Reconstructing dewey on power

Political Theory

Volumn 37, Issue 6, 2009, Pages 780-807

  Hildreth, R W ^a  

^a SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Democratic theory; John Dewey; Power; Pragmatism

Indexed keywords

EID: 70450099235     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591709345454     Document Type: Article

References (140)

1. Dewey, Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us (1939), LW 14, 227. All quotes from Dewey are taken from the Collected Works. The notation is as follows: title (date of publication), volume, page number. I abbreviated the volume notation as follows:
2. EW = John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1972);
3. MW= John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976-1983);
4. LW= John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale IL.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984-1991).
5. Dewey never uses the term public problem-solving. I take the following statement in The Public and Its Problems to mean public problem-solving: We take then our point of departure form the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived, their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others (LW 2, 243).
6. See for example, Eric MacGilvray, Five Myths about Pragmatism, or, Against a Second Pragmatic Acquiescence, Political Theory 28 (August 2000): 480-508;
7. Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
8. Festenstein, Politics and Acquiescence in Rorty's Pragmatism, Theoria 50:1 (June 2003): 1-26;
9. Marion Smiley, Pragmatic Inquiry and Social Conflict: A Critical Reconstruction of Dewey's Model of Democracy, Praxis International 9 (January 1990): 365-80.
10. See Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day (New York: Horace Liveright, Inc.,);
11. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1960);
12. C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963/1969);
13. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quinton Hoare and Goeffrey Nowell (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971);
14. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974);
15. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963);
16. John Patrick Diggins, Pragmatism and Its Limits, in The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999);
17. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
18. Richard Posner, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
19. Stephen K. White, The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science: A Pragmatist Turn, in Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
20. Dewey presented his own defense against the pragmatic acquiescence in his review of Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day. See The Pragmatic Acquiescence (1927), LW 3, 145-51. Important defenses of Dewey's democratic theory include:
21. Richard Bernstein, John Dewey (New York: Washington Square, 1964);
22. Bernstein, One Step Forward Two Steps Back, Political Theory 15:4 (Nov 1987): 538-63;
23. Sidney Hook, Introduction: The Relevance of John Dewey's Political Thought, in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 17. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974/1990);
24. Alfonso D'Amico, Dewey and Marx: On Partisanship and the Reconstruction of Society, in John Dewey: Critical Assessments, ed. J. E. Tiles (New York: Routledge, 1981/1992);
25. Smiley, Pragmatic Inquiry; Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
26. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
27. Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory; William Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
28. Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, 423;
29. White, The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science, 314. Sociology and Pragmatism was originally C. Wright Mills' 1942 doctoral dissertation but was not published until after his death in 1963.
30. Liberalism and Social Action (1937), LW 11, 45-46.
31. See Caspary, Dewey on Democracy for a reconstruction of Dewey as a theorist of conflict resolution. There are significant parallels between Caspary's reconstruction and goals even though we address different aspects of Dewey's thought.
32. Richard Bernstein, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back;
33. MacGilvray, Five Myths about Pragmatism;
34. Festenstein, Politics and Acquiescence;
35. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy;
36. Smiley, Pragmatic Inquiry;
37. James Bohman, Theories, Practices, and Pluralism: A Pragmatic Interpretation of Critical Social Science, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29:4 (December 1999): 459-80;
38. Alison Kadlec, Dewey's Critical Pragmatism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007);
39. Jack Knight and James Johnson, Political Consequences of Pragmatism, Political Theory 24:1 (February 1996): 68-96.
40. Sheldon Wolin frames his discussion of Dewey in his revised Politics and Vision in terms of power. However, he does not analyze a Deweyan account of power. Instead he posits Dewey as adhering to Bacon's idea that knowledge is power. See Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 517.
41. A notable exception is Randy Hewitt, Democracy and Power: A Reply to Dewey's Leftists Critics, Education and Culture 39:3 (Fall 2002): 1-13. Hewitt and I pursue similar goals. His work is oriented toward education and does not engage the explicit debates on power in political and social theory.
