SOURCE: "John Dewey in Vermont: A Reconsideration," in Soundings, Vol. LXXV, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 175-98.

[In the following essay, Taylor discusses the contradictory nature of Dewey's attitude toward his birth-state Vermont.]

John Dewey was always somewhat ambivalent about his Vermont background. At times he praised the "democratic" character of his Vermont heritage and even drew close parallels between the development of his own ideas and the ideas of his teachers at the University of Vermont. At other times, perhaps more frequently, he distanced himself as much as he could from these political and intellectual roots.

For example, in 1929 Dewey delivered an address at the University of Vermont commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Marsh's "Introduction" to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids To Reflection—a book of profound significance to the whole university community in the nineteenth century and one that Dewey, as a member of the class of 1879, had read as an undergraduate.¹ Toward the end of this talk, Dewey reflected on his own Vermont background and education at the university in a now oft-quoted passage:

If I may be allowed a personal word, I would say that 1 shall never cease to be grateful that I was born at a time and a place where the earlier ideal of liberty and the self-governing community of citizens still sufficiently prevailed, so that I unconsciously imbibed a sense of its meaning. In Vermont, perhaps more than elsewhere, there was embodied into the spirit of the people the conviction that governments were like the houses we live in, made to contribute to human welfare, and that those who lived in them were as free to change and extend the one as they were the other, when developing needs of the human family called for such alterations and modifications. So deeply bred in Vermonters was this conviction that I still think that one is more loyally patriotic to the ideal of America when one maintains this view than when one conceives of patriotism as rigid attachment to a form of the state alleged to be fixed forever, and recognizes the claims of a common human society as superior to those of any particular political form.²

Here Dewey pays tribute to what he understands to be the best of his Vermont inheritance and suggests that the independence, flexibility, and common sense contained in this heritage had greatly influenced the development of his mature political thinking—and continued to do so even fifty years after his graduation.

It is evident from other writings, however, that Dewey was not entirely uncritical of his background. In his only published autobiographical statement, an essay entitled "From Absolutism To Experimentalism," Dewey maintains a superficially respectful attitude toward his college experience. He refers to the importance for him of his "senior year course," taught by President Matthew Buckham, and of a number of books that he read, especially Thomas Huxley's textbook in physiology.³ He also has kind words for his teacher of philosophy, H. A. P. Torrey: "I owe him a double debt, that of turning my thoughts definitely to the study of philosophy as a life-pursuit, and of a generous gift of time to me during a year devoted privately under his direction to a reading of classics in the history of philosophy and learning to read philosophic German."⁴ Nonetheless, despite these comments, there is a strong ambivalence in these reflections. Although Torrey was a fine teacher, Dewey comments that "in a more congenial atmosphere than that of northern New England in those days, [he] would have achieved something significant."⁵ The implication is clearly that there was much in this "northern New England" environment that was uncongenial, presumably because it in some way prevented complete intellectual freedom and self-expression.

In fact, Dewey explained that his attraction to Hegel in graduate school and during the early part of his professional career served an almost therapeutic function for him, necessitated by his "uncongenial" Vermont background:

It [Hegelianism] supplied a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject-matter could satisfy. It is more than difficult, it is impossible to recover that early mood. But the sense of divisions and separations that were, I suppose, borne in upon me as a consequence of a heritage of New England culture, divisions by way of isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, of nature from God, brought a painful oppression—or, rather, they were an inward laceration. . . . Hegel's synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation.⁶

As the very title of his essay suggests, Dewey viewed his own development as a thinker as a movement away from the "absolutism" of his youth. His later instrumentalism represented a break from the philosophical and religious dogmatism of his childhood environment.

Elsewhere Dewey has similarly critical things to say about organized religion, which had played a central role in the communities to which he belonged in Vermont. In The Quest for Certainty he argues that the exclusivity of religious communities is one of the most divisive of human practices. "Men will never love their enemies until they cease to have enmities. The antagonism between the actual and the ideal, the spiritual and the natural is the source of the deepest and most injurious of all enmities."⁷ In A Common Faith, Dewey writes in a similar vein: "The opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religions is not to be bridged. Just because the release of these values is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved."⁸ Dewey, by 1934, had come a long way from his early Congregationalist piety. He could now view organized religions as no more than cults subscribing to unjustifiable dogmas.

Dewey's biography is very much the story of a man who left his hometown far behind him. After he graduated from college in 1879, Dewey spent a brief period teaching school in Oil City, Pennsylvania. He then returned to Vermont to teach school. During this time he resumed private studies with H. A. P. Torrey, and then decided to attend graduate school in philosophy. He left to study at Johns Hopkins University in 1882, and for all intents and purposes this event signifies his permanent break with Vermont. After graduate school, he would hold faculty positions at the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota, and at Chicago, and Columbia. From 1904, when he first went to Columbia, until his death in 1952, Dewey would become a central figure in the intellectual life of New York City. He enjoyed life in the big city. He could not, he once said, understand why so many of his colleagues vacationed in Vermont: "I don't see why you fellows want to go back to summer places in Vermont. I got out of there as soon as I could." Vermont was, he confided to another friend, "that God-forsaken country."⁹

Dewey's discomfort with his Vermont background is nicely illustrated by his appearance at a celebration held for him at the University of Vermont in honor of his ninetieth birthday in 1949. Arriving in Burlington, he was greeted by marching bands and cheerleaders, much as though he were a returning athletic hero. Dewey took a tour of Burlington and met with a few people he had known during his childhood. But like a man who had been away from the city long enough, he boarded the return train to New York well before the dinners and speeches were held in his honor that evening.

