John Dewey

The global public and its problems

John Narayan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784993245
• eBook ISBN: 9781526104816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book argues that John Dewey should be read as a philosopher of globalization rather than as a 'local' American philosopher. Although Dewey's political philosophy was rooted in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, it was more importantly about the role of America in a globalized world. In returning to, and recovering the neglected global dimensions of Dewey's political philosophy, the book highlights how his insights about globalization and democracy can inform present theoretical debates. John Narayan traces the emergence of Dewey as a global democrat through an examination of his work from The public and its problems (1927) onwards. Narayan shows how Dewey sets out an evolutionary form of global and national democracy in his work, that has not been fully appreciated even by contemporary scholars of pragmatism, and which offers valuable lessons for the twenty-first century and for our own hopes for global democracy.

1

Creative Democracy

Optimism about democracy is today under a cloud. (LW2: 304)

Unfashionable democracy

When Dewey published The Public and Its Problems in 1927, democracy had become somewhat of an unfashionable aspiration, with populations in Europe beginning to turn to the extreme Left and Right for their political settlements. In Russia the October Revolution was nearly ten years old, in Italy Mussolini had been in power for three years and in Germany both volumes of Mein Kampf had been published. At home in the United States of America, even the pretence of democracy in the country had come under attack.¹ The catalyst for this attack on American democracy revolved around the dissipation of post–First World War optimism about reconstructing America in fairer and more just terms. Whilst Progressives put forward ideas for economic justice and fairness, such reforms were ‘strangled’ by older patterns of thought and behaviour that re-emerged in the climate of revolution (Kloppenberg 1986). The breakdown of this optimism amongst American progressives in turn gave way to the rise of trenchant intellectual critiques of the suitability of democratic government for 1920s America. Conducted by American political scientists and commentators, these critiques of the suitability of democratic government would form what became known as ‘democratic realism’. And by the 1930s, the paradigm had become near hegemonic in American social science (Westbrook 1991: 281–6).

The main charge of democratic realism was that democracy was now unable to provide a stable or efficient government for advanced industrial societies. For democratic realism, the institutions of democratic government, which were based on democracy’s core beliefs in the capacity of all people for rational political action and the belief in maximizing civic participation in public life, were in fact counterproductive to good government in industrial societies (Westbrook 1991: 281–2). The main articulation of this position was to be found in the work of Walter Lippmann and his two treatises against standard liberal thought, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). Within these works, Lippmann puts forward the idea that America had entered into the Great Society, which made the core beliefs of democracy unrealizable.

The concept of the Great Society, adapted by both Lippmann and later Dewey from Graham Wallas’ (1914) book of the same name, was essentially shorthand for the complex industrial and mass consumer society America had become in the aftermath of the First World War. The end of the American Civil War had signalled that America would use its vast reserves of raw materials and land to become a continental nation state with an industrial economy rather than being a decentralized federation of states with a slave-based agrarian economy.² This process had seen America not only master the steam-, coal- and railway-based technologies and industries of the first industrial revolution, but also become the leader of the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This saw the systematic application of science to the industrial process in the new oil-, electricity- and chemical-based industries of automobiles, synthetic material production and consumer durables (Frieden 2006: 152; Morris 2011: 510; Lind 2012: 5–10). The result was that, as early as 1914, the US economy, in both absolute figures and per capita terms, had overtaken Britain as the biggest economy in the world. By 1919, due in part to the economic consequences of the First World War, US economic output was greater than all of Europe (Kennedy 1987: 242–4).

Dewey argued that the Great Society’s improvements in industrial production, travel and transportation (railways, cars), media (radio, newspapers) and communications (telegraph, telephone) not only eliminated distance as an economic and social factor but also created ‘interaction and interdependence’ on an unprecedented complex and wide scale (LW2: 307). In industry, for example, the new corporations of 1920s America such as General Motors, Ford and General Electric did not just produce oligopolistic industries but had become vertically integrated entities. Such vertically integrated corporations and the widespread use of electricity, cheaper steel production, the chemical industry and the advent of the assembly line thus delivered mass industrial production.³

The move from an agrarian to such an advanced capitalist society had essentially brought about massive changes in the day-to-day life of Americans. The revolution in corporate structure and industrial production, which saw consumer durables such as cars, radios and refrigerators become the driving force of economic growth, had seen a concomitant revolution of mass consumption. And as productivity soared, the prices of consumer durables dropped. Ford’s Model T, for example, reduced in price from $700 (US) in 1910 to $350 (US) in 1916 and by 1916 it took only six months for the average American to earn enough money to buy one. By 1929, Americans were driving some 26 million cars or trucks. And this is to say nothing of the 20 million phones installed by 1930, new public highways and railway lines, the advent of chain stores and modern advertising, radio set sales, electric stoves and heaters, consumer credit and the fact that by 1924 one could even buy sliced bread (Leuchtenburg 1993: 178–202; Frieden 2006: 62–3, 155–72).

