For nearly twenty-five years, Peter T. Manicas has been deeply engaged in the American pragmatist tradition, writing numerous articles about its most prominent figures, particularly John Dewey, and about its continuing philosophical and political significance. His most recent book, Rescuing Dewey, is a collection of essays written during this time, most previously published in journals and edited volumes. Although the essays have been written over an extended period and for different purposes, Manicas is able to bring them together as part of a larger project with a common theme. As the title suggests, Manicas intends to “rescue” Dewey, but not from his many critics and foes. Especially since the pragmatist revival began in the 1970s, Dewey has had no shortage of defenders who, to varying degrees of success, have waged counterattacks against those critics who have accused him of nearly every philosophical and political heresy one can imagine. Probably because Dewey's most vicious critics have been largely discredited, Manicas is far more concerned with the misappropriation of Dewey by his many friends and supporters who do not see the radically democratic core of his thought. Viewing him through either a positivist or a postmodernist frame, they arrive at a similar understanding of Dewey as a left-leaning liberal who favors reform of existing political institutions over sweeping change, and who places more trust in the expertise of technocrats than in mass social movements.

Manicas understands that Dewey is often responsible for the reckless interpretations of his work. His writing is often elusive and ambiguous on a number of key philosophical issues, particularly in the areas of metaphysics and epistemology. The trouble seems to begin with the mischaracterization of Dewey as a nominalist rather than a realist. Realism posits that the uniformities human beings encounter in their experience, from which they often devise general concepts about the world, reflect a reality independent of what anybody may think of it. Nominalism, on the other hand, proposes that our general concepts are convenient fictions that tell us nothing about reality, and that the only things about which we can be certain are the particular experiences in our lives.

If mistakenly interpreted as a nominalist, Manicas argues, Dewey would appear to have a far narrower understanding of science than he actually had. He would be reduced to either a positivist or a postmodernist. Positivists believe that scientific inquiry, always performed by highly trained experts, must adhere to the world of discrete and observable facts and never venture into questions involving values. Postmodernists view science as just another system of discourse, hardly deserving of any privileged status in the search for knowledge or truth. The former believe there are strict limits to what we can know about reality and how we can know it; the latter believe we can never know anything about reality because we are trapped in a world of text. Although Dewey believed that the quest for certainty was quixotic, he was still a realist who believed that scientific inquiry could answer, if provisionally, a broad spectrum of questions about nature and society. In addition, as Manicas correctly argues, both positivism and postmodernism open the door for an individualistic understanding of inquiry, for which Dewey had no use. Indeed, classifying Dewey as a positivist or a postmodernist fails to capture his fundamental belief that scientific inquiry must be a social, even a democratic, enterprise.

Manicas addresses many of these questions in parts 1 and 2 of Rescuing Dewey. The scrupulous reader, well-versed in the philosophical issues under discussion, may find these sections insightful, if sometimes unnecessarily abstruse. Demanding much of his readers, Manicas does not take pains to write clearly or accessibly. For this reason, this book is not for the novice looking for a useful introduction to Dewey and the relationship between his philosophical and political thought.

Fortunately, part 3 reads far more smoothly and contains a number of original essays on Dewey's democratic thought. The highlights are chapters 8 and 9, in which Manicas offers nuanced comparisons of Dewey's thought to anarchism and Marxism. Manicas does not make the mistake of placing Dewey in either school, but he demonstrates quite persuasively that viewing him through each lens brings his radical democratic thought, which anticipates C. Wright Mills and the New Left, into sharper focus. Manicas shows, for example, how Dewey shares with many thinkers in the anarchist tradition a scorn for the modern state. Like Kropotkin, Dewey longs for the emergence of self-governing local communities, free of domination and coercive control from a central state authority.

Manicas also employs Dewey to shed light on other thinkers. In chapter 9, for example, Manicas offers a refreshing, and somewhat persuasive, reading of Marx as a friend of democracy and an exponent of revolutionary gradualism. He pays particular attention to On the Paris Commune, in which Marx applauds the short-lived commune for having “fashioned the first government . . . which aimed at realizing full control over the circumstances of life by ordinary citizens” (215). His praise for their efforts notwithstanding, Marx saw the inevitable demise of the communards who could never create a permanent socialist order under the repressive French state. For this reason, argues Manicas, Marx saw no alternative but to work within the modern state to bring about socialist revolution. Manicas deftly draws on revealing passages in which Marx praises universal suffrage as a vital socialist measure and suggests that the ultimate aim of the movement is “the conquest of political power” for the working people (219–20).

Manicas's attempts to offer original readings can get him into trouble on occasion. His review of Democracy's Discontents by Michael Sandel, the last essay in part 3, is simply unfair. He contends that the renowned communitarian's concern about the demise of civic virtue in America—and his suggestion that the state should play a role in inculcating a conception of the common good in citizens—is somehow undemocratic. Toward the end of the essay, Manicas correctly compares Sandel to Dewey, who wanted to instill democratic habits, not virtue, in American citizens. But Manicas downplays the extent to which Sandel sees the democratic habits extolled by Dewey as a crucial element of civic virtue.

Prospective readers of Rescuing Dewey should be forewarned that Manicas has a radical democratic agenda. He laments “the absence of a genuinely democratic politics, a politics which aims at the creation of communities by the active participation of interdependent individuals, a politics in which ‘interests’ become shared goods, a politics which insists that truth can only be our truth” (212). He criticizes Dewey most visibly when the pragmatist proves to be not radical enough. Although Dewey believes that a major overhaul of existing political institutions is necessary, he continues to rest his hopes—naively, according to Manicas—in education as the primary source of change. Manicas can be included among a growing number of scholars, including Robert Westbrook and Cornel West, who have tried to recast Dewey as an ardent, small-d democrat and a penetrating critic of the modern liberal state. This collection of essays is an important contribution to this debate and will undoubtedly inspire further discussion about the proper placement of Dewey in the history of political thought.