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>>RICHARD RORTY: My uncle and aunt who taught at the University of Wisconsin were friendly
with Max Otto, who was a disciple of Dewey's, and who tried to write a sort of practical
version of pragmatism, bringing pragmatism more closely in touch with public life.
I read Otto at the time that I met him but I don't remember his works very well now.
The only other philosophy professor who I was in touch with in my teens was Sidney Hook,
who was a friend of my parents.
So, as it happened, the only philosophy professors I met when young were disciples of Dewey.
At an early age I knew there was such a thing as pragmatism, but as soon as I got to Chicago
I was told that it was a bad thing because people like Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was
chancellor of the university, and Mortimer Adler, who was an influential figure on the
Chicago scene, were inclined to say that Dewey was a relativist, and that we needed moral
absolutes.
There was a lot of neo-Thomism in the air, and Leo Strauss was also an opponent of pragmatism.
So, between Adler's neo-Thomism and Strauss's quasi-Platonism, there was a good deal of
anti-pragmatism around.
So I suppose at Chicago I learned more what was wrong with pragmatism than what was right
about it.
Until he was thirty he was still a believing Christian and tried to arrange his philosophical
thoughts around the truths of Christianity.
After he broke with the Christian religion, between the ages of, let's say, thirty and
eighty, he produced a series of books on various topics, which I don't think fall neatly into
periods.
Everyone has his favorite Dewey books.
My favorite is Reconstruction in Philosophy and A Common Faith, which, separated by a
considerable period.
Other people like Experience and Nature.
I don't.
His prose is remarkably boring.
It's very difficult to assign Dewey to students because they go to sleep halfway through the
assignment.
He wasn't exactly a bad writer and there are occasionally some vivid phrases and some quotable
bits, but compared either to James or Royce, he's a bore.
I think that if you ask about the influence of Hegel in the period after Darwin, there
are various figures who tried to put Hegel and Darwin together and of these Dewey was
perhaps the most successful.
That is, he shared Hegel's historicism and Darwin's naturalism and managed to synthesize
the two.
I think that James and Schiller and Dewey thought of themselves as fomenting an intellectual
revolution, which was partially successful in the culture as a whole, but not particularly
successful within the boundaries of philosophy departments.
I'm not sure that the philosophical world was much interested in this enterprise so
Dewey has never been very popular among his fellow philosophy professors, but he happened
to be the intellectual who best spoke up in public for the social democratic measures
of the progressive era and New Deal.
So he was an important figure in American public life even though the philosophy professors
didn't have any great use for him.
He kept up a steady stream of articles on the political issues of the day, trying to
see the events of his time as leading up to a better America of the future.
He had a utopian vision of social democracy and, indeed, participatory social democracy,
a dream that will probably never come true.
But by keeping that utopian vision before the public he did influence the public mood
to some extent.
It's true that the United States didn't approach the kind of welfare state that became the
norm in Europe in the period after the Second World War.
On the other hand the difference between this U.S. in 1905 as the progressives were getting
started and in 1965 after Johnson had gotten the civil rights legislation passed is enormous.
So there was a very considerable shift toward the political left in the first half of the
twentieth century and Dewey had as much with that as any other American intellectual.
I don't think you can single Dewey out as having made a particular political contribution.
He just stood for the right causes for a long, long time.
He was in favor of women's suffrage.
He was against racial discrimination.
He was in favor of increasing the power of the trade unions.
These were all things that came to pass more or less in the course of his lifetime.
I don't think you can find much of a connection between what Dewey said to the philosophy
professors and what he said to the general public.
The questions that he took up in response to people like Russell or Royce are just too
remote from politics for one to claim that the one presupposed or entailed the other.
In general I don't think there's much connection between the kinds of things philosophy professors
talk about to their colleagues and the kinds of things they talk about when they play a
role in public affairs.
Philosophical ideas are confined to one percent of the population and they tend to be cosmopolites
who are not easily identified with their country.
I think democratic governments are run by experts.
The only question is which experts are going to be in power at any given moment.
Dewey's dreams of participatory democracy will never come true.
I think American universities and Western universities generally have served society
very well indeed.
They've supplied experts who could then be associated with politicians who were voted
in or voted out by the masses.
That's the best we can expect.
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