Young Dewey the utopian in a late 19th-century era of crusading utopians.

John Dewey was restless as young Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. In the spirit of the times, he was perplexed as others were (notably Karl Marx) in the 19th-century by the problem that Hegel had raised: "How can society as we know it be transformed into organic wholeness?" Dewey had envisioned in his 1888 essay (which is the subject of a previous Group discussion) what an organic society might be philosophically--but what about actually? What would make it so?

From 1888 to 1892, young John Dewey became increasingly engaged in work with an experienced, crusading journalist named Franklin Ford. In their collaboration, Ford convinced Dewey that his idea to advance democracy in America was a "giant central clearinghouse of information" (Sound familiar?). Their vehicle for solving the Hegelian problem would be a newspaper, Thought Times, making information universally available to help change American society radically for the better. The increasingly centralized control of communication media which prevented freedom of inquiry and lessened the prospect of democracy would be broken.

No issue of Thought Times was ever published In Ann Arbor or anywhere. The fiasco taught Dewey that achieving desirable societal ends involves philosophical intelligence born of scientific study and reasoning, but it also requires very practical and strategic action based on the realities of time and circumstance. Even after the fiasco, Dewey often failed to think hard about practical means, but remained prone to philosophize.

Reformers today are faced with the overwhelming counter-weight of centralized communications media and politicized institutions that are dominated by large national and international commercial interests. Dewey and Ford seem naively fanciful to have believed that their underwhelming, utopian plan could have achieved real societal change for the better. How do we realize Dewey's dream in ways that are neither fancifully misguided, nor socially futile?

(I find Dewey's personal and career development instructive, especially in its early years, for anyone who actively seeks to reform institutionalized ways of doing things. Also, please note that most of this discussion is derived from reading the first chapter of Dewey's Dream [see citation above]--Skip)