Deweyan Experimentalism and the Problem of Method in Political Philosophy by Joshua Forstenzer (review)

With his recent contribution to Dewey studies, Deweyan Experimentalism and the Problem of Method in Political Philosophy, Joshua Forstenzer delivers a timely and highly readable examination of Dewey's democratic ideal and its contemporary relevance. Outstanding in its scholarship and compelling in its argument, Forstenzer's fascinating study presents an extensive interpretation of Dewey's experimentalist approach to democratic politics, while highlighting its significant interdisciplinary value and practical interest. Focussing particularly upon its experimentalist character and renunciation of a priori idealisations, Forstenzer examines, over ten well-argued chapters, how Dewey's approach to political philosophy differs from the Rawlsian paradigm of recent Anglophone contributors, without abandoning its concern with tackling injustice. Above all, Forstenzer seeks to show how political philosophers might, by experimenting with a Dewey-inspired self-conception as responsible participants in a dialogue between democratic citizens, make an active difference in addressing some of the urgent problems which confront today's political communities and social groups.

Forstenzer begins his compelling study with an unsparing account of the severe and urgent dangers threatening contemporary humanity. Few today, however, could seriously contest his stark assessment that our species finds itself teetering at the brink of a precipice, mired in uncertainty and hostile disagreement over how to proceed in the face of looming ecological disaster and political catastrophe. Under circumstances in which rational deliberation often appears to have little purchase within a political context marked by recently emboldened and increasingly conspicuous reactionary currents, to appeal to philosophy for direction may seem the height of naivety, and yet, as Forstenzer insists, there can be no route out of the present crisis without confidence in a philosophically-informed vision of future possibilities. Echoing realist criticisms of Rawlsian ideal theory, Forstenzer asks that political philosophy demonstrate its practical value without, however, abandoning its traditional moral mission of critiquing existing conditions and tackling injustice.

Having established such desiderata in the first chapter, Forstenzer proceeds in the second to outline Dewey's pragmatist critique of the traditional preconceptions which he alleges to have limited philosophy's effectiveness as a practical resource for addressing actual social problems. Chief amongst these, as Forstenzer understands Dewey, is the 'spectator' model of knowledge as the relation of a subject to an object unconditioned by the process of its coming to be known. Such an account of knowledge as a theoretical, rather than a practical, achievement naturally reinforces a host of dualisms (between mind and body, fact and value, subject and object, etc.) which collectively lend weight to a conception of the philosophical task as one of detached representation rather than active involvement. As Forstenzer explains, however, Dewey proposes quite another understanding of cognition, as the inherently situated activity of an organism seeking by intelligent means to overcome various kinds of obstacle.

In chapter three, Forstenzer elaborates upon Dewey's alternative proposal for a socially active and politically engaged conception of philosophy. According to Forstenzer, Dewey offers an appealing conception of philosophy as a species of cultural criticism, eschewing a priori idealisations and directed towards concrete problem-solving within specific contexts. While denying that philosophy affords privileged access to a special fund of truths concerning, for instance, the ideal state, Forstenzer encourages philosophers to experiment with a Deweyan self-conception as mediators facilitating dialogue amongst the various sources of insight that a society might bring to the problems which confront it. The philosopher may most effectively address our current crisis, according to Forstenzer's Deweyan approach, not by persisting in a discredited 'quest for certainty', but by participating in a cultural dialogue within which she inhabits a role analogous to a competent chair to a meeting amongst community members gathered to discuss problems of common concern.

Objections to Dewey's philosophical ideal are addressed in chapter four, in which Forstenzer defends philosophy's practical potential against possible Hegelian and Marxist critics. Contrary to conservative readings of Hegel's position, according to which philosophical understanding is fundamentally retrospective and...