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Philosophy and Social Criticism: John Dewey 1910–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Paul F. Bourke
Paul F. Bourke*
Affiliation:
American Studies, Flinders University of South Australia
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Extract

John Dewey's intellectual career is a remarkable example of sustained involvement across three quarters of a century with the challenge of formulating a philosophy that would engage with the common life. To break into the continuities of his questions and answers is to risk some distortion. Even his last work—for example, his collaboration with Arthur Bentley—involved a reformulation and correction of earlier themes and a constant retrospection at the accumulation of his work. It is clear, nonetheless, that certain phases in his work exhibit particular preoccupations. By focussing, as I shall do here, on the decade that bounded the First World War it is possible to see in sharp relief some problematical aspects of Dewey's longstanding commitment to the definition of a philosophy of praxis.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1975 , pp. 3 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Dewey, John, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Dewey, , et al., Creative Intelligence (New York, 1917), p. 60.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., p. 60.Google Scholar

3. Dewey, , Democracy and Education (New York, 1916), p. 333.Google Scholar

4. Dewey, , German Philosophy and Politics (New York, 1915), pp. 52–3.Google Scholar

5. Dewey, , Reconstruction in Philosophy (London, 1921), p. 156.Google Scholar

6. Dewey, , “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” pp. 7–8 and passim. Bernstein, Richard, Praxis and Action (New York, 1972) offers a penetrating statement of a number of important themes in Dewey's work.Google Scholar

7. Dewey, , “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” p. 65.Google Scholar

8. Dewey, , Democracy and Education, p. 328.Google Scholar

9. Dewey, Jane, “Biography of John Dewey,” in Schilp, P. (ed.), The Philosophy of John Dewey (New York, 1939), pp. 44–5.Google Scholar

10. For reasons of scale, my paper does not touch on a related point here: I have wondered what connection may have existed between Dewey's postwar absorption in aesthetics culminating in Art and Experience (1934) and the criticism, initiated by Van Wyck Brooks and Randolph Bourne during the war and continued later by Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld and Lewis Mumford, that pragmatism lacked an aesthetic sense. Along with other students of these matters, I hope that we soon have a detailed study of Dewey in the 1920's. I have dealt only with the wartime origins of the Brooks/Bourne critique of pragmatism in my “The Status of Politics 1909–1919: The New Republic, Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks,” Journal of American Studies, 8 (1974): 171–202.Google Scholar

11. Joseph Ratner, Preface to Dewey, , Characters and Events (New York, 1929), vol. 1, p. v–vi.Google Scholar

12. Ayres, Clarence, Review of Characters and Events, International Journal of Ethics (January, 1930): 264 cited in Wright Mills, C., Sociology and Pragmatism (New York, 1964), pp. 320–1.Google Scholar

13. For a brief discussion of the nature of Dewey's appeal to intellectuals before the war, see Bourke, Paul F., “The Social Critics and the End of American Innocence, 1907–1921,” Journal of American Studies, 3 (1969): 57–73.Google Scholar

14. Cywar, Alan, “John Dewey: Toward Domestic Reconstruction 1915–20,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 30 (1969): 385–400; and Cywar, , “John Dewey in World War I,” American Quarterly, 21 (1969): 578–595; see also Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America 1889–1963 (New York, 1965), chapter 6; Hirschfeld, Charles, “Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,” Mid-America, 45 (1963): 139–56.Google Scholar

15. For Dewey's argument on industrial federalism, see Cywar, , “John Dewey: Toward Domestic Reconstruction 1915–20”; for the New Republic's wartime enthusiasm for various forms of pluralism, see Lippmann, Walter, “A Clue,” New Republic (April 14, 1917) and the exchange between Alfred Zimmern, the editors and Robert McIvor on the State in the issues for September 15, 1917 and October 13, 1917. These themes recur in discussions of such agencies as the Food Administration. See Merz, Charles, “Strategy in Food,” New Republic (January 26, 1918) and Soule, George, “Instead of Revolution,” New Republic (March 2, 1918). Dewey's discussion in the 1920's and its reliance on Lippmann may be seen in The Public and its Problems, (New York, 1927), p. 116.Google Scholar

16. Feinberg, Walter, “Progressive Education and Social Planning,” Teachers' College Record, 73 (1972): 485–510; Karier, Clarence, “Liberalism and the Quest for Orderly Change,” History of Education Quarterly, 12 (1972): 57–80. Karier's essay is also available as chapter 5 of Karier, Violas, Paul and Spring, Joel, Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century, (Chicago, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Dewey, , Confidential Report: Conditions Among the Poles in the United States, privately printed, 1918 (available in the University of California, Berkeley, library); Blanshard, Brand, The Church and the Polish Immigrant, privately printed, 1920 (available in the Widener Library, Harvard University.) Although the book is not documented and is to be treated with some caution, Schack, William, Art and Argyrol, (New York, 1960)—a biography of Albert Barnes—has a useful brief account of the project.Google Scholar

