule, he seems guided by a faith similar to many of

those who take for granted the structures of global capitalism and defend the

currently fashionable idea of “civil society.” Sandel writes: “Instead of col-

lapsing the space between persons, it fills the space with public institutions

that gather people together in various capacities, that both separate and relate

them” (320). He offers no suggestions on how this might be possible. Nor

since he takes for granted both the modern state and global capitalism, it is

hardly clear what good this would do.

His notion that the state should not be morally neutral as regards “morals”

and “religion” and that it has a responsibility to cultivate “civic virtue” leads

him, inevitably, to some strikingly conservative conclusions. It is in these

concrete cases where we best get the flavor of the high abstraction, “civic

virtue.” He writes, e.g.:

What makes a religious belief worthy of respect is not its mode of acquisition—

whether by choice, revelation, persuasion, or habituation—but its place in a

good life or, from a political point of view, its tendency to promote the habits

and dispositions that make good citizens (1996: 66).

What are these “habits and dispositions”? Uncritical obedience? Undying

commitment and loyalty? And what if believers have a prior obligation to

God or to one of his emissaries? Suppose that such an obligation does not pro-

mote “moderation, social sympathy and a willingness to sacrifice private de-

sires for public ends,” then what? The liberal can insist that such beliefs must

be tolerated, as liberals see, a difficult enough task in itself (321), While there

is no problem in justifying laws aimed at preventing harm to others, on

Sandel’s principles, is it within the legitimate province of the state to suppress

beliefs which do not “promote moderation, social sympathy and a willingness

to suppress private desires for public ends.” This includes, as we shall see, the

enforcement of morals as such.

Sandel notes that in Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton, Chief Justice Burger

“wrote as if embarrassed to acknowledge the moral objection to obscenity as

such,” a reluctance that presumably, undercut the coherence of his argument.


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Thus, “allowing the states to decide that commerce in obscenity may ‘injure

the community as a whole’ begs the question whether communal injury canconsist in an offense against shared moral standards” (1996: 77). Burger

opted for his form of argument perhaps because he had read H.L.A Hart’s

devastation of Lord Devlin. If the state can legislate for the sake of “moral-

ity” as such, then it can proscribe acts merely because they are “sinful” or

“wrong.” In the light of human history, what could make anyone think that

this is morally defensible?

Perhaps, however, if his principles are not liberal, his intuitions are. This

seems so in a number of instances. For example, he seems to think that sex-

ual relations between consenting adults, heterosexual or not, should not be

proscribed. But he is uncomfortable with a straightforward liberal defense of

this, substantially that “people should be free to choose their intimate rela-

tions themselves, regardless of the virtue or popularity of the practices they

choose, so long as they do not harm others” (104). He prefers, instead, the de-

cision in Griswold where the court affirmed certain values and ends. It then

articulated “the virtues that homosexual intimacy may share with heterosex-

ual intimacy, as well any distinctive virtues of its own:” While homosexuals

have no right to intimacy, “family values” justify it.

Indeed, in the same vein, Sandel is most unhappy with no-fault divorce.

“By making dependence a dangerous thing, it burdens the practice of mar-

riage as a community in the constitutive sense” (115). If so, why not compel

life-long marriage under all conditions? In any case, blaming no fault divorce

for the grim statistics he quotes is just plain bad sociology. The problem is not

that the law affirmed the “encumbered self,” but the consequence of profound

structural problems in American society, coupled with a familiar inattention

to the rights of divorced women. If we want to support marriage, we ought,at the very least, ensure that people have jobs that pay living wages and pro-

vide families and single-mothers with child support, daycare, etc. Nor even

can we say that idea of no-fault was mistaken. There is nothing in that idea

that says the former partner should not be held responsible. If alimony is not

awarded and child support is not enforced, then we may suspect that patri-

archy is at work in our “liberal” courts and justice system.

One should not suppose that Sandel lacks arguments against liberals who

are reluctant to embrace “the formative project.” But they are frightfully lean

and implausible. What matters to the liberals, he writes (many times!), is not

the ends we choose, but our capacity to choose them. It is this that is most es-

sential to our personhood. What is wrong with this? Sandel offers that:

the philosophical difficulty lies in the liberal conception of citizens as freely

choosing, independent selves, unencumbered by moral or civic ties antecedent

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to choice. This vision cannot account for a wide range of moral and political ob-

ligations that we commonly recognize, such as obligations of loyalty or solidar-

ity. By insisting that we are bound only by ends and roles we choose for our-

selves, it denies that we can ever be claimed by ends we have not chosen—ends

given by nature or God, for example, or by our identities as members of fami-

lies, peoples, cultures, or traditions (1996: 322).

This describes is the familiar moral philosophy of “individualism.” Still one

wonders about both the pertinent sociology which is being assumed and

whether “liberals” are necessarily “individualist” in this sense?

Sandel continually speaks of the liberal assumption that the self is “unen-

cumbered.” A self is unencumbered, presumably, if first, the person has no

obligations which are not voluntarily incurred and second, and more interest-

ing, persons have identities which are independent of roles, including being

“members of [a] family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history,as citizens of this republic” (1996: 14). But if so, it is not clear that it is pos-

sible for a self to be “unencumbered” and if so, surely liberalism must fail.

Consider obligations that presumably cannot be accommodated. Sandel

knows that liberals can and generally do acknowledge non-voluntary “natu-

ral obligations,” or obligations owed to persons just because they are persons.

Thus, one has no right to harm others. Similarly, liberals acknowledge special

obligations of (say) a parent to their children, just because they are voluntar-

ily incurred. Are there then other obligations, to the “nation” or to other “cit-

izens” of the republic, and what is their status? For Sandel, “the liberal at-

tempt to construe all obligation in terms of duties universally owed or

obligations voluntarily incurred makes it difficult to account for civic obliga-

tions and other moral and political ties that we commonly recognize” (14). Itis not clear what the difficulty is. Of course, liberals do deny that we have a

natural obligation to the political community in which we happen to live. As

is well known, the problem of legitimacy (of “political right”) was “solved”

in the modern period by liberals who insisted that only if citizens “consent”

are they obligated. So for this form of liberal theory, the obligation to the state

is not “natural” but voluntary. Most of us who have had problems with this

position have no problems with the idea of voluntarily incurred obligations,

but with the idea citizens “consent.” Since as Hume had insisted, if merely

living in state (“tacit consent”) is consent, then, trivially, everybody consents.

But this is not Sandel’s problem. Rather, he seems to think that because our

“identities” are tied up not only with our families and roles, but also with “our

nation,” obligations generated by these have presumptive moral force. It is

easy for liberals to make sense of the claim that duties of parenthood have pre-

sumptive moral force. What of our “identities as Americans, or Christians—or

males or “white men”? So it is much less clear that we are to have sympathy


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for Robert E. Lee who opposed secession, but concluded that his obligation to

Virginia was not merely of sentimental import, but had moral force (15). Pre-sumably, as in Lee’s case, this obligation could override any other obligations

he might have, including any obligation he might have to the Republic or to

resist the profoundly immoral institution of slavery. This is a dangerous doc-

trine: One might, not implausibly, compare here the “obligations”of an Eich-

mann or a Lt. Calley, a devout Christian, a jihadist, or member of the KKK?

Moreover as regards selves, his view is stunningly “essentialist.” One

would have thought that he would know that nations and the identities of per-

sons are not “natural kinds,” but are socially constructed from biographically

and historically available materials. This means, critically, that they are

changed by both intended and intended actions sometimes in morally pro-

gressive ways, sometimes not. The institutions of slavery might well have led

Robert E. Lee to abandoned his identity as a loyal Virginian and to identify

himself as a loyal American. The recent construction of Serbian identity had

led, of course, to ethnic cleansing, an incredibly vicious form of “the forma-

tive project.”

As regards “unencumbered selves,” one suspects that Sandel is unduly un-

der the influence of Rawls. One thus might hold that the persons in Rawls’s

constructed “original position” are not “encumbered selves.” But of course

the point of that construction was precisely to deny that one’s family, ethnic

group, gender, or roles in society were relevant to defining the principles of

justice. Rawls’s social philosophy is cosmopolitan. Indeed, it was just here

that Rawls was at his most emancipating. Here was a liberal who showed that

the most “liberal” society in the world could not defend the fact that it was

the most unequal society in the world. Moreover, as Charles Beitz shows,

Rawls’s theory is easily and plausibly extended to address global injustice.1

As far as I can tell, inequality is not a concern of Sandel.

The idea, of course, of an “encumbered self” is implausible, but with the

exception of Kant (and possibly of Robert Nozick), who has held to it? Kant

badly confounded matters in bifurcating the phenomenal and the noumenal.

Presumably our phenomenal, flesh and blood, concrete, historically located

selves are “encumbered. Our “noumenal self,” by contrast, is “unencum-

bered.” Our “autonomy,” accordingly, depended upon our capacities as “ra-

tional beings” to give law to ourselves. Sandel does not take on Kant. Nor

shall I (even if think that his position is a disaster). What he does instead is to

speak of Kantian liberals (generally unnamed) and then to allow us to believe

that all liberals are committed to a Kantian ontology. One may wish here that

he had been more careful. Indeed, one the huge difficulties in the book is asystematic ambiguity over whether Sandel is describing the Weltanschauung

of the times and places in his book, or whether he is engaging normative the-

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ory. Worse, he lacks utterly a conception of ideology: the idea that certain

philosophical theories may be articulating what are, or are to become, widelyheld but false beliefs, beliefs which, in fact, are in the interest of the power-

ful. This ambiguity immensely contributes to the usefulness of this book as

ideology. I return to this.

As noted, rights theorists all acknowledge non-voluntary obligations, but

since they generally take a consequentialist position, they also insist that any

obligation may be overidden. Moreover, directly against Sandel, they can af-

firm that identities are tied up with relations and roles and still insist that

our personhood requires that we choose our ends—not God, not nature, not

the government. Personhood requires agency, but agency is not, as per Kant,

autonomy—self-legislating—but the capacity to choose such that given any

choice, one could have done otherwise.2

Because we are always “encumbered,” our choices, including our choice of

“ends,” are always both enabled and constrained both by our biographies and

the social situation we find ourselves in. Liberals have not, it is true, gener-

ally noticed the stunning inequalities in what is enabled, nor that these in-

equalities are a straightforward consequence of socially constructed race,

class and gender. Instead, they have tended to ignore enabling conditions and

to think that the only constraint is legal. Of course, this is major weakness of

most liberalism (partly addressed by Rawls). But this hardly calls for an aban-

donment of the idea that choosing one’s ends is a fundamental value. Indeed,

one must fear freedom—as in Plato, Durkheim, or Freud— to think otherwise

(Manicas, 1974).

Similarly, just as he confounds “autonomy” and “agency,” Sandel trades on

the idea that the liberal is committed to what he calls the “voluntarist” con-

ception of freedom. He writes, for example: “The voluntarist conception of freedom that inspires this liberalism holds out a liberating vision, a promise

of agency that could be realized even under conditions of concentrated

power” (Sandell, 1996: 278).

Again, agency is not the issue. Even if the choices are all grim, the capac-

ity to choose is the mark of agency. But Sandel is right that “voluntarist” or

“contractual” freedom is a central piece of liberal ideology. Nozick is the

surely best case. For him a choice is free if and only if it is voluntary. A choice

is involuntary if and only if it is coerced, and as above, coercion is the threat

or use of violence, including legal coercion exercised by the state. Coercive

social relations just don’t count. So, neither do the immense inequalities of

freedom that result from one’s position in prevailing social relations. For

Nozick, if people have equal rights, then they are equally free (period).Insofar as he recognizes “positive” rights, or rights that oblige others (in-

cluding especially the state) to do something to realize one’s rights, Rawls


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would seem to see that freedom is very unequally distributed. Thus, rights

demanded by Fair Equality of Opportunity, for example, the right to a goodeducation, or those demanded by the Difference Principle, e.g., the right to in-

come greater than the worst off in any other system of distribution, imply

non-legal constraints on freedom. But still trapped in liberal ideology, he also

asserts:

The inability to take advantage of one’s rights and opportunities as a result of

poverty or ignorance, and a lack of means generally, is sometimes counted

among the constraints definitive of liberty. I shall not, however, say this, but

rather I shall think of these things as affecting the worth of liberty, the value of

the rights that the first principle allows” (1971: 204).

But not all liberals are so whimsical about freedom. Perhaps the best (intu-

itively sensible, philosophically sound) definition of freedom was offered byJoel Feinberg (1973). On this view, freedom is a capacity to do something,

have something or be someone. But capacities are defined by enabling factors

such as competencies and resources, and persons are constrained by hin-

drances and obstacles that prevent them from doing, having or being. One can

choose to sleep under the bridge, but cannot choose to sleep at the Ritz-

Carlton if one lacks the required money. The idea of absolute freedom is both

incoherent and undesirable. But there are people with practically no freedom

in exactly the sense that ignorance and poverty have disenabled them. The

least of their problems is the coercive power of the state.

