John Dewey

Mary Stone | May 27, 2023

Summary

John Dewey (pronounced ), born on October 20, 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, and died on June 1, 1952 in New York, was a leading American psychologist and philosopher of the Pragmatist movement first developed by Charles S. Peirce and William James. Peirce and William James. He also wrote extensively in the field of pedagogy, where he was a leading figure in the field of new education. Finally, he had strong political and social commitments, notably through his articles published in The New Republic newspaper.

His philosophy is marked first and foremost by instrumentalism, i.e., by his desire to break with a classical philosophy that he saw as more or less tied to the ruling class, and turn it into an instrument of collective, deliberative transformation of the world. Dewey’s principal means to this end is what he calls “theory of inquiry”, part of his approach to democracy, in which traditional philosophical theories are seen as means of providing hypotheses to be tested.

In parallel with the new English liberalism, Dewey also played a part in the constitution of what is currently called “social liberalism”, of which he is on the left wing. For him, the individual is not an isolated being, but participates in society. This thesis marks his political philosophy, as evidenced by the importance he gives to the public, and the regulation of the consequences of transactions and interactions between individuals, a regulation he does not take for granted, but as the result of “inquiry”, but also of conflict, deliberation and persuasion. His political philosophy is also, and perhaps above all, concerned with the development of individuality, i.e., self-realization through democracy, conceived not as a form of government, but as the participation of individuals in collective action and as ethos or culture. Finally, its pedagogy, closely linked to its democratic ideal, aims to give students the means and character to participate actively in public and social life.

His background

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, into a middle-class family of Flemish descent. He is the son of Archibal Sprague Dewey, a businessman, and Lucina Artemisia Rich Dewey, a devout evangelist. He has an older brother Davis Rich Dewey, an economist, and a younger brother, Charles Miner Dewey. John’s parents were very different from each other: while his father was steeped in business and economic expansion, his mother was more concerned with intellectual development, public service and moral values.

Like his elder brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he studied at the University of Vermont (Phi Beta Kappa), graduating in 1879. Dewey’s interests as a student lay mainly in political and social philosophy, a course taught by Matthew Buckham, but also in mental and moral philosophy, taught by H. A. P. Torrey.

After graduation, Dewey taught elementary and high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania, for two years. In his spare time, he continued his project of reading the philosophical classics. This study of philosophy is supported by private lessons in classical philosophy taught by his former teacher, H.A.P. Torrey. It was Torrey who encouraged Dewey to make philosophy his life’s career.

Dewey was almost 23 when he continued his studies at Johns-Hopkins University in September 1882. Among the teachers who influenced him were philosopher and educator George Sylvester Morris, who introduced him to Hegel, and G. Stanley Hall, a philosopher and psychologist who supervised his dissertation. Paradoxically, while Charles S. Peirce was teaching at the university at the time, Dewey did not become involved with him, and did not discover Peirce’s pragmatism until twenty years later. Dewey received his Ph.D. from Johns-Hopkins University in 1884 with an unpublished and lost dissertation entitled The Psychology of Kant. He was appointed instructor at the University of Michigan (1884-1888 and 1889-1894), thanks to George Sylvester Morris.

In September 1884, Dewey began work as a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. Dewey took charge of the psychology and philosophy courses. He continued his research in psychology, and came up with the idea of combining the new psychology and neo-Hegelianism into a single system of thought, which we find in his book Psychology, published in 1887. It was during his early years in Michigan that Dewey’s interest in primary and secondary education began. He sought a theory of education that would reconcile the requirements of education, psychology and philosophy.

In 1888, Dewey was appointed Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, but his stay lasted only six months. Indeed, on the death of G.S. Morris in March 1889, Dewey returned to the University of Michigan, where he was elected to the position previously held by Morris, that of head of the philosophy department. During his second period at Michigan, influenced by Darwinian biology and the functional psychology of William James, Dewey began to move away from Hegelianism towards instrumentalism. This shift in thinking is reflected in two books: “Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics” and “The Study of Ethics”.

Dewey develops experimental idealism, according to which the only way for the individual to acquire knowledge of Reality, or Truth, is through action and experimentation. According to Dewey, science is a factor in the organization and integration of society. The change in thinking is also accompanied by a change in interest: social interests absorb his religious interests, and concern for democracy replaces his concern for the Church.

In 1886, he married Alice Chipman, a woman of great strength of character. They had six children. This union gave him “punch and substance”. Influenced by his wife’s liberal ideas, he abandoned the conservatism of his youth, as well as the Calvinism of his mother, a fervent evangelical. In 1894, Dewey joined the new University of Chicago and, influenced by William James’s Principles of Psychology, abandoned idealism in favor of pragmatism. During his years at the university, he published four essays under the collective title of Thought and its Subject-Matter, in a volume also collecting essays by his Chicago colleagues, whose collective title was Studies in Logical Theory (1903). He headed the Department of Philosophy, Psychology and Education and founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to test his pedagogical ideas, which he set out in a series of articles in his major work on education: The School and Society (1899). In 1899, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association.

During his years in Chicago, Dewey increasingly dissociated himself from organized religion, replacing it with an interest in educational and social affairs. Dewey belonged to the Chicago Civic Federation, a liberal committee that brought together many university professors and conducted studies on the political, educational, moral, philanthropic and public health aspects of city life. Dewey also maintained close relations with Hull House, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams. This was one of the most famous social establishments in large cities at the time. It was a popular meeting place for people with diverse social views, and it was these contacts that deepened and refined Dewey’s own ideas.

Disagreements with the university administration led to his resignation. In 1904, while visiting Europe with his family, one of his sons, Gordon, died in Ireland of typhoid fever. It was the second son they had lost, and although they adopted a child of the same age during their stay in Italy, Dewey and his wife never really recovered. From 1905 until his death, he was professor of philosophy both at Columbia University in New York and at its Teachers College.

Dewey considers his period of maturity to begin with his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy (1917), in which he insists that philosophy should concern itself primarily with the problems of man and less with what he calls pseudo-problems (such as epistemology and metaphysics). The interwar period was particularly fruitful, despite the death of his wife in 1927. He wrote a number of important works: Reconstruction in Philosophy (translated into French as: Reconstruction en philosophie, 2012), Human nature and conduct (in French: Expérience et Nature, 2012), The Quest for Certainty (in French: L’Art comme expérience, 2005), A Common Faith (in French: Logique: la théorie de l’enquête, 1967) and Theory of Valuation (1939).

During this period, he also wrote works more concerned with political philosophy: Le Public et ses problèmes (1927), partly written in response to Walter Lippmann, Individualism Old and New (in French: Après le libéralisme) and Freedom and Culture (in French: Liberté et culture). In addition to his books, he wrote for newspapers such as The New Republic, and took part in public life. Politically, he supported Theodore Roosevelt for president in 1912 and Senator Robert M. La Follette in 1924. Later, he opposed Soviet communism and its affiliates. On the political scene, he was classified as a left-winger in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. His travels during this period included Japan and China (1919-1921), Turkey (1924), Mexico (1926) and the USSR (1928). Following this trip, he wrote Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World.

In 1946, John Dewey remarried Roberta Lowitz Grant (1904-1970), and they adopted two children, both war orphans. He died in 1952, aged 92.

Although he enjoyed great influence in his mature years, this quickly disappeared after his death in 1952, as his philosophy was supplanted by analytic philosophy after the Second World War. However, this eclipse was short-lived, and his thought was soon revived, notably through the works of Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas, who developed an approach to democracy in which he can be seen as one of the precursors.

Its commitments

Dewey was involved in numerous humanist activities from the 1930s to the 1950s. He served on the board of the First Humanist Society of New York (1929) and was one of the 34 signatories of the first Humanist Manifesto (1933), and in 1936 was elected an honorary member of the Humanist Press Association. In an article entitled “What Humanism Means to Me” published in the June 1930 issue of Thinker 2, he defined his humanism as follows: “What humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which Nature and the science of Nature are made willing servants of the human good.”

In 1935, along with Albert Einstein and Alvin Johnson, Dewey joined the American section of the International League for Academic Freedom.

