The vague, seldom defined, and perhaps undefinable term public philosophy has recently become the focal point of attention in academic commentary on American politics. No fewer than ten books during the last decade have included the term as part of their title, among them Michael Sandel’s well-known volume Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. And there are other books--Richard Rorty’s Achieving our Country comes immediately to mind--that have been widely identified as attempts to define a public philosophy, even if the term itself is not used in the title.

A brief survey of these works reveals that while the meaning of the term public philosophy remains elusive, the reaction to it has been universally and overwhelmingly positive. It is, after all, a nice sounding term made up of two words--public and philosophy--each of which possesses a certain dignity. The result is therefore clear: if you don’t have a public philosophy, it is definitely something you ought to go out and get--right away.

What we have, then, is discourse in academia that has begun to grow up around the term public philosophy. According to a general theory of discourse, valid supposedly for political no less than for intellectual affairs, agendas are often set by the launching of certain words, sometimes of quite plastic meaning, after which successive efforts are mounted to take charge of the terms and make them serve a certain purpose. Political and intellectual battles are fought to win control of these words, which may be likened to key geographical strong points on the terrain of real warfare. The initial term can even be one of relatively clear meaning--take the word "family" from Dan Quayle’s family values speech--but it can then be occupied and re-described, as in Mario Cuomo’s the nation-as-family speech and Hillary Clinton’s the family-as-village metaphors. To the redescriber ultimately go the spoils. Sophistical as all this may seem--and it is--to opt out is to leave the field of action to others. [1]

To speak about the public philosophy today may thus be our fate. I can offer some slight confirmation from my own experience. The overblown title of this talk is really less of my own creation--though of course I make the empty gesture of taking responsibility--than it is one that was assigned to me. Last autumn there was to have been a very solemn and high-minded discussion on the public philosophy at the Woodrow Wilson Center to commemorate its move to the Ronald Reagan Building. I was given the assignment of redeveloping the conservative public philosophy, while Professor Sean Wilentz of Princeton was to have redeveloped the liberal public philosophy. This discussion was postponed, no doubt in order to enable Professor Wilentz to lecture the members of the House Judiciary Committee last December, in a high-minded fashion, that a vote for impeachment would lead "history to track you down and condemn you for your cravenness."

The term public philosophy entered--I should say re-entered--the American lexicon some twenty years ago in an AEI publication, The New American Political System, in an essay by Samuel Beer.[2] (I am setting aside for the moment Walter Lippmann’s usage in the title of his 1955 work Essays in the Public Philosophy.[3]) Beer used the term roughly as a synonym or a benign substitute for what American social scientists had called "ideology" inside of the American context, in reference, for example, to bodies of thought such as liberalism and conservatism. But Beer built into the concept one key new feature: success. A public philosophy is an ideology that prevails. Beer was using the term as a concept of historical explanation to account for watershed changes in American political development, as in the victory of the ideas of liberalism at the time of the New Deal. A public philosophy, then, refers to a core set of ideas that shapes public policy for a full era. In Beer’s words, it is "an outlook on public affairs which is accepted within a nation by a wide coalition and which serves to give definition to problems and directions to government policies dealing with them." Other analyses followed in the same vein.[4]

This concept, while perfectly neutral or scientific, carries along with it some important assumptions. It says that ideas play a vital role in moving or shaping politics, and that these ideas are of a certain kind. They are not specific ideas that apply to a single arena of policy--such as, say, the ideas about de-regulating pricing in energy and transportation that began to win favor twenty years ago--but general ideas that encompass a whole range of policies--indeed, if we want to extend the concept a bit, ideas that set forth an entire conception of where society should be heading and of what arrangement of governing institutions and powers (as well as which policies) are supposed to get us there.[5] Such was the case in the one instance Beer himself presented and which has since become a kind of model of public philosophy thinking: the New Deal. For Beer, the big ideas that ultimately came to fruition were those generated during the first part of this century by Herbert Croly, John Dewey, and the New Republic crowd. To strip things down to their core, the origination or synthesis of the whole New Deal public philosophy took place in the mind of one person, Herbert Croly, and it was articulated in the confines of one book, The Promise of American Life. It is in that book that Croly, when he is not comparing himself to the St. Francis of modern democracy, likens himself to "the lantern which illuminates the path."[6]

No wonder, then, that certain think tanks--AEI, of course, not among them--have expressed interest in the public philosophy. If a think tank, on a perfectly rational economic model, is an ideology-maximizing institution--one that aims to get, say, more liberalism for the buck, or the same amount of liberalism for fewer bucks--then one can readily understand why contemplating an investment in public philosophizing might seem attractive. For one small product you could get more value added than is to be found in all the tons of policy studies produced over a whole decade. That might seem a good risk for think-tank venture capital--that is, if anyone knew what a public philosophy was and how to make one.

There are some other assumptions or implications, perhaps not conscious or intended, that are tied into the prevailing discourse on the public philosophy. One is that the public philosophy is connected with a partisan kind of project (I don’t mean partisan here in a narrow sense). Thinkers like Herbert Croly and John Dewey articulated their ideas in behalf of a great partisan movement to defeat a prevailing view--what they called "individualism"--and to institute a new one. Although no one using the term public philosophy directly claims that the thinker’s highest task in political life is to play this kind of partisan role, the use of the exalted word philosophy has clearly left this implication and has tended to crowd out imagining a different role for philosophy in politics.

