Deliberating on Dewey: A Pragmatic Response to Jeffrey Stout's Public Philosophy

Jeffrey Stout's recent essay, "Public Reason and Dialectical Pragmatism" (2018), argues that theories of public reason in the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism, including its expression in the work of John Rawls, must be made over in an altogether more public fashion.¹ That is, these theories must abandon the private machinations of philosophical minds and come to embrace the messy forums of public debate. There, as the rightful inheritance of democratic publics instead of the exclusive province of erudite philosophers, public reasoning—as a progressive process—becomes an indispensable resource for the continual reconstruction of a liberal and deliberative democracy. Democracy, in Stout's view, is perpetually remade on the basis of public reasoning. By challenging Rawls's overly "individualist and ahistorical" doctrine of public reason, as Hegel did to Kant, Stout aims to "ameliorate" public reasoning and establish it at the center of democratic culture.² Tracing a trajectory from G. W. F. Hegel to John Dewey, Stout calls his view "dialectical pragmatism."³

Engaging with Stout in pragmatic dialectic, I affirm the thrust of his argument against a static and private view of public reason while challenging the practice of dialectical pragmatism in light of Stout's stated commitment to grassroots democracy, a commitment that I share. I thus make use of the methods of immanent criticism for which Stout's work is exemplary.

In "Public Reason," Stout describes immanent criticism as the practice of drawing unacceptable implications from accepted premises.⁴ My own approach in this article differs insofar as I challenge practices in light of basic commitments. The practice of affirming commitments in order to criticize practical implications, in this case affirming Stout's democratic commitments in order to criticize his theory's undemocratic results, is what joins my approach with his. What makes immanent criticism such a powerful tool in this endeavor is that it does not try to bend an adversary to the persuasive force of a substantive position but challenges a would-be accomplice to self-critical examination in light of what are ultimately shared goals.⁵ In what follows, I reveal undemocratic tendencies in Stout's practice of dialectical pragmatism to raise important questions about what might make political philosophy more democratic. Stout, as a fellow Deweyan who has thought long and hard about what would make philosophy adequately public, is a close intellectual ally to the cause.

My first move will be to spell out the way in which Stout thinks Rawlsian political theory is not public enough. Stout charges Rawls with offering an account of public reason that is at once too burdensome and too restrictive, fostering a program that creates undemocratic dependencies and undermines procedural democracy. I then interpret Stout's contrasting view to suggest how dialectical pragmatism may be vulnerable to some of the same criticism he levels at Rawls. In brief, Stout attends to procedural democracy empirically but ends with a concept-laden account that is vulnerable to the first prong of his own criticism: it remains too burdensome for ordinary citizens and thus creates an undemocratic dependency on political philosophers. The following section argues that an adequate response to this criticism warrants certain changes to dialectical pragmatism, which must adopt a different practice with respect to concepts if it is to better serve grassroots projects of democratic reform. The emerging practice, which relies on Dewey's logic and ontology of habits, is closer to the later Dewey, who, taking ever greater distance from Hegelian idealism, set out in search of the methods of social inquiry that would support public deliberation over pressing social problems. Following Dewey's trajectory away from idealism and toward a public pragmatism, I encourage dialectical pragmatism to drop its "conceptualism" in its embrace of grassroots democracy.⁶

What comes to the fore through this friendly dialectic are the questions, How do the products of intellectual labor recursively interact with democratic publics, and what makes a philosophical practice adequately public? The former, an empirical question, is what I address most fully here, though the ensuing discussion ultimately opens onto the latter...