In 1936, he headed the Dewey Commission investigating Joseph Stalin’s accusations against Leon Trotsky. At a meeting in Mexico City in 1938, the commission concluded that Stalin’s arguments were irrelevant. In 1950, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers and Jacques Maritain agreed to make Dewey honorary president of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

John Dewey was one of the founders of the Michigan Schoolmaster’s Club and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. His writings on pedagogy include The School and Society, Democracy and Education and Experience and Education (1938). Initially, he saw the school as a key element of democracy, but later downgraded its role to one among many. According to Gérard Deledalle, Dewey was at the origin of functionalism in psychology.

His method is based on “hands-on learning”, where the teacher is a guide and the pupil learns by doing. This method is attacked on the one hand by proponents of a “curriculum-centered” method, and on the other by those of an idealistic “child-centered” method. For Dewey, these two antagonistic methods are based on a dualism between experience and the subjects taught, a dualism he rejects.

When the Progressive Education Association was founded in 1919, John Dewey initially refused to join, but agreed to become its president in 1926, remaining so for the rest of his life.

The stages of Dewey’s thought

For Gérard Deledalle, Dewey was influenced in his youth by both Hegel and Charles Darwin, and it could be said that “the history of Dewey’s thought is the chronicle of a long effort to reconcile Darwin and Hegel”. If Darwin led him to concern himself with experience, Hegel preserved him from empiricism.

Until around 1891, his writings were strongly influenced by the idealism of George Sylvester Morris. From 1894 onwards, with his Study of Ethics, Dewey’s instrumentalism began to express itself, partly in connection with his children’s education and partly in his conversations with George Herbert Mead.

In 1905, on his arrival at Columbia University, Dewey joined the Pragmatist movement, within which he defended an instrumentalist position. In 1917, he published Creative Intelligence, a collection of essays by authors such as H. C. Brown, Addison Webster Moore, George Herbert Mead, B. H. Bode, H. W. Stuart, J. H. Tufts, Horace Kallen and himself, which Gérard Deledalle considers “the manifesto of the group of philosophers who, following Dewey, gave pragmatism an instrumentalist interpretation”. Dewey’s reflections on experience and experimentation then led him to write two books that Gérard Deledalle considers important: Experience and Nature (1925) and The Quest for Certainty (1929).

During his time at Columbia, he also met Albert Barnes, a major collector of Impressionists (notably paintings by Auguste Renoir) and Post-Impressionists, which led him to reflect on art. The lectures given at the Barnes Foundation are published under the title Art as Experience (1934).

Dewey and instrumentalism

The influence of Charles Darwin led Dewey to “understand thought genetically, as the product of an interaction between an organism and its environment, and knowledge as having a practical instrumentality in the orientation and control of this interaction”. His instrumentalism began with his 1896 article The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, in which he challenged the idea that consciousness arises univocally from environmental stimulation. He saw this way of thinking as reminiscent of body dualism.

John Dewey begins to apply the principles of instrumentalism to logic in his Essays on Experimental Logic (1916). However, for Clarence Edwin Ayres, it was only in the Gifford Lectures, published under the title The Quest for Certainty, that Dewey made clear the purpose and meaning of instrumental logic. It is primarily evolutionist, and “represents the first serious attempt to begin the analysis of thought with the assumption that man is an animal species struggling for survival on a minor planet”. From this point of view, for Dewey, ideas are instruments whose domain of validity is not absolute, but depends on the needs and challenges faced by mankind. In the Gifford Lectures, he contrasts the traditional philosophy stemming from Plato, which he considers to be the stuff of myth and magic, with instrumentalism, which, in his view, does not seek refuge in the imagination but seeks to transform the conditions of life by facing up to reality, by means of an intelligible inquiry, anchored in present reality, and instrumental, i.e. one that enables action.

Reconstruction in philosophy

Reconstruction in Philosophy appeared in 1919. In this book, Dewey seeks a reconstruction of ethics in order to respond to change and, to this end, he seeks to identify a method for improving moral judgment. For him, moral judgment is a tool for directing our conduct when habits fail, and it can be evaluated on the basis of its practical consequences. For Richard Rorty, Dewey’s book “contains most of his most important ideas”. It is a work that “was at the center of political and intellectual life in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century”. It is also Dewey’s most polemical work, in which he attacks philosophers who are more concerned with philosophy for its own sake than with its usefulness to the community. Dewey focuses his attacks on two major philosophical models: the logical empiricism that later became analytic philosophy, and the model that focuses on the history of philosophy. He criticizes the partisans of the first model – Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van Orman Quine, Max Black and their followers – for their technicality. To the historians of philosophy, he criticizes too much exegesis with no link to the present. For Dewey, the central question is: “What can philosophy teachers do to help create a better world?

In this book, John Dewey criticizes the philosophical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle from a genetic point of view, i.e., by showing its link with the Greek context of the time. Dewey insists that this type of philosophy is linked to the interests of a social class and is not adapted to the demands of the modern world. He also takes issue with the claim of this type of philosophy to see itself as invested with a higher mission than other arts or sciences. Moreover, while he admires the critical function of classical philosophy, he regrets that it is so little used with regard to philosophy itself. Finally, he disagrees with classical philosophy on the very purpose of philosophy. For him, it should not focus on objects such as “Being, Nature, Universe, Cosmos, Reality, Truth” as “something fixed, immobile, timeless, something eternal or all-encompassing universal”, but should concern itself with the problems of Man.

Philosophy, according to Dewey, must accompany the evolution of the world and give it meaning, so as to bring a certain harmony to the world. He belonged to a current of liberalism that did not believe in pre-established harmony. For him, “to suppose that harmony and order can reign unless new ends, new norms and new principles are first worked out with sufficient clarity and coherence is intellectually futile and would lead to a practical impossibility.” In his view, reconstruction in philosophy, or, to put it another way, the direction philosophy should take, rests on three pillars: (1) philosophy is a process – for Dewey there is nothing eternally fixed, (2) theories become hypotheses to be tested and, consequently, (3) in order to philosophize, it is urgent to develop “instruments for investigating human or moral facts.”

Experience and nature

Experience and Nature, published in 1925 and translated into French in 2012 as Expérience et Nature, follows on from Reconstruction en philosophie. The book sets out to explain how to overcome the dualisms of the philosophical tradition. To this end, Dewey considers “experience” the common, undifferentiated basis from which existence differentiates itself, acquiring the forms it assumes under the effect of social life and language”. In short, experience makes it possible to overcome dualisms (theory, practice, etc.) while accounting for the multiplicity of situations. To the question: “Why the title Experience and Nature?”, Dewey replies: “The title (…) is intended to indicate that the philosophy contained therein may be referred to either as empirical naturalism or as naturalistic empiricism, or, if we take the term ‘experience’ in its usual sense, as naturalistic humanism.”

What does Dewey mean by “empirical naturalism” or “naturalistic empiricism”? For Jean-Pierre Cometti, Dewey does not consider the term “empiricism” in its logical sense, which refers to the analytic opposition

To experiment usually has a double meaning: “it is to ‘participate’ in the constitution of the object as well as in that of the methods for knowing, it is to examine the situation from various angles in order to deprive it of its problematic characters and to act on it”. But Dewey’s vision of experience is broader. Indeed, for him, “the object of experience (the ‘experienced’ object)” is essential and “gives it specific characteristics”, so that reality is established between the individual and his environment: “a vast zone of dialogue”.

For Dewey, experience is not purely individual; on the contrary, it takes place in a context that, when this book was republished in 1948, he was tempted to call “cultural”, understood in the sense of the anthropology of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Bronisław Malinowski, whose works he was familiar with. Dewey insists on the role of rites and institutions in the performance of the most banal acts. This has two important consequences for him: on the one hand, experience does not concern a single individual, but a group of individuals; and on the other, the individual is not a prisoner of his codes, for through his experience and investigations, he can also make them evolve. A reading of Franz Boas can shed light on Dewey’s thinking here: “The activities of the individual are largely determined by his social environment, but reciprocally his own activities influence the society in which he lives, and can bring about changes in its form. Clearly, this problem is one of the most important to be considered in a study of cultural change.”