John Dewey, then, had mixed feelings about his Vermont background. This is neither unusual nor surprising—many of us have similar feelings and confusions regarding our origins, upbringing and early life. But this ambivalence is paralleled by a lack of clarity about Dewey's Vermont inheritance in the secondary literature. On the one hand, it is common for commentators to make claims about how Dewey's mature thinking reflects values "imbibed" from the democratic political culture of Burlington and Vermont. On the other hand, some Dewey scholars have emphasized the significant distance between the intellectual background of Burlington and Dewey's mature democratic theory (produced, we must note, in the great cities of Chicago and New York).

Jane Dewey, John's daughter and biographer, most clearly claims that Dewey's thought reflects the political culture of nineteenth-century Vermont: "His boyhood surroundings, although not marked by genuine industrial and financial democracy, created in him an unconscious but vital faith in democracy. . . ."Again, ".. . in spite of the especial prestige of the first few families, life was democratic [in Burlington]—not consciously, but in that deeper sense in which equality and absence of class distinctions are taken for granted."¹⁰ Sidney Hook, too, argues that Dewey's egalitarianism can be explained by the democratic Burlington of his childhood: "It was a community in which no great disparities of wealth or standards of living were to be found, and in which a man was judged as the saying went, not by what he had but by what he did."¹¹ These are but two well-known examples of interpreters explaining Dewey's democratic sensibilities by reference to his Vermont heritage. Dewey is thus frequently thought of as a representative of small town democratic America, giving the ideals of this environment their highest philosophical expression. More critically, but much in the same vein, Dewey is sometimes thought of as bound by his background in a way that never allowed him to break out of his provincialism.¹² Whether critical or admiring, many authors think of Dewey's philosophy as in some (not necessarily very clear) way reflecting his small town New England origins.

In contrast, other scholars have argued that in order to understand the origins and nature of Dewey's political beliefs and social theory we must concentrate on his experiences after he left Vermont.¹³ From this perspective there is a great gulf between Dewey's Republican background and his mature democratic socialism, his Congregationalist background and his mature view of religion, the presumed Protestant dogmatism of his teachers at Vermont and the pragmatism of his mature instrumentalism. For Lewis Feuer, "Dewey resented his Puritan upbringing because of the repressions it imposed."¹⁴ Dewey's mature ideas have to be understood as expressions of his rebellion against and rejection of Vermont.

We find, then, in the secondary Dewey literature both a tendency to make connections, however vague and weak, between the tone and sensibilities of Dewey's philosophy and his Vermont background, and an emphasis upon the substantive distance between Dewey's professional work and the intellectual environment of Burlington and UVM.

Both of these tendencies, whether in Dewey's self-understanding or in the commentaries and autobiographies, are quite misleading. The view that Dewey's work reflects small-town New England culture points in a useful direction, but it does so in a most misleading way. As we will see below, Dewey has much more in common with his teachers and peers in Burlington than is revealed by vague comments about his Vermont sensibilities—comments that are frequently based upon an inaccurate understanding of the social realities in Burlington in the last half of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the view of Dewey as a rebel against his Vermont origins is in many ways more satisfying—the intellectual distance between Dewey and his Vermont background is generally more carefully drawn than the contrary claims. But, this literature has paid insufficient attention to the ideas of those who influenced Dewey in his youth. When we look more carefully at these ideas, we find that Dewey had much more in common with the folks back home than even he understood or appreciated.

Consider first those who understand Dewey's intellectual development as an extension of his Vermont inheritance.¹⁵ The implication of this literature is that the Burlington of Dewey's childhood was a sleepy, homogeneous New England town with little or no class conflict or political strife found in larger urban settings. Although it is true that Dewey's ideas and values owed much to his experiences in Burlington and his education at the university, it is simply untenable to contend that he was deeply impressed by a small New England town and its "town meeting" political culture. Burlington was much more of a city during Dewey's childhood than this stereo-type would allow. The growth of the lumber trade had made it the third largest lumber center in the country in 1850.¹⁶ Town meetings were abolished when Burlington was incorporated as a city in 1865, when Dewey was only six years old (although they survive to this day in surrounding towns). Dewey's childhood actually coincided with the dramatic growth in Burlington that prompted municipal incorporation. This was accompanied by sharpening class, ethnic, and political cleavages. In the five years following the end of the Civil War and the establishment of city government, the population of Burlington doubled, causing serious public health problems, overcrowding, and social and political friction between the old Protestant Yankees and the immigrants who were primarily French-Canadian and Irish-Catholic working people. It was the growth of these working-class and Catholic groups that led old Yankee business leaders to fear that they would lose control of town meetings and thus political power. This, along with concerns over public health and public works in the face of population growth, led to the adoption of the city charter in 1865. In short, the sociology of Burlington during Dewey's childhood and adolescence belies the mythology of Dewey as a product of small town America.

The real lesson Dewey seems to have learned from the political culture of Burlington was less about town meeting democracy than about America's catapult into modern urban industrial society. The world of his childhood was a rapidly changing and expanding one, in which the personal, informal, and small-scale institutions of the earlier American experience were quickly becoming inadequate. This was the lesson that Dewey was sensitive to even as a college student, and it was to inform the central message of his lifelong philosophical project.

Consider, on the other hand, the views of those who have emphasized the great distance between Dewey's mature political thinking and activism and the conservative Republicanism of his Vermont heritage. What is most unsatisfying about his reading of Dewey is that it leaves so little room for any substantive influence from his early life. It is true that Dewey did rebel against his Vermont background; when he left for graduate school in 1882, he left pretty much for good. Nonetheless, even in this break with his childhood and youth, there was much more continuity than is conventionally recognized—even by Dewey himself.