18. Dewey, , Conditions Among the Poles, p. 2–3; Blanshard, , The Church and the Polish Immigrant, p. 17 identifies the Polish member as Anzia Yezierska. Yezierska's autobiography Red Ribbon on a White Horse, (New York, 1950) is dedicated to “my daughter, Louise Levitas.” Yezierska was born in 1885 in Russian Poland and came to the United States with her parents in 1901. After some years working in the Lower East Side “sweatshops” and attending settlement house evening classes—where she appears to have encountered Dewey—Yezierska studied at Columbia and was a member of Dewey's 1917 seminar from which the team for the Polish project was drawn. She lived in Philadelphia with the Blanshards, Edman and Bradshaw during the investigation and was assigned the topic of women and family life in the community. She later wrote for a range of periodicals but gained her greatest visibility when her novel Hungry Hearts was picked up by Hollywood. She enjoyed a brief and entirely frustrating career in Hollywood writing scenarios for several films. Her period as a celebrity ended with the depression and she spent some time in the 1930's involved in characteristic WPA tasks, such as labelling the trees in Central Park. She disappeared from view for nearly twenty years, emerging with Red Ribbon on a White Horse in 1950, with an introduction written by W. H. Auden. Apart from occasional reviews in the New York Times, Yezierska wrote little after that. She died in California in 1970. These fragments of biography may be reconstructed from Kunitz, S. J. (ed.), Twentieth Century Authors (New York, 1942); Schack, , Art and Argyrol, which refers briefly to her connection with the Barnes project and appears to cite communications between Yezierska and Schack on the project; Yezierska, , All I Could Never Be, (New York, 1933) and Red Ribbon on a White Horse. This last work refers only to Yezierska's life beyond 1920. See also New York Times November 23, 1970 (an obituary notice). Her scattered writings, reviews and occasional interviews after 1920 may be picked up in the Reader's Guide to Periodicals. Google Scholar

19. In All I Could Never Be, Professor Henry Scott who directs the project in the Polish district is a famous philosopher who has brought his students, Henry Edman, Robert Drake and Miss Foster to live in a house in the district for the duration of the project. Fanya joins them. After the completion of the project and his return to the University, Scott travels to such places as Mexico on educational missions and is the subject, finally, of a grand dinner and series of celebrations of his sixtyfifth birthday at which old colleagues and students laud his stature as an intellectual statesman and exponent of liberal values. These are some of the pieces of the “Dewey” character in the novel; there are others which might interest a Dewey biographer although only Yezierska could help us to know how far they should.Google Scholar

20. Yezierska, , All I Could Never Be, p. 96.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., pp. 89–92, 108–111, 117.Google Scholar

22. Karier, , “Liberalism and the Quest for Orderly Change,” 64.Google Scholar

23. Feinberg, , “Progressive Education and Social Planning,” 491–2; Dewey, , “Autocracy Under Cover,” New Republic (August 24, 1918).Google Scholar

24. Dewey, , “Autocracy Under Cover,” Edman, Irwin, “The Fourth Part of Poland,” Nation, 107 (1918): 342–343; Dewey, , Conditions Among the Poles, pp. 75–80, 27 and passim. Google Scholar

25. See Kobiet, Jan, “America and the Polish Question,” New Republic (August 10, 1918) and “America and Polish Politics,” New Republic (November 9, 1918). Gerson, Louis, Woodrow Wilson and the Rebirth of Poland, (New Haven, 1953) is the standard work. Gerson also reprints as appendices the two earlier memoranda referred to in Conditions Among the Poles which Dewey sent in August, 1918 to Colonel House. Gerson suggests, without making it entirely clear, that Military Intelligence approached Dewey in response to complaints by Polish groups against the Paderewski faction. Gerson, , Woodrow Wilson and the Rebirth of Poland, p. 53, fn. 28.Google Scholar

26. On the character of American war aims and Wilsonian ideology see Mayer, Arno, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, (New Haven, 1959) and Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking, (New York, 1967). See also Gordon Levin, N., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

27. Matthews, Fred, “The Revolt Against Americanism,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 1 (1970): 4–32 offers an excellent analysis of the emergence of cultural pluralism against which Dewey's interest in the problem should be placed.Google Scholar

28. Bourke, Paul F. “The Status of Politics 1909–1919” discusses the nature of Bourne's criticism of pragmatism.Google Scholar