42. John Stuhr, Pragmatism, Post-modernism and the Future of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003).
43. White appeals to the early Frankfurt School and later Habermas and Stuhr appeals to Adorno, Deleuze, and Foucault.
44. Unfortunately, Dewey did not read the texts on power by contemporaries such as Bertrand Russell and Max Weber until late in his life. In Freedom and Culture (1939) he references but does not engage Russell's 1938 Power: A New Social Analysis (1939), LW 13, 160. This is unfortunate as Russell's definition of power as the production of intended effects resonates with Dewey's basic understanding and could have been an occasion for further reflection.
45. See Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1938/1996), 23. In a 1949 letter Dewey remarked that he first read Max Weber in 1944 or 1945. He is most likely mistaken about the year since the text he refers to, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, was published in 1946.
46. See John Dewey to Jack C. Lamb, March 8, 1949, The Correspondence of John Dewey, Volume 3: 1940-1952 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).
47. The literature on power in social and political theory is immense and unwieldy, spanning diverse disciplines, methodologies, and political commitments. This breadth is expected, given the essential contestedness of power. See William Connelly, Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973/1993), 11, 86.
48. Like many debates in political science, the faces of power debate is a constructed narrative. Among the prominent theorists, only Bachrach and Baratz referred to power in terms of its faces. For the major texts in this debate, see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Routledge, 2000);
49. Robert Dahl, A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model, The American Political Science Review 52:2 (June, 1958): 463-69;
50. Dahl, The Concept of Power, in Power: Critical Concepts, vol. 1, ed. John Scott (New York: Routledge, [1957]1994);
51. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Two Faces of Power, American Political Science Review 56 (September 1962): 947-52;
52. Bachrach and Baratz, Decisions and Non-decisions: An Analytical Framework, American Political Science Review 57 (September 1963): 632-42;
53. Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Peter Digesser argues that the work of Michel Foucault represents a fourth face of power.
54. See The Fourth Face of Power, Journal of Politics 54 (1992): 977-1007.
55. Robert Dahl and others attacked Mills' methods as unscientific and based on a concept of power so ambiguous as to verge on meaninglessness. Without an operationalizable definition of power, Mills could not measure the scope of the power elite's actual control or influence over political decisions. Indeed, Mills did not adequately define power in The Power Elite. He was less interested in defining power than describing its distribution. Moreover, methodological rigor was not Mills' purpose; he sought instead to advance a critical, political, and at times polemical argument designed to disrupt complacency and spur action. See Dahl, A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model, 464-65
56. The Concept of Power, 290;
57. See also Alan Wolfe, Afterword, in Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Routledge, 2000), 363.
58. Mills, The Power Elite, 4.
59. Ibid., 19.
60. Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, 394.
61. Ibid., 432.
62. Ibid., 405.
63. Ibid., 417.
64. Lukes's radical view was a direct challenge to the first two faces of power. He argued that both approaches are deficient for their reliance on observable conflict, methodological individualism, and for assuming that social actors' interests are what they take them to be.
65. Lukes, Power, 27.
66. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 373.
67. Lukes Power, 38.
68. Ibid., 49.
69. Ibid., 48.
70. Ibid., 145.
71. White does not directly cite Lukes but does draw on John Gaventa to anchor his discussion of power. Gaventa was Lukes's student and conducted an empirical study of the radical view of power in Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence & Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980).
72. White, The Very Idea of a Critical Social Science, 313.
73. Ibid., 315.
74. Ibid., 321.
75. Ibid., 323.
76. For discussions of these criteria, see Public and Its Problems (1926), LW 2, 152-53, 155, 327, 328, 339.
77. See Force, Violence and Law (1916), MW 10;
78. Force and Coercion (1916), MW 10.
79. Ibid., 246.
80. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 215.
81. Though Dewey is not entirely consistent in his use of the term power, the basic sense of a capacity is broadly consistent throughout his works. See Ethics (1904), EW 4, 454;
82. Democracy and Education (1916), MW 9, 46;
83. Intelligence and Power (1934), LW 9, 109.
84. Dahl, The Concept of Power, 290.
85. Force and Coercion (1916), MW 10, 246.
86. Ibid., 245.
87. see also The Future of Radical Political Action (1933), LW 9, 68.
88. Ibid., 245.
89. Ibid., 252.
90. See Liberalism and Social Action (1937), LW 11.
91. Experience and Nature (1925), LW 1, 11, my emphasis.
92. Ibid., 18.
