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Rescuing Dewey

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Rescuing Dewey
Essays in Pragmatic Nationalism

Peter T. Manicas

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

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LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright 2008 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

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Acknowledgements Introduction PART I PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE 1 2 3 4 Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism John Dewey and American Psychology John Dewey and American Social Science Culture and Nature NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY

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3 35 63 81

PART II 5 6

Naturalism and Subjectivism Naturalizing Epistemology: Recent Developments in Psychology and the Sociology of Knowledge

101 119 143 187 211 237 251

PART III DEMOCRACY 7 American Democracy: A New Spirit in the World 8 9 10 11 John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State Philosophy and Politics: A Historical Approach to Marx and Dewey John Dewey and the Problem of Justice Liberalisms Discontent: America in Search for Past That Never Was
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PART IV 12 13 14 15

WHY NOT DEWEY? 273 283 287 295 305 315

The Evasion of Philosophy Democratic Hope Analytic Pragmatism Post-Modern Pragmatism

Bibliography Index

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The original place and time of presentation and/or publication is indicated below. I am grateful to each of the editors and publishers for their permission to reprint. Chapter 1, Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism, was read as part of an invited panel, American Philosophical Association, Boston, December 1986 and appeared in The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XXIV, No. 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 179222. Chapter 2, John Dewey and American Psychology, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, Vol. 32, No. 3 (September 2002), pp. 26794. Chapter 3, John Dewey and American Social Science, in Larry Hickman (ed.), Reading Dewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 4362. Chapter 4, Culture and Nature, was the Patrick Romanell Lecture, American Philosophical Association, Portland, March 27, 1992, published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1992), pp. 5976. Chapter 5, Naturalism and Subjectivism, read at the conference, The Future of Realism in the American Tradition of Pragmatic Naturalism, University of Buffalo, October 2022, 2000. The essay appeared in John Shook (ed.), Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 79106.

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Chapter 6, Naturalizing Epistemology: Recent Developments in Psychology and the Sociology of Knowledge, in John J. Stuhr (ed.), Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture: Pragmatic Essays After John Dewey (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 15174. Chapter 7, American Democracy: A New Spirit in the World, Chapter 13 of War and Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 33878. Chapter 8, John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State, read at the annual meetings of the Society for The Advancement of Philosophy, Villanova University, Spring 1980, and appearing in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 18 (Spring, 1982), pp. 13358. Reprinted in J. E. Tiles (ed.), John Dewey: Critical Assessments, Vol. II (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 40729. Chapter 9, Philosophy and Politics: An Historical Approach to Marx and Dewey, originally, Deweys Critique of Marxism, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, New York, December 28, l984 and appeared in W.J. Gavin (ed.), Context Over Foundation: Dewey and Marx (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988), pp. 14775. Chapter 10, John Dewey and the Problem of Justice, The Journal of Value Inquiry, 15 (1981), pp. 27991. Reprinted in J. E. Tiles (ed.), John Dewey: Critical Assessments, Vol. III (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 40729. Chapter 11, Liberalisms Discontent: America in Search for Past That Never Was, read at a panel discussion Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 1998. Chapter 12, Evasion of Philosophy, Review of Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XXVl, 3 (Summer, 1990), pp. 37384. Chapter 13, Democratic Hope, Review of Robert B. Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth, in Perspectives on Politics, Anerican Political Science Association, Vol. 4, No, 2 (June 2006), pp. 37375.

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Chapter 14, Analytic Pragmatism, Review of Mathew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, Vol. XXXV, No. 1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 20314. Chapter 15, Post-modern Pragmatism, Review of Baert, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), forthcoming in Journal of Critical Realism.

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There may be no philosopher who has provoked more books and articles than John Dewey, who, of course, may also have set a record in producing books and articles. (The Collected Works, now complete, number some 37 volumes.) One wonders if anyone has read all of it. Indeed, one strategy, perhaps too frequently adopted, is to ignore all the critical literature and try to stick to his published textssometimes, not even to all of them! Nor, it may be supposed, is any philosopher less in need of rescuing. He has been the subject of several biographies, including two excellent recent biographies and his name continues to reappear in all sorts of contexts, Moreover, Deweys many critics ranged pretty much across the philosophical spectrum and, to be sure, there were plenty of sympathetic philosophers who responded to these critics. But the guiding idea in this volume is not to try to rescue Dewey from his critics (although that is sometimes also a consequence), but to rescue Dewey from his friends. The friends that he needs rescuing from fall into two main groups. On the one hand, there are those who either play down or ignore the implications of Deweys naturalism. For these philosophers, his version of pragmatism broke new ground precisely because it overcame the fundamental impasses of traditional metaphysics. Viewed from the perspective of academic philosophy, these philosophers have labored hard to preserve and extend Deweys pragmatism as an original and distinct American philosophy. While still marginal in the academy, they have made many important contributions. Prominent in this group are philosophers who speak of Deweys metaphysics of experience.1 For these philosophers, Jamess radical empiricism is often taken as Deweys point of departure. These philosophers see rightly that Dewey rejected atomistic empiricist versions of experience and that, for him, experience
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was rich and informing, and included not only relations of all sorts, but both doings and sufferings. But as Tiles has recently remarked, while Dewey insisted that in his Experience and Nature, he sought to provide an empirical naturalism or a naturalistic empiricism, he saw also that many philosophers would find these expressions to be oxymoronic, like talking of a round square. These philosophers take seriously the problem set out by Kant and hold, not without reason, that Dewey is suspicious of metaphysics in Kants sense: claims about that which is not in experience. The problem here, as Ralph Barton Perry saw, was the slip into philosophical idealism. He argued: It would appear that while Dewey . . . rescues reality from dependence on intellect, he is satisfied to leave it in the grasp of more universal experience which is a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness. (Perry, 1955: 315). Some defenders of Dewey would, I think, also be satisfied. Perry was not, of course, since he persisted that a thoroughgoing realism must assert independence not only of thought, but any variety of whatsoever of experience, whether it be perception, feeling, or even the instinctive response of the organism to its environment (315).2 There was something radical and important about insisting on the rejection of a subject/object dichotomy but on the usual terms, if existence is restricted to what can be experienced, it is hard to see how idealism is to be avoided. There is an alternative, a form of critical realism, which makes Kants thing-in-itself knowable. That is, the causes of our experience cannot themselves in be in experience. There is a real tension in Dewey on this, a tension examined in several of the papers in this volume. On the present view, the critical point is that, for Dewey, contrary to modern epistemology, the problem of the external world was not a problemfor good reason; but even so, there remained not only the question of the causal role of an independently existing nature, but as part of this, the causal role of the theoretical entities of science. For the whole of Deweys long life, positivism was surely the unchallenged view on such matters (Manicas, 1989) and while recent pragmatic philosophies of science were not particularly influenced by Dewey, they have helped to promote the idea that Dewey could be enlisted in their cause. Thus, pragmatic philosophy of science rejects realism as an untenable and unnecessary metaphysical commitment. But this seems inconsistent with the actual practices of the successful sciences (Manicas, 2006). Thus, while it may seem obvious, we can only explain the rusting of iron if we have a theory that postulates the independent existence of Fe and which details the process called oxidation.

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Similarly, while it is clear that Dewey was a powerful advocate of the method of intelligence, and that plainly, the practices of the sciences were pertinent to seeing what was involved in this, these philosophers have tended to be uncritical of what might somewhat anachronistically be called Deweys philosophy of science. Partly because Dewey wrote no explicit philosophy of science and partly because these philosophers have been rightly suspicious of Vienna-inspired Anglo-American philosophy of science, they have paid almost no attention to Deweys originalbut confusingtheory of science, including his vision of its role and relation in society. This is an important lacunae from the present point of view. Dewey is rightly associated with science and scientific method, but neither idea can be taken for granted. For example, as Dewey made clear: the social sciences need to function in a democratic society, but as he insisted, the prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist (Dewey: 1954: 166; my emphasis). Quest for Certainty (1929) is hardly the key text for getting a handle on Deweys theory of science. As it turns out, Experience and Nature (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) and many disparate essays are both far richer and much more clearly provide the main outlines of his distinctive views on the critical issues in philosophy of science. These philosophers also see American pragmatism and especially Dewey as creating an image of America which made him a critical player in what has been termed the reformist left. These writers may acknowledge Deweys vision of a democratic society, but hold that, for him, problems in American society could be corrected using the institutions of constitutional democracy: elect the right politicians and enact the right laws. Thus, he is seen as left-liberal who put his trust in American exceptionalism: the history of the United States was moving progressively toward a distinct American vision. While it is true that Dewey rejected an insurrectionary politics and was no fire-eating leftist, his analysis of the present was radical in the sense that it went straight to the roots. This put his politics close to Marxs in critical ways. The interpretation of Dewey as a left-reformist is best articulated by the second group of Deweys friends. Rorty and those who follow him constitute this second group of friends from whom Dewey needs rescuing. Again, speaking from the point of view of academic philosophy, these philosophers are typically Anglo-American analytic philosophers. While their style of philosophy has somewhat waned, it is fair to say that they continue to dominate academic philosophy in the US, if less so in other places. A good deal of recent Dewey scholarship falls into this mode.

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Rorty, of course, is key here. Himself a well-established analytic philosopher, his discovery of Dewey led him to a more general attack on the claims of philosophy. He was correct to insist that epistemology is a modern subdiscipline of philosophy generated by the problem of legitimating the claims of the new science (Rorty, 1979). And given this understanding of the history of Western philosophy, he was correct also to see strong parallels between Nietzsche, James, Heideggar, Derrida and Foucault. Thus, contemporary textualism, the idea that there are nothing but texts parallels the idealist notion that there are nothing but ideas (Rorty, 1982: 139). But there is, he insists, a critical difference between current textualism and classical idealism. In repudiating the tradition, textualists rejected the framework that allow for epistemology and ontology. Thus, unlike idealists (or naturalists or materialists) socalled post-modern writers reject the idea that what is important is not whether what we believe is true, but what vocabulary we use. Finally, then, for Rorty, pragmatism joins post-modern thinking in repudiating metaphysical argument between idealist/naturalists and the epistemological idea of truth as correspondence with reality. But if Dewey was committed to naturalism, there would seem to be no escaping ontological commitmentsincluding a naturalistic account of consciousness. Similarly, philosophical realistsas most ordinary people, believe that true means correspondence with reality. But even if one assents that we can have no unmediated access to reality as it is itself, it does not follow that we cannot discriminate between true and false. Indeed, it is a scandal to think otherwise. Rorty sees problems with postmodernist moves to escape traditional philosophy. But he sees also that Dewey does not exactly fit his larger picture. In agreement with Santayana, Rorty insists that Deweys efforts at a naturalistic metaphysics betrays a recurrent flaw in Deweys work: his habit of announcing a bold new positive program when all he offers, and all he needs to offer, is criticism of the tradition (1982: 78). To be sure, Dewey does offer a bold new positive programa naturalistic metaphysics with epistemology replaced by his version of logic (Sleeper, 1986). And he needed to do this because he could not step out of history and argue, as Rorty does, that knowledge and truth are pseudo problems that will go away once we abandon the claims of philosophy. Indeed, it is quite one thing to try to convince us that warranted assertability could replace truth, understood as certainty, and quite another to say that, for pragmatists, there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational onesno wholesale constraints derived from the nature of objects, or the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers (1982: 165). Worse, the Socratic virtueswillingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the consequences of actions on other peopleare simply moral virtues . . . The

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pragmatists tell us that the conversations which it is our moral duty to continue is merely our project, the Europeans intellectual form of life (1982: 172). As several of essays in both Part I and Part II try to make clear, there are, for Dewey, considerable constraints on inquiry, beginning with a taken-forgranted independently existing nature, our embeddedness in it, our history and indeed, those ongoing institutional arrangements which often make impossible the required conversation. Thus, the inquiry which produced molecular chemistry as we now understand it very much depended both on the nature of the independently existing world and the practices which show that, as Peirce argued, there is a preferred mode of fixing belief about it. Similarly, our embeddedness in nature and history both enables and constrains us in action. Thus, for example, as Part III (below) tries to show, there are good reasons to believe that Dewey was fully aware that there were enormous obstacles to having the kind of knowledge that he thought was essential to a democratic society and a humane life. The writer who is the inspiration for the main thrust of most of the essays in this volume is Ralph W. Sleeper, my former colleague at Queens College. His wonderful The Necessity of Pragmatism (1986) provides a systematic effort to respond to both sets of the friends of Dewey. The reader might notice here that for many years five members of the Queens department had continuing conversation about Dewey and, more generally, about pragmatism. These include John J. McDermott, Jack B. Noone, and Eugene Fontinell. Our conversations never lacked passion but never approached violence. Because Deweys thought was both rich and provocative, it is hoped that the essays of this volume, written over a period of some twenty-five years, provide a contemporary refocusing of current problems, both philosophical and political. The essays are easily organized under four main headings.

PART I: PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE David Hollinger has rightly argued that the critical role played by the pragmatists was to find and articulate a way of life consistent with what they and contemporaries variously perceived as the implications of modern science (Hollinger, 1985: 93). Part I, finds a deep irony in this. It is widely held, by friends and enemies, that the pragmatists succeeded. On this interpretation, the pragmatists adopted an instrumentalist view of science in which successful prediction and control-vindicated inquiry. By subordinating all inquiry to practical ends, they could show that a belief was warranted only insofar as it was scientific. Finally, they could then vindicate a culture whose

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social motor was science. But there is a deep irony in this: As Chapter 1, Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism, tries to show, this victory was pyrrhic: In this chapter, I argue that the foregoing interpretation is a stunning distortion and that the pragmatists failed utterly in their quest to set a new course for a scientific civilization. Not only were the forces at work resistant to their criticisms, but their fundamental insights, in a paradoxical inversion, became absorbed in distorted forms. This was especially critical as regards psychology and the social sciencesas Chapters 2 and 3 try to show. By looking at the views of Peirce as well as James, we can see more clearly Deweys distinctive and original response. Chapter 1 provides, as well, a general introduction to themes and issues taken up in subsequent chapters and parts of the volume. Thus, Chapter 2 turns to Deweys relation to the history of American psychology and argues that contrary to much established opinion, not only did Dewey have no influence in the path taken, but that as early as 1896, he marked out a path which today offers considerable promise for a genuinely scientific psychology. The key is a proper understanding of his much ignored and when noticed, misunderstood, ideas on logic, understood by him as the theory of inquiry. It not only points the way to a powerful conception of an ecological psychology, but as Part II argues, it is at the heart of Deweys rejection of traditional epistemology. It is striking here that his enemies, for example, Bertrand Russell, found it to be confused mess and that most of his friends have paid no attention to it. Striking here also is the fact that the two most recent and otherwise very useful overall accounts of Dewey, Robert Westbrooks John Dewey and American Democracy (1991) and Alan Ryans John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995), almost entirely ignore it. Ryan, surely a competent philosopher of science, refers to the Logic as vast and somewhat baffling (309). Following on the excellent work of Tom Burke (1994), Chapter 2 develops the central role and key ideas of the Logic as the critical part of the misunderstanding of Deweys relation to psychology as a science. I conclude by arguing that, versus the dominant Cartesian varieties associated with a good deal of what is termed cognitive science, the Logic provides excellent philosophical ground for an ecological psychology. Thus, as Burke writes, in contrast with a classical empiricist view of perception (involving so-called, sense data, sense impression, stimulations or nerve endings, irritations of body surfaces, and so forth), ecological psychology emphasizes a different array of theoretical concepts; one being the concept of invariants and another the concept of affordances . . . (1994: 84). The pertinence of these ideas for a critical realist theory of science are picked up in Chapter 5.

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Chapters 3 and 4 extend the argument to the social sciences. From the perspective of naturalism, Dewey could easily respond to the fundamental problems of the social sciences, but especially the series of invidious dualisms: subjectivism/objectivism, agency/structure, nature/culture, the idiographic and the nomothetic. In this context, of special note, is his usually ignored or misunderstood theory of meaning, a theory shared by his Chicago colleague, G. H. Mead. But while there is an independently existing external world, it is striking that as social forms do not exist independently of the beliefs and actions of situated agents, only a naturalism can escape the poles of subjectivism and materialism. PART II: NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY This part picks up another central theme raised in Chapter I, the central position in Deweys naturalism of his remarkable and much ignored Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), which, as he insisted, was not another epistemology. Chapter 5 considers the broader context of naturalism and subjectivism, and seeks to locate Dewey in this context. Chapter 6 assumes the main thrust of the Logic, and considers critically some competing efforts at naturalistic epistemology, including the work of Quine, Rescher, and Laudan. Two problems stand out. First, all of the many varieties of contemporary analytic epistemology share in what can be termed an epistemological individualism. This is a legacy of ruggedly anti-ecological individualistic traditional epistemology, a legacy which, it is critical to emphasize, also profoundly effects a great deal of work in current cognitive psychology (Chapter 2). Quine, whose version of naturalistic epistemology has nothing in common with Deweys, despite suggestions to the contrary, gives an exemplary characterization of epistemological individualism: Thus:
This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input certain patterns of irradiation in certain frequencies, for instanceand in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history (Quine, 1969: 77).

It is hardly clear how we get from patterns of irradiation to concepts, or whether, finally, the output which is a description of the three-dimensional external world can be established as true. The same problems arise for those who identify themselves as pursuing alternative epistemologies. Internalists and reliabilists like William Lycan and Alvin Goldman, but also

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externalists and naturalists of various stripes, for example, Hilary Kornblith and Philip Kitcher. On these views, the social is not denied; but it enters only as regards either the explanation of false belief or the social organization of knowledgewith Robert K. Merton identified as having authored the most important twentieth century work. Remarkably, no attention is paid to the important work in recent sociology of science, including here work by the so-called strong programme, and work by Latour, Pickering, Hacking and many others. I said that there are two problems. Even we acknowledge the role of the social in perception and understanding, it is hardly clear whether we can, following Dewey, simply ignore the problem of Pyrhonian skepticism. The problem is not justifying the existence of an external world, or whether that world is structured in some fashion or other, but whether, given the naturalistic equivalence of the knowledge of different cultures, we can justify claims to even warranted belief while at the same time avoiding either circularity or dogmatism. Thus, can we say that when the Karam utters I see a kobity now he is wrong, that what he see is really a cassowary? Quines version of naturalistic epistemology, as well as most traditional epistemology, either assume that some privileged beliefs are true or they assume that something vaguely identified as science yields truth. In Chapter 6, at least in the spirit of Dewey, we consider three pragmatic approaches to the problem of privileging the claims of science without circularity or dogmatism. I suggest that instead of seeking to warrant pragmatically assertions or methods, we take practices as our point of departure. This provides a far more plausible even if modest outcome.

PART III: DEMOCRACY There is perhaps no term so badly abused as democracy. Originally, of course, it meant (literally) that the people rule. While not all those living in Athens were citizens, citizens actually met and made decisions, which affected them all. When the US Constitution convinced the world that the people could be sovereign and still be entirely excluded from participation in decision-makingexactly as Madison made clear, liberal republics became democracies.3 With this move, not only did capitalism become consistent with democracy, it became the ideal arrangement! Peoples democracies accepted Aristotle dictumand Madisons, that if the demos who are poor achieved power, they would abolish private property as contrary to their interests. The peoples democracies could be one-party states as long as they made the effort to realize the democratic value of equality. After all, as Mar-

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shall Tito liked to point out, since the people did not rule in either the (now gone) Yugoslavian state or in the US, the difference was really only one party as against two! The problem of democracy in the era of the modern nation-state was brilliantly posed in the 1920s in a remarkable debate between Dewey and Walter Lippmann who argued that in the US, tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee best characterized our party system. The debate, considered in Chapter 7, remains of profound relevance especially given the nearly complete capitulation to the idea that there is no alternative to the liberal capitalist democracies of the advanced industrial societies. Dewey surely thought otherwise. The occasion for this debate was World War I. But it is critical to notice that the war changed the minds of both parties and that war remains the generally unacknowledged problem for democracy in the modern world. That is, until the Great War, Deweys perception of American democracy was largely uncritical and we cannot begin to understand him on the subject of democracy until we locate his maturing ideas against the background of the war and of the writings of Walter Lippmann. Chapter 7 attempts an analytical/ historical consideration of the conditions and content of this debate. Briefly, Dewey fully grasped the power of Lippmanns brilliant critique, but he could not accept Lippmanns solution. Lippmann made two fundamental moves. First, he insisted that the citizen cannot know what is happening or what ought to happen, and even if they could, there is a structured incapacity to constitute any sort of coherent public opinion. Only mystical democrats could believe that the people had a will and that this waseven could beactually realized. But Lippmann was not threatened by this outcome, since he also insisted that the critical question of government was not whether citizens actually participated, or whether it sought and realized the will of the people, but whether it is producing a certain minimum of health, of decent housing, of material necessities, of education, of freedom, of pleasures, of beauty (1954: 19697.). Accordingly, the essence of popular government, notwithstanding tweedle dum and tweedle dee, is a choice between supporting the Ins when things are going well and supporting the Outs when they seem to be going badly (126). The capacity to throw the bums out does give a minimum of accountability and this should not be discounted,4 but Lippmanns criteria are empty of rational content. If the citizen is to appraise the success or failure of a regime in power, then she has to make impossible counterfactual judgments and to find some way for these to congeal into a coherent majority vote. Lippmann gave a host of reasons why, under present institutional arrangements, this is impossible. But if so, there is simply no rational ground for applying

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Lippmanns criteria. What indeed is minimum of health or freedom and how can know if the Outs would have done better? Lippmann fell back on a thoroughly elitist version of his argument regarding science. Gradually . . . the more enlightened directing minds have called in experts who were trained, or had trained themselves, to make parts of this Great Society intelligible to those who manage it (370). Though these enlightened directing minds knew that they needed help, they were slow to call in the social scientist (371). Lippmann hopes that the lesson has been learned. What is needed, he opines, is presidential leadership responsive to the best of social scientific knowledge!5 This is an unembarrassed technocratic solution to the problem of democracy. But, obviously, it assumes that experts can have the requisite knowledge, and it still confronts the problem of assessing counterfactuals. Moreover, even assuming that experts make no mistakes, actions have consequences that generally cannot be undone. War is surely the most obvious instance. Perhaps the recent Bush dominance of American politics is the best and worst case for Lippmann. The capacity to throw the bums out is a test of democracy, but we need to see clearly what democracy thus amounts to. Put aside the fact that mechanisms of opinion formation allow those with huge sums of money to manipulate the opinions of citizens. Put aside also that it is relatively easy to disenfranchise voters, that there are serious problems with the electoral system, including the electoral college and the US system of representation. Put aside also that, as we more recently have discovered, with electronic voting, there is no way to know if the results of voting using the new electronic technologies are even truthful!6 In the mid-term election of 2006, it seems clear enough that American voters did repudiate at least some of the policies of President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress. But not only is there no way to weigh the relative importance of the many policies adopted (and rejected) and to identify some coherent alternatives, but these decisions and their consequences have inalterably reshaped the world. While this is always the case, decisions are not all equally monumental. The most obvious case is the war in Iraq where the consequences include the death of thousands, the waste of billions of dollars, a civil war, and likely the promotion of global terrorism. By January 2007, it seemed that the clear message of the voter on the war in Iraq could be ignored. Indeed, confirming Lippmann on tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, the leaders of the Democratic party comfortably took positions remarkably similar to those of the sitting President! Moreover, there is already an argument about which of the Presidents legacies will be more important: the war, the inattention to the environment, the attack on the division of powers and

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civil liberties, the huge deficit or the stunning decline in Americas standing in the world. Indeed, the main argument for self-determination is precisely that if interdependent persons must live with decisions that affect them all they must have a hand in making them.7 But Dewey went further. For him, the problem of democracy and social science were intimately connected. Lippmann and the technocrats failed to realize that experts could indeed provide information, but policy needs also a clear idea of the present situation of persons and of goals to be pursued. That is, generating coherent policy that affects the lives of interdependent individuals requires the direct participation of these individuals. Lippmann earlier had it right: The scientific spirit is the discipline of democracy, the escape from drift, the outlook of the free man (1961: 151). But this requires not experts but a democratic social science. As Dewey insisted, what is required is the perfecting of the means and ways of communicating meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action (1954: 155). A public which satisfied this goal would still make mistakes and would still suffer the consequences of these; but they would be, at least, their mistakes. Dewey recognized full well that the conditions for realizing a democratic social science that could constitute a public required radical change in existing institutions. And this was not merely a change in our electoral politics important as these may be, but a change that acknowledged that in capitalism, decisions of major social importance are legitimately made by persons entirely unaccountable to the electorate. If democracy means that persons have a say in determining the conditions of their everyday lives, then democracy required some form of socialism. Dewey was never clear about how socialism was to be institutionalized, and there is evidence that he believed, wrongly on my view of the matter, that the difference and choice between a socialism that is public and one that is capitalist regarded a choice between markets versus planning.8 But however that may be, the problem of realizing democracy pushed him to what is easily read as an anarchist vision!9 Chapter 8 considers this by looking carefully at what Dewey actually said against the background of actual anarchist thought. Yet, at the same time, Alan Ryan observes rightly: He was not a fire-eating leftist, and never became one (1995: 117). Unfortunately, not only was anarchism a dirty word by the time Dewey wrote The Public and Its ProblemsSacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1921 for their beliefs and not the unproven charges against them, but the leftism of the day was inevitably connected to Bolshevism and a version of Marx which was rooted in Engels (Manicas, 2000) and in the 2nd International,

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and, subsequently, with what became the standard, but also contestable version of Lenin (Lewin, 2005). Indeed, it is absolutely crucial to notice that Dewey had read little of Marx and that his anti-communism was squarely directed at the Stalinism that had solidified in the 1930s. Similarly, a very different reading of Marx became possible only in the 1930s with the publication for the first time of the early writings of Marx (in German), the complete German Ideology and The Grundrisse. Chapter 9 offers an historical reading of Marx and Dewey and shows that understanding Dewey requires posing his thought against the Stalinist version of Marxism/Leninism. Dewey had no patience with the pseudo science of a vulgar dialectical or historical materialismmostly for good reasons, even if this leaves open the question of whether as Chapter 9 argues, some other version of Marx was easily compatible with Dewey and whether some patent shortcomings in Deweys analysis might be filled with some pertinent Marx. It is acknowledged by a number of important writers that Dewey and Marx shared fundamental philosophical premises, but it is not always noticed that they also shared in their vision of a good society and in thinking that a gradualist politics need not be anti-revolutionary (Chapter 9) 10 The point, more generally, is that Dewey tried to find a politics between liberals who insisted on parliamentary means but who saw no need for radical change in the existing social structure, and the scientistic, eschatological and insurrectionary versions of the Marxists. The problem remains assuring the continuing relevance of Dewey. Finally, then, Dewey would insist that a politics without vision is merely an un- principled opportunism. But Deweys vision of democracy is not merely an abstraction. As a practice and a process in which action is informed by a recognition of our inevitable interdependencies, it is a realizable ideal. As Rousseau, Marx and Dewey saw, interdependency is inevitable, and interdependency does establish the conditions of injustice and tyranny. But democracy is its only solution. There are no assurances, to be sure, but as Emma Goldman observed The night cannot last forever. The final two chapters of Part III consider Deweys political theory in contrast to three more recent and influential interventions. The publication of John Rawlss A Theory of Justice (1971) generated a veritable industry. For the first time in a very long time, here was philosopher doing normative political theory. Rawls articulated a liberal theory which had a New Deal look about it, progressive without being radical. It was quickly responded to by Rawlss Harvard colleague Robert Nozik. His book, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) was a criticism of Rawls from the Libertarian Right. It earned him a cover in the New York Times Magazine. It is critical to notice that neither Rawls nor Nozick had much to say about democracy. Rawls assumed some form of representative regime and (with

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J. S. Mill) even defended plural voting. While democracy is not indexed in Rawlss book, Nozick surely went further. After acknowledging that democracy is the idea that people have a right to a say in the decisions that importantly affect their lives, Nozick asserted, remarkably: After we exclude from consideration the decisions which others have a right to make and the actions which would aggress against me, steal from me, and so on, . . . it is not clear that there are any decisions remaining about which even to raise the question (1974: 270). For both, accordingly, justice was the key concept. Dewey is quite the opposite. As argued in Chapter 10, if one surveys the voluminous writings of Dewey, the first thing that one notices is the relative inattention paid by Dewey to the problem of justice. Altogether, there are perhaps not more than a dozen pages of sustained discussions devoted explicitly to the topic. These discussions are little gems, and they offer what are, I think, fatal criticisms of the liberal theories of both Rawls and Nozick. This, too, is generally ignored. Dewey, always concrete and historical, recognized that what we call liberal democracy emerged at a specific time and place in world history, that it did not have democracy as one of its goals, and that while it celebrated the autonomous individuala prerequisite for the ideology of market capitalism, it offered a false picture of individuals and their relations. Not only were persons social beings, deeply interdependent and encumbered (to borrow a term from Sandel), but the control of the social environment which is furnished by the institution of property makes the idea of equal freedom in liberal democracies a pure absurdity (Dewey, 1954: 271). It is not that Dewey did not care about justice. Rather, he insisted that democracy was the primary problem and that because the fundamental assumptions of associated life were misconceived by liberal theories, it disvalued democracy. Liberal theory thus shares with Lippmann the idea that participation was not an issue and that as long as the quality of everyday life was as good as could be expected, all was well enough. For liberal theory, securing political and civil rights, some measure of opportunity for all, unimpeded markets and private property was all that democracy demanded. It is striking that when, in 1928, Dewey traveled to the New Soviet Union, he observed: I was certainly was not prepared for what I saw; it came as a shock. (LW, Vol. 3: 217). For him, the experiment had two goals. First, there was what had concerned Lippmannsecurity against want and illness, and for health, recreation and a degree of material ease. The other was the familiar democratic ideals, familiar in words at leastof liberty, equality and brotherhood. The hope was that both will be more completely realized in a social regime based on voluntary cooperation, on conjoint workers control and management of industry, with an accompanying abolition of private

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property as a fixed institution (LW, Vol. 3: 244). Dewey soon enough came to see that the experiment which, under the prevailing conditions, could not have succeeded, had turned to disaster (Manicas, 1989, Chapter 11). Since then we have been left with the idea, inherited from Wilson and currently pursued by Bush, that making the world safe for democracy really means making the world safe for liberal capitalism. Apart from Marxist criticisms of liberal theory, there is a currently fashionable critique of rights-based liberalism often termed, republicancommunitarianism. It is clear enough that Rawls and Nozick (along with Flathman, Dworkin, Feinberg, Gewirth, Sen, and many others) are, despite differences, rights-based liberals. The other side is a much less clear group and might include any number of diverse writers who have criticized liberal philosophy and promoted some version or other of community, including Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Robert Paul Wolff, Charles Taylor, Roberto Mangiabera Unger, Michael Walzer, Carol Gould, Hannah Pitkin, Amitai Etzioni, and some others besides. The relation to democracy of these writers is also very diverse. But republican-communitarism is well represented by Michael Sandels , Democracys Discontent: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996), discussed in Chapter 11. Of particular interest here is Sandels effort to link his views to those of Dewey. There are two related features of Sandels position. First, he claims to have a version of self-rule and secondthe heart of his critique of liberalismthe real problem of government is not securing liberal justice as defined by either Rawls or Nozick, but the cultivation of civic virtue. To be a citizen requires a sense of belonging, the existence of a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake. On this view, governments have legitimate concerns with soulcraft, what he elsewhere calls the formative project. Sandel is quite right, of course, to say that Dewey was a critic of liberal individualism, but Dewey called for radical version of the alternative, not as in Sandel, a reactionary version of encumbered selves who, like Robert E. Lee, concluded that his obligation to Virginia (and to the institution of slavery?) was not merely of sentimental import, but had moral force (Sandel, 1996: 15). For Dewey, community was essential, but for him, in contrast to Sandel, it was grounded on recognition of interdependence not on blood, habit, religion or language. Similarly, Sandel seeks to capture the essential ingredient of democracy by speaking of self-rule, but in sharp contrast to Dewey, there is simply no attention paid to what this means institutionally. One wishes that he had read Lippmann, or more lately, Robert Dahl. This absence is explained, in part at least, by his distorted view of American historya history that, as noted, was well understood by Dewey and Lippmann.

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Worse, perhaps, for Dewey, in contrast to Sandel, the problem of American democracy was not moral but institutional and structural: In conditions of alienation, publics cannot exist.

PART IV WHY NOT DEWEY? The problem of American democracy is well understood by Cornel West in his important The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), discussed in Chapter 12. In the spirit of Rorty, he wishes that Dewey had been a more consistent historicist pragmatist, instead as I would have it, a more consistent naturalist, exactly in Marxs sense. West, sympathetic to Marxian ideas, sees the radical and unfinished character of Deweys emancipatory project. While one may have some misgivings about both his account of Emerson and his efforts at tapping American cultural materials, his critical reflections on the failure of Deweys project are especially provocative and suggest the deep reasons for what remains an unsolved dilemma: How to be both radical and committed to democratic processes. A useful comparison to Wests book is Robert Westbrooks Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (2005), discussed in Chapter 13. On his version, Dewey neither evaded nor transformed philosophy. Rather he holds that Dewey should be read as offering an epistemological defense of democracy, something which he recognizes Dewey did not do. For Westbrook, the argument has been filled in by the recent pragmatisms of Putnam and Misak. But the project is both alien to Dewey and, in contrast to his well informed book (1991), ignores the arguments that Dewey actually did make (see above). Westbrook admits that he gave Deweys logic short shrift and he endorses Kloppenbergs view that Dewey was taking the challenge of constructing a democratic political culture on the quicksand of instrumentalist logic (2005: 177). This is half-right: the Logic was the ground of his vision of a democratic culture, but one needs to overcome a good deal of the philosophical tradition before one can see that it can hardly be characterized as quicksand. Similarly, Westbrooks suggestion that Dewey never leaves the populism of late nineteenth century producer-republicanism is a fairly typical criticism that fails to account for the changes in his views following the Great War. While Deweys socialism contradicted all actually existing socialisms, it was fully consistent with Marxs idea that producers in capitalist society are alienated, that neither wage workers nor independent producers on the Jeffersonian model, are capable of what Marx termed, free production.

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Again, one must see that Deweys critique was not nostalgic, but radical in just the ways that Marx would have endorsed. The temptation to assist Dewey by constructing arguments which he lacked is the central task of Festensteins Pragmatism and Political Theory (1997), discussed in Chapter 14. Like Westbrook, Festenstein writes solidly within the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy and, viewed through these lens, he finds fatal problems in Deweys naturalistic ethical framework (62, 99, 145). He concludes that Dewey had a scientistic hope for a physics of problem-solving (45) and that his empirical theory of valuation seems to rest on the possibility of a prior science of problems and their resolution, which does not exist (44). But inquiry, as Dewey understood it, was not some prior science of problem solving. It was the only defensible way to address all problems, scientific and otherwise. Dewey did not, of course, embrace the prevailing fact/value dichotomy and he often spoke of alleged scientific social inquiry, The following text neatly sums up a theme which he pursued throughout his long life.
The sociologist, like the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower of genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing them together in somewhat aimless fashion . . . But social ethics is the change from inquiring into the nature of value in general to an inquiry of the particular values which ought to be realized in the life of everyone, and of the conditions which shall render possible this realization (Early Works, Vol. 5: 23).

Chapter 15, the final chapter, rejoins the question of Dewey and social science and argues that the currently fashonable post-modern reading of pragmatic social cience will not do. So why not Dewey?

NOTES
1. As Sleeper (1986) remarks, we need to resist the almost universal habit of taking for granted that experience is the subject matter of [Deweys] metaphysics (1986: 6) 2. Perrys version of direct realism is, to be sure, untenable. See Shook, Deweys Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. But see Roy Wood Sellars Materialism and Human Knowing, in R.W. Sellars, V.J. McGill and Marvin Farber (eds), Philosophy for the Future (New York: Macmillan, 1949). 3. See my War and Democracy, especially Parts I and III. Lippmann and Dewey well understood the consequences of this shift in the meaning of democracy. Lippmann wrote: the fiction that the US is a democracy owes to the victory of Thomas Jefferson. . . It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because

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loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible (Lippmann, 1954: 284). Dewey, who was never a mystical democrat, offered similar sentiments. 4. Most Americans believe, it seems, that one has a democracy if there are free elections, but free elections require political and civil liberties and it is these, not free elections that mark the important difference between tyrannies and nontyrannies. For this reason, as well, liberalism is often confused with democracy. See Part IV below. 5. Rorty remarks: Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory democracy against Walter Lippmans insistence on the need for expertise (1998: 104). Compare Westbrooks very useful Epilogue (1991) and his later account in Democratic Hope (Chapter 14 below) which seems, at least, to capitulate to a Rortyean problematic. 6. While they have been under attack by the Bush regime, political and civil liberties are not yet utterly compromised. People can still inquire, speak out, and organize, even if this has little effect on policy. Accordingly, if democracy in the US (as elsewhere) is profoundly constrained, the US is not a tyranny. 7. There is, of course, absolutely no democracy as regards what is hypocritically called the community of nations. See Deweys remarkable and much misunderstood efforts in the campaign to outlaw war (Chapter 8, below). 8. It is easy enough to show that centralized planning, Soviet style, cannot be theoretically sustained and is disastrous practically. As Mandel, for example, sees, one must assume the whole of general equilibrium theory. But there are fatal objections to this theoryas argued by Hayekians among many others. There are variant forms of market socialism, but surely a vision to be pursued was laid out in the much ignored essay by Diane Elson, Market Socialism or Socialism of the Market (1988). 9. Once we are clear about misconceptions of anarchist politics including the idea that anarchists were terrorists and utopian in the worst sense, there is nothing preposterous about seeing Dewey as an anarchist. At the time of the Pullman strike, he wrote to Alice Dewey that he had realized how anarchistic (to use the current term here) our ideas and especially feelings are (quoted by Westbrook, Democratic Hope: 86). See also Hooks extremely useful account of the Marxian theory of the state Hook (1933) distinguishes society, government and state, and argues that where the government represents the needs and interests of the entire community, it does not need [the state,] special and coercive force behind it (214). Hence, for Marxists, if democracy is to prevail, the state must be smashed. Indeed, Lenins State and Revolution (1905) is an anarchist tract and a proper reading of What is to be Done and of the period from the October Revolution to Lenins death, shows that while Lenin made many mistakes, including, for example, destroying the Constituent Assembly, he never wavered in his defense of the soviets, the most democratic of the institutions in the evolving USSR (Lewin 2005). 10. During the much-misunderstood period following the abdication of the Kaiser, the revolutionary goals of Social Democracy, as understood by Marx, Engels and the revisionists were betrayed by SPD leadership. After this betrayal, with the help of Bolshevik revolutionary practice, Social Democracy was redefined as consistent with

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a capitalism with a human face. Similarly, the highly restricted choices of the Bolsheviks in Russia generated a very distorted view of socialism. See Manicas, War and Democracy (1989), Chapters 11 and 12. In both the German and Soviet case, the critical question is: could it have been otherwise? As Hook insisted, following both Marx and Engels, to be a socialist, one had to be a democrat. In our Orwellian world, the meanings of anarchism, socialism and democracy are thoroughly corrupted.

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Part One

PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

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Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism

INTRODUCTION By the turn of the century, it was clear to William James, Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey that science was giving its tone to modern culture. But for them, the consequences were more than uncertain. The most well known advocates of science, Spencer, Clifford, Huxley and others, were not only defending agnosticism and positivism, but a view in which science was to be immunized from the biases and interests of human communities. James, Veb1en and Dewey were anything but enthusiastic about the situation as they saw it. Indeed, Jamess criticisms hinged on ideas about the foundations of science which were completely novel, and Veblen and Dewey were clearest in seeing that science was being shaped by changes in industry and in the economic organization of society. Science, pretender to transcendent authority, was becoming industrialized, technocratic. David Hollinger has rightly argued that the critical role played by the pragmatists in American culture was to find and articulate a way of life consistent with what they and their contemporaries variously perceived as the implications of modern science (Hollinger, 1985: 93).l It is widely held, by friends and enemies, that they succeeded. On this interpretation, the pragmatists adopted a view of science in which successful prediction and control-vindicated inquiry. By subordinating all inquiry to practical ends, they could show that a belief was warranted only insofar as it was scientific. Finally, they could then vindicate a culture whose social motor was science.2 In what follows, I suggest that the foregoing interpretation is a stunning distortion and that the pragmatists failed utterly in their quest to set a new course for a scientific civilization. Not only were the forces at work resistant to their criticisms, but their fundamental insights, in a paradoxical inversion, became absorbed in distorted forms.
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But they were not entirely blameless. The problem is not merely that the language they employed, including, of course, the term pragmatism itself, made it easy to misunderstand their viewsa1though this was certainly true.3 Rather the problem was deeper. In particular, it regarded pragmatist views of the nature of philosophy and its relation to science. While the pragmatists were correct in seeing themselves as innovators, and while, finally, they may well have agreed on less than they disagreed, they did not wholly escape prevailing anti-metaphysical attitudes. Indeed, the nature of their commitment to experience made it easy to distort the nature of their commitment to practice. If I am correct, the deep problem in pragmatist thought is the turn away from the epistemological question, explicitly taken by Dewey. The troubles begin with Peirces verificationism and are enormously exacerbated by Jamess shift from the philosophy of his Principles to his radical empiricism. The difficulties in getting a handle on Deweys philosophy can hardly be overstated. My treatment, which relies heavily on R. W. Sleepers recent and important study (1986), is but a sketch. In Sleepers useful terms, if I am correct, Deweys logic of experience and metaphysics of existence made his naturalism precarious and incomplete, a feature of his philosophy noticed, for example, by Woodbridge and Santayana. For me, his logic of experience needed what his metaphysics of existence would not allow, an indirect realism which affirmed that there is a causally efficacious non-experienceable world sufficiently structured to be inferentially knowable. Peirce struggled with the idea, and surely in Principles, James had held to such a view. But for reasons that I try to make clear, James and then Dewey supposed that it could be dispensed with. Spurred on by an emerging consensus over the nature of science, Peirces doubt-belief theory of inquiry allowed Dewey to dissolve both the problem of the external world and the mind/ body problem. For him, there was no problem of knowledge berhaupt, even if there were particular and concrete questions which cried for resolution, questions which persistent inquiry could answer. This meant, on Deweys view, how might the methods of science be turned to human use? Yet, if as a consequence of the turn away from the epistemological legacy of modern philosophy, the idea of science which he assumed had positivist elements, then it became easy to see pragmatism as a technocratic philosophy.4 The story I have suggested is complicated, of course, and this essay must be considered but a sketch.

PEIRCES PRAGMATISM As everyone knows, what came to be called pragmatism was first set out by Peirce in two remarkable essays published in Popular Science Monthly in

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187778. In the first, The Fixation of Belief, he put forward his genuinely original doubt-belief theory of inquiry, what I shall take to be the core of pragmatism.5 Insisting that that sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinionnot as the tradition had held, the securing of truth, and that belief is of the nature of a habit, he offered that of the possible modes of fixing belief, while all do have their merits, the method of science had, finally, to be the one we must chose. Unlike tenacity, but like authority, it is consistent with the fact that humans are social beings. On the other hand, while the method of science can give us a clear logical conscience, as with all that we cherish, it costs us dear. The other methods, indeed, are psychologically satisfying and easy. The a priori method, e.g., allows the action of natural preferences to be unimpeded and under their influences lets people conversing together and regarding matters in different lights, gradually develop beliefs in harmony with natural causes (Peirce, 1950: 105)Peirces version of philosophy as conversation. Similarly, the method of authority is not only propelled by our natural feelings of sympathy and fellowship, but, striking a skeptical note, if for the mass of mankind it is their highest impulse to be intellectual slaves, then slaves they ought to remain.6 Nevertheless, as with the mate one has selected, one must work and fight for the method of science, never complaining that there are blows to take, hoping that there may be as many and as hard to give . . . (112). Why this effort? Exactly because the method of science alone presents any distinction of a right and a wrong way (1089). Its fundamental hypothesis is that
there are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; these realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as our relations to objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are . . . (l078).

I want to emphasize that (1) for Peirce, the doubt-belief theory rules out the question of the existence of an external world as a sceptical question, even if versions of realism and idealism remained open questions. That is, neither solipsism nor the problem of other minds can be taken seriously. Peirce cannot prove that there is something which affects or might affect every [one], but upon which our thinking has no effect. Yet there is no reason that a genuine doubt should arise in the practice of the method; indeed, nobody . . . can really doubt there are realities, or, if he did, doubt would not be a source of dissatisfaction (Peirce, 1950: 108). (2) We can know how things really are even if the effects of reality on us are necessarily as various as are individual conditions. We can because we can assume that there are regular laws involved in our transacting with real things. As Peirce later

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makes clear, this guarantees that given infinite time, there will be agreement on the part of all inquirers. Finally, (3), not only does everybody use the method, hesitating only when he does not know when to apply it, but scientific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of settling opinion (108). More generally, then, I am suggesting that the doubtbelief theory is a psycho-socialand thus scientifictheory of belief, but that Peirce aims to provide a philosophical defense of a particular method of fixing belief, the scientific method, the foundations for which are in common sense. To put the matter briefly (if cryptically), Peirce recasts the epistemological problem by accepting the Kantian insulation against scepticism, but by rejecting Kants transcendental move.7 This enormously rich beginning was followed by How to Make Our Ideas Clear, the essay which contains Peirces famous pragmatic maxim. Usually read as the earliestand clearest!expression of the operationalist theory of meaning, the essay addressed a problem which a host of writers had begun to address: the distinctive character of the terms of science. Peirce, and of course, James and Dewey, began their inquiries at just the time that a host of philosopher/physicists were producing books and articles in what we would now call the philosophy of science. These included G. R. Kirchoff, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ludwig Boltzmann, Hermann Helmholtz, his pupil, Heinrich Hertz, Ernst Mach, W. K. Clifford and his student, Karl Pearson, Henri Poincar and Pierre Duhem. These men all spoke with enormous authority exactly because, by then, science was rapidly becoming an evident force in the daily lives of people. More- over, all of these men have been called positivists in that, following Kant, they held, first, that scientific explanation must eschew appeal to what in principle is beyond experience, that to do so takes one into metaphysics, and second, following Berkeley and Hume, that laws of nature, are but empirical invariances.8 This thesis was related to the first, and, as we shall, it was a critical one. In his Analytic Mechanics, then, Kirchoff had said that we understand the effect of force, but do not understand what force is. Peirce found this self-contradictory: the idea which the word force excites in our minds has no other function than to affect our actions, and these actions can have no reference to force otherwise than through its effects (Peirce, 1950: 129). It surely seems here that, as Ostwald and Mach argued, force is not some mysterious power but is nothing other than its sensible effects. Peirce illustrated his famous principle by asking if one could say of a diamond that had been crystalized in the midst of a cushion of cotton and had remained there until it was burned up, whether it was really hard? He responded confidently the question of what would occur under circumstances which do not actually arise is not a question of fact, but only of the most perspicuous arrangement of them.

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We know that Peirce came to see that his initial attempt to reconcile realism and phenomenalism, the characteristic drift of positivist philosophies of science, foundered on the assumption that nothing is possible which is not actual or will not become actual. The issue was not merely whether unscratched diamonds are hard, but more generally, there was the question of that Reality which he had posited as so essential to the method of science. When Peirce applied his principle to the meaning of the real, he was led, as everyone knows, to assert that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real (133). Against himself, he asked whether this was consistent with the definition given in his fixation essay? Did it not, in idealist fashion, make the characters of the real depend upon what is ultimately thought about them. He answered that reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it (133). Murray Murphey was surely correct to conclude:
In Peirces system, the infinite future plays the part of the philosophers stone; it transforms possibility into actuality without compromising either the inexhaustibility of the possible or the limitations of the actual. On the one hand, the real must be a permanent and inexhaustible possibility of sensation; on the other, it must be wholly cognized (1961: 16970).

But if the real is to provide a constraint on current belief adequate for epistemic purposes, will this do? In The Monist of 1905, he returned to these problems. In the first of two essays, he made clear that instead of merely jeering at metaphysics, like other prope-positivists, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, which will serve to give life to cosmology and physics (Peirce, 1950: 192). This precious essence was his scholastic realismand precious it indeed was. But if pragmatism was prope-positivist, what did this mean? He began the essay with an anecdote about an experimentalist. He wrote:
If you talk to him as Mr. Balfour talked not long ago to the British Association saying that the physicist . . . seeks something deeper than the laws connecting possible objects of experience, that his object is physical reality unrevealed in experiments, and that the existence of such non-experienceable reality is the unalterable faith of science . . . you will find the experimentalist mind to be color-blind (182).

Although the phrase, unrevealed in experiments, is more problematic than may appear, this could have been written by Ostwald or Mach, Poincar or Pearson: Science aims at discovering laws which connect possible objects of

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experience, where this means, laws of invariance between phenomena. But in that same essay, Peirce was as emphatic about his scholastic realism as he was emphatic about what for him was the real novelty of the new pragmatic theory: its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose, the connection which James will be so pleased to develop. Whatever Peirce intended by his scholastic realism, it is clear enough to see that it is inconsistent with all the positivisms, Comtes, Mills, Machs or later Vienna varieties. While for Peirce, there was no non-experienceable realityin this he agreed with Kant and the positivists, there are real objects that are general, among the number being the modes of determination of existent singulars. The article of 1878 had either glossed over this point as unsuited to the public there addressed or, he noted, perhaps the author wavered in his own mind (215). In that essay, he had written: it would be merely a question of nomenclature whether that diamond should be said to have been hard or not. This is, he now writes, no doubt true, except for the abominable falsehood in the word merely, implying that symbols are unreal. Nomenclature involves classification, he continued, and classification is true or false. Thus, the generals to which it refers are either reals . . . or figments (215). In this case, the generals are real: There are diamonds and anything which is really a diamond is really hard because being hard is an inseparable property of at least some of those other properties which make a diamond what it really is. It must be hard. He wrote:
Being a diamond, it was a mass of pure carbon, in the form of a more or less transparent crystal . . . it could be found to be insoluble, very highly refractive, showing under radium rays . . . a peculiar bluish phosphorescence, having as high a specific gravity as realgar . . . and giving off during its combustion less heat than any other form of carbon would have done. From some of these properties hardness is believed to be inseparable. For like it they bespeak the high polemerization of the molecule. (219)

The point must not be missed. On positivist versions, laws of nature are construed as universal conditionals of the form (x) (FxGx) where is suitably interpreted. That is, a law is construed as a contingent relationship between the extensions of its terms, all Fs are Gs. But on Peirces view of the matter, a law expresses a nomic relationship between properties, between F-ness and G-ness, properties to which we refer with corresponding abstract terms.9 The reality of the diamond is expressed in the truth of general conditional propositions, but these are not construed in a Humean fashion, for as Peirce saw (and Kant before him), on such a view, science is not possible.

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In an unpublished manuscript, Laws of Nature and Hume (1901), Peirces criticism of Hume (and the Humeans) is decisive. He writes:
. . . we do not say that the alternation of day and night is necessary, because it depends upon the circumstance that the earth continually rotates. But we do say that by virtue of gravity every body near the surface of the earth must be continually receiving a component downward acceleration . . . Nor do Hume or his followers dream of denying that. But what they mean when they say there is not necessity in gravitation is that every event which gravitation formulates is in reality totally independent of every other; just as Hume supposes the different instances of induction to be independent evidences. One stones falling has no real connection with anothers fall . . . The objection to Humes conception of a Law of Nature is that it supposes the universe to be utterly unintelligible, while, in truth, the only warrant for any hypothesis must be that it renders phenomena intelligible. (Peirce, 1950: 310)

Abduction leads us to conclude that gravity is a structural property of all bodies; hence, d 1/2 at2 is a law. It is a contingent fact that the world is constituted such that gravity is true of all bodies and it is a contingent fact that some particular body be near the earth, but if the theory is true, then that body must be continually receiving a component downward acceleration; in freefall, it must fall as 1/2 at2. Science needs real connectedness; but such connectedness is not the product of constitutive features of the mind, as Kant had it. Connectedness is in the mind-independent world. It is thus that for Peirce, there are objective possibilities, unactualized, but real. Plainly, I cannot here do any sort of justice to Peirces complicated and ingenious philosophy of science. Murray Murphey has, I think, caught its most fundamental premises in his account of the material aspects of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Briefly, Firstness and Secondness involve, critically, a psychological theory of percep- tion. The phenomenal suchness of a percept, Firstness is a product of unconscious inferences of neural stimulias Helmholtz had argued. Secondness is the stubbornness or compulsory character of sensation. Thirdness, then, is lawfulness. As Peirce wrote:
Whatever is subject to law is capable of representation by a sign of which that law is the meaning, and whatever is subject to law is itself a sign of the law to which it is subject. It is in this sense that Thirdness is at once the category of law and of rationality and intelligibility. (Quoted by Flower and Murphey, 1977: 604).

Since the pragmatic theory of meaning holds that what a thing means is simply what habits it involves, and since habits are themselves analysable as

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conditionals supporting expectationsrealistically understoodwe can see how critical is Peirces anti-Humean concept of law. There are all sorts of questions that might be asked here, not least whether, in whole or in part, Peirces philosophy of science can be sustained? I forego the temptation to engage this question. Instead, I merely emphasize that Peirce packed a great deal of empirical science into his theory of knowledge and that because all of the usual categories, positivist, realist, idealist, fit his thought, none of them did. He did deny with the positivist that there was a nonexperienceable reality, a consequence of his ingenious, if unsuccessful, effort to combine realism and phenomenalism. No doubt this fostered confusion. Moreover, like them, he offered a verificationist theory of meaning, but unlike them, he tied this to a psychosocial theory of belief and a strong version of lawfulness, a version which was under-girded by his scholastic realism. His conditionals were not exhausted by the material conditionals of later verificationist theories. For Peirce, Thirdness was a critical ontological category guaranteeing his semiotic. The ideologists of scientific method liked the operationist part of the story and at least in part because so much of Peirces work was unpublished, the very complicated metaphysics that sustained it was ignored. Aided and abetted by the loose language of Jamess Pragmatism, the former came to fit neatly into the Weltanschauung of the times, initiating the myth of Peirce, the seminal American pragmatist cum positivist. James and Dewey each found different things in Peirce, but it is fair to say that they both liked what Peirce saw to be the genuine novelty of pragmatism, namely, the inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose. Although James had arrived at a similar notion at about the same time as Peirce, it found its most developed expression in Jamess Principles of Psychology (1890).10

JAMES PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Jamess Principles is perhaps one of the two or three greatest books in the history of psychology. Yet contrary to the conventional wisdom, it had practically no influence on the development of American psychology. It would take another essay to begin to show this, but since the problem is germane to the present argument, something needs to be said. (For a fuller account, see Chapter 2, below.) We can notice, first, that Principles was published when the subject matter and method of psychology as a science were still very much unsettled (Manicas, 1987, Chahpter 9). For example, was psychology concerned with the

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laws of the mind (as in Mill, Bain, the later Wundt)? Or with giving a neurophysiological account of the phenomenon of mind, including the physiology of sensation and the genesis of reasoning (as for example, in Helmholtz or Spencer)? What was its relation to logic (as in Venn or Lotze)? Or perhaps the task of psychology was practical, in behavior? Was its concern the generalized, normal human adult mind or the psychology of individual differences? And finally, what of its methods? Was introspection part of experimental psychology, independent of it, or to be completely rejected? James offered, modestly and misleadingly, that the originality of his Principles consisted in its strictly positivist point of view (James, 1981, Vol. 1: 6). It is important first to see what James did not mean by this. He was clear that the results of scientific inquiry were in no way the immediate results of experience nor were scientific objects restricted to what is found in experience. Thus, the essence of things for science is not to be what they seem, but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other according to strange laws . . . What we experience, what comes before us, is a chaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each other; what we think is an abstract system of hypothetical data and laws (1981, Vol. II: 123031). Plainly, we do something with what comes before us. But there are two aspects of this. There is first what we all do if we are to have coherent experience, if we are to convert the chaos of fragmentary impressions to a grasp of the habitudes of concrete things. The grasp of these, the proximate laws of nature, for example, that heat melts ice and salt preserves meat, form an enormous part of human wisdom. These empirical truths are practical. Indeed, they are indispensable to the continued reproduction of human communities. In Jamess view, getting an understanding of how we come to have such knowledge was the first problem for a scientific psychology. But there is, as well, what as scientists we do: The effort to explain these proximate laws by means of theories that, for example, speak of polemerization or gravitation. For James, such theories have an entirely different aim and ground. The popular notion that Science is forced on the mind ab extra, and that our interests have nothing to do with its constructions, is utterly absurd. But James emphatically denied that the interest, which generates science is practical. Picking up a theme he had advanced in The Sentiment of Rationality, he insisted that the craving to believe that the things of the world belong to kinds which are related by an inward rationality together, is the parent of Science as well as of sentimental philosophy. Moreover, the original investigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic the materials are in his hands (1260). Scientific inquiry might yield technologies, but James was clear that this was neither its motivation nor its vindicationa point that Veblen put to such

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good work in his The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. In contrast to the proximate laws of nature, scientific theories are abstract systems of laws. They have to harmonize with the proximate laws of nature, yet they are tested not in the course of everyday experience, but in artificial experiments in the laboratory. James seems to see that, in order to set up an experiment, we need to conjecture that there is some unobservable mechanism whose processes have predicted effects. We contrive the experiment, then, so as to eliminate conditions that, in uncontrolled common experience, would interfere with its un- complicated operation. That is, experience, in Baconian fashion, does not engender the inner relations. Rather, in experimentation, we generate experiences that give us evidence of the reality postulated by the theory.11 Accordingly, what is pertinent to defining success will differ as well. Practical purposes offer practical tests; the interests of theoretic rationality, the constructions which bring a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, the lively relief which comes with rational comprehension, answer to the aesthetic Principle of Ease (James, 1978: 35), what Veblen termed, the test of dramatic consistency. In Principles, Jamess selected example is a long text from Helmholtzs Die Efhaltung der Kraft. Helmholtz had it right: Theoretical science tries to discover the unknown causes of processes from their visible effects; tries to understand them by the law of causality . . . The ultimate goal of theoretical physics is to find the last unchanging causes of the processes of nature (1981, II: 1261).12 To be sure, James gave this a novel twist: What makes the assumption [of unchanging causes] scientific and not merely poetic, what makes a Helmholtz and his kin discoverers, is that the things of Nature turn out to act as if they were of the kind assumed (1261). Over metaphysics, aesthetics and moral philosophy, science has an advantage:
. . . Though natures materials lend themselves slowly and discouragingly to our translation of them into ethical forms; but more readily into aesthetic forms; to translation into scientific forms they lend themselves with relative ease and completeness. The translation, it is true, will probably never be ended. The perceptive order does not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it arise at our bare word of command. It is often a deadly fight. (1981, II: 1236)

This is perhaps the basis of Jamess most profound ethical claim, repeated in many different formulations, that the inmost nature of . . . reality is congenial to powers which [we] possess. Moreover, saying that the translation . . . will probably never be ended suggests that James would reject, as I think he should, the Peircean notion that in the end, there will be some one true description that

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is the product of persistent inquiry. Indeed, this would seem to be the case, as well, as regards ethical and aesthetic matters. Yet, the belief that there are atoms and molecules moving to and from each other according to strange laws is a belief about the nature of a hidden reality. Indeed, in his notes for the 1879 The Sentiment of Rationality, there is a brilliant argument for the pragmatic pertinence of the idea of a non-experienceable reality. James says:
The principle of pragmatism which allows for all assumptions to be of identical value so long as they equally save the appearances will of course be satisfied by this empiricist explanation . . . [viz., as according to Mill, that no mysterious outness needs to be postulated]. But common sense is not assuaged. She says, yes, I get all the particulars, am cheated out of none of my expectations. And yet the principle of intelligibility is gone. Real outness makes everything simple as the day, but the troops of ideas marching and falling perpetually into order, which you now ask me to adopt, have no reason in themtheir whole existence is de facto and not de jure (James, 1978: 374).

Nevertheless, if British phenomenalism did not suffice, neither could he accept a more beyond the actual as it functioned in Spencer and Kant. Appealing to Peirces arguments, he first notes that most scientific readers of Spencer wholly fail to catch the destructive import of his theory . . . They are willing to believe with the Master that the deepest reality is the absolutely irrational, because that reality is unknowable, but few of them ultimately realize that the knowable of their philosophy forms a world of Chance pure and simple (1978: 369). Spencers unknowable cannot function to give order, since to do this it must be known to have properties which could explain the orderliness of experience. It was thus that the plus ultra in many philosophiesin Mr Spencers and in Kants e.g., the noumenon is a dog in the manger, it does nothing for us itself but merely stands and blasts with its breath the actual (371). James was haunted by the apparent intractability of making sense of a relation between outer and inner , between mental facts and facts in the world independent of mind. At this point at least, none of the inherited forms of phenomenalism would suffice. Moreover, so as to be clear, they did not suffice not because, or only because, of flaws in the associationist treatment of the connectedness of experience, but because the troops of ideas . . . have no reason in them. James agreed here with Peirce that the real could not be reduced to the actual: There are still other forces at work in the mind which lead it to suppose something over and above the mere actuality of things. These include the sense of futurity, the power of expectation and our moral judgments, which also involve [. . .] the notion of something related to the instant representation and yet lying beyond its mere actuality (36970).

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The Sentiment of Rationality is important in another way. In holding that conceptions, kinds are teleological instruments, serving the needs of theoretic rationality, he hinted at an utterly novel solution to some age-old problems, problems given a full-blown naturalistic treatment in Principles in the chapters on conception (XII), reasoning (XXII) and necessary truths (XXVIII). On this view, classification, judging and predicating presuppose a rather intricate system of necessary and immutable ideal truths of comparison. The empiricists are wrong in supposing that necessary truths are merely the result of experience or as Spencer had it, of mere paths of frequent association which outer stimuli . . . ploughed into the brain. But the apriorists are also wrong since the eternal verities which our mind lays hold of do not necessarily themselves lay hold on extra-mental being, nor have they, as Kant pretended later, a legislating character even for all possible experience. Rooted in the inner forces which make the brain grow, and therefore not transcendental, they can be given a wholly naturalistic explanation. Moreover, psychology shows that classification is functional in the sense that essential attributes are nothing more than abstracted properties which serve inference. While universals need not be grounded in reality, if we are to think at all, they are nevertheless indispensable. It is not surprising, accordingly, that if Mill et al begin with a clear nominalist note, they are sure to end with a grating rattle which sounds very like universalia in re, if not ante rem (James, 1978: 49). As Peirce had already insisted, if particulars are wholly independent, inference is impossible. But on Jamess view, Peirces generals did not need to have ontological status, either ante rem or in re. The only meaning of essence is teleological . . . classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind (1981, II: 961). Yet it is critical to see also that Jamess pragmatic account presupposes as he seesthat there are relatively enduring things, that the world which is independent of mind is not Heraclitean: This world might be a world in which all things differed, and in which what properties there were were ultimate and had not farther predicates. Fortunately, our world plays right into logics hands. Some of the things . . . are of the same kind as other things; some of them remain always of the kind which they once were; and some of the properties of them cohere indissolubly and are always found together (1981, II: 124647.). That is, as Peirce had insisted, the objects of the external world have some character or other, even though they need not be self-identifying to be cognized. If they are not self-identifying, however, the way they got identified can be largely a function of human purposes, generically understood. H2O is not more deeply and truly the essence of water

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than it is a solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirstsince it is all of these things with equal reality (II, p. 961, note). Still, for scientific purposes, H2O is primary, exactly because the scientific interest in the interest of theoretic rationality. The foregoing shows, I believe, that James offered a powerful philosophy of science that was not vulnerable to the difficulties in Peirces more speculative view. And it was not a positivism: All ages have their intellectual populace. That of our own day prides itself particularly on its love of Science and Facts and its contempt for all metaphysics (1978: 56). Positivists fool themselves if they suppose that they dispense with metaphysics. Indeed, Metaphysics of some sort there must be. The only alternative is between the good Metaphysics of clear-headed Philosophy and the trashy Metaphysics of vulgar Positivism (57).13 Jamess philosophy of science was no trashy metaphysics of vulgar Positivism. Yet, James prefaced Principles by insisting that in writing it, he had adopted a strictly positivist point of view. If I am correct, the nature of Jamess positivism is centrally connected to the problem acknowledged by James, that Principles was confusingly a psychology and an epistemology.

PSYCHOLOGY OR NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY? James insisted that a psychology which takes the natural science point of view, must assume as data (a) mental states of humans (experience) (b) physical things and states in a spatio-temporal environment and (c) knowledge by humans of things of type (b) (1981, Vol. 1: 6, 184). But he also asserted that the relation of knowing is the most mysterious thing in the world, that if we ask how one thing can know another we are led into the heart of Erkenntnisstheorie and metaphysics (1981, I: 212). A moments consideration will show, however, that if the latter is true, there are some serious problems for psychology as a science. Indeed, it was the fear of metaphysics which had led Mill, for example, to restrict psychology to investigation of mental states,14 just as it led the behaviorists to redefine the goals of a scientific psychology. James nevertheless insisted that while psychology was the Science of Mental Life, this necessarily committed the psychologist to investigation of not just its phenomena, e.g., consciousness and the stream of thought, but to investigation of its conditions, physiologically and in the outer world.15 Similarly, while he seems to deny that psychology, approached from the natural science point of view, needs to solve the mind/ body problem, he attacked materialism, spiritualism, parallelism and epiphenomenalism. For him, mental phenomena are not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily

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process, but they lead to them a parte post (I: 18). That is, although brain activity is a necessary causal condition for mental phenomena, for James, it seemed obvious that mental phenomena were themselves irreducibly real and had causal efficacy. Not only do they lead to actsof course the most familiar of truthsbut mental states occasion . . . changes in the calibre of blood vessels . . . or processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. His emergent naturalism recurs throughout Principles. The following brilliantly suggests his notion of this:
What happens in the brain after experience has done its utmost is what happens in every material mass which has been fashioned by an outward force . . . The fashioning from without brings the elements into collocations, which set new internal forces free to exert their effects in turn. And the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas, which supervene upon experience, and constitute our free mental play, are due entirely to those secondary internal processes, which vary enormously from brain to brain . . . The higher thought-processes owe their being to causes which correspond far more to the sourings and fermentations of dough, the setting of mortar, or the subsidence of sediments in mixtures than to the manipulations by which these physical aggregates came to be compounded. (II: 123435)

James was not, however, clear on how such a non-reductive naturalistic response to the mind/body problem had to be worked out.16 Indeed, one might say that the Cartesian (ontically dualist) formulations which also occur in Principles suggest more than unclarity, that they reveal tensions not resolved in Jamess own mind. Jamess 1894 Presidential address to the American Psychological Association, The Knowing of Things Together(1978: 7189) was a clear step in the resolution of the tensions of the Principles. In that essay, he considered a host of theories in response to the psychological problem of the nature of the synthetic unity of consciousness and concluded that for various reasons, none of the theories can be accepted. But what of his own view in the Principles? He there had proposed to simply eliminate from psychology considered as a natural science the whole business of ascertaining how we come to know things together or to know them at all (1978: 87, my emphasis). That we do know things, sometimes singly and sometimes together, is a fact. That states of consciousness are the vehicle of knowledge, and depend on brain states, are two other facts. At that time he supposed that a natural science of psychology might legitimately confine itself to tracing the functional variations of these three sorts of fact (1978: 87). It was precisely, then, in his claim that a science had to restrict itself to functional variations between facts that James was a positivist. For despite texts that suggest the opposite, for example, his willingness to counte-

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nance Helmholtz on the search for hidden causes, he more generally seems to agree with the positivists that all talk about causes as productive powers is metaphysical. Science aims at but functional variations. The point is critical. The clearest statement is in Vol. I, of Principles, in his criticism of the automation theory. James insisted the whole question of interaction and influence between things is a metaphysical question . . . It is truly enough hard to image the idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules together; but since Humes time it has been equally hard to imagine anything binding them together (1981, I: 140). The problem is not merely mind and matter as different stuffs, but of the causal interactions between molecules constituting a beefsteak! The whole idea of binding, he wrote, is a mystery, the first step towards the solution of which is to clear scholastic rubbish out of the way. It was true that popular science talks of forces, attractions or affinities as binding the molecules, but while such words may be used to abbreviate discourse, clear science [Mach, Pearson, Ostwald!] . . . has no use for the conceptions, and is satisfied when she can express in simple laws the bare space-relations of the molecules as functions of each other and of time (1981, I: 140). The automatists pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . and say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born (I: 140). James insists that one must be either impartially naif or impartially critical, either pull the pall over the whole business or admit both physical and psychic causation: If the latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or metaphysical, and will probably preserve the commonsense view that ideas are forces, in some translatable form. But Psychology is a mere natural science, accepting certain terms uncritically as her data, and stopping short of meta-physical construction (I: 141). He had defined psychology as the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions, and as he says many, many times, he is interested in ascertaining all sorts of conditionsof e.g., memory, I: 17; of discrimination, I: 49498; of thinking that what we believe is real, II: 91735, etc. But not only is he never bashful about employing causal language and in implying that it is explanatoryno scientist is!but one may reasonably wonder what are the conditions for something existing or happening if, taken together, they are not its causes and do not explain ? Moreover, it was clear to James, even if amazingly missed by so many, that one cannot experience the causes of experience. Indeed, there had to be complicated causal relations between the three sorts of facts involved in knowing. Even the spiritualist and the associationist are cerebralists since they must admit, certain peculiarities in the way of working of their

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own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of the result (I: 18, my emphasis). Nevertheless, for good historical reasons, James, like Spencer, remained trapped in the idea that scientific causation was merely empirical invariance. But if so, then if he were consistent, psychology, as James had defined it, was not likely to achieve its goals. It is true that one begins naively, by taking for granted that people have minds, that there is a physical world and that people have knowledge of it, but if one then refuses to consider how, one is surely not going to explain perception, conception, reasoning, learning, memory or anything else. On the positivist view, of course, explanation is either subsumption (deduction, inclusion in a class already known) or it is metaphysicalappealing to occult forces, substances, powers.17 James offered no deductions and he produced no empirical invariances between the three sorts of facts, between, for example, the experience of red tomato, some discharge of neurons and some thing in the external world. Indeed, exactly because an enormous number of very different kinds of causal mechanisms are involved in my experiencing red tomatoare codeterminant of the resultit is hard to see how this could be possible! On the other hand, when in terms of conditions, he did propose an explanation, for example, of memory, he was then well on his way to that thorough-going, metaphysical reconstruction which would have been at least part of naturalistic epistemology. An excellent example of this tension is Jamess discussion of memory. The reader has been led to believe that he is getting some explanations, but just before James concludes his brilliant account, he asserts:
A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved in remembering. According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brains workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole creation is one, which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery, which always returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness or of what sort the knowledge may be. (1981, I: 647)

It is a remarkable fact, but nonetheless a fact, that positivist assumptions about causality and lawfulness are adequate to a scientific psychology, which denies that it is the Science of Mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. By taking prediction and control as its theoretical (sic) goal, such a psychology avoids the troublesome metaphysics of mind/body, and of knowledge and reality. Or better, as James had it, it assumes the trashy Metaphysics of vulgar Positivism.

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RADICAL EMPIRICISM By the 1894 Knowing of Things Together, James became convinced . . . that no conventional restrictions can keep metaphysical and so-called epistemological inquiries out of the psychology books (1978: 88). But this did not lead him in the direction of a metaphysical reconstruction, which would have allowed a full-blown non- reductive, physiological psychology replete with physical and psychic causation as a replacement for some of the central problems of traditional epistemology. It led him, instead, to radical empiricism, as John McDermott rightly says, to a novel metaphysics of experience. This then is the heart of the problem. Was it possible to have both a physiological psychology, which displaced traditional epistemology and a metaphysics of experience, or indeed, are the two ideas at bottom inconsistent? From the beginning, James had sought to transform empiricism. As Hollinger says, his previous efforts had been in work which James himself called practical and psychological. Thus, the idea that relations as well as particulars come to us as part of a single stream was offered in response to both associationist psychology and to neo-Kantian alternatives. As I have suggested, this attack was fully consistent with the indirect realism of Principles. Still, the problem of the relation of knower to known and of mind to body haunted James. He made the break with radical empiricism. It seems that, originally, radical empiricism was, for James, merely a name of an attitude. But increasingly he came to think of it as the name for a technical position in epistemology and metaphysics, a doctrine that allowed him to overcome the limitations of conventional empiricisms and to dispense with the inclusive mind of the idealists. Nothing could be clearer, I believe, than that James overcame with the new doctrine of pure experience what, for him, were ultimately invidious dualisms in his own psychology. What, in Principles, he had called the most mysterious thing in the world was now, remarkably, fully intelligible.18
If we start with the supposition that there was only one primal stuff or material of the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. (1978: 4, my emphasis).

Yet I do not see how to square radical empiricism with any vision of an indirect realism. Thus the well-known postulate of radical empiricism asserts:
. . . the only things that shall be debateable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. Things of an unexperienceable

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nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.

If what is not definable in terms drawn from experience cannot be a matter of rational debate, it is hard to see how this is not a phenomenalism.19 One might hold here that this takes James too strictly or that it reads James in the light of developments in epistemology and the philosophy of science with which he had little concern. Why, for example, hold James to the logicians sense of definable in terms drawn from experience? There is, I believe, an important case to be made here. James as a philosopher was a popular writer whose concerns far outran the concerns of the professional community (including the present writer!), who now struggle to get straight his epistemology and metaphysics. James could applaud Mach and influence Russell, but the James who left the psychological laboratory was ambivalently an epistemologist and a trenchant cultural critic. As Hollinger has argued, especially did James fear that his contemporary intellectuals were forming a culturally destructive idea of what it meant to be scientific.(Hollinger, 1985: 5).20 Thus, the tragic irony: Because his scientific psychology seemed to him to involve an invidious dualism, James opted for an innovative metaphysics of experience. This theory, he hoped, gave logical rights to those too tender to give up religion, but too tough to give up science. But unnoticed was the fact that this theory also undercut the theory of science he so brilliantly sketched in Principles. Because it has been difficult not to read radical empiricism as a phenomenalism, Jamess pragmatism was plagued by an incipient subjectivism, and by the collapse of realism into actualism, the problem which haunted Peirce, and if I am correct, haunted Dewey, as well. The issue is not, so as to be clear here, the status of essences or universals, for Jamess own psychological account of these is fully consistent with his own earlier indirect realism. Nor does it regard Jamess life-long criticism of the correspondence theory of truth, for rejection of it is also consistent with forms of indirect realism. Jamess most penetrating text on this score is his very early Remarks on Spencers Definition of Mind as Correspondence. James there wrote:
. . . the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and co-efficient of truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth, which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human actionaction which to great extent transforms the worldhelp to make the truth which they declare . . . The only objective criterion of reality is coerciveness, in the long run, over thought. Objective facts, Spencers outward relations, are real only because they coerce sensation (1978: 21).

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But if this is true, as I think it is, then outward relations are real enough, even though all we can experience are the effects of a world which is never experienced as it is in itself. This means that no sense can be made of testing truth by correspondence; but it means as well that as James had assented, the world contains relatively enduring things which exist independently of us, and that these are the objects at the object end of the subject/object dichotomy. From the point of view of science, these are the theoretized objects of physical science, just as so much in Principles suggested. Accordingly, foundationalist epistemology can give way to a naturalized epistemology in which a critical part of the story will be showing how, for example, theorized photons, being emitted from things not in experience affect our retina, and how, through some very complicated causal process, things in the outer world become the things of ordinary experience.21 That is, either we admit the existence and causal powers of photons which are in principle not definable in terms drawn from experience, or as radical empiricists, we merely accept, unexplained, the de facto relatedness of experience.22

DEWEYS REJECTION OF TRADITIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY This is, if I am correct, another way of saying, as John Smith said of Dewey, that the essence of his well-known rejection of the epistemological problem was his unwillingness to countenance that there was a theoretical subject/ object problem, that in effect all attempts at making knowledge itself intelligible are greeted by pointing out that science is a fact and that is the end of the matter(Smith, 1970: 2). Dewey was right in rejecting the spectator theory of knowledgethe kernal of pragmatic cognition, and right also in insisting that inquiry had a biological and a social matrixas Peirce had seen. His theory of inquiry was a naturalist epistemology, but it was incomplete because he finally rejected the problem of an external world and the mind/body problem as non-problems. (See Chapter 5 below). Dewey did, of course, struggle with these problems, from his explicitly idealist beginnings until perhaps the exhaustion of the heated realist controversies at the end of the second decade of the last century. As Sleeper has convincingly demonstrated, Dewey generated an entirely novel metaphysics, rejecting both classical realism, even as that had lingered in the thought of Peirce, and the Jamesian metaphysics of experience. Neverthless, in my view, Deweys rejection of traditional epistemology was insufficiently radical; indeed, it was conservative insofar as his metaphysics of existence satisfied Kantian strictures about metaphysics.

