In this ambitious collection, Robert Westbrook aims to recover, from philosophical pragmatism, insight—and hope—regarding the promise of democracy. Following on his John Dewey and American Philosophy (1991), Dewey is surely his main man. Part One, “Pragmatism Old,” offers critical discussions of Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James. Part Two, “Pragmatism New,” treats recent writers who have identified themselves with pragmatism, including Hilary Putnam, Cheryl Misak, Cornel West, and Richard Posner. Richard Rorty is surely the main character in these accounts.
Indeed, it seems that the motivation for this volume is very much a matter of Rorty's influence in the “rediscovery” of pragmatism, and especially of Dewey. But this has its problems. Fundamentally, Rorty gets to set the context for the discussion. In the case of Dewey, this is especially troublesome, not merely because Rorty's pragmatism is far removed from Dewey's—as Westbrook sees—but because any proper understanding of Dewey requires that we acknowledge how radical was his effort to reconstruct philosophy. Mainstream philosophy is still almost entirely unaware of this, which is doubly ironical since rejection of the modern problem of epistemology was the one feature that Rorty shared with Dewey—even if Rorty's “reconstruction” was much more in the form of destruction. As R. W. Sleeper well put the matter: “We must amend Rorty's observation that Dewey was ‘waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled’ by the observation that Dewey was trying to block that road from its beginning” (The Necessity of Pragmatism, 1996, p. 5). Put simply, Dewey aimed to replace both epistemology and metaphysics, as these are conceived, with a naturalistic “logic of inquiry,” which amounted to a wholesale attack on the philosophical uses of Bertrand Russell's logic and the entire program of what became analytic philosophy. Failing to see what Dewey was up to, mainstream writers offer well-intentioned appeals to “experimental method,” “scientific communities,” “instrumentalist [sic] logic,” and “free inquiry.” Indeed, one suspects that they would agree with Alan Ryan's assessment that Dewey's Logic is “vast and somewhat baffling” (John Dewey and the High Tide of Liberalism, 1995).
The importance of this failure surfaces in what is the main concern of Democratic Hope: that Rorty is wrong in claiming that the pragmatists and postmodernists are distinguished by “the Americans' unjustifiable social hope and ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity” (p. 6). Presumably, “epistemological” grounds are available: The pragmatist's “low-profile conception of truth” and “truth-apt character of moral and political beliefs” (p. 196) provides a “bridge” between “epistemic” and “deliberative democracy” where persons engage one another not merely as citizens but as pragmatists (p. 239).
There are two problems with this approach. First, Westbrook sees that Dewey did not offer any sort of “argument” for this bridge. But presumably, the arguments of Misak and Putman are arguments that Dewey could have made (p. 180). Part of the problem is that having rejected the skeptical challenge of traditional epistemology, he saw no need for such a bridge. But since efforts were misunderstood, academic philosophers can still feel a need to respond to skepticisms, epistemic and moral. Dewey would not have been pleased with Rorty, but he would not have been pleased either to see that mainstream academics, despite good intentions, remain committed to the problems of philosophy. There are, we may note, philosophers working well within a Deweyan frame who are not engaged in this volume.
Indeed, one might insist that in today's very undemocratic world, it is at least misleading to focus on “an epistemological justification of democracy” (p. 176). Of course, even the weakest forms of “democracy”—“liberal republics”—require free speech and access to pertinent information, but Dewey would have been puzzled by the idea that democratic hope is enabled by thinking of the institutions of radical democracy as engaged in “a quest for truth.” If anything, democracy is a quest for accountability, possible only with the active participation of citizens. Indeed, the far more problematic relation between Dewey's philosophy of democracy and his theory of inquiry is whether, as C. Wright Mills noticed, he too often optimistically supposed that the conditions that forbid democracy could, in an undemocratic world, be overcome with persistent application of the method of intelligence.
Second, Dewey had all sorts of arguments for the genuine political problem of democracy: that citizens know best when the shoe pinches; that participation is essential to growth; but most critically (agreeing with Rousseau and Marx), that since interdependence makes possible domination, exploitation, and alienation, “the only possible solution” is “the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interests in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action.” Of course, neither Marx nor Dewey offered much direction about how this would look.
Still, for Dewey, democratic hope depends upon “community as a fact” and upon acknowledgment of the needs and capacities of persons living interdependently. Of course, as he well recognized, the conditions that make democracy possible are not easily achievable; but given what we know, they are not impossible.
Do these conditions include socialism? Westbrook has considerable sympathy for American “producer-republicanism,” with its emphasis on the “independence” of “yeoman farmers and skilled artisans” (p. 83). Indeed, for him, “the best of American radicalism has always marched under a ‘petty bourgeois banner’” (p. 210). Less contestably, he suggests also that Dewey would never “lose touch with the essential promise of producerism” and that this explains why he was “such a peculiar socialist” (p. 98).
This perspective especially informs Chapter 5, “Marrying Marxism,” a chapter that raises serious problems. While many pages would be necessary to engage this discussion, the central issue regards the current pertinence, if any, of both of two historically bankrupt visions: American producer-republicanism, and a Marxism still indebted to its 2d International genesis. Dewey may well have been nostalgic (again, as Mills argues), even if his arguments against the Marxism of his day were penetrating. But if so, perhaps one needs to exploit the deep affinities between Marx and Dewey. Cornel West is on the right track here, whatever misgivings one might have regarding the “prophetic” dimensions of his thought.
