These two short, readable, and engaging books in different ways try to tap the potential in John Dewey's thought and work for current radical democratic practice.

Ever since Lewis Mumford decried “pragmatic acquiescence,” supporters of Dewey have had to confront the worry that pragmatism lacks an account of what practice is for, and so amounts to a more or less complacent endorsement of the status quo. As Louis Hartz ominously wrote in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), it “is only when you take your ethics for granted that all problems emerge as problems of technique.” Although increasingly embattled in the face of careful scholarship about what Dewey actually thought, this view never quite faded, and for many gained new life when Richard Rorty presented himself both as reviving Dewey and as an ethnocentric postmodern bourgeois liberal.

Dewey's Critical Pragmatism can be recommended as a forceful rebuttal of this anxiety. Alison Kadlec wants to establish, in a way broadly inspired by Jürgen Habermas (and Stephen White), that Dewey is a critical theorist. She defines a critical theory as a) viewing society as in need of improvement, b) animated by faith in the power of critical reflection to inform intelligent action, c) aware that critical reflection may be distorted by privilege and hierarchy, and d) dedicated to exposing this distortion via interdisciplinary inquiry (p. 14). With this definition in place, she fleshes out this rather abstract conception by offering an account of Dewey's thought in these terms, looking particularly at his epistemology, his account of education, and his writings on democracy.

This is a book that can be recommended to someone wanting to know why we should read Dewey, and what he said. Kadlec deftly balances the need both to say something general about Dewey's rather baggy and monstrous oeuvre (and just to stay in intellectual control of it) and to focus discussions of particular debates at particular moments; impressively, she finds something fresh to say about Dewey's argument with Walter Lippmann. She persuasively argues that the specific reforms in education that Dewey argued for are incomplete and partial in his account without a broader and deeper social, especially industrial, democratization. I am less certain that “to understand the political salience of critical pragmatism … the place to turn is to Dewey's own lived politics” (p. 100). Kadlec's snapshot of this practice here is not going to supplant the detailed and rather less rosy account in Robert B. Westbrook's magisterial John Dewey and American Democracy (1991).

For all the care with which the points are made, Kadlec is pushing at an open door when she argues that Dewey's political philosophy complements contemporary writing on critical theory and deliberative democracy. What is less clear—and what would have been a more interesting argument to develop—is that Dewey is necessary for our current designers of deliberative institutions. To put this another way, such different and influential writers as James Fishkin and John Dryzek, for instance, seem to manage well without him. Perhaps, however, they do not. Or, at least, perhaps we can say that Dewey's thought can provide a safeguard against at least one tendency or “professional deformation” of deliberative democracy, namely, the drift toward a focus on well-designed microinstitutions. In contrast, we can say that Dewey is the philosopher of the deliberative society—quite the reverse of Hartz's technician—for whom deliberation must be a matter of broader social norms and indeed individual dispositions.

Pressing the claims of Dewey on contemporaries also requires us to deal with another problem, which is strikingly absent from this book (and from the other one under review for that matter). There are plenty of citizens for whom the vision of democratic regeneration fails to be compelling. For contemporary political liberals—and for other interpreters of critical theory such as Habermas—the Deweyan conception of democracy can be seen as the expression of one particular reasonable conception of good among others and, as such, struggles to possess legitimacy for a liberal order composed of a plurality of such reasonable conceptions. Now, a proponent of Deweyan democracy may disagree with this account of liberalism, of Deweyan democracy, or of both. But it is, I think, an omission in a book such as this not to reflect on the place of these ideals in an intractably plural polity.

For Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett, participatory democracy is the form of human society that would best allow us all to lead “long, healthy, active, peaceful, virtuous, happy lives.” Achieving it “should receive the degree of desperate urgency given the Manhattan Project during World War II” (p. xii, emphasis in the original). In their view, the royal road to this goal is clear: University-assisted community schools constitute the best practical means to help realize this. Dewey's Dream is, they disarmingly say, a manifesto, aiming to be “agenda-setting and movement-initiating, not thesis-proving,” and draws on their wealth of practical experience building community school partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Dewey whom they most admire is the philosopher who (in The Public and Its Problems, 1927) traces the source of democracy to “the neighbourly community.” Yet in this volume, it is less the philosophy than the pedagogy and the “lived politics,” particularly the famous educational experiment at the University of Chicago, that makes Dewey the touchstone for the authors' own vision. The first half of this book is a sketch in intellectual history, in which Dewey is praised for identifying the need to develop mechanisms for implementing this vision, but tartly admonished for lifelong failure actually to achieve it. As a young academic in Michigan, Dewey saw as the crucial obstacle to the achievement of the good society the absence of social “intelligence.” The result was the abortive Thought News (1892), in collaboration with a curious prophetic journalist, Franklin Ford, which ended in professional embarrassment. Dewey moved closer to the promised land when he relocated to Chicago, and to the ferment of pedagogic ideas encouraged by the university's president, William Rainey Harper. Unsurprisingly, the authors view the transformation of the public schooling system, and Dewey's writings on the roots of education in the problem solving within a particular community, as a far more fertile strategy. Yet they accuse Dewey's own most famous practical effort in this direction, the Laboratory School, of “scientism,” that is, of betraying the vision of participatory democracy by not being sufficiently integrated into its community. A more serious betrayal still comes with Dewey's move away from practical pedagogy and Chicago to Columbia and the writing of the philosophical works that sustain his reputation. His real contribution to addressing the problem that preoccupies Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett lies in inspiring the community schools movement in the United States.

The second part is a fascinating discussion of a particular model for this movement, concentrating on the West Philadelphia community schools project, of which these authors are legitimately proud. There are particularly interesting brief discussions of the way university and school teaching, research, and community engagement can complement one another in programs on nutrition and health care. More generally, they argue that community schools can act as “hubs” for local communities, both in delivering a range of services and in acting as a focus for democratic citizenship.

Focusing on such virtuous complementarities means that the authors are a little vague about what they take the goals of the university-assisted community schools movement to be: Revitalizing civic responsibility, improving schooling, and promoting research, scholarship, and teaching in universities are all desirable ends, but they do not obviously pull together. Even an agenda-setting, rather than thesis-proving, manifesto would be strengthened by at least considering the doubts about such projects as the engines of democratic renewal. Questions of funding, control, and accountability are skipped over very quickly. So, too, is the well-worn topic of the participatory demands of community schools, if they are to reflect the interests of their community, and unevenness in patterns of participation. This is not to respond to the authors' enthusiasm with bland cynicism, but only to suggest that Dewey was right to think that educational “reconstruction” could work only as part and parcel of larger changes, however vague and erratic he could be in spelling out the details of the changes needed.