There is, no doubt, something questionable, even troubling, in connecting the word philosophy so intimately with a partisan enterprise. There are still some who conceive that the role of philosophy is primarily to interpret the world, not to remake it; or who hold that, if philosophy is to descend into the chaotic and shadowy world of politics, it should do so modestly, in the spirit--as Aristotle says--of playing the umpire. Philosophy shouldn’t go barging into the world as the ideational hit man for a party. I think here of the caution of David Hume, who when speaking matter-of-factly of "philosophers who have embraced a party" immediately adds the parenthetical aside "(if that be not a contradiction in terms)."[7]

I mention these alternative understandings of philosophy in order to recall Walter Lippmann’s view, which was introduced under the rubric of "the public philosophy." Lippmann’s intention for the public philosophy, in the work bearing that name, was almost the opposite of that currently in usage. Lippmann was trying to set forth a few elements that he thought might bind Americans, despite their alternative partisan projects, to the deeper springs that supported liberal democratic government. His aim was largely trans-partisan. This elevated purpose, now all but forgotten (at least under the name of philosophy), was an especially important enterprise at a time when liberal democracy faced genuinely hostile ideologies.

Another implication of current discourse is the idea that a public philosophy is somehow the norm for American life. It is the norm in one or both of the following senses: that we have in fact had a dominant public philosophy during most of our history, and that the nation works best when there is one in place. Neither of these claims, it should be noted, has ever been rigorously established.

A final implication, actually more of a coda or addendum, is that we are living today in a period without a public philosophy. The last veritable public philosophy--the old champ, liberalism--has lost its hold, while the new contender--conservatism--has yet to grab the title, if indeed it ever will. This is now the conventional view, accepted perhaps even more by those on the Left than the Right. Intellectuals on the Left today readily concede that the public philosophy of liberalism ran out of steam shortly after reaching its high-water mark of influence with the Great Society. The sense that there was a vacuum was brought straight into the political arena by Gary Hart during his 1984 campaign for the Democratic nomination, when he spoke convincingly of the need for "new ideas," while not yet having any to supply. It remains boiler-plate think-tank rhetoric of the Left, as in the following declaration by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute: "The party’s old faith, New Deal progressivism, has run its course. . . . This has left Democrats without a clear governing philosophy that can infuse the party with an impelling sense of common purpose. . . . What is needed today is a new overarching creed."[8]

Lately, some on the Left have begun to think that they may have found that creed or some facsimile thereof. They have given the old champ a new name (they had long since abandoned liberalism for a short try with progressivism, only to embrace for a time New Democratism, and now to be experimenting with Third-Wayism); they have asked the old champ to slim down a bit and accept markets and modern management techniques ("lean and mean," I believe, is the operative expression); and they are pursuing state interventionism in micro bits, justified by high-tech reasoning or by plans to protect public health broadly conceived.

In the other corner sits the conservative contender--with the corner men all shouting different instructions. Conservatism began to come on as a potential public philosophy in the late 1970s just as liberalism was losing its force, and it subsequently became an article of faith that if any public philosophy thinking was occurring, it was on the conservative side. Liberal commentators paid conservatism the sincerest form of flattery by imitating conservative themes, latching on to the new concerns for civil society, for personal responsibility, and community. All this flattery and success, plus some electoral gains, has led many on the Right to conclude that conservatism is more than a contender, it is now fully in charge. We live, such conservatives say, in an era of conservative governance, no matter what the party label of those in power. Indeed, President Clinton said as much when he declared that the "era of Big Government is over," even if in his own mind he may have been entertaining questions about how big big is or how long an era lasts.

But if this is so and conservatism has triumphed, why have so many conservatives been the last to notice it? Why do so many conservatives, especially those emphasizing social or moral themes, argue that we have reached rock bottom and are somehow still sinking? And why, in any case, if there is a full conservative public philosophy in force does every conservative utterance about the public philosophy still begin with an extended commentary on what is wrong with liberalism? A real champ should by now have forgotten his washed-up predecessor and be looking for new challenges. Here, I suppose, is to be found part of the confusion of our era for conservatives, which is a confusion over whose era we are in. This situation is especially taxing for conservative strategists because they do not know whether to call attention to all the positive developments that have occurred and claim them as the happy consequence of conservative ideas, or point out all of the negative things that have happened and blame them on liberal ideas. If politicians complain about the problems of managing in an era of divided government, party thinkers face even greater difficulties in navigating an era of divided public philosophy.

Now perhaps we can begin to understand just why the concept of the public philosophy holds such allure for many inside the academy today. This attraction is obviously not being felt by historians itching to apply the concept to new studies of the past, but from political theorists thinking about acting in the present. If something large and important was done once, they ask, why can’t it be done again? Are we mere epigones incapable of achieving what past generations of thinkers had regularly been able to accomplish? And that excitement becomes all the greater if one assumes that there is no public philosophy in force today and that the country is at sea because of that absence. If this is the case, then there is more than just a theoretical possibility of refashioning a public philosophy and even more than even a good opportunity. There is a positive duty. On the wall of every theorist’s office must hang the poster of that stern man with the huge top hat and the outstretched pointed finger, "Uncle Sam Needs You."

And for the rare theorist who might be insufficiently moved by the call of duty, there is always the inducement of ambition. The public philosophy opens up a vast horizon for philosophers. Instead of contemplating a career closeted in a dim office pursuing some obscure mediaeval epistemological doctrine, an academic thinker might now imagine himself determining the whole field of public policy. There is something romantic in the now accepted notion of Herbert Croly heroically using pen and paper to reshape the nation. Richard Rorty’s Achieving our Country not only bears a title that is an echo of The Promise of American Life, but it is a work clearly written under Croly’s spell. Might it be said that our theorists suffer from Croly-envy?

