The American Architect of the Concept
A More Democratic Democracy pt.2
When living in the D.C. area, I took a class at George Washington U. on American Philosophy. The professor assigned us readings in the works of only five American philosophers, one of whom was John Dewey. Our text was a compilation that focused primarily on Dewey’s educational writings and I was not overly impressed. But I later discovered his political writings and this is essay focuses on those works.
I wish to begin this discussion with a small detour to British philosopher T.H. Green before turning to the political concepts and critiques of democracy propagated by John Dewey. Green developed his own critique of “liberalism” arguing that it rested on a false conception of the individual. Liberalism, that developed out of the enlightened views of Locke, Montesqieu, and Hobbes basically saw individuals in competition, rather than cooperative members of social units. Green is generally rejected as an idealist, and there are definitely elements of moral idealism projected throughout Green’s oeuvre. But I tend to believe that there is much to be learned from his rejection of political life as the aggregation of inherently conflicting private interests. Instead,he sought to view individuals relationally: individuality could be sustained only where social life was understood as an organism in which the well-being of each part was tied to the well-being of the whole. Freedom in a positive sense consisted not merely in the absence of external constraints but the positive fact of participation in such an ethically desirable social order.
In his early career, Dewey was heavily influenced by Green, even though he would later reject much of Green’s idealistically moral view for a more pragmatic view of democracy, and how democracy as practiced in the United States failed, while maintaining throughout his life, that democracy cannot succeed when it fails to understand group rather than individual dynamics are the only way to create an equalization necessary to successfully live democratically and through which individual freedom can be attained.
American democracy, through the eyes of many of its founders, could never be entrusted to the masses. Jefferson words in the Declaration notwithstanding, Jefferson certainly believed in egalitarian opportunity ( and despised, or at least in wrote such, even though he continued to use the labor of his own slaves, into coercing anyone into laboring for another), but when it came to equality in making decisions, he no more thought that “people” were equally capable of governance than any of the other elitists who fought for American liberty from England or who drafted the American constitution. Perhaps the most adamant proponent of the elitist concepts of governance was the bleak refutation of granting every individual a participatory role was Henry Maine’s treatise Popular Government. Maine doesn’t even recognize the enfranchisement of anyone not financially prosperous as acceptable. So of course, despite the book’s title, Maine is very much against any type of popular government. Dewey, however, rebuts Maine, and claims that while it is important that voters can reject their rulers and so control them to some extent, democracy is not simply a form of government defined by the distribution of the franchise or majority rule. Rather what matters, as Dewey puts it, is the way that the majority is formed. To understand that requires grasping what Maine misses, in Dewey’s view: that “men are not isolated non-social atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations” to one another, and the state in turn only represents them “so far as they have become organically related to one another, or are possessed of unity of purpose and interest” (“The Ethics of Democracy” 231–2). Democracy is a form of moral and spiritual association that recognizes the contribution that each member can make in his or her particular way to this ethical community. And each of us can contribute to this community since we each only become the individuals we are through our engagement in the institutions and practices of our society. Dewey is anti-elitist, and argues that the capacity of the wise few to discern the public interest tends to be distorted by their position. Democratic participation is not only viewed as a bulwark against government by elites, but also as an aspect of individual freedom – humanity cannot rest content with a good “procured from without”. Democracy is not “simply and solely a form of government”, but a social and personal ideal; in other words, it is not only a property of political institutions but of a wide range of social relationships. This ideal is common to a range of social spheres, and should take “industrial, as well as civil and political” forms (“The Ethics of Democracy” 246). The idea that democracy should be viewed as a form of relationship that encompasses and unifies different spheres of social life is important. Dewey’s later work is more questioning of the traditional ethical standards and ideals that he appeals to in an essay like “The Ethics of Democracy”. Individuals are not presocial atoms, and democracy in an ideal sense is a primarily social and ethical ideal rather than a method of majority rule through voting.
Dewey’s philosophy is his skepticism about what he calls an “absolutistic” conception of social and political philosophy. Dewey gathers some different ideas under this heading but at its core it is the belief that there are certain ahistorical and foundational features of the social world and that social and political philosophy should consist in identifying these features and using them to diagnose and evaluate social and political problems. This anti-absolutism is expressed in various ways by Dewey. In one version of this idea is the argument that “the logic of general notions” provides an idealized picture of agents and institutions that is too abstract to contribute to the kind of experimental inquiry that Dewey thinks we need in social thought (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 187).
