John Deweys Critique of Socioeconomic Individualism Essay -- Sociolog

My paper attempts to exhibit the consistency of John Dewey’s non-individualistic individualism. It details Dewey’s claim that the traditional dualism opposing the individual to the social is politically debilitating. We find Dewey in the 20’s and 30’s, for example, arguing that the creation of a genuine public arena, one capable of precluding the rise of an artificial chasm between sociality and individuality—or, rather, one capable of precluding the rise of an artificial chasm between notions of sociality and individuality—had itself been forestalled by an inherited, outdated, but nonetheless dominant custom called individualism. By blocking public investigation itself, by enervating what Dewey called social inquiry, and thus by misguiding historically sensitive assessments of slippery social phenomena, our contingently strapped individualism drifts aimlessly and destructively through the present era. Insofar as it fails to realize how publi city and individuality can be a congruous, inextricable, and mutually conditioning pair, individualism leeches many of today’s individuals of their situated and situating historical potential. In the final chapter of his work The Public and its Problems (PAIP) John Dewey suggests that, despite the insistence of most social theorists, if we regard the so-called individual/social distinction as a gap to be bridged or as an antithesis to be synthesized then our nose for public & democratic reform has been tricked by a central red herring of political modernity: The preliminary to fruitful discussion of social matters is that certain obstacles shall be overcome, obstacles residing in our present conceptions of the method of social inquiry. One of the obstructions in the path is the seemingl... ...ical progress, and only then will we lay the foundation for the construction of public apparati which do not merely police atomic selves negatively in their battles for economic supremacy and which do not merely reconcile Society to the claims of private Selves but which produce selves habitually resistant to atomization. Indeed, as we also indicated above, according to Dewey the problem of publicity in modern society and the modern state lies less in need of bridging the gap between the one and the many as in showing the impractical effects of thinking according to the conceptual scheme of a gap. It is currently anathema, in other words, to think sacrificially of publicity, to think that a lively public arena can exist only when certain individual claims are sacrificed or, conversely, that individuality will thrive only at the expense of the greater public good.