And not just this. The term, by its very high-mindedness, leaves the theorist with his dignity wholly intact. Whereas few in the academy today would want to be known as an ideologist, to be touted a "public philosopher" or a "public intellectual" is a great boon. (A private intellectual, by contrast, must be someone who exchanges ideas with other consenting adults.) And as the originator of a public philosophy there would be no need to engage in displays of professorial vulgarity, like trying to outshout an opponent on a television talk show. No, for the originator of a public philosophy, it will be those in power seeking a meeting with the philosopher, as when TR wrote Herbert Croly after reading his book and declared that he "very much wanted a chance to talk."[9]

True--and this might be something the aspiring public philosopher should bear in mind--the relation of the thinker to those in power has rarely been very satisfactory, at any rate in the short run. Think, for example, of Plato’s unhappy experience in his voyage to Syracuse, Aristotle’s failure in tutoring Alexander, or Voltaire’s humiliation by Frederick the Great. And in our own day, can we not all join together to lament the sad fate Michael Lerner, whose reflections on the politics of meaning earned him for a moment the unofficial title of the First Lady’s philosopher, and who was then cast aside and declared persona non grata. Then, too, there is the sad spectacle of philosophers making almost unseemly overtures to those in power, behaving virtually as stalkers, hoping to secure access of some kind to the corridors of power. One thinks here of Jeremy Bentham, who badgered Presidents Madison and Jackson with lengthy missives and then, receiving no reply, tried the Governor of Pennsylvania, writing, "Join hands with me, you and I will govern the world. Sir, I will show you how we will govern it."[10]

II

Having noted some of the features of the prevailing discourse on the public philosophy and some things to be aware of--call them a few caveats--I nevertheless can see no reason to reject its basic insight, which is hardly very startling, that general ideas exercise an important influence on political life. Perhaps it would have been better if the activity of generating such ideas had been given another name, but that issue hardly seems worth much of a battle today.

If there is an objection to be made to this discourse, it is not, then, with the validity of its basic claim, but with the poverty of the concept as an analytic idea. Like so many historical concepts this one appears to explain much about the past while offering almost no guidance in the present. The sole point of instruction one can draw from this concept is this: Summon all your energy, all your insight, and all your poetic ability, pick what you feel to be at or near the core of the problem our society is facing, and go create a public philosophy. You offer your vision, I’ll offer mine.

Perhaps this is a domain in which nothing instructional can be said and in which individual insight is all that is possible. But might one not hold out the possibility of a political science for the public philosophy, meaning a systematic body of concepts that could help those wishing to engage in this task to be conscious of the character of their activity and aware of the ground they should cover? Such a political science would be filled with lists of general categories, and clearly it is not the material for an evening lecture. So I will restrict myself here to a few general comments before applying a small part of the analysis to the subject.

First, as much as success in getting certain ideas to govern or prevail is one concern of public philosophy thinking, it cannot be the standard by which such ideas are judged today. Take here, if you wish, the Croly model. Croly published The Promise of American Life in 1909, but the success of his public philosophy did not come until more than a quarter of a century later, after Croly himself had died. (Like Moses, Croly was not permitted to enter the promised land.) We cannot judge from the future, because we live in the present. The absence of a dominant public philosophy in American politics today, if this is the case, does not mean that a body of thought worthy of a public philosophy is not already here.

Furthermore, the triumph of any set of ideas is never solely the result of the ideas themselves. Theorists looking back often exaggerate the direct influence of ideas, forgetting that in politics there are also such small things as events, statesmen, and contingencies. Just imagine the public philosophy in the 1930s if a Democrat rather than a Republican had been in the White House when the Depression occurred. Or imagine if the Republicans had held the White House in 1992 and had been able to attach in the public mind the current prosperity to conservative ideas. It is evident that no straight one-to-one, cause-and-effect relationship exists between ideas and political success, even if it is often the practice of intellectual historians to make it look as if this is the case. Neither can one infer a deficiency of ideas from every political defeat.

The only reasonable standard to apply in judging the criterion of success for a set of ideas is therefore this: can we judge the ideas now to have the potential to exercise enough weight with elites and the public to be able to govern and, should the political breaks follow, to command the kind of following that could enable them to achieve predominance.

Second, public philosophy thinking is a particular kind of thinking about politics that has its own domain and it own purpose. It is not synonymous with all "big thinking" about political life. It is thinking that considers, as one important concern, how thought might be able to make itself actual or effective in the world in the not too distant future. This means that many theories or ideas of first preference are probably not statements of a public philosophy in the strict sense. When someone writes a book, for example, about why he is a libertarian or a Christian conservative, he is no doubt expressing his deepest view of truth and may even, I would concede, be exercising some influence on public philosophy thinking. But where it is recognized that such a position is not in fact capable of commanding a following among elite and publics broad enough to govern, it is not public philosophy thinking. This does not mean that such thinking is not as interesting or as important as public philosophy thinking--indeed the contrary may be the case. It only means that the function and purpose of different modes of thinking ought to be kept distinct, so that each can perform its particular task well. Public philosophy thinking has an apologetic, a strategic, and a political dimension to it.

