John Dewey: Liberalism and Social Action. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.

 

John Dewey has won no palms for literary excellence. The skilled writer and dubious historian Richard Hofstadter ripostes: “His style is suggestive of the cannonading of distant armies: one concludes that something portentous is going on at a remote and inaccessible distance, but one cannot determine just what it is.”

True, but Dewey nonetheless ranks as a master of rhetoric, something for which he has received little credit. Arguably the most influential American Progressive of his day, he identified his audience and spoke to it persuasively in language that compelled it, if no one else. He won the allegiance of American educators, who went on to remake the American public school system in his ideological image. Hofstadter goes on to say that Dewey’s “great influence as an educational spokesman may have derived in part from the very inaccessibility of his exact meanings.” There was much more to it than that, although it is unquestionably true that Dewey’s rhetoric owed much of its effectiveness to the fact that it rarely ‘sounded’ like rhetoric.

He seldom needed his rhetorical skills more than in 1935, when not only his educational system but the entire regime of American liberalism as he had redefined and shaped it faced deadly threats. Fascists and communists vied for the control of Europe, and the United States, center of the worldwide economic depression, could hardly claim invulnerability to their militancy. “The center cannot hold,” the poet Yeats had claimed, and to many it looked that way. American Progressives (renamed ‘liberals’ by themselves) had allied themselves with socialists and communists in imitation of Europe’s Popular Front coalitions—a risky and even desperate measure, given the decidedly illiberal character of some of their partners. Dewey published Liberalism and Social Action in this menacing atmosphere. He titles the first chapter “The History of Liberalism”; in it, he proves an extraordinarily shrewd orator of the printed word, deftly slanting his narrative description of liberalism to make the story come out right, justifying his liberalism in the minds of his followers at exactly the moment they lacked such tonic.

He begins by steadying liberals with memories of past victory. “Liberalism has long been accustomed to onslaughts proceeding from those who oppose social change.” As he need not explain, liberals have steadily overcome those onslaughts, for two and a half centuries. Today, however, fiercer challengers loom. Unlike conservatives, these challengers also want social change. Without naming them, he describes their assault as three-pronged: in term of its scope, the changes they propose are “drastic,” not gradual; in terms of timing, they demand immediate change; and with respect to their methods, they require violence. Although one might expect Dewey to single out the radical Right as they main challenger, he chooses examples of arguments made by the radical Left, by the communists: liberals say they sympathize with the workers but when push comes to shove they side with the “masters of capitalism”; they profess radical opinions “in private” but never act upon them for fear of losing social standing with those masters. Mealy-mouthed and cowardly, they deserve contempt, not a position of leadership at History’s cutting edge.

Dewey thus puts his strongest criticism of his allies in the mouths of his, and their, opponents. He wants to make liberals indignant at the way they are caricatured. Crucially, and presciently, he sees that the radical Left poses the worse threat to liberalism than the radical Right. Things didn’t look that way to most people in 1935, but Dewey saw farther, and as a result he wasn’t discredited when the Right lost the coming world war and conservatives rounded on those liberals who’d band-wagoned with the communists in the Thirties.

And there is another adversary, now only in potential, but worrisome nonetheless. It is the very democracy ‘progressive’ liberalism had valorized. “Popular sentiment, especially in this country, is subject to rapid changes of fashion.” In Europe already, liberalism no longer enjoys the prestige it had, only two decades ago. “Three of the great nations of Europe”—Russia, Germany, Italy—”have summarily suppressed the civil liberties for which liberalism valiantly strove, and in few countries of the Continent are they maintained with vigor.” Indeed: and within a few years, only Switzerland would remain in the liberal camp. More, “it is well known that everything for which liberalism stands is put in peril in times of war”; he is thinking of conscription, restrictions on freedom of speech, and other governmental actions familiar to Americans who remembered the Great War and its aftermath. (Of course he could never anticipate how President Roosevelt would use the next war as an opportunity to consolidate the gains of liberalism, as seen in the “Four Freedoms” speech; Dewey wasn’t the only rhetorical and strategic genius among American liberals at that time.) “The belief spreads,” he warns, “that liberalism flourishes only in times of fair social weather,” and if popular sentiment turns against liberals (as it had in the Twenties), this time the setback might last a long time.