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The issue of realism was particularly bothersome since critics of pragmatism persistently said that it was an idealism. Consider but these few transitional texts: In Reality as Experience (1906), he offered, cautiously, that early realityreality which lacked conscious organisms, is at any and every point on its way to experience (MW, Vol. 3: 102). The answer could hardly be satisfactory. One might admit that if minded beings had not arrived on the scene, there could be no knowledge of early reality, but surely this reality would still have existed independently? In The Realism of Pragmatism, (1905) he wrote that ideas, sensations, mental states, are, in their cognitive significance, media of so adjusting things to one another, that they become representative of one another. When this is accomplished, they drop out; and things are present to the agent in the most naively realistic fashion (MW, Vol. 3: 153). His defense of a kind of operational naive realism recurs in The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism (1905), where he asserts: Immediate empiricism postulates that thingsanything, in the ordinary or nontechnical use of the term thingare what they are experienced as (MW, Vol. 3: 158). In Experience and Objective Idealism (1906), he defended the empiricism of (absolute) idealism but rejected its rationalism, the idea that thought or reason provides objectivity to sensory data. But he left open what did. It was thus that R. B. Perry was happy to accept Deweys rescue of reality from dependence on intellect, but was not happy that Dewey was satisfied to leave it in the grasp of that more universal experience which is a matter of functions and habit, of active adjustments and readjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than states of consciousness. For Perry, a thoroughgoing realism must assert independence not only of thought, but of any variety whatsoever of experiencing, whether it be perception, feeling, or even the instinctive response of the organism to its environment(Perry, 1912: 32324).23 Deweys earliest writings on mind and body are patently dualist and, as in his 1884 The New Psychology, he is at pains to deny that physiology can give any sort of explanation of psychical events. Following Wundt, he was at that time insisting that of itself, physiology has no value for psychology(EW, Vol. 1). The justly famous Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology (1896) has often been taken as Deweys solution to the mind/body problem. But though it does mark a decisive break from his earlier dualism, its key feature is the way that Dewey preserves, in a biological setting, the teleology of his earlier idealism. He firmly and rightly rejects mechanistic biology as inadequate to the facts, then generalizes this to include the psychical. To be sure, the mechanistic view did assume that the sensation is an ambiguous dweller on the borderland of soul and body, the idea (or central process) is purely psychical, and the act (or movement) is purely physical, but it was no

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answer to assert merely that the reflex arc formulation is neither physical (or physiological) nor psychological: it is a mixed materialistic-spiritualist assumption (EW, Vol. 5: 104). Had Dewey been more critical of the new behaviorists in American psychology, he would have seenand might have taught them, that his brilliant critique of mechanism utterly undermined their research program. But in fact, his easy functionalist solution to the ontological issue surely contributed to the view, shared by all the behaviorists, here including Skinner, that mind/ body was a non-issue. See Chapter 2, below. Finally, while there are texts that support the view that Dewey assumed that psychology (along with sociology) had displaced traditional epistemology, he seems not to have noticed there that there were matters left unfinished, matters which rightly puzzled his critics. Here is one example: . . . when a writer endeavors to take a frankly naturalistic, biological and moral attitude, and to account for knowledge on the basis of the place it occupies in such a reality, he is treated as if his philosophy were only, after all, just another kind of epistemology. (See Part II of this volume, below). For Dewey, of course, the root fallacy of all epistemology was the failure to recognize that what is doubtful is not the existence of the world but the validity of certain customary yet inferential beliefs about things in it (MW, Vol. 8). Presumably, once this be admitted, one ought to get on with the real questions of which inferred beliefs were valida wholly scientific problem. But it hardly satisfied his critics to treat them as if they failed to understand that their problems were non-problems and to assert that [pragmatism] occupies a position of an emancipated empiricism or thoroughgoing naive realism, that [it] is content to take its stand with science . . . [and] daily life(MW, Vol, 10: 39). By doing this, Dewey simply took for granted both common sense and science and thus refused to acknowledge with Hume and Kant, that there was a problem of knowledge, not merely of certain knowledge, but of how we can at all connect subjectivity to the world. Nevertheless, innocence once lost cannot be regained. Even if Dewey did show that the skeptical objections of modern philosophy foundered on a misconstrual of experience, there remained the problem of reconciling the reality of the physical object of science with the richly qualitative object of ordinary experience. Dewey, who I quote here, called this problem factitious (1960: 131). Yet however much the problem was unnatural, an artifact of some accidental developments in the history of Western civilization, it was, if unfortunately, a genuine theoretical problemas James surely would have acknowledged. In the present view, the much heralded over-coming of subject and object, the duality bequeathed by modern philosophy, is overcome only by eliminating one or the other: reductive materialism (the naturalism

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of Rorty), or (basement) idealism, the metaphysics so frequently imputed to Dewey.24 The other alternative, recommended here, is to insist that even if there is no duality between knower and cognized object, the famous egocentric predicament, there must be a duality between knower and that world which exists independently of knowers. Indeed, it is just this that makes possible that naturalized epistemology which James was so reluctant to pursue, but which, if I am correct, Dewey took for granted.

DEWEYS PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE James and Dewey had rich doctrines of experience. There is no doubt of that. Yet if I am correct, they became convinced, with Ostwald and Mach, and later, as regards Dewey, with Bridgman, Schlick and Carnap, that scientific knowledge could dispense not only with essentially metaphysical causal talk, but with talk of any non-experienceable reality. But if so, both radical and emancipated empiricism, can get only to positivist versions of science. That is, James and Dewey had to give a thoroughgoing instrumentalist reading to the theoretical terms of science and thus to accept the idea that an explanation was subsumption, explanation and prediction were symmetrical. Peirces How To Make Our Ideas Clear, now shorn of his realism, was, of course, the original inspiration for the pragmatic treatment of theoretical terms. Thus Dewey writes the resolution of objects and nature as a whole into facts stated exclusively in terms of quantities which may be handled in calculation . . . is a declaration that this is the effective way to think things . . . to formulate their meanings. Conceptions are either to be defined operationally or they are purely dialectical inventions (1960: 118). Dewey asserts that most of Newtons analytical work would remain unchanged, if his physical objects were dropped out and geometrical points were substituted (11819). But this could only be so if, to quote Duhem, a physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of mathematical principles, which aim to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a set of experimental laws. Once Dewey assented to this, it was easy to waffle over the goals and vindication of scientific theory. Did science aim at understanding or at prediction and control? Was a theory valid if and only if it predicted? Dewey was not, to be sure, alone in not seeing how critical these questions were. In fact, he seems to have anticipated Ernest Nagels influential view that the differences between realist and instrumentalist construals of theory reduce to but a conflict over preferred modes of speech(Nagel, 1961: 153). Yet, the differences are fundamentalas Hempels theoreticians dilemma shows

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(Hempel, 1965). Thus, if theoretical terms serve their purpose and establish definite connections among observable phenomena, then they are unnecessary. If, on the other hand, they lack such connections, then as but dialectical inventions, to use Deweys terms, they are surely unnecessary. As Hempel came to see, however, the dilemma depends upon holding that the sole purpose of a theory is to establish deductive connections among observation sentences. If this were the case, then theoretical terms would indeed be unnecessary. But theory has other purposes. As James of Principles had insisted, theory satisfies the interest of theoretic rationalityjust as had sentimental philosophy. Prediction and technical control is one thing, the satisfaction that comes with understanding quite another. On the positivist view, since explanation and prediction are symmetrical, this distinction is collapsed; and if so, prediction and control can be taken to define sciencea thoroughly technocratic view.25

THEORETIC JUDGMENTS AND JUDGMENTS OF PRACTICE Pragmatism had the burden that Americans could never accept that praktiche and pragmatisch were, as Peirce said, as far apart as the two poles. When this confusion is joined to some confusions over science, one easily produces the characteristic misunderstanding of Deweys profound analysis of the logic of judgments. By de- veloping in an original way the pragmatic insight which had linked rational cognition with rational purpose, Dewey tried to show that practical judgments answered to norms and conditions which made them as warrantable as theoretic judgments; but not because the justification of theoretical judgments is that they have some practical use, but because all inquiry is constrained by similar conditions, the indeterminate situation in which inquiry begins, the inherited materials with which it works, a reality which imposes its own limits, and consequences which are produced by acting on hypotheses, consequences whose pertinence will be a function of the rational purpose of the inquiry. There could still be differences in practices aimed at satisfying theoretic rationality and those aimed at solving practical problems. Fully following Peirce and James, Dewey held that the peculiarity of scientific abstraction lies in the degree of its freedom from particular existential adhesions and that in scientific inquiry . . . meanings are related to one another on the ground of their character as meanings, free from direct reference to the concern of a limited group(1938: 119). It was not, that is, that scientific inquiry was freed of its existential conditions and purposes, for it was exactly the pragmatists point that no inquiry was or could be. Rather, the words to emphasize in the foregoing are particular and limited, just as Peirce would have insisted.

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SCIENCE AND CULTURE Finally, there was Deweys well-known emphasis on science and scientific method. It is a persistent theme of all the pragmatists that although knowledge is fallible, inquiry has an integrity. Likewise, James and Dewey were emphatic that the world was responsive to human purposes, that inquiry could change the world. But it was profoundly easy to miss the real force of this, especially if, as I have been arguing, there was an incipient subjectivism and idealism in pragmatist ontology, and in consequence, an inevitable instumentalism in their conceptions of science. But adding to this, as Hollinger points out, it is a striking feature of the history of pragmatism that the detailed development of Deweys pragmatic theory of inquiry, in his 1938 Logic, appeared long after his more vague and question-begging pronouncements had helped win for his reconstructionist vision a following greater than it has enjoyed during the more than forty years since he did his best to justify it philosophically(Hollinger, 1985: 98).26 (See Chapter 5, below.) Nevertheless, Dewey was sufficiently clear on other matters that are essential. First, like Veblen, he believed that science was a critical part of the problem now being faced by inhabitants of modern civilization. Unlike Comte, Spencer and a host of nineteenth century writers, Dewey did not hold that as science gave us new knowledge, there would be continuous improvement in human life. In an 1893 assessment of Renans The Future of Science, Dewey endorsed Renans view that the definition of science . . . is to know from the standpoint of humanity; its goal is such a sense of life as will enable man to direct his conduct in relation to his fellows by intelligence and not by chance. But he was sympathetic to Renans loss of faith in science, acknowledging that the forty years since Renan wrote have not done much to add to the human spirit and the human interpretation to the results of science; they have gone to increase its technical and remote character. To be sure, he affirmed that any lasting denial of dogmatic authority is impossible save as science itself advances to that comprehensive synthesis which will allow it to become a guide of conduct, a social motor (EW, Vol. 4: 12, 17). In this essay, he did not say what needed to happen if science was to become a social motor for human progress. He returned to this theme in 1900, pointing out that the anomaly of our present social life is obvious enough. He went on:
With tremendous increase in control of nature, in ability to utilize nature for the indefinite expansion and multiplication of commodities for human use and satisfaction, we find the actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values growing unassured and precarious. At times it seems as if we were caught in a contradiction; the more we multiply means, the less certain and general is the use we are able to make of them (MW, Vol. 1: 76).

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If science were to become a social motor for human progress, there was, as Veblen was insisting, the need to gain knowledge of the conditions through which possible values become actual in life. Lacking an understanding of the causes of outcomes, we are at the mercy of habit, of haphazard, and hence of force. Physical science had out-distanced human science. We have applied intelligence to the control of nature but we have not put it to use to make a human world, to structure society so that our technologies are used for the realization of human values. (See Chapters 3, 4. below). Secondly, Dewey was also clear that the problem was essentially political. When he wrote the foregoing words, the social sciences were just then becoming institutionalized as specialized disciplines, each struggling to achieve that expertise which would make them authoritative in a civilization being shaped by industrialized science (Manicas, 1987). Dewey and Veblen agreed both on what was happening and why. Veblen was pessimistic that much could be done. In his view, American social science could not help but succumb to the temptations and atmosphere of the times. As he saw, it was easy to reject the idea that social science was inquiry into the nature and causes, the working and outcome of [the] institutional apparatus. Such inquiry was dangerous, since even if it should bear no colour of iconoclasm, its outcome will disturb the habitual convictions and pre-conceptions on which they rest. In the spirit of middle class reform, social science could concentrate on what ought to be done to improve conditions and to conserve those usages and conventions that have by habit become imbedded in the received scheme of use and wont, and so have been found to be good and right (Veblen, 1957: 132). So as Veblen saw it, habit, the haphazard and force were being reinforced by social science. Dewey, always hopeful, believed that the new social sciences could be part of the solution. Yet, in that early review of Renan, he had himself suggested an analysis that could have been endorsed by a Marxist, just as it became the point of departure of Veblens later trenchant analysis. Dewey wrote: Renan does not seem to have realized sufficiently the dead weight of intrenched class interests which resists all attempts of science to take practical form and become a social motor (EW, Vol. 4: 17) (See Chapter 10, below). His most significant treatment of the critical issues is perhaps his 1927 The Public and Its Problems. Dewey there offered a radical critique of the problem of democracy and concluded his account with a chapter entitled The Problem of Method. He affirmed some characteristic Deweyan themes, e.g., the absolutist character of political philosophies and the diversion of thought away from fruitful questions. In this context, he affirmed Veblens point, that while we willingly spent money responding to results of bad conditions, we needed to identify the causes of our problems. Forgetting his

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earlier insight, he argued that the reason for this anomaly was clear enough: There is no conviction that the sciences of human nature are far enough advanced to make public support of such activities worthwhile. Yet, if on this issue he had been nearer to the truth earlier, there was a deeper problem. It was the problem of democracy, the problem of the public, the incapacity of citizens to communicate freely, to overcome secrecy, prejudice, bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance, to replace these by inquiry and publicity, and thence to act so as to overcome present problems. This was the deep problem, since for Dewey, if social scientific knowledge of the causes of our problems was the work of experts, the problem of putting such knowledge to work so as to make possible values actual in life, was the problem of the Democratic Community. If people were unable to act intelligently, it was because they lacked the means. If people were now incapable, it was because they were incapacitated by the conditions of life, economic, political and pedagogic.27 Nor did people need to be experts: what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns. It was in this sense, indeed, that scientific method had to be the method of all, and it was in this sense that it was part of the democratic mode of life. (See Chapter 8). Dewey tried desperately to convince us that we must apply science to life, but even given the difficulties in his conception of science and even given his frequent use of control metaphors, his commitment to democracy kept his vision from being technocratic (See Chapters, 14, 15). In this paper I have suggested that pragmatism was a novel and liberating philosophy but that its fundamental insights became distorted as they became absorbed. The epigones and enemies of American pragmatism have been pleased to make it into the American philosophy of technocracy, celebrating positivist science and bourgoise society. This is profoundly ironical. Although, of course, there are very large differences in their philosophies, it would be fairer to say that the project of the pragmatists, like Marxs, was to assist us in de-alienating our increasing alienated world. (See Chapter 9).

NOTES
1. The many revisions of my essay have profited from Hollingers work. 2. It is also customary to hold that Veblens essay was a direct critique of Dewey and of pragmatic philosophy. This is symptomatic. Since Henry Waldgrave Stuarts review of Veblens remarkable The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (1906), Veblens idle curiosity has been widely interpreted as offered, as Diggins writes, in opposition to both the Deweyite determination to make all knowledge expedient and the Jamesian desire to allow man to believe what he wills to believe. But it is clear

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enough that idle curiosity is a direct and acknowledged appropriation from James. Moreover, Veblen put to work Deweys important reflex arc paper in his argument, and as I argue below, Veblen and Dewey fully agreed that as science was part of the problem, science was also part of the solution. As Diggins sees, Veblen is careful to express great respect for John Dewey and William James, but he fails to see, oddly, that this is exactly because Veblen is not attacking their pragmatism, but the already persuasive technologism of American culture. For an example of the misunderstandings on these critical points, see John Diggins, The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1978): 30, 82f. and 182. Perry Miller is more cautious. See his Introduction, American Thought, Civil War to World War I (New York: Reinhart, 1954): xlviii. More recently, see Dorothy Ross, American Social Science and the Idea of Progress, in Thomas L. Haskell (ed.), The Authority of Experts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984): 165 and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3. Jamess 1907 Pragmatism contributed greatly to confusion here. It is, of course, an exciting book which squarely faced the present dilemma of philosophy: Our children . . . are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Yet, James let his language carry him away, as Dewey was quick to point out. See Deweys review, What Pragmatism Means by Practical (1908), John Dewey: The Middle Works, Vol. 4 (Carbondale, II.: Southern Illinois Press, 1977). 4. While it is not part of the present argument, if I am correct, Richard Rortys interpretation of Dewey falls into the family of misinterpretations which stem from the problem discussed in what follows. Versus Rorty, Sleeper is correct in seeing that (1) Dewey did not try to overcome the tradition, but to transform it and (2) Dewey did not try to make everything scientific if by science, one means what Rorty means. Deweys conception, as I argue, was faulty, but not quite as faulty as the one promoted by Rorty and imputed to Dewey by him. Sleeper, John McDermott and Abraham Edel have considered Rortys views of pragmatism in the Winter, 1985 issue of The Transactions of the Charles s. Peirce Society, Vol. XXI, No.1. See also James Campbells excellent treatment, Rortys Use of Dewey, Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXII, No.2 (Summer, 1984). 5. More generally, the idea that there is an inseperable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose, is held by all the pragmatists. Remaining citations from Peirce are from P. P. Weiner (ed.), Values in a Universe of Chance (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 6. The text looks elitist, of course, but this is doubtful. Not only must we accept Peirces mix of irony and seriousness, but he was no doubt correct in judging both the effectiveness of the method of authority and its psychology. Yet he may well be offering here that, if we chose, we can all always use the scientific method. As I note below, he says everybody uses the scientific method about a great many things. For some interesting discussion, see Thomas L. Haskell, Professionalism versus Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of Professional Communities, in Haskell (ed.), The Authority of Experts.

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7. See M. F. Burnyeat, The Sceptic in his Place and Time, in R. Rorty et al. (eds), Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On the present view, if Peirce recast the epistemological problem and refused the transcendental move, Dewey, and James, in his radical empiricism, refused the transcendental move and the epistemological problem. 8. For discussion of these figures, see John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), chapter 14. My definition of positivism, it should be noted, has two components. The label was not true of Helmholtz, nor likely of Hertz, nor, as I shall argue, of Peirce or of James in Principles. An enormously useful account of Helmholtz, pertinent to the present essay, is to be found in M. Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1971). 9. See Fred I. Dretskes Laws of Nature, Philosophy of Science, 44 (1977). If the properties are real and abstract, that is, sui generis real, we have a Platonism. On the other hand, as Peirce also suggests, if they are but abstracted real properties of complexes, we can have a far more modest realism. 10. See Elizabeth Flower, The Unity of Knowledge and Purpose in Jamess View of Action, in W.R Corti (ed.), The Philosophy of William James (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976). 11. Although it cannot be pursued here, the point is more fundamental than may appear. Experiment, properly understood, implies that causal laws cannot be sequences of events and that causal laws continue to operate under open conditions, when there are no empirical invariances. See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science. 2nd Edition (Atlantic Highlands, N.]: Humanities, 1978): 3336. 12. There can be no doubt that Helmholtz had a realist view of causality. For example, he wrote, the word Ursache (which I use here precisely and literally) means that existent something (Bestehende) which lies hidden behind the changes we perceive. It is the hidden but continuously existent basis of phenomena (Selected Writings, Russell Kahl (ed.), Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). See especially 52126. Veblen concurred. Singling out Karl Pearson, he wrote: Those eminent authorities who speak for a colorless mathematical formulation invariably and necessarily fall back on the (essentially metaphysical) preconception of causation as soon as they go into the actual work of scientific inquiry (The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays, New York: Russell and Russell, 1961: 15). And in a distinctly Jamesian formulation, he noted that the concept of causation is recognized to be a metaphysical postulate, a matter of imputation, not of observation; whereas it is claimed that scientific inquiry neither does not legitimately, nor, indeed, currently make use a postulate more metaphysical than the concept of idle concomitance of variation . . . (35). Dewey is much less clear, offering very positivist sounding utterances. See Chapter 4, below. 13. Compare Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism Without Foundations (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), esp. 1014; 28489. 14. Mill followed Comte in noting that states of mind are caused either by other states of mind or by a state of the body (Mill, Logic, Bk. IV, ch. 4). This last was physiology, since sensation always has for its proximate cause some affection of the portion of our frame called the nervous system. The laws of the mind, then,

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were 1aws regarding the succession of states of mindBritish associationism, as it came to be called. 15. In the radically rewritten second edition of his Principles of Psychology (1870), Spencer defended an indirect realism, which he called transfigured realism. Spencer distinguished physiology, aestho-physiology, that is the discovery of the connections between the data of consciousness and physiology.and psychology. . . . That which distinguishes Psychology from the sciences on which it rests [i.e., physiology and aestho-physiology] is, that each of its propositions takes account of the connected internal phenomena (Jamess inner] and of the connected external phenomena to which they refer (Jamess outer] [A psychological proposition] is the connection between these two connections. (Spencer, Principles of Psychology, New York: Appleton, I: 132). In his Remarks on Spencers Definition of Mind as Correspondence, James gave a devastating critique of Spencers principle, the adjustment of inner to outer relations, a principle offered to explain both life and the entire process of mental evolution. James argued that if the ascertainment of outward fact is supposed to be the evolutionary task of organisms, then the principle cannot be true: Mind, as we actually find it, contains all sorts of lawsthose of logic, of fancy, of wit, of taste, decorum, beauty, morals, and so forth, as well as perception of fact (8). But if correspondence is loosened to avoid absurdity, the principle is quickly seen to be vacuous: Everything corresponds in some way with everything else that coexists in the same world with it (10). What James seems not to have seen is that the flaw he correctly diagnosed was itself a result of Spencers commitment to Humean causality, causes as empirical invariances. Machs influential physiological psychology, it might here be mentioned, made the same assumption. For discussion of Spencer and Mach on these critical themes, see Manicas, History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Chapter 9. 16. Owen Flanagan Jr. has provided a reading of Principles along the lines of an non-reductive neuropsychology in his The Science of the Mind (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT press, 1984). See also my Whither Psychology? in J. Margolis, R. Harr, P. T. Manicas and P. F. Secord, Psychology: Designing the Disci pline (Oxford: Basil Blackwel1, 1986); Manicas, A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, chapter 14 and below, Chapter 2. 17. For evidence that James was sensitive to the problems about explanation which had emerged at just this time, see his note for the Sentiment of Rationality, in Essays in Philosophy: 34041. A brilliant summary of twenty-five years of debate on the question is Pierre Duhems 1906 La Theories Physique; Son Object, Sa Structure (translated as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton University Press, 1954). To explain, Duhem said, is to strip reality of the appearances covering it like a veil. Explanations, accordingly, are always metaphysical. In agreement with Ostwald and Mach, then, a physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of mathematical principles, which aim to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a set of experimental laws (19). 18. See John J. McDermott, Introduction, Essays in Radical Empiricism, The Works of William James (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1976), and

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Gerald Myerss introduction to Jamess Principles of Psychology, Works: xixl. Myers offers that James had set out to write a book that introduced psychology as a natural science. . . . But the project forced him, he confessed, to operate with an assumption that the philosopher in him seriously mistrusted (xiii). 19. See Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), Chapter 11. Myers comments, the view that physical things are merely collections of sensations or sensible qualities (sometimes called phenomenalism, sometimes Berkeleyan idealism) might be hard to defend on the dualist premise of Principles, but it fits neatly into the scheme of radical empiricism, where everything is made of sensations or sensible qualities ( 319). Myers notes also if we examine the eight essays that represent Jamess radical empiricism, we cannot detect any effort to work out in technical detail the vague blueprint of pure experience (316). Myerss suggests an explanation of this in citing Jamess view that philosophies are only pictures of the world which have grown up in the minds of different individuals (317). Do pictures need philosophical argument? Or perhaps, was James satisfied to leave this to epistemologists? It is true that James denied, as per most phenomenalisms, that physical objects are constructions from private particulars. See Edward H. Madden and Peter H. Hare, Jamess View of Causality, in Corti (ed.), 1976: 113ff. It was thus that as James said, radical empiricism has more affinities with natural realism than with the views of Berkeley or Mill . . . Yet, as Madden and Hare argue, Jamess commitment to the privacy of the particulars of direct experience was fatal, exactly because he then could not provide an adequate account of potentiality. 20. Dewey shared Hollingers view. In his own Development of American Pragmatism, Dewey wrote, Peirce was above all a logician; whereas James was an educator and a humanist and wished to force the general public to realize that certain problems, certain philosophical debates, have a real importance for mankind, because the beliefs which they bring into play lead to very different modes of conduct. The premature narrowing of context, audience, discipline and definition of problems in reading James has hermeneutic implications which are far more important than one is likely to think. 21. The psychological story will be but part of the story because it will need to be supplemented by a sociology of knowledge and a philosophical argument. See below Chapter 6. For the pertinence of sociology of knowledge to Deweys naturalistic epistemology, see Thelma Lavine, Naturalism and the Sociological Analysis of Knowledge, in Y. H. Krikorian (ed.), Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944). 22. W. Donald Oliver remarks that in the world of pure experience there are no mysteries. Once the distinction between mental and physical is expressed in terms of two set of relations, no explanation need be sought for the occurrence of an item of experience in the one or the other set of relations. Indeed, the very notion of explanation is deprived of meaning, hence to seek one is to fail to understand the import of Jamess radical empiricism (Jamess Cerebral Dichotomy, in Corti, 1976: 36). One might hold, equally, that James wanted to keep the basis of the relatedness of experience mysterious so as to make possible a source of order, which is non-

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naturalistic. See Eugene Fontinell, Self, God and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 23. A useful volume in this regard is S. Morgenbesser (ed.), Dewey and his Critics (New York: The Journal of Philosophy, 1977), esp. Sections II and III. Sleeper argues that Dewey held to what he calls transactional realism, but sees that Dewey seems unable to recognize that what bothers Woodbridge is the conclusion that . . . real objects are not merely antecedent to being known, but antecedent to being had in experience, antecedent to experience altogether (1986: 115). 24. The term basement idealist in reference to Dewey is T. V. Smiths, my teacher at Syracuse. 25. Morgenbesser notes Dewey need not be interpreted to argue against a realist view of the nature of theoretical entities, to argue against their reality. His argument was rather that we can understand the significance and point of postulating theoretical entities or understand the role a theoretical term plays in a theory only if we understand the use to which the theory will be put and the specific problems to which it is addressed (1977: xvi). This is substantially the interpretation I have offered of James. While Dewey can be read in this way, Dewey sometimes seemed willing to accept a straightforward instrumentalist view of theoretical terms. We should note also here that to say this is not to say that Deweys philosophy of logic or of language has much in common with recent empiricism. See Chapter 2 and 4 below). 26. Sleeper rightly puts the Logic in the center of his interpretation of Dewey and shows that its ideas had antecedents as early as Deweys 1892 syllabus for Course 5. But, of course, Sleeper had the advantage of reading the Logic while Deweys early followers did not. As Ernest Nagels near dismissal of the doctrines of the Logic shows, by the time it was published, the philosophers could no longer welcome its central messagewhen it was understood. See Nagels Introduction to the Carbondale edition of Logic. 27. Although Dewey had considerable influence on public education in the US, the result was, for the most part, a caricature of his views. The appropriation of Dewey by interests antithetic to his was possible, at least partly, because he failed to communicate that his pragmatism was not, despite his protests, a scientism. One example must suffice: When educationists began to seek professional status within the university, the question arose, Is there a science of education? James, Royce, and Dewey were clear in insisting that the answer was in the negative. But as Silberman argues, most educationists ignored Deweys insistence that the study of education be rooted in philosophy and the social sciences. Instead, teacher education alienated itself within the university and, in an orgy of empiricism, the survey became the foundation on which the entire study of education and training of teachers was built {Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom, New York: Random House, 1970: 42829). Thus, just as Dewey could be associated with Watsons behaviorism, educationists could absorb Dewey into their Taylorism and scientism.

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John Dewey and American Psychology

INTRODUCTION John Dewey is always included as critical player in the development of psychology in America. But his relationship to this development is complicated and, for this reasonand others, too, nearly always misunderstood. Moreover, there is a double irony in this. First, it is often assumed that he played a significant role in the development of behaviorist psychology, which quickly came to dominate American psychology. In part, this depends upon the view, that as Boring put it, American psychology got its mind from Darwin and dealt with a mind in use, and, as an experimental science, was to be pursued in terms already well established in the biological sciences (1950: 553). It also depends on the assumption, related to this, that Dewey gave Progressivism its voice that as the twentieth century went on, psychologists would fulfill Deweys hopes. Psychologists would increasingly move out into society, remaking its misfits, its children, its schools, its governments, its businesses, its very psyche(Leahy, 1992: 277). Finally, the misunderstanding depends upon a distinctly positivist reading of pragmatism, the genuinely distinctive American family of philosophies. Thus Hilgard writes of a conception of scientific method that was continuous with the pragmatism of James and the instrumentalism of Dewey that continued to influence the nature of psychological investigations in America even after Watson had dropped consciousness in favor of behavioral measurement (Hilgard, 1987: 778). Dewey, the functionalists, and the behaviorists resisted mind/body dualism and focused in adaptive behavior. This allowed an easy collapse of the

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functionalism of James, and then of Dewey, into later versions of functionalism, the characteristic American psychology and from there to later operationalist versions of behaviorism. Indeed, Dewey was powerfully influenced by Darwin and was a strong advocate of experiment, and he often spoke not only of the mind in use but also of control (Hickman, 1992). But while Dewey was a leading voice in Progressive thought, it is easy to demonstrate that he was a strenuous critic of the sort of scientism so well expressed in the text cited from Leahy. (And see Chapter 1). And, it was easy but wrong to think that the differences between positivism and variant forms of pragmatism were of little importance to the idea of a scientific psychology. Dewey was committed to an empirical approach to mind and did reject dualist psychology, but his instrumentalism was no positivism. Indeed, it is not difficult to show that he played nearly no role in the development of mainstream American psychology. Part I of this essay addresses these confusions. It requires providing a reconstruction of the development of American psychology, if only in sketchy fashion, assaying what Dewey actual did and said, and clarifying some key concepts. What, then of the second irony? Although as I shall argue, Dewey had great hopes for the new psychology, and early on in his career, he identified himself as a psychologist, but he subsequently abandoned psychology and came to believe that it ill served what became his primary intellectual goal, that philosophy must address not the problems of philosophy, but the problems of humankind. While he continued to argue that the nature of all objects of philosophical inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what experience has to say about them, instead of getting answers from scientific psychology, problems he was interested in addressing would respond to a new conception of inquiry, work which culminated in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. This profound shift is missed primarily because Deweys theory of inquiry is so fundamentally in opposition to the dominating logical empiricist theory of science, which had by then captured psychology, that it was misunderstood and then ignored. The second irony then is this: Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the cutting edge of current work in psychology is so-called cognitive psychology. But, remarkably, not only does Deweys Logic, misunderstood when it is not ignored, give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these approaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science, but shows us decisively why symbolic AI models must fail. One wonders whether Dewey will be ill served once again? Part II of this essay addresses these complicated issues.

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DEWEY AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY The New Psychology One of Deweys earliest essays was an examination of The New Psychology (1884). Historians agree that the new psychology derived from Wilhelm Wundt who founded the first psychological laboratory in 1879 and whose Grndzge der physiologishe Psychologie (1st Edition, 1873) was an enormous success. But Wundts psychology was complicated and offered many not always clearly consistent strands. Drawing on all the recent advances in physiology, neurology and psycho-physics, Wundt seems to have put it all together: brain localization, sensory psychology, will, memory and cognition. Moreover, in contrast to the reigning British tradition, mind was conceived as both active and unitive. Thus apperception, a central idea, was a psychic mechanism, which gave us the power of selective attention and discriminative judgment. Introspection, which for Wundt was the foundation of psychology, licensed this view. Third, for Wundt, mind also was social, an idea thoroughly developed in his massive Volkerpsychologie (19001920). Finally, psychology earned its credential as a science (and not a branch of philosophy) because it was experimental and because it disclaimed irrelevant metaphysical issues, e.g., the relation of mind and body. To be sure, this made problematic the question of the relation of physiology to psychology, a question that still haunts inquiry.1 The entirely new American universities provided ample opportunity to institutionalize the new, scientific psychology (Manicas, 1987: Chapter 10). In short order, American psychology would pre-empt all others. By 1900, some 42 psychology laboratories were established in American colleges and universities; by 1926, there were 117. Of the first of these, thirteen of the founders had taken degrees with Wundt. We get a clear picture of Deweys assessment of the high importance of the new psychology, by looking at his essay, so entitled. Dewey first notes that the new psychology is part of the new Zeitgeist of the new sciences, including the advances in physiology, but Dewey sees a confusion. The common view is that some or all the events of our mental life physically conditioned upon certain nerve structures, and thereby explains these events. But, he insists, nothing could be further from the truth (Early Writings, Vol. 1: 52). According to Dewey, all the leading investigators clearly realize that explanations of psychical events, in order to explain, must be psychical and not physiological (52). Professor George Ladd was an exception. In Deweys review of Ladds Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), Ladd is

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charged with holding to both the older opinion that physiological psychology is the science of the relations of mind and body; of the correlations of the physical and the psychical (EW, 1: 200) and to the new view, promoted by Wundt, of physiological psychology as a method, whose end in not the parallelisms between the brain and consciousness, but the investigation of consciousness itself by physical methods (200). This very well characterizes nearly all the Wundtian inspired work then going on in America, for example, as represented by the influential work of Deweys teacher at Johns Hopkins, G. Stanley Hall, and of E.B. Titchener, fresh from his PhD under Wundt. It was experimental but it relied heavily on introspection and its primary goal was investigation of consciousness. But, according to Dewey, advances in the biological sciences have had another direct effect on the new psychology: To biology is due the conception of organism . . . In psychology this conception has led to the recognition of mental life as an organic unitary process developing according to the laws of all life, and not a theater for the exhibition of independent autonomous faculties, or a rendezvous in which isolated, atomic sensations and ideas may gather, hold external converse and the forever part (EW, I: 56). This, of course, is directed at British-style associationist psychology, but as part of this, Dewey, still the Hegelian, endorses an ecological conception and the Wundtian premise that mind is social. Thus, the idea of environment is a necessity to the idea of organism, and with the conception of environment comes the impossibility of considering psychical life as an individual, isolated thing, developing in vacuum (56). But there is more. As a movement the new psychology has certain general features: The chief characteristic distinguishing it from the old psychology is undoubtedly rejection of a formal logic as a method and test. The old psychologists almost without exception held to a nominalist logic (EW, I: 58), a pronounced tendency especially among those who proclaimed that experience was the sole source of all knowledge (EW, I: 59). Hume destroyed all relations except as accidents and denied all universality. But he did this on the basis of purely logical models, abstract principles of difference and identity . . . put in the guise of psychological expression. The reaction to this, as in Kant, was to fall back on certain ultimate, indecomposable, necessary first truths immediately known through some mysterious faculty of mind . . . Such intuitions are not psychological; they are conceptions bodily imported from the logical sphere (59). These ideas are, of course, familiar Deweyan themes, to be re-articulated and developed in the remainder of his long lifeeven if, as we shall, see, they will have negligible impact on the psychology, which comes after the new psychology.

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Deweys hopes for the new psychology were not restricted to psychology only; he believed that it held enormous promise for philosophy itself. In three essays published in 1884 and 1886, Dewey offered a redefinition of philosophy and a new role for psychology: in the ordinary way of putting it, the nature of all objects of philosophical inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what experience has to say about them. And Psychology is the scientific and systematic account of this experience (EW, I: 123). To be sure, not any psychology will do. Deweys first effort was his 1886 Psychology, published four years before Jamess Principles of Psychology. Dewey intended the book to be an introductory text in psychology, but wanted also that it be an introduction to philosophy. In his Preface, he remarks: How shall we make our psychology scientific and up to the times, free from metaphysicswhich, however good in its place, is out of place in a psychologyand at the same time make it an introduction to philosophy in general? (EW, 2: 4). In good Wundtian fashion, the book covers all the characteristic topics, but despite the disclaimer of the preface, the argument is couched thoroughly within a Hegelian frame. The ground for this was set in the three programmatic essays just mentioned. In Kant and Philosophic Method (1884), Dewey challenged the method of intellectualism begun by Descartes (EW, I: 34) and he argues, as before, that Humeans, avowedly empirical, distorted experience. Kants attempted repair failed: Though the categories make experience, they make it out of foreign material . . . They constitute objects, but these objects are not such in universal reference, but only to beings of like capacities of receptivity as ourselves. They respect not existence in itself, but ourselves as affected by that existence (EW, I: 39). Again, the only conception adequate to experience as a whole is organism, a conception which Dewey found in Hegels Logic (EW, 1: 42, 43). The rational for Absolute Idealism emerges more clearly in The Psychological Standpoint (1886). The fact that sensations exist before knowledge and that knowledge come about by their organic registration and integration is undisputed (EW, I: 127). If one accounts for this by something not in consciousness, then it is not known and we have abandoned the psychological standpoint for an ontological standpoint(EW, 1: 12829). But either this matter is unknown, is a thing-in-itself . . . or is known, and then becomes one set of the relations which in their completeness constitute mindwhen to account for mind from it is to assume as ultimate reality that which has existence only as substantiated by mind (EW, 1: 129). The argument is straightforward: From the psychological standpoint the relation of subject and object is one which exists within consciousness (EW, 1: 131). Hence, materialism and all forms of dualism, as for example,

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the Transfigured Realism of Spencer, all fail. But so too does Subjective Idealism.
The essence of Subjective Idealism is that the subject consciousness or mind, which remains after the subject world has been subtracted, is that for which after all this object world exists. Were this not sowere it admitted that this subject, mind, and the object, matter, are both but elements within, and both exist for, consciousnesswe would be in the sphere of an eternal absolute consciousness, who partial realization both the individual subject and the external world are (EW, I: 135).

Similarly, in Psychology as Philosophic Method, Dewey writes: The relation of Psychology to Philosophy now stands, I suppose, something like this: There is an absolute self-consciousness. The science of this is philosophy. This absolute self-consciousness manifests itself in the knowing and acting of individual men. The science of this manifestation, a phenomenology, is psychology (EW, I: 136). Before the century had ended, Dewey did become uncomfortable with his Hegelianism, abandoning it for the variety of naturalism, which now so strongly identifies him, but it is essential to see that while he abandoned Hegel and psychology, he never did abandon the seminal psychological insights that his Hegelianism afforded.2 William James and the Problem of a Scientific Psychology But before we pursue the divergence between Dewey and the development of academic psychology, we need here to bring in the work of William James. Along with Wundt, James is often credited as being one of the founders. As with Wundt, Jamess psychology was complex, freely drawing from a wide variety sources and orientations. And like Wundtian psychology, it was also to be rejected.3 James himself played a role in this. Despite his extremely rich and provocative beginning,4 there were some genuine tensions in his account, tensions which led him, ultimately to despair of the very idea of a scientific psychology. The center of this was precisely the problem that had led Wundt and Dewey to abandon physiology. In James terms (in criticism of Spencer) if there was no correspondence between inner and outer relations, then the problem of knowledge was insoluble!5 In his 1894 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association, The Knowing of Things Together, James returned to the problem of the nature of synthetic unity of consciousness and concluded that none of the available theories could be accepted. What of his own account in the Prin-

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ciples? He there had proposed to simply eliminate from psychology considered as a natural science the whole business of ascertaining how we come to know things together or to know them at all (James, 1978: 87). As Dewey had earlier also noted, That we do know things, sometimes singly and sometimes together, is a fact. That states of consciousness are the vehicle of knowledge, and depend on brain states, are two other facts. At the time of the writing of the Principles, he believed that a natural science of psychology might legitimately confine itself to tracing the functional variations of these three sorts of fact. But he now believed that this was a dead-end. Remarkably, after struggling for some twelve years to write his great book, James concluded that it was a loathsome, distended, tumified, bloated dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable6 One must dismiss Jamess self-deprecation. But could he be right: There is no such thing as a science of psychology? Well, at least not quite in the way that either Dewey or James conceived it. The last piece of our account regards the prior question: What would count for psychology to be a science? Two things may immediately be said: It had to be experimental and it had to be free of metaphysics. But what were to be the data of experiment? Indeed, this could not be answered without first deciding what was to be included as not metaphysical. Some experimental psychologists were interested in establishing functional relations between physiological events and mental events. As noted, this was essentially the position of Ladd and James, but also of the earlier psycho-physicists, Fechner, for example, and of some of the old psychologists, Helmholtz and Spencer, e.g. Moreover, there was currently available a powerful argument that such inquiry was not metaphysical. Ernst Mach, the eminent philosopher/physicist whose enormously influential Analysis of Sensations (1883) provided a clear and forceful statement of a positivistanti-metaphysicaltheory of science which did this. He held that sensations are the data of all science. Versus the metaphysicians, including here Kant, and realist and dualist versions of Kant, Mach asserted:
For us, the world does not consist of mysterious entities which by their interaction with another, equally mysterious entity the ego, produce sensations, which alone are accessible. For us, colors, sounds, spaces, times, . . . . are provisionally the ultimate elements, whose connexion (sic) it is our business to investigate (Mach, 1959: 29f.).

Since following Hume, causes are not productive powers, on this view of science, scientific laws are merely connexions. As Comte (who both introduced the term positivism and ably defined it) had argued, they are merely invariant associations, taking the form, if this, then that. This idea was

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powerfully propelled by Mach and his followers, including Karl Pearson and, at just about the same time, by Francis Galton, the pioneer of a new psychology in Great Britain (Boring, 1950: 482). Galton accepted the idea that quantitative measurement is the mark of a science and following Adolph Quetelet, applied the law of error to biological and psychological data, including, of course, mental inheritance (Boring, 1950: 476). At this point, experimental psychology and the psychology of individual differences, which employed the new statistical methods, were developing independently of each other. In the following decades, fully legitimated by a positivist theory of science, these research programs would converge.7 Or one could deny the explanatory relevance of physiology, as Dewey had suggested, and argue, with Titchener, for an experimental science of consciousness which included data gained by trained introspective experimenters. Titchener also was deeply influenced by Mach. Indeed, as Hilgard says, because sensation was the unit out of which mental processes were built, Titcheners position was called structuralism, with its emphasis on the what of consciousness with somewhat less concern for the how or why (Hilgard, 1987, 7374). Attention to function would be the response to Titcheners structuralism. Pragmatism and Functionalism In all the standard histories, functionalism, the distinctive American psychology figures heavily in the subsequent development. Moreover, the pragmatists figure heavily in the development of fumctionalism from its beginnings in Chicago to its variant forms elsewhere (Boring, 1950: Chapter 22; Hilgard and Bower, 1966: Chapter 10; Hilgard, 1987: 73103; Leahy, 1992: 28590; Benjamin, 1988; Murray, 1983; Schultz, 1987)8. The so-called functionalist school included James Mark Baldwin, James McKeen Cattel, both trained by Wundt, and James Rowland Angell, who did an MA under Dewey and took on James as his mentor at Harvard. In these histories, the pragmatists figure heavily in the development of functionalism. While Hilgard regards James as the guiding spirit, Boring remarks, it was the philosopher, John Dewey . . . who was the organizing principle behind the Chicago school of functional psychology (Boring: 539). Leahy holds that Deweys important but tediously written mid1890s papers furnished the central conceptions of Americas native psychology, functionalism (Leahy, 1992: 281), In these histories, the path from functionalism to behaviorism is less clear, even if Dewey, as the mentor of Angell, Watsons dissertation supervisor and the premier functionalist, remains in the fuzzy background. Boring could note

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that Watson was a functionalist (with a small f) but he could not tolerate for long the requirement of the Chicago school that even the animal psychologist must take time to translate (sic) positively observed behavior into the vague terms of inferred consciousness (1950: 641). Indeed, with this not subtle erasure of differences between pragmatism and positivism, Boring could conclude that [operationism] was there all along, recognized well before Percy Bridgeman and Vienna positivism offered their putative advances over the views of American psychologists. Similarly, Willard Day, Jr. notes, in his otherwise very helpful account (1998) of the antecedents of behaviorism, that James was . . . concretely influential in the thinking of certain individuals who are important in the history of behaviorism and goes on to name John Dewey and William McDougall. But he provides no argument as to how these two figure in this history. Hilgard offers that it would be a mistake . . . to think of Deweys influence upon the psychology of learning as limited to the work of those who developed functional psychology within the laboratories (1966: 299). He sees three additional lines: learning as the product of schoolroom practices, sociological social psychology by way of Mead, and Deweys influence as a philosopher carrying on the pragmatic tradition (300). In his later history, Hilgard notes that Dewey-inspired Chicago functionalism became, with E.L. Thorndykes connectionism, a stimulus-response psychology. Thorndyke, whose later work in educational psychology would cross paths with Dewey, had begun his animal studies in William Jamess Cambridge basement and, contestably, was already a behaviorist. His influential law of effect is also termed functionalist. As Hilgard sees matters, although functionalism declined as a recognizable school, it was destroyed by its own success, and in part by the success of its intellectual progeny,behaviorism (Hilgard, 1987: 8788). Leahy see functionalist controversy, especially as regards the motor theory of consciousness playing a key role. He offers that Thaddeus Bolton (1902) integrated theoretical development since James, including the motor theory of consciousness and Deweys account of the reflex arc, into a theory of perception embodying the coming behaviorist psychology (Leahy, 1992: 286). For Leahy, Angells APA Presidential address (1906) was a milestone on the road to behavioralism (288). As Angell later concluded:
There is unquestionably a movement on foot in which interest is centered in the results of conscious, rather than the processes themselves. This is particularly true in animal psychology; it is only less true in human psychology. In those cases interests in what may for lack of a better term be called behavior; and the analysis of consciousness is primarily justified by the light it throws on behavior, rather than vice-versa (cited by Leahy, 1992: 305).

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Boring was probably correct: Watson touched a match to this mixture, there was an explosion, and behaviorism was left (Boring, 1950: 506). Watson founded behaviorism because everything was ready for the founding. Otherwise, it could not have been done (ibid.). With Watsons behaviorism, scientific psychology had not only expunged all talk of consciousness but indeed, had become a technocratic science of prediction and control. Considering stereotypes of American pragmatism, its talk of the cash value of ideas, and Deweys association with Progressive political an social theory, it is easy to understand the taken-for-granted role of Dewey in the development of American psychology, especially when his remarkable 1896 essay, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology is taken, remarkably, to be one of the most important arguments for the functional attitude toward the interactions (sic) between stimulus and response (Hilgard: 81), and even more remarkably, when we recall that in 1943, this paper was chosen as one of the most important articles ever published in Psychological Review (Leahy, 1992: 282). The confusions will take some unpacking. First, it is hardly clear what functionalism meant for those writers who got the label pinned on them. The distinction and labels evidently came from Titchener who got the idea from James (Boring. 1950: 542). Deweys orientation surely was functionalist, but that term carries a host of meanings. For Dewey (as for James), functionalism in psychology implied that there was an essential relation between cognition and purpose. Indeed, this idea may be taken to be a defining idea of pragmatism. But more than this: For James and Dewey, it meant, as with Wundt, that intentionality was the critical feature of minded behavior. Finally, functionalism entailed that mechanism in biology will not suffice. These come together, to be sure, in the remarkable essay on the reflex arc, to be considered shortly. But other senses were very much in the air. In addition to the mathematical sense of function, Boring offers that Angells 1906 paper to the APA is useful in this regard. Angell distinguished three conceptions of functional psychology. First, it may be regarded as a psychology of mental operations in contrast to the psychology of mental elements (Boring: 543, quoting Angell). Second, it may be thought of as the `psychology of the fundamental utilities of consciousness, in which mind is primarily engaged in mediating between the environment and the needs of the organism (543). Finally, there is a broader view of functional psychology as psychophysics, that is to say, the psychology of the total mind-body organism. Such a view leaves psychology room for the consideration of well-habituated acts, where consciousness has almost or entirely lapsed (544). All three conceptions are open to diverging interpretations, from a mentalism to a dualism to a radical behav-

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iorism. All, I think, would have made Dewey uncomfortable, even if the second, at least, gives attention both to the purposiveness of mind and of the relation of the needs of the organism in relation to its environment.9 Deweys 1896 Essay on the Reflex Arc But the critical point is the failure to recognize the philosophical background and fundamental point of Deweys famous essay on the reflex arc. It is true and important that between perhaps 1891 and 1903, with the Studies in Logical Theory, Dewey had made a conversion to his distinctive version of naturalism. But it is equally true and important that this was as naturalism, which carried a huge Hegelian residue. Flower and Murphey say it well:
It is almost as if Dewey held off from naturalism until he should be able to integrate with it those aspects of idealism which he regarded as philosophically important: the view of knowledge as organic and relational, the social character of both self and knowledge, the unifying and purposive character of judgment. Dewey could not bring together those features with naturalism as long as the dominant model of the latter was atomistic . . . (1977: 820).10

This was precisely the burden of the reflex arc essay. Dewey acknowledges that the idea of a reflex arc has upon the whole come nearer to meeting the demand for a general working hypothesis than any other concept (EW, Vol. 5: 96) and his essay is not intended to make a plea for what it replaced. But the new account, best intentions notwithstanding, suffered from all the features of the older account. The dualism between sensation and idea is repeated in the current dualism of peripheral and central structures and functions; the older dualism of body and soul finds a distinct echo in the current dualism of stimulus and response (96). Thus, the sensory stimulus is one thing, the central activity, standing for the idea, is another thing, and the motor discharge, standing for the act proper, is a third. But if so, it impossible see how action can be thought-guided or how we can learn? Experience shows not only that we do, but what is amiss: the reflex arc is not a patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes. It was not to be understood mechanically but functionally. Rather, it is a comprehensive or organic unity (97). Dewey could now reject mechanism and atomism from a fully naturalistic point of view. Consider Jamess familiar child-candle example. First, contrary to the prevailing view, it does not begin with a stimulus. The real beginning is an act of seeing. This act stimulates another act, the reaching, but both are bound together, subordinate elements of a larger coordination so that the seeing controls the reaching and the reaching, in turn, stimulates and controls the

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seeing. It is now seeing-for-reaching purposes. At the next stage, there is another sensori-motor coordination: Indeed, only because the heat-pain quale enters into the same circuit of experience with the optical-ocular and muscular quales, does the child learn from the experience and get the ability to avoid the experience in the future. The act has become not merely seeing, but seeing-of-a-light-that-means-pain-when-contact-occurs (98). Dewey has given a description, a point of departure for a psychology. But he has not given us a psychology. While for Dewey, intentionality is a fundamental feature of all learning, he surely has not given us an account which provides the mechanisms for this.11 Siurely, it will be a very messy psychology including as it does a revisioning of the role and relationships of the allcritical elements. And it can be naturalistically implemented. But that is not the point here. The point rather is that while subsequent S-R psychology adopted the language of function, it failed utterly to take seriously Deweys 1896 criticisms, and continued, happily, with the development of an atomistic, mechanical and, ultimately, mindless psychology. It is striking that Borings account of Deweys paper is both sympathetic and generally accurate, but that he fails to see the consequences of Deweys criticism for all later functional and behaviorist thinking. Instead, he remarks Dewey was anticipating the position of Gestalt psychology and occupying a position in the history of dynamic psychology (Boring, 1950: 554). Of pertinence here is Boring s view that American psychology protested Wundt, first with functionalism and then with behaviorism, while German psychology protested and got Gestalten. Boring concludes, given everything else in America as it was in 1920, the year of James death, you could not have had a protest against Wundt developing as Gestalt psychologynot there and not then (1950: 643f). Nor indeed on the present argument, does it seem that Deweys far more radical alternative protest could have been grasped and taken seriously. Others are even less clear as regards the radical character of Deweys position. Hilgard in assessing the very much later loss of hegemony of S-R psychology, writes that some dissatisfaction with the stimulus-response concept had been expressed as early as Deweys (1986) criticism of the reflex arc concept and that Thurstone had reiterated some of Deweys points in 1923 against behaviorism (Hilgard, 1987: 224), but Hilgard does not reconsider the opinion expressed earlier that this paper gave one of the important arguments for the functional attitude (81) Given the flabbiness of the category functionalist psychology, one might be tempted to hold, with Leahy, that the ideas of reflex arc paper were the commonplaces of functionalism. But the temptation should be resisted, especially since, more important, Leahy goes on to conclude that Deweys formulation was centrally important to

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later American psychology (1992: 282). His grounds for this claim are of interest. Dewey showed, he wrote, that psychology could dispense with an an inaccessible ego and instead account for the control of perception and decision in terms of coordinated, ever-changing adaptive behaviors (282). There is a sense in which Dewey did show this, but unfortunately, nobody followed his sort of solution. Indeed, in the effort to sustain a genuinely scientific psychology, anything that hinted that mind was doing the coordinating would be either eliminated, or as Boring had noted, made safe by appropriate translation.12 Scientism and Scientific Psychology J. B. Watsons Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It (1913) is generally taken to be the founding document. Watson had little patience for philosophy and was a diligent experimenter. For him, the new psychology had produced no systematic body of knowledge (Boring, 1950: 642) and introspection was incapable of producing consensus on anything. It was more interesting to study behavior for its own sake, describing it and noting its functional use to the behaving organism (1950: 641). One could observe discriminatory behavior in both animals and humans. All reference not merely to will or attention could be dispensed with, but so too sensation and perception. All could be restated in terms of discriminatory response. Imagery and feeling were another matter. Watson denied both.13 In the ensuing years, stimulus will be employed to suit nearly any purpose, from a physical input or physiological event to a situation or an involved object with meaning encrusted on it (Boring, 1929: 586). All of this, to be sure, was scientific defined exactly in positivist terms. By the 1930s, Percy Bridgmans notion of an operational definition was absorbed by the reigning logical positivism. Thus, propelled and legitimated by the wedding of traditional Humean empiricism and the extensionalist logic of Principia Mathematica, logical positivism could vindicate the so-called Age of Theory. With intervening variables and hypothetical constructs, S-R psychology could even offer gestures in the way of central processes (Koch: 1964). Indeed, it was during the heyday of the Age of Theory that the Psychological Review applauded Deweys reflex-arc essay, exactly because it seemed at least to allow for both central processes, as per Hull-Spence and teleology, as per Tolman, of course, all properly operationalized.14 If it seems unlikely that the judges could have misunderstood Deweys paper, we can note also that Watson fully admitted being perplexed by Dewey. Although he had been drawn to Chicago to study with Dewey, in his autobiography Watson wrote: I never knew what he was talking about then, and

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unfortunately for me, I still dont know (cited by Fancher, 1979: 312; Robinson, 1981), Philosophically grounded in nominalist logic and Humean empiricism, psychology has become objective and instrumental with a vengeance. And in that same 1913 programatic statement, having redefined experimental psychology in behaviorist terms, Watson could also see the future of American psychology.
Those branches of psychology which have already partially withdrawn from the parent, experimental psychology, and which are consequently less dependent upon introspection are today in the most flourishing condition. Experimental pedagogy, the psychology of drugs, the psychology of advertising, legal psychology, the psychology of tests, and psychopathology are all vigorous growths (Watson, 1963: 158).

It should be emphasized that it mattered less that introspection had been expunged, but that atomism had prevailed, and that the theoretical (sic) goal of scientific psychology had been transformed from an effort to understand the mind in use to the prediction and control of behavior(Samelson, 1979; Manicas, 1987; Danziger, 1990) We can this most clearly in the case of experimental pedagogy and the psychology of tests. Although the tools were created in Europe, Boring is correct to argue, the psychology of tests is essentially American. And, as Lewis Terman insisted, it brought psychology down from the clouds and made it useful to men (quoted by Samelson, 1979: 106). Poor Dewey would be again credited, if not directly, at least by innuendo.15 In 1929, Boring was clear that it was the functional psychology of G. Stanley Hall and Cattell that prepared the psychological soil for tests and measurements, but as with educational psychology, it was James and Dewey who provided its philosophical sanction (Boring, 1950, 570). Indeed, in the pages preceding this remark, Boring presumes to have shown how this spirit of America was crystallized by Dewey and Angell at Chicago (54546)!! Similar confusions attend Deweys work in educational psychology, especially as that is often confounded with the work of his colleague at Columbia, E. L. Thorndyke. Unfortunately, space forbids an extended discussion of Deweys contributionsand the misunderstandings of them. Briefly, everyone recognizes that Dewey emphasized intelligent problem solving, in which each child solves the problems that are confronted by selecting appropriate materials and methods and by learning to adapt these materials and methods to his or her needs (Hilgard, 1987: 674). This emphasis derived directly from insights already set out in his early psychological writings, and,

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of course, they were developed extensively in the work in experimental logic. It is also recognized, remarkably perhaps, that his intellectual heritage of Deweys views on education was a critical appropriation from European thinkers, including Rousseau, Pestalozi, Froebel and Herbart, particularly the doctrine of interest, which he apparently permitted to cover also the Herbartian concept of apperception (Hilgard, 1987: 674). Indeed, as Hilgard appreciates, although both preached scientific method, in marked contrast to Dewey, Thorndyke was conservative, aiming not at innovation in the schools, but at quality control, a consequence of the fact that Thorndyke was first of all an experimenter and measurer who valued data above all else (671). This was a result, of course, of his version of functionalism,S-R connectionism, and made him an ally of the more general movement in testing. As Hilgard remarks: Largely as a consequence of Thorndykes insistence on measurement of all aspects of education, supported by the prominence that intelligence and achievement testing had received just before and after World War I, the decade of the 1920s was one in which educational psychology flourished (Hilgard, 1987: 682). But to repeat: this was emphatically not an educational psychology that was in any sense Deweyan. To be sure, adding to confusion, Deweys efforts at reform went in parallel to this developmenteven if in fundamental ways, they were at odds. The fundamental problem here, as with functionalism, is the flabbiness as regards pragmatism, especially its relation to positivism. For example, Boring is good on the early relation of psychology to Machist positivism, and properly identifies the importance of 1930s positivism as regards behaviorism, but he makes no mention, in either edition of his influential book, of Dewey instrumentalism. Hilgard discusses positivism and pragmatism, but is not at all clear, offering both that there are distinctions to be made among various forms of positivism and pragmatism (Hilgard, 1987, 777) and that the conception of scientific method of later behaviorism was continuous with the pragmatism of James and the instrumentalism of Dewey (778). Leahy links James to Mach and thence to the logical positivists who influenced behaviorism (Leahy, 1992: 148), but omits reference here to Dewey. Despite his welcome concern with the philosophy of science, Leahy pays no attention to Deweys theory of inquiry nor to his views of science. More generally, for him, the dominant influence of pragmatism was its role in promoting a scientistic Zeitgeist for America: American psychologists . . . offered a science with pragmatic cash value. Pragmatism demanded that ideas become true by making a difference in human conduct. For him, this entailed that psychology be applied: adjustment, testing and control (Leahy, 1992: 342).

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Dewey and Academic Psychology Part Ways After the mid 1890s, Dewey wrote nearly nothing, which could be said to find a place in the emerging discipline of American psychology.16 Several reviews give us some additional insight into why this was so. His 1898 review of Baldwins Social and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development, offers a critical distinction: between examining the individual from the standpoint of psychical process and determining what of this is social, and examining not the process but the content of the individuals experience to discover what this has in common with others (EW, 5: 38586). For Dewey, the first belongs to psychology, the second to sociology. Baldwin confuses these question because he falls into a trap: Both the individual and the society are taken as given. Accordingly, when we want to know about the individual we are referred to society; when we want to know about society we are referred to the individual (388).17 This theme is elaborated in the address, The Need for Social Psychology (MW, Vol. 10), given in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the APA in 1916. Ludy Benjamin (1988: 419) well captures the characteristic misunderstanding of Deweys essay. He notes that the address, given shortly after Watsons manifesto, linked behaviorism with the development of social psychology in the service of social control.18 This not only capitulates to myth, but utterly misses Deweys central point. Arguing that anything which may properly be called mind or intelligence is not an original possession but is a consequence of the manifestation of instincts under the conditions supplied by associated life (MW, 10: 59), Dewey endorses Tardes view that all psychological phenomena can be divided into the physiological and the social, and that when we have relegated elementary sensation and appetite to the former head, all that is left of our mental life is, our beliefs, ideas and desires, falls within the scope of social psychology (MW, 10: 54). Although both the application of statistical methods and the behavioristic movement were just getting started, Benjamin would seem to have been misled by Deweys optimistic belief that both would contribute to what, he believed, was needed. Thus: Social phenomena are of a kind which demand statistical mathematics and the behavioristic movement transfers attention from vague generalities regarding social consciousness and social mind to the specific processes of interaction which take place among human beings (Dewey, MW, 10: 57). Indeed, Dewey (remarkably!) foresees a great reflex wave from social psychology back into general psychology (58). The net outcome of the newer type of psychological method will then be an unexpected confirmation of the insight of Tarde that what we call mind means essentially the working of certain beliefs

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and desires, and that these in the concrete in the only sense in which mind may be said to exist are functions of associated behavior . . . (59). We need to be clear that his suggestion that from the point of view of the psychology of behavior all psychology is either biological or social psychology (63), was both radical and unheard. Deweys optimism regarding the future of psychology should have been tempered. Indeed, just three years earlier, in a paper read at a joint session of the American Philosophical and American Psychological Associations on The Standpoint and Method of Psychology, he expressed fears about the direction of the behavioristic movement. It was quite thing to throw out consciousness as private and open only to introspection. It was quite another thing to throw out mind in the sense just noted. To conceive behavior exclusively in terms of the changes ongoing on within an organism physically separate in space from other organisms is to continue that conception of mind which Professor Perry has well termed, subcutaneous (MW, 7: 54). His criticisms paralleled those made against S-R psychology: In so far as behaviorists tend to ignore the social qualities of behavior, they are perpetuating exactly the tradition against which they are nominally protesting (54). So far as I can tell, Dewey explicitly discussed ongoing work in psychology only twice more. In 1927, in his essay, Body and Mind (LW, Vol. 3), he argued that in consequence of neglecting the development and historical career of an individual, an account of the mechanism of a particular movement of behavior is converted into an account of behavior itself and of behavior in its entirety (LW, 3: 33). The criticism may be broadened to take in the whole reduction of mental phenomena to the stimulus-response type as that reduction obtains in current psychological theory, even among those who do not call themselves behaviorists (3: 3334, my emphasis). By this time it was clear to Dewey that there was very little about academic psychology that he could endorse. Already by 1903, he saw that what he wanted to say did not need psychologyat least as it was then conceived, that logic, articulated within a thoroughgoing naturalism was the way to go. Of course, logic for Dewey did not mean what it meant for most. It was, as I shall insist, a strong form of an ecological psychology. We need not review the development of Deweys views on logic, which includes not only the The Studies in Logical Theory (1903) and How We think (1911), but Human Nature and Conduct (1922) and Experience and Nature (1926), along with a host of pertinent essays. Instead, we can directly consider his 1938 Logic, the text, which is the culmination of this development.19

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PART II LOGIC AND THE NEW COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Principia Logic and Empiricist Epistemology Logic for Dewey regarded the theory of inquiry and inquiry, for him, was a problem-solving activity. In 1958, Allen Newell, Clifford Shaw and Herbert A. Simon published The General Problem-Solver, a computer simulation of human problem solving. This provoked an entirely new direction for scientific psychology. Behaviorism in the form that Skinner had taken it had utterly discounted central processes. Age of Theory S-R psychology, from Hull-Spence to Tolman to Estes, had made gestures in the direction of these, but with the new technologies, an entirely different approach was possible: an information-processing paradigm that has generality across artificial and natural problems-solving systems (Wagman, 1998: 11). Remarkably, Deweys remarks in 1884 regarding his hopes for the the new psychology expressed a prophetic caution: Would the new cognitive psychology make mental life a theater for the exhibition of independent autonomous faculties, or a rendezvous in which isolated, atomic sensations and ideas may gather, hold external converse and then forever part? (EW, I: 56). Indeed, would it, like the old psychology hold to a nominalist logic and re-institute formal logic as a method and test (I: 58), As with Hume, would it proceed on the basis of purely logical models, abstract principles of difference and identity . . . put in the guise of psychological expression? Amazing as it might seem, this is exactly what it did. And the reason for this turns precisely on the question of whether we should or should not accept the still dominant empiricist epistemology of which the logic of Russell and Whitehead is an essential element. For Dewey logic is the theory of inquiry, naturalistic envisaged. It is sufficiently general to explain the behaviors of simple biological systems but also those of, say, a human scientific community (Burke, 1994: 23). It was intended to replace epistemology as that had been conceived. Nor was there a foundationof knowledge problem. Logic or inquiry into inquiry was for him autonomous in that it was a circular process which did not need foundations, either in epistemology, metaphysics or psychology. Indeed, it was the supposition that it did that had forestalled an adequate understanding of knowing. In a wonderful understatement, he notes that a sound psychology may be a great advantage and that unsound psychology has done great damage (LW, 12: 29). For the standard view, logic is basically a formal theory of linguistic syntax and insofar as true belief is a function of both the knowledge base and the inference mechanisms, it plays an essential role in epistemology. In sum, it is the aim of traditional epistemology to establish the grounds for dis-

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criminating beliefs as either true or false. Thus, the primary vehicle is the sentence. Second, the problem of the knowledge-base takes the form of identifying the proposition or meaning of a sentence with the information conveyed. Quine notes some epistemologists would catalog [the] alternatives by introspection of sense data. Others, more naturalistically inclined, would look to neural stimulation. Third, if logic is to be centrally concerned with tracing truth conditions through the grammatical constructions, an artificial grammar designed by logicians is bound to assign the truth functions a fundamental place among its constructions . . . The simple sentences are got by predication, and all further sentences are generated from these by negation, conjunction, and existential quantification (Quine, 1970: 3536). That is, standard logic is extensionalist logic. A consequence of this is the incapacity to deal with intentionality or to provide a convincing analysis of causality and of lawfulness.20 Finally, empiricist epistemology is epistemologically individualist in holding that there are beliefs for which social causes are wholly irrelevant. (See Chapter 6, below.) I specifically select Quine here to represent current empiricist epistemology since the point to be made holds whether one is positivist, logical empiricist (neo-positivist) or post-positivist, a la Quine, whether or not, that is, one holds to a firm analytic/synthetic distinction, to a non-holist verification theory of meaning or indeed, to one of the more recent varieties of reliabilism, internalism or externalism.21 It can hardly be doubted that the blossoming of AI (artificial intelligence) was profoundly constrained by assumptions taken uncritically from standard empiricist epistemology. Here is an early formulation:
The human brain is an information-processing system whose memories hold interrelated symbol structures and whose sensory and motor connections received encoded symbols from the outside via sensory organs and send encoded symbols to motor organs. It accomplishes its thinking by copying and reorganizing symbols in memory, receiving and outputting symbols, and comparing symbol structures for identify and difference.22

And this depends upon logic. As Zenon Pylshyn argues, there is good reason why computers can be described as processing knowledge. This good reason, which owes, he says, to Hilbert, Gdel, Russell and Whitehead, Turing and Church, was this:
Reasoning about meaningful thingsabout things in the world or in the imaginationcould be carried out by a process that itself knew nothing of the world or of meanings, did not know what thoughts were about . . . The idea that logical inference can be carried out by a process of examining meaningless symbols leads directly to the foundational assumption of cognitive

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science, which is that thought is species of computing . . . The bridge from formal symbol manipulation to computing was completed in 1936 by the mathematician Kurt Gdel who showed that anything that could be described in terms of manipulations of symbols could be carried out by a simple machine (later called a Turing machine), which became the defining property of reasoning and later of intelligent action (Lepore and Pylshyn, 1999: 67).

For AI theory, the intelligent organism is a sentential automaton, whose behavior is the outcome of a sequence of mental states (beliefs that p, desire that p, etc.) and the processing will be described in terms of the semantic and syntactic relations among the content-specifying sentences (Churchland, 1980: 188; Wagman, 1998: 25). Accordingly, AI inquiry can proceed, not only independently of organism/environment relations, but independently of neurophysiology as well. This paradigm has not, to be sure, proceeded without criticism.23 An important challenge comes from the so-called connectionist or neural network paradigm. This approach assumes that sensory, motor and, ultimately, cognitive processes are explained in terms of inhibitory or excitatory connections between nodes which differ in strength. The language of connectionism is differential equations rather than mathematical logic (Wagman: 26). A brain model of the mind replaces the computer model of mind. Cognition is viewed as the emergence of global states in a network of simpler components. Instead of symbols, meaning resides in these emergent global states. Instead of processing information provided to mind by senses, minds create information for their own uses (Varella, Thompson and Rosch, 1991).24 An Ecological Psychology? It is clear that while the symbolic approach is wholly inconsistent with a Deweyan approach, the connectionist approach is not inconsistent with such an approach. I will round out this discussion with some brief remarks on this. First, and critically, in connectionist theory,
there will be nothing that corresponds to the classical symbolic data-structures. Instead, context-sensitive shifting coalitions of units will correspond to single classical representations . . . Since there are thus no neat analogues to the classical symbolic structures, the system cannot (not even tacitly) embody knowledge of transition rules defined over these very structures(Clark, 1990: 297).

Put bluntly, the constraints on an intelligent problem-solving device are no labels in the world, no external semantics, and no internal, unexplained homunculus in the loop to provide meaning (Franklin, 1995: 301, explicating

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the work of Edelman, 1992). These constraints were all fully articulated and defended by Dewey. Second, as Dennett has argued, there is nothing in connectionist theory, nor in Dewey, which forbids that human symbolic capacities are a recent addition, an evolutionary enhancement of mammalian cognitive architecture (Dennett, 1991: 28). Finally, there is the question of whether attention to neural networks will be sufficient to glean an understanding of problem-solving intelligence. The early chapters of Deweys Logic set out the naturalistic basis for logic in his sense, beginning with the obvious fact that when people inquire, they employ their eyes and ears, their hands and their brains and that these organs, sensory, motor or central are biological (LW: 12: 30). Huge chunks of this read as if they had come directly from his reflex arc essay. For example, in decided contrast to the then current S-R theory, he wrote:
When the stimulus is recognized to be the tension in the total organic activity (ultimately reducible to that between contact activities and those occasioned through distance receptors), it is seen that the stimulus in its relationship to special activities persists throughout the entire pursuit, although it changes its actual content at each stage of the chase. As the animal runs, specific sensory excitations . . . alter every change of position . . . (LW, 12: 37).

That is, there is no way to disconnect seeing and acting, nor to disconnect these from the situation which is changing as the consequences of acting. Other passages sound like arguments in Human Nature and Conduct.
Habits are the basis of organic learning. According to the theory of independent successive units of excitation-reaction, [both then current S-R and later learning theory] habit formation can mean only the increasing fixation of certain ways of behavior through repetition . . . Developmental behavior shows, on the other hand, that in the higher organisms excitations are diffusely linked with reactions that the sequel in affected by the state of the organism in relation to environment. In habit and learning the linkage is tightened up not by sheer repetition but by the institution of effective integration of organic-environing energiesthe consumatory close of activities of exploration and search (38).

And:
Even the neuro-muscular structures of individuals are modified through the influence of the cultural environment upon the activities performed . . . This modification of organic behavior in and by the cultural environment accounts for, or rather is, the transformation of properties with which the present

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discussion is concerned . . . Any theory that rests upon a naturalistic postulate must face the extraordinary differences that mark off the activities and achievements of human beings from those of other biological forms (49).

As Dewey rightly emphasized, while lower organisms are proficient problemsolvers, there was no problem acknowledging that much human problem solving does require symbols (and thus, linguistic capacities). But as he insisted, it was an intellectualist fallacy to impose this on all problem-solving activity. Moreover, as part of his powerful account of language, Dewey (and Mead) insisted that the plateau of coordinated animal behavior is not irrelevant to communication at the linguistic level even if it cannot be reducible to it. (See Chapter 4). As these quoted texts imply, Deweys approach is not psychologistic if that means (as it usually does) that mental life is a theater for the exhibition of independent autonomous faculties, or a rendezvous in which isolated, atomic sensations and ideas may gather, hold external converse and the forever part (EW, I: 56). It is thus, if anything, an ecological psychology. As Burke rightly notes, Deweys views compare to J.J. Gibsons theory of perception, which stands in marked contrast to standard psychologistic theories. Ecological psychologists and Dewey share the view that perception is not mediated by internal representational processes, which is not to hold that it is not mediated by something. Perception is mediated, rather, by established attunements to lawlike relations among ways of acting in the world, that is by habits . . . (Burke, 1994: 93); and more generally: Perception and cognition in general do not happen somewhere up in the head, but rather they involve an interactive information-processing mesh that cuts across a simplistic organism/environment distinction (95). As cognitive scientist Stan Franklin notes (following Skarda and Freeman, 1987, Edelman, 1992 and Varela, et al, 1996), information is created not from sensory input but from structural coupling, the dynamical relations between subsumption architecture, accomplished by competences, a series of incremental layers, each layer connecting perception to action (Franklin, 1997).25 As the foregoing suggestions, not all-current connectionist inquiry would seem able to deal with the problem initially posed by Deweys reflex-arch essay. As Hanson notes: Connectionist models have been fundamentally about system-level brain accounts. And, indeed,
Without appreciating that commitment, it is hard to understand how a simplified neuron model and synaptic connectivity could be informative for actual brain function . . . It is a common experience in the neurosciences to discover cells that behave in some orderly way without at the same time understanding what their larger purpose might be in terms of system-level function, which in

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turn requires a deep understanding of the way cells interact and what emergent properties might arise when millions of cells that code for spatial, temporal or structural properties of the world begin to compute something (Hanson, 1999: 425).

Hanson is surely correct that this problem does not go away by measuring more cells, measuring them more precisely or measuring the molecular properties of cells. But he is overly optimistic in supposing that the problem is sufficiently addressed by a systems-level theory that takes into account some simplified assumptions about systems of cells and simplified self-organizing principles such as learning. That is, if Dewey is correct, we need to be talking about an intact organism with a brain, including, ultimately, an organism with a mind in Deweys sense, acting in an environment.26 This cannot be simulated by a computer. But it might be simulated by a robot, which could explore, work in, and communicate results of its ongoing activities in distant planetary environments (Burke, 1994: 262). Burke offers that Deweys logical theory cannot tell us how to build such a machine, but it does offer a number of design principles which would, in his view, have to be treated as fundamental, not as goals to be achieved later, once other preliminaries are taken care of (263). Indeed, such an approach to AI and robotics is actually not so foreign to work lately found in the cognitive science literature.27 Finally, one might want to claim that
Whether or not Deweys theory of knowledge is acceptable in every detail, his type of theory, namely, a naturalistic operation-based theory geared to explaining problem solving in concrete contexts, is the only one which holds any promise for handling issues in the cognitive sciences which hinge on our knowing what knowledge is (265).

This essay argued that there are two ironies as regards Deweys relation to the discipline of psychology. The first regards the belief that his pragmatism influenced the development of psychology in American. The second irony then is this: Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the cutting edge of current work in psychology is so-called cognitive psychology. But, remarkably, not only does Deweys Logic, misunderstood when it is not ignored, give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these approaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science, but shows us decisively why symbolic AI models must fail. One wonders whethe Dewey will be ill served once again? More generally, Deweys type of theory would seem to be the only one that holds any promise for understanding the remarkable capacities of sentiment beingsincluding homo sapiens sapiens.

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NOTES
1. That Wundt ultimately divorced psychology form physiology is now generally agreed. See my account, A History of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 182f. which follows S. Diamond, Wundt before Leipzig, in R. E. Reiber (ed.), Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology (New York: Plenum, 1980). In the last edition of the Grndzge, he wrote:
Of the two tasks that are . . . implied by the name of physiological psychologyone methodological, relating to the use of experiment, the other amplificatory, relating to the corporeal basis of mental lifeit is the former that is more essential to psychology itself, while the later has value chiefly with respect to the philosophic question about the unity of life processes (quoted by Diamond, 1980: 169).

