Dewey, Democracy, and Democratic Experimentalism

Abstract

Dewey's approach to the problem of organizing reform of democracy focused on rethinking the ideal of democratic participation, or, backing up a step, the conditions of communication eventually shaping it. He left the design of institutions to advance joint problem solving and individual development to the outcome of this process. To the extent that he had concrete institutional plans they vacillated in focus between the society as a whole and the immediate local community. Democratic experimentalism looks to connect these levels to correct the defects of an exclusive focus on either.1. IntroductionDewey's enduring achievement was to present a compelling account of the mutual constitution of the individual and society, struggling together to extend the limits of their knowledge in response to surprising failures of what they thought they already knew, and to establish an ideal of democracy as that form of self-government which, under ever new circumstances, affords the greatest possible scope to the social intelligence of problem solving and the flourishing of individual character as its condition and product. Dewey shares with Marx the idea of the sociability of production and the deformation of the self through its denial, with Rawls the idea of recognition of the full, individual humanity of fellow citizens as the first and most fundamental constraint on political order. Yet he had a sense of the moral and political malleability of the technical world - a recognition that the organization of production conditions politics yet is also profoundly conditioned by it - and a congenital understanding of the individual in democracy alien to the former. He had an intellectually productive absorption in the lived interaction between individual and society alien to the latter. In an uncertain world, where innovations in production and changes in individual life courses and gender roles upend each other, settled forms of assuring social solidarity fail, and traditional representative democracy seems more an institutional casualty of these changes than an instrument for an effective public response to them, committed democrats will want to learn from Dewey.Yet when it came to questions of institutional design - of specifying how various domains of activity might be organized to advance joint problem solving and individual development - Dewey had, to the evident irritation of some of his most ardent admirers and closest readers,1 and apart from limited and ultimately vexed observations about schooling, next to nothing to say. His reticence in these matters is a puzzling double default. First there is the very general (but in debate infrequently remarked) absence in Dewey's work of discussion of what might be called pragmatist institutions. No one understood better than Dewey that habit, or experience accrued into unnoticed assumptions, enabled action by allowing the concentration of attention on troubling violations of (habitual) expectations; no one understood better than he that habit could also harden into routine, making unnoticed assumptions inaccessible to revision and trapping us in experiences only possible if we do not attempt to scrutinize them fully in the event. Dewey stressed as well the mutual dependence of individuals and institutions, and the way the stunting of the one impoverished the other. Institutions and individuals thus had to change together or not at all. Given all this it is puzzling that he did not pose the question of how to design institutions that reduce the chance of organizational habits congealing into limiting routines, or that can detect and dis-entrench routines that have become obstructive.Second, there is the more specific and more frequently noted absence of discussion of the design of democracy itself, of institutions of public choice serving the ideal of democracy as enabling individual flourishing, and adapted to the circumstances of the day. Dewey was nothing if not a fallibilist. …