Amidst this perfect storm of confusion, Dewey will urge intellectual clarity and strength of purpose, and to achieve the first (prerequisite to the second) he must begin by an act a philosopher will have mastered: the act of definition. The act of definition will work rhetorically, however, only if the philosopher exhibits skill in the art of definition, and in this case the portentous and all-inclusive cloudiness Hoftstadter scorned will not do. Socrates, that master of the ‘What is?’ question, shows the way: What is liberalism? What elements “of permanent value” does it have? How can these “values” be “maintained and developed”—he must avoid any hint of ‘conservativism,’ of the rear-guard defensive action—”in the conditions the world now faces.” Although he obviously knows how he will answer these questions, he pretends he does not, inviting his readers to think along with him: “I have wanted to find out whether it is possible for a person to continue, honestly and intelligently, to be a liberal, and if the answer be in the affirmative”—the suspense won’t kill us—”what kind of liberal faith should be asserted today.” With a becoming show of modesty, he allows “I do not suppose that I am the only one who has put such questions to himself,” and, knowing that most liberals will want to remain liberal, to confirm their long-held convictions, and also having prepared the ground, he can now unfold his argument with confidence.

He essays a bit of legerdemain that will prove characteristic. “The natural beginning of the inquiry in which we are engaged is consideration of the origin and past development of liberalism.” That is, the “natural” way to start isn’t natural but historical. He can say this because for more than a century philosophers and their intellectual followers had conceived of all reality, very much including nature, as historical. Historicism enables Dewey to shape his argument by bringing some historical facts to the foreground, leaving others in the background. “The conclusion reached from a brief survey of history,” which he will unfold in the balance of the chapter, is that “liberalism has had a chequered career”—it has made its mistakes, he humbly submits—”and that it has meant in practice things so different as to be opposed to one another.” Dewey is justly known as having insisted on a pragmatic and experimental liberalism, unlike the ‘idealistic’ liberalism of Woodrow Wilson and many of the early Progressives, although aiming at the same goals. Consistent with this, he will define liberalism in its succession of theories, basing these theories on practice and not finally on ideas.

Hence the emphasis on use: “The use of the words liberal and liberalism to denote a particular social philosophy does not appear to occur earlier than the first decade of the nineteenth century.” He grants himself an anachronistic exception in tracing liberalism to John Locke, whom he brackets neatly into a historical period as “the philosopher of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688.” Locke teaches what the Declaration of Independence asserts: Rights “belong to individuals prior to political organization of social relations,” and these natural rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; they also include property, which an individual rightly acquires by labor. Further, if a government violates rights, individuals separately or in groups may justly resist or revolutionize it. The need to exercise the right to revolution will subside to a considerable extent if governments practice religious toleration—itself a practical recognition of individuals’ natural right to their own opinions.

Dewey initially criticizes Locke more for the effect of his thought than for its content. His liberalism “bequeathed to later social thought a rigid doctrine of natural rights inherent in individuals themselves independent of social organization,” owing to his “semi-theological and semi-metaphysical conception of natural law as supreme over positive law,” a “new version of the old idea that natural law is the counterpart of reason, being disclosed by the natural light with which man is endowed.” Dewey the historicist demurs, but not immediately on the theoretical level. He instead criticizes the doctrine that natural rights inhere in individuals, and thus, somehow, “oppose social action” because they establish “the primacy of the individual over the state not only in time but in moral authority.” Further, this philosophy skews the meaning of reason itself. As a supposedly “inherent endowment of the individual, expressed in men’s moral relations to one another,” it was “not sustained and developed because of these relations.” All of this made natural-rights thinkers regard government as “the great enemy of individual liberty,” positing “a natural antagonism between ruled.” “Not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the idea that government might and should be an instrument for securing and extending the liberties of individuals.”

As Dewey must know, this is nonsense. The theory of inherent or natural rights possessed by individuals in no way inhibited social organization. Indeed, Locke claims that it led to social organization, inasmuch as human beings living alone or in families formed civil societies in order to secure their rights. As for the Americans, the rights cited in the Declaration of Independence hardly prevented them from forming civil associations (as documented by Tocqueville but as seen in the colonial settlements before the Revolution and in the ‘committees of correspondence’ which organized it). As for governments as distinct from civil associations, the Locke and the Declaration assert, as Dewey himself recognizes, that they exist in order to secure natural rights. Government can defend or attack the natural rights of individuals, and the object of Locke and the American Founders was to see to it that it defended them. Their emphasis on government as an enemy of liberty made sense, given the threat of the regime of absolute monarchy, prevalent in Europe and practiced by the British monarch in the North American colonies at the time.

As for reason, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education clearly shows that it needed development through social relations, first of all in the home. Such founding-generation Americans as Noah Webster extended this teaching to public schools without in any way compromising the idea that reason is a natural endowment of human individuals as such.

