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become the least appreciated among the great American pragmatists.
More than Peirce and James, however, he was a combatant in the culture
wars of his time - a besieged defender of liberalism in politics, higher
education, and the schools. His writings are reports from the front, reso–
lute expressions of openness and experimentalism during a period when
American society was periodically gripped by fits of xenophobia and was
in a more or less chronic state of reaction against immigrant peoples and
ideas.
Dewey was a contemporary of both the "multiculturalists" who ar–
gued that American society should be reconceived as a collection of
ethnic clusters, and of the self-appointed protectors of Anglo-Saxon pu–
rity who argued that, with assimilation faltering, "aliens" should be
excluded or expelled. He distrusted not only the opposing parties but the
very terms of this debate, because both sides seemed to him fundamen–
tally disrespectful of the ideal of democracy, which is inconsistent with
any form of group insularity, and which ultimately rests on a concept of
inviolable individual rights.
Dewey's vision for society was finally simple. He also "wanted a
world," as Ryan says of Green, "where the Kantian idea that human be–
ings are equal members of a Kingdom of Ends would be brought down to
earth and made actual in the institutions of modern society." Such a soci–
ety could be built, Dewey believed, only on the foundation of the free
individual - whom he conceived not as some closed monadic entity,
walled and integral, but as a being whose vitality depended on its recep–
tivity to new experience. Democracy was, to Dewey, the natural form
through which the human imagination seeks to express itself; conscious–
ness itself was a kind of rough-and-tumble democracy - a continuous
infusion of new impressions and thoughts that combine ceaselessly into
new forms. Dewey found democratic aspiration in the religious longing
for equality before God and (anticipating, as Ryan points out, Karl Pop–
per's concept of the "open society") in the genius of modern science,
whose experimental method and continually critical assessment of pre–
vailing hypotheses struck him as a model for all forms of genuine thought
and practice. Dewey stood directly in the lineage of Whitman, who had
celebrated in
Democratic Vistas
(1870) the American "idea of perfect indi–
vidualism" as the "religious element ... at the core of democracy" that
gives meaning and substance to the theory of political equality.
"It is in democracy," Dewey declared with almost Whitmanesque
bravado, that "the incarnation of God in man ... becomes a living pres–
ent thing"; and he went so far as to claim for democracy that it was "the
means by which the revelation of truth is carried on." But his emphasis
was never as much on the revelation as on the carrying on:
