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The American Hope-Dream: Implications for Democracy and Public Education

John Anglin Horton

Doctor of Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

2018

Abstract Current crisis and pessimism enshroud the state of democracy and public education. This dissertation interrogates how representative philosophers, beginning with , have conceptualized hope. The early philosophers considered also include Spinoza, Hume, Descartes and Kant.

From the more recent past, I investigate Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch, , and Jane

Addams. Contemporary philosophers with the hope canon are also canvassed for insights on democratic hope and education relevant to democracy and public education, including Bernstein,

Boler, Bredo, Calhoun, Freire, Garrison, Green, Kompridis, Koopman, Seigfried and Westbrook.

The philosophical history is rooted in what is termed in this dissertation “The American hope- dream,” referring to the historic American Dream as a national aspiration of exemplary ethico- moral leadership to the world, especially with reference to its distinctive form of governance.

The thesis investigates the dynamics of hope that accompanied the settlement, evolution of the new nation, and the emergent interlinking spirit of independence, democracy, and education of the new nation. It analyses key values germane to hope, such as freedom and equality, which surfaced within the context of governance, education and social .

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There is special attention to the work of American , and the work of John Dewey and

Jane Addams. Their orientation to the need for philosophically relating democracy and education to one another is addressed. My project probes their ethical and epistemological insights with a view to appropriating relevancies for the 21st Century Arguments are advanced for important epistemic connections of hope in promoting imagination and creative thinking, and investigate the role of hope in the radical social reforms of Addams with special attention to inclusivity, care and equality. The thesis references tragic hope, and the failures of leaders, past and present, to realize many of the promising ideals of the American Dream.

In sum, the dissertation interrogates the American Dream, with focus on democracy and public education, with shards of past, present and prospects undergoing philosophical analysis to justify hope as an initiating, nurturing force for political and educational renewal.

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Acknowledgements

My very deep gratitude to my Supervisor, Megan Boler, for her nurturing support of the ideas behind this thesis, her constant encouragement and never-ending resourcefulness in helping me find pathways through which, for me, was a complex and often bewildering project. From the courses I took from her and the reading she recommended, to her structuring advice on thick topics, I feel my adventure in has been wonderfully inspired and guided. Her own multidisciplinary scholarship was a constant source of inspiration.

Much appreciation goes forth to the members of my Thesis Supervising Committee, Professor Lauren Bialystok and Professor Eric Bredo for their generous assistance in guiding me in ways that have improved this thesis.

I am most grateful for Professor Eric Bredo’s involvement in this thesis, before and during its writing, during which time he responded most generously to my queries and philosophic tangles. He brought the hopes of the early Pragmatist, John Dewey, and his colleagues vividly to life for me. I was also honoured and grateful to have as External Examiner Dr. James Garrison, whose prolific scholarship I have long admired.

On the home front, I be forever grateful to my wife, Carolyn, who has shown incredible forbearance during what turned out to be a much longer academic odyssey than anticipated. The fact that she is non-pareil as a life partner was not lost on me for a moment and I marvelled at the endurance of her patience. The project could never have survived without her wide-ranging, selfless support in countless ways. My gratitude knows no bounds.

My two sons, Sean and Kevin, were called upon to support a semi-literate computer operator in ways that most generously allowed me to draw upon their cyber-savvy and other talents time and again. My very great gratitude to them.

Special thanks to long-time friend, John Plumpton, whose renowned expertise in matters historical was generously shared with me. Friends too numerous to name have expressed interest in my topic, and offered ideas and encouragement that nourished and extended the frontiers of my quest for understanding hope. They, too, are the subjects of my gratitude.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iv Introduction: Hope, Dream and Social Transformation: the Audacity of Hope ...... 1

Dream, Hope, and the Sunlit Path ...... 1

The American Hope Dream ...... 2

How I Define Hope in My Dissertation ...... 3

The Significance of Exodus and Promethean Myth to My Thesis ...... 3

What are the Limitations of Invoking the American Hope Dream? ...... 5

Education, Another Central Ideal of the American Hope Dream ...... 7

Hope in an Age of Pessimism: The Future of Democracy ...... 8

Conceptualizing Hope: The American Hope Dream and Bright-Lines of Hope ...... 11

Hope and the American Hope Dream: Visions for Democracy and Education ...... 13

The Ongoing Resonance of Exodus and Prometheus: Early Narratives of Hope and New Beginnings ...... 17

Narratives of Despair ...... 20

Making a Case for the Emancipative Potential of Partial Hope ...... 22

What This Thesis is Not: Samuel Huntington’s Ideology of Retrieving a Partisan Past ...... 25

Hope: Inherent Commonality of Democracy and Education ...... 26

Hope, Progressive Pedagogy and the Ethic of Meliorism ...... 27

Outline of Chapters ...... 32 Chapter 1: Notable Narratives and Episodes of Bright-Line Hope in Greek and Judeo-Antiquity ...... 41

Introduction ...... 41

Section A: Hope and the Long Arc of History ...... 43

Section B: Hope as Suspect in Antiquity ...... 46 v

Section C: Platonic Hope: The Illumining Thesis of Katja Maria Vogt ...... 47

Conclusion ...... 56 Chapter 2: The Many Shades of Hope in the Work of Arendt ...... 59

Section A: Natality of Hope ...... 61

Section B: The Janus Face of Hope ...... 63

Genealogical Perspectives on Hope ...... 66

Section C: The Practicality of Hope ...... 68

Arendt’s Emancipative Agenda ...... 69

Section D: The Revolutionary Spirit of Hope ...... 72

Section E: The Audacity of Hope ...... 75 Chapter 3: Founders and Heirs of the Revolutionary Spirit: Hope, Democracy, and Education ...... 84

Section A: Franklin and the Quintessential Hopes of the American Dream ...... 84

Section B: The Proto-pragmatic Hope of Franklin ...... 87

Franklin’s Utopian Hope for Education ...... 89

Franklin’s Utopian Dream for Education ...... 95

Section C: Thomas Jefferson: The Inspiriting American Founder of Hope for Democracy ...... 97

The Role of the Public(s) in Democracy ...... 98

The Hope for Deliberation: Jefferson, Habermas, Arendt, and Dewey ...... 100

Education about Democracy for the Public as a Primary Hope for Its Survival ...... 102

Section D: Lincoln and the Tragic Hope of Democracy ...... 107

Walt Whitman: Civil War Poetry of Tragic Hope ...... 110

Lincoln and his International Reputation of Redemptive Hope ...... 115

Lincoln, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Freedom and Hope ...... 117

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Chapter 4: Jane Addams: the Personification of Bright-line Social Hope and Social Justice ...... 120

Addams Ushers in New Hope for Democracy at Hull House ...... 120

Bringing Democratic Hope to an Institution ...... 121

The Raising of Voices of Hope: The Women at Hull House ...... 123

An Ethic of Caring: New Hope for Governance and Education ...... 124

Standpoint : Essential to the Hope for a New Democracy ...... 126

The Cosmopolitan Hope of Addams ...... 127

The Ethic of Nurturing Care: Caring for versus Caring with and Its Political Implications ...... 131

Addams’s Bright-Line Vision of Consolidative Hope ...... 132

Implications of Addams’s Form of Hope for Democracy and Public Education .... 134

A Pedagogy of Hope ...... 134

Perplexity and Addams’s Hope-Inspired Pivot Forward ...... 136 Chapter 5: John Dewey, Democracy, Education, and the American Dream ...... 139

The Bright-Line as Represented by John Dewey ...... 139

Dewey and the Critique of the Reflex Arc Concept ...... 141

Transactionalism ...... 144

Dewey’s “The of Democracy” ...... 145

Dewey’s Early Attempt to Define Hope: Bridging from to the New Psychology ...... 148

Dewey as Freedom Fighter ...... 150

A Darwinian Centre to the Hope of John Dewey ...... 153

Progressives’ Clashing Hopes: Dewey verses Thorndike, versus Behaviourism ...... 158

New Hope for Democracy ...... 163

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Chapter 6: The Bright-line of the American Hope Dream and the Need for Critical Thinking ...... 167

Foreshadowing Foucault: The Limits of Thought and Unlimited Critical Hope .... 168

The Critical Thinking and Problem Solving of Abraham Lincoln ...... 171

Equality Moves from Declaration to Interblend with the Constitution ...... 174

Fraternity and the Bright-Line of Democracy ...... 178

Caring and Democracy, and Caring as Fraternity: Addams as a Feminist Philosopher ...... 179

Addams’s Progressive Model: Perplexity and Critical Hope ...... 181

Critical Thinking: Fraternity, Bright-lined as New World Distinctiveness ...... 184

Dewey and the Critical Problem of Education: The Needed Revolution in Pedagogy ...... 186

Dewey and the Pre-War Crisis of Democracy ...... 189

Pragmatic Genealogical Analysis and Problem Solving ...... 193

Conclusion: An Audacious American Hope Dream for a Re-Imagined Democracy ...... 193 Chapter 7: Legacies of Critical Hope for Democracy and Education ...... 198

Navigating Space between and Pragmatism: Critical Hope ...... 199

Contemporary Frameworks for Critical Hope ...... 201

Paulo Freire’s Critical Hope ...... 205

The Legacy of Paulo Freire ...... 209

Freire’s Educational Legacy ...... 211

The Dream of Freire and the American Hope Dream: The Challenge Remains .... 211

The Bright-line of Critical Hopers ...... 215

The Pragmatist-Progressives’ Living Legacy ...... 216

Dewey’s Living Legacy on Democracy ...... 217

Addams’s Living Legacy ...... 219 viii

A Synoptic Survey of Bright-Line Thought-Lineage ...... 220

Deweyan Hope and Its Broad Based Legacy of Naturalistic ...... 222

The Long Journey of Hope ...... 224 Conclusion ...... 225

The Continuing Quest for “the Sunlit Path of Hope” for Democracy and Public Education ...... 225

Bright-line Hope with New Horizons ...... 226

The Need for Bright-Line Praxis for the Bright-Line Ideals ...... 227

Hope in Dark Times ...... 228

American Democracy, the Foremost Carrier of the American Hope Dream ...... 229

The Living Legacy of Bright-line Thinkers of the Past and Present ...... 230

In Sum, the Transcending Nature of Hope ...... 230

The Appendix Provides Forward Thinking in Democracy and Education ...... 232

Participation: A Key Concept in Furthering Democracy in Myriad Ways ...... 233 References ...... 234 Appendix A ...... 252

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List of Appendices

APPENDIX A……………………………………………………………………………… 252

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Introduction: Hope, Dream and Social Transformation: the Audacity of Hope

Dream, Hope, and the Sunlit Path

When Martin Luther King famously declared in 1963, “I have a Dream,” the centrepiece of that American Dream was his hope and faith that his country would make amends for failing to live up to its pledge to deliver equal rights as promised by the Declaration of Independence. Similarly, fifty years later, Obama also looked back to the idealizations in 1776 of the Founders’ Creed in his book The Audacity of Hope. Martin Luther King, describing the centrality of justice to the American Dream, also said: “The bright day must come, the sunlit path of democracy and its promises of brotherhood, freedom and security of life and equality must be honored. Until the bright day of justice emerges, the whirlwind of revolt will continue.” In my dissertation, I borrow King’s metaphor to trace what I call “bright lines of hope”-- ideals that contain a criterion of social justice.

My research identifies and attempts to justify key episodes and actors in U.S. history that impact on the American Dream by furnishing it with ideals. My dissertation traces the bright- lines of such ideals, via moments and persons that exemplify some variation of: fairness, equality, the security of life, brotherhood, democracy and/or freedom--ideals that characterize the Declaration of Independence. All my protagonists struggled with or personified one or more of those elements of justice for the Dream in its making. Their struggles, and mine, result in a partial vision of possibility, since hope-dreams--to qualify as full-throated hope--are an actualizing process (Bloch, 1986). Utopic dreaming offers my thesis a starting point for analysing the role of hope in the American Dream. For my own work and for my many predecessors who delved into the power of hope to effect change, such utopic dreaming constitutes the projected transformation of this world to a better world.

The questions that guided my thesis are: (1) What were the sources and impulses that gave root to the American Hope Dream? (2) What were the strengths of the ideals, and do they have sustaining power to remain relevant in our day?

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The American Hope Dream

The idealizations of 1776, and the bright-line that preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence are the focus of my thesis inquiry. In the dissertation, I call these ideals the “American Hope Dream.” The American Dream is multifaceted, and includes the coveted as the land of plenty that promised material prosperity, upward mobility, new frontiers, home ownership and improved life chances for children.

However, I offer a complementary interpretation of the American Hope Dream. I suggest that another plane of hope revolves around the exceptionalism of the American ethos--its comparative classlessness, its strong sense of individual and collective freedom and its freedom of worship. This plane of the American Hope Dream moves into the territory of ideals. It was a transcending plane of high hopes for a political governance with new parameters of freedom and equality, one with aspirations of fair distribution of justice and opportunity and other progressive socio-ethical possibilities that were, in terms of idealizations, destined to become distinctively American. Such a vision, the Founders hoped, would become the hallmarks of a glorious new forward-looking society. Hope entered that picture taking the form of utopian dreaming. My goal in this thesis has been to discern the source of the ingredients of the ideal plane of the American Dream with fresh illumination of the ideals, and how public education might support their resuscitation.

Viewing history through the lens of social justice, my project seeks to establish bright-lines of the ideals that converged over time, and to analyze how and why they seemed pertinent to the Declaration and with what consequence. Lincoln--one of the first bright-line thinkers I examine in this thesis--stated that The Declaration of Independence “was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land.”... “The giving of liberty, not alone to people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” Lincoln further said: “all should have an equal chance...if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle...I would rather be assassinated on the spot than surrender it.” The Declaration took on growing significance to Lincoln as he grappled with the enormity of the slavery issue. It was the ideals of the Declaration that became Lincoln’s ‘sheet anchor’ of American identity: “I have never had a feeling

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politically that did not spring from the sentiments of what was embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

My argument in bringing Lincoln into the bright-line of American thinkers and actors is his loyalty to the idealizations of the Declaration. Clearly, they inspired Lincoln--and indeed, these Founders’ ideals inspired Barack Obama two hundred years later: “for all our disagreements, we would be hard pressed to find conservative or liberal...academic or layman, who doesn’t subscribe to the basic set of individual liberties identified by the Founders...” (Audacity of Hope p.103). We are in the heartland of the American Hope Dream, I argue in this thesis, when we visit the hopes expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

How I Define Hope in My Dissertation

For the purposes of this dissertation, I define hope as follows: a feeling in response to a desired imaginary, accompanied by a will to action. Social hope, I suggest, is a cognitive process in which the imaginary seeks a desired state of betterness for the world. Hope is not an entity. It is active imagining at work, with desire aroused. Hope is a cognitive process set in motion, -- involving some combination of willing (conation), striving, yearning and anticipating.

Ernst Bloch’s studies, written during WW II, deeply informs my understanding of hope. Bloch, a renowned German scholar of hope, built his many studies around the human daydream (a daydream too often latent in us)—the dream being, to make the world a better place, a more just society for humankind. Bloch saw transformative hope as the result of the of subjective and objective factors. The ultimately real perception of the world implies the political task of humanizing the world. His conception of hope reflects a German Romanticism where the imagination and world finally meet. Yet, as I explore in my dissertation, Bloch’s emphasis on the theme of possibility resonates with the vision of the early American Pragmatists.

The Significance of Exodus and Promethean Myth to My Thesis

My research into the possible sources of the bright-line of the Declaration’s ideals led me to explore the resonance of two ancient narratives that I have come to believe importantly shaped the American Hope Dream: firstly Exodus, and secondly, the Promethean Myth -- both sources interweave through history to become influential in the shaping of ideals in the Declaration. 3

Democracy is a fundamental ideal in both Exodus and Prometheus. Their common emphasis is on freeing people from bondage. I suggest, throughout the thesis, how these two ancient visions infuse aspects of the American Hope Dream. Most importantly, in the Exodus biblical scripture, Democratic governance is given an important start, but within a narrow frame. The passengers on the Mayflower had been made aware that they were repeating that much earlier pattern of hope, the flight of the Israelites from Egypt. That flight also embodied two types of hope, freedom from oppression and freedom to rebuild. It was a prescriptive mission. On the plus side, the Exodus story highlights values of voluntary solidarity of purpose and act, interdependency, discipline, bonding, and communalism.

However, Exodus had a very narrow application to ‘the chosen,’ and thus a highly parochial outlook. Promethean hope, by contrast, had no such conditions: as a gift of to all of humanity, it was a hope that is open, democratic, romantic, experimental, transgressive and innovative. The Pilgrims chose to board the Mayflower as their forebears had chosen to follow Moses into Canaan. They freely agreed on the Mayflower to commit to a discipline that would make the Colony work. In contrast, the knowledge dispensed by Prometheus was gifted to all humanity, not to a select group. Prometheus invited all of humanity to all knowledge, opening the door to experimentation, invention, and discovery. The latter gift became particularly germane, I posit, in the run-up to the American Revolution.

I limited myself to exploring the ideals that may be thought of as important guideposts of desirable ends with potential to lead to M. L. King’s “bright day of justice” which he was summoning to fulfill his notion of the American Dream. The atrocities that took place in the first half of the 19th Century had not diminished King’s vision for his in the ideals of the American Dream. In the first 4 chapters of my dissertation, I identify the persons and events which in history seemed to best represent the ideas that emerged, i.e. freedom, brotherhood, and democracy. The final 3 chapters of my dissertation explore the ways in which the American Hope Dream resonates with understandings of “Critical hope” that are developed in the vision of the Frankfurt School to Paulo Freire, and beyond. In these chapters, as in the previous, I foreground that hope is not dichotomized from practice within the lineage I establish. Ernst Bloch was insistent that the transcending value of hope lay precisely in working for its concretization. It was actualizing hope that distinguished the hope-dream from reverie or 4

fantasy. Hope, for Bloch, was this-worldly, the sponsor of imaginative acts of world betterment. It was not a spectator sport, but in a world often caught up in “the darkness of the lived moment.” Bloch believed in the transcending power of hope to bring this world ‘home’ to its proper state of world justice. Like American Pragmatist , Bloch believed that “the world stands really malleable waiting to receive its final touches in our hands.” Like John Dewey, Bloch believed in reconciling ends and means.

What are the Limitations of Invoking the American Hope Dream?

I must issue several key caveats, regarding the limits of my historical and philosophical treatment. Some might read the histories connected to the American Dream as simply or primarily histories not of hope, but of and slavery. My thesis is, of course, but a partial vision of the American Hope Dream, one of many narratives within the histories of the nation. This perspective was chosen for an examination of the ideals articulated. I argue for the importance of those ideals within the Declaration, bypassing the much- compromised arena of implementation of the Constitution and the clash of ideals and values that overruled them.1

The language of the Declaration of Independence was startling to Hannah Arendt because it had gone through a thorough deliberative process that required approval by each of the colonial Assemblies before full ratification. It was a different register, a language stunningly emancipative in the Declaration. The degree of forward thinking of the Founders remains equally surprising to me. These founders identified liberal ideals far in advance of what had become their custom. These ideals seemed to herald a sea-change in the kind of country that they wanted as their legacy. Jefferson was to say it represented the best democracy (on paper) that had ever

1 I move the yardstick beyond the Exodus narrative, which had some strengths but which was parochial, arguing that the Declaration opened the door to plurality, flexibility, and potential new freedoms and more fair play for all. I see merit in holding up the worthiness of the ideals for the hopes they represented to key followers, who turned in times of crisis to mount fights on behalf of American democracy’s ideals (Dewey and Lincoln, for example). I note that the ideals of the Dream proved inspirational to Lincoln, Whitman, Addams and Dewey, to push hard in ways to strengthen the ideals, as bright-line steps toward “a brighter day” as Dr. King called his American Dream.

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been articulated. That I believe, but it failed tragically to get off the ground for several generations. Indeed, the Founders kicked the can of implementation well down the road.

For some, the American Dream was and is a sham. But the narrative of the Declaration is meaningful to bright-line American thinkers including Langston Hughes, Dr. Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and Cornell West. The Constitution was not cast in cement. Jefferson called it an experiment and advocated from the get-go the need for public discussion and revision as needed. Against fixity, Jefferson insisted that the Creeds were open to amendment and change. The Founders had indeed legitimated a genocidal and slavery regime. But America was not locked into the Creeds, and progressively slavery was overturned by Lincoln as he struggled to achieve national cohesion.

Pursuing the bright-lines, I give fresh salience to the Progressives Era from 1890 to 1920. Jane Addams’s dream, for example, was for a classless society in America. She manifested this transcendence of class in her Hull Settlement House in Chicago, an environment that welcomed all immigrants on an equal footing, engaged everyone in participatory activity, drew the voiceless into safe dialogue, and introduced the ethic of caring as an integral, keynote element of democratic justice. Jane Addams becomes a bright-line symbol of relentless pursuit of ideals on multiple fronts of social reform. Her vision was profound, anticipating many 20th and 21st century feminist and humanitarian issues ---notably, her embrace of otherness, activism in wide- ranging municipal reforms, and national and international efforts to protect children from exploitation. Addams also addressed the working conditions of women and men and became a pacifist and crusader for world peace.

Addams and her soul-mate, John Dewey, were ardent believers in the promise of American democracy, believing that it honored the uniqueness of individual potential within a social context. Guided by Addams, they radically redefined and deepened the meaning of American democracy by emphasizing the practice and ideals of relationality and its close cousin, fraternity. The idea of fraternity, which had been prominent in the French revolution, had been left out of the American Revolutionary Creed. Fraternity addresses the all-important social relationality; and Addams and Dewey stressed the caring and nurturing role as a way of life endemic not only to education but also to democracy. Dewey imported the notion of fraternity as an ideal in his

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strenuous defence of American Democracy against Hitlerism and Stalinism before World War II. Addams led the way with fraternity and sorority in the praxis of Hull House.

Intersubjectivity was thus at the heartland of U.S. Democracy. Dewey was deeply concerned that democracy not fall prey to the reductive, determinative, mechanistic form of new psychology that was making rapid inroads in his time in all aspects of society at the turn of the Century. Dewey countered the threat of Thorndike and Watson style reductive behaviourism by advancing a naturalistic metaphysics, which Larry Hickman describes as Dewey’s “low-rise metaphysics.” Pragmatist Jim Garrison, too, explicates how important it was to Dewey that we understand the richness of ideals that are distilled from his pragmatic . We must distinguish pragmatic metaphysics from traditional Idealism and noting that Dewey wished to reveal and stress the richness of naturalistic metaphysics in our transactions with one another. “Men are not isolated non-social atoms “ Dewey had posited from very early in his philosophizing.(1888 p.186). Metaphysics must not be understood as a systematic first philosophy, but experienced within nature in context sensitive, problem-solving ways.

Thus, Addams in practice and Dewey in theory envisioned democracy ‘as primarily a mode of associated living...its spirit permeating every aspect of our lives.” (1923 p. 101). Dewey carried forward the bright- line of democratic wisdom represented by the lineage of Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman and James. Dewey praised their understanding of the authentic meaning of democracy, in particular its affinity with responsiveness to ordinary folk.

Education, Another Central Ideal of the American Hope Dream

The importance of education was not only its role of enabling social mobility and personal fulfillment, but for importance in safeguarding the health of democracy from erosion. The Founding Fathers, led by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, repeatedly explained the need for an educated citizenry who understood the distinct of American democracy and its need to be subjected to periodic public review. Jefferson called for town hall meetings and direct participation whenever possible. The new vision of democracy of Addams and Dewey some 100 years after the Constitution saw structural common ground in democracy and education. Hybrid ideals included a methodology of cooperation and collaboration, active engagement and dynamic participation in the process of learning. Democracy and public education were idealized as 7

interweaving, mutually supportive and constituting, in both instances, flourishing growth for the individual and society.

Democracy as a bright-line ideal of the American Dream must be robustly defended, as Dewey himself did in 1939 on the threshold of WW II, when he warned against technologies— including war—that could too easily be used in ways that doom democratic values.2 To conclude with the words of philosopher Richard Rorty: “You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every 3 morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of actual.”

