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	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

	V. Social Theory and Politics

	Dewey's thinking about education and his thinking about philosophy more generally were characterized by a deep hostility to any mode of thought that separated theory and ideas from practice and action. As a result, he was antagonistic not only to idealistic forms of philosophy but also to the industrial division of labor that had set in at the turn of the nineteenth century and had come to the fore in the early twentieth century with the rise of modern management. The separation of skill from labor reached its apogee—or nadir, depending on one's perspective—in the invention of the assembly line at Henry Ford's auto plant in Detroit in 1914 and was, for Dewey, an affront to human nature. It imposed limitations on human possibility. One finds in Dewey's writings about education and in his social theory more generally a desire to find possibilities for bringing together theory and practice, knowledge and work, culture and everyday life, to reintegrate aspects of human knowledge and human experience that had become divided. Dewey became increasingly radicalized in his politics over the years. As a life-long "small-d" democrat, he kept pushing the envelope with respect to where democracy could take place. For Dewey, democracy was not just a matter for governance. It was a way of life, and the problems of democracy were always to be solved by more and more democracy. This democratic commitment led him to rethink certain elements of the liberal tradition in which he and virtually every other American intellectual of his day had been raised. In his view, classic American liberalism, with its emphasis on limited government and a laissez-faire approach to the economy, had been a necessary response to the absolutism of monarchical regimes. But beginning with the years 1910–19, and coming to a head certainly in the 1930s, Dewey advanced a series of arguments that, if liberalism were to remain true to its traditional ideals—freedom of thought, freedom for the individual to maximize his or her potential—then it would have to rethink these assumptions. It would become increasingly necessary, he believed, for liberals to adopt a more interventionist stance in their approach to economic issues and to imagine a more positive role for government. By the end of his life, this line of argument had taken him from a liberal or progressive point of view to a politics that might be described as broadly socialist.


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