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An Innocent Abroad? John Dewey and International Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Robert B. Westbrook
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Abstract

Dewey's refusal to abandon his strong belief in the democratic ideal, which must materialize not via powerful political elites but rather through publicly created institutions and full participation of ordinary citizens, has been grossly misunderstood. Using Dewey's critics' own arguments that purport to show Dewey intentionally, or naively, disregarded the role of power in the relations of communities, Westbrook brings examples to reinforce the contrary view. Dewey's adherence to the view that war must be universally outlawed and sanctioned was targeted precisely on the international political elites in order to reduce their domination and to maintain the real power within the hands of the citizens.

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Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 7 , March 1993 , pp. 203 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1993

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References

2 Diggins, John Patrick, “Power and Suspicion: The Perspectives of Reinhold Niebuhr,” Ethics and International Affairs 6 (1992), 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribners, 1932), xii–xv, xx, xxiiiGoogle Scholar. For Dewey's most concerted effort to respond to Niebuhr see “Intelligence and Power” (1934), Later Works of John Dewey 9 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 108–10Google Scholar.

4 Diggins, , “Power and Suspicion,” 151–52Google Scholar; Dewey, John, “Force and Coercion” (1916), Middle Works of John Dewey 10 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 245Google Scholar. See also “Force, Violence, and Law” (1916), Middle Works 10, 211–15Google Scholar. My discussion of Niebuhr and Dewey is in Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 523–32Google Scholar.

5 Dewey, John, “Imperative Need: A New Radical Party” (1934), Later Works 9, 76–77Google Scholar.

6 Niebuhr, Reinhold, “The Pathos of Liberalism,” Nation 141 (September 11, 1935), 304Google Scholar.

7 Dewey, John, “The Schools and Social Preparedness” (1916), Middle Works 10,193Google Scholar; and “Reply to William Ernest Hocking's ‘Political Philosophy in Germany’” (1915), Middle Works of John Dewey 8 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 418, 420Google Scholar.

8 “Professor Dewey of Columbia on War's Social Results,” New York World, July 29,1917; Bourne, Randolph, “War and the Intellectuals,” in Hansen, Olaf, ed., The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings (New York: Urizen, 1977), 308Google Scholar. For a full account of the Bourne—Dewey debate on the war, see Westbrook, , John Dewey and American Democracy, 195–212, 223–27, 231–40Google Scholar.

9 Dewey, John, “The Cult of Irrationality” (1918), Middle Works of John Dewey 11 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 109–10Google Scholar; John Dewey to S.O. Levinson, December 30, 1918, S.O. Levinson Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

10 Dewey, John, “The Discrediting of Idealism” (1919), Middle Works 11, 180–85Google Scholar.

11 Dewey, John, “Our National Dilemma” (1920), Middle Works of John Dewey 12 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 7Google Scholar; and “Shall We Join the League?” (1923) and “Political Combination or Legal Cooperation?” (1923), Middle Works of John Dewey 15 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 80,107Google Scholar.

12 For Niebuhr's disparagement of the Kellogg—Briand Pact see Moral Man, xi, 79Google Scholar. Diggins suggests that Dewey's participation in the outlawry movement is evidence of his abandonment of his wartime conviction that “all ideas, even the idea of democracy, require the use of power for their realization” (“Power and Suspicion,” 152). My argument here is that Dewey remained true to this conviction—what changed was his belief that war (that is, a specific instance of the exercise of power) was an effective servant of his democratic ideals.

13 The most detailed account of the outlawry movement is John E. Stoner, S.O. Levinson and the Pact of Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943),Google Scholar but for a succinct summary see Dewey's, own “Outlawry of War” (1933), Later Works of John Dewey 8 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 13–18Google Scholar. Other useful studies of the movement include Ferrell, Robert H., Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), esp. 31–37Google Scholar; Howlett, Charles F., Troubled Philosopher: John Dewey and the Struggle for World Peace (Port Washington NY: Kennikat Press, 1977),Google Scholar chaps. 6–7; and Morrison, Charles C., The Outlawry of War (Chicago: Willett, Clark and Colby, 1927)Google Scholar. My account here is a condensation and revision of that I offered in John Dewey and American Democracy, 260–74.

14 Levinson, S.O., “The Legal Status of ‘War’ New Republic 14 (March 9, 1918), 171–73Google Scholar. Dewey followed Levinson's article two weeks later with a companion piece which argued that outlawing war was essential to the creation of an international organization that would “align the moral code of state behavior with the best which obtains as to personal conduct” (“Morals and the Conduct of States” [1918], Middle Works 11,122–26). Most experts disputed Levinson's contention that international law held war to be legal. Rather, they held, war was akin to a natural disaster like an earthquake, a nonlegal contingency to be provided against. Had Levinson acknowledged this, his argument would have lost some of its polemical force but (logically) the significance of making war illegal would have been undiminished (see Stoner, , Levinson, 186Google Scholar).