So what is Dewey up to? As a historicist, he claims that reason and political life—indeed, nature itself—all remain subject to change over time. In human life, changes in ideas and in social and political life typically result from underlying changes in the material conditions of human life at a given point in time. And so he writes that for Locke, living in England at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, property could be understood as a matter individual possession, but with the rise of industrialism in the following century “industry and commerce were sufficiently advanced in Great Britain so that interest centered in production of wealth, rather than in its possession.” The English then redefined “freedom” as “the use and investment of capital and the right of laborers to move about and seek new modes of employment—claims denied by the common law that came down from semi-feudal conditions.” True enough, but not denied by Locke, whose Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England provides a refutation of the common law and a vindication of individual natural rights, very much against the semi-feudal conditions which had survived until that time. Far from being a “transformation of earlier liberalism,” the assertion of the liberty to invest and to work amounted to an application of it.

Similarly, respecting reason, Dewey claims that it too was transformed, thanks to Adam Smith’s capitalism-inspired notion of the “Invisible Hand:” the spontaneous organization of markets under conditions of minimal government interference does a better job than any attempt at rational planning of political economy could do. Again, true, but it does not follow that Smith provides “a radically new significance to the earlier conception of reason”; on the contrary, he applies ordinary rules of logic to a new social condition, a condition in which social relations under the modern state and its far bigger and more intricate political economy has discovered its own practical limits. According to Dewey, under rapidly-developed capitalism “natural laws lost their remote moral meaning” and were instead “identified with the laws of free industrial production and free commercial exchange.” But the reason that philosophers began to deny the moral meaning of natural laws came not from capitalist development but from David Hume, who asked how right can derive from a nature conceived as entirely material and purposeless. Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, along with Kant’s categorical imperative and Bentham’s utilitarianism, all responded to a philosophic critique of modern natural right, not socio-economic change.

With this distortion of actual history in the service of his theory of historicism and his intention to put government to the service of social change, Dewey turns to Jeremy Bentham, the thinker to whom he devotes the greatest attention. Like Smith, Bentham begins with psychology. But instead of a theory of moral sentiments he simplifies human response to a matter of the desire for pleasure and the aversion to pain, “the sole forces that govern human action.” Whereas Locke had concentrated his rhetorical efforts at liberalizing the English gentry class, “the constant expansion of manufacturing and trade” which Locke himself had promoted “put the force of a powerful class interests behind the new,” Benthamite, “version of liberalism,” which Bentham named utilitarianism. Dewey’s historical relativism leads him to associate such intellectual movements with social classes, but not in any simple way. Utilitarians detached themselves “from the immediate interests of the market place”; this “emancipation enabled them to detect and make articulate the nascent movements of their time—a function that defines the genuine work of the intellectual class at any period.” Unlike a Socratic philosopher, unlike any natural-rights philosopher ‘ancient’ or ‘modern,’ the philosopher of history aspires not to ascend from the Cave of popular opinion but to identify the flow of those opinions through the river of that cave, which may or may not someday ascend into the daylight. The Utilitarians “might have been as voices crying in the wilderness if what they taught had not coincided with the interests of a class that was constantly rising in prestige and power.” The philosopher not only identifies the nascent movements of his time, he contrives to ride them. His detachment is the detachment of a captain on a ship in the underground river of time.

This begs the question: What class was constantly rising in prestige and power in the first half of the twentieth century, in Dewey’s America? Which class interest does his teaching aim to ride and guide? None other than the professional classes: teachers, administrators, and lawyers. If Bentham taught the commercial and industrial classes, and Marx chose the proletariat as the vehicle for revolution, Dewey chooses the ‘white-collar’ men as the rising class of his time and place. As it happened he chose very shrewdly. They, far more than the ‘blue-collar’ men of the Marxists and socialists generally, proved to be those who came to rule in the America and Europe of his century. Compared with Marx, Dewey proved the superior historicist. Despite the seemingly bad prospects for liberalism in 1935, he remained confident in his analysis, and moved to steady the nerves of his progressive-liberal allies.

Dewey admires Bentham because utilitarianism “transferred attention from the well-being already possessed by individuals to one they might attain if there were a radical change in social institutions.” Although, like Smith, he preferred a limited state, “there was nothing in his fundamental doctrine that stood in the way of using the power of government to create, constructively and positively, new institutions if and when it should appear that the latter would contribute more effectively to the well-being of individuals.” Indeed: utility is as utility does. But notice the subtle misinterpretation. Dewey pretends that natural rights, inherent in individuals, somehow preclude government efforts to effect the “well-being” of individuals. The Declaration of Independence contrarily asserts that “the People”—not simply individuals—may “institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” A natural-rights theory of politics can aim at the well-being of individuals and of peoples just as readily as a theory founded on the utilitarian calculus of Bentham or the historicist calculus of Dewey.

