Abstract
“Chicago is the place to make you recognize at every turn the absolute opportunity which chaos affords—it is sheer Matter with no standards at all,” John Dewey wrote to his wife Alice on an early visit there.1 Such a city, which had become the geographical nexus of American industrial democracy, pushed Dewey to consider the problems industrial modes of organization pose for democratic theory. His reconceptualization of democracy, and the refinements and clarifications to it that he made over the years, reflects an appreciation of the significance of work—of human transfiguration of chaotic matter into something useable, and of the corollary construction of human psychology as it meets with the world around it and ..