Survey theory

For Gérard Deledalle, John Dewey aims to develop a logic that meets “the scientific requirements of the modern mind, just as Aristotle’s logic met the grammatical requirements of the Greek mind”. Dewey believes that “it is not enough to extrapolate the Organon, as Bacon and Mill did, nor to adorn it with mathematical trappings, as Russell did”, but that it must be founded on new foundations. The book Logic, subtitled The Theory of Inquiry, is neither a treatise on logic in the Aristotelian nor in the contemporary sense, since it contains no mathematical symbols. Indeed, Dewey’s interest in logic is not in ascertaining the true nature of a thing through deductive and formal reasoning, but, as the subtitle indicates and in line with his instrumentalism, in establishing a link between idea and action based on both intuition and the study and verification of that idea. Dewey’s logic is first and foremost a reflection on inquiry, in which the “logician” is not concerned with the process of “temporal” inquiry, but only with its formal structure, i.e., the different kinds of terms and methodological canons and their interrelationships. The criterion for distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful survey methods must be established “inside” the survey rules. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have an autonomous scientific process.”

For there to be an inquiry, the situation must be indeterminate, i.e. uncertain, unstable and doubtful. This indeterminacy is not subjective, i.e. psychological in essence, but objective, i.e. real. Let’s not forget that Dewey, influenced by Charles Darwin, has an organic vision of the world. He sees human beings as organically linked to their environment, so that a change in the environment is for him objective – in the sense that it is not a psychological illusion – and provokes an indeterminate situation before a change in human behavior takes place. However, these objective changes also imply changes in the way people perceive things. Indeed, man is not only an organism, he is also a cultural being, the transition between the two taking place through language, so that “the problems that provoke inquiry have their origin in the relations in which human beings find themselves engaged, and the organs of these relations are not only the eye and the ear but the meanings that have developed in the course of life, together with the ways of forming and transmitting culture with all its constituent elements, tools, arts, institutions, traditions and secular beliefs.”

An investigation begins with a search for the elements that render the situation indeterminate. These observations give rise to hypotheses, which become ideas when they can be used functionally to solve the problem. Dewey writes: “A hypothesis, once suggested and supported, develops in relation to other conceptual structures until it receives a form in which it can produce and direct experimentation that will reveal precisely those conditions that have the maximum possible force in determining whether the hypothesis should be accepted or rejected. Or, it may be that experimentation will indicate the modifications that the hypothesis requires to be applicable, i.e. to suit the interpretation and organization of the elements of the problem.”

For Dewey, “if inquiry begins in doubt, it ends in the institution of conditions that remove the need for doubt”. Assertability is then guaranteed, i.e. the solution to the problem has been found. However, in keeping with Dewey’s Darwinian vision, the environment continues to change, so that other problems arise, and with them new investigations are necessary. For Dewey, Truth is never reached, a notion he makes little use of in his treatise on logic. He uses it all the less because, for him, guaranteed assertability is synonymous with satisfaction, utility, “what pays”, “what works”.

The foundations

Dewey’s social psychology is organized around three poles: impulse (or driving force), habits and intelligent conduct.

For him, impulse is not linked to an idea of end, but includes “what we today call impulses, appetites, instincts and unconditioned reflexes”. Dewey’s psychology differs from desire-based psychologies in two respects: firstly, for him, activity is the norm and rest the exception; secondly, whereas desires imply an end, impulse can lead to multiple ends.

Habits are “dispositions socially shaped by certain forms of activity or by certain modes of response to the environment. They channel impulses in a given direction”. They make people act in a non-conscious way, and can be perpetuated even though they are no longer adapted to the present times, and the causes that gave rise to them have disappeared. Changing habits is difficult for at least two reasons: people become attached to them, and above all, ideologies will adopt them and see them as intangible, indisputable values. Dewey wants the world to adapt more easily to environmental change than it has up to now. To this end, he advocates an education that fosters independence of mind, experimentation and inquiry, elements that in his view facilitate adaptation.

Intelligent driving occurs when impulses and habits can no longer respond to problems and become blocked. Then men must deliberate to find ways of overcoming problems.

Dewey’s ambition was to change the morality of his time, which he felt was no longer adapted to the modern world. He was therefore interested in studying the process of evolution and the link between moral theories and their context. To this end, his book Ethics begins with “a brief history of the moral problems and practices of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks and Romans”.

In this book, Dewey sees morality and traditional philosophies as serving an elite. The desire to change this state of affairs is at the root of his social ethics. In particular, he wants to put an end to the dichotomy underlying traditional moral philosophy between “purely instrumental Goods and intrinsic Goods”, as he sees in it an echo of the ancient dichotomy between the educated who have leisure and the common people who work. For him, the Good, conceived as the contemplation or appreciation of beauty, could only be the prerogative of the leisure class, which, for his contemporary Thorstein Veblen, meant the very wealthy of the time, who devoted themselves in particular to art collections.

If we examine his proposals for social ethics, we see that Dewey’s focus is not so much on the behavior of individuals as on how society should be organized and what institutional reforms should be undertaken.

Dewey discusses aesthetics in his book Art as Experience. For him, art creates objects that enable us to better understand our environment and, as such, is both a complement and an element of inquiry. For him, art does not end with the artist’s creation of the work, but involves the participation of those who receive it. From this perspective, the aim of criticism is to enrich our experience of art. It should not judge works of art according to the aesthetics of the past, but look to the future and reinforce our ability to appreciate them for ourselves.

Criticism can, he believes, make the aesthetic values of a work of art objective to the extent that, by drawing attention to a few salient features, it succeeds in capturing what many observers feel. The important thing about criticism is that it enhances our ability to appreciate art in a way that enriches human life. In this regard, he writes: “the listener informed by musical theory learns to listen, and consequently takes pleasure in different modulations (…) creating alternate tensions, achievements, and surprises such as musical works give us when they are played. Similar observations can be made for all the arts, be they artistic”.

For Dewey, aesthetics is not limited to the work of art. It can also be present in work. Here, he takes up a recurring criticism of the highly fragmented nature of work in modern society. For him, Taylorism, by sharply separating those who conceive from those who produce in a quasi-mechanical way, reserves for the former the participation in art that it denies to the latter. The challenge of modern society is to ensure that the entire population makes art through work.

John Dewey didn’t necessarily invent or discover anything; rather, he devoted his life to analyzing legal issues from a pragmatic point of view. John Dewey was a proponent of a particular version of pragmatism, called instrumentalism. Dewey was a critic of liberalism and laissez-faire. He saw social and political intervention as necessary to correct the dysfunctions of free market exchanges and protect the individual. In addition, he was a leading critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal left, while opposing Soviet communism and its apologists. Throughout his life, he analyzed a state of affairs whose three subjects we will focus on in this chapter are: the critique of natural law, judicial decision-making and the social theory of law.

Dewey had repeatedly criticized natural law as a bulwark against reform. However, he admitted that natural law arguments can sometimes serve as a source of legal improvement.

He argues that assertions of universal timelessness made in the name of natural law are disguises. “As a matter of fact, legal philosophies have reflected and will certainly continue to reflect the movements of the period in which they are produced, and therefore cannot be separated from what the movements represent.” He considers that these are linked to past systems, to legal philosophies, and must be seen in relation to the actual cultural and social movements of the periods during which they appeared.

Legal rules and principles must remain flexible to cope with new circumstances and allow for experimentation with reforms, otherwise they stand in the way of progress. On the contrary, if they are conceived as tools to be adapted to the conditions in which they are employed, rather than as absolute and intrinsic “principles”, attention will be focused on the facts of social life, and rules will thus be prevented from attracting attention and becoming absolute truths to be kept intact at all costs.

He has written essays on the legal personality of companies, judicial decision-making, the coercive force of law, and reasonableness and law in general. In addition, he supported numerous social reforms, including, for example, workers’ rights to form and join trade unions.

