Respect for the unrealized democratic potentialities in...

Respect for the unrealized democratic potentialities in human beings is a powerful, admirable theme that runs through the core of Dewey’s philosophy. Human development was at the center of his first serious statement on democracy, his essay “The Ethics of Democracy,” written in 1888. Democracy, according to Dewey, involves an ethical ideal, not simply a government. Its aim should be the development of the potentials of each individual.

“Democracy means the personality is the first and final reality,” Dewey wrote. “It admits that the chief stimuli and encouragement to the realization of personality come from society; but it holds, nonetheless, to the fact that personality cannot be procured for any one, however degraded and feeble, by anyone else, however wise and strong.”[^50] Dewey here introduced a focus on the importance of work as a source of development and democracy, extremely unusual among political theorists, along with a sharp criticism of most people’s degraded experiences of work.

“Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political…”[^51] Dewey was proudly, though far from uncritically, “American,” but he extended his emphasis on human democratic development across the world. Indeed, he had strong appreciation for the insights and contributions of many other societies and cultures. For instance, his descriptions of the integration of esthetic experiences with life in earlier societies are replete with praise.

“We do not have to travel to the ends of the earth nor return many millennia in time to find peoples for whom everything that intensifies the sense of immediate living is an object of intense admiration,” Dewey wrote in Art as Experience.