Dewey, John

Dewey, John (1859–1952), philosopher, educator, reformer.Over a long and diverse career, John Dewey established himself as the most significant American philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century and a leading voice among reformers struggling to extend democracy at home and abroad. At the heart of his thinking lay an expansive moral vision of democracy as not merely a political ideal but a wider way of life. As a philosopher, he sought compelling arguments for his democratic ideals, while as an activist he tried to give these ideals practical expression in the school, the workplace, and the polity.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a storekeeper, Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879. Among the first graduate students in philosophy in an American university, he received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1884, and began his college teaching career at the University of Michigan. In 1894 he moved to the recently founded University of Chicago. While at Michigan, Dewey gained prominence as a proponent of neo‐Hegelian idealism, but at Chicago he moved toward Darwinian naturalism and pragmatism. Adopting the functional psychology of William James's Principles of Psychology (1890), Dewey developed an instrumental view of human intelligence that saw it not as the repository of transcendent reason or a mere receptacle of sense impressions but as the means by which a uniquely purposive creature addressed the problems that confronted it in a struggle for a fruitful existence.

Chicago was also the site of Dewey's earliest ventures into educational reform. Recognizing the pedagogical implications of his new philosophy and psychology, he established a Laboratory School, in which to test his ideas. In the curriculum of this school, as well as in such widely read books as The School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), and later Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey called for a pedagogy that would build on the inherent interests of children, while leading them to the accumulated wisdom of adults embodied in the established subjects. He urged teachers to structure the classroom as a cooperative community of inquiry, thereby fostering in children both the skills of scientific investigation and the character essential for a democratic society.

Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, following a bitter dispute with university president William Rainey Harper (1856–1906) over control of the Laboratory School Dewey had founded, and he remained at Columbia for the remainder of his career. Prior to World War I, he devoted much of his energy as a philosopher to the defense of pragmatism from its idealist and realist critics, while urging his fellow philosophers to turn their attention from the epistemological conundrums that philosophers had created for themselves to the ethical “problems of men.” In the major books of his later phase—Experience and Nature (1925), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Art as Experience (1934), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)—Dewey himself pursued this project by developing a philosophy designed to provide the moral ideals of democracy with what he termed “an encouraging nod.” At the same time, in his only work of formal political theory, The Public and Its Problems (1927), he offered a vigorous, if ultimately wistful, defense of participatory democracy against critics such as Walter Lippmann, who were eager to shrink government by the people to minimal dimensions.

Beginning with his strong support of American intervention in World War I, Dewey also functioned as a public intellectual, speaking out on a wide range of controversial issues not only in the United States but in Japan, China, Turkey, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. He played a leading role in the Outlawry of War movement in the 1920s, radical third‐party politics in the 1930s, and anti‐Stalinist agitation in the 1940s. A long‐time critic of capitalism, Dewey advanced his own brand of democratic socialism in Individualism Old and New (1930), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and Freedom and Culture (1939).

Dewey's posthumous reputation went into eclipse among academic philosophers increasingly preoccupied with technical problems of analysis, as well as in a political culture inclined to the kind of skeptical “realism” about the possibilities of democracy that he had spent his life combating. The final years of the twentieth century, however, which witnessed the emergence of schools of “neopragmatism” in philosophy, literature, and legal theory, brought a rekindled interest in Dewey's philosophy, if not a revitalization of his extraordinary democratic hope.
See also Bourne, Randolph; Education; Evolution, Theory of; Intelligence, Concepts of; Liberalism; Progressive Era; Rorty, Richard.

Bibliography

George Dykhuizen , The Life and Mind of John Dewey, 1973.
Neil Coughlan , Young John Dewey, 1975.
Steven C. Rockefeller , John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism, 1991.
Robert B. Westbrook , John Dewey and American Democracy, 1991.
James Campbell , Understanding John Dewey, 1995.
Alan Ryan , John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 1995.

Robert B. Westbrook