Dewey situates legal reasoning as an instance of inquiry generally, understood in the instrumental terms enunciated by pragmatism. Thus, he distinguishes two types of human conduct. The first type involves human action without deliberation, following routines, intuitions, trained intuition. The second type engages in a process of inquiry in which facts are weighed up, alternatives evaluated and likely consequences anticipated when deciding what action to take.

He asserts that “it is very important that the rules of law should form generalized logical systems as coherent as possible, but these logical systematizations of law in all fields… is clearly ultimately subordinate to economics and effective decision-making in particular cases.”

The systematization of knowledge, in law as in other fields, often involves concepts. Concepts are indispensable and beneficial in many ways, including the organization of ideas and experience, in the service of efficiency and stability. “It is practically economical to use a ready-made concept at hand rather than take time, trouble and effort to change it or devise a new one”. However, concepts contain an “intrinsic inertia on their own account” and combined with the human tendency towards habitual behavior, they change slowly and may not be synchronized with changing circumstances and needs.

Dewey turns to judicial decisions, pointing out that reasons for decisions serve several important purposes: to provide reasons that justify the decision (showing that it was not arbitrary or ad-hoc), to articulate a rule that guides the determination of future cases and facilitates uniformity, and to provide notice, stability and predictability to people who need legal consequences of their actions. He adds that the judge must write judicial decisions in a logical form, to give the impression that he is impersonal and objective.

Judges are often faced with finding the right balance between maintaining legal stability and legal change. He points out that “there is of course every reason why rules of law should be as regular and defined as possible”. However, the reality is that rules are ambiguous, sometimes vague and indeterminate, and cannot be written to anticipate or deal with every circumstance, and that “situations do not repeat themselves literally in every detail, and questions of the degree of that factor or have the main weight in determining the general rule that will be used to judge the situation in question.”

When judges stubbornly hold to interpretations of the past, “the gap between conditions and the principles used by the courts” widens steadily, arousing public “irritation” and “disrespect for the law.” Dewey argues that judges, should apply “a logic relative to consequences rather than antecedents, a logic of predicting probabilities rather than a logic of deducing certainties.”

In conclusion, we can say that Dewey’s philosophy encourages legal theorists to be more conceptually humble and more involved in understanding present-day social and cultural phenomena. Moreover, Dewey’s critique calls for a different kind of investigation, one that is attentive to the effects of concepts and draws on the diversity of empirical social sciences.

At a conference held at Northwestern University, he outlined his conception of the philosophy of law. Dewey sees law as social, and proposes to break away from traditional approaches to the philosophy of law.

The founding text of his philosophy of law is My Philosophy of Law. This is an analysis of his position on law, which aims to show that law “is through and through a social phenomenon: it is a human activity, but also an interactivity between humans”. He also asserts that: “The point of view adopted is that law is through and through a social phenomenon, social in origin, in purpose or end, and in application”.

Dewey argued that interactions have an influence on law because they gradually stabilize into habits, customs, which can become sources of law. He identified customs, which are linked to the human tendency towards habitual behavior, as the primary origin and source of law. He tried to demonstrate that legal rules evolve and depend on social practices, and that their value must be assessed. Dewey advocated the use of “best methods” to examine and measure the effects of rules, decisions and laws, thus opening the way to empirical approaches to law and justice. He invites us to take a closer look at law as practice, and to construct new objects of research.

He describes the emergence of law and government in evolutionary terms as a “crystallization” of social forces into organized institutions that effectively govern by law. Legal rules are “precipitated formulations” of long-standing social customs, while the transposition of customs into law in turn reinforces and extends the stability of those customs. Judicial decisions are the main mechanisms by which customs are incorporated into law. Legislation also applies custom, although the recent huge explosion in legislative activity is linked to social interests, particularly those related to factors. All laws, including constitutional law, common law and legislation, involve the crystallization of moral (or social) forces within society as products of “the whole complex of social activities”.

Dewey argues that law and enforcement is a form of force utilization. In his view, law and force are not two separate notions, but together form a whole. Dewey’s idea proved decisive for the theory of constitutional law. Understood in this way, constitutional law is about the existence of government, and its study requires precisely the study of those “social forces” that define and sustain the existence of governments. To realize sovereignty, it must be able to be expressed and exercised precisely and distinctly by organs, which is precisely what defines constitutional law. Dewey thus makes it possible to develop a theory of the different modes of sovereignty, and to envisage a fruitful renewal of conceptual instruments in constitutional law, particularly (but not only) in relation to constitutional change.

Dewey applies this analysis to ongoing battles between employers and strikers, who were subject to court-ordered injunctions against strikes and harsh police enforcement. He uses the instrumental test not only to assess the use of force by the police, but also the use of force by strikers. The use of force by the police that is excessive, brutal or provokes negative reactions does not advance social ends: “An immoral use of force is a stupid use”.

The instrumental theory of value

For Dewey, values are facts. He writes: “Values are values, things immediately having certain intrinsic qualities. Of these as values, there is consequently nothing to say: they are what they are”. Values are qualities attributed to things, propositions to be investigated. In this way, he takes a rather different perspective from the one usually used in France. Norms, understood by Jürgen Habermas as potentially universal, are usually contrasted with values, understood as being much more closely linked to groups or individuals. From this point of view, value conflicts are seen as a dead end. For Dewey, on the other hand, there is “an objectivity of values”, and this objectivity emerges through the investigations and experiments to which values are subjected.

Valuation comprises both affective valuing, which drives us towards something or makes us want to avoid it, and objective evaluation, which is based on the analysis of consequences. Primitive valuing is a passive experience of pleasure that differs from desire in that, unlike desire, it does not have an “end in view”. For Dewey, valuation lies in “the reasoned formation of desires, interests and ends in a concrete situation”, on the understanding that “valuation implies desire”. From this it follows that valuation is not purely mental, since it refers to concrete situations.

For Hans Joas, “values seem more durable, perhaps also more stable, and superior to mere momentary desires, but do not differ fundamentally from them”. Dewey distinguishes the desired from the desirable. The process of valuation enables us to move from impulses to desires and interests: “The desirable, or the object that ought to be desired (valued), descends neither from an a priori heaven nor from a Sinai of morality. It comes from the fact that experience has shown that acting in haste, following one’s desire without examination, leads to failure and potentially to catastrophe. Desirable”, as distinct from “desired”, does not designate a thing in general or a priori. It highlights the difference between the action and consequences of unthinking impulses, and those of desires and interests that proceed from an investigation of conditions and consequences.”

For Dewey, an interest is “a set of interrelated desires”, and in a given context, interests are so interrelated that in order to value one, you have to value the whole.

According to Elizabeth Anderson, the value judgment is triply instrumental. First, it is an instrument for guiding future action. The value judgment comes into play after a period of crisis, when previous values are called into question. It is a practical judgment that does not describe things, but aims to solve the problem and guide future action. The value judgment assesses actions and objects in terms of their consequences in the broadest sense. Finally, it is a means of restarting activity on new foundations until the next crisis.

Value judgments are tested in the same way as scientific hypotheses, by verifying that the consequences they produce are those expected. But they are not part of a trial-and-error process. In fact, before making a decision, we try to test it against analogous situations. It’s important to remember that Dewey is a pragmatist, and that pragmatist moral philosophy rejects philosophies that determine right or wrong a priori. For them, what these philosophies arrive at are hypotheses that need to be tested. They believe that if we stick to purely theoretical reasoning, we have little chance of achieving a better life through experimentation.

It is often objected to Dewey that his instrumental theory of value deals only with means and not with ends. On this point, he differs quite strongly from other great thinkers. For Max Weber, for example, there is a distinction between rationality in value and rationality in purpose. The same idea is found in Amartya Sen, who distinguishes between an ethical tradition associated with Aristotle, endowed with a clear purpose, and a mechanistic tradition associated with engineering thought. For Dewey, on the other hand, there is an interaction between ends and means. “The “end-in-view” is the particular activity that acts as a coordinating factor for all the activities involved. Recognizing the end as a coordination or unified organization of activities, and the “end-in-view” as the special activity that enables this coordination to take place, removes the apparent paradox attached to the idea of a temporal continuum of activities, where successive stages are equal parts ends and means. An end or consequence achieved always has the same ‘form’: that of appropriate coordination.” From this point of view, the value judgment is a practical judgment, creative since it creates new “ends-in-view”, and transformative, i.e., it changes the way we see things and value them.