As, for example, Dewey well documented (Chapter 10), there are many

problems with variant versions of liberal political philosophy; but the idea

that there is a value in choosing our ends is not one of them. As I noted, onehuge problem of liberal theory is its incoherence in acknowledging both the

value of freedom and the equality of persons. It has thus persistently failed to

address the problem of inequalities of freedom. Another, not unrelated to this,

is the problem of democracy, to which I now turn.

REPUBLICAN FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY

The foregoing has given the gist of the Sandel’s moral philosophy. Most of

the book, however, is devoted to showing that the public philosophy that is

the alternative to the procedural republic was present at the Founding and that

it was replaced only recently. It what follows, I pursue two related themes.

First, it is a mistake to hold that one can understand the liberal strand in

American thought apart the civic republican strand. These were not indepen-

dent and merely consistent ideas: They were part and parcel of the same bun-

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dle of ideas as they emerged at a critical juncture in America’s past.3 Sandel’s

distinction is artificial. Indeed, as the few examples adduced above suggest,at every critical instance, in order to try to make his case, he holds that the au-

thors of his case examples are confused, or inconsistent, or that we must read

between the lines to see really what is being put forward.4 It never seems to

occur to him that these interpretative difficulties are a function of the artifi-

ciality of his distinction. Worse, his distinction promotes a profoundly ideo-

logical understanding of the American past. This is my second major theme.

Sandel is both historically and philosophically uncritical regarding the idea of

democracy.

HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY

Sandel would have us believe that the Founding Fathers (or least some im-

portant and leading set of them) had as among their goals a constitution which

promoted “self-government,” and that one of the key problems presented by

the so-called “crisis period” was the absence of the civic virtue required by

citizens (128). Throughout the nineteenth century, then, “the civic ideal” of

virtuous self-governing citizens was the dominant public philosophy in

America. All of this is ideology in exactly the sense that these beliefs are false

or distorted, and are both critical to the reproduction of the status quo and

serve those who have power in America. I begin with the Founding.

There are three or four fundamental facts for us to keep in mind. First, the

War of Independence had converted farmers and mechanics, even the poorest

of them and even some slaves, into armed citizens who, remarkably, had de-

feated one the best professional armies in the world. The war for indepen-dence was not likely to have had no impact on their political sensibilities. Ed-

mund Morgan summarizes the main points very well:

Had the southern plantations not shifted from free to slave labor, had the

planters continued to import masses of indentured servants and continued to

pour them into their own and other colonies a few years later as indigent free-

dom, then the picture of social mobility in the colonial period and of class con-

flict in the Revolution might have been quite different. The Minutemen of 1774

might have been truly a rabble in arms, ready to turn from fighting the British

to fighting their well-to-do neighbors . . . But in the century between 1676 and

1776 the growth of slavery had curbed the growth of a free, depressed lower

class and correspondingly magnified the social and economic opportunities for

whites. It is perhaps the greatest irony of a Revolution fought in the cause of

freedom, a Revolution that indeed advanced the cause of freedom throughout

the world, that the men who carried it out were able to unite against British


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oppression because they had so completely and successfully oppressed the

largest segment of their own laboring population (Morgan, 1976: 182).

The analogies to Athens, well enough understood by a tradition that had fol-

lowed Aristotle, knew exactly what was at issue in this situation. Athens made

citizens of poor people in order to man the triremes. Would these American

citizens be the equivalent of what for Aristotle was “a maritime mob” (nau-

tikos ochlos)? Would they, as citizens, do what everyone knew all democra-

cies do? Would they attack the institutions of private property?

Indeed, it is quite impossible to underestimate the importance of Shay’s (lit-

tle!) rebellion in this regard, an event which took place four months after the de-

funct Annapolis convention and some three months before the historic meeting

at Philadelphia. Promoted by Massachusetts’ financial policies that had reaped

enormous profits for holders of state notes—and had forced farmers into fore-

closure, it was, as the leading expert on finance for this period says, “as surelyclass legislation as any paper money bill” (Ferguson, 1961: 245).

The trouble had begun in 1782 and accelerated. In the fall of 1786, farm-

ers began petitioning and obstructing the proceedings of county courts. Gov-

ernor Bowdoin clamped down, forbidding their assemblies as illegal—even

though, as I note next, they were using exactly the same methods as they had

used fifteen years earlier against British “tyranny.” When Shays led his group

of 1100 on the arsenal—their ultimate aims are unclear, Major General Shep-

herd fired a volley from his cannon. The crowd dispersed and was chased into

the snowy woods. No one was hurt. Fourteen captured leaders were sentenced

to death, but were later pardoned. Bowdoin lost the next election and the new

legislature acquiesced to the demands of the farmers.

Shay’s little rebellion did not involve the whole people of Massachusetts,still less of New York and the rest of the Confederacy. But Jefferson, in Paris,

saw the importance of Shay’s little “rebellion” and concluded, rightly, that the

new Constitution was the result of “overzealous reaction to . . . democracy.”

The problem was not a lack of “civic virtue,” but of evident class legisla-

tion—to be remedied by democratic participation.

Second, the war unleashed democratic ideas. As colonial authority was col-

lapsed, it is sometimes said that the colonists had returned to “a state of na-

ture.” This was hardly the case. Yet, as Palmer emphasizes:

Governors, unable to control their assemblies, undertook to disband them, only

to see most of the members continue to meet as unauthorized congresses and as-

sociations; or conventions of counties unknown to law, choose delegates to such

congresses for provinces as a whole; or local people forcibly prevented the sit-

ting of law courts . . . Violence spread, militias formed, and the Continental Con-

gress called into the existence a Continental army (Palmer, 1969, Vol. 2: 109)

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The first Congress had developed out of these “extra-legal” provincial con-

ventions and committees of correspondence. The idea was not to form a newgovernment but to institutionalize a common front for ongoing negotiations;

then after the fissure, to field an army. What needs to be emphasized here is

that despite huge wartime problems, the Confederation worked.5 The peace

brought unique conditions and unique opportunities.

As Bailyn emphasized, even prior to the war, the American experience had

led the colonies to move in directions opposite from Britain. As he writes: the

Americans,

starting with seventh century assumptions, out of necessity . . . drifted back-

ward, as it were, toward the medieval forms of attorneyship in representation.

. . . The colonial town and counties . . . were largely autonomous, and they stood

to lose more than they were likely to gain from a loose acquiescence in the ac-

tion of central government (Bailyn, 1967: 164).

Localism, the aggrandizement of government in the legislative body—

contrary to the teachings of Montesquieu and Harrington regarding “balanced

government”—and a shift in the meaning of representation, were all signs of

what had been traditionally recognized as shifts toward democracy. The shift

in the idea of representation brings the foregoing together and takes us to the

heart of Sandel’s ideas regarding both “self-rule” and “civic virtue.”

A debate in Maryland in 1785 makes clear that during this period, Ameri-

cans articulated two distinct and incompatible meanings of the word “repre-

sent.” In one sense, a representative could be defined, as in Hobbes and

Locke, in terms of his authority. In this sense, as in Hobbes and Locke, we

“consent” and thus create his authority. Even if the representative is elected

(and he need not be), he acted for the people. By contrast a representative

could be conceived merely as an agent, “a servant of the people,” elected and

controlled by those he represents in the sense that he is “instructed” by them.

In this sense, the people retained their power. Sovereignty was, in this sense,

as Rousseau had insisted, inalienable.6

The Maryland House of Delegates had acted in favor of “an emission of

credit,” legislation in favor of the debt-ridden farmers, but the Senate had refused

to ratify it. Did the people then have a right to instruct their representatives in the

upper house? The defenders of instruction held, rightly, that during the time

Maryland had been a colony, it is was not denied, even by the Crown, that mem-

bers of the lower house, the House of Delegates, were bound by their instruc-

tions from the people. During British rule, of course, the people had no claimson representatives on members of the upper house, since, of course, they were

appointed by the Crown. For Samuel Chase the power to elect implied the power


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to instruct. If so, then the members of the upper house were also “servants of the

people.” But if so, as an opponent insisted:

Planters, Farmers, Parsons, Overseers, Lawyers, Constables, Petifoggers, Physi-

cians, Mechanicks, Shopkeepers, Merchants, Apprentices, Watchman, Barbers,

Beaux, Drayman, Porters, Labourers, Cobles and Cooks, all are to order the ho-

nourable, the legislature of Maryland what they must do upon the most intricate

questions in government (Yawaza, 1975: 20).

But why, within Sandel’s frame, should anyone have supposed that these men

(sic) had the requisite “civic virtue?” Sandel might not deny this even if he is

unable to disengage himself from manifest ideology and to see what was at

issue. He writes:

What troubled the revolutionary leaders most of all [which “revolutionary lead-

ers”?] was the popular politics increasingly practiced in the state legislature.

They [the propertied elite?] had assumed that under republican government, a

“natural aristocracy” of merit and virtue would replace an artificial aristocracy

of heredity and patronage. But in the postrevolutionary state legislatures, the

best [sic] did not necessarily rule. . . . For republican leaders such as Madison,

this form of politics amounted to an excess of democracy, a perversion of re-

publican ideals. Rather than governing in a disinterested spirit in behalf of the

public good, these representatives of the people were all too representative—

parochial, small-minded, and eager to serve the private interests of their con-

stituents (Sandel, 1996: 128, my emphasis).

This is quite an old story, surely as old as Aristotle, who, at least, made no

pretense of being a fan of democracy. As Madison more honestly argued, if

you let a majority rule, then since as Aristotle had pointed out, the majorityare always poor and they will rule in their interests. For Sandel and the anti-

democratic tradition behind him, better than to have the wealthy minority

rule. We are to suppose that they will govern “in a disinterested spirit in be-

half of the public good.”

The US Constitution was a marvelous success, of course, even if it fore-

closed the possibility that America might have had a far stronger democracy.

But it was a huge success also in that, designed explicitly to undermine “self-

rule,” it came to be thought of as a democracy—indeed, a democratic model

for the world (Manicas, 1988).7

Although there is no space here to tell this story in an adequate way, three

facts seem central. First, as Gordon Wood has demonstrated, the biggest

stumbling block for the Nationalists was the problem of sovereignty. Howcould there be one supreme legislature in each state and a federal government

that could make laws that superseded those of the individual states? The in-

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vention of the idea of “the sovereign people,” which, remarkably, was offered

as a solution to sidestepping the mandated ratification process, was a stunningachievement. The existing law had required that the new document be re-

turned to state legislatures for approval. But it is almost certain that these bod-

ies would not have approved of it. In defense of the revolutionary act of by-

passing state legislatures, Madison offered what seemed to be an obvious

revolutionary justification: “The people were, in fact, the fountain of all

power . . . They could alter constitutions as they see as they please . . .” As

Wood argues, “relocating sovereignty in the people by making them `the

fountain of all power’ seemed to make sense of the entire system”(Wood,

1969: 352). It is difficult, I think, to underestimate the ideological power of

this idea. Henceforth, governments could be democracies if power “origi-

nated in” or “derived from” the sovereign people.

Second, although this has been obfuscated since, it is clear that there were

plenty of people present at Philadelphia who had a clear grasp of the differ-

ence between the Confederacy under the Articles and the Virginia plan which

subsequently was adopted. Mason contended, for example, that “under the

existing Confederacy, Cong[gress] represent[s] the States, not the people of

the States; [its] acts operate on States, not on individuals.” The New Jersey

plan, which was rejected, would have responded to the real flaws in the Arti-

cles without in any way compromising this principled difference. Madison

and Hamilton will, of course, convince Americans—including many legal

scholars (and likely also Sandel?) that “in principle” there was no difference.

Indeed, ironically, in his concluding chapter, Sandel sees, rightly, that “the

hope for self-government lies not in relocating sovereignty but in dispersing

it” (345). But it was precisely the “problem” of “dispersed” sovereignty that

so exercised the founding fathers—exactly because it allowed for greater par-ticipation by citizens.