Dewey knows that, but letting his readers know it would not serve his rhetorical purpose. What does serve that purpose is to observe a new use of practical reason encouraged by Bentham, the practice of social experimentation. He quotes Bentham with approval: We should “extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral,” trying one reform and then, if it fails, another. Dewey finds Bentham’s actions consistent with his words. “History shows no mind more fertile than [Bentham’s] in invention of legal and administrative devices,” and his followers enabled the progressive democratization of British society and politics via the three great reform acts of the nineteenth century to avoid both violent political revolution and administrative disorder. In answer to the question of liberalism’s vulnerability in 1935 to violent revolutionary challenges, Dewey harkens to Bentham, whose followers in principle met the same kind of challenge a century before. “Liberalism is not compelled by anything in its own nature to be impotent save for minor reforms. Bentham’s influence is proof that liberalism can be a power in bringing about radical social changes: provided it combine capacity for bold and comprehensive social invention with detailed study of particulars and with courage in action.” What is more, these radical social changes need no tyrant-leaders to effect them: “I think there is something significant for the liberalism of today and tomorrow to be found in the fact that his group did not consist in any large measure of politicians, legislators or public officials” at all. Liberals today and tomorrow, like the utilitarian liberals of yesterday, can develop their “program” “outside of the immediate realm of governmental action,” galvanizing “public attention, before direct political action of a thoroughgoing liberal sort.” This developmental or historicist strategy can yield far more reliable results than any ‘top-down,’ immediately governmental strategy can do, and thus surpass and outlast the violent tyrannies.

Unlike Lockeian, Smithian, and (Dewey might have as well added) Kantian liberalism, Benthamite liberalism judges “all organized action” by its consequences. Although utilitarianism is not historicism, it shares that principle with historicism. Following Hume, Bentham argued that “natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological historical zoology. Men do not obey laws because they think these laws are in accord with a scheme of natural rights. They obey because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the consequences of obeying are upon the whole better than the consequences of disobeying…. Not natural rights but consequences in the lives of individuals are the criterion and measure of policy and judgment.” Dewey first denies that rights inhere in nature, following Bentham, who follows Hume. He next shifts the reader’s attention not to the origin of rights but to the human motive that induce us to obey any assertion of rights at all. In this, Bentham serves as a model. What Dewey’s historicist liberalism will alter is utilitarianism’s continued focus on the individual. He will more thoroughly ‘historicize’ liberalism by ‘socializing’ it—by making it a matter of socio-economic change defined and to some extent guided by the rising professional class, now instructed by (it is almost needless to say) Dewey himself, and his followers, primarily in the education system.

For America, alas, “had no Bentham.” As a consequence, the influence of “the school of Locke” “lasted much longer in the United States” than it did in Europe. But while “the ideas of Locke embodied in the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our pioneer conditions that gave individuals the opportunity to carve their own careers,” the American frontier is long closed. In the old America, “the gospel of self-help and private initiative was practiced so spontaneously that it needed no special intellectual support,” anyway. Dewey carefully overlooks Tocqueville’s account of civil associations, which arose as it were spontaneously in the ‘Lockeian’ America. He must overlook that account, because it shows that Locke’s principles give plenty of room for social action and self-government, up to and including natural-rights republicanism on the national level. Dewey would like to confine that characteristically American form of social action to an irrecoverable agrarian past, to relativize it to a certain set of historical conditions that will never exist again.

Dewey will lead the way, in part by following Bentham. “Great Britain, largely under Benthamite influence, built up an ordered civil service independent of political party control,” and reinforcing “the supremacy of national over local interests.” Like Dewey, Bentham “urged a great extension of public education and of action in behalf of public health” upon his people. Such “collectivist legislative policies gained in force for at least a generation after the [eighteen-] sixties.” This movement “greatly weakened the notion that Reason is a remote majestic power that discloses ultimate truth,” instead “render[ing] it an agency in investigation of concrete situations and in projection of measures for their betterment”—i.e., epistemological pragmatism. Dewey’s liberal progressivism will remain on the ground level, precisely to ensure real progress via experiment not speculative fancies.