Hope in an Age of Pessimism: The Future of Democracy

This thesis is being written during a time of unusual social turbulence, a central manifestation being the state of American democracy under the reign of Donald Trump—a phenomenon that renders hope increasingly elusive for many.4 On balance, when noted historian Jill Lepore (2017) surveys the American turn to dystopic fiction, she finds the current state of the nation sociologically “hope significant,” and calls this an “Age of Pessimism.” Lepore contrasts 2017 with 2004 when a national spirit of hope was on the rise in American electoral , personified in the speeches and writings of Barack Obama. Today, in the vein of despair, there is a strong sense of the eroding of cherished principles associated with democracy—freedom of the press, separation of powers, defilement of national institutions, and the protection of human

2 Science through its physical technological consequences is now determining the relations which human , severally and in groups, sustain to one another. If it is incapable of developing moral techniques which will also determine these relations, the split in modern culture goes so deep that not only democracy but all civilized values are doomed [...]. A culture which permits science to destroy traditional values but which distrusts its power to create new ones is a culture which is destroying itself. War is a symptom as well as a cause of the inner division (Dewey, 1939, p. 118).

3[Achieving Our Country1998.] 4 While presidential polls fluctuate, President Trump has had the support of less than half the nation since his inauguration. NBC reports (via Pew Research Centre Poll) that Americans are “mostly in agreement that the country is falling far short of its ideals.” Carrie Dawn, April 26, 2018. 75% lack confidence in elected officials to act in the best interest of the public. (Same Pew report). 8

rights is to mention but four crucial values seemingly under siege. At the same time, crisis and pessimism are bedfellows in the field of public education. Hardly a new occurrence, public education has been a perennial target of alleged failure, with critiques intensifying since the Reagan presidency.5

The vulnerability of American democracy was given an incisive interpretation by eminent historian Donald Kagan (1998) towards the end of the last century, whose comment is most telling for our day:

Although in our time democracy is taken for granted, it is in fact one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human . It existed for only two centuries in Athens…. An understanding of that should give pause to any who may think that democracy is the natural polity of mankind and that its establishment and success are assured once despotic or “reactionary” rule has been removed. (p. 2)

In his extensive scholarship, Kagan (1998) repeatedly points to the similarity of views on democracy of Pericles and Jefferson. They had strong views in common on equality before the law, the need for equality of opportunity and were of one mind that only in an authentic democracy was there a conscious effort to equalize opportunity. The lineage of that Greek cum American idea of equality is one that I interrogate in my analysis of the American Dream, situating what yet remains to be accomplished in the realm of equality as a pressingly critical issue.

Kagan (1998) also compares Lincoln to Pericles with respect to the power and content of their rhetoric. In the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, America was “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Pericles also presented a vision for his country, prizing thought, deliberation and discussion: “He believed that man’s capacities and desires could be fulfilled at the highest level through participation in the life of the community governed by reasoned discussion and guided by intelligence.” (1998 p.6)

5 Crisis in Education. In 2012, in a report co-chaired by Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, a searing report that addressed the plight of schools in regions of poverty within the U.S., Rice saw the crisis as “a matter of social justice, maintaining the national fabric, and a matter of national security.” Independent Task Force Report on the U.S. Education Reform and National Security. Another headline example of crisis: "Schools in Florida as Failure Factories.” 9

Kagan (1998) closes on a claim about democracy which must be challenged: “Democracy alone of all regimes respects the dignity and autonomy of every individual” (ibid). I would certainly dispute his implication that the dignity and autonomy of every individual was or is respected in either the founding or subsequent histories of the American Republic. It was an idealization but little more, and certainly neglected the equality, much less the autonomy of vast numbers of its people. Nonetheless, in this thesis I claim that such ideals are still embedded in democracy, but face increasing peril. They are eminently worthy of protection. Kagan’s hope for democracy comes with the strong caveat of the need to educate the public that democracy’s survival requires the understanding that each individual sees his or her well-being as “inextricably linked to that of the whole community” (Kagan 1998, p. 16). These themes of democracy will be visited intensively in the course of this thesis, enriched with the thinking of many of the protagonists that give leadership to distinctiveness of the American Hope Dream, both in democracy and the education of the public.

As mentioned, this thesis contributes a (partial) narrative of hope by centering what I term the "American Hope Dream" a dream rooted in the ideals characterizing the Framers’ visions of American democracy during, through and after the Revolution. I draw on two continental philosophers who, at first blush, might seem odd bedfellows given my focus on the American Hope Dream. I draw on Hannah Arendt to shed light on her own visions regarding hope and the public's role in democracy. Arendt’s historical research into early America provides invaluable insight, and her probes into the hope-incited, revolutionary American spirit situates re-birth as a refreshing epiphany of hope—a narrative that animates the evolutionary American dream. Indeed, a 2018 book by historian Richard King, Arendt and America, contributes a missing treatment of the degree to which Arendt's thinking was shaped by her adopted homeland.6 The

6The précis of the book as presented by the publisher reiterates my own research into Arendt’s relationship to the Founding Fathers: "In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule. “Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re- creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her 10

second continental philosopher that informs my project is Ernst Bloch and his lengthy treatment of hope in The Principle of Hope (1986). Not only, of course, is Bloch one of the pivotal philosophers of hope, but his conception of hope resonates with progressive vision, as I will show. While these two European thinkers might be seen as having little relation to American related to the American Dream, they provide significant conceptualizations that bear directly on the narratives and discourses of hope that animate my thesis.

More broadly, this thesis focuses on Western philosophical narratives of hope as they link to visions of democracy. Democracy is a central theme of my study, with special reference to what kind of democracy seems best suited for society and what connections public education might have to enhance these democratic ideals. Those questions placed in the American locus of our day raise alarm upon alarm, given the luster of democracy’s cherished birth, and its laurels of much-celebrated distinctiveness, a feat that I see as a part of its revolutionary heritage. My orientation should be understood as squarely in liberal democratic theory and philosophy, informed by the work of such scholars as Richard Rorty, Chantal Mouffe, Frank Cunningham, J. B. Macpherson, Carol Pateman, David Held, Susan Shelton, Judith Green, Gordon Wood, James Kloppenberg, Benjamin Barber, Donald Kagan, and, preeminently by the democratic theory developed collaboratively by John Dewey and Jane Addams.

Conceptualizing Hope: The American Hope Dream and Bright-Lines of Hope A dissertation on the topic of hope surely needs to clarify how hope is being defined and conceptualized. Defining hope is nearly impossible, given the diverse range of disciplinary conceptions and the unresolved disagreements about hope's function. Hope continues to be

understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since. As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. “For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought.” (http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo21933917.html) 11

understood and defined very differently, depending on the historical moment and context, cultural differences and diverse cultural histories bearing on a society's notion of hope. Certainly, different scholarly disciplines approach hope in divergent manners.

Is hope a feeling, experienced by individuals? Is it a feeling experienced collectively? Is it a version of thinking or cognition? Because I am tracing the evolving and resonant discourses of hope, the understanding of hope that moves through this thesis will change, as the different frameworks upon which I draw conceptualize hope in different ways.

I can, however, provide a conceptual definition of what I term the American Hope Dream. I can define it as the coalescence of ideals in events (or epoch) and persons that seem to cause a historically momentous occurrence of outcome. The American Hope Dream is a shorthand to refer to the phenomenon of exceptionality attributed to America in many different ways: the land of milk and honey, the best hope for democracy (Jefferson), the last best hope for democracy (Lincoln), the City on a Hill (Exodus), the frontier spirit, land of the free, a mission of divine destiny by the pilgrim leaders of the Mayflower.

The American Hope Dream reflecting the “bright lines” within the historical context of my study is centrally linked to my thesis about the ideals of the American Hope Dream. Examples of these bright lines that animate my thesis are breaking free from the Empire; the run-up to the Revolutionary War; the process of public deliberation that went into the Creeds; the ideals in the Declaration—equality and freedom; the at-any-cost decision made by Lincoln to end slavery and introduce a vision for reconstruction; Whitman’s Democratic Vistas; the Progressives reimaging of democracy as associative living and closely relating it to an education that would foster socially relational, non-reductive, non-mechanistic, experiential learning.

The pattern of ideal-making and ideal-professing in the history of America for which I use the descriptor the bright-line, becomes the defining moments in the events that seem rich in ideals. Their clustering and dissemination constitute such moments in the history of the American Dream. The revolutionary period of the of late 17th century is my prime example in this thesis for its famous crystallization of the American Dream in the Declaration of Independence, promulgated by its Founders as American destiny in its idealized form. The transition from 13 Colonies to one nation was redolent with ideals as was the rhetoric of

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Abraham Lincoln, 75 years later in another defining moment in American history deserving of bright-line recognition.

Hope and the American Hope Dream: Visions for Democracy and Education This thesis analyzes the mosaic of hope that proved catalytic to keeping the American Dream vibrant. I examine the phenomenon of the American Dream in an effort to understand what it was, how it originated, its historical trajectory, and what it speaks to in our day. Within the framework of democracy and education, my thesis brings to light the manifold properties of hope, many of them personified in individuals, in word and action. The range of those hopes from the inspirational, to the entrepreneurial, to the relational to the pedagogical, all lean in the direction of social justice as the heartland of the American Dream. I take the broad historical view of hope to understand its relation to social justice, to invention, to utopic thinking, and to inciting change. I attempt to answer the question, “What can the current crises in democracy and education learn from a philosophical study of the nature of hope?” My perspective is largely confined to the framework of democracy and education (Burbules, 1990; Mouffe & LeClau, 2002; Ojara, 2007). I look to the symbiosis of democracy and education, investigating reciprocities in their that add dynamism and engagement to both domains and that proffer hope towards improving the condition of their flourishing.

This thesis examines hope historically, inquiring how unfulfilled history still has a latent role in our consciousness that sparks forward in the present with an orientation of fulfilling the unfulfilled. I pursue the rootedness of hope, firstly to Promethean and knowledge, then to the freedom of the Exodus theme in scripture repeated in the Puritan flight from Europe and the ubiquity in the pioneering spirit of the American Dream (Brook, 2017; Gorski, 2017). I argue for the tensions inherent in hope that reveal its complexity as a phenomenon—hope’s power of contagion, for example (Brennan, 2004). l also interrogate hope’s failures: the tragedy of misplaced hope and the lack of hope, both of which are important hope elements.

Specifically—and of course, partially—I situate this study of the historical context of philosophies of hope in the American Revolutionary era, a trajectory that provides fertile ground to explore a notion of hope. A key claim about American democracy—and the philosophical conceptions of hope I explore—is its seeming distinctiveness, and its sense of newness: the flight

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from Europe to something new, free from the barnacles of the Old World and determinedly eager to create a distinctively new order of governance rooted in principles of freedom and equality.

Education was implicated in that vision, seen by Jefferson and other Founders as keystone to creating and sustaining the support needed to preserve democracy’s new look. I examine the distinctiveness narrative at length, partly through classical narratives that I have been discussing but also through the lens of Hannah Arendt who had insight into the nature of American democratic distinctiveness in its formulation, demonstrating democratic deliberation unlike its counterpart, the French Revolution. The emergent Declaration of Independence, with its high- profile ideals of liberty and equality, had radical implications for reform. Sadly, they remained largely dormant for a great many years with only partial redress at best to this day. Counter- narratives telling of immeasurable despoliation, murder, and misery followed the founding of the nation. But the ideals remained, replete with tragic evidence of the unfulfilled. Concern with democracy both waxed and waned for a century, cataclysmically disrupted by the Civil War until reformists in the Progressive Era decided to re-imagine and take steps to reconstruct democracy and education.

My study will stress the interrelationship of polity and education that was given much attention by the Founders. I recognize, in passing, the noteworthy early public education advocacy symbolized by Horace Mann. Major attention in the 19th century, however, centres on Abraham Lincoln for his radical nation-saving hope and then the liberal progressive for their attempted radical reform of both democracy and education in mutually reinforcing ways, led by John Dewey and Jane Addams. That the reciprocity inherent in that reform should be seen in the light of yet another spoke in the wheel, hope, is explored in some depth. I discuss the temporal nature of hope, following Dewey’s early definition of hope, and its orientation to the future; I also follow Dewey’s life-long hope-orientation towards the well-being of the social self and country, a belief that characterized his philosophies of democracy and education.

I suggest that a cluster of hope-intimate values can be justified as a conceptual family under that rubric of hope.7 This suite of values—freedom, fairness, belief in the individual’s liberating

7 In his book, Of Human Potential (1985), Israel Scheffler notes that “concepts belong to families” (p 9). 14

development—form a value constellation illuminating progressive democracy and, further, that those values are of the utmost importance to the ontology by which the liberal progressives saw education within their era. In turn, those values were to undergird a naturalized philosophy of pragmatic hope, thus giving to democracy, education, and hope a highly symbiotic relationship and a fresh distinctiveness to the American revolutionary spirit and vision. Dewey tirelessly explicated the democracy-education relationship for over half a century, seeing hope for his country dependent on such an axis of ethicacy. He brought intelligent imagination to the fore as salvific to America’s national destiny:

Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large task for our philosophy. (Dewey, 1917 p.9)

I deepen the reform focus in democracy and public education by analyzing the attempted turn in both by the progressives in a heroic effort to create a radically different education in league with a democracy with significantly closer affinity to the ideals of the Declaration. My interest is far from antiquarian. I see shards of the vision of the progressives being highly relevant for the dilemmas in democracy and education today. I study the progressives’ insight into the profound relationship between democracy and education as theorized and practiced by Jane Addams and John Dewey. I examine how the hegemony of behaviourism and successive mechanical models of mind, did long-lasting damage to more enlightened models being spearheaded by the progressives.

The justification of this thesis, then, is the argument that I make that the history of the American Hope Dream offers lessons for today’s solution-seekers in regard to what ails democracy and education in our age. My research has focused perhaps more on the “players” than events in search of the critical ideas on democracy and education that nourished the American Dream. I attempt genealogical analysis of problems with a view to considering whether pragmatic solutions are possible in an effort to restore the already damaged or potentially threatened aspects of democracy and public education. It is a study of the deeper values associated with the American Dream, and the modes of hope that came into play in ways that inspired, criticized, redeemed, and transformed epochal events through the generations. 15

By exploring the genealogy of hope in the American Dream, my purpose is to reveal a componentry of hope that is relevant to today and tomorrow within the conjugation of democracy and education. From colonists to Founding Fathers to seers like Mann, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman and the progressives ramified the ways and means that democracy could live up to its idealization as an enabling governing and educational force for the flourishing growth of each and every individual. This is a study of the beneficent side of the American heart and spirit that hope brought to life. The commonality of hope democracy and education, revolve around freedom, fraternity and the inalienable right to equality of opportunity for persons of any age being party to a liberating development of potentiality. Such a premise informs my intellectual exploration of hope, democracy and education in this thesis.

My investigation serves to broaden appreciation of hope’s potency, and the varied forms that it evinced in shaping events. The periodic continuum of hope in the formation of the nation has now reached a low ebb. I give thought to the tragic side of American history, the overlooked injustices, the unevenness of hope and lack of hope that co-exist with triumphalism, and the suffering that shares the American narrative alongside the Dream.

The history of colonization and the historic mistreatment of African Americans are but two challenges to the ideal of the American Dream. The irony of the ideals of freedom and democracy, so eloquently articulated by Thomas Jefferson, evaded their hypocrisy in practice. Te-Nehisio, in the tradition of James Baldwin, says the American Dream is a lie (Slaughter, 2015). Clearly, in discussing the conditions of democracy and education, the issue of race equality, integration, and the discrepancy of ideal and reality is part of the national narrative that needs thorough ventilation in any discussion of the route to fulfilling the Dream.

On balance, my primary goal is to understand the variability, imagination, and meaningfulness of hope’s presence within the hope-dream. Aspirationally, it will lead to appreciation of the creative strengths of the dreams in the past which, in turn, will suggest ways and means such that methodologies of the hope phenomenon can be of service to the present.

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The Ongoing Resonance of Exodus and Prometheus: Early Narratives of Hope and New Beginnings The ideals of the Revolution are often seen as having been drawn from the Enlightenment. My research suggests much earlier sources of ideals were in play. As previously noted, I thus begin this history of hope with the hitherto largely unappreciated intertwining of the two ancient narratives, Exodus and Prometheus, as they wind their way through some 25 centuries of telling and retelling. I relate their enduring impact as ideals on the spirit that led to Revolution, and its aftermath.

The values that I probe throughout this dissertation connect with the narratives of hope (detailed below) that I identify in both the Exodus and Prometheus. What the Exodus had in common with Prometheus was freedom from oppressive authority. What the Exodus was offering, as seen by the pilgrims coming to America was religious hope, including Christian charity, compassion, and love. Promethean altruism consisted of the gift of knowledge. It was knowledge without conditions, an open knowledge, without the constraints that the biblical narratives of the day prescribed about knowledge (Sulek, 2001; Horton, 2014).

The concept of hope being linked to a Dream discourse would seem to be archetypal. My research indicates that the earliest tale of hope in Western society begins in the mythical tale of Hesiod about 750 B.C. with the Greek creation myths of Prometheus and Pandora. Although the chronology is contested, it would seem that at nearly the same time, the Hebrews, Exodus offered a powerful narrative of emancipation from being slave to the Egyptians. Both this Bible story and the Greek myth in their recounting of common instances of freedom from oppression brought hope for a promising new beginning—in the case of Exodus, to a chosen people, and in Prometheus, the gift of fire, symbol of knowledge, to humanity without any governing conditions. That will become relevant when I discuss the epistemological differences in the American Revolution between the Exodus legacy and the Promethean legacy.

Explanatory creation stories abound in most cultures, but in Western society these two narratives have been particularly luminous through the ages, with many imaginative visual renditions created during the middle ages and the Enlightenment, followed by interpretation in myths, poetry, novels, music, and cinema that wended their way into modern culture. I explore the luminosity of hope in the Exodus story as it related to the American Hope Dream. The 17

Exodus had a particularly vivid revival in the history of American settlement, with the historical record of the settlers arriving in 1620 believing their voyage to the New World was a divinely ordained repeat of the flight from Egypt (Feiler, 2010).8 I call this a bright-line moment in American history because of the presence of ideals that it represented.

On the Mayflower, as I have previously noted, people acted in concert in communal solidarity of purpose a keystone principle of fraternity that was to become a legacy at the time of the American Revolution. The notion of humans coming together in relationship was characterized by formal common agreement, such as making promises to work together in a world-building sense. That observation was prominent in the thinking of Hannah Arendt in the last century (Arendt, 1963). Famously, Arendt traced the roots of such value into an age of antiquity, and in her study of revolutions in Europe and the New World, she cited the pilgrims coalescing around those values on the Mayflower. In citing what came to be known as the Mayflower Compact that was signed by 41 of the 152 pilgrims, Arendt noted:

The 41 signatories displayed remarkable confidence in their self-appointed power to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, (sic) for our better Ordering and Preservation…and by hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts Constitutions, and Offices…for the General good of the Colony” (Bowering, 2011, p. 39).

The values of the Mayflower Compact thus included caring and responsibility for one another in common cause, and keeping promises in “the grammar of action” (Bowering, 2011, p.38). It presaged the activities that led to another bright-line event, the historic Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, with their many pledges towards unity and the binding of their actions through promise-making.

Again, in somewhat parallel fashion to Exodus Two, this time on the Mayflower, a famous painting of Prometheus by Peter Paul Rubens, was being produced about the same time that the Mayflower sailed. That myth was to be prominently linked to a century after

8 William Bradford, their leader, compared their voyage across the Atlantic to that of the Hebrews crossing the Red Sea. The pilgrims described themselves as God`s Chosen People who were reliving the Exodus story. 18

American settlement took firm root. Franklin was called “the new American Prometheus” by , owing to his crucial role in the invention of electricity. I have been concentrating on the Exodus story as powering the bright-line, its lineage beginning with religion and the Declaration as having residual elements of Mayflower Compact ethics blended with Enlightenment values of autonomy and justice. But the revolutionary spirit reflected some of the romantic side of the Promethean myth. By the early 19th century, the Promethean myth had been romanticized as heralding human freedom, giving free rein to creative expression, idolizing the imagination, lionizing heroism, extolling expressiveness, and even condoning transgression. While that syndrome becomes full-blown in writers such as Byron, Coleridge, Shelley (although these works post-dated the Revolution in the early 19th century), Goethe demonstrated much of this kind of creative thrust in his drama about Prometheus that was in the air just as the American struggle for freedom was happening. Prometheus represented the liberating of creative powers, as did Goethe. Into the making of the Revolution was going not only the revolutionary thought of Tom Paine but also the rebellious thinking of Goethe. The latter was celebrating the generic Romantic artist rejoicing in his own liberated, creative power. Transgressive and unbounded experience, knowledge and freedom of being, I will argue, were in social and political circulation. They were reflective of the revolutionary spirit and its Creeds. There were no conditions given to world-building in the Promethean myth in contrast to the Exodus story. One can argue the merits and demerits of each. I argue that the religious and pagan values provided a provocative blend of hope characterized by ambition, inventiveness, and experimentation with probity. The Exodus was, and is, recognized by members of Congress for its religiously based ideals. Prometheus, to my mind, brought an ecumenical embrace to all humanity without conditions.

These narratives have in common the dawning of new opportunity in times of profound darkness, what hope-scholar Ernst Bloch (1986) was to call “the darkness of the lived moment." Bloch was to spend his entire career attempting to explicate the power of hope within human lives and its potential to bring about constructive change in the world. His was not a religious belief. Bloch believed in many of the Judeo-Christian values animating the pilgrims, but attempted to orient those values to this-worldly belief and action towards realizing that belief.

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That was what would overcome the darkness of present circumstances providing, as his friend Walter Benjamin would say, “the spark of hope” to a more humanistic world.

Utopic daydreaming was of the utmost importance to Bloch in shaping the lives we should live. Our daydreams were not idylls or reveries to be dismissed, but latencies of our past experience, the prompting of our utopic imagination. Central ideas about hope were stressed by Bloch, first the human propensity to imagine better conditions for humanity in daydreams. Secondly, by being thought of as a “this-worldly” phenomenon, Bloch’s notion of hope shifts the responsibility to the human plane for agentic action. In other words, the locus of this-worldly hope lay now with humanity, and was not dependent on transcendental supervention. The utopic imagination, for Bloch, serves as a source of generative power for bettering the world. Bloch believed that many values such as dignity, compassion, and equality, which were inherent in the Judeo-Christian view of the world need not to be thought transcendentally. He posited that they were simply the constituents of human hope.

Narratives of Despair Without question, to highlight narratives of hope as linked to the discourse of the American Dream is far from unproblematic. During early American history, neither slavery nor colonization was deemed moral issues of consequence. Slave labour became an immediate fixture, fully integrated into the economy and adjunctively neutral with the American Hope Dream (see, for example, Zinn, 2015; Genovese, 1976; Aptheker, 1937). It resulted in a bonanza of milk and honey for the colonists with vast profits accumulating for the landowners. (Patterson, 1982; Aptheker, 1937; Ward Churchill, 2004; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Berlin, 1982). Slavery would create a national catastrophe that would threaten and almost destroy the Dream along with the nation. It was and is a national tragedy, largely without a resolved resolution, a tragedy largely without catharsis. For many readers, the American Dream cannot be understood as distinct from the of colonization and slavery that underlie even the nomenclature of "Founding Fathers," for example. For whom, we must ask, is the American Dream one of hope? For such thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, the answer would clearly be otherwise; the history of America is not the history of a Dream but of unfulfilled promises: “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro 20

people...” (Du Bois, 1903). In his renowned 1935 poem, “Let America be America Again,” Langston Hughes (1994) aptly captures the sense of ideals that were never realized:

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

I probe in depth the values of the American Hope Dream as foreordained by the pilgrims and elaborated on in the new nationhood brought about by the spirit of the American Revolution. Colonization brought with it the challenges of such world-building activities, but also the concomitant other narratives that colonizing inflicted on other peoples. Indigenous peoples and slaves were co-opted and coerced in the course of fulfilling the American Dream. The seeming incongruity, rationalization, and hypocrisy of those actions with high-minded ideals associated

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with those narratives are not the direct subject of this project, although they provide ongoing high tension to the bright-line of development of the American Dream.

