Pragmatism and Political Theory

Matthew Festenstein

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745616278, 9780745616261
• eBook ISBN: 9780745666259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This exciting new book is the first comprehensive and critical study of the relationship between the Pragmatist tradition and political theory. Festenstein develops his argument through a detailed and original reading of four key thinkers: John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas and Hilary Putnam.

PART I

Dewey’s Political Philosophy

1

Interpreting Dewey’s
Political Thought

1 READING DEWEY

Dewey enjoys a peculiar status in political theory. Revered by some for his democratic faith and emphasis on the practical understanding of social and political problems, he is reviled by others for failing to articulate any values at all, democratic or other, and for acquiescing in the drift of the corporate social and political status quo. This chapter surveys the prevalent views of Dewey’s political theory, suggesting that a range of interpretations misconstrue or neglect the nature and role of ethical value in this theory. In the following chapters, I try to show how ethics and political thought are interdependent for Dewey, and that his political philosophy cannot be understood without a clear conception of the central features of his moral theory.

The received view of Dewey’s moral and political philosophy emphasizes its focus on the application of ‘scientific method’ or ‘critical intelligence’ to social, political, educational and economic problems. In exalting the instrumental rationality which provides solutions to pre-given social ends, he obscures the deeper question of the moral authority of those ends, and appears as ‘the philosopher of the civil service of democracy’.¹ From a variety of perspectives, commentators have been prepared to endorse the proposition that Dewey eschews any substantive moral claims in favour of the articulation of ‘technique’, an interpretation which is often employed in order to bolster some broader argument about the tendencies of American social and political thought. Even as sympathetic a reader as Morton White finds that Dewey’s liberalism ‘supplies us with no particular or specific political position that can be acted on, only a plea for intelligence’. Lacking a conception of the ends or purposes which critical intelligence should serve, ‘Dewey’s … philosophy might easily fall into the hands of those willing to cry “science, science” in defense of the most obnoxious ends and means.’²

In one version, Dewey’s emphasis on method tacitly assumes the validity of a monolithic liberal ethos which grips the political culture of the United States. Pragmatism, according to the cavalier but influential critic Louis Hartz, ‘feeds … on the Lockeian settlement. It is only when you take your ethics for granted that all problems emerge as problems of technique.’³ Dewey’s philosophy is seen as deeply embedded in a political culture which is firmly precommitted to an array of core ‘Lockeian’ political values, an atomistic individualism of self-interested, if conformist, property owners, with little sense of the individual’s social or institutional surroundings. The crucial illustration of this relationship for Hartz was the ‘pragmatism’ of the New Deal which ‘saw no more clearly than the great Dewey himself, the absolute moral base on which it rested’.⁴ Once we recognize pragmatism’s complacent acquiescence in this ethos, according to this interpretation, we can explain its concern with the application of ‘scientific method’ to social and political problems: assured of an unquestionable foundation of ‘submerged convictions’ about the ends towards which techniques are to be directed, Dewey and his followers are solely preoccupied with the means by which these ends might be achieved. This interpretation has been supported by the image of Dewey as the quintessential intellectual proponent of the culture and ideology of the United States. His pragmatism has been taken to be both expressive of, and a crucial influence on, twentieth-century American liberalism, and he has repeatedly been hailed as a ‘national philosopher’, ‘the guide, the mentor and the conscience of the American people’.⁵ Santayana sardonically rehearsed this theme when he called Dewey ‘the devoted spokesman of the spirit of enterprise, of experiment, of modern industry … [H]is philosophy is calculated to justify all the assumptions of American society.’⁶

