Thanks for this. There is one aspect of what Dewey says that I particularly like, but I have a couple of reservations.
First, as so often when reading the words of great Americans from past eras, I’m astonished at the cognitive dissonance that people could tolerate. In one short article, Dewey resoundingly champions “the potentialities of human nature as that nature is exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth” – and at the same time is able to write of the Founders that “there was more than a marvelous conjunction of physical circumstances involved in bringing to birth this new nation. There was in existence a group of men who were capable of readapting older institutions and ideas to meet the situations provided by new physical conditions – a group of men extraordinarily gifted in political inventiveness.”
The very phrase “a group of men” clearly doesn’t disturb Dewey at all, though the 1st feminist movement had secured the vote for women just a few years ago, and Dewey could not have been unaware of the injustice of excluding women from enjoying the same rights as men. Additionally, he makes a point of talking about “young men and women” when discussing the effects of the Depression. But the “group of men” receives no comment; clearly Dewey doesn’t think this is relevant to his ideas about the founding of the US. I guess his reasoning is that, since the Founders had no real access to feminist thought and “could not be blamed”, therefore this lack had no effect on the results, and needn’t be remarked on.
Equally troubling is his apparent willingness to ignore the presence of chattel slavery throughout the American Southern colonies, and the intimate and complicit involvement of Northerners in that practice. About half of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, which laid out our democratic principles, were slave-owners. Moreover, not a single delegate proposed that Native Americans could share in the rights endowed by the Constitution.
Should we say that these men “should have known better”? Well, they were (mostly) typical of their time, and the issue of slavery was heatedly debated at the Convention, so it’s unclear what they “should have known.” But Dewey should have known better. By the 1930s, it was no longer possible to speak ignorantly about the founding of the US as “the happy conjunction of men and events in an earlier day” while leaving out everything that was unhappy about it. (I haven’t even touched on the class-exclusion laws involving who had the right to vote and debate.) Yet many besides Dewey continued to do so, and continue to this day.
Trying to be fair, I should say that this article is in praise of American democracy, written in a context of rising fascism, so perhaps Dewey did not feel called upon to present a balanced picture. I think he was wrong – an unbalanced picture of a topic this significant is not honest, no matter the occasion and the audience – but that may have been his reasoning nonetheless.
My second point of concern is that, although I can see you want him to, Dewey nowhere says “democracy is not everyone arguing with the force of reason to determine the answer to what is right.” Dewey lists a number of things that impede democratic discussion – intolerance, cruelty, prejudice, abuse, mutual suspicion, and violence both physical and psychological – but he nowhere says or implies that “arguing with the force of reason” might be a concern.
Should we want him to? Well, Dewey is not Habermas, and many of our contemporary ideas about how public policy is formed were perhaps not thinkable in the 1930s. Still, I can’t help but feel Dewey understood something of this, and perhaps you feel that too, since you want him to declare that “arguing with the force of reason” is not an essential characteristic of democracy. (BTW, I don’t mean that you read him as saying such argument is undemocratic, only that it is not an essential characteristic of democracy.)
This leads me to what I admire in the article, which is very much related to a possible suspicion of the role of the “force of reason.” It’s this: Dewey is asking us to consider democracy not as a process that produces a “special result” which is valuable in itself, but instead as “a belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness.”
This is a deep thought. Dewey is claiming that what he calls “the personal democratic attitude” can generate “aims and methods” that will lead to growth and “ordered richness.” Again, even more clearly: “Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process.” (my emphasis). In other words, if a “force of reason”-type argument has a role, it will not be by virtue of its producing a certain type of answer (which Dewey likens to “arrests, fixations”), but by its ability to generate the next “aims and methods” to enhance democratic society. In so doing, it will enhance our human experience, which Dewey thinks is the true purpose of democracy. All “special results” (which may be worthwhile, of course) must be judged by this standard.
I’ve gone on too long, and I could go on much longer about why I think this insight is so important. I’ll just end by pointing out the clear connection with process-oriented Rawlsian liberalism, and Habermasian ideas about communicative action.
Anyway, sorry to be so hard on Dewey earlier! Happy Independence Day.