The third fact relevant to the idea that a large state can be a democracy as

long as “representatives” are elected evokes a further irony. Sandel is right to

appeal to Jefferson as the most democratic of all America’s early leaders. As

regards the idea of representation, he always avoided the Federalist formula

of power “originating” or “deriving from” the people. He always spoke of

representatives as delegates, deputies, servants, functionaries or agents. Es-

pecially after he left office, he complained bitterly regarding the direction of

American politics, that the problem had begun in Philadelphia where the Fed-

eralists had “endeavored to draw the cords of power as right as they could ob-

tain them—indeed, as Madison had all but said in the 10th Federalist Paper—

“to lessen the dependence of the general functionaries on their constituents”and “to weaken the means of maintaining a steady equilibrium which the ma-

jority of the convention had deemed salutary for both branches, general and


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local.” Moreover, he was persistently localist, insisting that the Montesquie-

vian problem of size had been solved by the idea of layered “federated” ju-risdictions from the local to the national.8

Merrill Peterson has rightly remarked that “men like Jefferson, deceived by

the French Revolution, . . . taught the people to think of their government as

a democracy rather than a balanced republic after Adams’s vision.” His “rev-

olution of 1800” in the hotly ideological election of that year was critical in

this. His victory was, as he insisted, “a revolution in the principles of our gov-

ernment as that of 1776 was in its form.” It was, of course, nothing of the

kind. The victory of Jefferson, the first of a long series of “republican” victo-

ries, was a revolution in ideology.

Sandel’s unhistorical reading of “the republican tradition” prevents him

seeing any of these remarkable ironies. He writes:

Growing doubts about the prospect of civic virtue in the 1780s [growing paranoia

that institutional arrangements had unleashed democracy?] prompted two kinds of

response—one formative, the other procedural. The first sought, through education

and other means, to inculcate virtue more strenuously. The second sought, through

constitutional change, to render virtue less necessary (129).

The constitutional change that effectively disempowered citizens is quaintly

put:

The republican tradition taught that a certain distance between the people and

their government was unavoidable, even desirable—provided that distance was

filled with mediating institutions that gathered people together and equipped

them to share in self-rule (my emphasis).

Indeed, as his historical account of America from Jackson to Kennedy itself

decisively shows, once the new constitution was in place, “virtue” was not

rendered “less necessary.” It was rendered utterly unnecessary.

This is clearest in Sandel’s chapter 6, “Free labor versus Wage Labor.” Al-

though he lacks the language to say it, Sandel sees in this chapter that the real

problem for his “civic republicans” was class: “. . . they shared the long-

standing republican conviction that economic dependence is essential to citi-

zenship” (169). But, of course, with industrial capitalism, if any sense was to

be made of the new arrangements, holding firm to this prejudice would have

been intolerable. So, “ultimately, the debate over the meaning of free labor

would carry American political argument beyond the terms of republican

thought . . . Wage labor is consistent with freedom, they would argue, not be-cause it forms virtuous independent citizens but simply because it is volun-

tary, the product of agreement between employer and employee” (171). On

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the one hand, this admission seems utterly inconsistent with this notion that

“the formative project” remained alive and well until recently. On the other,that workers were “free” was not only a huge ideological victory but it was

perfectly consistent with both a Lockean liberalism in which everybody had

property: either in land and productive assets or in their labor, and with the

redefinition of democracy that had been wrought by the Americans. Hence-

forth, not only would capitalism be consistent with democracy, but also it

would come increasingly to be thought of as its ideal political form. With an

impotent sovereign people, class struggle could be submerged and deflected.

Much of this was clearly seen by John Dewey (above, Chapter 10). There

is some paradox in this also since it is easy to think that Sandel is broadly, at

least, in agreement with Dewey.

SANDEL AND DEMOCRACY

It is worthwhile perhaps to quote in full Sandel’s brief précis of Dewey’s crit-

icism of political democracy in America. Sandel writes:

The philosopher John Dewey observed that the theory of freely choosing indi-

vidual self “was framed at just the time when the individual was counting for

less in the direction of social affairs, at a time when mechanical forces and vast

impersonal organizations were determining the frame of things. . . . According

to Dewey, modern economic forces liberated the individual from traditional

communal ties, and so encouraged voluntarist self-understanding, but at the

same time disempowered individuals and local political units. The struggle for

emancipation from traditional communities was mistakenly “identified with the

liberty of the individual as such; in the intensity of the struggle, associations and

institutions were condemned wholesale as foes of freedom save as they were

products of personal agreement and voluntary choice.

Meanwhile, mass suffrage reenforced (sic) the voluntarist self-image by mak-

ing it appear as if citizens held the power “to shape social relations on the basis

of individual volition. Popular franchise and majority rule afforded the imagi-

nation of a picture of individuals in their untrammeled individual sovereign

making the state.” But this concealed a deeper, harder reality. The “spectacle of

`free men’ going to the polls to determine by their personal volitions the politi-

cal forms under which they should live” was an illusion (1996: 204).

It is clear enough what Sandel does share with Dewey. Both reject individu-

alistic liberalism. What are the differences?

First, Dewey’s critique of liberal ideology involves seeing that “mass suf-

frage” was an essential part of the alienation of politics that people came

falsely to think that they lived in a democracy in which they were “self-


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ruled.” Dewey knew better. For him, the democratic state, ideologically sus-

tained by individualist philosophy, emerged, contrary to Sandel, for reasonslargely unrelated to the goal of realizing self-government. Dewey held, per-

haps optimistically, that it tried, at least, “to counteract forces that . . . largely

determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors,” and

tried, at least, “to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve

private instead of public ends” (Dewey, 1954: 108). But he insisted that it has

failed even as regards these limited goals. Not only was the democratic state

“grasped and used to suit the desires of the new class of businessmen”

(Dewey, 1954: 96), but the very forms of political democracy themselves

throw up huge barriers in the way of realization of democratic publics. The

constitution (despite Jefferson) had become “sacred,” private power had been

made invulnerable and public power had become firmly entrenched in the

hands of a ruling elite.

Second, Dewey’s operative theoretical term was publics, not “civic virtue.”

Dewey was not in the least interested in Sandel’s “formative project,” the state’s

obligation to “produce citizens,” to cultivate attitudes of disinterested public

spirit, to build up fellow-feeling and to articulate and promote common goals

and interests. The problem was quite otherwise: It concerned the disintegration,

wrought by “economic forces”—Dewey’s euphemism for capitalism—of the

very conditions for democracy as a way of life, an idea which he sharply distin-

guished from the modern idea of political democracy.

For Dewey, the problem of the public is the present incapacity of interde-

pendent people even to perceive the consequences of “combined action,” still

less to act collectively regarding their collective interests regarding these con-

sequences. Dewey was in full agreement with Lippmann’s trenchant analysis,

but refused to accept that nothing could be done. He was interested in “com-munity,” but for him communities were constituted “rationally,” in terms of

the actively articulated goals of conjoint action (Manicas, 1974). Communi-

ties in his sense did not involve “identity issues,” nor were they constituted

emotively or ethnically. Nor surely were they the responsibility of a non-neu-

tral government seeking to enforce or reinforce values that they assumed

were essential to the “nation.” These sorts of communities were and are

shackles, destructive and not emancipating. Indeed, the principles that pre-

sumably make them essential were rightly delegitimized by liberalism. Rem-

iniscent of Rousseau’s scathing attack on Hobbes and Locke and Marx’s

analysis of alienation, for Dewey:

Where there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good byall singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization the good is

such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because

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it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear conscious-

ness of communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy

(Dewey, 1954: 149).

Dewey did not, to be sure, offer much in the way of positive help on how we

were to overcome those conditions that make impossible the emergence of

publics, but as should be clear, the problem is not moral; it is structural and

political. Here again we need to be careful in understanding Sandel’s remarks,

quoted earlier, regarding the idea that the hope for self-government is in dis-

persing sovereignty.

Sandel sees a “moral defect” in the cosmopolitan ethic (Sandel, 1996: 342).

Dewey did not. Dewey heaped nothing but scorn on the idea of the Nation

and of National Sovereignty, but he did this precisely because its claims were

fraudulent and because it served only to promote violence. He approved of a

multiplicity of communities and political bodies, but for him, this required acosmopolitian ethic, exactly because these communities were to be con-

structed on the basis of perceiving and collectively acting on the conse-

quences of conjoint activities.

Although this is hardly the space to develop the idea, since global capital-

ism is the main problem, building social movements internationally is now

the only strategy. As Dewey said, we already have a Great Society. What is

now sorely lacking is a Great Community.

NOTES

1. Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1979).

2. The clause is important and is meant to undercut the old freedom/determinism

chestnut. To have agency, we must be free in the sense that whatever we do, we could

have done otherwise. That is even acts which are not voluntary in the sense that we

were coerced display agency. One can choose even if the only other choice is death.

But we must not confused agency with “freedom.” See below.

3. The point was made by Ian Shapiro in his excellent The Evolution of Rights in

Liberal Theory (1986). Sandel seems here to appropriate and extend a version of J.G.

A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975). But a careful reading of Pocock’s last

chapter (XV) will show, I think, that he does not deny the view shared by Bernard

Bailyn, J.R. Pole and Gordon Wood that, as he summarizes matters: “in the period of

the making of the Constitution and the Federalist-Republican debate, the civic tradi-

tion underwent a transforming crisis and was never the same again; Wood in particu-lar speaks of an ‘end of classical politics’” (1975). Put in other terms, the Americans

invented modern democracy, surely the most successful version of liberalism to date.


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4. For other examples, see page 70, where he says of a Scalia Supreme Court ar-

gument: “such decisions might seem at odds with the liberalism that asserts the pri-

ority of the right over the good. But . . .” and p. 282, where he asserts that “Johnson’s

evocation of national community might seem to embrace the nationalizing tradition

of progressive reform . . .” but . . .

5. We must ignore overwhelming historical evidence that the real “crisis” had

nothing to do with sovereignty, finance or commerce, all of which could easily have

been solved. The problem was the drift toward democracy and Madison and many

others explicitly insisted. The bad name given to confederacies by the Americans con-

tinues to haunt otherwise intelligent people. For some discussion of this evidence, see

my War and Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). The present movement to-

ward an European Union may overcome this prejudice.

6. We need to keep in mind the relevant numbers here. As Pole notes, the British

Parliament had one member for every 14,300 people, while in the colonies, there was

one for every 1200. The total number of eligible voters in Pennsylvania was only

90,000. As the democrats insisted (including here, later, Jefferson), far more “directcontrol” could have been expected.

7. One might argue that this was an entirely good thing on grounds that there is no

better institutional arrangement possible. But indeed, it is plain enough that even at

the time of the Convention, stronger versions were available and that, with Dewey, a

very strong version of democracy remains a fundamental ideal of politics.

8. But there is some doubt that even as the third President, he ever fully grasped

what the Constitution had wrought. There are many texts that support this (including

some of those mentioned here), but perhaps the most decisive is his Kentucky Reso-

lution of 1798 that is easily shown to be inconsistent with the Constitution. This was,

for this reason, a critical text for later secessionists. For a more thorough account of

Jefferson’s role in the redefinition of democracy, see Chapter 8 of my War and De-

mocracy (1989).

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Part Four

WHY NOT DEWEY?

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273

“Classic” American philosophers did not restrict themselves to the problem

of knowing the world; rather they sought to change it—without the assistance

of Marx’s inversion of Hegel. Nor could it be said that classic American phi-

losophy was “academic,” the province of “professionals” who earned their

pay by teaching epistemology to future teachers of philosophy and who

earned their promotions by writing to one another about “c-functions” and

“private languages.” While one can surely contest Cornel West’s claims about

the causal role of the writings of Richard Rorty in recovering this tradition

(West, 1989: 199), one can surely endorse the effort of West’s most impres-

sive book, under review here. Indeed, one hopes that its title will not dis-

courage potential readers. For West, it is precisely the “evasion” of philoso-

phy that makes the distinctly American philosophical tradition valuable. The“swerve” from epistemology, initiated by Emerson on West’s view, is surely

not “a wholesale rejection of philosophy.” Rather, for West, the American

evasion offers a “reconception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism

that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural and political traditions

for the purpose of increasing the scope of individual development and demo-

cratic operations” (230). Because West is not only manifestly in control of his

material, but, as well, because his is a distinct voice in this project, his book

deserves to be widely read.

West offers a “geneaology” of American pragmatism, from Emerson to its

“coming of age” with Peirce, James, and Dewey—Mead is omitted, perhaps

unjustifiably—thence to its “dilemma” in the mid-twentieth century and its de-

cline and resurgence in the recent past and present. The chapter on the dilemmaof the mid-century pragmatic intellectual includes discussions of Sidney Hook,

W.E.B. Du Bois, C. Wright Mills, Reinhold Nicbuhr and Lionel Trilling. West

Chapter Twelve

The Evasion of Philosophy1

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shows how “Emersonian sensibilities and pragmatist progeny cut across the

modern, disciplinary division of knowledge” (6) and, as important, he showshow the results of this appropriation were so very different. Quine and Rorty

are the focus of the chapter on the decline and resurgence, though West recog-

nizes and credits a number of American philosophers—John McDermott, John

Smith, Richard Bernstein and Morton White—who “continued to keep alive the

pragmatist tradition during the age of logical positivism” (194). Although his

treatment of the geneaology of pragmatism is much influenced by Rorty, West

moves the argument to another level in his last chapter, “Prophetic Pragmatism:

Cultural Criticism and Political Engagement.” Using the work of Roberto

Mangabeira Unger, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci as foils, West takes

us back and forward to Dewey to his own sense of pragmatism as a viable and

energizing post-modern philosophy.

