John Dewey and the Liberal Science of Community

Abstract

The social and political philosophy of John Dewey is not idiosyncratically American in character. It appeals to the rationality of science in order to compensate for the failure of the liberal tradition of politics to specify adequately the grounds of membership within a political community; as such, it perpetuates a branch of that tradition whose origins are found in the work of Thomas Hobbes and whose recent adherents include Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. By purifying the language of common sense through the application of a method of scientific abstraction, Dewey seeks to furnish liberal citizens with a shared apprehension of the web of interdependence which now confuses their daily experience and thus to enable those citizens to exercise rational control over the consequences of that interdependence. However, the kind of political education which is to transform this scientific knowledge into a possession of the public must undermine the coherence of the forms of community within which, according to Dewey's own analysis, citizens are first to learn the distinctively political virtues.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.