America’s Public Philosopher: Essays on Social Justice, Economics, Education, and the Future of Democracy by John Dewey (review)

John Dewey conducted his philosophy in public as a public philosopher, concerned with public questions that crucially mattered in America. How may integration ever happen? When shall women ever vote? Will religion control schooling, or not? Shall teachers be professionals, or not? Will labor gain protections, or not? Shall science lead policy, or not? Are civil liberties truly for everyone, or not? Can technocratic management be trusted, or not? Is capitalism more democratic, or is socialism? Shall America be an empire, or a peacemaker? If answers seem obvious now, or at least debate-worthy, that is because you live in Dewey’s America. That progressivism was pragmatism, not just “publicity.” Dewey was constantly in the public eye and on the public’s mind during several of its most transformative decades because his philosophy was of, by, and for the American people.

Dewey was always on the march, often literally as well as in literary form. There was hardly any agenda of the liberal, civil rights, and progressive movements from the 1890s through the 1940s that proceeded without his name as a cofounder, signatory, delegate, advisor, or advocate. If a single affordable volume could capture the ethical, educational, social, economic, legal, and political philosophy of such a wide-ranging epochal thinker, this must be it. Eric Thomas Weber’s fine general introduction and concise prefaces to each selection (forty-six in total) keeps up with that pace. This volume’s writings are sometimes more academic than popularly written, but there was not a big difference when Dewey offered his explanations of social problems, dissected rival theories, and proposed practical solutions. We are to be reminded of his prolificity; it is hardly an exaggeration to say that no matter the topic, a hundred or more items stand alongside any single piece represented here, filling the bulk of the thirty-seven volumes of his Collected Works. His open letters, talks, testimonies, speeches, and addresses to innumerable meetings, councils, leagues, committees, and associations were broadcast and printed everywhere, from local radio and city newspapers to national and international magazines and journals, along with pamphlets and tracts printed in uncountable numbers. Dewey did not have to compete for public attention; his philosophy attended to America’s struggles.

Part 1, on democracy and the United States, brings together “Democracy Is Radical,” “Address to National Negro Conference,” “A Symposium on Woman’s Suffrage,” “Pragmatic America,” and “The Basic Values and Loyalties of Democracy,” along with three more pieces on democracy’s duty and destiny. Part 2, on politics and power, has eight essays, including “Politics and Culture,” “Force, Violence, and the Law,” “Why I Am Not a Communist,” and “A Liberal Speaks Out for Liberalism.” The eight essays in part 3, on education, explain the essential role of public education and professionalized teachers for democracy’s growth. Part 4, on social ethics and economic justice, has eight essays, including “Capitalistic or Public Socialism?”, “Does Human Nature Change?”, “The Ethics of Animal Experimentation,” “Ethics and International Relations,” and “The Jobless—A Job for All of Us.” Part 5, on science and society, has “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” “Science, Belief and the Public,” “Social Science and Social Control,” “Education and Birth Control,” “The Supreme Intellectual Obligation,” and “The Revolt against Science.” Part 6, on philosophy and culture, has “The Case of the Professor and the Public Interest,” “Social Absolutism,” “Some Factors in Mutual National Understanding,” “The Basis for Hope,” “Art as Our Heritage,” “The Value of Historical Christianity,” and “What Humanism Means to Me.” Although his stand-alone books such as Democracy and Education and Reconstruction in Philosophy should be required reading, the essentials of Dewey’s entire philosophy are all here in their full vitality.

Fame for this Columbia University professor was inescapable. A cover of Time magazine came in...