Dewey’s normative moral theory

There are three types of normative moral theories that seek to harmonize conflicts of desires:

As pragmatism in ethics is “often seen as a form of teleology or consequentialism”, it is important to analyze how Dewey positions himself in relation to the three common forms that the teleological current can take: hedonism, idealism and moral theories based on informed desire.

Dewey’s position on hedonistic theories is nuanced. On the one hand, he believes that reasoning in terms of pleasure and pain is too individualistic and does not allow us to reach an end that is approved by all. On the other hand, for Dewey, desire is important, because without desire there can be no good. He therefore adopted a form of hedonism in which desire is more reflexive, based on the study of consequences. Dewey considers that pleasure in itself is not sufficient as a criterion, as it already contains elements of judgment (a person’s moral value influences what he or she takes pleasure or displeasure in), but nevertheless gives a methodological indication for investigation.

When it comes to idealistic theories, his judgment is equally nuanced – in his youth, he was an idealist. On the one hand, he believes in the driving value of the ideal. But for him, ideals are not timeless; they are linked to a time and a context, and are basically just hypotheses to be tested. If Dewey is close to the theories of informed desire for the good, his conception of Man distances him from contemporary currents that have a more “fixist”, less malleable vision of human nature than he does. For Dewey, our character is part of the information to be taken into account. It is not a fixed datum, but changes. There is never complete information, because the world changes and our imagination creates new possibilities. The search for what is good is therefore an infinite search, and is in fact life itself.

“Deontological theories tend to identify rightness either with fixed laws or rules of conduct, such as the Ten Commandments, or with a single supreme principle of morality, such as the categorical imperative, understood as providing a procedure for ethical decision-making”. For Dewey, the problem is that, on the one hand, things change and therefore laws must evolve and, on the other hand, general principles cannot deal with all particular cases. He sees the categorical imperative in the same way as Kant’s critics: as an “empty formalism”. For him, in fact, we must first have an idea of the Good if we are to deal with morality. Nevertheless, the categorical imperative can be an interesting instrument of inquiry, as it ensures that “the interests of all have been fairly considered”. The just cannot be reduced to the good, since it appeals to authority (and not to attraction, like the good) and aims to harmonize claims emanating from conflicting conceptions of the good, and therefore aims neither at the good of each individual nor at the good of society, without a prior conception of the just making it possible to define how to incorporate individual conceptions of the good. But right and good are linked, because right is an important element of good social relations.

Among virtue-based moral theories, Dewey is quite approving of the English utilitarians and their ambition to achieve the standard of well-being (Welfare) that an impartial and benevolent spectator would approve of, but he makes several objections to it: firstly, in line with his Darwinism, the notion of well-being is not fixed and must therefore vary according to the environment; secondly, the notion of a standard of well-being must not be used to make decisions algorithmically (or mechanically). These objections aside, he is in favor of the principles of approval and disapproval deduced from the utilitarian standard of well-being, as they make individuals more aware of the consequences of their actions and thus better able to govern themselves.

Although Dewey is most influenced by the teleological and virtue-based theories, he nonetheless holds all three as hypotheses in his conception of inquiry. Indeed, in this framework, they enable us to better understand the overall consequences of our actions. Ideals of the good enable us to project ourselves towards a future good and test it, principles of law oblige us to take into account the interests of others, the approval or disapproval of impartial spectators compels us to examine not only the consequences of our actions, but also their motives. What Dewey refuses is to see these theories as transcendent imperatives.

John Dewey considers that moral conduct must be the result of an inquiry. In this inquiry, the principles proposed by moral theories must be taken as hypotheses that each time take a given point of view, teleological theories, based on principles of the good, taking the point of view of the prudent and informed individual, deontological theories, based on principles of the just, taking the point of view of affected persons, having claims on the individual and, finally, theories based on principles of virtue taking the point of view of the external observer.

The sources of his political philosophy

On the one hand, Dewey’s political philosophy is rooted in idealism, notably that of Thomas Hill Green, in Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse’s New Liberalism and in his theory of inquiry.

Along with Thomas Hill Green, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse and the New Liberalism, Dewey believes that traditional classical liberalism starts from a false conception of the individual that undermines liberal thought. For them, unlike traditional liberalism, the individual is not simply an entity in competition with others. On the contrary, they emphasize the relationships between individuals and perceive social life in a rather organic mode. For him, as for the New Liberalism, freedom is not simply an absence of constraint, but also resides in participation in social and political life. Consequently, Dewey does not believe that men, by pursuing their particular interests, can achieve a rich “living together”. They must also, as he writes in The Ethics of Democracy, be “endowed with a unity of purpose and interest”.

Dewey’s theory of inquiry is an important part of his political philosophy. He rejects the “spectator theory” that sees knowledge as a subject’s search for a fixed, a priori truth. He sees inquiry as a struggle by human beings to solve problems. The aim is not to seek a truth which, in Dewey’s Darwinian perspective, is necessarily in flux, but to solve problems here and now. This means testing and verifying hypotheses, values and theories that are destined to evolve one day. The model is scientific research. Dewey makes no a priori distinction between scientific, ethical and political inquiry.

In a way, it is possible to see “Dewey’s political philosophy as the marriage of the views of idealism and New Liberalism with his pragmatic or experimental conception of inquiry.”

Dewey’s liberalism

For Dewey, values are seen as constructed to solve a social problem, and must evolve according to the situations to be faced. He criticizes classical liberalism, notably in Logical Method and Law, for failing to evolve and thus becoming “the bulwark of reaction”, and for thinking too much in terms of the individual and not enough in terms of individuality.

John Dewey criticizes classical liberalism for conceiving the individual as “something given, something already there” before institutions. On the contrary, for him, it is institutions (as he notes in his book Reconstruction in Philosophy) that create individuals. Dewey rejects the basic idea of contract theory, according to which isolated individuals enter into a contract and, only then, form a society. Men are men, he argues, only in relation to other men. Man is essentially a social being. Democracy cannot therefore be seen as the government of the multitude, for there is no multitude (as there are many grains of sand, for example). The social character of man has both descriptive and normative significance. Taking this normative dimension into account leads to the idea of democracy as a form of ethical life. As an idea, democracy is the idea of community itself.

Classical liberalism therefore errs in analyzing the behavior of human beings and physical things separately, an error which for it is rooted in dualisms (mind, body, spirit).

For Dewey, freedom cannot simply be the absence of constraints. The individual must achieve individuality, which is at once “reflexive, social and must be exercised in order to be loved”. It is reflexive in the sense that the individual must be able to choose by critically examining alternatives. It is social in the sense that it requires participation in the decisions that help to shape living conditions. Finally, human beings must not only have the opportunity to make decisions, they must actually make them.

In general, Dewey wanted to replace laissez-faire policies with policies based on intelligent social control, based on the active participation of individuals as a means of achieving transcendent coherence. In general, scholars who have studied Dewey believe that his conviction that educated individuals can arrive at a common goal is linked to the Christianity of his youth. In Christianity and Democracy, he writes: “The incarnation of God in Man (…) becomes a living and present thing (which leads to a common truth present in all fields of action, and no longer in an isolated sphere called religion”.

On democracy

For Dewey, thinking that democracy is just a form of government is like thinking that a church is just a building: it’s forgetting what’s essential. For him, the essential purpose of democracy is ethics, i.e. the development of personality. It is also a way of managing conflicts of values. He explains: “Democracy is the form of society in which every man has a chance, and knows he has it (…) the chance to become a person. It seems to me that we can conceive of the dominant feature of democracy, as a way of life, as the necessary participation of every adult human being in the formation of the values that regulate human life in common.

For Dewey, democracy differs from aristocracy in that it is based on the conviction that every human being is capable of individual responsibility and initiative. In democracy, then, there is an ethical individualism that Dewey calls personality and sees as an achievement. In a democratic society, every sovereign citizen can achieve personality. Democracy implies radical changes in social, economic, legal and cultural institutions. Democracy goes beyond institutional and procedural issues. It concerns all social spheres, including the workplace. It consists of inquiry and the conditions of inquiry. It is based on equality (everyone can contribute to critical inquiry). It places deliberation at its heart. It is the best way to deal with conflicting interests. It implies that the public sees itself as a political agent (and learns about it through a network of local, everyday social interactions). We arrive at the idea of democracy by starting with community as a fact, and attempting to clarify and promote the constituent elements of this fact. For there to be community, there must be joint action, and the consequences of joint action must be perceived and become the object of desire and effort, which implies the communication that enables us to attach meaning to things and acts.

For him, democracy is a prerequisite for freedom in the sense of individuality. For him, the individual is not an atom but a being in relationship with others, which leads him to reject the social contract theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, since in this case relationships pre-exist society, whereas the essential lies in social interactions within society. For him, philosophy and democracy are linked because, in both cases, choices cannot be imposed from outside. In both cases, it’s through discussion, questioning and reflection that our convictions take root and become our own.

It is because the individual must participate in the debate in order to realize his or her potential that Dewey distrusts experts. For Festenstein, however, Dewey’s democracy is instrumental and in some ways minimal. True, democracy enables citizen participation and protects them from experts, whom he sees as an oligarchy whose interests are not necessarily those of the citizenry, but, despite this, expert technicians retain an important place in social inquiry, the centerpiece of his philosophy, the one that conditions his faith in democracy. From this point of view, for Joëlle Zask, in Dewey “participation is the ethical and political term equivalent to experimentation”. In line with Dewey’s Darwinism, while political and administrative institutions must foster both the democratic process and citizen participation, they are nonetheless contingent and subject to the obligation to constantly evolve in response to problems. For Dewey, political issues are technical, complex and require fact-finding, which can only be carried out by those equipped to do so. Yet this does not eliminate the public question, nor the fact that arriving at a technical question is already the result of a process. Investigation is the work of experts. However, a government of experts, no matter how competent and well-intentioned, is not enough without the participation of the people, for without the latter, the experts are cut off from social needs and unrest. The masses, on the other hand, must have the ability to judge the impact of the knowledge provided by others on common concerns. They can do this if the right conditions (publicity, surveys) are in place, and if they receive an education that develops their intelligence.

This concern to anchor political reflection in the actual problems raised by a society explains why Dewey’s analysis of the industrialization of society led him to believe that a reactivation of the democratic ideal implies overcoming the opposition between liberalism and collectivism, particularly of Marxist inspiration. This attempt led him to criticize the position of Walter Lippmann, whose criticism of collectivism is explained by the fact that he reduced it to state collectivism on the Soviet model or the attenuated New Deal model. On the contrary, for Dewey, the strength of organizations in an industrial society like ours implies the need to think in terms of a “liberal collectivism”, the better to recast individuality, its power and its freedom. This understanding of a socialism that would no longer be statist led Dewey to nourish liberalism, as he wished to reconstruct it, with Marxist motifs, whose dogmatic form he criticized as adopted in most communist currents, but whose intentions he validated, starting with the understanding of society in terms of class struggle, the importance of the economic factor in understanding social processes, and the necessary socialization of industry to put an end to “industrial autocracy”.

The public and its problems

Dewey’s The Public and its Problems was published in 1927, in part to address a theme broached by Walter Lippmann in his two books Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). The basic issues of these works are quite similar: “The aim is to denounce the liberal myth of the ‘omnicompetence’ of citizens”, and to explore ways of better integrating the public into the decision-making system of countries that are both becoming Great Societies and having to fit into a world society.

For Dewey, there is nothing metaphysical about the state, as with the Hegelians. Nor does it depend on a single cause, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will, or on historical or psychological reasons, like Hobbes’ fear. The state is essentially functional in nature, stemming from the need to manage the consequences of human actions. For him, there is a state because “human acts have consequences for other men, some of these consequences are perceived, and their perception leads to a subsequent effort to control the action so that some consequences are avoided and others secured”. It is only because people become aware that such a function must be ensured that a public is formed and constitutes a state. For Dewey, “the state is the organization of the public carried out through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members. But what the public is, and what public servants are, if they perform their function properly, are things we can discover only by going into history.”

Dewey wants to de-substantialize politics, i.e., not limit it to the circles of power, but enable individuals to enrich and develop their individuality by participating in politics in a concrete way, based on the problems they face. The public can only become politically organized if it becomes aware of its own interests and of itself. This awareness is facilitated by education and made more efficient by the theory of inquiry. Politics, for Dewey, is when people indirectly affected by a problem that limits their possibility of individuation become active not just at the social level, but at the political level, i.e. to promote more appropriate legal or institutional regulations. Put another way: “the essential task of the public is to ensure a transitional movement between problematic social situations and acts of political regulation”. The formation of enlightened publics thus implies adequately posing the problem of the social implications and social form of knowledge.

Dewey wrote almost 150 texts commenting on various aspects of the New Deal during the period. His theoretical ideas influenced Roosevelt and several of his close advisors, including the jurist Adolf Berle and the economist Rexford Tugwell, particularly with regard to the inability of formal liberalism or laissez-faire to cope with the problems created by industrial society and, as a corollary, the need for stronger state intervention and planning in the economy. Many of Dewey’s specific policy recommendations were taken up by the New Deal, such as fairer income distribution, progressive taxation, urban renewal programs through housing, social security, direct aid to the poor, stronger unions and labor rights.

But for John Dewey, the New Deal, while a step in the right direction, was far from radical enough. The New Deal didn’t democratize the economy enough, and didn’t give workers the opportunity to define their interests in production, distribution and consumption. It does not aim to organize citizens politically to create a new culture of radical democracy (popular, egalitarian, deliberative). It fails to take sufficient account of the fact that production and consumption are only means, not ends in themselves, the end being the production of free human beings associated with each other in a bond of equality. It favors capitalism over democracy, and fails to question the status and power of the capitalist class.

For Dewey, the New Deal should have created an institutional framework enabling citizens to communicate with each other and reach an understanding of their common interests. But the actual organization of the state does not support this strengthening of democracy, and the public is disorganized. The vacuum this disorganized public leaves within the state is taken over by organized interests, namely capitalist interests. For Dewey, the challenge of liberalism is to build a state that serves the interests of the community of citizens, not private capitalist interests. For him, both major parties serve the interests of capitalism. The result is bad government and apathetic citizens (because they know their vote doesn’t change much).

Dewey criticizes the New Deal on the basis of what he sees as a typically American ethical tradition of democracy, whose central elements are the right and duty of every individual to participate in the government of the locality, the state, the nation; moral ideas centered on equality, liberty and individualism (in the sense of freedom, not selfishness); and the vision of government as a matter of voluntary organization, implying the right to change institutions if they no longer serve the common interest. For him, socialism represents the result of applying liberal values in the context of American capitalist society. He calls for radical democracy and liberalism based on intelligence as a guide to inquiry and action (which implies using available means, being flexible, understanding challenges and adopting an experimental approach).

For all that, Dewey didn’t consider himself a communist, because for him, communism was not part of the American tradition and didn’t take account of the American context; communist doctrine tended towards practical and theoretical uniformity, which was profoundly anti-democratic; communism promoted violence, which Dewey considered to be a serious error; and the tactics of American communists (perversion of democratic processes, intellectual dishonesty, etc.) exasperated him.

Dewey’s relationship with the New Deal was not purely intellectual. Between 1928 and 1936, John Dewey took an active part in the League For Independent Political Action (LIPA) and the People’s Lobby, with the aim of educating the public and creating a third party that would serve to transfer control from the hands of capitalist interests to those of the citizenry, two crucial objectives in his view. In 1933, Dewey took an active part in the formation of the Farmer Labor Political Federation and became its honorary president, with the aim of federating the interests of farmers and workers. In 1934, the FLPF achieved electoral success in the Great Lakes (Minnesota, Wisconsin) and on the West Coast (Washington State, Oregon, California). In 1936, these attempts to promote a third party failed for a variety of reasons (factionalism, some people’s agreements with Roosevelt, fear of making fools of themselves, fear of playing into the hands of the Republicans, etc.).