West’s understanding of Emerson not only begins his story; it provides

as well the driving force and thematic levers of the book, represented in the

tropes of power, provocation and personality. Emerson is not a “philosopher”—

hereafter quotation marks around “philosopher” are meant to convey the re-

stricted sense of the term. But he is “more than a mediocre man of letters or a

meteoric man of lectures.” While interpreters who make him “a self-willed es-

capee from the American genteel tradition,” “a purveyor of ‘secular incarna-

tion,” or “a grand ideological synthesizer of American nature, the American

self, and the American destiny” do yield insights, these readings hide his “his-

torical perspective” and “seminal reflections on power” (11). Indeed, West

compares him, perhaps remarkably, to his contemporary Marx. Like Marx,

Emerson is a “died-in-the-wool romantic thinker who takes seriously the em-

bodiment of ideals within the real, the actualization of principles in the practi-

cal” (10). Similar to Marx, Emerson’s focus is “the scope of human powers andthe contingency of human societies,” in social scientific terms, “the relation be-

tween purposive subjects and prevailing structures . . .” (10).

West goes quickly here, no doubt. Still, the comparison provokes. But like

Marx, Emerson was caught in his time and place. Thus, the Emersonian telos

“is not simply a strategy to deny time, reject history, and usurp authority,” but

is “symptomatic of a deep desire to conceive time, history and authority as

commensurate with and parallel to the vast open spaces of untouched woods,

virgin lands, and haunting wilderness” (19). West develops a deeper Emer-

sonian blindspot, one surely not disconnected from the Emersonian “mythic

conception of the exceptional individual as America[n].” This blindspot is

racism—“in the American grain.” West does not apologize for Emerson. Al-

though in his genealogy, the others cannot be so accused, it is surely also truethat only Du Bois adequately grasped the degree to which black slavery has

impeded and distorted the Emersonian vision (147). Moreover, and not unre-

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lated, another Emersonian legacy has characterized American philosophers:

Emerson created a style which “deploys a set of rhetorical strategies that at-tempt to both legitimize and criticize America” and like those who followed

him, American philosophers situated their projects “within and among the re-

fined and reformist elements of the middle class—the emerging and evolving

class envisioned as the historical agent of the American religion” (41).

Peirce, of course, was always on the margin of academic philosophy, but

given that, it is not clear whether one wants to say that he “evaded” the epis-

temological turn. As West appreciates, it might be better to say that he

tried—without success—to reject the challenge that modem philosophy had

posed. Of course, he did this in an entirely novel way, accepting Kantian

“insulation” against scepticism, but rejecting Kant’s transcendental move.

West is emphatic that Peirce’s technical writings—what today still excite the

“philosophers”—should not be disconnected from his metaphysics—”a kind

of ‘Kantianism without things-in -themselves”—from his concern with com-

munity, the basis of his belief-doubt theory of knowledge, and, more often

put aside, from his morally energized speculations on evolutionary love—

”the development of concrete reasonableness.”

Peirce was not a verificationist, never scientistic. Although committed to

the method of science and a pragmatist, West can also quote him as writing

that “a useless inquiry, provided it is a systematic one, is pretty much the

same thing as a scientific inquiry” (46). Veblen was later to call the motiva-

tion for science “idle curiousity,” and no doubt influenced by Peirce, his

teacher at Hopkins, was among the first to see how much rising industrial so-

ciety had compromised this. James could join in this as well. On his view,

“the craving to believe that the things in world belong to kinds which are re-

lated by an inward rationality together is the parent of Science as well as sen-timental philosophy” (James, 1981, Vol. 2: 1260). Science’s aim, like “senti-

mental philosophy” is intelligibility, not prediction and control—contrary to

the characteristic misreading of American pragmatism. Moreover, like James,

Peirce fell back “on moral sentiment and instinctive action as an alternative

to a ‘scientific ethics” (West, 46).

For West, “whereas Peirce applies Emersonian themes of contingency and

revisability to the scientific method, James extends them to our personal and

moral lives.” The basic aim of the Jamesian “popularization” was “to medi-

ate between the old and the new—religion and science, Gemeinschaft and

Gesellschaft, country and city, vocation and profession—in order to lessen

the shock of the new educated middle class” (55). We need not assume, of

course, that James intended to do this. Still, the point hits home. It wasn’tmerely that his audience was the educated middle class but that, agreeing with

R.B. Perry, “his distrust of the masses is undeniable” (61). Indeed, although

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we like to think that American writers are different, such distrust pervades

the literature of political philosophy. Dewey is surely the most outstandingexception.

West concentrates on Pragmatism and the popular essays, for example, “Is

Life Worth Living?”, “On a Certain Blindness . . .,” and the seldom read,

“The Social Value of the College-Bred.” He but mentions Principles and does

not even allude to “radical empiricism.” But I would not quarrel with his ef-

fort to try to steal—or insulate?—James from the “philosophers.” As West

sees, academic philosophy had not yet become institutionalized in America

and as David Hollinger has pointed out, we err in failing to see that James was

not a academic philosopher, but an engaged intellectual for whom, as West

says, “philosophy mediated essential rifts in the self” (95). West concludes

that James was “first and foremost a moralist obsessed with heroic energies

and reconciliatory strategies available to the individual” (54) and that he was

“much more attuned to the depths of evil in the world than Emerson.” But

oddly—given his interests—West does not allude to Santayana’s challenging

criticism that James held “a false moralistic view of history.” According to

Santayana, the war with Spain deeply upset James because he believed that

he had “lost his country, when his country, just beginning to play its part in

the history of the world, appeared to ignore an ideal that he innocently ex-

pected would always guide it” (Quoted by Myers, 1985: 439–440).” This is

an Emersonian residue which will plague even Dewey—at least until the ca-

tastrophe of the Great War. See Chapter 8, above.

Dewey, properly, is the central figure of West’s account. Again, there are

two themes, the Deweyan “evasion” and the particular Deweyan slant as po-

litical and cultural critic. West holds that Dewey held ambiguously to “a mod-

est view of philosophy as social and cultural criticism.” It was ambiguous be-cause he was attracted to Greek naturalism, especially after encountering

Woodbridge at Columbia. Coupled, then, “with his allegiance to his profes-

sional identity and status,” West argues, he was left “uneasy” with this more

modest view. Thus, those “intent on simply incorporating Dewey into the tra-

dition of modern philosophy point out Dewey’s own descriptive metaphysi-

cal project in his classic work Experience and Nature” (West: 94).

But if like James, his sensitivity to the modern epistemological problem did

preclude metaphysics in Kant’s sense, it need not preclude “descriptive meta-

physics,” the Aristotelian turn developed in Ralph Sleeper’s The Necessity of

Pragmatism (1986). But it may be also that Dewey remained within the prob-

lematic of modern epistemology. And if so, then he evaded it by ignoring it. As

John Smith has said, with Dewey, “all attempts at making knowledge itself in-telligible are greeted by pointing out that science is a fact and that is the end of

the matter” (Smith, 1970: 52). The consequence, on my view, was disastrous.

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The problem was that although pragmatism was intended to be a new begin-

ning, displacing transcendental philosophy, Dewey’s doctrine of experiencelimited him to an empirical realism and worse, perhaps to what often seemed to

be an empiricist—if not positivist—view of science. To be sure, as with James,

Dewey had a rich and contextual view of experience; but for all of that, it seems

that he remained within the Kantian strictures of an empirical realism. As ar-

gued in Chapter 5, above, this hardly sufficed for his remarkable theory of in-

quiry, and it left him vulnerable to all sorts of criticisms, including one made by

West, for example, that Art as Experience is “shot through with an organic ide-

alism unbecoming a card-carrying pragmatist” (95). Thus, while West, now fol-

lowing Rorty, wishes that Dewey had been “a more consistent historicist prag-

matist,” I wish that he had been a more consistent naturalist—indeed in nearly

the sense that was Marx in his criticism of Feuerbach. Like Marx, after diag-

nosing the dead-ended path set by modern epistemology, Dewey lost patience

with the problem, well captured by the famous dichotomy of subject and ob-

ject. Itself the legacy of modern science, the dichotomy became not only the

preoccupation of “philosophers,” but unsurprisingly, the effort to overcome it

produced the collapse of one into the other—”behaviorism,” “structuralism”

“eliminative materialism” a la Rorty and on the other side, “phenomenology,”

“voluntarism,” “methodological solipsism”—and more recently in anti-

philosophical “postmodernist” thought, the stunning dissolution of both object

and subject. (See Chapter 4. above.) Dewey was anxious to avoid “the episte-

mological problem,” and supposed that he could do this and still promote a

roomy and non-reductive naturalism. In this sense, then, he was not as anxious

to evade philosophy as is Rorty and as seems to be the case with West.

West is at his best when he writes as a social theorist. What he has to say

about Dewey’s social and political philosophy, and in the next chapter, his ac-count of Hook, Mills, Niebuhr, DuBois and Trilling is both penetrating and

important. West sees the radicalism of Dewey. Of course, Dewey shunned

“confrontational politics and agitational social struggle.” But his view was

radical in that his vision required fundamental transformations of American

institutions. Moreover, “contrary to popular opinion, Dewey’s project never

really got off the ground” (West: 107).

The point is important and too little appreciated. But West’s explanation of

Dewey’s failure will raise some eyebrows. He argues that Dewey’s project is

one of cultural transformation that “envisions a future Emersonian and dem-

ocratic way of life that has the flavor of small-scale homogeneous communi-

ties.” West seems not to object to this vision, usually dismissed as utopian.

Rather, he writes that “Dewey’s project is problematic because his emphasison culture leads him to promote principally pedagogic and dialogical means

of social change” and that “despite, and maybe because of, his widespread


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involvement in political organizations, groups, even third parties, Dewey

never did get over his Emersonian distrust of them” (106). His project failed,then, because “his favored historical agents—the professional and reformist

elements of the middle class—were seduced by two strong waves of thought

and action: managerial ideologies of corporate liberalism and bureaucratic

control, and Marxist ideologies of class struggle and party organization”

(107).

It is easy to see the knot that West is trying to untie: What kind of politics

is possible given the peculiar American condition—especially after the tragi-

cally quick failure of the Bolshevik project? Nonetheless, he seems not to no-

tice how much Dewey contributed to the “managerial ideologies of corporate

liberalism”—especially in his 1918 New Republic essays. (See Chapter 8).

On the other hand, given that Dewey could never accept the Second Interna-

tional definition of class struggle—for altogether sensible reasons—he pro-

vides no evidence of his “Emersonian mistrust of organization.” The charge

that his favored historical agents were the most progressive elements of the

middle class was made by Mills, as West knows, and indeed, there is consid-

erable plausibility in this. Still, once one sees what Dewey, Eduard Bernstein,

Kautsky and Lenin all saw, that proletarian revolutionary class-consciousness

was not on the historical agenda, and surely not in the United Sates, we are

left with some deep political questions that remain unsolved. (See above,

Chapter 10.) As Dewey diagnosed, the “public” is inchoate, eclipsed, lost;

and he was unsure how to find it. Dewey could surely endorse the coalition

politics that West rightly favors. Moreover, this politics is not more radical

than Dewey’s, nor, it seems to me, is it less “dialogic.”

West is also severe with Dewey’s failure to “take the time to come to terms

with . . . Marxism.” But he is not historical here. Not only was it not possiblefor Dewey to have read the Paris manuscripts, the so-called Grundrisse and

the many, many unpublished letters, speeches and essays, but the political

movements which defined Marxism were either the mono-causal and

teleological Second International Marxisms which had failed or the Leninist

version which had “succeeded” but which, for hardly arguable historical rea-

sons, could not succeed in achieving its vision of democracy. West rightly

sees that Dewey’s deepest philosophical and political commitments were very

close to Marx’s, although he seems unaware of some of the more recent

literature on this important topic. On the other hand, while West seems indif-

ferent to the point, in my mind, Dewey saw little difference between capital-

ism and other modern possibilities. Given recent events in the socialist world,

of course, many will say that Dewey was vindicated.Although plainly it is not here possible to review his discussion in any sort

of detail, readers will find West’s accounts of Hook, Mills, Du Bois, Niebuhr

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and Trilling especially gratifying. He might have added other figures to this

list, for example, Walter Lippmann. Still, these writers were profoundly prag-matic thinkers and, excepting Trilling, they each had a confrontation with

Marxism. West negotiates this territory with unexpected sympathies. He cred-

its Hook with being the “first original Marxist philosopher in America” and

depending here on one’s use of “philosopher,” this may be true. Surely his To-

wards an Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) was a landmark book. On the

other hand, Hook’s “ideological trajectory . . . portrays American pragmatism

in deep crisis” (124). C. Wright Mills, he writes, “understood this crisis bet-

ter than anyone else in America.” Offering a creative mis-reading of Dewey,

Mills provided a powerful immanent critique of liberalism (127). But ac-

cording to West, Mills suffered from the limitations that he attributed to

Dewey: Not only does he focus on intellectual elites as primary historical

agents (131), but also he betrays “a nostalgia for Emerson’s America” (135).

