John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism.

ALAN RYAN tells us in the preface to this book that he began it not long after he moved to Princeton University and finished a book on the politics of Bertrand Russell -- a time at which ``it seemed plausible to explore Dewey's place in a secular trinity of liberal intellectuals consisting of Mill, Russell, and him.'' This is not a very promising beginning to a book of which it would be unfair, but at the same time not entirely untrue, to say that it exhibits several of the defects of its subject. John Dewey's thought, as Ryan ably expounds it, was animated by a passion for intellectual reconciliation, which led Dewey to soften or blur distinctions that produced decisive contrasts and conflicts even in the thought of other liberal intellectuals. Such was the distinction between science and religion in the thought of Bertrand Russell, who always maintained that the scientific outlook undermined the hopes expressed by religion. For Russell, unlike Dewey, religious faith was real enough for its absence to be perceived as a loss. Indeed, Russell was liable throughout his long life to episodes of despair about the human lot that he himself accounted for, in part, by reference to his ``vain search for God.'' It is difficult to think of a sharper contrast or conflict between liberal intellectuals than between Russell and Dewey, whose pursuit of moral uplift eventuated in a faith in democracy and the common man that Russell never shared, and whose lifelong pragmatist project of making science and religion collaborators in a common enterprise of world improvement Russell heartily despised. Ryan's careful, comprehensive, and learned study does not altogether pass over these differences, but it tends to dull or blunt them by its uncritical assumption of a common humanist project of which Russell and Dewey were merely different exemplars. This prevents any investigation of the fascinating and complex subject of the relations of liberalism with Christianity -- in particular, of the ways in which liberals of Dewey's stripe thought they were free to inherit Christianity's large moral hopes for the human species without accepting any element of its transcendental faith. In this Ryan is all too like Dewey and his followers, and unlike Russell, who found faith in democracy and the common man even more unreasonable than faith in God, on the ground that we know so much more about the former, and what we know does not conduce to faith. This was, after all, the substance of Walter Lippmann's criticism of democratic public opinion, to which Dewey took such violent exception that he was moved to attack it not once but twice. It is impossible not to see in Lippmann the true spirit of objectivity and empirical openness about democracy, which Dewey's work signally lacks. Unfortunately, subsequent American thought -- conservative no less than liberal -- has followed Dewey rather than Lippmann in its valuation of democracy as an article of humanist faith rather than an expedient political device. It would be unfair to suggest that Ryan is altogether uncritical of Dewey. He often takes Dewey to task for his vague affirmations of an eventual convergence between social control and individual liberty and an ultimate harmony between man and nature; and, in fact, when Ryan defends Dewey, the reader has the sense that his heart is not in it. As an apologia for the relevance of Dewey's thought to our own dilemmas the book is extraordinarily unpersuasive. It is a useful contribution to American intellectual history, fusing a sensitive appreciation of the cultural milieu in which Dewey's thought was incubated with a highly professional grip on the state of philosophy in Britain and America during the early decades of this century, but Ryan's seeming conviction of the staying power of Dewey's thought is not transmitted to the reader. The abiding question suggested by this book -- a question Ryan's account of its inception does not satisfactorily answer -- is, Why was it written? In the utterly different, but almost equally remote, historical circumstances of the Thirties and the Cold War, it was possible for Sidney Hook to appropriate Dewey's ideas for his own pragmatic purposes; it is thoroughly unclear that they can have any similar utility for anyone in our circumstances. The oddity of Ryan's book -- in which, however, it is entirely typical of a certain kind of transatlantic liberalism -- is that it exhibits a well-developed awareness of those features of late-twentieth-century experience which most confound liberal expectations, such as the renaissance of ethnic particularisms and the rise of fundamentalist movements, without at any point daring to revise, or even to question, the liberal philosophy which supports those expectations. It does not seem to have occurred to Ryan to ask whether these developments might warrant amending the philosophical anthropology, or the philosophy of history, that underpins liberalism even in Dewey's naturalistic and Hegelian reformulation of it. Is it too harsh to suggest that, in this way, Ryan is closer to Dewey than he is to Russell? Dewey's legacy to American culture is a species of edifying discourse, now all but ubiquitous, which inhibits the asking of hard questions about liberalism. That edification and questioning were not always contraries is shown by the splendid example of William James, who sadly receives only passing mention in Ryan's book, and who -- unlike Dewey -- did not take liberal morality as an unexamined postulate of his thought. Nor did William James's style reflect, as Dewey's did, the effort of melting down hard distinctions into a mess of indeterminate idealism. William James could not, I think, have written this passage on education, which Ryan quotes with apparent approval: . . . the individual who is to be educated is a social individual, and . . . society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted -- we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents -- into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service. To which one can only reply: If this is edification, give us cynicism instead.