John Dewey's academic career at Vermont was respectable, but in no way outstanding. As Max Eastman wrote, "He slid through his first three college years . . . without throwing off any sparks, or giving grounds to predict anything about his future."¹⁷ The story is often told, however, about his reading during his junior year a physiology text by the Darwinian T. H. Huxley that had a deep impact on him. Dewey himself traces his interest in philosophy to this event.¹⁸ He then went on to perform very well in his senior year, especially in a year-long course in social and political morals offered by President Buckham. In his final year of study Dewey improved his rather average academic standing enough to graduate second in a class of eighteen.¹⁹

There is evidence, however, primarily in the form of library records of his reading habits, that Dewey was interested in philosophical and political affairs quite early in his college career. During his first year, for example. Dewey read Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and a more obscure, but for our purposes very interesting, volume by Richard Josiah Hinton, English Radical Leaders.²⁰ Bagehot's book is a discussion of the importance of Darwinism for political thinking and institutions.²¹ Tocqueville's monumental work, of course, is one of the most insightful studies of America's democratic political culture. Hinton's book is a series of profiles of liberal and progressive English politicians. As Hinton writes, the book is about "a class of men who seem destined to lead their nation through the peaceful ways of ameliorative reforms, into the larger liberties and ordered equities of a practically democratic future."²² These three books indicate that Dewey, even in his first year of college, was interested in and sensitive to major intellectual changes (most notably the development of Darwinist scientific and social theory), social change (the growth of the labor movement, the increasing concentration of capital, the woman's movement), and the importance of these developments for democratic politics and society.

This freshman interest was not short-lived. Dewey's sophomore essay was a discussion of municipal reform, a topic of some significance in Burlington, which had incorporated as a city a little more than a decade earlier.²³ His commencement speech, entitled "Limits Of Political Economy," was also obviously of political interest.²⁴ Throughout his four years of college Dewey read extensively in the most advanced literary, philosophical, and political periodicals of the day, such as Edinburgh Review, Westminster Review, North American Review, Atlantic, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. And in addition to his coursework he read Spencer, J. S. Mill, Bain, and Comte among others.²⁵ In all of this reading, Dewey was confronting the most advanced English-language philosophical and political discussions of the period.

Dewey comments in "From Absolutism To Experimentalism" that at this time what interested him the most in Comte's writings was "his idea of the disorganized character of Western modern culture, due to a disintegrative 'individualism,' and his idea of a synthesis of science that should be a regulative method of an organized social life. . . ."²⁶ In general, Dewey learned from all these readings about the tremendous flux in traditional ideas and social practices, a sense of openness and change for the future, the importance of new developments in science, and the excitement and apprehension accompanying these profound intellectual and social developments. It is clear that from his earliest years in Burlington Dewey became sensitive to change and development in American society and that this sensitivity led him in college to seek out literature which would help him to explain these developments and project their future. The University of Vermont, at the very least, provided Dewey with the environment and resources necessary to pursue this interest.

But there were more direct influences at the university. Dewey was grateful to H. A .P. Torrey both for his educational attention and for his encouragement in pursuing philosophy as a vocation. Torrey was primarily a teacher, and he never wrote very much. Looking back over the written materials he did leave, however, one is at first struck by the great differences in tone and perspective between Torrey's writing and that of Dewey. For example, after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Torrey wrote an essay (unpublished) in remembrance of the dead President. The moral certainty and stern piety of this discussion of the Civil War reminds one that Torrey was only the latest in a long line of Puritan thinkers in New England. The war had been, to Torrey, a conflict between the just and righteous Union and the evil and ungodly Confederacy, and God, working through Lincoln, had assured the Union victory. "For if ever the Hand Of Providence is visible in human history, it is visible in the history of this war, and in the career of him whom God chose to guide the nation through it."²⁷ Two qualities of this document provide a noticeable contrast with Dewey's later political writings. First is its extreme moral certainty. There is no attempt to understand the moral complexity of the Civil War or the possibility of moral guilt on the part of the North as well as the South. Torrey views the conflict in much simpler terms, as a conflict between good and evil. Dewey would never be guilty, in his mature work, of exhibiting such a contempt for moral complexity. Although he would never lose the capacity for moral indignation, he would spend much of his adult life attacking precisely the "quest for certainty" so clearly illustrated in Torrey's essay.²⁸

Second, Torrey's understanding of the political world is still informed by Puritan orthodoxy: the basic reason for political organization is original sin. Because of sin, war is and always will be a necessary institution in human life, for "persuasion comes more of suffering than of conscience."²⁹ In fact, "the strength of government is still in the sword."³⁰ Dewey would become very critical of the conception of original sin, which he considered to be indicative of philosophical laziness (for assuming that which needs explaining). Referring to Reinhold Niebuhr's insistence on the importance of original sin, Dewey once commented to Sidney Hook, "A man doesn't have to be an S.O.B. S.O.B.'s are made, not born."³¹

