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Five A POST-SECULAR EXCHANGE: JACQUES MARITAIN, JOHN DEWEY, AND KARL MARX Thomas M. Jeannot Suppose a conversation among three humanists from the recent modern past could be staged: namely, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), a principal figure in the twentieth-century revival of Thomism and a leading Catholic philosopher; John Dewey (1859-1952), the American pragmatist and ambivalent apologist for liberalism; and Karl Marx (1818-83), founder of modern communism and the most trenchant critic of the capitalist mode of production. What might it contribute to the way we understand our contemporary situation? A successful conversation does not require complete agreement as its outcome, but it can lead to what Hans-Georg Gadamer called a "fusion of horizons," the occupation of common ground. Still, why pick these three? I begin, I hope not too idiosyncratically, with my own circumstances. First, I was born in the United States. Even though it is the center of capitalist development, and even though its history has been the history of economic imperialism, drenched in blood, I want to believe in its possibilities for atonement. I want to believe this probably for theological reasons, and especially because the capitalist mode of production is an impersonal, abstract system of domination that knows no loyalties or community allegiances, whereas people in the United States, like people anywhere, are basically more good than evil, mainly trying to make it by from day to day.1 The non-national communism that lies on the distant eschatological horizon will certainly be multicultural, and w6 should count on the continued existence of regional and national cultures and identities. I imagine Canadians will still speak English and French and play more hockey than soccer, while Brazilians will still speak Portuguese and play more soccer than hockey. Meanwhile, if a social and political philosophy is to be practical - whether in Maritain's, Dewey's, or Marx's sense - then it is incumbent on us to achieve one rooted in the concrete experiences of the people for whom it is practical, and among whom it must be practiced if it is to be practiced at all. I am drawn to Dewey because his social and political philosophy, a radicalized liberalism, is cut from the grain of an American experience capable of addressing the dominant culture to which I belong. Second, the family resemblances between Dewey and Marx make conversation between them congenial, although I cannot develop those resemblances here. For 84 Thomas M. Jeannot instance, they both cut their teeth on Hegelianism, they retained prominent aspects of Hegelian philosophy in their own thinking, and their respective critiques of Hegelian idealism led each to achieve a naturalistic and experimentalist reconstruction of it (for Marx, historical materialism; for Dewey, pragmatism). Each insists on the unity of theory with practice and on the priority of practice, regarding not only the theory of knowledge, but its point as well. Moreover, each can be read, in our contemporary idiom, as a communitarian, just as Aristotle's "political animal" is fundamental to their respective philosophical anthropologies. But this also means that each can be read as a humanist and as philosopher of liberation, once the appropriate meaning of our moral freedom (positive freedom, autonomy) has been grasped. When Dewey achieves the radicalization of his own commitment to liberalism, for example, in The Public and Its Problems, Individualism Old and New and Liberalism and Social Action, he focuses on the socialization of the means of production as the key to overcoming the failed liberalism, the bourgeois individualism, of the nineteenth century. Although the social conditions of his writing would have made it highly improbable that he ever thought of himself as a communist (not even in Sidney Hook's lower-case sense), he explicitly advances thetheory of democratic socialism - nota Millian socialism of distribution, but socialized production and radical economic democracy. Third, however, how can one expect Maritain tojoin in? The autobiographical fact of my Catholicism gives him a certain psychological relevance, but if I succeed in this essay, his role in the proposed conversation will have a better basis than that. At first blush, if it is plausible to conceive of a Marx/Dewey dialogue without doing too much violence to the integrity of either philosopher, they also belong to a profoundly different social and intellectual universe than the one Maritain inhabited. The largest obstacle to overcome in order to bring him into a common orbit with them is religious and theological. Marx and Dewey, as they are often interpreted...

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