Liberalism and Social Action - Great Books in Philosophy | Political Theory & Social Philosophy Classics | Perfect for Academic Studies & Political Science Research

Some authors are so original, cultivated, and write so well that we may enjoy reading their work even when we have serious reservations about the views they express. Among the most informative and engaging of the few so endowed, John Dewey occupies a privileged place. Dewey writes with the authority of a philosopher whose brilliance was long committed to investigating and helping to shape the social, political, and economic world of the last decades of the Nineteenth Century and the first half of the Twentieth. To read Dewey is to see the world he lived in through a new and different lens, one that illuminates prevailing institutions in ways that were previously obscured by taken-for-granted conventions and shop-worn ideas. One important reason for the excellence of Dewey's offerings is his commitment to being actively engaged in the organizational arrangements he was trying to better understand. As such, Dewey's work was practical in the best sense, recognizing that abstruse ruminations made from a safe distance produce obfuscation rather than objectivity.Liberalism and Social Action was written in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, two years after Hitler came to power in Germany, and during a time when the Japanese were expanding their imperial domain throughout the South Pacific. Involvement of the U.S. in what was to be World War II was six years away, but in spite of pervasive isolationist sentiment, the prospect of America becoming embroiled in a brutal and costly conflict that spanned two continents was becoming more likely. In this perilous and painful time, Dewey sought to foster a renaissance in the ethos and application of Liberalism, transforming it from an outmoded and stagnant set of old ideas and obsolete standards into a dynamic intellectual foundation for making best use of the resources produced by a modern and modernizing society. That Dewey fails to acknowledge the myriad innovations and new ideas forged by FDR's New Deal is not explained. Perhaps Dewey judged the New Deal to be helter-skelter, lacking in a solid foundation, and likely transitory. And perhaps he thought the New Deal was too tame.Dewey acknowledged the contribution of Classical Liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom and self-interested action unfettered by adventitious and stifling institutional constraints. However, he also recognized that the Jeffersonian ideal of a society of independent yeoman farmers and unaffiliated rugged individualists was no longer workable. Instead, developments in science and science-based technology had given rise to an industrial era where concentrations of wealth and power yielded a class-based social formation, one in which opportunity and material sustenance were artificially scarce, serving the interests of the favored few much as described by Thorstein Veblen in The Engineers and the Price System.In this environment, the traditional hands-off policies of Classical Liberalism left the vast majority of people powerless and needlessly lacking in the material and cultural means of day-to-day existence. Moreover, contemporary Liberalism with its interest in largely piecemeal economic reform was hampered by disorganization and an incoherent set of insufficiently ambitious objectives. For Dewey, a Liberalism that acknowledged the misuse and willful dampening of America's productive potential and proceeded in a systematic and rigorous way to seek durable remedies was both necessary and possible given new and emerging circumstances.Dewey was convinced that in a modern and enormously productive industrial society, there could easily be plenty to go around. Citizens no longer needed be motivated by scarcity of essentials, but could realize their inherent potential through engagement in intellectual and physical activity in the world around them. Opportunity for self-realization was potentially abundant. Achieving these desired ends, however, could be accomplished only if Americans disabused themselves of their aversion to planned collective and centralized direction of the development of the social system. Government, citizens needed to acknowledge, was no longer the enemy. Government could be used by engaged participants to bring disciplined inquiry and intelligently informed application -- the ethos and method of science -- to accomplish an equitable distribution of resources in a way that benefited all, a not uncommon view at the time. For those who argue that centralized planning has been tried and it does not work, Dewey would argue that past failures could not avail themselves of present circumstances which may be much more conducive to the success of such efforts.Dewey valued individualism at least as much as the Classical Liberals, but he held that individuals were inherently social, and that their individualism became manifest through functionally significant activity with their fellow citizens. For those who held that rewards commensurate with the contributions of the best and the brightest would not be forthcoming in a context devoid of special incentives, Dewey invoked the notion of social intelligence. This means that we are all thoroughly integrated into a social system that, for example, enables us to travel from New York to Los Angeles in a few hours, a trip that in the middle of the Nineteenth Century took months. The real differences among us have to do with differential access to the products of social intelligence, and Dewey dismissed the importance of measures of purported individual merit, such as IQ.Toward the end of Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey takes great pains to distinguish his renewed Liberalism from the sort of classless society that Marxists seek. In truth, however, whatever the differences, the similarities between Dewey's society based on the integration of scientific rigor into all institutions and the sort of social system that Marxists think is eminently possible and desirable became more numerous and striking as Dewey goes along.Dewey was convinced that the failure of his brand of thoroughgoing liberalism was what an influential sociologist of his time, William F. Ogburn, would have called "cultural lag." Dewey seemed convinced that the lag would be made up, and rational use of our collectively held resources would make it possible for all of us to become fully developed individuals in a just society that was capable of maintaining its exemplary character by scientifically adjusting to changing circumstances.Dewey, however, was a realist, and I think I've probably made his views more utopian than they really were. Still, if Dewey were alive today, he'd have to acknowledge that the same arguments on behalf of Classical Liberalism are being dogmatically made by Libertarians, Conservatives, and most professional economists. If anything, we are farther from his scientifically planned and directed society than in his day, and his understanding of social intelligence and its implications are alien to contemporary political discourse. Even in our schools, Dewey's special domain, the absurdly heavy emphasis on standardized tests has given priority to knowing an isolated fact rather than being able to find and follow a useful course of action. Test-driven schooling is an extension of the stupidity documented by Raymond Callahan in Education and the Cult of Efficiency, and it brings to mind many of the things that Dewey objected to in the schools of his day.I enjoyed Liberalism and Social Action, and I would recommend it to others. Unfortunately, however, when Dewey becomes prescriptive he acknowledges but badly underestimates the entrenched and powerful special interests he's up against. I think that his more critically evaluative book The Public and Its Problems does a better job of showing us where we are without offering unattainable outcomes. Sometimes even a genius comes up a bit short. However that may be, it's long past time that we recognize the extraordinary breadth of Dewey's attainments and acknowledge him as the genius that he was.