Third, public philosophy thinking does not have in view just the aim of (temporarily) prevailing, but of being a good guide for directing a general course of action. It has a steering function to perform and is looked to for that purpose. Of course what constitutes a good guide will differ according to one’s partisan leanings, but assuming a public philosophy for those who share roughly the same impulses--say conservatism--there is still much work to do. People look to a public philosophy to help--in the degree to which any set of ideas can help--to avoid getting off the track and falling into contradictions. A public philosophy ought to be able to help to provide for some coherence. Conservatives, for example, might look to guidance from public philosophy thinking in order to consider how much to invest in the principle of populism, if it should turn out later that they may want to take the side of constitutionalism. These are just the kind of matters where people of roughly the same views will be looking for guidance, honestly looking to avoid falling into unnecessary confusions. And they will want to know when they are adopting a position for merely tactical reasons, rather than reasons of principle, so that they can avoid elevating the former to the status of the latter.

To provide assistance in such matters, public philosophy thinking must avoid focusing on one element, no matter how important it seems at the moment. The reason for this caution is that an idea in respect to one element may turn out to conflict or undercut a favored position on some other element. To speak in the jargon of political science, the various elements in the political field are related as a kind of system in which a stance on one element affects or implies something about a stance on the others. An objective of public philosophy thinking, therefore, is to become cognizant of the full field of elements that comprises a public philosophy and of the connections that exist among these elements. Progress toward this objective can be made by studying past public philosophies to observe the areas they have covered and the areas it seems that they ought to have covered (as might be known from criticisms they met or from troubles or contradictions that may have developed).

The elements discovered to be inside this field consist of the following: a conception of the general ends of society as a whole, the role of government and civil society in promoting those ends, the basis of solidarity or citizenship, a theory of governance (including the role of the Constitution, the proper arrangement among the national institutions, the proper relationship among the levels of government, and the principle of who should rule, e.g.. more populism of representation), and the role for the United States in the world. It is not, of course, being suggested that the presentation of a public philosophy should cover every element, as some may be of no interest or relevance in a given historical context. Keeping all the elements in mind is meant to aid the process of thinking through a public philosophy, not in directing how it is to be fashioned and presented. Nor, finally, should the idea of a "system" be taken to mean that these elements are all tightly or fully connected. Indeed, the guiding or steering function of a public philosophy, I would argue, often consists in insisting on the degree of autonomy of these different elements and in resisting overblown intellectual claims that seek to deduce policy in all areas of political life from a single idea or principle. Such a conception of "theory" has long been the bane of a prudent understanding of politics and statesmanship.

The final point for a political science of a public philosophy--and the one I would like to discuss further--relates to the background elements that justify or underwrite the key elements inside the political field I just mentioned, above all the general goals of society. If it is claimed, for example, that a primary goal of society ought to be social justice or equality (rather than liberty), it may be asked why. An answer, I suppose, is that one is stating one’s "values," and just leave it at that. But this is not how public life works. People generally have justifications for their positions, or they expect justifications to be stated. It is by reference to these justifications that a public philosophy may present itself as something stable, rather than a mere list of values that is stated today and perhaps changed tomorrow. One can think of these justifications either as the real causes that in fact lead people to support certain goals; or, from a purely rhetorical perspective, as reasons that must be offered to try to persuade people of a position and convince them to hold to it.

These background elements are at the core of public philosophy thinking. They are its deeper and some might argue its controlling parts, and just as in the case of the elements in the political field they must be studied and considered from the point of view of how they function and what connections they bear to one another. The background elements are three in number, consisting of grounding, narrative, and sentiment. By a grounding, I mean the philosophical or theological basis for a position--as, for example, when one argues for liberty and rights because they are grounded in nature and natural rights. By a narrative, I mean an account of things in time that can establish a position by virtue of the sense it makes inside of history--as, for example, when one supports liberalism because it is a system said to be the wave of the future. By a sentiment, I mean an open appeal in the form of a public justification of an emotion or feeling--as, for example, when one supports liberalism because it furthers compassion.[11]

To reiterate, behind the statement of a political position are reasons or justifications that back up and underwrite any position These are a place in the universe, a location in time, and a feeling inside the human heart. Public philosophy thinking must consciously address each one.

III

The public philosophy that held sway for much of this century is liberalism. To understand the character of the three background elements to a public philosophy--ground, narrative, and sentiment--it should help to examine each of them in the context of liberal thought, concentrating on the period of origins when the expression of its thinking was clearest and perhaps most candid.

Liberalism has become so dominant in shaping our thinking that we need to remind ourselves that it first came to sight as a reaction. It was a reaction against "individualism," or what Croly sometimes called "false" or "extreme" individualism and Dewey the "old individualism." Individualism was the keyword or slogan used to describe the fundamental characteristics of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regime: an emphasis on individual rights, especially in the realm of economics, that led to a preoccupation with money making (which was identified as the good), and the unchecked and growing economic inequality, insecurity, and exploitation that flowed from this arrangement. Many of liberalism’s categories of thought were shaped by the reaction to this regime.

Let us consider the first element--what I called the grounding--on which liberalism built its case. Liberals might have avoided an extended discussion of a grounding--at any rate a new grounding--if they had said that individualism was not the sole logical development of the existing ground of natural rights. On this assumption, liberals could have proposed a political correction of course within the horizon of the old framework, arguing perhaps that natural rights were being interpreted in an unnecessarily exaggerated way that produced extreme claims of rights or hyper-individualism. And they could have argued that the Constitution was being interpreted erroneously, especially by the courts, in a way that made it impossible to take adequate steps to limit the growing economic inequalities and reduce economic exploitation.