Despite these differences with Dewey, in Torrey's most extensive published writings, a three-article series on "The Theodicy of Leibniz,'" we find that Dewey has much more in common with his old teacher than the above comments suggest. Torrey criticizes Leibniz for practicing philosophy on a level too highly abstracted from the realities of life as experienced by everyday men and women. Referring, for example, to Leibniz's definition of suffering as metaphysical evil, Torrey sarcastically observes, "The philosopher may define suffering as metaphysical evil, but the victim is not eased by the definition."³² His point, of course, is that Leibniz's definition is a pure abstraction, removed from the facts and realities of life and experience. In terms of pure metaphysical knowledge, Torrey suggests, the problem of theodicy may be intractable (at least until the "end of history"). Yet, this is not the only kind of knowledge, nor even the most important knowledge available to Christians. Torrey suggests that "Light comes more from living than from thinking. Moreover, this practical way of dealing with a problem too hard for the intellect is like that which God himself has offered to our consideration and acceptance." It is possible, through Christian faith, to live and feel the solution to theodicy, if not to strictly "understand" it in philosophical terms.³³ There is a hardheaded practicality to Torrey's discussion here. It is this type of appeal to lived reality and the distrust of "philosopher's problems" that suggests a strong similarity with Dewey's later pragmatism. In addition, Torrey writes, "Pessimism is artificial, non-natural. Every man is at heart an optimist."³⁴ Dewey, too, was an optimist, although by no means an uncritical or complacent one.

What we find in Torrey's work is a surprising mix of characteristics. On the one hand, the content of much of his thought appears almost diametrically opposed to Dewey's mature writings. On the other, there are elements of great similarity. When we look at some of the other individuals in a position to influence Dewey at the University of Vermont and in the Congregational Church during these years, we find the same mix of elements. President Buckham, was "looked upon as the very embodiment of tradition, a kind of fortress of conservatism."³⁵ And when we read through his essays, there is material that sets him very much apart from what we recognize in Dewey. For instance, when discussing the "college ideal of life," Buckham writes: "It would not have human life dominated by the philosophy of the average man. It says to that philosophy, there are more things in heaven and earth than you have dreamed of."³⁶ This elitism and idealism is a far cry from the thought of the "philosopher of the common man," as Dewey was not infrequently called.³⁷ There is also in these essays a sort of Horatio Algerism, a belief that individuals, through hard work and determination, are able to overcome all obstacles and adverse circumstances that is incongruous with Dewey's communitarianism and his analysis of the organizational and structural constraints in complex urban industrial society.³⁸

Yet despite these differences with Dewey, some of the other elements in Buckham's writings are quite similar to the sensibilities of the later Dewey. Like Dewey, Buckham was committed to an understanding of the moral life as an activist life: "the life nurtured by Christianity is a life of action."³⁹ Although he warned his students against the temptations of radicalism, Buckham was sensitive to the changes taking place in American society and the need to rethink many of our moral and political ideals and categories.⁴⁰ Most interesting, however, is his attack on what he views as too great an emphasis on individualism and individual rights in contemporary society.

We in this country . . . have been living too long in the primitive stage of human society. We have built our social fabric too much out of a mere assertion of rights. At times we have been lifted into a glorious forgetfulness of our selfishness, but have soon dropped back again into our old ways. Save as religion modifies the temper of our people, the spirit of American life is too much that of individualism. Every man is for himself. Politically we are democratic: socially we are intensely aristocratic. The strongest are the best.⁴¹

A society built merely on the assertion of individual rights would, Buckham thought, be a chaotic one. In Buckham's mind America has been saved from this chaos only by its all too infrequently recognized Christian morality and fellowship:

To found society on the rights of man, his rights only, is simply to incorporate the principle of multiple self-assertion. The experiment has been tried, and its various phases have been hate, cruelty, bloodshed, anarchy, insurrections, massacres, the reign of terror, military despotism. History furnishes no single instance of a community beneficently organized upon a mere assertion of rights. The French anarchists were fond of justifying themselves by appealing to the American Declaration of Independence. But that document represented the spirit of American liberty only when taken in connection with the profound respect for law and the deep sense of religion which informed the substance of the American character.⁴²

Dewey's sense of the limitations of liberal individualism are not at all surprising against this intellectual background. Like Dewey, Buckham believed that unbridled individualism was both morally and empirically incorrect.

During his college years and directly afterward, while he still lived in Burlington, Dewey was active in the First Congregational Church; he was elected president of the church's newly founded youth group in 1881.⁴³ From the church's minister at this time, Lewis Orsmond Brastow (subsequently a professor at the Yale Divinity School), Dewey certainly heard much Congregational orthodoxy. In a discussion of religion and government, for example, Brastow tortuously attempts to prove that ours is a Christian state and can therefore favor Christian activity and morals even if there is a formal separation between these two spheres. He concludes his case by observing, "It is God, not man, who creates government."⁴⁴ Nonetheless, there is also much in Brastow's career and writings which is similar to Dewey's convictions. He bravely defends toleration of diverse opinions within the Congregational Church from an attempt by conservatives at the 1887 state convention to impose greater doctrinal standards upon the clergy and laity.⁴⁵ After his death, one of his colleagues at Yale eulogized him as a man whose theology "arms one against all movements in the direction of intolerance and dogmatism."⁴⁶ Like Dewey, Brastow firmly believed that "doctrines that fear liberty confess weakness."⁴⁷ From Brastow Dewey also probably heard criticisms of the individualism of contemporary life.^4* Most striking are comments Brastow made in a special sermon during Dewey's senior year in college, in which he emphasized the importance of personal growth and development: "Every man is a man of whom more might have been made. No one attains his full measure. We all die half-grown. ... It belittles a man not to grow."⁴⁹ Life as a moral opportunity for personal growth would, of course, become an idea of central importance for Dewey's moral and political theory.