Dewey writes, “We want to know about the worth of the institution of private property as it operates under given conditions of definite time and place. We meet with the reply of Proudhon that property generally is theft, or with that of Hegel that the realization of will is the end of all institutions, and that private ownership as the expression of mastery of personality over physical nature is a necessary element in such realization …. They are general answers supposed to have a universal meaning that covers and dominates all particulars. Hence they do not assist in inquiry. They close it. They are not instrumentalities to be employed and tested in clarifying concrete social difficulties. They are ready-made principles to be imposed upon particulars in order to determine their nature.” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 188)
Dewey diagnoses the same defect of absolutism in the more “professedly empirical” social theory of J. S. Mill (1843), for whom certain “social laws, normative and regulative, at all periods and under all circumstances of proper social life were assumed to exist” (Public and Its Problems 357).
On this view, society is an aggregate of individual human minds and the purpose of social science is to derive the laws governing these aggregates. Dewey argues that this ignores the extent to which the content of individual beliefs, desires and purposes are given by the social context in which individuals live and selves are socially constituted: the individual should not be “regarded as something given, something already there” – social institutions are “means for creating individuals” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 190-192). Mill’s individualism exemplifies what he describes as “the most pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking” (“Context and Thought” 5). . That this abstraction is in particular circumstances essential for inquiry is an important theme in Dewey’s philosophy. But this abstraction goes wrong “whenever the distinctions or elements that are discriminated are treated as if they were final and self-sufficient” (“Context and Thought” 7), as when classical liberalism treats the individuals as “something given”, ontologically prior to the social groups of which they are members. Dewey objects to the idea that the individuals can be abstracted from their social context for certain analytical purposes but with the idea that this abstracted individual provides the firm foundation for a fixed and ahistorical explanatory framework for social theory.
Social criticism should be governed by what he calls “an immanent standard” that is “relative to phenomena but at the same time it is experimental and hence it is checked up by social processes similar to those which suggest it” (Syllabus Social Institutions and the Study of Morals 134). This is not an appeal to a conventionalist or relativist idea that the standards for judging a practice are whatever happens to be prevalent or identifiable in a community since, unless we define social groups in a moralistic way, these can include groups “banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together by the interests of plunder“ (Democracy and Education 88): so not just any set of standards is valuable. We don’t chase the impossible goal of certainty, he thinks, and there are no epistemological foundations available to guarantee that we have achieved it. The goal of an inquiry is not to arrive at a certain picture of the nature of things, but to come up with what is an inevitably provisional solution to the practical and intellectual problem that sparked it. Inquiry should be understood as part of our struggle with an objectively precarious but improvable environment. Inquiry is demanded by what he calls an “incomplete” or “problematic” situation that is, one in which our inherited habits and standard ways of doing things run into trouble, perhaps through our actions’ having unexpected consequences, through our having developed new needs and desires that are unmet in current circumstances, or through conflict among our own goals and projects or with those of others. These challenges prompt us to step back, identify the problem that confronts us, and reflect on what to do next. Modern societies have an awesome exemplar of successful inquiry, in the natural sciences which, Dewey argues, have been progressive and cumulative, giving us greater and greater understanding of the natural world. This has above all been the result of their experimental character, in which no intellectual element is taken to be beyond rational scrutiny. Theories and hypotheses are invented, used, tested, revised, and so on. At the same time, new methods for the invention, use, testing and revision of theories and hypotheses are developed and refined, and so are new standards for evaluating theories and hypotheses. What counts as success in inquiry is some practice’s meeting these standards, but these standards themselves may be judged in the light of how they square with ongoing practices of inquiry. In this way, the methods used by science are not fixed but themselves have a history and develop progressively and sometimes in unexpected ways. A crucial dimension of the experience that has established these standards and practices is social or communal, as we must look to the community of our fellow inquirers for testing and confirmation of our findings.
