Just one more species doing its best

Richard Rorty

• The Later Works 1925-1953. Volume XVII: Miscellaneous Writings, 1885-1953 by John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston
  Southern Illinois, 786 pp, $50.00, August 1990, ISBN 0 8093 1661 7
• Dewey by J.E. Tiles
  Routledge, 256 pp, £35.00, December 1988, ISBN 0 415 00908 1
• John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook
  Cornell, 608 pp, $32.95, May 1991, ISBN 0 8014 2560 3
• Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford by Casey Blake
  North Carolina, 370 pp, $38.45, November 1990, ISBN 0 8078 1935 2

A.J. Ayer began his Bertrand Russell with his customary insouciance, saying that Russell was ‘unique among the philosophers of this century in combining the study of the specialised problems of philosophy, not only with an interest in both the natural and the social sciences, but with an engagement in primary as well as higher education, and an active participation in politics’. Dozens of 20th-century philosophers have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful.