Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey

What Is Democracy? (ca. 1946)

What Is Democracy? (ca. 1946) AT NO TIME IN THE past has the world faced as many and as serious problems as at the present time. For at no past time has the world in which man lives been so extended and so complicated in its interconnected parts. This statement is made, however, not for its own sake but as an introduction to the aspect of the world’s problems that will be here considered. The recent historical scene would have been regarded as impossible not more than half a century ago. For at that time the progressive triumph of democracy, both as an idea of political philosophy and as a political fact, seemed fairly assured. Of late years its very existence has been so challenged that its fate seemed to hang in the balance and even now its future is far from settled. The first attack made upon it was open, unconcealed. The military assault of Japan, Italy, and Germany and their satellites was attended and supported by the ever-repeated charge that the democratic ideal had outlived its usefulness, and that new and different order was urgently required. The nations that made the military attack suffered a crushing defeat. The present state of the world proves, without need for extended argument, that the underlying ground of social, economic, and political principles is far from being crushed. The struggle between democratic beliefs as they have been understood and put into practice in the past is more overt and acute than before or during the military conflict. The question “What is Democracy?” is not in the existing state of the world’s affairs an academic question. Nor at present is it a matter of defending democratic principles and policies against attack by those who openly, avowedly, treated them with complete scorn. The conflict is now between two radically different, completely opposed, systems each of which claims to be faithful to the cause of democracy. 216 Typescript in the John Dewey Papers, Box 55, folder 3, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, ca. 1946. What Is Democracy? 217 A conflict which is of direct practical importance to hundreds of millions of people and upon which the issue of world-wide war or peace may depend is not a theoretical question to be settled by the arguments of political scientists. One of the national states which was an ally of the states that represent democracy as it has been traditionally understood and practiced now engages in an attack upon the latter which is both ideological and diplomatic and which, by common consent, might pass into strife of armed forces. For it accuses the traditionally democratic peoples of the West in Europe and America of betraying the cause of democracy and holds itself up as representing in its policies and principles the fulfillment of the democratic idea now misrepresented and betrayed by peoples who profess democracy but who fail to carry it into practice in one very important part of human relationships. That part is, of course, that of human relations as they are affected by the economic order, by the conditions under which industry and finance are conducted. However, I do not intend to discuss the conflict as if its focus and centre is primarily located in the matter of economic policies. It is my belief, for instance, that economic policies have been in the past the weakest aspect of traditional western democracies. Nor do I propose to defend these democracies on the ground that each one of them, not excluding the United States which has perhaps been the country the most attached to an “individualistic” economic order, is actively modifying in its own behalf its traditional economic system. The fact that “capitalism” is so far from being a rigidly fixed system that in fact it is in almost a fluid state is pertinent to some of the charges brought against this and other western democracies but not to the issue I am discussing;—namely, what is the centre and the foundation of the democratic idea and policies? This centre and base is, in my judgment, thrown into clear and impressive relief by the fact that the nation from which the assaults now proceed has taken over and improved upon the general totalitarian philosophy and practice, one species of which it was actively fighting only a few years ago—and which in fact is historically continuous with the anti-democratic history of its own political past. For this totalitarianism reveals...