Probably the most significant intellectual presence at Vermont when Dewey attended was the ghost of the late president of the university, James Marsh. Marsh had been an important figure in the New England transcendentalist movement, and his introductory essay to Coleridge's Aids To Reflection, along with a collection of his writings published after his death and edited by his friend and colleague Joseph Torrey (H. A. P. Torrey's uncle), were perhaps the most important texts of moral philosophy taught and read at Vermont during the middle part of the nineteenth century. Marsh expounded a philosophy highly critical of the Lockeanism that he (like Coleridge) believed dominated contemporary philosophy and moral theory. He felt that Lockean epistemology was subversive of religious orthodoxy because it radically split the worlds of faith and reason.⁵⁰ On the contrary, Marsh ar gued, "Christian faith is the perfection of human reason."⁵¹ The worlds of faith and reason are complementary when properly understood, rather than antagonistic or simply unrelated. Philosophy and religion are mutually compatible and, in reality, interdependent. True religion must be philosophical, just as true philosophy must become religiously informed.⁵²

From this perspective, Marsh was critical of philosophical systems that had purely intellectual integrity but seemed far removed from the concerns of Christian life and activity. Joseph Torrey commented that Marsh "felt altogether dissatisfied with the old method of the Scottish and English philosophers, which he thought too formal, cold and barren. They did not, he said, keep alive the heart in the head."⁵³ Philosophical thinking must grow out of the experiences that individuals have in the course of their daily lives. In turn, for philosophy to be significant, it must influence the living of these lives: "No living and actual knowledge can be arrived at simply by speculation. The man must become what he knows; he must make his knowledge one with his own being; and in his power to do this, joined with the infinite capacity of his spirit, lies the possibility of his endless progress."⁵⁴ So Marsh was impatient with philosophical systems of merely academic or speculative interest. Philosophy must be activist, intimately concerned with the moral problems raised by the facts of life.⁵⁵

Marsh believed that this moral perspective was in direct conflict with the currently fashionable Lockeanism, with its emphasis on individualism and self-interest.⁵⁶ Philosophy must be intimately associated with, if indeed not subordinated to, the claims of religion and moral duty. Marsh and those who followed him at UVM held that we are obliged to think seriously not because it is fun or interesting or exciting or creative but because without doing so we simply do not know how to live appropriately. Any philosophical system that does not inform such concerns and is not proved in the living is false, vain, or irrelevant.

Even though Dewey would eventually hold few if any of Marsh's religious beliefs, there is a great deal of common ground between Dewey and his Congregationalist forebear. Marsh, Dewey points out in his centennial address, condemned all attempts to separate knowledge from action. "Marsh constantly condemns what he calls speculation and the speculative tendency, by which he means a separation of knowledge and the intellect from action and the will."⁵⁷ Dewey also quotes extensively from a speech Marsh gave at the dedication of the University chapel in 1830, in which he discussed the democratic nature of American government:

We can hardly, indeed, be said to be the subjects of any state, considered in its ordinary sense, as body politic with a fixed constitution and a determinate organization of its several powers. . . . With us there is nothing so fixed by the forms of political and civil organizations as to obstruct our efforts for promoting the full and free development of all our powers, both individual and social. Indeed, where the principle of self-government is admitted to such an extent as it is in this state [i.e., the United States], there is, in fact, nothing fixed or permanent, but as it is made so by that which is permanent and abiding in the intelligence and fixed rational principles of action in the self-governed. The selfpreserving principle of our government is to be found only in the continuing determination and unchanging aims of its subjects.⁵⁸

Dewey finds that his own pragmatic perspective and understanding of democratic values is not greatly different from this view.

When we look at these intellectual influences of a few key individuals on Dewey the young man and student, we find many more similarities between Dewey's developed democratic philosophy and the ideas of his teachers and of clergy back home in Burlington than the secondary literature or even Dewey's own personal reflections would lead us to expect. It was common for him in the early years to hear criticisms of philosophical individualism and conventional Lockean theory. It was equally common to hear criticisms of all philosophy and intellectual life that was not intimately involved with human activity and life as it is lived. Individual growth and development were held by others in Burlington and the University to be of ultimate moral concern for personal moral life and social life in general. Democracy, at least as it was understood by Marsh, is less a fixed form of government than an open opportunity for the development and growth of the citizenry. And finally, all of those in a position to have influenced Dewey strongly opposed any radical separation between the world of facts and the world of values, between intelligence and morality, between means and ends. On all of these counts, which are so important to Dewey's mature democratic thought, there are important precedents in the thought of those who taught and influenced him at the University of Vermont.

Dewey's democratic theory is distinctive in a number of ways. He distrusted the individualism of much conventional liberal theory, both in its natural rights (Locke) and utilitarian (Mill) incarnations. His criticisms were two-fold: on the one hand, the theory is empirically inaccurate (especially in the twentieth century); on the other, it has become a mere rationalization for institutions and social behavior that are actually contrary to the spirit of the liberalism from which it developed. On the first count, liberal individualism simply fails to understand the objective interdependency of individuals in the modern world. Because of this the theory is not terribly useful in guiding moral action in the world that individuals actually live in. Thus, in The Public and Its Problems, Dewey refers to "the enormous ineptitude of the individualistic philosophy to meet the needs and direct the factors of the new age."⁵⁹ In an equally characteristic passage in Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey argues that the "beliefs and methods of earlier liberalism were ineffective when faced with the problems of social organization and integration."⁶⁰

On the second count, Dewey argues that it is largely because of this theoretical limitation that liberalism has so easily been corrupted and vulgarized as an ideology serving narrow, selfish interests. Thus, for example, liberal individualism has come to be associated with the rights of capitalists to engage in unrestricted economic activity, regardless of the consequences for the community as a whole.⁶¹ The individualism of earlier liberal democratic theory, which had been formulated as a theory of freedom for all members of the political community, has easily been co-opted and put to work for particular class interests.

