The American philosopher Morton White wrote that after the death of John Dewey in 1952, “a great change came over the face of American philosophy as it used more and more refined logical techniques, squinted its eyes, and peered into smaller and smaller places.” After several decades with eyes wide shut, a renewed focus on Dewey and classical Pragmatism evolved, due in part to Richard Rorty's recuperation of Dewey for neo-Pragmatism, the completion of the thirty-seven-volume Collected Works of John Dewey, and the exhaustion of post-structuralism and other highly theorized models of academic critique. As Cornell West rightly suggests, the renewed appeal of Dewey's philosophy of experience, conflict, inquiry and experimentalist resolve stems from its progressive, democratic tenor, matching a meliorist quest for relevant social responsibility in reaction to the privatized culture of Reaganism and a faith in the sanctity of “free-market” norms.

Besides the work of neo-Pragmatists such as Rorty and West, landmark scholarship in the Dewey revival includes the critical biographies by Robert Westbrook (John Dewey and American Democracy (1991)) and Alan Ryan (John Dewey and the High Tide of American Democracy (1995)), both worthy introductions to Dewey's life and thought. Melvin Rogers's Undiscovered Dewey belongs on the shelf alongside them, offering an authoritative, coherentist account that integrates Dewey's political, ethical and religious thought in the context of his engagement with American democracy in a post-Darwinian, post-Christian – and now postindustrial – world.

It was a lengthy engagement, as Dewey was born before the Civil War and died during the Korean War at the age of 92. He was prolific as well, and, more importantly for Rogers, consistent through the decades in shaping his philosophy of experience, inquiry, and intelligent action. In Rogers's view, Dewey was not a child of the Enlightenment so much as a worldly philosopher coming to terms with Darwin and the “death of God,” alert to the contingencies and uncertainties of modernity, an anti-foundationalist with faith in creative, practical intelligence for constructing a viable system of ethics, politics and religion. For Rogers, “Dewey's philosophy represents a careful and measured attempt to defend a belief in human agency in a world shorn of ultimate foundations” (237).

Rogers's persuasive, fresh account views Dewey's work as a careful reconstruction of philosophy developed in response to a post-Darwinian world of evolving contingencies, shorn of the certainties of orthodox Christianity, the eternal truths of metaphysics, and the rationalist confidence of the Enlightenment. For Dewey, the demise of dogmas and dualisms did not lead to an abyss of existential despair, but rather could prove liberating, allowing for a more dynamic individualism in the context of deliberative democratic community. Dewey's anti-foundationalist pluralism and celebration of agency makes him congenial to global, participatory, democratic politics and also contributes to his revival – the Obama campaign's chant of “Yes we can!” might have been Dewey's own mantra.

The Undiscovered Dewey illuminates the Pragmatic roots of that appeal. The first part, “From Certainty to Contingency,” explores the profound shifts to a more anthropocentric paradigm and the collapse of the “sacred canopy” of conventional Christian belief. Rogers argues persuasively that the shift animated Dewey's turn from neo-Hegelian idealism to a “modified Aristotelianism” – practical inquiry and phronesis, adapted to a more dynamic, pluralist context than ancient Athens, and less dark a vision of modernity than Max Weber's “iron cage.”

The book's second part offers a comprehensive, integrated view of Dewey's philosophy, the “Religion, Morality and the Ethos of Democracy” of the subtitle. In carefully laying out his argument, Rogers also manages to take on and rebut familiar criticisms of Dewey – that he was naive in his faith in participatory democracy, blind to political inequalities and the tragic sense of life, an amoral relativist, and a pious but secular humanist. The chapter on democratic politics, “Constraining Elites and Managing Power,” positions Dewey against Walter Lippmann's faith in the expertise of an elite of technocrats (Dewey preferred an informed electorate, not just an informed elite) and Richard Wolin's radical distrust of institutions (which Dewey thought an informed electorate could keep in check). The chapter on ethics describes the reflective, sympathetic, and “mutually responsive” citizen one could trust with the right to vote, developing “habits of character” and reflection reminiscent of Aristotle's virtuous, practical citizen–philosopher.

“Faith and Democratic Piety,” Rogers's chapter on Dewey and religion, is perhaps the most controversial, arguing that Dewey saw in democracy “a fuller and deeper religion” than the Protestantism of his early years. Rogers rightly argues that in works such as A Common Faith (1934) Dewey did not so much secularize religion as sanctify democracy – inquiry emerges not from abstraction or an Archimedean vantage point, but from within “our religious commitments, moral choices, or political decisions” (239) – with piety, openness, and sympathy as democratic virtues. Skeptical secularists might turn to Dewey's early essay “Christianity and Democracy” (1893), where he argues that the main theme of the New Testament is that “the truth shall set you free,” and that “Democracy thus appears as the means by which the revelation of truth is carried on.” It is an ongoing, open-ended revelation, congruent with the dynamics of Pragmatism.

President Obama's election represents the more hopeful, progressive, participatory strain of American democracy of which Dewey might approve (although he invariably voted for socialist candidates, now a rara avis in American electoral politics). Several tests of the viability of Deweyan deliberative democracy will be the current effort to reform an inefficient, ineffective American health care system; to diminish the overinvestment of “blood and treasure” in colonialist wars; and to redistribute American wealth from the top-heavy “trickle-down” model to more of a “trickle-up” model. Such progress would prove to be the ongoing redemption, rather than the relative squandering, of the promise of American life. Melvin Rogers's articulate, timely work helps make audible once again Dewey's voice in this fateful conversation.