discover and extend and manifest their fundamental human nature
and human rights. Democracy is rooted in freedom, solidarity, a
choice of work and the ability to participate in the social order.
Democracy produces real people, he said. That’s the major product
of a democratic society—real people.
He recognized that democracy in that sense was a very withered
plant. Jefferson’s “banking institutions and monied incorporations”
had of course become vastly more powerful by this time, and
Dewey felt that “the shadow cast on society by big business” made
reform very difficult, if not impossible. He believed that reform
may be of some use, but as long as there’s no democratic control of
the workplace, reform isn’t going to bring democracy and freedom.
Like Jefferson and other classical liberals, Dewey recognized
that institutions of private power were absolutist institutions,
unaccountable and basically totalitarian in their internal structure.
Today, they’re far more powerful than anything Dewey dreamed of.
This literature is all accessible. It’s hard to think of more leading
figures in American history than Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey.
They’re as American as apple pie. But when you read them today,
they sound like crazed Marxist lunatics. That just shows how much
our intellectual life has deteriorated.
In many ways, these ideas received their earliest—and often
most powerful—formulation in people like [the German intellectual]
Wilhelm von Humboldt, who inspired [the English philosopher] John
Stuart Mill and was one of the founders of the classical liberal
tradition in the late eighteenth century. Like Adam Smith and others,
von Humboldt felt that at the root of human nature is the need for
free creative work under one’s own control. That must be at the
basis of any decent society.
Those ideas, which run straight through to Dewey, are deeply
anticapitalist in character. Adam Smith didn’t call himself an
anticapitalist because, back in the eighteenth century, he was
basically precapitalist, but he had a good deal of skepticism about
capitalist ideology and practice—even about what he called “joint
stock companies” (what we call corporations today, which existed
in quite a different form in his day). He worried about the separation
of managerial control from direct participation, and he also feared
that these joint stock companies might turn into “immortal
persons.”
This indeed happened in the nineteenth century, after Smith’s
ann
(Ann)
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