Deweys Critical Pragmatism

The introduction to Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism, a new book from Public Agenda's Senior Public Engagement Research Associate Dr. Alison Kadlec.

At present, we are well over twenty-five years into an astonishing resurgence of interest in American pragmatism in general, and in John Dewey’s work specifically. What began as a modest flurry of interest in Dewey’s work, sparked by Richard Rorty’s 1979 claim that along with Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Dewey “is one of the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century,” has since developed into a remarkably vibrant research tradition with a wide range of expressions in the humanities and social sciences. While interest in Dewey’s significance has flourished across a number of academic disciplines from feminist theory to legal studies, perhaps even more interesting is the extent to which interest in Dewey has spilled beyond the confines of the ivory tower. It is no longer unusual to run across references to Dewey in more popular, if not exactly mainstream, media. In fact, for disaffected commentators on the hostile and vacuous partisan spectacle that passes for public discourse in America today, and on the attending abyss separating decision-making processes from the life of citizens, it has become increasingly common to refer to Dewey’s call for “democracy as a way of life” to signal the seriousness of our failures as an ostensibly self-directing peoples.

That Dewey might still ignite public imagination and spur ruminations about the health of American democracy should not come as a surprise. After all, Dewey was arguably the most important public thinker in America from the Progressive Era to World War II, and was viewed by his generation as “the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people.” Moreover, that Dewey was an astoundingly prolific writer for the better part of six decades helps account for the peculiar fact that attention to Dewey’s work has become a hotbed of academic activity that shows no signs of abatement. However, what is harder to account for is the fact that from Dewey’s death in 1952 to Rorty’s revival in 1979, Dewey all but disappeared from both the public and academic radars. Given my interest in the contemporary relevance of Dewey’s work, accounting for this strange disappearance is important because it helps brings into relief the extent to which democracy in general, and American democracy specifically, is an essentially contested concept rather than a set of established principles and mechanisms.

While the eclipse of Dewey’s work in academic circles can be explained largely by the rise of positivism and analytic philosophy, it is the disappearance of Dewey’s democratic vision from the American public life that is most relevant to my aims. During the early twentieth century, the language of experimentalism, which informed Dewey’s pragmatic vision of participatory democracy, was deployed in the service of a competing agenda. In his superb biography of Dewey, Robert Westbrook details how the development of the expansive research infrastructure of the social sciences, led by scholars such as Charles Merriam, initiated an era in the study of politics that forced Dewey’s democratic vision to the margins of public philosophy and privileged a new breed of democratic “realists” who sought to redefine American democracy.

The democratic realists of the twenties focused their criticism of democracy on two of its essential beliefs: the belief in the capacity of all men for rational political action and the belief in the practicality and desirability of maximizing the participation of all citizens in public life. Finding ordinary men and women irrational and participatory democracy impossible and unwise under modern conditions, they argued that it was best to strictly limit government by the people and to redefine democracy as, by and large, government for the people by enlightened and responsible elites.

Behind these claims, political scientists marshaled the forces of behavioral psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis to buttress their demands that American democracy be freed of its dangerous participatory associations. In this context, there was no room for Dewey’s call for “democracy as a way of life” and for the radical reform of educational institutions to make meaningful participation possible for all citizens. Though Dewey remained a leading public voice through the 1930s, by the time of his death in 1952, democratic realism had evolved into a fully self-justificatory model of democracy as efficiency.

Whereas the democratic realists of the 1920s had argued that we must recognize and compensate for the gap between democratic ideals and political realities, the realists of the 1950s took this argument to the next level by actively seeking to cast this gap in the role of a new democratic ideal. The identification of democracy with the existing machinery of pluralist and technocratic efficiency came to dominate American democratic theory beginning in the post-war period, and Dewey’s more expansive understanding of democracy as a form of associated living was eclipsed by the vision of democracy as rule by ‘accountable’ experts and elites. In arguing for the severe circumscription of citizen activity to guide the course of politics, democratic realists sapped democracy of its most democratic associations and the American system of governance by experts took firm and seemingly permanent root. Though participatory democracy made a brief comeback in the student movements of the 1960s, Dewey’s name and the democratic vision of pragmatism remained in eclipse for nearly three decades.

