John Dewey - Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us (1939)
By
John Dewey (1859-1952)
Written late in Dewey’s life and during the
rise of the Nazis, Creative Democracy is Dewey’s explanation of how democracy
can and should be revitalized as a means of creating the good society and
combating the growth of fascism. Note the emphasis placed on cooperation and
Dewey’s general optimism regarding human nature.
Under present circumstances I cannot hope
to conceal the fact that I have managed to exist eighty years. Mention of the
fact may suggest to you a more important fact – namely, that events of the
utmost significance for the destiny of this country have taken place during the
past four-fifths of a century a period that covers more than half of its
national life in its present form. For obvious reasons I shall not attempt a
summary of even the more important of these events. I refer here to them
because of their bearing upon the issue to which this country committed itself
when the nation took shape – the creation of democracy, an issue which is now
as urgent as it was a hundred and fifty years ago when the most experienced and
wisest men of the country gathered to take stock of conditions and to create
the political structure of a self-governing society.
For the net import of the changes that have
taken place in these later years is that ways of life and institutions which
were once the natural, almost the inevitable, product of fortunate conditions
have now to be won by conscious and resolute effort. Not all the country was in
a pioneer state eighty years ago. But it was still, save perhaps in a few large
cities, so close to the pioneer stage of American life that the traditions of
the pioneer, indeed of the frontier, were active agencies in forming the
thoughts and shaping the beliefs of those who were born into its life. In
imagination at least the country was still having an open frontier, one of
unused and unappropriated resources. It was a country of physical opportunity
and invitation. Even so, there was more than a marvelous conjunction of
physical circumstances involved in bringing to birth this new nation. There was
in existence a group of men who were capable of readapting older institutions
and ideas to meet the situations provided by new physical conditions-a group of
men extraordinarily gifted in political inventiveness.