Accordingly he rejects non-cognitivism about values and holds that values can be true or false in his pragmatic sense, responsive to reasons and corrigible in the light of experience. He argues that we should generally think of values or ideals as hypotheses about what course of action to take, forged reflectively in response to problematic situations, with the aim of providing means for what Dewey calls their “directed resolution” (most fully in these terms in the late work,(Theory of Valuation)
Moral theories are generated in contingent historical circumstances, are responsive to the particular needs and conflicts of those circumstances, and reflect their prejudices and assumptions. Ideals and values that were functional for a particular social order can cease to Conflict among these approaches cannot be resolved in theory, only in practice and in particular contexts, if at all, where an agent must make “the best adjustment he can among forces which are genuinely disparate” (“Three Independent Factors in Morals”). At the social level, the model of ethical deliberation is not that of trying to implement a given standard:
“the process of growth, of improvement and progress, rather than the static outcome and result, becomes the significant thing. Not health as an end fixed once and for all, but the needed improvement in health – a continual process – is the end and good. The end is no longer a terminus or limit to be reached. It is the active process of transforming the existing situation. Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim in living … Growth itself is the only moral “end”.” (Reconstruction in Philosophy)
Dewey goes on to explain that “their position is that past experience enables us to state a criterion of judgment which is sufficiently definite to be usable and sufficiently flexible to lead to its own reinterpretation as experience progresses” Beyond this, though, Dewey has a conception of what it is to judge a social group based on its relationship to its members. For example, he writes in Democracy and Education:
“Now in any social group whatsoever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, the members of a criminal band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence the education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members – it is readily communicable – and that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business interests, with schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in return receives support from it. In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free modes of association with other modes of association.”
Moral theories can be viewed as constructs to solve practical problems. Like an outmoded piece of technology, a past value which was once constructed to address a problem in one set of circumstances can outlive its usefulness, and become a hindrance to the capacity of those in the present to deal with their practical needs and worries. This, Dewey believes, is the case with the theory of classical or laissez-faire liberalism. As he puts it, “the slogans of liberalism in one period can become the bulwarks of reaction” in the next (“Logical Method and Law”).
He sees it as a doctrine committed to the universal moral primacy of the individual possessed of pre-societal rights, including liberties of thought and action, which it is the sole business of the state to protect (Liberalism and Social Action). This meant that the main opponent of liberty was seen as government because of its tendency to encroach on these innate liberties. The abstraction of the individual from social context in classical liberalism shapes its normative theory. If the individual is thought of as existing prior to social institutions, then it is easier to envisage securing freedom for the individual in purely negative terms as solely consisting in the removal of external impediments on individual action. For classical liberalism or “old individualism”, freedom is taken to consist in the absence of some intentional constraint on the individual’s ability to pursue his or her chosen goals and the individual is viewed as surrounded by a protective cordon of rights, which define his or her freedom. While removal of external constraints may sometimes be very important for supplying the conditions of liberty, liberty in the sense in which it is a value for liberals does not consist in the mere absence of external constraint. For Dewey, this negative view of freedom is at the root of the wider social, ethical and political defects of this form of individualism (“Religion and Morality in a Free Society”). This failure of historical self-awareness means that classical liberalism neglects or suppresses an understanding of the central challenges to liberty and in effect becomes an instrument of plutocratic interests.
At one time it made sense to say that dynastic despotic rule or inherited legal customs were the main obstacles to individual freedom. Today, however, liberty signifies “liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are to hand” (Liberalism and Social Action. It is a historically relative matter what constitutes a constraint on individual freedom, however. By attempting to mask this as well as by promoting an outdated conception of what these constraints must be, classical liberalism has come to subvert liberalism’s core commitments to liberty and individuality.
The alternative to intelligent self-direction is action according to whatever notions individuals have picked up from their environment, including not only unreflective impulses but propaganda (the “flood of mass suggestion” that he identifies with the media revolution of the early twentieth century), class ideologies and “the monotonous round of imagery flowing from illiberal interests, broken only by wild forays into the illicit” (Ethics). It follows that possession and exercise of this capacity for individuality require the right social conditions; this capacity for critical reflection as supported by democratic institutions and culture, since, at least in principle, these allow for openness, epistemic diversity, experiment, contestation and revision that supports freedom as individuality (The Public and Its Problems; Ethics).