But while many of the progressives endorsed these arguments as far as they went, the leading liberals in fact went further. Their position, more openly articulated by Dewey than by Croly, was that individualism was itself the direct and logical expression of the doctrine of nature and natural rights and of religion. To undermine individualism, accordingly, its philosophical and religious foundation had to be attacked; and to prepare the way for a new system, a new grounding had to be offered. This is why metaphysics and theology must become political.

The liberal assault on natural rights philosophy was not a complete, frontal attack on the founders. The articulation of natural rights thinking at the time of the founding had a positive, not a negative, effect. It had, Dewey said, "an immediate pragmatic value" for its time by fighting reactionaries and undermining appeals to "origin, precedent and past history."[12] Indeed, perhaps no more should be asked of a philosophical doctrine than that it function well in the circumstances in which it is used and help get a job done. But conditions in society had now changed. Productive capacities had grown more complicated and the impact of individual actions on others had increased tremendously. Under these conditions, the use of the old metaphysical doctrine of natural rights, advanced as a "timeless truth," had a regressive effect. That doctrine had to be discarded and a new one developed.[13]

Dewey took a further step that is of considerable interest to philosophy when he insisted that not just natural rights philosophy, but any kind of metaphysics or philosophy--any view of Nature--must now have a regressive effect. A view of Nature is somehow undemocratic because its suggests a hierarchy of beings; and it is regressive because it represents that certain things have a fixed quality and cannot be manipulated and re-made by our will. On the other hand, if everything is matter in motion, linked perhaps by laws of regularity, then there is no hierarchy and everything can be recast according to our will and intelligence.[14] Pragmatism was meant to be the last philosophy by eliminating the claim to authority within politics of any kind of philosophy, of any doctrine labeled "natural" with a capital N. Dewey sought to have method and science--ultimately social science--occupy the intellectual space of metaphysics and religion. The neo-pragmatist, Richard Rorty, follows Dewey in this attempt to eliminate any public role for philosophy or religion, only he fills that space with an aesthetic method of linguistic therapy rather than a scientific method of direct administration and social control.

What was to replace individualism as the end of society? Liberals proposed two goals: (1) greater security and equality, what people today call "social justice," and (2) individualism properly understood, which Croly and Dewey often called "individuality" or the "real" or "new" individualism.[15] Dewey wrote, "The problem of constructing a new individuality consonant with the objective conditions under which we live is the deepest problem of our times."[16] The new individuality had an extraordinarily vague and airy quality to it. It meant a freeing of the individual from the pursuit of mere necessities to something higher. The aim, as Croly put it, was to "raise human nature."[17] This "raising" of human nature included the feeling of being a participant in the collective national project of taking charge of our conditions and acting to make them better. Participating in the means to the end, in the collective project of "social improvement," became itself part of the end of what Croly called "the increase in American individuality."[18] The fusion of the particular (the individual) and the general (the nation) acquires an almost new age or mystical quality in Croly’s prose, perhaps because this is the only way they can be united: "The individual becomes a nation in miniature, but devoted to the loyal realization of a purpose peculiar to himself. The nation becomes an enlarged individual whose special purpose is that of human amelioration, and in whose life every individual should find some particular but essential function."[19]

Of concern here is the ground liberals advanced to undermine support for individualism and then to underwrite these new goals for society of social justice and individuality. To undercut individualism, the individual had to be denied primary reality. There must be no self-subsisting or, as Dewey said, "ready-made" individuals; instead there was an entity that is moved, shaped, and formed by something outside of itself. Social institutions "are means of creating individuals."[20] The individual, in Rorty’s words, is a "social construction, and discursive practices go all the way down."[21] The ground Dewey offered is a form of Darwinism and pragmatism--Darwinism meaning that biological things were in a state of flux and movement with no fixed natures, although somehow moving forward; and pragmatism meaning that for its part the human species can only seize on this possibility of moving forward by employing "social intelligence."[22] Not each person acting for himself in a process of the survival of the fittest, but the collective action of society under the direction of social science, is the source of progress. The "technique of social and moral engineering" and the exercise of "social control" were the ways to ensure that society will move forward.[23]

A faith in science or what science can do not only runs through the whole period, but it has special application to our central figure, Herbert Croly. Croly’s father, David Croly, was an actual convert to Auguste Comte’s religion of Humanity, and Herbert was physically baptized in this religion, which I suppose must have involved some sort of immersion into a vat of social statistics. In fact, David Croly in a letter to Herbert summed up the core of the liberal project as well as anyone, "Society is an organism controlled by laws of development which when discovered can be modified by man for himself."[24]

It has sometimes been asked why this school and its leading proponent, John Dewey, showed so decided a preference for an enlarged role for the "state" and "administration" when the case in favor of collective public solutions had never been proven on the "pragmatic" grounds of actual performance. In part, this was a reaction to the fact that the Constitution as interpreted had excluded legislation in certain areas. But there is more to it than this. Pragmatism in fact never meant, as many now suppose it did when they use the word, a neutral weighing of the various strategies, (including the strategy of avoiding any active planning); rather, it meant applying social science in a vigorous and proactive way to master and control social processes. Not only was the old presumption in favor of restraint eliminated, but a new presumption in favor of experimentation and social engineering was implemented.[25]

Rexford Tugwell, who would later become a leader of Franklin Roosevelt’s early brain trust, offered a revealing answer. What he learned from Dewey, he said, was that pragmatism in the social sphere "meant something more than judging things or institutions by working tests. It meant the future could be brought into focus; judged in advance as a working hypothesis, and altered before it was reached. This was and is the essence of planning."[26] Pragmatism as a philosophical grounding thus supplied a foundation for--or at least it gave a license to--abandoning limited government and establishing the norm of expanding government.