2. Flower and Murphey (1977) see rightly that his essay, The New Psychology, reads like a preliminary comment for Experience and Nature and that armed with post game wisdom, all the idealist works have the promise of the thoroughly naturalistic direction of his pragmatism (820). 3. Hilgard refers to a Berlin newspaper account of the 1896 Third International Congress of Psychology in Munich which described Wundt as the psychological Pope of the Old World and James as the psychological Pope of the New World (Hilgard, 1987: 37). He offers a useful comparison of the two and rightly concludes also neither the psychology of Wundt nor the psychology of James persisted in America in anything like their original forms (1987: 65). 4. Owen J. Flanagan, Jr. (1984) gives a sympathetic reading of Jamess Principles as the first formulation of the naturalistic position in the philosophy of mind (2324). 5. Spencers Transfigured Realism (developed in his Principles of Psychology, first edition, 1855, and many thereafter) also had no influence in the development of a scientific psychology for reasons similar to those that explain the rejection of Wundt and James. Briefly, Spencer distinguished sharply between physiology, an objective science and psychology whose data were subjective. But contrary to the mentalism of associationist (and Wundtian psychology), and to materialism, inquiry could not be restricted to the laws of successive states of the mind. One needed also to know how these were connected with changes in the central nervous system (inner relations ) and then to the external environment (outer relations). He called this aestho-physiology. Similar moves were made by Gustav Fechners Psychophysics (1860). For James decisive criticism of these, see above, Chapter 1, note 15, and my Modest Realism, Experience and Evolution, in Roy Bhaskar (ed.), Harr and His Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 2340. 6. Letter to Henry Holt, his publisher, May 1990, quoted from Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Two Vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935). Hilgard usefully discusses Gordon Allports 1943 article, The Productive Paradoxes of William James. He sees six: the relation of mind and body, positivism and phenomenology, the self, freedom and determinism, association and individual-

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ity. James, suggested Allport, did not make them productive by synthesizing his contradictory views, at least not the Principles, but left them as unsolved paradoxes (Hilgard, 1987: 59). Chapter 1, above, argued that radical empiricism was, ultimately, James preferred solution, a solution similar to the one offered by Mach. But this solution similarly had no effect on the development of American psychology. 7. The history of the use of variable in psychological discourse was critical here. See Kurt Danziger (1997: 16379). Causal relations (and hence lawfulness) could now be construed extensionally, as relations of variables, or functions in the mathematical sense. 8. There is now available a three volume collection, The Chicago School of Funtionalism, edited by John R. Shook (Bristol: Thoemes Press, 2002). 9. Dewey must take some responsibility. In his 1922/25 Development of American Pragmatism (LW, Vol. 2), he did associate pragmatism with behaviorism, but as the context makes clear, it was the idea that the brain was an organ for the coordination of sense stimuli which led him to make the association. Functionalism /mechanism are still unsettled issues. See the essays by Stephen Jay Gould, Christopher Bourse and William Wimsatt in Eliott Sober (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1984). 10. On their view, the drift he reported in his autobiographical essay was an eminently reasonable one in terms of the very new question of the relation of psychological methods to philosophy (Flower and Murphey: 819). In addition to the psychological articles, including several not discussed here, e.g., The Theory of Emotion(1884, 1885), The Psychology of Infant Language(1894) and Interpretation of the Savage Mind (1902), Flower and Murphey trace the drift also in the revised Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (1894), propelled by Jamess Principles. The revision, remarked Dewey, was in no sense a second edition . . . On the contrary, [the new studies] undertake a thorough examination of the process of active experience, and a derivation from this analysis of the chief ethical types and crisistask , so far as I know, not previously attempted (EW, 4:221). 11. Mead was fully in agreement with the central issue. Similarly, in arguing against both Wundt and Watson, his problem was precisely to explain mind and meaning in terms consistent with Darwin. See Chapter 4, below. 12. That is, if behavior is not merely movement then it involves intentional descriptions: reference to the object, goal or meaning that it has for the agent (Taylor, 1964; Margolis, 1985). As we now appreciate, efforts to eliminate intentionality (as in Watson) or to operationalize it (as in Tolman, not only failed, but must fail. Hilgard argues there is a family resemblance between Deweys position and Skinners operant behavior, in which responses are coordinatd with the stimuli to which they lead (Hilgard, 1966: 298 note). But, of course, Skinners reinforcers are vacuous. As Taylor writes: But although the property of having been reinforced is certainly a property of the object itself separate from other properties of size, shape, etc., it cannot as a stimulus property be separated. For in order for it to hold as a stimulus property the animal has to recognize the object as that object which was in fact reinforced, one has to know some other description true of it beside simply that of having been reinforced(Taylor, 1964: 133).

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13. It is true that many were not attracted to the more extreme physicalism of Watson. They could be experimentalists who, employing the standard S-R jargon could deal with behavior ambiguously understood. See Kurt Danziger, 1997, Chapter 9. 14. See Estes, et al, 1954 and for critique, S. Koch, 1964, Psychology and Emerging Conceptions of Knowledge as Unity. 15. To my knowledge, Dewey never offered his views on the psychology of mental tests. There is an 1889 review of Natural Inheritance, Galtons Statistical Methods, in which Dewey both encourages the use of the new techniques and notes its limitations. 16. One might want to include Deweys Human Nature and Conduct (1922), which attracted some attention from mainstream psychologists. But the combination of Allports individualist social psychology, laboratory experimentation, for example, as in Thurston, 1928 and Freud was sufficient to marginalize Deweys book among psychologists. 17. This, it may be noticed, is Deweys version of the rejection of what is now termed, agent/structure dualism. See Chapter 4, above. 18. See also Leahys comments on this paper.[Dewey] offered his pragmaticist conception of mind as a social creation as the proper foundation for an experimental psychology. Since, on Deweys view mind was created by society, it could be deliberately molded by society, and psychology, the science of the mind, could take as its goal, the scientific management of society (1992, 342). 19. The fundamental work has been done, by Tom Burke, in his groundbreaking, Deweys New Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 20. See my essay W. V. Quine (2004), and M.T. Turvey, R. E. Shaw, E. S. Reed and W. M. Mace, Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshn (1981), Cognition, 9 (1981): 237304. 21. See Susan Haack (1995) for the most thorough assessment of variants of analytic epistemology. 22. Morton Wagman, Cognitive Science and the Mind-Body Problem (Westport: Praeger, 1998): 11, quoting J. A. Anderson, The Architecture of Cognition, 1983. In a an earlier pertinent context, Dewey had wisely remarked, Those who are concerned with symbolic logic do not always recognize the need for giving an account of the reference and function of symbols . . . Any theory of logic has to take some stand on the question of whether symbols are ready-made clothing for meanings that subsist independently, or whether they are necessary conditions for the existence of meanings . . . (LW, 1938: 27). The former view neatly characterizes symbolic AI theory, the latter idea is developed both in Deweys Experience and Nature and in Meads Mind, Self and Society. See Chapter 4, below. 23. This is hardly the place to review this. For an excellent review, see Franklin, 1995. In addition to the various writings of Churchland, 1980, see Flanagan, 1984 and Searle, 1992. 24. This approach has the much longer lineage going back to late nineteenth century neurophysiological speculations underpinning associationist psychology. Hebbs account (1949) is purely associationist and, in the form of simple vector dot potentials, takes on the presumption of neuronal activations and synaptic potentials

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(Stephen Jose Hanson, Connectionist Neuroscience: Representational and Learning Issues in Neuroscience, in Lepore and Pylyshyn (eds.), What is Cognitive Science?: 404). McCulloch and Pitts (1943) offered a model of the brain as a specialized computing device and Rosenblatt developed a perception-learning machine, the Perceptron, 1962. AI inquiry (in contrast to natural intelligence) in the 1970s and 80s overwhelmed these beginnings which more lately have been rediscovered and have issued in a variety of new efforts, including so-called hybrid symbolic, connectionist models. 25. See Rodney A. Brooks, Flesh and Machines (New York, Vintage, 2003). See also his website: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/. Brooks work is discussed in a useful essay by Robin Marantz Henig, The Real Transformers, The New York Times Magazine,7 July 2007. 26. For an account of the limits of connectionism see Hans Radder, The World Observed/The World Conceived. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2006. 27. See the review by Judith Effken and Robert E. Shaw, Ecological Perspectives on the New Artificial Intelligence, Ecological Psychology 4, (1992): 24770. See also references to Rodney A. Brooks and the review in Wagman (1998: 8395).

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John Dewey and American Social Science

It has not been an easy matter to judge John Deweys relation to the social sciences in America. Most writers have held that his influence was significant. Some of these think that this influence was a good one; others are critical, since for them it contributed to what is seen to be a technocratic version of social science.1 It is easy to infer what seems to have propelled this view: Pragmatism was an important and culturally influential philosophical movement in the U.S. Dewey was at Michigan and then at Chicago (with G. H. Mead) at what was the crucial period in the genesis of the social sciences in America; Dewey was distinctly interested in promoting a view which incorporated science and the scientific frame of mind; hence, Deweys pragmatism must have left its mark on American social science. Those who find that this influence was salutary also believe, I think, that on the whole academic social science provides us with much needed knowledge.2 Although the premises are all true, the argument doesnt work. It doesnt mainly because the key ideas are mostly either mushy or ideological (or both?). To see this, one must be clear not only about Deweys version of pragmatism, still very much contested but also about the character of social science in America. This last requires some concrete history governed by a philosophically sophisticated understanding of science and its possible goals. For me, what may be termed mainstream social science is generally a disaster for substantially the reasons pointed to by Deweys erstwhile colleague, Thorsten Veblen. Veblen insisted that social science had as its task, inquiry into the nature and causes, the working and the outcome, of [the] institutional apparatus.3 Such inquiry need bear no colour of iconoclasm, since even if it did not, its outcome will disturb the habitual convictions and preconceptions upon which they rest. Instead, usages and conventions that have by
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habit become embedded in the received scheme of use and wont, and so have been found to be good and right are given scientific legitimation. The result is a `science of complaisant interpretations, apologies, and projected remedies (1957: 136). Veblens objection, like mine and Deweys, is not that social scientists were reformers but rather that they were not good scientists. As regards Dewey, we are just now, I think, beginning to get clearer about his instrumentalism, despite the ill-conceived effort to appropriate it for postmodernist purposes, and even if the two most recent full length accounts, one by an historian, the other by a philosopher, say precious little of any use about how it bears on Deweys conception of science, including social science.4 In this essay, accordingly, I want to develop Deweys scattered views on social science, both as he came to understand what they had become, and what they might be. Much of what he did say gave ample room for both misunderstanding and misappropriation.5 Still, there remains in Deweys philosophy some untapped resources for reconstituting social science. The Origins of Social Science in America It is of considerable importance to notice that the modern disciplines of the social sciences are an American invention that European Universities had nothing like what we now take for granted as social science. Indeed, some of the disciplines were not part of European higher education until after World War II when, as with so much else, Americanization became the order of the day.6 America provided the nearly perfect conditions for the modern idea of the social sciences.7 There was, first of all, the social problem produced during the Gilded Age by rapid industrialization, urbanization and massive immigration. Second, America had a weak state in the sense that it lacked both significant state bureaucracies and a strong central government. This promoted responses from civil society, but especially from the private colleges and universities. Third, lacking a feudal past, America was bourgeois from its beginnings: As Bledsoe put it, Americans lacked tradition as a source of authority, but they did not lack `science. Before Johns Hopkins became a university in 1876, there were no universities in Americathe educational upshot of the absence of a feudal past. Educational enterpreneurs could convince the John D. Rockefellers, Carnegies and Mellons that science was just what was needed and that it could be produced with good effect in the new institutions. Finally, as science had itself been industrialized, a group of European philosopher/physicists had articulated a thoroughly positivist understanding of the successful sciences, from the practically irrelevant idea of science as theoria, to a practically relevant productive and predictive in-

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strument whose ultimate vindication was its capacity to generate technologies for the relief of mans estate. Indeed, for the men (sic) in the institutions of higher learning, the problem was not class war, but ignorance. Social problems surely were no less subject to scientific solutions than other problems. Moreover, since for them there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Americas basic institutions, these problems could be dealt with as technical questions in a piecemeal, ameliorative fashion. But if social scientists were to be professional with legitimate claims to authority and autonomy, they must mark out their scientific territories, clear away all that was non-scientific, and establish their own system of credentialing. What this meant was clear enough: It meant establishing distinct disciplines exactly in the terms which they believed any true science must be constituted. The outcome, settled between the wars, was the disciplines of the social sciences, as we know them today. This was, then, the context in which Dewey reflected. Where, we may ask, did he fit in?

DEWEY AND THE ORIGINS OF ACADEMIC SOCIAL SCIENCE Dewey said very little about the social sciences and although one finds throughout the corpus references to science, one finds too little in the way of a systematic account of science. Most of the terms descriptive of science and in general use wereand arevague and uncritically employed: for example, cause, law, theory, explanation and experimental method. Dewey, like most writers today could take these terms for granted even if, as I would insist, one can get contradictory conceptions of science from different analyses of them. This unclarity should not surprise us. What we now think of as an important sub-discipline of philosophy, philosophy of science, emerged only in the 1950s and it is only in the 1970s that there has been a genuine competitor to the positivist interpretation of science. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, published in 1938, is surely the main exception to the overall absence of texts on Deweys theory of science. What is there is very important, but there are many important questions which Dewey did not address and, typically, he does not make much effort to place his effort in the context of other writers on science, Vienna positivism, for example. When the Logic was published, As Ralph Sleeper has argued, it was both ignored and misunderstood, so thoroughgoing were entrenched assumptions about logic and science. Moreover, by this time, systematic misunderstanding of Dewey was also well entrenched.8 Accordingly, it was not then and is not now a genuine competitor for the received view.

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At bottom is an ill-developed conception of science, which is distinctly Deweyan. On the positivist, technocratic conception, the aim of science is prediction and control. To achieve this one needs only confirmed regularities, laws or law-like statements. On this view, since they can be no part of science, ends are given or assumed and the only question is means. Since it is not within the realm of social science to decide on goals, the social scientist (qua social scientist) is neutral regarding who his work serves. For Dewey, none of the foregoing was true, but for reasons noted, is not an easy matter to get a firm grip of Deweys alternative view. There is a sense in which it is utterly unique, the consequence of his radical position in epistemology. His instrumentalism involves a rejection of the epistemological problem, and thus of the fact/value dichotomy. It offered a unique conception of control and a confusing conception of the character of theory and of the goals of science. I try to keep my account focused, as much as possible, on what Dewey had to say about social science.

DEWEYS REJECTION OF THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM Modern philosophy, responding to the new science, has been haunted by the epistemological problem, the problem of justifying true belief. As argued in Chapters 1 and 2, Dewey rejected the assumptions, which generated the problem. Failure to see this has misled many otherwise astute commentators. Dorothy Ross, for example, singles out Deweys (1897) lecture, The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge as a critical intervention on the side of the technocrats. But this is far from being the case: Its thrust is against traditional foundationist epistemology: rationalist, sensationalist and Kantian. Dewey writes:
Knowledge can define the percept and elaborate the concept, but their union can be found only in action. The experimental method of modern science, its erection into the ultimate mode of verification, is simply this fact obtaining recognition (EW, Vol. 5: 21).

Contrary to the epistemologists, there is no problem of knowledge in general: philosophy is not an original fountainhead of truth. And this means that for answers to questions about how knowledge is possible we need to look to psychology and social ethicsincluding in the latter term all the related concrete social sciences, so far as they may give guidance to conduct (22). Deweys project was to naturalize epistemology and moral theory.9

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Psychology is naught but the account of the way in which conscious life is . . . progressively maintained and reorganized. Psychology is the attempt to state in detail the machinery of the individual considered as the instrument and organ through which social action operates (23).

Similarly,
The sociologist, like the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower of genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing them together in somewhat aimless fashion . . . But social ethics represents the attempt to translate philosophy from a general and therefore abstract method into a working and specific method; it is the change from inquiring into the nature of value in general to an inquiry of the particular values which ought to be realized in the life of everyone, and of the conditions which shall render possible this realization (23).

This is stunning research program for social science, stunningly ignored. We need to be clear about this. Dewey believed, rightly, that human sciences could help us to understand ourselves: how we think and inquire and why, when thinking and inquiry is successful, it is successful. They would give us insight into what were our genuine interests and purposes and their relations, and most obviously, they would give us an understanding of the obstacles in present arrangements, which keep us from realizing our genuine interests and purposes. The human sciences would be emancipating in exactly the sense that they would clear away misconceptions about ourselves and our arrangements and empower us to reconstruct the social world more in accordance with our wants and aims. Central to this project was the rejection of the bifurcation of fact and value, a further consequence of the mistaken assumptions that had generated the epistemological problem. In his Logic, Dewey argued that most current social inquiry was marked by the separation of theory and practice (LW, 12: 487). It is sound principle, Dewey says, that one should avoid making social judgments on the ground of moral preconceptions, conceptions of what is right and wrong, vicious and virtuous (489). But this is mistakenly converted to the principle that one should make no evaluations about ends. These are, accordingly, precluded from inquiry. But only recognition in both theory and practice that ends to be attained (ends-in-view) are of the nature of hypotheses and that hypotheses have to be formed and tested in strict correlativity with existential conditions as means, can alter current habits of dealing with social issues (491). If one wants a ready current example, consider poverty. What indeed, are the possible ends-in-view of current policy and what, accordingly, are the

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existential conditions that are demanded for their satisfaction? It is easy to deal here with high abstractions, getting people off welfare, getting people to work, ensuring that people can acquire skills and knowledge which will make them employable, and to leave up in the air, unexamined, the requisite existential conditions. Although I cannot prove this here, I would insist that the modern social sciences must take large measure of responsibility for the shallowness of the usual understanding of problems like poverty and crime.10 Moreover, it is easy to assume that the problems which exist are already definite in their main features, and if so, then inquiry could be aimed at finding the best methods of solution. The result is that methods for resolving problematic situations are proposed without any clear conception of the material in which projects are to be applied and to take effect, with often a worsening of the situation which generated the inquiry (LW, 12: 487). The analogy between current modes of inquiry in social science and pre-scientific medicine was apt. As Dewey noted elsewhere, such practice was a combination of empiricism and quackery: Without analysis, symptoms were responded to in terms of handed down remedies. Of course, these sometimes worked. But as regards medicine at least, it is now recognized that choice of remedial measures looking to restoration of health is haphazard until the conditions which constitute the trouble or disease have been determined as completely and accurately as possible (488). The poverty example again illustrates this: It is held that people are not working and that present arrangements make them welfare-dependent. The solution is obvious: eliminate welfare. But it does not take much to see that the conditions which constitute the trouble begin with the absence of jobs which would pay enough to take a family out of poverty and that one would need here to be clear about a host of other attending steps and conditions to make this possible. The self-imposed constraints of allegedly scientific social inquiry also explain the positivist penchant for fact-gathering. Dewey had attacked this idea in his 1931 essay, Social Science and Social Control. Dewey offered the existing limitations of `social science (Deweys quotation marks) are due mainly to unreasoning devotion to physical science as a model, and to a misconception of physical science at that (LW, 6: 64). In the Logic, Dewey held that methods adopted in the professed name of social science are merely the form of genuine science since they fail to observe the logical conditions which in physical science give the techniques of observing and measuring their standing and force (LW, 12: 492). There are many places where Dewey assessed current social science as deficient. Moreover, it is surprising that the foregoing explanation of the deficiency is overlooked by Ross and

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other writers who accuse Dewey of contributing to scientism. In this essay (as in the Logic), Dewey held: . . . [T]he facts of social fact-finding remain a miscellaneous pile of meaningless items. Since their connections with human wants and their effect on human values are neglected, there is nothing which binds them together into an intelligible whole (LW, 6: 65). Dewey was surely aware that his colleagues, among them Merriam at Chicago and Ogburn at Columbia had by then established fact-gathering as the goal of social science.11 This was, of course, a main target of Robert Lynds Knowledge for What? (1939), a book that was both very Deweyan and very much out of the mainstream. Indeed, in a related section of the Logic, Dewey developed an argument that C.W. Mills will pick up in his 1959 Sociological Imagination. Dewey saw two one-sided distortions. The positivist school (his term) singlemindedly directs itself as fact-findingwhat Mills had called abstracted empiricism. But the opposing tendency places its entire emphasis on conceptions (LW, 12:497) what Mills called Grand Theory. Facts are subsumed directly under `principles, the latter being regarded as fixed norms that decide the legitimacy or illegitimacy of existing phenomena and that prescribe the end toward which endeavor should be directed (497). There is another issue, part of his more general instrumentalist theory of inquiry that needs to be introduced if we are to have any hopes of grasping Deweys thoughts on science.

INSTRUMENTALISM AND SCIENCE Deweys commitments to scientific method, his persistent attacks on inquiry detached from human concerns and his extensive use of technological metaphors have caused enormous confusion, almost certainly because as Dewey himself saw, modern science had not been the salvific force that it was once hoped to be. (See Chapter 1). Surely the most far-reaching attempt to illuminate Deweys philosophy is terms of technology is Larry Hickmans John Deweys Pragmatic Technology (1990). It may be that Hickman goes too far in asserting that late in his life, technology became a synonym for the very method of inquiry (1991: 1); but Hickman wisely glosses Deweys instrumentalism by arguing that Dewey goes beyond theory and beyond praxis to production: his concern is with the making and testing of new entities including extra-organic tools as well as goals and ideals (15). Science in this sense is a more refined and developed form of all inquiry. Thus, in the Logic, Dewey insists, there is no sharp dividing line between common sense and science. Gradually and by processes that are more or less

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tortuous and originally unplanned, definite technical processes and instrumentalities [were] formed and transmitted. It was just these, which allowed for control. Controlas Hickman says, a synonym for knowledgedoes not refer to the subordination or domination of something. Rather, as Dewey makes clear enough, control refers to our capacity to apply intelligence successfully: to produce, adapt, adjust, accommodate, achieve, institute, identify, order, discriminate, and to resolve problems in many other sorts of ways. Control has been achieved when the problem, which generated inquiry, has been resolved. It is in this sense, also, that practical must be understood. These technical processes and instrumentalities then become the background of materials and operations which we term science (LW, 12: 77). And, indeed,
Genuine scientific knowledge revived when inquiry adopted as part of its own procedure and for its own purpose the previously disregarded instrumentalities and procedures of productive workers. This adoption is the radical characteristic of the experimental method of science (LW, 12: 99, 38889).12

But this does entail a collapse of science into technology in the sense that all inquiry has some immediate practical aim and surely not in the sense that we can and should seek to dominate nature. All knowing is technological in the sense that if the problematic situation is to be brought under control, language, mathematics and/or artifacts of various kinds are required. Indeed, more generally, this is consequence of Deweys attack on the spectator theory of knowledge. But the difference between science and common sense is exactly that while commonsense inquiry occurs for the sake of settlement of some issue of use and enjoyment, scientific inquiry occurs for its own sake (LW, 12: 6667.) Deweys position here is almost always overlooked. Dewey did not reject the (Greek) idea that inquiry could be aimed solely at understanding. He rejected the bifurcation of theory and practice, the idea that one could understand anything without tools and without experimental operations, involving definite techniques (LW, 12: 151, 420, 455). Of course, it would be hard to deny that understanding may well promote the development of technologiesa key feature of late nineteenth century industrialized science. This leaves open the question of whether this was, as Dewey would sometimes at least seem to suggest, the ultimate justification of science.13 I want to say more about experimental operations, but we need here to notice that the continuity between science and commonsense creates a very special burden for social science. Cultural conditions impact all inquirya critical point for a sociology of science, but because the physical is relatively independent of social issues, the influence of cultural conditions is

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indirect. For example, it is not possible . . . to separate nineteenth century devotion to exclusively mechanical conceptions from the needs of industry of that period. In social science, by contrast, prejudices of race, nationality, class and sect play such an important role that their influence is seen by any observer of the field (LW, 12: 482). It is, however, more than annoying to notice that Dewey did not, as far as I can tell, say much about how such prejudices were influencing the social sciences.

SCIENTIFIC LAWS AND CAUSALITY Critical to any understanding of science is the conception of law and causality. We can here briefly summarize the relevant conclusions of the previous chapters of this volume. First, Dewey rejected the most characteristic, even defining features of empiricist philosophy of science: that scientific laws are formulations of uniform and unconditional sequences of events, and that causality must be defined in terms of such sequences (LW, 12: 437). Of all the doctrines, which currently inform mainstream social science, these are surely the most pernicious. Once accepted, we are committed to an event ontology and a regularity determinist view of the universe: Whenever this, then that. It is then also easy to assume a covering law model of explanation, and thus to hold also that prediction and explanation are symmetrical. One final consequence is the inability to conceptualize agency: the fact that persons make things happen. But as Dewey rightly sees, there are no such things as uniform sequences of events (LW, 12: 445). Second, he argued, atoms and molecules show a selective bias in their indifferences, affinities and repulsions to other events (LW, 1:162). These selective biases, he says, define their essence, a term Dewey used without prejudicing his fully processual view of the universe. But since on a realist view, the things of the universe are always related to other things, outcomes are never guaranteed. Thus, iron as such exhibits characteristics of bias or selective reactions, but iron as a genuine constituent of an organized body acts so as to end to maintain the type of activity of the organism to which it belongs (195). In a living organism, it functions not to produce ironoxideas it would in a hingebut to contribute to metabolism. Moreover such moves are quite consistent with his idea that commonsense inquiry is continuous with advanced science. Dewey gives some examples: A good rain will cause the seeds that have been planted to grow. The expectations are explained by the unscientific person by attributing a power to rain. The empiricist disallows this, but content with an effort to establish the validity of the expectations, he does not seek to understand the power.

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Dewey sees, rightly, that from the standpoint of scientific inquiry, these expectations are but material of problems (LW, 12: 446). He may, however, miss the main point. That is, if the scientific problem is to try to provide a more refined regularity or to fill in ever-larger numbers of variables, then he has succumbed to the regularity determinist conception.14 On realist grounds, the scientific problem is not, as positivists would have it, to close the system in order to make better predictions. Rather the scientific problem is to identify what is about the nature of water and of seeds such that a good rain will (ceteris paribus) cause the seeds to grow. One needs a theory about pertinent causal mechanisms, not a better analysis of the variables. In Quest for Certainty, he argued against empiricist ontology, both of the naive realist sort characteristic of Greek science and of modern sensationalist versions. The experimental method, he writes, substitutes data for objects (LW, 4: 79). By data is signified subject-matter for further interpretation; something to be thought about . . . Hot and cold, wet and dry, light and heavy, instead of being self-evident matters with which to explain phenomenon, were things to be investigated; they were effects, not causal principles (LW, 4: 80). Hot, for example, is surely an effect of what is a most complicated causal nexus, a nexus that includes not only the properties of bodies, but organisms, which experience. Nevertheless, Deweys view needs to be distinguished from a scientific realism, which holds that things have causal powers. For Dewey, causality is a logical category, not an ontological one. For Dewey, the empiricist rightly ruled out occult qualities, but then offered a hybrid notion which took from commonsense the idea of succession and from the science the idea of invariability of conjunction. But the contents which are invariably related in a law are not events, and . . . their relation is not one of sequence (LW, 12: 446). As a rejection of regularity determinism, this seems right. And while I do not think that Deweys positive account of causality is satisfactory, his rejection of regularity determinism was all that is needed to distinguish his views from the prevailing positivisms in social science. This is generally missed. For example, Ross (1991: 253) holds that Deweys Psychology and Social Practice is another place where he endorses technocracy. Dewey argues that the teacher has a psychological theory, like it or not. Teachers tell you that a child is careless or inattentive in the same final way that they would tell you that a piece of paper is white. But, insists Dewey,
it is only through some recognition of attention as a mechanism, some awareness of the interplay of sensations, images and motor impulses which constitute it as an objective fact that the teacher can deal effectively with attention as a function (139).

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Deweys point is exactly that unless teachers have an understanding of the student as a psycho-social being, all their efforts are bound to be misdirected, ineffective, even destructive. It is only by understanding the psychological mechanisms of attention, memory, cognition and judgment and the social mechanisms implicated in all experience and behavior that the teacher can cultivate the powers of the student.15 This is for Dewey a research program to be satisfied. We are, he says, discussing the question of the role of psychological science in education only because we have as yet made so little headway (144). Deweys use of the term mechanisms here is notable and suggests how far he is from a regularity determinist view. This is made even clearer in a 1918 essay entitled A New Social Science, one of the very few places where Dewey explicitly discusses social science. (The Logic is the other notable place.) Dewey argues against the idea, inherited from Comte and Spencerand still currentthat the existing social order is the product of natural laws which are expounded in a rational, scientific way (MW, 11: 89). Dewey insists that World War I should finally have exposed this idea as myth: . . . The war has revealed that our existing social situation is in effect the result of a convergence of a large number of independently generated historic accidents (90). Indeed,
Any science which pretends to be more than a description of the particular forces which are at work and a descriptive tracing of the particular consequences which they produce, which pretends to discover basic principles to which social things conform, and inherent laws which explain them is, I repeat, sheer mythology (90).

Dewey acknowledged radical contingency in the universe, a universe that was both precarious and stable. There were uniformities a consequence of selective biases and there were plenty of surprises, a consequence of the open systematic character of the world. But such a metaphysic calls for a historical and concrete social science. The description of particular forces at work are the analogue of the selective biases discoverable by physical science. The particular consequences which they produce are not guaranteed in advance because the relations of such mechanisms are complex and historically contingent. There are no general laws under which we can subsume and thereby explain wars, revolutions or, for that matter, hurricanes or the genesis of a species (Manicas, 2006, Chapter 5). Dewey concludes this brief but rich essay by remarking, there is . . . an immense amount of empirical subjectmatter contained within the confines of existing social sciences. The only trouble is that it has been framed up and

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betrayed by its mythical and apologetic setting (MW, 11: 91). He does not, unfortunately, elaborate on this very pregnant idea.

DEWEY ON EXPERIMENTATION Deweys views on experimentation certainly did not help clarify his position. I noted that, for Dewey, one could not understand anything without experimental operations, involving technique. There is, of course, a paradigm, characteristic of the laboratory, but how far can this be extended? A long way it seems.16 Thus, he insists there is no ground whatever upon which a logical line can be drawn between the operations and techniques of experimentation in the natural sciences and the same operations and techniques employed for distinctly practical purposes (LW, 12: 434). But what counts here as the same operations and techniques? This text continues with what may be his most general definition:
. . . Experimentation is a form of doing and making. Application of conceptions and hypotheses to existential matters through the medium of doing and making is an intrinsic feature of scientific method (ibid.)17

As before, if this is a consequence of his general criticism of the spectator theory of knowledge, there is no problem. On the other hand, Dewey did not, I think, have a clear understanding of the laboratory experiment as it is actually practiced in the successful sciences and this allowed him to give the idea a very extended sense. Only sometimes does he suggest that the main use of an experiment is to test a well-articulated theory. On this realist view, the idea, roughly, is to deduce what the theory entails and then to establish experimental closure to see if what was predicted by theory under closure does, in fact, obtain.18 But if we think of an experiment in this sense, as a situation in which a theory of a mechanism is to be tested, then, as is very plain, this is never possible in social scienceputting it at a distinct disadvantage. This is not, however, what Dewey seems to have in mind when he speaks of experimenting in social science. In the Logic, he remarks, every measure of policy put into operation is, logically, and should be, actually, of the nature of an experiment (LW, 12: 502; see also LW, 12: 486). Insofar as we should make the effort to see as clearly as we can what consequences obtained after a policy was introduced, there is good sense to this. We know, for example, that people didnt stop drinking alcoholic beverages when prohibition was enforced. But this is a test of a policy not of a theory of social behavior, exactly because, as Dewey clearly recognized, there are always a host of connected and interact-

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ing processes involved which conjointly produced the actual outcomes. In this case, as we now know, demand for alcohol was satisfied by illegal producers and distributors so that, if anything, the policy served to create criminalsincluding law enforcement officersand to deprive the society of any effective control of the production and distribution of alcohol. In his 1931 Social Science and Social Control, alluded to earlier, Dewey did indeed sound technicist. He there offered that The Five Year Plan of Russia . . . whether noble or the reverse, has many of the traits of a social experiment, for it is an attempt to obtain certain specified social results by the use of specified definite measures, exercised under conditions of considerable, if not complete, control (LW, 6: 65). This is, in my mind, so much nonsense: Despite totalitarian methods of control, the outcomes were, as they must be, conjoint products of a myriad of interacting activities of which some, at least, were directly contradictory to the intentions of the planners. Here experiment, and control get Dewey into unnecessary difficulty. The example raises, as well, the question of the relation of democracy to social scientific knowledge. For the technocrats, one controls the conditions and gets predictable results. More, because experts have knowledge that the masses lack, democracy must give way.

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY It is easy enough to establish that World War I had a tremendous impact on Dewey and that one of the consequences was his readiness to believe that the war had brought forward the more conscious and extensive use of science for communal purposes. (See Chapter 7, below). It had made it customary to utilize collective knowledge and skill of scientific experts of all kinds, organizing them for community ends. The warfare state, remarkably, had laid the foundations for the Nationalist Liberalism, which became the political agenda of Deweys associates at the The New Republic. But when Walter Lippman, already persuaded of a technocratic version of social control, published his Phantom Public in 1925, Dewey finally came to grips with the problem of scientific knowledge and democracy. In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey agreed that there were a host of technical questions which could be answered by experts: sanitation, public health, healthful and adequate housing, transportation, planning of cities, regulation and distribution of immigrants, selection and management of personnel, right methods of instruction and preparation of competent teachers, scientific adjustment of taxation, efficient management of funds and so on (LW, 2: 313). But the idea that such knowledge was sufficient was

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profoundly in error. Those who hold to such views ignore forces which have to be composed and resolved before technical and specialized action can come into play (LW, 2: 313). The problem is deep: It is in the first instance the search for conditions under which the Great Society may become the Great Community (327). The public is lost, eclipsed, inchoate, bewildered, caught in a drift, which it cannot grasp and therefore cannot overcome. Lippmann (and later C.W. Mills) was not wrong in diagnosing that the American public was a mass, but he was wrong in thinking that social scientists should now rule. Dewey was clear that such experts lacked the knowledge that was needed. Indeed, the prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not exist (339). Citizens needed to understand what was happening and why. Some technical knowledge was needed, to be sure, but in the absence of a widely shared understanding of the forces at work, no democratic public could emerge. Dewey is clearly correct in this analysis, but he is not as radical as he might be in assigning the causes of this. I put aside here the problems of distributing the kind of knowledge which does not exist, for example, problems of the corporate control of mass communication, and concentrate here on the role of the social sciences themselves. In particular, while he acknowledges the limits of the special sciences in generating such knowledge, he does not seem to see that they contribute mightily to the mystification of what needs to be known. Instead of illuminating and emancipating, too much contemporary social science obscures and misleads. Dewey gets his hands on some of the reasons for this. He notes that the backwardness of social knowledge is marked in its division into independent and insulated branches of learning (171).19 But this is more than a mark of its backwardness: It guarantees backwardness. It is not merely, as he says, that there is lacking continuous cross-fertilization, but that fragmentation prevents us from grasping causes and connections. Thus we are told that poverty is a psychological or cultural problem: People lose initiative, lack ambition, look for the easy way. The sociologist assumes that this is fact (it is not!) and then tries to explain it. We are told the cause is the breakdown of the family or to welfare dependency. Moreover, our social scientist can, without risk, ignore an economic or historical analysis. She can, for example, altogether ignore the lack of decent-paying jobs and the reasons for this. The reasons can be left to the economists who tell us that markets are self-correcting and that, accordingly, a political analysis which calls for state intervention is self-defeating. Dewey notes also that specialized knowledge aims to be abstract which practically means that it is not conceived in terms of its bearing on human life (171). Plainly, the commitment to value-neutrality requires this. The up-

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shot, of course, is not value-neutrality, but as Veblen insisted, scientific legitimation of usages and conventions that have by habit become embedded in the received scheme of use and wont, and so have been found to be good and right. Social science happily conspires in persuading us that the poor have only themselves to blame. He argues forcefully that what counts as news in our daily papers is rendered completely unintelligible in terms of its connections but fails to argue that this tendency is reinforced by fact-gathering social science. He is correct that a genuine social science would manifest its reality in the daily press, while learned books and articles supply and polish tools of inquiry (347), but of course, it is precisely because we are not journalists but social scientists that we write jargonized learned books and articles. As Lynd said, we are either scholars or techniciansworking for whoever will pay the bill. Finally, for all of Deweys interest in education, he makes no mention of the disastrous consequences of current patterns of education in the social sciences. Instead of cultivating what Mills called the sociological imagination, we offer students textbooks, which guarantee disciplinary fragmentation, empty abstractions and uncritical thought. Instead of seeking causes and insisting on making connections, we require disciplinary integrity. Instead of raising questions about habits embedded in the received scheme of things, we seek relations of variables. Dewey was surely on the right track when, as early as his essay on Renan (See Chapter 1, above), he offered some reasons for these patterns of ideology and disinformation. He then wrote that we do not yet appreciate the dead weight of class interest which resists all attempts of science to take practical form and become a social motor. I conclude by saying that we still do not itself a function of the failure of the present practices of the social sciences. NOTES
1. For evidence that Dewey is often charged with holding to a technocratic version of psychology and the social sciences, see Chapters 1 and 2, above. As regards Dewey and social science more generally, see, most recently, Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For Ross, Deweys position was scientistic. See the note that follows. 2. Ross does not celebrate academic social science in America. She argues that it is scientistic. [Scientism] was the result of a long-standing commitment perennially deferred, an effort to make good on the positivist claim that only natural science provided certain knowledge and conferred the power of prediction and control. With science now defined by its method, scientism demanded that the requirements of natural scientific method dominate the practice of social science (Ross, 1991: 390).

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While I very much agree with Ross as regards much academic social science, her explanation is very different that the one I offered in my History and Philosophy of the Social Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). She seems wrongly to assume that the positivists provide a generally correct understanding of natural science. For her, scientism arises only when the social sciences are constituted in positivist terms. Ross seems to favor interpretative models available in history and cultural anthropology or the generalizing and interpretative model offered by Max Weber (Ross, 1991: 473). I argued in my 1987 book that there was a third, realist alternative. It allows us to incorporate the historical and hermeneutic and also to give social science an emancipatory role. See also my A Realist Philosophy of Social Science (2006). I suggest in what follows that Dewey seems to have stumbled toward a fourth alternative, neither positivist, realist nor interpretative. 3. Thorsten Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (New York: Sagamore, 1957: 132). This was written before World War I and published in 1918. It remains a wonderful account. Indeed, things have changed little. Dewey and Veblen agreed on much but it is hard to discern how the influences ran. Both had struggled with the views of Peirce. 4. See Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995). Westbrook and Ryan are helpful as regards Deweys views on democracy and politics. It is a bit surprising that Ryan pays so little attention to issues in the theory of science, given his interests. Ryan finds Deweys Logic: The Theory of Inquiry somewhat baffing(1995: 309). This is a bit remarkable (though not unusual) since this is the place where Dewey makes his most fundamental assault on the conventional wisdom. 5. I think also that his influence was minimal and even though many parties, often conflicting, were fond of drawing on him to suit their purposes. Early Chicago school sociology has some Deweyan marks, but it too moved toward positivism. See Lester R. Kurtz, Evaluating Chicago Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). G. H. Mead, of course, was the direct influence on symbolic interactionism and Meads relations to Dewey remains unclear. Symbolic interactionism, in any case, was always a minor competitor to mainstream social science. Perhaps C. W. Mills, for his all unhappiness with Deweyfor many of the right reasonsis the most Deweyan social scientist. 6. The most comprehensive comparative overview of the emergence of modern social science is Wagner, P., Wittrock, B., and R. Whiteley (eds.), Discourses on Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines, Sociology of Sciences Yearbook, 1991 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). 7. See my account, A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Chapter 11, and Ross, Origins, Chapter 3. 8. See Ralph W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), especially Chapter 6, and Thomas Burke, Deweys New Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 9. For a very useful account of Deweys theory of inquiry as epistemology see, H. S. Thayer, Objects of Knowledge, in John J. Stuhr (ed.), Philosophy and the Re-

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construction of Culture (Albany: State University of New Press). See Chapter 6, below. 10. See Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) and Herbert Gans, The War Against the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 1995) for review and criticism of the contribution of recent mainstream social science to this impoverishment. More recently, see Alice OConnor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001 and my brief essay, The Sociology of Poverty, in Encyclopedia of Poverty (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 2006). 11. In 1929, Herbert Hoover assembled a distinguished group of social scientists to examine the feasibility of a national survey of social trends . . . to undertake the researches and to make . . . a complete impartial examination of the facts. This was funded by the Rockefeller foundation with support from the SSRC, one of Merriams inspirations. Four years of work by hundreds of social scientists filled 1600 pages of quantitative research. The document called the Ogburn Report after its director, William F. Ogburn of Columbia, may be taken to signal the full maturation of American-style social science. 12. It is not altogether clear what Dewey has in mind here. He may assume that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century owed to incorporation of techniques derived from the workshops of craftmen. But it has been argued by Koyre, Butterfield and Kuhn that as regards the development of the classical sciences: physics and astronomy, the scientific revolution was not a consequence of new experimental techniques, but of new ways of looking at old phenonena. Baconian experiments did, later, give rise to a large number of newer scientific fields which had their roots in the crafts and in alchemy. See Kuhn, 1977. 13. Having abandoned the quest for foundations, Dewey had to justify science as a mode of fixing belief pragmatically. But this need not give technology a privileged position. For discussion, see Chapter 6, below. 14. He writes scientific inquiry proceeds by introducing qualifications. The amount of arsenic has to be specified . . . The conditions of the system into which it is taken have to be determined . . . The presence or absence of `counteracting conditions has to be taken into account . . . (LW, Vol. 12: 44647.). 15. Dewey very early on insisted that all behavior and experience was social, but he did not say much about what this meant or entailed. See Chapter 4, below. For some alternative conceptions, see John Greenwood (ed.), The Mark of the Social (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). 16. In some places, he suggests that a mind experiment may be quite sufficient; in others he seems at least to deny this. For example:
Experimental operations change existing conditions. Reasoning as such, can provide means for effecting the change of conditions but by itself cannot effect it. Only execution of existential operations directed by an idea in which ratiocination terminates can bring about the re-ordering of environing conditions required to produce a settled and unified situation (LW, 12: 121).

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17. See also LW, 12: 458. As a consequence of his rejection of the spectator theory of knowledge, it is clear that all inquiry requires experimentation for Dewey. He says also that there are at least three needs satisfied by experimentation: the institution of data, the elimination of material that is irrelevant to the problem at hand, and the generation of new existential materials. He generally seems to have in mind something much like the methods that Mill had provided in his Logic (LW, 12: 190). But sometimes, experiment seems to be exploratory in its aim (LW, 12: 317), close indeed to the Baconian idea of twisting the tail of the lion. 18. For a systematic discussion of experiment see Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd Edition (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1978). 19. This feature of Deweys concern with the existing disciplines of social science is rarely acknowledged. See also Logic (LW, 12: 5012).

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Culture and Nature

INTRODUCTION My title intends to associate my effort with Deweys Experience and Nature, better titled, he later thought, Culture and Nature. My main interest is to reconsider naturalism in the light of recent debate in the philosophy of the social sciences. Since at least Dilthey, the question of a human science had been very much contested. Could one hold, for example, that as there were physical laws, there was social laws? Could one argue that explanation proceeded in terms of these, just as, presumably, it does in the physical sciences? Could one hold that, even ideally speaking, the terms of the social sciences could be reduced to terms in the physical language? Indeed, anti-naturalism could be defined as the view that epistemological and ontological differences in the domains of nature and culture demand a wholly different methodology. Beginning with the Kantian cleavage between an empirical (phenomenal) realm subject to knowable law and an intelligible realm where agents are free, late nineteenth century thought dichotomized eklaren (causal explanation) and verstehen (interpretative understanding), the nomothetic and the idiographic, the domain of nature and the domain of history. For anti-naturalists, then, even if the methods of the natural sciences are apt for the investigation of nature, by virtue of the meaningful, linguistic or conceptual character of the human sciences, the methods of the human sciences need to be toto coelo different. They require a hermeneutic, phenomenological approach.

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OBJECTIVE VS SUBJECTIVE WELTANSCHAUUNGEN? This bifurcation was the operative idea behind Maurice Natansons 1963 much used anthology, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences. In his forward, Natanson wrote:
Two distinctly opposed philosophical attitudes are taken as polar positions underlying the social sciences: let us, for want of satisfying alternatives, call them objective and subjective Weltanschauungen (Natanson, 1963: viii).

As the book unfolds, sociologist and naturalist, George Lundberg is put against Simmels neo-Kantianism, essays by Ernest Nagel and C. G. Hempel on concept and theory formation in the social sciences are paired with one on the same topic by Alfred Schtz, an essay by A. J. Ayer is juxtaposed with one by Merleau-Ponty. But perhaps most striking was the exchange generated by Thelma Lavines incisive essay, Note to Naturalists on the Human Spirit. Lavine sharply criticized any naturalism that was content to be defined by a principle of continuity of analysis conceived of in terms of experiment and empirical verifiablity. . . . This amounted, she insisted, to forfeiting its status as a positive, i.e., constructive philosophy (In Natanson, 1963: 252). Naturalists not only exaggerated experimentalism but they confused the method of naturalism with methods stipulated by naturalism for inquiry into all types of subject matter. Finally, Lavine charged that naturalists had thus far been able to satisfy its new-found concern with the human spirit by recommending the method of experimentation to the social sciences. By default, they had failed to show that naturalisms were not, finally, materialisms. On her view, these weaknesses could be overcome, but only if naturalists developed a naturalistically reconstructed method of verstehen (254, 258). Lavines essay brought sharp rebuttals from both Nagel and Natanson. Nagel found that the difficulties she claims to find in current naturalism are only doubtfully genuine; and the specific recommendation . . . of questionable worth (262), Natanson much approved of Lavines criticism but found that her recommendation was, finally, incoherent: To reinvoke naturalistic criteria as correctives for a reconstructed naturalistic method is to take a step forward and follow with a step back (282). For Natanson, since verstehen was foundational, the way out was the transcension of naturalism in favor of a phenomenological standpoint (283). Indeed, after saying that W. I. Thomas, Cooley and Mead were all representatives of the phenomenological standpoint, Natanson offered that this transcension could be achieved by adopting the phenomenological stance of Edmund Husserl. In what follows, I argue that both Nagel and Natanson were wrong and that Lavine was correct. But to do this requires rejection of mainstream, empiri-

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cist, neo-positivist philosophy of science, including especially its characteristic philosophy of language and the (still dominating idea) that explanation proceeds by subsumption under law. Instead, I draw on Dewey and recent work in the realist philosophy of science.1 In turn, I offer that in terms of this view of science, a human science may be secured with a robust naturalism of the sort defended by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.2 On the present view, anti-naturalisms thrive because, beginning with the debates of the last decades of the nineteenth century, both sides of the argument have shared in assumptions about both nature and culture and about what natural science is. They still do.

NATURE AND CULTURE Nature exists independently of human activity. Society (and, not trivially, knowledge of nature) does not.3 On the present view, society is best construed as a relatively enduring ensemble of social relations, relatively enduring because social relations are incarnate in the activities of persons (Manicas, 2006; Giddens, 1984). There would be no society without human activity. There would be no human activity without culture, broadly, everything which has meaning, including then, language and the total range of material objects that are regularly used by people in mediating both their social and their environmental actions (Byers, 1991: 3). Although the activity-dependent character of society has implications for inquiry in the social sciences, this fact does not, emphatically, call for antinaturalism. The philosophical basis for such a naturalistic (yet, non-reductive) view of society is hinted at by Marx (especially in The German Ideology), and developed by G.H. Mead and Dewey. Alternativeand on the present view, badly mistaken naturalismsare offered in the nineteenth century positivist formulations of Spencer, Haeckel and Engels and in more recent eliminative materialism.4 For Dewey and Mead, life and mind are emergent evolutionary products; but as Tiles has argued, it is critical to see that most theories under this banner amount to little more than dualism back from the laundry (Tiles, 1988: 49). Characteristically, it is acknowledged that life and mind evolved, but then argued that mind is consciousness and that its contents are ideas (or intentions), qualities directly known only to subjects. Within, then, this Cartesian framework, meaning and communication require either reductionist strategies, for example, verificationism, behaviorism, or they remain miraculous, at the very least wanting of some non-naturalistic solution.

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A fully naturalistic posture will not merely allow mind (culture, meaning and society) an evolution from the sentient, but will reject what Dewey called intellectualism, the two-fold error of operating with an incomplete (abstracted) picture of what is to have [an] experience of seeing and recognizing, and on the other hand, [imposing] on all experience, specifically sentient experience, a structure which is present only in sophisticated (cognitive) developments of sentience (Tiles, 1988: 55). On cannot, I think, underestimate the hold of intellectualism on philosophers, psychologists and social scientists that seek an understanding of humans and society. Semantic theories of language, current cognitive science, talk about the cultural system as in Parsonian-influence theory or more radically, in the cultural work of Geertz or his opposite, Lvi-Strauss, is antinaturalist, even platonist in this way. Similarly, the Parsonian conception of the affective as providing only motivating, non-cognitive role in action, recent rational choice theory and the idea that all knowledge is discursive knowledge each thrive on intellectualism. For Dewey, three general plateaus are easilyand empirically discerned, each of which incorporates the function and relations of those below it, and is such that it cannot be understood in isolation from the level (or levels) below it . . . (Tiles, 1988: 56) The first plateau is inanimate nature. In strongly realist terms, Dewey writes atoms and molecules show a selective bias in their indifferences, affinities and repulsions, when exposed to other events. 5 Following James in his Principles, Dewey argues that things are defined by means of symbols that convey only their consequences with respect to one another. Water in ordinary experience designates an essence of something which has familiar bearings and uses in human life . . . But H20 gets away from these connnections, and embodies in its essence only instrumental efficacy in respect to things independent of human affairs (E&N: 160). In the foregoing terms, H20 is represents a theoretical entity, real but not empirical. For realist theory of science, things, both the things of ordinary experience and the highly abstracted theoretical things of advanced science, are metaphysical compounds. Ordinary table salt is a compound of different kinds of molecules even while it is mostly NaCl. NaCl, of course, is a theoretical entity, an item of the current ontology of science. Realist philosophy of science is strongly naturalistic in holding that nature exists independently of mind, even if the nature of nature is a scientific problem, to be settled by inquiry.6 In contrast to empiricisms, laws are not statements about empirical regularities but assertions about the dispositional powers of thingstheir selective biassand these are understood as natural necessities, in Deweys terms, essences. Theories are conceived as representations of enduring

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structures or mechanisms. On this view, theories have essential non-sentential dimensions, what Harr termed imagined paramorphs, models of causal mechanisms at work in the world.7 The second general plateau, life, is distinguished by the way physicochemical energies are interconnected and operate. Animate bodies seek to maintain a temporal pattern of activity . . . to utilize conserved consequences of past activities so as to adapt subsequent changes to the needs of the integral system in which they belong. Thus, iron as such exhibits characteristics of bias or selective reactions but iron as a genuine constituent of an organized body acts so as to tend to maintain the type of activity of the organism to which it belongs.(E&N: 192). In an organism, it functions not to become iron-oxide (as it would in a hinge), but to contribute to metabolism. As Dewey sees, how some element of a concrete composite behaves depends upon its (theorized) dispositional properties, on how in the integrated system, it is related to other things, and on how the composite is related to things external to it. It is because ironFeis what it is that it has properties, which enable it to function differently in different relations. Compare here hinges in New Mexico and Honolulu. We experience patterns not invariances. Patterns are the result of relatively stable configurations of causal mechanisms. Salt (usually) dissolves in water; for human percipients, gold isalmost always appearsyellow; and to shift the example to the domain of society, there is a strong positive correlation between poverty and one-on-one crime. Indeed, it terms of Deweys most basic metaphysical category, there is both precariousness and stability because the world is not, as empiricists have it, a determined concatenation of contingent events but a contingent concatenation of ensembles of complexly related natural necessities, a world of genuine change and novelty. The implications of this for a proper understanding of science are, without exaggeration, simply enormous.

MEANING, MIND AND SOCIETY But if vitalism in biology is no longer persuasive, mind remains a problem, not only in the persistent mind/body dualism (and epistemological individualism) of most general psychology, but also in the social sciences, in what is, effectively, a radical bifurcation of nature and culture. As Dewey says, upon the whole, professed transcendentalists have been more aware than have professed empiricists of the fact that language makes the difference between brute and man. The trouble is, he continued, that they have lacked a naturalistic conception of its origin and status.(E&N: 140). For Dewey (and

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Mead), society, meaning and mind are tightly linked and a genetic account is indispensable if we are not to fall into the philosophic fallacy, the conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence. The fallacy converts consequences of interactions of events into causes of the occurrence of these consequences (200). As Dewey recognized, this fallacy is widespread, but nowhere more vivid than in accounts of mind and of society. The former are epistemologically individualist in positing as given, an available language, beliefs expressed in this language and rationality independently of the social relations, which generate these. Accounts of society are methodologically individualist in believing that social relations are not presupposed in action. Deweys move, to shift the problem of mind to the problem of language, sounds remarkably au courant. But his naturalistic account of its origin and status has yet to taken seriously. We can usefully supplement Deweys account with G. H. Meads. Creatures that lack language nevertheless gesture. Thus the perception by a dog that another is ready to attack becomes a stimulus . . . to change his position or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this than the change of attitude . . . causes the first dog to change his attitude. We have here, Mead notes, a conversation of gestures (Mead, 1867: 43). To be sure, it would be an error to say these acts have meaning for the animals. Dewey and Mead insist that meanings do not come into being without language and these creatures lack language (Dewey, E&N: 212), On the other hand, as Tiles writes, animals which do not already respond to each others behavior cannot respond to each others intentions to produce modifications in their behavior.(Tiles, 1988: 89). The plateau of co-ordinated animal response is not irrelevant to communication at the linguistic plateau even if it is not reducible to it. Consider, then, a linguistically apt creature.8 Gestures can become significant symbols. That is, vocal gestures can arouse in an individual making them the response that they explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals (Mead, 1934: 71). They can come to stand for a particular act or response. Significant symbols are meanings. Mead wrote that the difference between a gesture and a significant symbol is that the individual is conscious of the meaning of his own gesture. Indeed, Mead often refers to intentional acts, which entail an elaborate mental process. David Rubenstein (1977: 212) calls this an inconsistency in Mead and says that it was the reintroduction of the psychical entities he tried to eliminate which invited interpretation of him as a phenomenologist. But this (not uncharacteristic) reading is a huge error, in Deweys terms, a straightforward product of the philosophic fallacy. Neither Dewey nor Mead deny that persons are conscious or that they have intentions. Rather, it is their claim that meaning cannot be explained in terms of intentions (or in-

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tentional objects, psychic or otherwise). Thus, if someone is to be taken as, e.g., making a request, as Tiles writes:
he has to be taken to have responded to the object not as a stimulus but from the standpoint of the [other]. And what establishes the possibility of thus adopting the standpoint of the other is the recognition of the regularity of the relationship holding between gesture and completed act (1988: 93).

These perceived regularities are the foundation of socially constructed linguistic universals. In the absence of this plateau, meaning cannot be made intelligible. Thus, semantic theories that try to define meaning in terms of truth conditions without acknowledging that linguistic acts (or their vehicles) presuppose social activity fail to explain how a linguistic vehicle could get meaning. They must, finally, either beg the question or postulate meanings. It is also to deny nominalism, the dominating posture of Hume-inspired empiricist philosophies of language. As consequences of social interactions, which depend upon regularities that can become habitualized and standardized, neither meaning nor essence is adventitious and arbitrary. Yet, as important, linguistic universals are not platonic entities or formulae, which prescribe their application. By explaining meaning, Dewey can also account for philosophys enduring fallacies regarding it: Thus, meanings that were discovered to be indispensable to communication were treated as final and ultimate in nature itself. Essences were hypostatized into original and constitutive forms of all existencethe philosophic fallacy at work (E&N: 155). There is no objection to talk about either meanings or essencesas long as one fully appreciates them to be nothing more than relatively enduring social products. On the other hand, exactly because meanings (and essences) are grounded in regularities of interaction and are the product of these, they are both objective and remain revisable. Thus, meaning is not a peculiar kind of thing, a Platonic Idea, a subsisting concept or logical in a style which separates logic from nature. For Dewey, meanings are rules for using and interpreting things; interpretation being always an imputation of potentiality for some consequence. As before, gestures depend upon expected outcomes that presuppose the regularities of past experience. Accordingly, use is constrained, neither adventitous nor arbitrary, but because in acting, agents decide, use is revisable. In noting the scope and limits of application are ascertained experimentally [practically] in the process of application(E&N: 156). Dewey anticipates what has come to be called a finitist conception of rules, the idea that since there is no universal or natural scale for weighing similarity against difference, the application of rules (including meaning-rules) are

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contingent judgments by actors using materials at hand.9 As I argue subsequently, the implications of seeing that meanings are both objective and reproduced and transformed by practice are critical for social science.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM The failure to see that meaning is to be found in transactions is propelled by the failure to see that there is a radical difference between individuals with minds and individual minds, the characteristic posture of epistemological individualism. To avoid a solipsism of the present moment, epistemological individualists need to hold that the experienced world is shared by individuals; but if is not a social product, this world needs to be the world of the naive realist where things are, pretty much, as they appear. Thus, in the mind independent world, there are red apples, even if we must learn to call them red apples. If, however, we take modern physical science and the evidence of history and anthropology seriously, we need to acknowledge that the capacity to identify the most mundane things of experience requires, in addition to our evolved natural capacities, a massive system of meaning which has been historically, regionally, and locally bequeathed. Indeed, the failure to acknowledge this would seem to be consequence of both intellectualism and the conversion of eventual functions into antecedent causes. As Dewey insists,
The whole history of science, art and morals proves that the mind that appears in individuals is not as such individual mind. The former is in itself a system of belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and rejections, of expectancies and appraisals of meanings, which have been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition (E&N: 180).

A more esoteric example may make the point clearer and show also its relevance to the present essay. According to Bulmer, the terminal taxa of the Karam correspond very well with some 70% of the cases with species identified by a scientific zoologist.10 The cassowary is an instance of non-correspondence. Karam have the taxon yakt for birds and bats, but the cassowary in not placed in this taxon. Instead, it appears in a special taxon, kobity, making it a nonbird/non-bat. For Bulmer, this is an error explained by Karam willingness to allow culture to supercede objective biological facts. But on the present view, what counts as an objective scientific fact depends upon practices which may differ from culture to culture. If we think that Karam taxonoy is wrong, it is because we have reason to think that the practice of science generates taxonomies, which better serve our purposes.

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It should be clear enough that the text just quoted from Dewey does not betray an Hegelian, objective idealist prejudice. On such views, mind is severed from natural existence and individuals merely participate in mind. Here I refer you to the customary bifurcation of cultural system and social system, to the standard notion of socialization wherein selves are empty vessels into which meaning is poured, and to the normative determinism so characteristic of mainstream sociology. The foregoing account of meanings gives us the resources to hold that the idea of individuals with minds admits of a fully naturalist interpretation. The difference between it and an idealist alternative, unfortunately, is easily missed. The idea of social super-mind is a philosophical nightmare because it precludes agency. It makes agents merely bearers of cultural systems that, in the last analysis, determine action. By contrast, for Mead and Dewey, because meanings are modes of natural interaction, culture is the continuous evolving product of recognitions and ignorances, acceptances and rejections, and expectancies and appraisals that are themselves the medium and product of conscious activity. Mind is social, not in the sense that cultural meaning is intersubjectivebetween subjectivitiesbut in the sense that meanings are public, in the world, and not (only or merely) in our consciousness.11

EMPIRICISM, PHENOMENOLOGY AND ANTI-NATURALISM Philosophical positions have never been irrelevant to the practice of social sciencemost often, I am afraid, for ill. Attacks on empiricist philosophy of science, beginning in the 1950s joined with phenomenological criticisms of empiricist social science. Both were unsettling to the mainstream, dominated, thenand still, if less so, by the objectivist Parsonian synthesis. But these criticisms did not encourage a re-thinking of naturalism in non-empiricist terms. Rather, they encouraged anti-naturalism. I must be brief. The work of Schtz, no doubt, was critical. On the one hand, his work contained many valuable insights, for example: that sociological constructs are constructs of social constructions, that the stock of knowledge is held in typfied form and dispersed, and that common-sense knowledge is a patchwork in which clear and distinct experiences are intermingled with vague conjectures; suppositions and prejudices cross well-proven evidences; motives, means and ends, as well as causes and effects, are strung together without clear understanding of their real connections.12 This contributed heavily to undermining the Parsonian theory of action, including, critically, the still standard theory of rationality.13

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Similarly, Schtzs idea, derived and extended from Husserl, of a lifeworld which is the taken-for-granted beginning for inquiry (the epoch of the natural attitude), was a strong solvent for the naive realism of mainstream social science.14 On the other hand, as Farber insisted, the life-world fell like manna from heaven, as an unexpected answer to the prayer of persons seeking an alternative to the worldview of a scientific philosophy, but for whom the existentialist bill of linguistic fare [was] inpalatable(Farber, 1967: 122).15 Even a mundane phenomenology could not (as Natanson agreed) consistently be grounded in naturalism. The trouble was not that Schtz remained committed to Husserls transcendental project, but that he retained, as Giddens noted, the unbilical tie to the subjectivity of the ego. For Schtz the social world is strictly speaking, my world. (Giddens, 1976: 31). Schtz did acknowledge that to study the social world, it was necessary to abandon the strictly phenomenological method. But while he was comfortable to assume the existence of the social world, not only did intersubjectivity remain, philosophically, a problem, but the social world seemed, at least, to be nothing more than a construction of consciousness. Put in other terms, it was difficult see how to incorporate either the natural context or the relatively enduring consequences of action into the account. Moreover, interpretative social science was restricted to describing and clarifying what is thought about the social world by those living it. This thoroughly descriptivist, ethnographic orientation, even in the hands of sensitive inquirers, lost even the hint of causal explanation and in consequence, any capacity for critique. Finally, while Schtz often said that it was the aim of sociology to obtain organized knowledge about the world of cultural objects and social institutionsleaving unclear what exactly this meant, the discovery of in order to motives became central task for sociological explanation. That is, phenomenology encouraged a highly psychologized notion of social science.16 Garfinkel, a student of Parsons, seems to have begun with Schtz, and before he was finished, offered a radical and powerful alternative to the Parsonian action frame of reference. This included a strong emphasis on agency, and rejection of motive analysis in favor of inquiry into situated actions. This was profoundly propelled by his generalized use of indexicality (indirectly owed to Peirce) and by finitism (derived from Wittgenstein). Garfinkel, however, was but ambivalently naturalistic. On some readings, e.g., his principle of ethnomethodological indifference was not merely a recommendation to bracket temporarily aspects of the empirical world, but was converted into an ontological commitment wherein, as Giddens wrote, social phenomena exist only in so far as lay actors classify or identify them as existing(Giddens, 1976: 42)an intellectualist dip into voluntarism and idealism. Moreover, like Schtz, Garfinkel was preoccuppied with the condi-

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tions of action, ignoring almost utterly the consequences of action, intended and unintended. Thus, neither could he sustain an adequate notion of social structure. While he acknowledged that actors had resources which were the medium of their actions, his actors became so thoroughly disconnected from their bodies and the larger pre-existing contexts in which they acted that these resources reduced to abstractly detached meaning-rules. In effect, his intellectualism led him to ignore the fact that his agents were fleshly, interested actors contexted in a geographical environment and embedded in a socially sustained, but not always transparent social relations of power. Worse, betrayed by epistemologically generated worries, he often suggested that these meaning rules were not about anything. As in current anti-realisms, participants could cooperatively reconstitute them at will. By the 1970s, phenomenologically inspired social science remained on the margin, but the unsatisfactory character of both mainstream and Marxist approaches was more than noticed. The response was cultural studies, inspired by the structuralism of Lvi-Strauss and Saussure and then, in response to this, both post-structuralism and the hermeneuticial approach of Clifford Geertz, and, finally, by Marxists writers responding to Althusserian structuralism.17 Powerfully encouraged by the epistemological criticisms of empiricism, including here Kuhns ambivalent Structure of Scientific Revolution, the work of Schtz, Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and Gadamer, and the more radical post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida, cultural studies betrayed a decided shift toward idealism. As Alexander rightly pointed out,
Insofar as [sociological theory] seeks a purely hermeneutic analysisnot only is there always cultural reference for every action but . . . there is only a cultural reference. Every change in action, every source of stability, everything that works for the good, everything that works for the badall must be explained in terms of the search for meaning itself. Every culturalist theory is . . . a form of sociological idealism (Alexander, 1987: 31112).

Nor did Marxists escape the drift toward idealismespecially those taken by strong readings of Gramsci (a student of Croce) and by post-modernist epistemology.18 The response, in my view, is neither a return to materialism, nor to some pseudo-solution that demands that we think dialectically about culture and material life.19 On the present view no such dialectic is possible because divorced of culture, material life is utterly empty. Here we are betrayed by systematic ambiguity as regards the very idea of culture. At one time, culture was used inclusively to refer to forms of life, to ensembles of meaningful patterns of activity that included work, play, marriage, worship.

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More recent cultural studies, however, have conceived culture far more narrowly, in terms of mentalitis, values, symbolic codes, signs, texts, and discourses that are effectively, if not explicitly autonomous.20 We need to return to the older idea; but we need to do this, as already suggested, with a strong agent centered naturalistic conception of mind and society. That is, instead of supposing that meanings have independent existences, we need to see them in contexts of action.

A NATURALISTIC ALTERNATIVE More particularly, we move in the right direction by putting the insights of Schtz and Garfinkel onto the naturalistic footing provided by Dewey and Mead. As Rubenstein rightly said, it was a major motive of phenomenological and verstehen approaches to social science to describe action in terms of mental components in order to combat the naturalistic inclination to treat action and social phenomena in the same way one treats the meaningless properties and events of nature. On the other hand, it was a major motive of empiricists to argue, reliable knowledge cannot be established about what is essentially private to the actor. (Rubenstein, 1977: 232). But if the foregoing is sound, there is no reason to be suspicious of an approach that insists that the category of meaning is indispensable to the understanding of human behavior, and for the same reason, there is reason to be suspicious of those philosophies of language which inform empiricist philosophy of science. As work by Kuhn, Polanyi and more recent sociology of scientific knowledge make clear enough, the meaning of scientific terms depends not on operational definitions and other semantic devices, but in taking account of science as a social activity in the sense of Dewey and Mead. First, with Schtz, we can endorse verstehen and the idea that sociological terms are constructions of what are already social constructions, what Giddens has called the double hermeneutic. Social science (in contrast to the physical sciences) is involved in theorizing and communicating about an already meaningful social world. But because verstehen is not some form of empathetic understandingindeed, is a presupposition of any human activity, including, then the practices of natural science, social science requires no special observational methods. Second, pace Garfinkel, instead of a one-sided emphasis on action as meaning, we can shift to action as praxis, as Giddens writes: the involvement of actors with the practical realization of interests, including the material transformation of nature through human activity (Giddens, 1976: 53). So

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construed, culture is not bifurcated from material activity, but is understood as inseparable, substantively and analytically, from it.21 Third, in consequence, all social research has a necessarily cultural, ethnographic or anthropological aspect to it. (Giddens, 1984: 1984). In other terms, qualitative research is an indispensable component of social science. This will be largely descriptive, even though, inevitably, it will theoretically informed, and thus, not only is literary style not irrelevant to the accuracy and communicability of such descriptions, but social scientists must draw on the same sources of mutual knowledge drawn on by novelists and journalists.22 But, fourth, because meaning is not in the head, and experience is not reducible to conscious contents, we need to distinguish practical knowledge from discursive knowledge. That is, while the present view centers agency and, unlike most mainstream and Marxist views, acknowledges that actors have complex skills and knowledge which they employ in acting and interacting, if we are to avoid the intellectualist fallacy, much of this knowledge is not discursively available. As Bhaskar says, it is tacit and implicit, spontaneous and not reflective, a matter of know-how rather than knowthat.(Bhaskar, 1986: 163). Accordingly, even if what is discursively available (or made available) is true, acquiring knowledge of the beliefs of actors will not be sufficient to establish an understanding of their social world. That is, even a good ethnography must go well beyond what people think about their world. Of course, since social activity cannot be described at all unless the inquirer knows what actors know, accounts from actors are necessary and play a critical role in enabling us to assess accounts offered inquirers. But indeed, there is good reason to hold that beliefs discursively available are not always true! While practical activity is skillful and intended, it does not require true belief as regards the conditions of action. In part this is because action always has an unintended consequence, viz., the reproduction and transformation of the very conditions of action. We do make history but, as Marx insisted, not with a plan and not with materials of our own choosing. Unacknowledged conditions, unknown and unintended consequences, self-deception and other obstacles limit our ability to cognize fully and accurately the social world which our own actions sustain. Were it otherwise, there would hardly be a point to human science. This means, sixth, not only that social science can enlarge the understanding of members, but by so doing, it can have a critical and emancipatory dimension. That is, because the domain of the social sciences comprises social objects, e.g., institutions, social practices and social relations which are the product of social activity, and because this domain includes beliefs about

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these activities, when these beliefs can be shown to be false, distorted or otherwise inadequate, agents have grounds to change these social forms. Consider the belief that males are superior. If this belief is constitutive of the relations which define the nuclear family, then if (as women increasingly appreciate!) this belief is false, people have good reasons for altering these relationsas indeed, they have been doing! That is, eklaren, the effort to explain how these forms have come to be and why people have the beliefs they have is an essential part of the task of social science. Seventh, such explanation is not via subsumption under law. On the present, realist view, success in the theoretical sciences depends upon the capacity to abstract a strata of the world and to identify, theoretically, causal mechanisms within that strata. Such theory gives us an understanding. We gain, thus, an understanding of tensile strength by appeal to physical theory. But because the theoretical powers of things are never operating in a closed systemother causes are always operating on themthere are patterns, but no invariant empirical regularities. Everything that happens is caused, but it is complexly caused, a function of the causal powers of the things of the world and their continuously changing relations and configurations. For example, one explains the collapse of a landing gear by appeal to the tensile strength of the materials and a host of other pertinent causes, including, perhaps, the historical effects of the maintenance schedule and the decision to make an emergency landing on a field not heretofore used by such aircraft. Because causal conjunctures are contingent, we are often in a position to explain something that happened when we could not have predicted it. Stellar mechanics is the worst possible paradigm for a science exactly because, as regards the pertinent variables, the solar system is relatively closed. Explanation in social science has the same form, involving, on the one hand, the effort to identify the social mechanisms or structured processes being sustained by the activities of agents, and on the other, the effort to grasp, concretely, the capacities which they have and the constraints to which they subject, what they know and understand, and, finally, the uses to which they put their capacities and knowledge. Because all these are historically variable, social science, in contrast to the most successful of the physical sciences, is inevitably concrete and historicaland for the same reasons, it could never be finished (Manicas, 2006). For example, one begins to understand a capitalist society by identifying the logic of capital. That is, given the (very different) resources made available by capitalist social relations, as a consequence of their actions, intended and unintended, actors will promote a tendency toward over accumulation. To be sure, because between Japan and the United States, or between the US in 1929 and the US today, there will be immense differences in the concrete

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forms of these relations and their relation to other structured practices, there will be differences in the capacities, constraints, and forms of knowledgeability between actors in these different times and places. On the other hand, the tendency to over accumulation will surely figure in any account of the Great Depression, even if, as noted, any plausible account will need to integrate a host of other processes, contingent events, and decisions by persons, acting and interacting, as always, as cultural beings with beliefs and a range of meaningful material objects. I conclude with what for me is the most important idea: The foregoing implies that the anti-naturalistic Kantian bifurcation of freedom and determinism needs to be thoroughly rejected. The problem of human freedom, naturalistically understood, is the problem of possessing the capacity to act in realizing ones genuine interests; and this involves understanding the sources of constraint and limitation, and then transforming these to needed, wanted and empowering sources of determination. Indeed, it is to generate a social science that would have satisfied Dewey.

NOTES
1. To be clear, the realism assumed here is not of the variety associated with Hilary Putnam or Richard Boyd. It is, roughly, the policy realism of Rom Harr, an explicitly pragmatic version of realism, still too little appreciated in the USA. See Rom Harr The Principles of Scientific Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Rom Harr and Edward Madden, Causal Powers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975) and most recently, Harr, Varieties of Realism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). See also Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd Edition (Brighton: Harvester, 1979) and The Possibility of Naturalism (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), my A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987) and A Realist Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 2. I say of the sort here since my interest is not primarily to represent either Dewey or Mead. I use them to develop a position that is both naturalistic and realistic. Although influenced by R.W. Sleepers defense of Dewey as a transactional realist, I am not clear whether Dewey would be entirely happy with the sort of realism defended here. See R.W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 3. It thus that naturalisms need to be committed to strong versions of the sociology of knowledge. See P. T. Manicas and Alan Rosenberg, Naturalism, Epistemological Individualism and The Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 15 (March 1985). See Chapter 6, below. 4. Thus Rortys physicalist idea that
every speech, thought, theory, poem, composition, and philosophy will turn out to be completely predictable in purely naturalistic terms. Some atoms-and-the-void account of

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micro-processes within individual human beings will permit the prediction of every sound or inscription which will be uttered (Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979): 387.

5. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, The Later Works, 19251953 (Southern Illinois Press), hereafter E&N. 6. We need to distinguish philosophical ontology, what is presumed by inquiry, from scientific ontology, the result of (ongoing) inquiry. See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science. 7. See Harr, Principles of Scientific Thinking, 1970 and Varieties of Realism, 1986. On the present view, it is an error of considerable importance to think of theories as interpreted deductive systems. 8. See Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) for a superb evolutionary account of the genesis of linguistic capacity. 9. The idea is also critical to Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, although it may well be that Wittgensteins version is not entirely free of nominalist fantasy. As we note below, finitism is a central part of Garfinkels theory of action. My criticism of his use of the idea is that he ignores the powerful constraints of enduring social relations, well recognized by Dewey and Mead. 10. I take this example from Barry Barnes, On the Conventional Character of Knowledge and Cognition, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1981): 30333. See R. Bulmer, Why is the Cassowary not a Bird? Man 21 (1967: 425. 11. On the other hand, to say that mind is social is not deny the individuality of individuals with minds. Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social (E&N: 71). As Dewey wrote:
Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life; consciousness in a being with language evolves denotes awareness or perception of meanings . . . The greater part of mind is only implicit in any conscious act or state; the field of mindof operative meaningsis enormously wider than that of consciousness . . . Mind is, so to speak, structural, substantial, a constant background and foreground; perceptive consciousness is process, a series of heres and now ( 247).

12. See John Heritage, Ethnomethodology, in A. Giddens and J.H. Turner (eds.) Social Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987): 230, quoting Schutz. 13. Roughly, actors are rational in the sense that they distinguish means and ends, articulate consequences of alternative courses of action and assess their costs and benefits. As rational, they optimize benefits and minimize costs.. For some discussion, see John Heritage, 1987. 14. More recently, of course, deconstruction has been an even more powerful solvent. 15. It is some interest to note that Farber and Schtz were very close colleagues during the early years of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Schtzs biographer writes: . . . it was the close connection and collaboration with Farber, more than anything else, that was responsible for the early realization of Schtzs intention

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to establish contacts with American philosophers and find an opportunity to address American philosophical audiences (Helmut R. Wagner, Alfred Schtz: An Intellectual Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). One can give at least Schtzs later writings a naturalistic reading. Peter Hare reports that the archives of PPR show that Farber struggled hard to keep the pages of the journal open. 16. Some avowed followers of Weber also often express what is at least a tension here, between a psychologistic explanation of some act and a sociological explanation of acts of that sort. Thus, one may need an in order to motives to explain why some particular person commits a crime, but understanding what structures criminal behavior will require more and other than this. See my A Realist Philosophy of Social Science (2006). 17. For a useful critical overviews, see Anthony Giddens, Structuralism, Poststructuralism and the Production of Culture, in A. Giddens and J.H. Turner (eds.), Social Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). For Geertz, see The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and criticism by Jeffrey Alexander, Twenty Lectures, Lectures 16, 17. As regards Marxism, see Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980); Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, in T. Bennett et al (eds.) Culture, Ideology and Social Process (The Open University Press, 1981). See also my The Rise and Fall of Scientism, in Wiliiam Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner (eds), Handbook of Social Science Methodology (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007). This essay includes discussion of other critical figures including Bourdieu, Giddens and Foucault. 18. On Gramsci, see Paul Piccone, Italian Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). A useful compendium is Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). As the editors note, as little as twenty years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine such a project and such a volume (2). See especially the essays by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau. 19. The most powerful non-reductionist Marxisms come from Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson. On the present view, Williams Marxism is far and away to be preferred. Hall (Cultural Studies) quotes Thompson that the dialectical intercourse between social being and social consciousnessor between culture and not cultureis at the heart of any comprehension of the historical process within the Marxist tradition . . . The tradition inherits a dialectic that is right but he particular mechanical metaphor through which it is expressed is wrong. But it is hard to see how the dialect is right in the absence of clarity about could be the right metaphor? On the other hand, Thompson is quite correct to bring together the two elements consciousness and conditionsaround the concept of experience. For Williams, there is no interesting sense of dialectic. Indeed, it nowhere appears in his important book, Marxism and Literature (1977). Instead, Williams insists that talk about base/superstructure, economy, culture, and then, problems of determination and mediation are predicated on reifying abstractions. This is, he insists, particularly ironic since Marxs central emphasis was on a conception of productive activity in which labour and language, as practices, can be seen as

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evolutionary and historically constitutive (33). As Hall says, disapprovingly, Williams so totally absorbs definitions of experience into our ways of living, and both into an indissoluble real material practice-in-general, as to obviate any distinction between culture and not-culture (26) This is, of course, very reminiscent of Dewey. 20. As Roy DAndrade has remarked: When I was a graduate student, one imagined people in a culture; ten years later culture was all in their heads (Andrade, A Colloquy of Cultural Theorists,in Richard A. Schweder and Robert A. LeVine (eds), Culture Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987: 7. For a representative sample of work that puts culture all in their heads, see K.C. Alexander and S. Seidman (eds.), Culture and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The conjunctive and in the title betrays the problem of much recent work. 21. As Paul Willis has insisted, there is no question . . . of counterposing the cultural with the productive or the real, as if the former had no actual constitutive role in the basic social relations which govern the form of . . . society (in Alexander and Seidman (eds.), Culture and Society: 84). Thus, the class relations of British proletariat toward the end of the century and of jute workers in British India in this century were fundamentally different. See Dipesh Chahkrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 18901940 (London: Verso, 1991). In a nutshell, the jute workers of Bengal were wageworkers but were culturally not proletarian in Marxs sense. 22. Indeed, it is far to say that as regards communicating an understanding of cultural milieu, novelists and journalists often do a better job than do academic social scientists!