The political implications of Dewey's democratic theory are strongly participatory: against the thrust of much twentieth-century political theory he warns us to be wary of the power of political experts and elites. As social and political life has become increasingly complex, centralized, and national (or international) in scope, the temptation for democratic theorists is to give up on the possibilities for direct citizen participation and to view democratic politics as primarily a method for the periodic control of elite behavior and policies. In fact, the tendency has frequently been for theorists to attempt to protect and isolate political elites as much as possible from the influences of mass opinion so that they will be able to develop the expertise necessary for political activity and have the power to practice their skills.⁶² Dewey, in contrast, argued that the challenge for democratic politics in the twentieth century was to find new ways for citizens to participate meaningfully in political affairs despite the increasing complexity and impersonality of those affairs. To hand over political life to a class of political experts would be a disaster, because their expertise is illusory. "A class of experts is invariably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all/'⁶³ If politics is concerned with common affairs, then it is the individuals who hold those affairs in common—that is, the citizenry—who must, to the greatest degree possible, participate in the direction and determination of public life.

This characteristic of Dewey's democratic theory is related to a third, and perhaps most important, aspect of his thinking: democracy is viewed not simply as a political form or a set of institutions but as a way of life. From Dewey's perspective the ultimate moral value, as far as we can define such a thing, is found in what he refers to as individual growth: "Growth itself is the only moral 'end.'"⁶⁴ Because it is the highest of all social goals, democracy is to be cherished as the greatest of social values because it maximizes the opportunities for personal growth for all individuals in a society. "Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme thrust of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society."⁶⁵ The way democracy promotes this value is through its insistence on free and open communication, which allows every member of a community the opportunity to contribute to the development of social life and shared interests. Thus, "regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself." 66 To the degree that a genuine community life is achieved, the opportunity for individual growth and communication with others is maximized. Dewey's theory is, obviously, a highly moralized theory of democracy, rather than simply descriptive or empirical (like much contemporary democratic theory). For Dewey, democracy places a premium on communication, and "Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful."⁶⁷

Because Dewey thinks of democracy as a way of life, his theory differs markedly from those theories that view democracy only as a set of institutions or political practices. Although elections and constitutional protections of individual liberty are essential ingredients of a democratic society, for Dewey they are not enough to form a community where communication is nurtured, protected, and stimulated. In fact, the institutions necessary for a democratic community change from society to society and from time to time, depending upon the particular needs of each community. In small, local communities, town meeting democracy may be the appropriate vehicle for democratic participation. In a large urban area, different institutional arrangements (for example, neighborhood organizations or the like) become necessary. The final form of a democratic state, therefore, cannot be defined, nor should current or past institutional arrangements be fetishized. "The formation of states must be an experimental process."⁶⁸ Institutions must constantly be revised, created, or abolished as required to maximize the democratic communication and participation of the citizenry. Dewey's theory emphasizes democratic process, change, and development, and is hostile to democratic theories which are overly formalistic, static, or ahistorical. There is nothing sacred in political forms in and of themselves. Only to the degree that they cultivate democratic life are they to be valued.

Finally, Dewey's theory is a critique of the tendency in much contemporary political thought and political practice to separate political means from political ends. Dewey believed that such a separation was based upon a misunderstanding of the relationship between means and ends and, more generally, between facts and values. In a 1937 essay, Dewey wrote:

The fundamental principle of democracy is that the ends of freedom and individuality for all can be attained only by means that accord with those ends. . . . The value of upholding the banner of liberalism in this country ... is its insistence upon freedom of belief, of inquiry, of discussion, of assembly, of education: upon the method of public intelligence in opposition to even a coercion that claims to be exercised in behalf of the ultimate freedom of all individuals. . . . But democratic means and the attainment of democratic ends are one and inseparable.⁶⁹

The maintenance and protection of democratic society requires not only that we use democratic methods but also that we reject the split between facts and values found in much contemporary philosophy.⁷⁰

What we find, then, in Dewey's mature political thinking is a theory based on strong communitarian and participatory principles, which views democracy as much more important than political institutions alone and, in fact, thinks of democracy as a way of "associated life." His theory is pragmatic and antiformalistic. It sees democracy as an experimental process of development, not something achieved once and for all. Finally, Dewey emphasizes the intimate relationship between means and ends, and he argues that to sacrifice democratic means is to also sacrifice democratic ends.

Given Dewey's personal ambivalence about his background, as well as the emphasis in much of the secondary literature on the gulf between Dewey and his Vermont origins, it is at first a little surprising to find that those with whom he came into contact when he was a young man studying at Vermont prefigured so many of the ideas in his later philosophical work. Perhaps the most striking similarity is in what we might call the pragmatic perspective. Dewey agreed with his teachers that thought divorced from the problems of action is at best vanity and at worst dangerous and irresponsible. There is a deep sense of earthly vocation in the writings of Dewey's teachers, alive and dead, and their strong religious sensibilities served less to separate their thoughts from this world than to moralize the entirety of their worldly activities. Although the theological component of this moralism would disappear from Dewey's thought, the moral perspective of instrumentalism is very much in the tradition of his Puritan forebears. Paul Conklin has been one of the few to recognize this relationship; he writes, "He never repudiated most of the values of his childhood. Instead, he correlated them with a new knowledge of man and his environment, a knowledge never possessed by his less sophisticated forebears."⁷¹ With his pragmatic perspective, Dewey "was the best of the Puritans."⁷² He had no tolerance for philosophy apart from the real problems faced by common men and women in everyday life, anymore than his forebears had tolerance for those who professed religious belief but did not allow this belief to guide them in the mundane details of living.

