Politics, Pluralism, and Uncertainty: John Dewey and Michael Oakeshott

Washington, DC: Where Democracy Meets Obsessive Academics

I’ve promised before that I would eventually explain my dissertation topic (successfully defended on Dec. 3rd). Enough people have asked that I’m finally going to give it a go. Don’t blame me if you find yourself asleep on your keyboard, though…

I came to college ready to save the United States (and the world) from the spectre of George W. Bush’s neo-conservatism. Unfortunately, after one semester reading political theory (mostly Aristotle and Augustine), I realized that I knew very little about politics. Most worrying of all, I realized that I had no firm, convincing reasons for my political convictions. After three years of searching, I knew that I was more theoretically sophisticated, but I was still basically just a sophist. Around this time, I happened upon John Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty. Though Dewey’s prose is frustrating, I came away feeling theoretically satisfied (at long last). Dewey asked why philosophy needed to be obsessed with certain, absolute, truths. In essence, he made me wonder why I was so desperate to be sure of myself.

My research since then has largely been on this sort of question: what do uncertain, non-foundationalist politics look like? When I started down this path, I thought that it was a Deweyan innovation, and praised him correspondingly. At Georgetown, however, I’ve discovered that he is far from the only non-foundationalist in town…and he may not even be the most interesting of the bunch.

The dissertation takes political uncertainty as a given. As I’ve already argued in other posts [link], modern liberal democracy requires self-respective skepticism. In order to get modern democracy off the ground, we have “to be willing to be wrong” (hat tip to W. Jensen) about much of our own political convictions. We have to be willing to argue and compromise and lose—all without rancor or resentment.

In other words, we have to deliberate with each other without coming to blows. Dewey and Oakeshott are interesting on this because they undertake to defend democratic skepticism and uncertainty on strong grounds.

But see, this should prompt all kinds of eyebrow-raising out there in the peanut gallery (and kudos if you’re still reading, because this is pretty advanced dork material). Think about how difficult this is: How do we fiercely defend a disposition to tolerate others? How do we demand tolerance of all ideas…except those that are intolerant or anti-democratic? If we’re skeptics about how much we know, how can we argue that there’s anything particularly holy about democracy?

(One last [optional] example of the difficulty: imagine two people—let’s call them Barack and John—are arguing over whether or not the government should allow openly gay Americans to serve in the military. Barack and his backers win the necessary votes and make it possible. John and his backers release angry statements to the press, but restrict their opposition to remain within democratic procedures and institutions. They even repudiate citizens groups who seek to violently oppose the new policy. In essence, they accept that democratic outcomes are more important than being “RIGHT” in any muscular sense. They believe that the new policy is wrong, but they suspend their convictions so that we can all get along. Obviously this example would be just as illustrative if we reversed the winners and losers of that particular political fight.)

Both Dewey and Oakeshott were concerned to defend democratic uncertainty, since it makes tolerance and pluralism possible. Despite sharing a general comfort with modern political life, they disagreed about nearly everything else. Dewey was one of the original inventors of American progressivism, while Oakeshott tried to bridge traditionalist (semi-Burkean) conservatism and a libertarian/libertine disposition. Dewey argued that the state needed to intervene in economic and social life to help to foster individual development, while Oakeshott repeatedly argued against state prescription of individual ends. Dewey is unequivocally considered to be a man of the left, while Oakeshott is generally taken to be a man of the right.

Despite their surface-level differences, though, there are some surprising affinities between the two on a more theoretical level. This is where my research gets pretty incomprehensible. In essence, both recognized the importance of historical context in political right, but refused to settle for pure multi-culturalism. The technical terms are eye-poppingly awkward: they both accept a coherentist approach to truth, an idealist epistemology, and discomfort with metaphysics/ontology. You don’t care about those…I hope. These surprising similarities (despite apparent differences) are the core of my dissertation. How could they be so similar and so different?

That’s all for now, but stay tuned for an uptick in the number of awkward, academic-themed posts on pluralism…