As with the account of Dewey, I am doubtful of this.

Despite his turn to cold warrior, perhaps predictable given his World War I

chauvinism, Niebuhr comes off better than he did, for example, in the treat-

ment by Morton White. Because “Niebuhr’s Reformation theology accents

disaster just as much as development,” for West, “after him the Emersonian

theodicy of American pragmatism would never be the same” (164). By ap-

propriating Matthew Arnold and Freud, Trilling, however, “tried to salvage

American pragmatism by purging it of its Emersonian elements” (164). In-

deed, with “the New Left and black revolt, rock ‘n’ roll, drugs and free love,”

Trilling came to believe not only that pragmatism could not meet the crisis of

America, but that “it fanned and fueled the crisis” (178).

If an account of Trilling gives a kind of symmetry to this rich chapter, the

account of Du Bois is indispensable to the book. We need to be reminded thatDu Bois was, in his own words, “a devoted follower of James,” that he spent

two years at the University of Berlin (1892–94) studying the historical econ-

omists, Schmoller and Wagner, and was impressed by Treitschke’s “heroic ro-

mantic nationalism.” But more important, perhaps, West argues that Du Bois’

stay in Europe gave him, on the one hand, a way for looking at the world as

man and not simply from a racial and provincial outlook,” and on the other,

“it provided him with an outlet for his hostility toward America and insight

into its provinciality” (140).

This was to make Du Bois an original and creative voice in what is still a si-

lence. Thus, Du Bois displays “the blindnesses and silences in American prag-

matic reflections on individuality and democracy,” and his Black Reconstruc-

tion (1935) “is a seminal work because it examines the ways in which thestruggle for democracy was stifled at a critical period in American history from

the vantage point of the victims (including both black and white laborers)”


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(146). Like Dewey, Du Bois had been energized by the Bolshevik revolution

and like him, he had rejected the strategies of the communist party in the UnitedStates. The revolution here would have to be “a slow reasoned development”

informed by “the most intelligent body of American thought” (146). But unlike

Dewey, his understanding of race and class gave him a deeper understanding of

the impasses that had to be overcome, including, in Color and Democracy:

Colonies and Peace (1945), an excoriation of cold warriors as “handmaidens of

the American imperial empire” (148). His indictment by the government “for

failure to register as agent for a foreign principle” and consequent vilification

was all too graphic testimony of the deeply rooted American capacity to lie to

itself.

I have left little space to discuss what I believe is West’s weakest chapter,

his engagement with recent American pragmatic “philosophers” (in quotes).

His account of Quine suffers, on my view, from failure to appreciate Quine’s

rejection of the “realist” aspects of classic pragmatism’s theory of science

(187). As must be clear from what has already been said, he is deeply critical

of Rorty’s incapacity to go beyond kicking “the philosophic props from un-

der liberal bourgeois societies” (206). He concludes that “his viewpoint has

immense anti-professional implications for the academy,” a point of no small

importance, but “on the macro-societal level,” there are no ethical or political

consequences of his pragmatism. This is a serious charge, of course.

In the final chapter, then, West sketches “prophetic pragmatism,” a post-

modern form of pragmatism that “preserves its historicist sense and ge-

nealogical aims, accents both consequences and specific practices in the light

of a set of provisional and revisable theoretical frameworks while it resists

grand theories” (209). His stance here is sound. Pragmatism was prematurely

postmodern in rejecting the quest for foundations. West exploits this, but isunabashed in arguing that current practices become available to criticism in

the light of our best available theories. Although he rightly opposes the char-

acteristic Eurocentrism of Western social and philosophical theory, one may

be surprised that he so warmly embraces an American variant, especially one

that “balances” Emersonian optimistic theodicies with Niebuhr’s project of

walking “the tightrope between Promethean romanticism and Augustinian

pessimism” (228). To be clear here, this is not to agree with those who see

no liberating potentialities in either religious experience or institutionalized

religions—East and West. Consider here, for example, the Liberation Church

of Latin America or Lutheranism in the German Democratic Republic.

Rather, it is question of whether “prophetic pragmatism,” “a child of Protes-

tant Christianity wedded to left romanticism” is as wide—and perhaps ascoherent—as Dewey’s less “prophetic” version?

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One must hope, with West, that philosophical thought in America has taken

a turn to what is best in it. Reservations included, there can be little doubt thathis book is a major contribution in the recovery of the Deweyan vision of

“creative democracy.” Indeed, in our deeply disillusioned world, The Ameri-

can Evasion of Philosophy is a stunning combination of scholarship, passion

and sensitivity.

NOTES

1. A review of Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: Uni-

versity of Wisconsin Press, 1989).


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283

In this ambitious collection, Robert B. Westbrook aims to recover from philo-

sophical pragmatism, insight—and hope—regarding the promise of democ-

racy. Following on his John Dewey and American Philosophy (1991), Dewey

is surely his main man. Part One, “Pragmatism Old,” offers as well, selective

critical discussions of Peirce and James. Part Two, “Pragmatism New,” treats

recent writers who have identified themselves with pragmatism, including

Hilary Putnam, Cheryl Misak, Cornel West and Richard Posner. Rorty is the

main character in these accounts.

Indeed, it seems that the motivation for this volume is very much a matter

of Rorty’s influence in the “rediscovery” of pragmatism, but especially

Dewey. But this has its problems. Fundamentally, Rorty gets to set the con-

text for the discussion. In the case of Dewey this is especially troublesome,not merely because Rorty’s pragmatism is far removed from Dewey’s—as

Westbrook sees, but because any proper understanding of Dewey requires

that we acknowledge how radical was his effort to reconstruct philosophy.

Mainstream philosophy is still almost entirely unaware of this. This is doubly

ironical since rejection of the modern problem of epistemology was the one

feature which Rorty shared with Dewey—even if Rorty’s “reconstruction”

was much more in the form of destruction. As Sleeper well put the matter:

“We must amend Rorty’s observation that Dewey was ‘waiting at the end of

the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled’ by the observation

that Dewey was trying to block that road from its beginning” (Sleeper, 1996:

5). Put simply, Dewey aimed to replace both epistemology and metaphysics

as these are conceived with a naturalistic “logic of inquiry” which amountedto a wholesale attack on the philosophical uses of Russell’s logic and the en-

tire program of what became analytic philosophy. Failing to see what Dewey

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was up to, these writers offer well-intentioned appeals to “experimental

method,” “scientific communities,” “instrumentalist (sic) logic,” and “free in-quiry.” Indeed, one suspects that they would agree with Alan Ryan’s assess-

ment that Dewey’s Logic is “vast and somewhat baffling” (Ryan, 1995: 309).

The importance of this failure surfaces in what is the main concern of Dem-

ocratic Hope: that Rorty is wrong in claiming that the pragmatists and post-

modernists are distinguished by “the Americans’unjustifiable social hope and

ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity’“ (6). Presumably, “episte-

mological” grounds are available: the pragmatist “low-profile conception of

truth” and “truth-apt character of moral and political beliefs” (Westbrook,

2005: 196) provides a “bridge” between “epistemic “ and “deliberative de-

mocracy” where persons engage one another not merely as citizens but as

pragmatists (239).

There are two problems. First, Westbrook sees that Dewey did not offer

any sort of “argument” for this bridge. But presumably the arguments of

Misak and Putman are arguments that Dewey could have made (180). Part of

the problem is that having rejected the skeptical challenge of traditional epis-

temology, he saw no need for such a bridge. But since his efforts were mis-

understood, academic philosophers can still feel a need to respond to skepti-

cisms, epistemic and moral. Dewey would not have been pleased with Rorty,

but it would not have been pleased either to see that mainstream academics,

despite good intentions, remain committed to the problems of philosophy.

There are, we may note, philosophers working well within a Deweyan frame

who are not engaged in this Westbrooks book.

Indeed, one might insist that in today’s very undemocratic world, it is at least

misleading to focus on “an epistemological justification of democracy” (176).

Of course, even the weakest forms of “democracy”—”liberal republics”—re-quire free speech and access to pertinent information, but Dewey would have

been puzzled by the idea that democratic hope is enabled by thinking of the in-

stitutions of radical democracy as engaged in “a quest for truth.” If anything, de-

mocracy is a quest for accountability, possible only with the active participation

of citizens. Indeed, the far more problematic relation between Dewey’s philoso-

phy of democracy and his theory of inquiry is whether, as C. Wright Mills

noticed, he too often optimistically supposed that the conditions which forbid

democracy could, in an undemocratic world, be overcome with persistent appli-

cation of the method of intelligence.

Second, Dewey had all sorts of arguments for the genuine problem of de-

mocracy, including the idea that citizens know best when the shoe pinches,

that participation is essential to growth, but most critically, agreeing withRousseau (and Marx) that since interdependence makes possible domination,

exploitation and alienation, “the only possible solution” is “the perfecting of

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the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared

interests in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desireand effort and thereby direct action.” Of course, neither Marx nor Dewey of-

fered much direction about how this would look.

Still, for Dewey, democratic hope depends upon “community as a fact” and

with acknowledgement of the needs and capacities of persons living interde-

pendently. Of course, as he well recognized, the conditions that make de-

mocracy possible are not easily achievable; but given what we know, they are

not impossible.

Do these conditions include socialism? Westbrook has considerable sym-

pathy for American “producer-republicanism,” with its emphasis on the “in-

dependence” of “yeoman farmers and skilled artisans” (83). Indeed, for him,

“the best of American radicalism has always marched under a ‘petty bour-

geois banner’“(210). This assessment can surely be contested both as to

whether is represents “the best of American radicalism” and whether this was

Dewey’s position. Less contestably, he suggests also that Dewey would never

“lose touch with the essential promise of producerism” and that this explains

why he was “such a peculiar socialist” (98).

This perspective especially informs Chapter 5, “Marrying Marxism,” a chap-

ter that raises serious problems. While many pages would be necessary to en-

gage this discussion, the central issue regards the current pertinence, if any, of

both of two historically bankrupt visions: American “producer-republicanism,”

and a Marxism that still owes to its 2nd International genesis. Dewey may well

have been nostalgic (again, as Mills argues), even if his arguments against the

Marxism of his day were penetrating. But if so, perhaps one needs to exploit the

deep affinities between Marx and Dewey. Cornel West is on the right track here

whatever misgivings one might have regarding the “prophetic” dimensions of his thought.

NOTES

1. A review of Robert B. Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Pol-

itics of Truth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University of Press, 2005).

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287

Depending what one is willing to assume, there are some importantly differ-

ent conclusions one might come to regarding the publication of Matthew Fes-

tenstein’s Pragmatism and Political Theory (1997). If one takes for granted

the current state of higher education, academic publishing and mainstream

academic philosophy in America, one must conclude (with, for example,

Richard Bernstein) that it is a valuable addition to the literature. It is a well-

argued and informed examination of Dewey’s political theory and of three

theories that are offered as “New Pragmatisms.” For Festenstein, Dewey is

not the technocratic, bourgeois thinker that he is too often taken to be, nor “a

hazy utopian,” nor, as Richard Rorty would have it, is he a premature post-

modernist who having rejected metaphysical realism and representational

epistemology creates “room only for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable. . . sense of human solidarity.” Rather, for Festenstein, “Dewey’s political

philosophy must be understood against the background of his ethical, psy-

chological and metaphysical thought” (1997:10). While this has been seen

before (Flower and Murphey, 1977; Tiles, 1988), the burden of Part I is to de-

velop, in a systematic way, the underpinnings of Dewey’s theory of democ-

racy. There is much that is sound here, including his careful reconstruction of

Dewey’s claims regarding the “the objective character of human freedom and

its dependence upon a congruity of environment with human wants” (22), and

perhaps especially his idea that “our reasons for valuing the imperfect forms

of political democracy are not the same as our reasons for revering democ-

racy” (80).