For writers such as Lippmann, the emergence of the Great Society created a far too complex industrial and corporate environment for a normal citizen to exercise rational political judgement about how such a society should be governed. For Lippmann the common citizen was being driven along by industrial innovation and expertise that they could not grasp and was also distracted by mass consumption. As a result, modern citizens were incapable of grasping their immediate present, their own interests and essentially living in a world they ‘cannot see, [do] not understand and [are] unable to direct’ (Lippmann 1925: 4). The democratic goal of maximizing the civic participation of all citizens in public life was thus simply ‘bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer’ (Lippmann 1925: 29). The only solution, argued Lippmann, was for normal citizens to give up the concept of self-rule and move towards a system of elitism, whereby experts who are in a position to grasp the complexities of the Great Society would create and enact social policy. In this context, citizens would only play the role of siding with or against different elites, playing no role in policy formation and simply voting for the ‘Ins when things are going well and the Outs when things are going badly’ (Lippmann 1925: 126).

In Dewey’s eyes, the attacks upon democracy by communism, fascism and democratic realism were bound to fail miserably or end up in violence and bloodshed. Quite simply, democratic realism’s quasi-Platonism and communism and fascism’s authoritarianism, which held experts or rulers as the only ones capable to enact policies that would be wise and beneficial to the common good of society, contradicted the historical record. The emergence and practice of democracy itself had shown that it is only through wide consultation and discussion that wider social needs and common goods are uncovered. As Dewey colourfully put it, the man ‘ … who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoe maker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied’ (LW2: 364). To subsequently remove the input of the masses and leave government policy to an elite was to create a class closed off from the knowledge of the needs that they were supposed to serve. Dewey therefore feared that rule by an elite group in which the masses could not express their needs would resemble an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few rather than the many. And as Dewey reminded his readers, such fears were not mere abstractions when history patently highlighted how the ‘ … world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the so-called folly of masses’ (LW2: 365).⁴

The Public and Its Problems is thus best seen as attempting to walk along the path that Dewey believed the far Left and Right in Europe and democratic realism in America shed light upon but refused to travel: the contemporary problem of democracy within the Great Society. Moreover, Dewey sets himself the goal of answering the question that he believed Lippmann and others hastily skimmed over by rendering the masses innately incapable of civic organization: Why is the contemporary public seemingly unable to intelligently perform the tasks that democracy requires of them? To accomplish this, Dewey embarks upon two interrelated tasks within The Public and Its Problems. The first task, which I examine below, involves Dewey reconstructing the concept of democracy as a form of ‘creative democracy’, simultaneously redefining the political concepts of the ‘state’, ‘public’, ‘government’ and ultimately ‘democracy’ itself. As I outline in Chapter 2, this task saw Dewey stretch those concepts beyond the remit of the nation state. The second task, which we will discuss in Chapter 3, involves the examination of why the democracy of Dewey’s present within the Great Society bore a poor resemblance to his own vision of democracy as a way of life.⁵

Problematic states and their problematic publics: The futility of state theory

It was Dewey’s belief that the meaning of democracy and the justification for its practice had seemingly become lost in the hubris of democratic realism. In the journey to reconstruct and redefine the concept of democracy, Dewey initially returns to another, if not the most, perennial question of political philosophy: What is the origin and nature of the state? In reference to what he believed were prior flawed theories of the state, from the works of Aristotle through to and beyond Hegel, Dewey cautions his readers that the ‘moment we utter the words “The State” a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision’ (LW2: 240).

This obfuscation, Dewey contended, arose because theories of the state resorted to mythological ‘state-forming forces’ or ‘political instincts’ to explain the state and its functions. For example, Aristotle’s claim that man by nature is an animal that lives in a state and Social Contract Theory’s claim that the state emerges after a fictional state of nature tell us nothing about how actual states come into being or why states take on different forms at different points in history. Such theories merely repackaged the outcome of a given social process (Greek City State/Liberal Democracy) as its cause and reduplicated it in ‘ … a so called causal force the effects to be accounted for.’ Ultimately, Dewey charged, that such theories hold no more explanatory value than the statement that opium had sleep-inducing effects because of its ‘dormative powers’ (LW2: 240–1).