Nonetheless, utilitarianism alone does not supply the rhetorical ‘lift’ needed for any reform movement. Here, in an especially ironic instance of History’s cunning (not entirely unlike Smith’s Invisible Hand, but even more like Hegelian dialectic), English conservatives made an unwitting contribution. Pushing against utilitarianism and industrialism in a last and ultimately failing attempt to defend aristocratic sensibilities, Tories fostered the Romantic movement; combined with middle-class humanitarianism and “evangelical piety,” they revived an older definition of ‘liberal’ as generous, open-handed—a “generosity of outlook,” of “liberty of belief and action.” Under the influence of this redefinition, “gradually a change came over the spirit and meaning of liberalism,” which disassociated itself with economic laisser faire and instead became “associated with the use of governmental action for aid to those at economic disadvantage and for alleviation of their conditions.” American Progressives followed in this line. Dewey recalls the firm anti-industrial spirit of the English Romantic poets, calling it part of “a powerful counterpoise to the anti-historic interest of the Benthamite school.” A synthesis occurred. “The leading scientific interest of the nineteenth century came to be history, including evolution within the scope of history.” John Stuart Mill, the greatest of the second-generation Utilitarians, provided the link between Bentham and the Romantics, turning to the poets after realizing that even the success of all his useful reform efforts would leave him emotionally dead.

English philosophers soon made this implicitly or potentially Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic manifest, led by the Oxford University philosophy professor Thomas Hill Green. Green took “the organic idealism that originated in Germany,” itself a “reaction against the basic philosophy of individualistic liberalism and individualistic empiricism,” and aimed it against “the atomistic philosophy that had developed under the alleged empiricism of the earlier liberal school.” English Hegelians could now answer Hume’s refutation of modern natural right by not merely by abandoning natural right but by substituting ‘History’ for it. “Criticizing piece by piece almost every item of the theory of mind, knowledge and society that had grown out of the teachings of Locke… they asserted that relations constitute the reality  of nature, of mind and of society” while nonetheless retaining “the ideals of liberalism.” They redefined individual liberty not in terms of natural rights possessed by individuals but as rights inherent in social relations. Far from being mere conventions, far from resting on self-interested pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, moral claims and social relations as the new liberals conceived them stood on “unshakeable objective foundations in the very structure of things.” “For the relations that constitute the essential nature of things are… the expression of an objective Reason and Spirit that sustains nature and the human mind,” qualities of “an ultimate cosmic mind” or, as Hegel calls it, the Absolute Spirit.

The political result is equally Hegelian. “The state is a moral organism, of which the government is one organ,” itself “but one organ among many of the Spirit and Will that holds all things together and makes human beings members of one another.” Under this system, the individual realizes himself by participating in “the common intelligence and sharing the common purpose as it works for the common good.” The state can then be conceived not so much as an instrument for securing innate rights of individuals as “the means of voluntary self-realization”—no longer the menacing potential oppressor of the individual but his ally in true liberation. As in Hegel, the state clears away obstacles to individuals “coming to consciousness of themselves for what they are,” a negative task supplemented by the positive effort “to promote the cause of public education.” The new freedom of the individual is no possession but “something to be achieved” as a part of this comprehensive historical process. Liberals who understand this today, in 1935, can “resolve the crisis” of liberalism “and emerge as a compact, aggressive force” against tyrannies Right and Left. Fortified by Dewey’s tonic, liberals can again exhibit the courage their enemies accuse them of lacking.

Dewey’s wish was fulfilled, more immediately by the pragmatic-yet-idealist progressive-liberal American president, aided by one of those old-fashioned, Romantic Tories, Winston Churchill, and also, more dangerously, by one of the tyrants, Josef Stalin. These Allies did indeed form, if not a compact, surely a massive and aggressive force against the fascist tyrannies. In the longer term, Dewey’s pragmatic liberalism, already well-established in the public school system, outlasted the remaining extremist tyranny, which ossified and finally collapsed less than four decades after Stalin’s death. In recent decades, however, Dewey’s liberalism has itself declined, as the administrative state staffed by ‘his’ rising professional class has proved not so instrumental to liberty—whether defined as natural, as utilitarian, or as a matter of self-realization—as Dewey claimed it would be. Less than a century since Dewey wrote, his liberal regimes face challenges from illiberally organized states, both secular and even (he would have been astonished) religious. And they face challenges from within themselves.

However this may go, Dewey surely deserves more credit than he deserves as what Wilson had called an “opinion leader.” He wasn’t the oratorical leader the young Wilson had in mind, and came to exemplify. Dewey, a master of written rhetoric, sought to influence only a part of public opinion directly, and for a long time. But he had identified the decisive part, the opinion of the opinion-makers. As a result, his project has endured for almost 90 years since Dewey published his book. ‘Postmodern’ thinkers of a still ‘newer’ Left now imperil the house that Dewey built, and a variety of ‘conservatives’ have criticized its architecture, but they haven’t toppled it yet.