A word should be said here about the connection between this background element and one element inside the political field, the place of the Constitution and constitutionalism. Pragmatism is thought that is a- or anti-constitutional because it is theoretically at odds with the idea of limited government and with the structures designed to promote it. This attack on constitutionalism is explicit in Dewey’s work, more veiled in Croly’s. It is found implicitly as well in Woodrow Wilson’s work, specifically in his charge that the Constitution was based on an outmoded "Newtonian" foundation, whereas we today ought to be taking our bearings from "Darwinian" premises.[27] Social intelligence cannot work its way if it is impeded by arbitrary limitations on its scope. It cannot be constrained by doctrines of limited government and by supporting mechanisms such as the separation of powers. The deepest problem we face, therefore, is not an erroneous prevailing interpretation of the Constitution, but the Constitution and indeed constitutionalism itself. For Dewey, social science or policy science, with the sole stipulation that it operate under democratic control, replaces constitutionalism. This is the new Constitution.

The rejection of the Constitution and constitutionalism opened up a new discourse in American public life, which until then had generally been bounded by a constitutional-legal discourse, with general references to the broad philosophic principles of natural rights that underlay it.[28] Both major political parties in the nineteenth century claimed to be constitutional parties--one of broader construction that allowed for the use of considerable discretion, the other of narrower or strict construction that demanded a specific authority for any exercise of power. These were important differences to be sure, but both parties were constitutional parties nonetheless. It may be, as some have argued, that in the case of the national government the constitutional mechanism of enumerated powers was a weak basis on which to enforce limited government. But even so, in combination with an acceptance of the basic philosophy of limited government, it had at least a symbolic function as a check on governmental power.

With liberalism, however, an appeal was made beyond the Constitution to philosophy, and to a philosophy that was openly opposed to constitutionalism. This new philosophy made an expanding government, supposedly under policy science guided by democratic wishes, the expected, the normal, and the fully legitimate mode of operation. Initially at least, a discourse of pragmatic philosophy was to replace a discourse of law, and we were to become a philosophy-abiding people rather than a law abiding people. Probably, too, our parties have never been the same since, as at least one of them surely takes its bearing from a philosophy at odds with constitutionalism. To be sure, this radical attack on constitutionalism was quickly covered over by a different rhetoric--that of interpreting the Constitution in the spirit of the times (or what is sometimes called constitutional non-interpretivism). Furthermore, the very idea of constitutional sanctity was employed by liberalism to expand government still further, as the concept of guaranteed constitutional rights was employed, often by courts, to sanction a further enlargement of national power. But through all of these tactical shifts, the kernel of the original liberal view has remained the real operative doctrine.

Individualism rested, in Dewey’s view, not just on a philosophical view of nature, but on religion as well. The connection to religion is less frequently discussed today, but there is no question that pragmatism sought to undermine religion with nearly the same fervor that it attacked natural rights philosophy. Pragmatism was not just a secular philosophy--what philosophy, perhaps, is not?--but a philosophy that sought actively to promote a secularization of society. It wanted to eliminate religion as an influence on the formation of individual souls and to do away with organized religion as a social force that helped minister to society’s social problems.

John Dewey pursued these objectives in part by means of redescription or linguistic therapy. There was, Dewey said, religion, and there was the religious. If one could establish that the religious had no necessary connection with religion, then an attack on religion could perhaps be pursued with less confrontation and pain. The tactic was to de-couple the religious from anything having to do with God or with institutions that operated in the service of God--with anything having to do with creed, code cult, and community. Religiousness, Dewey said, consisted in a "quality of experience" that accompanies "any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal and against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value."[29] The religious is "the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends."[30] According to the Humanist Manifesto, which was signed by John Dewey, "Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy . . . and love . . . all that is . . . expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained."[31]

The highest horizon is to be found in social or political membership in what Croly called the nation and Dewey the Great Community. This membership consists in being part of the project of social intelligence that is employed to reconstruct democratic life. As democratic intelligence and instrumentalism "find expression in social life," Dewey wrote, they will "take on religious value. The religious spirit will be revivified because it will be in harmony with men’s unquestioned scientific beliefs and their ordinary day-to-day activities."[32] This goal remains, oddly enough, a central element of current pragmatic (or neo-pragmatic) thought. Richard Rorty calls for a culture that should be "secular through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to which human beings should be responsible."[33]

Is this militant atheism merely a nice add-on--a splendid dessert, as it were, for the pragmatist’s main course--or is the connection to pragmatism essential? For Dewey, it is clear that the project of undermining individualism required this attack on religion. Although this may have been particularly true in the case of Protestantism, which of course had a special individualist caste to it and had gone hand-in hand with the development of philosophical individualism, it was true as well for all of Christianity and Judaism. These religions hold that there is an individual with a moral make-up. The individual is something more than an entity shaped at will by social intelligence. The individual has a "constitution"--a soul--and a relationship as an individual to something beyond the community. By the same token--and here is where Dewey resisted the Church’s role in ministering to social problems--the religions operated under the idea that not all social problems can be resolved by adjustments in the environment or by modes of psychological therapy. The "treatment’ of some problems may involve a change of heart or a "turning." Religion thus challenges the claims of social science to be able to shape human beings and solve all social problems. At the outer limits, it is either God or social science. And this of course takes us to the heart of many controversies of modern social policy.

