The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy

353 Pages·2012·1.405 MB·English

by  Melvin Rogers

0.6692”
spine bulk
“The Undiscovered Dewey is the best book on our greatest public philosopher since Robert r
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Westbrook’s classic text. It is one of those rare works that would make John Dewey smile, and g
Richard Rorty grin from the grave.” e
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cornel wesT, Princeton University s
“A significant contribution to the growing literature on Dewey’s religious and political
thought.”
shane ralsTon, Journal of Politics
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“A bold, fresh, exhaustively researched reinterpretation of America’s greatest democratic h
theorist.”
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Jeffrey sToUT, author of Democracy and Tradition

“Rogers offers a revisionist reading of Dewey to recover what he considers lost intellectual and U
moral resources for a revitalized politics in a pluralist society. . . . A great virtue of this work is
n
the breadth of his engagement with Dewey across his entire, vast corpus, and the careful pit-
d
ting of Dewey in conversation with contemporary thinkers such as Walter Lippmann, Han-
nah Arendt, William James, and George Herbert Mead. This book matters precisely because i
of its ambitions.” s
MaTThew s. hedsTroM, Journal of the American Academy of Religion c
“Rogers’s articulate, timely work helps make audible once again Dewey’s voice in this fateful o
conversation.”
v
roberT w. King, Journal of American Studies
e
“[Rogers] pushes engagement with democratic theory further, defending Dewey not only
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against such trenchant critics as Reinhold Neibuhr, Christopher Lasch, and John Patrick
Diggins, but also against [Robert] Westbrook, Hillary Putnam, and Cornel West. . . . Rogers e
presents his ‘undiscovered Dewey’ through a reinterpretation of Darwinian evolution’s influ- d
ence on Dewey’s conception of ‘inquiry,’ which Rogers places at the very center of Dewey’s

epistemology as well as his moral and political philosophy. Rogers situates Dewey in the con- d
text of Darwin’s broader ‘impact on the American religious imagination,’ arguing that Dewey
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was more deeply engaged in theological controversy than is sometimes recognized, and that
this engagement left an indelible mark on later developments in his thinking.” w The Undiscovered dewey
Jason franK, Political Theory
e
“An impressive achievement . . . essential for anyone interested in pragmatism and of value for
y religion, morality, and the ethos of democracy
anyone working on democratic theory.”
colin KoopMan, Perspectives on Politics
Melvin l. rogers is assistant professor of philosophy at Emory University, where he teaches melvin l. rogers
political theory.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14487-2
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LIbRARy, SoUTHERN ILLINoIS UNIvERSITy CARboNDALE
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colUMbia UniversiTy press new yorK cUp.colUMbia.edU prinTed in The U.s.a. Columbia
The Undiscovered dewey

The
Undiscovered
dewey
Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy
Melvin L. Rogers
columbia university press new york
columbia university press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press
Paperback edition, 2012
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rogers, Melvin L.
The undiscovered Dewey : religion, morality, and the ethos of
democracy / Melvin L. Rogers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-231-14486-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—
isbn 978-0-231-14487-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—
isbn 978-0-231-51616-7 (e-book)
1. Dewey, John, 1859–1952. I. Title.
b945.d44r59 2008
191—dc22
2008022221
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and
durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
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design by vin dang
cover image: special collections research
center, morris library, southern illinois
university carbondale
to my parents,
yvonne ^ roosevelt rogers

conTenTs
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Introduction 1
Dewey and the Problem of Intellectual Retrieval 1
Avoiding the Criticism: Dewey’s Darwinian Enlightenment 3
Redirection: Religious Certainty and the Quest for Meaning 6
The Plan of This Book 13
part i • from certainty to contingency • 25
1 • Protestant Self-Assertion and Spiritual Sickness 27
Dewey’s Evasion of Protestant Self-Assertion and Spiritual Sickness 27
Darwin, Science, and the Moral Economy of Self and Society 31
Hodge and the Problem of Human Agency in the Wake of Evolution 35
Reconciliation and the Quest for Certainty 41
Dewey and the Meaningfulness of Modern Life 47
2 • Agency and Inquiry After Darwin 59
Inquiry and Phron¯esis: Dewey’s Modified Aristotelianism 62
Theory, Practice, and the Quest for Certainty 67
The Experience of Living: Action and the Primacy of Contingency 74
Contingency and the Place of Intelligent Action 88
viii • contents
part ii • religion, the moral life, and democracy • 105
3 • Faith and Democratic Piety 107
Democratic Self-Reliance: Emerson, Dewey, and Niebuhr 110
Reading A Common Faith 125
4 • Within the Space of Moral Reflection 145
The Moral Life and the Place of Conflict 148
The Expanded Self: Deliberation, Imagination, and Sympathy 170
The Tragic Self: Deliberation and Conflict 183
5 • Constraining Elites and Managing Power 191
The Danger of Political Pessimism: Between Lippmann and Wolin 196
Employing and Legitimizing Power 208
The Permanence of Contingency: On the Precarious and Stable Public 225
Epilogue 237
Notes 245
Bibliography 297
Index 319
Preface
This book offers a new perspective on the foundations of John Dewey’s phi-
losophy and so tilts our understanding of his religious, ethical, and political
reflections in a novel direction. This assertion may seem a bit cavalier. After
all, in the past two decades the field of Dewey scholarship has greatly expand-
ed. Influential books have been written by Cornel West, Robert Westbrook,
James Kloppenberg, Alan Ryan, John Patrick Diggins, and Steven Rockefell-
er, making the field a crowded one. Yet even in these important contributions
Dewey is consistently understood as a child of the Enlightenment in regard
to his appreciation for scientific inquiry. Despite his consistent rejection of
philosophical and theological certainties, he seems inescapably wedded to a
progressive view of experience, making him an unlikely guide in these politi-
cally uncertain times. Indeed, all of these contemporary thinkers are united
by a singular worry: Dewey’s conception of inquiry denies the fragility of life
that a thoroughgoing experimentalism demands.
While there is much to recommend in the work of these scholars, their
view of Dewey has the effect of obscuring the significance of his philosophy
for understanding ourselves under modern conditions. All of these scholars
miss or diminish in various ways the profound influence of Charles Darwin’s
account of evolution on Dewey’s notion of inquiry and the corresponding
ideas of contingency and uncertainty it introduced. By focusing on this in-
fluence, I show that for him, our cognitive abilities are both stimulated and
potentially frustrated by contingency, and that this beginning point guides
even as it humbles the significance of human action. While he retains the
humanistic and political hopes of the Enlightenment, those hopes are cau-