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NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY

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Naturalism and Subjectivism: Philosophy for the Future?

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RECENT PAST In order, eventually, to make some claims about realism and naturalism, I begin with a view of philosophy and with a very brief sketch of the philosophy of the recent past. For me, philosophical labels, like the term philosophy itself, do not discriminate natural kinds. Accordingly, with Jonathan Ree, I think of philosophy as part of literature and general history (Ree, 1988).1 And with Rorty, I think that we need to appeal to contingent arrangements to explain both what counts as philosophy and its problems and to understand the meaning of philosophical terms of art in use at any given time and place (Rorty, 1984). Even given some historical continuity in the use of some terms, this implies that what counts a philosophical problem in one period needs not be one in some other. The present period owes directly to contingent arrangements in the late nineteenth centuryas I shall argue, and it is important to acknowledge this if we are to understand philosophys current situation. Rorty comments: We need to realize that the questions which the contingent arrangements of the present time lead us to regard as the questions are questions which may be better than whose which our ancestors asked, but need not be the same. Of course, they may be better, but they may also be worse. I would not go so far as to say that there are no perennial philosophical problems, but they are ethical and political. Dewey had something like this mind, I would guess, in urging philosophers to forego struggle with problems of philosophers for struggle with the problems of humans. Many who are not recognized by anybodys canon as philosophers have spoken, sometimes wisely, to my two perennial problems. But those
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traditionally deemed philosophers have tended to provide a ground for their views on questions in ethics and politics, generally metaphysics and sometimes an epistemology. Two further observations: First, recent philosophy has tended to be anti-metaphysical, and much more interested in epistemology than in ethics or politics. In the limiting case characteristic of much analytic philosophy, ethical and political claims are deemed, on epistemological grounds, non-cognitive. I am especially interested in denying this, but here I only assume that the arguments of naturalists like Dewey, Abraham Edel and Marvin Farber can be sustained. Second, by virtue of this, it is not implausible to follow Farber and assert that the only serious alternatives for philosophy are naturalismor alternatively, materialism, and subjectivismin his special senses.2 Farber used materialism and naturalism interchangeably, having the advantage of flexibility and acknowledged, of course, that there are alternative versions of both. He included as subjectivisms, all forms of idealism, including absolute idealism and phenomenology, and various types of existential philosophy. But what is most striking about his dichotomy is the absence of reference to positivism. We need some history.

IDEALISM Mandelbaum argued that during the nineteenth century, there were only two main streams of philosophical thought, each of which possessed a relatively high degree of continuity, and each of which tended to deal with similar problems, although from opposed points of view(Mandelbaum, 1971: 5). The problems regarded knowledge but especially the nature and role of science. The two positions were metaphysical idealism and positivism. His definition of idealism is useful: metaphysical idealism holds that within natural human experience one can find the clue to an understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, and this clue is revealed through those traits which distinguish man as a spiritual being (1971: 6). Epistemology, a new philosophical discipline that derived from Kant, was the critical feature of the forms of argument of idealism but as Mandelbaum argues, the movement was part of a more general rebellion against the conceptions of man and nature which characterized the Enlightenment (1971: 7). As in Kant, idealism was motivated by distress that God, freedom and immortality were being undermined by the new science. Neither the forms of argument nor the general rebellion have gone away, even while, especially as regards the rebellion, there are now at least two important anti-Enlightenment postures, pre-modern theisms which, for the most part, are not defended by academic philosophers,

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and ethical nihilisms, aided and abetted both by positivist epistemology and subjectivist post-modernisms, very much academic positions. But we need to fill in positivism, and to get back to Farber, to define materialism and naturalism.

POSITIVISM The 19th century battleground was over science and what it had to say about man and nature. Positivisms and materialisms both stood on science critically, a very much-contested concept until very late in the century. And both positivisms and materialisms were opposed to traditional theologies. But it would be wrong to suppose that nineteenth century positivisms were all materialisms.3 Engels and then Lenin, who had an anti-positivist conception of science, was closer to the truth in asserting that positivists were each covert idealists. Farbers dichotomy, of course, follows Engels who had argued that there are but two great camps in philosophy: idealists and materialists. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form . . . comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism(Engels, 1935: 32). For Engels, the great basic question of all philosophy, especially of modern philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking to being. Engelss dichotomy was Lenins point of departure against the Machists, and the entire cast of empiricist philosophers of science of the period. In his infrequently read Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908), Lenin defended Engelss materialism against those bold warriors, who proudly allude to the modern theory of knowledge, recent philosophy (or recent positivism), the philosophy of the natural sciences or even more boldly, the philosophy of natural science of the twentieth century(Lenin, 1970: 7).4 Lenin was quite correct to identify positivist theory of science as hegemonic, to link it with modern theory of knowledge, and to see that it rejected the realism of materialisms, of which more in a moment. Mandelbaum well summarized the distinct feature of positive philosophy.
Since positivism confines all human knowledge to what has been experienced or can be experienced, it claims that a science which has freed itself from metaphysical preconceptions will restrict itself to discovering reliable correlations within experience . . . According to this view, a scientific explanation does not involve appeal to any immanent forces nor to any transcendent entities; to explain a phenomena is to be able subsume it under one or more laws of which it is an instance(1971: 11.)

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Positivists are manifestly empiricists, and it is easy enough to see how, as Mandelbaum put it, the positivist interpretation of science even came to be absorbed into the idealist tradition (11). As he notes in another place, common to all forms of idealism and phenomenalism is subjectivism, understood as the idea that all we can know are the contents of consciousness (what Rorty later referred to as the veil of ideas). If, then, reference to transcendent reality is to be rejected and all knowledge is restricted to what is in experience, then what is to be gained by holding that the objects of experience exist independently of it? As Farber well said: the methodological restriction of the objects of reality to a relationship with an experiencing subjectthe subject-object limitationserves as a wheelhorse for idealistic arguments at critical points (Farber, 1984: 130). It is very critical to see also that causality figures hugely in the positivist vision. What is rejected as causation, of course, is any sort of metaphysical notion of causes as productive powers. Instead, we have a Humean conception of causality as an empirically available constant conjunction. Hence even in the transfigured realism of Spencer, reality was unknowable exactly because, on his empiricist premises, there was no way to get from objective reality to experience. As Mandelbaum summarizes:
Science would be transcended and metaphysics would set in if one tried to form any conception of how motions in the nerves produce sensations, or how complex associations of ideas can lead to those efferent nerve-impulses which eventuate in action. To attempt to go beyond the verifiable correlations between these utterly different types of concept would be to introduce notions, which it is not in any way possible to verify within experience (1971: 304).5

Accordingly, despite large differences between them, British empiricists, for example, J. S. Mill, and Spencer, Kirchoff, Mach, Avenarius, Duhem and Poincar, and, of course, the logical positivists, logical empiricists, neo-positivists and anti-realists of today are all positivist (in Comtes sense). Indeed, since their conception of science is perfectly comfortable with the extensionalist logic of Whitehead and Russell, it came to define logical positivism; and despite fatal challenges, remains the unquestioned assumption of both most current discussions in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Naturalists takes their stand with science, but the critical point then is precisely how science is to be understood. To anticipate, the naturalism (and realism), which I will defend, follows Rom Harr and Ed Maddens groundbreaking, Causal Powers and Harrs revolutionary assault on deductivism in the philosophy of science.6 But before pursuing this idea, we need to comment on the third nineteenth century contender, materialism.

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MATERIALISM Although materialism was a widely held view in the 18th century, Mandelbaum notes that despite some confusion on this issue, there were very few materialists in the 19th century, and most of them were German. The obvious materialism, and from the point of view of later global philosophy, is, of course, Marxism. We can usefully begin with Mandelbaums definition:
Taken in its broadest sense, materialism is only committed to holding that the nature of that which is self-existent is material in character, there being no entities which exists independently of matter. Thus, in this sense, we would class as a materialist anyone who accepts all of the following propositions: that there is an independently existing world; that human beings, like all other objects, are material entities; that the human mind does not exist as an entity distinct from the human body; and that there is no God (nor any other non-human being) whose mode of existence is not that of material entities (1971: 22).

This is plainly Farbers sense and explains why naturalism and materialism are usefully interchangeble. Thus, reductionist forms of materialism, as in Ernest Haeckel, or Moleschott and Bchner, are easily distinguished from Engelss dialectical reading of scienceand even more important from the present point of view from the non-reductionist naturalisms of Marx and Dewey. As important, the definition leaves open questions about the nature or character of the material world, including whether matter is a substance (as per Descartes) or an underlying substratum (as per Locke). As is well known, these positions are subject to Berkeleyan criticisms. But the nature or character of the material world may be understood as an entirely scientific question. If so, a realist and anti-positivist theory of science will be required, of which more below. Materialisms, of course, are realisms in the first important sense that, in contrast to idealisms which make reality minddependent, for the materialist, the world exists independently of minds, Gods included.

RESIDUAL PROBLEMS OF THE DEBATE OVER IDEALISM As the twentieth century began, positivism had won the battle over the character of the physical sciences.7 But the existential status of the external world had not been resolved. It informs, of course, the problem articulation of Moore and Russell, James and Dewey, and all the American realists (in their several varieties), with variant forms of positivism confounding matters

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further. I shall not attempt a review of the often-puerile debates that characterize this battle and why it has been so difficult to be clear about the pertinent issues. But I would insist that this debate is a philosophers problem in the sense that first, the things that we see, hear, and touchand to a significant degree also what we taste or smellappear as independent of our seeing, hearing, or touching them (Mandelbaum, 1964: 222).8 Only a philosopher could raise questions about this. Second, we cannot doubt that we can learn from experiences in this world, even if philosophy and science remain puzzled as to just how this occurs. Thus, in no human community, however different, have persons failed to make judgments about the resources and dangers of this world. Papaya was identified as nourishing before there was any understanding of metabolism and cold was avoided before we understood the mechanisms. But even more than this, only a philosopher could doubt that the modern natural sciences produce genuine knowledge of this world. I take it as fundamental not merely that nature exists independently of at least human experience, but that it is structured in some way independent of human inquiry and that we can have some knowledge of it.9 But this does not mean that debate between idealists and their opponents left no no residual problems. I find two, the one that motivates Farber and the other, the paradigmatic philosophers problem (or nest of philosopherss problems). I begin with the latter.

EPISTEMOLOGY: THE PHILOSOPHERS PROBLEM PAR EXCELLENCE Epistemological problems, either in traditional foundationist or in more recent non-foundationalist, analytic variations, are philosophers problems. The discipline is of recent vintage, achieving self-consciousness only after Kant, indeed, as part and parcel of the emergence of metaphysical idealism. Since eighteenth century thinkers did not distinguish science and philosophy, in the Enlightenment vision of man and nature, metaphysics and physics were not distinguishable. Thus Newton, Boyle and Locke could assume that scientific inference could offer evidence that there were non-perceivable, independently existing objects, which could be known.10 And since they worked prior to the development of empiricist criticisms of causality, they could also seek causal explanations of experience. Evidently, these could not be understood as correlations of directly observed sequences. After Kant, claims about knowing would pre-empt claims about being (what Roy Bhaskar called the epistemic fallacy) leaving room only for an

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idealistic metaphysics or a positivism, including forms of Kantianism, phenomenalism, nave realism, or doctrines of pure experience. And, as part of this, despite struggles by Helmholtz, Spencer and James (in his Principles), science could offer nothing of interest about knowing. The question, How is our knowledge possible? was, thereafter, nothing like the question: How are telephones possible. As a philosophical problem, it could be answered in either one of two ways: Either by taking a transcendental turn (phenomenology) or in terms of evidential relations between basic and non-basic propositions (Rorty, 1979).11

DEWEY AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY PROBLEM There have been some modern philosophers who tried to avoid this regressive pursuit. Indeed, one can argue that this is what is most distinctive about American pragmatism, from Peirce to Dewey.12 But none, including Dewey, entirely escaped the Kantian epistemological problematic. This explains the odd character of Peirces philosophy, Jamess shift to radical empiricism, the frustrating debates that Dewey had with the American realists of various sorts, his frustration with them, on grounds that he was not offering but another epistemology, and the failure to see also that he was not offering just another scientism. (See Chapter 1). Dewey was surely correct to reject the spectator theory of knowledge and to deny the idea that truth was to be determined by its relation to the independently existing realitythe assumption of at least some realisms, and he was correct in his effort to displace epistemology for inquiry into inquiry, comprehended as a practical, social activity which made science continuous with common sense. But his naturalism was burdened by his commitment to experience. The problem was not, however, his defense of nave realism or even his postulate or criterion of immediate empiricism (properly understood). Rather the problem was his unwillingness to accept a strong version of scientific realism, necessary if I am correct, to carry out the program of his groundbreaking and little understood Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. And this amounts to saying that he could find no grounds on which to assert that the thing-in-itself was knowable and causally pertinent. Experience had been corrupted by the tradition, which gave us epistemology. As John Shook points out, by the time he was ninety-one years old, Dewey saw this. As a good empiricist, he had intended to liberate philosophy from desiccated abstractions (a task also set by Marx.) But experience had become effectively identified with experiencing in the sense of the psychological, and the psychological had become established as that which is

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intrinsically psychical, mental, private. Accordingly, his insistence that experience also designates that what is experienced was a mere ideological thundering in the Index for it ignored the ironical twist which made this use of experience strange and incomprehensible (LW, 1: 362). If indeed Deweys instrumentalism was an epistemology, then this move was strange and incomprehensible exactly because it denied the starting point of the epistemological problem. Either Dewey, like Moore in his famous refutation of idealism, missed the point or he was a covert idealist, perhaps a Hegelian of some sort.13 There is nothing fatal about the postulate of immediate empiricism, that thingsanything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term thingare what they are experienced as (MW, 3: 159). The postulate not only allowed for, but required that we recognize that the experiences of individuals may well differ, so if it is a horse which is to be described, or the equus which is to be defined, then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or . . . the paleontologist tell us what the horse is which is experienced. These accounts may differ, but none is privileged as real against others, which are deemed phenomenal. For Dewey, it is clear that each account is from some point of view and that the conditions necessary for understanding the differences as well as the agreements can be provided. This plainly will be problem for psychology and the sociology of knowledgean inquiry demanded by Deweys theory of knowledge and welcomed by me. But, presumably, there is something independent of each of these experiences which is causally pertinent to the having of themand, if so, why not independent of anybodys? And if not, why was this not an idealism? Indeed, on Deweys own naturalistic premises, cats, bats, and beetles each have worlds which are enabled and constrained by their particular sensory (and mental) capacities.14

NATURALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM Tom Burke is quite correct, I think, to argue that the naturalism of Deweys Logic joins with the ecological psychology of J.J. Gibson (Burke, 1994: 8396). Burke summarizes:
In contrast with a classical empiricist view of perception (involving so-called, sense data, sense impression, stimulations or nerve endings, irritations of body surfaces, and so forth), ecological psychology emphasizes a different array of theoretical concepts; one being the concept of invariants and another the concept of affordances . . . Ecological psychology treats the perceiving agent as a dynamic organism/ environment system, continually engaged in various sorts of actions designed

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for exploring the world and utilizing its resources. Controlled sampling of the world gives evidence of possible uses of things (and of ways to orchestrate subsequent actions) by virtue of the agents being attuned to lawlike relations which involve stable associations of different sorts of possible experiences (84).

Now, my point is just this: the idea of invariantslawlike relations, and the concept of affordancespossibilities as determined by invariants require a realist theory of causal powers. Affordances are dispositional properties of things, which refer to a things powers construed as per Harr and Madden (1974) and Bunge (1970). It is to assert a categorical referring to the nature (structure) of the thing and to tendencies true of the thing by virtue of its nature. Dispositions manifest themselves (minimally) in pairs: salt dissolves in water, clay is molded with the hands. Affordances are dispositions in an organism-populated world. As Turvey et al write: Possibilities for action, or more precisely, things with possibilities for action, are among the kinds of things that populate an animals niche and are, contrary to received wisdom, things to be heard, or smelt, etc. This is most easily seen with an example:
Sharks electrically detect things to eat and things that impede locomotion . . . An edible thing such as flatfish differs in ionic composition from the surrounding water, producing a bioelectric field partially modulated in the rhythm of the living things respiratory movements. A flatfish that has buried in the sand will be detectable by a shark swimming just above it. Reproducing the bioelectric field of the flatfish artificially, by passing a current between two electrodes buried in the sand, invites the same behavior. The shark digs tenaciously at the source of the field departing from the site when the act fails to reveal an edible thing . . . Now there is no intelligible sense in which it can be claimed that the source ought to have appeared edible if the sharks perception of affordances were direct. In the niche of the shark, edible thing and electric field of, say, type F are nomically related. To predicate of the shark (a) detects electrical field of type F and (b) takes to be an edible thing is not to refer to two different states of affairs, one (viz. (b)) that is reached from the other (viz. (a)) by an inference. Rather, it is to make reference to a single state of affairs of the shark-niche system. The linking of (a) and (b) is not something that goes on in the mind of the shark, as the Establishment would have it. The linking of (a) and (b) is in the physics of an ecological world . . . (Turvey et al, 1981: 27677).

Dewey would, I think, strongly agree that ecological psychology picks up on themes that he articulated, especially, in the Logic. And it is perfectly clear that for Dewey, even perception is profoundly affected by the fact that humans are social beings, a fact which raises immense problems for empirical psychology (Manicas and Secord, 1984). But we need to ask: How did

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Dewey stand on what is now termed scientific realism? Unfortunately, as with earlier realism debates, it is not perfectly clear what this implies. A large part of the problem, moreover, turns on whether the claims mean to provide an account of the actual practices of the physical sciences, especially physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and whether if they do, the accounts are constrained by traditional epistemological assumptions, for example, as in Quine, whose understanding of empirical and of logic (as extensional and providing the canonical form of scientific sentences) gives his understanding of scientific realism a most distinctive empiricist caste (Manicas, 2004). So as to be as clear as possible on my position, let me merely assert one of Margoliss conclusions (as I understand them.) Margolis has argued convincingly, I think, that a strong form of scientific realism need not be either foundationist or cognitivist as he explicates these. To do this, one needs to assert ontic externalism, the view that the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects, that the question the way the world is makes sense relative to one conceptual theme or another, and finally, that objectivity in the cognitive sense is only objectivity for us (Margolis, 1986: 285). Dewey would, I think, agree with all three, even while taking what amounts to an anti-realist position regarding unobservables and even if he denies that causality is an ontological category. We can notice, first, that Deweys prose leaves us with some questions on the pertinent issues. This results, in part at least, from his willingness to incorporate into his own highly idiosyncratic theory of science, elements from competing historical traditions, but especially empiricism and rationalism. Thus, it is clear enough that he was not a Humean (although Mill is usually his target), that he joined nominalism and realism, and that he supposed that one could settle most of the questions about inquiry, and, accordingly, about science, by paying close attention to the function of propositions in use in science. He clearly rejected the regularity determinist ontology of events so characteristic of Hume and positivism. For him, there are no such things as uniform sequences of events (LW, Vol. 12: 445) and hence scientific laws could not be formulations of uniform and unconditional sequences of events (LW, 12: 437. This would seem to encourage the view that, for him, science assumed an ontology of things. Similarly, in Experience and Nature, he held that atoms and molecules show a selective bias in their indifferences, affinities and repulsions . . . to other events (LW, 1: 162). Selective biases are surely tendencies in the sense of Harr and Madden, and atoms, if not molecules, are not observableat least as ordinarily understood. On the other hand, he denies explicitly that causality is an ontological category; for him, it is a logical category (in his special sense) and the term

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causal laws is, . . . in spite of its general use, a figure of speech, a case of metonymy (LW, 12: 440). Indeed, he gave an account of what he took to be the confusion regarding causality. There is, upon reflection, a qualitative gap between gross qualitative objects (which are the objects of direct perception), for example,, the lighted match and the burning of the paper. Forces were introduced to get over this difficulty. Thus, the match was supposed to have a certain calorific power (LW, 12: 445). But the time came when it was seen that forces by definition are such as to be incapable of scientific observation. They were then ruled out of science . . . 15 Then there grew up the hybrid notion which took from common sense the idea of succession and from science the idea of invariability of conjunction (LW, 12: 445). If Dewey is not a Humean, neither, it seems, would he accept the idea that things have causal powers. But if so, his alternative is anything but clear. It turns, I think, on his critical distinction between generic propositions and universal propositions. Generic propositions, for example, sugar is sweet, iron rusts, are existential and (as with singular propositions, for example, this is sweet) predicates represent potentialities which will be actualized when certain further operations are performed . . . (LW, 12: 251). Universal propositions for example, if a particle at rest is acted upon by a single moving particle, then . . . . (LW, 12: 254) and, ambiguously, sentences of the form, All A is B (rendered as in modern logic as conditionals) lack existential import. They are valid, if valid at all, because they express a necessary relation of abstract characters (LW, 12: 255). Ernest Nagel was correct, it seems, in saying that the function of generic propositions is to organize perceptual materials . . . (LW, 12: xvi). They are, accordingly, the heart of our commonsense understanding of nature. The formulation just quoted suggests a reading of them as dispositions, non-realistically analyzed: If X is tasted, then if X is sugar, X will taste sweet. But will be actualized (even ceteris paribus) suggests also that there is some sort of necessity attached to them. If so, this is an odd mix. It is easy to see how one could have natural necessity if generic propositions are analyzed realistically.16 Universal propositions, by contrast, formulate necessary relations between abstract characters and their function in inquiry is to propose possible operations which, if carried out, might solve the problem under inquiry (LW 12: xvi). This, of course, grapples with the medieval problem of realism/nominalism. Nagel quite understandably is puzzled by the putative necessity in such laws. Such necessity surely is not a priori for Dewey, even while he terms the relation logical and definitional, nor does it seem to square with standard logicist efforts (unsuccessful!) to discriminate

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between accidental generalizations and laws. But neither does it represent what Harr and Madden termed natural necessity, for this is ontological. Dewey seems to think that the pertinent issues are resolved once we accept that conceptual subject-matter is [to be] interpreted solely and wholly on the ground of the function it performs on the conduct of inquiry (LW, 12: 462). We can, he says, then reject as spurious an exclusive dichotomy between conceptions [as] mere devices of practical convenience, or as descriptive of something actually existing in the material dealt with (462). The former is an instrumentalist reading; the latter, realist. And, of course, depending on what they are devices for, they may be both descriptive and of practical convenience, perhaps useful also as guides to inquiry. But are these conceptions descriptions? And if so, what are they descriptions of? Dewey sees rightly that the notion of abstraction is part of the problem. As he sees it, if conceptions are descriptions, abstract characters are abstracted from existents in the sense of selective discrimination. But, he insists, this is quite impossible as regards an abstract character as a scientific conception. He gives an example: smoothness, as an instance of a scientific conception, is not capable of observation and hence of selective discrimination (462). Hence, as scientific conceptions, such abstract characters are not descriptions. But the scientific realist, not bound by positivist predilections, will agree that while abstraction is part of the problem, we should not be looking at abstract characters at all, but at models of things as abstractions from the real, concrete. We experience water as fluid and clear and capable of many sorts of transactions. H2O, an abstraction, identifies the model for a molecule of water, and molecular chemistry develops the theory, which explains these powers. The model is not a fiction, but an abstracted real structure. Experienced water is H2O but it is not only H2O. The water of immediate experience does what it does by virtue of being H2 O. Hence, ceteris paribus, because it is NaCl, ordinary (experienced) table salt must dissolve in the water in my boiling pot.17 Perhaps Deweys account can be rescued, and perhaps it is sound as it stands. John Shook18 seems to bite the bullet. He has argued that while Dewey allowed, the sciences should be permitted to postulate unexperienceable, transcendent entities that permit scientific explanation of experienced events, he also refuses to take a realistic stand towards such objects, while Quine [e.g.,] encourages realism here. But if as he says, scientific theories are used to guide inferences toward predictions, and universal propositions function in science regardless of whether their terms actually refer to anything at all, then as Mach, Poincar and Duhem each insisted, why cling to the idea that science seeks to explain? It is the core of realist theories of sci-

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ence that science explains and could not unless we accept that inquiry gives us knowledge of the causal powers of the things, which exist independently of us.

HUMAN PROBLEMS I noted that there were two residual problems of the idealism/realism debate. The second regards not philosophers problems, but problems of how we should live. I want to support Deweys theory of inquiry as a naturalism because, as Farber insisted, there are only two ways to address these problems. One is either a naturalist who holds that naturalist inquiry can answer these questions or one is anti-naturalist and denies this. Today, anti-naturalism has two main forms: the appeals to authority of traditional theology, and the subjectivisms of positivism and post-modernist theory. Our daily papers are filled with examples of the first.19 But a central issue is identified by Hare and Madden in their little book, Evil and the Concept of God (1968). They argue that, however understood, evils should be eliminated as far as humanly possible; but if indeed, they are not remediable, and if, worse, they serve some theological values not obvious to us, then why make the effort? Or as Parry writes in his short rejoinder to Father Clarks defense of theism:
There is no need to blame Jupiter for the lightening, nor a jealous god for natural death. Violent homicide is indeed blameworthy, especially wholesale slaughter. Though the system is undoubtedly faulty, yet it operates only through individuals, who must be held morally responsible. The rulers of the world, on my view, must be held primarily responsible for such horrors as burning civilians by gas chambers, atom bombs, and napalm; and all of us are jointly responsible to the extent that we support our rulers (Parry, 1968).

That this needs saying is, itself, shameful. Positivisms accept science, but on its understanding of knowledge, science becomes irrelevant to questions of morals and politics. So, for example, the eminent Harvard zoologist, Stephen Jay Gould, argues that religion and science are complementary: Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world . . . Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different (my emphasis) realm of human purposes, meanings and values . . .20 Postmodernisms deny nature and hold that sciencegenerally misunderstoodis but one among many discourses, including, then, the discourses of multiplied communities, faith, ethnic and otherwise.

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Like the New Age quest for a new inwardness with its metaphysical dissolvent, Transcendental Individualism,21 the postmodernist obliterates objectivity and licenses equally whatever beliefs are shared by these self-defined communities, however belief gets fixed. Moreover, positivism and postmodernism are consistent with and propelled by capitalist ambiance, flexible accumulation and consumerism.22 Marvin Farber had it right:
The philosophical Pandoras box [of subjectivism] is one more fairy tale . . . It is, however, a fairy tale with sociohistorical linkage and consequences, for it is an ingenious philosophy of renunciation that leaves the status quo unexamined and unchallenged and that may even be accommodated to reactionary ideas (1984: 130).

Dewey is pertinent here. But bringing me full circle back to Marvin Farber, the naturalism of Marx is even more pertinent:
The great thing in Hegels Phenomenology . . . is simply that Hegel grasps the selfcreation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the nature of work, and comprehends objective man, authentic because actual, as the result of his own work. The actual, active relation of man to himself as a species-being or the confirmation of his species being as an actual, that is, human, being is only possible so far as he really brings forth all his species-powerswhich in turn is only possible through the collective effort of mankind, only as the result of history. . . . We see here how a consistent naturalism or humanism is distinguished from both idealism and materialism, as well and at the same time the unifying truth of both. We also see that only naturalism is able to comprehend the act of world history . . . (Marx, 1967: 32125).

Evidently, although I would need at least another paper to elaborate these most pregnant insights and to demonstrate their connection to alienation, the problem of democracy and the analysis of capitalist society, nothing that I am likely to say would add much to what is, by now, a rich and still relevant literature. (See Chapter 10, below).

NOTES
1. In his review of the multi-volume Dictionary of Eighteenth Century British Philosophers, James Harris remarks: just as it is usually hard to distinguish philosophy from science in the eighteenth century, then so also it is difficult to hold apart science and theology for long. That is why, if the character and significance of their

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work is to be properly understood, men such as Hume and Reid have to be surrounded by so many relatively obscure figures from disciplines which today have little or nothing to do with philosophy. For the truth is that there are no purely philosophical questions in eighteenth century Britain (Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 2000). See below as regards Locke, Boyle and Newton. 2. Especially, Marvin Farber, Naturalism and Subjectivism (Springfield, IL.: C. C. Thomas, 1959); The Search for an Alternative (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984). The extraordinary volume, Philosophy for the Future (New York: Macmillan Co., 1949) edited by Roy Wood Sellars, V.J. McGill and Farber, was on the reading list of Farbers marvelous lecture course, The Philosophy of the Recent Past. A defense of materialism, the essays, many authored by the distinguished list who contributed regularly to Science and Society, are remarkably pertinent. 3. Mandelbaum notes that the confusion persists despite explicit disavowals on the part of Comte, Spencer, Bernard, Huxley, and Machand the positivists of the very recent past. 4. Farber and I would agree with Lenins attack on the Machists, but it seems clear that neither Engels nor Lenin provided a plausible answer to the question of the relation of thought to being: the reflection theory surely will not do. Nor, tragically in my view, did either Engels or Lenin provide a convincing alternative philosophy of science. I have discussed this, along with Engelss relation to competing materialisms, in my Engelss Philosophy of Science, in Terrell Carver and Manfred Steger (eds.), Engels After Marx (College Station: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). For a beautifully wrought criticism of logical positivismfrom a Marxist perspective, see V. J. McGill, An Evaluation of Logical Positivism, in Volume 1, Number 1 of Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly (Fall, 1936). Parry and Albert Blumberg are thanked by McGill who was, of course, a close associate of Farbers. See also Lewis Feuers excellent account, The Development of Logical Empiricism, Science and Society, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer, 1941). 5. See my Modest Realism, Experience and Evolution, in Roy Bhaskar (ed.), Harr and His Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1990), 2340, and the discussion of James, Chapter 1, above, who was caught in the same dilemma. Mandelbaum notes, correctly, that having established that science had demonstrated that what we directly experience never gives us the characteristics of what exists independently of us, both Spencer and Helmholtz reversed themselves and spoke as if it were a defect in knowledge that we do not directly experience the world as it exists independently of us (1971: 362). The solution, available to both, was to admit that transdiction, or inference to what is in principle not experienceable is scientifically justified. McGill gave a very similar argument, briefly that one cannot argue coherently from the causal argument that sensations cannot be regarded as copies or direct representations of . . . the material object (which McGill holds to be true) to either agnosticism or phenomenalism.( 1936: 51). 6. See Causal Powers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974); Principles of Scientific Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). One should cite here also, Mario Bunges infrequently noticed, Causality and Modern Science, First Edition, 1959 (Dover, 1979) and Michael Scrivens essays in Minnesota Studies in the

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Philosophy of Science. Parry is acknowledged by Harr and Madden. As noted, Bill Parrys critique of extensionalist difficulties with entails and the contrary-to-fact conditional was a lasting influence on me, but I do not remember whether he raised this with particular reference to causality. See also Roderick Chisholm, The Contrary-To-Fact Conditional, (1946), reprinted in Manicas (ed.), Logic as Philosophy (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1971). 7. The story of the human or social sciences is different and more complicated. See my A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19 87). 8. Mandelbaum notes that this, probably, catches the element of truth in Moores famous refutation. In direct experience we are all realists and cannot avoid being so. He insists, rightly, that this only the beginning of an argument, for me, a philosophers argument. Moreover, as part of this, it is not true that everything we experience exists precisely as we experience it. (1964: 2). 9. As Farber many times insisted, the philosophical problem of existence . . . arises when a method is adopted that does not proceed from the basic fact of experience (Phenomenology and Existence: Toward a Philosophy within Nature (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967: 70. It is a methogenic problem. Indeed, the fact of nondependent existence is basic of philosophical thought. Not to recognize that fact is to incur the error of illicit ignorance . . . (72). See also the work of another student of Farbers, Wilfred Sellars. But we should not go as far as Sellars macho-realism (Roy Bhaskars term) and argue that if the scientific image in true, then the manifest image is false. See Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963: 96. Farber might argue that

Sellarss startling conclusion is also a methogenic result. 10. It is a serious error to read Boyle and Newton as positivists. Their corpuscularism depended on their perfect comfort with transdictive inferences: inference to what lies beyond the scope of all possible experience (Mandelbaum, 1964: chapter 2.) 11. See also his useful footnote on the historiography of philosophy: 1979: 132. 12. As argued in Chapter 1, above, Peirce recast the epistemological problem by rejecting the transcendental move but by accepting the Kantian insulation against skepticism. See also, Murray G. Murphey, The Development of Peirces Philosophy (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard, 1961) and the essay by my former associate at Buffalo, R.G. Meyers, Peirce on Cartesian Doubt, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 3 (1967). 13. See Kenneth R. Westphals excellent Hegels Epistemological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).
14. As Burke notes, we must distinguish operational perspectivity from subjectivity. The former is impossible to avoid; the latter in a Deweyan frame is not the starting point, but needs to be explained. See Tom Burke, Deweys New Logic: A Reply to Russell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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15. Perhaps it is unnecessary to note here that Dewey endorses this ruling out, and that it was precisely this move which defines positivism and which burdened Spencer, Helmholtz and James. 16. A power ascription can be analysed as: X has the power to A means X can do A, in the appropriate conditions, in virtue of its intrinsic nature (Harr and Madden: 1974: 86). Empirical investigation is needed to fill in the italicized clause. This will require theory and, as well, construction of a model, perhaps detailing the microstructure of the thing. See below. In contrast to non-realist ascription, things have powers even if never exercisedas was held by Peirce. See also Everett J. Nelsons powerful The Category of Substance, in Sellars, McGill and Farber, Philosophy for the Future. 17. We need theory to fill in the CP clause, and we experiment to test the model. See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978). If we drop the CP clause, this becomes a tendency. On models, see Harr, Principles of Scientific Thinking, esp. Chapter 2. Derek Sayer has offered a reconstruction of Marxs theory of science along these lines. Thus, Marx criticizes Ricardo and others as engaging in violent abstraction. He summarizes:
It conveys the idea of precipitate abstraction from manifest phenomena to their alleged essences, without the mechanisms by means of which the latter cause the former to assume the forms they do being adequately specified; or, to use different terminology, an idea of immediate identification of phenomena as supposed instantiations of general laws, when in fact these laws operate only in mediate fashion through a series of intervening links which the analysis ought to specify. True abstract thinking . . . entails elaborating the mechanisms linking laws and phenomena in such a way that their apparent divergence is consistently explained. (Sayer, 1979: 12122.)

See also the several essays in Craig Dilworth (ed.), Idealization IV: Intelligibility in Science (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992, including my essay, Intelligibility and Idealization: Marx and Weber and references therein. 18. In addition to his book, see the extended discussion in his unpublished paper, Dewey and Quine on What There Is. The following quotations are from this manuscript, hopefully permitted by Shook. 19. Writing in the New York Times (June 19, 2000), the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary held that arguments over creation, womens roles, homosexuality, abortion, etc. are, for his 16 million parishioners, settled by the word of God. 20. Quoted by Jerry A. Coyne, Is NOMA a no mans land? Times Literary Supplement June 9, 2000). Gould seems not have noticed that the idea that religion and science complement one another is both factually false and founders on the assumption that facts and values can be bifurcated. One may hope that the surveys are flawed, but Coyne notes that nearly 50 percent of Americans believe that humans were directly created by God within the past 100,000 years, and 40 percent think that

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creationism should replace [not just be taught!] evolution in the biology classroom. The New York Times helps this along when it publishes an essay by Richard Rothstein (June 7, 2000), which argues that facts are only what we observe. Evolution is not a fact: There could be other theories. Perhaps Rothstein took a course in philosophy at one of our more distinguished institutions? 21. The term is Irving Kristols, an ally here. See his excellent Faith a la Carte. Times Literary Supplement May 26, 2000. 22. The best treatment is David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

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Naturalizing Epistemology: Reconstructing Philosophy

INTRODUCTION It is surely plausible to think of the histories of humankind as a series of discontinuous, and sometimes continuous, intersecting movements marked by accidents, some benign, some fortuitous, and some disastrous. In this regard, if nothing else, history is radically contingenteven if looking back, we can often provide altogether satisfactory explanations of what happened and why?1 One such legacy is the intertwined conceptual and institutional legacies of science and academic philosophy. Yet not all is well as regards these. Dewey could lament that we had failed to replace old habits of thought with more scientific ways. This was one aspect of the reconstruction in philosophy for which he called. We wonder, not unreasonably, whether the authority of science was but Western provincialism, the rationale for the imperialist obliteration of non-Western cultures. On the other side, while Dewey was aware that science had been misappropriated and misapplied, he remained optimistic that this could be changed, that democratic processes could be brought to bear on expert claims to authority. This, too, was an aspect of his call for reconstruction. Yet, as above, Deweys hopes strike us as naive. Wholly disjoined from experts, we stand in terror of their so carefully considered decisions. What, heaven help us, will be the unintended consequences of genetic engineering or the disaster of Iraq? If the nineteenth century had Frankenstein, we have energy-obsessed Dr. Strangeloves. This chapter pursues the idea of reconstructing philosophy; thus, if very indirectly, of reconstructing culture. With Dewey as both guide and foil, the focus is on the implications of the current debate over the effort to naturalize epistemology, that is, to study knowledge scientifically. Dewey was surely
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correct that we need an alternative to dogmatism and to skepticism; but as perhaps Dewey did not clearly see, we cannot take science for granted. A second goal of this chapter, then, is to raise some questions both about current scientific practices and our understanding of these. THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM We can begin with Barry Strouds critique of Quines influential essay, Epistemology Naturalized.2 Quine argues that naturalized epistemology is the empirical study of a species of primates, or, in the particular case, of an individual human subject in interaction with his environment (in Kornblith, 1985: 77). Thus:
This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled imput certain patterns of irradiation in certain frequencies, for instanceand in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history? (Kornbilith, 1985: 77).3

The story continues: we observe the subject as she interacts with her environment. Given then that we know her environment and have an adequate psychology, we then explain her output, seeing that, in the fullness of time, what she says is true. But, of course, the situation just described is not the situation of our naturalizing epistemologist, since, of course, like our knower, she is (as everyone!) utterly denied that independent, theory-neutral access to the world which could be the only basis for determining whether inputs from it ever result in outputs which are true. Stroud concludes that Quine simply fails to address what he takes to be the traditional question of epistemology: How do we know that the external world is what anybody says it is? This problem is not the problem of whether there is an external world or, for that matter, whether it has some structure. As Peirce and Dewey insisted, we can call into question any particular version of how the world is, but Cartesian skepticism cannot be reasonably motivated.4 But as the foregoing seems at least to show, one can assume an external and structured world, the method of science, and still ask if what is presumed to be known is known. Dewey might add there that this problem presumes an absolute conception of reality.5 On this (commonsensical) view, reality means reality as it is independently of you and me, independently of what it is known as. My skeptic demands that we show that knowledge of this reality is possible. If the only knowledge we can have is from some viewpoint, how can we know whether itour or some otheris valid? That is, even given an absolute con-

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ception of reality, it would seem that we are forced to accept a relative conception of knowledge. It may be, of course, that we can justify some viewpoint. Perhaps (as I argue below) there are modes of fixing belief, which should be preferred. Such a relationalism and fallibilism could then be contrasted to relativism: understood as the thesis that no viewpoint, no mode of fixing belief, can claim privilege over any other. It may be doubted that we need an absolute conception of reality. But we surely doif we want to avoid relativism and to anchor our fallibilism.6 Even if we can privilege some mode of fixing belief, we will need to aspire to the ideal of grasping the world as it is, independently of what you and I might believe. The problem of historical knowledge is, perhaps, the clearest case. We must acknowledge that we shall never have more than a fragment of the possible evidence and that alternative histories are always possible. But surely what transpired transpired independently of these. It is just this, which grounds the limits of all perspectives and thus our fallibilism. More, we need an absolute conception of reality if criticism and persuasion is not to collapse into sophistry, to be merely a struggle to win opinion. As rhetoricians know, truth-talk plays a vital role in argument, persuasion, and criticism. Indeed, if we could dispense with the conception of an absolute conception of reality, truth-talk might be dispensable, replaced by pragmatic works/does not work or predicts/does not predict. Language (and theories about the world) are surely (our) tools for coping with our world; but for social animals, they could not serve if they did not have a rhetorical function.7 There is another form of answer to Stroud. We dont need independent access to the world if we can assume there is a necessary connection between some method, say, the method of science and truth. Thus, with persistent application of our method, our (un-Peircean) individual, given a (Peircean) fullness of time, will arrive at truth. But even this act of faith does not help us. Since we will always lack independent access, we can never know whether we have arrived! Here we can pause to consider, even if too briefly, an argument put forward by Michael Friedman in his essay, Truth and Confirmation (in Kornblith, 1985). He points out (rightly) that there is no necessary connection between confirmation and truth and that what traditional philosophy of science has to offer on the relation cannot be sustained.8 In particular, he argues that if scientific method (or any other) is to show that it achieves (or even approximates) truth, the Tarskian theory of truth (shared by all traditional candidates) must be supplemented to include a causal theory of reference. Since our methods cannot guarantee success, we have to know facts about the actual world if we are to know which method is best; and we have to know facts about the actual world to know even that any given method has any chance at

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all of leading to truth! (Kornblith, 1985: 15556). To do this in a nonviciously circular way we need general laws connecting physics and psychology [sic] with the theory of truth; and it is precisely this kind of generality that a theory of reference tries to provide (161).9 There are two fairly obvious objections. First, even given these laws, it is by no means clear what scientific method is and thus what and how it is to be tested (of which more below). But, second, as Friedman says, we lack utterly such general laws. Worse, I believe that there is little reason to suppose that such are possible. To anticipate, Friedmans program seems, at least, to follow Quines in being committed to an epistemological individualism.10

EPISTEMOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM There are, I believe, about nine (or forty?) ways into this. One way is to observe that experience requires concepts and that most of our conceptsat leastare social products. Thus, I cannot see a tree unless I have the concept tree and this is surely learned in a social process.11 The epistemological problem that is at issue here was surely propelled by modern science, but contrary to what Quine (and Dewey) imply, acknowledging this is no advantage for the naturalizing epistemologist. It is, indeed, because of modern science that, as William James rightly saw (versus Spencer), the epistemological problem is so intractable. Naive realism could (and does!) sustain epistemological individualism: if you dont believe there are red apples in the world, then just look and see! But if you take modern physical science and Deweys views of experience seriously (as I think we must), then it is a rather gigantic system of belief, recognition, and the rest, which has been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition. Given this, how can we be so confident that our beliefs correspond to a world that exists independent of either you or me? This does not mean that I am deluded in saying there is a red apple when I see a red apple. That is not the issue. Plainly, science did not undermine our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking. When a G. E. Moore says, I know that there are red apples, and a neuroscientist says The experience of red apples is the product of physical and biochemical transactions between something and us and the skeptic says, Nobody could know that there are red apples, the same words are being used differently (Stroud: 76). What Moore and the rest of us say, even if true, is not decisive as regards either the epistemological or the scientific investigation of knowledge. We began with Quines psychological program; this is the appropriate point to refer to recent sociology of knowledge, to the so-called strong pro-

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gramme (Manicas and Rosenberg, 1985, 1988). Its key insight is what Barry Barnes calls the naturalistic equivalence of the knowledge of different cultures.
Naturalism . . . implies the most intensely serious concern with what is real. . . . Everything of naturalistic significance would indicate that there is indeed one world, one reality, out there; the source of our perceptions if not their total determinant [that is, though not their total determinant], the cause of our perceptions being fulfilled or disappointed, of our endeavors succeeding or being frustrated. But this reality should not be identified with any linguistic account of it, or needless to say, with any way of perceiving it, or pictorial representation of it. Reality is the source of our primitive causes, which, having been presupposed by our perceptual apparatus, produces changes in our knowledge and the verbal representations of it which we possess. All cultures relate symmetrically to this reality. Men [sic] in all cultures are capable of making reasonable responses to the causal inputs they receive from realitythat is, are capable of learning. That the structure of our verbal knowledge does not thereby necessarily converge upon a single form, isomorphous with what is real, should not surprise us. Why should we ever expect this to be a property of our linguistic and cognitive capacities? (Barnes, 1977: 25).

Because, like Quine, Barnes and Bloor take science seriously, they believe (a) there is an independently existing world, but (b) they also believe with Dewey that human cognition is always socially mediated. (See Chapter 4). The idea that knowledge of different cultures is naturalistically equivalent is both a premise and a conclusion of strong program science.12 Strong programmers are interested in understanding belief, and therefore, for scientific purposes, beliefs which we think of as rationalincluding accordingly, those which are fixed scientificallymust be treated as on the same footing as all others.13. The belief I see a Panda now involves language. Hence social considerations are relevant. Just because our only access to a world is causal, and epistemological individualism cannot be sustained, a naturalistic epistemology interested in explaining knowledge must appeal to social facts. Not only do these enter into concept formation (enormously complicating empirical psychology), but we need to acknowledge that the problem of reproducing the cognitive order could not possibly be explained without a sociological understanding of the relevant social mechanisms, for example, how belief is authorized and stabilized. On the other hand, because our best science implies that all we can have is a representation of reality, and because there is no way to measure any representation against reality-in-itself, we cannot escape a relationalism. But it does not follow from this that all truth claims are equally good. At this point, we can turn to Dewey.

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DEWEYS PROGRAM It is not perfectly clear what Dewey would say to a Karam defender of his system of classification. Who here has the truth? He might say that the question is badly posed. He might say that since true presupposes an absolutist conception that is neither necessary nor possible, both are right. Although the world is structured, it does not allow us to discriminate between contrary taxonomies. It does constrain these: A culture could not, for example, treat what we have identified as poisonous as foods, for their biology will not allow them to survive. But there is nonetheless plenty of room for alternative and contrary schemes depending on a host of alternative contingent factors regarding beliefs about the gods, the good, etc. On this view of the matter, there are too many truths and it is idle to suppose that any can be privileged. There is an attractive aspect to this move. Given that peoples have different interests and different ideas about the gods and the good, we need to acknowledge that they may very well be able to justify their beliefs about the way the world ishowever strange these may seem to us. There is, unfortunately, an unattractive aspect to this posture. Not only does it disavow an attempt to give any special credence to the claims of science (perhaps not such a bad thing?), but it disavows any effort to provide guidance about how we ought to go about finding out what to believe, including here, lest we forget, beliefs about what is good and right. I think that we can do better. So, too, did Dewey.

DEWEYS NATURALIZING OF EPISTEMOLOGY Dewey wrote that the methods of knowing practiced in daily life and science are excluded from consideration in the philosophical theory of knowing (MW, Vol. 10: 37). Presumably, the actual process of knowing; involves operations of controlled observation, inference, reasoning, and testing. While this seems true enough, it does not help us in the present instance. Surely, Karam do all these things even as they are arriving at a different taxonomy than ours. Are the Karam going about the business of inquiry wrongly? Perhaps what is needed is a more systematic attempt at discriminating the special features of successful knowing. Dewey set this as the goal of inquiry into inquiry. Thus, he writes:
The position here taken holds that since every special case of knowledge is constituted as the outcome of some special inquiry, the conception of knowledge as

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such can only be a generalization of the properties discovered to belong to conclusions which are outcomes of inquiry. Knowledge, as an abstract term, is a name for the product of competent inquiries (LW, 12: 16).

That is, by examining the outcomes of inquiries, we can discover why these are knowledge and, conjunctively, by examining inquiries we can discover what makes for competence. As Dewey insisted: Through examination of the relations which exist between means (methods) employed and conclusions attained as their consequence, reasons are discovered why some methods succeed and other methods fail (LW, 12: 17). It is important to see what this program is and is not. Not only was Dewey not altogether clear regarding what is involved, but more troublesome, the program does not neatly join with work being carried on today in philosophy, psychology or sociology as they are generally practiced in todays academic disciplines. Perhaps Dewey was off the mark, or perhaps the fault is with the disciplinary division of labor.

INQUIRY INTO INQUIRY: I It may be best to proceed indirectly and to begin by noting that Deweys program is not akin to the psychologically oriented programs of Quine or, for example, William Lycan (1988). Quine has not said very much about the sort of psychology he assumes will explain how we know, but we may guess that it is some sophisticated version of behaviorism. By contrast, Lycan is very clear in his commitments to a Fodor/Dennett-inspired homuncularism, a currently fashionable version of cognitive psychology.14 But in either case, Quine, Lycan, and the psychologies they presume are epistemologically individualistic and Deweys psychology was not. Moreover, these writers and the psychologies they want to include are committed to a logical theory which Dewey found to be misdirected. Throughout his career, from his brilliant essay on the reflex arc, through the 1903 studies in experimental logic, to How We Think (1910), to his illunderstood Logic, Dewey developed a naturalistic theory of inquiry that totally went against the dominating and now taken-for-granted Frege-Russell conception of logic.15 In this view, logical relations hold between abstract predicates and inference (deductive and inductive) depends on there being some sort of objective relation between propositions.16 Because this assumption was a feature of what Dewey called intellectualism; he looked at the matter entirely differently. As Thomas Burke says, Deweys conception of inquiry has to be understood not so much as cognitive problem

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solving but more generally in terms of an adaptive stabilization propensity of organism/environment relations.17 This basic naturalistic starting point led Dewey to totally refashion inference, propositional content, kinds, and other critical terms in standard logical theory. Thus, as I understand Dewey, inference is fundamentally a way of handling information, which does not require human language. The logicians concept of inference is not, of course, to be abandoned; it is rather to be seen as a highly useful abstraction, regimented for particular purposes.18 This is hardly the place to develop the radical implications of Deweys revision. Continuing along lines just suggested, one example will have to suffice. Enormous effort in psychology has been directed at solving Menos paradox: If inputs require concepts to be meaningful, then concepts must precede inputs as in nativism; but if concepts (to be at all useful in the real world) require input for their content, then inputs must precede concepts as in empiricism (either of the ontogenetic or phylogenetic variety).19 For example, behaviorist-learning theory needs to assume that the organism has made the relevant abstraction if it is to be reinforced. But this assumes exactly what needs to be explained. On the other hand, recent cognitive psychology, by conceiving of mind as an information processing system, assumes that information comes sententially prepackaged, ready-made for use by the linguistically apt learner. If I am correct we can now identify three obstacles to an adequate understanding of knowing: a pervasive intellectualism, an epistemological individualism, and third, a pervasive assumption, shared by the main contending views, that, as Kelly and Kreuger put it the only relations between contents of cognitive states which makes a process involving those states a cognitive process are the sorts of logical functions used in classical experiments(Kelly and Kreuger, 1984: 64). But, of course, on the standard view of logic, logical functions can hold only between abstract predicates. Menos dilemma is then inescapeable! Indeed, until psychology breaks from those philosophical dogmas that have formed it, we shall not have an adequate psychology of learning, and we shall not naturalistically understand knowing. Deweys path, if I am right, was the right one. But even if we accept completely Deweys picture of inquiry (including a host of details yet to be filled in), this would not, of itself, respond to the problem of judging between the belief systems of the Karam and the Western zoologist. Presumably, Deweys account applies to both. If only the zoologist gets it right, then something more is being assumed, likely that something called the method of science privileges the findings of the zoologist. But we have yet to see the argument for this.

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INQUIRY INTO INQUIRY: II There is an entirely different program that is rightly construed as inquiry into inquiry. Dewey offered (as we noted) that through examination of the relations which exist between means (methods) employed and conclusions attained as their consequence, reasons are discovered why some methods succeed and other methods fail (LW, 12: 17). This might be understood as meaning that the task is not only to frame theory which describes and explains the general feature of inquiry, but consistent with this, to consider empirical science empirically. It might then be possible to generate warranted methodological rules, thus satisfying the demand that we be able to judge between contrary beliefs and belief systems. This version of a naturalistic program has had some recent advocates, among them, most outstandingly, Nicholas Rescher and Larry Laudan. There are, I think, three main features, which distinguish this approach. First, the Deweyan inspiration is in the effort to avoid a vicious circularity in which one either justifies outcomes by assuming that means are competent, or warrants the means by assuming the truth of the outcomes. If as Rescher puts it, justification is here an essentially two-way processits results legitimate the method as proper and appropriate, and the method justifies its results as correct then one needs either to break the circle or to show that it is nonvicious (Rescher, 1975: 27). Briefly, Rescher argues that any experiential justification of a truth criterion must pull itself up by its own bootstrapsit needs factual inputs, but yet factual inputs cannot at this stage already qualify as truths. To meet this need, accordingly, Rescher appeals to truth candidates; data which are no more truths than candidate-presidents are presidents. . . .(28)20 Rescher then envisages a feed-back loop in which the reasonableness of the over-all process . . . rests not only on the (external) element of success inherent in the factor of pragmatic efficiency, but also on the (internal) factor of intrinsic coherence and the mutual support of self-substantiation that the various stages of the whole are able to lend to one another(36). Laudan offers what he calls a reticulated model of scientific rationality which explicitly introduces values:
The reticulational approach shows that we can use our knowledge of the available methods of inquiry as a tool for assessing the viability of proposed cognitive claims. . . . Equally, the reticulated picture insists that our judgments about which theories are sound can be played off against our explicit axiologies in order to reveal tensions between our implicit and explicit value structures (Laudan, 1984: 62).

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For Laudan, fully in the spirit of Dewey, axiology, methodology, and factual claims are inevitably intertwined in relations of mutual dependency (63). Second, both writers (Rescher explicitly, Laudan implicitly) reject a thesis (or propositional) pragmatism in which the problem is to vindicate particular truth claims. Instead, they opt for a methodological pragmatism in which the problem is to justify methods. Thus, pragmatic considerations are never brought to bear on theses directly. The relationship becomes indirect and mediated; a specific knowledge claim is supported by reference to a method, which in turn is supported on pragmatist lines (Rescher, 1975; 73). Beliefs arrived at with warranted methods may very well be false. The aim, however, is to find methods which are reliable in the sense that they answer to human purposes, critically assessed. Thesis pragmatism is highly vulnerable to a wholly idiosyncratic mode determining what counts as warranted assertibility. This is, of course, a longstanding objection to pragmatism. Methodological pragmatism offers hope since beliefs are warranted only insofar as they are the outcome of an explicit method that has been warranted independently of this or that particular belief. As Rescher points out:
Considerations of the suitability and effectiveness of methods introduce an inherently rational orientation, which serves to assure the logical properties. Moreover, methods are intrinsically public, interpersonal, and communal. A method is not a successful method unless its employment is generally effectiveotherwise we are talking about a knack or skill rather than a method. A skill can only be shown, it cannot be explained. . . . This line of thought indicates the fundamentally social dimension of methods. . . . They can be examined and evaluated in abstracto, without any dependency on particular practitioners (Rescher, 1975; 73).

These are certainly desirable features of this program, even if as I shall suggest, instead of methods, we are better advised to try to warrant practices. But we should first notice that if the program carries, we will have escaped subjectivism, we will have warranted our method and thus beliefs which are determined by means of these methods, but we will not have secured truth. But, of course, Deweys shift to warranted assertibility was a rejection of the search for truth (understood, as always, in the absolutist sense).21

EXCURSUS: TRUTH ABOUT THE WORLD AND MORAL TRUTH It will be important to notice the bearing of the foregoing on the question of moral relativism. In my view, this is surely the most important of the trou-

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blesome questions raised by relativism. Plainly, I cannot pursue this here. Yet, it seems to me that it is just here that the foregoing is most helpful. The reason is clear enough. The skeptical objection forecloses the possibility of securing a perspectively neutral truth about a world, which exists independently of you and me. But since on naturalistic grounds, our ideas about what is good and right are our ideas, the skeptical objection has no force. All that we need as regards questions of the good and the right is warranted assertibility. Moreover, in this context, the public, interpersonal, and communal aspects are fundamental. While the effort to secure ever-inclusive representations of the external world cannot secure truth about it, the effort to secure ever-inclusive goods is exactly what is called for as regards moral matters.

METHODOLOGICAL PRAGMATISM There is a third aspect to methodological pragmatism. It presumes that an empirical study of science will yield clarity about aims and methods, and that there is a way to reflexively test methods against aims, once identified. As far as I know, Laudan (and his associates), have been in the forefront of actually engaging in such research.22 But I think that on this count, there are some very difficult problems. First, there is the abstraction science. It is easy to suppose that although there are manifest differences in the sciences, the term, science is meaningful because the sciences share in goals, for example, prediction and control, and/or because there is something called scientific method, again, usually defined in terms of a series of abstractions about the formation, deductive elaboration, and testing of hypotheses. Dewey was, I believe, utterly uncritical in this.23 Laudan acknowledges that goals do differ and that, pertinent to this and to subject matter, methods (not merely techniques) may vary. Still it would seem that an adequate empirical picture would show some fundamental differences, not only in the sites and goals of the practices of the sciences, but in their methods and standards as well.24 Consider first the idea of the goals of these practices. Even a cursory examination would show, I believe, that there are at least four fundamentally different goals currently operative in the sciences. 1. Description: for example, ethnographic work in anthropology; quantitative research in economics or demography; much geography; and taxonomic work in botany and zoology (motivated, I believe, by very different goals than the pre-scientific taxonomy of the Karam!).

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2. Prediction and control: behavioral social science, most psychology, meteorology, the engineering sciences, and applied sciences. 3. Understanding: basic science, including work in space/time theory, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory, some (but surely the smallest part) of theoretical work in psychology and the social sciences. 4. The explanation of concrete events: history and the historical sciences (including here, some social science, some geology, some evolutionary biology, some psychology). It has been easy to collapse these cognitive goals. For example, by means of the idea that the discovery of laws is the goal of science, it has been easy to believe that explanation, understanding, and prediction are of a piece. But while the point cannot be pursued here, it is easy to show that these are conceptually, and in practice, distinct aims (Manicas, 2006). Empirical examination of practice would show, I believe, that those practices which aim at prediction and control (implicitly or explicitly) offer nothing in the way of understanding or in the explanation of concrete events. For example, behaviorist psychology gives no understanding of learning; and it cannot explain the most elementary concrete act, for example, my response, fantastic, to seeing Guernica for the first time. Butand this is not to be minimizedbehaviorist psychology has been an effective tool for manipulation and control. But the point of this sketch is not to settle issues, but to raise questions for the empirical program that I have called Inquiry into Inquiry: II Speaking now within its frame of reference, if the goals are different, then we can expect the methods to be different. For any particular goal, there still will be methods that are most effective and suitable. And we can still endorse the basic Deweyan effort to self-referentially bootstrap. But not all these goals will be pertinent to the problem with which we began. The skeptical objection is plainly irrelevant if the aim is prediction and control. Moreover, it is very easy to justify science as the preferred mode if prediction and control is the goal. Indeed, this is a major motive for continuously attractive instrumentalist theories of science. If, however, one is interested in understanding or in explaining what happens, then inquiry into the practices of sciences with those aims will be pertinent. Laudan and his colleagues look at the basic natural sciences (despite their antirealism). If they had looked at most mainstream psychology, indeed at most mainstream social science, things would look very different. But let us assume that the intention is to get an empirically well-grounded picture of those practices that in fact (and not merely in intention) aim at giving an account of how the world is. Of course, it will not do, as Laudan has himself so strenuously insisted, to accept those descriptions of science that are written with manifest assumptions imported from Carnap or Popper, the

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two dominating traditions of twentieth-century philosophy of science. These studies cannot count as tests because they are self-authenticating. Nor can we, uncritically, accept what practitioners say are their methods (or for that matter, their standards and goals). As Einstein remarked, If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: Dont listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds.25 We have the best chance of getting some understanding about what they do if we can study activities directly. For standard historiographical reasons, things get much more difficult when we consider past practices. Indeed, in the face of these problems, there may be a temptation to assume methods and then to assume that they determine outcomes. We then enter history less problematically, with an eye merely to these. Laudans program risks this. Thus, he seems (at least) to begin with hypotheses regarding methodological rules that derive from philosophies of science. The idea then is to enter into history and seek either confirmation or disconfirmation of these. But there are now two additional problems. First, if as Laudan asserts, science changes, it is not clear how much generalizing will be possible 26 and thus, to what degree we can regard conclusions drawn from such inquiry as tests. For example, consider but the institutional differences between Newtons scientific research and the big science of today. Assuming (what is likely contrary to fact) that the goals are comparable, can we be confident that abstracted methodological rules effective then would now be effective? Second, as recent studies surely show, agents making decisions in science are complexly affected. Not only are they capable of self-delusion (like everyone else), but rules, even if they are crisply formulated and form a consistent set, need to be applied concretely. This is hardly to say that methods are irrelevant. Rather it is to assent to Kuhns view, rejected by Laudan, that methodological criteria rarely if ever determine choices between rival theories. As Kuhn (and strong program writers) have insisted, this is not to deny rationality; it is to affirm that rationality is both changing (as Laudan admits) and concrete, exactly in a more Deweyan sense that we cannot explain choices by subsuming them under rules. One thrust of my argument has been against philosophers (and those influenced by these) who, despite the best intentions, have been unable to free themselves from the shackles of traditional epistemology. Another thrust has been to sympathize warmly with pragmatic approaches, but to suggest that among the most outstanding of these, there are serious problems to be faced. Before concluding, I summarize: First, if we are to understand knowing naturalistically, we need to rethink, in Deweyan terms, the psychology and logic of knowing. This will require, if

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I am correct, some important changes in the mainstream practices of empirical psychology. See Chapter 2, above. Second, since knowledge is inescapeably a social product, we need to welcome the efforts of recent sociology of scientific knowledge. Our naturalism cannot be half-hearted (See Chapter 4.) Third, having achieved a better understanding of the production of knowledge, if we are to seek warrant for beliefs (or to prescribe norms for belief), we will need to embrace a Deweyan approach to the fact/value dichotomy. We need to acknowledge, straight out, as Sleeper puts it, that since all judgment is practical... there is no gulf between intellectual and practical judgment. Fourth and finally, instead of trying to warrant methods, we will be better advised to try to warrant practices. I conclude with a sketch of what I mean by this.

THE WARRANTING OF PRACTICES Practices are, roughly, ways of doing. Practices include the beliefs of practitioners, the tools they use, their explicit goals, and much else besides. Practices are institutionalized (structured) activities, activities that presuppose habits in Deweys sense, dispositions that carry the legacy of training and custom. The shift from methods to practices has consequences: First, we will not be stymied if, as seems to be the case, much of what is known by practitioners is not formulable in terms of rules, but is tacit, craftlike, and learned at the side of experienced mentors. One learns how to use the tools, not merely the instrumentation, but the special languages, for example, the mathematics, and the standards for employing them. One learns what counts, what are the pitfalls, what are the ongoing standards of adequacy. Indeed, understanding these is precisely what would count as understanding a practice.27 Second, the shift to practice allows us to acknowledge that structured activities have unintended consequences. This includes not merely the uses to which basic work can be put, but the potential that outcomes may be surprising and hence not subject to control, and that intentions may be frustrated and transformed. Third, as part of the picture, we can include the real possibility that actors engaged in a practice can have false consciousness: they may have beliefs which are essential to the practice in the sense that if they have believed otherwise, they would not do what they do, but these beliefs might be false in the sense that actors may not fully understand just what they are doing. For example, they may believe that they are Popperians or instrumen-

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talists when in fact they are not; they may believe that they are explaining when they are merely controlling; they may believe that their research is uncontaminated by interests foreign to their aims, etc. A fourth advantage of this shift is that it allows us to incorporate as critical the fact that scientific practices are enmeshed in, effecting and effected by, a host of other practices: economic, educational, and political. Thus, the political economy of big science is critically relevant to understanding how its problems get defined and how it approaches and resolves them.28 The issue is not merely that the goals and methods of the practice of big science are not autonomous, but that nonscientific factors are playing critical roles in constituting these practices. Finally, we can be sensitive to the fact that scientific practices are very differently constituted, not merely between and among disciplines, but across time. Given this, a global defense of science may not be possible. On the other hand, we do not need a global defense. We need only to learn by inquiry what it is that makes a practice warrantable.

HARRS JUSTIFICATION OF THEORETICAL/EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS With these considerations in mind, there is at least one recent work to which we can point. Rom Harr is a trained physicist/philosopher who takes fully to heart the idea that (a) we had best look at scientific practices, (b) that a defense of practice in theoretical/experimental physics is not, tout court, a defense of science or of scientific method and (c) that such a defense must recognize the skeptical challenge with which we began. Plainly, this is not the place to detail Harrs important work, but I believe that (with some minor emendations), it is entirely congenial to the views of this chapter. Begin with (c). Harr rejects what he calls truth realism; roughly that a belief is true if and only if it corresponds to reality. Sensitive to arguments from Hume to Laudan, he defends referential realism; roughly, the idea that some of the substantive terms in a discourse denote or purport to denote beings of various metaphysical categories such as substance, quality or relation, that exist independently of that discourse (Harr, 1986: 67). In terms of our earlier discussion, not only is there an external world, but given what we know, the most plausible causal theory of perception is Gibsonian. That is, while one must concede that there could not be psychological laws which explain how someone came to see a pencil, it does not follow that there could not be psychological laws which explain how someone came to see long, thin things, causal sequences, and other generic perceptibles(154). On this view,

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these are natural affordances, possibilities of action ecologically offered to naturally evolved species and found in the exploration of the ambient array. But plainly, this story will not suffice to explain our relevant taxonomies since, as above, Karam see (mediately) kobity and we see birds (or if we are birdwatchers, we see cassowary). We need to make room for the social component of knowledge. Harr exploits Dretskes explication of seeing that . . . Thus, 1. S sees b. 2. The conditions under which S sees b are such that it would not look the way it does look, say L, unless it were P. 3. S, believing 2, takes b to be P. Here, b is a Gibsonian invariant; condition 2 introduces Ss corpus of prior belief. That b is P is knowledge, but, plainly, it is relative to the corpus of beliefs held by S, and there is no way to find some original, terminal, or foundational belief! We have found a toehold on the world, but we have not secured an absolutist conception of knowledge. Nor have we secured science. We can imagine a discourse, Harr calls it Realm I discourse, which made reference only to the states and relations of beings known in actual experience (the heaven of empirical realisms!). Could such a discourse sustain a science? No doubt, human communities have put considerable attention on classifying beings in Realm I discourse, but as is now sufficiently clear, the boundaries which serve to maintain discrete groupings in any human classificatory practice cannot be justified without reference to unobservable properties and structures of the beings in question(179).29 Harrs problem is now clear. Can he justify theoretical/ experimental physics as a preferred mode of fixing belief about the external world? Grasping fully the idea that the science we consume, so to speak, is the final product of the complex interplay of social forces and cognitive and material practices (and not the product of a logic engine), he argues that one must acknowledge that scientific communities control their products by the informal yet rigorous maintenance of a moral order(12). Indeed, on Harrs view, a great deal of the best work by philosophers of science is most usefully understood as sketching an ideal moral order, not an ideal (or still less, real) epistemic order. On this reading, the (epistemic realist) manifesto, Scientific statements should be taken as true or false by virtue of the way the world is as a moral principle becomes: As scientists, that is, members of a certain community, we should apportion our willingness or reluctance to accept a claim as worthy . . . only to the extent that we sincerely believe that it somehow reflects the way the world is. Similarly, the

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idea that we should seek falsification cannot be sustained as an epistemic principle. But it has manifest merits as encapsulating moral injunctions: for example, However much personal investment one has in a theory, one should not ignore contrary evidence (90). For Harr, then, facts are socially constructed, but not only are they not constructed from whole cloth (the burden of referential realism), but to the extent that the ideal moral order is functioning, then the results are to be preferredon strict pragmatic grounds.

WHY WE ARE EPISTEMICALLY IN TROUBLE Harr appeals to empirical studies of scientific practices to identify what, pertinent to the problem of knowledge, is distinctive of these and, then, why, ideally speaking, they should be preferred. Speaking as a naturalizing epistemologist, this is all that we can demand. He does not, to be sure, say very much about the social conditions that would seem to be requisite to sustaining the ideal moral order. In general terms, these are the ideas that we familiarly associate with Peirce and Dewey, critically, the ideas of publicity and access.30 But it is also clear that under conditions of industrialized science, it is just these conditions that are now under threat. Shoddy science becomes possible when published papers are not being read and thus not subjected to critical scrutiny.31 But since they easily become part of the construction of facts, how can we know what to trust? Entrepreneurial science allows contractors to establish huge mission-oriented, capital-intensive enterprises in which researchers lose all independence and everyone else is denied access. Since these products are not assessed by consensus, why should they be trusted? Runaway technology can produce reckless science. Here ready access to millions of dollars aimed at some specific technical power, for example, the manipulation of genetic materials, can produce shoddy science now accompanied by the risk of catastrophic consequences. Finally, there is dirty science in which opportunities to fund research projects aimed at realizing understanding are converted into technologies for state purposes of destruction, or control, or manipulation. We thus come full circle. We are stuck with our history. With the invention of modern philosophy as a discipline pretending not only autonomy but a privileged role in the intellectual division of labor, philosophers unwittingly conspired in mystifying a world in which science has played a profoundly important role. Seventy years after Deweys called for reconstruction, the need is, if anything, even more urgent.

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NOTES
1. I have made two efforts at this, in A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) and War and Democracy (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 2. Quines 1969 essay and Strouds 1981 The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology are reprinted in Hilary Kornbliths influential anthology, Naturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), cited in what follows. 3. Quines picture, presumably, is that, in Carnapian fashion, our knower can continually revise C-functions or in Popperian fashion, she can continue indefinitely to conceive hypothesis, which she tries to falsify. Note also the epistemological individualism. See below. These two programs in philosophy of science have been the most influential epistemologies in our century, but, as Laudan observes in a wonderful under-statement, they have run into technical difficulties which seem beyond their resources to surmount (Progress or Rationality: The Prospects for Normative Naturalism, American Philosophical Quarterly 14, 1 (January 1987): 19. 4. See John Dewey, The Existence of the World as Logical Problem (Middle Works, 8: 9495). Of course, there are other forms of skepticism. See, for example, Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 71. J. E. Tiles, in Dewey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), quotes Russells complaint that Professor Dewey ignores all fundamental skepticism. To those who are troubled by the question: Is knowledge possible at all? he has nothing to say (14). Tiles retorts that this is not fair: what Dewey had to say was that the question lacked foundation (14). But the question is ambiguous. Whether there is an external world that is at least partly structured cannot be motivated. But whether knowledge is possible, given our history, does have a point. See below. 5. See Tiles, Dewey: 7076, 11623, 12729. My account departs, however, from Tiles (and from Dewey?). Holding to an absolute conception of reality does not commit one to an absolute conception of knowledge. It is not my contention that we could describe the world from no point of view. Knowing is necessarily a relation between a situated knower and the world. But unless being depends upon knowing, this does not make whatever is at the object end either featureless or unknowable. On the other hand, Dewey was correct to insist that objects of knowledge (the character of things as known) were produced by inquiry. But because they are not produced from whole cloth (either by individuals or groups!), the skeptical problem arises. 6. Fallibilism, according to Nagel in The View from Nowhere, holds that our beliefs go beyond their grounds in ways that make it impossible to defend them against doubt (68). Nagel here is defining skepticism, not fallibilism! It is hard to say how much disagreement in epistemology turns on different usages. Peirces limit conception of truth provides an anchor, but at a cost. See below. Dewey seemed at least to subscribe to Peirces conception. See John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (LW, 2: 345). 7. See David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974): 3233; Barry Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977). In his Dewey, Tiles holds that Deweys

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fallibilism was secured by the idea that inquiries comprise a continuum and suggests that Dewey was correct to de-emphasize Peirces limit theory (Tiles, 1988: 1068). I doubt this. Where there is no doubt, there is no inquiry. But the limit notion of truth does, at least, give the dissenter a rhetorical tack that is otherwise lacking. 8. Friedman offers what seem to me to be fatal objections to positivist views and to those views, like Peirces, which seek to ensure a connection between confirmation and truth by giving a special meaning to truth. This would include Popper and at least some contemporary versions of instrumentalismperhaps Larry Laudan. As regards the theory of reference, see my sketch of Harrs approach, below. 9. Notice that sociology is omitted. Presumably, what it has to offer is irrelevant to epistemology? 10. Quine waffles on just what he is claiming. Susan Haack holds that Quine is ambivalent between a reformist Modest Naturalism in which epistemology is an integral part of empirical belief and a revolutionary Scientistic Naturalism according to which epistemology is be conducted wholly within the natural sciences. See her The Two Faces of Quine s Naturalism, ms, nd. On his more notorious ambiguities regarding the validation of claims to knowledge, see Ken Geme, Epistemological Vs. Causal Explanation in Quine, or Quine: Sic et Non, ms, nd. 11. Another way into epistemological individualism is to observe (versus Quine) there is no way (as far as we can know) to go from molecules upon our sensory surfaces to the rat perception of, e.g., an edible object, to the (linguistically modeled) belief that there are red apples in the world. We return to this. 12. There are important differences between those doing sociology of science as regards questions in philosophy, between (say) Barnes, Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar, and Latour. Confusion over the claims of Barnes and Bloor is now joined by confusion over these differences. See also the excellent more recent collection of essays edited by Andrew Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 13. Thus drawing the rage of philosophers. It is presumably one thing to explain irrationally fixed belief by appeal to sociological facts; it is quite another thing to suppose that rational belief needs these. Presumably, one must contrast my belief that some figure presently in my vision is the Virgin Mary with my belief that some figure presently in my vision is a panda. Anthony Flew, now speaking for countless epistemological individualists, thinks that the former belief admits of a sociological explanation, but that if it is being argued (and it is!) that intrusive, non-social, physiological, and biological facts are not sufficient to explain this latter belief, then the view is manifestly preposterous and in its implications, catastrophically obscurantist (Anthony Flew, A Strong Programme for the Sociology of Belief; Inquiry 25 (1982): 36667). 14. According to Lycan, occurent beliefs are sentencelike representations stored and played back in our brains (1988: 6). A belief, then, is epistemically justified if and only if it is rated highly overall by the set of all-purpose, topic neutral canons of theory-preference that would have been selected by Mother Nature for creatures of our general sort . . . (160). 15. See Ralph W. Sleepers important The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986); and Thomas Burke, Dewey on Defeasibility, in Situation

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Theory and Its Applications, eds. R. Cooper, K. Mukai, and J. Perry, (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1990): 23368 and Chapter 2, above. 16. Confirmation theory is the skeleton in the closet of empiricist epistemologies of this century. For some of the key papers, see P. T. Manicas, ed., Logic as Philosophy (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1972). 17. As Burke writes:
The basic scenario is that a given organism/environmental system is constantly performing certain operations as a matter of course employing sensory mechanisms, scanning, varying, probing, and otherwise moving about and altering things. Inquiry is initiated by some unsettling perturbation. . . . None of this needs be deliberate: Deweys picture of inquiry is supposed to describe general architectural and dynamic features of virtually any constituent subsystem of living animals, characterizing the simplest cellular life-functions as well as the most complex motor activities. (1990: 236).

