John Dewey

I. Dewey and James
II. Life and Career
III. Reconstructing Philosophy
IV. Educational Reform
V. Social Theory and Politics
VI. Critiques of Pragmatism

II. Life and Career

Dewey's ideas changed over the course of his lifetime, in response to the times in which he lived.

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John Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, which by the time of his birth was no longer a small New England town but an industrializing city. In fact, if one follows Dewey's career, one can see him moving again and again into places in the United States that were more and more characterized by the industrializing forces that were transforming American society as a whole. He is often characterized as a small-town New England boy who made his way into the big city, but that's really inaccurate. Instead, Dewey was deeply engaged with the transformations of American society. At an early age, he was already witnessing those changes in his hometown of Burlington.

Dewey attended the University of Vermont at Burlington. He then went on to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins, a new university that had been founded after the Civil War and modeled after the German research university, and was now the center for new work in the burgeoning social sciences. He took his first job at the University of Michigan, where he became deeply involved in debates surrounding Darwinism and social Darwinism. In 1894 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, arriving at the very moment when that city was being torn apart by the great Pullman strike that pitted unionized railroad workers against police and, ultimately, federal troops, with blood flowing in the streets.

The move to Chicago was a momentous one for Dewey, intellectually and politically. He found his way to Jane Addams's Hull House during the 1890s and was tremendously influenced and impressed by her as an intellectual and an activist. One could say that Dewey became a kind of pupil of Addams in this period, and that Hull House offered him an alternative to the university as a site for intellectual debate and political activism.

By 1905, Dewey had moved to New York, taking a position at Columbia University, where he taught both in the philosophy department and at Teachers College. That move likewise put him closer to the center of social and political events in this country. Coming to New York at the beginning of the twentieth century meant coming to an immigrant city, a city that was energized and also divided by the great social and political movements of the day.

During the 1910-19, the 1920s, and the 1930s, at a time when one would expect a man of his age to be winding down his career, Dewey became ever more involved in public affairs, taking stands on World War I, as we'll see in a later seminar; trying, during the Depression years, to organize left-of-center political groups into a labor party that would serve as an alternative to the Democratic Party; intervening in the Stalin-Trotsky debates of the 1930s. Dewey became a figure with an international reputation.

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Dewey's ideas changed over the course of his lifetime, in response to the times in which he lived.

What one sees in Dewey's life, then, is exactly the kind of interaction between the self and its environment, between cognition and lived experience, that James and other pragmatists had believed was the very center of human nature. Dewey's ideas changed because of where he lived; they were responses to the places he lived, and they were responses to the times in which he lived.

Throughout his entire career he was, as I said, motivated by democracy as a moral ideal. A democratic polity was the place in which individuals could find self-realization, could find happiness and live a good life, in communication and in concerted action with others. But in the context of an industrializing America—an America that was becoming a global power, an America dominated largely by huge corporations, an America characterized also by vibrant social movements—Dewey's democratic commitments led him to an ever more radical political position, so that by the end of his life, it is fair to say, Dewey was a democratic socialist, not a position one would necessarily have identified with him at the beginning of his life.

Content excerpted from Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States, 1890-1945: Pragmatism and Its Critics, with Casey Nelson Blake.