Aware of the tensions thus inherent to my thesis, I now turn to outline the “partiality” of the philosophical ideals and histories I have selected to investigate. I also posit that my thesis is not intended to be normative. I do not suggest that the ideals explicated herein reflect values or histories that should be taken as globally prescriptive for all people at all times—particularly in light of the damage done in the name of the American Dream and “progress.” Rather, my project focuses on the bright-lines that allow insight into the unique revolutionary histories of the United States and how these inflect different Anglo and European philosophical approaches to understanding hope. If my thesis serves primarily to engender counter-narratives—analyses of the despair wrought in the name of these bright-lines; scholarship on the nature of hope and/or despair experienced distinctively by those whose lives are directly shaped by colonization and slavery—then my partial narrative will have succeeded in renewing dialogues about the future of hope in the wilting democracy of the United States.

Making a Case for the Emancipative Potential of Partial Hope

My approach adopts the notion of re-visioning, an outlook famously captured by Adrienne Rich (1971,1991): “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text, for a new critical direction” (P.1). Angelika Bammer (1991) elaborates on the notion of partial vision, as framed by Rich, arguing it is a notion that distinguishes the traditional fixed, static sense of utopia with a much less comprehensive model of change, one that responds to the narrower utopian impulse: “Often the gaze that encompasses less is often able to grasp more, the partial vision is more utopian….[than] full-blown utopias” (p. 4) Donna Haraway (1988), too, puts the case for partial vision with characteristic bluntness: “The moral is simple, only partial perspective promises objective Vision” (p.590). Bammer (1991) argues similarly: “I argue that it is often the partial vision, rather than the supposedly comprehensive one that is most able to see clearly” (p.4). My partiality in this project is about the change that kept occurring in the colonial and then national thinking toward the desirablity for change, freedom and more personal and national autonomy. Fredric Jameson (2005) points to the urgency that oppression begets (p. 4). It is that urgency for freedom and the changes sought in the direction of political purpose that

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fascinated Hannah Arendt. My work moves from the role of imagination in bringing about qualitative change, (Plato/Vogt) to the Arendtian analysis of the political way that hope entered desire for change in America and fed the American appetite for the revolutionary spirit. I show how that became uniquely expressed in the Creedal documents of the Revolution. Correlatively, education was entailed as essential to sustaining and nurturing that change. Jefferson also pushed the emancipative agenda into the new space of equality as an inalienable right. I analyze how that principle kept being revisited by Lincoln and the progressives.

My partial vision shifts in time to selected periods within the 20th century to periods when democracy was caught up in the turmoil of a pending Second World War. John Dewey becomes the public intellectual voice in the defense of liberal democracy wherein he differentiates it from the totalitarian visions of fascism and communism. His focus is on American values, those distinctive features of the dream that prize belief and freedom of the individual. In 1939, as if in silent awareness of the vast inequities in Dream fulfillment for minorities and marginalized peoples within the country, he writes his essay “Creative Democracy, the Task Before Us” (1998a), in which he gives tacit acknowledgement to the incompletion of the American Dream while giving a primary defensive thrust to what America has already accomplished through democracy. His memorable piece, I argue, was a cri de coeur for national, patriotic hope. Critical hope, in relation to the Dream, surfaces in the 1960s and 1970s with remnant thinking of the Frankfurt school,9 the spawning of new intellectual currents on the campuses across the nation, and the fierce opposition to the perceived folly of American foreign policy in .

My partial vision moves to select from among the many manifestoes of critical hope in the 1960s and 1970s the works of Brazilian author, Paulo Freire (1970), who brought to American attention, while attending Harvard, a particularly passionate case for “the wretched of the earth.”10 The lack of voice for the peasants of Brazil and Chile where Freire had pioneered radical literacy programs, resonated with other forms of unheard voices in America. Previously mute or silenced voices now appropriated ideas for liberating the “wretchedness” of their condition. Voices of feminists of America, the Black Panthers, and anti-Vietnam war protesters

9 Herbert Marcuse might be thought of in this light. 10 Franz Fanon famously identified the plight of the oppressed in the title of his book from 1961, The Wretched of the Earth. 23

became activist groups for critical change, leading to powerful zeitgeists of the day. My attention to the Hope Dream then shifts to the reactionary tear-downs to democracy and education in the Reagan era. It was a time when democratic participation was systemically slighted by government and measures of reductive control were on the rise on many fronts, especially virulent in public education.11

In sum, Ernst Bloch’s central thesis of hope, being a principle marked by not-yet-anticipation, was taking root in America over several decades, his work having finally been published in English in 1986. While his loyalty to Soviet Marxism kept him well removed from the mainstream, his vision of “possibility” for a more just world was a recurring current of intellectual thought in America over several decades. Echoes of Bloch's vision seemed to appear in 2004, when a message of unabashed hope vividly resurfaced in political form in the dramatic convention speech of Barack Obama. Hope was suddenly in “neon lights” and the American Dream seemed to have prospect for serious revival. Bloch's The Principle of Hope (1986), in which he expressed that secular hope was the original locus of historical change, seemed to be reawakening. Obama continually looked to what I am calling the bright-line of history for sustenance of the Dream, and he did that throughout in the rhetoric of his two terms as President.

In a new collection of essays entitled The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, editors Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek (2013) note:

[Bloch] provided a detailed and systematic account of…an open universe—opened up toward its future sustained by the hope of redemption, joy and justice to come… To combat false liberation one should learn to discern in it the authentic utopian core… [Bloch] remains our contemporary, and maybe he belongs even more to our time than to his own. (pp. xix, xx)

My partial vision will try to make the case that the American Dream still has renewable power, despite the welter of deep concern about the erosion of democracy under the current Trump administration. The concern for decay of liberal democracy goes well beyond the partisan

11 The misuses of standardized testing—its excesses and collateral effects on curriculum and pedagogy— were exacerbated during the Reagan era and continue to adversely affect public education in many areas in the present day. 24

politics of the current administration, however. While democracy has been severely tested under the current regime, the wider concern is with a long-term erosion of the Constitution and, concomitantly, the shrinkage of the public sphere, the politicizing and centralizing of executive power, and the increase in authoritarian revisionism (see Huq & Ginsburg, 2018; McCarthy, 2018). Economic inequality in and of itself is deemed an influence on the health of liberal democracy, and the seemingly constant widening of the wealth gap between rich and poor is of concern to those who see this retrogression in liberal democracy. I discuss the foregoing theme in my project.

Similarly, that public education continues to be under-resourced is a deficit characterized by supreme neglect, given the wealth of the nation. My claim reverts to the fundamental theme that Dewey made that all children can flourish given propitious conditions for learning and that such must become the operational banner for public education in every quarter of the nation for the future to fulfill the American Dream.

Partiality is an omnipresent caveat of my project, given the limit of time and space. There is no pretext to be comprehensive in anything beyond exploring modes of hoping and the importance of their prolific nature. I confine my argument to a bright-line of hope, an important ethico-moral line that runs through the American Dream—at times bold, at times dotted or faded, but nonetheless a line worthy of close examination for the values that it represents. The future potential of America, which is of special interest to me, revolves around the warrant for doing more with qualitatively rich conceptualizations of democracy and education. This work is unabashedly partial. It is also partisanly partial with a bias towards liberal democracy.

What This Thesis is Not: Samuel Huntington’s Ideology of Retrieving a Partisan Past

What this thesis is not is a rerun under the rubric of the kind of hope for which noted historian Samuel Huntington advocated, one charged with ideology and identity. His was not the cosmopolitan, cross-cultural rapport that Jane Addams had championed a century earlier. Rather, it was advocacy for a return of the past, a call to reaffirm the American Founders’ Anglo- Protestant lifeways and their interpretation of the American Creed as a restoration of American self-identity. The Huntington nostalgia stands four square in the face of an America that is now of mixed race, mixed cultural history as the new majority-minority. Rather, my hope lies in the 25

direction of forging a new kind of mutually transformative, across- re-engagement as essential to achieving 21st century social hope in America.

In seeming retribution to the movements for enlarging direct participation in government, reflective of the Founders’ concern for maintaining the vitality of democracy, government countermeasures were proposed. The way of Huntington thought, which found its way into the report of the Trilateral Commission, of which he was chair, was influential in dismantling years of progress made on building more democratic dialogue (see Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 1975; this report was informally referred to as the Huntington Report). Direct citizen participation came under further attack during Reagan’s presidency a few years later, when he systematically de-authorized federal encouragement and funding for organizations promoting activism in democratic social involvement. The Jefferson ideal for a direct, participatory American democracy was unravelling on the advice of Huntington.

In sum, retrospective immersion in nostalgia exemplified by the negative legacy of Samuel Huntington leads to divisiveness. My bias and goal in this project works to revivify the more creative bright-line of thinking that gave to the American Dream the patina of a distinctive model of democracy. To that end, I focus on the progressive lineage of thinkers on democracy. I include examples of democratic movements that serve to motivate cross-difference communication. I argue for their relevance in creating robust and ever-deepening politics of citizen engagement.12

Hope: Inherent Commonality of Democracy and Education

I am guided in political theory of democracy by Frank Cunningham, J. B. Macpherson, Carol Pateman, David Held, Donald Kagan, and preeminently by the democratic theory developed collaboratively by John Dewey and Jane Addams. My interest in linking democracy to school, and both of these to hope, arises from what I believe to be a keystone definition as follows:“A democratically functioning group is to be valued especially for liberating development of the potentialities of all the individuals in it” (Dewey, 1927, p. 147). This definition, formulated by Cunningham, but prominent also in the pragmatically oriented works of democracy by J. B.

12 Angelika Bammer p. 1. Adrienne Rich; Oct, 1972. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” Vol.34, no.1; Women Writing and Teaching, NTCE 26

Macpherson and John Dewey, rings of openness, sociality and unlimited scope. The “liberating development of the individual” is contextualized by occurring “within a group” and implies inclusiveness and action. These authors also believe that democracy should apply to all modes of human association, be context sensitive, and follow the early pragmatist paradigm of problem solving, which included recognizing that solutions create more problems.

Distinguished British feminist and leading participatory-democratic theorist Carol Pateman (1970), drawing on central notions in Rousseau and Mill, also sees the participatory character of democracy as crucially important in fostering human development as well as efficacious polity. Benjamin Barber (1984), another proponent of robust, participative democracy, notes that in strong democracies citizens relate to one another as neighbors, bound together as active participants in shared activities. Both Pateman’s and Barber’s emphasis on participatory democracy is in strong concurrence with the Cunningham and McPherson view of American democracy, held in prominence by the Founders, and its human development cognate philosophically deepened by Addams and Dewey. In this thesis, I foreground the unique contribution of Jane Addams who made a valiant attempt to operationalize democracy in Hull Settlement House, thereby giving persuasive evidence of its workability to support its theoretical promise.

Dewey, the defining member of the pragmatic school of democracy, having rejected the instrumental view of democracy (Dewey, 1887) as a “piece of machinery” for tabulating votes, expressed the pragmatist ideal of democracy as good, justifying the moral view “because it consists in the development of all the social capabilities of every individual of society” (Dewey & Tufts, 1908; Dewey, 1932).

Hope, Progressive Pedagogy and the Ethic of Meliorism

This thesis centres on the progressive vision of John Dewey and Jane Addams, as their philosophy and praxis reflect essential elements of the American Hope Dream. In light of my praise for the audacity of the Addams-Dewey attempt to rectify and resuscitate democracy, I dig deeply into their attempt to re-imagine a new way of thinking about democracy in company with new thinking about education being spearheaded by Dewey. Addams, in theory and practice, returned to the founding principles of the Republic in which they both deeply believed, with a 27

profound interest in the notion of human equality and freedom, and what that meant in the light of an infinitely more complex society that America was for them, than it had been a century earlier. Remarkably, much of the essence of a cosmopolitan America was to be found not only in the vision but also within the practices of Jane Addams, who pioneered a social gospel within Chicago’s Hull Settlement House. The ideal of the political sovereignty of everyone was also put on a pedestal by John Dewey in his extensive writings about the distinctive character of American Democracy—that idea sponsored, he claimed, in the Jefferson-guided rhetoric of the Declaration. While the ideal of equality was an ideal, not a personal practice in Jefferson’s governance of Virginia, he clearly articulated an egalitarian vision for the destiny of the country, a value that Lincoln was to treat as virtually mandated for the country. I take up the fraternal, inclusive kind of thinking of Addams and Dewey, and argue for its revival in the America of the 21st Century.

I focus on their astoundingly “progressive” views on democracy’s ideals stemming from their parsing of equity as embracing inclusiveness and cosmopolitanism as well as an emancipative agenda for education in their re-imagined form. I draw attention to their import of the French “fraternity” from the French Revolution, a notion inspired by Rousseau, which emphasized the importance of human relationship as foundational to democracy. The key to the new democracy was ascension to a broader, more nutrient democracy based on human association. Dewey (1919/1998d) put it this way: “If democratic equality may be construed as individuality, there is nothing forced in understanding fraternity [emphasis mine] as continuity, that is to say, as association and interaction without limit” (p. 78).

Dewey and Addams had important insights on moving towards equality of opportunity for both economic and political equity. These I probe for their contemporary relevance. They were revolutionary insights, but both opposed physical revolution. My study is of their ideals, this- worldly ideals, with their weltanschauung of local and global harmony, and building towards conviviality, acceptance, and friendship, all steps towards a democratic way of life. While the starting-point for Dewey is the family, the school becomes for him immensely important as the site to nurture the values of democracy through everyday experience. The rejuvenated values and concomitant implications for the American Dream become of central importance within the

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discourse of this thesis; what schools can do by way of nurturance of those values becomes crucial to my argument for reform in democracy and public education.

I note the international flavour Addams and Dewey provide to the American Dream, through their intellectual with the European philosophers Mazzini, Maeterlinck, and Bergson— famous champions of freedom, equality, and creative evolution, respectively. They provided ethical substratum to the Addams-Dewey attempt to give a purview broader and deeper to democracy than simply polity. It involved interweaving education and democracy into an ethic of social hope that would revivify the American Dream (Rorty, 1998, speaks to the theme of Deweyan creativity in re-imagining democracy). I explore the “new Dream,” emphasizing the importance of Dewey concatenating the notion of democracy and education in a landmark book by that title, Democracy and Education (1917, 1923), to draw attention to their reciprocal nature. Dewey creatively marries the epistemic properties of governance and pedagogy under the nurturing rubric of growth. Dewey put the larger context of creating a democratic society as follows: “When the aim of continued growth is applied to everyone, a democratic society is suggested, one that fosters the unique abilities of all its members, including the abilities to restructure the social institutions in just such restructuring” (p. 114, 115).

The conjugation of democracy and education, inherencies of the American Dream, became dynamic in a marquee sense by John Dewey by the entitling of his most acclaimed work, 100 years ago, Democracy and Education (1917). In that classic, he laid the groundwork for radical new thinking about democracy as a vastly more ambitious social hope and for the wholesale reform of public education in ways that would humanize the learning environment for children. Democratic modes of thinking became integral as they did at Hull House. The manner in which Dewey compounded his vision of democracy with education was theoretically groundbreaking. His new hope derived from a secular rather than religious naturalistic evolutionary philosophy. It was social hope that was both individually and collectively empowering and grounded on the dynamic relationship of the individual within society.

I also note the early attempts by Dewey to define hope psychologically, as published in Psychology (1887), a textbook testimony to his grasp of many elusive, but important, attributes of hope to human development. I highlight the extraordinary avant-garde thinking of Addams, both ethically and pedagogically in Hull Settlement House by attacking classism through 29

embracing and equalizing otherness, while giving voice to women—both volunteers and clients—in myriad ways.13 These activisms of Addams and Dewey grounded in their respective “experimental” habitats, Hull Settlement House and the Deweyan Lab School, they called meliorism, or in modern parlance, “robust hope” (Koopman, 2009). Meliorism added not only muscle to hope but also gave it a concrete dimension, an orientation to social reform that was to become of paramount importance to scholars of hope (Bloch, 1986). Hope in praxis becomes important to my study. I argue that Addams was particularly noteworthy in the way she provided praxis to her theorizing, her innovative technique of “action research,” her attempts to sensitively integrate university speakers into institutional life and, in general, her exemplary modeling of the role of reflective practitioner in her leadership of Hull House.

Noteworthy in my project is also the kinship of imagination and hope, a linkage given influential attention by Richard Rorty (1998) and by Bloch (1986). The theme of imagination and American Dream is picked up by Rorty (1998) at the end of the last century, as indeed it had been by Lionel Trilling (1950) in mid-century. I address the need for more emphasis on “imaginative uplift” in fostering better democracy and better public education (Addams, 1899).

The American slogan of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was incorporated into their thinking, but Addams and Dewey were not content to stop there. With the importation of fraternity and the Declaration’s reference to equality as additions to the libertarian theme, they birthed fraternity with a collateral wealth of relational concepts: solicitude, cooperation, collaboration, participation, mutuality, and inclusion. These were notions, hitherto underappreciated, but fundamental to both education and democracy, bespeaking action, purpose, engagement, and, all importantly, sociality, with attendant communal forms of mutuality. Contemporary scholar Larry Hickman (1990) gives succinct explanation from a pragmatist perspective: “For Dewey the significant contrast is not between the individual and the group…but between individuals who are constructive and creative…and therefore able to contribute to group life” (p. 171). George Mead, an early pragmatist, pointed specifically to education with a similar insight. He notes that education aims for the internalization of social activities. Explaining that we learn to take others into consideration, in part by listening to their

13 Hull Settlement House in Chicago was established by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. 30

stories. Mead (2013) points out that self is born from the process of “taking the role of the other” (p. 198).

A long-standing ideal of Dewey, that is, the ordinary individual becoming supremely important in relation to the group, became the new ethical basis for democracy. Already a living reality in Hull House, his idealization of American democracy had become to Addams “the most precious possession” of the nation (Addams, 1997, p. 273). She had been co-progenitor and co- shaper of the transformation of the re-imagined democracy with Dewey. The new potential for democracy became an epiphanic moment for both Addams and Dewey. It became a platform that animated their theoretic re-imagining of democracy. Democracy was a way of associated living; it was put into practice intergenerationally at Hull House, and associated living became the leitmotif of Dewey’s Democracy and Education. In the chapters that follow, I argue that key aspects of their theory commend themselves to revived attention in our “Age of Pessimism.”

Progressive education was to become seriously contested in the last century. The pedagogic emphases that Dewey was championing were fiercely challenged by a radically different form of psychology, one incorporating behaviorist theory within public education. From its theoretical base to its pedagogical methods, behaviourism flew in the face of many of the deepest ideals of Dewey and his colleagues. Its strengths played to the vulnerabilities of Dewey’s theories. At a time of inordinate pressure on building and staffing new schools in cities across the nation, behaviourism offered straightforward, linear materials that simplified teachers’ lives, and brought praise from proliferating bureaucrats who were building systems of education with an eye to meeting the demands of burgeoning manufacturing industries and clerical support staffs for growing businesses. Detractors referred to it as the cult of efficiency, but it enjoyed financial and public support. Critics from Ralph Sleeper (1988) to Eric Bredo (1997) and James Garrison (1998) have shown how learning theory picked up on Newtonian, pre-Darwin science, with its regulative laws of physics, and in so doing brought a determinist, reductive approach to learning that was rooted in animal psychology coupled with the notion of a machine-mind analogy. Edward Thorndike gave spirited early leadership to the movement and was entrepreneurially renowned for marketing his learning materials. Thorndike’s standardized tests became a staple, along with many other of his printed materials, largely based on a “skill and drills” order (Tomlinson, 1997). 31

This thesis tracks the longevity of behaviourism, discusses its legacy and attributes to it factors that precipitate and aggravate many of the “crises” in the public education of our day. The values that drove its narrative were, for the most part, alien to the welfare of the child. I discuss why, and I detail the way they were particularly detrimental to the most vulnerable children. The values that Dewey ranked foremost in his hierarchy of effective pedagogy went largely missing in the educational environments of these children, in part because of their greater cost and the misbegotten belief that other methods were simpler as well as more cost effective. Both were true. They also were also largely ineffective.

The tragic neglect of such heart and spirit within American schooling would appear to correspond with a tragic loss of hope for countless children. Equality of opportunity, with its attendant values of social inclusion, school ecology of “uplifting imagination,” and the deep focus on the well-being of children has been the short suit of urban-child education within America. Deweyan education, commonly adapted within private schools and evident in the best schools, has widened the learning gap, I argue, with its attention to more personalized learning, experiential learning, field trips, imaginative arts programs, adaptation to learning styles—in short, high interest and engaging curricula. For this to be largely confined to the preserve of the privileged children of America is, as its critiques lament, a grave crisis. By the end of my project I will have entertained ideas and explorations of a platform of change vectored towards the values of the progressives with regard to overcoming the inequality of affect and other forms of “privileged” resource as a paramount route to reclaiming the hope of the American Dream in education.

Outline of Chapters

Chapter 1: The Ontology of Hope

In Chapter 1, I address the ontology of hope in history by illustrating its presence in biblical narrative and myth though the ages into the American Hope Dream, via the early settlers, the aspiration for the City on a Hill, and a Promethean quest for new knowledge. I interrogate “received wisdom” that hope was not a significant feature of Greek philosophic thought by investigating the work of a current classicist philosopher, Katja Vogt (2017), who explicates the

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prominence of hope in Plato’s Philebus. I bring the Vogt-Platonic hope into conversation with the hope scholarship of Ernst Bloch with respect to their common didacticism.

I also note the attempt of Vogt to bring imagination to the forefront of hope within a Platonic context. Her current research into the philosophy of the imagination shows how it works to produce multiple scenarios that our mind screens until we discern the “good” projection of the future, one with the most prudently hopeful likelihood for leading to a successful outcome.

I see congruence in Vogt’s (2017) work in the light of contemporary hope being viewed philosophically as encompassing the power of feeling (Boler, 1999) with the “stickiness” of emotions (Ahmed, 2004) and their contagion (Brennan, 2004). This convergence leads me to argue for the lineage of hope from antiquity having direct implication to understanding the trajectory of democracy and education as they weave their way through the American Hope- Dream.

Chapter 2: Concepts of Hope in Hannah Arendt

In Chapter 2, I address the hope of Hannah Arendt with its emphasis on the role of the public in democracy, and her focus on the concepts of action and natality as human instigations of awakening to new hope. I examine the importance she attaches to deliberation within democratic polity. I interrogate her historical research into the birth of her adopted country, and her probes into the hope-incited revolutionary American spirit that gives re-birth as a refreshing epiphany of hope, one that importantly animates the evolutionary American dream.

Arendt edifies especially the tenacious spirit that prevailed beyond the military triumph of the Colonies that crystallized the Republican creed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To that reflective and tenacity of spirit, she calls attention to American distinctiveness from other revolutions, most notably the French, which lacked such prudent promulgation—for which it paid dearly.

I discuss Arendt’s (1982) analysis of Immanuel Kant`s Critique of Judgment and the new status for feeling accorded the act of judging. As well, I explore the enlargement of concepts, mentioned by Kant and interpreted by the current scholar, Linda Zerilli (2013, P.10). The third critique offers scope for analysis of concepts for Arendt and Zerilli to explore the notion of

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world-building, which underlies the development of democracy. I argue for the importance of the Arendt-Zerilli axis of research to better understand the American Dream, its roots and possibilities.

I explore the many shades of hope in Hannah Arendt, her “outsider” take on America and her avid interest in its experimental venture as a Republic. Arendt, educated and steeped in continental polity, and a victim of its catastrophes through two world wars, decoded the American Dream with fresh insight by discerning an American kind of hope that its Founders wrestled with, one tempered by deliberative hope, with a role assigned to the constitutional openness to change, denoting awareness of the constitution’s experimental nature. As well, Arendt extolled the Founders’ aspiring commitment to a direct and highly participative public or publics as a distinctive goal of their democracy. Arendt laments that Jefferson was persuaded to replace “public good” in favor of “the pursuit of happiness,” a change which led to the pursuit of the privatization of hope, as it were, rather than the homage of hope to the Public Good with its sharply different ethico-moral vector.

