progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
"Even pragmatism which at first glance looked the perfect philosophical rationale for
bureaucratic thought, underwent significant changes before it joined with the new
approach. A revolt in its own right from idealism, pragmatism like scientific management
carried relatively little baggage. By treating truth as a process instead of essence and
knowledge as the continual testing of hypothesis against life's facts instead of the
inculcation of fixed truths, it seemed to offer just the fluidity required by the new
orientation…..Bureaucratic thought and pragmatism met only after John Dewey had
transformed it into a theory that made individuals the plastic stuff of society." 68
This is an exceptionally good description of the pragmatism and the influence of Dewey.
First it is a relativism. It is what results from the actions. Truth is not immutable, to be
sought, it is whatever we can agree that we observe. There may not even be a need for a
consensus. The statement regarding Dewey is the most critical because indeed his
thought became the underpinnings of the growth in Progressive bureaucracy but the
ability to treat people as plastic entities to be modeled depending on what that
bureaucracy desires is the theme we see going forward. Dewey had created the very set of
tools justified in a "philosophy" that allowed for the public intellectual to spread forth
their baseless views of human control.
To some Dewey was one of the founders of pragmatism to others he was not a pragmatist
as were James and Peirce but an experimentalist, a nuanced difference in emphasis. As
Fott states:
"…Dewey prefers to call his pragmatism by the name "experimentalism" because the
term "pragmatism" gives the misleading sense that all thought is for the sake of action,
instead of for the sake of resolution of a problematic situation or unproblematic
experience." 69
Posner discusses the Experimentalism approach as follows 70 :
"Dewey dubbed his approach “experimentalism,” and the word aptly conveys the tenor of
his thought. He commended the temperament that, impatient with convention and the
accustomed ways of doing things—the sediment of habit—insists on trying now this,
now that, in a creatively restless search for better means. The search yields, as a
byproduct, better ends as well. As Dewey explained under the rubric of “interactionism,”
our beliefs are a product not of pure thought but of the interplay of thought and action.
When (to take a post-Deweyan example) airlines were deregulated, consumers did not
“know” what kind of airline service they wanted; they learned what they wanted by
experience with the various new services that the airlines, freed from the dead hand of
regulation, offered. A central planner could not have designed the optimal configuration
of a deregulated airline industry; the essential information concerning consumer demands
68 See Wiebe p. 151.
69 See Fott p. 3.
70 Posner, R., HAYEK, LAW, AND COGNITION, NYU Journal of Law and Liberty
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