Abstract
This paper began as a piece of historical research concerning some of the principal themes of Dewey’s critique of Marx. I thought that it would be interesting, since Dewey viewed the world so much in evolutionary terms, to pick out several such critical references over a long span of time. The period that I chose, after reconsidering the chronology of Dewey’s writings, was roughly four decades, beginning in 1898 and ending in 1939; five texts, published at intervals of approximately a decade, presented themselves as especially useful for my purposes. Accordingly, I shall devote the first half of this paper to reproducing what I take to be some of the main points of these Deweyan allusions to Marx and Marxism.
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Notes
‘Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Seilars, and Davidson’, in Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 317.
John Dewey, Lectures on Psychological and Political Ethics: 1898, ed. D.F. Koch, New York, Hafner Press, 1976, p. 399.
Ibid. p. 200.
See Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, tr. K. Saper and M.H. Ryle, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1984, esp. pp. 315–20, for a critique of this Marxian notion that casts it in a foundationalist light.
John Dewey and James Tufts, Ethics, New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1908, p. 513.
John Dewey and James Tufts, Ethics, New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1908 Ibid. p. 535.
Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, revised ed., New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1932, pp. 475–76.
Dewey, The Middle Works, Vol. 11:1918–1919, ed. J.A. Boydston, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, p. 161.
Dewey, The Middle Works, Vol. 12: 1920, ed. J.A. Boydston, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, p. 20.
Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World, New York, New Republic, Inc., 1929.
Dewey, Individualism Old and New, New York, Minton, Balch & Co., 1930, p. 102–03.
Jim Cork, ‘John Dewey, Karl Marx, and Democratic Socialism’, Antioch Review 9(Dec. 1949), p. 435.
Jim Cork, ‘John Dewey, Karl Marx, and Democratic Socialism’, Antioch Review 9(Dec. 1949)Ibid. p. 438.
Dewey, Freedom and Culture, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939, p. 83.
Ibid. p. 84.
Ibid. p. 54.
Ibid. p. 87.
Loc. cit.
Ibid. p. 98.
Ibid. p. 99.
V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, New York, International Publishers, 1970.
This qualification, “at a given time”, establishes Leninist Marxism as a version of the historicist-tinged “modest foundationalism” which John Kekes distinguishes from ahistorical “classical foundationalism”. Kekes, a defender of “modest foundationalism” in principle, defines a “worldview” as “the defence of a cluster of ideals guiding policies for coping with the enduring problems of a particular society at a particular time”, considers Marxism to be one such world-view, and contends that “Philosophy is the construction and justification of worldviews.” — Kekes, ’Philosophy, Historicism, and Foundationalism’, Philosophy 13, 3–4(Oct. 1983), p. 214.
Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx, with new introduction, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1962, p. 6.
Dewey, Freedom and Culture, p. 100.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, tr. S. Moore and E. Aveling, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, p. 35.
Michel Henry, Marx, tr. K. McLaughlin, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1983.
Louis Dupré, Marx’s Social Critique of Culture, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983.
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McBride, W.L. (1988). Science, Psychology, and Human Values in the Context of Dewey’s Critique of Marx. In: Gavin, W.J. (eds) Context over Foundation. Sovietica, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2903-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2903-6_3
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