JOHN DEWEY: ORGANIC INTELLECTUAL OF
THE MIDDLE CLASS?

Frank Margonis
University of Utah

I want to thank Richard for an interesting paper, which persuasively argues that John Dewey’s democratic theory and pedagogy would benefit from a supplement of Marxist structural thought. Dewey too readily reduced political action to scientific problem solving and thus ended up without a defensible approach to change. Relying upon cooperative employment of the scientific method by citizens, yet unable to explain how problem solving would begin in a society with sharp divisions of class and race, Dewey — Richard insightfully suggests — assumed the beneficence of the most powerful groups of people. Richard is thus on strong ground to suggest that contemporary conceptions of Deweyan pedagogy should be informed by Marx’s economic analyses.

Richard also believes Marxists need Dewey’s pedagogy. The Dewey that intrigues Richard “is one of the premier advocates of democracy and education for democratic empowerment.” Dewey invoked conceptions of participatory democracy — the fundamentally socialist vision of workers controlling their own work — in his middle and later educational works, and Dewey’s pedagogy was suited to preparing workers for self-determination. Richard suggests that “neither educational theorists nor practitioners have succeeded in getting much further than Dewey’s impressive analysis of how education for critical democratic empowerment should be conducted.” Unfortunately, such radicalism would not lead Dewey to “make common cause with a radicalism that recognized — and frontally opposed — the dominant capitalism of his time.”

Frustrated by Dewey’s “inability to hitch” his “democratic project to the most radical and potent social force of that historical period, viz., the organized working class,” Richard hopes to reclaim Dewey for radicals. While I am drawn to Richard’s vision of Dewey’s radicalism, I think it is important to consider a contrary hypothesis. Dewey’s virulent opposition to Marxist conceptions of class analysis, developed in works like Freedom and Culture, may indicate that the division between Marxism and pragmatism is greater than Richard suggests. While I am entirely undecided on this issue, I would like to explore the possibility that Dewey was an organic intellectual operating on behalf of the relatively privileged, working to create a middle-class hegemony. Perhaps Dewey’s resistance to class analysis reflects Dewey’s embeddedness in the circumstances and values of the professional middle class, and perhaps his positions are ill-suited to radical reclamation. My concern here is not so much with discrediting Dewey but with turning a critical gaze upon middle-class assumptions — hoping we may, to some degree, better understand the hegemonic possibilities in our own philosophizing. I would like to consider the possibility that Dewey helped forge a middle-class hegemony by considering two domains: Dewey’s conception of vocational education, and his amelioristic politics.

Dewey’s conception of vocational education has long earned him biting attacks from liberal arts theorists and radicals alike; both groups have been uncomfortable with Dewey’s perceived interest in making existing jobs the guiding focus in education. Richard’s analysis allows us to frame this objection in a way that better captures the spirit of Dewey’s position. Dewey is quite clear — at least in several passages — that students’ educations should be guided by broadly defined vocations, not the jobs of the existing division of labor. Career, for Dewey, includes the development of artistic capacity of any kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well as professional and business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical labor or engagement in gainful pursuits.”¹ Having defined vocation in an idealistic manner, unifying the pursuits of an individual, Dewey cannot be blamed for educating workers for the assembly line. His mistake comes in neglecting the existing division of labor and its relation to vocational education; by omitting class analysis and the likely possibility that vocational education will be used in a capitalist society at the expense of workers, Dewey facilitates the sleight of hand which allowed his vision of vocational education to be used by his opponents, the social efficiency educators.

Now Richard’s paper suggests a generous interpretation of Dewey here: Dewey’s interests lie with the working class, but his unwillingness to employ class analysis prevented him linking his theory with the working class movement. And indeed, Dewey does say his interests lie with the working class,² but the position he develops might better be seen as the articulation of a distinctively middle-class perspective. If we place ourselves back to the turn-of-the century and posit that the contemporary conception of a career — as a mission that supplies meaning to life and is worth total commitment — was not broadly established, then Dewey’s valorized conception of a career appears not merely as a response to crass social engineering perspectives, but also as a defining moment for the rising middle class. In a remarkable way, Dewey unifies the centrality of vocational pursuits with individual expression, societal needs and individual growth. This vision might have been seen as supplying the unity desperately strived for by the professional middle class, for it unites the expressive individualism and the utilitarian individualism which Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton believe defines middle class ethics.³ Dewey’s utopian hope that students might voluntarily develop vocations which simultaneously serve individual and social needs neatly captures the idealism of the middle class.