If the need to undermine individualism explains one part of Dewey’s attack on religion, the need to generate some emotional or affective energy on behalf of the secular Great Community may explain the rest. There is no question--Dewey himself makes this point clear--that it is to the benefit of the Great Community if citizens could devote themselves to the project of social transformation in a "religious" spirit. The displacement of religious sentiments onto a political project helps to stimulate a devotion to it and to generate authority for its new clerisy of philosophical engineers, social scientists, and administrators.[34] This political pantheism remains alive today and is a key element of Richard Rorty’s attempt to resurrect Walt Whitman, along with John Dewey, as the spiritual sources for a renewed Left. At a conference at the University of Virginia held in 1998 to celebrate Richard Rorty’s book, the public intellectual Paul Berman bore his soul to the audience, announcing: "Democracy is my religion." He did not say whether he was originally baptized into this religion or had only more recently converted, on the road to Charlottesville, upon reading Achieving our Country.

For liberals the second background element of a public philosophy--the narrative--has no doubt been more important, at least rhetorically, than the discussion of philosophy and theology. They perceive that human beings (or "subjects" as they are now often called) are moved more convincingly by where they are able to locate themselves inside of time than where they place themselves in nature. We are, Michael Sandel tells us, "storytelling beings."[35] In this, of course, liberals are only following modern philosophy, one of the tenets of which has been to replace an account of where man fits into nature with where he situates himself in history.

The liberalism of Croly and Dewey relies on a narrative of progress and growth. Its history is one that recognizes progress in the past, but a deep crisis in the present that puts in jeopardy what humans have achieved. But there is no question of progress in the future, if only the new methods of social intelligence are adopted. The future is something far more than restoration of anything in the past. It is something new and better than anything seen before, with better defined in processual terms as "growth" and the "ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing and refining. . . ."[36] This is history without a sense of the tragic. It is history that supports fully the pragmatic project, on the basis of the view that if we devote ourselves to that project we will be progressively rewarded with a better world. This is the great "promise" of American life. It was, of course, the rejection of the belief in progress in the 1960s by the academic left that helped bring liberalism into its disarray.

The last background element is sentiment, or the passion or feeling that supports a position. It has been argued that in the modern world, it is this element, far more than either a philosophical ground or a narrative, that moves humans. The deepest legislation is a "sentimental education."[37] Today’s liberalism is supported by compassion, which has arguably been the element that in recent years has done the most to hold liberalism together. Liberalism has promoted the value or strength of compassion, touting it at every opportunity. Indeed, compassion runs so deep that it is the culture, independently of any political program, that now supports this compassion. Compassion is then relied on as a weapon to attack foes (who are seen as "mean-spirited" or "hard-hearted") and bolster one’s own cause.

It is here that we observe one of the more striking differences between the liberalism of the first generation and the liberalism of today. Early liberalism, while appealing intellectually to democratic ends, relied on what was a quasi-aristocratic sentiment: conquest. The project or challenge of conquering society to meet social objectives, of making ourselves more "efficient" in controlling ourselves, was meant to be inspiriting especially for the social science elites. Croly’s biographer writes that he "concluded that American artists and intellectuals could be saved only by the remaking of American society."[38] The enterprise of liberalism cannot begin to be understood without appreciating the excitement that applying social science to society once engendered--and still engenders--among certain elites. Society is the canvas on which these new artists paint their master work. Their medium is the government program.

IV

Let us turn in conclusion to conservatives in their attempt to craft a public philosophy in our time. As with the early liberalism, conservatism began as a reaction, and that reaction has fixed in large degree the categories of its view. The reaction of the first wave of conservatism came in response to the policies of the New Deal and to many of the collectivist measures of "social control." But the modern era of conservatism, which brought conservative ideas into genuine contention for "shaping the public mind," has been a post-Great Society development. It began in reaction to the level or magnitude of intervention and social control that was found in some of the Great Society programs.

This reaction began modestly, by relying heavily on an empirical social science. This social science began to call into question the kind of project that, it had been said, social science was supposed to have supported. The newer social science argued that many of the policy interventions and experiments were ineffective, that they rested on a flawed social science harboring an intellectual bias toward intervention, and that a social science establishment had developed that had an institutionalized self-interest in interventions. The public turned as well, sensing that the public administrator was no longer always the friend, but an alien or enemy. The label conservatives eventually gave to the excess of government they opposed was Big Government.

There was another point of reaction that was combined at times with the reaction to Big Government, although it was really more qualitative than quantitative in nature. (Indeed, this point is partially obscured to conservatives themselves by virtue of their reliance on the term Big Government, which puts the emphasis on size or quantity.) In the study of the failures of some of the Great Society programs, a suspicion developed that there was something more shaping humans than the environment or material incentives or perhaps even psychological incentives. This would be the beginning of the reaction to the whole idea of the "social construction" of the subject who is seen as having no soul. Not just the pretensions, but the very premise, of solving certain kinds of human problems by means of social science programs was brought home to many conservatives by their reaction to the ideas of the Great Society. Harry McPherson, one of Lyndon Johnson’s principal advisors, spoke the language of Deweyism when he spelled out the Great Society’s plans for "raising human nature":

[P]eople were suffering from a sense of alienation from one another, of anomie, of powerlessness. This affected the well to do as much as it did the poor. Middle-class women, bored and friendless in the suburban afternoons; father, working at "meaningless" jobs, or slumped before the television sets; sons and daughters desperate for relevance--all were in need of community, beauty, purpose. . . . What would change all of this was a creative public effort: for the middle class new parks, conservation, the removal of billboards and junk . . . better television aid to the arts; for the poor job, training, Head Start, decent housing, medical care, civil rights, for both, and for bridging the gap between them, VISTA, the teacher corps, the community action agencies, mass transportation, model cities.[39]

The final reaction of conservatism has been against the form and shape of the culture. It was connected to the practical question of the causes of recognized social problems and pathologies, such as crime and poverty. But the reaction has gone much further to the very character of that culture. And conservatives have been unsure about where exactly to place the blame. Is it just Big Government? Or is it the consequence of the process and policy of secularizing society? And are the causes to be found primarily in what liberalism promoted, or do the sources go back further still, even to our own founding?

