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Dewey, by contrast, put the emphasis on the ends to be achieved, and
then reflected upon the means that would, when chosen, achieve the
desired ends.
In his reply
to
Trotsky, he arrived immediately at his central critique:
Means and ends are certainly interdependent, and one would
expect that if the liberation of mankind is the end-in-view, there
would follow an examination of
all means
that are likely
to
attain
this
end
without any fixed conception of what the
means
must be.
And every suggested means would be considered and weighed and
judged on the express grounds of the consequences they are likely
to
produce. But when Mr. Trotsky finds in the class struggle the
"law of laws," the one and only means to human liberation, then
the
means become the end.
(Instead of, for Dewey, the ends determining the means.) That is, if one
starts with struggle as a means, the Revolution itself, when achieved,
will involve continued struggle. Dewey continued:
It is tragic
to
see Trotsky'S brilliant native intelligence so completely
locked up in an absolute so that means become ends. Orthodox
Marxism shares with Orthodox religionism and with traditional
idealism the belief that human ends are interwoven into the very
texture and structure of existence-a conception inherited from its
Hegelian origin. Trotsky is an absolutist, and he is unable to escape
from the prisonhouse of absolutism.
Dewey'S insistence on the interdependence of means and ends is a
crucial point to underline. Indeed, his colleague George Herbert Mead,
in a seminar he gave at the University of Chicago in the winter of
1926,
referred to it as the "core," the "final statement of Dewey's philoso–
phy." For Dewey, philosophy must be, Mead said, "a criticism of the
means in the process (of analysis) which gives us the end of the process
...philosophy is not
knowledge
as an abstraction-it's a criticism of the
methods by which you reach your ends, or results." How we think will
lead to
what
we think-and do.
The Trotsky hearings constituted a central turning point in the history
of American liberalism. From Jack Reed's celebration of the Revolution
through the Palmer Raids, the well-publicized conversion to commu–
nism of Lincoln Steffens, the onset of the Depression, to, say, symboli–
cally, the announcement by Edmund Wilson in
1932
that he would vote