It is this characteristic of Dewey's Vermont inheritance, in fact, which may have led him to overemphasize the practical significance of philosophical activity. It is the Puritan in him that made him believe that wrong thinking necessarily leads to wrong acting, in ways, I think, that simply cannot be sustained empirically. This view, for example, led him to exaggerate the importance of Kantian idealism for the growth of German political absolutism before the World Wars.⁷³

On the other hand, it is this same characteristic that made Dewey so important to his generation and potentially to our own. He always had, even in his choice of reading at college, a strong sense of the movement and change in his society. This was not unusual for men and women of his generation—the Progressive movement as a whole, of which he was a central figure, was very much a movement struggling to come to terms with the new American society emerging from the post-Civil War era. What made Dewey so important and attractive to his peers was not the uniqueness of his concerns so much as the strength of his vision and his supreme sensitivity to the problems of social change. If it is true, he argued, that the world has changed in ways such that our old ideas are no longer reliable guides for everyday life, then it is our moral duty to develop new ways of thinking so as not to be cut adrift in this new world (which, he was afraid, was becoming more and more the case). All the while he insisted, in the tradition of James Marsh, that it was unacceptable to separate moral from intellectual concerns, and that to do so was not only an intellectual error but also a grave danger to moral integrity.

Cushing Strout has rightly observed of Dewey: "He was a man of notable common sense and decency, and if he seems remote now it is partly because we find it difficult to conceive of a philosopher so effective in the world."⁷⁴ This effectiveness was at least in part the result of his early moral and intellectual training in Vermont. It was not simply intellectual curiosity that drew the young Dewey to the debates about Darwin and Comte, Spencer and Hegel, in the intellectual journals he found in the University library. It was the same moral concern that would later lead him to attempt a "reconstruction in philosophy" in order to make philosophy a more effective tool for action.

Dewey's objection to the theological perspective of his forebears, then, was not that it was too moralistic but that the moralism it brought to bear on life was dogmatic and pragmatically indefensible—quite simply, it would not do the work required of it. In fact, he argues that if we are. to maintain the moral concern and responsibility taught by his Puritan elders, the content of their theology and philosophy must change. This position is nicely illustrated by an article written in 1935 by Dewey's childhood friend, John Wright Buckham (the son of President Buckham), discussing Dewey's A Common Faith. A professor at the Pacific School of Religion, Buckham had stayed much closer than Dewey to the Congregationalist orthodoxy of his youth, and he was quite unsympathetic to Dewey's pragmatism (which he understood only imperfectly). He sensed, nonetheless, that he and Dewey had maintained a much closer similarity in moral perspective than he had yet appreciated—in fact, he believed that in A Common Faith Dewey had transcended his pragmatism and returned to the fold.⁷⁵ Buckham was both right and wrong. Dewey had not renounced pragmatism, nor had he really returned to the fold. Yet he was not as far away from the views of his childhood friend as Buckham had thought.

If the relationship between Dewey and his Vermont inheritance has been overlooked or misunderstood, the result is that we have missed an opportunity to understand a crucial chapter in the development of modern American democratic theory. The relationship between secular democratic theory and the theistic philosophies out of which it grew is a complex and not always happy one. But Dewey's democratic theory grew not only out of a rebellion against Congregationalist society. Nor is it the simple reflection of the values of the supposed political culture of his youth. His preoccupation with the democratization of American life grew quite naturally out of his moral and intellectual education in Vermont. Dewey had more in common with the folks back home than most commentators have realized.

NOTES

¹ Referring to Marsh's edition of Coleridge's book, Dewey said to his friend and colleague, Herbert W. Schneider: "Yes, I remember very well that this was our spiritual emancipation in Vermont. Coleridge's idea of the spirit came to us as a real relief, because we could be both liberal and pious; and this Aids to Reflection book, especially Marsh's edition, was my first Bible." Corliss Lamont, ed., Dialogue on Dewey (New York: Horizon Press, 1959) 15.

² John Dewey, "James Marsh and American Philosophy," Journal of the History of Ideas II (April 1941): 147.

³ John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," in George P. Adams and William Pepperill Montague, eds., Contemporary American Philosophy, vol. 2 (NY: Macmillan, 1930) 13.

⁴ Dewey, "From Absolutism" 14-15.

⁵ Dewey, "From Absolutism" 14.

⁶ Dewey, "From Absolutism" 19.

⁷ John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (NY: Paragon Books; 1929) 308.

⁸ John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale 1934) 28.

⁹ Lamont 89.

¹⁰ Jane Dewey, "Biography of John Dewey," in Paul Arthur Schlipp, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University, 1939) 43, 3.

¹¹ Sidney Hook, John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: John Day, 1939) 5.

¹² For example, see Neil Coughlan, Young John Dewey (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1973) 112. For a general criticism of pragmatism as a "provincial" philosophy, see Ernest Gellner, "Pragmatism and the Importance of Being Earnest," in Robert Mulvaney and Philip Zeltner, eds., Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects (Columbia, SC: U South Carolina P, 1981) 41-65.

¹³ Coughlan 90-91; Lewis Feuer, "John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in American Thought," Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1958): 545-68.

¹⁴ Feuer 565.

