Dewey as a Restrained Modernist:

Educational Experimentalism in a Capitalist Democracy

Paul M. Zisman, Professor Emeritus
University of Mary Washington
Original 1995. Edited 2020.

I. Introduction
Political systems and economic processes go hand in hand.
Hence, the traditional discipline of political economics. Liberal
democracy and the free-market capitalist economic system are a case
in point. The fall of Soviet Communism leads many to believe that
democratic capitalism works effectively to create wealth and distribute it
fairly broadly. Furthermore, as Heilbroner has noted, democratic
capitalist societies do not go to war against each other.1 (Of course, he
considers them separate societies rather than loosely coupled world
system!). So such societies have tended to prove themselves
particularly stable.
At a time when capitalist democracy as a system is so heavily
touted, however, the modern democratic impulse itself prompts some
notes of irony. Democratic capitalist systems are not simply the
workings of politics and the market economy. They evolve certain
cultural dynamics as well, referred to collectively as "modernity". In
this paper, I attempt to trace some of the cultural themes of
modernity, as they stem from free market activity, in the educational
theory of the most democratic of American philosophers, John
Dewey. The thesis of this essay is that John Dewey's educational
theory advances modernity. In so doing, it carries within it certain
assumptions associated with market capitalism.
The first problem in tackling this thesis is the definition of
modernity. I approach this task by identifying certain propensities
toward value transformations that modernists employ in their
thinking. The movement toward modernity requires a shift in value
orientations. This shift results in a different cultural syndrome,
referred to as modernity, that cuts across the economic (market
capitalism) and political (liberal democratic republicanism) systems
1Robert Heilbroner. The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1985).

1
and infuses itself into even the less institutionalized modes of living
(modern life styles) of a society. I am interested in how these
transvaluations associated with our commercial society are used in
educational theories. To keep my project manageable, I limit the
topic by selecting what I view as the central value operations of
modernity (Part II) and then show how they operate in Dewey's
theories about education (Part III). To foreshadow the outcome, I
conclude in Part IV that Dewey does indeed participate in the
modernist culture but only to a certain extent. Dewey tempers or
moderates the modernist adventure in value displacement (i.e., the
infatuation with the ever-new) by his drive towards coherence (also
referred to as "organicity"). As a result, Dewey's educational theory
is both part and parcel of modernity while at the same time, in my
understanding, a form of resistance against its excesses. In other
words, Dewey is both inside and outside the modernist impulse, and
thus he is an educator for those who find themselves within the
modernist tradition but are repelled by the "postmodern" flourishes
toward nihilism.
A central feature of modernity as I see it is Nietzsche's insight into
modernity as the inversion of values. The mark of this era is
nihilism, of which he wrote:
"What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate

themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer."

[Italics in original]2
This epigram foretells my story of how modernity has come to
displace the traditional ranking of values. Traditional valuations as defined here depend on a
fixed religious or ideological context in which ends are clearly marked and the means clearly
identified. In a Nietzschean conception of modernity the ends are not clearly marked hence the
means are opportunistic fitting situations as they arise. The nihilist is "one [who] grants the reality of
becoming as the only reality...".3 Such a person rejects a cosmological unity and
denies the validity of any metaphysical realm depriving life of any grand and overarching
meaning.
Following Nietzsche, I will look for the heart of modernism in
its valuations. My method is to derive the characteristic
transformations of values thrown off by the dynamics of the market
society. The starting point is to recognize the power of the economic factors to transform
2Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Edited by William Kaufmann, New
York: Vintage Books, 1967) p. 9.
3Nietzsche, The Will to Power p. 13.
,

2
society and its values. While this may seem to be taking a Marxian
position in the broad sense it is also found in the work of Adam
Smith, an apologist for capitalism. . What they have in common is
their common understanding of how the market forces have given rise to
the features of modern society. Yet, I am not interested in the
material and structural relations themselves. I am persuaded by
Nietzsche that valuations are what gives a shape to lives in an era.
While economic forces may create the material environment and
operations that structure behavior, the residue that is left in life's
meanings are the valuations, the ranking of values,
To know how persons of an era structure their thoughts, we look at their
valuations.

This study, consequently, depends on the geneological method

since it identifies the continuities in the value transformations from
market relations to modern culture and to Dewey's philosophy. If I
can find the same types of value operations in Dewey's work on the
problems of educational theory as those giving rise to modern
market society, then I have located Dewey within the modern
cultural syndrome. He becomes one of its transforming agents. How
he modifies the modern transvaluations and curbs their excesses
reveals his resistance to these powerful cultural forces. To look
ahead, while Dewey refuses to posit any overarching cosmological
unity, as the adherent modernist, his genius, and answer to
Nietzsche, is how he maintains a constructed and particularistic
organic unity to moderate modernity's free-fall toward nihilism.

II. Modernity. Market Exchange and Value Displacements

The great truth about American society, as any society modeled
on Western capitalist democracy, its its overwhelming preoccupation
with the economic sphere of life. We are a commercial society par
excellence. The historical signicance of America is its ability to
harness technology for the sake of economic development. As a
consequence, production becomes the engine to enlarge consumption.
This drive toward consumption has cultural spin offs, among which
are transformations of cultural values. In what follows I identify
four of culturally characteristic ways of transvaluing values. In each
case, I will start with the economic ideology, drawing on Adam Smith

3
mostly, and Karl Marx secondarily. According to the view of
modernity I am advocating, the economic ideology determines
cultural ways of making value judgements.
A brief synopsis of the transition from feudal to commercial
society will establish the historical momentum underlying the four
modern transvaluations. To begin, first, the market revolution has
its roots in the gradual growth of towns in twelve century Europe to
its culmination in the rise of the commercial class as signaled by the
revolutions of the 18th century. With the rise of merchants and
tradesmen came a suspicion of all authorities impeding the
commercial classes as they strove to loosen the feudal reigns on all
marketing activities. Secondly, to create the commerical man,
changes had to occur in the moral project associated with feudalism
and its religious culture. Selfishness had to be transformed into a
potential for creating a good for society, rather than generating evil.
Thirdly, the process of shifting the commercial orientation from the
periphery of feudal society to the center of the modern one required
the interfusion of commercial modes of creating values into the social
spheres of life. Negotiation was revalued from a merely commercial
activity to become widespread in all types of social relations,
resulting in the socializing of market exchange. Negotation of social
relations gives rise to the negotation of value rankings. Hence,
values are routinely displaced as what was once an ends becomes a
means. This leads to a free-floating propensity to transform values
as readily as commodities are transformed. This takes us to the
fourth value propensity to prize the ever-new. The cultural value
for novelty is supported by the dynamics of market activity to seek
its expansion in the creation of a never-ending supply of enticing
These four value propensities are part of a mutually
reinforcing cultural syndrome, so while they may be presented as
analytically "real" they are not so readily uncoupled in experience.
1 . The Bourgeoisie Revolution: the overcoming of traditional
authorities
commodities.
The transition from a feudal to commercial society entails a
transvaluation of authority as centralized, say in the throne, to the
diffuse authority associated with the checks and balances of
democracy. This political shift signals the reversal of fortunes of the

