| This dissertation is a study of John Dewey's political writings. The structure of the study is largely developmental and chronological, beginning with Dewey's early political ideas and noting how they changed and evolved during different political periods and in the light of various events. Observing this development helps us to understand and clarify Dewey's strengths and contributions as a theorist of liberal democracy. My principal thesis is that Dewey's writings present a unique theoretical formulation of the relationship between liberty and equality, liberalism and democracy, and that this formulation reflects the contexts and concerns out of which it grew.; It is my contention that the vast majority of literature currently available which discusses Dewey's political theory applies a non-historical methodology, and that it therefore fails to understand the role that experience played in the development of Dewey's political ideas. This study is an attempt to partially correct this failing. My goal is to understand Dewey's political writings as Dewey himself would demand--as expressions of, and responses to, particular problems and experiences.; This study also has implications for a more general literature concerning the nature of American liberalism as a whole. I believe that much of this broad interpretative literature, such as Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, tends to grossly oversimplify the American liberal inheritance and portray it in elementary, even stereotypical, Lockean terms. An examination of Dewey's liberalism, however, demonstrates a much more complex, and potentially radical, strain of American liberalism than most interpreters of the American liberal tradition take into account. Dewey's liberalism demonstrates the ambiguity and complexity of liberalism itself. |
