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and who "would come back after a summer vacation hell-bent on study–
ing Lukacs, Marcuse, Adorno, or Habermas" - a representative instance
of Americans' tendency to doubt the value of their own intellectual tradi–
tion in the face of European competition. For Ryan, remote as he may
have been from Dewey's New England roots (Dewey was born into a
Vermont Congregationalist family), the American philosopher was an ex–
citing discovery. What Ryan particularly relished was Dewey's
pugnacious brand of liberalism associated in the British tradition with the
Oxford don T . H . Green, whom he presents as a "premonition of
Dewey," and whose core conviction he sums up in this formulation:
the good man or woman is the person who combines a dutiful observance of the
community's existing standards with his or her own individual efforts to push the
community toward ideals that its current condition gestures toward but that its
behavior does not yet embody.
This quiet summary of the liberal sensibility is liable to sound banal in
the radical's ear.
In
fact, it expresses an intellectual balance that is exqui–
sitely difficult to sustain; and Ryan is certainly right that it was the
mission of Dewey's life, no less than of Green's, to expound and promote
it. Green (known in some circles as the "father of Britain's welfare state")
disseminated it through his Oxford tutorials, in which he taught some of
Britain's future leaders. Dewey, too, was a university man, exerting a
lasting influence on both Chicago and Columbia, especially on Colum–
bia's Teacher's College, from which his influence still radiates into
American primary and secondary education.
Here is Dewey's own account, from
Democracy and Education (1916),
of the means by which the worth of a society can be evaluated:
An undesirable society ... is one which internally and externally sets up barriers
to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society which makes
provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and
which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the
different forms of associated life is in so far democratic.
Although Ryan does not quote this passage, the cumulative force of
his book is to restore to our awareness the distinctive combination of pas–
sion and prudence that suffuses it. Lacking the technical brilliance of
Charles Sanders Peirce and the poetic
gift
ofWilliam James, Dewey had a
tendency to write in gluey abstractions, which is one reason that he has