Chapter 3: Founders and Heirs of the Revolutionary Spirit

In Chapter 3, I address early settler hope as the embryonic American Dream evolved, and the kind of new empowering hope for self and society represented by the early settlers and epitomized by Benjamin Franklin’s many-sided hopes for himself and his colony.

Franklin was a politician, public servant, businessman, printer, wealth accumulator, diplomat, educationist, aspiring philosopher, social climber, man of the world, writer, publisher, and more. A complete recital of his interests and achievements and misadventures is the stuff of legend, including twists and turns in his life—from patriot to Anglophile—his home-spun image to bon vivant in Paris and capped by co-developing the Declaration of Independence and exhibiting improvisational genius by becoming, arguably, the pivotal diplomatic figure in bringing about the American Dream. I interrogate his career as revelatory of many modes of hope in play as part and parcel of the formation of the American Dream.

Dubbed the American Prometheus by Kant by virtue of his invention of electricity, Franklin’s rise to eminence never totally eclipsed his Calvinist upbringing, and thus both themes, Promethean and Calvinist, were interwoven into the American Dream of the colonies. 34

Also in Chapter 3, I address the role of Thomas Jefferson, a figure whose prominence in this thesis is justified by his vision in idealizing the governmental structure that brings greatness to his country. He brought acceptance to that vision insofar as fashioning, with collegial support, a creedal foundation in the Declaration and the Constitution. He recognized the importance of universalizing education even though he failed to do so in his own state. His personal life decisions operated far below his idealizations, as he retained his slaves, freeing them only with death coming upon him. As well, the ideal of “equality,” championed for the country, was heavily qualified on the home front as governor and as private citizen. Nonetheless, this chapter recognizes his pivotal role, along with Lincoln’s, of building a critically important philosophical base for democracy and for promoting the dissemination of education for its preservation, one to be followed by the likes of Horace Mann. Jefferson, an aristocrat, stepped well clear of his life of privilege when he authored the Declaration of Independence, thereby deserving the legacy appellation by John Dewey a hundred years later as the father of American Democracy.

I also discuss Abraham Lincoln and the complex mode of hope that he represents in history beginning with the Great Emancipator but not ending there. There are many Lincolns to contend with in American history, by no means all favorable. In the positive ledger, I argue that Lincolnesque hope represents hues from arch-pragmatist and opportunist to the Tolstoy epigraph of unalloyed world-greatness. From the former to the latter lies a large range of perceptions of those who saw him as slow to embrace abolition, to his being a humble champion of man, representative of the ordinary people, the symbol of a figure of redeeming hope, a leader whose beliefs caused him his life.

I analyze the varied perspectives on Lincoln, noting the range of about him at a 200-year commemorative symposium of historians drawn from around the world. What seems clear is that he was a symbol of hope for the progressives and republicans in many parts of the world, Spain and , South and Central America, as well as an inspiration to the Italian freedom fighters Mazzini and Garibaldi.

Lincoln also represented practical hope. Jane Addams recounts her father’s remembrance of a favorite Lincoln phrase “best possible,” a guiding pragmatic slogan as he contended with the turbulent politics of his day. (It also became a mantra that she adopted for her own ambitious agenda for social reform.) 35

Lincoln is also an enduring figure of tragic hope, one that unites seemingly all stripes within current American parties, his brooding presence of presidential gravitas creating a legacy that positions him at the pinnacle of American exceptionalism. To Tolstoy, Lincoln was a figure of universal significance, and to Whitman, he was his revered “Captain” of the nation.

The slant on Lincoln that I pursue in detail in this thesis was the critical hope he represented in his statecraft to save the unity of the nation as well as its democracy, through the high stakes gamble of emancipating the slaves. I look at mixed motives, the risks and the horrific specter that he unleashed, but in the context of one of the great political moves, one that kept the bright- line of the American Hope Dream alive.

Chapter 4: Jane Addams, Social Hope, Social Justice

In Chapter 4, I address Jane Addams’s pioneering leadership in the robust hope of meliorism. Addams brought vision and praxis to social reform in Chicago during its rapid growth, much of it by immigration. Her intervention was to co-create the Hull Settlement House, a community meeting place which reflected her visionary passion for social reform. I explicate that vision, not only bringing forward the essence of the Founders as a guide to values undergirding social reform and the philosophy of Hull House, but also exhibiting transformative hope by reinterpreting century old values that were then converted to policy and practice within her establishment. Her way of paying homage to the vision of the American Hope-Dream was to re- imagine what democratic values like freedom and equality could mean for a given environment, values with a broadened ethico-moral frame of caring in theory and democratic practice. The “institution” became family-like in its welcoming of visitors, that is, a wide variety of immigrants from Europe, with friendliness, caring, and services. Democratic practice prevailed, including attempts of classlessness and equity, with special opportunity for women’s voices to be heard. As well, she encouraged all clientele to engage in civic affairs. Her civic, national and international contribution to initiating reform made her, at one point in her career, a national icon.

Addams influenced John Dewey’s attempt to conceptually re-imagine democracy as a way of life such as he was witness to at Hull House. Her warmly hospitable response to “otherness” was legendary as was her cosmopolitan outlook on world harmony.

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In sum, Addams took the notion of equality seriously in her dealings on many levels of civic, national, and international leadership. Her commitment to world peace and cosmopolitanism brought a vision of global hope to centre stage. Addams shared a dream of what a century later Arendt was to call world-building beyond America for which she achieved international renown, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. But her primary energies were centred on enhancing the American Dream of a more just, compassionate, and peaceful American society. She united social justice with the ethic of caring at a time when that union was not philosophically acceptable. Her praxis of cooperative living in Hull House and dynamic ethic of participation as a crucial act to strengthen citizenship and democracy was combined with the uplift of imaginative programming that she was continually striving for in Hull House. She anticipated a global village, an idyll where peace, goodwill, and conviviality were normative, a cosmopolitan world shot through with social justice for all.

Chapter 5: John Dewey, Democracy, and Education

In Chapter 5, I address the role of hope that John Dewey gave to democracy and to revolutionizing education. The deepening of democratic values and the reinvention of education interblended vital aspects of education and democracy— sociality, mutuality, and communion based on shared engagement. It was a conceptual reconstruction of democracy, predicated on more deeply humane commitment to equality, especially in valorizing the ordinary person, and “leveling the playing field” regarding “conditions of propitious learning” that brought such promise and attendant hostility to his notion.

Dewey pursued a lifelong defense of democracy as an ideal. His explication of equality and fraternity as inherent to democracy was crucial to his reinterpretation of the communal nature of democracy. His legacy of ideas on the dynamic “transactional” nature of the learning experience is still being mined for insight. His defense of democracy in times of peril was built on a retrospective of the American Hope Dream, with special attention to the Jeffersonian notions of freedom and equality as inalienable rights. The Declaration thus furnished the vision of the Dream with ethico-morally justified political hope for the country’s survival and provided the vision of democratic possibility for a free world. 37

Chapter 6: Critical Hope and the American Hope Dream

In Chapter 6, I continue to trace the historical course of a bright-line of hope. I show in this chapter how the bright-line spotlights critical thinking as a feature of American history with special implication for the American Hope Dream. My claim that Frankfurt school’s approach to critical thinking (careful analysis followed by constructive social action) was compellingly, if informally, prototyped within American history, first with Lincoln’s pattern of thought that led to ending slavery in a desperate attempt to hold his country together in 1862.14 New fractures were forming apace with the America of Lincoln’s day. I examine the fraught tensions within the political sphere, the clashing politico-moral ideals and values that were involved, and the strategic conundrums within which Lincoln became enmeshed. I examine the critical decisions that he eventually made.

I then examine prototype two, the decades-later critical thinking by the team of John Dewey and Jane Addams in response to what they perceived as a flagrantly “out of touch” democracy. In this chapter I also point out the ways in which these thinkers’ approaches to critical hope reveal a resonance with aspects of Foucauldian thought.

I first address the relationship between crisis and critique under the rubric of critical hope. I discuss the genealogy of complex problem identification as explicated by Wittgenstein and Foucault, and proceed to the pragmatization of those problems within democracy and education offered by Addams and Dewey in praxis and theory as they wrestle with finding hopeful solutions.

I turn to the test case of Lincoln in the major crisis that he faced in the gathering storm of Civil War and analyze his process of decision-making at a critical moment in American history as a subsequent turning point in the course of the American Dream of national unity

14 There are sharply different perspectives regarding the motivation of Lincoln for ending slavery. See, for example, Eric Foner (2010), Kenneth Deutsch (2005), Garry Wills (2006), Ta-Nehisi Coates (2012), and Allen Guelzo (1999).

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In my analysis of the roles deployed by Addams and Dewey, I focus on their attention to bringing fraternity, in the sense of productive human relationships, into the centre of their respective spheres, democracy and public education. Indirectly they were critically addressing the absence of fraternity in the Declaration of Independence. They joined forces to reimagine democracy as a critical response to that area of neglect in the American Dream.

Addams and Dewey opened new space for hope, bringing novel bright-line ethical values to bear on the Declaration’s idealizations of freedom and equality. Democratic action was infused in public education, signaling ways to promote individual and social growth. Democracy was thus firmly linked to lifelong education. In that regard Chapter Six has shown how Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1917) was a landmark publication.

Chapter 7: Legacies of Critical Hope for Democracy and Education

In my final chapter, I look to setting the stage of practical vistas of hope by first reviewing critical hope in earlier chapters where the world building theme of hope was explored. Now having just considered hope in the narrower light of criticality, the three notions of critique, utopianism and concrete action hybridize into the category of critical hope.

I examine theoretical philosophical issues germane to practice and then move to examples of contemporary research theory and practice that I believe are oriented to amelioration of the problem raised about democracy and education in this thesis. I address one of the key tensions within the concept of hope, namely how to strike the best balance between idealism and the pressing matter of pragmatic action. Several bright-line examples of philosophical hopers are featured-- some, but not all, being Pragmatists but all seeking concrete action to ground their theory. In earlier chapters, the world-building, world-making phenomena of hope was explored, and with hope now being considered in the narrower light of criticality, the three notions of critique, utopianism, and concrete action are hybridized into the category of critical hope. This interblend, I will argue, is crucial to our understanding of the American Hope Dream, its past and future, and the bright-line idealism that I have been investigating.

Throughout this chapter I make particular reference to how John Dewey’s and Jane Addams’s visions contribute to this synthesis. I pay special attention to the Deweyan metaphysics of hope 39

which conveys to some scholars the best way to understand the un-reductive, anti-mechanistic vision of the hope that Dewey had for his pragmatic naturalistic philosophy. I then outline critical hope as envisioned by Paulo Freire, marking the last major bright-line figure of my thesis.

I then set the stage for ways in which my three bright-liners, Addams, Dewey, and Freire, provide a living legacy and foreshadow routes to action that I will be exploring in my conclusion. I also analyze other bright-line projects and bring their authors research and scholarship into focus for the promise that their projects would seem to offer for democracy and education in areas of research and related scholarship.

The future success of the hopeful mission was given thought by Raymond William, when he reflected on his personal commitment to hope, but realized that the journey was, as he famously put it, in need of tremendous tenacity of purpose:

Once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey. If there are no easy answers there are still available and discoverable hard answers and it is these that we can now learn to make and share. This has been, from the beginning, the sense and the impulse of the long revolution. A Short Revolution: Towards 2000, Revisited (1983 p.219).

These sentiments by Williams frame the formidable tasks before America in the domains of democracy and education for the 21st Century. In the Conclusion to this thesis that follows, I map areas of prospective promise for the continuing hope-journey. To me, they offer points of departure for this worthwhile journey, starting points germane to tackling the contemporary problems, both theoretical and empirical.

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Chapter 1: Notable Narratives and Episodes of Bright-Line Hope in Greek and Judeo- Antiquity

Introduction

The concept of hope as probed in this chapter becomes relevant to my overarching theme of democracy and public education. That relevance begins with the notion of freedom. I open this chapter with two momentous hope narratives of desiring freedom and escaping oppression, that of Exodus and Prometheus. These narratives are roughly from the time period 500–700 B.C. making them among the oldest forms of recorded literature. My reason for starting with these originary stories of hope is because of their connection with hope operating on two planes of thought: one plane is oriented to communal hope, the other permeates our everyday world of creative thinking and imagining.

The two narratives that I am about to introduce into this thesis are prima facie examples that shines forth the stellar qualities of ideals and values that drove major events at an important junction of history: the political revolutions of the late 17th century. Brought back to their starting point in Greek poetry, the values are dramatized by a famous poet and given widespread circulation. Prometheus was translated into English some seventeen hundred years later by Francis Bacon and regained prominence, this time in the English-speaking world. Within another two centuries, it becomes a favorite literary work of Karl Marx, this time translated into German (Wilson, 2000).15 As such, the two narratives launch a time-line trajectory that I will call a Bright-line that connects those ideals and values through certain epochs of history with outcroppings of high visibility. My claim later in this thesis will be that both the American and French revolutions were greatly influenced by a circulating constellation of values that is hope- imbued from this early time. I will be arguing that those values created and sustained the motivational drive of the revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, i.e. in the 13 American colonies of the eastern seaboard, as indeed they did with their French revolutionary counterparts.

15 The Aeschylus translation was the one that was dominant in 19th Century Germany 41

The better known originary narrative is the famous Biblical scripture of Exodus, an allegory of flight of an enslaved people from oppressors, with the promise of divine safety and guidance, and the reward of creating an emancipated life in return for obeisance to God’s ordinance. Exodus became a lodestone within Judaism. It was also incorporated into Christianity as a foundational story of and the blending testamentary narratives of Old and New accounts of the Judeo-Christian eschatology.

The foremost hope in both narrations link to the concept of human freedom, both freedom from and freedom for, is pursuing the famous template formulation from Isaiah Berlin. In this thesis I trace their impact through history to the high hopes that were manifest by the Founders of the American breakaway from the British Empire and the revolutionary Republicans of France. A mix of reasons has been advanced for the insurrections in America and France. In France, hope was fanned by the American success. It also was beset with dire economic conditions. One contemporary scholar of the French Revolution, however, is convinced that Hegel had it right in asserting that hope for freedom was a defining catalyst for the world or as Hegel was to put it “freedom is the last hinge on which humanity turns” (Brunkhurst,2005, xxiv).

In this chapter I briefly look at the polity of classical Greece, touching on the hopefulness of its Periclean democracy, and other instances of hope suggesting that hope was active in Aristotelian thought. I focus also on a discussion of hope in a Platonic dialogue, Philebus. A contemporary classics scholar, Katja Vogt (2017), has excavated that discussion as revelatory of how Socrates perceived hope to operate in daily life. My research, then, cautions the conventional downplaying of hope in Greek society given this new thesis by Vogt that illuminates Platonic hope and the seeming presence of hope in current affairs of state and in philosophical comments by Aristotle depicting hope. I will look for fresh conclusions in this chapter on what we might draw from selected instances of hope in Greece, focusing particularly on the relation to problem solving and thinking. Greek hope as an individual psychological phenomenon is an important player in problem solving as well as thinking or judging; it also plays a dynamic role in imagination. There was nothing approximating collective hope, for example an , as in the Christian tradition.

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In short, the concept of hope is being hypothesized in this chapter to have an exceedingly influential role in both Middle East and Greek settings in antiquity. In the context of the Middle East, I focus on the famous Exodus as described in the Torah and Bible, and the high drama of its content. In the pre-Golden and Golden Age of Greece, I probe two planes of hope, the individual and the communal and their important differences, but also how they interrelate and overlap. In this chapter, I posit that hope and thinking are more reciprocally involved than conventionally acknowledged.

Section A: Hope and the Long Arc of History

A thesis with a focus on the power and peril of hope encounters the challenge of a multi- faceted term with myriad interpretations and ambiguities. My starting point is historical, the concept of hope, which leads me into the mists of time. My research suggests there are two dominant appearances of hope in ancient times of Western civilization. One is biblical, the Hebrew narratives of Exodus and Jeremiah, books of the Bible in which hope is especially important and poignantly so, speaking as they do to the issue of oppression, escape from its direness and the grounds for deliverance of that oppression. The other “originary” of hope is the Greek myth involving Prometheus and Pandora, with a similar pattern to that of the biblical narrative of oppression and emancipation by divine . Both developed in similar periods, 650–750 B.C.; as well, the renaissance theme was common to both. There were key differences, however, in the way they relate to the kind of hope inspired by the respective discourses, thus offering importantly differing perspectives on hope.

The first of these historical sources of hope occurs in the Hebrew story of Moses leading the Exodus of his people across the Red Sea, from oppression to safety. Based on a covenant with God, it was both a promise and an opportunity to create a New Jerusalem in return for obedience to and worship of him. The story of Jeremiah has cognate prophecies with similar promises of redemption over the years; it is prominent in Hebrew scripture and was picked up in Christianity and Islam. Both narratives, Greek mythology and Middle Eastern religious doctrine, like that of Christian doctrine, point to the extraordinary significance of hope within human life (Horton, 2014). It becomes the resource to alleviate suffering and escape captivity; oppressed peoples are granted freedom and a rebuilding capacity—an opportunity of a promising new life under

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conditions covenanted by the Hebrew God, Yahweh. Divinely supported hope within monotheism gave authorship to the first Judeo-Christian epiphany of liberation from suffering, and an enduring discourse of transcending and transcendent hope for God’s “chosen people.” This account, archived over the years, became archetypally important to the Puritans who were to colonize the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. They believed, like the Israelites of antiquity, that they were called upon by God to bring a chosen way of life to civilize the New World (Kloppenberg, 2016).

The second renowned discourse on hope’s origin, emerging from classical Greece about the same time, is from the poet or “rhapsodist of poetry,” Hesiod, who related a creation story of his world. It too was about oppression, and new beginnings in a myth shrouded with ambiguity. In a somewhat involved tale it involved the trickster act of the Titan God, Prometheus, stealing fire from Zeus, and gifting it to humanity. That action blended with Zeus’s daughter, Pandora, opening a jar—full of evil sprites—that, with its lid lifted, released all sprites into the world, save hope. Pandora lives on mythically, in part, serving as a referent to the mysterious, ineffable, enigmatic nature of hope.

Such a skeletal outline hardly does justice to the future fame of the Promethean creation story; his daring deed of giving fire to humanity became celebrated as the symbolic gifting of knowledge to the mortal world. Picked up in countless variations—drama, novel, opera, and now film—Prometheus has inspired translations and variegated interpretations over successive millennia. The thematic common ground was to credit Prometheus with launching the human capacity for acquiring new knowledge, symbolized by the purloined blazing torch.

It was true that he had suffered terrifying punishment for doing his deed behind Zeus’s back. As with Exodus, risk and suffering in pursuit of the greater good is endemic to the genealogical story of hope:

I rescued man from shattering destruction…And therefore I am tortured on this rock…I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom… I placed in them blind hopes…besides, I gave them fire… from it they will learn many crafts… I know when I transgressed nor will I deny it.

In helping man, I brought my troubles on me. (Aeschylus, 1962. pp. 74-75)

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The torch as symbol of enlightenment explained the advent of reason, foresight, and related cognitive and constructive skills. Prometheus was thus the personification of epistemic freedom. But the myth is also about altruism, in what has been recently historicized as the first recorded act of philanthropy (Sulek, 2001). Concern and caring for others thus joins with foresight and “learning” to become the Promethean bestowal to humanity.

The phenomenon of hope was thus central to both narratives, Hebraic biblical and Greek myth. Hope-content ran importantly parallel courses with states of benightedness and oppression being replaced with hope for the future, an opportunity for a life that held promise of being freer, more humane, with untold new possibilities. The biblical story revolved around a personal, monistic, all powerful God, covenanting a group of his chosen people such that fulfilling their part in a binding relationship would free them from the fear of death.

The Greek myth of Titan, featuring the deity, Prometheus, was also allegorically located in a religious cosmography of divinity, with hope for its offspring as its core message, albeit in a radically different vein than Exodus. Although freedom from this-worldly oppression is common to both, important differences exist in the types of struggle and the nature of the rewards. In the Greek myth of Prometheus, humanity as a whole is the beneficiary, with the benefits depending on their enterprise. In Exodus, the most famous biblical myth known to our age, it was a bargain struck by God with his chosen people. The “familied” concepts affiliated with the concept of hope—freedom, altruistic relationship with the Other, a form of renaissance—are part of both narratives.16 The kind of hope that Prometheus represented in Hesiod’s original version, was soon to take a dramatic turn in the re-telling by Aeschylus that highlighted its epistemic root of acquiring new knowledge. In hindsight, we now are aware that in both the Renaissance and Enlightenment the theme not only of the Exodus story resurfaced as a powerful narrative of religious liberation from the travails of Europe, but that the Promethean myth was translated and reinterpreted by Francis Bacon as a beacon of inspirational hope for widespread intellectual

16 In Of Human Potential (1985), Israel Scheffler says, “Concepts belong to families” (p. 9). 45

revolution. Prometheus also takes in a central casting role within the career of Benjamin Franklin. Prometheus, as it were, becomes adopted into the American Hope Dream.17

Section B: Hope as Suspect in Antiquity

Section A of this chapter began with the origins of a collective discourse of hope in Western antiquity, with Greek and Hebrew narratives. These narratives gave prominence to hope, but in the case of Greece, the received wisdom has been that the birthplace of tended to shun or disparage hope (Arendt, 1963). Wariness about hope was expressed, for example, in Hesiod’s enigmatic tale of Pandora, with hope being left alone in Pandora’s jar, its lid resealed. Skeptics of hope abounded. Plato uses the phrase “the gullibility of hope” in Timaeus, and the famous jurist Solon referred at one point to “empty hopes” (Lewis, 2006, p. 85). The views of Solon were “conditioned by a common heritage of stretching back from Homer, and beyond” (p. 94). John David Lewis that Solon found the future inscrutable, in the “arbitrary” hands of the gods. In Thucydides also, hopers “typically have a poor understanding of their situation, fail to come up with good plans and things go badly for them in war” (Thucydides, trans. 2009, pp. 5.102-103, 5.113).

The classic association of hope with enigma began, it would seem, with the myth of Pandora, whose hope was recounted in “Works and Days.” In his commentary on “Works and Days” the noted classicist Willem Jacob Verdenius (1985) asks, “Was it to keep the hope available for humans or, rather, to keep the hope from man?” (p. 66). A measure of about hope in ancient times, as represented in this early account by Hesiod, was widespread in his era, and has continued over the centuries to this day. My study probes the contestations that have followed the arc of hope history. This prompts a key question of my study, which asks, what of our historical understanding of hope is relevant to hope in our day?

Negativity about hope in classical Greece was in vivid contrast to hope within the biblical writings of the Near and Middle East. Hope was arguably the central concept of their Bible, appearing multiple times in relation to eternal life, the hope for salvation, the hope for freedom

17 NY Times David Brooks on “The Exodus Theme.” Immanuel Kant calls Franklin the Prometheus of our times. 46

from captivity, and the hope for some kind of rebirth and protection in a promised land, with the prospect for creating a new Eden.

But is the relative dismissal of hope as an important phenomenon in classical Greek philosophy justified? Was the myth of Prometheus the only prominent exception to hope as an unreliable concept of the time? Recent scholarship on Aristotle has focused on the relationship of courage to hope. That linkage, spoken to in this century by Scott Gravlee (2000) and Jonathan Lear (2008), importantly brings the Aristotelian notion of confidence into the discussion of courage and hope. Particular attention is given to that link by Lear in his study, Radical Hope. His noteworthy ethnological research on the relation of hope to cultural devastation is discussed later in this chapter; germane to its roots in antiquity, he locates an important root of radical hope in Nicomachean Ethics. Adrienne Martin, (2014) is another contemporary scholar who subscribes to hope having Aristotelian roots. Martin notes, in company with Gravlee, that in Nicomachean Ethics, hope and virtue relate to courage and that, to Aristotle, the exercise of virtue that was important to any form of courage was to be found taking the form of deliberation (p.72). Deliberative thinking as intrinsic to the way we hope also becomes a dominant theme of a current research project on hope in antiquity by Katja Maria Vogt, and it is to her theme that I now turn.

