John Dewey's intellectual career is a remarkable example of sustained involvement across three quarters of a century with the challenge of formulating a philosophy that would engage with the common life. To break into the continuities of his questions and answers is to risk some distortion. Even his last work—for example, his collaboration with Arthur Bentley—involved a reformulation and correction of earlier themes and a constant retrospection at the accumulation of his work. It is clear, nonetheless, that certain phases in his work exhibit particular preoccupations. By focussing, as I shall do here, on the decade that bounded the First World War it is possible to see in sharp relief some problematical aspects of Dewey's longstanding commitment to the definition of a philosophy of praxis.

Two historians, Clarence J. Karier and Walter Feinberg, recently have suggested that John Dewey's commitment to democracy was less than whole-hearted. This view rests in part on their use of a report submitted by Dewey to the Federal Government in 1918: “Conditions Among the Poles in the United States: Confidential Report.” As Karier puts it, the report reveals Dewey as a conservative who was “committed to flexible, experimentally managed, orderly social change, which included a high degree of manipulation.” A closer look at the report and its historical context, however, suggests precisely the opposite: Dewey is shown as strongly and personally committed to the democratic process and opposed to manipulative government. In addition, it is a revealing example of Dewey's efforts to connect his educational theories to more general social and political questions.

By the end of his long, productive life John Dewey had become as familiar a part of the American scene as any man of ideas of the century. He reigned as aegis of progressive education, the final architect of Pragmatism—America's own philosophy—and the writer of so many books, articles, reviews and broadsides that it is hardly any wonder he has been so often mistaken for Melvil Dewey, the inventor of a library classification system!

John Dewey has been the subject of comment and criticism for over three-quarters of a century. Often, especially in recent writing on the history of education, the criticism has been divided between those who, to use Richard LaBreque's colorful language, see Dewey as the “good guy” and those who see him as the “bad guy.” Among the latter, sometimes collectively called “revisionists,” are Clarence Karier, Walter Feinberg, and Colin Greer. Charles Tesconi and Van Cleve Morris have recently co-authored a book emphasizing similar themes. Their attacks on Dewey and other liberals have centered around the rather vaguely defined issue of social control. As Michael Katz says in his discussion of twentieth century school reform in Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, “Nonetheless, there is a darker side to the social thought of even the best progressives, notably Dewey and Jane Addams, … Briefly, the emphasis on community in Jane Addams and the definitions of democracy and experience in Dewey provide particularly subtle and sophisticated instances the widespread attempt in their time to foster modes of social control appropriate to a complex urban environment.”