A more scathing variant of this interpretation derives from the criticisms of the ‘pragmatic acquiescence’ levelled by Randolph Bourne and Lewis Mumford in response to Dewey’s interventionism in the First World War, a critique which was the more bitter for being, to a considerable extent, in-house. ‘To those of us who have taken Dewey’s philosophy almost as our American religion,’ Bourne elegized, ‘it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique.’⁷ Dewey’s failure to articulate any scheme of values had allowed his conception of science as a generalizable mode of critical inquiry to be used as a technocratic ideology of scientific expertise. This is seen not only as a contingent fact about how the theory came to be exploited but as a theoretical implication of this doctrine’s alleged preoccupation with technique at the expense of the ideals or ‘vision’ that these techniques should serve.⁸ Concentrating on Dewey’s occasional expressions of étatisme (particularly in his writings from the First World War) and his view of industrial production as ‘organized intelligence’, some critics have extended this interpretation beyond the allegation that pragmatism acquiesced in a cult of ‘war-technique’ in order to argue that its ‘operationalization of consciousness’, in R. Jeffrey Lustig’s acid phrase, provided the philosophical underpinnings for the ambitions of new middle-class experts and for the burgeoning processes of ‘scientific management’ in industry.⁹ Asserting that Dewey was committed to a cult of ‘expert knowledge over popular opinion’, Clarence Karier argues that he ‘advocated the use of unchecked state power to control the future through shaping the thought, action and character of its citizens’.¹⁰ This line of interpretation envisages Dewey not as a technician of the Lockean dispensation but as a more or less self-conscious adviser to a new age of corporate liberalism. However, it shares the assumption that Dewey’s political theory ducks questions about the ends or value of political action and is concerned only with the methods through which the pre-given ends of the economic and political order may be achieved.

We can hear the conjoined claims of moral evasiveness, elevation of practicalities, and American particularism in David Ricci’s discussion of the role of ‘Deweyism’ in mid-century American political science: ‘Deweyism’ urges ‘considering the world of politics rather than principles, and concentrating upon practical considerations … In the process, it might be possible to portray democracy as an imperfect but necessary mechanism, in words so plain that recourse to the tricky ground of ethical analysis and explication could be avoided entirely’.¹¹ Since it is difficult (but not, as we have seen, impossible) to overlook Dewey’s numerous positive ethical and political pronouncements, they are thought to be smuggled in under the guise of ‘practical considerations’ but to have no part in his official political theory.¹² In this vein, political scientists from Harold Lasswell to Aaron Wildavsky have claimed indebtedness to Dewey (among others), and that ‘policy analysis has its foundations for learning in pragmatism.’¹³ This aspect of Dewey’s thought is also emphasized by A. H. Somjee, although he carefully examines a wider range of Dewey’s views and philosophical affiliations than comports comfortably with Ricci’s kind of reading.¹⁴

Finally, Richard Rorty’s recent stewardship of Dewey’s reputation might appear only to offer a restatement of the received view, in his support for what a critic calls ‘pragmatist culture … deeply wedded to the hegemonic values of present-day American society’.¹⁵ For Rorty (at least in one of his moods) identifies Deweyan pragmatism with ‘social engineering’ and an emphasis on ‘concrete concerns with the daily problems of one’s community’¹⁶ and ‘the appeal of instrumental rationality’.¹⁷ The criterion for success in social engineering is ultimately given by a ‘consensus’ which Rorty variously characterizes by reference to (some of) the pieties of the public culture of ‘North Atlantic democracies’ and to ‘America’s hopes and interests and self-image’.¹⁸

The social and political impact, and cultural significance, of Dewey’s writings are not at issue here; these phenomena belong to the history of the reception and diffusion of his work. However, the understanding of Dewey’s political theory on which these analyses of Dewey as an ethically unreflective ideologue rely is flawed. Dewey’s writings on individualism and liberalism are quite directly opposed to the ideology identified by Hartz.¹⁹ Dewey’s ‘new’, regenerated individualism is designed to preserve the truth in the older individualism; but it does so by transforming the social and economic assumptions which Hartz views as central to this ideology. The line of criticism descending from Bourne also underestimates Dewey’s commitment to a distinctive conception of democracy. I examine the details of these Deweyan responses (as well as the elements of justice in the criticisms) below.²⁰ But I want to isolate here the assumption that Dewey avoids articulating any moral values in his political theory, creating a vacuum which these ideologies of capitalism must fill.