Section C: Platonic Hope: The Illumining Thesis of Katja Maria Vogt

While a narrative of hope may have been a scarcity in classical antiquity, it was far from absent, as we have seen in the enduring myth of Pandora and Prometheus. A strikingly new interpretation of Plato’s Philebus by Katja Maria Vogt (2017) gives evidence that the later Plato gave much thought to a doctrine of hope as an aspect of everyday thinking (p. 201). Her research into Philebus, I argue, suggests that the later Plato was vitally interested in the role of hope as an important phenomenon in human development. I find in the historiographic excavation of Vogt startling evidence from more than two millennia ago, that the meaning of hope was foundationally compatible with much recent hope scholarship (Martin, 2014.Waterworth ,2004. Green, 2009). Of even greater consequence, I claim, is that the contribution of Vogt’s scholarship of what Plato was saying in the Philebus offers fresh insights on hope methodology, explicating how he thought hope operated in our daily lives. He provides a generic template of

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hope methodology as a developmental process. The latter “discovery,” I will argue, has significant implications for education. In this section, I review Vogt’s most recent scholarship, and show its particular contribution to the moral and methodological message that it offers towards a deeper understanding of the ontology of hope.

Refuting the usual trio of classical Greek critiques of hope—its alleged emptiness and its inimicalness to grasping a situation or to contribute to effective planning—Vogt begins her analysis of hope in Philebus with its initial focus on everyday desire, and the anticipatory pleasure that desire brings to our minds. Desire as a stimulus to thought is then the important starting point to understanding the workings of hope in a processual way, with imagination being central to that process. She continues the Philebus’s “process of hoping” as imagining good future states, such imagining being prompted by desire. The very act of envisioning future desirable scenarios she terms the agentic imagination at work. This is not simple prediction but projecting scenarios of possibility germane to the desire. The process that Vogt is outlining requires a form of deliberative thinking that is not “logical reasoning” in the Aristotelian sense of employing the of reason.18 Plato is distancing himself from the “term logic” to a different kind of thought process, one, for example, in which affect is heavily involved. We experience an intense emotional response to the anticipated pleasure when we hope, one which, in turn, triggers a winnowing process by which the multiple scenarios that we conjecture are imagined critically, with an ethico-moral dimension involved, and gradually reduced to the best fit (Vogt, 2017).

Determining the most fitting scenario brings Philebus into the realm of Platonic ethics, shorthanded by Vogt (2017) as “the search for goodness,” in this case the goodness of the scenarios fit with our sense of what is good for us, what carries the most weight in the interests of our well-being. This, Vogt claims, is not ego gratification but a subtler form of what is in character for the agent’s self-concept and self-regard. The process becomes, according to Vogt, a constitutive dimension of well-being of the good within the context of decision making. She believes that Plato was convinced that good hope was attainable. It revolves around which scenario is ultimately deemed to be most compatible with the agent’s well-being. Vogt

18This is contestable. Philebus’s approach may be compatible with Aristotle’s logic. 48

distinguishes between the decision-making process of “weighing by reasons” for and against a particular course of action, a logical process usually attributed to the Aristotelian concept of deliberative reasoning, with this more intricate thought process, which Philebus contrastingly explores as our actual everyday experience with hoping.19

What is striking to me is how presciently aligned the interpretation Vogt discerns in Philebus is to contemporary exegeses of hope. What Vogt is attributing to Plato also reverberates in “critical hope,” the phenomenon of seeing the state of being hopeful not as in vacuo initiative but the result of analyzing present circumstances that are deemed unsatisfactory and allying that to a wish (or desire) and, significantly, to intentionality to better those circumstances. The notion of the problematic being deeply ingrained in the ontology of hope and the movement that that occasions as integral to the act of hoping is akin if not a kernel ingredient in many contemporary analyses of hope (Bloch, 1986; Koopman, 2009). But that is just the beginning for Plato in Philebus. As revealed by Vogt (2017), in Platonic hope there is the awareness of skill growth in “agency-imagination” (p. 1). She speaks to the developmental process of creating and assessing scenarios culminating in the growth in sophistication of the agentic imagination.

I will argue that the pedagogical implication in what Vogt (2017) says arises from the developmental nature of hope as Plato analyzes it, with the sense that like pedagogy, hope is an unfolding, educative process involving and evoking “affective attitudes” (p. 22). Hope as an affective attitude that influences reasoning is an illumining beginning to my search of Platonic relevance to pedagogy and an important contribution to the ontology of hope.

To review what Vogt (2017) says about Platonic hope in his discussion within Philebus: the importance lies in elevating hope to (1) a planning experience, based on desire; (2) the initiation of an imaginative exercise of scenario growth, as a developmental process; (3) the importance of the daydreams that arise from desire, to prompt multiple scenarios pertinent to the desire; (4) the power of desire-driven daydreams to evoke emotions that permeate the scenarios; (5) a process

19Aristotle might have called what Vogt is suggesting ‘intuition,’ which he gave scope to in interpretation of thinking. 49

of aesthetic and ethical screenings that the agent undergoes in relation to the scenarios;(6) the entry of self-regard as entering the agentic process.

With the dimensions of hope thus sketched out, Vogt (2017) proceeds to claim that hope is grossly underappreciated in Platonic scholarship. Rather, the hope in Philebus is rich in possibilities in understanding human development and modes of flourishing, to which I would add and will argue, with profound implications for education in our day.

Strategic considerations for which I will continue to be on the lookout are the extensions of the Vogt analysis into education: its implications for pedagogical strategies for parsing and solving problems, for motivating students, evoking interest to students making decisions, planning their lives in ways that deepen introspection, and promoting self-reflection on the worthiness of desires. The amalgam of affect (desire) with agency-imagination linking to enhanced reasoning about what is in the best interests of one’s flourishing selfhood, gives the ontology of hope an enhanced profile. As Vogt (2017) puts it, such a sequence offers an important “claim about the interrelations between goings-on in the mind” (p. 4).

Not only is Vogt (2017) bringing the importance of hope centre stage within an era that has conventionally been critiqued for its lack of hope, but her analysis of Platonic hope invites analogy and contrast with other important views on hope through the ages. Take the case of a foremost 20th-century scholar of hope, Ernst Bloch, and his fertile scholarship on hope’s importance of bringing meaning, purpose, and fulfillment to human lives. Hope was also thought of as a psychological phenomenon of the utmost importance by Bloch (1986), but crucially, hope in relation to the plight of the world, specifically the human condition. Hope, for Bloch, properly conceived, was the route to a transformed world, a product of inherent dreams of humanity for a better world; it was a secular dream, a transcending but not transcendent dream.

There was grandeur in Bloch’s (1986) role for hope. For him, hope was the critical response to the “darkness of the just lived moment” (p. xxix). In contrast, the importance of the Philebus discourse on hope for Vogt (2017) is a more modest and mundane, psychologically oriented template for understanding hope in everyday practical terms. That is not to say that Platonic hope lacks vision. Actually, it is all about how we arrive at a hopeful vision. The Bloch magnum opus on hope, titled The Principle of Hope (1986), was allegorically rather than psychologically 50

directed. A cri de coeur for the importance of latent hope to be universally mobilized by humanity towards making the world a more open, democratic, humane place (p. xxix).Plato’s role for hope in the Philebus account is also didactic, but with attention to individual growth, to learning how imagination, feeling, and ratiocination could blend harmoniously in wise reasoning. Experience and training becomes educative in bringing wise reasoning to fulfillment. Plato looks inward, parsing the hoping process in a way that highlights the importance of the dream-desire, but also grounds the act of hoping within a creative regimen of planning and problem solving. Bloch’s teaching of hope he called docta spes, the twofold lesson being the potency of activist hope and the ethical imperative of embracing world-transforming justice as the hope-catalyst.

Both Bloch and Plato aspire to our greater epistemic and moral understanding of just how hope can enable the growth of self in expansive ways. Both see the potential of the role of hope as an amalgam of inspiration, education, and expansiveness of the self in relation to communal action. In Bloch (1986), hope becomes explicitly relational, a world horizon of hopefulness leading towards world betterment. For him, hope reverberates harmoniously with a generically powerful utopic impulse for humanizing the world. By comparison, Plato is inward-looking as the actual functioning of hope; he parses the hoping process in a way that ideally matures the psyche by examining how our dreams can be productively channeled by means of consciously “educating” our conjectural capacity. Vogt (2017) speaks to the hope phenomenon of experiencing agentic imagination, to become skilled in imagining good future states, becoming “agents who are good at planning their lives, and whose lives are going well” (p.2). Both reflect a kind of world-building, Plato internally, Bloch externally, but both with heavy emphasis on imaginaries, as other more contemporary students of hope have done (Arendt, 1958). What is different about the Vogt-Plato philosophical analysis is the development tracing the sequence of mental processes detailed above. A number of studies on hope have also seen hoping as processional (McKenna, 2001). None has delineated it quite the fulsome way of Philebus by giving such prominence to the blend of feeling, imagination and ethical judging in fastidious detail, through a cycle of desire, scenario building, and ethical screening. Clearly Plato was reaching for a role for hope that was also emancipative in nature, and accompaniment to human development and flourishing. It was a dynamic process, with the imaginative planning and pursuit of a goal. This is consistent with hope being given a psychological role by the Greeks, but

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not in the way of the Christian adaption of the Exodus narrative. Collective hope for another world was not part of their thinking.

I have mentioned that Vogt (2017) moves beyond the term “the logic of Aristotle” in describing a sequence of problem solving that is intimately involved in hoping. Jonathan Lear in his book on Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980) makes a telling point that I take in support of Vogt: “Aristotle’s work was to investigate logic as a metatheory.”Lear notes that his primary goal was not to offer a practical guide to argumentation but to study the properties of inferential systems (i.e., a metatheory).

The role for hope that Vogt (2017) ascribes to Philebus brings feeling to the fore. This is a phenomenon that is blended into hope in a dynamic way, harbingering the theses on affect of Megan Boler, (2008), Sarah Ahmed (2004) Teresa Brennan (2004) and their contemporary philosophical scholarship on the hitherto-unrecognized power of feeling in our lives and its underappreciated relation to processes of reasoning and education. In Feeling Power, for example, Megan Boler (2008), speaks to the significance of emotion: “How emotion shapes how we treat other people, and informs our moral assumptions and judgments” (p. xvi). As well, she linked feeling power to the ability to achieve social justice (p. xviii).

In Philebus, affect is given similar prominence by Plato: “Remember, it is affect taking the form of desire or displeasure that is behind the role of hope in virtually all human affairs” (Vogt, 2017, p.2). Feeling in Philebus “becomes attached to the desire to figure out what we want.” Vogt (2017 p.3) finds the role of feeling critical to not only prompting the desire, or hoped-for end, but integral to influencing the entire process, including the ultimate choice of scenario.

The feeling of hope, and the desire that prompts that feeling of hope, moves the process of agency-imagination immediately into the realm of affect, adding intensity along scenario- immersion, a process which is not reductive to simple linear deliberation, says Vogt (2017), In the case of mature hope, it spawns in sequence a projection of scenarios, and a deliberative attempt to situate oneself in anticipating which variation of the desire will result in the most self- satisfaction. The latter dimension of the process will warrant further examination.

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Vogt (2017) speaks of the notion of movement as central to the act of imaginative agency, and the accompanying deliberative process. The notion of movement as part of the motivational process is well-documented in educational motivation studies within education psychology and other areas of psychology (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Herzberg, 1968). What is striking to me is how presciently aligned the Vogt-Plato interpretation is in that regard. From the field of organizational and human relations management, for example, contemporary analysts of “the hoping act” brings forward theories of hope as a movement of the mind towards an improved state of affairs, alternatively identified as a “move toward the superlative, even the sublime” (Ludema, 2003, p. 15).

The Platonic hope of motivation is multidimensional. I see such theory having implications for education. Vogt’s Platonic revelation is about mind-reasoning processes that happen within the act of hoping. The Platonic swerve moves away from the logical Aristotelean reasoning, (a contested position), as the sole or principal way that one develops skill in some forms of reasoning, decision making, and planning to one which engages interrelation of mental skills conjugating pleasure, imagination, and discriminatory reasoning. The interrelated reasoning process of imagining scenes of personal pleasure or displeasure that will arise based on one’s choice of agential imagination as a motivator seems fertile ground for considering correlative pedagogies. Vogt (2017) asserts hope’s developmental character thought of in this new light. Agency-imagination moves hope onto the terrain of decision-making, with imagination furnishing a testing ground for the goodness of alternative scenarios. It may offer pedagogical strategies with developmental potential. The phenomenon of agential imagination is “surprisingly silent” in motivation literature, asserts Vogt.

Feeling, as Sara Ahmed (2004) points out, does have a “stickiness,” and feelings attach themselves to us in such a way that they relate to agent actions in the future. The corollary is that hope may be thought of as largely future directed. The special Platonic interpretation is that not only affective feelings attach themselves to hope but ethical issues intrude on the hoping process in, as it were, collaboration with our feelings. The ethical dimension, added to affect, provides volitional agency towards the desired enhancement of our well-being. The Platonic assertion is that we weigh and ultimately discern whether the proposed action might be helpful in planning our lives successfully. 53

Vogt (2017) critiques, in effect, the commonly attributed Aristotelian outlook of mental reasoning as an adequate way of understanding the mental reasoning associated with the act of hoping. Aristotle’s well-respected focus on formal logic gives some critics the impression of a single track that belongs to logical reasoning as central to the claims for knowledge. No discursive attention is paid to attendant features of mind, such as feeling, in the linear process of logical thinking, and imagination is not part of “term logic.” As previously discussed, the Aristotelian form of “term logic” was structured with a very different purpose in mind.20

Is Plato moving in quite a different wavelength from Aristotle with Philebus in his discussion on reasoning process inherent in hope? Plato’s account would seem somewhat analogous to Immanuel Kant, who began with the Critique of Pure Reason followed more than a decade later with the Critique of only to blossom with the Critique of Judgment in 1790. The similarity is with the revelatory interest of Kant in the significance of affect in formulating judgment, which to some philosophers gave overdue attention to the power of feeling (Zerrilli,2005; Arendt, 1989).“We feel our freedom,” said Kant famously, in reference to the political hope that was sweeping the European Continent, allowing what was not personal in favor of physical revolution, but feeling the liberating wind behind the revolutionaries who were sweeping across Europe; behind their backs was the driving and reckoning force of the emancipative agenda of political revolution.

Plato, often cited for his much earlier wariness of the arts for their arousal of threatening emotions, had a similar “epiphany.” In Philebus, he extols the valuable synthesis of reason in steadfast league with conation, emotion, and imagination as the legitimate depiction of hope in action. Here is Socrates asking Protarchus whether imaginative representations are also concerned with the future. Protarchus says “decidedly with the future” and Socrates comments on this qualification: “If you say decidedly, is it because all of them are really hopes for future times, and are we forever brimful of hopes [emphasis mine] throughout our lifetime.”(Cooper ed.

20The single track thinking of Aristotle suggested by Vogt (2017) is contestable. Is it a stereotype? Aristotle did indeed allow for thinking to have other properties. Only scientific theory had to be necessarily true logically. It has been pointed out that Aristotle also allowed for intuition with scientific premises. 54

Plato, Complete Works.1997, pp. 39e 4-6). Crucially for Vogt (2017), Philebus covers a wide range of representational thinking activities. Of key importance in her reading is the role of imagination that Plato assigns to thinking, which is considered much wider than judgment [emphasis mine]” (p.7).

“” seems to include other kinds of representational thinking. As a future-directed form of thought, about what to pursue or how to attain things in the future, representational thinking gives practical idealization of future pleasure to oneself (Vogt, 2017, p. 8.) Imagination becomes the principal resource in helping to make up one’s mind. Agents imagine a given state of affairs and respond to their sense of what it would be like (p.9). Pleasure remains a key ingredient throughout the process “when we imagine a given path for ourselves” to its effectuation (p.9). Socrates refutes the idea of pleasure being chimerical. “[He] elaborates on the desiderative side of pleasure/pain by pointing out that one registers a process in relation to what, in a given situation, remains preferable” (p. 16).

Constantly concerned about the future, Plato argues that images are painted in the mind metaphorically by the imagination. The mind produces corresponding images to linguistic counterparts. Imagination is the all-important kind of cognitive activity which, in a sense, emulates a painter in the way it draws images in the “soul.” It is our evaluation that determines whether such images are true or false in accordance with which proposition is most apt to make our lives go well (Vogt 2017, p. 19). Vogt (2017) makes a forceful case for a greater appreciation for the potent confluence of hope and imagination of agency. Vogt along with other notable scholars who have philosophized on hope have to a person called attention to hope’s imaginative power. Hope, in the Vogtian sense, finds hope necessary for functional or adaptive thinking and problem solving. It assists in dealing with the problem. To have enlisted Plato’s prestigious name to that support is important groundbreaking research. But agency-imagination was only part of the Vogt thesis. Plato brings affect into play as a spur to the imaginative construction of scenarios of hope, combining all in an adjudicative screening of ethical aptness as part of a growth cycle of hope.

My interest is in how the Platonic view of how we hope matters when we think of education. Vogt (2017) noted the interdisciplinary nature of Platonic hope. In considering contemporary

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hope scholarship. I am struck by the variety of fields and vantage points in this scholarly work. However, no one to my knowledge has put together the complete picture of the ontology of hope and hope’s modus operandi with more breadth and depth of understanding than Plato in his Philebus, as emphasized in Vogt’s erudite interpretation.

For that reason, I will be turning to the Vogt-Plato thesis again when I explore insights on hope from an educational perspective in Chapter 7, a foraging of pedagogical understandings and implications for schooling that I derive from the Plato account of hope. Admittedly, Ernst Bloch (1986) was in some ways an incomparable maestro of evoking the good future state as his dream of utopic hope. But like Plato and his Republic, Bloch’s grand utopic vision has not done well over time, although many of his insights are still treasured. And Aristotle referred to hope as “the waking dream.” Other modern hope scholarship, to which I turn in the next chapter, has much to contribute.

Conclusion

In Plato, I have been examining the kind of processual hope that was present in Greek society. My thesis will be examining hope’s personal side, the hoping phenomenon within the individual, as well as hope that is collectively inspired to act. Communal hope puts on display the contagion that hope incites. When hope is appropriated for “the good,” its communal orientation is to make society or a country or the world a better place. The Greeks would not hold anything like a Christian view of hope in a public or collective sense (the Greeks being more fatalistic). (E. Bredo, personal communication, June 20, 2018. Hope and learning, it would seem, have gone hand in hand since the mists of time. That brings us back to the two main narratives of hope: the myth of Prometheus and the Exodus from Egypt, both indicating the need for the conceptual construct of hope to be thought of as several-sided or multi-dimensional. For example, the moral orientation of hope is interlinked in Exodus, with the oppressed population escaping in hopes of building a new and better society. From an axiological facet of hope, Exodus reflected values of bonding, brotherhood and sisterhood, moving in solidarity from the intolerable to the creative good.

Hope also has a political edge. It was under the tyranny of the Egyptian rule that new hope came to life within the enslaved. They heard and heeded a champion, Moses, with his promise of 56

a new, free, and enriching life, a new polity that promised freedom within a hypostatized framework that professed enlightened moral guidance.

The other myth, the story of Prometheus, featured the epistemic hope that new horizons would be opened up by knowledge and its application. Different perspectives can play on that notion of values associated with knowledge, of course, but most of the versions of Prometheus that have come down through the ages have stressed the liberatory nature of science and education and its benefits to humanity. As well, the struggle for freedom vividly depicted within Exodus reveals the political edge of hope in operation. In the Promethean myth, we saw his good deed for humanity done in defiance of Zeus’s injunction not to help humanity. That kind of resistant action in the face of arbitrary authority will arise again as we see the spirit of Promethean resistance in bold relief come alive in pursuit of freedom from Egyptian tyranny.

In sum, the two narratives reveal important commonalities of substance, style, and social impact. The first commonality is the fact of their temporal durability of those narratives. These have both enjoyed continuing revivals over 2,500 years of exposure; they have become reference points in the 21stcentury, taking on a different coloration of hope, but retaining the values that brought them into vogue by the first written poet, Hesiod, with the launch of its first relation in the case of Prometheus.

A second common feature is the audacity of the hope that is characterized in Exodus, with an impassioned leader challenging and subverting authority in ways that lead to momentous change. Both narratives reflect key properties of hope: (1) the vision that accompanies hope, (2) the moral quality of that vision, (3) the hope precipitating an activist response to overcoming adversity, and (4) the dream of having a better life that is underlain by an altruistic motive behind the vision.

Both emancipative agendas in Exodus and Prometheus are forced to struggle, illustrate bold leadership, subvert established authority, and presume or promise salvific potential for a better life. In the latter sense the narratives share the sense of anticipation for where freedom leads, and excitement over new opportunities awaiting. They relate to collective active opportunity, but also empowering benefit to each individual. My project straddles both planes of hope: hope as a phenomenon of the individual and communal hope with its commitment to build anew; epistemic 57

hope was an opportunity to learn and to flourish as a result of that learning. These two narratives were introduced in this chapter to begin to illustrate the hope constellation of values. They were introductions to aspects of the hope family of kindred values. Assessing the future impact of Exodus and Promethean hopes in modern times will become a central and larger purpose of this thesis.

An example of such value emerging from the Prometheus myth is altruism. Prometheus is sometimes cited as history’s first philanthropist. His gift was an enabling act symbolic of hope for humanity. Altruism in the Prometheus story is about helping the Other, and it incorporates keynote values, notably brotherhood and solidarity. Similarly, Exodus reflects bonding and fraternity in the struggle to successfully accomplish a common enterprise to reach the Promised Land. The nexus of hope-sponsoring values speaks to the power of hope, not only in the sense of the empowered hoper but also in connecting with social objects of hope. Thought of in tandem, Prometheus and Exodus exemplify the bright-line of historical tracing of hope, tracings wherein ideals become dominant forces, the prompts to action.

It is in search of conditions of bettering life chances that makes this deeper study of democracy and education through the lens of hope rich in historical significance. In pursuit of enlarging that understanding of hope, I now turn to the thought leadership of Hannah Arendt in the next chapter. Arendt wrote about democracy in both the Old World and the New World, and about the generative properties of hope, the phenomenon of natality.

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Chapter 2: The Many Shades of Hope Ontology in the Work of Arendt

Hanna Arendt, a Jewish refugee from in the nineteen thirties from Nazi Germany, became an American citizen in 1950. By that time she was becoming a famous writer on subjects largely related to her experience with revolution and totalitarianism, the role of hope and polity within The Human Condition, and her study of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical legacy. She also covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, with highly controversial results. Her personal relationship with Martin Heidegger had added poignancy to her flight from her homeland. Arendt was student, lover and later apologist for Heidegger. Arendt at 19, was twenty years younger than Heidegger when she enrolled in his “ground-breaking” seminars in Greek philosophy. 21 Arendt was Jewish, forced to go into hiding in 1933, became active in resistance activity and fled from Nazi Germany, joining her husband in Paris and eventually locating in America where she supported Jewish causes.22

My Bright-line interest in featuring Arendt in this thesis is her interpretation of the American Revolution as an act of natality, a rebirth of a new political order and the distinctive conditions under which the Revolution and Creeds which flowed from it came about. Arendt had high praise for the ideals of the insurrection as they became expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Particularly noteworthy was the more reflective thought processes evinced in the American Revolution, she averred, when compared with the French Revolution. Her analysis of the political process that brought it to fruition reflected a new beginning, a rebirth, the concept of natality at work, whereby fresh possibility is reborn with generative prospects for political

21 Finn Bowering, Hannah Arendt. Pluto Press, London, 2011. p. 7.

22 Heidegger, a Nazi supporter, and a rising star within philosophical circles, was most famous for Being and Time, 1927. He found his career flourishing for a short time under Nazism; he remained largely unrepentant of his support for the Nazi Party and a party member until it went out of in 1945. Although he had resigned his Rectorship of Freiberg University in 1934, he remained at Freiberg. In post- war Germany he became virtually an academic pariah. Arendt continued to visit him in Germany after the war and to defend the integrity and the importance of his contribution to philosophy.