Following his dismissal of the explanatory value of prior theories of the state, Dewey begins his own analysis of politics – its institutional forms and practices – from the very empirical starting point he believes the aforementioned theories neglect: the history of human activity and its consequences (LW2: 243). Building upon his prior engagement with Darwin’s theory of evolution and the psychology of William James, Dewey puts forward an argument for the social nature of both the self and morality. The foundation of this argument is that like all objects within nature, human beings exist in an environment where ‘conjoint, combined, associated action is a universal trait of the behaviour of things’ (LW2: 257). What we take to be human nature or what we take to be the human ‘self’ is said by Dewey not to be an immutable property or instinct which individuals then utilize to interact with their environment, but rather an entity which is produced as the outcome of the interaction of the human organism with its environment.⁶

This interaction of the human organism with its environment takes place through what Dewey denotes as habits, which ‘bind us to orderly and established ways of action’ (LW2: 335).⁷ In this sense, habits are not simply recurrent or routine ways of behaving but rather acquired predispositions or modes of response, which generate ease, skill and interest when individuals interact with their environment:

For we are given to thinking of a habit as simply a recurrent external mode of action, like smoking or swearing, being neat or negligent in clothes and person, taking exercise or playing games. But habit reaches even more significantly down into the very structure of the self; it signifies a building up of and solidifying of certain desires; an increased sensitiveness and responsiveness to certain stimuli, a confirmed or impaired capacity to attend to and think about certain things. Habit covers in other words the very make up of desire, intent, choice, disposition which gives an act its voluntary quality. (LW7: 170–1)

The important point to consider here, however, is that we do not simply create our habits out of thin air, but rather acquire and learn our habits from what Dewey calls ‘social customs’. Much like the language we speak, individuals inherit and form their personal moral habits from the uniformities, habits or set ways of conduct of the respective social groups they are born into or are associated with throughout their lives. From birth onwards individuals find that established social customs, which saturate such habits with meaning, are taught and transmitted to them through the associated life they have with other humans (MW14: 43–52). As Dewey points out, the sailor, miner, fisherman and farmer think about their actions, but their thoughts fall within the framework of accustomed occupations and social relations. What an individual actually is as a self – that is, how an individual thinks and acts – is ultimately dependent upon the nature and movement of their associated life (LW5: 275).

These habits and customs are structured through what Dewey calls a society’s ‘cultural matrix’.⁸ The idea of a ‘cultural matrix’ thus corresponds to a society’s socio-economic, technological and intellectual (religion/science/philosophy/politics) practices, which determine the associative relations (occupations, family structures and geographical links) and the meanings (habits/customs) attached to those associated relations by various social groups (LW12: 481–2). As such, a society’s cultural matrix provides an:

… inalienable and ineradicable framework of conceptions which is not of our own making, but given to us ready-made by society – a whole apparatus of concepts and categories, within which and by which individual thinking, however daring and original, is compelled to move. (LW12: 482)

It may be tempting to think from the above that Dewey assigns priority of society over the individual and that the individual is only an expression of society. However, Dewey’s point is that the human self is produced through pre-existent associations and the social customs of other humans not society at large (M14: 44, cf. Gouinlock 1972: 105–6). This does not discount that social customs can stretch across society but such a subtle distinction highlights how societies are not uniform but rather pluralistic entities:

Society is one word, but many things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. Within every larger social organisation there are numerous minor groups; not only political subdivisions but industrial, scientific, religious, associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and so in endless variety. In many modern states, and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of varying languages, religions, moral codes and traditions. From this standpoint, many a modern political unit, one of large cities for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies rather than an inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (MW9: 87–8)

At any given synchronic moment within a cultural matrix, there exist individuals and groups who share different associated relations and different habits and different social customs. Indeed, Dewey suggests, that the more complex a society’s cultural matrix, the more likely it is to include individuals who possess habits that are informed by differing or even conflicting patterns of social customs (MW14: 90).

The ability of a society’s cultural matrix to produce groups with different or even conflicting habits and social customs revealed for Dewey that morality, when taken as defining acceptable parameters of both individual behaviour and behaviour between individuals and groups within society, is also a socially determined activity. Whilst all humans form associations with and are formed by associations (habits/social customs) with natural objects and other human beings within a cultural matrix, it is also the case that all human action has possible consequences for other natural objects and other human beings who share in association or who inhabit the same society:

Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up reaction in the surroundings. Others approve, disapprove, protest, encourage, share and resist … Conduct is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical ‘ought’ that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good. (MW14: 16)

Importantly, however, Dewey contends that what separates human associations from that of natural objects, such as assemblies of electrons, unions of trees, swarms of insects, herds of sheep or constellations of stars, is the ability of humanity to intelligently perceive, reflect upon and subsequently plan to secure certain consequences and avoid others (LW2: 243, 250, 257). This ability of humans to intelligently perceive the consequences of associated action is structured around two kinds of consequences: those that directly affect individuals engaged in a transaction of associated behaviour and those that indirectly affect individuals beyond those immediately concerned in the transaction.

Within this distinction, Dewey finds the germ of the distinction between conceptions of private and public transactions. Transactions where the consequences of action were confined, or thought to be predominantly confined, to those directly engaged in such associative behaviour are said to be private. Transactions where the consequences are perceived to be extensive, enduring and serious for persons beyond those i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Retrieving a ‘Global’ American Philosopher
• 1. Creative Democracy
• 2. The Global Democrat
• 3. The Obstacles to Creative Democracy at Home and Abroad
• 4. Social Intelligence and Equality
• 5. New Lessons from the Old Professor
• Conclusion: Inheriting the Task of Creative Democracy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint