Inquiry as Critique: On the Legacy of Deweyan Pragmatism for Political Theory
| Author | Matthew Festenstein |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00339 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Inquiry as Critique: on the Legacy
of Deweyan Pragmatism for
Political Theory
Matthew Festenstein
University of Sheffield
This article provides a critical reconstruction of John Dewey’s theory of social and political inquiry.
Clearing away some misconceptions about this theory allows us to grasp its practical and political
focus, and to see its similarities to other strands of anti-positivist social thought, including
hermeneutics and critical theory. I go on to examine the relationship between democratic values
and the theory of inquiry. Like recent proponents of discursive conceptions of democracy such as
Habermas he sees a connection between democracy and the conditions for rational procedures of
problem solving. What connects democracy to inquiry for Dewey is primarily ethical and political,
rather than epistemological. The article considers what may be usefully taken from Dewey’s
conception of social inquiry, without accepting his full ethical agenda.
From being a neglected and mildly risible figure, John Dewey has undergone a
dramatic rehabilitation for social and political thought, which has emphasized his
stature as a deliberative democrat and progressive liberal.1At the same time, another
important part of his philosophy, his conception of social and political inquiry, has
been relatively neglected. In itself this is an unDeweyan development, since he
emphasizes the broader social and political ‘waste, confusion and distortion’ which
result from the failure to grasp the ‘primary human importance’ of the theory of
inquiry (Dewey, 1938, p. 499). It also leaves hanging the question of how we
should understand the relationship of Dewey’s pragmatist notion of inquiry to
his political thought. Beyond the confines of pragmatist studies, the substantive
question this lacuna leaves concerns the significance, if any, of this philosophy for
social and political theory.
Two rival camps dominate the struggle over the political significance of Dewey’s
thought. On one side, there are those who mobilize his pragmatist theory of inquiry
on behalf of a progressive politics, ‘a modernist discourse of democratic deliberation
in which communities of inquiry [test] hypotheses in order to solve problems’
(Kloppenberg, 1996, p. 101).2For this view, Dewey is a forerunner of contemp-
orary deliberative democrats, close in spirit to Jürgen Habermas, and a firm believer
in a critical conception of democracy as a critical ideal (Bernstein, 1986, p. 91;
Kloppenberg, 1998, pp. 82–100). Democracy demands a high level of individual
participation, deliberation and concern for others, but provides the way in which
social problems can be solved to the benefit of the whole community. On the other
side, there is Richard Rorty. For him, there is no philosophical warrant for such
demanding ideals. In our public lives, the best we can hope for is sympathy toward
a wide and inclusive community of others, while privately we can be as narcissistic
or odd as we desire (Rorty, 1989; Rorty, 1998b, pp. 167–227). The community of
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2001 VOL 49, 730–748
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those with whom ‘we’ feel sympathy or solidarity is contingently constructed, and
not a matter of relationships whose reality we ought to acknowledge. Accordingly,
‘sad and sentimental stories’, or any other available rhetorical devices, are the
appropriate means by which a community may be built up, a claim which he
suggests is consonant with Dewey’s notion of inquiry as practical problem-solving
(Rorty, 1998b, pp. 172–3). For Rorty’s opponents, this is a licence for ‘selfishness,
cynicism, and resignation’ (Kloppenberg, 1996, p. 125; Westbrook, 1991, pp. 539–42;
Bernstein, 1991, pp. 258–92).
In this article, I advance four arguments. The first is that Dewey’s account of social
and political inquiry, particularly as it is developed in his writings of the 1920s and
1930s, parallels and prefigures the critique of positivist conceptions of the social
sciences undertaken by hermeneutics and critical theory (Bernstein, 1979; Bohman,
1991). Second, I argue that his conception of social inquiry developed in this period
is particularly concerned with practical inquiry, and with breaking down the sep-
aration between normative and factual inquiry. In part, these features of Dewey’s
thought have been obscured by the presumption that he is a ‘founder’ of American
political science, in itself enough to foster the presumption that he must be tied
to some outmoded paradigm.3In particular, he has been taxed with two sorts of
distortion to which pragmatists are thought to be susceptible. The first is scientism,
the belief that the natural sciences provide an appropriate model for social inquiry,
and that this in turn provides determinate and ideology-free solutions to social and
political problems. The other error is a crude instrumentalism, for which social in-
quiry only exists in order to furnish the means for the achievement of policy goals
which themselves are not susceptible to social inquiry, and perhaps ultimately not
susceptible to rational appraisal at all. In fact, Dewey explicitly rejects both of these
as symptoms of the positivist outlook that he wants to displace. Once these inter-
pretative blinkers are removed it is possible to understand both what Dewey is
saying, and why it is of value.
Third, I argue that Dewey does not seek to derive democratic values from his
account of inquiry as rational problem-solving; rather, inquiry is understood as a
constitutive part of a flourishing democracy, conceived as an ideal of social co-
operation. Here, I suggest, there is a contrast with the Habermasian arguments
with which Dewey is sometimes thought to have an affinity. Fourth, my reading
of Dewey’s account of inquiry suggests that although the first of the warring camps
is unquestionably entitled to claim greater interpretative fidelity, this is not the
same as establishing the plausibility of his view of the democratic ideal, and of
the place of inquiry in it. If we question Dewey’s bolder ethical assumptions, I
argue, then what remains overlaps significantly with Rorty’s contingent conception
of community.
In the following section, I outline the theory of inquiry of which his conception of
social inquiry is a special case, and bring out the practical orientation of his notion
of inquiry as rational problem-solving. In the second section, I discuss the relation-
ship of Dewey’s notion of inquiry to hermeneutic conceptions of political science:
while Dewey agrees with the critique of positivism in the social sciences, he eschews
driving a wedge between natural and social sciences. In the third section, I develop
a comparison with critical theory, and argue that the evaluative component of his
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