Given these fluctuations in Dewey’s status in the American democratic landscape, it is intriguing that at the start of the twenty-first century his work and vision should be enjoying such a dizzying array of renewed attention. Louis Menand has suggested that the core emphases on contingency at the expense of absolutism, on creative experimentalism, and on a socially constituted view of the individual have been recovered as therapeutic and serviceable contributions to a number of fields. To provide just a few of many possible examples; legal scholars advancing arguments for the pursuit of social justice via flexible interpretations of the Constitution, cultural pluralists arguing in defense of a shared democratic life in the context of irreducible plurality, and education reformers arguing for the generation of educational institutions that give all children the opportunity to develop their capacities for self-governance and creative problem-solving have each found a great deal of philosophical support in the pragmatist worldview that views associated living as the wellspring of democratic practices and institutions. In slightly more poetic, if decidedly vaguer terms, Cornel West describes the resurgence of pragmatism this way,

The distinctive appeal of American pragmatism in our postmodern moment is its unashamedly moral emphasis and its unequivocally ameliorative impulse. In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicism, nihilisms, terrorisms and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight.

On this account, while pragmatism may be a notoriously unwieldy tradition, a unifying theme is its undeniable appeal at those moments in American history when resuscitation of belief in deeply agentic and meaningful visions of democracy are felt especially needed. In other words, pragmatism is a natural ally to those who believe that ordinary citizens can do more to actively and intelligently participate in determining the conditions under which we live and directing the course of events. In this vein, I argue in what follows for the continued exploration of the contemporary significance of Dewey’s deep democratic faith.

In my view, the most important elements of this faith are Dewey’s staunch optimism about the human capacity for creative collaboration, and the attending belief that such collaboration is vital for the intelligent navigation of a dynamic world that is fraught in equal parts with promise and peril. What interests me most about this odd democratic faith is that it is, in Dewey’s thought, a working faith that depends on the activation of citizens who must do the heavy lifting of generating sound public knowledge. In contrast to the commitments of democratic realists who view voting as the most important, and ultimately only, vehicle for citizen involvement in decision-making and governance, a Deweyan view of democracy is, in contemporary parlance, deeply deliberative. In the most gen-eral of terms, contemporary deliberative democracy is oriented by the basic belief that legitimate governance in a democracy depends at least in part on the willingness and capacity of citizens to engage in public deliberation about mat-ters of common concern.

Though Dewey’s democratic faith is arguably his most significant legacy, the optimism it entails has tended to obscure some of its more interesting and imaginative features. The revitalization of citizen engagement cannot be understood merely as a matter of inviting the public back into the fold of decision-making, of making room for non-elites in the business of governance. While making the case for inclusion is certainly part of the work to be done, what is even more pressing is the need to account for the proliferating obstacles to the generation of meaningfully inclusive deliberative democratic opportunities for citizens. A range of social critics, from critical theorists to radical democratic theorists, have made tremendous headway in exposing and examining the impact of entrenched interests and structural inequalities on American public life, and it is in the spirit of these contributions that I seek to recover Deweyan pragmatism as a powerful resource for contemporary democratic theory and practice.

In what follows here I take four passes at Dewey’s lifework in order to open avenues of inquiry into the relevance of his democratic vision and activism for a more critically minded approach to contemporary deliberative democracy. In what follows, I reconstruct key aspects of Dewey’s approach to epistemology (Chapter 1), philosophy (Chapter 2), education (Chapter 3), and politics (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5), in order to argue for a model of pragmatism that is both attuned to the challenges posed by complex power relations and oriented by a commitment to meaningful democracy.

By reconstructing key aspects of Dewey’s thought and activism as expressions of this hard-edged working faith in democracy, I hope to clear space for a defensible and relevant model of “critical pragmatism.” It is important to note that Dewey’s views on epistemology, philosophy, education, and politics are inextricably linked together, overlapping in ways that make them, at times, virtually indistinguishable. This is not to say that these distinctions are arbitrary, only that they are related areas of Dewey’s work, and therefore must be seen as reflecting different dimensions of Dewey’s pragmatism. Likewise, the critical quality of Dewey’s thought must be viewed as multidimensional, reflecting the protean character of the term. Although I focus on epistemology, philosophy, education, and politics as discreet areas of inquiry into the critical dimensions of Deweyan pragmatism, I attempt to show throughout that Dewey’s lifelong commitment to the idea and practice of “democracy as a way of life” is the red thread connecting these three aspects of his work.

This phrase of Dewey’s is often quoted, but rarely explored. By looking to philosophy, education, and politics as the trajectory for this development, I hope to show how a preoccupation with the purpose and requirements for meaningful democracy circulates in Dewey’s many intellectual and practical experiments, and is inextricably linked to the critical components of his pragmatism as an antifoundational model of inquiry and action. To frame this in terms of the key components of any “critical” project, I argue that Dewey’s pragmatism is properly critical insofar as it is oriented by a commitment to exposing and actively combating, through interdisciplinary research and on-the-ground activity, the socio-cultural and economic relations of power that undergird the deep and pervasive inequalities that plague American society. It is my basic contention that Dewey firmly establishes a framework for rethinking deliberative democracy that is self-consciously purged of dogmatic foundationalism while still oriented by the critical reflection that is necessary for realization of democratic aims.