Conservatism is still in the stage of defining and characterizing its reactions--indeed it is trying still to decide against just whom or what it is reacting. That it has struggled with these questions--and often gotten tangled up in locating and naming the causes--is understandable. When one thinks of how deeply liberalism has sunk its roots into our national mind--how far it has succeeded in transforming once contested ways of thinking into what are now regarded as impartial starting points for viewing the world--one begins to appreciate how much is involved in an effort to overturn a public philosophy and to establish a new one. And it is obvious, too, how much more is entailed in this task than determining who is making decisions today in Washington, however important that is. It is a project that must address at the same time every one of the elements of a public philosophy, including those deeper background elements that are one remove from immediate political struggles. And this means that conservatives need to be thinking--as of course many of them are--in strategic terms about what will be our ground, our narrative, and our sentimental education.

Notes

For an overview of this kind of discourse theory, see Daniel T. Rogers Contested Truths (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Samuel Beer, "In Search of a New Public Philosophy" in Anthony King, ed. The New American Political System (Washington: AEI Press, 1977).

Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).

For other statements see Hugh Heclo, "Reaganism and the Search for a Public Philosophy," in John Palmer, ed. Perspectives on the Reagan Years, (Washington: Urban Institute, 1988); William Galston, "A Public Philosophy for the 21st Century," The Responsive Community, Summer 1998.

See Martha Derthick and Paul Quirk, The Politics of Deregulation (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985) for the role of ideas inside of a particular policy arena.

Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Dutton, 1963, orig. 1909), p. 452.

David Hume, "Of the Original Contract," in Eugene Miller, ed. Essays, p. 469.

Will Marshall, "A New Fighting Faith" The New Democrat , September-October 1996, p. 14.

Cited in Charles Forcey’s "Introduction" to The Promise of American Life (New York: Dutton, 1963), p. viii.

Bentham, Collected Works, 4:474. Cited in Rogers, Contested Truths, p. 26.

Should an appeal to experience (what works) or real social science be included as a fourth background element?

John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Putnam, 1935), p. 32. I am following here the analysis of James H. Nichols, Jr. in his article "Pragmatism and the U.S. Constitution" in Allan Bloom, ed., Confronting the Constitution (Washington: AEI, 1990), p. 373.

Cited in Nichols, p. 373.

John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957, orig. 1920), pp. 64-66.

See The Promise of American Life, chap iii. Sec 2; and Samuel Beer, "Liberalism and the National Idea" in Robert Goldwin, ed., Left, Right, and Center (Chicago: Rand McNally 1967), pp. 161-62.

John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (New York: Minton, Balch and Co. 1930), p. 32; see also Nichols, p. 373.

Croly, The Promise of American Life, p. 399.

Croly, The Promise of American Life, p. 410; discussed also in Beer (1967), p. 162.

Croly, The Promise of American Life, p. 414.

Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 194.

Rorty here is describing Dewey’s view (and his own) of the subject. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), p. 35.

This characterization of the influence of Darwinism is meant to be taken in a general way. It has been expressed by many analysts of Dewey’s thought. See, for example, Bruce Kuklick, "John Dewey, American Theology, and Scientific Politics" in Religion and Twentieth Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael Lacy (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1989), p. 81; and Nichols.

Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 173. "Social control" was one of the favorite terms in Dewey’s rhetorical arsenal.

John Jordan, Machine Age Ideology (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press 1994), p. 69.

See John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, p. 34.

Rexford Tugwell, To Lesser Heights of Morningside (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 157.

Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, orig. 1908)

There were some exceptions, as in the Confederate challenge to natural rights. Recurring to the purer philosophy of natural rights, divorced from legal doctrine, could sometimes rekindle more "revolutionary" sentiments, as in the movements for labor rights, abolitionism, and women’s rights. It is for this reason that certain conservatives, like Rufus Choate, sought to hide or subordinate any natural rights discourse. Later in the nineteenth century, natural rights discourse was often used in legal forums as a conservative defense of property rights--indeed, this was what Dewey and other progressives were often objecting to. I would contend, however, that a more careful analysis of this period would show that it was less natural rights than a new interpolation of biological natural selection that underwrote some of these more extreme defenses of property rights.

John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p.27. Quoted also in William Shea and Peter Huff, Knowledge and Belief in America (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Press), p. 297.

Dewey, A Common Faith (different edition), cited in Shea and Huff, p. 42.

Humanist Manifesto, 1933. Seventh proposition.

Reconstruction in Philosophy, quoted in Shea and Huff, p. 43. See also Richard Rorty’s account in Achieving Our Country, p. 18.

Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.45.

"Philosophical engineers" is a term used by Stuart Chase, The Nemesis of American Business (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 179.

Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge: Harvard, 1996), p. 351.

Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 177.

See Clifford Orwin, "Moist Eyes--From Rousseau to Clinton" The Public Interest, Summer 1997. (Based on a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute on April 14, 1997.)

Charles Forcey, "Introduction" to The Promise of American Life, p. xv.

Harry McPhearson, A Political Education, pp 301-02.