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36 3 Democracy as a Way of Life Ruth Anna Putnam, Wellesley College At the occasion of a banquet in honor of his eightieth birthday in 1939, John Dewey said, “we have had the habit of thinking of democracy as a kind of political mechanism that will work as long as citizens were reasonably faithful in performing political duties.” But, he continued, this is not enough; we must come to “realize in thought and act that democracy is a personal way of individual life; that it signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life.”1 Democracy is a personal way of individual life. This is quite startling. Even if we think of democracy as more than a political system, characterized by universal suffrage, frequent elections, and majority rule, even if we think of it as a set of values—rights of individuals, a commitment to pluralism, or as liberty, equality, and fraternity—we think of democracy as a social phenomenon. How can it be a personal way of individual life? Although this characterization of democracy is mentioned by James T. Kloppenberg as well as by Robert B. Westbrook, they seem to me to be insufficiently startled.2 Westbrook characterizes it as an appeal to a faith that is required to strengthen whatever arguments for democracy Dewey gave or might have given. So Westbrook mentions Dewey’s remark, in the same address, that democracy “is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgments and action if proper conditions are furnished.”3 Kloppenberg uses Dewey’s remark as a reminder that for both Dewey and James democracy is a moral ideal and points out that for both their commitment to democracy is inseparable from their pragmatism. Perhaps these authors are so steeped in Dewey’s thought that it is obvious to them that for Dewey a certain personal way of individual life would necessarily accompany a commitment, which is after all a personal thing, Democracy as a Way of Life 37 to democracy as a social ideal or as the ideal form of a communal way of life. Indeed, two years earlier Dewey had said of democracy, “It is, as we often say, though perhaps without appreciating all that is involved in the saying, a way of life, social and individual” (emphasis mine). What was startling in the remark with which I began was the lack of any reference to the social. In contrast, the remark in the 1937 address continues as follows: “The key-note of democracy as a way of life may be expressed, it seems to me, as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together:—which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals” (LW.11.217–18). Note that Dewey does not say “from both the standpoint of the general social welfare and the standpoint of the full development of human beings as individuals.” Dewey does not posit two goals; the general welfare and the full development of all individuals are one and the same thing. From his earliest writings on, Dewey rejects the assumption that there is something problematic about the relation between individual and society, that the individual’s good may conflict with that of society. What appears to be such a conflict is instead a conflict between groups. Thus he wrote in The Public and Its Problems, “An individual cannot be opposed to the association of which he is an integral part nor can the association be set against its integrated members. But groups may be opposed to one another, and an individual as a member of different groups may be divided within himself, and in a true sense have conflicting selves. . . . In these facts we have the ground of the common antithesis set up between society and the individual” (LW.2.354–55). Nevertheless, sometimes one must emphasize collectivity and sometimes individuality. For democracy is challenged from two sides: excessive individualism in the form of laissez faire capitalism, on the one hand, and collectivism on the other. Laissez faire capitalism, Dewey observed, tends in practice to protect the freedom of the rich and the powerful...

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