My view of what constitutes the “critical” elements of Dewey’s thought is at odds with mainstream views of critical theory, especially those that have developed from the neo-Marxist tradition of the Frankfurt School, that have insisted that any truly critical perspective and deep normativity must issue from a transcendental and singular point of origin outside of human experience. This divergence between critical theory and pragmatism is not only responsible for the tendency of critical theorists to dismiss pragmatism as a weak theory, it is also at the root of Dewey’s rejection of Marxism. Though he agrees entirely that economic arrangements are crucial factors in determining key features of the rest of society, and that they are often acute obstacles to meaningful democracy, Dewey rejects the singularity and fixity that Marxism insists upon in its analytic framework. In my view, the main thrust of Dewey’s argument against Marxism is that its analytic rigidity prevents it from being sufficiently critical. “Any monolithic theory of social action and social causation,” says Dewey, “tends to have a ready-made answer for problems that present themselves. The wholesale character of this answer prevents critical examination of the particular facts involved in the actual problem.” The clearest manifestation of Marxism’s insufficiently critical nature may be found in its inherently undemocratic intolerance of alternative viewpoints and modes of analysis. Most problematic for Dewey in this antidemocratic intolerance is that it exists alongside the specious suggestion that Marxism has standing as a “scientific” doctrine.

It is ironical that the theory which has made the most display and the greatest pretense of having a scientific foundation should be the one which has violated most systematically every principle of scientific methods. . . . I would not claim that any existing democracy has ever made complete or adequate use of scientific method in deciding its policies. But freedom of inquiry, toleration of diverse views, freedom of communication, the distribution of what is found out to every individual as the ultimate intellectual consumer, are involved in the democratic as in the scientific method. When democracy openly recognizes the existence of problems and the need for probing them as problems as its glory, it will relegate political groups that pride themselves upon refusing to admit incompatible opinions to the obscurity which already is the fate of similar groups in science.

The upshot here is that genuinely critical reflection, of the kind Marxists and their inheritors defend as essential to democratic transformation, proceeds from communicative flexibility and openness, not transcendental foundations.

For critical pragmatism the single most important challenge and necessity is to craft the habits that inspire both our openness to new perspectives and a shared taste for cooperative inquiry about the consequences of our individual and collective choices. Because the forces at work in modern life are so complex that we are continually experiencing unforeseeable consequences of our institutional arrangements and prevailing habits of thought, the choice between actively engaging and thus directing these forces and allowing them to direct us is the choice between democracy and authoritarianism. In turn, attempting to actively direct these forces, i.e., to choose democracy over authoritarianism, depends ultimately on our ability to cultivate the kinds of dispositions and habits that make the perception of complex and flexible patterns possible.

Because ours is a changeful existence, our policies and institutional arrangements are always spinning off unanticipated consequences that we must perceive and whose meaning we must tentatively determine in order to move forward intelligently in the pursuit of better practices. The mere fluidity and complexity of modern life makes the development of this intelligence extremely difficult, but totalizing theories that require a transcendental point of appeal “add the further handicap” of making dynamic intelligence unnecessary. The critical salience of pragmatism is grounded in the key insight that the greatest obstacles to meaningful democracy are not fixed institutional or economic arrangements; rather, they are the fluid and discursively constructed forces that isolate us and preclude the generation of social intelligence. Since the problems we face aren’t fixed and static, neither should be our confrontation of these problems. Critical thought and action depends on our ability to overcome isolating forces through the development of deliberative habits of inquiry and interaction.

In owing its existence to the framework provided by Marxism, what most versions of critical theory miss, even those versions which are most appreciative of pragmatism, is that fixed principles can take us only so far in developing critical capacities. They can help us identify some of the forces of subjugation and exclusion that emerge in formal structures and economic relations, but because they rely on fixed principles they cannot help us really grapple with the complexity of those relations and develop the kind of creativity that might help us meaningfully challenge and transform those relations in unexpected ways. As a result, fixed principles are unfortunately best suited to the generation of unnecessarily rigid views of the workings of power.

