Dewey, John

DEWEY, JOHN (1859–1952). One of the most influential philosophers, educators, and social reformers in the United States, John Dewey was a member or founder of innumerable political organizations and a lifelong defender of unpopular causes. He intervened in every major social issue—from the Great Depression and the world wars to the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Trials—with a progressive viewpoint that consistently rooted social conflicts in the workings of the capitalist economy.

Initially, Dewey flirted with socialist ideas such as guild socialism and nationalization of key industries. But with the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia, Dewey, like so many other intellectuals, softened his earlier radicalism and concluded that the most urgent task was to defend existing democratic rights, however imperfect. Yet he never went so far, unlike his student Sidney Hook, as to enlist in the Right. As a testament to his enduring progressivism, at the age of seventy-eight Dewey traveled to Mexico in 1937 to head the commission investigating the charges against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, publishing Not Guilty the same year.

A central figure of the philosophical school known as pragmatism, Dewey argued that philosophy should abandon its sterile metaphysical pursuits and apply itself in a practical manner toward the amelioration of social life. While Dewey made major contributions in virtually every area of philosophy, he is best known for his philosophy of education, which stated that the evils of capitalism could be remedied through the proper inbuing of creativity, democratic values, and scientific intelligence.

There are strong similarities between Dewey’s philosophy and that of Karl Marx (whom Dewey misinterpreted as a mechanistic materialist). These include a common heritage in Hegel, a strong historical sense, a repudiation of individualism as anathema to democracy, a rejection of all dualistic categories, and a belief in evolution and naturalism (self-realization through interaction with nature). Such parallels have led many writers to seek a rapprochement between the two thinkers. Philosopher Sidney Hook has gone so far as to argue that Deweyism is the genuine fulfillment of Marxism. But the similarities end abruptly on a key point: Marx insisting on the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and Dewey embracing pragmatic reform and rejecting Marxism as “unscientific utopianism.”

Trotsky, who engaged in a famous debate with Dewey on the question of means and ends in the revolutionary process (Dewey insisting that a democratic result required a democratic process), saw an extreme danger in Dewey’s philosophy insofar as it seduced radicals into accepting a reformist program. At Trotsky’s urging, George Novack wrote a powerful Marxist critique of Dewey’s philosophy. Novack, later to be a leading intellectual in the Socialist Workers Party, emphasized the virtues of Dewey the man and the considerable value of his philosophy over previous bourgeois philosophies, but sharply condemned pragmatism as an insidious apology for capitalism and class collaboration. It remains a contradiction of pragmatism that the experimentalism it championed was not rigorously applied to the socialist experiment itself.

Bernstein, Richard. John Dewey. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966.

Bullert, Gary. The Politics of John Dewey. New York: Prometheus Books, 1983.

Fishman, Stephen M. and Lucille McCarthy. John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Hook, Sidney. John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait. New York: John Day, 1939.

Novack, George. Pragmatism versus Marxism. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975.

Talisse, Robert B. A Pragmatic Philosophy of Democracy. London: Routledge, 2007.

Thomas, M. H. John Dewey: A Centennial Bibliography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.