Just as Dewey portrayed a world in which individuals were educated for their economic roles via an educational program internal to their own experience, he envisioned social change that organically developed from shared social commitments and cooperative employment of the scientific method. Richard argues persuasively that because Dewey was “not convinced that genuine democracy had to be anticapitalist,” he and his followers’ contributions were “limited to the ameliorization of injustices caused by social-class stratification.” Richard phrases this perfectly: since Dewey relied upon a process of social experimentation to decide the course of reform, he cannot pledge an unqualified commitment to socialism. Economic inequality appears in Dewey’s work as a fact, not as an essential aspect of capitalism, for the latter perspective relies upon absolutist claims about the character of capitalism.

Dewey’s unwillingness to accept the absolutist reasoning unfolding in the pages of papers like the Industrial Worker certainly placed him at odds with socialist working-class movements, and Dewey’s unwillingness to recognize absolutist reasoning may vindicate my hypothesis suggesting that Dewey’s experimentalism served middle-class hegemony. Absolutist claims do violate the character of the scientific method, but it is quite possible that the scientific method itself — the insistence upon reifying observations as “facts” and the emphasis upon maintaining the moral commitments vindicated by experiment — serves the interests of relatively privileged groups in society. As Lukacs states it, taking data as immediately presented as the starting point for scientific conceptualization amounts to taking a “stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of ‘science.’”⁴ Assuming the foundational character of facts, Dewey developed a conception of social change that addressed social problems as they arose. Marxist revolutionary perspectives, in contrast, rely upon rationalistic claims about the laws of capital and the inherent economic limits upon reform in capitalist society; revolutionary ethical orientations are not flexible and open-minded but resolute and committed.⁵

However, in hopes of reclaiming Dewey for radicalism Richard is inclined to de-emphasize these differences between Dewey’s amelioristic experimentalism and Marxist revolutionary rationalism. Marx, he thinks, was more of an experimentalist than Dewey realized, for both men rest “the validity of their claims to knowledge on outcomes resulting from translating ideas into action.” Yet, as Richard notes, Dewey’s experimentalism is not the only source of Dewey’s resistance to class analysis, for the experimental method should allow employment of any theories likely to produce viable hypotheses; class analysis should not be excluded. Perhaps Dewey’s most fundamental source of opposition to class analysis lies with his social conception of democracy and the ideal developed in his famous chapter, “Search for the Great Community.” Dewey hopes that by sharing institutions, practices, and beliefs, people of differing classes and ethnicities might develop sufficient sympathy with one another to make policy sensitive to the interests of all citizens.⁶ Social policy would thus be constructed without imposition.

Yet, I wonder whether this insistence upon nonimpositional policy and its attendant neglect of irreconcilable differences amounts to a typically middle-class version of bad faith. Consider the recent history of racial segregation in U.S. cities. As with Dewey, the middle class has typically pursued a vision whereby integration would result from voluntary choices. In school policy, for example, busing has been violently opposed, and voluntary desegregation through magnet schools has been offered as the more democratic alternative.⁷ But, this appeal to voluntary choice ignores the social and economic realities pitting the interests of ghetto and suburban residents against one another. While the white middle class has argued for voluntary desegregation, they have — as a group — used their discretion to construct neighborhoods and schools marked by the highest levels of segregation in U.S. history.⁸ In sociological reality, the ethic of voluntary integration has equaled the greatest maneuvering room for the relatively privileged. As a fundamental ethical criterion of democratic policy, Dewey’s insistence upon voluntary incrementalism is well-suited to preserving existing privileges.

Once these potential middle class biases are registered — the union of individual and social good in the “vocation,” the experimentalist’s commitment to tentative hypotheses, and the emphasis upon organic voluntary change — I wonder whether Dewey’s position can be reclaimed by radicals. Significant social change requires a redistribution of wealth, and it’s difficult to imagine such changes occurring via voluntary means. Consequently, the agents of social change are often absolutists; they seize upon a root cause of injustice and relentlessly work to alter that root cause. Eugene Debs and Malcolm X, for example, were not Deweyan experimentalists, for tentativeness was an attitude they could not afford.

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1. John Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Univ. Press, 1980), 317.

2. For example, “Class Struggle and the Democratic Way,” in The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Univ. Press, 1991), 386.

3. Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 16, 27, 129.

4. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 7.

5. See, for example, the exchange between Dewey and Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours, ed. George Novak (New York: Pathfinder, 1969).

6. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow, 1927), 147-50.

7. David Armor, “After Busing: Education and Choice,” Public Interest 95 (Spring 1989): 24-37.

8. See, for example, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993), ch. 2.