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World War II and the Crisis of Liberalism: Dewey and Neibuhr Reconsidered
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12651 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
5,585 Words |
| Author
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Gary Bullert
Gary Bullert is professor of political science at Troy State
University and is the author of The Politics of John Dewey. |
The isolationist, antiwar temper of many American liberal intellectuals underwent a severe test as Hitler's legion strode triumphantly across Europe. Liberals struggled for an explanation of this desperate state. They wondered why the United States had first failed to prevent the war diplomatically and then adopted a complacent posture of neutrality toward it. John Dewey's pragmatic liberalism, which was the dominant intellectual outlook in America, was saddled with the responsibility for this acquiescence. Critics linked Dewey's initial neutralism toward the war with the scientific positivism and ethical relativism that had corrupted the moral foundations of American society, paralyzing its ability to respond to radical evil. At the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion held in New York on September 10, 1940, Mortimer Adler charged that "the most serious threat to democracy is the positivism of the professor, which dominates every aspect of modern education and is the central corruption of modern culture. Democracy has much more to fear the mentality of its teachers than from the nihilism of Hitler." The denial of universal truth resulted in mental libertinism, which rendered academics incapable of defending civilized values. After polls had revealed that only 4 percent of college students wanted to fight, Adler blamed this cynicism on Dewey's "pragmatic relativism" and labeled him "public enemy number one."
Reinhold Neibuhr and Lewis Mumford likewise attacked Dewey for his naive view of scientific progress, his failure to recognize the impotence of rational persuasion to mediate social conflicts, and his blindness toward the role of original sin in human affairs. The temperate and tentative politics of Deweyite pragmatism, they said, fomented conditions that produced the war by allowing tyrants to practice
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