scholarly journals John Dewey: Closet Conservative?

Paideusis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
David I. Waddington
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
World War ◽  
Careful Scrutiny ◽  
Joint Authorship

Several well-known scholars, including Clarence Karier, Walter Feinberg, and Eamonn Callan, have offered arguments suggesting that John Dewey was more politically conservative than is generally thought. Karier and Feinberg base their respective cases on Dewey’s involvement with Polish community during World War I, while Callan relies heavily on some remarks offered in one of Dewey’s later works, Ethics. In the following account, it is suggested that neither of these analyses withstands careful scrutiny. In the case of the Polish affair, Karier and Feinberg are not able to marshal sufficient evidence to condemn Dewey convincingly, and there is a significant quantity of counterevidence which indicates that Dewey’s intentions were benign. Callan’s case, though seemingly convincing, is undermined by the joint authorship of the Ethics and by information contained in Dewey’s correspondence. In conclusion, it is argued that the more popular understanding of Dewey as a left-liberal reformer is, in fact, correct.

The Elusive Ideal of Academic Freedom

2021 ◽  
pp. 215-240
Author(s):  
George M. Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
American Association ◽  
World War ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Lafayette College ◽  
American Schools ◽  
The Ideal

Academic freedom arose as a prominent ideal at major American schools in the early twentieth century and with the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915. The concern was to exclude outside interests of business or religion from limiting academic freedom, as had sometimes happened. As John Dewey advocated, scientifically trained experts should be free to rule. Schools with religious heritage often had both proclaimed the freedom of professors and expected some religiously defined limits on their teaching. That was well illustrated in the controversy at Lafayette College when a conservative Presbyterian president fired a controversial professor. The ideal of academic freedom was elusive, however, because freedom always had limits as was illustrated by the controversies over national loyalty of professors during World War I. The AAUP eventually allowed religious limits on freedom if they were clearly stated in advance.

War and the Intellectuals: Bourne, Dewey, and the Fate of Pragmatism

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Great War ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
Primal Scene ◽  
Randolph Bourne ◽  
The Great War ◽  
American Left

My purpose here, apart from convincing you that John Dewey was quite possibly right about American entry into World War I, is to address the repression and mutilation of pragmatism by left-wing intellectuals in the twentieth century. These would seem to be very different purposes, but in fact they are the same. If we are to understand how pragmatism acquired its unsavory reputation among leftists everywhere, we must go back to 1917, when Randolph Bourne denounced not only Dewey's decision in favor of American entry but also pragmatism itself as the source of that decision. These almost ancient denunciations would not matter very much, except that they are repeated in every subsequent account of the American Left in World War I, and are recalled if not reiterated in every subsequent critique of pragmatism – they still determine our thinking about Dewey, about pragmatism, and about the war. Revisiting this primal scene allows us to ask why. It allows us to convert the following statement, which still serves as a left-wing credential, into a question: Dewey's support for American entry into the Great War demonstrates that pragmatism is a philosophy of acquiescence to “the existing fact,” a philosophy that must validate capitalism, accept imperialism, and repudiate socialism.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Culture

2017 ◽  
pp. 674-694
Author(s):  
Erin McKenna ◽  
Scott L. Pratt
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Academy ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
World War ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Linguistic Turn

Philosophy of language—the dominant philosophy of the American academy—is central to the rise of Donald Trump. To philosophers, this claim may seem as surprising as Trump’s presidency. Neither would have surprised John Dewey. In German Philosophy and Politics (1915), Dewey claimed that World War I was inevitable thanks to the Kantian philosophical commitments that informed German culture, such as the separation of reason from experience and an absolute sense of duty. In the 1943 edition, Dewey argued that Hitler’s rise and World War II depended on these same commitments. German philosophy was a mirror of German culture that provided a “definitely practical aid” in realizing the ends it reflected. Today, the mirror of American culture is the philosophy of the linguistic turn exemplified by the work of Robert Brandom. This chapter considers this link and argues for a recovery of a Deweyan pluralist philosophy of resistance and freedom.

CANONIZING DEWEY: NATURALISM, LOGICAL EMPIRICISM, AND THE IDEA OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW JEWETT
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Logical Empiricism ◽  
Primary Role ◽  
World War ◽  
Third Way ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Value Neutrality

Between World War I and World War II, the students of Columbia University's John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge built up a school of philosophical naturalism sharply critical of claims to value-neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the second-generation Columbia naturalists (John Herman Randall Jr, Herbert W. Schneider, Irwin Edman, Horace L. Friess, and James Gutmann) and their students who later joined the department (Charles Frankel, Joseph L. Blau, Albert Hofstadter, and Justus Buchler) reacted with dismay to the arrival on American shores of logical empiricism and other analytic modes of philosophy. These figures undermined their colleague Ernest Nagel's attempt to build an alliance with the logical empiricists, accusing them of ignoring the scholar's primary role as a public critic. After the war, the prestige of analytic approaches and a tendency to label philosophies either “analytic” or “Continental” eclipsed the Columbia philosophers’ normatively inflected naturalism. Yet in their efforts to resist logical empiricism, the Columbia naturalists helped to construct a sturdy, canonical portrait of “American philosophy” that proponents still hold up as a third way between analytic and Continental approaches.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

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