Democracy as Culture: Deweyan Pragmatism in a Globalizing World

Explores the significance of Dewey’s thought on democracy for the contemporary world.Using a multidisciplinary approach, contributors to this volume explore the significance of John Dewey’s Pragmatism for the contemporary world. They examine such issues as whether Classical Pragmatism justifies global democracy, whether Dewey’s idea of democracy—so intimately linked to American culture—has any relevance for other cultures, and whether democracy can take other forms than those found in Europe and America. Contributors focus on Dewey’s cross-cultural experience and affinities with Descartes and modern Neo-Confucians to provide a glimpse of how Dewey’s influence outside America has stimulated other cultures, heralding a new stage in the growth of Pragmatism.“It is high time, the editors suggest, that we stop bundling democracy with Western political systems in the way that Explorer has been automatically bundled with the Windows operating system. There is much valuable material in this book to aid the project of reconstructing democracy as an open-source conception—a conception applicable in many cultural architectures to guide the realization of a better quality community.” — J. E. Tiles, author of Dewey“This book as a whole exhibits the fresh thinking Dewey called ‘experimental intelligence’: exploratory not dogmatic, boldly imaginative not clichéd, constructive not nugatory.” — George Allan, author of Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon At the National University of Singapore, Sor-hoon Tan is Associate Professor of Philosophy, and John Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature. Tan is the author of Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction, also published by SUNY Press, and editor of Challenging Citizenship: Group Membership and Cultural Identity in a Global Age. Whalen-Bridge is the author of Political Fiction and the American Self. Read more