4
feudal lords and the merchants. The revolutionary proportions of
this shift was not lost on its early observers, who portrayed its
future with varying degrees of optimism and pessimism.4
The most thoughtful optimist, Adam Smith, called these
changes "a revolution of the greatest importance to the public
happiness..."5 But his feelings were mixed when considering the
motives of those involved. The passage goes on:
4See Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in his Time and Ours: Designing the Decent
Society. New York: The Free Press, 1993. Oscillations between optimism and
pessimism "reflect the alternating pattern of expansion and contraction in
standards of living related to international conflict, demographic transitions,
the pace of technological innovation, and a host of other factors." (P. 182).
Muller's re-assessment of Smith is a fascinating correction of the many of the
myths surrounding his advocacy of laissez-faire economics. For example,
while Smith's Wealth of Nations called for government withdrawal from many
economic activities, he also clearly recognized the dependency of the market
system on a large and active state apparatus generated in part from the taxed
wealth and protectionist concerns of the commercial class (p. 142). While
Smith did not go so far as to suggest compulsory education, he did advocate
universal public schooling supported by state moneys. (P. 150).
5Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Ed. and introduced by Edwin Cannan (New York: The Modem Library, 1937), p.
391.
[This revolution] was...brought about by two different orders of
people, who had not the least intention to serve the public. To
gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the
great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less
ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and
in pursuit of their own peddler principle of turning a penny
wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either
knowledge or foresight of that great revolution the folly of the
one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing
about.6
The fact that this revolution was unintentional and unanticipated by
its protagonists confirms for Smith that benefits to society can occur
as an unintended and unexpected by-products of behavior directed
toward individual purposes. Additionally, he was wary of this
revolution, rightly fearing that the entrepreneur's values would seep
into all aspects of human affairs, foreshadowing some of Dewey's

5
misgivings.
Yet, the part of his market rationale, The Wealth of Nations,
that has garnered the greatest attention is his appreciation of the
commercial society’s great potential for benefiting a wide crosssection of society. Not only
does commercial society create "national
opulence" which increases the standard of living of all, but Smith
found the possibility of a "commercial humanism" that civilizes men.
As Muller states:
Smith valued the market most because it promoted the
development of cooperative modes of behavior and because it
6Smith, Wealth of Nations p. 391-2.
,

made men more self-controlled and more likely to subordinate

their asocial passions to the needs of others. In short, it made
men more "respectable" in their behavior.7
Consequently, Smith was not naively singing the praises of
commercial society and its decentralized pricing market mechanisms
as the highest ends to which men should aspire. According to
Lindren:
Smith did not favor a system of commerce which fostered
money making, but merely tolerated it and then only on the
condition that merchants and traders are placed in a position in
which the only way they can pursue the object of their
"rapacious greed" is by competing with one another in the
observance of the moral sentiments of the larger society..."8
Since competition requires forethought, calculation, industry,
cooperation, and taking the perspective of the other, it draws out
these minor virtues. Equally as important to Smith is the general
sentiments or conventions of society to which men tend to adhere to
satisfy their need for the respect of others. Smith believed such
"moral sentiments" motivated by the desire for respect and prestige
has as strong or stronger influence over conduct than the motivation
for personal gain.9 The crucial point, however, is that societal
configurations can indeed channel antagonistic impulses in directions
that benefit all members of society.
7Muller, p. 94.
8Lindgren, The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith , p. 130.
9Lindgren, p. 106.
By way of contrast with Smith's optimism, we turn to Karl

6
Marx, for whom the label of pessimist sounds like an
understatement, given his characterizations of capitalism. Writing a
century after Smith, Marx also recognized the liberating effect of the
capitalist revolution. It freed the commercial class of townspeople
and merchants, AKA the bourgeoisie, from being "[a]n oppressed
class under the sway of the feudal nobility..."10 He opines:
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary
part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has
put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man
to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other
nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous "cash payment".11
Marshall Berman notes that for Marx this great sundering of feudal
relations opened up great opportunities for new forms of
relationships. But, alas, the acquisitive merchants and townsmen
committed themselves to developing trade at the cost of developing
altruistic and ennobling virtues.12 Marx focused more on the plight
of the workers than Adam Smith, which by Marx's time had grown
much bleaker. Also, Marx was more utopian in his thinking and less
accepting of the plutocratic social structure that was evolving to take
the place of the feudal one.
10Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings edited by David McClellan. Oxford:
,

Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 223

^Marx ,in McClellan, p. 223.
12Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of
Modernity ,

modernity is indebted to Berman.

New York: Simon and Shuster, 1981 , p. 93. My approach to
Despite their contrasting attitudes, Smith and Marx both
observed and appreciated the movement away from feudalism and
towards commercialism. In sum, the modernist attitude, instilled by
the bourgeois revolution, is a distrust of authorities, especially
traditional ones. As such, modernity represents the negation of
feudalistic residuals. Such diminution of authorities opens up more
egalitarian possibilities, facilitating market exchanges and thus
opening up opportunities for further capital accumulation. Thus,
freedom from traditions and authorities is a necessary condition of

7
bourgeois democracy. Dewey manifests this aspect of modernity in
his drive to overcome dualisms, as will be shown in Part II.
2. Market Exchange and the Domestication of Self-Interest
Marx knew well the result of merchant activity: the continuous
revolution of the "instruments of production, and thereby the
relations of production, and with them the whole relations of
s o c i e t y. T h e effects on individuals, especially the workers, were
dehumanizing. Equally troubling was the low moral state of
everyone infused with the desire for gain. Marx here is echoing
Aristotle and influential Christian theologians (attitudinally, he was
perhaps influenced by the legacy of his Jewish forebears, many of
whom were rabbis who preached against greed for material wealth).
The classical Greek and traditional Christian doctrines associated
commerce with avarice at worst, making it an evil, and at best
considered commerce a necessary but mistrusted endeavor. For
example, St. Thomas Aquinas, according to Muller, believed the drive
13Marx in McClellan, p. 224.
to accumulate new wealth disrupted the "just distribution" of wealth
according to one's position in the social hierarchy. Aquinas even
criticized the insatiable aspect of commercial activity: "[TJrade,
insofar as it aims at making profits, is most reprehensible, since the
desire for gain knows no bounds but reaches into the infinite."14
Marx secularized the religious tradition by declaring the zealous
accumulation of wealth as unjust.
Smith was part of an earlier movement to revise the valuation
of self-interest from bad to good. In this regard, he is a modernist
and Marx is a throw-back to a feudalistic valuation. As an advocate
for a commercial system, Smith had to show that self-love does not
necessarily lead to evil. First, from his observations he believed that
commerce guided by the profit motive could actually benefit society:
A merchant is accustomed to employ his money chiefly in
profitable projects; whereas a mere country gentleman does
nothing but spend it. The one often sees his money go from
him and return to him again with a profit; the other, when once
he parts with it, very seldom expects to see any of it again.
Those different habits naturally affect their temper and
disposition...A merchant is commonly a bold...undertaker. [He]

8
is not afraid to lay out at once a large capital upon the
improvement of his land, when he has a probable prospect of
raising the value of it in proportion to the expence.15
To justify this position, Smith built on an intellectual movement
away from the traditional classical one and the Christian one. This
14Quoted in Muller, p. 43. This statement echoes Aristotle, p. 41.
15Smith, The Wealth of Nations p. 384.
,

movement to revalue self-love appeared even in the writings of

clerics. More influential, however, was the Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius,
who in the seventeenth century made the Roman notion of
"possessive individualism" a central premise of the polity and
declared that the duty of the state is to protect the right of the
individual to live in the way he pleases.16 This shift in thinking
changed the notion of a nation from a hierarchical and organic
association based on dependence to the state as a kind of container, a
bounded spacial sphere, inside of which individuals worked out their
relations on an individualistic basis. Such a notion allowed for the
development of the legal framework necessary for the type of
impersonal trust upon which commercial transactions depend.
Adam Smith drew on Grotius and a string of other writings who
revalued the functions of self-love and of the state. He took to heart
the new role of "social institutions to give direction to passions", that
is, to shape conduct toward virtuous ends, termed by Muller,
"psychological institutionalism."17 Smith sought, in Muller’s words,
"to preserve or create institutions which would pit otherwise
malicious motives against one another," thereby neutralizing or
deflecting their negative effects. A second strategy was to create
social institutions that channel self-love toward conduct that at least
appears virtuous.
Smith went on from this microscopic view to more broadly
view the workings of the market economy as benefiting society as a
whole even while the purposes of individuals were narrowly
16Muller, 45-46.
17Muller, 49-53.
focussed on their own private benefit. The metaphor of the
"invisible hand" stands for the unintended outcomes of the acts of
individuals pursuing their private self interests.18 While individuals

9
often under- or over-estimate their losses and gains, at the societal
level things usually work out to maximize benefits. The free market
would function in this way as long as it stayed free. And it would
function better left alone than if a government attempted to set
prices and regulate the flow of goods. Yet, Smith was very aware, as
Muller succinctly puts it, that "creating the preconditions for the
market and compensating for its negative effects will sometimes
require the visible hand of government."19
Smith, then, participated in a movement which challenged the
traditional view of self-love as the cause of all evils. He believed
that self love paradoxically drives men toward social relations, and
that this desire to see themselves reflected in others had a
domesticating effect on them. Social institutions could be used to
abet this inclination, harnessing its force rather than fighting against
it. Psychological institutionalism thus became a tool for the
habituation of conduct to a somewhat higher level of virtue (but
admittedly a limited virtue). In addition, the activities to satisfy
self-interest when multiplied and managed within amenable
institutions could raise the living standards of all, creating wealth
that would remove deprivation, a primary cause of unvirtous
behavior in the first place. In this way Smith justified the freemarket system as domesticating
individuals toward greater
18Muller, p. 86.
19Muller, p. 87.
sociability ever while allowing them to satisfy their private self
interests.
Dewey’s theories of education, as we will show in Part III, also
seek to domesticate desire. He relied on a social arrangement which
encourages the application of intelligence to problems. Dewey's
propensity to gather up potentially conflicting forces into a

harmonious whole —organicity—is an awareness on his part of the

effects of social organization on individual psychology and conduct.
3. Market Culture and The Propensity for Value Displacement

Economic influence on culture. —Those who write about

modernity usually distinguish these two aspects: modernism as the

10
modern sensibility as applied to art and life style, and modernization
as an economic process by which societies evolve toward a
democratic and capitalist society. While the political, economic and
social realms of a society are conceptually separate features, they
function with some degree of complementarity and overlap .
Nevertheless, in commercial societies like ours, and the other
Western and emerging capitalist democracies, the economic processes
predominate to an historically unprecedented degree, insinuating
themselves into every part of society. Adam Smith was keenly
aware of the repercussions of economic practices that interfuse social
values. For example, what determines a commodity's purchasing
cost? He noted that the value of a commodity in cash terms is
determined by the degree of respectability that commodity brings to
its owners. And who sets respectability? The elite who decide on
fashion. As he explains: "That is not fashion which everybody
wears, but which those wear who are of a high rank or character."20
The bare economic utility of a commodity is augmented by its social
utility. This transfer of value from the utility of a commodity to its
ability to enhance status is an example of "value displacement", a
propensity of modernity which interfuses all spheres of society.

The discovery of the displacement propensity. — A major critical

insight of Smith's into the workings of market capitalism is this
general tendency to shift the desire or value from one thing to
another, or one level of activity to another. Lindgren who discovered
the centrality of this operational propensity in Smith's work has
termed it value displacement . This process of value shifting is a
necessary counterpart to the transformation from a feudal to a
commercial society and the subsequent rapid and continuing
transitions brought about by the commercial revolution. I believe
this displacement process is what Nietzsche sensed in his thoughts
about modern nihilism cited earlier. Propensity to displace values is
the urge to revalue things so as to identify with the "reality of
becoming." Since this modern propensity is so central to my task, I
will develop in some detial its origin in Smith's work and how it has
been extended.
Smith accepts Hume's position that the perception of the utility

11
of an object provides satisfaction. Lindgren21 warns us to
understand "utility" as referring to the perceived usefulness and not
20Adam Smith quoted in J. Ralph Lindgren, The Social Philosophy of Adam
Smith . The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (1973), p. 104.
2lindgren, p. 75. I acknowledge Lindgren for my understanding of value
displacement for drawing attention to its importance in Smith.
to utility in the sense of its actual use. Smith gives Hume's
generalization as:
The utility of any object...pleases the master by perpetually
suggesting to him the pleasure or convenience which it is fitted
to promote.22
Smith extends this into economic thinking by noting that an object is
often valued more for the pleasure it gives the eye than for its
instrumental value, that is, the value created by its actually use:
But that this fitness [which registers in the mind as pleasure],
this happy contrivance of any production of art [in the old
sense of craft], should often be more valued, than the very end
.
for which it was intended [my italics].. 23
Smith adds that individuals will often "adjust the means," referring
to the outlay of additional money, for attaining the object according
to this added satisfaction, increasing its cost beyond the obvious
worth of the object when calculated purely according to its
usefulness. Smith believes that he is the first to note this effect,
even while it is "observed in a thousand instances" in human life.24
The editors of the 1976 edition of Smith's Moral Sentiments state
that Smith would use this observation as the link between his ethical
concerns and his economic ones.25 To elaborate, first and foremost,
economic activity is a social activity since commodities are socially
constructed and have value according to their social implications.
22Adam Smith, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L.
Macfie (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1976.) p. 179.
23Smith, Moral Sentiments p. 179.
,

24Ibid. p. 180.
25Raphael and Macfie in A Theory of Moral Sentiments p. 180, note #2.
,

This observation foreshadows Thorsten Veblen’s classic, The Theory

of the Leisure Class, in which it is discovered that "conspicuous
consumption" is valued for its status-giving value rather than its
satisfaction of some utilitarian ends.

12
Social displacements. — Adam Smith observed the displacement
propensity in other realms of social life and thereby affirmed its
centrality in the workings of commercial society. He noted that
organizations in general tend to seek their fulfillment in their ideal
images of themselves, rather than to adhere to the instrumental
rationale for their existence. "Goal displacement" is now a common
sociological notion: for example, when schools place greater emphasis
on custodial ends over academic ones a value displacement has
occurred. Or when school system bureaucracies grow like topsy with
no or little academic improvement, one observes the shift in values
in the organization from education to self-maintenance and selffortification for institutional
combat against other institutions.
Lindgren emphasizes in Smith’s work the symbolic aspects of
the displacement propensity. For example,
In pursuit of wealth commercially ambitious men desire to
acquire commodities possessed of exchange value not because
their possession is expected to improve the quality of their
private lives, but as symbols which excite in them the image of
public respect.26
A subject does not obey his sovereign because of moral approval but
because of admiration: "His way of life is the symbol of all that is fine
26Lindgren, p. 77.
and good. For this reason he is emulated and obeyed."27 While
commercial activity may start out as a way of satisfying material
desires, its social aspect changes it to symbolize success in the eyes of
others.

Marxian Displacements —Marx later rediscovered the

displacement tendency, and particularly extended its symbolic
connotation. Marxists tend to overuse it and to reduce all capitalist
phenomenon to this single propensity. Marx placed great
significance in the transition from valuing an object for its use value,
i.e., using it for the purposes for which it was produced, to valuing it
for its exchange value, i.e., valuing the object for the return it gives
on its resale. Marx marshaled his entire criticism of capitalism on
the extension of this fundamental capitalist displacement into human

13
relations. The drive to amass capital inverts the fundamental
relationship of things and labour, and of their worth and use.
Whereas in the primitive markets of pre-capitalist communities,
money is simply a means to make more convenient the bartering of
commodities. By contrast, in a capitalist market money acquires the
properties of an ends, effecting the displacement of value from
means to ends. But this is only to make the acquisition of means the
aim of life. In the first instance, commodities are exchanged for
money so that other commodities can be purchased for use.
Commodities are wanted for the usefulness. Under the regime of
capitalism, money is exchanged for commodities so that they can be
converted into a greater amount of money.2** Hence, commodities are
27Lindgren, p. 77.
28 Marx codifies the difference in convenient formulas, C-M-C’, for
commodities to money in order to buy other commodities; and M-C-M' for
/
wanted for their exchange value. Money has an "occult quality" that
spoils all social relations since it extends the habit of value
displacements associated with commodity exchange to individuals.
The result is a society that treats all things, including fellow humans,
as commodities. Marx's basic humanistic message is that capitalism
leads to dehumanization. Adam Smith was more sanguine about the
ability of men to so arrange their institutions to overcome this real
danger, but he was no less aware of it.

The centrality of the displacement propensity. —I consider this

propensity to capture the essence of market modernity. The
prominence of this propensity drives the bourgeois revolution
forward beyond the economic sphere into the political and cultural.
Thus, this propensity requires the overcoming of traditions, freeing
the exchange market toward greater concatenations of negotiated
exchange, and loosening an aesthetic of the ever-new.
To summarize how this might occur, we can start at the
material level of capitalist exchanges. Capitalism, defined as the use
of capital (say money) to increase capital, disrupts the basic
relationship of producer/labor and consumer/use. As market

14
mechanisms multiply and insert mediating interactions
("middlemen") into the basic producer-consumer relationship, the
value of the goods becomes tied more to the dynamics of exchange
than to its actual use. A spiral of abstractions is instigated from the
things themselves, from the art of their production, and from their
money to purchase commodities with the intention of acquiring greater
amounts of money upon their resale. Marx in McClellan, pp. 445-51, and see
also, for a very clear explanation, Robert Heilbroner, The Logic and Nature of
Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
use value to create layers of exchanges at many removes from the
basic exchange between the creator of the commodity and the
consumer. In addition, things that were once valued for their use
become symbols of a life style. The value is transferred from the
product and its use to its social symbolism. The original material
displacements seep into the culture as style. I want to show, also,
that it also seeps into the thinking of modernist thinkers such as
Dewey.
4. Market Dynamics and the Flight after the Ever-New
The "occult qualities" of money to transform itself reaps as byproducts transformations in
other spheres. Before the rise of
capitalist democracies, the activities of the aristocrats, feudal lords,
and priests all conspired to avoid change and disruption. Such
societies emphasized the continuities of ascribed status, which
lessened the demands on individuals to compete for status. In
contrast, the rise of the economic class and its capitalist activities sets
into motions a chain of competitive activities that perpetually destabilize society . The
fluidity of modern society creates opportunities
for social mobility and breeds an achievement orientation in its
population. But the very opportunities to compete for positions force
individuals to pit their life chances against one another, taking its toll
on the personalities of its denizens. Berman captures this well:
What kinds of people does this permanent revolution produce?
In order for people, whatever their class, to survive in modern
society, their personalities must take on the fluid and open
form of this society. Modern men and women must learn to
yearn for change: not merely to be open to changes in their
personal and social lives, but positively to demand them,

15
actively to seek them out and carry them through.29
Such fluidity easily slides from purposeful seeking of ends to
the adventurous disposition of valuing newness for its own sake.
Novelty itself becomes a good. As Berman relates, the 19th century
French poet and writer, Baudelaire, captured the fetish quality of
newness in his neologism modernite . He discerned a new aesthetic
self-consciousness arising in the metropolis, described by Walter
Benjamin as a "landscape" for the "fleeting beauty of fashion." When
Baudelaire instructs a young painter to be modern and paint what he
sees in the present-day city, he is relying on the root of the word
"modern," which is "mode," as in a la mode. Berman quotes
Baudelaire:
By ’modernity" I mean the ephemeral, the contingent, the half
of art whose other half is eternal and immutable.30
Thus modernity is the cult of now-ness and the immediate. The
modernist impulse is to adventure into the ever-new, the ever
fashionable, and the ever-stylish.
The pursuit of the ever-new is the stylistic counterpart of the
rationale of commercial markets. The market through its
presentation of commodities stimulates a demand for an everyincreasing supply of
commodities. The demand does not only come
from the want of the commodities themselves. Rather the demand is
to be fashionable, and commodities, in their stylistic differences,
29Berman, p.
30Quoted in Berman, p. 133.
offer us new modes of self-presentation. The cult of the ever-new is
the uprooting of the value displacement tendency from material and
human relations into the psyche itself. Styles are commoditized and
sought for an adventure in a way of life, and nothing more. Pieces of
life styles from other cultures are captured in this way, too.
Religious icons lose their symbolism, as crosses become fashion,
mixed in with Hindu and animist amulets. Nuances in style are
picked out as highly significant signs of sexual and political
orientation.
Ideas can also become commoditized in this way. The
displacement noted by Foucault, for example, from the official
function of prisons to its symbolic function opens up a new way of

16
thinking about institutions, but not far from Adam Smith's
psychological institutionalism. Deconstructionists are delighted in
identifying the self-fragmenting tendencies in texts. To take these
ideas uncritically, however, is to engage in "promiscuous formalism,"
as Cornel West31 calls it, by applying them without discretion and by
committing the fallacy of taking the part for the whole. Stylishness
invades intellectual circles as easily as it does the more obviously
commercial ones.
Dewey does not ask teachers to pursue the ever-new in
education. But his declamation of traditional methods have
encouraged teachers to search for new methods, propelling them in
31A speech by Cornel West, collected in his Prophetic Thought in Postmodern
Times (Monroe Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993), p. 95. An example of
promiscuous formalism in the use of deconstruction: "[E]very text can be
turned against itself in order to show the degree to which every ground can be
undermined, including the very ground that is put forward to underline it,
and so on and so forth.”
the direction of the ever-new. In addition, Dewey's advocacy for
growth as continual reconstruction has the danger of leading to
intellectual stylishness. Given this background of modernity, we are
now ready for the question: how does Dewey promote the modernist
regime in his philosophy of education ?
II. Dewey's Experimentalism as Modernism
We now turn to how the valuational propensities of modernity
have infiltrated Dewey's thinking. At the end of each section, I will
indicate in summary fashion the limit of Dewey’s participation in the
propensity in question. In Part III, I will return to Dewey's
resistance to the excesses of modernity.
1. Overcoming Traditions: Dewey's Attack Upon Dualisms
Feudal society depended on a fixed hierarchical structure.
Peasants could not become noblemen, and noblemen could rarely
become monarchs. This accomplished stability and security for all:
everyone knew his place and could immediately identify the status
of another and the ensuing obligations owed to him. Likewise,
knowledge was scholastic and rested on an authority: parish priests
established truth for others, bishops for the priests and the Bible
remained the ultimate source of truth. Modernism fights against
such certainty by undercutting the dualisms upon which absolutes

17
are founded. Dewey was a modern knight jousting against the infidel
dualisms of his time. His was a mopping-up exercise to expunge all
remnants of philosophical dualisms from contemporary thinking. In
this way, he fought against feudal residuals in society.
In Quest for Certainty. Dewey rails against the separation of
practice and theory, the arts and philosophy, saying that experiential
certainty will come about through practice rather than speculation.
..
The shift to instrumental thinking is no small task, since " .for over
two thousand years the weight of the most influential and
authoritatively orthodox tradition of thought has been thrown into
the opposite scale."32 Dewey is not after reversing the dualism of
theory and practice, but overcoming it. He proposes to nullify their
separation through experiential inquiry and to avoid the fallacy of
equating knowledge to "the disclosure of reality, of reality prior to
and independent of knowing." The quest for certainty assumes
antiquated notions about truth and knowledge, their relationship to
each other and to moral problems.
Here we have an implied recognition of the forces of
modernity: the clashing of authorities due to fundamental changes in
society, the insecurity created by their clashes and the resulting
search for a new truth to tie one's fate to. Dewey here participates in
the force of modernity by mocking these traditional props,
particularly undercutting religious supports in the face of science.
Yet he even demystifies science by striking down the correspondence
theory in scientific inquiry, thereby destroying the last pillar of
certainty for the hesitantly modern individual .
His recommendation for experimental inquiry refers to a
process of generating knowledge that is tested out in action and then
recycled back as new knowledge to be tested again, perpetuating the
32John Dewey , "Philosophy's Search for the Immutable." In The Philosophy of
John Dewev. edited by John J. McDermott. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1973
(1939), p. 384.

process of the ever-new. We often find these same features of

argumentation in his educational theory: isolate the dualism, reveal
how each side is misguided, and direct the attention to a
transactional mode of inquiry or conception of knowledge.33 Dewey
is employing the operation of displacement, but in a different way

18
from those whom he criticizes. Whereas the tendency of many
educational advocates is to displace horizontally, from one extreme to
the other or even along the continuum in a compromise fashion,
Dewey advocates displacing one level of understanding to a
reorganized higher level. His vertical displacements sets him apart
from other modernists.
The Child-Subject Dualism: Curricular Transactions..--An
example of vertical displacement as a means of overcoming a
perennial educational dualism is found in Dewey's "The Child and the
Curriculum," written in 1902, when he was forty-three. He lays out
the general problem as a propensity to "just to stick to what is
already said" and to chose one side or the other when conflicts
between schools of thought arise.34 The basic dualism to be
confronted here is the separation between the individual and society,
or in educational terms, the child and the curriculum. Dewey
proceeds to demolish this dualism by asking us to "realize that the
child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single
process."35 We should think of the subject-matter as already
33John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, . Boston: The Beacon Press, 1949.
34 John Dewey. The Child and Curriculum/The School and Leonard
Society . Edited by Carmichael
. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956 (1902,
1915), p. 4.
35Ibid., p. 11
contained, at least in embryonic form, within the child, and
"[a]bandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and
ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience."36
Dewey similarly points out the fallacious dualism separating
the logical from the psychological, noting that the former is the
organized outcome of knowledge and the latter is the process of
reaching the outcome. By neglecting to "psychologize" the subject,
the symbols of knowledge are forcibly fed to the child before the
preliminary and foundational experience has been digested.
Secondly, the child will lose motivation if she does not discern the
connection between what she needs to know to accomplish a task
and what is being taught. And thirdly, in the case of science
imparted only logically, the child loses the active process by which
science comprehends its subject matter.

19
To overcome such interrelated dualisms, Dewey proposes to
focus on the activity which incorporates the two conceptually
isolated objects, the child and subject, rather than ranking one over
the other. The change of mind required to grasp their relationship of
mutual dependence, which the ideal educational activity creates,
hinges on the ability to grasp the flow of interaction from a higher
plane, a transactional one. To do this, a mentality is required that is
accustomed to moving out of fixed positions-accustomed to shifting
perspectives—in other words, a thoroughly modernized mentality. A
displacement occurs here from treating the entities as discrete causal
agents to their complementary relationship in a comprehensive
whole. At this transactional level the role of one actor defines and is
36Ibid.
dependent on the role of the other. The reconceptualization of child
and curriculum in terms of transactions moves the attention from the
end points of the relationship to the processes uniting them in the
educational experience. A downside to the transactional perspective
is the danger of highlighting procedures and processes at the expense
of what happens qualitatively in the experiences of child and
teacher .
2. Domestication of Self-Interest and theNegotiation of Experience:
The exchange market in a simplified form, with direct
interaction between the producer and the consumer, represents
Adam Smith's paradigmatic economic person: persuading and
bargaining. Persuasion is the attempt to win the sympathy of the
other to one’s point of view and bargaining is the give-and-take of
settling on the terms of the exchange. The original impulse to engage
in the market is self-interest: an individual wants to secure a gain
for himself. He wants to satisfy certain needs. Yet humans are
social animals due to their naturally dependence on others. So they
have refined the art of winning approval by appealing to the selfinterests of others in order to
satisfy their own. Smith and his
forerunners, the Scottish philosophers, were able to domesticate the
antagonistic Hobbesian self-interests by revealing their positive
function to draw individuals into cooperative arrangements. For
Smith, the social arrangements based on a division of labor into

20
specialized components is the groundwork for all other societal
arrangements of commercial society. Such arrangements sublimate
the potentially warring self-interests by channeling them into
economically productive relationships.37
Dewey deals with a similar problem when he discusses the role
of impulse and desire in children. His solution is similarly a "market"
solution in that such individualistic desires, when forged in the oven
of social intelligence, become purposes for a cooperative plan of
action. In a vein similar to the Scottish economists, Dewey notices
the universality of desires and their function as "the ultimate moving
springs of action."38 In his characteristic fashion of avoiding
polarizations, Dewey parries with equal vigor against the traditional
educators who ignore desires as well as the progressives who treat
desires as already containing purposes. The teacher must insert
herself between the child and the curriculum by translating the
child's diffuse desire for general satisfaction into a specific plan of
action to secure a particular satisfying experience. In other words,
purpose is the drive toward coherence in one's experience.
Dewey is at his best in cajoling the progressives to avoid
equating freedom and impulse. This is the kind of displacement he
eschews, since it amounts to an oscillation between the extremes of
permissiveness and imposition. He counsels: "[Gjuidance given by the
teacher to the exercise of the pupil's intelligence is an aid to freedom,
not a restriction upon it."39 The harnessing of the child’s desires by
instrumental purposes is Dewey's approach to domesticating selfinterest.
37Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in his Time and Ours. Chapter 4.
38John Dewey, Experience and Education. New York: The Macmillan Company,
1939. P. 82.
39Dewey , Experience and Education p. 84.
,

The guidance of a desire or impulse is a delicate operation. For

if teachers co-opt the pupils' desires by replacing them with their
own purposes, then the teachers "abuse the office." Dewey's
suggestion for avoiding this form of displacement is quite expert, and
bears a resemblance to the market situation, in which a certain
degree of egalitarianism must be respected for the negotiation of
business:
The way is, first, for the teacher to be intelligently aware of the
capacities, needs, and past experiences of those under

21
instruction, and, secondly, to [...] develop into a plan and project
by means of [...] suggestions contributed and organized into a
whole by the members of the group....The development occurs
through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not
being afraid also to give. The essential point is that the
purpose grows and takes shape through the process of social
intelligence.40
Dewey believed that knowledge is derived instrumentally by
connecting purposes (or, intentions for certain ends) to certain
procedures or means, and then actually testing the effects of this
connection. The testing process is rooted in experientialism, which
assumes that experience is the proof of the instrumental association.
Yet knowledge does not achieve its instrumental status for a
community until the members of that community affirm that it does
indeed accomplish what it purports. This aspect is called consensual
validation. Social intelligence brings into play the three aspects of
instrumentalism, experientialism and consensual validation.
40Dewey, Experience and Education., p. 85.
Applying these concepts of pragmatism to the teaching
situation, we find that in order to mobilize the learners' intelligence,
the teacher has to induce them into an instrumental experience. To
instrumentalize a situation, the teacher must respect the learners'
interests and desires in relation to their educational needs. This
requires a kind of negotiation between what the teacher defines as
significant and what the learners define as significant. The
experience, to be meaningful, must engage both learners and
teachers toward fulfilling their purposes. The mutuality of the
engagement socializes the experience: it is instrumentally satisfying
to all. The experience is so negotiated, in Dewey's ideal democratic
exchange, so as to join together the purposes of learner and teacher
resulting in mutually satisfying consequences. The optimism of
experiential education reflects the optimism of market systems.
Looking forward to the outcomes in hopeful anticipation of
completing the purpose-action-consequence cycle fulfills the selfinterests of learners and
entrepreneurs alike.
The appropriation of self-interest for higher purposes is a
commonalty in Dewey's and Smith's approaches. A Marxian way of

22
describing its market connotation is that the will of the individual is
commoditized for the sake of national opulence. This
characterization obviously does not describe the foregoing account of
Dewey's educational theory because of his restrained form of
For Dewey, the sublimation of self-interest is only
legitimate for the growth of the individual and for societal
reconstruction (the topic of the concluding section). Dewey wants
teachers to contain value displacements within an web of social
modernity .
organicity41 shaped by the immediate social nature of the experience
and the curricular purposes of the teacher. The experience is organic
in two senses: in the sense of growing into the experience and in the
sense of the growing together of purposes through application of
intelligence to a common situation. The teacher creates the organic
unity by molding her behavior to the children, changing the
relationship from a tit-for-tat exchange of separate entities to a
mutually supportive and enmeshing coordination of intelligences (i.e.,
purposes). More specifically, the teacher is engrossed in the
relationship because of her pursuit of a topic or problem that will in
turn engross the learners.
The shift in perspective required to view self-interest and
desire as potentially good qualities requires a willingness to give up
notions about fixed human nature. The emptiness of human nature,
or the fluidity of the self, is a hallmark of modernity. But what is not
a theme of modernity, but is a restraining aspect of Dewey's
philosophy, is the propensity toward organicity, albeit localized and
particularistic. Interests and needs are channeled toward mutually
engrossing experiences that require the application of intelligence.
41Alfonso J. Damico, Individuality and Community: The Social and Political
Thought of John Dewev. Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1978,
Chapter 3. According to Damico, Dewey's early work failed to specify what
constitutes this organicism. Later, he moved towards notions of
interdependence, association and cooperation in order to avoid a metaphysical
abstraction prohibited by his allegiance to instrumentalism. Yet he also
wanted to avoid the extreme of an atomistic conception of community. Damico
shows that in Democracy and Education (p. 84-5), Dewey retains a kind of
organicism achieved through common interests, aspirations and
understandings that elicit "like-mindedness" and cooperation, Damico, p. 44-45.

23
This is often referred to in the social discourse as "bonding" but it is difficult to
empirically pin down. For an attempt, see Paul Zisman and Vernon Wilson,
"Table-Hopping in the Cafeteria: An Exploration of 'Racial' Integration in
Early Adolescent Social Groups." Anthropology and Education Quarterly 23 No.
3 (September 1992), pp. 199-220.
Market displacements, in contrast, channel self-interests in a onefor-one exchange with no
overarching virtuous purpose.
3. Darwinian Displacements: Capacities as Stages
In "The Child and the Curriculum"
* after attacking the dualism
and suggesting the transactional view, Dewey makes positive
assertions about what the teacher should do. He urges teachers to
interpret and guide the child's continuous reconstruction of
experience. Revealed here is a sensitivity to the nature of the

learning process as unusual as that of Maria Montessori42 - jean

Piaget, or Vivian Paley43.

In interpreting the child's actions, the teacher must be alert to
the arising and subsiding of different talents and capacities. The
value imparted to the child's activities is established by comparison
to "some larger growth-process in which they have their place."44
Thus, the teacher brings cultural and intellectual understandings to
judge the value of the child's activities and to guide her in selecting
further educational activities. Some capacities presented by the child
will be just hatching into differentiation and should be encouraged as
"the dawning of flickering light that will shine steadily only in the far
future."45 Some powers of the child are "symptoms of a waning
42Dewey specifically recommends Montessori's approach with the caveat
against its mechanization, in Interest and Effort in Education originally
,

published in 1913. Reprinted in John Dewev: The Middle Works. 1899-1924. Vol.
7, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1979. P. 187.
43The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter. (New York: Teachers College Press,
1990).
44Dewey, "The Child and the Curriculum" in School and Society (University of
Chicago Press, 19..), p. 14.
45Ibid .
tendency" and should not be taken as having some final significance
but should be allowed to subside from use. A capacity's "genuine

24
meaning is in the propulsion it affords toward a higher level."46 In
other words, a valued capacity is one that serves as a scaffold to
generate subsequent capacities. The idea is to value capacities
differentially, letting some thrive but in a sense pruning others.
In these passages is revealed Dewey's Darwinian conception of
education. His overarching conception of growth is that individuals
adjust to the environment by making purposeful changes in itself or
in the environment.47 Since individuals must adjust themselves to a
certain extent, and have the propensity to do so, the teacher manages
the evolution of the child's capacities through artful construction of
the environment. The Darwinian influence is apparent here and
much more so in Dewey's later discussion of education, Democracy
and Education,48 In the well-known fourth chapter, "Education as
Growth," Dewey explicitly relates education to adaptation, noting the
reciprocal effects of the organism's modification of the environment
even in the process of assimilating to it. He further reduces growth
to the development of habits, defining them instrumentally as
"inclinations" to seek out certain stimuli, rather than the passive
reaction to them. This adaptation process is the leitmotif of Dewey's
educational theory, encapsulated under the rubric of growth.
The object of education, then, is to excite the individual
towards growth, and the object of growth is to secure the ground for
46Ibid. p. 15.
47Damico, p. 33.
48John Dewey, Democracy and Education New York: Free Press, 1966 (1916).
even further growth. Thus, habits should be cultivated that do not
fix the individual in any one mode of response, or else his ability to
adapt will be curtailed and he will cease to grow. Growth becomes
the displacement process itself. Development is the continual
displacement of less effective habits with more effective ones, as
determined by the ability of the individual to adjust to a particular
environment.
Dewey's affinity for Darwinism is well-established and his
ideas on education as growth are well-known. But what is less
obvious is the marketplace origin of Darwin's theory of evolution,
which helps to explain the overlap between Dewey's Darwinism and
his relationship to Adam Smith. Charles Darwin himself had

25
immersed himself in the works of Adam Smith, becoming fully
conversant with his ideas on the division of labor and its control by
the expansion or contraction of the market.49
Smith's conception of the division of labor ties market
capitalism to Darwinian evolution.50 The division of labor, according
to Smith, grows out of the human "propensity to truck, barter, and
exchange one thing for another."51 The exchange propensity rests on
the still more deeply embedded human propensity for self-love, the
necessary heightened interest an individual has in his own survival
and mode of survival. Such self-interest, however, is tempered by
human beings' natural dependence on one another. The division of
49Three sources influenced Darwin: Malthus' ideas on population, animal
breeding practices by fanners, and Adam Smith and the other Scottish
economists. Elliot Soper, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in
Philosophical Focus. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984, pp. 15-20.
50Social Darwinian preceded Biological Darwinism in this scenario.
51Smith, op. cit.. p. 13.
labor comes about spontaneously since the need to exchange urges
humans to occupy themselves in labor which produces something
that others do not produce, or at least is not so widely produced. The
range of divisions in labor is therefore tied to the extent of the
market. As demand expands, for instance through population growth
in towns, then a greater market is available and the more likely
individuals are to specialize. With market expansion occurs the birth
of new shops and additional tradesmen, and the increase in their
number eventually reaches a point of heightened competition.
Competition can result in the "ruin" of some shopkeepers, but this is
the "business of the parties concerned" and has no ill-effect on the
citizens.52 Thus, competition actually has a beneficial effect on
society since prices will fall and shopkeepers will do a better job of
buying dear and selling low, and maladjusted businesses will fall by
the wayside. The net effect is greater wealth for all to partake in (to
some degree). Imbued in such thinking, Darwin encountered the
Galapagos to find a similar process taking place among the flora and
fauna.
Affinity for Darwin leads Dewey to unwittingly apply certain
conceptions to teaching that have parallels with the free market
notions of Adam Smith. The teacher ideally responds to the child as

26
the market responds to vendors: cultivating certain powers and
leaving others to die from neglect. The cultivation of capacities
requires the elicitation of behaviors in a similar way that biological
evolution requires mutations and the market requires new products
to stimulate consumer activity. This is the theme of the ever-new,
52Ibid. 343
the ever unique. New forms must be generated in order to elicit the
one most adaptive to a certain environment, economic or biological .
Any habit can outlast its usefulness, and therefore no habit should be
regarded as end in itself. This willingness towards displacement is
necessary for the survival of businesses as well as organisms.
In terms of instruction, the teaching method formulated for one
stage of development or for one type of capacity may be maladaptive
for another. Thus the teacher's willingness to dethrone certain
methods or habits must be a predisposition, and echoes the modern
propensity to overcome traditions in society. This sort of educational
fluidity treats the learner's capacities and the teacher's methods as
transitive to other capacities and procedures, displacing the value
from its particular function (the utility of the capacity or procedure)
to its growth function. Dewey urges methodological openness on the
part of teachers so that they do not form any special attachment to a
single approach that may outlast its usefulness. Yet even the
exclusive attention to instructional methodology can easily induce
the teacher treat the learner's purposes as mere means to the
teacher's higher goals, enervating the learner's faith in her own
purposes. To check the fragmenting tendency of instructional
instrumentalism, Dewey widens the teacher's vision to embrace an
appreciation for the learner’s development of her own instrumental
powers. An education toward purposes results, in which the teacher
guides the learner to transform impulsive desires to considered
purposes. The art of forming purposes becomes equal to the art of
devising instruments to make changes. Adaptation is a process of
purposeful change, and not change for its own sake. In short, Dewey
offers a pedagogy of moderation in which the teacher tempers her
inclinations toward instructional instrumentalism by recognizing the
inherent pedagogical powers in the child's creation of purposes.
4. Social Reconstruction vs. the Ever-New

27
The hallmark of modernity is rupture and change; or, in
Nietzsche’s more apocalyptic language, it is the overthrow of
cosmological values by a reality of becoming. Just as market
capitalism seeks to transform one form of capital to another capital,
modernity requires the continual transformation of the old styles to
the new. To be fashionable is to be changeable. For Dewey, the
purpose of education, and, for that matter, of life in general, is to
encourage growth, and growth is change. Since growth for Dewey is
not any kind of change, he sets limits on the fluidity of
displacements, toward social reconstruction and democratic
development. To wit:
If there is especial[ly the] need [for] educational reconstruction
at the present time, if this need makes urgent a reconsideration
of the basic ideas of traditional philosophic systems, it is
because of the thorough going change in social life
accompanying the advance of science, the industrial revolution,
and the development of democracy.53
In other places, Dewey reverses the relationship of educational
purposes and democratic purposes: the growth of the individual is
best promoted in a democracy, as this crucial passage leaves no
doubt:
53Pemocracv and Education , p. 331.
Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions have a
meaning, a purpose. That purpose is to set free and to develop
the capacities of human individuals without respect to race,
sex, class or economic status. And this is all one with saying
that the test of their value is the extent to which they educate
every individual into the full stature of his posssibility.
Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning,
it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political
institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the
contribtuion they make to the all-around growth of every
member of society.54
So the point is not so much in the causal direction, rather, as usual
with Dewey, he intends to displace the relationship from an either/or
to a transactional level.
Yet, because Dewey eschews any Hegelian cosmological ends to
the reconstruction process, a careless consideration of his description
of education easily moves him into the nihilistic "reality of

28
becoming." Education is, to quote Dewey's well known definition, "the
reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the
meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the
course of subsequent experience."55 "Reconstruction" is a key word
in Dewey's discourse, and is "growth's" substitute, as discussed above
The reconstruction process is
a vertical displacement of one level of functioning by another. But
with reference to Darwinian evolution.
54Dewey, from his Reconstruction in Philosophy (p. 186), quoted in Alfonso J.
Damico, Individuality and Community: The Social and Political Thought of John
Dewev
55Pemocracv and Education , p. 76.
Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1978, p. 34.
Dewey leaves open the question as to where it leads, making
reference only to economic and democratic advances as in the quote
above.
Advocacy of growth of this sort runs the danger of promoting
overly adaptable individuals, in the sense of David Reisman’s otheroriented individual
described in his classic The Lonely Crowd, and
Sinclair Lewis' Babbit. Dewey's open-endness associated with
"growth" and "reconstruction" draws him into the modernist camp
with its fascination with displacements and hence becoming rather
than any fixed constellation of values. Dewey appears to let the top
-
off of the will toward the ever new by rejecting a teleology, any final
purposes or aims of growth. Dewey's genius was to contain the
displacements under a more immediate and imanent human canopy.
How the transvaluation of values itself be contained within a value
for coherence? This question is addressed in the next and concluding
section. Dewey participates in the thrust of modernity in a unique
and individualitic way that actually moderates its excesses.
III. Dewey's Restrained Modernism
Dewey's Resistance to Capitalism and State Socialism
The concerns of Adam Smith and the outright attacks by Marx
are echoed in Dewey's own criticism of capitalism. Dewey, in the
1930's, engaged in the debates about capitalism and socialism.
According to Westbrook's well-received study of Dewey, he "knew
how to frame the agenda for democratic socialism," which called for
radical democracy, but he conceded that no one, including himself,

29
really developed an adequate program.56 Nevertheless, Dewey's
56Westbrook, pp. 461-2.
preoccupation with the question demonstrates his dissatisfaction
with liberal capitalism.
Dewey accepted that liberalism is an ideology emanating from
the bourgeois capitalist regime, and that liberal republican
democracy is its offspring.57 Yet his words also leave no doubt
about his enmity towards an unregulated capitalism. Dewey's
critique was that capitalism has become oligarchic in its
concentration of power, and despite its undeniable benefits for the
masses in terms of higher standards of living, it readily evolves
forms that contradict the democratic values. In strong language he
declares that the "distortion and stultification of human personality
by the existing pecuniary and competitive regime give the lie to the
claim that the present social system is one of freedom and
individualism in any sense in which liberty and individuality exist
for all."58
Marx, although in a different style, had earlier recognized that
the forces unleashed by bourgeois capitalism liberated people from
the oppressions of feudalism, but then these same forces wreak
havoc on the very system they created. The result is a different set
of chains, ones which treat workers as commodities. Marx, in the
Communist Manifesto, saw modern bourgeois society as a conjurer of
forces which it no longer can control: "The weapons with which the
bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against
the bourgeoisie itself."59 Proportionally as the bourgeoisie has
accumulated capital, the modern working class, the proletariat, has
57Westbrook, p. 431.
58Quoted in Westbrook, p. 431.
59Marx in McCellan, p. 226.
grown: "These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a
commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are
consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the
fluctuations of the market."60
It would appear that Dewey would be attracted to Marx since
they both strongly feared the commoditization of the individual. But
Dewey rejected state socialism as an answer in view of the Soviet
experience and his own distaste for totalizing theories. Dewey's

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criterion for democracy rested on full-fledged individuality, all
attendant democratic ideals of freedom and justice served to
promote the democratic individual.61 Dewey's construction of the
individual was in the pro-active sense, not one who stays within her
bounds in order not to violate the freedoms of others. The pro-active
individual actively works for the construction of a society in which
freedom and equality are not in conflict, a society in which the
exercise of individual freedom does not delimit the freedom of
another, but actually promotes it. Consequently, Dewey denied that
equality and individuality are natural antagonists.62 If we conclude
as a society that capitalism promotes exploitative relationships
among individuals, we need not accept this state of affairs as
inevitable. Since different societal configurations would lead to
different relationships, we should reconstruct our system towards
greater equality.
Value Displacement and Organicity
60Ibid .
61See Damico, pp. 52- 3 for a summary of Dewey's other criticism of Marx.
62Westbrook, p. 434.
When we assess Dewey's educational theory, we see that he is
driven along by some of the same forces which characterize
bourgeois liberal democracies. But arriving at certain points, Dewey
recoils against a central valuation of capitalist modernity,
unmoderated value displacements. The resistance to this aspect of
modernity rests on how he contains value displacements within a
consciousness of individual purposes. Dewey's approach can be
characterized as a restrained modernism. In regard to the
propensity toward displacements, the hallmark of modernist
thinking, he employs vertical displacements rather than horizontal
ones, and he grounds these in the foundational will toward
wholeness or unity, an organicity of the ideal and real shaped by
individual purposes. The elements of Dewey's restrained moderns
will be summarized.
Vertical displacements: Dewey's tendency is to displace
vertically a dichotomous set of superficially antagonistic concepts or
positions with a transactional re-conceptualization. We saw this in
his treatment of the child and curriculum as a transactional
relationship rather than one of opposition or either/or. Horizontal