15 Stoner, , Levinson, 187Google Scholar. Dewey's understanding of the outlawry commandments differed in important respects from those listed here, and I shall turn to the most significant of these differences momentarily. I use this formulation here because I believe it closely approximates the most widespread understanding of the outlawry program (by historians as well as contemporaries).

16 Dewey, , “Political Combination or Legal Cooperation,” 109Google Scholar; “Shall the United States Join the World Court?” (1923), Middle Works 15, 90Google Scholar.

17 Levinson, , “Legal Status of War,” 391, 392Google Scholar; Dewey, , “Morals and the Conduct of States,” 125–26Google Scholar; Dewey, , “Shall the United States Join the World Court?” 94Google Scholar; Dewey, John, “If War Were Outlawed” (1923), Middle Works 15, 113–14Google Scholar. See also Levinson, S. O., “Can Peace Be ‘Enforced’?” Christian Century 42 (January 8, 1925), 46–47Google Scholar.

18 Dewey, John, “Are Sanctions Necessary to International Organization? No” (1932), Later Works of John Dewey 6 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 196–223Google Scholar.

19 Levinson, S.O., “The Sanctions of Peace,” Christian Century 46 (December 25, 1929), 1604Google Scholar; Dewey, John, “As an Example to Other Nations” (1928), Later Works of John Dewey 3 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 163–67Google Scholar; Dewey, John, “Outlawing Peace by Discussing War” (1928), Later Works 3, 173–76Google Scholar.

20 Dewey, , “Outlawry of War,” 15Google Scholar; Levinson, “Can Peace Be ‘Enforced’?” 47. Two other differences in Dewey's version of the first three outlawry commandments are worth mentioning. First, as a sympathetic observer in the 1920s of revolutionary nationalism in the world outside the West, Dewey did not confine participation in the codification of international law to so—called “civilized” nations. Second, in their debates with World Court advocates, Dewey and others came to insist on the importance of vesting the international tribunal with “affirmative” (not just optional) jurisdiction over international disputes, that is with the authority to hear any case that a party to a dispute asked it to hear, an authority that could not simply be ignored by the other party or parties to the dispute as it could if jurisdiction were merely optional (see Dewey, “Shall the United States Join the World Court?” 92–93).

21 Dewey, John, “Ethics and International Relations” (1923), Middle Works 15, 62–63Google Scholar.

22 Ratner, Joseph, “Editor's Note,” in Ratner, , ed., Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy (New York: Modem Library, 1939), 529Google Scholar.

23 Dewey, , “If War Were Outlawed,” 111Google Scholar.

24 Dewey, John, John Dewey: Lectures in China, 1919–1920, ed. Clopton, Robert and Ou, Tsuin—chen (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973), 161Google Scholar.

25 Dewey, , “Shall the United States Join the World Court?” 100Google Scholar;Dewey, , “If War Were Outlawed,” 110–11Google Scholar.

26 “In the case of a tiger or eagle, anger may be identified with a serviceable life—activity, with attack and defense. With a human being it is as meaningless as a gust of wind on a muddpuddle apart from a direction given it by the presence of other persons, apart from the responses they make to it. It is a physical spasm, a blind depressive burst of wasteful energy. It gets quality, significance, when it becomes a smoldering sullenness, an annoying interruption, a peevish irritation, a murderous revenge, a blazing indignation. And although these phenomena which have a meaning spring from the original native reactions to stimuli, yet they depend also on the responsive behavior of others. They and all similar human displays of anger are not pure impulses; they are habits formed under the influence of association with others who have habits already and who show their habits in the treatment which converts a blind physical discharge into a significant anger” (Dewey, John, Human Nature and Conduct [1922], Middle Works of John Dewey 14 [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983], 65–66)Google Scholar. For more on Dewey's social psychology, see Westbrook, , John Dewey and American Democracy, 286–93Google Scholar.

27 On the Pact negotiations see Stoner, , Levinson, chaps. 13–18, and Ferrell, Peace In Their Time, chaps. 5–17Google Scholar.

28 Ratner, , “Editor's Note,” 547nGoogle Scholar; Dewey, John, “Peace—by Pact or Covenant?” (1932), Later Works 6,190–91Google Scholar; Dewey, “As an Example to Other Nations,” 163–67; Dewey, “Outlawing Peace by Discussing War,” 173–76.