Part II considers the writings of Rorty, Habermas and Hilary Putnam. Ac-cording to Festenstein, the critical force of Dewey’s view derives from estab-

lishing “some distance between his own conception of individuality and the

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beliefs and values which he thinks are still embodied in the practices and

thinking of his society” (99). But, if Festenstein is right, Dewey cannot vin-dicate this conception. Accordingly, “his is simply a differing opinion about

those values and beliefs [and] not a critical vantage point which his fellow cit-

izens should themselves adopt” (99). Rorty, of course, bites this bullet. Fes-

tenstein’s criticism of Rorty is careful and very much located within the con-

temporary philosophical debate. Habermas and Putnam, like Rorty, “are

sensitive to a sceptical threat which is alien to Dewey’s thought” (105) and

they offer “reconstructions.” Their response, flawed in ways different from

Dewey’s, is “to construct a vantage point on different foundations from

Dewey’s teleological naturalism” (105). Since Dewey looks good compared

to both Habermas and Putnam, partisans of pragmatism may like the out-

come, even if I have my doubts that they should. My doubts on this derive

from two sources, one is the question of whether Festenstein has caught

Dewey’s philosophical significance, the other from my unwillingness to

make the assumptions just identified. Let me, if briefly, start with this last.

Festenstein’s book would not be useful either to undergraduates or to the

general reader. His over-riding concern is to argue, against the background of

“the sceptical threat,” that Dewey offers a plausible, if incomplete, philo-

sophical justification for his normative ethical and political theory. Moreover,

it is written in the argumentative style of analytic philosophy. Thus, there is

no concern for the historical or problem-context of Dewey’s work, for his cul-

tural or social significance, nor for more straightforward political matters:

what follows, perhaps, in the way of political institutions, practices, policies

or even political vision, whether, e.g., liberal democracy has already given us

the last word. The book is abstract (and abstracted) theory, justified on the

perfectly plausible ground that “extending to a past thinker’s work a degreeof theoretical articulation which the texts themselves do not overtly display

may be a means of discovering what, if anything, can be learned from that

thinker” (11).

The book is “well-argued” in the sense that philosophical argument is cur-

rently understood: it responds to “arguments” in “the literature,” tries to be

clear about implicit assumptions and the warrant of inferences, made or im-

plied. And it is “dialectical” in the sense that after all the objections and qual-

ifications are considered, one is never quite sure what the author wants us to

believe. Accordingly, the “market” for this book is restricted. Rorty identified

the pertinent group: “first rate minds” who “are busy solving problems which

no non-philosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with

nothing outside the discipline”(Rorty, 1998: 129). I am not, to be sure, think-ing of this as a marketing problem for the University of Chicago (and Polity)

Press. Rather it is meant to speak to what is happening in higher education, in

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academic publishing and academic philosophy, and more generally in public

culture. Rorty’s criticism of philosophy and of the role of philosophers surelygets a piece of this, even while Rorty is less interested in getting at the causes

of what we would agree is an increasingly dangerous situation.2

Plainly, I cannot here treat this. Still one must notice that the mass media,

including academic publishing, and higher education are hostage to the

changing capitalist political economy and its imperatives.3 In 1927, the pub-

lic was being eclipsed: Dewey brilliantly diagnosed the causes of this. Today,

the public is obliterated: mass media, as Marcuse saw, both numb our minds

and encourage irrelevant expression. The modern research university makes

its contribution. Despite the protests of Dewey and a few others, it would

not be long before disciplinary fragmentation would make its contribution to

the disintegration of intelligible experience, vision would be displaced by

technique—sometimes in the name of Dewey, and critical, humanistic stu-

dent-centered teaching and learning would take second place to the impera-

tives of “research and publication.” Philosophers and their students can read

the books of philosophers in order to discover (remarkably!) that “neofascists

are wrong (to put it mildly) without implying that this judgment can be justi-

fied to them as they are, with the beliefs and values they hold.” It is thus that

students are turned off, politically and otherwise, and that most of the stuff

produced for publication in academic departments, not merely in philosophy,

but in the humanities and social sciences is, intended or not, politically irrel-

evant (at its best?), or profoundly conservative.4 I don’t know what, these

days, is the break-even point for a book, nor how many people will eventu-

ally read this very solid book. But it need not be many. And do not misun-

derstand me: no irony is intended in saying that this is a very solid book. It

just isn’t very Deweyan.Festenstein writes that Rorty “sees in Dewey’s pragmatism the rejection of the

concern with ‘accounts’ and ‘foundations’ slavishly (sic) displayed in his [Fes-

tenstein’s] approach.” This is certainly true. According to Rorty, Dewey had two

sides: an “enlightened” and a “retrograde” half. Quoting Rorty: “. . . in his

`hedgehog life capacity as a philosopher, as opposed to his foxy capacity as

columnist,” [Dewey] kept insisting that a new logic and a new metaphysics were

required if moral and political thought were to be rejuvenated’ “(10). Rorty, of

course, can see little to recommend Dewey’s insistence on this, for Rorty, an un-

welcome residue of his commitment to philosophy. Dewey, obviously, saw it

otherwise: It was his goal to transform both the institutions of liberal democratic

America and the philosophical tradition that stood as an obstacle to this. Ac-

cordingly, Dewey did not abandon philosophy; he tried to transform it. The ironyhere is this: Rorty approves of the “foxy columnist” who wrote marvelous analy-

ses and critiques of our institutions, but he chucked what in Dewey was most

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profound—and radical: his efforts to replace epistemology with a naturalistic

theory of inquiry. Festenstein wants to rescue Dewey from this “selective read-ing.” But he does it without appreciating the radical force of Dewey’s “new

logic” and “new metaphysics, “ which begins with a rejection of the “slavish”

concern with accounts and foundations.5

There were, of course, skeptics before Descartes raised his questions. As

Rorty wrote, ancient Pyrrhonism was concerned to show that we could know

nothing with certainty and that it “had been troubled principally by the ̀ prob-

lem of the criterion’—the problem of validating procedures of inquiry while

avoiding either circularity or dogmatism.” Descartes, Rorty suggests, thought

he solved this problem but in trying to do this—with his doctrine of “clear and

distinct ideas,” he created a new kind of problem: “the problem of getting

from inner space to outer space—the `problem of the external world’ which

became paradigmatic for modern philosophy”(Rorty, 1979: 139). Rorty was

correct in arguing that since it was widely believed that something had to le-

gitimate the new science, epistemology became the core of the fairly recent

demarcation of philosophy and science. He is right also that metaphysics then

had to be something that emerged out of epistemology rather than vice versa.

This is part of our history—the Western tradition of philosophy and science.

Like it or not, we have it. (There are other traditions that do not.)

But given this history, it doesn’t follow that we need to reproduce its problems

or as Rorty would seem to have it, to throw up our hands. Dewey did not. In-

stead, he tried to shift ground. For him, there was no problem of going from

“inner space” to “outer space,” so he had to redefine both “experience” and

“metaphysics.” Epistemology became “inquiry;” “truth” became warranted as-

sertability and “knowledge,” he insisted, was best understood as the product of

competent inquiries in any domain. In effect, he agreed with that version of Pyrrhonism that accepted that we could have no certain knowledge of anything

and that the genuine problem was “the problem of validating procedures of in-

quiry while avoiding either circularity or dogmatism.” While Festenstein some-

times seems to be close to seeing this, ultimately, I believe, he misses.

It is thus that he concludes that Dewey had “a scientistic hope for a physics

of problem-solving” (45) and that his “empirical theory of valuation seems to

rest on the possibility of a prior science of problems and their resolution,

which does not exist” (44). It is thus also that he finds serious, if not fatal,

problems in Dewey’s naturalistic ethical framework (62, 99, 145), and can

seriously offer us the neo-Kantian “discourse ethics” of Habermas and the

internal realism of Putnam as potential improvements.

Dewey surely did contribute to being misread, and this was due not merelyor mainly to his prose. Pragmatism, he insisted, “occupies a position of an

emancipated empiricism or thoroughgoing naïve realism.” Accordingly, it


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was content “to take its stand with science and . . . [and] daily life” ( Middle

Writings, Vol. 10: 39). But innocence lost cannot be regained. Even if Deweydid insist that “objectivity” did not require “foundations” (warranted asserta-

bility was sufficient), he could hardly satisfy modern philosophers with the

claim that he was content to take his stand with science and daily life without

leaving himself open to the charge of scientism—and a naïve one at that.

It is critical to notice first, that although Dewey was fully aware that sci-

ence was not the engine of human liberation it was so often thought to be,

( Early Writings, Vol. 4: 16), he did not take the trouble to think of science in

the concrete terms his own approach should have required. Instead of think-

ing of the sciences as practices with different methods, goals and relations to

the larger society, he spoke abstractly of “science.” Further, he had no phi-

losophy of science and much of what he says in this regard seems both naïve

and positivist (Chapter 1, above). Finally, at least until the Logic, he spoke of

“scientific method” as pretty much equivalent to “inquiry, “ and even to “crit-

ical intelligence.” This was a disaster and encouraged the wide-spread view,

well put by Festenstein:

Dewey’s writings suggest several kinds of connections between the sciences and

ethical and political thought . . . These included the thesis that there is something

called the ‘scientific method’ which is determinate and capable of abstraction

from the intellectual and institutional context of the natural sciences; the view

that this method can and should be exploited by the developing human sciences,

and to some extent had already been taken up . . . ; and the commitment to the

use of the social sciences, and of scientific technology more generally, in ad-

dressing social problems (30).

But Dewey’s theory of inquiry is not some metaphysically neutral abstracted

“scientific method” (whatever that may be) and it is surely is not the typical sort

of nonsense one still gets in introductions in textbooks with silly talk that, e.g.,

“hypotheses” are confirmed only insofar as they allow us to make “good pre-

dictions.” While features of his theory of inquiry were suggested by what Dewey

took to be features of successful science, it was meant to replace the problems

of epistemology with a different set of questions. Thus:

. . . [W]hen a writer endeavors to take a frankly naturalistic, biological and

moral atttitude, and to account for knowledge on the basis of the place it occu-

pies in such a reality, he is treated as if his philosophy were, after all, just an-

other kind of epistemology ( Middle Works, Vol. 8).

Just as his metaphysics is “new” in that he refuses Kant’s transcendental

move, his “logic,” which flows from his metaphysics, is new in rejecting


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Russellian strictures in the theory of science. Burke summarizes the upshot of

this:

The complexity of Dewey’s logical theory as a whole is due to the fact that there

is more to consider than simply comparing sentences against facts. His focus on

inquiry and experience, his reformulation of the notion of facts in information-

theoretic terms, his relatively complicated taxonomy of propositions (as distinct,

moreover, from judgments), and so forth are all part of an attempt to explain (1)

what it means to say that a statement about how things are may or may nor cor-

respond to how things actually are, when at the same time, (2) it is not possible

to step back and treat this correspondence as if it were a matter of comparing the

statement against reality (Burke, 1994: 240).

Nor was Dewey scientistic in the sense that he assumed that the social sci-

ences should model themselves on the natural sciences, especially as they

were then understood. He regularly spoke of “alleged scientific social in-

quiry” and was often very critical of both the natural and the social sciences.

He offered, for example, that “the existing limitations of ‘social science”

[Dewey’s quotation marks!] are due mainly to unreasoning devotion to phys-

ical science as a model, to a misconception of physical science at that.”( Later

Works, Vol. 6: 64) In another place, he notes that the “backwardness of social

knowledge is marked in its division into independent and insulated branches

of learning,” and “it is not conceived in terms of its bearing on human life”

( Later Works, Vol. 2: 2). Dewey was anything but a naïve defender of the

fragmented, ideologically driven social sciences and he envisaged, it is safe

to say, a research program that has been stunningly ignored. As early as 1897,

he had this to say:



them together in somewhat aimless fashion . . . But social ethics represents the

attempt to translate philosophy from a general and therefore abstract method

into a working and specific method; it is the change from inquiring into the na-

ture of value in general to an inquiry of the particular values which ought to be

realized in the life of everyone, and of the conditions which shall render possi-

ble this realization ( Early Works, Vol. 5: 23).

This well summarizes Dewey’s naturalistic philosophical project, dubiously

consistent with Festenstein’s idea that he assumed that there was “some a

prior science of problems and their resolution,” or that “scientific technol-

ogy” would be of any help in addressing social problems. Finally, as Deweywell recognized, achieving the conditions that would render possible the re-

alization of these values is the problem of democracy. Despite the scientific


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claims by “experts,” “the prime condition of a democratically organized pub-

lic is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist.”It may be that Festenstein’s able book will further stimulate efforts to re-

store what is viable in Dewey. My fear is that it may do just the opposite.