Freedom, for Dewey, cannot be just the individual liberties granted to individuals, but must include participation in a community. . As he puts it in The Public and Its Problems, liberty “is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association” (The Public and Its Problems. You are free not only in reflectively choosing among a set of options but in having available a rich set of worthwhile options; without these options, you aren’t free, or as free, as someone who does enjoy a rich and manifold association with others. You are also free only when you are making your own distinctive contribution to the society
Laissez-faire should not be assumed to be the default position for a liberal. For earlier liberalism, the opposition of the individual and government may have made sense, in an era characterized by political despotism. It is only a democratic community, Dewey believes, which allows each member fully to realize her potentialities without conflict and coercion, since it does not inherently generate conflict. Dewey is explicit that this ideal describes a problem that societies confront and a critical ideal for them to attain, namely, how to harmonize the development of each individual with the maintenance of a society in which the individual activities will contribute to the common good (Ethics), rather than the blueprint for an institutional solution. Dewey’s point is that (unlike externally imposed moral standards) this ideal is immanent to democratic societies, since what makes them democratic is the extent to which they overcome the barriers (of class and race, for example (Democracy and Education)) to free interaction. Power and domination are present in all these spheres of social life so restricting democratic scrutiny and control to a single sphere of social life would be a mistake.
“The very heart of political democracy is adjudication of social differences by discussion and exchange of views”, he writes in a late essay. “This method provides a rough approximation to the method of effecting change by means of experimental inquiry and test” (“Challenge to Liberal Thought”). Democracy is a method for identifying and solving the common problems confronted by communities. Robust inquiry requires that we must have access to all the available evidence and arguments. If we want our inquiry to be successful, we should not prejudge its outcomes, by excluding sources of experience that allow us to explore and correct our hypotheses. By contrast, [e]very authoritarian scheme, … assumes that its value may be assessed by some prior principle, if not of family and birth or race and color or possession of material wealth, then by the position and rank the person occupies in the existing social scheme. The democratic faith in equality is the faith that each individual shall have the chance and opportunity to contribute whatever he is capable of contributing, and that the value of his contribution be decided by its place and function in the organized total of similar contributions: – not on the basis of prior status of any kind whatever. (“Democracy and Educational Administration”)
Although the “democratic faith” suggests that we are all capable of meaningfully contributing to critical inquiry, the development of habits of intelligent conduct isn’t taken for granted: they can be degraded by social disempowerment, propaganda and ideology.
Dewey does not conflate this kind of deliberative politics with the elimination of social conflict, and so with the critical ideal of democracy in his social ontology. He doesn’t imagine away differences of opinion, conflicts of interest and value pluralism as ineliminable features of social and political life. Even where there is open public discussion, “[d]ifferences of opinion in the sense of differences of judgment as to the course which it is best to follow, the policy which it is best to try out, will still exist” (The Public and Its Problems). Democracy as public discussion is viewed as the best way of dealing with the conflict of interests in a society:
It is not only that some classes are excluded from cultural capital and education or subjected to propaganda: “all special privilege narrows the outlook of those who possess it, as well as limits the possibilities of development of those not having it” (Ethics).. Rationalization of your own superior position as well as wilful ignorance of others’ situation are central epistemic vices of this kind of hierarchy
At the minimum, for Dewey, this machinery helps to protect individuals from putative experts about where the interests of people lie. Dewey’s response to this is to point out that experts have their own biases, and need correction from those who have to live with the consequences of their decisions: “in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses, the best do not remain the best, the wise cease to be wise …. In the degree to which they become a specialized class, they are shut off from knowledge of the needs they are supposed to serve”. So the merit of even existing “rudimentary” forms of democracy is that they compel “recourse to methods of discussion, consultation and persuasion” and in so doing provide the opportunity to improve decisions (The Public and Its Problems; Reconstruction in Philosophy).
The real target of his ire is the exclusive identification of democracy with a particular current set of political institutions, particularly only with elections and majority rule. As in the case of the defunct idea of liberalism, Dewey thinks of this as a once liberating conception that now contains an inbuilt conservative bias that prevents us from seeing the relevance of democracy to wider social terrain, such as the workplace, and constrains more imaginative institutional thinking.
However, I personally find Dewey’s ultimate solution as a pragmatic socialism, unsatisfactory. Socialism will only return us to the same issues Dewey points out in the conflict of control. The direction that I discern from his political writings should move us away from representative democracy not towards a more socialistic society but towards a community based society that is small enough that they have the opportunity to determine their own needs and select representatives for every couple of people to meet in larger groups with the focus of the larger group being minimally legislative and highly executively judicial that can protect encroachments of one community upon another.