THE METHOD OF DEMOCRACY: JOHN DEWEY’S THEORY OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE BY DAVID RIDLEY

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Method of Democracy: John Dewey's Theory of Collective Intelligence by David Ridley Veli-Mikko Kauppi By David Ridley The Method of Democracy: John Dewey's Theory of Collective Intelligence Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021, 220pp., incl. index. John Dewey's writings on social intelligence, collective intelligence and the intelligence of the public have gained renascent attention, especially within democratic theory and democratic education. It has been proposed that pragmatism in general and Dewey in particular, offer an alternative model for democratic participation. This model shares many of the goals of deliberative democratic theory or critical theory, but is proposed to be capable of dodging some of the problems often affiliated with them—such as the powerlessness in the face of the rise of non-democratic populist movements that exploit the very means and apparatus of democracy. It is in part this allegedly non-democratic and non-intelligent populism that has motivated David Ridley to search for a 'forgotten alternative' model for populism: one that relies on the popular expressions of the contradictions of society, but one that is democratic and intelligent. In Ridley's thought neoliberalism presents the essential problem affecting and corrupting all aspects of life—a problem which must be solved in its multifariousness. However, so far the suggestions of how to solve it have been bound to fail due to the denial of collective intelligence, which can be observed in both right-wing populist solutions as well as their traditional leftist counterparts (p. 3). [End Page 295] The book is in three parts. Part one: Theoretical Foundations; Part two: A Problematic Situation; and Part three: Reconstruction. In part one Ridley first travels through the history of western intellectual Marxism and the so-called Frankfurt School. Starting with Lukács and his concept of reification, Ridley draws a rather grim picture of the pessimism and retreat from practice to theory, to which the Frankfurt School ended up in by its first generation, most notably Adorno and Horkheimer. This pessimism and distrust towards the potential of masses followed as an essential undercurrent also to its second generation, of which Jurgen Habermas is the most notable representative. As a way out of this dead-end, Ridley examines John Dewey's contribution to critical social theory in the second chapter of his book. This contribution was, at least during the first generation of Frankfurt School and to some extent even today, ignorantly underrated in Europe. This has been a loss for both critical theory and pragmatism, as both apparently share, among other things, the central interest in a just practice of social inquiry as interdisciplinary social research. It is in the second chapter of part one that Ridley presents his main argument: that uncritical everyday experiences can be transformed into critical opinion, or in Ridley's terms to 'intelligent populism', by means of Dewey's notion of collective intelligence. "Democratic social inquiry is in a primitive sense already in the public's hands," Ridley points out (p. 183). As members of democratic societies, we already are inquirers, but the quality of our inquiries defines the quality of our decisions. Co-operative social inquiry is the method of democracy, a procedure to actualize the aims of democracy: "On one level, Dewey's theory of social inquiry is very abstract and banal. Socialising formal practices of inquiry, developed to sophistication by academics and scientists, would help the public develop its collective intelligence, avoid co-optation by reactionary political parties and interests, free it from the manipulative consumption of the culture industry and, in time, reclaim democracy for the people." (p. 183). In Ridley's presentation, accusations of too much optimism regarding the intelligence of the common man in Dewey's work can be objected to as misinterpretation of his ideas, both in their simplicity and in their nuanced complexity. This nuanced complexity of Dewey's method of democracy is then examined in detail, producing the philosophically most interesting contribution of the book. Following the Deweyan pattern of inquiry, Part two focuses on elaborating what the problem is, once an indeterminate situation has emerged. This is done in two chapters, of which the first one focuses on neoliberalism being...