Liberal Meltdown

ALAN RYAN tells us in the preface to this book that he began it not long after he moved to Princeton University and finished a book on the politics of Bertrand Russell—a time at which “it. seemed plausible to explore Dewey’s place in a secular trinity of liberal intellectuals consisting of Mill, Russell, and him.” This is not a very promising beginning to a book of which it would be unfair, but at the same time not entirely untrue, to say that it exhibits several of the defects of its subject.

John Dewey’s thought, as Ryan ably expounds it, was animated by a passion for intellectual reconciliation, which led Dewey to soften or blur distinctions that produced decisive contrasts and conflicts even in the thought of other liberal intellectuals. Such was the distinction between science and religion in the thought of Bertrand Russell, who always maintained that the scientific outlook undermined the hopes expressed by religion. For Russell, unlike Dewey, religious faith was real enough for its absence to be perceived as a loss. Indeed, Russell was liable throughout his long life to episodes of despair about the human lot that he himself accounted for, in part, by reference to his “vain search for God.” It is difficult to think of a sharper contrast or conflict between liberal intellectuals than between Russell and .Dewey, whose pursuit of moral uplift eventuated in a faith in democracy and the common man that Russell never shared, and whose life- long pragmatist project of making science and religion collaborators in a common enterprise of world improvement Russell heartily despised.

JG

About the Author

John Gray

ALAN RYAN tells us in the preface to this book that he began it not long after he moved to Princeton University and finished a book on the politics of Bertrand Russell—a time at which “it. seemed plausible to explore Dewey’s place in a secular trinity of liberal intellectuals consisting of Mill, Russell, and him.” This is not a very promising beginning to a book of which it would be unfair, but at the same time not entirely untrue, to say that it exhibits several of the defects of its subject.

John Dewey’s thought, as Ryan ably expounds it, was animated by a passion for intellectual reconciliation, which led Dewey to soften or blur distinctions that produced decisive contrasts and conflicts even in the thought of other liberal intellectuals. Such was the distinction between science and religion in the thought of Bertrand Russell, who always maintained that the scientific outlook undermined the hopes expressed by religion. For Russell, unlike Dewey, religious faith was real enough for its absence to be perceived as a loss. Indeed, Russell was liable throughout his long life to episodes of despair about the human lot that he himself accounted for, in part, by reference to his “vain search for God.” It is difficult to think of a sharper contrast or conflict between liberal intellectuals than between Russell and .Dewey, whose pursuit of moral uplift eventuated in a faith in democracy and the common man that Russell never shared, and whose life- long pragmatist project of making science and religion collaborators in a common enterprise of world improvement Russell heartily despised.