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freedom. Although not a professional historian, Arendt’s insights were to become influential in mainstream American political history.

It has been noted by Arendtian scholars that action was central to her early work, most notably in The Human Condition (1958). But such was action of a certain type, the action associated with hoping that brought impressive insight to political theory and beyond (Bowen- Moore, 2014; Durst, 2004). The concept of natality, I argue, makes up the axis of her political and epistemological hope, providing an ontologically rooted conceptual centre. Arendt herself, has seen continually regenerative relevance, based on the creativity of her thought. With democracy’s recent undermining, her championing the need for authentic democratic space is once again topical.23 This chapter focuses on the impact of Arendt’s theory of hope on a wide variety of political and epistemic philosophical themes. Hope was about novelty and new beginnings, about the “miracle” of birth into the realm of action, about revolutionary political empowerment; hope was also about expanding our thinking powers and directing hope towards the polity of the world. Especially germane to my study of hope and its role in democracy is the fact that she located hope in a penetrating analysis of the American Revolution. The founding was critical to understanding the potentiality of democracy. As well, her renowned scholarship on Kant brings epistemic insight to the learning process, especially the expansion of concepts, a topic germane to my project. Her overarching concern with human freedom has a high degree of relevance to the predicament of governance in our day, not only in the United States—the dominant site for investigating the phenomenon of democracy of this chapter, but to the human community at large.

Hope is a multi-faceted concept, of which Arendt was supremely aware. Her conception of it embraced a variety of forms even within a polity, which was her main interest. German and Jewish, Arendt had fled the Holocaust, ending up in America in 1941. Hope in her adopted country was of particular interest as she delved into what she called the American revolutionary spirit and the political possibilities and outcomes that both emanated, and fell short of, emanating from that spirit. Her transatlantic background brought a mix of vistas to bear on her new home,

23 A recent example: Yahsya Mounk, “|American is not an Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly , March, 2018. 60

combined with her views of her upbringing, rooted in European history, culture, the experience of surviving a war, and a rich heritage of studying .

This chapter brings together the key shadings of hope that Arendt probed. Her landscape of hope embraced the political in ways that continue to inspire. In part, that may be because of her acute awareness of tragic hope, such as the loss of her friend, Walter Benjamin, murdered by the “Nazi powers of darkness.” Her personal relationship with Martin Heidegger added poignancy to Arendt’s flight from her homeland. As well, she wrote on the multifarious forms of edifying hope, such as the hope that she reaches for in her analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. There, her desire was to see hope manifest in the enlargement of the thinking experience “without a banister” and “when taking sides for the world’s sake,” to do so with an imagination “trained to go visiting” (Bowen-Moore, 2014; Durst, 2004). I continue the theme of Chapter 1 of endeavouring to find influential languages of hope in the history of philosophy, in this chapter locating them in the work of Hannah Arendt.24

Section A: Natality of Hope

It is her view of the natality of hope for which Arendt is particularly well known. In her first major publication, The Human Condition (1958), she famously referred to the birth of hope and its significance in her chapter on “Action”:

The new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of action. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality [emphasis mine], is inherent in all human activities.

The miracle [emphasis mine] of that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is

24See Kompridis (2014) for a general reference work for this kind of what he calls “romantic” thought.

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ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action that they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human experience which Greek antiquity ignored. (pp. 10, 11, 222, 223)

For Arendt, hope meant, in general terms, freedom, novelty and the possibility of new beginnings. Because her doctoral thesis was based on St. Augustine, theological interpretations have, quite naturally, been advanced. So, too, have biological theses of birth. Arendt, herself, clarified miracle in non-theological terms in The Promise of Politics (1951/2005), in which she gave an explanation oriented to “natality,” her special and oft repeated theme of the birth of hope beginning in a “miracle.” Arendt frames her discussion by saying:

…from the standpoint of universal occurrences and the statistically calculable probabilities controlling them [e.g., evolutionary processes of organic life], the formation of the earth is an “infinite improbability”:

Whenever something new occurs, it bursts into the context of predictable processes as something unexpected, unpredictable, and ultimately causally inexplicable—just like a miracle. In other words, every new beginning is by nature a miracle when seen and experienced from processes it necessarily interrupts. (pp. 111-112)

Arendt was particularly fascinated with analyzing hope as a force within a polity, its appearance having been an all too rare a phenomenon in the world of her upbringing. Her dominant experience was with a totalitarian government, amidst a world enshrouded by that form of terror, a fact well-noted by her biographers and alluded to in her writings. In the book Men in Dark Times (1968), narrating the lives and struggles of men and women who lived through the first half of the 20th century, she pits their courage and illuminating insights against a Brechtian backdrop of “the hunger, the massacres, and the slaughterers, the outrage over injustice and the despair, when there was only wrong and no outrage,” the legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-founded wrath that makes the voice hoarse” (p.viii).

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My purpose in this chapter is to track her pursuit of the communal process that provides an alternative to this horror.

Influential writer-activist, Rebecca Solnit, in her book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2016), refers to hope emerging from the shadows. She notes that the “grounds of hope are in the shadows,” to be awakened in moments of our greatest despair and coming from unseen quarters: “the anonymous, the unseen, the officially powerless” (p. 164). Arendt (1968) puts it similarly:

That even in the darkest of times…illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and in their works, will kindle…the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. (pp. ix, x)

Arendt brought the philosophical world’s attention of the regenerative nature of hope through natalic reappearance. She was deeply conscious of a world in need of hope, a human condition that in her century witnessed widespread chronic despair as a fixture if not a fatality of all human life. Hope, however, could not always be trusted. As edifying as she found the phenomenon of natalic hope, she knew from personal experience that new beginnings also begat the horrors of totalitarian regimes. So horrific was that experience that one of her first philosophical monographs was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Arendt’s earliest writings reflect the Janus face of the past, a binary visual metaphor for her war-saturated past, together with the shining face of new hope yet to appear.25

Section B: The Janus Face of Hope

From Victor Frankl to Adolphus Lingis, psychiatrists and philosophers have commented on the significance of hope in times of trauma and suffering. To Victor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, the very presence of hope in the incarcerated was, he was certain, a determinant for some in

25 Richard Bernstein (2011) calls attention to the double-faced Janus as having symbolic significance for Arendt. “New beginnings do not necessarily result in favorable outcomes” (p. 13). 63

holocaust survival. For contemporary philosopher Alphonso Lingis, hope constitutes hope against the evidence. Akin to Arendt, Lingis finds in hope a break with the past:

There is a kind of cut and the past is let go....I think that kind of birth doesn’t come out of what went before. It comes out in spite of what went before. Abruptly there is a break and there’s an upsurge in hope, something turned toward the future....Every time hope begins again, however late in life, it is a very childlike moment; it is like being born. (as cited in Zournazi, 2002, p. 24)

Walter Benjamin, one of the men Arendt profiles as having experienced “dark times,” in his case with the storm of the Third Reich upon him, captures the vicissitudes of history that show the alternating faces of hope. In his famous poetic epiphany of history, he writes:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees only one catastrophe, which piles wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. (as cited in Solnit, 2016, p.73)

Rebecca Solnit (2016) describes Benjamin’s contrast aptly: “History is a being to whom things happen, a creature whose despairing lineaments are redeemed only by the sublimity of the imagery” (p. 73). For Virginia Woolf, the devastation of the First World War brought similar calamity. “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best the future can be” (as cited in Solnit, 2016, p. 1).26 But Arendt thought not. The point of her chronicling the lives of illuminating persons was to show how the deeds and words of each person illuminated the darkness of a public realm that people shared in common. New beginning could be totalitarian, dark new beginnings with capacity to initiate something new, says Richard Bernstein (2011). All Arendt’s efforts were to remind us of life’s radical contingency, reminders that natality can

26See also Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee (1997) notes the tension inherent in her life, her persistent, and urgent tussle between life and death, her vision of her own existence as a battle ground between these two forces. 64

spring forth with new expressions of hope, to offer a new resilience to humanity. “The emergence of totalitarianism in the 20th century is also rooted in the capacity to act and initiate something new; it was an unprecedented event, a dark new beginning” (Bernstein, 2011, p. 13).

Founded on Arendt’s belief in natality, a platform of hope can emerge with such vitality that it can obscure the forces that interrupt and threaten democratic hope. Natality was ‘the expression of power that can spring forth,” and it was precisely that hope that she saw emerging in the American Revolution. At the same time, Arendt saw other emerges, other forms of new beginning, that, like natalic hope, were rooted in the capacity to act and initiate something new, but far from benign. As noted, totalitarianism also was an unexpected event, an emergence of hideous proportions for the 20th century. Arendt had lived through the totalitarian horror. The invidious violence that she wrote against in her first work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), was in vehement disagreement with Max Weber’s and C. Wright Mills’s linkage of power and violence being a fact of life. She abhorred Jean-Paul Sartre’s defense of violence in his introduction to ’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Hope in the sense of new beginnings was vulnerable to being co-opted into the wrong hands. Both Arendt and her contemporary, Ernst Bloch, were well aware of fraudulent hope. To Arendt, history was full of totalitarian power bringing calamity in the name of hope. To Bloch, “fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, in extreme contrast to “concretely genuine hope,” which he exalted as the “most dedicated benefactor of the human race” (as cited in Solnit, 2016, p. 73).

As the present century dawned, Chantal Mouffe spoke of the threat of cooptation of “authentic” hope. Her words seem even more poignantly apropos today than they were at the beginning of our millennium:

I do think we are in a dangerous situation today. I think it is very important to realize that, in circumstances that seem so bleak for people, this is the moment when right-wing movements are the ones which provide hope. In fact, in recent studies about the rise of Hitler in Germany, for instance, have shown that one of the attractions of his movement was that he was the one who was offering German peoples a new idea about what Germany could be; he was bringing hope to German people. This is really terrible to 65

realize….And, of course, the situation in democratic countries is less dramatic but is also very worrying in exactly the same direction. (as cited in Zournazi, 2002, pp. 126-127)

Genealogical Perspectives on Hope

In the genealogy of hope ontology, Enlightenment philosophers recognized Janus-faced ambiguity as inherent in hope. Three philosophers, Baruch de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, and , all agreed that hope was first and foremost an emotion or “passion” and, other than Spinoza, agreed that it was a motivating factor in human agency. Spinoza saw hope not necessarily as desire, but as a form of pleasure or joy that is mingled with sadness, prompted by uncertainty. He saw the futurity inherent in hope as leading to its unpredictability, if not its irrationality (as cited in Bloeser, 2017). What was also generally agreed upon by representative philosophers of the 17thand 18th centuries was that hope is based on some kind of uncertainty of belief, and that that led to tension, to conflict in emotions embodied within the act of hoping. Spinoza identified in his Ethics the pairing of hope with fear, the latter provoking tension (as cited in Waterworth, 2003, p. 33). Spinoza also brings in the temporality of hope, “an inconstant pleasure arising from the idea of something past or future.” Importantly he adds that with hope, “to a certain extent we doubt [emphasis mine] the issue.” He amplifies his “tension thesis” by claiming that “there is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope” (p. 34). Spinoza is not a fan of hope, believing that it falls prey to superstition and therefore should be kept at arm’s-length. He does not doubt hope’s political significance, however, but ascribes that as negative, making men vulnerable to superstition.

Descartes pairs hope with anxiety rather than fear, while he pairs despair and confidence as opposites. For Descartes (Passions of the Soul, 1649), “desire” is the passion par excellence that leads us to the future (as cited in Waterworth, 2003, p. 153, note 22). Descartes also notes that when confidence is extreme, hope changes its nature and it is called “assurance,” just as, on the other hand, extreme anxiety becomes “despair” (p. 37). Descartes asserts that hope “has to be convinced that what is desired will come about” (p. 37).

Descartes thus raises here the issue of tension, the tentativeness, the doubt, the uncertainty of hope that is a defining characteristic of hope as Spinoza originally identified. Fear or doubt pairs

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with desire as a common feature of hope. But Hume, by way of contrast, does not see hope changing its nature as Descartes did. Rather he posited the emotions of hope and fear blending – leading to mixed emotions, not necessarily leading to uniformity, but to a mixture. Joy and grief can accompany hope. J. P. Day (1969), explicating Hume’s view, gives an example of the mixed emotions of a mother at a daughter’s wedding, glad to see her daughter’s happiness, sad at losing her (as cited in Waterford, 2003, p. 40).

This brief diversion into the challenge of defining hope—whether psychologically or philosophically—is revealed in this sampling of Enlightenment philosophers’ variations, the commonality being the tension that hope produces, and which is seemingly inherent in the concept, or perhaps the other way around, that hope springs from the tension such as the tension between desire and possibility. In Chapter 1, I described how the Plato/Vogt response to desire- fuelled hope could be creatively channeled into imaginative scenarios as part of a maturing thought process. The classical insights into the ontology of hope will become relevant to my project when I interrogate the role of hope in the light of the Progressive Era and contemporary education in later chapters.

Thinking along the politico-social lines of hope and its tensions, Hannah Arendt, as previously noted, was poignantly aware of the sinister plots that may emerge under the guise of hope. Her response was unflagging, however, in her faith in democracy, if properly constituted. It is to the constituents of properly constructed hope that we are about to turn. There is indeed an element of leaping to faith to be taken seriously. Before we turn to the programmatic side of Arendt’s democratic construction of political hope, it is prudent to consider the summarization of hope offered by Christopher Lasch, given the ambiguities and complexity of the ontology of hope that I have been discussing. Lasch (1991), ironizes the precarity of hope:

Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it.…The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life, would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrated the continuing need for hope….Improvidence, blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best,

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furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t. (p. 91)

That caveat noted, I now focus on Arendt’s programmatically activist vision of the importance, need, and viability of anchoring hope within democratic parameters. Starting with classical exemplars, she advocates moves that she believed would concretize hope’s political future, beginning with an outline of the conditions and actions leading to its fruition. To Arendt, analyzing the need for restoring pristine democratic thinking in the turbulent late 1960s, her adopted nation need only to look at the roots of its founding to find a vocabulary of political concepts that, translated into action, would form a bulwark defending authentic democratic hope.

Section C: The Practicality of Hope

Kant’s famous three questions seemed to tie hope to the act of doing: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? Eminent pragmatist thinker John McDermott (2007) believed that the doing question is the “practical” within Kant and he adds, warningly, “I take it that we can only hope if we do what we ought to do [emphasis in original]” (pp. 23-24). For McDermott, “in this ameliorative vein…the major figures in the history of thought…maintain the need for practice, the need to do something, to forage, to nurture, to sustain, to maintain, and to build” (p. 24). Arendt is certainly one of those pragmatic thinkers, who not only provided historical analysis and conjecture, but had a strong compulsion towards advancing the cause of democracy by identifying what would make it work successfully.

Ernst Bloch (1986), too, wrote often about the need for daydreams as the starting point of hope but mandated that without action, the dream remains sterile. Hope was not just about desire, not just about aspiration, but about realization. The “work of this emotion,” he said, referring to hope, is about translating the utopic impulse into praxis (as cited in Solnit, 2016, p. 5). Praxis emerging from hope was necessary to give authentic meaning to the word. Hope only became hope when efforts were made to concretize it. It was the praxis of hope that lifted the hope-daydream from reverie or fantasy to genuine hope.

For Arendt, like Bloch, praxis was the most important aspect of human activity, and at the heart of political life. While their ideological outlook differed on what that ultimate polity would 68

look like, the goal for them both was the praxis of hope, and in both cases, they boldly offered a platform of discursive action to better the world. Prominent in their respective canons was the importance of hope as manifest in action, in both cases envisioning the possibility of creating something from the past and present that will transform conditions for the future betterment for humanity. Hoping for radically enlightened governance was high on the emancipative agenda. For Arendt the focus was how to bring about direct and dynamic democracy as she delineated steps for a workable democratic polity. For Bloch, the key was fulfilling the early Marxian vision of an infinitely more humane and just world, to be brought about by classlessness world socialism. His vision was ideologically utopic although not statically utopic. Arendt’s vision was more processual, focusing on creating the conditions that would nurture robust democracy, with contemporary parallels to the classical marketplace, town meetings, councils and polis. Polis was a self-governing community. Hope was integral to the democratizing process, the liberating hope that insisted on the participation of citizenry, respect for the sanctity of law, and representation of varied perspectives.

Arendt’s Emancipative Agenda

Current events within the United States with Donald Trump, first as candidate and currently as President, have sparked interest in the political theories of a number of women and men from within a full spectrum of fiction and prose: Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, and unsurprisingly, Hannah Arendt are representative. All shed light on totalitarian regimes, and offer implied or explicit actions needed to combat autocracies of tyranny. The latter’s great passion was to discern the conditions of possibility that make a polity work in the interests of human freedom. According to Arendt (1958), freedom began, as I have discussed, with the human phenomenon of natality, which initiates the “newcomer into the world,” with the corollary that each new arrival “possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting,” that is, to produce something uniquely new (pp. 9 and 8). Those core ideas, natality and acting, led Arendt to discuss the revolutions and uprisings that create political space, “a space where freedom can appear as a world reality” (as cited in d’Entrèves, 1993, p. 68). I will be noting Arendt’s multiple examples of such public upheavals through human history in addition to the events of her lifetime. Arendt shows that human condition is not only plural in nature but has fruitfully demonstrated its capacity to produce women and men “who do step forward from 69

their private lives to create a public space where freedom could appear, and to act in such a way that the memory of their deeds could become a source of inspiration for future generations” (p. 68).

In the differences of plurality, Arendt is saying, we show ourselves to be able to do something to change the world. In my study, I focus on her core example of such action, the founding of America. In close association with the notion of new actions of freedom initiated by humans was the language that in our communication shows ourselves to one another in our difference. And it is in this disclosure that action is generated.

The link between action and speech becomes the key for people to establish relations, and to create new realities in concert with one another. It was the Greek polis that constituted the political institutions of the Greek city-states through which all important debates and discussions of public concern took place. The metaphor of the Greek polis was of the utmost significance to Arendt, signifying the public setting where change agency could take place in deliberative and rational fora, thereby nullifying violence, and instead arriving at representative consensus in peaceful and thoughtful ways.

My study has thus far alluded to the lessons for making democracy work, with brief forays into early Western examples, finding, as did Arendt, hope for the possibility of radical democracy in classical Greece. Arendt would add Rome, as well, in considering contributions to democracy’s origin, and as we shall presently see, she, like McDermott (2007), also found inspiration for hope in Immanuel Kant. The content of Arendt’s “doing” revolved around a number of concepts that she used to underpin the notion of a healthy democracy. While natality incited the beginning of the new, Arendt focused on the conditions for public participation, the plurality and representation of that public, and the clear expectation of the public to give voice to varied views as critical to achieving a democratic decision-making process. Persuasion was keynote to arriving at non-violent conclusions, she believed, and creative democratic outcomes only occurred when gatherings of people became part of a dynamic participatory adventure in political decision-making. Opinions were to be expressed, revised with one’s peers, and acted

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upon and thus became concretely realized in order for the word republic to be legitimized.27 As we will presently see, the more she studied the making of the American Republic, and related it to Kant, the more impressed she became with the way democracy in the colonies took shape.

It was Arendt’s choice to name the work “the spirit of revolution,” with special identification of the American Revolution as its leitmotif. As Richard Bernstein (2011) notes, she wishes to distinguish the violence of revolution from the deliberative processes that constitutes her idea of “revolutionary spirit” (p. 15). Hope was a major reason behind that original choice since, in her research of the French and American Revolutions, she came to ardently admire the process by which the nascent American nation moved into an ethos of democratic freedom. While albeit it was through upheaval, she argued that it was a revolution of a special nature: one that prioritized rhetoric above violence.

It was hope concretized, in both senses of the word concrete: it was (1) a growing together and (2) an embodiment of their dream in the shape of Declaration, Covenant, and Constitution. The American Revolution, she argued, was not about revolt or upheaval at its heart. It was about the ideas and ideals being given practical resolution, developing ways and means of bringing political hope in the creation of a new society. The birth, the natality of America, as much more than a physical struggle, was given brilliant notice by Alexis de Tocqueville (2000).

In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made civilized; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impractical, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past. (p. 15)

Arendt was zealous in distinguishing power from violence. In her analysis of the American Revolution, she makes a strong case for why it was the spirit of the American Revolution, in contrast to the violence of the French Revolution, that was critically distinctive. “Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert” (Arendt, 1963, p. 32). She cites the process of “acting in concert” that she had in mind to describe legitimate power. The revolution in

27 The parallels with classical American pragmatism in Arendt are striking. 71

America evolved from a long tradition of mutual covenants and agreements and a pre- revolutionary tradition of self-determination. Perhaps Arendt somewhat idealizes or exaggerates the early democratization of America before the Revolution. But renowned historians, like Gordon Wood (1998), have come to agree that violence was not a major part of the American revolutionary scene in the way it became in France, and that the ingredients for democracy— plurality, debate and persuasion, testing and revising opinions with one’s peers, and active participation in public affairs—were indeed concretely manifested in the making of American polity before and during the revolutionary period. The fact that it was only a “half-way successful revolution” is another key part of the revolutionary narrative to be pursued later in this chapter (Wellmer, 2001).28 But Arendt’s thoughtful exegeses about violence, totalitarianism, and democracy in the context of the new beginnings that hope can usher in, brought illumination to her times and, I will argue, have relevance to the troubled landscape of our times. Her belief in new natality, and the new beginnings that it awakened, led to a celebrated probe into the birth of her adopted country seemingly in search of the hopefulness that it represented in what she was to call “the revolutionary spirit.”

Section D: The Revolutionary Spirit of Hope

Arendt’s second major work, On Revolution (1963), focused on the relation of hope and freedom, and the hope for freedom advertised by two revolutions of the 18th century, the American and the French. Her interest in exploring revolutionary movements seemed reflective of her late teen experience as witness to the catastrophic civilian and military deaths of World War I, “the war to end all wars,” and the ominous clouds of renewed catastrophe that she saw looming in Stalin’s criminality and Nazi Germany. Her preoccupying theme was to examine how totalitarianism could be avoided when the global human condition was wretchedly in need and clamoring for change.

Succour, she believed, could come by emulating the American spirit of hopefulness that she discerned in the founding of her adopted country. Hope was vividly manifest in the Revolution

28 Albrecht Wellmer (2001) feels that was Arendt’s conclusion. 72

of 1776, the lead up to it, and the democratic vision that emanated from it. She gave evidence to show why the spirit behind the making of the Revolution in America was markedly superior to the French Revolution and her reasons pointed to the distinctive character of the American Dream. Certainly, the colonists wished to cast off the annoyances of their colonial status. But America, with all its economic complaints of being victimized by lack of representation and trade injustices, was already being viewed by the rest of the world as the land of milk and honey, where even the least prosperous were above subsistence level, and most colonists were thriving. Arendt pointed out that this was the first revolution not born out of the anguish of hunger and starvation. Political overthrows and upheavals by the poor had been natural and unavoidable as long as men and women believed that poverty was inherent in the human condition. With New World colonization that historical “axiom” was called into question. America became the symbol of a society without poverty. Inequality and the question of rich and poor had not disappeared in America but it was of a different order than the poverty of Europe and much of the rest of the world.

Not a professional historian by background, Arendt nevertheless made a compelling comparison with American and French Revolutions, emphasizing the “food factor” as a critical difference. Some 40 years later, in a retrospective on Arendt’s writings in “Violence and Revolution,” Richard Bernstein (2011) backed her prescient account, citing the later corroborative “authoritative” study of early American historian Gordon Wood (1998) in arriving at a conclusion similar to Arendt’s in her publication of five years earlier. Bernstein endorses the Arendtian description of the revolutionary spirit as indeed a worthy exemplar of the revolutionary spirit, one not consumed with violence and terror which became the fate of the French Revolution, but with a strong deliberative element in its run-up and aftermath. Its culmination with debates and compromises leading to the ultimate ratification of the Constitution was, through Arendtian and now Bernstein’s lenses, a singularly laudatory process in the annals of such upheavals.