Classical epistemology is intellectualist in that it miscontrues experience and then conflates having of an experience with knowledge. Experience is an affair of the intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment; it is not primarily psychical; nor a knowledge affair; and it is pregnant with connexions and full of inference (MW, 10: 6). 18. Compare Barnes and Bloor, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge, in Rationality and Relativism eds. Hollis and Lukes, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982): 44. For a provocative treatment in the context of recent philosophy of mathematics, see Mary Tiles, Mathematics and The Image of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 19. M. T. Turvey, R. E. Shaw, E. S. Reed, and W. M. Mace, Ecological Laws of Perceiving and Acting: In Reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981), Cognition 9 (1981): 285. See also W. B. Weimer, The Psychology of Inference and Expectations: Some Preliminary Remarks, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Eds. G. R. Maxwell and A. R. Anderson vol. 6 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975). 20. See Guy Axtell, Logicism, Pragmatism and MetaScience, in Philosophy of Science, 1990. 21. Of course, the pragmatist, rejecting the problem of knowledge berhaupt and alive to differences in aims, cognitive and otherwise, is open to the possibility that different communities with different aims, cognitive and otherwise, might well be justified in their beliefs about the world. Thus, it is not clear that Karam methods, perhaps informed by and tested against goals that, for example, emphasize harmony with the natural world, are not justified. 22. Expanding on work in his Progress and Its Problems, Laudan has provided a test of realist axiology and methodology in his Science and Values, Chapter 5. He construes realism as a truth-realism and then argues that a great deal of what physicists have believed to be true has been given up. Accordingly, realist methodological advice cannot be historically vindicated. However, as Harr says, this conclusion is vulnerable to a modest objection: While physicists perhaps have not been able to keep their stock of deep fundamental theories unscathed by later developments, there has been a continual refinement and growing repertoire of very plausible items of in-

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formation about many kinds of being whose existence can no longer be seriously called into doubt. (Varieties of Realism, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987: 41). Indeed, once realism is construed as by Harr, not only can Laudans bullet be dodged but an excellent case for what Harr calls policy realism can be made: If a substantive term seems to denote a being of certain natural kind (and some special conditions are satisfied by the theory in which that term functions) it is worth setting up a search for that being (59). That is, by including in their working vocabulary a robust referring expression, there are features of theories which historical experience shows are good bets for having anticipated experience . . . (60). For other suggestions for rules worth testing, see Rachel Laudan, Larry Laudan, and Arthur Donovan, Scrutinizing Science (Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). 23. Dewey inconsistently offered an instrumentalist theory of science in which prediction and control were emphasized as the goals of the sciences. See Chapter 1, above. In his antirealism as regards theoretical terms, he shares much with my former colleague, Larry Laudan. See Chapter 5. 24. Think of astrophysics at Princetons Advanced Institute and at Rome ARDC, research in solid state physics at Stony Brook or at Roswell, N.M., DNA/RNA research at Cold Spring Harbor and at Texas Medical Center; biochemists working at Max Factor, or on bonding metals ions to antibodies at Scripps Clinic, or neurotransmitters at the University of Hawaii; economists at the Bureau of Labor, the American Enterprise Institute, or Cambridge University, England; psychologists at Merrill Lynch, in the social welfare services of the City of New York, at the New School for Social Research, at MIT; unfunded anthropologists in Thailand and anthropologists working for AID in Thailand. One could easily go on. 25. Quoted by G. Holton, Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality. in Ernst Mach, Physicist and Philosopher, eds. R. S. Cohen and R. J. Seeger (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970). The text is from Einsteins 1933 Herbert Spencer Lecture. 26. Feyerabend surely goes too far here. Harr points out that Feyerabend aims his guns at the logicisms of the alleged inductive method and the fallibilism of Popper, but this target is too restricted. More importantly as regards the present context, there may be more than one but not indefinitely many contexts of enquiry, in each of which different methodological and metaphysical principles, each cluster of which could be taken as defining a scientific inquiry, could be rationally defended (Varieties of Realism: 2425). This would, I think, still undermine Laudans program. 27. Compare, of course: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); Jerome Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 28. Merely by way of illustration, what are we to make of the fact that sixty billion dollars will be spent in the 1990s on a half-dozen projectsa space station, a human genome project, a supercollider. And what are we to make of the criticism that big science has gone berserk, that good minds and a lot of money are going into areas that are not relevant to American competitiveness, American technological health, or even the balanced development of American science (New York Times, Sunday, May 27, 1990: 1).

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29. They will, for example, require dispositional attributions. The clearest examples are in everyday discriminations, for example, salt and sugar. But consider also classifications of modern zoology, sustained (or not) by appeal to beliefs deriving from neo Darwinian theory (just as the Karam classifications are sustained [or not] by appeal to beliefs which run past Realm I discourse). 30. See Deweys remarkable The Public and Its Problems (LW, 2) and Chapter 3, above. Dewey pointed out that the conditions for assessing claims were, in general, being eroded. Thirty years later, C. W. Mills picked up this theme: As experts constrained dialogue, publics were being converted to masses. 31. The term shoddy science, the analysis, and the other categories that follow are owed to Jerome Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems, Chap. 10.

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Part Three

DEMOCRACY

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John Dewey believed that Americans were not an over-agile people morally (Middle Works,Vol. X: 261).1 Like many, then and since, he was struck by the stunning turn in their attitudes toward the Great War in Europe.
Our remoteness from the immediate scene of international hatreds, the bad after-taste of the Spanish American war, the contentment generated by successful industrialization, the general humanitarianism of which political progressivism was as much a symptom as social settlements, the gradual substitution of calculating rationalism for the older romantic patriotism, all these and more had created an American sense that war was the supreme stupidity (MW, X: 260).

When the Great War came, some managed the shift in attitude easily. It was, in fact, depressing that so many who when war was actually declared merely clumsily rolled their conscience out from under the imperative of Thou shalt not kill till it settled under the imperative of Obey thy law,and this despite the fact that they still saw the situation exactly as they had before (MW, X: 263). For others, seeing the situation exactly as they had before, the pacific moral impulse remained steady. Now a troublesome minority, Dewey worried that they were being treated badly. Not yet clear that this was but a tip of the iceberg, he wrote that they deserve something better that accusations, varying from pro-Germanism and the crime of Socialism to traitorous disloyalty (MW, X: 61). For others, a moral wrench had been necessary, a moral adjustment which if not involving a tragedy of the inner life has been effected only with some awkward trampling of what has been cherished as the finer flowers of the soul. Indeed, Dewey could hardly believe [that] the turnover could have been accomplished under a leadership less skillful than that of President
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Wilson, so far as he succeeded in creating the belief that just because the moral impulse retained its full validity Germany must be defeated in order to find full fruitionthe war to end all war. Deweys view that it took the skillful leadership of Wilson must not be taken lightly. It may be that few others could have so successfully fostered the belief among Americans that by entering the war they could fulfill a unique historical task. Moreover, in these passages, Dewey was not suggesting that Wilson had created a false belief. On the contrary, right along Dewey had been insisting that this is not merely a war of armies, this is a war of peoples. Accordingly, there is no aspect of our lives to which this war does not come home or which it does not touch. In his judgment, we ought not to be neutral when the war comes home in one form or another and to talk of being neutral is to talk foolishness (MW, X: 158). There is, he insisted, such a thing as interests being vitally affected without a vital interest being affected (258). Unlike most Americans, Dewey had convinced himself early on that the United States had to be in the war. He was also confident that the Allies would win the war. But he was not thoroughly convinced that the aims of American entry would be realized. The United States could not enter the war with full heart and soul though we join with unreserved energy. Not until the almost impossible happens, he continued, not until the Allies are fighting on our terms for our democracy and civilization, will that happen (259; my emphasis). That Dewey should himself have believed, with Wilson, that this war was a great opportunity to further our democracy and civilization is stunning, given what we now know. The texts quoted above are from Deweys In Time of National Hesitation, written with relief that at last we were in it ourselves. Dewey concluded this remarkable text by offering that the war has shown that we are no longer a colony of any European nation nor of them all collectively. We are, he continued, a new body and a new spirit in the world (259). This was surely true. But as he later came to see, he had misread that new spirit. Dewey did not then know that our democracy and our civilization were not what he had thought them to be. He did not then appreciate that this Great War would prove that the chauvinists, pacifists, internationalists, and cynics were correct. The new body would be a globally powerful America, which would occupy its rightful place in what Dewey was to call the war system. In this chapter, the focus is on the role and thought of two of Americas most important political philosophers and analysts, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. The idea is to use them to recover a critical moment and argument in American history over democracy in the epoch of modern war. The perti-

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nence of this moment to the present cannot, perhaps, be overstated. Dewey and Lippmann played important roles as regards American entry into the war and, in different ways, as regards the terms of the peace. Although little has been made of this, for Dewey the war was a transforming experience. It forced him to articulate a philosophy of democracy, which was profoundly radical. Lippmann was not transformed; but the war forced him to become clear on some critical themes, which he had previously left unclear. In the process, the two of them came to share a diagnosis of the problems of American society, even if their prescriptions were leagues apart. Their positions on science, government, mass society, democracy, and war say much about America, before and after the Great War.

THE NEW REPUBLIC The first Republic, of course, had been written by Plato. Reflecting on the problem of war in his world, Plato had envisioned a radically reformed polis, capable of dealing with both war and, of even greater importance, civil strife (stasis). The second republic was that of Cicero, who, while approving of empire, nonetheless wanted Rome to return to its more virtuous republican days. The New Republic referred to in this part of the book, however, is neither Athens nor Rome, but, with appropriate equivocation, the magazine which was created in 1914 by Herbert Croly and funded by Willard Straight and his wife, Dorothy. Straight was a Morgan banker and an arch-exponent of American imperialism; Dorothy Straight was a Whitney with the benefits of ample Standard Oil royalties. The young Walter Lippmannhe was but four years out of Harvard College, the first president and founder of its Socialist Clubwas a key member of the magazines original staff. The much older John Dewey, born in 1859, was an enthusiastic contributor. There were a host of other notables who were close to die new magazine, including as an editor, Walter Weyl, author of The New Democracy (1912) and Felix Frankfurter, who was then teaching at Harvard Law School. Among the first contributors were Van Wyck Brooks, the youthful author of Americas Coming of Age (1915). Indeed, the list of early contributors reads like a whos who of English-speaking intellectuals. More interesting, perhaps, Theodore Roosevelt looked on the magazinewith the encouragement of its editorsas his own personal stepping-stone back to the White House.2 On the face of it, this array of personalities seems like a disparate group; but they shared in thinking that the United States was to be a new republic. Croly had been a Harvard philosophy student and had become instantly famous with his The Promise of American Life (1909), the perfect title for a new

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vision of American liberalism, a nationalist liberalism which would give a democratic meaning and purpose to the Hamiltonian tradition and method (Forcey: 129). Croly had savaged the ]effersonians as individualists, isolationists, and defenders of a bankrupt laissez-faire economic philosophy. He had argued that Big Business was here to stay, but that with Big Government and Big Labor, there were totally new possibilities. He had insisted that this would call for strong leadershipthe answer to the devil-take-the-hindmost individualism of the Jeffersonians (38). As Forcey notes, although clouded by a certain horror of the former Rough Riders lusty militancy, Croly had a deep and abiding admiration of Theodore Roosevelt (40). But then there are always trade-offs in politics. Lippmanns first book was his 1913 A Preface to Politics. It was an iconoclastic book, influenced by Croly and by his old teachers at Harvard, William James and especially Graham Wallas, the famous British Fabian and political theorist. But the then fashionable Freud, along with Nietzsche and Sorel, were even more in evidence. In the background, usually unnoticed, is Woodrow Wilsons new theory of democracy. Lippmann distinguished between routineers and inventors and argued that government, dominated by routineers, had failed. The trusts had appeared, labor was restless, vice seemed to be corrupting the vitality of the nation. Statesmen had to do something (Lippmann, 1913: 35). Their training was legal and therefore utterly inadequate. But it was all they had. As routineers, they panicked and reverted to ancient superstition. They forbade the existence of evil by law. Lippmann insisted that what was needed was an entirely different approach. It was necessary to put this restless, untamed energy to work. The impulses were like dynamite, capable of all sorts of uses. Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them (4950). Accordingly, the United States needed a real government that has power and serves a want, and not a frame imposed upon men from on top (45). But the United States was no Greek polis:
Plato and Aristotle thought in terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before, plumped down on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. . . . Nor can we keep the problems within our borders. Whether we wish it or not we are involved in the worlds problems, and all the winds of heaven blow through our land. (105)

In the face of this, improvements in knowledge seem meager indeed. What is demanded is a different conception of government and different kind of statesmen.

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Princeton political scientist Woodrow Wilson had been concerned since the 1890s with leaderless govemment.3 He was correct in arguing that the American Founding Fathers, with genuine scientific enthusiasm, had followed Montesquieu in yearning for equipoise and balance in a machine- like system (Constitutional Government: 56). But on his view, if what had been wrought by them had been good enough for their sons, it was not good enough for the sons of their sons or, presumably, for their daughters either. Sharply critical of a disjointed, hence incapacitated government, Wilson responded to the same currents that had moved Max Weber; but he seemed to endorse what Weber had feared. Modern societies were mass societies, complex and inchoate. Wilson offered that policywhere there is no absolute and arbitrary ruler to do the choosing for the whole peoplemeans massed opinion, and the forming of massed opinion is the whole art and mastery of politics (Leaderless Government: 339). This was truly a remarkable idea, pregnant with implications that Lippmann was shortly to pursuewith a vengeance. Wilson argued that since the president was the only official with a national mandate, he had this special role. The air of German philosophy still present in America surely influenced his next move. In a text that Hegel could have endorsed, he argued that leadership is interpretation: The nation lay as it were unconscious of its unity and purpose, and [the leader] called it to full consciousness. It could never again be anything less than what he had said it was. It is at such moments and in the mouths of such interpreters that nations spring from age to age in their development (Constitutional Government: 21).4 In A Preface to Politics, Lippmann fully shared in rejecting the machine conception of government(Lippmann, 1913: 13). He insisted that the object of democracy is not to imitate the rhythm of stars but to harness political power to the nations need (21). Our choice, he maintained, lies between a blind push and a deliberate leadership, between thwarting movements until they master us, and domesticating them until they are answered (286). But if Wilson had grasped what was needed, Lippmann was unsure about whether Wilson could fill the bill. Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is [William Jennings] Bryans chief defect -the scientific habit of holding facts in solution (1023). On the other hand, Wilson understands easily, but he does not incarnate: he has never been part of the protest he speaks. You think of him as a good counselor, as an excellent presiding officer. Roosevelt has seemed to me the most effective, the most nearly complete. . . . He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship (103). Indeed, Roosevelt in his term did much to center government truly. For a time natural leadership and nominal position coincided, and the administration became in a measure a real sovereignty (23).

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A Preface to Politics is surely criticism of traditionthe record and machine-like imitation of the habits; that our ancestors createdand of the traditional view of politics in a republic. Lippmann criticized the mystical democrats who believe that an election expresses the will of the people, and that that will is wise (115). Like Wilson, he was struggling to rearticulate democracy for a complex mass society. But he stepped back from the Nietzschean implications of the new language of masses and urged instead a break-up of herd politics. What was needed, on his view, was a more robust pluralism. Accordingly, he saw the reformation of party politics somewhat differently from either Wilson or Max Weber. He condemned the rigidity of the two-party system. For him, it ignores issues without settling them, dulls and wastes the energies of active groups, and chokes off the protests which should find a civilized expression in public life (262). And he appealed to just those mechanisms, which Weber had rejected, saying that the initiative and referendum will help (263). Like Wilson, Lippmann wanted leadership and saw the leader as an interpreter; although for him the relation of leader to mass was more dialectical than it had been for Wilson. Social movements had tendencies and energy, but they needed an inventor if they were to be imbued with life (Lippmann, 1913: 63). At the same time, to govern a democracy you have to educate it: . . . contact with great masses of men reciprocates by educating the leader. He was optimistic, indeed enthusiastic. In a rough way and with many exceptions, democracy compels law to approximate human need (116). Given all that he himself said, it is not clear what could possibly be the mechanism for this. Lippmanns second book, Drift and Mastery, published in 1914, represents a decided shift. It carries forward some of the earlier themes, but in many ways it is a more democratic book; and, with its enormous emphasis on the application of science to politics, it is much closer to the vision which we now associate with Dewey. Indeed, one is tempted to say that if James had ever written a political book, it would have been Drift and Mastery! Both the title and the main argument are Jamesian: A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like the Christians sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and skill to wield it; in all others it is a piece of junk (Lippmann, 1961: 16). The book begins with the obvious drift of our time and gropes for the conditions of mastery (19). What is this obvious drift? We have lost authority. We are emancipated from an ordered world (111).
We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world, and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche. As a

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nation we have all the vulgarity that goes with that, all the scattering of soul. The modern man is not yet settled in this world. It is strange to him, terrifying, alluring, and incomprehensibly big. . . . We make love to ragtime and die for it. We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience (118).

Worth emphasizing is the fact that for Lippmann, America is the modern world, the land of immigrants and the land where all of us are immigrants spiritually. Surely industrialization and urbanization are part of this; but of themselves, they do not make a people modern. Americans, we are asked to believe, are modern because they are the first people to acknowledge the failure of all absolutes. The theme runs throughout the book: Our ancestors thought they knew their way from birth through all eternity: we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow. The guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest have evaporated. The iconoclasts didnt free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim (112). But this remarkable diagnosis, along with its existential tone, is Jamesian, in that it allows for the most characteristic of Jamesian themes: the purposive effort to shape the environment, to make relations, to create and recreate an unfinished world. Mastery, an ill-chosen word, is possible; but we must be clear about what it means:
When we cultivate reflection by watching ourselves and the world outside us, the thing we call science begins. We draw the hidden into the light of consciousness, record it, compare phases of it, note its history, experiment, reflect on error, and we find that our conscious life is no longer a trivial irridescence, but a progressively powerful way of domesticating the brute. This is what mastery means: the substitution of conscious intention for unconscious striving. . . . You cannot throw yourself blindly against unknown facts and trust to luck that the result will be satisfactory (148).

This is a distinctly Jamesian view in which there is nothing inhuman about the scientific attitude (158). By now the idea has all but been lost, a victim of the distance of esoteric language, unintelligble to all but specialists, the image of anonymous men in white coats experimenting, the modem magic of technology and the Bomb. For James, as for Lippmann, there was nothing about science properly understood which need make it inevitably hostile to the variety of life (161), nothing putting the scientific attitude at odds with impulse, intuition, imagination, creativity, or indeed, religious belief:
There have been hasty people who announced boldly that any interest in the immorality of the soul was unscientific. William James, in fact, was accused of treason because he listened to mystics and indulged in physical research. Wasnt

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he opening gates to superstition and obscurantism? It was an ignorant attack. For the attitude of William James toward ghosts was the very opposite of blind belief. He listened to evidence. No apostle of authority can find the least comfort in that (161).

This was no scientism or positivism. Science was controlled inquiry; but, as with Dewey, it was creative intelligence, purposive, and in the service of human impulses. Neither was it a technologism.5 Accordingly, it did not call for a technocracy. The method of a self- governing people is to meet every issue with an affirmative proposal which draws its strength from some latent promise (174). For Lippmann, mastery, whether we like it or not, is an immense collaboration, in which all the promises of today will have their vote (75). Indeed, there is nothing accidental . . . in the fact that democracy in politics is the twin-brother of scientific thinking. They had to come together. As absolutism falls, science arises. It is selfgovernment. . . . The scientific spirit is the discipline of democracy, the escape from drift, the outlook of the free man (151). To be sure, Lippmann is usefully unclear here as to exactly how the leadership which was so important in Preface functions in this scheme of things; and as before, he is unclear about the mechanisms which might join the scientific spirit with the machinery of a democracy. Moreover, as he became clear, after the war, he also changed his mind. This vagueness, as well as certain other strands in the book, make it easy to see a continuity which has thrown off more than one commentator. It also makes it easy to see why the book could receive adulation from almost all sides. Lippmann had not given up on Crolys notion that organized labor could be a countervailing power, to adopt Galbraiths term. To this he added the idea that consumers would be a power to be reckoned with; but, more than that, in anticipation of Adolf Berle, he argued that the real news about business . . . is that it is being administered by men who are not profiteers (42). The established magazines and newspapers, ready to accept Lippmanns deflation of socialism and his celebration of Americas uniqueness could easily be enthusiastic. So too could the women of America. In a chapter devoted exclusively to the topic of the Womens Movement, Lippmann saw that there had to be confusion and conflict within the movement, precisely because every step in the womans movement is creative (123). Randolph Bourne, who was shortly to lay blame for Americas entry into the war on the war intellectuals, said that he would have given his soul to have written Drift and Mastery. And with much less good reason, even the revolutionary magazine, The Masses, concerned perhaps with the good relations between Reed and Lippmann, received it with warmth.6

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Drift and Mastery was a pragmatists political book and important; but it was anything but Lippmanns last word on the topic under discussion. We need first to see what, during this same period, the active, influential pragmatist, John Dewey, was up to. For some time prior to the publication of Drift and Mastery, Dewey had been insisting on the application of experimental methods to social change, arguing that in crucial ways the problem of a better society was a problem of knowledge. Yet the most striking thing about Deweys thought up to World War I was the absence of a political philosophy. Until that time, as an intellectual and a theorist, Dewey was a psychologist, a moral philosopher, an educationist, a defender of his new instrumentalist version of pragmatism, a philosopher engaged in philosophical problems which, if they would touch the problems of men, had not yet issued a clear vision of the good society.7 One here suspects a kind of characteristic American innocence. Dewey, reared in the town-meeting atmosphere of Vermont, had no reason to doubt that if there were problems in America, the American way, erected on solid foundations, was essentially sound. Of course, he had always been more than a theorist. He had always been involved practically, in Chicago with the work of Jane Addams and the experimental lab school at the University of Chicago, and in New York, especially with the schools. The Great War prompted Deweys first systematic political work, German Philosophy and Politics (1915). But if the book was motivated by the war, it was guided by Deweys conviction that there is a mutual relationship of philosophy and practical social affairs (Dewey, 1915: 13). As the title suggests, the book is an effort to grasp the German politics of World Policy by a study of German philosophy, from the esoteric inquiries of Kants Critique of Pure Reason to the philosophy of history, the state, and of war in the philosophy of Hegel.8 Both German philosophy and politics come off badly. Like Marx, Dewey had been nurtured on Hegel, but had long since broken with that tradition. So far as politics is concerned, German Philosophy and Politics is Deweys German Ideology. At the root of German politics, Dewey finds the two worlds of Kantian philosophy and its subsequent correction by Hegel. Thus:
The division established between the outer realm, in which of course acts fall, and the inner realm of consciousness explains what is otherwise so paradoxical to a foreigner in German writings: The constant assertion that Germany brought to the world the conscious recognition of freedom coupled with the assertion of the relative incompetency of the German folk en masse for political self-direction. To one saturated with the English tradition which identifies freedom with power to act upon ones ideas, to make ones purposes

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effective in regulation of public affairs, the combination seems selfcontradictory. To the German it is natural. (34)

General Friedrich von Bernhardis frank and immodest Germany and the Next War of 1912 is extensively quoted. Drawing on the Reformation and Kant, Bernhardi had concluded: To no nation except the German has it been given to enjoy in its inner self that which is given to mankind as a whole. . . . It is this quality which especially fits us for leadership in the intellectual domain and imposes upon us the obligation to maintain that position (quoted by Dewey: 1915: 35, emphasis in the original). This was no metaphor, of course. In this book, Bernhardi had called for the elimination of France (die Ausschaltung Frankreichs), the foundation of a Central European federation under German control, and the acquisition of new colonies. In a masterful understatement, Dewey comments: Outside of Germany, cavalry generals who employ philosophy to bring home practical lessons are, I think, rare. Outside of Germany, it would be hard to find an audience where an appeal for military preparedness would be reinforced by allusions to the Critique of Pure Reason (35). Dewey does not stop at bashing German philosophy, however. He draws more general conclusions. There is a real difference between a theory which is pinned down to belief in an Absolute beyond history and behind experience, and one that is frankly experimental. For any philosophy that is not consistently experimental will always traffic in absolutes no matter in how disguised a form. In German political philosophy, the traffic is without mask (89). America, unsurprisingly, is said to be experimental: America is too new to afford a foundation for an a priori philosophy. . . . For our history is too obviously future (129). On the other hand, our country is too big and too unformed . . . to enable us to trust to an empirical philosophy of muddling along. . . . We must have system, constructive method. . . . I cannot help but think that the present European situation forces home the need for constructive planning (12930).9 Indeed, there is a pressing need to clarify and guide our future endeavor; but to do this, we need to articulate and consolidate the ideas to which our social practice commits us (130). Current American social practices were sound. They needed to be discerned so as to provide leverage on the future. He allows himself one illustration: The present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural (130). The philosophy of isolated national sovereignty will no longer suffice. But just for that reason, neither will those remedies which were then in the air. Arbitration treaties, inter-national judicial councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace movements are all well in their way. But the situation calls for more radical think-

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ing (13031). There is an unacknowledged depth and width of human intercourse, and this needs to be applied without and within our national life. As to the remedies just mentioned, an international judicial tribunal will break in the end upon the principle of national sovereignty (131). For Dewey, political, racial, and cultural nationalism will take on an increasing prominence and urgency during the next three years. We find the theme in Democracy and Education, published in 1916. Because it is rich in the philosophy and practice of education, readers usually fail to notice the underlying tension created by Deweys insight into the problem of nationalist and statist politics. He asks, Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted? (Dewey, 1966: 97). The problem is plain enough. As Plato knew, no polity can escape from the demands of creating citizens, and no educational system can escape from the fact that to be a citizen is to value and honor the distinct features of the polity. In Gernan Philosophy and Politics, Dewey had both applauded and condemned the German system of education: Germany is the modern state which provides the greatest facilities for general ideas to take effect through social inculcation. Its system of education is adapted to that end (1415). Surely, American schools had to make Americans. But what was an American? The solution presented itself. If we are talking about education in and for a democratic society, then it is possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state without a corruption or restriction of the full social ends of the educative process. While the if was a big one, Dewey did not yet have any doubts that education in America was in and for a democratic society, and that in this regard America was leading the way. Democracy and Education introduced a critical Deweyan distinction, that between democracy as a mode of associated living and democracy as a form of government. He had little to say about the latter except to notice that the two ideas went hand in hand. Education in a political democracy has as its aim sustaining and extending democracy as a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. As a way of life, democracy was the extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own (87). There was an unnoticed difficulty. Given the increasing depth and width of human intercourse, it would seem that democracy as a way of living would present an increasingly difficultperhaps even intractableproblem. This surely was the conclusion Lippmann had already come to. It would, indeed, be the basis of Lippmanns incisive analysis of the postwar American polity. But in 1916, at least, Dewey seems not to have been in the least

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disturbed. He noted that there was definitely a widening of the area of shared concerns. He concluded, optimistically, that these would break down the barriers of class, race and national territory. Moreover, such widening was not the product of deliberation and conscious effort. On the contrary, it was the result of the development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration and intercommunication which flowed from the command of science over natural energy (87). Like Lippmann, he saw that all the winds of heaven blow through our land; or, to adopt Graham Wallass influential term, that there was now a Great Society which was international and interdependent. For Dewey, as for Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, if for different reasons, the implications of this were entirely hopeful. We can, no doubt, instantly agree with Dewey that these forces were giving rise to problems whose solutions were increasingly intractable to local instrumentalities; but it was far from clear that these forces were in fact generating the appropriate instrumentalities for their own solution. As he came to appreciate, the problem of democracy was to provide ways whereby problems could be recognized as shared concerns and to provide the means and the instruments for dealing with them as shared. In 1916 he seems still to have been a victim of an element of that same German philosophy which had victimized Marx. Just as Marx had supposed that capitalist modes of production would destroy national boundaries, make for international proletarian solidarity, and politicize workers, so Dewey seems to have thought that the machine age, once hooked to genuine American experimentalism, would propel democracy as a way of life.10 The United States, forced to invent, had invented well. The idea that the Old World was just thatoldhad always been a feature of American thought, to be sure. But the new psychology, new experimental philosophy, new nationalism, new democracy, new freedom, and new internationalism offered a new promise. When America entered the war, Wilson and the war intellectuals were ready to commit Americans to a fight for our democracy and our civilization.11

ARMED NEUTRALITY, PREPAREDNESS, AND WAR The editors of The New Republic were democratic nationalists, not democratic socialists. But, as Forcey comments, to be a nationalist amidst the carnage that followed Serajevo [sic], . . . was no longer so easy as it had been in the innocent days that gave birth to the new liberalism (Forcey, 1961: 221). This was especially difficult, since it was hard for anyone to imagine why America should have entered the war.

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We cannot here review the difficulties on this score faced by the New Republic nationalists, except to notice that, to begin with, they probably did better than most of the violently partisan press (Forcey, 1961: 231). They ridiculed the pacifists, to be sure, and on this they got ample assistance from Dewey. In the January 19l6 New Republic, Dewey offered the classic pragmatist response to pacifism: Until pacifism puts its faith in constructive, inventive intelligence instead of its appeal to emotions and in exhortation, the disparate unorganized forces of the world will continue to develop outbreaks of violence (MW, X: 214). In any caseand more fundamentallythe issue of whether force was justified depended on the consequences. If war cannot be shown to be the most economical method of securing the results which are desirable with a minimum of undesirable results, it marks waste and loss (X: 21415). But plainly, it might be so shown.12 The editors also resisted Roosevelts shrill calls for preparedness, asking, reasonably, Preparedness for What? In this they also got considerable support from Dewey, who wrote a series of essays against the idea that compulsory military service would overcome the admitted defects in our educational system. Indeed,
when Mr. Roosevelt writes with as much vehemence about national aid to vocational education, national aid to wipe out illiteracy, and national aid for evening and continuing schools for our immigrants, as he now writes in behalf of military service, I for one shall take him more seriously as an authority on the educational advantages of setting-up exercises, firing guns and living in camp (X: 186).

But most striking, perhaps, are the Orwellian terms which the men of the New Republic helped to create and promote as they moved closer and closer to militancy. They called for differential neutrality. Their constructive radicalism became constructive patriotism. With the sinking of the Lusitania, they called for a new kind of war, armed neutrality, forgetting that they had only recently been telling Americans who sailed on British ships that they did so at their own risk.13 It was now perfectly justifiable for the United States to use defensive convoys, confiscate German assets, and intern its shipping. Wilsons actions showed that he appreciated that the option was not to do nothing. Similarly, the New Republic men had been ecstatic when Wilson called for Peace without Victory, believing, with good cause, that Wilson had got the idea from them (Forcey, 1961: 36568). The only question was whether Wilson really understood Aggressive Pacifism. It turned out that he did. Historians remain in disagreement over the explanation of Americas entry into the Great War: whether, as American schoolbooks have it, the United

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States (by which they must(?) mean the President and the Congress) was forced into war,14 whether there were deep causes having to do with securing imperial interests, or whether, as Randolph Bourne had suggested, it was the result of failure of some distinct aspects of the American Weltanschauung. However, there are some facts upon which everyone can agree. For one, as Morison writes, No citizen of a neutral state lost his life as a result of the British blockage, and all neutral cargoes seized were paid at war prices. On the other hand, U-boat warfare took a toll of some 200 [actually 118] American lives on the high seas while America was still neutral (Morison, 1965: 851). And it is surely the case that the infamous Zimmerman telegram15 was critical as regards Wilsons final decisionwhether as the last straw or the perfect excuse. Still, it is hardly self-evident that the German proposal of a German-Mexican alliance was good reason to send troops 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to France. Nor could there be any doubt that some Wall Street interests were served by war, and that many of their spokesmen, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Willard Straight, wanted war. Still, unless we assume that Wilson was a dupe for these interests, more needs to be said.16 But however this may be, although it is often supposed that in the 1916 campaign Wilson was the peace candidate, this is very far from being the truth. The slogan He kept us out of war was part of the campaign, to be sure; but not only was no promise ever made that Wilson would continue to keep the United States out of the war, but the importance of the slogan has been magnified by Republicans who, retrospectively, like to believe that they were right all along and that Wilson had played a game of duplicity (Paxson, 1966, I: 347). After all, nearly everyone was for peace, motherhood, and apple pie. Even those who, like the editors of the Chicago Tribune, were vigorous in their support of Teddy Roosevelt were saying that preparedness was the only hope for peace.

DOMESTIC POLITICS AND AMERICAS ENTRY INTO THE GREAT WAR We need here to look, if only briefly, at American domestic politics. By the time of the 1912 presidential campaign, the Republican party, whose right to rule had scarcely been questioned since the Civil War, had collapsed into open schism. The result had been the election of Wilson as a minority president over William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelts splinter Progressive Party candidacy. Wilsons presidency had not satisfied the Progressives, and

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the war had not made things any easier for Wilson. For one thing, ethnic politics had taken on entirely new dimensions. The census of 1910 showed some 91,972,266 Americans of whom 9,827,763 were Afro-Americans. Politicians could safely ignore them. Of the remaining 82,144,503, 32,413,723 were foreign-born or had a foreignborn parent, and 10,984,614 had either been born in Germany or AustroHungary or had a parent who hadthat is, around one in eight. But there were also 4,505,360 who were Irish-born or of Irish parentage. Displeased with Wilsons policy of differential neutrality, they joined a chorus of antiBritish sentiment, which grew louder after the unsuccessful Irish Rebellion at Eastertime of 1916. Wilson had never been happy with the hyphenated movement, and he probably did as much as anyone to give currency to the term. In his widely quoted May 1914 remarks at the unveiling of a statue in memory of a revolutionary hero, he said impatiently: Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over. But when the whole man has come over, heart and thought- and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name(Paxson, 1966, I: 205). In his Leaderless Government address to the Virginia Bar Association, an address which, with appropriate changes, he evidently repeated many times, he was distressingly frank: We have the immemorial practice of the English race itself, to which we belong. Nowhere else has the pure strain of the nation which planted the colonies and made the independent government under which we live been kept so without taint or mixture as it has been in Virginia, and hitherto in all the South (Public Papers: 337). Of course, Americans of less pure strain could find little to attract them in Roosevelt either, an attitude then shared by the big-shots in the Republican party who were not about to forgive Roosevelts recent, disastrous bolt of the party. Nonetheless, Roosevelts hopes were decidedly boosted by the vocalif minority preparedness sentiment. When the Republicans met for their convention, there were those who counted on a stampede for Roosevelt. This group almost certainly wanted war and knew that Roosevelt would not disappoint them. When the movement to Roosevelt did not materialize, efforts to seal the schism led, on the fourth day, to the nomination of Charles Evans Hughes, who at least seemed electable. Roosevelts well-publicized dislike of him, along with his ancestry, made him a plausible friend of the Germans. Moreover, since he had said nothing to indicate that he leaned toward the cause of the Allies, the Irish might go along as well. So might Catholics and others who were angry with Wilsons confused interventions in the Mexican civil war and pacifists and militarists unhappy with armed neutrality. More than that, he might appeal to the Progressives, the hyphens, and the non-hyphens. After all, Hughes had been

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one of the craftsmen of the movement (Paxson, 1966, I: 342), Dewey, writing in the New Republic, seems to have got it right: Were one to judge from the style of campaign undertaken by the Republican managers, one would conclude that there are no issues in the present campaignunless the business of ousting Mr. Wilson from the Presidency be called an issue (MW, X: 252). As Dewey saw, Hughess undiluted Americanism was but the mask for a contradictory medley.17 Nevertheless, this perfectly clear perception of the nature of American party politics seems not to have disturbed Dewey. Or at least, it did not disturb him enough to deter him from saying, I find myself, along with many others who have not been especially enthusiastic in the past about Mr . Wilson, warming up to him more and more every day (X: 253). Worth noting, the Socialists did not even have a convention. For them a mail primary was sufficient. Senator Bob La Follette optimistically prophesied, in April 1916, the day is coming when the people, who always pay the full price, are going to have the final say over their own destinies. . . . They who do the fighting will do their own deciding (Quoted in Paxson, I: 274). Wilsons campaign was a combination of exploiting undiluted Americanism and a belated, energetic shift to progressivism. Jeremy A. OLearys American Truth Society had been saying, reasonably, that Wilsons neutrality was fraudulent. Knowing that the group had been cultivated by Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, Wilsons response to OLeary was brief: I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them(Quoted in Paxson, I: 350). But that was still not the end of the matter. The Democratic National Committee discovered that Hughes had been in conference with OLearys group. With good effect on the campaign, they accused Hughes of being in secret alliance with disloyal hyphens. On the other side, Wilson nominated the notoriously pro-labor Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court; and in the few closing weeks of the congressional session, a raft of Progressive measures, stemming from presidential initiative, got passed: the Federal Farm Loan Act, the creation of the United States Tariff Commission, an important new labor bill restricting child labor, and the Adamson Act, a novel piece of legislation which had been the favorite of railroad labor. Still, Wilson won only barely. In the electoral college, the victor needed 266 out of 531 votes. With California still out, Hughes had 254 and Wilson 264. The thirteen California electoral votes made the difference. Paxson comments: Indeed, with a well-placed smile Hughes might have won the needed four votes in a thousand from the opposition, nearly half of them Republican at heart, but they had been snubbed (Paxson, I: 363). The fact that Governor Johnson of California had combined the nonDemocratic vote to win in that state makes this a convincing argument.18

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Nevertheless, it had been clear enough to Lippmann that Wilson would be a war president. Steel reports a summer 1916 interview granted to him by Wilson, then strenuously cultivating Progressive support. After almost two hours on domestic questions and benevolent neutrality, the discussion turned to war. Steel writes:
Wilson knew what Lippmann wanted to hear. Neutrality,benevolent or otherwise, Wilson said, was becoming more difficult. Let me show you what I mean, he added, and dramatically pulled out a cable from the embassy in Berlin predicting that the Germans would resume unrestricted submarine warfare after the American elections in November. Its a terrible thing to carry around with me. The implication was clear. When the Germans sank the Sussex five months earlier, Wilson had said that he would break relations if they resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. Now he had to either back down or go to war. Lippmann hurried back to New York to meet Croly and Straight. Now well have to face it, Lippmann told them. What were electing is a war President,not for the man who kept us out of war. And weve got to make up our minds whether we want to go through the war with Hughes or with Wilson (Steel: 1980: 1067).

We shall never know, of course, whether Hughes, too, would have been forced into the warany more than we can be sure about Wilsons true motivations and beliefs either prior to the election or up to his call for war. Historically, these are of little consequence. Far more important is the fact that up to the day on which Wilson delivered his stirring war message to Congress, 2 April 1917, few Americans could have found any reason to enter the war in Europe. Wilson himself offered but one reason, and that one reason, ironically, had been a gift of the Russian Provisional Government just one month before: We desire, he declared, no conquest, no dominion. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. . . . America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth. The world must be made safe for democracy. As important, surely, is the fact that he decided that America should go to war, and that he could have decided otherwise. But this is not a statement that Wilson had free will. Rather, unlike the similar judgment by Thucydides in reference to the Spartans, it is to say that he could have decided otherwise without in any obvious way compromising the interests of the United States. Of course, this claim may be contested. One might argue, for example, that a victorious Germany would have been a threat to the United States and to its interests. It is hard to know what sense to make of this sort of defense, especially in light of the fact that Germany was defeated and Hitler had even greater aspirations than the Kaiser!

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The German High Command had blundered disastrously in believing that America was not disposed to enter the war and that therefore it could renew the submarine campaign with impunity.19 This gave Wilson all the justification or excuse?he needed. To be sure, America could have adopted a consistently neutral stance, could have abided by the principles of a neutral country under international law, marked her ships appropriately, and engaged only in shipping that was pacific. Wilson knew that he was within his authority in protecting American rights at sea, even if that meant abandoning a consistently neutral posture and, thus, encouraging war. But he preferred not to act upon general implication(quoted in Paxson, I: 399. Nonetheless, his request for an immediate bill arming merchant ships was blocked in committee by La Follette. On Wilsons view, a little group of willful men representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible(quoted in Paxson, I: 401). Indeed, this same little group of willful men had been doggedly demanding a national referendum on war before any further step toward war be taken. We can only guess what its outcome might have been. But there is no doubt that the Congress supported Wilson: the declaration passed 82 to 6 in the Senate and 373 to 50 in the House. With less good reason than the German Social Democrats, these men were not going to be parties to a posture of cowardice which would make the United States look helpless and contemptible. Finally, and not to be overlooked, it is by no means clear that they did the right thing in endorsing Wilsons war policy. They could not know, of course, the consequences of the American entry; nor can we make any sort of sensible judgment about the consequences of that war had they acted otherwise. But surely it was as clear then as now, that the proffered reason for war was, at best, highly dubious.

THE NEW REPUBLIC? Dewey was instantly distressed by official and unofficial responses to the exigencies of war. In December 1917 he addressed a group at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City. Three teachers had been charged with disloyalty and suspended. Dewey saw that it was no coincidence that the three had been active in promoting the new Teachers Union. There had been no trial, no opportunity to present evidence or weigh testimony. It was, said Dewey, an inquisition. He offered that he was pro-Ally; but to be so, it was not necessary to be in favor of establishing Prussianism in New York City (MW, X: 159). Repression justified by war was not a novelty in the liberal democ-

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racies and had not been so in America. What was new was a new capacity to use repression, now coupled with a fantastic new ability to obliterate the distinction between information and propaganda. It is not clear whether at this time Croly, Lippmann, Dewey, or indeed anyone, appreciated this or its implications or how far it would go. But as the repression increased, so did the protest that issued from these men, especially from Dewey. The Espionage Acts (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), aided by Justice Holmess famous articulation of a clear and present danger, provided the legal ground for slapping a ten-year jail sentence on Eugene Debbs for an anti-war speech and for the mass indictment of the leaders of the IWW and others equally protected by due process. The editors of the Masses went on trial; an issue of Oswald Garrisons Nation was suppressed; the Jewish Daily Forward was threatened; and Simon Patten and Charles Beard joined the list of academics who lost their posts. The atmosphere of suspicion resulted in the withdrawal of the subsidy that had kept Bournes The Seven Arts in print. Even the New Republic came under government surveillance until Georg Creel, the chief of President Wilsons new propaganda bureau, the Committee of Public Information, pointed out to federal agents that the magazine was a supporter of the Administration!20 In order to satisfy the need for an authoritative agency for the dissemination of facts about the war, the Committee of Public Information (CPI) had been created seven days after the declaration of war. It had no congressional authority and was primarily supported out of the Presidents fund. Its efforts were monumental. Not only did Creels office release the news, which meant that it had control over what Americans learned about the war; but, as Creel said, there was no medium of appeal that we did not employ: films, posters, cartoons, prepared speeches, and widely distributed pamphlets. A sample of their titles gives the flavor: How the War Came [sic] to America, The War Message, [Wilsons speech before Congress] and the Facts [sic] Behind It, Why Working Men [sic] Support the War, and the Official Bulletin, a novel experiment in government journalism. In his summary Paxson concludes that the Wilson doctrine was the doctrine of his C. P. I. It was elaborated in the war of pamphlets and was explained out of the history of the United States and of the world. It was rationalized as a reasonable outgrowth of United States experience. It was grounded in the ideas implicit in the phrase, a world safe for democracy.(Paxson, II: 48). Plenty of people saw the films, read these tracts, and passed on what they had read. Still more were influenced by the CPI effort at disseminating information. The pieces of printed matter and presentations number in the millions.

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Moreover, with the Government providing the example, private organizations, especially hate mills like the National Security League, could go to work. Seeing traitors everywhere, their strident, irresponsible publications attacked liberals as traitors, especially those with Teutonic names, at the same time giving the CPI a benign, centrist, responsible look. The February Revolution in Russia had made Wilsons war for democracy plausible, but the Bolshevik Revolution now gave the defenders of reaction wonderful new fuel. Because it was quite impossible to get any clear picture of what was happening in Russia; because, since at least the Haymarket bombing, American WASPs had associated socialism with foreigners, especially Slavs and Jews; because, in turn, these were terrorists; because the German High Command and German Social Democrats had chimed in with the threat of Bolshevism, it was easy for Americans to believe whatever they were told about the Russian Revolution. Lippmann, who surely knew this, could observe that the people are shivering in their boots over Bolshevism, and they are more afraid of Lenin than they ever were of the Kaiser. He concluded by noticing what may be a characteristic trait of American culture in this century: We seem to be the most frightened lot of victors that the world ever saw(quoted by Steel: 156). Nor have those truths about Russian history been erased. The Red scare had by then begun. The Palmer raids and the mass deportations of dangerous Americanswithout trialmade previous efforts at repression seem sweet. Lippmann had confessed to Colonel Rouse that he had no doctrinaire belief in free speech, but that he could not be sanguine over the hysteria. Dewey, who had been on platforms with many of the radicals, including the deported anarchists Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman, responded, in 1920, along with Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, and Clarence Darrow, by forming the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Dewey had insisted that Goldmans reputation as a dangerous woman was built up by a conjunction of yellow-journalism and ill-advised police raids. The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, in 1921, propelled Dewey to the conviction that the ACLU was anything but sufficient, a discovery that would motivate his thought from then on. But there were other unintended consequences of the war. One was the realization of at least the main features of the New Republic image of a nationalist liberalism. Perhaps Dewey was in the best position to see this clearly. In a remarkable essay entitled What are we Fighting For? of June 1918, he spelled it out. The war had brought forward the more conscious and extensive use of science for communal purposes. It had made it customary to utilize collective knowledge and skill of scientific experts of all kinds, organizing them for community ends. This was, he concluded prophetically, the

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one phase of Prussianism . . . which is likely permanently to remain (XI: 9899). The warfare state had laid the foundations for the new liberalism! Still, Prussianism was hardly a democratic image. Further consequences of the war were the formation of large political groupings (MW, XI: 99) and domestic integration within each unit (XI: 101). But this too seemed to propel democracy. Production for profit had been subordinated to production for use. On Deweys view, the war has . . . afforded an immense object lesson as to the absence of democracy in most important phases of our national life, while it has also brought into existence arrangements for facilitating democratic integrated control (Xl: 102). It did not matter what you called this, state socialism, state capitalism, socialization, or something else. The fact of deeper import was the creation of instrumentalities for enforcing the public interest in all the agencies of modem production and exchange (XI: 102). This was the key. At this time, Dewey surely believed that the instrumentalities of representative government were being extended and that they could do the job. But he was incredibly vague on the possible dangers. He did not deny that the absorption of the means of production and distribution by government and the replacement of the present corporate employing and directive forces by a bureaucracy of officials led to centralized government. Moreover, so far as the consequences of war assume this form, it supplies another illustration of the main thesis of Herbert Spencer that a centralized government has been built up by war necessities and that such a state is necessarily militaristic (XI: 104). Dewey did not even comment on the idea that such a state is necessarily militaristic. He seemed satisfied to point out merely that
in Great Britain and this country, and apparently to a considerable degree even in centralized Germany, the measures taken for enforcing the subordination of private activity to public need and service has been successful only because they have enlisted the voluntary cooperation of associations which have been formed on a non-political, non-governmental basis (XI: 104).

The workplace too was being democratized: The wage-earner is more likely to be interested in using his newly discovered power to increase his own share of control in an industry than he is in transferring that control over to government officials (XI: 105). Still, these words, published just as the workers and soldiers councils in Russia had begun to solidify and just before a workers revolution had come to Germany seemed hardly true of America. Indeed, Randolph Bournes appraisal of the situation was very much closer to the truth. In a series of articles published between June and October 1917,

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Bourne had offered an extraordinary criticism of the war intellectuals, and especially of Deweys New Republic articles.21 Bourne had noted that for war intellectuals, democracy remains an unanalysed term, useful as a call to battle, not as an intellectual tool, turning up fresh sod for the changing future (Bourne, 1919: 123). He asked, rhetorically, Is it the political democracy of a plutocratic America that we are fighting for, or is it the social democracy of the new Russia? Which do our rulers really fear more, the menace of Imperial Germany, or the liberating influence of a socialist Russia? (12324). To those of us who have taken Deweys philosophy almost as our American religion, he noted that it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique. He agreed that the young men in Belgium, the officers training corps, the young men being sucked into the councils of Washington and into war organization everywhere have among them a definite element, upon whom Dewey, as veteran philosopher, might well bestow a papal blessing (128). Liberal and enlightened, they had absorbed the secret of scientific method as applied to political organization. Creative intelligence was indeed lined up in the service of war technique. We were instrumentalities, he admitted; but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place as contributory You must have your vision and you must have your technique. The practical effect of Deweys philosophy has evidently been to develop the sense of the latter at the expense of the former (13031). Bourne was a pragmatist. He began his essay Twilight of Idols by evoking James and concluded by again evoking him:
A more skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood may actually be the sign of more stirring life fermenting in America today. It may be a sign of hope. That thirst for more of the intellectual war and laughter that we find Nietzsche call us to may bring us satisfactions that optimism-haunted philosophies could never bring. Malcontentedness may be the beginning of promise. That is why I evoked the spirit of WIlliam James, with its gay passion for ideas, and its freedom of speculation, when I felt the slightly pedestrian gait into which the war had brought pragmatism. It is the creative desire more than the creative intelligence that we shall need if we are ever to fly. (13839)

Bournes remarks are, perhaps, a confession of his rude awakening, not so much to the traps and ambiguities of instrumentalism, but to the nature of those nebulous ideals which so many had presumed to be instantiated in American democracy. It would take Dewey a bit longer before he would get clear on the critical issues. But, contrary to many of his later critics and epigones, get clear he eventually did.

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TWO INQUIRIES As the war labored to an end, Lippmann and then Dewey had the chance to be engaged in projects, which put their pragmatic philosophies to work. Lippmanns project was an enormous success; Deweys was not. Colonel House, Wilsons powerful man for all seasons, initiated Lippmanns project in September 1917. So secret that it had no name, the group which formed its directorate decided on the Inquiry.22 The name, a member noted, would be blind to the general public, but would serve to identify it among the initiated(Steel, 1980: 128). The directorate included Sidney Meses, Houses brother-in-law and a philosopher who was then president of City College, David Hunter Miller, a law partner of Houses son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, Columbia historian James T. Shotwell, and geographer Isaiah Bowman. Eventually it came to number some 150 academic experts, including Samuel Eliot Morison; but Lippmann was its general secretary and, as it turned out, its motivating spirit. Evidently, Dewey was tempted by Lippmann to head a Moscow branch, but in the end decided against the plan. It is interesting to speculate on how that experience might have affected his political philosophy. The mandate of the inquiry was broad. It was to consist not only of a study of the facts but of quiet negotiation, especially among the neutrals, so that America could enter the peace conference as the leader of the great coalition of forces(129). It was just at this time that the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties. Because Wilson feared, rightly, that these would adversely affect American public opinionhow would Wilson maintain the fiction that the war was not an unholy alliance of bribes and rewards?he tried, but failed, to prevent their publication in America. In consequence, there was an urgency in Houses early December invitation to Lippmann to come to his home. Wilson had to disconnect himself from the manifest imperialism of his Allied partners and to set out a peace of his own. The terms had to purge and pacify the Allied cause and, at the same time, be so tempting to the German people that they would reject their own leadership. This rather incredible mandate was brilliantly managed by Lippmann. On 22 December 1917, Lippmann presented House with a document entitled The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests. The President got it on Christmas Day. On January 2, Lippmann responded to requests for clarification with a revised memorandum. Wilson accepted the recommendations, adding six points of his own, and on January 8 he assembled Congress to offer them his historic Fourteen Points. Lippmann was rightly exultant. Deweys inquiry, by contrast, bore absolutely no fruit. It had been initiated in the summer of 1918 by Albert Barnes, a self-made millionaire who had

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been a student in Deweys social philosophy course at Columbia. Barnes had asked Dewey whether he would like to come down to Philadelphia and attempt to put his social theory into practice, to address a large group of Polish immigrants on questions of national identity and democratic pluralism. It turned out that Philadelphia was just the starting place for a the-ranging inquiry with direct pertinence to the terms of the peace. Dewey and his graduate students quickly discovered that Poles in America like other groups, presumablywere caught in a set of intractable dilemmas. By virtue of their understandable affection for their own language and traditions, they quickly became isolated, reinforcing their otherness versus the mainstream. This prevented them, as the Handlins remark, from getting their fair share of [Americas] rewards.23 At the same time, it made them vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation. As Dewey said, We discovered much fear and intimidation in a certain part of die Polish population, much manipulation and exploitation in another part, together with much criticism of leaders who they were nominally following with much enthusiasm (MW, XI: 26061). To get at this complex web of fear, manipulation and exploitation, and contradictory responses to leadership, however, Dewey saw that it would be necessary to extend the study to European and international relations. The problem was focused by a forthcoming convention in Detroit, which aimed to unite the Poles in America behind the faction of Ignace Paderewski, the famous pianist and prospective first president of the new Polish Republic. The United States had already set in motion its plans to make Paderewskis group, exiled in Paris, the official representatives of the Polish people. But Dewey quickly came to believe that this faction was not terribly interested in democracy, that Paderewski represented a tiny minority in his homeland, and that the leaders of the KONthe acronym (from the Polish) of the Congress (or Committee) of National Defense which opposed Paderewskihad a far broader democratic base. The Poles in America were being manipulated with the full, if unintended, cooperation of American media and officialdom. As to the European aspect, Dewey saw that the struggle went way back into history. It was between a party whose chief policies were monarchical, reactionary and clerical and a party which was radical, often revolutionary and socialistic, anticlerical and republican (XI: 262). This, of course, was the characteristic form of struggle going on in all those nations which, through no fault of their populations, had achieved neither modern, industrial civilization nor, in consequence, republican institutions. Neither side was especially favorable to the cause of the Jews but the record of the conservative party is much the more aggressively anti-Semitic. Similarly, both parties share the tendency among all Poles to exaggerate ter-

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ritorial claims based upon events of past history, some of them as old as the twelfth century. Still, Dewey continued, the conservative party is the more imperialist and extreme, being Pan-Polish. Since the Russian revolution particu1ary, the radical party has moderated its claims (XI: 262). As to the American aspect, there existed an alliance between Polish clergy, opposed to and admittedly afraid of Americanization, and the conservative European faction. The radical group, on the other hand, had suffered continuous accusations of pro-Germanism, anarchism, Bolshevism, and antidemocracy, all this despite the fact that one of their leaders, General Pilsudski, was then in a German prison, and that the adherents of K.O.N. in this country have been officially expelled from the socialist party (XI: 293)! Indeed, based upon his personal knowledge of the leadership, Dewey asserted that he could not speak too strongly of the malicious campaign of insinuation, misrepresentation and personal attack carried on against the leaders of the K.O.N. (XI: 294). The problem, or better, the set of problems, which Dewey had diagnosed, were anything but unique in domestic and international American politics. They have re-occurred steadily, from World War I to the present. (Compare, more recently, immigrant Salvadoreans, Vietnamese and Iraqis.) The official response to Deweys efforts is perhaps typical. Dewey tried desperately to get his detailed seventy-five-page report into the hands of pertinent officials, and eventually to House himself. Yet, although he finally managed this, he did not have Lippmanns success. This is hardly surprising, for Dewey said nothing that House wanted to hear. Indeed, House was later to write: He [Paderewski) came as the spokesman of an ancient people whose wrongs and sorrows had stirred the sympathies of the entire world. This artist, patriot, and statesman awakened the Congress to do justice to his native land, and sought to help make a great dream come true (quoted in XI: 406). The great dream come true is summarized by the conservative historian Paul Johnson: Of the beneficiaries of Versailles, Poland [the Paderewski faction?] was the greediest and the most bellicose, emerging in 1921, after three years of fighting, twice as big as had been expected at the Peace Conference. The Polish government had, of course, exploited Western fears of Bolshevism and interests in a cordon sanitaire around Russia. But now, with the largest minorities problem in Europe, with a third of her population treated as virtual aliens, it would not be long before she maintained an enormous police force, plus a numerous but ill-equipped standing army to defend her vast frontiers (Johnson, 1985: 39). There is no doubt that Deweys inquiry was, for him, a profoundly educative experience, perhaps, indeed, the decisive turning point as regards his hopes for a more democratic world. Lippmanns direct experience in Europe

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as a propagandist for the Military Intelligence Bureau had already given him all the education he needed when, in Public Opinion, he returned to the topic of democracy. But before turning to this Lippmann-Dewey argument, we should look at another Lippmann-Dewey argument, this one regarding the League of Nations and the campaign to outlaw war.

THE LEAGUE AND THE OUTLAWRY OF WAR As Lippmann quickly saw, the Versailles Peace was a sham, whatever he might at one time have hoped, With Allied troops on their way to intervene in Russia, the Fourteen Points was a vehicle for constructing a cordon sanitaire around Bolshevik Russia. Weve got no business taking part in unauthorized civil war in Russia. Weve got no business either in law or morals or humanity trying to starve European Russia in the interests of Kolchak, Denikin and the White Finns(quoted in Steel: 164). Central Europe was balkanized; but millions of people, including Germans, were forcibly put under alien rule. The reparations imposed on Germany were contrary to anything Lippmann had expected, and the League of Nations, although it was not a defense pact, incredibly excluded an unarmed Germany. For the life of me I cant see peace in this document, he wrote (quoted in Steel: 158). Lippmann got it exactly right: Unless the bridges to moderate radicalism are maintained, anarchy will follow. It was not just that American policy was illegal and immoral; it was also counterproductive. Now Lippmann found himself saying things that no one wanted to hear. But surely he had to share the blame. Like Dewey, he had contributed to Wilsons ideological war politics, now so successful that those who were still able to distinguish between reality and ideology were suspectif not accused of downright disloyalty. Nor has it become easier since then to distinguish reality from ideology. After a hostile Senate committee caught the administration in a host of highly dubious claims and outright lies, the Treaty, with its provision for the League, might still have passed had Wilson, its creator, been willing to compromise. In any case, it is clear that Europe got a League which it did not want, and that Wilson, who seemed to believe throughout that the League was as he said it was, was thoroughly discredited. In Deweys first comments on the League, he was enthusiastic about the idea of permanent international government whose powers shall be even more executive and international than judicial (MW, XI: 138). In another essay, of November 1918, he had argued that the League was not, as he understood it, merely to enforce peace. This betrayed the same logic of the old military-political system. What distinguishes Wilson from the other states-

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men of the epoch, he said, was his prompt recognition that, given the conditions of modern life, no adequate defense and protection of the interests of peace can be found except in a policy based upon positive cooperation for interests which are so universal as to be mutual (XI: 128). This was not merely a shared interest in peace, of course. Rather, it involved interests which grew out of common everyday necessities, and which operated to meet the commonplace needs of everyday life with respect to food, labor, securing raw materials . . . and so on. He continued, An organization which grew out of wants and met them would, once formed, become so indispensable that speedily no one could imagine: the world getting on without it (XI: 129). The idea had been important to Dewey since at least his German Philosophy and Politics. Dewey was surely correct about the limits to the idea that peace could be enforced. But, as with his remarks regarding shared concerns in Democracy and Education, because global interdependence had accelerated and mechanisms were needed to respond to the new problems generated by inter-dependence, were we to suppose that the League proposed by Wilson would be such an instrument? Might we not suppose that sovereignty would stand equally in the way of what Dewey had hoped for? In another essay of the same month, he linked the League to the New Diplomacy and argued that the question was whether the end of the war will reverse the relative eclipse of democracy, whether the efforts of a nation that entered the war to make the world safe for democracy will effect a transformation of sentimental valuations. In particular, the question was whether we continue with an unconscious adoption of the older morale of honor and defense of status, or whether the democratic movement has the intellectual courage to assert the moral meaning of industry, exchange and reciprocal service (MW, XI: 132). For some time, Dewey was relatively silent in judging which of the two roads had been taken. But by March 1920, he had decided. There is no use in blinking the non-democratic foreign policy of the democratic nations of France and Great Britain. Did Dewey forget to include the United States here, or was this simply taken granted? He continued, The Versailles Conference was not an untoward exceptional incident. It was a revelation of standing realities (MW, XII: 5). Diplomacy is still the home of the exclusiveness, the privacy, the unchecked love of power and prestige, and one may say the stupidity, characteristic of every oligarchy. Democracy has not touched it (XII: 7). The distinction between peoples and governments was important, but by 1923, he could write that the League of Nations is not a League of Nations but of governments, and of the governments whose policies played a part in bringing on the war and that have no wish to change their

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policies (MW, XV: 7980). Like Lippmann, he seems not to have remembered that he was once an important soldier in the army of writers whose words had served to obscure these important facts. His whole posture had indeed changed. One shift regarded the little understoodand now forgottencampaign to outlaw war.24 The idea derived from Salmon O. Levinson, and by 1923, in addition to Dewey, it had picked up the support of Senator William Borah, Republican leader of the assault on the League and sponsor of Senate Resolution 411 (introduced February 14, 1923). Borahs Resolution had three parts: a universal treaty making war a public crime, the creation of a code of international law of peace, and the creation of a judicial substitute for war . . . in the form of an international court (XV: xvi). At first blush, the idea seems incredibly naive and utopian. To most of its critics, it also seemed impossible that its supporters could at the same time be such adamant opponents of the League and the Hague World Court. Yet the idea was neither naive nor utopian; nor were its supporters inconsistent. Indeed, the main idea is startlingly reasonable. There is no such thing as an illegal war except the kind of war that appears to most persons the most justifiable from the moral standpoint internal wars of liberation (XV: 62).25 In denying the sovereignty of an imperial power or the authority of a regime, a group or a people must make themselves outlaws. But for a sovereign state in its relation to other states, war is the most authorized method of settling disputes between nations which are intense, the ultima ratio of states (54). Yet we insist that individuals in conflict face some sort of mechanism for nonviolent resolution that they engage in some kind of negotiation adjudication. The point has nothing to do with the justice or injustice of a particular war. The point is that by not making war illegal, we utterly abandon the idea of nonviolent resolution of conflict. Nor is Dewey saying that a law making war illegal, signed by all, will end war. Even given the heavy sanctions available to lawmakers within states, crime does not cease. Nor is Dewey saying that the international mechanisms to be created should include coercive sanctions. The measure is logicalnot merely formally logical but substantially logical in its adherence to the idea that war is a crime (XV: 94). The use of police power against an individual is not at all like its use against a nation. The latter is war, no matter what name you give it. . . . You cannot coerce an entire nation save by war. To outlaw war and in the same measure to provide for war is to guarantee the perpetuation of the war system (XV: 94). This, of course, is one of the implications of Deweys old objection to the League, one which also applies to the court at The Hague. Both lack coercive sanctions. Yet, incredibly, if one thinks about it, they operate under an international law which sanctions recourse to war (XV: 96).

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Nor is this a form of pacifism. It is not claimed that force is never to be used or that nations should disarm. On the contrary, they may well have to fight a war. It is to say, by contrast, that unless and until war is outlawed and there are alternative mechanisms for settling disputes, we will not have taken one single stride toward lasting peace. Indeed, all steps taken within the war system are useless; for it is not a step we need, it is a right-about-face (XV: 98). The choice, then, is between political methods based upon a system which legalizes war, and political methods which have as their basic principle that war is a crime, so that when diplomacy and conferences cannot reach agreement the dispute shall be submitted to a court (XV: 11920). But isnt this naive? Consider the possibilities. Suppose that we choose the second alternative and outlaw war and create an international tribunal. Then there are three alternatives: first, issues are settled by the open inquiry of the court; second, one party (or both) refuses to assent to the courts decision; or third, one party (or both) refuses to even submit the dispute to the court. In the latter case, then, assuming that there are mechanisms for publicity, it should be clear to the people of the world, including the people of the nations involved, that the party has no case, that the regimes rationale for war cannot stand up to the public scrutiny. The refusal to submit to publicity indicts them. In the second case, the world, including the people of the recalcitrant regime, can judge who, if anybody, has right on their side. Dewey argues that the proposition to outlaw war has never been put to the people of the world. If they do not want war, they will respond. Similarly, if such a mechanism existed, the people could decide whether they wanted the particular war, which they were being asked to fight. At the risk of pedantry, I have tried to make the foregoing absolutely clear. But Walter Lippmann, surely one of the most perceptive men around, never seemed to quite grasp what Dewey and the others had in mind. This is striking. Deweys position is open to criticism, of course; but Lippmanns criticisms are utterly off the mark. He argued, for example, that Deweys proposal was a plan to enforce peace (XV: 405), that it committed people to a code so radical that it destroys the patriotic code which they are accustomed to associate with their security and their national destiny, that nations could never. agree on the code to which they would be bound (XV: 40910), that any test would require an abrogation of sovereignty (XV: 411), that the advocates propose to continue to legalize all kinds of wars (XV: 412), that the idea calls for the elimination of diplomacy and other voluntary mechanisms of adjudication (XV: 414), and more. Dewey fielded these objections in two essays in response to Lippmanns polemic, and in each instance it was easy to show that Lippmann had been

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mistaken, that he had distorted the text or missed the point.26 The main objection to Deweys plan, of course, was that no government, not even in the democracies, was willing to submit its foreign policy aims to anybodys scrutiny, still less the scrutiny of its own people. It seems fair to say that Lippmann simply took this for granted. There was nothing wrong with Deweys logic, even if his position made him a holdout for the new diplomacy. Perhaps he did not see that in this world, vested interests were, if anything, more powerful than they ever had been; that, if anything, people would have less say with regard to war than ever in the past. By 1923 there was urgency in his posture. In his 1927 response to Lippmanns mature views on democracy, he converted urgency into radical analysis.

PUBLIC OPINION AND DEMOCRACY It is no exaggeration to say that Lippmanns Public Opinion is one of the most important books in modern democratic theory. Published in 1922, it is a masterful account of the epistemology, conditions, and mechanisms of massopinion formation in a modern mass society. It also includes a brilliant chapter that annihilates the individualists image of democracy, of the self-centered man and the self-contained community. As Dewey saw, the only disappointing aspect of the book was Lippmanns constructive suggestions. In Public Opinion Lippmann did not draw the deep implications of his analysis for democracy, although they were clear enough. He did this in his The Phantom Public of 1925. And this is the book that prompted Dewey to his full-dress response, in The Public and Its Problems of 1927. Part I of Public Opinion sets the parameters: The World outside and Pictures in our Heads. Lippmann does not doubt that there is a World outside, and that in some sense it is knowable. People in modern mass societies have direct acquaintance with their milieus; but even the latter involve the selection, the rearrangement, the tracing of patterns upon, the stylizing of, what William James called `the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas (Lippmann, 1954: 16). Knowing is through the medium of fictions. But fictions are not lies. A fiction is a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself. It may have almost any degree of fidelity, depending on its construction. The persistent difficulty, he concludes, is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone elses need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia (16). The problem is that most people believe that they have a good map without having any way to know this.27 The materials of public opinion are the pic-

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tures inside the heads . . . of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relations. Those pictures which are acted on by groups of people, or by an individual acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters (19). In successive chapters, Lippmann develops the mechanisms for the formation of public opinion. Part II, Approaches to the World Outside, has chapters on censorship and privacy, contact and opportunity, time and attention, and speed, words and clearness. Members of modern mass societies are not polis-dwellers directly engaged in a world where the causes and consequences of acting can be used to check ones maps. Nor have they the time or the opportunity to range across the spaces of indirect involvement. Always subject to mediation by others, from the childhood books put into their hands to the representations of the Official Bulletin, they have no way to discriminate among the representations set before them or to judge whether someones need has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia on their map. Moreover, it has now become possible, when necessary, to create something that might almost be called one public opinion all over America (47). Lippmann gives a devastating account of the Committee on Public Information and its unwitting conspirators in manipulation. He argues that the Committee drew in a host of willing helpers, from the Boy Scouts who delivered the Presidents annotated addresses to doorsteps to the 600,000 teachers who received the fortnightly periodicals and passed on the information contained therein to their pupils to Mr. Hoovers far reaching propaganda about food to the Red Cross, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, and other groups who carried out the campaigns. Largely voluntary, the Committees effort was insidious, an achievement which far outran the hopes of the small group who sat at its center. In Part III, Lippmann illuminates the overwhelming role of stereotypes in forming thought. We see a bad man. We see a dewy mom, a blushing maiden, a sainted priest, a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree bohemian, a lazy hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile Irishman, a greedy Jew, a 100% American (11920). Taken as an ordered ensemble, they provide a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. No wonder, Lippmann concludes, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundation of the universe (95). Indeed, when these are reproduced ad nauseam, in authoritative histories, magazines, stories, cartoons, movies, radio shows, television productions and more,their grip is irresistible. Part IV is an insiders account of the role and limits of newspapers. They deal with news, not truth. The news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground, but it may tell you when the first sprout breaks

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through the surface (341). Moreover, where there is a good machinery of. public record, statistics on crime, stock prices, election returns, and the like, the modem news service is excellent. But where information is spasmodically recorded, unclear, explanatory, contestable, or hidden because of censorship or a tradition of privacy, the service fails. Worse, news and truth are not the same. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act (358). The Press is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about. . . . Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. And, critically, the press cannot do otherwise. The newspaper is neither a church nor a school. It is a business. Indeed, the citizen will pay for his telephone, his railroad rides, his motor car, his entertainment. But he does not pay openly for his news (322). Unreported scandals by dry-goods merchants who advertise are not the problem. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the costs of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants (324. Lippmann neatly summarized the point. He wrote: To get advertisers [a paper] must get readers. To get readers it must defer to their own experiences and prejudices as setting the standard; it must adapt itself to sell newspapers (341). Dewey thought that Lippmann had given up too quickly. But the problem is not the immorality of editors or publishers. It is structural, a self-reproducing, closed, causal loop. Indeed, it may be a loop, which is well nigh impossible to break! Lippmann illustrates the mechanisms of the making of a common will with a case study of the building of the Wllsonian picture of the Great War. It joins all the previous themes and deserves a full airing here. We must settle, however, for only its flavor. Well before the Committee of Public Information geared up and well before Wilsons dramatic congressional speech, the Republican candidate Hughes unwittingly contributed. At the critical moment of the campaign of 1916 he did what was expected of him. He played politics. His first speech set the tone. Lippmann summarizes it thus: On the non-contentious record, the detail is overwhelming; on the issue everything is cloudy (210). What cannot be compromised must be obliterated, when there is a question on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend that it does not exist (201). With regard to Wilson, the experiment of the Fourteen Points, addressed to all the governments, allied, enemy, neutral, and to all the peoples, would have been impossible without cable, radio, telegraph and daily press (207). And there was the opportunity. By the end of 1917, the earlier symbols of the war had become hackneyed, and had lost their power to unify. Beneath the surface a wide schism was opening in each Al-

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lied country (209). Moreover, the whole Allied cause had been put on the defensive by the refusal to participate in Brest-Litovsk (210). Wilson filled the gap. But, of course, the Fourteen Points served precisely because no one risked a discussion. Indeed, on pain of exposing their roles, they could not The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the civilized world, were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but they evoked a common emotion (215). Lippmann then turns to democracy. The never true, fanciful, democratic image of the self-centered individual autonomously and directly confronting the world as it is makes no sense. Nor does the idea that the community is self-contained, and that, accordingly, there is no unseen environment which escapes everyones direct and certain knowledge. We are not polis-dwellers. We are a mass. Yet Lippmann does not for a second pretend that the Founding Fathers were democrats, mystical or otherwise. On the contrary, when they went to Philadelphia in May 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles of Confederation, they were really in full reaction against the fundamental premise of Eighteenth Century democracy (277). They were determined to offset as far as they could the ideal of self-governing communities in self- contained environments. The problem, as they saw it, was to restore government as against democracy (278). To be sure, the American people came to believe that their Constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such. Moreover, they owe that fiction to the victory of Thomas Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction it has been. . . . It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible (284). (See Manicas, 1989, Chapters 6, 7 and 8.) What then is the upshot? What is the solution? One might guess here that Lippmann believes that all is well, on the grounds that, mythology notwithstanding, the people do not rule anyway. Representatives rule, and surely they have good maps. But Lippmann thinks otherwise. Everywhere in the world, he says, representative bodies are discredited. And there is a good reason: A congress of representatives is essentially a group of blind men in a vast unknown world (288). Indeed, for Lippmann, one of the preconditions of a strong parliament can never by satisfied: There is no systematic, adequate, and authorized way for Congress to know what is going on in the world. The president tells Congress what he chooses to tell it (289). Recurring now to his earlier views, he concludes that this is why the prestige of presidents has grown in modem democracies. He seems to throw a bouquet to the Congress, but it ends up being more like a crumb. He writes,

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There is no need to question the value of expressing local opinions and exchanging them. Accordingly, Congress has a great value as the marketplace of a continental nation (288). But since the president, presiding over a vast collection of bureaus and their agents, which report as well as act, frames and directs policy, the congressional market- place is effectively the congressional talking shop! Although it would appear that Lippmann did not know what Max Weber had recently said on the subject, he has further limited the capacities of a representative body and, without any apparent fear of the consequences, has celebrated the singular importance of leadership in the modem mass state. As an American, he could still have special faith in experts. Predictably, this was the entering wedge which allowed him to join knowledge and power. As Dewey and the pragmatists had been saying all along, the problem of the modern state was the problem of organized intelligence. Lippmann, having forgotten his William James, now gives an unabashed elitist, technocratic version of this. Gradually . . . the more enlightened directing minds have called in experts who were trained, or had trained themselves, to make parts of this Great Society intelligible to those who manage it (370). Though these enlightened directing minds knew that they needed help, they were slow to call in the social scientist (371). Lippmann hopes that the lesson has been learned. What is needed is presidential leadership responsive to the best of social scientific knowledge!28 Lippmann ended Public Opinion by referring to Platos parable of the ship at sea. In the first great encounter between reason and politics, the strategy of reason was to retire in anger, leaving the world to Machiavelli (1954: 412). Whenever one makes an appeal to reason in politics, the parable recurs. But Lippmanns answer is not the one just given. His answer is to combine Plato and Machiavelli: Even if you assume with Plato that the true pilot knows what is best for the ship, you have to recall that he is not so easy to recognize, and that uncertainty leaves a large part of the crew unconvinced, (413). Worse, during a crisis at sea there is no time to make each sailor an expert judge of experts.
It would be altogether academic, then, to tell the pilot that the true remedy is, for example, an education that will endow sailors with a better sense of evidence. . . . In the crisis, the only advice is to use a gun, or make a speech, utter a stirring slogan, offer a compromise, employ any quick means available to quell the mutiny, the sense of evidence being what it is.29

Indeed. By the time of The Phantom Public, Lippmann had groped his way to a clearly articulated, novel conception of democracy. He could now insist that the democratic ideal is a false ideal because it is unattainable, bad only

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in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer(39). Things are too complicated, too changing, too obscure, and too difficult; and ordinary people simply have no time to get the information they need in order to make intelligent judgments. Even if each person is equipped for 1925, this will not equip him to master American problems ten years later. That is why the usual appeal to education as the remedy for the incompetence of democracy is so barren (26).
The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people can produce a continuing directing voice in public affairs (39).

What, then, is democracy?

To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government. Even the most intelligent large public of which we have any experience must determine finally who shall wield the organized power of the state, its army and its police, by a choice between Ins and Outs (126).30

But is there, then, any important difference between democracy and dictatorship? A community where there is no choice [between Ins and Outs] does not have popular government. It is subject to some form of dictatorship or it is ruled by the intrigues of the politicians in the lobbies (126).

THE PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS Tweedledum and Tweedledee did not satisfy Dewey. Eleven incredible years had separated Democracy and Education from The Public and Its Problems, Deweys direct response to Lippmann and almost certainly the best twentiethcentury defense of the idea of democracy. The distinction between democracy as a way of living and democracy as a form of government remained. However, not only had Dewey developed a critique of democracy as a form of government, but, aided and abetted by Lippmann, he had come to see that democracy as a way of life was not being fostered by the new interdependencies and the new capacities of technological society. On the contrary, democracy as a mode of associated living was being profoundly undermined by these forces. Since the problem was deep, Dewey was driven to a radical

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solution. Indeed, as Chapter 9, below, argues, Deweys version of democracy is so strong that it bears little comparison to the very weak forms of what is now called democracy. Dewey did not give up the simple and fundamental idea that democracy requires that interdependent individuals must actually participate in decisions that affect them all. Indeed, here comparison is best made to both some versions of anarchism (Chapter 8) and to the version of socialism sketched in the writings of Marx (Chapter 9). In sum, Dewey saw that he had erred in supposing that the institutions created in the American Founding were adequate to the new property relations, the new forms of commerce and industry. These had indeed brought about the forms of democratic governmentgeneral suffrage and executives and legislators chosen by majority votebut these same forces have thrown huge barriers in the way of the realization of democratic publics. Woodrow Wilsons new age of human relationships has no political agencies worthy of it (Dewey: 1954: 109). Lippmanns analysis of the mechanisms of the formation of public opinion was surely not wrong; but in describing the public as a phantom, he drew the wrong conclusions. As Dewey had it, The democratic public is inchoate and unorganized; it is lost, eclipsed, confused, and bewildered. There is a Great Society, but organized into a war system of states, individuals, who are impersonally dependent, commodified, alienated, and disempowered, are prevented from identifying themselves as members of publics: Where extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of the conjoint activity of comparatively few persons traverse the globe, the absence of publics is a catastrophe. Surely the Great War is a convincing reminder of the meaning of the Great Society (128). The problem admitted no easy solutions; for surely it did not involve perfecting the institutions of political democracy. The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining or perfecting that machinery (1954: 144). The problem was much deeper and concerned the disintegration of the conditions for democracy as a way of life: the incapacity of interdependent people even to perceive the consequences of combined action, still less to perceive shared goods and to act on them. Dewey is at pains to emphasize the role of knowledge and participation in the constitution of democratic community. Although as individuals we are interdependent, there is at present no way for the countless Is to become we. Moreover, as Rousseau and then Marx had discerned, interdependence provides just the situation which makes it possible and worthwhile for the stronger and abler to exploit others for their own ends, to keep others in a state of subjection where they can be utilized as animated tools (115).

