After a number of decades of relative neglect in the middle of the last century, followed by increasing attention in the last 25 years, the time is now propitious for a return to John Dewey's classical pragmatism in order to put his thought into contact with contemporary political theory. In The Undiscovered Dewey Melvin Rogers excellently establishes now-needed points of contact between his subject's thought and contemporary theory. This is no easy task given Dewey's range: He wrote at length in the three areas flagged by Rogers's subtitle (democratic theory, ethics, and religion), as well as contributing widely to quintessential philosophical areas, such as epistemology, logic, and metaphysics. Part of what makes this book important is Rogers's skill at negotiating a wide range of Dewey's thought.

A synopsis of the flow of the book gives a good sense of its thematic breadth and interdisciplinary approach. The Preface captures the central message of Rogers's Dewey as offering “an understanding of humility that does not extinguish hope” (p. xiii). This is quite a bold claim. A standard criticism of Dewey (which Rogers rightly locates in Cornel West, Robert Westbrook, and others) is that he “denies the fragility of life that a thoroughgoing experimentalism demands” (p. ix). This critique takes many forms: Dewey lacks a sense of the tragic, Dewey is naively enamored of scientific method, Dewey fails to theorize the role of power in politics. After the Preface, the Introduction continues to wrestle with other scholarship in a way that almost gives the impression of an author who is a little too nervous about his place in the secondary literature. But the bulk of the book effectively avoids this potential pitfall by fully engaging Dewey's own writings, as well as the primary works of other theorists. The book itself is divided into two parts. Part I (Chapters 1–2) develops an interpretation of Dewey's theory of inquiry, which is then leveraged in Part II (Chapters 3–5) for a rereading of Dewey's contributions to religion, morality, and democracy respectively. As he is a political scientist by training, it is in his discussion of democratic theory that Rogers is at his best. This is also the chapter that will be of greatest interest to readers of this journal.

The interpretation of Dewey's theory of inquiry forwarded in Part I is an impressive effort in intellectual history. Chapter 1 locates his pragmatism as negotiating a via media in nineteenth-century debates between the self-assertiveness of liberal Protestantism and those theologians who waxed pessimistic about the ineffectiveness of human agency in a disenchanted world. This culturewide “crisis of agency” was largely a function of Charles Darwin's impact (p. 47). Dewey embraced Darwinian uncertainty so as to hold both humility and hope in view. How is a hopeful-yet-humble agency possible in conditions where “precariousness saturates the whole of human experience” (p. 85)?

Chapter 2 answers this question by locating Dewey's cautious meliorism through his naturalistic, social, and rational conception of inquiry as normatively authoritative. This chapter strikes up an impressive conversation between Dewey and contemporary neopragmatist language philosopher Robert Brandom. This connection is welcome insofar as too many contemporary Dewey scholars remain reticent about the contributions of neopragmatism. Like Brandom, Dewey takes effective agency to depend on the normativity of our conceptions. Also like Brandom, Dewey takes normativity to be possible just insofar as rationality is already thoroughly social: “What Dewey is drawing our attention to is the explicability of action that makes discursive negotiation central” (p. 93). Insofar as practical actions always have a “linguistic counterpart” in our preparedness to give reasons for acting as we do (and asking others for reasons for their actions), these actions are subject to the normative constraints of rational-social communication. Rogers's discussions of Deweyan inquiry in the Brandomian idiom of “giving and asking for reasons” put classical and contemporary pragmatism into productive conversation. The result is a Dewey for whom social rationality sponsors an effective agency at the same time that it facilitates the recognition of the limitations we face in exerting agency in concert with, or sometimes in opposition to, other inquiring agents.

If Part I puts Dewey into conversation with contemporary neopragmatism, then Part II is even more impressive in locating Dewey amid contemporary political theory. Here we find him enriching, arguing with, or benefiting from the work of Sheldon Wolin, Walter Lippmann, Philip Pettit, Jürgen Habermas, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Claude Lefort. The range to which Rogers writes is, simply put, most impressive. The key discussions of democratic theory are in Chapter 5. Rogers does not merely rehearse familiar stories about Dewey's hopeful embrace of democratic practice; for he here effectively cashes out his earlier articulation of Dewey's humility in order to purchase recognition of his attentiveness to the role of power in politics. This is important insofar as it is widely thought that Dewey was blind to the difference that power (too often) makes. Rogers argues that Dewey embraced democracy insofar as one of its aims is to directly “manage power over those on whom it will be exercised so that its use does not become arbitrary” (p. 208). How can we manage power? Through democratic deliberation. This is the political face of rational-social-normative inquiry: “[D]emocracy makes the practice of reason-giving constitutive of how it handles and legitimizes its ongoing affairs” (p. 212). The best version of this idea is that the rational reflexivity built into democratic deliberation goes further than anything else we have to address power in a way that mitigates its injustices without pretending to dispense with power itself. Dewey is humble in recognizing that precarious politics is saturated with power. Yet he remains hopeful in affirming that deliberation will enable us to manage power in the interests of justice.

An objection will be raised by those who take Dewey's emphasis on nonlinguistic primary experience to be a valuable corrective for the extremes of philosophy's linguistic turn (Richard Rorty, Brandom) and the related deliberative turn in democratic theory (Habermas, John Dryzek). The contentious claim of linguistic-deliberative theory is that language sufficiently captures that in virtue of which experience is subject to normative constraint. (The strong claim is not, for instance, that language exhaustively captures the full range of human experience, since nobody really takes that position seriously.) The objection to this is as follows: How do we account for normativity in cases where it seems that norms cannot be linguistically articulated? The clearest examples of this are from art: a beautiful painting or a perfect dance. It is blatant reductivism to insist that communicative practice exhaustively captures that which establishes artistic achievement. Examples from political practice point to the same conclusion: That which makes a direct action or a political campaign successful is not always deliberation alone. In some instances, the legitimate management of power flows through channels that are visual, sensorial, and deeply somatic (think of a hunger strike). It is not that words are nothing—but surely they are also not everything.

Rogers's book is itself an impressive achievement in having brought Dewey into close contact with some of the most pressing issues of contemporary political theory. His point is that one learns much from rereading Dewey today. One also learns much from reading Rogers on Dewey. This book is essential for anyone interested in pragmatism and of value for anyone working on democratic theory.