The hope that became the sovereign motivation for the Founding Fathers was that by virtue of restoring basic liberty for themselves they were, in fact, creating something new, something entirely without precedent. As Arendt (1963, 2006) put it, “the course of history suddenly begins anew…an entirely new story never known or told before is about to unfold” (p. 136). This is the 73

“freedom for” notion of emancipation with which Bernstein (2011) concurs, branding this as the “the distinctive mark of the modern conception of revolution” French philosopher activist Claude Lefort in Democracy and Political Theory (1991), along with Bernstein (2011), is in agreement with Arendt. She is gifted in her capture of a special kind of hope in the American Revolution; Lefort sees that hope endemic to special moments of history. They were what he calls “the privileged moments” when a new qualitatively different democratic order was suddenly born. Lefort (1991) cites such moments, “the moment of the Greek City in Antiquity, and in modern times, the American and French Revolutions, the moments of the workers’ councils in Russia 1917, and that of the Hungarian worker’s councils in 1956.” Such moments for Lefort and Arendt signaled times of hope—when the people found their political voice in concert. It was not only hope in action but it was the concretizing moment that made their hope “privileged.” The renowned scholar, Ernst Bloch, also wrote extensively about the praxis of hope, and the need to move hope from dream—reverie he called it—until it had become acted upon, whereupon hope becomes an authentic daydream that warrants being called hope.

More will be said presently about the praxis of hope. In essence, what Bloch (1986) is saying, is that for hope to progress to meaningfulness requires work. “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong” (as cited in Solnit, 2016, p. 5). The very word “concrete” has hybrid genealogy applied to hope with a special aptness to thinkers like Arendt and Lefort. Concrete’s root is (con+crescence), “growing together,” and it was just that congregating of citizen voice and activism in the interest of progressive polity that Arendt and Lefort were aggressively seeking as the world-building way to grow and strengthen democracy (Thompson & Zizek, 2013, p. 12). To them, concrete activism, was the way to combat totalitarianism and bring democratic hope to humanity.

Just how different in character was the American Revolution from its French counterpart? Arendt (1963/2006) deftly parses the differences. The French Assembly had no experience to fall back upon, only ideas and principles untested by reality to guide and inspire them:

The manifestation was not in the form of deliberations, discussion and decision; it was on the contrary, an intoxication on whose chief element was the crowd—the mass, whose 74

applause and patriotic delight added as much charm as brilliance to the oath of the tennis court as experienced by Robespierre. (pp. 120, 121)

Contrast that with America:

It is well known that how much the Founding Fathers, their deep sense of the novelty of their enterprise notwithstanding, prided themselves on having only applied boldly and without prejudice what had been discovered long before. They considered themselves masters of because they dared, and knew how to apply, the accumulated wisdom of the past (Arendt, 1963/2006, p. 125).

The Constitution of 1791 in France remained a piece of paper that “was shattered even more before it went into effect, and it followed in quick succession by one constitution after another until in an avalanche of constitution, disintegrated beyond recognition” (Arendt, 1963/2006, p. 125). In vivid contrast, the process for resulting in the Declaration of the Independence saw the initiation of the writing of constitutional Assemblies for each [emphasis mine] of the American States, an exercise which prepared and culminated in the Constitution of the Union, the foundation of the United States (p. 125). The Constitution guaranteed the foundation of the body politic a space where freedom could appear.

Section E: The Audacity of Hope

In his stirring article on “The Future of Possibility,” Stanley Cavell (1980) spoke to the “unavoidable arrogance of philosophy” (p. 21). By arrogance he means romantic outbreaks, which are often transgressive, with reverberations of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.29 I believe that the audacity of hope falls into that category of hope ontology and that audaciousness was much in evidence in the American Revolution. At the centre of the movement was not only a confidence in what had been accomplished, but the consolidative feeling that America was

29 Nicholas Kompridis29Reports from National Public Radio Report (NPR), and OECD. speaks to this interpretation of romanticism in “Moral Perfectionism and Cavell’s Romantic Turn” (1986, pp. 29-32). 75

indeed a land of destiny, a feeling given 21st-century expression by Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama as “the audacity of hope.”30

While not using the exuberant language of that phrase, Arendt cites as typical of such “arrogance” the audacious words of John Adams, spoken a full decade before the actual outbreak of the American Revolution was to take shape, as representative of the ambition that lay behind the American spirit of hopefulness: “I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth” (as cited in Arendt, 1963/2006, p. 23).

This was not all vainglory. This remarkable enunciation by John Adams was less vainglorious than it was impassioned belief. It was not only activist in nature, but extravagantly ambitious for a group of Colonies, still somewhat “survivalist,” finding themselves in a relative wilderness.31 That ebullience was to be expected some hundred years later, say, in the Manifest Destiny movement. But Adams was displaying the confidence, the boldness, and the exuberance of the leader emboldened with a vision of hope. That was to rebound in the hope of Pericles, as noted by Arendt and other historians (e.g., Kagan, 1998). It became characteristic of several American personas identified with American democracy in the 19th century, as they became aware of the struggles that were being faced by democracy for simple survival.32

Arendt sees the spirit of the American Revolution giving birth to John Adams’s kind of audacious hope. Other revolutions that were to sweep Europe were brought about by the deep anger and despair of extreme chronic hunger. They were inspired by the New World order of the economic revolution that “new technologies,” as Arendt put it, could overcome poverty, could feed them, could save them from perishing, which hitherto had been their inexorable fate.

30 The title of Barack Obama’s 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, and the title of his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. His phrase derived from a sermon by Jeremiah Wright. Audacity can be thought of in two ways, audacity to hope, and as Obama adapted it from Wright, the audacity of hope. 31 Historian James Kloppenberg (2016) speaks of the “survivalist times” of the early colonists. 32 Whitman and Dewey are prime examples of “concern for democracy” surfacing in the 19th century. 76

American hope was thus born of a different kind of vision, a vision of potential accomplishment rather than merely reaction against what came before. In the opening chapter I discussed the paradigm of the Exodus theme as applied to the early American settlement. As is well known, that archetypal religious theme lay behind the arrival of the first Puritan settlers to Plymouth Rock, and we know the advent of that biblical mission lingers until the present day.33 It was part of a liberatory vision; there had been indeed religio-political oppression of the Puritans in Europe. But that oppression was well before the time of the Revolution, and the negativity of their European oppression was generations behind them. The Revolution, Arendt argues, was born from a different ethico-political motive, the hope of creating something anew, a society with ennobling goals, one that was to be built on shining ideals. The American spirit of hope was audacious hope. Here is Joseph Warren echoing the confidence of that hope in 1772, several years prior to the Revolution: “Public happiness depends on the virtuous and unshaken attachment to a free Constitution” (Warren, 1772) .

In his well-known analysis of positive and negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin (1969) spoke of freedom’s twofold nature, “freedom from and freedom for.” Often both sentiments are intermingled as they were in the early settlement of the Colonies. But the dichotomy in America had largely, if not entirely, dissolved by the time of the Revolution. In Chapter 1, I spoke to the Exodus’s twofold theme of escaping from oppression accompanied by the creative construction of the new. Similarly, the Promethean myth captures the suffering that hope can bring upon the hoper, along with liberatory possibilities for creative enterprise. While the list of grievances that Thomas Jefferson recites in the Declaration of Independence is impressively long in justifying a sense of persecution that legitimated divorce from England, the “real” agenda of the American Revolution was to be found in the ringing words of John Adams or Joseph Warren. America was boldly preparing to become the lighthouse to the world; America with a newly minted Constitution was destined to emerge, so the dream went, as the supreme symbol of a “new world order” that would end the “slavish part of humanity” worldwide through its exemplary leadership as embodied in “a virtuous and unshaken attachment to a free constitution” (Op. Cit.)

33 Recent reference by a senator in the American Congress to the “City on a Hill.” 77

The risks, the perils, the downside of audacious hope will be discussed as a part of the ontology of hope presently. But Arendt, despite the Holocaust, despite the continent of her homeland having been reduced to near-ashes, was pointing to the dream that brings hope to the surface in catastrophes both large and small; that is, the spirit of hope. Indeed, it seemed an “impossible dream”: a scattering of colonies wishing to “emancipate the world” by its example of revolutionary nation-building; a vintage example of audacious hope.

This was not the vision of Plato in Philebus where, as I explicated in Chapter 1, Socrates extolled the power of Platonic hope within the frame of our everyday acts of hoping. Those hopes were attuned to daily hopes for fulfilling our desires, a methodology for hope writ small that gave insight to how we reason our way to good hope in the light of unruly pleasures that urge indulgence. Audacious hopes may well follow the kind of hope template that Plato/Vogt describe. But the hopes of a John Adams and Joseph Warren were writ exceedingly large and, of the utmost importance to Arendt, were to be acted out in the political realm—and that was the lifelong passion of Arendt.

If the first argument for a distinctive American hope was its audacious “spirit,” the second argument of Arendt’s ontology of hope and its significance in the American story is the idealizing that hope can give rise to. Consistent with her idea that destitution was not the root cause of the Revolution in America, she raises the counter reason that a vision of America was emerging, that the American Dream augured a destiny born of independence and the desire to embark on a journey to national sovereignty that would be untrammeled by foreign interference. It was, as it were, resounding evidence of self-confidence, a coming of age, a desire to break free from the clutches of the Empire that motivated the republican movement, and it was accompanied by equally audacious idealizations of morally enlightened governance. This is the Euro-Anglo perspective of “morally enlightened governance.” When she was theorizing her work in the 1960s, Arendt seemed largely unaware of the abyss between the ideals of the American’s Creed and the realities of injustice against Indigenous nations and the enslavement of African peoples that colonization had wrought, and the dire problematic of their redress.

Audacity as a characteristic of the ontology of hope became a critical factor in not only motivating the success of the founding of the Republic, but in attempting to consolidate its future 78

success. Jefferson, for one, was confident that he was the creator of an American nation bound for glory. The challenges of developing a meaningful praxis to translate the boldness of that dream await another chapter. But the ramping process was indeed, as Arendt (1963/2006) illustrated and I have been stressing, in glaring comparison with their French counterpart.

The American colonists had the “luxury” of time to deliberate on ideals and on their vision, and to codify them in a Constitution and a Declaration of Independence. That was an act of consolidation, of solidifying a mission, of developing a common understanding of their beliefs. It was a chart for the way forward. Arendt (1963/2016) interpreted it in the following way:

The French Assembly had no experience to fall back on and only some ideas and principles untested by reality to guide and inspire them. The manifestation was not in the form of deliberations, a discussion and decision; it was, on the contrary, an intoxicant, whose chief element was the crowd—that mass, ‘whose applause and patriotic delight added as much brilliance to the oath of the tennis court as experienced by Robespierre. Even the word democracy, she adds, was not used in France until 1794. (pp. 120, 121)

The Constitution of 1791 in France “remained a piece of paper…[that] was shattered even more before it went into effect, and it was followed in quick succession by one constitution after another until in an avalanche of constitutions disintegrated beyond recognition” (Arendt, 196/2016, p. 123). Again, through the Arendtian lens, the American Founders had arrived at a very different way of envisioning polity: that public or political freedom and public or political happiness were the inspiring principles which prepared the minds of those who then did what they had never expected to do.

Compare the skimpiness of the foregoing process with the Declaration of Independence, which entailed the writing of constitutions for each of the American States, a process which prepared and culminated in the Constitution of the Union, the foundation of the United States. For Arendt, the American approach guaranteed the foundation of the body politic, and created a space where freedom could appear.

In The Audacity of Hope (2006), written by President Barack Obama a dozen years ago, and two years before he was to become President, he reflected on the strengths and weakness of the 79

founding documents and the governance issues faced by post–9/11 America. His Harvard education had provided a strong academic understanding of democratic polity. Now he was preparing for a run to give leadership to that governance.

In an astute analysis of the audacity represented by the visions of the Constitution, Obama (2006) eulogized the leadership that America gave to the world by defining a new character for democracy. He also praised the specific brilliance of some of its key merits—the strengths that Arendt discerned—its fidelity to deliberation, separation of powers and other measures to prevent tyranny, and the recognition of an adaptive, evolving nature consistent with open, participative revision. Obama highlighted the audacious brilliance of the revolutionary documents. He also analyzed at length its strategic flaw, that of ignoring the enslavement of millions of African Americans in the light of the values and ideals it expressed (pp. 107-117).

Obama (2006) quoted noted historian Joseph Ellis, who extolled the high promise of the constitutional enterprise: “It may have been a transformative moment [emphasis mine] in world history, when all laws and human relationships would be swept away forever” (p. 110). Such was the effrontery of the constitutional dream, to create a model of polity/governance to inspire the world. The “genius” of the design was the “conversation” that was built into it. It provided a framework:

What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery, its separation of powers, its checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights—is designed to force us into a conversation, a “deliberative” democracy. (p. 110)

The Constitution’s “elaborate machinery” would secure the rights of citizens, those deemed to be members of America’s political community. Democratic deliberation had produced many accomplishments, Obama (2006) went on to say—the promise of grand ideals. “It may be the vision of the Founders that inspires us, but it was their realism, their practicality, and flexibility, and curiosity that ensured the Union’s survival” (p. 112). But deliberation alone would not provide the slave with his freedom. Was the Constitution, then, a hypocritical enterprise,

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consciously or otherwise, “a betrayal of the grand ideals set forth by the Declaration’s ideals?” asks Obama (p. 115).

My project turns to that question in the next chapter, an inquiry into the American democracy’s attempt to move its stated “grand ideals,” astoundingly audacious, and now in formal text, into public policy (p. 115). My tracings of the thinking of Hannah Arendt, as this chapter has noted, reveals how enthralled she was, albeit a qualified enthrallment, with the grandeur of the Founders’ vision. While she recognized the potential of what had been wrought in the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution, she bemoaned the fact that the Public voice had not been given more prominence as a way to add torque to the democratic spirit of the Revolution. On balance, however, the American spirit as codified in the Revolutionary Documents represented for Arendt natality in action, lyrically at work in creating new governance. She did, however, refer to the revolutionary dream as a halfway success, a diagnosis that has oft been repeated by political pundits and historians.

As Obama vividly recognized what the Constitution failed to do was to provide protection to those outside the constitutional circle, the narrow band of America’s political community of white, property-owning males. It failed to protect Native Americans, “whose treaties proved worthless before the courts of the conquerors, or the black man, Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a freeman and leave a slave” p. 114. For that matter the Constitution failed to provide the franchise to women for a century and a half.

Obama was not naive in understanding that democratic deliberation failed to provide ‘the slave his freedom,’ or what he called cleansing itself of ‘its original sin of slavery.’ It took the Civil War to sever the chains of slavery. Obama opined: “I cannot brush aside the magnitude of injustice done, or erase the ghosts of deliberations past, or the open wound, the aching spirit that ails this country still.” The blood of slaves reminds us that our pragmatism can sometimes be moral cowardice.” (P.115, 117). Obama fully recognized, (as did Arendt) that this American Dream, as it came to be known, was not public accomplishment. Its start had been notably emancipative.

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Obama in 2004 also knew clearly the struggles that lay before him in public life even as a then- Senator. In retrospect his eight years of subsequent struggle as President were not without effort and achievement. Current events have brought calamity to many of the liberal-oriented attainments for which he fought. Many other attempts were politically thwarted. The litany of concern by liberals has produced an anvil chorus of theorizing about the political peril of American democracy today. Most pressing of concerns seems to revolve around maintaining the integrity of the separation of powers, and protection of public institutions. The concerns began in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and have crescendoed steadily for the two years of his presidency. At the behest of President Donald Trump, the Obama legacy has been steadily undermined and dismantled by the current Republican Administration.

Candidate Obama closed his earlier memoir, Dreams from My Father, with a coda announcing his forthcoming book, TheAudacity of Hope. He laid out what was needed to rise to the challenge of the Hope-Dream that the Founders envisioned:

A government that truly represents [all] Americans –that truly serves these Americans will require a different kind of politics...It will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves, just how much we 34 share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.

The purpose of exploring Arendt for her insights has been to see through her lens the past ideals of the Revolution for their worthiness and how they constituted the spirit of an American Hope Dream from its days of settlement to its liberatory revolutionary aspirations. In the next Chapter, I shed light on the contribution of bright-line individuals involved in Democracy and Education whose unique vision, seemingly inspired by the ideals of the revolutionary spirit and its Creeds, influenced the historical arc of the pre and post-revolutionary period. Again, I will be analysing what, if any, continuance there had been in furnishing a bright-line for the advancement of the shining ideals underlying the polity of a new Nation (e.g., Wellmer, 2001). President Obama

34 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father. 1995. 82

closed his earlier memoir Dreams from My Father (2004) with a coda announcing his forthcoming book, The Audacity of Hope. The parting line he gave to the phenomena of hope’s centrality to achieving the America Hope Dream was to read:

We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions, and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break. (Obama, 2004, p. 457)

In the next chapter, I interrogate the contribution of key individuals involved in American democracy and education whose unique vision influenced the historical arc of the pre- and post- revolutionary periods.

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Chapter 3: Founders and Heirs of the Revolutionary Spirit: Hope, Democracy, and Education

Section A: Franklin and the Quintessential Hopes of the American Dream

The historical picture of Benjamin Franklin is fraught with complexity, reflecting the “many lives” that biographers now believe is the received wisdom about how he lived. His biographers of our century are largely agreed also that (a) he was a genius; and (b) the kind of hope he came to represent reflects hopes that are as multi-hued as his life. Several shades of his hope, principally those that bear on democracy and education, are discussed in this section:

§ Franklin, a stellar example of bright-line thinkers, a gifted improvisational and inventive `self-made` man who embodied the Promethean spirit of America.

§ Franklin’s hope as representative of the bifocal hope of early settlers of America, with respect to religious freedom and the world-building responsibility inherent in the covenant to create “the City on a Hill.” § The complementary Promethean dream-myth of creating new knowledge and new enlightenment for humanity. § Franklin as proto-pragmatist, as an extraordinary “doer,” with special interest in experimental science relating to the natural world. § Franklin as a social activist, an ameliorating servant of the public good. § Franklin’s hopeful vision of education as engagement and his harbingering of the educational theory of the progressivist era. Franklin was the embodiment of the sober-sided, Puritan settlers, full of homilies and sayings in his published work that edified thrift, industry, and common sense. James Campbell summarizes the pith of Franklin’s Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793/2017) as a proxy for the American Dream. About that world-famous work of Franklin, biographer Campbell asserts, “It was the story of the rise from impotence to importance, from dependence to independence, from helplessness to power” (Campbell, 1999, p. 25). Franklin’s memoir charted his life story as if in illustration of how to successfully pursue the American Dream through virtuous living. At the same time Franklin also represents the other stream of hope that resonated with the Promethean myth of bringing forth new knowledge, the adventuring discoverer of 84

world-changing facts. Having made himself a good living by middle age, he was able to pursue his interest in experimentation, most notably linking lightning to electricity; that astonishing discovery gave him such an international reputation for inventive ingenuity that Immanuel Kant was to compliment him as the “modern Prometheus” (Kant, 1988, p. 482; see also Franssen, 2014).

With his interest in scientific inventions, Franklin became an apostle of transformative hope. Significantly, he also fulfilled a second qualification of Prometheanism: he was altruistic, refusing to take out patents on his inventions. To him, the “new knowledge” that they revealed was a gift that belonged in the public domain for the public good. That was the moralistic strain of Franklin, a life which involved a huge investment in public service, complemented by a strong sense of philanthropy; he used both his wealth and talent for the improvement of society. He makes the Promethean appellation an ideal fit with a steady stream of inventions, and his many services to humanity. In calling him the modern Prometheus, Kant, of course. was focusing on his contribution to the scientific properties of electricity with its incalculably important potential. But there was an ancillary aptness to the metaphor, with Franklin giving galvanizing civic, educational, and diplomatic activism. In short, Franklin brought social hope to public life.

Franklin’s reference to the public domain links back to Francis Bacon, one of Franklin’s heroes, and someone that he emulated in important ways. Bacon represented the renaissance of hope of new discoveries about the nature of the universe. He conducted new explorations into unknown lands, and achieved breakthroughs in virtually every science. Renascent thinking revelled in new art and literature, and the sharing of information through the printing press. Renascent publishing led to the translation of the classics, which Bacon was part of, including the translation of the myth of Prometheus into English. It also led to utopic imaginaries, which Bacon produced, such as New Atlantis, a work of science fiction that illuminated his hope for future scientific advance. Contemporary Bacon scholarship focuses on the breakthrough that he made from timeworn traditions to open up the world to experiment, invention, and new ways of thinking. John Dewey was to call him “the great forerunner of the spirit of modern life” (Dewey, 1920/2004, p. 16). In this section of this chapter, my central focus will be how Franklin, too, was a “great forerunner of modern educational thinking.”

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Franklin was following in Bacon’s footsteps by making available his research findings to the public, gratis, and publicly declaring that only scientific advances that worked for the benefit of the public estate were worthy of support. Bacon was strongly interested in building public institutions to support the national welfare. Both were adherents to scientific processes, to inductive logic, to reasoning processes; both eschewed dogma, and had democratic leanings in spite of their involvements in aristocratic circles of government. Bacon’s life and work were clearly an inspiration to Franklin, by his own account, and there were frequent Baconian patterns in his life story.

Franklin was largely self-educated. Astonishingly, his schooling was limited to two years, ending at the age of 10. He apprenticed as a printer and brought distinction to himself as a prosperous tradesman, with a boot-strapping rise to success symbolic of how ordinary men could achieve economic success through pluck, thrift, hard work, learning, and native intelligence. As I have claimed in Chapter 1, with the rising prosperity of the colonial settlers, material success had become morally entangled with spiritual worthiness, both attributes increasingly being seen as compatible aspirations in the American Dream. Franklin represented those hopes of ordinary folk becoming part of a larger canvas of religio-economic hope that came to be called the American Dream.35Franklin represented the mobility of American society, the sense that everyone could rise to new heights in keeping with the New World’s openness to the entrepreneurial spirit. A facet of the American Dream was the notion that everyone more or less started out on an equal footing, and prospered by the sweat of one’s brow and ambition. Franklin came out of that mould without inheritance, largely self-educated, and full of ambition.

Franklin boosted the realism of the egalitarian hope for the American Dream. A social equity theme was an important part of the distinctiveness of the American Dream. Farmer and author J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked in his Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, “What, then is an American, this new man?” (1781/1981, pp. 69, 104). From Crèvecoeur’s expatriate perspective, he was reflecting on the American willingness

35 A century later the stories of Horatio Alger began to surface, that rags-to-riches genre that became an immensely successful one. 86

to work hard and help others. He marveled at the sense of community amidst personal freedom. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin possessed the Crèvecoeur hope. It was the dream of the ordinary man, the free man, the unencumbered man: no house of lords, no aristocracy, no feudalism. It was the spirit of the “equality of persons” that Abraham Lincoln articulated at Gettysburg, and that Jane Addams and John Dewey were a century later to theorize and edify as the central ethical concept of democracy.

Despite their radically different styles and personal bearing, both Franklin and Jefferson conveyed a democratic aura whose public presence embodied a sense of human equity as inherent in the distinctive American Revolutionary spirit. Liberty, yes, but in Franklin’s America, it was freedom conceived of as a universal value, theoretically accessible to all. As Arendt expressed in many ways, it was not freedom from oppression as much as it was freedom to build a new world that made America unique.

Section B: The Proto-pragmatic Hope of Franklin

With the turn into the twenty-first century came the 300th anniversary of Franklin’s birth. That celebration occasioned a spate of biographies, most notably those of Gordon S. Wood (2001), Walter Isaacson (2004), and James Campbell (1999).All gave a more rounded picture without disputing the complexity of his character, and each biographer found a great many avenues of his life that were rich in productivity and representative of the hopes of the American Dream. This trio of biographies was in dramatic contrast to the beginning of the last century when Franklin was badly mauled by his critics. Campbell (1999) reviews the depictions from economist Max Weber, to novelist D.H. Lawrence, to the philosopher Charles Angoff, all of whom were disdainful of Franklin’s literary works. He was pilloried for “crass capitalism,” “the mechanization of the self,” the “commonplaceness” of his thinking. In effect, Franklin was caricatured for being the essence of an equally derided American Dream that was simplistic in comparison with its European counterparts.36

36 Most of the criticism of Franklin was oriented to his famous Autobiography (1793/2017). 87

Of the three contemporary biographers, Campbell (1999) was the only one to explore Franklin’s contribution to philosophy in depth. While Franklin was well-recognized as having been the founder of the American Philosophical Society in 1741, his actual philosophical writing had not been extensively explored. The wording of Campbell’s book title, Recovering Benjamin Franklin, signaled the need to redress the reputation of Franklin. Philosophy became the main terrain on which to explore Franklin’s life of science and service, and Campbell sounded the bellwether note of Franklin’s significance as a thinker. Granted, Franklin was well-recognized as the soul of practicality. But Campbell delved much more deeply into the praxis represented by Franklin’s life and its philosophical implications. His conclusion was that Franklin was, in fact, a forerunner of pragmatism.

