Dewey's Attempt To Provide a Metaphysical Foundation for Democracy

Abstract

HE HISTORY of political thought is replete with works that are unabashedly polemical and even sheerly propagandistic. Less frequently, political writings support major propositions with empirical evidence, at times stopping at the limits of such empirical evidence and other times going beyond the conclusions called for by such evidence. On occasion, political thought takes cognizance of information and assumptions current in fields other than politics, and imports this knowledge, sometimes candidly and sometimes surreptitiously, for use in its own area. Sometimes political thought is characterized by an attempt to ground its major propositions about the nature of politics, the governmental structure, the relationship of man to government, and the chief political values, on a psychology of man or a view of historic processes or even on a metaphysics or theory of reality. American political thought has not escaped this history. And it too has been deeply involved in various philosophic assumptions. Indicative of such an involvement was the Lockean-Jeffersonian synthesis which dominated American democratic political thought at least through the nineteenth century. There were those like John Adams, Calhoun, and Social Darwinists like Sumner who for various reasons questioned the doctrine of natural rights, the social contract and majority rule, but, by and large, the political consensus remained democratic and the assumptions underlying this consensus remained those of Locke and Jefferson. Even Bellamy in his tract Looking Backward justified a communist view by stating that since God made all men equal, their equal humanity must be recognized by equal wages. However, there were intellectual forces at work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which slowly eroded if not the democratic political faith, then at least the philosophic assumptions on which that faith rested. One primary intellectual force was the scientific outlook which rapidly precipitated into an ethic influencing the way men approached problems in areas outside the physical sciences. The scientific methodology, originally a generalized description of procedures common to the physical sciences, became, for many at least, the key to the structure of the real world and the only methodology appropriate to the solution of all real, solvable problems. Out of this intellectual milieu came several challenges to the natural rights theory as an adequate rationale for democratic political thought. One alternative to the traditional natural rights theory was formulated by John Dewey in an attempt to provide for American democratic political thought a foundation more in keeping with what he believed science had disclosed concerning the nature of reality and the appropriate methodology for inquiry into this reality.'