NOTES

1. A review of Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From

Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

2. Rorty’s descriptions are trenchant. For example, he writes that “one of the scari-

est social trends is illustrated by the fact that in 1979 kids from the top socioeconomic

quarter of American families were four times more likely to get a college degree than

those from the bottom quarter; now they are ten times more likely” (86). Add to this

his further observation: “Humanistic education may become what it was in Oxbridgebefore the reforms of the 1870s: merely a turnstile for admission to the overclass”

(135). Given his (implausible!) understanding of “the reformist left,” Rorty waffles in

trying to explain this, seeing on the one hand that “the international, cosmopolitan su-

per-rich” will “make all the important decisions” and on the other, berating the Marx-

ist left as either Stalinist stooges or apocalyptic revolutionaries. Missing here is ac-

knowledgment that only Marxists gave plausible analyses of what was happening.

While Rorty quite rightly puts weight on agency in historical change, he evidently

fails to see that in both his incarnations as a philosopher, he was a major contributor

to the disastrous outcome he describes.

3. See my “Higher Education at the Brink” (2000), “The Social Sciences: Who

Needs ‘Em” (2003), and “Globalization and Higher Education (2007).

4. Rorty is unduly hard on “the Foucauldian academic left,” whom, he says, “is ex-

actly the sort of Left that the oligarchy dreams of: ALeft whose members are so busyunmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to passed in

order to create a better future” (139). Were it only a matter of passing new laws!

5. Festenstein cites Sleeper’s 1960 intervention versus Morton White: “Even

among those who have welcomed Dewey’s plan for putting ethics on a scientific ba-

sis there is a general tendency to focus upon the methodological implications of his

proposals and to neglect, the metaphysical perspective which accompanies them and

without which that plan seems inevitably to go awry” (21). While this seems correct,

Sleeper 1960 may well have encouraged the reading Festenstein gives, a reading not

possible in Sleeper’s much later, “Rorty’s Pragmatism: Afloat in Neurath’s Boat, But

Why Adrift” (Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, 21 (1985): 9–20, and his im-

portant The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)

which shows the connection between Dewey’s theory of inquiry in the Logic (1938)

and his “metaphysics of existence.” That is, more than a naturalistic ethic is at stake.

Festenstein seems to believe that Ernest Nagel provides an adequate understanding

and assessment of Dewey’s Logic. For discussion, see Part II.


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295

Patrick Baert has written an ambitious and provocative book. He tells us that

he had two objectives. The first is “to advance a new approach to [philosophy

of the social sciences] that is indebted to American pragmatism” (Baert, 2005:

1). In brief, once “foundationalism” and “naturalism” are rejected, we can ac-

knowledge for social science a diversity of “cognitive “interests” including

“self-knowledge,” and a pluralism of “method.” To my knowledge, this is an

entirely novel proposal, both in making self-knowledge an important goal of

research in the social sciences, and in seeking to ground this in pragmatism.

A number of writers, including, for example, Rescher (1975), Laudan (1984),

and perhaps one could count also Quine and Putnam, have provided at least

the rudiments of a pragmatic philosophy of science, but excepting perhaps

Margolis (1987), to my knowledge, no recent self-declared pragmatist haslooked specifically at the social sciences. Moreover, Baert recognizes that he

is jumping into a beehive of controversy over just what pragmatism is, a prob-

lem decidedly complicated by the intervention of Richard Rorty. It is true that

Rorty’s work has brought “pragmatism” back to the mainstream, but he has

been severely criticized by a wide variety of interpreters of American prag-

matism (for example, Sleeper 1986; Margolis 1986; Hickman 1990; Bern-

stein 1991; Stuhr 2003).

The second goal “is to present an advanced assessment of the main ap-

proaches in philosophy of social sciences.” The book, he says, “is written so

that it can be read in either way” (2005: 1). The latter goal is provided by the

first five chapters. Those interested in his new approach “can read chapters 6

and 7 and for those already familiar with pragmatism, only chapter 7, the con-cluding chapter.” But “this is not to say that chapters 1 to 6 are irrelevant to the

concluding chapter” (1). While the authors discussed in the first five chapter

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were not chosen because “they somehow fit into narrative that ultimately leads

towards [his] pragmatic view,” his pragmatic proposal “is partly based on a rejection of other strategies in the philosophy of the social sciences” (3). Ac-

cordingly, the topics and authors of the first five chapters “were chosen be-

cause their perspectives are central in the philosophy of social sciences.

Chapter 1 considers Durkheim’s “naturalism,” chapter 2 discusses Weber’s

“interpretative method,” chapter 3, Popper’s “falsificationism,” 4, “critical re-

alism,” and 5, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. Chapter 6. “Richard

Rorty and Pragmatism,” then, provides the point of departure for Baert’s con-

cluding chapter 7, “A Pragmatist Philosophy of the Social Sciences.”

All of the first five chapters are of interest and each provides learned ex-

position and assessment of the positions under discussion. One might quarrel

with this or that point of interpretation, but this will not be the focus of the

present review. But if the individual chapters are useful, one might say that

the selection of topics and authors of the first five chapters does not in a help-

ful way allow us to identify the central perspectives in philosophy of social

science. To be sure, much depends on how one wants to cut the pie as regards

alternative positions. For example, Baert writes that Durkheim’s work stands

in ‘an uneasy relation to positivism” (13) and that indeed, “Durkheim viewed

science as capable of delving beneath the surface and uncovering underlying

mechanisms that account for the observed regularities” (15). If true then this

is squarely a realist position. Baert’s account of Durkheim may be recom-

mended as a contribution to the literature on Durkheim, but my point here is

that since the still dominating philosophy of social science among sociolo-

gists is a version of positivism, this needs representation and comment. One

thinks here of Lundberg, Homans or more recently, Jonathan Turner (1987).2

Similarly, Weber was surely anti-positivist and a key player in the Methoden-streit, and as Baert rightly sees, he “transcended” the polarization between the

positivist idea of a nomothetic science and Diltheyan version of the human

sciences as ideographic. For him causal analysis and “interpretation” were

both essential and possible. Indeed, given his views of causation, it is not dif-

ficult to give a reading of Weber that makes him close to a realist position

(Manicas, 2006: 115–125). Similarly, then, Weber may not be the best choice

to represent interpretative sociology, generally understood to be a distinctly

“anti-naturalist” posture and still prominent in sociology and anthropology.

Among philosophers, one thinks here of Gadamer and Natanson, and among

social scientists, Geertz, any number of recent cultural anthropologists (Rabi-

now and Sullivan, 1987), and sociologists inspired by an anti-naturalistic phe-

nomenological posture.3 Popper is an odd choice for all sorts of reasons, notleast because he wrote practically nothing in the philosophy of social science

and has left no legacy among social scientists. Indeed, there are plenty of

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signs that his major contribution to the philosophy of history, the critique of

“historicism” (in his idiosyncratic sense) has still not penetrated the thinkingof many social scientists. The account of the Frankfurt school is both sound

and appropriate, but this ignores views that are closer to Marx and perhaps

more influential. One thinks here, for example of E.P. Thompson, Paul Willis,

Nancy Fraser, Mike Davis and many others. Critical realism has drawn on

this wing of Marxism, so perhaps Baert’s account of it is all that is necessary

here. His account of critical realism is generally sound but since I share this

view and Baert takes it to be an exemplary version of what he rejects, the

reader has a fair point of departure. In any case, perhaps for Baert, the selec-

tion of writers is not that important since it seems that the problem with all

the writers discussed in the first five chapters is their commitment to either

“naturalism,” understood as “the search for a single scientific method appro-

priate for the study of both the social and the natural realms” (3) or to “foun-

dationalism,” understood as “the effort to uncover unchanging foundations of

an all-embracing framework or science of the social” (153). These are the

twin bogies which “pragmatism” allows us to exorcize.

My second problem is this: How well does Baert negotiate the thicket of

pragmatism? Baert notes that while his view is “in line with recent contribu-

tions to pragmatism, specifically Rorty and Bernstein, I am not arguing that my

views are necessarily consistent with those expressed by earlier generations of

pragmatism” (147). Rather, his proposal “is inspired by neo-pragmatism rather

then derived from it.” The gist of his argument, he continues, “is perfectly con-

sistent with the philosophical outlook of neo-pragmatism” (147). I think that it

is easy to show that his view is not consistent with Peirce, James or Dewey but

will not labor the point here. Here agreeing with Bernstein, I conclude that

Rorty got Dewey entirely wrong. Baert, while seeing some serious problems inRorty, nevertheless thinks of pragmatism pretty much as Rorty does. The con-

cluding chapter very conveniently summarizes his proposal under six major

headings. It will be useful here, one hopes, to address these seriatum.

1. “METHODOLOGICAL DIVERSITYCHARACTERIZES SCIENCE” (147)

As noted, Baert rejects what he terms “naturalism,” “the search for a single sci-

entific method for the study of both the social and the natural sciences” (3).3

Drawing on Rorty he asserts that this search has failed (Baert: 131–35). Agood

deal depends, of course, on what is to count as “a single scientific method.”Here one must distinguish method as technique and method in the wider sense

of presupposing a philosophy of science, including an ontology and episte-

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mology. To be sure, astronomy does not employ experiments, ethnographers

do not employ multiple regression, and surely there are differences betweenthe practices of the physical sciences and the practices of most social scien-

tists: a straightforward consequence of differences in ontology: the social

world is meaningful and does not exist independently of the actions of persons.

Thus, the physical scientist does not ask for the meaning of action of mole-

cules; if human action is to be explained, the social scientist must seek mean-

ing (as Weber, ethnographers, and critical realists emphasize.) Similarly, for

post-Kuhnian epistemology, there is no algorithm that assures a scientific con-

sensus (when it is achieved), no “logic” of discovery or confirmation or as per

Popper, logic of “falsification.” Indeed, dispelling this myth was surely the

major achievement both Kuhn and Feyerabend.4 But it does not follow that the

successful sciences share nothing of importance, however different are their

practices and techniques (both across disciplines and historically within disci-

plines). At the very least, the practices of the successful physical sciences have

evolved norms regarding inquiry that practitioners acknowledge, usually tac-

itly. Publicity and consideration of evidence is one. Acknowledgement of a

stubborn reality and fallibilism is another. Thus, while the very powerful work

in the sociology of science gives us a deeper understanding the actual practices

of the sciences, few, if anyone, would go so far as to say that scientific prac-

tices are indistinguishable “methodologically” from non-scientific practices

(Pickering, 1992). Baert’s view is especially ironical as regards the pragma-

tists. Peirce famously distinguished four methods of fixing belief and insisted

that the “method of science,” which by virtue of its acknowledgement that

there is “something which affects or might affect any man” is self-corrective

and, accordingly, had to be preferred—pragmatically. Similarly, Dewey put

huge wait on inquiry insisting that the successful sciences were successful be-cause they were in fact using the “logic” which for him not only characterized

science, but everyday “intelligent” problem solving. The classical pragmatists

rejected Kant’s transcendental move, but unlike Rorty, they sought a recon-

struction of philosophy, not a rejection of it. As we shall see, on this critical is-

sue, Baert is strongly pulled in the direction of Rorty.

2. “THE SOCIAL SCIENCES GAINFROM METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM” (150)

For Baert there is a “multitude of cognitive interests that underlie social re-

search” and it is an error to reduce these to one: “explanation, possibly pre-diction” (150). It is not clear to me what are these many “cognitive interests”

(which smacks more of Habermas than any pragmatist) or what the argument

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here is. Is this, for example, an empirical claim? It is normative? As he says,

if “prediction and control” is the goal, then the “value-free” “vocabulary”of “naturalistic” approaches will suffice. If, on the other hand, “we want to treat

human beings as moral individuals, then surely anti-naturalistic approaches

are called for” (134). This seems to be, following Rorty, a very positivist view

of the matter, not shared by critical realists or Dewey. Rorty is clearly posi-

tivist. He “sums up” by offering “two distinct requirements for the vocabu-

lary of the social sciences: (1) It should contain descriptions of situations

which facilitate their prediction and control” and (2) “It should contain de-

scriptions which help one decide what to do” (Rorty 1982: 197). Rorty notes,

correctly, those who aim at prediction do very poorly. He might also have no-

ticed that not only does “control” require very little science (it requires

power), it too is limited—as regards persons, thank heaven, and as regards na-

ture, it is entirely absent when it comes to ensuring that nature will do our

bidding. The best we can do here is try to understand its dynamics, to avoid

disastrous intervention. and otherwise to learn “to cope.”

Is not clear how much of Rorty’s “summary” Baert accepts, since most ob-

viously missing in Rorty’s account is the realist idea that the “descriptions”

have nothing to do with “prediction” and should aim at facilitating explana-

tion in the realist sense. That is, just as we understand why iron rusts because

we have molecular chemistry, we can understand why working class kids get

working class jobs. That is, we need an account of the beliefs and attitudes of

working class kids (and their teachers and parents) that explains what they do,

and then an account that provides the conditions and consequences, mostly

unintended, of these actions. Indeed, only with such understanding can we

build technologies and/or intervene successfully. May we suppose that along

with prediction and control, methodological pluralism tolerates realistgoals—and others perhaps not identified? But we are entitled to ask which of

the identified goals bear pragmatic fruit? On this point, there would seem to

be deep disagreement between myself and Baert.