L’Université des écoles de laboratoire de Chicago

When Dewey arrived in Chicago in 1886, there were many progressive educational movements: “the Herbart Society for the Scientific Study of Education, the Child Study Movement, the Manual Education Movement, William Harris’s Hegelian Movement and Colonel Parker’s Movement”. Dewey sent his children to Colonel Parker’s school, although Harris saw him as one of his disciples. In 1896, he set up the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools at the University of Chicago, with sixteen children and two teachers. By 1903, it had grown to 140 pupils, 23 teachers and ten assistants. Few of the students had parents who were members of the University of Chicago teaching staff. Dewey set two goals for the experiment: to be a source of inspiration for others, and to serve as a center for pedagogical research.

Pupils are divided into eleven age groups and go “to class to do things: cook, sew, woodwork and use tools for simple acts of construction, and it is in the context and on the occasion of these acts that studies are ordered: writing, arithmetic, etc.” For Westbrook, the experimental school is first and foremost “an experiment in education for democracy”. The spirit of democracy should animate not only the pupils, but also the teachers, who should participate in the management of the schools. Dewey is critical of what has happened in the United States, where power in schools has shifted from politicians to principals without any change in the autocratic nature of power. For him, student participation is important. He writes: “Until we create conditions that oblige the child to take an active part in the personalized construction of his own problems and to contribute to the implementation of the methods that will enable him to solve them (even at the cost of multiple trials and errors), the mind cannot be truly liberated”.

Following the incorporation of Francis Parker’s school in 1903, its teachers refused to allow “Mr. and Mrs. Dewey” to join the school. This disagreement was settled in their favor by the president of the University of Chicago, who dismissed Dewey’s wife, who resigned in 1904.

Pragmatism, instrumentalism and pedagogy

Dewey’s pedagogy is strongly marked by his instrumentalism, which holds that thinking helps humanity to survive and increase its happiness. Just as his philosophy is based on the refusal of dualism between thought and practice, and on interaction between the two, so the school’s function is to start from children’s experience and give it direction, based on four impulses: “to communicate, to construct, to seek to know and to refine one’s expression”.

This approach set him apart from the two opposing pedagogical currents of around 1890: the traditionalists and the advocates of a “child-centered” pedagogy. He criticizes the former for failing to link what is taught to children’s interests and activities. To the latter, he criticizes being too child-centered and forgetting society and economic reality. For Dewey, in fact, we must not “treat the interests and capacities of the child as things significant in themselves”, for “the facts and truths that enter into the child’s experience and those contained in the curricula are the initial and final term of the same reality.”

Dewey’s pedagogy is generally considered very demanding for the teacher. Matthew and Edwards, two authors who have studied his pedagogy, compare the role of the teacher to that of Alice in Lewis Carroll’s novel: Like Alice,” they write, “the teacher must pass with her children behind the mirror and, in this prism of the imaginary, she must see all things through their eyes and with the limits which are those of their experience; but, when the need arises, she must be able to recover her exercised vision and, with the realistic point of view of the adult, provide the children with the landmarks of knowledge and the tools of method”.

Democracy and education

For a long time, John Dewey saw pedagogy as “an essential means of democratizing American life”, before focusing more on political action. Ultimately, however, according to Westbrook, the spread of philosophy was achieved more through his pedagogical work than through his philosophical works. He wrote his most accomplished work on pedagogy, Democracy and Education, in 1916, just before producing his major philosophical works. The success of this book, regularly republished in English, lies in the fact that it raises fundamental questions about the child and the society that lies ahead. According to Gérard Deledalle, for Dewey, “school is not a means of adapting the child to adult society, whatever that may be; school is the society in which the child prepares himself for the society that will be his tomorrow”.

For Dewey, the essential function of the school is to help children acquire “character”, i.e. “a sum of habits and virtues that will enable them to realize their full potential”. This means making the most of the innate desire he perceives in children “to give, to do, in other words, to serve”. He is wary of a school based on fear and rivalry, as it loses the sense of community in favor of individualistic motivations. This type of school also leads the weakest to lose their ability and internalize their position of academic inferiority. On the contrary, it should foster a social and democratic sense by being a cooperative community, i.e. “an institution that is, temporarily, a place for the child to live, where the child is a member of society, is aware of this belonging and agrees to contribute”.

Dewey and progressive education

According to Gérard Deledalle, “Dewey is regarded as the theorist – the spokesman, the representative and the symbol of progressive education in America and throughout the world, whether he is praised for it or reproached for it”. Criticism soon followed in the United States, and by the end of the 1920s, he was being blamed for everything that was wrong with his country’s education system. Elsewhere, his influence was also felt, notably in the Chinese reform of 1922. In Iraq, he had many disciples, including Mohammed Fadhel Jamali.

One of the strengths of Dewey’s pedagogy, which sets him apart from other progressive American pedagogies, is that he does not propose recipes but methods of experimentation. He was also fortunate to have skilled disciples: William H. Kilpatrick, Georges Counts and John L. Childs. Although Dewey is classed as a progressive educator, he does not belong to the “romantic progessive school” centered on the child and self-realization. Indeed, in accordance with his philosophy, the child, like any individual, interacts with his environment, and his ego comes up against the constraints of reality, causing him to experiment with adaptation.

He did not take part in the congresses of the Ligue internationale pour l’éducation nouvelle, apart from the one in South Africa in 1934, but, translated into French as early as 1913, he was considered a reference by French-speaking practitioners of the école nouvelle such as Célestin Freinet, Roger Cousinet and Ovide Decroly, and other proponents of active pedagogical methods. Between Dewey and them, there is a difference in perspective. First and foremost, they were pedagogues, even if they were aware of the political and social issues at stake in schools. Dewey is first and foremost a philosopher, who from the outset integrates pedagogy into the broader framework of his philosophical thought. His pedagogy is also close in some respects to that of French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Both gave the school the mission of fostering a sense of society, and assigned the schoolmaster the role of coordinator. However, their conception of human nature is radically different. Durhkeim sees the child as a blank slate from which “it is necessary that, by the quickest means, to the selfish and asocial being just born, it should add another, capable of leading a moral and social life”. Dewey sees reminiscences of soul dualism in this perception of man.

In 1916, he published the classic “Democracy and Education”. In his book, Dewey writes that change is needed in two areas, school and civil society, particularly with a view to stimulating creativity and pluralism and building a social society, where systems such as government, church and business are in balance, a counterpart to the totalitarian system.

Dewey was convinced that students learn primarily through progressive education. He considered it important that students’ interests and needs be carefully taken into account. It is essential to enable discovery of the world, preferably through an interdisciplinary program, such as project-based teaching, in which students can enter or leave the classroom on their own initiative, with the teacher providing more support and facilitation .

For John Dewey and other pragmatists, learning by doing is very important; they believe that students or other learners should experience reality as it is. From John Dewey’s pedagogical point of view, this means that students must adapt to their environment in order to learn.

According to him, it’s not just the student who learns, but it’s the experience of students and teachers together that adds value to both.

The above shows that John Dewey was a proponent of progressive educational reform. He was convinced that the education system was flawed and needed to focus on learning by doing. He and his wife Harriet therefore set up their own experimental elementary school in 1894: the University Elementary School.

From 1894 to 1904, Dewey focused on a “Laboratory School” teaching experiment at the University of Chicago: students are not taught standard subjects, but work on subjects through a “project”. This school is currently one of the top five in the country. Over twenty-five years later, in 1919, Dewey founded the New School for Social Research with his colleagues Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson and Wesley Slair Mitchell. This was another progressive, experimental school that stimulated the free exchange of ideas in the arts and social sciences.

Some critical views

According to Bertrand Russell, truth for professional philosophers is most often “static and final, perfect and eternal” and, in religious terms, can be identified with divine reason or the rationality we share with God. Russell holds the multiplication table to be the perfection of truth. Generally speaking, for this philosopher, truth is linked with mathematics. Dewey, on the other hand, shares with Hegel a more organic vision of the world, but whereas with the German philosopher, the existence of an absolute is not called into question, with Dewey everything is process without any idea of eternity or the eternal order of nature. Or, rather, for Russell, this order underlies Dewey’s theory, without his being able to understand to what extent Dewey is aware of it.

Bertrand Russell believes that the main difference between him and Dewey is that “he judges a belief by its effects, whereas I judge it by its causes”. “If truth is determined by what has happened, it is independent of present or future will. On the contrary, to see truth as guaranteed assertability, as with Dewey, introduces the possibility of man weighing in on what is to be asserted. Thus, for Russell, an ingenious Dewey supporter could arrive at the guaranteed assertability that Julius Caesar did not cross the Rubicon.

For Russell, Dewey’s thought is very much linked to the world of the industrial revolution, and he agrees with George Santayana when the latter writes “in Dewey, as in present-day science and ethics, there is a strong quasi-Hegelian tendency to dissolve the individual in his social functions, as all that is substantial and true into something relative and transitory”.

For Richard Posner, the word democracy has two main meanings in Dewey. The first is an epistemic perception of democracy that, through the theory of inquiry, breaks with an essentially individualistic approach to research. The second is a vision of democracy as a system of political decision-making in which decision-makers are elected. Posner calls “deliberative democracy” Dewey’s attempt to conceive of democracy not as a conflict of interests as in public choice theory, nor as an aggregation of preferences like the followers of Jeremy Bentham, nor as a surveillance of the ruling elite in the manner of Joseph Schumpeter, but as a pooling of different approaches followed by debates to select the best one. According to Posner, “this deliberative democracy is almost as purely a hope of hopeless unrealism as government by Platonic guardians”. In his view, one of the only advantages of this system is that it enables politicians to take the “pulse of public opinion”.

Posner makes several other criticisms of John Dewey. He believes that, like many intellectuals, he “exaggerates the importance of knowledge and intelligence in public affairs”. Moreover, he fears that involving citizens in public life is more likely to weaken democracy than strengthen it. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, citizen involvement is more likely to exacerbate conflicts than facilitate their rational resolution. Secondly, citizens know their own best interests. Involving them in public life takes them into fields with which they are unfamiliar, and is likely to distract them from pursuing their own affairs, with the result that both public and private life will suffer. If, according to Richard Posner, representative democracy, which is aristocratic in the Aristotelian sense of government by the best, is superior, the important thing for him lies elsewhere. It lies first and foremost in freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry, as John Stuart Mill already emphasized in his book Liberty.

Dewey, the American institutionalist school and “reasonable capitalism

Economists have examined the links between John Dewey’s philosophy and American institutionalism. For Rick Tilman, “John Dewey’s instrumentalist political theory is the political counterpart of economic institutionalism”, while Laure Bazzoli and Véronique Dutraive have studied the influence of Dewey’s and Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy on the epistemology of American institutionalism, and the link between Dewey’s philosophy and John Rogers Commons’ reflections on reasonable capitalism.

It is possible to discern at least two major points of convergence between pragmatism, particularly Dewey’s, and American institutionalism. On the one hand, like Dewey’s pragmatism, institutionalists reject the Cartesian dualism that allowed the neoclassical school to consider the psychology of human beings to be outside its scope, and to focus on rationality. This is how Veblen came to emphasize instincts, habits and transactions, and Commons the will, customs and transactions. On the other hand, in Dewey’s theory, the individual is not isolated and is not merely reactive to his environment, but seeks to adapt to his environment in a more complex and global way, notably through institutions (laws, transactions, governments, organizations, etc.) than in neoclassical theory. Commons translates Dewey’s concept of individuality by considering the individual as a person and “an institutionalized mind”.

John Rogers Commons took up Dewey’s theory of inquiry and, like him, saw the scientific process as the “reduction to theories and hypotheses for investigation”. Commons would implement social inquiry in his research “to make capitalism better”. For Bazzoli and Dutraive, the convergence between John Dewey and John Rogers Commons extends to their social philosophy based on democracy. They also consider that reasonable values and the practice of reasonable capitalism “can constitute the coherent extension of Dewey’s philosophy and make it operative in the realm of economic life, as the essential anchor, in the world, of a ‘creative democracy'”. To the question of what constitutes a reasonable value in Commons’ work, it’s possible to answer that they are values that have emerged from a Dewey-like process of successive problem-solving. However, Commons is more concrete than Dewey, and his processes include rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court or political bodies.

Presence of Dewey’s thought today

John Dewey was the most influential American philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Then his thought went into eclipse. During this period, his vision of democracy was seen by Reinhold Niebuhr and the realists who dominated political thought as blind optimism. During this period, his theory of inquiry was often seen, by both left and right, as a hollow and perhaps dangerous reworking of the scientific method. With the decline of analytic philosophy, his work returned to the fore. This movement back to Dewey and pragmatism was initiated by several philosophers, including Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, to name but the most influential. Today, Dewey is often considered a precursor of the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas, as well as a source of inspiration for the notions of deliberative or participatory democracy.

While in England Dewey’s thought was much discussed and criticized, notably by Bertrand Russell, in France his philosophical thought was long ignored, with only some of his pedagogical books having been translated. It wasn’t until 1967, with Gérard Deledalle’s translation of La Logique, that his philosophy really came to be known and studied. Since then, his main works have been available in French.

After his death, opponents of progressive pedagogical methods, such as Allan Bloom, tended to blame Dewey for everything that was wrong with the American education system, and to make him the representative of a child-centered school inspired by Romanticism and Rousseauism, which he was not and which he had strongly rejected. Despite this, Dewey’s pedagogical thinking remains strong in the United States, and is gaining ground in France, a country nevertheless marked by the thought of Émile Durkheim. On a global scale, Meuret considers the PISA program to be close to Dewey’s thinking. While he doesn’t believe that it was designed by Dewey’s disciples, for him, the similarity of approach is a sign of the fruitfulness of Dewey’s pedagogy.

Recent newspaper articles have focused on the influence of Dewey’s thought on President Obama. More anecdotally, anthropologist Alice Dewey, a granddaughter of John Dewey, directed the dissertation of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, and her daughters attended a “Dewey pedagogy” school.

In English

The Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University has assembled the writings of John Dewey into three series of books: The Early Works, The Middle Works and The Later Works. The collection is published by Southern Illinois University Press (SIU Press) under the direction of Jo Ann Boydston, who was also the director of the Center for Dewey Studies. In 2014, a French branch of the Center for Dewey Studies was created. It is housed at the Institut Marcel Mauss.

External links

Sources

1. John Dewey
2. John Dewey
3. « Dewey’s approach understood thought genetically, as the product of the interaction between organism end environnement, and knowledge as having pratical instumentality in the guidance and control of that interaction. »
4. (en) « Liberalism knows that an individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made. It is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical : -including in « cultural », economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and art »
5. ^ “Process Philosophy”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2021.
6. ^ “Dewey, John | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy”.
7. ^ 于其多. “和胡适同为留洋博士、师从杜威，为什么陶行知成了中国人民教育家”. 上观新闻. Retrieved March 11, 2023.
8. ^ John Dewey, How we think (1910), p. 9.
9. ^ a b “PBS Online: Only A Teacher: Schoolhouse Pioneers”. www.pbs.org. Retrieved August 29, 2019.
10. a b Zimbardo, Philip G. & L. Weber, Ann & L. Johnson, Robert, Psychologie, een inleiding., Pearson Education Benelux: Amsterdam, p. 8.
11. Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 5.
12. Logister, Louis, (Red.) John Dewey, Een inleiding tot zijn filosofie, p. 13.
13. John Dewey: Biography in Spartacus Educational
14. vgl. Scheuerl, Hans: Klassiker der Pädagogik. Bd. 2. München, S. 85f.
15. John Dewey: Die Suche nach Gewissheit. Frankfurt1998, S. 25 ff., 43 f.