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Community requires both communication and knowledge; but Lippmann and the technocrats failed to realize that the kind of knowledge which is the prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist (166: my emphasis). For Dewey, such knowledge is knowledge of the causes and consequences of activity; but it is knowledge which funds experience by transforming needs and wants into mutually understood ends, knowledge which can be used in the conscious direction of conjoint activity. War is surely the clearest case. It takes the combined energies of many, and the sufferings of many, many more; but unless there is someonethe philosopher-kingwho knows what all the rest cannot know, they have a rightful claim to the requisite information and to being parties to the decision. It is one thing to argue that the people lack the knowledge they need to make a decision, quite another to argue that they cannot have it. In rejecting the democratic ideal as a false ideal, Lippmann, like so many before and after him, takes everything as it is and offers us, dangerously and naively, an unaccountable technocracy. By contrast, Dewey refuses things as they are. He is a democrat, and his vision is immense. Assuming that
The Great Society is to become a Great Community; a society in which the everexpanding and intricately ramifying consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense of the word. . . . The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is the name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is dissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication (184).

This vision is Jeffersonian and cosmopolitan. If today it seems utopian in a vicious sense, it is worth remembering that not long ago, it seemed not only possible, but imminent! On the other hand, Dewey remained hopeful that people could find one another and act for themselves. The Soviet Union provided a fatal test.

THE SOVIET UNION: DEWEY AND LIPPMANN The year after the publication of The Public and Its Problems, Dewey visited the Soviet Union. In a series of six articles published in the New Republic, he offered his impressions (LW, Vol. 3). In the first, Leningrad Gives the Clue,

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in terms reminiscent of Tocqueville, he wrote that he was inclined to think that not only the present state of Communism (that of non-existence in any literal sense), but even its future is of less account than is the fact of this achieved revolution of heart and mind, this liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate (204). The spirit of democracy remained irresistible. Here, as throughout these essays, Dewey notes right away that, given conventional beliefs about Bolshevism and Bolshevik Russia, what he says may seem absurd. In the second essay, A Country in a State of Flux, he insists that anything said about Russia must be dated, since Russia was, again, rapidly undergoing change. From the World War, the blockade and the civil war, the government did practically take over the management of co-operatives, even while, as he remarks parenthetically, the legal forms of the cooperatives were jealousy guarded. But, he reports, this state of affairs no longer exists: on the contrary, the free and democratically conducted cooperative movement has assumed a new vitalitysubject, of course, to control of prices by the State (20910). In the third, A New World in the Making, he writes of the sense of energy and vigor released by the Revolution . . . a sense of the planned constructive endeavor which the new regime is giving this liberated energy; and he says, 1 certainly was not prepared for what I saw; it came as a shock (217). And in his concluding essay, The Great Experiment and the Future, he sees an experiment with two purposes:
The first and more immediate aim is to see whether human beings can have such guarantees of security against want, illness, old age, and for health, recreation, reasonable degree of material ease and comfort that they will not have to struggle for purely personal acquisition and accumulation, without, in short, being forced to undergo the strain of competitive struggle for personal profit. In its ulterior reaches, it is an experiment to discover whether the familiar democratic idealsfamiliar in words, at leastof liberty, equality and brotherhood will not be most completely realized in a social regime based on voluntary cooperation, on conjoint workers control and management of industry, with an accompanying abolition of private property as a fixed institution -a somewhat different matter, of course, than the abolition of private possessions as such (244).

Dewey must have known that the Western democracies had played no small role at a critical moment in 1918 in derailing the experiment. He had gone to Russia almost indifferent to this. Now in language as strong as he can find, he expressed his altered perception: 1 came away with the feeling that the maintenance of barriers that prevent intercourse, knowledge and understanding is close to a crime against humanity (249).

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In 1933, Lippmann also commented on the future of the Soviet Union. If Deweys hopes for democracy were crushed by the experience of the Soviet Union, Lippmanns understanding of this failure has perhaps not been surpassed. For Lippmann, while the Bolsheviks made errors, the existence of powerful enemies was the decisive fact:
This is, I believe, a crucial point in any and every effort to understand the inwardness of the communist regime. The circumstance which compelled Lenin to depart from the Marxian idea of controlling the economy organized by capitalists, and to adopt the idea of organizing a new economy, was the civil and international war which broke out in July 1918 and lasted until November 1920 . .. The proof is to be found in the fact that the two Five- Year Plans have had as their primary objective the creation of heavy industries in the strategically invulnerable part of Russia, and that to finance this industrial development the Russian people have been subjected to years of forced privation . . .31

Of course, people are more afraid of Lenin than they ever were of the Kaiser (quoted by Steel: 156). And, of course, as he had also so powerfully argued, it had become easy to provide people maps, which satisfied somebody elses need.

NOTES
1. Unless otherwise indicated, citations from Dewey are from John Dewey, The Collected Works (ed.) Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 197683), cited by volume and page numbers in parentheses in the text. 2. The foregoing draws on Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ch. 6, 7, and Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Cro/y, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 19001925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). Ch. 5. The New Republic was to be radical without being socialistic. How radical is arguable, of course. The magazine ran a deficit, except toward the end of the war, when it was selling more than 40,000 copies. For four years, the Straight subsidy ran to $100,000 per year. 3. This is the title of an oft-given speech and essay. A version may be found in Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (eds), The Public Papers ofWoodrow Wilson (New York: Harper and Row, 1925). See also Wilsons very influential Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), which, by 1900, was in its fifteenth edition; and his later Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908). These are cited in the text respectively as Leaderless Government, Congressional Government, and Constitutional Government.

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According to Wilson, we have in this country . . . no real leadership; because no man is allowed to direct the course of Congress, and there is no way of governing the country save through Congress which is supreme (ibid: 205). Jeffrey K. Tulis has given an excellent account of Wilsons transformation of the presidency. See his The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). The Great War gave Wilson the chance to bring to realization his idea that the systemic difficulties of mechanical government could be overcome by a president who had the capacity to form mass opinion. See below. 4. The idea of the leader as interpreter has a distinguished German history. It runs from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Hegel, Ranke, Droysen, Treitschke, Dilthey, and Meinecke. The fundamental premise is well expressed by Ranke: No state ever existed without a spiritual basis and spiritual content. In power itself a spiritual essence manifests itself. An original genius, which has a life of its own, fulfills conditions more or less peculiar to itself. By means of interpretation, the historian discerns this genius and thereby makes history intelligible; and the leader (Der Fhrer) who expresses it becomes, as for Hegel, a World-Historical Individual. I have discussed these remarkable notions in my A History and Philosophy of the Social Science: 8696, 11724. On General von Bernhardis use of these ideas, see below. We do not need to be reminded here that these ideas also had a remarkable future in fascist and Nazi ideology. See e.g., Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome: Ardita, 1935). 5. David Hollinger properly insists that James had an importantly distinct notion of science and its relation to culture, a notion thoroughly grasped by Lippmann. See Hollingers Science and Anarchy: Walter Lippmanns Drift and Mastery, American Quarterly (1977), and idem William James and the Culture of Inquiry, Michigan Quarterly Review (1981), both repr. in Hollinger, In the American Province (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 6. Reed and Lippmann, friends since Harvard, had been part of a group which had recently put on a Madison Square pageant dramatizing the situation of striking IWW silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey. But in Drift and Mastery, Lippmann had applauded conservative unions and condemned the IWW as preferring revolt to solidarity and, in practice, being ready to destroy a union for the sake of militancy (p. 62). 7. The 1908 Ethics, a collaboration with James H. Tufts, contains much social philosophy and sensible social philosophy at that. Still, these parts were Tuftss contribution. See my discussion, Chapter 10. 8. Dewey seems to have liked Marxs little joke which he cites in a note attached to Hegels famous reference to the bird of Minerva which takes its flight only at the close of day: Marx said of the historic schools of politics, law and economics that to them, as Jehovah to Moses at Mt. Sinai, the divine showed but its posterior side (ibid.: 110)! 9. The text is worth calling to die attention of critics of Dewey who say that Deweys experimentalism kept him from insisting on the need for an inclusive plan. The idea stayed with him throughout. But, like his associates at the New Republic, he

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was no socialistat least until later. Accordingly, he waffled regarding the key features of a constructive plan. 10. Dewey was reluctant to refer to the capitalist epoch by its name, preferring instead machine age, industrial order, new forms of commerce and industry, and so forth. This had some severe consequences, especially after his radical turn. See Chapter 9 below. 11. For the early period in American culture, see Sacvan Berkovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 12. See also Deweys April 1916 essay for The International Journal of Ethics, Force and Coercion (Middle Works, X. 24451). In terms of Deweys altogether sensible moral posture, the pacifist case against World War I, of course, was much stronger than it was against World War II. 13. In June 1915, the issue had brought about the resignation from Wilsons Cabinet of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Bryan had wanted the United States to bring all disputes between it and the thirty countries with which it had treaties before an international commission. He wondered, moreover: Why should an American citizen be permitted to involve the country in war by travelling upon a belligerent ship when he knows that the ship will pass through a danger zone? Finally, he could not understand how American passenger ships were permitted to carry cargoes of ammunition, a policy that plainly and provocatively threatened the ships and encouraged war. Wilson would not submit the issue to impartial inquiry; nor would he disclaim responsibility for the precipitous actions of private citizens. See Bryans Letter of Resignation, in S. Cohen (ed.), Reform, War and Reaction: 19121932 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972): 58. 14. Forcey, Crossroads: 26568. The conventional opinion regarding the American entry is ably represented by Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People: 85156. See also Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World War, 3 vols (repr. New York: Cooper Square, 1966). 15. In January 1917 Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Minister, had sent a telegram to Mexican President Carranza which had been intercepted by British intelligence. It read (in part):
We intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on the first of February. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of an alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Given the circumstances, the idea was hardly shocking. Not only was the United States arming ships that carried munitions to Britain; but also if the United States were to be in a full-scale war with Germany, then Germany would obviously hope for all the help she could get. For anyone wanting war, of course, the note was a gift from heaven. Wilson released it on 28 Feb and in April received a vote in favor of war. See below.

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16. It is certainly true that American foreign policy was imperialist. It had been so from the beginning. But its imperialist designs had been confined to the western hemisphere and, more recently, to the Pacific. 17. Ronald Steel quotes a spleen-filled passage from Lippmanns report of the Republican convention. A piece of this gives the flavor:
I think that there were fifteen nominations plus the secondary orations. It was a nightmare, a witches dance of idiocy and adult hypocrisy . . . The incredible sordidness of the convention passes all description. It was a gathering of insanitary callous men who blasphemed patriotism, made a mockery of Republican government and filled the air with sodden and scheming stupidity (Steele: 103).

Lippmann gives a brilliant analysis of Hughess speech in his Public Opinion. See below. 18. The foregoing is influenced by Walter Karp, even though it departs from his account. See Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (18901920) (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980). Karp argues: If the interests of the country or even the desire to win the elections had shaped the policy of the Republican Party leaders, Wilsons diplomacy would have provided a political target impossible to miss (216). No doubt it is true that for the Republicans, straightforward warmongering was out of the question. It would have brought not war, but political disaster to the agitators (220). Wilsons diplomacy, he writes, had opened up the prospect for war, and war was what the Republican oligarchy wanted and needed (21617). But they wanted war to undo the deep damage of the preceding ten years. As Bourne saw, they wanted war . . . because they saw in war the opportunity to become the great captains of an industrial war machine and partners, once again, in the governance of the country (219). 19. Commentators agree that the German High Command were completely confident that the United States government would not confound its plans, and that even if it choose to do so, America would be unable to raise, train, and send much of a force. See Paxson, American Democracy, I: 394, and Fritz Fischer, Germanys War Aims in the First World War: 307. These views were very much the product of German thinking about the war-making capacity of democracies! 20. Since exclusion from the mails was near-equivalent for silencing, the Espionage and Trading-with-the-Enemy Acts permitted Postmaster-General Burleson to repress by administrative fiat (Paxson, American Democracy, II: 286). Not only did second-class mail come under his autonomous purview, but he had the power to examine private correspondence as well. Even before the war had begun, the Attorney General had developed a vast network of agents, law-enforcement officers, and voluntary coadjutors, who persistently prosecuted complaints, sometimes malicious, sometimes hysterical, against accused saboteurs, and traitors. The Sedition Act prescribed language that was disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive. It did not take many successful prosecutions before Americans got the idea. It is still very much worth reading George Creels enthusiastic How We Advertised America (New York: Harper and Row, 1920).

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21. Randolph Bourne, Untimely Papers (New York: Huebsch, 1919). These beautiful essays, so Jamesianand Sartrean!in style and thrust, have been too soon forgotten. Page references are given in the text in parentheses. 22. See Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 19171919 (New Haven: Yale Universit,y Press, 1963). 23. Dewey, Middle Works, vol. XI, contains the full materials on Deweys study of Polish conditions, including a valuable note, presumably by Lillian and Oscar Handlin, who introduce the volume. 24. Middle Works, vol. XV, contains all Deweys essays on the campaign to outlaw war, along with Walter Lippmanns polemical rebuttal to Levinson and Dewey. Carl Cohens introduction to the volume is also most useful. 25. After World War II, the United Nations made both war and imperialism illegal. In terms of the UN code, wars of national liberation are the only legal wars. The upshot, not foreseen by Dewey and Levinson, was that thereafter there would be no declared wars, only police actions sent to suppress national liberation movements! 26. See Lippmanns The Outlawry of War (XV: 40417) and Deweys rejoinders: What Outlawry of War Is Not (XV: 11521) and War and a Code of Law (XV: 12227). Sovereignty is not denied, since the state will decide whether to submit its claims and whether to abide by the judgment of the court. No third party exists to enforce decisions. No complicated code is required beyond the ordinary, vague conventions governing international law. The plan hardly denies that diplomacy is necessary for maintaining peace. 27. Dewey was later to make the point vividly:
Schooling in literacy is no substitute for the dispositions which were formerly provided by direct experience of an educative quality. The void created by lack of relevant personal experiences combines with the confusion produced by impact of multitudes of unrelated incidents to create attitudes which are responsive to organized propaganda, hammering in day after day, the same few and relatively simple beliefs asseverated to be the truths essential to national welfare. (Freedom and Culture (New York: Capricorn, 1963), p. 46)

28. It is not irrelevant here that the social sciences as we now know them had just then completed their institutionalization in the universities of America. See my A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Pt II. Perhaps thinking here of Veblens critique of the social sciences, Lippmann writes that if so much social science is apologetic rather than constructive, the explanation lies in the opportunities of social science, not in capitalism (Public Opinion: 373). Lippmann, who usually sees the pertinence of the fact that practices are influenced by conditions external to them, clearly forgets this here. 29. Lippmanns unabashed Machiavellianism is also clear in The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt,Brace and World, 1925). There he writes:
We do know, as a matter of experience, that all the cards are not laid face up upon the table. For however deep the personal prejudice of the statesmen in favor of truth as a method, he is most certainly forced to treat truth as an element of policy In so far as he

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has power to control the publication of truth, he manipulates it to what he considers the necessities of action, of bargaining, morale and prestige (158)

30. Compare Robert A. Dahls important Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1956). Dahl agreed with Lippmann that there is no way for populations in democratic mass states to influence policy; yet he supposed that he had shown that elections are a crucial device for controlling leaders, and thus that the distinction between democracy and dictatorship still makes sense (13132). But what, apart from what Lippmann says, can control leaders mean? It is true, I believe, that two-party representative systems are important in preserving hard-won civil liberties, and that these are fundamental and not to be scorned. Nevertheless, we should not confuse civil freedom with democracy. Compare Dewey, below. 31. Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (Boston; Little, Brown, 1936: ix). See also Manicas, War and Democracy, Chapter 11. Indeed, in his 1936 book, Lippmann provided convincing grounds that it was already evident that the world was moving toward a gigantic war.

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John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State

INTRODUCTION John Deweys social and political philosophy has been as much interpreted as it has been praised and condemned. Thus, to merely illustrate the spectrum of opinion, his philosophy of democracy has been called a Jeffersonian provincialism, nostalgic and irrelevant, and a pluralist federalism fully pertinent to the prevailing American political order. His theory of inquiry is construed as essential to his social philosophy, as independent of it, and as inconsistent with it. Finally, his basic philosophy is understood as an independent elaboration .of the best elements in Marxs thought and, remarkably, as the philosophy of American imperialism.l Dewey is not altogether blameless. There are many strands in his thought, sometimes conflicting strands. He is sometimes unclear, sometimes just where one wants a clear statement most of all. But these are not the main problems in coming to grips with Dewey as a social philosopher. Rather, most of the difficulty derives from the style and range of his thought. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to associate him in a clear way with any of the isms by which we tend to identify a political and social theory. And, in turn, this makes him fair game for ideological purposes. Political writing, after all, is itself a political act. Dewey was, of course, both a liberal and a democrat, and he was not a Marxist. Yet, as I shall argue, his liberalism and democratic philosophy were decidedly radical, more socialist than libertarian, indeed, more anarchist than communist or liberal. But let me not be misunderstood. Dewey was no anarchist (however amusing it is that Sidney Hook should have written that, in looks at least, Dewey resembled a cross between a philosophical anarchist
187

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and Robert Louis Stevenson). Dewey was not, for example, exact1y clear on the future role of the state and he seems to have had little taste for anarchist direct actionhowever peaceful. I do not argue, accordingly, that he was an anarchist without knowing it or that anarchism is itself so vague that his thought, as he worked it out, is easily subsumed. Nevertheless, we can advance our understanding of Dewey and of the problems of political philosophy, if we take a fresh look at his writings from the vantage point of anarchism. This will be the main aim of this paper. Still; there is a historical argument to be made, an argument that seems to me to be very important, but which can be but hinted at here. That is, not only is it not farfetched to juxtapose Dewey and anarchism, but perhaps more fundamentally, on the present view, the First World War and the period immediately following were crucial years for radical political thought. Dewey was caught up in this, and as Chapter 7 has argued, it left decided marks on his thought. We need, perhaps, to be reminded that Dewey was twenty-seven when the bomb was thrown at Haymarket Square (1886), already fifty-eight when the Great War was coming to an end and the Bolshevik revolution erupted. Active in public issues at least from his Chicago days (from18941904), Dewey nonetheless wrote no political philosophy until perhaps 1908, the several chapters that he wrote as part of Ethics, with James H. Tufts. World War I seems to have been critical for him as for many others. In German Philosophy and Politics (1915), his first systematic political work, Dewey traced the philosophic basis of patriotic statism in Germany and concluded that the present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural (GPP: 130).2 Opening a theme to which he returned repeatedly, he attacked the idea of national sovereignty and argued that the situation calls for a more radical thinking, more radical than arbitration, treaties, international judicial councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace movements (130). Dewey was correct in calling for more radical thinking of the problems, but unfortunately, he was entirely wrong if he hoped that statism was dead. As is well known, of course, Dewey supported the allied war effort, as did Kropotkin and a host of other internationalists in the radical parties of Europe. Indeed, patriotic statism and imperialist war had hardly run its course. In 1919, a host of radicals, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, became the victims of a virulent Americanism and were deported. With Dewey, Norman Thomas, Clarence Darrow, Roger N. Baldwin and others as founders, the American Union Against Militarism became, in 1920, The American Civil Liberties Union. The Red Scare was by now in

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full flower. Dewey had known Goldman and Berkman, having shared platforms with them on several occasions. Baldwin has reported that she had a very high regard for [Deweys] ideas, a view which, as I shall argue, is hardly surprising given the coincidence of so many of their ideas. For his part, Dewey found that Emma Goldmans reputation as a dangerous woman was built up by a conjunction of yellow-journalism and ill-advised police raids a fact which Dewey would find increasingly ominous as the decade proceded.3 It was during this time, as Hook has noted, that Dewey made the great turn and came to believe in the essential correctness of socialist diagnoses of Americas ills.4 The ACLU was hardly sufficient. The 1921 trial of the acknowledged anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, and their subsequent execution in 1927for their beliefs and not for the unproved charges against themhad a profound effect on Dewey. As he saw it, the events had put America on trial.5 Almost certainly, they forced him to considerably temper whatever optimism he might have had regarding the use of intelligence in conditions where emotions are so easily mobilized and manipulated in the service of reactionary politics. As I shall develop, these considerations became an increasingly important part of Deweys incisive analysis of the failures of present arrangements. In 1928, Dewey visited the Soviet Union and reported that his own antecedent notionsor, if you will, prejudices, underwent their most complete reversal (C&E, I: 425). Assessing the revolution as an experiment to discover whether the familiar democratic idealsfamiliar in words, at least will not be most completely realized in a social regime based on voluntary cooperation, on conjoint workers control and management of industry. . . . Dewey concluded enthusiastically that its future is of less account than is the fact of this achieved revolution of heart and mind, this liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate (424, 380). Two key books were written during this period, The Public and Its Problems (1927) and Individualism Old and New (1929). But with the Great Depression and the failure of the existing major political parties to respond to the challenge, Deweyas a radicalfaced a dilemma. The socialist and anarchist radical traditions, reflective of their nineteenth century European roots, had always been revolutionary in the sense that radical social change was seen to involve a mass insurrection against the prevailing order of things. But in contrast to socialists, communists, anarchists and most American radicals of the 1920s and 30s, Dewey saw no evidence for this view. As he put it, I do not . . . hear the noises of an angry proletariat (ION: 78.). Butand this must be understoodit was not because they were

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drowned out by shouts of eagerness or adventurous opportunityhowever much this was the official gospel of America. Rather, for Dewey, the murmurs of discontent are drowned by the murmurs of lost opportunities, along with the din of machinery, motor cars and speakeasies (78). These are powerful metaphors and suggest an analysis, to be developed below, which is far subtler than the ones offered by the mechanical formulas of the periods revolutionaries. But if so, then Deweys question at this time was, how to be radical and still be relevant? This question has always been especially difficult for Americans and it was so for Dewey. His own quandaries on this score go some way, indeed, toward explaining his effortsultimately unsuccessfulto generate (beginning in 1931) a genuine radical, mass-based, third-party alternative. Although it may be now forgotten, Dewey was arguing, by the 1929 writing of Individualism Old and New, that our presidential elections are upon the whole determined by fear and that neither of the major parties could be vehicles for radical changeeven if this change was to be incrementally won. On the other hand, Dewey could not align himself unambiguously with the Socialist Party either. Like the anarchists, the socialists too were isolated.6 Kropotkins sadly prophetic letter to Lenin, written in 1920, identified a significant reason, a reason that Dewey fully appreciated. Kropotkin wrote: If the present situation continues, the very word socialism will turn into a curse. . . . (Kropotkin, 1970: 337). Indeed, in one sense, the problem of the present essay, and, I believe, still a problem of our time, is to recover an idea: Dewey referred to it as the idea of democracy, but others have called it socialism, and still others have called it anarchism. In this regard, Deweys idea of democracy is neither a nostalgic ]effersonianism nor a liberal pluralism. I shall argue that it is anarchist insofar as it contains: (1) a view of an ideal, noncoercive, nonauthoritarian society; (2) a criticism of existing society and its institutions, based on this antiauthoritarian ideal; (3) a view of human nature that justifies the hope of significant progress toward the ideal; and (4) a strategy for change, involving immediate institution of noncoercive, nonauthotitarian and decentralist alternatives.7 Deweys Critique of Existing Society and his Vision of the Good Society In his most systematic work on the state, The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey attempts a generic and empirical approach to the question, What is the State? Disavowing the utility of a series of traditional doctrines,

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he argues that associated actiona universal traithas consequences, sometimes confined to those who directly share in the transaction and sometimes not. When those indirectly and seriously affected . . . form a group, we can speak of The Public (PP: 35). And when this public is organized and made effective by means of representatives who care for its special interests, then and in so far, we may speak of the state. This analysis, made rich by Deweys knack for illustration and sometimes brilliant but not immediately relevant asides, is both important and badly misleading. The analysis is important because it allows us to see that no two ages or places is there the same public (33). Moreover, it allows us to see that State and Society are not the same, that in states, there are governmentsagencies that represent individuals in society. Finally, it allows us to see that a state is only as good as its public and that there is no model pattern which makes a state a good or true state (45). But the analysis is seriously misleading insofar as it leads us to think of states as universal entities. Deweys concern, as a long footnote makes clear, is with functions, not structures. He is thus quite ready to admit that the state is a very modern institution. Yet, he insists, all history, or almost all, records the exercise of analogous functions (6566, note7). In a sense, of course, this is true. The idea that special agencies and measures must be formed if extensive and enduring consequences are to be attended to has a general applicabilitydepending crucially on what is concretely meant by special agencies and measures. But as Dewey sees, these special agencies and the public that they represent are open to an almost infinite range of possibilities. For better or for worse, state, government, even public is very modern terms with very definite modern connotations. Moreover, while we use the term state to refer indiscriminately to any sort of political body, from primitive clan organizations to poleis, to the Roman Empire, the word state properly denotes what are very modern political bodies. However great are the differences between (modern) states, between e.g., the Absolutist State which emerged in the 17th century, contemporary capitalist or communist states, liberal democratic states and totalitarian states, all of them are states in the quite clear sense that they are legally defined entities claiming sovereignty and a monopoly of legitimate force. Each circumscribes an extended territory and a very large and heterogeneous population. Each has a centralized organizational apparatus engaged in continuous administration and having both the authority and, especially in this century, the ability to dramatically affect the conditions of life of its populationfor better or for worse. Now Dewey recognized this. Not every association is a state or even has state-like characteristics. At one extreme are associations which are too narrow and restricted in size to give rise to a public (39). Immediate contiguity,

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face to face relationships, has consequences which generate a community of interests, a sharing of values, too direct and vital to occasion a need for political organization (39). Indeed, within a community, the state is an impertinence (41). Villages and neighborhoods shade imperceptibly into a political public (43) and there may or may not be agencies which are specifically its instrument. Kropotkin could still refer to the Medieval commune and Dewey to the early New England town. Further along the continuum of historical associations is perhaps the polis of the ancient world, where as Dewey says, much of the intimacy of the vivid and prompt personal touch of the family endures while there has been added the transforming aspiration of a varied, freer, fuller life, whose issues are so momentous that in comparison the life of the neighborhood is parochial and that of the household dull (44). Indeed, it was hardly an accident that the idea of democracy was an invention of the polis world (Manicas, 1989, Chapters 1 and 2). Still of a very different sort, we can identify empires due to conquest where political rule exists only in forced levies of taxes and soldiers; and in which, though the word state may be used, the characteristic signs of a public are notable for their absence (4344). Finally, as Dewey argues, but which needs emphasis, for long periods 0 human history . . . the state is hardly more than a shadow thrown upon the family and neighborhood by remote personages. . . . It rules but it does not regulate. . . . The intimate and familiar propinquity group is not a social unity within an exclusive whole. It is, for almost all purposes, society itself (4142). These points are not peripheral to comprehending the problem of The Public and Its Problems, even if Deweys effort to treat the state generically tempts us to treat them as historical asides. As Kropotkin and others in the anarchist tradition often argued, the state as we understand it, is a very modern phenomenon. And there is nothing necessary about it. Moreover, as Dewey and the anarchists saw, the development of the modern state meant also the emergence of an entirely new organization for war, the obliteration of community and the suffocation of the personal and the intimate. Both were concerned to address the questions and to offer analyses and programs in these terms. But this need not be a nostalgic irrelevancyunless, of course, we uncritically accept the framework assumptions of the modern state and then proceed to political inquiry. Methodologically, Dewey was committed to a fully historical and contextual mode of inquiry and he recognized that the problems of contemporary political arrangements were not those of the past. Nor accordingly would past solutions suffice. At the global level, Dewey deeply appreciated the problem of the modern state. In Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), he extended a

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central theme of German Philosophy and Politics, and diagnosed the failure of many schools of thought, varying even more widely in respect to method and conclusion, [yet] agreed upon the final consummating position of the state. . . . They do not question the unique and supreme position of the State in the social hierarchy. Dewey concluded: Indeed, that conception has hardened into unquestionable dogma under the title of sovereignty (RIP: 201). But perhaps he put matters most graphically in his 1927 essay, Nationalism and Its Fruits. He there wrote:
Patriotism, National Honor, National Interests and National Sovereignty are the four foundation stones upon which the structure of the National State is erected. It is no wonder that the windows of such a building are closed to the light of heaven; that its inmates are fear, jealously, suspicion, and that War issues regularly from its portals (C&E, II: 803).

Except for explicit anarchist thoughtand even then, not all of it -no one saw more clearly than Dewey that for the modern age, the State was not part of the solution, but was, instead, an essential part of the problem. The structural dynamics of inter-state relations were not his only concern, however, for there were effects on the relations within states. This is a fundamental concern of The Public and Its Problems, in particular as regards the most progressive form of the modern statethe Democratic State. Although it is often overlookedor downplayedDewey had no illusions about it. As in many other places, he sharply distinguishes democracy as an idea or ideal and democracy as a mode of government. On Deweys analysis, all states have governments and all governments represent some public. But there are different institutional arrangements by which governments exist and represent some public. For Dewey, then, political democracy is a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their conduct as officials (PP: 82). Dewey argued that political democracy emerged at a specific period in the development of the modern state and that it emerged as a kind of net consequence of a vast multitude of responsive adjustments to a vast number of situations . . . (84). Indeed, in no sense did Dewey succumb to the mystifying rationalizations of liberal democratic political theoryto the idea, e.g., that democratic institutions function so as to implement something called the will of the people. He said:
Instead of individuals who in the privacy of their consciousness make choices which are carried into effect by personal volition, there are citizens who have the blessed opportunity to vote for a ticket of men mostly unknown to them, and which is made up by an under-cover machine in a caucus whose operations constitute a kind of political predestination (120).

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Political democracy, or better, modern political democracy, is a statist form and, no doubt, it has consequential merits. But as Dewey writes, it is a means, not for realizing the idea of democracy, but to counteract the forces that have so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors and . . . to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public ends (83). For Dewey, the full reality of political democracy was not that painted by patriotic publicists, nor did it meet the goals, limited as they were, which had brought it into existence. His indictment was severe: In a word, the new forms of combined action due to the modern economic regime control present policies, much as dynastic interests controlled those of two centuries ago. They affect thinking and desire more than did the interests which formerly moved the state (108). Even more in the spirit of Marx and left anarchism, Dewey observed that the fusion of political and economic liberalism, the attainment of political rights and guarantees of private property which liberal democracy represents, had emancipated the classes whose special interest they represented, rather than human beings impartially (270). The text continues:
The notion that men are equally free to act if only the same legal arrangements apply equally to allirrespective of differences in education, in command of capital, and the control of the social environment which is furnished by the institution of propertyis a pure absurdity, as facts have demonstrated (271).

Deweys analysis of the Democratic State is radical and called for radical solutions. In his terms, the problem was not with the instruments of the public, but with the public itself. The public was inchoate and unorganized, lost, eclipsed, confused and bewildered. This theme, expressed in many different ways and in many different places is at the basis of his radical critique of the political state. In Individualism Old and New, he attacked the ideology of individualism, repeating earlier indictments of its mythological character, and he spoke of the lost individual, lost because while persons are now caught up in vast complex of associations, there is no harmonious and coherent reflection of the import of these connections into the imaginative and emotional outlook on life. Blunted, if not impossible, is the give and take of participation, of a sharing and significance of the integrating actors. Instead, we have conformity, a name for the absence of vital interplay; the arrest and benumbing of communication (ION: 8586). Moreover, here as in other places also, Dewey attributes our rapacious nationalism to a situation in which corporateness has gone so far as to detach individuals from their old local ties and allegiances but not far enough to give them a new center and order of life. While modern industry, technology and

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commerce have created modern nations in their external form and armies and navies exist to protect commerce, to make secure the control of raw materials, and to command markets, . . . the balked demand for genuine cooperativeness and reciprocal solidarity in daily life finds an outlet in nationalistic sentiment. Finally, if the simple duties of peace do not establish a common life, the emotions are mobilized in the service of a war that will supply its temporary simulation (6162). Indeed, the windows of our building are also closed to the light of heaven. In Freedom and Culture (1939), he spoke of a kind of molluscan organization, soft individuals within and a hard constrictive shell without (F&C: 160). In this text, the problem is put in terms of culture: The problem is to know what kind of culture is so free in itself that it conceives and begets political freedom as its accompaniment and consequence (6). Dewey is clear that present culture militates against such a consequence and that the situation calls emphatic attention to the need for face-to-face associations, whose interactions with one another may offset if not control the dread impersonality of the sweep of present forces (159). Nevertheless, as John McDermott has rightly noted, Dewey expresses deep reservations about the external signs of progress, whether of material or intellectual accomplishment (McDermott, 1973: 679). McDermott calls our attention to the following:
Schooling in literacy is no substitute for the dispositions, which were formerly provided by direct experiences of an educative quality. The void created by lack of relevant personal experiences combines with the confusion produced by impact of multitudes of unrelated incidents to create attitudes which are responsive to organized propaganda, hammering in day after day the same few and relatively simple beliefs asseverated to be truths essential to national welfare (F&C: 46).

But this problem, the problem of the public, was not for Dewey to be reduced to that of private property and to the domination of politics by the modern economic regime. To be sure, the philosophers of individualism predicted truly when they asserted that the main business of government is to make property interests secure (PP: 1089). Nevertheless, economic determinism was not the whole story for Dewey. On the other hand, the problem was not to be solved either by changes in the organization of government. The problem lies deeper, he wrote. The search for the conditions under which the public may find and express itself is necessarily precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery (146). What, then, are the conditions that need to be brought into existence to rediscover the public? According to Dewey, it is simply democracy. But we must repeat, this doesnt mean, that the evils can be remedied by introducing more

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machinery of the same kind . . . or by refining and perfecting that machinery (144). It means democracy in its generic social sense (147). Democracy here refers to the idea of democracy, the idea of democracy as community. What needs to be done is to identify the conditions of community and to bring them into existence. The identification of the idea of democracy and the idea of community may be Deweys most characteristic doctrine. He seems to have arrived at it early and to have never abandoned it. And he gave it a clear and special meaning. Democracy and Education (1916) gives one of the better statements of democracy as more than a form of government and as primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience (D&E: 87). Dewey points out we cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society (83). The problem, rather, is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist. . . . From two such traits, Dewey derives a standard: How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? and How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? (83).8 These themes are more fully developed in The Public and Its Problems where Dewey reasserts that regarded as an ideal, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community itself (PP: 148). Dewey is here at pains to emphasize the task of knowledge and participation in the constitution of the democratic community. The complexities and scope of indirect consequence had destroyed communities. Although as individuals we are interdependent, community exists only when the consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of desire and effort (151). It is then that a distinctive share in mutual action is consciously asserted and claimed (152). It is then that I can become We. Moreover, as Rousseau had already seen, interdependence provides just the situation which makes it possible and worthwhile for the stronger and abler to exploit others for their own ends) to keep others in a state of subjection where they can be utilized as animated tools (155). But if as Dewey reads Rousseau, the solution is a return to the condition of independence based on isolation, then asserts Dewey, it was hardly seriously meant (155)). The only possible solution is nevertheless indicated. It is the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action (155). This too can define the idea of democracy:
Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good

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is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy (149).

Community requires communication and it requires knowledge, but crucially, the kind of knowledge which is the prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist (166). For Dewey, such knowledge is a knowledge which is shared, which funds experience with common meanings, transforms needs and wants into mutually understood goals and which thereby consciously directs conjoint activity. As it is, knowledge is merely technique: knowledge goes relatively but little further than that of the competent skilled operator who manages a machine. It suffices to employ the conditions that are before him. Skill enables him to turn the flux of events this way or that in his neighborhood. It gives him no control of the flux (166). Dewey fully recognized, both as ideal and as possibility, that the idea of returning to some barricaded and provincially defined context was misconceived. On the other hand, he persistently demanded that the basic and fundamental locus of life had to be the neighborly community. He asserted:
In its deepest and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse. . . . The Great Community, in the sense of free and full communication is conceivable. But it can never possess all the qualities, which mark a local community. It will do its final work in ordering the relations and enriching the experience of local associations (211).

Indeed,
Whatever the future may have in store, one thing is certain. Unless local community life can be restored the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself (216).

For Dewey, deliberative participation in conjoint activity, the shared communication of goals and outcomes of that activity, the communication of meanings that that presupposes, is generalizable to the Great Community, but inevitably, at an increasing degree of abstraction and dilution. If in its deepest and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercoursefor there to be genuinely deliberative participation, immediate recognition of shared meanings, and concrete satisfaction of purposes consciously aimed atthen as one moves away from the local community, community becomes increasingly shallow and more watery. On the other

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hand, at every increasingly inclusive level there must be some ordering and some sharing. This, however, is the anarchist image of the good society. Thus Martin Buber:
The collectivity is not a warm, friendly gathering but a great link-up of economic and political forces inimical to the play of romantic fancies, only understandable in terms of quantity, expressing itself in actions and effectsa thing which an individual has to belong to with no intimacies of any kind but all the time conscious of his energetic contribution . . . An organic commonwealthand only such commonwealths can join together to form a shapely and articulated race of (persons)will never build itself up out of individuals but only out of small and ever small communities: a nation is a community to the degree that it is community of communities.9

There remains, however, a legitimate question and ambivalence in Dewey, even given that his image of the Great Community and his criticism of existing societies is profoundly anarchistic. It is the question, whether and in what sense; the idea of government may be still relevant? There are two questions. First, what constitutes an anarchist answer to this question? Second, what seems to be Deweys answer? Different anarchists have given different sorts of analyses of the relevant issues, but it may be that the main tradition of anarchist thought is best described )not absence not as anarchy, but as Buber put it, as anocracy ( of government but absence of domination. This cuts two ways, meaning not only that non-governmental forms of domination are to be rejected, but also that non-dominating government may be tolerated, indeed required. Anarchists are anti-state insofar as we keep in mind that the state is a particular kind of political entity that because of its nature constricts and disallows democracy as a mode of life. Its institutions are inherently structures of domination. But government is consistent with anarchist principles if by government one means roughly what the Greeks and Rousseau had in mind; namely a commission or an employment which servesnow to use Deweys extremely useful languageactive and articulated publics. An articulated public could still use, might very well need, agencies in this sense. Government a modern word which in this context must now be stripped of its modern connotations will not rule, and the holders of office will not be rulersif by that one means that they will not be in a position to legitimately dominate those they represent. Indeed, as argued in Chapter 11, below, and extensively developed in my War and Democracy (1989), these ideas were clearly articulated by many writers during the so-called crisis period in the United States.

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This position can be re-posed in terms of the question of the legitimacy of law and government.10 Deweys stance in this regard is strikingly similar to the one advanced by William Godwin in his classic Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), perhaps the first systematic effort at anarchist theory. Godwin began with a dialectical criticism of liberal political philosophy, and especially with the familiar idea that obedience to and the authority of government derive from contract. Finding unsurmountable difficulties in this theory, Godwin shifts to a utilitarian ground and finds that justice is the key. Three kinds of authority are distinguished: to ones judgment, to specialized knowledge and to sanctions. On this view, then, if a rule is just, it should be complied withbut because one can see that the rule is just, not because of some mythological contract. Similarly, for Dewey, the question, Why should the will of rulers have more authority than that of others? and Why should the latter submit? are spurious questions, the dialectical consequence of . . . theories . . . which define the state in terms of an antecedent causation . . . (PP: 53). Dewey was quite correct in holding that it was these sorts of theories that dominated modern political thought. But in rejecting the very formulation of the question, Dewey came preciously close to the anarchist Godwin. Thus, the regulations and laws of the State are misconceived when they are viewed as commands (53). Commands presuppose a commander. If so, we can then ask the question, what gives the commander the right to command? What grounds my duty to him? For Dewey, however, laws are but instruments: the institution of conditions under which persons make their arrangements with one another (54). They are a means of doing for a person what otherwise only his own foresight, if thoroughly reasonable, could do (56). Evidently, on this view, as Godwin had also insisted, rules are good or bad only insofar as they are means for doing what reasonable people would do and for assisting them in getting those things done. Their justification needs nothing else. Indeed, it is the spurious theories of law and the state which lead us to look elsewhere and which, ultimately, cause us to blindly follow rules which are not so justified.l1 Anarchism, a transliteration from the Greek, means literally without a ruler and because in some contexts, in the absence of a rulera commander or someone to give ordersthere is disorder, anarchy can also denote chaos. Anarchists do not, of course, assume that this must be so and believe that ideally at least, individuals can be self- governing. Indeed, they believe that it is primarily the mystified complexity of the state, as Godwin puts it, the craft and mystery of governing, the pernicious notion of an extensive territory, the dreams of glory, empire and national greatness which prohibit such self-governance. Even worse, it is the myth of popular sovereignty that,

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paradoxically, has so successfully propelled the mystification of the state. Compare here Godwin and Dewey. First Godwin:
Too much stress has undoubtedly been laid upon the idea, as of a grand and magnificent spectacle, of a nation deciding for itself upon some great public principle, and of the highest magistracy yielding its claim when the general voice has pronounced (Godwin, 1971: 115).

And Dewey:
The familiar eulogies of the spectacle of free men going to the polls to determine by their personal volitions the political forms under which they live is a specimen of the tendency to take whatever is readily seen as the full reality of the situation (PP: 101).

Dewey could no doubt agree with Godwin, that in his society, like Godwins, too many revere too many established institutions and bad laws, that as supernatural matters have progressively been left high and dry . . . the actuality of religious taboos has more and more gathered about secular institutions, especially those connected with the nationalist state (PP: 170). Indeed, if holy means that which is not to be approached nor touched, save with ceremonial precautions and by specially anointed officials, then such things are holy in contemporary political life (170). David Wieck has perceptively observed that the values which Dewey hoped to realize in a democracy . . . are realizable only in something approaching anarchy. But he may be correct in saying that about decentralism . . . Dewey hadnt paid heed to Kropotkin.12 Still, we may wonder. As early as 1918, Dewey wrote that if we are to have a world safe for democracy and a world in which democracy is safely anchored, the solution will be in the direction of a federated world government and a variety of freely experimenting and freely cooperating self-governing local, cultural and industrial groups (C&E, II: 55960.). Forty years and two World Wars after he had called for more radical thinking about the sovereign state, Dewey wrote (in his 1946 Afterword to The Public and Its Problems) that the State is a myth. He there offered as a working principle, the idea of Federation as distinct from both isolation and imperial rule (255). Dewey did not, it seems, get clear about what this might mean concretely. Nevertheless, if we take the restoration of the local community as his point of departure, his vision is indeed powerful:
Territorial states and political boundaries will persist; but they will not be barriers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from his fellows; they will not be hard and fast divisions whereby external separation is converted into in-

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ner jealousy, fear, suspicion and hostility. Competition will continue, but it will be less rivalry for acquisition of material goods, and more emulation of local groups to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual and artistic wealth (PP: 217).

And the material basis for such a Great Community is within reach:
If the technological age can provide mankind with a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed into a human age (217).

Buber noted that the socialist idea points of necessity, even in Marx and Lenin, to the organic construction of a new society out of little societies inwardly bound together by a common life and common work and their associations (Buber, 1949: 99). But how much more is it true that the main and most distinctive themes in Deweys social philosophy pointof necessity to such a vision? In the next part, I will seek to reinforce the foregoing claim by arguing that Dewey, along with the anarchists, parted ways with the Marxist-Leninists for approximately the same reasons and with approximately the same conclusions.

HUMAN NATURE AND THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL CHANGE Deweys social and political philosophy is close to anarchism as regards his view of social change. Both sharply contrast with Marxism in rejecting the idea that a social revolution could be made by the few for the many and in rejecting the idea that the proletariat must be the agent of an insurrectionary revolution. The anarchist, as Dewey, does not deny the existence of class division in society and both affirm that a good society could not be class divided. But it was a mistake, on both of their views, to suppose that progressive change could have but one agent or that anyone agent of change could be sufficient. As Hook rightly pointed out, Dewey spoke of class struggles in their plural form.13 Anarchists tended to speak more vaguely of the people or the masses. Marxists will insist, of course, that this offers a dubious politics. The matter of insurrection is more complicated. In the first place, some anarchists did believe in insurrection and in the use of such violence as had to attend insurrection.14 Bakunin saw this in apocalyptic terms; Kropotkin believed it to be unavoidable, but hoped that the violence could be kept to a minimum. Tolstoi, at opposite poles from Bakunin, was consistently pacifist. But more important, anarchists tended to be undoctrinaire about the problems of revolutionary change, to orient programs to specific contexts and to

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emphasize pedagogic means. These emphases are, of course, wholly congenial to Dewey. The emphasis on pedagogic means was implied by the most characteristic criticism by anarchists of Marxian politics. For the anarchist, there could be no separation of the revolution process from the revolutionary goal. Thus, Alexander Berkman:
It is only by growing to a true realization of their present position, by visualizing their possibilities and powers, by learning unity and cooperation, and practicing them, that the masses can attain freedom.15

Or Gustav Landauer:
One can throw away a chair or destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior between (people); we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another. . . .We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created institutions that form a real community and society of (persons).16

All this could be Dewey. But especially noticeable are Deweys arguments, which parallel and often supplement and enrich the anarchist position. Most anarchists have not been so naive as to suppose that persons are naturally good. Nor have they based their hopes or, more important, their programs on such a postulate -even if, unfortunately, they are too frequently read that way. Some, for example, Landauer, were influenced by romanticism and especially by Nietzsche. Others, for example, Kropotkin, were influenced by the naturalism of Darwin. While I cannot here assess these different views of human nature, there is little doubt that Dewey was deeply concerned with the question and that his approach has considerable force. Dewey did not think that human beings were naturally good, naturally intelligent or naturally free, since as is well known, on his view, human impulses and capacities were always realized socially. This meant that institutional arrangements were decisive: Social arrange- ments are means of creating individuals (RIP: 194). But at the same time, Dewey did not find himself caught up in what he called a vicious circle. For him, individuals, beginning from where they were, could change themselves as they change society. As Arthur Lothstein has rightly pointed out, Dewey dropped the self-enclosed metaphor of the circle for the dynamic and open-ended metaphor of the spiral. Dewey wrote, for example:

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We are not caught in a circle; we traverse a spiral in which social customs generate some consciousness of interdependencies, and this consciousness is embodied in acts which in improving the environment generate new perceptions of social ties, and So on forever (HNC, in McDermott: 721).

This was possible since, in Deweys terms, habits and customs could be deliberatively transformed. Habits, he argued, were the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the customs of the group (PP: 119). We are never habitless, to be sure, but customs are nothing but the social grooves which are the result of previous habituations. At the social-psychological level, habits can be altered through acting differently; and because custom and social structure are themselves incarnate in the repeated and multiplied acts of persons, acting differently changes them too. Indeed, Dewey well sees that, in Giddenss terms, acting differently creates new conditions as it changes our perceptions, beliefs and desires. And this means also that we need pertinent knowledge of the conditions and consequences of our actions and we need to be clear about our goals. (See Chapter 4, above.) For Dewey, the problem was essentially pedagogic. Purposive and progressive change in society, however, has to be directed and there must be definite goals in mind. Dewey was perfectly clear about this as regards education: The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning, until we define the kind of society we have in mind (D&E: 97). And in Human Nature and Conduct as in many, many other places, Dewey put great emphasis on educating the young:
. . . the cold fact of the situation is that the chief means of continuous, graded economical improvement and social rectification lies in utilizing the opportunities of educating the young to modify prevailing types of thought and desire. The young are not as yet as subject to the full impact of established customs (HNC: 127).17

Dewey was optimistic in his assessment that the school could be the chief means of social rectification. But on his own premises, the schoollike the experimental anarchist communitywas not and could not be independent and disconnected from the large society. It is inevitable, accordingly, that it would tend to reproduce the habits and ideas of the larger society, since especially in the case of the schools, they depended for their existence on institutions interested explicitly in maintaining the status quo. But the school was not the only place where changes could be wrought. Indeed, in terms of Deweys theory, since all habits and all customs were sustained by repeated activities, any of them could be changed by changing

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these acts, which sustain them. Nevertheless, if the alteration of activities and thence of habits and customs was not to issue in chaosinto merely a breakdown of the prevailing order of things, it had to be directed and unified, and as with the schools, there had to be definite goals in mind. There are but two alternatives. Either one imposed the change on individuals or one took advantage of opportunities to encourage and develop tendencies on the part of those affected to make the changes themselves. The former route, of course, is the method of revolutionary vanguard parties; the latter is the method of democracy. Indeed, knowledge is liberating insofar as understanding how we participate in maintaining oppressive conditions gives us reasons to change those conditions. It is possible to discern in Deweys writings at least three powerful objections to the strategy of imposed change. First, and very generally, for Dewey, if intelligence is to be brought to bear on progressive social change, not only must we consider goals, but as well, we must consider the particular conditions and particular context and assess the complex possible consequences of possible strategies for change. Imposing change may produce the desired outcome, but even if it does, it doesnt produce just that outcome. As Dewey summarized the point:
Doctrines, whether proceeding from Mussolini or Marx, which assume that because certain ends are desirable therefore those ends and nothing else will result from the use of force to attain them is but another example of the limitations put on intelligence by any absolutist theory (PM: 139).

But Emma Goldmanwith some of the same doctrines clearly in mind, would seem to concur heartily:
Anarchism is not . . . a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of anarchism therefore do not comprise an ironclad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual . . . Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth (Goldman, 1969).

A second and related objection regards the difficultyif not impossibility of all-at-once, totalist, attempts at change. Dewey concluded:
The revolutionary radical . . . overlooks the force of ingrained habits. He is right, in my opinion, about the infinite plasticity of human nature. But he is wrong in thinking that patterns of desire, belief and purpose do not have a force compa-

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rable to the momentum of physical objects . . . Habit, not original human nature, keeps things moving most of the time (PM: 190).

Imposed change cannot be sustained because habits cannot be dramatically altered. That is why revolutionary societies tend to revert to older ways of activity, and worse, to reproduce the old structures but in new institutional forms. Similarly, anarchists write of the preparation for the revolution to anarchistic society and emphasize the pedagogic problem of changing peoplea problem not solvable by divine inspiration, by violence and authoritarian tactics. Such changes will take time and if they are to be sustained, must be deeply rooted. This is suggested by the previous text quoted from Emma Goldman; it reoccurs with a different emphasis in this earlier text, almost in the language of Dewey:
The true criterion of the practical . . . is not whether (some scheme) can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build as well as sustain, new life (Goldman, 1969: 9).

I am suggesting here, of course, that anarchists do not have a utopic conception of social change, that they realize full well, that their ideal could not come into existence by means of some totalist transformation, as Goldman put it, through divine inspiration. The idea that anarchists must reject anything short of their ideal as unjustifiable and therefore deserving of immediate destruction is not anarchism but nihilism. And this means that the new social forms, new habits and customs will be but painfully and slowly evolved. Daniel Guerin, a contemporary French anarchist writer notes:
Proudhon, in the midst of the 1848 Revolution, wisely thought that it would have been asking too much of his artisans to go, immediately, all the way to anarchy. In default of his maximum program, he sketched out a minimum libertarian program: progressive reduction in the power of the State, parallel development of the power of the people from below. . . . It seems to be the more or less conscious purpose of many contemporary socialists to seek out such a program (Guerin, 1972: 550)

The anarchist, like Dewey, can have a vision of the good society without being lacking in programs. And if Dewey and the anarchists are correct, it is not the doctrinaire revolutionaries who are practical, but as Goldman suggests, those who seek programs which are vital enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build as well as sustain new life. It is hardly assumed here that the commitment of the anarchist traditionand of Deweyto a revolutionary process consistent with genuine democracy

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settles any of the difficult questions which will still need to be asked, or that Dewey and particular anarchist writers would necessarily or even likely agree on particular plans of action. Indeed, there is a very great difference between Deweys emphasis on the methods of political democracy and the anarchist emphasis on what is called direct action. However, as April Carter has correctly pointed out, while direct action must be distinguished from constitutional and parliamentary styles of activity on the one hand, and from guerilla warfare on the other, not only do forms of direct action shade into parliamentary styles, as e.g., in sit-ins, strikes, and civil disobedience, but as well, they may be best construed as a kind of crude and creative form of direct democracy. Insofar, accordingly, direct action may be entirely consistent with, indeed, a logical implication of, Deweys social philosophy. As anarchists have often argued, such tactics are essentially pedagogic because they are vehicles by which persons learn and practice democratic participation (Carter, 1973). Moreover, there may be considerable disagreement on whether the state is itself to be used and if so how, whether, e.g., as some anarchists have argued, one should entirely reject the vote, or political parties, whether one should seek alternative and parallel forms or whether it is possible to effect progressive change through existing structures.18 Nor finally, need there be agreement on the prospects and probability of change toward the ideal of democracy. Perhaps Dewey should here have the last word:
The foundation of democracy is faith in the capacities of human nature; faith in human intelligence and the power of pooled and cooperative experience. It is not because these things are complete but that if given a show they will grow and be able to generate progressively the wisdom needed to guide collective again (D&EA: 402).

NOTES
1. C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969): 44344, and more recently, Charles Frankel, John Deweys Social Philosophy, New Studies in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1977) found Deweys thought to be nostalgic. Alphonso I. Damico, Individualism and Community, The Social and Political Thought of John Dewey (Gainesville, Fla.: University Presses of Florida, 1978) discusses some of the literature relevant to pluralistic democracy and some of the problems regarding the relation of Deweys theory of inquiry to his social philosophy, See also Mills on this point: 31820 and Chapters 20 and 21. George Novack in Pragmatism Versus Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975) cites Maurice Cornforth as one example of the view that pragmatism, particularly in the form which Dewey has given it, is the

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philosophy of American imperialism (275). Novack rejects this (silly) view even though he finds that Sidney Hooks uneven political career, including his defense of American imperialism, stems from pragmatisms promiscuousness (82). It was Hook, of course, who attributed to Dewey the best elements of Marxs thought (Reason, Social Myths and Democracy (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1966): 132. 2. References to Deweys writings will be indicated with abbreviated titles and page numbers within parenthesis. See below for abbreviations of Dewey texts cited. 3. Quotations from Baldwin are from Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton Press, 1980: 38) from an interview with Baldwin. 4. Sidney Hook, John Dewey:An Intellectual Portrait (New York: John Day, 1939). See also Arthur Lothsteins excellent dissertation, From Privacy to Praxis: The Case for John Dewey as a Radical Social Philosopher, New York University, 1979, Ch. 4. 5. For a discussion of Deweys response to the trial and execution, see George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind Of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (CarbonDale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Press, 1973). 6. See Frank A. Warren, An Alternative Vision (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). For Deweys analysis of the need for a third party, see Bingham and Rodman (eds.), Challenge of the New Deal (New York, 1934) which reprints Deweys important Common Sense essay, Imperative Need for New Radical Party. See James Campbells very useful account, in his dissertation, Pragmatism and Reform: Social Reconstruction in the Thought of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, SUNY, Stony Brook, 1979. 7. The foregoing criteria for an anarchist social philosophy are quoted from John P. Clark, What is Anarchism? in Anarchism: Nomos XIX, edited by J. R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman (New York, NYU Press, 1978): 13. 8. In this book, Dewey identifies the dire consequences of Identifying the civic function of education with The State, and concludes that the very idea of national sovereignty gives rise to a contradiction between the wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrow sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes (97). 9. Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949): 42. This indispensable little book may be the best single treatment of the dilemmas of the statist/ anarchist tensions, theoretical and practical, in the radical tradition. Buber and Dewey have very much in common and, perhaps, not surprisingly; Bubers anarchism is overlooked. 10. I have discussed the question of the legitimate state in The Death of the State (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1974), chapter II. 11. On this view, the problem of civil disobedience is misconceived, as Godwin, Thoreauand Dewey, show. That is, whether in any given case, one should or should not comply with a law depends upon its justness and the consequences of complying or not. Cf. Deweys little essay, Conscience and Compulsion (in Characters and Events). One should also note that Godwin, as most anarchist writers, conceives of the problem of coercive sanctions in straightforward consequentialist terms and argues that

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only at the limit of the anarchist ideal are they unjustifiable. Cf., for example, Godwin, 1971: Book VII. 12. The first text is from David Wieck, Anarchist Justice, in Nomos XIX: 235, the second is from his review of Paul Goodmans Drawing the Line, Telos, No. 35 (Spring, 1978), 13. Lothstein carefully examines the pertinent literature in his From Privacy to Praxis, Chapter IV. He rescues Dewey from Deweys right-wing epigones and responds with force to some of Deweys more mechanically minded left critics. But Lothstein is himself critical of Dewey. 14. This is as good a place as any to comment on the unfortunate association of anarchism with terrorism. Terrorism must be distinguished from violence as such. Understood as the idea that acts of violence against individuals or groups: assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, etc., are means of revolutionary change, terrorism has been rejected by almost all anarchist writers, yet it is true that one can identify a period of terrorist activity in several national histories. On this see, James Joll, The Anarchists (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964) and Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton University Press, 1967). The identification of anarchism with terrorism has, of course, had enormous consequences and, no doubt, goes some way toward explaining the discrediting of anarchism. For a perceptive account, see Emma Goldman, The Psychology of Political Violence (1910?), in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969). Dewey, we should recall, argued that the only question which can be raised about the justification of force is that of comparative efficiency and economy of use and what is justly objected to as violence or undue coercion is a reliance upon wasteful and destructful means of accomplishing results (Force and Coercion (1916) in Characters and Events II: 789). 15. Alexander Berkman, What is a Communist Anarchist? with an Introduction by Paul Avrich (New York: Dover, 1972), originally published as New and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929). This is a very clear exposition of many of the key points of difference between anarchism and (the prevailing) Marxism. 16. Quoted by Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 197?: 226, translated from Schwache Stattsminner, Schwacheres Volk Der Sozialist. June, 1910. 17. American anarchists also put enormous emphasis on educating the young. The Spaniard, Francisco Ferrar, was a more direct influence on early 20th century efforts, but the pertinence of Deweys view were fully recognized. For discussion, see especially, Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement. It is interesting to notice that Dewey was not especially interested in educational experiments conducted within anarchist colonies, although he did visit the Stelton Colony and school in Stelton, N.J. On the other hand, many anarchists had little confidence in this route. Berkman said, I myself . . . have little faith in colonies. You cannot build the new society that way (quoted from Avrich: 306 18. Much recent radical theory has come to the conclusion that in the advanced capitalist states where liberal democracies exist, the only strategy to be pursued consistent with a genuine socialismrequires an answer to this question:

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How is it possible radically to transform the State in such a manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy . . . are combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of selfmanagement bodies? (Nicos Poulantzas. State, Power and Socialism (London: Verso, 1980).

DEWEYS WRITINGS, CITED IN THIS CHAPTER:

GPP German Philosophy and Politics (New York: Henry Holt, 1915). D&E Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1966, Enlarged Edition) RIP Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). HNC Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt, 1922). PP The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954). PF Philosophies of Freedom, in R. J. Bernstein (ed.), Experience, Nature and Freedom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960). C&E Characters and Events. Two Vols., edited by Joseph Ratner (New York: Henry Holt, 1929) LSA Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Capricorn, 1963). ION Individualism Old and New (New York: Capricorn, 1962). F&C Freedom and Culture (New York: Capricorn, 1963). D&EA Democracy and Educational Administration, in Joseph Ratner (ed.), Intelligence and The Modern World (New York: Modern Library, 1939), PM Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).

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If we begin with the political calamities of the last one hundred years and add, as at least part consequence of these, the upheavals in philosophy, literature, art and science, we can appreciate the present attractiveness of a political philosophy without foundations: There is no truth; only an endless conversation in a self-sufficient linguistic realm which is totally disconnected from any extra-linguistic realityif such there be. Because God is dead, human nature has no content, and history is meaningless, the dream of creating a new kind of human societythe dream of utopian and revolutionary modern politicsis instead a nightmare. There is no knowable, objective, definable, transmittable common good; there are only interests, not to be judged, still less to be accommodated. There is no responsible politics which is not impotent: Either we irresponsibly offer the masses ungrounded hope or, more responsibly, we reject the quest for glittering triumph, perhaps even improvement, and settle for the far more modest, though indispensable, concern to prevent catastrophes. On this view of things, the belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed, that efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.1 With Camus, anguishing over Algeria, we may wonder how one can even write, knowing that what is said might provide an alibi for a Pol Pot or a terrorist willing to throwor dropa bomb. The alternatives would seem to be these: Either one knows what is good and true, or one does not. If one does, then, must not one act on that knowledge, even if, finally, it turns out that one is wrong? On the other hand, if one does not know what is good and true, if perhaps there is no good and true, then, must we not be unwilling to act in the name of the people, or history,
211

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or of our ideals? Instead, is it not the case that our commitment must be but to keep the conversation going?2 As liberal, the anti-foundationalist alternative has an appeal. Indeed, it is just this that makes it a useful counter-revolutionary ideology. But the issue is misformulated. It is not that there is no basis for human solidarityeven if that basis is not to be discovered but created, or that there is no truth, even if like solidarity, it too is a social product. Nor is violence, as such, the problem. Like inaction, it is sometimes justified and sometimes not justified. For, unnoticed by the anti-foundationalist is the possibility of a politics that needs no foundations, a politics which does not guarantee success and does not presuppose that some person or party has a truth not shared by those in whose name they.act. Put in other terms, the problem of modern politics is less the lack of foundations and more the absence of a genuinely democratic politics, a politics which aims at the creation of communities by the active participation of interdependent individuals, a politics in which interests become shared goods, a politics which insists that truth can only be our truth. In what follows, I argue that Marx and Dewey offered versions of this. On this view, we are sculptors or crafters, but we lack blueprints. On this view, we are actors in history, but we canand mustwrite our own scripts.

RECOVERING MARX Marx had some clear and definite ideas about democracy, ideas which remain unrealized, but which cannot be dismissed as utopian or as youthful extravagances or cynical subterfuge. Marx consistently held that participatory democracy was the goal of revolutionary transformation, that what we call modern democracy, though a form of alienated politics, was genuinely progressive, and finallyand most criticallythat there could. be no separation of revolutionary means from revolutionary ends. While the issues are contentious, I want to suggest that opposing views depend largely on an ahistorical reading of important texts and events. Critical in this regard is the persistent tendency to construe Marxs politics in terms of a misconstrual of the differences between Marx and the anarchists and to be anachronistic as regards later debates between revolutionary Marxists and social democrats.3

MARXS ANALYSIS OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE Characteristically, Marx point of departure was criticism of Hegel, but while he rejected much in Hegel, he also found much of value. Hegel saw that the

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French Revolution had raised the problem of sovereignty in a critical way and that it was this problem with which history is now occupied, and whose solution it has to work out in the future (Hegel, 1956: 452). The problem was critical, because in the fully developed modern state the people could not be sovereign. On Hegels view of the matter, the sovereignty of the people is one of the confused notions based on the wild idea of the people. Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole . . . the people is a formless mass and no longer a state (Hegel, 1952: 279). In the fully developed modem state, there was a bifurcation of civil society and the state. Individuals live private lives and relate anonymously. It was thus that, unless articulated, the people are a formless mass. On the other hand, the government, the king, parliament, the bureaucracy and the police became the mode by which the whole was articulated and expressed. Failing to grasp the full force of the American solution to the problem of sovereignty, Hegel opted for a reactionary solution, a constitutional monarchy. Marx agreed fully with the Hegelian analysis of the bifurcation of civil society and the state, but he saw also that the Americans had, in a remarkable way, already solved the problem that Hegel believed had still to be solved. That is, Marx saw that the fully realized modem state would be a democratic state. The solution, however, required that in the fully realized modern state, the alienation of individuals would be fully realized and at the same time fully obscured. In the democratic state, every adult is a citizen with full civil and political rights. Moreover, in virtue of the mechanisms of representative government, the people are sovereign. But for Marx the reality was otherwise: Each citizen is an imagined member of an imagined sovereignty, divested of his actual individual life and endowed with an unactual universality. In the democratic state, liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving [the] so-called rights of man. But this means man in his uncivilized and unsocial aspect, in his fortuitous existence and just as he is, corrupted by the entire organization of our society, lost and alienated from himself, oppressed by inhuman relations and elements (Easton and Guddat, 1967: 22526, 231). To say that in the democratic state individuals are uncivilized and unsocial and that they have fortuitous existences is not to say that individuals are barbaric, or nasty or motivated by greedthough this may also be true. It is to say rather that they live private lives that they are isolated, that they relate anonymously, that their situations are accidental like their sex or race, and that while their powers are social, they are not socially realized. This is the result of the entire organization of society, but in particular of the market structure of bourgeois society and the alienating structures of the modern state. As Thomas points out, the state

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becomes a fetishistic personification of political potential, very much as the concept of capital designates the separation between the conditions of labor and the producer. Both are the members of societys own real force set up against them, opposed to them, and out of control (Thomas, 1980: 196). The people are sovereign but they have no power over the conditions of their lives. As sovereigns in an illusory community, they are in reality controlled by inhuman relations. A number of critical implications flow from Marx analysis. First, the problem for Marx is first and last political, of what has to be done and to happen if people are to gain control of the circumstancesnow alienatedwhich structure their lives. This problem was not to be solved economistically or by perfecting the instrumentalities of the democratic state. This distinguished Marx view from e.g., Proudhon on the one hand, and on the other, from republicans. Second, to achieve the goal is to overcome the duality of civil society and the state, and this means, as Marx writes, in true democracy, the political state disappears (untergeht). This view, of course, has its Rousseauian intimations and suggests the critical point of comparison to nineteenth-century anarchisms and social democrats. But third, in contrast to anarchisms which share with Marx the idea that state power must be broken, if this was to be achieved, it had to be achieved by an agency which did not reflect the alienated relations of private property. As he wrote, it was the work of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering(Easton and Guddat, 1967: 263-264). These ideas lead directly to the 1848 Communist Manifesto where, recurring to the Aristotelian lineage of the idea that democracy was class rule by the poor, Marx and Engels write the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy. In this democracy, to be sure, the political state has not disappeared, for as a statist form, this democracy was still a dictatorship, albeit a dictatorship of the majority, the proletariat, against the minoritythe owners of the means of production. It was thus that it was but a first step in the revolution of the working class (McClellan, 1977: 237).4 But it was the Paris Commune of 1871 which seems to have given Marx a paradigm for what might be, a paradigm which, prefigured in actuality, has earlier intimations of true democracy. As he said, the democracy of the Commune was a historically new creation and the glorious harbinger of a new society.5 Still, it is vital to be clear about what Marx saw in it and why also that, for him, it was a premature and finally unwise act of heroism.

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THE COMMUNE AND DEMOCRACY For us, democracy refers to statist electoral politics and anarchism refers either to a silly utopianism or to terrorist politics. If in the nineteenth century, these terms had not yet been thoroughly appropriated by the enemies of rule by the demos, it was already the case, as Marx noted, that it was generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they bear a certain likeness (Marx, 1971: 73) In what sense, then, was the Commune a completely new historical creation? On the one hand, it was anarchist in the sense that it broke state power. As he wrote: The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence (73). But it was not anarchist in the sense of Stirner, Proudhon or Bakunin. Marx took these writers seriouslywith due cause but because, on his view, they lacked an adequate understanding of political economy, they were mistaken both as regards their vision of a good society and as regards the means of attaining it. Putting the matter as briefly as possible, for Marx, anarchists were inverted statists. Since on their view the state was the problem, once rid of it, all would be well. Because for them there was little point in discriminating between forms of the state, transformative activity, whether the anti-revolutionary activity of Proudhon or the conspiratorial activity of Bakunin, had to wash its hands of the state. As Proudhon said, to indulge in politics is to wash ones hand in dung (quoted by Thomas, 1980: 184). Marx saw the matter very differently. His view of the Commune gives us a start in seeing how. In the first place, the Commune was
a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class . . . (Marx, 1971: 75).

We must be clear what this means. The Commune had fashioned the first governmentthe word must be used gingerly-which aimed at realizing full control over the circumstances of life by ordinary citizens. It was in this sense expansive in contrast to those forms that took for granted the conditions of ordinary life. Even the best case, for example, the democracy of ancient Athens, took these for granted. Previous democracies,

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like non-democracies, were repressive in that they aimed but to replace the rule of one class for anotherwithout altering the alienating conditions which called for class rule in the first place. For example, in the ancient polis, politics regarded the struggle between rich and poor over decisions of law and war, but the poor were not social revolutionaries in the sense that they either did or could aim at reconstituting society. This idea, which was owed to the French Revolution, regarded the perception, now familiar largely through the thought of Hegel and of Marx that human history was radically unlike natural history in being the product of human activity. For Marx this meant that
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjects them to the power of united individuals (McClellan, 1977: 179).

Political democracy was a great step forward because it acknowledged the sovereign people, but it was the final form of emancipation only within the prevailing order of things. Indeed, it was just for these reasons that the Commune could not have succeeded: Apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a city under exceptional circumstances, the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist nor could it be (Marx, 1971: 293). The exceptional circumstances which produced the Commune left the full machinery of the repressive French State in place, and insofar, the Communards faced formidable odds. But in addition, because the Communards were not organized, politically active workers, their political capacities were undeveloped. The problem was not that the Communards lacked revolutionary consciousness, for they surely knew how to die on the barricades, nor was the problem economistic, regarding their incapacity at the existing stage of economic development to conquer scarcity, but that an alienated citizenry was in no position to reabsorb their alienated social powers. They were still isolated, private persons who, as not yet thoroughly interdependent, could not organize themselves so as to realize fully the powers that they had. As Edwards says: the Communards belonged more to the past tradition of Paris revolutionaries than presaging the industrial struggles of the future (Edwards, 1971: 360). As an alliance of artisans, of workers in craft industries, of petty bourgeois shopkeepers and traders, it was impossible for them to overcome the contradiction between public and private life, between general and particular interests. It was thus that with a modicum of common sense . . . [the Commune] could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the

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whole mass of the people the only thing that could have been reached at the time (Marx, 1971: 293). The anarchists saw and celebrated the fact that the Commune was not made by the proletariat and was instead an alliance of the people, and they saw and celebrated the spontaneity and disorganization that was a critical mark of the Commune. But, for Marx, their failure to see that unless the Communards were to have a long period for self-education in self-rulean impossibility in the circumstances of Civil Warthe Commune had to fail. A second point of comparison between Marxs understanding of the Commune and anarchist thought regards the question of government. For us, either there is a government or there is anarchyno authority, no coercive organization. The idea was surely reinforced by a great deal of anarchist polemicsespecially in the nineteenth century, but the confusion is deeper, depending on the eighteenth-century identification of rule with government. In the ancient polis, there was, strictly speaking, no government; there was rule by one, few or many. Political power was unmediated. In the modern state, however, there are always governments, the executive, parliament, bureaucracies and the police, and they always claim to represent the governed. It is easy then to suppose that the middle ground between self-rule and rule by others is modern political democracy, representative government. But for Marx (and Dewey, as we shall see), this was not the only alternative. The institutional novelty of the Commune was in just this. There would be functionaries of the people, agents in the strictest of senses, and these would be under strict instructions from those whom they represent. These functionaries would not be as in bourgeois democracy merely authorized to rule those who elect them, but would be as ambassadors or military commanders, responsible and revocable at the pleasure of those who elected them. Sovereignty, as in Rousseau, would not be alienated. Accordingly, it would not be illusory. As Marx wrote:
Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture (Marx, 1971: 73).6

It is hard to know how to classify this arrangement. Is it a government with power but no authority or with authority but no power? It would manage

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but it would be, like the police and the courtswhich are not to be abolished elective, responsible, and revocable. We need to emphasize here that the rejection of bourgeois democracy did not involve the rejection of its patently most critical democratic features: free elections, free communication, etc. Marx never questioned their indispensability. His criticism, like Deweys, was that democracy required something more, not something less. For Marx, it meant a form of real participation consistent with government. We should note also that Marxs analogy is nearly perfect. A company could be operated by workmen and managers, and no one supposes that the owner of the company has lost his sovereignty. It was but elitist propaganda to believe that the same principles could not apply to a commune. The only real question was whether a commune, like a company, could agree on the goals of the association. This problem, of course, relates to the first point regarding the question of whether the citzenry is or is not alienated. Finally, as already suggested, we must not assume that a full-fledged democracy would be totalitarian, that the people ruling themselves would trample personal freedom. As Aristotle and Madison both saw, this assumption was warranted where personal freedom meant the rights of property, freedom of the exploiters to exploit the exploited. Insofar as the Commune was expansive and not repressive, it would be different from previous democracies. It is true, of course, that Marx did mock liberal constitutional theory and did not himself pay heed to the institutional problems of true democracy, but it is clear that he profoundly valued personal freedom, saw, rightly, that only in community do the means exist for every individual to cultivate his talents in all directions, and assumed, optimistically, that individuals in a community would act so that, in contrast to previous forms, all would realize personal freedom. The absence of concern to institutional detail here stems from his commitment to a democratic politics, to his repeated contention that no one could write scripts for othersstill less for future others who will need to solve just those problems which they have.7 It is also clear that if the unity of the nation was not to be broken, some sort of federation was involved, and while this was not to be a federation of small States, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the Girondins, it is not clear what Marx has in mind. There are, from Marx point of view, two possible objections to small States. First, if they are states, then they still embody an alienated politics. Second, if they are small, the unity of the nation is broken. This second problem is critical, but it is hard to say whether, as he suggests, the nation is the smallest unit for social production in the modern world, or whether, perhaps as part of this, if we are to think of moving progressively towards the future and be realistic, we need, in a world of aggrandizing nation-states, to think in terms of nations?

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The problem is resolvable, however, if we return Marxs discussion to its context. Marxs conclusion, that had the Commune shown a modicum of commonsense, it would have tried to reach a compromise with Versailles, powerfully reinforces a host of evidence that Marx politics were gradualist. This means, in this context, that the best that one could have hoped for, in these circumstances, was the best possible compromise consistent with the continuing existence of the French State. To suppose that the Communards could have mapped out and realized the future is the worst kind of utopian thinking.

MARXS GRADUALIST POLITICS It may be doubted that Marx politics were gradualist. But a gradualist politics is not necessarily reformist nor is it necessarily antirevolutionary. It is a politics that seeks to realize what is at the time realizable. Marx surely wanted society to be revolutionized and he surely also believed that, at the right moment, a revolution would occur; but there is strong evidence that Marx was never naive about the right moment and that, in contrast to anarchist-inspired politics, he was always perfectly prepared to work within the stateif it was a liberal democratic state.8 Already against Stirner, he had argued, it is only in the mind of the ideologist that [the will to abolish competition and with it the state and law] arises before conditions have developed far enough to make its production possible(quoted by Thomas, 1980: 343). And to emphasize, the conditions referred to are political, regarding the political capacities of the people whose activities had sustained competition and law and the state. But perhaps the clearest statement of his position is his speech, given upon resigning from the Central Council of the Communist League:
The minority have substituted the dogmatic spirit for the critical, the idealist interpretation of events for the materialist. Simple willpower, instead of the true relations of things, has become the motive force of the revolution. While we say to the working people, You will have to go through fifteen, twenty-five years of civil wars, and wars between nations not only to change existing conditions but to change yourselves and make yourselves worthy of political power, you on the other hand, say We ought to get power at once, or else give up the fight. . . . Just as the democrats make a fetish of the word people you make one of the word proletariat. Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for revolutionary action (Quoted by Thomas: 331).