Much is missed when we impose artificial arrests on a world in flux, as not only does this impede our ability to perceive deeper and more nuanced relations of power that constrain and repress, this also stunts our ability to perceive and cultivate new possibilities for change. Genuinely critical reflection is not merely about identifying structural obstacles to democracy, it is also about identifying new opportunities to confront and dismantle the obstacle to democracy. Cultivating both the taste for and ability to identify developing patterns, discern connections between seemingly disparate forces, and appreciate the fluidity of signs and symbols in our dynamic work is what is required to tap into the democratic potential of lived experience. This is simultaneously the goal of and means to meaningful democratic struggle, and its connection to the contemporary movement for deliberative democracy is both obvious and unexpectedly complex.

In Chapter 1, I focus on Dewey’s critique of classical epistemology to situate my view of Deweyan critical pragmatism with respect to Habermas’ pragmatically infused critical theory. My main goal in this chapter is to clear the ground for my core claim that the point of reflective inquiry is not to discover, recover, or secure antecedently justified principles through appeals to transcendental universality, but rather to improve our individual and shared capacity to tap into the critical potential of lived experience in a world that is unalterably characterized by flux and change. My textual focus here is on The Quest for Certainty and secondarily on Experience and Nature.

In Chapter 2, I focus on what critical means in the context of Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism and focus on Reconstruction in Philosophy to argue for a view of philosophy animated by hermeneutic suspicion. Moreover, this “unmasking” is accompanied by a deep faith in the capacity for philosophy to aid in the betterment of our collective existence, but only once it is no longer a safe-haven for appeals to transcendental universality.

Importantly, Chapters 1 and 2 are interspersed with brief treatments of or references to Dewey’s disposition toward science and the scientific revolutions initiated by Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Darwin, and Einstein. These figures, each in his own way, ineradicably called into question the ideas of fixed essences and of absolutist views of time and space, and instead argued for a universe “as infinitely complex in internal structure as it is infinite in extent.” As such, these were heroic figures in Dewey’s worldview. While I do not deal systematically with Dewey’s appreciation of these figures, I do draw on select treatments in order to clarify aspects of my argument. For example, in Chapter 1, I draw on Dewey’s view of Einstein’s improvement upon Newton, and on his treatment of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy or uncertainty to fill out my discussion of the critical dimensions of Dewey’s rejection of classical epistemology. In Chapter 2, I take a step back to Dewey’s appreciation of Bacon and Darwin in order to establish the critical significance of Dewey’s evolutionary view of human reason, against the arguments of Gramsci and Horkheimer who both equate pragmatism with vulgar positivism.

In Chapters 3 and 4 I turn my attention away from the comparatively speculative dimensions of Deweyan pragmatism and toward the more explicitly political dimensions of his work. In these chapters I move my discussion in increasingly concrete directions. In Chapter 3, I explicate the meaning of critical pragmatism in the context of Dewey’s educational theories and experiments. It is in Dewey’s work on education that his critical perspicuity finds its clearest expression in the context of interdisciplinary research. In the context of early childhood education Dewey most effectively explores the circumstances under which existing educational institutions and philosophies stunt the critical capacities of children. Dewey’s interdisciplinary focus on the intersection of education and democracy is a critical focus because it is aimed directly at rooting-out and counteracting distortions of communication. While I rely on a number of shorter pieces to tease out my argument, I take a primary focus in this chapter on Democracy and Education.

In Chapter 4, I focus on the Dewey/Lippmann debate in order to argue that Dewey’s critical antifoundationalism provided him with the ground necessary to orient his radical democratic activism in the 1920s and 30s. While I focus mainly on The Public and Its Problems, and Liberalism and Social Action in this chapter, I also rely on a number of shorter and more popular pieces as examples of Dewey’s activism during this period. In taking up the political theory of pragmatism in Chapter 4, I argue that Dewey’s pragmatist vision provided a solid enough basis to inform his own political activism in the 1930s. Though I find it crucial to argue that Dewey’s vision made a radical politics possible in the 1930s, I don’t explicitly extend this claim to our current circumstances in this chapter. Instead, I turn my attention to the contemporary significance of critical pragmatism in Chapter 5.

In Chapter 5, I draw on both Freedom and Culture and the shorter “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” to argue that the same insights that made Dewey a powerful and wholly novel force in his own time have underappreciated contemporary relevance for the vibrant, though immature, field of deliberative democracy. In this last chapter, by addressing the arguments leveled against deliberative democracy by contemporary radical democratic theorists, I offer but one of many ways to think about the contemporary value of critical pragmatism for deliberative democracy. As such, while I sketch the contours of the critical significance of Dewey’s notion of democracy “as a way of life” for the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, the overwhelming bulk of that important work is still to be undertaken. In other words, the last chapter here represents only the first steps down a path that is, from the perspective of critical pragmatism, replete with possibilities.