Democracy —Practice as Needed

Abstract

One may object to Richard Rorty’s failing to take seriously Dewey’s defense of participatory democracy (1997, 104), as does Judith Green (2004, 63–65), but while noteworthy, Rorty’s view is more or less in line with what many think. True, Rorty was an admirer of Dewey but the latter’s expansive notion of democracy is often not taken seriously. It is thought to be one of the impractical parts of Dewey’s pragmatism along with what is judged by many to be the unrealistic expectations that Dewey had of classroom teachers. But it was something of a surprise when Robert Talisse, who had endorsed Dewey’s approach to democracy in 2005 in Democracy after Liberalism, mounted a sustained attack on Dewey as a democratic thinker in A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy in 2007, in order to make room for a Peircean epistemic defense of democracy. Talisse can be polemical and at odds with conventional thinking, but his latter book represents a real turnaround from the former. Moreover, as Talisse concedes, “Dewey is the pragmatist philosopher who has exerted the most influence on democratic theory” (2007, 27). This is not to say that Dewey’s thinking is generally admired and employed by democratic theorists. As noted above even pragmatists disagree about the value of Dewey’s proposals, but no one, to my knowledge, has tried before to displace him as the representative pragmatist political thinker. Even those who disagree with Dewey have regarded him as the pragmatist that dealt with social and political matters.