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World War II and the Crisis of Liberalism: Dewey and Neibuhr Reconsidered
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12651 |
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Modern Thought
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6 / 1987 |
5,585 Words |
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Gary Bullert
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The isolationist, antiwar temper of many American liberal intellectuals underwent a severe test as Hitler's legion strode triumphantly across Europe. Liberals struggled for an explanation of this desperate state. They wondered why the United States had first failed to prevent the war diplomatically and then adopted a complacent posture of neutrality toward it. John Dewey's pragmatic liberalism, which was the dominant intellectual outlook in America, was saddled with the responsibility for this acquiescence. Critics linked Dewey's initial neutralism toward the war with the scientific positivism and ethical relativism that had corrupted the moral foundations of American society, paralyzing its ability to respond to radical evil. At the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion held in New York on September 10, 1940, Mortimer Adler charged that "the most serious threat to democracy is the positivism of the professor, which dominates every aspect of modern education and is the central corruption of modern culture. Democracy has much more to fear the mentality of its teachers than from the nihilism of Hitler." The denial of universal truth resulted in mental libertinism, which rendered academics incapable of defending civilized values. After polls had revealed that only 4 percent of college students wanted to fight, Adler blamed this cynicism on Dewey's "pragmatic relativism" and labeled him "public enemy number one."
Reinhold Neibuhr and Lewis Mumford likewise attacked Dewey for his naive view of scientific progress, his failure to recognize the impotence of rational persuasion to mediate social conflicts, and his blindness toward the role of original sin in human affairs. The temperate and tentative politics of Deweyite pragmatism, they said, fomented conditions that produced the war by allowing tyrants to practice aggression. These provocative and well-publicized assaults dissipated the popularity of Dewey among progressive intellectuals. By 1944, Jacques Barzun remarked that "today it is rather Dewey's 'Reconstruction in Philosophy' (purely scientific instrumentalism) that seems on the other brink of the gulf." According to some historians, a new liberal paradigm emerged, supplanting Dewey with the "power politics" approach of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr formulated a comprehensive democratic theory for America that endeavored to expose the inadequacies of Dewey's brand of liberalism. In 1940 Niebuhr wrote The Nature and Destiny of Man as a theological foundation for his popular political journalism.
When Dewey failed to predict the outcome of the war in December 1939, his critics concluded, according to John Diggings, that "pragmatism prides itself in making knowledge useful; yet when confronted with totalitarianism it offers the most useless knowledge imaginable." Striving to reorient philosophy toward the concrete problems of men, Dewey had insisted that his philosophy and all others be tried and tested in action. Dewey's self-imposed standard of unifying theory and practice has been employed by historians in judging the pragmatic liberalism of The New Republic during World War I, which Dewey helped formulate.
But Dewey explicitly criticized the rise of European existentialism for sanctioning ethical commitments created "ex nihilo," revolting against scientific reason, and manifesting an escapism which failed to establish an adequate basis for society. Dewey also rebuked the progressive education movement for cultivating immature self-absorption and spasmodic, artistic impulses at the expense of refined moral character, powers of rational thought, and social responsibility. The appropriate
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