This has never been the only view. Some have seen Dewey as a hazy utopian, who hymns a political faith, but does not offer much by way of argument for it. Indeed, Rorty sometimes seems to fall into this camp, ascribing to Dewey a philosophy of ‘unjustifiable social hope’.²¹ Others grant that there is a positive account of ethics, rather than a vacuum or a set of tacit assumptions, but see Dewey’s account of scientific inquiry or of critical intelligence as its cornerstone. In one version of this, he is taken to have an ethical theory, but it is thought to be encapsulated in his effort to develop ‘an empirical theory of valuation’ from his account of scientific method. Pragmatism is concerned with the ‘search for the ends and values that give direction to our collective human activities’, but it holds that ‘use of the methods and conclusions of our best knowledge, that called scientific; provides the means for conducting this search’, through an ‘extension of the ways of tested knowing that define science from physical and physiological matters to social and distinctly human affairs’.²² Critics retort that ‘experimental method’ cannot constitute the basis for a normative ethical theory, as it can only elucidate the means to achieve some goal, not the goals which action should achieve. To the extent that Dewey is thought to offer a substantive moral criterion this is held to be a vague and plastic conception of progress joined to the hopeless promise of a scientific ethics: the dictum that ‘growth itself is the only moral end’ is cited as an example of this evasiveness.²³ Supporters tend to stress the virtues of resisting a priori formulations of value, and argue that Dewey’s view of the role of inquiry in ethics has its roots in conceptions of phronesis rather than techne, practical judgement rather than instrumental reason.²⁴ A second (and compatible) interpretation is that Dewey furnishes an argument for a connection between scientific inquiry and democratic politics: a democratic political culture is necessary for free inquiry into social problems. The commitment to critical intelligence as a means of explaining and controlling the world provides grounds for embracing certain political freedoms: ‘Dewey is concerned to argue, early and late … that democracy is the precondition for the application of intelligence to the solution of social problems.’ This comports with the view, adumbrated by Israel Scheffler and Richard Bernstein, that Dewey arrives at his communicative conception of democracy by giving a ‘political turn’ to Peirce’s epistemological notion of a community of inquirers. ²⁵

Although these interpretations illuminate several aspects of Dewey’s thought, they display a certain lopsidedness or partiality of vision which, in misconstruing the ethical foundations of his political theory, provides an inadequate vantage point for surveying the rest of it. The argument that the accredited methods of the natural sciences can somehow effect a decisive transformation in ethics, I will argue, should be understood against the background of his metaphysics. As Ralph Sleeper observes, even among ‘those who have welcomed Dewey’s plan for putting ethics on a scientific basis 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.’²⁶ Once that context is taken into account, the argument that emerges for an empirical science of ethics, that ‘one and the same method is to be used in determination of physical judgment and the value-judgments of morals’, and that this method can be successfully employed in the resolution of social and political problems, is more modest than Dewey’s programmatic statements suggest.²⁷ Moreover, it is only one component of Dewey’s ethical and political theory, and should be understood in that context. However, I will argue, while this is the best route to understanding his views on the relation between value and inquiry, it is less clear that this metaphysical perspective does indeed furnish the most helpful vantage point from which to address many questions in practical reason; that Dewey’s plan does not in fact go awry. The view that Dewey’s conception of democracy is based on a claim that it is instrumental for the application of intelligence to social problems is also distorted by abstracting one aspect of his political theory from this context.

These arguments have none the less encouraged the sense that there is more to Dewey’s ‘democratic faith’ than utopian rhetoric or cynical acquiescence. This has been further boosted by two authoritative intellectual biographies. According to Robert Westbrook, views such as these neglect or blunt Dewey’s radical edge: among ‘liberal intellectuals of the twentieth century, Dewey was the most important advocate of participatory democracy, that is, of the belief that democracy as an ethical ideal calls upon men and women to build communities in which the necessary opportunities and resources are available for every individual to realize fully his or her particular capacities and powers through participation in political, social and cultural life.’²⁸ Although more inclined to emphasize liberalism than democratic faith, Alan Ryan also finds that Dewey was not only a considerable political philosopher, but a radical one. Accepting that Dewey urges attention to concrete social and political problems, this interpretation does not envisage him as wedded to the evasion of tricky ethical questions but to a fundamental concern with the philosophical articulation of democratic values. This is, moreover, a critical rather than an acquiescent account of democracy, designed to elucidate for his readers the gap between credible democratic ideals and present realities of government.

In outline, the account of Dewey’s ethical and political theory offered in this part of the book is as follows. The normative basis of this theory is defined by a teleological ethics of self-realization or growth, ‘a philosophy that recognizes the objective character of human freedom and its dependence upon a congruity of environment with human wants, an agreement which can be attained only by profound thought and unremitting application’.²⁹ Dewey’s ethical theory in turn constitutes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Dewey’s Political Philosophy
• Part II New Pragmatisms
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index