¹⁵ Lewis Feuer writes, "Dewey's metaphysics indeed was Vermont village democracy projected upon the universe as a whole." "H. A. P. Torrey and John Dewey: Teacher and Pupil," American Quarterly 10 (1958): 53.

¹⁶ "Burlington, Vermont 1865-1965" (Burlington, VT: League of Women Voters, n.d.) 7.

¹⁷ Max Eastman, "John Dewey," Atlantic 168 (1941): 672.

¹⁸ In a letter to George Dykhuizen, Dewey wrote on October 15, 1949: "I think I've referred in print to the influence of a course with Dr. Perkin's father in physiology in our Junior year—text by T. H. Huxley—I imagine that was the beginning of my interest in philosophy." University of Vermont Archives, Dykhuizen File #16.

¹⁹ George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973) 12.

²⁰ The records of Dewey's library transactions were discovered and published by Lewis Fuer, "John Dewey's Reading at College," Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 415-21.

²¹ The following passage also is interesting because it reads very much like Dewey's later political thinking: "Nothing promotes intellect like intellectual discussion, and nothing promotes intellectual discussion so much as government by discussion." Physics and Politics (NY:—1873) 199.

²² R. J. Hinton, English Radical Leaders (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1875) 76.

²³ Julian Ira Lindsay, Tradition Looks Forward (Burlington, VT: The University of Vermont, 1954) 234.

²⁴ Lindsay 252.

²⁵ There is no reference in Feuer's list to Dewey having checked out writings by Comte from the library, but Dewey mentions having read Comte in the library. See Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism" 20.

²⁶ Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism" 20.

²⁷ "In Memoriam—Abraham Lincoln," 18. This manuscript is located in the University of Vermont Archives. Page numbers refer to typewritten transcription of the document made by Lewis Feuer (located with original).

²⁸ The phrase comes from Dewey's book, The Quest for Certainty.

²⁹ Torrey 13.

³⁰ Torrey 9.

³¹ Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974) 101.

³² H. A. P. Torrey, 'The Theodicy of Leibniz'," Andover Review 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1885): 497.

³³ Torrey, "The 'Theodicy of Leibniz'" 511.

³⁴ Torrey, "The 'Theodicy of Leibniz"' 509.

³⁵ Levi P. Smith, introductory essay, "A Masterpiece in Living," in Matthew Buckham, The Very Elect (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1912) 5.

³⁶ Buckham 48.

³⁷ Sidney Ratner, The Philosopher of the Common Man (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1940).

³⁸ See Buckham 34.

³⁹ Buckham 80.

⁴⁰ Buckham 329.

⁴¹ Buckham 201.

⁴² Buckham 200.

⁴³ Minutes of the first meeting of Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor of First Congregational Church of Burlington, VT, 21 November 1881; Special Collections, Bailey Howe Library, UVM, First Congregational Church documents, vol. 15.

⁴⁴ Lewis O. Brastow, "Religion and Government," Burlington Free Press 6 (April 1876): 4.

⁴⁵ Minutes of the Eighty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the General Convention of Congregational Ministers and Held at Burlington, June 1879 (Montpelier: Vermont Chronicle, 1879) 19-20.

⁴⁶ Frank C. Porter, "Lewis Orsmond Brastow, D.D.," Yale Divinity Quarterly (January 1913): 6.

⁴⁷ Quoted, Porter 10.

⁴⁸ Brastow remarked, for example, that it was the "extreme development of the theories of individualism which have resulted in a loose public sentiment." "Comments about a Divorce Reform Bill," Burlington Free Press (16 February 1884): 1. Although Brastow made this comment well after Dewey had left Burlington, it is the type of opinion Dewey was likely to have heard from him.

⁴⁹ Lewis O. Brastow, "The True Estimate of Life," Burlington Free Press (17 February 1879): 2.

⁵⁰ James Marsh, introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (Burlington, VT: Chauncey Goodrich, 1829) xlv.

⁵¹ Marsh xiv.

⁵² Marsh xx.

⁵³ Joseph Torrey, The Remains of the Rev, James Marsh, With a Memoir of His Life (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1843) 42.

⁵⁴ Torrey, Remains 115.

⁵⁵ Torrey, Remains 114-15.

⁵⁶ Torrey, Remains 490.

⁵⁷ Dewey, "James Marsh and American Philosophy" 142.

⁵⁸ Quoted in Dewey, "James Marsh" 145.

⁵⁹ John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1927) 96.

⁶⁰ John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Capricorn Books, 1963) 28.

⁶¹ Dewey, Liberalism and Solid Action, see especially chap. 1.

⁶² In Dewey's own time, the best expression of this perspective is found in Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).

⁶³ Dewey, The Public and Its Problems 207.

⁶⁴ Dewey, The Public and Its Problems 207.

⁶⁵ Dewey, The Public and Its Problems 186.

⁶⁶ Dewey, The Public and Its Problems 148.

⁶⁷ John Dewey, Experience and Nature (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1925) 138.

⁶⁸ Dewey, The Public and Its Problems 33.

⁶⁹ John Dewey, "Democracy is Radical," Common Sense 6 (January 1937): 11.

⁷⁰ See, for example, his attack on Kantianism and his understanding of its political implications in John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 8 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1979) 135-204.

⁷¹ Paul Conklin, Puritans and Pragmatists (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968) 346.

⁷² Conklin 402.

⁷³ See Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics.

⁷⁴ Cushing Strout, Intellectual History in America, Vol. II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968) 77.

⁷⁵ John Write Buckham, "God and the Ideal: Professor Dewey Reinterprets Religion," The Journal of Religion 15 (January 1935): 1-9, 309-15. The specific reference here is to 311.