Articulating a Sense of Powers: An Expressivist Reading of John Dewey’s Theory of Social Movements

John Dewey’s lectures delivered in China (1919–1920) provide us with a detailed analysis of the epistemic and normative dynamics of social struggles. Drawing on the notion of “act of expression”, by which Dewey refers to the articulation of our aims and emotional states, this paper offers a “expressivist” interpretation of Dewey’s view of social struggles. The interpretation gives a central role to the analysis of the learning process of the oppressed as involving the development of expressive capacities. By doing this, it aims both at illuminating important theoretical steps in Dewey’s own argumentation and at indicating some implications for what I call a Deweyan understanding of social movements.