93. For a good discussion of the radical implications of Dewey's transactional understanding of experience, see Ralph W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), especially chap. 3.
94. Experience and Nature (1925), LW 1, 246 and Democracy and Education (1916), MW 9, 167.
95. Democracy and Education (1916), MW 9, 167
96. Art as Experience (1934), LW 10, 196-197;
97. Experience and Nature (1925), LW 1, 36, 229.
98. Similarly to power, Dewey is not entirely consistent in his use of terms. He uses a variety of terms to refer to this general pattern of experience, including intermediate experience, experimental inquiry, social inquiry, cooperative inquiry, intelligent action, aesthetic experience, consummatory experience, even thinking. For the sake of consistency, I use experimental inquiry.
99. Force and Coercion (1916), MW 10, 246.
100. Dewey often uses the terms capability, capacity, potentiality interchangeably. For a different account of Dewey's use of these terms, see Craig C. Cunningham, Dewey's Metaphysics and the Self, Studies in Philosophy and Education 13 (September, 1994): 343-60.
101. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), LW 12, 482. Dewey borrows this definition of cultural matrix from Francis MacDonald Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), 45.
102. Dewey notes, The possession of effective power is always a matter of the distribution of power that exists at the time. See Liberty and Social Control (1937), LW 11, 36;
103. Liberalism and Social Action (1937), LW 11, 35-36.
104. Human Nature and Conduct (1924), MW 14, 38, 96.
105. Ibid., 50.
106. Experience and Education (1938), LW 13, 19.
107. For a phenomenological account of the relationship between skill, habit, and expertise, see Herbert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus, The Ethical Implications of the Five-Stage Skill-Acquisition Model, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 24:3 (June, 2004): 251-64.
108. Experience and Nature (1925), LW 1, 235.
109. Human Nature and Conduct (1924), MW 14, 44.
110. Ibid., 54.
111. Ibid., 79.
112. Ibid., 57, my emphasis.
113. Authority and Social Change (1937), LW 11, 135.
114. For the idea that individuals are vehicles and subjects of power, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 101. It is important to note that there are only certain resemblances between Dewey and Foucault. An obvious difference between Foucault and Dewey hinges on the social sciences. Dewey saw great potential in the social sciences for progressive politics. Foucault details how specific social sciences and social practices aligned power and knowledge to discipline the subject.
115. Individualism Old and New (1929), LW 5, 55.71.
116. Science, technology, and the capitalist economy are the most significant forces of Dewey's time. See Individualism Old and New (1929), LW 5, 88.
117. Public and Its Problems (1926), LW 2, 231.
118. Ibid., 301.
119. Ibid., 307.
120. Posner, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, 24.
121. Reconstruction and Philosophy (1920), MW 12, 181;
122. Democracy and Education (1916), MW 9, 54
123. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism, 361.
124. Experience and Education (1938), LW 13, 19.
125. Public and Its Problems (1926), LW 2, 328.
126. Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), MW 12, 186.
127. Democracy and Education (1916), MW 9, 89.
128. Liberalism and Social Action (1937), LW 11, 56.
129. Human Nature and Conduct (1922), MW 14, 207.
130. For a persuasive reading of Dewey's democratic theory in terms of conflict resolution, see Caspary, Dewey on Democracy.
131. Liberalism and Social Action (1937), LW 11, 56.
132. Creative Democracy (1939), LW 14, 227.
133. Democracy and Educational Administration (1937), LW 11, 217.
134. Public and Its Problems (1926), LW 2, 362.
135. In positing democracy as a form of social inquiry, it is important to note- against Mills-that Dewey never argues that democracy should replicate natural science. This vision of democracy-even understood as a kind of public problem-solving-does not presuppose that a political community is exactly like a community of scientists. Instead, Dewey argues that society is composed of groups of immense number of kinds, having different ties and instituting different interests. These societies take many different forms and have different orientations toward the public-good, bad and indifferent (e.g., neighborhood associations, gangs, sports clubs). Because these groups are both distinctive entities and constitutive parts of the public, there will always be overlapping and conflicting interests. Given this diversity, Dewey acknowledges that not everyone will view the same problem in the same way. An experimental approach to democracy will not erase or even dampen differences of opinion and interest, even when different sides are using the same facts. Conflicts will always arise and some may be difficult to overcome. However, an experimental approach to democracy holds out the promise that more intelligence will be brought to bear in addressing these conflicts. See Experience and Education (1938), LW 13, 59;
136. Public and Its Problems (1926), LW 2, 278, 347.
137. Ibid., 88, my emphasis.
138. See Needed-A New Politics (1935), LW 11, 280;
139. Liberalism and Social Action (1937), LW 11, 45.
140. Intelligence and Power (1934), LW 9, 108.