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displacements would shift from the child to the curriculum and back
again. Classroom reading instruction has predictably shifted from
phonics (subject-centered) to language experience (child-centered) in
late sixties and early seventies back to skill oriented and word
analysis programs (subject-centered) of the late seventies and
eighties to the sudden return of the child-centered approach in the
form of whole language programs in the 1990's.
Dewey's use of displacements was to further his particular
project for a more intelligent society. Displacements toward higher
levels of cognitive reorganization and democratic social
reconstruction are good. Displacement activity which remained
within a certain fixed ideational sphere represents pseudo-progress.
There is movement but no reorganization.
Organicity: Dewey’s grounding principle is a will toward
coherence63 and it is because of this that he resists modernist
decadence toward fragmentation. Dewey defined the good as
movement towards continuities and unities in the particularistic
interactions of individuals. He eschewed grand abstractions of
coherence since they move out of the hands of interacting
individuals. Organicity differs from organicism in that the latter is
an animal analogy, purporting that parts of society, the individuals,
lose their particular identities as they become swallowed up in the
social organism. But society can be continuously abuilding and its
63This notion of "organicity", a word of my own choosing, is based on my
understanding of Damico, especially, Chapter 2, and the groundbreaking work
of John Rockefeller, John Dewev: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Rockefeller asserts about Dewey:
"He longed to know for certain and to realize in his own life experience the
truth that reality is an organic unity in which the actual world is thoroughly
organized by a liberating ideal." (p. 74). Rockefeller places this will toward
organicity as central to Dewey's preoccupation with overcoming dualisms.
This may appear to conflict with my approach of associating him with the
modernity movement. But my point is that no matter the motivation, he has
promoted modernity by his attacks on dualisms and hence traditional
authorities. I place more weight than Rockefeller on Dewey's empirical bent
by emphasizing that the will toward unity resides within the individual, and
not in the cosmos. Rockefeller by contrast emphasizes Dewey’s idealistic bent
and romanticism in tracing his lines of influence through the English
romantic poets (Wordsworth and Coleridge), and Hegel to his later period
which produced A Common Faith. Rockefeller carefully and persuasively

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traces Dewey's struggle throughout his life to integrate his religious impulse
toward organic unity and the Enlightenment legacy (as did a line of American
philosopher/theologians), resulting in a particularly American brand of
idealistic pragmatism.
organicity is in its change within a cohering arrangement of
relationships.
Dewey's organicity propels him away from antagonisms and
conflicts. Hence, pluralistic notions of cultural conflict do not fit
neatly into Dewey's holistic thinking. The implication is that cultural
relativism is acceptable only so far as it promotes intelligently
guided growth leading to some sort of common ground. Dewey
seems to accept relativism only as a means, part of the process of
growth. When it becomes dysfunctional in terms of his organicity, it
is eschewed. The modern drive toward value displacements are
therefore regulated by organicity. This is more than a reflective
equilibrium between competing extremes or modes of analysis, as
Rawls as proposed. Dewey's organicity propels movement toward
new forms, as modernism would drive it, but adds the self-regulation
of social intelligence.
Social intelligence coordinates means and ends. The
individual's purpose for engaging in an activity becomes the glue
which holds together the organic unity of the situation.
Consciousness of the role of purpose and its deliberate consideration
is implied in the notion of organicity. That purposes are not private
affairs, but social ones, inhering in the social context of their
operation. The particularistic level of purposes, rather than a
Kantian universalism, keeps Dewey rooted in actual situations and
particular problems. Thus, while Dewey favors vertical
displacements which tend to broaden one's vision, he maintains
within sight the daily and situational concerns of actual individuals.
Darwinian vs. Democratic Foundationalism. At first glance, it
may appear that Dewey's limits are co-terminous with the limits of
democracy. Dewey placed great store in democracy as a means to
create a harmonious whole of the parts of society, particularly to
integrate persons as individuals into society and not as the masses.
Also, democracy would allow optimum adaptation to the

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environment. But democracy seem more of a means than ends.
Growth in terms of reogranization for a better fit between
environment and organism seems Dewey's bottom line. Yet this does
not mean that the democratic values are not foundational for Dewey.
Both Darwin and Dewey reject any overarching plan to growth. Yet
while Darwinian growth is purposeless, Deweyan growth must be
measured by the fruits of social intelligence. The democratic values
promote social intelligence and hence are instrumental to evolving
social arrangement that facilitate social intelligence. But if other
values evolve that are more adaptive, they could displace democracy.
At this point, this is difficult to imagine, and Dewey seems to have
been working toward a meaning of democracy that is synomous with
his more open-ended term, social intelligence.
The Immediate Relevance of Restrained Modernism to this Era
To say that this is a time of crisis is another way of saying that
this is an era saturated with modernity. The entire twentieth
century has been a time of "crisis", giving a tinny sound to the word.
Yet a transitional moment does seem to be occurring. The social
contract ingeniously worked out to launch the industrial revolution
appears under attack by the information revolution. The
demographic shift away from the traditional white male elite,
primarily descendants of Great Britain and Western Europe, creates a
potential transfer of power concomitant to the economic one. The
shifts in the geopolitical sphere is another echo in this transitional
moment. Such transitions reverberate in the schools. They must
adjust to new technology, to the diversity of instructional delivery
systems available, to the fragmenting of the comprehensive school
system under the pressure for greater local control and choice, to the
change in the occupational structure in a different geopolitical
environment, and to the intensification of social problems that
students bring to schools. An educational theory is required to
handle this transitional moment.
Given the inevitable and perpetual crisis of modernity, Dewey's
approach becomes most vital to modern and liberal educators who
equally love liberty and accept the fact of modernity. The
democratic vision of the small New England town draws us

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nostalgically back to a simpler time when face-to-face democracy
was possible, and small common schools could really create a sense
of community. But now we are in the modern age, at a precarious
moment that will either launch a new expansion or collapse under its
own weight. The very forces of our age rapidly pull us away from
feudal authorities, and a way from even the familiarities of the
industrial society. Educational theorists in the postmodern vein
should be wary of promoting the excesses of modernity. To get
beyond modernity the theorist needs to quiet the modernist impulse
towards the ever-new. Dewey is post-modern in this sense. For his
vision, as I understand it, accepts the continuities of modernity in the
present era but goes beyond modernity in a way that does not
continue its excesses.
Dewey later in life did not attribute to the schools the same
capacity for societal change as he did when he authored the "The
Child and the Curriculum" at the University of Chicago, a time period
bridging the industrial nineteenth and modernizing twentieth
century. Now, when the twentieth century is slipping from our
hands, we may find in Dewey’s educational vision a new relevance
and even a refreshingly insightful diagnosis of our times. While
modernity cannot be turned back, it also cannot be pursued
uncritically. The duality created by the forces of modernity and the
countervailing forces of fundamentalism present us with a false
choice. We must fall into an either/or predicament as Dewey often
warned. Yet, while his vision perhaps offers a means of avoiding the
dualism, it is nevertheless part of the modern experience, and so it
can be dangerous as well. His notions of educational practice
prompts us to displace more basic values for higher ones. But if we
do not carefully observe what we are doing, we may become
enamored with the displacement process itself, and having become
enthralled by the ever-new, our fascination may entice us to trade
our liberal democratic inheritance for the conjurer's powers in Marx's
Manifesto.

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