29 Dewey, John, “No Matter What Happens—Stay Out” (1939), Later Works of John Dewey 14 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 364Google Scholar. For a sampling of the views of Dewey's critics see Frank, Waldo, “Our Guilt in Fascism,” New Republic 102 (May 6, 1940), 606Google Scholar; Mumford, Lewis, “The Corruption of Liberalism,” New Republic 102 (April 29, 1940), 568–73Google Scholar; Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Manl (New York: Seribners, 1946), 111Google Scholar.

30 Dewey's decision to support American intervention in World War I and oppose it in World War II are perhaps the most thoroughly scrutinized moments in his activism. Critics of these decisions, such as Diggins, believe they are evidence of the shortcomings of his pragmatic ethics—the method of a “dramatic rehearsal” of the consequences of an action in light of the best available evidence of what those consequences might be. But this criticism is belied by the use of a pragmatic ethical argument for an opposing position by Bourne, Mumford, and others. Dewey's arguments about both wars are most effectively challenged from within the framework of his own ethics. For an opposing view, see Diggins, John Patrick, “John Dewey in Peace and War,” American Scholar 50 (1981), 213–30Google Scholar.

31 I have argued against such exaggerations in John Dewey and American Democracy, 528–30. Let me add here that Dewey shared Niebuhr' s skepticism about the sort of “universal human rights” thinking that David Little in another article in this issue proposes to attach to Niebuhr's thinking (, “The Recovery of Liberalism: Moral Man and Immoral Society Sixty Years Later,” Ethics & International Affairs 7 [1993], 171–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Like Niebuhr, Dewey objected on historicist and antifoundationalist grounds to any notion of timeless, universal rights antecedent to the moral principles of any particular community. The way to secure the values embedded in such “rights,” he contended, was to foster democratic community where it does not exist and thereby root such values in communal practices rather than in abstract declarations by world leaders (which is, I believe, what advocates of human rights ultimately intend to do anyway). For a forceful argument that one can achieve the essential goals of liberal “rights talk”——constraints on repression and discrimination—without its liabilities by relying on the implications of a commitment to democracy, see Guttmann, Amy, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987Google Scholar).

32 Diggins, , “Power and Suspicion,” 153Google Scholar; Niebuhr, , Nature and Destiny of Man I, 110Google Scholar; John Dewey as quoted in Hook, Sidney, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 66Google Scholar; Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems, as quoted in Diggins, “Power and Suspicion,” 154Google Scholar.

33 Dewey, , Public and Its ProblemsGoogle Scholar, as quoted in Diggins, “Power and Suspicion,” 154. Diggins argues that Dewey did not share Niebuhr's deep suspicion of collective politics, but I would say that Dewey's position was that not all collective politics was subject to the same suspicions, and undemocratic politics was deserving of far greater suspicion than democratic politics—for which Dewey held out considerably more hope than Niebuhr. Dewey was unwilling to abandon the ideal of moral men and women in a moral society, which, as he saw it, was essential to the democratic ideal and, as an ideal, to democratic practice and reform. He did think, as Diggins critically suggests, that democratic citizens could live “lives of mutuality” and not just engage in a balancing of interests. Yet, as the remark about “old Adam” indicates, even a democratic society could not expect to root out egoism and corruption altogether. If, as David Little says, Niebuhr later changed his mind and argued that “effective democratic communities might actually elevate moral sensitivity and responsibility above what individuals can achieve in small, intimate groups, and thereby facilitate and enhance moral development rather than frustrate it,” then the gap between Niebuhr and Dewey closes substantially (Little, “Recovery of Liberalism,” 190).

34 This feature of democratic politics was an aspect of Dewey's defense of democracy from the very outset of his career. See Dewey, John, “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888), Early Works of John Dewey 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 237–38Google Scholar.

35 Lippmann, Walter, Public Opinion (1922; New York: Free Press, 1965), 196–97Google Scholar; Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), xii, xivGoogle Scholar; Niebuhr, , “Study in Cynicism,” Nation 156 (May 1, 1943), 638Google Scholar; Dewey, John, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” (1939), Later Works 14, 227Google Scholar. For an account of the minimalist democracy allowed by foreign policy realists see Rosenthal, Joel H., Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), chap. 4Google Scholar.

36 Dewey, , “Shall the United States Join the World Court?” 100Google Scholar; Dewey, John, “Reconstruction Editorial,” Dial 65 (December 28, 1918), 619Google Scholar.

37 John Dewey to James T. Farrell, February 22, 1941, Dewey Papers, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. See Dahl, Robert, Controlling Nuclear Weapons: Democracy versus Guardianship (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, which argues that even this most sacrosanct preserve of insulated elite power should be subject to democratic control.