3. “THE SPECTATOR THEORY OF KNOWLEDGEIS INAPPROPRIATE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH” (151)

The “spectator theory of knowledge” is, of course, Dewey’s term. It was

aimed at all epistemologies which fail to appreciate that knowing is an active

relation between the knower and the known, and that inquiry is constrained

by both the practical concern which generates it and the constraints imposedby the environment in which the inquirer is situated.5 In his demolition of

foundational epistemology, Rorty enlisted Dewey. But we need to notice that


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not only did they have different purposes, but they began with very different

assumptions: Dewey assumed a philosophical naturalism and sought a recon-struction of philosophy in which the spectator theory of knowledge was re-

placed by “not another epistemology” but with a naturalistic theory of

inquiry—finally elaborated in his generally ignored and misunderstood 1938

Logic. For Dewey, inquirers are always situated in space and time, confront a

material and historically produced social world, and are motivated to inquiry

to solve a problem. Indeed, it is this sense of “practical” which is shared by

all pragmatists. Knowledge, then, is simply the product of competent inquiry.

A God’s eye for the world is neither necessary nor possible. Thus, for exam-

ple, when known as Fe, iron enters into new relations for us.6 Rorty, by con-

trast, wants to insist that the product of inquiry cannot be a representation of

a reality even though, for Dewey, it is the hard won product of controlled ex-

periment: the paradigm of an active effort to produce knowledge.7 Similarly,

Rorty aims not at reconstruction, but thinks that the “problems” of philoso-

phy, including epistemology and ontology disappear once we see that it is all

a matter of finding a “vocabulary” suitable for the purpose at hand—Baert’s

main indebtedness to Rorty .

Thus, contemporary “textualism,” the idea that there are nothing but texts

parallels the idealist notion that there are nothing but ideas (Rorty, 1982:

139). But there is, he insists, a critical difference between current textualism

and classical idealism. In repudiating the tradition, textualists reject the

framework that allows for epistemology and ontology. Thus, unlike idealists

(or naturalists or materialists) so-called “post-modern” writers reject the idea

that what is important is not whether what we believe is true, but what “vo-

cabulary we use.” Finally, then, for Rorty, pragmatism joins post-modern

thinking in repudiating metaphysical argument between idealist/naturalists—and the epistemological idea of truth as correspondence with reality.

Baert has some misgivings with aspects of Rorty’s thought—for example,

his polemic against Marx and his politics, but finds that most of what Rorty

offers is convincing. Similarly Rorty sees that Dewey does not exactly fit his

larger picture. In agreement with Santayana, Rorty insists that Dewey’s ef-

forts at a “naturalistic metaphysics” betrays “a recurrent flaw in Dewey’s

work: his habit of announcing a bold new positive program when all he of-

fers, and all he needs to offer, is criticism of the tradition” (Rorty 1982: 78).

To be sure, Dewey does offer “a bold new positive program”—a naturalistic

metaphysics with epistemology replaced by his version of “logic” (Sleeper,

1986). And he needed to do this because he could not step out of history and

argue, as Rorty does, that knowledge and truth are pseudo problems that willgo away once we abandon the claims of philosophy. Indeed, it is quite one

thing to try to convince us that “warranted assertability” could replace

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“truth,” understood as a certainty, and quite another to say that, for pragma-

tists, “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—nowholesale constraints derived from the nature of objects, or the mind, or of

language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our

fellow-inquirers” (Rorty 1982: 165). Worse,

the Socratic virtues—willingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the

consequences of actions on other people—are simply moral virtues . . . The prag-

matists tell us that the conversation which it is our moral duty to continue is merely

our project, the European’s intellectual form of life” (Rorty 1982: 172).

Perhaps we can put aside this remarkable provincialism and consider more

broadly “conversation” as the key to “successful” outcomes. For Baehr,

4. “SOCIAL RESEARCH IS A CONVERSATION” (153)

This would seem to be the most obvious of the influences of Rorty on Baert’s

project. Baert sees rightly that classical pragmatism rejected what is generally

termed “foundationalism,” the search for secure epistemic grounding of truth

claims. But there is a critical difference between what might be called “the

situated objectivity” defended by Dewey—who as noted, agreed that there

could be no God’s eye view of the world and the position taken by Rorty. As

with metaphysical controversy that dissolves once we see that all that is nec-

essary is an appropriate vocabulary, relativism can similarly be evaded—not

answered.8 One we rid ourselves of the Enlightenment framework, we

“would no longer by haunted by spectors called ‘relativism’ and ‘irrational-

ism’ (Bernstein 1992: 270). Instead of directly addressing this question, Baert

calls our attention to another sense of “foundationalism,” “the effort to un-

cover unchanging foundations of an all-embracing framework of science or

science of the social” (153). Critical realists are the “purest expression” of

this, but it is true of Parson’s structural functionalism, Giddens’s structuration

theory (which I consider a version of realism), and the theories of Luhmann,

Habermas, and rational choice theory. These metatheories, like the search for

a method, presuppose both an epistemology and an ontology of science and,

for Rorty and Baert, they all fail.

Perhaps remarkably, a solution to both senses of foundationalism seems to

be found in the work of Richard Bernstein and what he called a “dialogic en-

counter.” Baert is clear on what he means:

In a dialogic encounter people do not wish to score points by exploiting the

weakness of others; they try to listen to them by understanding them in the


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strongest way. They strengthen their own arguments so as to make them most

credible and to learn from them. Academic communication, then, becomes a

more like a proper conversation, which encourages the participants to think dif-

ferently. The ultimate aim is not to defend a refine a particular system but to use

academic conversation to enhance our imaginative faculties.

It would seem foolish to quarrel with the good manners of this good advice—

even if it is a council of perfection. The more difficult question is how this

bears on the question of addressing deep differences in frameworks, between

say Giddens and Parsons, or rational choice theorists and critical theorists?

Indeed, having enhanced our imaginative faculties, are we now to say that

one can only be tolerant of differences since there is no true, correct, valid,

warranted, justified answer to the questions of epistemology and ontology?

Rorty at least would seem to be content to stop here. I am not clear where

Baert stands on this critical issue.

5. “KNOWLEDGE AS ACTION” (154)

As above, for Baert, the question of method depends in part at least on the

goals of research, but “methodological questions cannot be reduced to ques-

tions of ontology: (154). Accordingly, for him, “there is nothing essential

about the social that compels the use of a particular method” (154). One can

be generous here and agree that if prediction and control are our aims, per-

haps we can think of human action in the same way we think of the move-

ment of planets! But indeed, this seems like a reductio ad absurdum of the as-

sumed metaphysics! This is not merely a philosophical prejudice: theempirical evidence shows it to be nonsense. Indeed, as Weber insisted, even

if a goal of science is to “predict” action, one needs verstehen to do this. As

he correctly saw, science is not likely to improve on our capacities to under-

stand and then to anticipate responses of others. Indeed these capacities are a

presupposition of social interaction.

6. “SELF-UNDERSTANDING OPENS UPALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS” (155)

A “dialogic encounter” has additional fruits. Baert recommends “self-knowl-

edge” as a worthy cognitive object for social science. Following Gadamer,

“understanding ought be seen as an encounter, firstly, in which we rely upon

our cultural presuppositions to gain access to what in being studied, and sec-

ondly, through which we articulate and rearticulate the very same presuppo-

302 Chapter Fifteen

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sitions” (155). To do this, we need to reject the idea that “the right interpre-

tative method would allow us to touch upon the ‘reality-out-there,’” but wegain sensitivity to views not held by us (155). The third consequence of the

hermeneutic circle, so conceived, is that understanding is closely linked to

self-understanding. Baert concludes the volume with illustrations from sev-

eral ongoing research programs, including cultural anthropology, archaeol-

ogy, and the genealogical work of Foucault.

Again, there is surely no complaint about social scientific efforts at self-un-

derstanding. And no doubt encountering alien cultures and deconstructing

historical constructions can be a most useful means to this. On the other hand,

as Baert acknowledges, other genre: fiction, biography, narrative history, well

serve this aim, as of course, does travel. But more pertinent, the question

arises whether some forms of social science serve this role as part of a larger

goal: the possibility of human emancipation.

Baert notes that as regards self-understanding there is the “emancipation ef-

fect.” “[E]ncountering difference may allow people to question some of their

deep-seated beliefs,” “to distinguish the necessary from the contingent, the es-

sential from historical specificity” (156). But why stop here? Why not also ar-

gue that for exactly the same reasons, understanding the causal conditions and

consequences of action is also emancipating? This is, of course, a critical con-

sequence of realist social science. Indeed, it provides a sufficient ground for im-

manent critique, surely an important task for social science. That is, under-

standing why one believes what one believes and seeing that such belief is false

but essential to the reproduction of a practice, gives one good reasons to chal-

lenge the practice. Baert gives a sympathetic reading of Foucault along these

lines. He might well have taken more seriously Bernstein’s penetrating criti-

cism of Rorty and his powerful defense of immanent critique against all thosepost-modern writers who, having dismissed philosophy, have lost all confi-

dence in the rational grounding of critique (Bernstein 1992: 316).

NOTES

1. A review of Patrick Baert, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragma-

tism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).

2. Baert holds that “most mainstream social research complies with the intricate

procedures suggested by the realist agenda” and that “it is simply not the case that

contemporary social researchers are satisfied with a mere recording of regularity con-

junctions; they look for mechanisms that account for how the regularities are broughtabout” (102). But as Calhoun writes (following Boudin), “most of what passes as

causal analysis in the social sciences is in fact identification of more or less ‘weak im-

plication’ between statistical variables” (1998: 866). Moreover, it is easy to show that


08_235_Ch15.qxd 4/30/08 7:17 AM Page 303



the “official” position of most social researchers that the goal of science is establish

“laws” construed as regularities that then “explain” by subsumption. Here are one or

two examples: Frankfort Nachmias and Nachmias write: “Ever since David Hume

. . . an application of the term explanation has been considered a matter of relating the

phenomena to be explained with other phenomena by means of general laws (1992:

10); Babbie writes: “In large part research aims to find patterns of regularity in social

life” (2004: 13). Even somebody like Jeffrey Alexander who, as a post-Kuhnian, re-

jects classic positivist epistemology would not say that “there is no ‘objective’knowl-

edge in the social sciences, nor even that there is no possibility of successful predic-

tions or covering laws (1987: 20). To be sure, like Durkheim, researchers very often

let good sense get in the way, contradict themselves, and hint at causal mechanisms.

Perhaps this is what Baert had in mind.

3. Interpretation of Alfred Schütz as anti-naturalistic is contestable, as is the un-

derstanding of work of the ethnomethodologists and perhaps also Goffman. See my

“The Social Sciences Since World War II: The Rise and Fall of Scientism,” in William

Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner (eds.), Handbook of Social Science Methodology,London: Sage.

4. Baert acknowledges that critical realism is a “qualified naturalism” in that while

it models social science on natural science, it insists on important differences between

the social and natural sciences (96). Similarly as regards Weber. Durkheim’s natural-

ism is unqualified and, as Schütz pointed out, it found expression in Parsons and those

who followed him. See my “The Social Sciences Since World War II: The Rise and

Fall of Scientism,” As I noted earlier, there are unqualified anti-naturalisms as well.

5. Versus “logical empiricism,” they displaced the “logic” of the logicians and un-

dermined positivist foundationist epistemology. Interesting in this regard is Baert’s

claim that if as realists say, most systems are open, then “most scientific explanations

cannot be properly justified philosophically” (103). This surely seems like a hanker-

ing for justification that, as pragmatists insist, is neither available nor necessary.

6. Dewey writes: “If we see that knowing is not the act of an outside spectator butof a participator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object of knowledge

resides in the consequences of directed action . . . For on this basis there will be as

many kinds of known objects as there are kinds of effectively conducted operations

of inquiry which result in the consequences intended” (Quest for Certainty 1960:

196–97). This includes knowing that iron is Fe and will, ceteris paribus, oxidize.

7. The work of Hacking and Pickering is very Deweyan. Thus Hacking writes: “The

theories of the laboratory sciences are not directly compared to ‘the world’; they persist

because they are true to the phenomena produced or even created by apparatus in the lab-

oratory and measured by instruments that we have engineered” (1992: 30). See also Pick-

ering’s idea of the “mangle of practice.” Critical realists can, of course, share in this view.

The so-called correspondence theory of truth cannot, to be sure, provide a mode of es-

tablishing truth, even if ‘true’may still mean “corresponds to the facts.”

8. For criticism of Rorty’s effort here see, Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constel-lation (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1992): 270–73.

304 Chapter Fifteen

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