We can be reminded that, writing in 1852, he held that the carrying of universal suffrage in England would . . . be a far more socialist measure than

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anything that has been honoured with that name on the continent. He continued, optimistically, that its inevitable result . . . [would be] the political supremacy of the working class (345). And his mind had not changed, after the Commune, when in 1871, he wrote that:
The ultimate object of the political movement of the working class is . . . the conquest of political power for this class; and this naturally requires that the organization of the working class, an organization which arises from its economic struggles, should previously reach a certain level of development. On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class as a class confronts the ruling classes and tries to constrain them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt by strikes, etc., in a particular factory or even in a particular trade to compel individual capitalists to reduce the working day, is a purely economic movement. On the other hand, the movement to force through an eight-hour, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say, a class movement, with the object of enforcing its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially coercive force. While these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organization, they are in turn equally a means of developing this organization (Quoted by Thomas, 347).9

THE REDEFINITION OF MARXIAN POLITICS Events did not proceed, however, as Marx had thought they would. While, on the one hand, industrialization in England and then in Germany did promote an increasingly politicized labor movement, radicals were by no means able to agree on either strategy or tactics. During his lifetime, Marx had had some success in negotiating the differences and in maintaining the extraordinarily diverse elements of the International on a course of gradualist change. But the events which led to the effective demise of the First international (in 1872, formally in 1876 in Philadelphia) were critical in the subsequent Internationalist movement, in Marxist politics, and in our retrospective understanding of Marxs politics. Oversimplifying a very complicated story, instead of being, as Thomas puts it, a form of doctrine having some vague and, as far as Marx was concerned, irksome appeal, anarchism became a movement having a considerable, and widespread, appeal across national boundaries (Thomas: 249). Because Marx wanted not merely that there should be a revolution, but that it be the right sort of revolution, he fought the anarchists tooth and nail. He did not fight them, if the foregoing is correct, because he believed in the state, or in

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centralized authority, or worse, in a revolution made by revolutionaries in the name of the people. For Marx, the First International and the Paris Commune did in fact prefigure the future, yet the repression that the Paris Commune provoked, itself a critical factor in the demise of the International, and Marxs role in this collapse, had serious consequences. Instead of being a pluralist, ideologically heterogeneous vehicle for the transformation of the international order, subsequent Internationals were monolithic and ideologically doctrinaire. Indeed, Marxs machinations versus Bakunin became the alibi for this and at the same time confirmed as prophetic the anarchist suspicion that Marx and Marxism were authoritarian, offering but a new version of absolutist politics. Finally, failing to grasp what the Commune was and why it failed, instead of being for radicals a premature glimmer into a historically novel form of society, for some, because it lacked centralization and authority, the Commune became an apocalyptic and hopelessly degenerative fit of revolutionary madness. For others, it was the very model of revolution, of the spontaneity of the masses. For many anarchists, the Commune proved that revolution did not require a vanguard working class, still less, organization; or, quite oppositely, as in Bakunin and the Blanquists, it showed the need for a conspiratorial revolutionary party to provide the match which would light the fire of revolution. But events continued to undermine Marx hopes. The destruction of Internationalism, of social democracy in Germany10 and the collapse of Tsarist Russia, all sparked by the World War, completed that redefinition of Marxist politics that had begun with the violent end of the Commune. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxist struggles to transform society will rapidly collapse into two poles, between a Blanquist-style demand for a revolutionary conspiratorial vanguard of the working class aimed at smashing the state and reformist social democracy, aimed not at a gradualist transformation of the political conditions for revolution, but at winning economic concessions from the capitalists.11 By the turn of the century, it had already become clear to Marxists that while economic development was creating the conditions for socialist production, it was not creating a revolutionary consciousness among the workers. Writing in his enormously influentialand often misunderstoodWhat is to be Done? (1902), Lenin noted that everyone agrees that it is necessary to develop the political consciousness of the working class. The question was, he continued, how is that to be done and what is required to do it? For Lenin, economismthe effort to win economic concessionsand terrorism have one common root, subservience to spontaniety. For Lenin, both views presumed historical inevitability and were thus apolitical. While as with Marx and the social democrats, the working class remained the

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center of a mass-based social revolution, Lenin insisted that we must go among all classes of the population as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organizers; and while he protested against Blanquism and against confining the political struggle to conspiracy, he also insisted that this did not deny the need for a strong revolutionary organizationif the workers were to be politicized (Lenin, 1966: 112m 119). But it was easy to read this tract in the light of the Bolshevik Revolution and to hold that it had already set out the principles of socialist revolution, not as a movement of workers, nor of workers allied with other classes, but of an authoritarian organization of dedicated professional revolutionaries, a minority acting for the workers.12 It is exactly here, then, where we can begin our analysis of Deweys version of a democratic politics. As we shall see, there are both strong parallels and some critical differences.

DEWEYS VISION OF DEMOCRACY AND HIS ANALYSIS OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE Dewey was born in 1859, the year that Marx published the Critique of Political Economy, but Dewey did not turn explicitly to political philosophy until his 1915 German Philosophy and Politics. Moreover, while it is well-known that Dewey was a critic of Marxism, especially in his writings beginning in the 1930s, Dewey could not at that time have read Marxs critique of Hegels philosophy of state and the tracts on alienation, nor what we call the Grundrisse, nor even the critically important German Ideology. For Dewey, Marxism was philosophically what may be called Second International Marxism, a variant that was powerfully influenced by the monist philosophy of history of Georgi Plekhanov. Politically, Marxism was, by that time, defined largely by Leninby then understood as the promoter of the vanguard Party. Deweys philosophical roots, of course, like Marxs, trace to Hegel a fact of some importance; but his political sensitivities were shaped not by the revolutions of 1848 or the Paris Commune, but by New England localism and an understanding of this which in critical ways was Jeffersonian. In German Philosophy and Politics, Dewey traced the philosophic basis of patriotic statism in Germany and concluded, the present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural. Dewey rejected the sufficiency of arbitration, treaties, international judicial councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace movements. He called for more radical thinking of the problem (Dewey, 1915: 130). The problem of statist politics was

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also present in Democracy and Education, published the next year. He asked: Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted?(97). Dewey thought that the answer could be yes, if, to be sure, we were talking about education in and for a democratic society. In Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), he argued that despite wide differences, political philosophies were agreed upon the final consummating position of the state and he concluded that assumptions regarding the unique and supreme position of the State in the social hierarchy had solidified into dogma (201). Just as Marx had supposed that capitalist modes of intercourse would destroy national boundaries, make for international proletarian solidarity, and politicize workers, Dewey hoped that these forces would propel democracy as a way of life.13 But the critical eleven years that separated Democracy and Education and The Public and Its Problems forced Dewey to different conclusions. Not only had he developed a critique of democracy as a form of government, but also it was now clear to him that democracy, as a way of life was not being fostered by the new interdependencies and the new capacities of technological society. On the contrary, democracy as a mode of associated living was being profoundly undermined by these same forces. In terms familiar to the anarchism of Gustave Landauer and Martin Buber, Dewey argued that democracy was not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community itself. Within a community, the state is an impertinence. Turning his attention to democracy as a form of government, Dewey argued that at best, political democracy represents an effort . . . to counteract forces that so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors, and . . . an effort to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public ends. But political democracy had failed even to realize these limited goals. In a word, he concluded, the new forms of combined action due to the modern economic regime controls present policies, much as dynastic interests controlled those of two centuries ago. They affect thinking and desire more than did the interests which formerly moved the state (Dewey, 1954).14 The analysis compares easily to Marx, but especially insofar as it suggests that the constraints on policies, as on thinking and desire, are structurally rooted. Accordingly, the problem of constituting democracy as a way of life had no easy solutions and regarded the incapacity of interdependent people even to perceive the consequences of combined action, still less to be able to perceive shared goods and to act on them: What, then, was to be done?

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DEWEYS REJECTION OF CLASS POLITICS Dewey visited the Soviet Union in 1928, the year after he published The Public and Its Problems. In no sense was Dewey an ideological anti-Marxist. He had assessed the Bolshevik revolution as an experiment to discover whether the familiar democratic idealsfamiliar in words at least will not be most completely realized in a social regime based on voluntary co-operation, on conjoint workers control and management of industry. Dewey saw, it is clear, that socialism was inconceivable without democracy and that, as the foregoing suggests, democracy in its complete sense demanded socialism. Nevertheless, his analysis of the democratic state made it plain to him, though not to the Marxists, that in the United States, at least, proletarian revolution was not on the historical agenda. For him, the critical issue was the very idea of class. A great deal of what Dewey wrote during this period sounded like a Marxian class analysis. In addition to what has already been noted, consider Individualism Old and New. In that critical text, Dewey argued that the issue that Marx had raised, the relation of the economic structure to political operationsis one that actively persists. Indeed, he continues, it forms the only basis of present political questions. In the pages that follow, Dewey gives an account of the crisis that could have come from Capital, Vol. III. He writes:
There are now, it is estimated, eight billions of surplus savings a year, and the amount is increasing. Where is this capital to find its outlet? Diversion into the stock market gives temporary relief, but the resulting inflation is a cure which creates a new disease. If it goes into the expansion of industrial plants, how long will it be before they, too, overproduce (Dewey, 1962: 8586).

There is in this text even a clear reference to the upshot of the Marxian labor theory of value:
That the total earnings of eight million wage workers should be only four times the amount of what the income-tax returns frankly call the unearned income of . . . eleven thousand millionaires goes almost without notice (109).

Perhaps even more Marxist sounding is his claim that large and basic economic currents cannot be ignored for any length of time, and they are working in one direction. Indeed, economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory. His account concludes with a text that could have been written by Engels:
. . . There is a difference and a choice between a blind, chaotic and unplanned determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profitthe anar-

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chy of capitalist productionand the determination of socially planned and ordered development. It is the difference and the choice between a socialism that is public and one that is capitalistic (119)

Finally, Dewey also sees the relation between this theoretically informed analysis and the problem of the lost individual. We live, he writes, politically from hand to mouth.
The various expressions of public control . . . have taken place sporadically and in response to the pressure of distressed groups so large that their voting power demanded attention. They have been improvised to meet special occasions. They have not been adopted as parts of any general social policy (114)

It is clear enough .why this is the case. Under present arrangements, financial and industrial power, corporately organized, can deflect economic consequences away from the advantage of the many to serve the privilege of the few. The political parties themselves, the ostensible vehicles of mobilization for change, have been eager accomplices in maintaining confusion and unreality (114). This analysis, as pertinent today as when it was offered, is not untypical of Dewey. It suggests that Deweys understanding of the political possibilities of democratic politics in capitalist America was anything but naive, and that, in important ways, it was close to Marxism. But for all this, there is evidence that he sometimes lost sight of the critical issue. An instance is the book which some have taken to be one of Deweys more radical political tracts, Liberalism and Social Action, written in 1935. As is well known, Dewey there insisted that
Liberalism must become radical, meaning by radical perception of the necessity of thorough-going changes in the set-up of institutions and corresponding activity to bring changes to pass (62).

Dewey emphatically rejected reform that dealt with but this abuse and now that without having a social goal based on an inclusive plan, but he was less clear what that goal and plan was. One thing was clear: Dewey rejected Marxism, but especially the idea of a struggle between classes, culminating in open and violent warfare as being the method for production of radical social change (78). Dewey had a clear and adequate instrumentalist view of violence. In another place he had written that what is justly objected to as violence or undue coercion is a reliance upon wasteful or destructful means of accomplishing results (Dewey, 1929, Vol. II: 785). In Liberalism and Social Action,

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similarly, it was not violence as such that was the issue. He recognized, with the Marxists, that force, rather than intelligence is built into the procedures of the existing social system, and that even free expression will be tolerated as long as it does not seem to menace in any way the status quo of society(63, 64).27 When it does, he wrote, the state will be quick to use official violence in the name of protecting the general welfare. Dewey had learned from his experience with the Palmer raids and the tragedy of Sacco and Vanzetti. What then was his objection to the class war notion of the Marxists? Dewey might have argued, though he did not, that the Marxist analysis was substantially correct, but that for good historical reasons, the idea of struggle between classes, culminating in open warfare, had to be rejected. The argument for this conclusion would be complicated, but it would be fully consistent with Deweys own analysis of the democratic state. In agreement with the anarchists of his day, for Dewey, the workers were not to be agents of social change. It was not that there was no oppression and inequality in America, that workers were not exploited, nor that they were happy with their lot. One did not hear their angry voices, Dewey wrote, but that was not because they were drowned out by shouts of eagerness for adventurous opportunity. Rather, the murmurs of discontent are drowned by the murmurs of lost opportunities, along with the din of machinery, motor cars and speakeasies(1962: 7879). The metaphor, suggestive of the much later writings of Marcuse or Foucault, was employed in the context of Deweys brilliant analysis of America individualism. It was not roast beef, but repressive needs, normalization and atomization which had disintegrated class-consciousness. As I argued, Marx knew that the struggle would be long and hard, but he could not have anticipated the fantastic flexibility of capitalism in the liberal democracies, and especially in America, the fragmenting effects of race and ethnicity. In America, then, workers had become a politically useless category. But if so, then, class struggle was, at its worse, a slogan for assuring the faithful or, at its best, an abstraction at a different level of analysis. The issue is complicated, but I must be brief. In Marxism, classes are not defined by a set of empirically given characteristics, e.g., income, social status, or occupation. Rather, class is a theoretical concept, grounded in the central concept of mode of production. Marxs Capital provides a theoretical and abstract account of the capitalist mode of production. Abstractly considered, there are but two classes, the owners of the means of production and the producers of surplus value, the proletariat. This analysis, the core of any Marxism, provides an understanding of capitalism as a mode of production. It shows what problems need to be solved if it is to be reproduced

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including thus an explanation of why capitalist relations need to be mystified, the famous fetishism of commodities. It shows that capitalism is irrational, that it is subject to periodic crises, and it gives an argument for socialism by showing that as long as the means of production are not jointly controlled, there is no way to end domination and alienationincluding the alienated politics of the modern state. But of course the real world is not just a mode of production. It is comprised of societies with modes of production. Like all others, societies with a capitalist mode of production have state structures, churches, gender and racial conflicts, schools and mass media. They have housewives, professionals, civil servants, and all sorts of workers who are not proletarians defined as producers of surplus value. But this means that Marxs projection into the future of the effects of the capitalist mode of production could well be wrongas, indeed, it was. In the nineteenth century, it was still possible to keep things simple by identifying the growing class of industrial workers with a growing and increasingly organized proletariat, to suppose, as the Manifesto had it, that the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasantsall these sink gradually into the proletariat. The workers, now the immense majority, now organized, now pauperized, would become a revolutionary class. But close as that had come to being prophetic, just before World War I, that time had now passed. More generally, then, since Marxist revolutionary class politics was predicated on the assumption of global capitalist transformation, of increasing polarization and immiseration, and on the consequent development of the political capacities of organized workers, and since these had not obtained as Marx had hoped, Marxists might well have abandoned the idea of proletarian revolution. The problem, then would not be to find or make a revolutionary class, but as Hindess writes, to mobilize effective support around socialist objectives out of the forces, struggles and ideologies operative in particular societies.15 The Marxists of the inter-war period did not, of course, see this; nor, given that their Marxism was the monocausal Marxism of the Second International, was it surprising that Dewey would reject Marxist analysis. He observed according to the Marxians . . . the economic foundations of society consist of two things, the forces of production on one side and, on the other side, the social relations of production. Further, for Marxians, scientific technology is part of the forces of production. It is dynamic while the social relations are static; they lag behind. Dewey here was ready to admit that what was happening socially is the result of the combination of these two factors, and thus it would seem that here, as above, Dewey had fully appropriated the extremely influential Preface account of what came to be

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called historical materialism.16 But Dewey then insisted that it was but a truism to call this combination capitalism and to say that capitalism is the cause of all the important changes that have occurred. On his view,
Colossal increase in productivity, the bringing together of men in cities and large factories, the elimination of distance, the accumulation of capital, fixed and liquidthese things would have come about, at a certain stage, no matter what the established institutional system. They are the consequences of the new means of technological production (1963: 81).17

The text is a startlingly clear expression of technological determinism, but if indeed, for orthodox Marxists, technology produces changes in the relations of production and thus explains the emergence of capitalism, Dewey saw what they did not, that once one holds that technology directly defines the labor process and, through this, the wider social relations, historical materialism entails that there need be little real difference between capitalism and socialism!18 Deweys concrete approach should have put him on guard. While he often succumbs to the high abstraction, industrial society, he seems also to have seen that the logic and consequences of the accumulation of capital was a fundamental cause of the way changes occurred in the West, of the particular application of technologies and the particular distribution of wealth and resources, that had capitalism been other than what it isand here we are indebted to Marxtechnological production could surely have been different. Putting the matter as briefly as possible, insofar as the relations of private property define the accumulation of capital, the state is preferably liberal. This means not just that private and public are bifurcated but that government will be predictably limited in addressing problems thrown up by the process of capital accumulation. At the very least, it must be constrained to activities consistent with the maintenance of the system of private accumulation. Deweys claim that the release of productivity is the product of cooperatively organized intelligence is correct. As Marxists point out, production is socialized in capitalism. Moreover, if one wants the productivity associated with industrial societies, there is no alternative to that. But Deweys idea that coercion and oppression on a large scale exist because of the perpetuation of old institutions and patterns not touched by scientific method is patently fallacious. Indeed, in the text already quoted from Individualism Old and New, he had it right: There is a difference and a choice between a blind, chaotic and unplanned determinism, issuing from business conducted for pecuniary profit, and the determination of a socially planned and ordered development, between a socialism that is public and one that is capitalistic. This difference, of course, is exactly the extension of political democracy to the economy, the

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elimination of the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation, and finally, as Marx insisted and Dewey surely seemed also to see, the reappropriation of social powers by united individuals. Once Dewey lost touch with the root of the problem, he could no longer offer plausible solutions. In Liberalism and Social Action, he offered:
The question is whether force or intelligence is to be the method upon which we consistently rely and to whose promotion we devote our energies. Insistence that the use of force is inevitable limits the use of available intelligence . . . There is an undoubted objective clash of interests between finance-capitalism that controls the means of production and whose profit is served by maintaining relative scarcity, and idle workers and hungry consumers. But what generates violent strife is failure to bring the conflict into the light of intelligence, where the conflicting interests can be adjudicated on behalf of the interests of the great majority (79, 80).

The argument is a bad argument for at least three reasons. First, Deweys absolutist either/or, either force or intelligence, is unwarranted. No serious revolutionary, not Marx, not Lenin, not even Bakunin, so tied his hands in the way that Dewey suggests, even if, for them, violence was inevitable. One would have supposed that Deweys fine understanding of the use of violence by the state in defense of the status quo would have led him to the conclusion that as regards radical social change, some violence would, at some point, be necessary. Second, whatever the difficulties of a Marxian analysis, Marxists were not so foolish as to suppose that the lions, the finance capitalists, would sit down with the lambs and adjudicate away their privileged power. The objective clash of interests which Dewey rightly acknowledged was neither temporary nor negotiable. Rooted in the capitalist system as such, it left the parties locked in a death clutch.19 Third, Dewey here presupposes that publics exist, for it is only then, as he here implies, that cooperative intelligence can be a mode of social reconstruction. Immediately after he condemns Marxists for a rigid logic, he says: The experimentalist is one who would see to it that the method depended upon by all in some degree in a democratic community can be followed through to completion (80, my emphasis). It will not be easy to explain Deweys continuing optimism that creative intelligence can be effective even where it so patently lacks institutions. It is easier to explain his decisive turn against Marxism. By 1928 at least, Dewey had given up on the Socialist Party.20 By this time, the Soviets had already severely abused, perhaps irreparably, the idea of socialism. They would, in the years coming, disillusion still more. As noted, Deweys notion of Marxism was

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essentially the Marxism of the Second International, a Marxism flawed in more ways than one. In his 1939 Freedom and Culture, Dewey attacked Marxism as unscientific on grounds that it had a monistic block-universe theory of social causation. The monistic theory of history was a disaster: Social causation was plural and reciprocal. As I have suggested in this essay, the actual course of history is the cluttered product of contingencies that no theory could assimilate.21 On the other hand, Deweylike the Marxistshad never himself been clear on the causal questions regarding capitalism, industrial society and the modern state. If anything, he shared with them a tendency toward technological and economic determinism. Similarly, he was fully correct to charge that no one was less scientific than the scientific Soviet Marxists: Scientific method in operating with working hypotheses instead of with fixed and final Truth is not forced to have an Inner Council to declare just what is the Truth . . . (97). Finally, Marxists had all too often argued that capitalism was the only evil and that therefore, once rid of it, all would be lovely. One would have thought that the Thirties proved otherwise. Still, by 1939, Dewey had definitely shifted his emphasisif not worse. After reminding his readers that he had from time to time pointed out the harmful consequences the present regime of industry and finance had upon the reality of democratic ends and methods, and that he had nothing to retract, he went on to say that the Marxists were wrong in holding that government in the so-called democratic states is only the organ of a capitalist class. Now if this meantas by then Marxists had supposedthat the state could not be used by revolutionary socialists, then Dewey was surely correct. But as I have argued, Marx would have agreed with Dewey here. Yet Dewey seems to mean more than this:
the effect of constant criticism of governmental action; of more than one political party in formulating rival policies; of frequent elections; of the discussion and public education that attend majority rule, and above all the fact that political action is but one factor in the interplay of a number of cultural factors, have a value that critics of partial democracy have not realized (94).

Though admittedly partial, he was now prepared to defend what he took to be a characteristic American looseness of cohesion and indefiniteness in direction of action.
We take for granted the action of a number of diverse factors in producing any social result. There are temporary waves of insistence upon this and that particular measure and aim. But there is enough democracy so that in time any one tendency gets averaged up in interplay with other tendencies. An average presents qualities that are open to easy criticism. But as compared with the fanati-

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cism generated by monistic ideas when they are put into operation, the averaging of tendencies a movement toward the mean, is an achievement of splendor (9495).

But from the fact that what happens in history is the product of complex multiple factors working in unpredictable ways, it did not follow that American pluralist politics generated some splendid movement toward the mean, that conflicting interests somehow get averaged up, that the equilibrium in social affairs was desirable. Indeed, how pluralist could a politics be when, as he had argued in 1927, the public was lost? Finally, it was true that political action is but one factor, but does not this mean, as in 1929 he also had seen, that in a capitalist society, this left a free hand for financial and industrial power, corporately organized? Dewey could accept the criticism that much of our political democracy is more formal than substantial, provided, he now insisted, it is placed in contrast with totalitarian political control. To be sure, one does not need a very good society to compare well with Nazism and Stalinism. One might argue here that the despair of politics, so characteristic of our day, had by then infected Dewey and that, like Sidney Hook and later pragmatists, he was now prepared to celebrate bourgeois democracy. But this would be most unfair to Dewey. Not only was he unflinching in his rejection of the new kind of Stoicism which had gripped post-war Europe, but he was unflinching in his recognition of the profoundly troubled situation and in his commitment to the idea that things could be made bettera great deal better. As Lothstein writes:
The central point for Dewey was that while suffering and setback suffused the total human endeavor, it was neither daemonic or unremitting. Rather suffering and celebration . . . were experimental correlatives, happiness supervening upon their conjoint and dialectical origination. Although nested in a radically contingent and indeterminate world, our situation, Dewey argued, was not that of Sisyphus or Job, our fate sealed by divine fiat or historical obsolescence. He saw us instead as freewheeling sculptors of meaning in a world bereft of ultimate guarantees, but open to experimental improvement.22

Nor, despite his unflinching optimism, was it the case that Marx had ever-expected miracles. There are, he once remarked, no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du people, and if so, then surely there were none to be instituted by a vanguard party wreaking death in the name of the people. If we are to be emancipated, we need to work out our own emancipation and to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and [people].

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This returns us to the question of foundations. Whatever his blind spots, Deweys was a politics that needed no foundations. While Marxists did find a foundation for politics in an eschatological philosophy of history, I have argued that this is much less clear as regards Marx. But, however that may be, what is now needed, it seems to me, is to renew the possibilities of democratic politics which acknowledges the insights of Marx but yet strips Marxism of the idea that history is on the side of emancipation. We need, that is, to combine the best in Marx and Dewey. The public, lost and eclipsed, has not been found. For those of us living in a democratic state, finding it is the primary imperative. But how to do this? Deweys answer might go as follows: Try, by taking advantage of any opportunity that presents itself, to bring. into existence publics; try to give direct experience and educative quality by informing it; try to create from our atomized relations incipient communities which can be fostered and enlarged, and try to do this by identifying common goods which can call for active support and participation. Of course, this is not to say much, even if, as I think, it is true and important. Still, armed with a Marxist understanding of what is happening to us and why, it may be possible to take advantage of opportunities and to try, as Dewey offered, to build some incipient but progressively growing democratic publics.

NOTES
1. Cf. Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace, The Functions and Limits of Political Theory, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. Jacobsons book is perhaps the most systematic effort to examine the implications of a foundation-less politics, but his moral is equivocal. See my review, The Crisis of Contemporary Political Theory, Interpretation, 9 (September 1981). The texts quoted are from Arendt, as quoted by Jacobson, Chapter V, passim. 2. An anti-foundationalist politics need not reflect despair. Rorty suggests a version when he writes that we should be more willing than we are to celebrate bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far, while regretting that it is irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the population of the planet (Method, Social Science, Social Hope, in Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 210). But of course, ideological certitude is an obvious feature of those American policies which, in the pursuit of triumph in what can only be called a Holy War, are as limitless in their means as any which Orwell, Camus or Arendt condemned. Indeed, bourgeois capitalist society is not irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the population of the planet exactly because it is a large part of the problem of these peopleswhether the societies are capitalist miracles, e.g., Korea, or socialist disasters, e.g., Nicaragua.

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3. An excellent contextual reading of Marxs politics is Alan Gilberts Marxs Politics: Communists and Citizens, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press. Gilbert, following a path marked by Michael Harrington (in his Socialism, New York: Bantam, 1973), shows that Marx persistently altered his political strategies in the light of experience and that he was no economic determinist, inflexibly committed to pat formulasunlike most of his later epigones. Paul Thomas Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) is an indispensable account of Marxs relations, ideologically and politically, to nineteenth-century anarchism. See also his Alienated Politics, in Terence Ball et al (eds.), After Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984. Martin Bubers Paths in Utopia (Boston, Beacon, 1949) remains valuable. Barry Hindess offers a crisp account of the critical debates between Lenin, Kautsky, and Bernstein. Unfortunately, he does not discuss Rosa Luxemburg, who was perhaps closest to Marx on the critical issues. See Marxism and Political Democracy, in Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980. On Luxemburg, see Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, London, NLB, 1976. 4. This is not to say that there are not difficulties and ambiguities in Marxs writings on the critical issues. An excellent treatment is Frederic L. Bender, The Ambiguities of Marxs Concepts of Proletarian Dictatorship and Transition to Communism, History of Political Thought, II (November, 1981). See also, Harrington: 5460; Gilbert, Chapter VIII. 5. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in On the Paris Commune, Moscow, Progress, 1971: 97. As Bender points out, Engels confirmed that for them, the Commune was a new type of polity. In an 1875 letter to Bebel, Engels wrote: The whole talk about the state should be dropped [from our partys statements] especially since the Commune . . . was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word [because it was a state in-the-process of dissolving] . . . We would therefore propose to replace state everywhere by Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word commune (cited by Bender: 549). 6. For an extended development of these ideas in the American Confederation period, see my War and Democracy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, Part V, and The Foreclosure of Democracy in America, History of Political Thought, Vol. 9, (Spring, 1988). 7. Of course, insofar as he ignored the very real dangers of usurpation of power and violation of individual rights, Marx was, as Bender notes, to this extent responsible for later vanguard interpretations. 8. Harrington, Thomas and Gilbert each provides ample evidence on this critical point. 9. See M. Levin, Marx and Working-Class Consciousness, History of Political Thought, I (Autumn, 1980). 10. Cf. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 19051917: The Development of the Great Schism, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard, 1955 and my War and Democracy, Chapters 11 and 12. 11. See F. Claudin, Democracy and Dictatorship in Lenin and Kautsky, New Left Review, 107 (Nov./Dec. 1977).

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12. This is hardly the place to survey the literature on Lenin and Leninism. My views are influenced by Roy Medvedev, Leninism and Western Socialism, London, NLB, 1981; Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, New York, Knopf, 1974, Moshe Lewin, Lenins Last Struggle (New York: Vintage, 1970). See also my War and Democracy, Chapter 11. 13. Compare, of course, Marx and Engels: National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the developments of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto (Communist Manifesto, in McClellan: 235). 14. The most extensive.treatment of Dewey as a vestibular anarchist, in the American grain, is Arthur Lothsteins excellent From Privacy to Praxis: The Case for John Dewey as a Radical American Philosopher, PhD Dissertation, NYU, 1979. See also his Salving From the Dross: John Deweys AnarchoCommunalism, The Philosophical Forum, 10 (Fall, 1978). 15. Hindess argues that the series of critical debates between Kautsky, Lenin and Bernstein, from 1891 to World War I, are variations on a single theme, viz., where to locate the boundaries for non-economic, non-class determinants of political life and stop it from getting out of hand (37). Thus, while none of these writers was simply class-reductionist and while even Bernstein does not break completely with the conception that the economy is ultimately determining, they differ enormously on what and how much of what is political is not determined by the economy. But on Hindess view, the debate between them is irresolvable because there is no one general mechanism of connection between politics and the economy that is characteristic of capitalism as suchor for that matter, of particular historical phases of its development (41). In other words, as in Marx own political practice, political questions must always be posed concretely, considering the particular details of the particular society under consideration. A revisionist politics becomes plausible, then, at the point where, in the liberal-democratic state, socialism is no longer primarily a class issue. 16. The phrase historical materialism is not used by Marx at all. Engels first employed the term materialist conception of history in a review of Marx Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that has the famous Preface that became the authority for Second International versions of historical materialism. For a recent defense of this view, see G.A. Cohen, Karl Marxs Theory of History: A Defense, New York, Oxford University Press and the critique by Andrew Levine and Eric Olin Wright, Rationality and the Class Struggle, New Left Review, 123 (Sept./Oct., 1980). 17. Liberalism and Social Action: 81. In Individualism Old and New, Dewey had chastized Marx for reasoning too much from psychological economic premises and depending too little upon technological causes (102). 18. See Phillip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay and Derek Sayer, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique, New York, Monthly Review, 1978; Marc Rakovski, Towards an East European Marxism, London, Allison and Busby, 1978.

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19. The expression is C. Wright Mills. Mills made a similar critique of Dewey in his Sociology and Pragmatism, New York, Oxford, 1966. 20. See Dewey, The Need for a New Party, Who Might Make a New Party? and Politics for a New Party, New Republic, Vol. 66 (1931); The Future of Radical Political Action, Nation, Vol. 136 (1933); The Imperative Need for a New Radical Party. Commonsense, II (1933). For a general account of the Socialist Party and its relation to the Dewey-led League for Independent Political Action, see Frank A. Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930s, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1974, esp. Chapter V. 21. See my A Realist Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 22. Arthur Lothstein, From Privacy to Praxis, p. 80. Lothstein points out that the criticism of a new kind of Stoicism, was made a month after Deweys eighty-eighth birthday, in 1947. Dewey argued that on this view, existence reduces pretty well to what the individual can make out of it on his own hook, and added, I think they are reactions of people who are scared and have not the guts to face life (ibid., p. 60f., quoting from a letter to William Daniels, Letters of John Dewey to Robert V. Daniels, 194650, Journal of the History of Ideas, XX October-December, 1959.

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John Dewey and the Problem of Justice

The problem of justice continues to be a topic of lively debate. The continuing struggle over civil rights, our anguish over the war in Iraq and the socalled war on terror, our continuing unease over the economy, immigration and the environment, skepticism regarding the system of criminal justice, and doubts about our educational institutions identify the main historical forces and problems which underlie the current discussion. The symptoms and issues cover a very wide range: attacks on affirmative action, death penalty legislation and attacks on the rights of the accused, profoundly exacerbated by the war on terror, and, propelled by free market ideology, tax revolt and cutbacks in education and social services. At the level of social theory, John Rawlss A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, generated a veritable industry. His difficult and highly praised book seems to have arrived at exactly the right time, perhaps because it offered a powerful statement and defense of what was probably mainstream liberal thinking on justice. Rawlss theory is individualistic, but his recognition of the least advantaged, coupled with his attention to what he called, pure procedural justice, seemed to confirm our most basic intuitions about justice. To be sure, there were immediate criticisms of some of the more vulnerable arguments, but these received a greater response from the right than from the left. Indeed, Robert Nozicks critical treatment in his 1974 Anarchy, State and Utopia gave him a cover of the popular and liberal New York Times Magazine. Not only was the presence there of a philosopher significant and unusual; but he was there heralded as the most articulate of the new spokesmen of conservative, individualistic thinking on justice. Indeed, as regards the current state of opinion, Nozick, seems to have conquered Rawlss version of New Deal Liberalism.
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In this context, it may be useful to consider the writings of John Dewey, Americas foremost social philosopher. And in this context, if one surveys the voluminous writings of Dewey, writings which span over seven decades until his death in 1952, the first thing that one notices is the relative inattention paid by Dewey to the problem of justice. Altogether, there are perhaps not more than a dozen pages of sustained discussions devoted explicitly to the topic. These discussions are insightful and important, little gems, and in what follows, it will be a pleasure to appeal to them. But the first task, really the main task of this presentation, is to try to explain this apparent imbalance in Deweys attention. Deweys lack of discussion of the theory and problems of justice is not to be explained by a failure to see problems, nor by an unwillingness to deal with them at the theoretical or practical level. Indeed, the two most substantial discussions of justice were written during two periods of acute crisis in our economy, during the 1890s and again, in 1932. Similarly, Deweys active involvement in a host of public matters of social and political nature are too well known to recite here. Several of these, e.g., the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, raised serious questions of justice.1 There are, I believe, two sets of reasons that do explain this imbalance. They are important and give us insight into both our problems and Deweys unique strengths as a social philosopher. One set of reasons specifically regards this stance. As a social philosopher, Dewey was a writer who aimed not to write a social philosophya doctrinebut who aimed rather to show how we must try to seek solution of our social problems. The other set regards the very idea of justice. It seems to me that Dewey, for various reasons to be detailed, sought to displace justice as the central concept of social philosophy. However, for these same reasons, he found himself using the term less and less, until ultimately he abandoned it altogether. These two sets of reasons are definitely related, but it may nevertheless be desirable to treat them more or less separately, taking the idea of justice first.

TWO CONCEPTS OF JUSTICE It is possible to show that there are two dominating conceptions of justice in Western Civilization. The first had its home and only full articulation in the ancient Greek polis.2 Plato and Aristotle, of course, develop it with sophistication and vigor. The other concept of justice was also first formulated in the ancient Greek polis, in Periclean Athens. It is associated with the names of Democritus and Protagoras. But this idea of justice did not come into its own until the modern period, with Hobbes and Locke, Kant, Hume, and 19th-

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century liberal philosophy. We should call it the liberal concept of justice. It remains the dominating concept in the West, and Rawls and his more conservative critics, despite differences, stand in this tradition. The liberal concept of justice favors atomistic metaphors and voluntary relations, for example, the contract; it is conventionalistic, arguing that justice and political society are artifacts deliberately and rationally constructed; it is legalistic, emphasizing formal and procedural justice; it employs market notions of distributive justice, presupposes scarcity and finally, it is harsh and hard. As Hume put it, justice is the mean virtue. By contrast, the PlatonicAristotelian notion of justice favors organic metaphors and conceive of human relations and political society as natural; it presupposes natural inequalities, emphasizes morality instead of law, and thinks of justice very widely. As Aristotle said, it is the whole of virtue. While this is not the place to develop this radical contrast, an illustration of each concept may be helpful if only to fix our ideas. Platos Republic aimed to answer the question: What is justice? For him, it will be remembered, justice is a condition of the soul, a psychic harmony, a prerequisite of just acts and, crucially, of well being and happiness (eudaimonia) itself. Parallel with this analysis, justice is a condition of the polis that is itself thought of as an organic unity. Each element, class or person, has a task (ergon) which, when performed well, contributes to the well being of the totality. The four virtues, Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice are each defined as functions of the social and psychic unities of society and self. At the very opposite pole is Thomas Hobbes. Where men are in the natural condition, for Hobbes, there is neither justice nor injustice. The consensually introduced mechanism of impersonal law that constitutes political society also constitutes the very possibility of justice. Once done, natural equity and justice is replaced by one principle, performance of the convenant. The whole apparatus of customary rights and privileges is similarly reduced: To each according to the agreements he has made. To be sure, Hobbess theory was too extreme, too tough-minded. And no doubt, subsequent versions of contract theory from Locke to Rawls responded with corrections and additions. Nevertheless, there is a clearly identifiable tradition that must be sharply separated from the earlier one. Where then does Dewey stand as regards these two concepts and traditions of justice? In the last analysis, Dewey could not accept either, even if he did pull strongly toward the Greek. In his Syllabus of 1884, Dewey noted in many respects, the discussions of virtue in Plato and Aristotle are still unequaled. Indeed, following them, if in his own novel fashion, he argued that that courage, temperance and wisdom denote simply phases of every moral act and that the name is

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given according to the phase which, in a given case, happens to be dominant. Justice, then, argues Dewey,
is the name for the deed in its entirety. . . . It is not another virtue, it is the system of virtue, the organized doing: whose organic members are wisdom, the will to know; courage, the impulse to reach; control, the acquired power to do. (EW, Vol. 4: 363, 357).

As this text shows, Dewey is very, very Greek in holding that justice is the virtue of a unity organically related, even if at the same time, Dewey rejected the faculty psychology which is generally imputed to Greek moral philosophy. He is Greek, too, in couching virtue in terms of self-development and self-realization, even if for him in contrast to the Greeks, the underlying notion of human nature is open, dynamic, and changing; not closed, static, and fixed.3 Dewey and the Greeks agreed that persons were doers, exerting, developing and enjoying human powers and capacities and that the concern for realization of these powers should be at the center of a moral and social philosophy.4 But if so, then justice could not be reduced to obedience to law or to just desert. His text continues:
. . . the current distinction between justice as penal, and justice as concrete recognition of positive merit by the share awarded an agent . . . is far too rigid. . . . Unconsciously there is smuggled in the assumption that worth is static; that what a man has done is somehow complete in itself, and serves to indicate his merit, and therefore, the way he should be treated. Service is taken as some thing rendered, not as a function . . . (EW: Vol. 4: 359).

The idea that worth is static and that deserts and entitlements are like commodities, exchangeable as equivalents for things exactly characterizes the market conception of justice, the dominant mode of modern thinking on the subject. Dewey struggles in this text, as in others, to drive home the limiting and incomplete nature of this framework for justice. He writes:
When it was said that the ordinary concept of desert concealed a momentous assumption, it was meant that the whole dualism of justice and love is involved. If justice be conceived as mere return to an individual of what he has done, if his deed, in other words, be separated from his vital, developing self, and if, therefore, the equivalent return ignore the profound and persistent presence of self-hood in the deed, then it is true that justice is narrow in its sphere, harsh in form, requiring to be supplemented by another virtue of larger outlook and freer playGrace. But if justice be the returning to a man of the equivalent of his deed, and if, in truth, the sole thing which equates the deed is self, then quite otherwise. Love is justice brought to self-consciousness; justice with a full, in-

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stead of a partial standard of value; justice with a dynamic, instead of a static, scale of equivalency (361).

Our ordinary sense of justice is narrow, is harsh. Recognizing, though ambivalently and sometimes incoherently, that persons are dynamic selves relating humanly to one another and to the world, we think of justice as requiring supplementation, by mercy, by kindness, by love. But surely that misleads as well. It is not either justice or love. It is not justice or charityfrom caritas, love. This accepts the dualism and allows us to paste over injustice with gratuities. But how to overcome this dualism? Dewey had it right: Once we reject the idea that deeds are things to be exchanged for equivalents, we undermine the dualism, for then, it is possible to link the deed with the self. But Dewey remains contaminated by the market theory of justice. Significantly, he puts the matter conditionally: if justice be the returning to a person of the equivalent of his deed. And he lets us muse as to whether he would have preferred to deny the hypothesis altogether. But if we are to think of justice in these terms, and as moderns, it is hard to see how to do otherwise, then for Dewey, at least at this point, let us try not to disconnect the deed from the vital, changing self. Dewey will return to these themes just twice more, in the Ethics written collaboratively with James Tufts, published originally in 1908 and then in substantial revision in 1932. As in the earlier Syllabus, Dewey focuses on the notion that justice is hard and harsh and he develops another dimension of this attitude. Here, he argues that it comes from identifying justice with the working of some fixed and abstract law . . .as if man was made for law, not law for man (MW: Vol. 5: 373). Although pursuing this idea systematically would take us directly into Deweys problem-centered and inquiry-oriented style of social philosophy, we should pause here if only briefly to emphasize the pervasiveness of the notion, as it bears on the problem of justice. Dewey clearly saw that alongside the market conceptualization of justice was another that derived ultimately from Kant. It put heavy emphasis on duty and obligation and its most austere and rigorous form is captured by the Latin, Fiat justitia, ruat coelum, let justice be done, let the heavens fall. Dewey took this phrase as the title for a brief, popular essay written for the New Republic in 1971. Rejecting the legalism and formalism which so typically characterizes moral discussions of justice, whether of war and international relations, as in this case, or of race or sex, Dewey identified such ethics as resolutely irrelevant to the circumstances of action and the conditions of life (1929: 592). In another and earlier essay, entitled Nature and Reason in Law (1914), Dewey pregnantly characterized the chief working difference between moral philosophies in their application to law. It was, he argued,

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that some of them seek for an antecedent principle by which to decide; while others recommend the consideration of the specific consequences that flow from treating a specific situation this way or that, using the antecedent materials and rules as guides of intellectual analysis but not as norms of decision(795). This text, we might note here, could well be the point of departure for an extended analysis of the current debate over affirmative action programs as, of course, it compresses an entire potential legal philosophy. For Dewey, this methodological inversion explained in part the limiting and narrowing conception of justice. And in the 1908 discussion, Dewey again calls, optimistically, for the transformation of the conception of justice so that it joins hands with love and sympathy (MW: Vol. 5: 37374). But one can hardly be heartened by these remarks. The problem seems inescapable. The liberal notion of justice was liberating insofar as it made men indiscriminately subject to impersonal law and insofar as it broke the basis of privilege based on hereditary status, but Dewey saw early on that the liberal notion was far too narrow, too rigid. So he struggled to enlarge it, to remedy its partiality, to supplement it. And if we grant that love and sympathy are the requisite supplementations, one may legitimately wonder how good a merely just society or merely just person would be? For the Greek, this could not be a question. With their notion of justice, the just man and the just society had to be good. And, of course, if love and sympathy are the requisite supplementations to our ordinary sense of justice, then one may legitimately wonder how we are to proceed. Indeed, the deeper Dewey looked into the problems and issues of liberal society, the more disjointed became the effort to transform and widen liberal justice.

LIBERAL SOCIETY AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Dewey was never sanguine regarding the mechanisms of distribution in liberal society. Still less was he mystified by the rhetoric of the current theories. This may be brought out by considering Tuftss contribution to the collaborative 1908 edition of their Ethics. Dewey must surely have endorsed the pertinent pages. Indeed, in the revision of 1932, it seems that Dewey himself wrote the crucial Chapter 21 that restated the issues and reaffirmed their earlier stance. We may look first at the earlier version, noting well the early date of the text. Characteristically, the locus of the critique is individualism. They begin by arguing that if we take a purely formal view and make formal freedom of contract the only criterion, then any price is fair which both parties agree to (MW, Vol. 5: 475). This position, characteristic of Hobbes, and of classi-

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cal and neoclassical political economy, is substantially the position argued for by Nozick in the recent work cited earlier. Although the argument cannot be developed here, Nozicks entitlement theory, while very much enriched by detail and the sophistication of modern decision theory, is, I would argue, subject quite precisely to Tuftss criticism. It is this: If the exchange is to be fair, the parties to the bargain must be equal. But in a large part of the exchanges of business and services, the two parties are not equal.5 In other terms, where some must accept the conditions of the contract, formal freedom of contract is not a sufficient condition. In his 1932 statement of this theory, Dewey characterizes it even more economically. Its motto is to each what he can get through his ability, his shrewdness, his advantageous economic position due to inherited wealth and every other factor that adds to his bargaining power . . . Dewey rightly notes that this is the existing method under capitalism (Dewey and Tufts, 1912: 454), as today, owners of baseball teams, school boards, and the AMA tend to forget. The take-advantage-of-your-bargaining-power theory of justice has another, less rude, version. It is characterized by Dewey by the motto: To each what he earns. This theory, plausible enough on its face, due perhaps to the multitude of difficulties concealed in the notion of earn, does not, argues Dewey, characterize capitalist distribution. But it must be rejected in any case, since it cannot be realized. It cannot be realized because production is social. The point is important but often misunderstood. In producingtoasters, services, skills, or knowledgeindividuals employ knowledge, skills, and instruments that are the legacy of previous generations of workers. Moreover, and characteristically, productsincluding knowledgeare jointly produced in the more obvious sense that they are products of many hands and minds. Suppose, then, we take the Gross National Product to represent the combined social productan entirely artificial measure for the product we need to measure, but useful perhaps to fix our ideas. The earning theory of distribution, then (like its sophisticated relative, modern productivity theory), presupposes that it is possible to divide up the GNP and assign to each individual exactly what is hers or his. No part of this is to be shared on grounds that we cant disentangle our contribution; no part is a residue earned by past labor and no part is earned by anyone. The problem here is not simply whether this division is fair, whether each receives a just share, but whether, indeed, any coherent sense can be given to the idea that respective contributions to the social product can be so disentangled. For Dewey, rightly, it was obvious that they could not.6 But this is not the end of the difficulties for the individualistic theories, for as Dewey and Tufts write, they suffer from a serious moral failure. Achievement and failure, what one does contribute, or earn is a function of three

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things: heredity, social advantage and the socially produced conditions of knowledge and environment and, finally, individual effort. It is not a matter of individual effort alone. It is at this juncture that Rawlss influential theory departs from traditional individualisms, for with Tufts and Dewey, Rawls agrees that accidents of birththe good fortune to be born rich and handsomeare not in themselves morally relevant. And indeed, if so, then one can ask, as does Dewey and Tufts, If all men are accounted equal in the State, why not in wealth? (Dewey and Tufts, 1932: 359). It is perhaps here that the contrast in the orientation of Dewey and of Rawls is most graphic and where, at the same time, Dewey reveals both his greatest strength as a social philosopher and perhaps, as well, his greatest weakness. Consider Rawlss response first. For Rawls, the family is the key problem and, short of restructuring it, natural talents and social advantages will inevitably be rewarded. I think that it can easily be shown that Rawls gives up too quickly here. Indeed, as we suggest, Dewey and Tufts have a more encouraging response. But Rawlss originality begins at exactly this point, for his famous difference principle is meant precisely to justify inequalities that, however they come about, had best not be removed. His argument is quite straightforward. An egalitarian distribution would be inefficient but an efficient system need not be just. It would be just, however, if social and economic inequalities were arranged so that there was fair equality of opportunity and, crucially, so that the least advantaged were better off than they otherwise would have been. If Rawls is right, something looking very much like our system is, in his terms, nearly just. To be sure, we have some way to go in achieving fair equality of opportunitynotice that this still rewards natural ability and that, for Rawls, the family remains (and will remain) a crucial limitation even on this. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that, for Rawls, we are doing perhaps as well as can be expected. Tufts and Dewey take an entirely different tack. After evaluating the extant theories, they offer, instead of their own theory, what they call a working program. The gist of it is contained in a short paragraph:
A mans power is due (I) to physical heredity; (2) to social heredity . . . (3) to his own efforts. Individualism may properly claim this third factor. It is just to treat men unequally so far as their efforts are unequal. It is socially desirable to give as much incentive as possible to the full development of everyones powers. But this very same reason demands that in the first two respects we treat men as equally as possible (490).

This working program is radical since, ultimately, it means that no unequal benefits should accrue to persons exclusively on the basis of their natural talents or on the basis of socially derived advantages. But it is a working pro-

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gram in the sense that it leaves entirely open the means by which the ideal is to be achieved. It does not demand radical revolution in order to achieve a radical restructuring of society, even if the realization of the ideal would involve a radical restructuring of society. And it does not insist on any particular ameliorative reforms, even if there are steps that could and should be taken. And it is in this that Deweys greatest strength and weakness may be revealed. For it is not at all easy to judge whether or not Dewey saw how radical the ideal was or how radical would the changes have to be to bring the ideal into existence. In both the 1908 and the 1932 discussions, education characteristically is emphasized as means. But conditions of food, labor and housing and the importance of private property are also identified. In the later discussion, Dewey responded passionately to the notion that because per capita income had increased greatlyshades of Rawls!it was foolish to raise the question of distribution. Indeed, in direct contrast to Rawls, he argued that wealth, not income is the crucial variable: The individuals or corporations that have great wealth undertake great enterprises. They control for better or worse the wages and living conditions of great numbers(454).7 These same sorts of criticisms are found in many of Deweys writings and demonstrate that he was keenly aware of the bearing of the system of private property not only on the problem of justice, but on the problem of freedom and democracy as well.8 Yet, many commentators have found grounds for arguing that Dewey was naive in having unwarranted hopes for the efficacy of education even as an ameliorative factor. This is probably so.9 The backlash on affirmative action and ERA, the decisive, if inevitable failures of poverty programs and efforts to guarantee equal education for all, would indeed have been disheartening to Dewey. And as disheartening, perhaps, is the renewed enthusiasm for what are really quite worn out individualistic theories of justice. His own theory could be stated in a sentence, first written in 1891: What is due the self is that it be treated as self (Dewey and Tufts, 1932:35). In the last analysis, Dewey preferred working programs over theories. Indeed, this takes us to the final part of our account.

SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY It is another of the commonplaces of commentators on John Deweys thought that he was preoccupied with method, indeed sometimes to the extent that content altogether seemed to dissolve.10 This is not the place to examine all the difficult questions which attend this criticism, but as regards our particular problem, the problem of justice, I think that it must be said that Deweys social philosophy does represent a departure from traditional social philosophies and

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that this shift is perhaps best construed as an orientation which displaced the problem of justice as a substantive theoretical problem and replaced it with an orientation which emphasized problems and ideas that connected more directly to method and to practice. This alternative point of departure in Deweys thought may be best expressed in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) although many texts confirm the idea. Identifying three alternative social philosophies, the individualistic, the socialist, and the organic, Dewey argued that all suffer from a common defect.
They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. . . . They are general answers supposed to have universal meaning that covers and dominates all particulars. Hence, they do not assist inquiry. They close it. They are not instrumentalities to be employed and tested in clarifying concrete social difficulties. . . . The social philosopher, dwelling in the region of his concepts, solves problems by showing relationships of ideas, instead of by helping men solve problems in the concrete. . . .(Dewey, 1948: 188, 192).

This is the touchstone idea of Deweys emphasis on inquiry, experimentalism, and instrumentalism. Within Deweys frame, current debate on justice would suffer from the same defects of abstraction, from the same irrelevance to the actual conditions of education, of work, and of association, from the same aristocratic detachment that seems presupposed by the idea that philosophers can solve human problems. Deweys critics on the left are also correct, however, in judging that his experimentalist and method-centered attitude left him vulnerable to two alternativeand at bottom inconsistentsorts of readings. On the one hand, Deweys efforts to shift the focus of social philosophy away from doctrine led some to see Dewey as advocating an engineering and scientistic conception of social philosophy and inquiry. This view, inspired by Deweys repeated assertion that social questions could be treated scientifically and experimentally, meant for those readers something like the sort of practice which presumably goes in laboratories manned by persons in white coats and constrained by canons of efficiency and positive control. On this viewtechnocratic and still fashionablea new breed of social scientists would provide that expert knowledge that would speedily solve concrete social problems. (See the account of Lippman, Chapter 7.) In the last analysis, this reading cannot be sustained, even if Dewey did give ample room for misconstrual. Perhaps his willingness and openness to incorporate and encourage ideas that seemed congenial to him further confused matters. One might mention here his long association with A.F. Bent-

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ley and his attraction in the late 1920s to the operationist views of P.W. Bridgman. On the other hand, it led others to see Dewey as committed to a kind of unprincipled reformism, to a defense of patchwork suggestions as responses to the outcropping of crisis. As argued in Chapter 9 above, Dewey was reformist in his attitude, rejecting consistently the idea that societies could be intelligently transformed by radical and revolutionary programs. His approach was piecemeal, a call to deal amelioratively with concrete and particular problems. Thus, for him, Marxism was doctrinaire in offering sweeping generalizations and general solutions to general problems. Dewey was surely sensitive to the problem of the unintended consequences of radical change and to the ease with which progressive movements become appropriated and distorted. But it must be said as well that while his ideals were radical, as we already noted, his appreciation of obstacles preventing their realization was probably naive. Nevertheless, his reformism was hardly unprincipled and his shift in focus was both sound and important. Indeed, I believe that there is much to be learned from him on this score. For Dewey, the problem of justice, as the problems of freedom and democracy, cannot be solved by experts or by philosophers. They could only be solvedif that is still the right wordby people in the everyday world in their doings and sufferings. Dewey seems to have grasped this and that is why, in the last analysis, the content of his social philosophy seems so thin and, finally, so painfully obvious. There are, it seems to me, but two items in it: First, there is the idea that the level of action fixed by embodied intelligence is always the important thing(Dewey, 1954:166), and second, the idea that democracy is a way of life, individual and social. These crucially related ideas defined the limits of social philosophy. Movement in the direction of their realization was movement toward an ideal in the only sense of ideal that Dewey allowedthe tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to his final limit (148). As with justice, they identified a working program and, crucially, a program that could be implemented only by people in their individual and collective doings and sufferings. This did not mean, for Dewey, that philosophy had nothing to do. Indeed, there was a great deal to be said about both ideals and about their mode of realization. The whole of Deweys extensive writings on methods of inquiry and on education, both in and out of the school, issue in the idea of action fixed by embodied intelligence. As Dewey saw it, the application of intelligence to social problems meant not the application of new techniques by experts, however defined, nor did it reduce to the application of antecedently derived principles to concrete particular situations. Rather, the canons had to be generated in inquiry and realized in practice. And this kind

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of social knowledge does not yet exist (166). The only possible solution, he wrote, to the problems generated by interdependence require the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuine shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action (155). And as this text suggests, this was both condition and consequence of democracy as a way of life, the other guiding ideal of Deweys social philosophy. Accordingly, the whole of his writings on democracy, community, freedom, and culture bear on this second theme. Keeping this in mind allows us, finally, to grasp the full force of this wonderful text: Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problem of men (McDermott, 1973: 95). If it is philosophers who have the task of articulating and cultivating these methods, it is people themselves who must employ them. Dewey was insufficiently radical regarding the difficulties standing in the way of transforming The Great Society into The Great Community, but he never fell victim to pat solutions. He saw that we never begin anew, from scratch, from nothing. We either1 sustain the inherited forms or we transform them, purposefully and intelligently, whimsically and stupidly, coercively or cooperatively. Dewey put his faith in the possibility that action could be conjoint, purposeful, and intelligent. He put the matter crisply in his 1919/20 lectures in China. Responding to the question, Where should we start in reforming our society? Dewey answered:
. . . we must start by reforming the component institutions of the society. Families, schools, local governments, the central governmentall these must be reformed, but they must be reformed by the people who constitute them, working as individualsin collaboration with other individuals, each accepting his own responsibility. . . . Social progress is neither an accident nor a miracle; it is the sum of efforts made by individuals whose actions are guided by intelligence (Dewey, 1973: 6263).

But he also saw, as John J. McDermott has written, that if the responsibility is ours and ours alone, the transformation of the processes and forms of living is, at the same time, laced with chance (McDermott, 1973: xxi).

NOTES
1. See George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1973): 234.

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2. See my Two Concepts of Justice, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 4 (1977): 99121. 3. Cf. here, of course, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt, 1922). 4. C.B. Macpherson has argued that J.S. Mill tried to incorporate this fundamental feature of Greek Idealism into his liberalism, though the result was less than satisfactory. See his Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 5. Dewey gives the same argument against classical individualism and free enterprise in his lectures in China. See John Dewey, Lectures in China, 19191920, edited and translated from the Chinese by Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen Ou (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973): 113. 6. It may be noted here that modern price theory employs the fiction that marginal products are so divisible. This makes for quite a respectable mathematical theory, useful as a praxiology. But it doesnt follow that a theory of justice that assumes the fiction is intelligible. In this regard, Nozicks criticism of Rawls is interesting. Rawls sees, if not clearly, that social cooperation does make a difference. By assuming that marginal products can be disentangled, Nozick argues that Rawlss account of the problem created by social cooperation is mistaken. Nozick does show, however, that Rawlss individualism does not square with his view of social 7. Rawls obliterates the distinction between income and wealth by inattention. He persistently refers to income and wealth but never addresses the difference. Accordingly, for him it would seem to be unimportant. 8. See, for example, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954): 1012, 107; Philosophies of Freedom, in R.J. Bernstein, ed., On Experience, Nature and Freedom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960): 271; Liberalism and Social Action, excerpted in John J. McDermott, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey (New York: G.P. Putnams, 1973), two vols.: 648. 9. For example, R.J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971): 228; C.W. Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964): 333. 10. See, for example, Charles Frankel, Deweys Social Philosophy, in New Studies in the Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. S. M. Cahn (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977).

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Liberalisms Discontent: America in Search of a Past that Never Was

One has to be impressed by the fact that Americas premier University continues to provide us with people who write brilliant, wise, elegant, impressive and refreshing books which it needs so desperately. As democratic theorist Jane Mansbridge put it, Harvards Michael Sandels Democracys Discontent: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996) is bound to change the course of American historiography, political philosophy and legal scholarship. George Will, not generally thought of as a theorist of democracy, was equally enthusiastic. In his words, Sandels book is a thinking persons guide to the current rethinking of the role of government in America. Like Robert Nozicks Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) that made him a darling to the minimal government-free marketers who triumphed with Reagan and Company, Sandels book is aimed at John Rawlss influential A Theory of Justice (1971). It seems well on its way to make him a darling of the new republican-communitarians. I can only hope that some evangelical defender of soulcraft does not come to capture the imagination of our deeply troubled society. But this gets well ahead of what I want to say. Sandels argument is subtle and deceptive, even if, for me at least, it is a combination of bad philosophy, bad sociology, bad history and bad politics. I begin with the philosophy.

LIBERAL AND REPUBLICAN FREEDOM There is a currently fashionable dichotomy between what George Kateb called rights-based liberalism and American republican-communitarianism. It is
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clear enough that Rawls and Nozick (along with Flathman, Dworkin, Feinberg, Gewirth, Sen, and many others) are, despite differences, rights-based liberals. The other side is a much less clear bunch and might include any number of diverse writers who have criticized liberal philosophy and promoted some version or other of community, including John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Robert Paul Wolff, Charles Taylor, Roberto Mangiabera Unger, Michael Walzer, Carol Gould, Hannah Pitkin, Amitai Etzioni, and some others besides. The relation to democracy of these writers is also very diverse. Presumably, one of the notable achievements of Sandel is have clarified this argument, to show us both the limits of rights-based liberalism and that there is a viable alternative well within the American tradition. His main distinction, accordingly, is between what he calls the procedural republicthe version of liberalism by which we live (he offers that the label was suggested by Judith Sklar) and republican theory. As regards the procedural republic, then:
Its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse. Since people disagree about the best way to live, governments should not affirm in law any particular vision of the good life. Instead, it should provide a framework of rights that respects persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends. Since this liberalism asserts the priority of fair procedures over particular ends, the public life it informs may be called the procedural republic (Sandel, 1996: 4).

This is, of course, a fair statement of both Rawls and Nozick. It is less clear that it abstracts correctly the prevailing public philosophy, but I pass on that here. In sharp contrast to republican theory, as understood by Sandel, we should emphasize that neither Rawls nor Nozick had much to say about democracy. Rawls assumed some form of representative regime and (with Mill) even defended plural voting. While democracy is not even indexed in Rawlss book, Nozick surely goes further. After acknowledging that democracy is the idea that people have a right to a say in the decisions that importantly affect their lives, Nozick asserts, remarkably: After we exclude from consideration the decisions which others have a right to make and the actions which would aggress against me, steal from me, and so on, . . . it is not clear that there are any decisions remaining about which even to raise the question (Nozick, 1974: 270). Both Rawls and Nozick do capture certain strands in the prevailing public philosophy, but the differences between them are criticaland much of what might be in this philosophy is not captured in the least. Thus, for example, both positions are certainly too extreme for most Americans. Rawls is too egalitarian; Nozick is too libertarian. Both Rawls and Nozick should be com-

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plemented for their refreshing reluctance to mostly ignore the critical idea of democracy. As regards most Americans, it is true to say, I think, that democracy is safely understood to be defined by free elections (period). Since neither Rawls nor Nozick reject this idea, their views are safely consistent with the prevailing public philosophy. Sandel acknowledges that the prevailing conception of liberal political theory has its roots in Locke, Kant and Mill, but at the same time, he asserts that it is a recent arrival, a development of the last fourth or fifty years. Indeed, it replaced a rival public philosophy, republican theory. This is characterized as follows:
Central to republican theory is the idea that liberty depends on sharing in selfgovernment. This idea is not inconsistent with liberal freedom. Participating in politics can be one among the ways people choose to pursue their ends. According to republican political theory, however, sharing in self-rule involves something more. It means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community. But to deliberate well about the common good requires more than the capacity to choose ones ends and to respect others rights to do the same. It requires knowledge of public affairs and also a sense of belonging a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake. To share in self-rule therefore requires that citizens possess, or come to acquire certain qualities of character, or civic virtue (1996: 56).

Sandels emphasis on self-rule makes his version of republican theory looks like, of course, a version of democracy, but surprisingly absent in this characterization is any critical sense of what self-rule might mean or what would count as deliberating about the common good, or helping to shape the destiny of the political community. His concern, manifestly, is certain qualities of character essential to self-rule. Indeed, there is nothing in the book that attends to the currently profound structural limits on self-rule. Perhaps the best that he does on this score is to endorse Tocquevilles potentially beautiful trivialization of democracy: Local attachments enable citizens to practice the art of government in the small sphere within [their] reach (314). Their reach may, of course, be pitiably small. Ideally at least, the reach extends as the sphere extends (314). This extension is also efficiently discussed: Presumably, civic capacities first wakened in neighborhoods and town halls, churches and synagogues, trade unions and social movements find broader expression (314). One need not take a radical stance as regards self-rule to wonder about this suggestion. That is, suppose that all decisions of major social importance are made by either private corporations or governments dominated by two parties who

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fundamentally share a public philosophy? There would be no institutional means to make even this broader expression felt. As long ago as 1925, Walter Lippmann pointed out that in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, modern democracy was purely and simply a matter of choosing whether to support the Ins when things are going well, or to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly. (See Chapter 7.) Moreover, as regards knowledge of public affairs, Lippmann saw also before televisionthat public opinion was manufactured, that, to shift the metaphor, for the ordinary citizen, the problem was to secure maps on which their own need, or someone elses need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia. For Lippmann, even if they were so disposed, ordinary people (including representative bodies which he called a group of blind men) cannot get the information they need: what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. We are, as C.W. Mills was later to argue, a mass dominated by mass media. In turn (as everybody knows, but cannot do anything about), these are dominated by money, both because they need to sell their products (and ads) and because they are owned by a handful of corporations. This is, of course, but part of this story. But if Sandel is not interested in looking at how citizens might effectively participate in governance, he is deeply interested in looking at the qualities of character, the civic virtue, which is required if citizens are to be self-ruled. Indeed, his fundamental (almost exclusive) concern (as with Plato and, more recently George Will), is that, contrary to liberals, government ought not to be neutral (even if it could) and even more, that governments have legitimate concerns with soulcraft, what he elsewhere calls the formative project. His clearest statement of the content of civic virtue comes from George Will. Sandell writes:
Unlike Falwell, who sought Americas salvation in a rebirth of Christian morality, Will sought to cultivate civic virtue, the dispositions, habits and mores on which free government depends. By virtue he meant good citizenship, whose principle components are moderation, social sympathy and willingness to sacrifice private desires for public ends (1996: 310).

Sandel, like Will, Etzioni and many other communitarians would seem to have a theory of society in which problems can be solved by changing the morals of persons. Perhaps it is assumed that until such time that people acquire that civic virtue which is the prerequisite of self-rule, we need not worry about either how people are to get the information they need, how to deconstruct maps with the coastline of Bohemia drawn on them, or how to begin to alter structures so that people can have the power to make decisions that importantly affect their lives. I return to this in my last section.

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For Sandel, the formative project is both inescapable and carries risk (321). Indeed, the task of forging a common citizenship among a vast and disparate people invites more strenuous forms of soulcraft (319). One has to be impressed with the ease by which he deflects this risk. We may agree with him that the civic strand of freedom is not necessarily exclusive or coercive, that it can sometimes find democratic, pluralist expression (321, my emphases). But first, as liberals have long insisted, the key virtue in this regard is toleration, reveling in difference, a willingness as equals to engage disagreement and conflict. Here, as with the question of enlarging the sphere of self-rule, he seems guided by a faith similar to many of those who take for granted the structures of global capitalism and defend the currently fashionable idea of civil society. Sandel writes: Instead of collapsing the space between persons, it fills the space with public institutions that gather people together in various capacities, that both separate and relate them (320). He offers no suggestions on how this might be possible. Nor since he takes for granted both the modern state and global capitalism, it is hardly clear what good this would do. His notion that the state should not be morally neutral as regards morals and religion and that it has a responsibility to cultivate civic virtue leads him, inevitably, to some strikingly conservative conclusions. It is in these concrete cases where we best get the flavor of the high abstraction, civic virtue. He writes, e.g.:
What makes a religious belief worthy of respect is not its mode of acquisition whether by choice, revelation, persuasion, or habituationbut its place in a good life or, from a political point of view, its tendency to promote the habits and dispositions that make good citizens (1996: 66).

What are these habits and dispositions? Uncritical obedience? Undying commitment and loyalty? And what if believers have a prior obligation to God or to one of his emissaries? Suppose that such an obligation does not promote moderation, social sympathy and a willingness to sacrifice private desires for public ends, then what? The liberal can insist that such beliefs must be tolerated, as liberals see, a difficult enough task in itself (321), While there is no problem in justifying laws aimed at preventing harm to others, on Sandels principles, is it within the legitimate province of the state to suppress beliefs which do not promote moderation, social sympathy and a willingness to suppress private desires for public ends. This includes, as we shall see, the enforcement of morals as such. Sandel notes that in Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton, Chief Justice Burger wrote as if embarrassed to acknowledge the moral objection to obscenity as such, a reluctance that presumably, undercut the coherence of his argument.

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Thus, allowing the states to decide that commerce in obscenity may injure the community as a whole begs the question whether communal injury can consist in an offense against shared moral standards (1996: 77). Burger opted for his form of argument perhaps because he had read H.L.A Harts devastation of Lord Devlin. If the state can legislate for the sake of morality as such, then it can proscribe acts merely because they are sinful or wrong. In the light of human history, what could make anyone think that this is morally defensible? Perhaps, however, if his principles are not liberal, his intuitions are. This seems so in a number of instances. For example, he seems to think that sexual relations between consenting adults, heterosexual or not, should not be proscribed. But he is uncomfortable with a straightforward liberal defense of this, substantially that people should be free to choose their intimate relations themselves, regardless of the virtue or popularity of the practices they choose, so long as they do not harm others (104). He prefers, instead, the decision in Griswold where the court affirmed certain values and ends. It then articulated the virtues that homosexual intimacy may share with heterosexual intimacy, as well any distinctive virtues of its own: While homosexuals have no right to intimacy, family values justify it. Indeed, in the same vein, Sandel is most unhappy with no-fault divorce. By making dependence a dangerous thing, it burdens the practice of marriage as a community in the constitutive sense (115). If so, why not compel life-long marriage under all conditions? In any case, blaming no fault divorce for the grim statistics he quotes is just plain bad sociology. The problem is not that the law affirmed the encumbered self, but the consequence of profound structural problems in American society, coupled with a familiar inattention to the rights of divorced women. If we want to support marriage, we ought, at the very least, ensure that people have jobs that pay living wages and provide families and single-mothers with child support, daycare, etc. Nor even can we say that idea of no-fault was mistaken. There is nothing in that idea that says the former partner should not be held responsible. If alimony is not awarded and child support is not enforced, then we may suspect that patriarchy is at work in our liberal courts and justice system. One should not suppose that Sandel lacks arguments against liberals who are reluctant to embrace the formative project. But they are frightfully lean and implausible. What matters to the liberals, he writes (many times!), is not the ends we choose, but our capacity to choose them. It is this that is most essential to our personhood. What is wrong with this? Sandel offers that:
the philosophical difficulty lies in the liberal conception of citizens as freely choosing, independent selves, unencumbered by moral or civic ties antecedent

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to choice. This vision cannot account for a wide range of moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, such as obligations of loyalty or solidarity. By insisting that we are bound only by ends and roles we choose for ourselves, it denies that we can ever be claimed by ends we have not chosenends given by nature or God, for example, or by our identities as members of families, peoples, cultures, or traditions (1996: 322).

This describes is the familiar moral philosophy of individualism. Still one wonders about both the pertinent sociology which is being assumed and whether liberals are necessarily individualist in this sense? Sandel continually speaks of the liberal assumption that the self is unencumbered. A self is unencumbered, presumably, if first, the person has no obligations which are not voluntarily incurred and second, and more interesting, persons have identities which are independent of roles, including being members of [a] family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic (1996: 14). But if so, it is not clear that it is possible for a self to be unencumbered and if so, surely liberalism must fail. Consider obligations that presumably cannot be accommodated. Sandel knows that liberals can and generally do acknowledge non-voluntary natural obligations, or obligations owed to persons just because they are persons. Thus, one has no right to harm others. Similarly, liberals acknowledge special obligations of (say) a parent to their children, just because they are voluntarily incurred. Are there then other obligations, to the nation or to other citizens of the republic, and what is their status? For Sandel, the liberal attempt to construe all obligation in terms of duties universally owed or obligations voluntarily incurred makes it difficult to account for civic obligations and other moral and political ties that we commonly recognize (14). It is not clear what the difficulty is. Of course, liberals do deny that we have a natural obligation to the political community in which we happen to live. As is well known, the problem of legitimacy (of political right) was solved in the modern period by liberals who insisted that only if citizens consent are they obligated. So for this form of liberal theory, the obligation to the state is not natural but voluntary. Most of us who have had problems with this position have no problems with the idea of voluntarily incurred obligations, but with the idea citizens consent. Since as Hume had insisted, if merely living in state (tacit consent) is consent, then, trivially, everybody consents. But this is not Sandels problem. Rather, he seems to think that because our identities are tied up not only with our families and roles, but also with our nation, obligations generated by these have presumptive moral force. It is easy for liberals to make sense of the claim that duties of parenthood have presumptive moral force. What of our identities as Americans, or Christiansor males or white men? So it is much less clear that we are to have sympathy

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for Robert E. Lee who opposed secession, but concluded that his obligation to Virginia was not merely of sentimental import, but had moral force (15). Presumably, as in Lees case, this obligation could override any other obligations he might have, including any obligation he might have to the Republic or to resist the profoundly immoral institution of slavery. This is a dangerous doctrine: One might, not implausibly, compare here the obligationsof an Eichmann or a Lt. Calley, a devout Christian, a jihadist, or member of the KKK? Moreover as regards selves, his view is stunningly essentialist. One would have thought that he would know that nations and the identities of persons are not natural kinds, but are socially constructed from biographically and historically available materials. This means, critically, that they are changed by both intended and intended actions sometimes in morally progressive ways, sometimes not. The institutions of slavery might well have led Robert E. Lee to abandoned his identity as a loyal Virginian and to identify himself as a loyal American. The recent construction of Serbian identity had led, of course, to ethnic cleansing, an incredibly vicious form of the formative project. As regards unencumbered selves, one suspects that Sandel is unduly under the influence of Rawls. One thus might hold that the persons in Rawlss constructed original position are not encumbered selves. But of course the point of that construction was precisely to deny that ones family, ethnic group, gender, or roles in society were relevant to defining the principles of justice. Rawlss social philosophy is cosmopolitan. Indeed, it was just here that Rawls was at his most emancipating. Here was a liberal who showed that the most liberal society in the world could not defend the fact that it was the most unequal society in the world. Moreover, as Charles Beitz shows, Rawlss theory is easily and plausibly extended to address global injustice.1 As far as I can tell, inequality is not a concern of Sandel. The idea, of course, of an encumbered self is implausible, but with the exception of Kant (and possibly of Robert Nozick), who has held to it? Kant badly confounded matters in bifurcating the phenomenal and the noumenal. Presumably our phenomenal, flesh and blood, concrete, historically located selves are encumbered. Our noumenal self, by contrast, is unencumbered. Our autonomy, accordingly, depended upon our capacities as rational beings to give law to ourselves. Sandel does not take on Kant. Nor shall I (even if think that his position is a disaster). What he does instead is to speak of Kantian liberals (generally unnamed) and then to allow us to believe that all liberals are committed to a Kantian ontology. One may wish here that he had been more careful. Indeed, one the huge difficulties in the book is a systematic ambiguity over whether Sandel is describing the Weltanschauung of the times and places in his book, or whether he is engaging normative the-

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ory. Worse, he lacks utterly a conception of ideology: the idea that certain philosophical theories may be articulating what are, or are to become, widely held but false beliefs, beliefs which, in fact, are in the interest of the powerful. This ambiguity immensely contributes to the usefulness of this book as ideology. I return to this. As noted, rights theorists all acknowledge non-voluntary obligations, but since they generally take a consequentialist position, they also insist that any obligation may be overidden. Moreover, directly against Sandel, they can affirm that identities are tied up with relations and roles and still insist that our personhood requires that we choose our endsnot God, not nature, not the government. Personhood requires agency, but agency is not, as per Kant, autonomyself-legislatingbut the capacity to choose such that given any choice, one could have done otherwise.2 Because we are always encumbered, our choices, including our choice of ends, are always both enabled and constrained both by our biographies and the social situation we find ourselves in. Liberals have not, it is true, generally noticed the stunning inequalities in what is enabled, nor that these inequalities are a straightforward consequence of socially constructed race, class and gender. Instead, they have tended to ignore enabling conditions and to think that the only constraint is legal. Of course, this is major weakness of most liberalism (partly addressed by Rawls). But this hardly calls for an abandonment of the idea that choosing ones ends is a fundamental value. Indeed, one must fear freedomas in Plato, Durkheim, or Freud to think otherwise (Manicas, 1974). Similarly, just as he confounds autonomy and agency, Sandel trades on the idea that the liberal is committed to what he calls the voluntarist conception of freedom. He writes, for example: The voluntarist conception of freedom that inspires this liberalism holds out a liberating vision, a promise of agency that could be realized even under conditions of concentrated power (Sandell, 1996: 278). Again, agency is not the issue. Even if the choices are all grim, the capacity to choose is the mark of agency. But Sandel is right that voluntarist or contractual freedom is a central piece of liberal ideology. Nozick is the surely best case. For him a choice is free if and only if it is voluntary. A choice is involuntary if and only if it is coerced, and as above, coercion is the threat or use of violence, including legal coercion exercised by the state. Coercive social relations just dont count. So, neither do the immense inequalities of freedom that result from ones position in prevailing social relations. For Nozick, if people have equal rights, then they are equally free (period). Insofar as he recognizes positive rights, or rights that oblige others (including especially the state) to do something to realize ones rights, Rawls

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would seem to see that freedom is very unequally distributed. Thus, rights demanded by Fair Equality of Opportunity, for example, the right to a good education, or those demanded by the Difference Principle, e.g., the right to income greater than the worst off in any other system of distribution, imply non-legal constraints on freedom. But still trapped in liberal ideology, he also asserts:
The inability to take advantage of ones rights and opportunities as a result of poverty or ignorance, and a lack of means generally, is sometimes counted among the constraints definitive of liberty. I shall not, however, say this, but rather I shall think of these things as affecting the worth of liberty, the value of the rights that the first principle allows (1971: 204).

But not all liberals are so whimsical about freedom. Perhaps the best (intuitively sensible, philosophically sound) definition of freedom was offered by Joel Feinberg (1973). On this view, freedom is a capacity to do something, have something or be someone. But capacities are defined by enabling factors such as competencies and resources, and persons are constrained by hindrances and obstacles that prevent them from doing, having or being. One can choose to sleep under the bridge, but cannot choose to sleep at the RitzCarlton if one lacks the required money. The idea of absolute freedom is both incoherent and undesirable. But there are people with practically no freedom in exactly the sense that ignorance and poverty have disenabled them. The least of their problems is the coercive power of the state. As, for example, Dewey well documented (Chapter 10), there are many problems with variant versions of liberal political philosophy; but the idea that there is a value in choosing our ends is not one of them. As I noted, one huge problem of liberal theory is its incoherence in acknowledging both the value of freedom and the equality of persons. It has thus persistently failed to address the problem of inequalities of freedom. Another, not unrelated to this, is the problem of democracy, to which I now turn.

REPUBLICAN FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY The foregoing has given the gist of the Sandels moral philosophy. Most of the book, however, is devoted to showing that the public philosophy that is the alternative to the procedural republic was present at the Founding and that it was replaced only recently. It what follows, I pursue two related themes. First, it is a mistake to hold that one can understand the liberal strand in American thought apart the civic republican strand. These were not independent and merely consistent ideas: They were part and parcel of the same bun-

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dle of ideas as they emerged at a critical juncture in Americas past.3 Sandels distinction is artificial. Indeed, as the few examples adduced above suggest, at every critical instance, in order to try to make his case, he holds that the authors of his case examples are confused, or inconsistent, or that we must read between the lines to see really what is being put forward.4 It never seems to occur to him that these interpretative difficulties are a function of the artificiality of his distinction. Worse, his distinction promotes a profoundly ideological understanding of the American past. This is my second major theme. Sandel is both historically and philosophically uncritical regarding the idea of democracy.

HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY Sandel would have us believe that the Founding Fathers (or least some important and leading set of them) had as among their goals a constitution which promoted self-government, and that one of the key problems presented by the so-called crisis period was the absence of the civic virtue required by citizens (128). Throughout the nineteenth century, then, the civic ideal of virtuous self-governing citizens was the dominant public philosophy in America. All of this is ideology in exactly the sense that these beliefs are false or distorted, and are both critical to the reproduction of the status quo and serve those who have power in America. I begin with the Founding. There are three or four fundamental facts for us to keep in mind. First, the War of Independence had converted farmers and mechanics, even the poorest of them and even some slaves, into armed citizens who, remarkably, had defeated one the best professional armies in the world. The war for independence was not likely to have had no impact on their political sensibilities. Edmund Morgan summarizes the main points very well:
Had the southern plantations not shifted from free to slave labor, had the planters continued to import masses of indentured servants and continued to pour them into their own and other colonies a few years later as indigent freedom, then the picture of social mobility in the colonial period and of class conflict in the Revolution might have been quite different. The Minutemen of 1774 might have been truly a rabble in arms, ready to turn from fighting the British to fighting their well-to-do neighbors . . . But in the century between 1676 and 1776 the growth of slavery had curbed the growth of a free, depressed lower class and correspondingly magnified the social and economic opportunities for whites. It is perhaps the greatest irony of a Revolution fought in the cause of freedom, a Revolution that indeed advanced the cause of freedom throughout the world, that the men who carried it out were able to unite against British

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oppression because they had so completely and successfully oppressed the largest segment of their own laboring population (Morgan, 1976: 182).

The analogies to Athens, well enough understood by a tradition that had followed Aristotle, knew exactly what was at issue in this situation. Athens made citizens of poor people in order to man the triremes. Would these American citizens be the equivalent of what for Aristotle was a maritime mob (nautikos ochlos)? Would they, as citizens, do what everyone knew all democracies do? Would they attack the institutions of private property? Indeed, it is quite impossible to underestimate the importance of Shays (little!) rebellion in this regard, an event which took place four months after the defunct Annapolis convention and some three months before the historic meeting at Philadelphia. Promoted by Massachusetts financial policies that had reaped enormous profits for holders of state notesand had forced farmers into foreclosure, it was, as the leading expert on finance for this period says, as surely class legislation as any paper money bill (Ferguson, 1961: 245). The trouble had begun in 1782 and accelerated. In the fall of 1786, farmers began petitioning and obstructing the proceedings of county courts. Governor Bowdoin clamped down, forbidding their assemblies as illegaleven though, as I note next, they were using exactly the same methods as they had used fifteen years earlier against British tyranny. When Shays led his group of 1100 on the arsenaltheir ultimate aims are unclear, Major General Shepherd fired a volley from his cannon. The crowd dispersed and was chased into the snowy woods. No one was hurt. Fourteen captured leaders were sentenced to death, but were later pardoned. Bowdoin lost the next election and the new legislature acquiesced to the demands of the farmers. Shays little rebellion did not involve the whole people of Massachusetts, still less of New York and the rest of the Confederacy. But Jefferson, in Paris, saw the importance of Shays little rebellion and concluded, rightly, that the new Constitution was the result of overzealous reaction to . . . democracy. The problem was not a lack of civic virtue, but of evident class legislationto be remedied by democratic participation. Second, the war unleashed democratic ideas. As colonial authority was collapsed, it is sometimes said that the colonists had returned to a state of nature. This was hardly the case. Yet, as Palmer emphasizes:
Governors, unable to control their assemblies, undertook to disband them, only to see most of the members continue to meet as unauthorized congresses and associations; or conventions of counties unknown to law, choose delegates to such congresses for provinces as a whole; or local people forcibly prevented the sitting of law courts . . . Violence spread, militias formed, and the Continental Congress called into the existence a Continental army (Palmer, 1969, Vol. 2: 109)

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The first Congress had developed out of these extra-legal provincial conventions and committees of correspondence. The idea was not to form a new government but to institutionalize a common front for ongoing negotiations; then after the fissure, to field an army. What needs to be emphasized here is that despite huge wartime problems, the Confederation worked.5 The peace brought unique conditions and unique opportunities. As Bailyn emphasized, even prior to the war, the American experience had led the colonies to move in directions opposite from Britain. As he writes: the Americans,
starting with seventh century assumptions, out of necessity . . . drifted backward, as it were, toward the medieval forms of attorneyship in representation. . . . The colonial town and counties . . . were largely autonomous, and they stood to lose more than they were likely to gain from a loose acquiescence in the action of central government (Bailyn, 1967: 164).

Localism, the aggrandizement of government in the legislative body contrary to the teachings of Montesquieu and Harrington regarding balanced governmentand a shift in the meaning of representation, were all signs of what had been traditionally recognized as shifts toward democracy. The shift in the idea of representation brings the foregoing together and takes us to the heart of Sandels ideas regarding both self-rule and civic virtue. A debate in Maryland in 1785 makes clear that during this period, Americans articulated two distinct and incompatible meanings of the word represent. In one sense, a representative could be defined, as in Hobbes and Locke, in terms of his authority. In this sense, as in Hobbes and Locke, we consent and thus create his authority. Even if the representative is elected (and he need not be), he acted for the people. By contrast a representative could be conceived merely as an agent, a servant of the people, elected and controlled by those he represents in the sense that he is instructed by them. In this sense, the people retained their power. Sovereignty was, in this sense, as Rousseau had insisted, inalienable.6 The Maryland House of Delegates had acted in favor of an emission of credit, legislation in favor of the debt-ridden farmers, but the Senate had refused to ratify it. Did the people then have a right to instruct their representatives in the upper house? The defenders of instruction held, rightly, that during the time Maryland had been a colony, it is was not denied, even by the Crown, that members of the lower house, the House of Delegates, were bound by their instructions from the people. During British rule, of course, the people had no claims on representatives on members of the upper house, since, of course, they were appointed by the Crown. For Samuel Chase the power to elect implied the power

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to instruct. If so, then the members of the upper house were also servants of the people. But if so, as an opponent insisted:
Planters, Farmers, Parsons, Overseers, Lawyers, Constables, Petifoggers, Physicians, Mechanicks, Shopkeepers, Merchants, Apprentices, Watchman, Barbers, Beaux, Drayman, Porters, Labourers, Cobles and Cooks, all are to order the honourable, the legislature of Maryland what they must do upon the most intricate questions in government (Yawaza, 1975: 20).

But why, within Sandels frame, should anyone have supposed that these men (sic) had the requisite civic virtue? Sandel might not deny this even if he is unable to disengage himself from manifest ideology and to see what was at issue. He writes:
What troubled the revolutionary leaders most of all [which revolutionary leaders?] was the popular politics increasingly practiced in the state legislature. They [the propertied elite?] had assumed that under republican government, a natural aristocracy of merit and virtue would replace an artificial aristocracy of heredity and patronage. But in the postrevolutionary state legislatures, the best [sic] did not necessarily rule. . . . For republican leaders such as Madison, this form of politics amounted to an excess of democracy, a perversion of republican ideals. Rather than governing in a disinterested spirit in behalf of the public good, these representatives of the people were all too representative parochial, small-minded, and eager to serve the private interests of their constituents (Sandel, 1996: 128, my emphasis).

This is quite an old story, surely as old as Aristotle, who, at least, made no pretense of being a fan of democracy. As Madison more honestly argued, if you let a majority rule, then since as Aristotle had pointed out, the majority are always poor and they will rule in their interests. For Sandel and the antidemocratic tradition behind him, better than to have the wealthy minority rule. We are to suppose that they will govern in a disinterested spirit in behalf of the public good. The US Constitution was a marvelous success, of course, even if it foreclosed the possibility that America might have had a far stronger democracy. But it was a huge success also in that, designed explicitly to undermine selfrule, it came to be thought of as a democracyindeed, a democratic model for the world (Manicas, 1988).7 Although there is no space here to tell this story in an adequate way, three facts seem central. First, as Gordon Wood has demonstrated, the biggest stumbling block for the Nationalists was the problem of sovereignty. How could there be one supreme legislature in each state and a federal government that could make laws that superseded those of the individual states? The in-

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vention of the idea of the sovereign people, which, remarkably, was offered as a solution to sidestepping the mandated ratification process, was a stunning achievement. The existing law had required that the new document be returned to state legislatures for approval. But it is almost certain that these bodies would not have approved of it. In defense of the revolutionary act of bypassing state legislatures, Madison offered what seemed to be an obvious revolutionary justification: The people were, in fact, the fountain of all power . . . They could alter constitutions as they see as they please . . . As Wood argues, relocating sovereignty in the people by making them `the fountain of all power seemed to make sense of the entire system(Wood, 1969: 352). It is difficult, I think, to underestimate the ideological power of this idea. Henceforth, governments could be democracies if power originated in or derived from the sovereign people. Second, although this has been obfuscated since, it is clear that there were plenty of people present at Philadelphia who had a clear grasp of the difference between the Confederacy under the Articles and the Virginia plan which subsequently was adopted. Mason contended, for example, that under the existing Confederacy, Cong[gress] represent[s] the States, not the people of the States; [its] acts operate on States, not on individuals. The New Jersey plan, which was rejected, would have responded to the real flaws in the Articles without in any way compromising this principled difference. Madison and Hamilton will, of course, convince Americansincluding many legal scholars (and likely also Sandel?) that in principle there was no difference. Indeed, ironically, in his concluding chapter, Sandel sees, rightly, that the hope for self-government lies not in relocating sovereignty but in dispersing it (345). But it was precisely the problem of dispersed sovereignty that so exercised the founding fathersexactly because it allowed for greater participation by citizens. The third fact relevant to the idea that a large state can be a democracy as long as representatives are elected evokes a further irony. Sandel is right to appeal to Jefferson as the most democratic of all Americas early leaders. As regards the idea of representation, he always avoided the Federalist formula of power originating or deriving from the people. He always spoke of representatives as delegates, deputies, servants, functionaries or agents. Especially after he left office, he complained bitterly regarding the direction of American politics, that the problem had begun in Philadelphia where the Federalists had endeavored to draw the cords of power as right as they could obtain themindeed, as Madison had all but said in the 10th Federalist Paper to lessen the dependence of the general functionaries on their constituents and to weaken the means of maintaining a steady equilibrium which the majority of the convention had deemed salutary for both branches, general and

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local. Moreover, he was persistently localist, insisting that the Montesquievian problem of size had been solved by the idea of layered federated jurisdictions from the local to the national.8 Merrill Peterson has rightly remarked that men like Jefferson, deceived by the French Revolution, . . . taught the people to think of their government as a democracy rather than a balanced republic after Adamss vision. His revolution of 1800 in the hotly ideological election of that year was critical in this. His victory was, as he insisted, a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form. It was, of course, nothing of the kind. The victory of Jefferson, the first of a long series of republican victories, was a revolution in ideology. Sandels unhistorical reading of the republican tradition prevents him seeing any of these remarkable ironies. He writes:
Growing doubts about the prospect of civic virtue in the 1780s [growing paranoia that institutional arrangements had unleashed democracy?] prompted two kinds of responseone formative, the other procedural. The first sought, through education and other means, to inculcate virtue more strenuously. The second sought, through constitutional change, to render virtue less necessary (129).

The constitutional change that effectively disempowered citizens is quaintly put:

The republican tradition taught that a certain distance between the people and their government was unavoidable, even desirableprovided that distance was filled with mediating institutions that gathered people together and equipped them to share in self-rule (my emphasis).

Indeed, as his historical account of America from Jackson to Kennedy itself decisively shows, once the new constitution was in place, virtue was not rendered less necessary. It was rendered utterly unnecessary. This is clearest in Sandels chapter 6, Free labor versus Wage Labor. Although he lacks the language to say it, Sandel sees in this chapter that the real problem for his civic republicans was class: . . . they shared the longstanding republican conviction that economic dependence is essential to citizenship (169). But, of course, with industrial capitalism, if any sense was to be made of the new arrangements, holding firm to this prejudice would have been intolerable. So, ultimately, the debate over the meaning of free labor would carry American political argument beyond the terms of republican thought . . . Wage labor is consistent with freedom, they would argue, not because it forms virtuous independent citizens but simply because it is voluntary, the product of agreement between employer and employee (171). On

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the one hand, this admission seems utterly inconsistent with this notion that the formative project remained alive and well until recently. On the other, that workers were free was not only a huge ideological victory but it was perfectly consistent with both a Lockean liberalism in which everybody had property: either in land and productive assets or in their labor, and with the redefinition of democracy that had been wrought by the Americans. Henceforth, not only would capitalism be consistent with democracy, but also it would come increasingly to be thought of as its ideal political form. With an impotent sovereign people, class struggle could be submerged and deflected. Much of this was clearly seen by John Dewey (above, Chapter 10). There is some paradox in this also since it is easy to think that Sandel is broadly, at least, in agreement with Dewey.

SANDEL AND DEMOCRACY It is worthwhile perhaps to quote in full Sandels brief prcis of Deweys criticism of political democracy in America. Sandel writes:
The philosopher John Dewey observed that the theory of freely choosing individual self was framed at just the time when the individual was counting for less in the direction of social affairs, at a time when mechanical forces and vast impersonal organizations were determining the frame of things. . . . According to Dewey, modern economic forces liberated the individual from traditional communal ties, and so encouraged voluntarist self-understanding, but at the same time disempowered individuals and local political units. The struggle for emancipation from traditional communities was mistakenly identified with the liberty of the individual as such; in the intensity of the struggle, associations and institutions were condemned wholesale as foes of freedom save as they were products of personal agreement and voluntary choice. Meanwhile, mass suffrage reenforced (sic) the voluntarist self-image by making it appear as if citizens held the power to shape social relations on the basis of individual volition. Popular franchise and majority rule afforded the imagination of a picture of individuals in their untrammeled individual sovereign making the state. But this concealed a deeper, harder reality. The spectacle of `free men going to the polls to determine by their personal volitions the political forms under which they should live was an illusion (1996: 204).

It is clear enough what Sandel does share with Dewey. Both reject individualistic liberalism. What are the differences? First, Deweys critique of liberal ideology involves seeing that mass suffrage was an essential part of the alienation of politics that people came falsely to think that they lived in a democracy in which they were self-

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ruled. Dewey knew better. For him, the democratic state, ideologically sustained by individualist philosophy, emerged, contrary to Sandel, for reasons largely unrelated to the goal of realizing self-government. Dewey held, perhaps optimistically, that it tried, at least, to counteract forces that . . . largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors, and tried, at least, to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public ends (Dewey, 1954: 108). But he insisted that it has failed even as regards these limited goals. Not only was the democratic state grasped and used to suit the desires of the new class of businessmen (Dewey, 1954: 96), but the very forms of political democracy themselves throw up huge barriers in the way of realization of democratic publics. The constitution (despite Jefferson) had become sacred, private power had been made invulnerable and public power had become firmly entrenched in the hands of a ruling elite. Second, Deweys operative theoretical term was publics, not civic virtue. Dewey was not in the least interested in Sandels formative project, the states obligation to produce citizens, to cultivate attitudes of disinterested public spirit, to build up fellow-feeling and to articulate and promote common goals and interests. The problem was quite otherwise: It concerned the disintegration, wrought by economic forcesDeweys euphemism for capitalismof the very conditions for democracy as a way of life, an idea which he sharply distinguished from the modern idea of political democracy. For Dewey, the problem of the public is the present incapacity of interdependent people even to perceive the consequences of combined action, still less to act collectively regarding their collective interests regarding these consequences. Dewey was in full agreement with Lippmanns trenchant analysis, but refused to accept that nothing could be done. He was interested in community, but for him communities were constituted rationally, in terms of the actively articulated goals of conjoint action (Manicas, 1974). Communities in his sense did not involve identity issues, nor were they constituted emotively or ethnically. Nor surely were they the responsibility of a non-neutral government seeking to enforce or reinforce values that they assumed were essential to the nation. These sorts of communities were and are shackles, destructive and not emancipating. Indeed, the principles that presumably make them essential were rightly delegitimized by liberalism. Reminiscent of Rousseaus scathing attack on Hobbes and Locke and Marxs analysis of alienation, for Dewey:
Where there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because

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it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy (Dewey, 1954: 149).

Dewey did not, to be sure, offer much in the way of positive help on how we were to overcome those conditions that make impossible the emergence of publics, but as should be clear, the problem is not moral; it is structural and political. Here again we need to be careful in understanding Sandels remarks, quoted earlier, regarding the idea that the hope for self-government is in dispersing sovereignty. Sandel sees a moral defect in the cosmopolitan ethic (Sandel, 1996: 342). Dewey did not. Dewey heaped nothing but scorn on the idea of the Nation and of National Sovereignty, but he did this precisely because its claims were fraudulent and because it served only to promote violence. He approved of a multiplicity of communities and political bodies, but for him, this required a cosmopolitian ethic, exactly because these communities were to be constructed on the basis of perceiving and collectively acting on the consequences of conjoint activities. Although this is hardly the space to develop the idea, since global capitalism is the main problem, building social movements internationally is now the only strategy. As Dewey said, we already have a Great Society. What is now sorely lacking is a Great Community.

NOTES
1. Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 2. The clause is important and is meant to undercut the old freedom/determinism chestnut. To have agency, we must be free in the sense that whatever we do, we could have done otherwise. That is even acts which are not voluntary in the sense that we were coerced display agency. One can choose even if the only other choice is death. But we must not confused agency with freedom. See below. 3. The point was made by Ian Shapiro in his excellent The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (1986). Sandel seems here to appropriate and extend a version of J.G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975). But a careful reading of Pococks last chapter (XV) will show, I think, that he does not deny the view shared by Bernard Bailyn, J.R. Pole and Gordon Wood that, as he summarizes matters: in the period of the making of the Constitution and the Federalist-Republican debate, the civic tradition underwent a transforming crisis and was never the same again; Wood in particular speaks of an end of classical politics (1975). Put in other terms, the Americans invented modern democracy, surely the most successful version of liberalism to date.

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4. For other examples, see page 70, where he says of a Scalia Supreme Court argument: such decisions might seem at odds with the liberalism that asserts the priority of the right over the good. But . . . and p. 282, where he asserts that Johnsons evocation of national community might seem to embrace the nationalizing tradition of progressive reform . . . but . . . 5. We must ignore overwhelming historical evidence that the real crisis had nothing to do with sovereignty, finance or commerce, all of which could easily have been solved. The problem was the drift toward democracy and Madison and many others explicitly insisted. The bad name given to confederacies by the Americans continues to haunt otherwise intelligent people. For some discussion of this evidence, see my War and Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). The present movement toward an European Union may overcome this prejudice. 6. We need to keep in mind the relevant numbers here. As Pole notes, the British Parliament had one member for every 14,300 people, while in the colonies, there was one for every 1200. The total number of eligible voters in Pennsylvania was only 90,000. As the democrats insisted (including here, later, Jefferson), far more direct control could have been expected. 7. One might argue that this was an entirely good thing on grounds that there is no better institutional arrangement possible. But indeed, it is plain enough that even at the time of the Convention, stronger versions were available and that, with Dewey, a very strong version of democracy remains a fundamental ideal of politics. 8. But there is some doubt that even as the third President, he ever fully grasped what the Constitution had wrought. There are many texts that support this (including some of those mentioned here), but perhaps the most decisive is his Kentucky Resolution of 1798 that is easily shown to be inconsistent with the Constitution. This was, for this reason, a critical text for later secessionists. For a more thorough account of Jeffersons role in the redefinition of democracy, see Chapter 8 of my War and Democracy (1989).

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Part Four

WHY NOT DEWEY?

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Chapter Twelve

The Evasion of Philosophy1

Classic American philosophers did not restrict themselves to the problem of knowing the world; rather they sought to change itwithout the assistance of Marxs inversion of Hegel. Nor could it be said that classic American philosophy was academic, the province of professionals who earned their pay by teaching epistemology to future teachers of philosophy and who earned their promotions by writing to one another about c-functions and private languages. While one can surely contest Cornel Wests claims about the causal role of the writings of Richard Rorty in recovering this tradition (West, 1989: 199), one can surely endorse the effort of Wests most impressive book, under review here. Indeed, one hopes that its title will not discourage potential readers. For West, it is precisely the evasion of philosophy that makes the distinctly American philosophical tradition valuable. The swerve from epistemology, initiated by Emerson on Wests view, is surely not a wholesale rejection of philosophy. Rather, for West, the American evasion offers a reconception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural and political traditions for the purpose of increasing the scope of individual development and democratic operations (230). Because West is not only manifestly in control of his material, but, as well, because his is a distinct voice in this project, his book deserves to be widely read. West offers a geneaology of American pragmatism, from Emerson to its coming of age with Peirce, James, and DeweyMead is omitted, perhaps unjustifiablythence to its dilemma in the mid-twentieth century and its decline and resurgence in the recent past and present. The chapter on the dilemma of the mid-century pragmatic intellectual includes discussions of Sidney Hook, W.E.B. Du Bois, C. Wright Mills, Reinhold Nicbuhr and Lionel Trilling. West
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shows how Emersonian sensibilities and pragmatist progeny cut across the modern, disciplinary division of knowledge (6) and, as important, he shows how the results of this appropriation were so very different. Quine and Rorty are the focus of the chapter on the decline and resurgence, though West recognizes and credits a number of American philosophersJohn McDermott, John Smith, Richard Bernstein and Morton Whitewho continued to keep alive the pragmatist tradition during the age of logical positivism (194). Although his treatment of the geneaology of pragmatism is much influenced by Rorty, West moves the argument to another level in his last chapter, Prophetic Pragmatism: Cultural Criticism and Political Engagement. Using the work of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci as foils, West takes us back and forward to Dewey to his own sense of pragmatism as a viable and energizing post-modern philosophy. Wests understanding of Emerson not only begins his story; it provides as well the driving force and thematic levers of the book, represented in the tropes of power, provocation and personality. Emerson is not a philosopher hereafter quotation marks around philosopher are meant to convey the restricted sense of the term. But he is more than a mediocre man of letters or a meteoric man of lectures. While interpreters who make him a self-willed escapee from the American genteel tradition, a purveyor of secular incarnation, or a grand ideological synthesizer of American nature, the American self, and the American destiny do yield insights, these readings hide his historical perspective and seminal reflections on power (11). Indeed, West compares him, perhaps remarkably, to his contemporary Marx. Like Marx, Emerson is a died-in-the-wool romantic thinker who takes seriously the embodiment of ideals within the real, the actualization of principles in the practical (10). Similar to Marx, Emersons focus is the scope of human powers and the contingency of human societies, in social scientific terms, the relation between purposive subjects and prevailing structures . . . (10). West goes quickly here, no doubt. Still, the comparison provokes. But like Marx, Emerson was caught in his time and place. Thus, the Emersonian telos is not simply a strategy to deny time, reject history, and usurp authority, but is symptomatic of a deep desire to conceive time, history and authority as commensurate with and parallel to the vast open spaces of untouched woods, virgin lands, and haunting wilderness (19). West develops a deeper Emersonian blindspot, one surely not disconnected from the Emersonian mythic conception of the exceptional individual as America[n]. This blindspot is racismin the American grain. West does not apologize for Emerson. Although in his genealogy, the others cannot be so accused, it is surely also true that only Du Bois adequately grasped the degree to which black slavery has impeded and distorted the Emersonian vision (147). Moreover, and not unre-

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lated, another Emersonian legacy has characterized American philosophers: Emerson created a style which deploys a set of rhetorical strategies that attempt to both legitimize and criticize America and like those who followed him, American philosophers situated their projects within and among the refined and reformist elements of the middle classthe emerging and evolving class envisioned as the historical agent of the American religion (41). Peirce, of course, was always on the margin of academic philosophy, but given that, it is not clear whether one wants to say that he evaded the epistemological turn. As West appreciates, it might be better to say that he triedwithout successto reject the challenge that modem philosophy had posed. Of course, he did this in an entirely novel way, accepting Kantian insulation against scepticism, but rejecting Kants transcendental move. West is emphatic that Peirces technical writingswhat today still excite the philosophersshould not be disconnected from his metaphysicsa kind of Kantianism without things-in -themselvesfrom his concern with community, the basis of his belief-doubt theory of knowledge, and, more often put aside, from his morally energized speculations on evolutionary love the development of concrete reasonableness. Peirce was not a verificationist, never scientistic. Although committed to the method of science and a pragmatist, West can also quote him as writing that a useless inquiry, provided it is a systematic one, is pretty much the same thing as a scientific inquiry (46). Veblen was later to call the motivation for science idle curiousity, and no doubt influenced by Peirce, his teacher at Hopkins, was among the first to see how much rising industrial society had compromised this. James could join in this as well. On his view, the craving to believe that the things in world belong to kinds which are related by an inward rationality together is the parent of Science as well as sentimental philosophy (James, 1981, Vol. 2: 1260). Sciences aim, like sentimental philosophy is intelligibility, not prediction and controlcontrary to the characteristic misreading of American pragmatism. Moreover, like James, Peirce fell back on moral sentiment and instinctive action as an alternative to a scientific ethics (West, 46). For West, whereas Peirce applies Emersonian themes of contingency and revisability to the scientific method, James extends them to our personal and moral lives. The basic aim of the Jamesian popularization was to mediate between the old and the newreligion and science, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, country and city, vocation and professionin order to lessen the shock of the new educated middle class (55). We need not assume, of course, that James intended to do this. Still, the point hits home. It wasnt merely that his audience was the educated middle class but that, agreeing with R.B. Perry, his distrust of the masses is undeniable (61). Indeed, although

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we like to think that American writers are different, such distrust pervades the literature of political philosophy. Dewey is surely the most outstanding exception. West concentrates on Pragmatism and the popular essays, for example, Is Life Worth Living?, On a Certain Blindness . . ., and the seldom read, The Social Value of the College-Bred. He but mentions Principles and does not even allude to radical empiricism. But I would not quarrel with his effort to try to stealor insulate?James from the philosophers. As West sees, academic philosophy had not yet become institutionalized in America and as David Hollinger has pointed out, we err in failing to see that James was not a academic philosopher, but an engaged intellectual for whom, as West says, philosophy mediated essential rifts in the self (95). West concludes that James was first and foremost a moralist obsessed with heroic energies and reconciliatory strategies available to the individual (54) and that he was much more attuned to the depths of evil in the world than Emerson. But oddlygiven his interestsWest does not allude to Santayanas challenging criticism that James held a false moralistic view of history. According to Santayana, the war with Spain deeply upset James because he believed that he had lost his country, when his country, just beginning to play its part in the history of the world, appeared to ignore an ideal that he innocently expected would always guide it (Quoted by Myers, 1985: 439440). This is an Emersonian residue which will plague even Deweyat least until the catastrophe of the Great War. See Chapter 8, above. Dewey, properly, is the central figure of Wests account. Again, there are two themes, the Deweyan evasion and the particular Deweyan slant as political and cultural critic. West holds that Dewey held ambiguously to a modest view of philosophy as social and cultural criticism. It was ambiguous because he was attracted to Greek naturalism, especially after encountering Woodbridge at Columbia. Coupled, then, with his allegiance to his professional identity and status, West argues, he was left uneasy with this more modest view. Thus, those intent on simply incorporating Dewey into the tradition of modern philosophy point out Deweys own descriptive metaphysical project in his classic work Experience and Nature (West: 94). But if like James, his sensitivity to the modern epistemological problem did preclude metaphysics in Kants sense, it need not preclude descriptive metaphysics, the Aristotelian turn developed in Ralph Sleepers The Necessity of Pragmatism (1986). But it may be also that Dewey remained within the problematic of modern epistemology. And if so, then he evaded it by ignoring it. As John Smith has said, with Dewey, all attempts at making knowledge itself intelligible are greeted by pointing out that science is a fact and that is the end of the matter (Smith, 1970: 52). The consequence, on my view, was disastrous.

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The problem was that although pragmatism was intended to be a new beginning, displacing transcendental philosophy, Deweys doctrine of experience limited him to an empirical realism and worse, perhaps to what often seemed to be an empiricistif not positivistview of science. To be sure, as with James, Dewey had a rich and contextual view of experience; but for all of that, it seems that he remained within the Kantian strictures of an empirical realism. As argued in Chapter 5, above, this hardly sufficed for his remarkable theory of inquiry, and it left him vulnerable to all sorts of criticisms, including one made by West, for example, that Art as Experience is shot through with an organic idealism unbecoming a card-carrying pragmatist (95). Thus, while West, now following Rorty, wishes that Dewey had been a more consistent historicist pragmatist, I wish that he had been a more consistent naturalistindeed in nearly the sense that was Marx in his criticism of Feuerbach. Like Marx, after diagnosing the dead-ended path set by modern epistemology, Dewey lost patience with the problem, well captured by the famous dichotomy of subject and object. Itself the legacy of modern science, the dichotomy became not only the preoccupation of philosophers, but unsurprisingly, the effort to overcome it produced the collapse of one into the otherbehaviorism, structuralism eliminative materialism a la Rorty and on the other side, phenomenology, voluntarism, methodological solipsismand more recently in antiphilosophical postmodernist thought, the stunning dissolution of both object and subject. (See Chapter 4. above.) Dewey was anxious to avoid the epistemological problem, and supposed that he could do this and still promote a roomy and non-reductive naturalism. In this sense, then, he was not as anxious to evade philosophy as is Rorty and as seems to be the case with West. West is at his best when he writes as a social theorist. What he has to say about Deweys social and political philosophy, and in the next chapter, his account of Hook, Mills, Niebuhr, DuBois and Trilling is both penetrating and important. West sees the radicalism of Dewey. Of course, Dewey shunned confrontational politics and agitational social struggle. But his view was radical in that his vision required fundamental transformations of American institutions. Moreover, contrary to popular opinion, Deweys project never really got off the ground (West: 107). The point is important and too little appreciated. But Wests explanation of Deweys failure will raise some eyebrows. He argues that Deweys project is one of cultural transformation that envisions a future Emersonian and democratic way of life that has the flavor of small-scale homogeneous communities. West seems not to object to this vision, usually dismissed as utopian. Rather, he writes that Deweys project is problematic because his emphasis on culture leads him to promote principally pedagogic and dialogical means of social change and that despite, and maybe because of, his widespread

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involvement in political organizations, groups, even third parties, Dewey never did get over his Emersonian distrust of them (106). His project failed, then, because his favored historical agentsthe professional and reformist elements of the middle classwere seduced by two strong waves of thought and action: managerial ideologies of corporate liberalism and bureaucratic control, and Marxist ideologies of class struggle and party organization (107). It is easy to see the knot that West is trying to untie: What kind of politics is possible given the peculiar American conditionespecially after the tragically quick failure of the Bolshevik project? Nonetheless, he seems not to notice how much Dewey contributed to the managerial ideologies of corporate liberalismespecially in his 1918 New Republic essays. (See Chapter 8). On the other hand, given that Dewey could never accept the Second International definition of class strugglefor altogether sensible reasonshe provides no evidence of his Emersonian mistrust of organization. The charge that his favored historical agents were the most progressive elements of the middle class was made by Mills, as West knows, and indeed, there is considerable plausibility in this. Still, once one sees what Dewey, Eduard Bernstein, Kautsky and Lenin all saw, that proletarian revolutionary class-consciousness was not on the historical agenda, and surely not in the United Sates, we are left with some deep political questions that remain unsolved. (See above, Chapter 10.) As Dewey diagnosed, the public is inchoate, eclipsed, lost; and he was unsure how to find it. Dewey could surely endorse the coalition politics that West rightly favors. Moreover, this politics is not more radical than Deweys, nor, it seems to me, is it less dialogic. West is also severe with Deweys failure to take the time to come to terms with . . . Marxism. But he is not historical here. Not only was it not possible for Dewey to have read the Paris manuscripts, the so-called Grundrisse and the many, many unpublished letters, speeches and essays, but the political movements which defined Marxism were either the mono-causal and teleological Second International Marxisms which had failed or the Leninist version which had succeeded but which, for hardly arguable historical reasons, could not succeed in achieving its vision of democracy. West rightly sees that Deweys deepest philosophical and political commitments were very close to Marxs, although he seems unaware of some of the more recent literature on this important topic. On the other hand, while West seems indifferent to the point, in my mind, Dewey saw little difference between capitalism and other modern possibilities. Given recent events in the socialist world, of course, many will say that Dewey was vindicated. Although plainly it is not here possible to review his discussion in any sort of detail, readers will find Wests accounts of Hook, Mills, Du Bois, Niebuhr

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and Trilling especially gratifying. He might have added other figures to this list, for example, Walter Lippmann. Still, these writers were profoundly pragmatic thinkers and, excepting Trilling, they each had a confrontation with Marxism. West negotiates this territory with unexpected sympathies. He credits Hook with being the first original Marxist philosopher in America and depending here on ones use of philosopher, this may be true. Surely his Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) was a landmark book. On the other hand, Hooks ideological trajectory . . . portrays American pragmatism in deep crisis (124). C. Wright Mills, he writes, understood this crisis better than anyone else in America. Offering a creative mis-reading of Dewey, Mills provided a powerful immanent critique of liberalism (127). But according to West, Mills suffered from the limitations that he attributed to Dewey: Not only does he focus on intellectual elites as primary historical agents (131), but also he betrays a nostalgia for Emersons America (135). As with the account of Dewey, I am doubtful of this. Despite his turn to cold warrior, perhaps predictable given his World War I chauvinism, Niebuhr comes off better than he did, for example, in the treatment by Morton White. Because Niebuhrs Reformation theology accents disaster just as much as development, for West, after him the Emersonian theodicy of American pragmatism would never be the same (164). By appropriating Matthew Arnold and Freud, Trilling, however, tried to salvage American pragmatism by purging it of its Emersonian elements (164). Indeed, with the New Left and black revolt, rock n roll, drugs and free love, Trilling came to believe not only that pragmatism could not meet the crisis of America, but that it fanned and fueled the crisis (178). If an account of Trilling gives a kind of symmetry to this rich chapter, the account of Du Bois is indispensable to the book. We need to be reminded that Du Bois was, in his own words, a devoted follower of James, that he spent two years at the University of Berlin (189294) studying the historical economists, Schmoller and Wagner, and was impressed by Treitschkes heroic romantic nationalism. But more important, perhaps, West argues that Du Bois stay in Europe gave him, on the one hand, a way for looking at the world as man and not simply from a racial and provincial outlook, and on the other, it provided him with an outlet for his hostility toward America and insight into its provinciality (140). This was to make Du Bois an original and creative voice in what is still a silence. Thus, Du Bois displays the blindnesses and silences in American pragmatic reflections on individuality and democracy, and his Black Reconstruction (1935) is a seminal work because it examines the ways in which the struggle for democracy was stifled at a critical period in American history from the vantage point of the victims (including both black and white laborers)

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(146). Like Dewey, Du Bois had been energized by the Bolshevik revolution and like him, he had rejected the strategies of the communist party in the United States. The revolution here would have to be a slow reasoned development informed by the most intelligent body of American thought (146). But unlike Dewey, his understanding of race and class gave him a deeper understanding of the impasses that had to be overcome, including, in Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), an excoriation of cold warriors as handmaidens of the American imperial empire (148). His indictment by the government for failure to register as agent for a foreign principle and consequent vilification was all too graphic testimony of the deeply rooted American capacity to lie to itself. I have left little space to discuss what I believe is Wests weakest chapter, his engagement with recent American pragmatic philosophers (in quotes). His account of Quine suffers, on my view, from failure to appreciate Quines rejection of the realist aspects of classic pragmatisms theory of science (187). As must be clear from what has already been said, he is deeply critical of Rortys incapacity to go beyond kicking the philosophic props from under liberal bourgeois societies (206). He concludes that his viewpoint has immense anti-professional implications for the academy, a point of no small importance, but on the macro-societal level, there are no ethical or political consequences of his pragmatism. This is a serious charge, of course. In the final chapter, then, West sketches prophetic pragmatism, a postmodern form of pragmatism that preserves its historicist sense and genealogical aims, accents both consequences and specific practices in the light of a set of provisional and revisable theoretical frameworks while it resists grand theories (209). His stance here is sound. Pragmatism was prematurely postmodern in rejecting the quest for foundations. West exploits this, but is unabashed in arguing that current practices become available to criticism in the light of our best available theories. Although he rightly opposes the characteristic Eurocentrism of Western social and philosophical theory, one may be surprised that he so warmly embraces an American variant, especially one that balances Emersonian optimistic theodicies with Niebuhrs project of walking the tightrope between Promethean romanticism and Augustinian pessimism (228). To be clear here, this is not to agree with those who see no liberating potentialities in either religious experience or institutionalized religionsEast and West. Consider here, for example, the Liberation Church of Latin America or Lutheranism in the German Democratic Republic. Rather, it is question of whether prophetic pragmatism, a child of Protestant Christianity wedded to left romanticism is as wideand perhaps as coherentas Deweys less prophetic version?

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One must hope, with West, that philosophical thought in America has taken a turn to what is best in it. Reservations included, there can be little doubt that his book is a major contribution in the recovery of the Deweyan vision of creative democracy. Indeed, in our deeply disillusioned world, The American Evasion of Philosophy is a stunning combination of scholarship, passion and sensitivity.

NOTES
1. A review of Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

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Democratic Hope1

In this ambitious collection, Robert B. Westbrook aims to recover from philosophical pragmatism, insightand hoperegarding the promise of democracy. Following on his John Dewey and American Philosophy (1991), Dewey is surely his main man. Part One, Pragmatism Old, offers as well, selective critical discussions of Peirce and James. Part Two, Pragmatism New, treats recent writers who have identified themselves with pragmatism, including Hilary Putnam, Cheryl Misak, Cornel West and Richard Posner. Rorty is the main character in these accounts. Indeed, it seems that the motivation for this volume is very much a matter of Rortys influence in the rediscovery of pragmatism, but especially Dewey. But this has its problems. Fundamentally, Rorty gets to set the context for the discussion. In the case of Dewey this is especially troublesome, not merely because Rortys pragmatism is far removed from Deweysas Westbrook sees, but because any proper understanding of Dewey requires that we acknowledge how radical was his effort to reconstruct philosophy. Mainstream philosophy is still almost entirely unaware of this. This is doubly ironical since rejection of the modern problem of epistemology was the one feature which Rorty shared with Deweyeven if Rortys reconstruction was much more in the form of destruction. As Sleeper well put the matter: We must amend Rortys observation that Dewey was waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled by the observation that Dewey was trying to block that road from its beginning (Sleeper, 1996: 5). Put simply, Dewey aimed to replace both epistemology and metaphysics as these are conceived with a naturalistic logic of inquiry which amounted to a wholesale attack on the philosophical uses of Russells logic and the entire program of what became analytic philosophy. Failing to see what Dewey
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was up to, these writers offer well-intentioned appeals to experimental method, scientific communities, instrumentalist (sic) logic, and free inquiry. Indeed, one suspects that they would agree with Alan Ryans assessment that Deweys Logic is vast and somewhat baffling (Ryan, 1995: 309). The importance of this failure surfaces in what is the main concern of Democratic Hope: that Rorty is wrong in claiming that the pragmatists and postmodernists are distinguished by the Americans unjustifiable social hope and ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity (6). Presumably, epistemological grounds are available: the pragmatist low-profile conception of truth and truth-apt character of moral and political beliefs (Westbrook, 2005: 196) provides a bridge between epistemic and deliberative democracy where persons engage one another not merely as citizens but as pragmatists (239). There are two problems. First, Westbrook sees that Dewey did not offer any sort of argument for this bridge. But presumably the arguments of Misak and Putman are arguments that Dewey could have made (180). Part of the problem is that having rejected the skeptical challenge of traditional epistemology, he saw no need for such a bridge. But since his efforts were misunderstood, academic philosophers can still feel a need to respond to skepticisms, epistemic and moral. Dewey would not have been pleased with Rorty, but it would not have been pleased either to see that mainstream academics, despite good intentions, remain committed to the problems of philosophy. There are, we may note, philosophers working well within a Deweyan frame who are not engaged in this Westbrooks book. Indeed, one might insist that in todays very undemocratic world, it is at least misleading to focus on an epistemological justification of democracy (176). Of course, even the weakest forms of democracyliberal republicsrequire free speech and access to pertinent information, but Dewey would have been puzzled by the idea that democratic hope is enabled by thinking of the institutions of radical democracy as engaged in a quest for truth. If anything, democracy is a quest for accountability, possible only with the active participation of citizens. Indeed, the far more problematic relation between Deweys philosophy of democracy and his theory of inquiry is whether, as C. Wright Mills noticed, he too often optimistically supposed that the conditions which forbid democracy could, in an undemocratic world, be overcome with persistent application of the method of intelligence. Second, Dewey had all sorts of arguments for the genuine problem of democracy, including the idea that citizens know best when the shoe pinches, that participation is essential to growth, but most critically, agreeing with Rousseau (and Marx) that since interdependence makes possible domination, exploitation and alienation, the only possible solution is the perfecting of

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the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interests in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action. Of course, neither Marx nor Dewey offered much direction about how this would look. Still, for Dewey, democratic hope depends upon community as a fact and with acknowledgement of the needs and capacities of persons living interdependently. Of course, as he well recognized, the conditions that make democracy possible are not easily achievable; but given what we know, they are not impossible. Do these conditions include socialism? Westbrook has considerable sympathy for American producer-republicanism, with its emphasis on the independence of yeoman farmers and skilled artisans (83). Indeed, for him, the best of American radicalism has always marched under a petty bourgeois banner(210). This assessment can surely be contested both as to whether is represents the best of American radicalism and whether this was Deweys position. Less contestably, he suggests also that Dewey would never lose touch with the essential promise of producerism and that this explains why he was such a peculiar socialist (98). This perspective especially informs Chapter 5, Marrying Marxism, a chapter that raises serious problems. While many pages would be necessary to engage this discussion, the central issue regards the current pertinence, if any, of both of two historically bankrupt visions: American producer-republicanism, and a Marxism that still owes to its 2nd International genesis. Dewey may well have been nostalgic (again, as Mills argues), even if his arguments against the Marxism of his day were penetrating. But if so, perhaps one needs to exploit the deep affinities between Marx and Dewey. Cornel West is on the right track here whatever misgivings one might have regarding the prophetic dimensions of his thought.

NOTES
1. A review of Robert B. Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University of Press, 2005).

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Analytic Pragmatism1

Depending what one is willing to assume, there are some importantly different conclusions one might come to regarding the publication of Matthew Festensteins Pragmatism and Political Theory (1997). If one takes for granted the current state of higher education, academic publishing and mainstream academic philosophy in America, one must conclude (with, for example, Richard Bernstein) that it is a valuable addition to the literature. It is a wellargued and informed examination of Deweys political theory and of three theories that are offered as New Pragmatisms. For Festenstein, Dewey is not the technocratic, bourgeois thinker that he is too often taken to be, nor a hazy utopian, nor, as Richard Rorty would have it, is he a premature postmodernist who having rejected metaphysical realism and representational epistemology creates room only for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable . . . sense of human solidarity. Rather, for Festenstein, Deweys political philosophy must be understood against the background of his ethical, psychological and metaphysical thought (1997:10). While this has been seen before (Flower and Murphey, 1977; Tiles, 1988), the burden of Part I is to develop, in a systematic way, the underpinnings of Deweys theory of democracy. There is much that is sound here, including his careful reconstruction of Deweys claims regarding the the objective character of human freedom and its dependence upon a congruity of environment with human wants (22), and perhaps especially his idea that our reasons for valuing the imperfect forms of political democracy are not the same as our reasons for revering democracy (80). Part II considers the writings of Rorty, Habermas and Hilary Putnam. According to Festenstein, the critical force of Deweys view derives from establishing some distance between his own conception of individuality and the
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beliefs and values which he thinks are still embodied in the practices and thinking of his society (99). But, if Festenstein is right, Dewey cannot vindicate this conception. Accordingly, his is simply a differing opinion about those values and beliefs [and] not a critical vantage point which his fellow citizens should themselves adopt (99). Rorty, of course, bites this bullet. Festensteins criticism of Rorty is careful and very much located within the contemporary philosophical debate. Habermas and Putnam, like Rorty, are sensitive to a sceptical threat which is alien to Deweys thought (105) and they offer reconstructions. Their response, flawed in ways different from Deweys, is to construct a vantage point on different foundations from Deweys teleological naturalism (105). Since Dewey looks good compared to both Habermas and Putnam, partisans of pragmatism may like the outcome, even if I have my doubts that they should. My doubts on this derive from two sources, one is the question of whether Festenstein has caught Deweys philosophical significance, the other from my unwillingness to make the assumptions just identified. Let me, if briefly, start with this last. Festensteins book would not be useful either to undergraduates or to the general reader. His over-riding concern is to argue, against the background of the sceptical threat, that Dewey offers a plausible, if incomplete, philosophical justification for his normative ethical and political theory. Moreover, it is written in the argumentative style of analytic philosophy. Thus, there is no concern for the historical or problem-context of Deweys work, for his cultural or social significance, nor for more straightforward political matters: what follows, perhaps, in the way of political institutions, practices, policies or even political vision, whether, e.g., liberal democracy has already given us the last word. The book is abstract (and abstracted) theory, justified on the perfectly plausible ground that extending to a past thinkers work a degree of theoretical articulation which the texts themselves do not overtly display may be a means of discovering what, if anything, can be learned from that thinker (11). The book is well-argued in the sense that philosophical argument is currently understood: it responds to arguments in the literature, tries to be clear about implicit assumptions and the warrant of inferences, made or implied. And it is dialectical in the sense that after all the objections and qualifications are considered, one is never quite sure what the author wants us to believe. Accordingly, the market for this book is restricted. Rorty identified the pertinent group: first rate minds who are busy solving problems which no non-philosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline(Rorty, 1998: 129). I am not, to be sure, thinking of this as a marketing problem for the University of Chicago (and Polity) Press. Rather it is meant to speak to what is happening in higher education, in

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academic publishing and academic philosophy, and more generally in public culture. Rortys criticism of philosophy and of the role of philosophers surely gets a piece of this, even while Rorty is less interested in getting at the causes of what we would agree is an increasingly dangerous situation.2 Plainly, I cannot here treat this. Still one must notice that the mass media, including academic publishing, and higher education are hostage to the changing capitalist political economy and its imperatives.3 In 1927, the public was being eclipsed: Dewey brilliantly diagnosed the causes of this. Today, the public is obliterated: mass media, as Marcuse saw, both numb our minds and encourage irrelevant expression. The modern research university makes its contribution. Despite the protests of Dewey and a few others, it would not be long before disciplinary fragmentation would make its contribution to the disintegration of intelligible experience, vision would be displaced by techniquesometimes in the name of Dewey, and critical, humanistic student-centered teaching and learning would take second place to the imperatives of research and publication. Philosophers and their students can read the books of philosophers in order to discover (remarkably!) that neofascists are wrong (to put it mildly) without implying that this judgment can be justified to them as they are, with the beliefs and values they hold. It is thus that students are turned off, politically and otherwise, and that most of the stuff produced for publication in academic departments, not merely in philosophy, but in the humanities and social sciences is, intended or not, politically irrelevant (at its best?), or profoundly conservative.4 I dont know what, these days, is the break-even point for a book, nor how many people will eventually read this very solid book. But it need not be many. And do not misunderstand me: no irony is intended in saying that this is a very solid book. It just isnt very Deweyan. Festenstein writes that Rorty sees in Deweys pragmatism the rejection of the concern with accounts and foundations slavishly (sic) displayed in his [Festensteins] approach. This is certainly true. According to Rorty, Dewey had two sides: an enlightened and a retrograde half. Quoting Rorty: . . . in his `hedgehog life capacity as a philosopher, as opposed to his foxy capacity as columnist, [Dewey] kept insisting that a new logic and a new metaphysics were required if moral and political thought were to be rejuvenated (10). Rorty, of course, can see little to recommend Deweys insistence on this, for Rorty, an unwelcome residue of his commitment to philosophy. Dewey, obviously, saw it otherwise: It was his goal to transform both the institutions of liberal democratic America and the philosophical tradition that stood as an obstacle to this. Accordingly, Dewey did not abandon philosophy; he tried to transform it. The irony here is this: Rorty approves of the foxy columnist who wrote marvelous analyses and critiques of our institutions, but he chucked what in Dewey was most

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profoundand radical: his efforts to replace epistemology with a naturalistic theory of inquiry. Festenstein wants to rescue Dewey from this selective reading. But he does it without appreciating the radical force of Deweys new logic and new metaphysics, which begins with a rejection of the slavish concern with accounts and foundations.5 There were, of course, skeptics before Descartes raised his questions. As Rorty wrote, ancient Pyrrhonism was concerned to show that we could know nothing with certainty and that it had been troubled principally by the `problem of the criterionthe problem of validating procedures of inquiry while avoiding either circularity or dogmatism. Descartes, Rorty suggests, thought he solved this problem but in trying to do thiswith his doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, he created a new kind of problem: the problem of getting from inner space to outer spacethe `problem of the external world which became paradigmatic for modern philosophy(Rorty, 1979: 139). Rorty was correct in arguing that since it was widely believed that something had to legitimate the new science, epistemology became the core of the fairly recent demarcation of philosophy and science. He is right also that metaphysics then had to be something that emerged out of epistemology rather than vice versa. This is part of our historythe Western tradition of philosophy and science. Like it or not, we have it. (There are other traditions that do not.) But given this history, it doesnt follow that we need to reproduce its problems or as Rorty would seem to have it, to throw up our hands. Dewey did not. Instead, he tried to shift ground. For him, there was no problem of going from inner space to outer space, so he had to redefine both experience and metaphysics. Epistemology became inquiry; truth became warranted assertability and knowledge, he insisted, was best understood as the product of competent inquiries in any domain. In effect, he agreed with that version of Pyrrhonism that accepted that we could have no certain knowledge of anything and that the genuine problem was the problem of validating procedures of inquiry while avoiding either circularity or dogmatism. While Festenstein sometimes seems to be close to seeing this, ultimately, I believe, he misses. It is thus that he concludes that Dewey had a scientistic hope for a physics of problem-solving (45) and that his empirical theory of valuation seems to rest on the possibility of a prior science of problems and their resolution, which does not exist (44). It is thus also that he finds serious, if not fatal, problems in Deweys naturalistic ethical framework (62, 99, 145), and can seriously offer us the neo-Kantian discourse ethics of Habermas and the internal realism of Putnam as potential improvements. Dewey surely did contribute to being misread, and this was due not merely or mainly to his prose. Pragmatism, he insisted, occupies a position of an emancipated empiricism or thoroughgoing nave realism. Accordingly, it

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was content to take its stand with science and . . . [and] daily life (Middle Writings, Vol. 10: 39). But innocence lost cannot be regained. Even if Dewey did insist that objectivity did not require foundations (warranted assertability was sufficient), he could hardly satisfy modern philosophers with the claim that he was content to take his stand with science and daily life without leaving himself open to the charge of scientismand a nave one at that. It is critical to notice first, that although Dewey was fully aware that science was not the engine of human liberation it was so often thought to be, (Early Writings, Vol. 4: 16), he did not take the trouble to think of science in the concrete terms his own approach should have required. Instead of thinking of the sciences as practices with different methods, goals and relations to the larger society, he spoke abstractly of science. Further, he had no philosophy of science and much of what he says in this regard seems both nave and positivist (Chapter 1, above). Finally, at least until the Logic, he spoke of scientific method as pretty much equivalent to inquiry, and even to critical intelligence. This was a disaster and encouraged the wide-spread view, well put by Festenstein:
Deweys writings suggest several kinds of connections between the sciences and ethical and political thought . . . These included the thesis that there is something called the scientific method which is determinate and capable of abstraction from the intellectual and institutional context of the natural sciences; the view that this method can and should be exploited by the developing human sciences, and to some extent had already been taken up . . . ; and the commitment to the use of the social sciences, and of scientific technology more generally, in addressing social problems (30).

But Deweys theory of inquiry is not some metaphysically neutral abstracted scientific method (whatever that may be) and it is surely is not the typical sort of nonsense one still gets in introductions in textbooks with silly talk that, e.g., hypotheses are confirmed only insofar as they allow us to make good predictions. While features of his theory of inquiry were suggested by what Dewey took to be features of successful science, it was meant to replace the problems of epistemology with a different set of questions. Thus:
. . . [W]hen a writer endeavors to take a frankly naturalistic, biological and moral atttitude, and to account for knowledge on the basis of the place it occupies in such a reality, he is treated as if his philosophy were, after all, just another kind of epistemology (Middle Works, Vol. 8).

Just as his metaphysics is new in that he refuses Kants transcendental move, his logic, which flows from his metaphysics, is new in rejecting

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Russellian strictures in the theory of science. Burke summarizes the upshot of this:
The complexity of Deweys logical theory as a whole is due to the fact that there is more to consider than simply comparing sentences against facts. His focus on inquiry and experience, his reformulation of the notion of facts in informationtheoretic terms, his relatively complicated taxonomy of propositions (as distinct, moreover, from judgments), and so forth are all part of an attempt to explain (1) what it means to say that a statement about how things are may or may nor correspond to how things actually are, when at the same time, (2) it is not possible to step back and treat this correspondence as if it were a matter of comparing the statement against reality (Burke, 1994: 240).

Nor was Dewey scientistic in the sense that he assumed that the social sciences should model themselves on the natural sciences, especially as they were then understood. He regularly spoke of alleged scientific social inquiry and was often very critical of both the natural and the social sciences. He offered, for example, that the existing limitations of social science [Deweys quotation marks!] are due mainly to unreasoning devotion to physical science as a model, to a misconception of physical science at that.(Later Works, Vol. 6: 64) In another place, he notes that the backwardness of social knowledge is marked in its division into independent and insulated branches of learning, and it is not conceived in terms of its bearing on human life (Later Works, Vol. 2: 2). Dewey was anything but a nave defender of the fragmented, ideologically driven social sciences and he envisaged, it is safe to say, a research program that has been stunningly ignored. As early as 1897, he had this to say:
The sociologist, like the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp follower of genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecing them together in somewhat aimless fashion . . . But social ethics represents the attempt to translate philosophy from a general and therefore abstract method into a working and specific method; it is the change from inquiring into the nature of value in general to an inquiry of the particular values which ought to be realized in the life of everyone, and of the conditions which shall render possible this realization (Early Works, Vol. 5: 23).

This well summarizes Deweys naturalistic philosophical project, dubiously consistent with Festensteins idea that he assumed that there was some a prior science of problems and their resolution, or that scientific technology would be of any help in addressing social problems. Finally, as Dewey well recognized, achieving the conditions that would render possible the realization of these values is the problem of democracy. Despite the scientific

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claims by experts, the prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist. It may be that Festensteins able book will further stimulate efforts to restore what is viable in Dewey. My fear is that it may do just the opposite.

NOTES
1. A review of Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 2. Rortys descriptions are trenchant. For example, he writes that one of the scariest social trends is illustrated by the fact that in 1979 kids from the top socioeconomic quarter of American families were four times more likely to get a college degree than those from the bottom quarter; now they are ten times more likely (86). Add to this his further observation: Humanistic education may become what it was in Oxbridge before the reforms of the 1870s: merely a turnstile for admission to the overclass (135). Given his (implausible!) understanding of the reformist left, Rorty waffles in trying to explain this, seeing on the one hand that the international, cosmopolitan super-rich will make all the important decisions and on the other, berating the Marxist left as either Stalinist stooges or apocalyptic revolutionaries. Missing here is acknowledgment that only Marxists gave plausible analyses of what was happening. While Rorty quite rightly puts weight on agency in historical change, he evidently fails to see that in both his incarnations as a philosopher, he was a major contributor to the disastrous outcome he describes. 3. See my Higher Education at the Brink (2000), The Social Sciences: Who Needs Em (2003), and Globalization and Higher Education (2007). 4. Rorty is unduly hard on the Foucauldian academic left, whom, he says, is exactly the sort of Left that the oligarchy dreams of: A Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to passed in order to create a better future (139). Were it only a matter of passing new laws! 5. Festenstein cites Sleepers 1960 intervention versus Morton White: Even among those who have welcomed Deweys plan for putting ethics on a scientific basis there is a general tendency to focus upon the methodological implications of his proposals and to neglect, the metaphysical perspective which accompanies them and without which that plan seems inevitably to go awry (21). While this seems correct, Sleeper 1960 may well have encouraged the reading Festenstein gives, a reading not possible in Sleepers much later, Rortys Pragmatism: Afloat in Neuraths Boat, But Why Adrift (Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, 21 (1985): 920, and his important The Necessity of Pragmatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) which shows the connection between Deweys theory of inquiry in the Logic (1938) and his metaphysics of existence. That is, more than a naturalistic ethic is at stake. Festenstein seems to believe that Ernest Nagel provides an adequate understanding and assessment of Deweys Logic. For discussion, see Part II.

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Post-Modern Pragmatism1

Patrick Baert has written an ambitious and provocative book. He tells us that he had two objectives. The first is to advance a new approach to [philosophy of the social sciences] that is indebted to American pragmatism (Baert, 2005: 1). In brief, once foundationalism and naturalism are rejected, we can acknowledge for social science a diversity of cognitive interests including self-knowledge, and a pluralism of method. To my knowledge, this is an entirely novel proposal, both in making self-knowledge an important goal of research in the social sciences, and in seeking to ground this in pragmatism. A number of writers, including, for example, Rescher (1975), Laudan (1984), and perhaps one could count also Quine and Putnam, have provided at least the rudiments of a pragmatic philosophy of science, but excepting perhaps Margolis (1987), to my knowledge, no recent self-declared pragmatist has looked specifically at the social sciences. Moreover, Baert recognizes that he is jumping into a beehive of controversy over just what pragmatism is, a problem decidedly complicated by the intervention of Richard Rorty. It is true that Rortys work has brought pragmatism back to the mainstream, but he has been severely criticized by a wide variety of interpreters of American pragmatism (for example, Sleeper 1986; Margolis 1986; Hickman 1990; Bernstein 1991; Stuhr 2003). The second goal is to present an advanced assessment of the main approaches in philosophy of social sciences. The book, he says, is written so that it can be read in either way (2005: 1). The latter goal is provided by the first five chapters. Those interested in his new approach can read chapters 6 and 7 and for those already familiar with pragmatism, only chapter 7, the concluding chapter. But this is not to say that chapters 1 to 6 are irrelevant to the concluding chapter (1). While the authors discussed in the first five chapter
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were not chosen because they somehow fit into narrative that ultimately leads towards [his] pragmatic view, his pragmatic proposal is partly based on a rejection of other strategies in the philosophy of the social sciences (3). Accordingly, the topics and authors of the first five chapters were chosen because their perspectives are central in the philosophy of social sciences. Chapter 1 considers Durkheims naturalism, chapter 2 discusses Webers interpretative method, chapter 3, Poppers falsificationism, 4, critical realism, and 5, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. Chapter 6. Richard Rorty and Pragmatism, then, provides the point of departure for Baerts concluding chapter 7, A Pragmatist Philosophy of the Social Sciences. All of the first five chapters are of interest and each provides learned exposition and assessment of the positions under discussion. One might quarrel with this or that point of interpretation, but this will not be the focus of the present review. But if the individual chapters are useful, one might say that the selection of topics and authors of the first five chapters does not in a helpful way allow us to identify the central perspectives in philosophy of social science. To be sure, much depends on how one wants to cut the pie as regards alternative positions. For example, Baert writes that Durkheims work stands in an uneasy relation to positivism (13) and that indeed, Durkheim viewed science as capable of delving beneath the surface and uncovering underlying mechanisms that account for the observed regularities (15). If true then this is squarely a realist position. Baerts account of Durkheim may be recommended as a contribution to the literature on Durkheim, but my point here is that since the still dominating philosophy of social science among sociologists is a version of positivism, this needs representation and comment. One thinks here of Lundberg, Homans or more recently, Jonathan Turner (1987).2 Similarly, Weber was surely anti-positivist and a key player in the Methodenstreit, and as Baert rightly sees, he transcended the polarization between the positivist idea of a nomothetic science and Diltheyan version of the human sciences as ideographic. For him causal analysis and interpretation were both essential and possible. Indeed, given his views of causation, it is not difficult to give a reading of Weber that makes him close to a realist position (Manicas, 2006: 115125). Similarly, then, Weber may not be the best choice to represent interpretative sociology, generally understood to be a distinctly anti-naturalist posture and still prominent in sociology and anthropology. Among philosophers, one thinks here of Gadamer and Natanson, and among social scientists, Geertz, any number of recent cultural anthropologists (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1987), and sociologists inspired by an anti-naturalistic phenomenological posture.3 Popper is an odd choice for all sorts of reasons, not least because he wrote practically nothing in the philosophy of social science and has left no legacy among social scientists. Indeed, there are plenty of

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signs that his major contribution to the philosophy of history, the critique of historicism (in his idiosyncratic sense) has still not penetrated the thinking of many social scientists. The account of the Frankfurt school is both sound and appropriate, but this ignores views that are closer to Marx and perhaps more influential. One thinks here, for example of E.P. Thompson, Paul Willis, Nancy Fraser, Mike Davis and many others. Critical realism has drawn on this wing of Marxism, so perhaps Baerts account of it is all that is necessary here. His account of critical realism is generally sound but since I share this view and Baert takes it to be an exemplary version of what he rejects, the reader has a fair point of departure. In any case, perhaps for Baert, the selection of writers is not that important since it seems that the problem with all the writers discussed in the first five chapters is their commitment to either naturalism, understood as the search for a single scientific method appropriate for the study of both the social and the natural realms (3) or to foundationalism, understood as the effort to uncover unchanging foundations of an all-embracing framework or science of the social (153). These are the twin bogies which pragmatism allows us to exorcize. My second problem is this: How well does Baert negotiate the thicket of pragmatism? Baert notes that while his view is in line with recent contributions to pragmatism, specifically Rorty and Bernstein, I am not arguing that my views are necessarily consistent with those expressed by earlier generations of pragmatism (147). Rather, his proposal is inspired by neo-pragmatism rather then derived from it. The gist of his argument, he continues, is perfectly consistent with the philosophical outlook of neo-pragmatism (147). I think that it is easy to show that his view is not consistent with Peirce, James or Dewey but will not labor the point here. Here agreeing with Bernstein, I conclude that Rorty got Dewey entirely wrong. Baert, while seeing some serious problems in Rorty, nevertheless thinks of pragmatism pretty much as Rorty does. The concluding chapter very conveniently summarizes his proposal under six major headings. It will be useful here, one hopes, to address these seriatum.

1. METHODOLOGICAL DIVERSITY CHARACTERIZES SCIENCE (147) As noted, Baert rejects what he terms naturalism, the search for a single scientific method for the study of both the social and the natural sciences (3).3 Drawing on Rorty he asserts that this search has failed (Baert: 13135). A good deal depends, of course, on what is to count as a single scientific method. Here one must distinguish method as technique and method in the wider sense of presupposing a philosophy of science, including an ontology and episte-

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mology. To be sure, astronomy does not employ experiments, ethnographers do not employ multiple regression, and surely there are differences between the practices of the physical sciences and the practices of most social scientists: a straightforward consequence of differences in ontology: the social world is meaningful and does not exist independently of the actions of persons. Thus, the physical scientist does not ask for the meaning of action of molecules; if human action is to be explained, the social scientist must seek meaning (as Weber, ethnographers, and critical realists emphasize.) Similarly, for post-Kuhnian epistemology, there is no algorithm that assures a scientific consensus (when it is achieved), no logic of discovery or confirmation or as per Popper, logic of falsification. Indeed, dispelling this myth was surely the major achievement both Kuhn and Feyerabend.4 But it does not follow that the successful sciences share nothing of importance, however different are their practices and techniques (both across disciplines and historically within disciplines). At the very least, the practices of the successful physical sciences have evolved norms regarding inquiry that practitioners acknowledge, usually tacitly. Publicity and consideration of evidence is one. Acknowledgement of a stubborn reality and fallibilism is another. Thus, while the very powerful work in the sociology of science gives us a deeper understanding the actual practices of the sciences, few, if anyone, would go so far as to say that scientific practices are indistinguishable methodologically from non-scientific practices (Pickering, 1992). Baerts view is especially ironical as regards the pragmatists. Peirce famously distinguished four methods of fixing belief and insisted that the method of science, which by virtue of its acknowledgement that there is something which affects or might affect any man is self-corrective and, accordingly, had to be preferredpragmatically. Similarly, Dewey put huge wait on inquiry insisting that the successful sciences were successful because they were in fact using the logic which for him not only characterized science, but everyday intelligent problem solving. The classical pragmatists rejected Kants transcendental move, but unlike Rorty, they sought a reconstruction of philosophy, not a rejection of it. As we shall see, on this critical issue, Baert is strongly pulled in the direction of Rorty.

2. THE SOCIAL SCIENCES GAIN FROM METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM (150) For Baert there is a multitude of cognitive interests that underlie social research and it is an error to reduce these to one: explanation, possibly prediction (150). It is not clear to me what are these many cognitive interests (which smacks more of Habermas than any pragmatist) or what the argument

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here is. Is this, for example, an empirical claim? It is normative? As he says, if prediction and control is the goal, then the value-free vocabularyof naturalistic approaches will suffice. If, on the other hand, we want to treat human beings as moral individuals, then surely anti-naturalistic approaches are called for (134). This seems to be, following Rorty, a very positivist view of the matter, not shared by critical realists or Dewey. Rorty is clearly positivist. He sums up by offering two distinct requirements for the vocabulary of the social sciences: (1) It should contain descriptions of situations which facilitate their prediction and control and (2) It should contain descriptions which help one decide what to do (Rorty 1982: 197). Rorty notes, correctly, those who aim at prediction do very poorly. He might also have noticed that not only does control require very little science (it requires power), it too is limitedas regards persons, thank heaven, and as regards nature, it is entirely absent when it comes to ensuring that nature will do our bidding. The best we can do here is try to understand its dynamics, to avoid disastrous intervention. and otherwise to learn to cope. Is not clear how much of Rortys summary Baert accepts, since most obviously missing in Rortys account is the realist idea that the descriptions have nothing to do with prediction and should aim at facilitating explanation in the realist sense. That is, just as we understand why iron rusts because we have molecular chemistry, we can understand why working class kids get working class jobs. That is, we need an account of the beliefs and attitudes of working class kids (and their teachers and parents) that explains what they do, and then an account that provides the conditions and consequences, mostly unintended, of these actions. Indeed, only with such understanding can we build technologies and/or intervene successfully. May we suppose that along with prediction and control, methodological pluralism tolerates realist goalsand others perhaps not identified? But we are entitled to ask which of the identified goals bear pragmatic fruit? On this point, there would seem to be deep disagreement between myself and Baert.

3. THE SPECTATOR THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE IS INAPPROPRIATE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH (151) The spectator theory of knowledge is, of course, Deweys term. It was aimed at all epistemologies which fail to appreciate that knowing is an active relation between the knower and the known, and that inquiry is constrained by both the practical concern which generates it and the constraints imposed by the environment in which the inquirer is situated.5 In his demolition of foundational epistemology, Rorty enlisted Dewey. But we need to notice that

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not only did they have different purposes, but they began with very different assumptions: Dewey assumed a philosophical naturalism and sought a reconstruction of philosophy in which the spectator theory of knowledge was replaced by not another epistemology but with a naturalistic theory of inquiryfinally elaborated in his generally ignored and misunderstood 1938 Logic. For Dewey, inquirers are always situated in space and time, confront a material and historically produced social world, and are motivated to inquiry to solve a problem. Indeed, it is this sense of practical which is shared by all pragmatists. Knowledge, then, is simply the product of competent inquiry. A Gods eye for the world is neither necessary nor possible. Thus, for example, when known as Fe, iron enters into new relations for us.6 Rorty, by contrast, wants to insist that the product of inquiry cannot be a representation of a reality even though, for Dewey, it is the hard won product of controlled experiment: the paradigm of an active effort to produce knowledge.7 Similarly, Rorty aims not at reconstruction, but thinks that the problems of philosophy, including epistemology and ontology disappear once we see that it is all a matter of finding a vocabulary suitable for the purpose at handBaerts main indebtedness to Rorty . Thus, contemporary textualism, the idea that there are nothing but texts parallels the idealist notion that there are nothing but ideas (Rorty, 1982: 139). But there is, he insists, a critical difference between current textualism and classical idealism. In repudiating the tradition, textualists reject the framework that allows for epistemology and ontology. Thus, unlike idealists (or naturalists or materialists) so-called post-modern writers reject the idea that what is important is not whether what we believe is true, but what vocabulary we use. Finally, then, for Rorty, pragmatism joins post-modern thinking in repudiating metaphysical argument between idealist/naturalists and the epistemological idea of truth as correspondence with reality. Baert has some misgivings with aspects of Rortys thoughtfor example, his polemic against Marx and his politics, but finds that most of what Rorty offers is convincing. Similarly Rorty sees that Dewey does not exactly fit his larger picture. In agreement with Santayana, Rorty insists that Deweys efforts at a naturalistic metaphysics betrays a recurrent flaw in Deweys work: his habit of announcing a bold new positive program when all he offers, and all he needs to offer, is criticism of the tradition (Rorty 1982: 78). To be sure, Dewey does offer a bold new positive programa naturalistic metaphysics with epistemology replaced by his version of logic (Sleeper, 1986). And he needed to do this because he could not step out of history and argue, as Rorty does, that knowledge and truth are pseudo problems that will go away once we abandon the claims of philosophy. Indeed, it is quite one thing to try to convince us that warranted assertability could replace

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truth, understood as a certainty, and quite another to say that, for pragmatists, there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational onesno wholesale constraints derived from the nature of objects, or the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers (Rorty 1982: 165). Worse,
the Socratic virtueswillingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the consequences of actions on other peopleare simply moral virtues . . . The pragmatists tell us that the conversation which it is our moral duty to continue is merely our project, the Europeans intellectual form of life (Rorty 1982: 172).

Perhaps we can put aside this remarkable provincialism and consider more broadly conversation as the key to successful outcomes. For Baehr, 4. SOCIAL RESEARCH IS A CONVERSATION (153) This would seem to be the most obvious of the influences of Rorty on Baerts project. Baert sees rightly that classical pragmatism rejected what is generally termed foundationalism, the search for secure epistemic grounding of truth claims. But there is a critical difference between what might be called the situated objectivity defended by Deweywho as noted, agreed that there could be no Gods eye view of the world and the position taken by Rorty. As with metaphysical controversy that dissolves once we see that all that is necessary is an appropriate vocabulary, relativism can similarly be evadednot answered.8 One we rid ourselves of the Enlightenment framework, we would no longer by haunted by spectors called relativism and irrationalism (Bernstein 1992: 270). Instead of directly addressing this question, Baert calls our attention to another sense of foundationalism, the effort to uncover unchanging foundations of an all-embracing framework of science or science of the social (153). Critical realists are the purest expression of this, but it is true of Parsons structural functionalism, Giddenss structuration theory (which I consider a version of realism), and the theories of Luhmann, Habermas, and rational choice theory. These metatheories, like the search for a method, presuppose both an epistemology and an ontology of science and, for Rorty and Baert, they all fail. Perhaps remarkably, a solution to both senses of foundationalism seems to be found in the work of Richard Bernstein and what he called a dialogic encounter. Baert is clear on what he means:
In a dialogic encounter people do not wish to score points by exploiting the weakness of others; they try to listen to them by understanding them in the

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strongest way. They strengthen their own arguments so as to make them most credible and to learn from them. Academic communication, then, becomes a more like a proper conversation, which encourages the participants to think differently. The ultimate aim is not to defend a refine a particular system but to use academic conversation to enhance our imaginative faculties.

It would seem foolish to quarrel with the good manners of this good advice even if it is a council of perfection. The more difficult question is how this bears on the question of addressing deep differences in frameworks, between say Giddens and Parsons, or rational choice theorists and critical theorists? Indeed, having enhanced our imaginative faculties, are we now to say that one can only be tolerant of differences since there is no true, correct, valid, warranted, justified answer to the questions of epistemology and ontology? Rorty at least would seem to be content to stop here. I am not clear where Baert stands on this critical issue.

5. KNOWLEDGE AS ACTION (154) As above, for Baert, the question of method depends in part at least on the goals of research, but methodological questions cannot be reduced to questions of ontology: (154). Accordingly, for him, there is nothing essential about the social that compels the use of a particular method (154). One can be generous here and agree that if prediction and control are our aims, perhaps we can think of human action in the same way we think of the movement of planets! But indeed, this seems like a reductio ad absurdum of the assumed metaphysics! This is not merely a philosophical prejudice: the empirical evidence shows it to be nonsense. Indeed, as Weber insisted, even if a goal of science is to predict action, one needs verstehen to do this. As he correctly saw, science is not likely to improve on our capacities to understand and then to anticipate responses of others. Indeed these capacities are a presupposition of social interaction.

6. SELF-UNDERSTANDING OPENS UP ALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS (155) A dialogic encounter has additional fruits. Baert recommends self-knowledge as a worthy cognitive object for social science. Following Gadamer, understanding ought be seen as an encounter, firstly, in which we rely upon our cultural presuppositions to gain access to what in being studied, and secondly, through which we articulate and rearticulate the very same presuppo-

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sitions (155). To do this, we need to reject the idea that the right interpretative method would allow us to touch upon the reality-out-there, but we gain sensitivity to views not held by us (155). The third consequence of the hermeneutic circle, so conceived, is that understanding is closely linked to self-understanding. Baert concludes the volume with illustrations from several ongoing research programs, including cultural anthropology, archaeology, and the genealogical work of Foucault. Again, there is surely no complaint about social scientific efforts at self-understanding. And no doubt encountering alien cultures and deconstructing historical constructions can be a most useful means to this. On the other hand, as Baert acknowledges, other genre: fiction, biography, narrative history, well serve this aim, as of course, does travel. But more pertinent, the question arises whether some forms of social science serve this role as part of a larger goal: the possibility of human emancipation. Baert notes that as regards self-understanding there is the emancipation effect. [E]ncountering difference may allow people to question some of their deep-seated beliefs, to distinguish the necessary from the contingent, the essential from historical specificity (156). But why stop here? Why not also argue that for exactly the same reasons, understanding the causal conditions and consequences of action is also emancipating? This is, of course, a critical consequence of realist social science. Indeed, it provides a sufficient ground for immanent critique, surely an important task for social science. That is, understanding why one believes what one believes and seeing that such belief is false but essential to the reproduction of a practice, gives one good reasons to challenge the practice. Baert gives a sympathetic reading of Foucault along these lines. He might well have taken more seriously Bernsteins penetrating criticism of Rorty and his powerful defense of immanent critique against all those post-modern writers who, having dismissed philosophy, have lost all confidence in the rational grounding of critique (Bernstein 1992: 316).

NOTES
1. A review of Patrick Baert, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 2. Baert holds that most mainstream social research complies with the intricate procedures suggested by the realist agenda and that it is simply not the case that contemporary social researchers are satisfied with a mere recording of regularity conjunctions; they look for mechanisms that account for how the regularities are brought about (102). But as Calhoun writes (following Boudin), most of what passes as causal analysis in the social sciences is in fact identification of more or less weak implication between statistical variables (1998: 866). Moreover, it is easy to show that

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the official position of most social researchers that the goal of science is establish laws construed as regularities that then explain by subsumption. Here are one or two examples: Frankfort Nachmias and Nachmias write: Ever since David Hume . . . an application of the term explanation has been considered a matter of relating the phenomena to be explained with other phenomena by means of general laws (1992: 10); Babbie writes: In large part research aims to find patterns of regularity in social life (2004: 13). Even somebody like Jeffrey Alexander who, as a post-Kuhnian, rejects classic positivist epistemology would not say that there is no objective knowledge in the social sciences, nor even that there is no possibility of successful predictions or covering laws (1987: 20). To be sure, like Durkheim, researchers very often let good sense get in the way, contradict themselves, and hint at causal mechanisms. Perhaps this is what Baert had in mind. 3. Interpretation of Alfred Schtz as anti-naturalistic is contestable, as is the understanding of work of the ethnomethodologists and perhaps also Goffman. See my The Social Sciences Since World War II: The Rise and Fall of Scientism, in William Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner (eds.), Handbook of Social Science Methodology, London: Sage. 4. Baert acknowledges that critical realism is a qualified naturalism in that while it models social science on natural science, it insists on important differences between the social and natural sciences (96). Similarly as regards Weber. Durkheims naturalism is unqualified and, as Schtz pointed out, it found expression in Parsons and those who followed him. See my The Social Sciences Since World War II: The Rise and Fall of Scientism, As I noted earlier, there are unqualified anti-naturalisms as well. 5. Versus logical empiricism, they displaced the logic of the logicians and undermined positivist foundationist epistemology. Interesting in this regard is Baerts claim that if as realists say, most systems are open, then most scientific explanations cannot be properly justified philosophically (103). This surely seems like a hankering for justification that, as pragmatists insist, is neither available nor necessary. 6. Dewey writes: If we see that knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a participator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object of knowledge resides in the consequences of directed action . . . For on this basis there will be as many kinds of known objects as there are kinds of effectively conducted operations of inquiry which result in the consequences intended (Quest for Certainty 1960: 19697). This includes knowing that iron is Fe and will, ceteris paribus, oxidize. 7. The work of Hacking and Pickering is very Deweyan. Thus Hacking writes: The theories of the laboratory sciences are not directly compared to the world; they persist because they are true to the phenomena produced or even created by apparatus in the laboratory and measured by instruments that we have engineered (1992: 30). See also Pickerings idea of the mangle of practice. Critical realists can, of course, share in this view. The so-called correspondence theory of truth cannot, to be sure, provide a mode of establishing truth, even if true may still mean corresponds to the facts. 8. For criticism of Rortys effort here see, Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1992): 27073.

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