4 Social Intelligence and Equality The democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has. (LW14: 227) We talk a great deal about democracy as equality of opportunity and then we adopt a system of private ownership of opportunities that makes our boast a farce and a tragedy. (LW11: 256) Throughout his life and beyond it, Dewey’s work on creative democracy has largely been criticized
This book argues that John Dewey should be read as a philosopher of globalization rather than as a 'local' American philosopher. Although Dewey's political philosophy was rooted in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, it was more importantly about the role of America in a globalized world. The book highlights how Dewey's defence of democracy in the context of what he denotes as the Great Society leads him to confront the problems of globalization and global democracy. Then, it explores how Dewey's conception of creative democracy had global connotations. The book examines how Dewey problematized his own conception of democracy through arguing that the public within modern nation states was 'eclipsed' under the regime he called 'bourgeois democracy'. Then, it shifts the terrain of Dewey's global focus to ideas of global justice and equality. The book demonstrates that Dewey's idea of global democracy was linked with an idea of global equality, which would secure social intelligence on a global scale. It outlines the key Deweyan lessons about the problem of global democracy. The book shows how Dewey sets out an evolutionary form of global and national democracy in his work. Finally, it also outlines how Dewey believed liberal capitalism was unable to support social intelligence and needed replacing with a form of democratic socialism.
‘global’ philosopher and global democrat. This was because Dewey understood that the Great Society and the globalization and scientific revolutions that underpinned it both demanded and offered potential avenues to renew and refresh democracy as a way of life across and between nation states. This held the potential of helping humanity not only move forwards and away from extinction but also move towards a more enhanced and enriched shared existence. This was the dual promise Dewey saw in creative democracy and social intelligence within a global Great Community. In
series – all skills which are independent from prior experience and learned knowledge. The second kind of scientific intelligence is a social intelligence, that is, the capability to navigate and negotiate with others, because scientific method is an intersubjective process that depends upon the careful inspection of results, as well as their approval and sharing by other members of the scientific community. Socially speaking, science is a liberal–democratic system in which scientists have freedom of thought and expression and share values and rules that allow rational
communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertakings engaged in’ (LW13: 176). The emergence and conditions of the Great Society did not automatically lend themselves towards the creation of a Great Community but rather held the potential to facilitate such a goal. In short, the global public or rather global publics will not emerge without conscious action and the conscious dispersion of democratic habits that induce social intelligence both within and beyond the nation state. Dewey therefore provides us with the lesson that democratic
, which would secure social intelligence on a global scale. The logical result of this argument is a radical conception of global justice and the need for economic equality within and beyond nations. This revolves around examining how Dewey’s idea of creative democracy was based upon a form of deliberation he called social intelligence and how social intelligence is essentially an adoption of the ‘scientific attitude of the mind’ into moral and political matters. It will be argued that Dewey did not believe that liberal capitalism’s culture and political economy could
Dewey artificial intellectual inequality engendered by bourgeois democracy and elements of its consumer culture: The indictments that are drawn against intelligence of individuals are in truth indictments of a social order that does not permit the average individual to have access to the rich store of the accumulated wealth of mankind in knowledge, ideas and purposes. There does not now exist the kind of social organization that even permits the average human being to share the potentially available social intelligence. Still less is there a social order that has for