In the series of lectures he delivered during the two years he spent in China, John Dewey provided the most complete version of his theory of social conflict and struggle. The two textual sources from this time we have at our disposal – the doubly translated lectures published in Honolulu2 and Dewey’s original notes recently published under the name of Lectures in Social and Political Philosophy 3 – outline an original understanding of social conflict as taking place between groups with (...) different interests, aims and powers. After formulating a programmatic account of the nature and the tasks of social philosophy, Dewey devoted one of his lectures to the exploration of society’s tendencies to generate... (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 38-58, Spring 2022.

Critical social theories are generally understood to be distinct from other normative theories by their explicit orientation toward emancipation: they not only present normative criteria for assessing the legitimacy or justification of social institutions or merely inquire into the actualized freedom of a given form of social life but claim to point toward a “freedom in view”—an end that might aid those participating in social struggles to overcome the pathological, alienated, or ideological social order of the present. John Dewey’s social (...) theory clearly cherishes this ideal of social criticism. It contributes to a critical social inquiry in a variety of ways, some of which, so we believe, are still to be... (shrink)