Franklin was a problem-solver. He embodied the kind of pragmatic hope that John Dewey was to describe as meliorism. He thought of life in terms of making his community, his city, his colony, and eventually his nascent nation a better place to live. He was first and foremost a doer, a man of action, a player. Franklin was preeminently practical. Pragmatist John Dewey described him this way: “In the words of that great spokesman of American practicality, Benjamin Franklin, “opinions should be judged of by their influences and effects” (Campbell, 1995, p. 5). In what sense was he a precursor of James, Peirce, Addams, Dewey, and Mead? Campbell (1999) focuses on Franklin’s interest in natural processes, on the nature and meaning of experience. He notes that Franklin advanced experiential criteria especially through hypothetical and cooperative challenges to the tyranny of dogma. Melioristic efforts were not without purpose; as well, Franklin was notable for underscoring the need to make room for possibility.37

As a social activist his closest classical pragmatist era companion may be Jane Addams, also a consummate doer, a social reformer who shared many of Franklin’s qualities, from inferential logic, to reflective practitioning, to community, to pursuing possibility, to negotiating peace treaties. Addams’s tireless efforts on behalf of the social good were in many ways peerless for her time. Franklin also worked for many decades on trying to avoid the Revolutionary War. When he failed, he responded to the urgencies of preparing for American nationhood by helping

37 Paraphrase of Campbell’s (1999) case for why Franklin was a proto-pragmatist. 88

to draft the Declaration of Independence and to shape the Constitution. He took on a diplomatic task of enormous proportions in working to draw France into helping the Colonies finance their struggle for independence. As biographer Stacey Schiff (2005) describes in her scholarly account of that mission, Franklin was the master of diplomatic improvisation. Describing his “majestic suppleness,” she elaborates, “his charisma, his ingenuity, his silkiness…stand out in high relief” (p. 3).

Franklin’s statecraft had a higher mission than recruiting French money to finance the war against Britain, as important as their loans would prove to be. It was, says Walter Isaacson (2005), a prophetic hope for the destiny of the revolutionary dream:

[Franklin] wove in the idealism that was to make America’s exceptional both then and now; he realized that the appeal of the values of democracy and an attention to winning hearts and minds through public diplomacy would be sources of the new nation’s global influence as much as its military might.38

Such manipulations, often conducted with Machiavellian wiliness, and showing resourcefulness and courage, were oriented to the highest of national and intellectual ends.

I have been discussing the several shades of hope that Franklin represented as warp and woof of the American Dream—proto-pragmatic, experimental, diplomatic, Promethean, and exotic forms of freedom and world-building. Another Franklinian hope, revelatory of his amazing vision, was for changing the nature of the traditional education system. It is to the hope that Franklin had for transforming education that I now turn.

Franklin’s Utopian Hope for Education

In mid-career, when Franklin was looking to institutional improvement for Philadelphia, he wrote up Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1749 (hereafter the Proposals)on the aims of education relating to youth, which led to the founding of

38 Walter Isaacson, Book Review of New York Times Book Review, April 3, 2005. Review of Stacey Schiff, The Great Improvisation . P.5 89

the Academy of Philadelphia.39 The Academy opened in 1751 with Franklin as the President of the Board of Trustees for an all-boys’ secondary school; a charity school designated for poor children opened shortly, for boys in 1751, for girls in 1773. While the charity qualification gave access to poor children, the school for young students was a social, economic, and political mix of children attending, and as such, also gave to the setting, “a healthy classroom atmosphere and a democratic social exchange.” 40

My focus is on the Proposals that is an expression of Franklin’s vision of the kind of school that he felt was needed for the children to flourish. No substantive attention has been attendant to that topic by Franklin’s major biographers—James Campbell, Carl Van Doren, Gordon Wood, or Walter Isaacson. I am struck, not only by the progressiveness of the document, but also by its democratic, liberal, outlook, as it charted a new way forward for education. There are, however, vocational and utilitarian aspects to his proposals which have drawn recent attention (see the recent compilation by Benson et al., 2017). But the standpoint that I argue for features the holistic vision it offers. The Proposals was a manifesto for needed change; it was about developmental growth, about proactive thinking, about motivation, and about looking to the relationship of pedagogy to nature in defining developmental education.

Franklin was the apotheosis of nascent liberal, democratic hope in his Proposals. It was transformative hope that he was propositioning. It was a new deal for students. It would offer an education that befitted the vision of the evolving Colonies, one that would lead to their continuing prosperity, and to the enlightenment of the society that would be presumably fostered by the type of new school that he was proposing to found.

His Proposals began on a satirical note, by quoting from a poem by the popular Scottish poet James Thomson. Franklin, the practical, self-educated, businessman/printer, begins his treatise lyrically, twice invoking lines from Thomson. His four poems published in the collection The Seasons were wildly popular in the Colonies, and copies of the book circulated widely and its

39 The Academy morphed into a degree-granting school within several years, and into the University of Pennsylvania by the end of the century. 40Penn, in the 18th Century Archives, University Records Centre. Online. Minutes of the Trustees 1761. 90

contents became part of everyday discussion. “Franklin commended the poetry of Thomson’s The Seasons,” narrates his biographer Leo Lemay (2006, p. 400), and Louise Stevenson noted that the success of Thomson in the Colonies “made quotations from his book household staples” (2006, p. 121).41

In the lines with which Franklin prefaces his Proposals, the poet mocks first the quality of education from “gloom of cloister’d monk and jargon-teaching schools.” The lines he quotes are from the poem, “Summer.” Franklin, a devotee of nature, then chose lines from the poem “Spring” in which Thomson evokes with great tenderness the delight that loving parents have for their offspring. He moves into the metaphor of springtime blossoming to develop an imaginary of the child’s development in the loving context of nature’s cultivating, “kind hand of assiduous care”; the growth promotes tender shoots leading to “All nature pressing on the heart and the breath of the enlivening spirit.” It is a lyric of springtime blossoming arising from natality and nurture.

Thomson’s “Spring” would seem to be a paradigm of homologous hopefulness for Franklin’s vision of education for his new school. The children in his proposed school were to be offered curricular and instructional reforms oriented to a nurturing, developmental environment that was to build on their interests, their “inducements.” He encouraged “active learning,” exploration, and experimentation; he spread the wings of learning widely, into arts and sciences. Learning was looked upon as personal expansion, a matter of cultivation and the development of talents that would need to be for service to humankind. When one ranges that against the kind of dreary recitation and the deadening syndrome that seems to go with rote learning, his proposal indeed looks like a springtime renaissance of learning, with hope-driven expectation of personal

41The poems became part of household life in the Colonies. Stevenson (2006) notes that The Seasons had a far-ranging and deep cultural impact in disseminating ideas. Women and girls stitched passages from the poem into fine arts and decorative arts in needle-work curricula and household stitching. Ideas from The Seasons became ways in which “women’s [participation] in the political discourse that led to the American Revolution…the works meanings moved through time and space and across lines of media, class and gender… The Seasons’ motifs were to be found in “Decorative arts, paintings, and prints, political theory and philosophy…and school girl embroidery.” Stevenson compares The Seasons’ impact with The Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling and the Waverley novels of Walter J. Scott. 91

growth; he emphasized self-expression in writing and speaking, and spoke to “warming the imagination.”

These few lines from “Spring,” I argue, reverberate tellingly with the natality and growth themes of Franklin’s :

Spring

By degrees

The Human blossom grows

Soft as it rolls along, shows some new charm.

The father’s lustre and the mother’s bloom.

Then infant reason grows apace, and calls

For the kind hand of assiduous care.

Delightful task, to rear the tender thought,

To teach the young idea how to shoot.

To pour the fresh instruction o’er the mind,

To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix the

The generous purpose in the glowing breast.

And from Thomson’s “Winter”:

‘Tis come, the glorious morn, the second birth

Of heaven and earth! Awakening Nature hears

The new-creating word, and starts to life

From every heightened form, from pain and death

Forever free.

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The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,

And one unbounded Spring encircle all.

Franklin describes the school’s learning environment as educationally rich, selected for its and practicality, even building swimming into the curriculum: “not far from a river, having a Garden, Orchard, and a Field or two” (Proposals, 1749). The outdoors was to become the site for horticulture, experiments, and other kinds of “field trip” activities. The house for the Academy was to be furnished with libraries, maps, laboratory equipment, machines and building materials, and pictorial materials. The educational environment that Franklin planned was to be stimulating, lead to inquiry, with a full and varied curriculum and a breadth of subjects for the older youth.

He highlighted the importance of the decorative according to the tastes of his day (meaning arts, along with science and literary studies).He wanted the personal exploration, excursions, hands-on learning. True, this pedagogy was framed with characterological expectations, highly moralistic in nature and reverential to God, but the religion was not the overlay of traditional doctrinal religious education, and sectarianism was to be shunned. An ethical overlay was the emphasis on being of service to one’s family and friends, community and “country,” with the “benignity” of mind of service towards others being a priority.

I am unclear how much of the above education, if any, was available to girls. It was unusual to have any formal education for girls and young women in Franklin’s era, especially for girls living in poverty. Deep-dyed sexism was to reign in education for more than another century. Thus, even a beginning provision for girls to be provided with formal education was a step forward. This formal education for girls was presumably oriented to domestic life but the physical situation of the Academy was conducive for outdoor activity for both genders.

Overridingly, the school curriculum and methodology were intended to be beneficial to humanity: family, friends, and extended engagement with society and the expectation of social leadership. It was to be an education replete with hope—the kind of hope that Franklin clearly enunciated for the future welfare of the Colonies. In short, he advocated a rich, liberal education 93

for personal and societal benefit. He wanted it to be “warmly imaginative,” cosmopolitan in breadth, and full of inducement for learning, all of which was geared towards the productive engagement of youth. Franklin commended the insights of Charles Rollin (circa 1730), French historian and educator who advocated the use of the vernacular in a book on educational reform and innovation. A principal theme of Rollin was that good in literature was not confined to the sciences, which was common in France, but should include music, sculpture, architecture, and painting. He also suggested getting beyond the classics to “writers of their own nation.”

In the Proposals (1749), Franklin went further with his prescriptions of a curriculum, insisting that knowledge of the kind of mechanical philosophy and knowledge and their interrelation to technology and history of commerce would produce significant societal changes and significantly improve the quality of life. Franklin insisted on the accounts in other histories of the prodigious force and the effect of machines and engines used in labor-saving manufactures. He emphasized the practical value of natural history and insisted on a method of oratory being taught by using texts drawn from modern journalism. He argued that advantages over the ancient in some respects are to be shown, as its effects are more extensive, more lasting. Franklin (1749) added that the students should in effect “learn by doing”[emphasis mine]. “While students were reading natural history, for example, might not a little Gardening Planting, grafting, inoculation, be taught and practiced” (p. 29). Excursions should be made to the neighboring plantations of the best farmers, “their methods observed and reason’d upon for the information of youth” (p.29). Learning by doing also applied to the study of English and the application to writing skills, practice in letter writing, reading of the best English authors and innovative texts, such as contemporary magazine articles. Learning by doing was not restricted to letter writing: “Students would alsowrite little essays in prose and sometime in verse, not to the make them poets but to add variety to their expressions.”

John Hardin Best, editor of Benjamin Franklin on Education (1962), provided an overview of the curriculum and methods of Franklin’s Proposal and arrived at a pithy conclusion of Franklin’s intent: “The educational thought of the Enlightenment made a profound impression on Franklin, and much of his greatness lay in a characteristic ability to translate European ideas into American designs for action” (p. 12).

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Franklin’s Utopian Dream for Education

In Chapter 1, I discussed the audacity of hope. Franklin’s hope was marked by audacity. His ambitions in printing were marked by audacity, many of the projects that he undertook for his city and his Colony were audacious, his attempt to prevent his country from going to war with Britain was audacious, and his mission to bring France into partnership with America in the role of military and financial backer was the height of audacity. Some of his utopic dreams were successful, some were not. The latter mission was “mission impossible.” Stacy Schiff (2005) expresses the accomplishment with succinct brilliance:

What is more un-American than the tale of an old man who went east? But American Independence fell out of a conflict that was neither as neat nor as commonsensical nor as American-centric as one might like to believe. The majority of guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French. Four years later when the British set down their muskets at Yorktown, they surrendered to forces that were nearly equal in French and American, all of them fed and clothed and paid by France, and protected by De Grasse’s fleet….At the center of that success was a self-made, street-smart, civic-minded individual who, roused by ideals crackling in the distance—harnessed those forces and wrestled them to the ground for closer examination—with his bare hands. (p.4,5)

The remarkable sagacity and audacity of Benjamin Franklin, I argue, was also demonstrated in his Proposals for a radically new dispensation for education. On one level, it failed. The project did not materialize the way he envisioned. But on another level, it was a remarkable utopic dream of the possible. What he achieved was mounting a mountaintop to foresee a vista of hope for what education must become if the New World was to fulfill its dream. Was this not outrageously audacious for someone with two years of schooling, to sketch out a panorama of educational curricula and pedagogy for children, youth, and young adults? How he framed it is of more consequence than its content, as thought-provoking as that was. He began with seeing the potential of the child, his or her developmental needs and the potentiality that a loving, nutritive environment brings to human fulfillment. He analogized education and springtime, with the exuberance, the adventure, the exhilaration and joy that comes from learning about the world of the arts, the sciences, the polity. He championed an awakening to a New World of 95

cooperation, dialogue, public engagement, and public service and to the kind of people and their skill-sets that would be needed to cultivate and sustain such a world. At the beginning of his Proposals, he set as a goal “a foundation of happiness” for the “good education of the Youth.” But as George Boudreau (2002), a 21st-century Franklin scholar asserts, “this was not for mere personal joy, ‘happiness’ implied a public experience, rather than an individual feeling” (pp. 532-533).

Franklin’s pragmatism has been noted. But this document is not about vocational education or a narrowing to job preparation as its focus. In keeping with Franklin’s own metamorphosis, he saw a world vista needed by the children and youth. As Boudreau (2002) reminds us, “Franklin’s proposals show an educational ideal that balanced ornamental and useful studies, because, as Franklin had experienced it, ornamental disciplines could also be essential to mobility” (p. 528). And he had the temerity to put all of his ideas and ideals into a document, and lard it with “learned” footnotes that encompassed most of the scholarship of the entire Enlightenment.42

The Proposals was an American Enlightenment version of that Westernly world phenomenon, Americanized with many democratic, open, down-to earth, undogmatic, pragmatic, and artisan-like features. But like the idyllic setting in which he pictured his learning institution, it was romantic, imaginative, and aesthetically sensitive, a site for action, but also conducive to reflection in tranquility. All this from a leather-aproned tradesman, as he liked to call himself, who was almost entirely self-educated. His vision adumbrated many features that were to be adopted over time by the best educational architects, theorists, researchers, and practitioners, some of which were revived for further development in passionate detail by the educational Progressives a century and half later, as I detail in Chapter 5. Jane Addams and John Dewey, for example, captured the Franklin “springtime” of hope for education in their revolutionary pedagogies, and fittingly married that rejuvenation in thought to the liberality of their view on democracy as a “way of life.”

42 David Tyack (1966) regards the large number of footnotes as Franklin playing a joke on his readers. Franklin was certainly capable of mocking pedantry. But in this instance, I believe he was raising the bar for educational scope, and trying to lift his Proposals from the amateur to the professional level in keeping with grand sweep of his vision. 96

As claimed in Chapter 1, hope and education have been companionate since the dawn of time. Franklin was a reincarnation of Prometheus, not just for taming lightning and labeling its positive and negative electrical charges, a world-changing breakthrough, but as this project claims, for bringing a bracingly strong humanitarian feel, moral tenor, and aestheticism to the educative process. It was not an ego-centric feel, but a morally companionable feel, a social “adhesiveness,” as Walt Whitman was to call it, that is a critical element of the American Dream at its finest. There is indeed audacity to the American Dream, and Franklin was one of its worthiest exemplars.43

Section C: Thomas Jefferson: The Inspiriting American Founder of Hope for Democracy

In the last chapter, I explored the view that Hannah Arendt’s vision of freedom was at the epicentre of a theory of governance enveloped in new hope. Arendt believed in such a hope, and extolled the role of Thomas Jefferson for promulgating such a vision of possibility in constructing new world governance. It was Jefferson in 1774 who expressed the notion of “establishing new societies under such laws and regulations that to them shall seem most likely to promote human happiness.” It was not fear that drove them to constitution making, but “the direct expression of people’s appetite and understanding of the joyful experience of political agency and public dialogue” (Bowring, 2011, p. 71).

Although he did not distinguish public and private happiness, Jefferson’s substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for the standard qualifier of property, to accompany life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was critically important. His implied identification of happiness with public freedom in America was an essential part of the American experience. As Thomas Paine had famously put it in 1791, “A constitution is not the act of its Government but of the people constituting a Government.” Revolutionary Hope to Jefferson was all about being “a participator in the government of affairs” (Arendt, 1963/2006, p. 244).

43 Franklin left Philadelphia on a variety of government missions in England and France shortly after the Academy began operations in 1751. His diplomatic duties essentially kept him in Europe for 30 years. The Proposals were never implemented by the traditionalists who inherited its management, much to Franklin’s chagrin. 97

According to Linda Zerilli (2017), hope to Hannah Arendt meant the people having freedom, the inalienable human right to freedom. When Arendt turned to a study of the phenomenon of generic revolution, she singled out two exceptionally prominent examples, the American and the French Revolutions. These Revolutions were driven by differently motivated desires for freedom, she claimed—the French for freedom from the ravages of starvation and deep poverty, and the Americans for independence, the right to govern themselves.

Arendt (1963/2006) found that the American Revolution offered inspiring hope of autonomy insofar as it revealed a progressive way to organize government through deliberative processes as a way of liberating people from oppression. Her strategy was to think through a set of processes that would give dynamic traction towards freedom. Arendt gave a radical new meaning to democracy, says Zerilli (2017), one that had its origins in a freedom that expressed itself in political action; “the activity of politics being in itself freedom, we are free when we act, not before, not after.” She continues, “Freedom is political action,” echoing Arendt expressing the social relationality theme of politics, with participation and representation as two givens in democratic decision-making.

The Role of the Public(s) in Democracy

In the mid-twentieth century, the two philosophical giants on political theory undertook to explain the importance of defining and defending democracy. John Dewey, seeing democracy under siege in the latter stages of his career, and Hannah Arendt, a generation later, turned to the Founding Fathers, and in particular to Jefferson, for exemplary vision of revolutionary democracy. The crisis in democracy for Dewey was the impending totalitarian threat represented by Hitler and Stalin. That, and an impending world war, prompted his famous defense, “Creative Democracy, the Task Before Us” in 1939. For Hannah Arendt, looking retrospectively in the early 1960s, the cold war was challenging democracy, as were increasingly restive American ethnicity-equity issues.44 Democracy for Arendt and Dewey was a politics of hope and, while

44Such as the Rosa Parks sit-ins during 1955-1956, The Montgomery bus boycott, and the Birmingham Children’s Crusade. 98

their ways of explaining that belief differed, they converged in the persona of Jefferson as the architect who understood the importance of participatory governance.

The role of the public in creating and sustaining democracy was crucial to both Dewey and Arendt. For Arendt, it was Jefferson’s understanding of the key decentralizing role of townships, wards, and councils and the importance such local aggregations must take in counteracting the growing size of the a now-centralized new nation.45 The need was for units of local democracy, to sustain the revolutionary spirit of robust debate, deliberation, and decision that constituted the life force of democracy. It brought direct democracy into play in a realistic rather than abstract form. For Arendt, the challenge was to keep political freedom vibrantly alive and only through engagement, the hallmark of revolutionary achievement, would true democracy flourish.

John Dewey, too, had been long preoccupied with how to achieve direct democracy. Initially, Dewey had identified “community” as the unit of democracy to grow democratic values. Given the explosive population growth in the centuries following the Revolution, Dewey broadened his conception of community while attempting to maintain the key Jeffersonian vision of keeping democracy in direct contact with publics that would be affected by political decisions. Voices uniting in discussion and deliberation should not be geographically confined to communities, he realized, but could retain the notion of “the communal” through a variety of networks and associations. Multiple “communities” reflected changing societal patterns and would have to supplant the original “community” as alternative “deliberative organs” of deliberation across the country.

Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire to sustain it as being just because it is a good idea shared by all, there in so far a community [emphasis mine]. (Dewey, 1927, p. 295)

Dewey was driven to use the word community in two radically different senses: first, to define the tightly knit local community, and second, to refer to the widely diffused “metaspatial Great

45Contemporary historian Benjamin Barber (1984, 2003) was to call such units “cells.” 99

Community” (Calhoun, 2013, p. 98). This second use, the Great Community, may have been conceivable, “but for Dewey, it could never possess all the qualities which mark a local community” (p. 99). Dewey continued to hope, says Craig Calhoun (2013), because, “fraternity liberty and equality [i.e., the Jeffersonian ‘community’] isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions” (p.ibid).

The idea of political hope for democracy was its ordinariness, its faith in the common people and their judgment. Jefferson had given that idea its marquee valorization in a letter written in 1820: “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves [emphasis mine]” (as cited in Kloppenberg, 2016, p.6). The Jeffersonian endorsement of popular rule challenged all forms of hierarchy whether monarchy, ecclesiastical, or state. It moved dramatically in the direction of equality, universal human rights, all positions that were enthusiastically supported by Arendt and Dewey. Dewey, in company with Jane Addams, added the notion of fraternity, signaling the premium they placed on caring, compassion, and friendship as integral to a democratic way of living.

The Hope for Deliberation: Jefferson, Habermas, Arendt, and Dewey

The “genius” of Jefferson was the “felt knowledge” that for democracy to work required, as Arendt came to call it, “concerted action,” the sensus communis that could only arise through deliberative processes of people about matters of common concern. For Arendt (1963/2006), that was the nub of Jeffersonian democracy. Such freedom did not mean an individual being granted freedom by a monarch or by any hierarchy of authority. On the contrary, democracy meant arriving at the freest degree of autonomy that a group could achieve through group dialogue, consensus, and action. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun (1992) reminds us of the early influence of Immanuel Kant in defining the phenomenon of the public sphere:

If we attend to the course of conversation in mixed company consisting not merely of scholars and subtle reasoners but also of business people …we notice that besides storytelling and jesting they have another entertainment, namely, arguing [emphasis mine]. (p. 1)

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In this retrospective glance at Kant we note that he was reminding us of the ubiquity and argumentative nature of debate within the sphere, a forerunner to the proliferating publics described in the 19th century by Warner and Habermas.

John Dewey was vitally concerned with creating publics as a way of broadening public deliberation on the issues of the day. His hope was for the new media to become an engendering form of critical inquiry, a theme analyzed by Megan Boler (2008) which reflected on Dewey’s concern with the influence of the media, and the need for a deep educational focus on inquiry, which alone can furnish knowledge as a precondition of public judgments”.46 Boler, like Dewey, focuses on the need for critical reflection oriented to deliberation—that genre of critique in the 21st century taking on radically new formats in political satire:

Dewey’s call for cultivating deliberation is a vision of democracy in which the activity of thinking and reflection are values and seen to tie to material change. Social context and habituation encourage individuals to be inclined toward certain actions, but through reflection on one’s habits there is potential to alter one’s course and then the course of others and the environment. (Boler, 2006, p. 35)

Another response by Dewey defended democracy against Walter Lippmann’s attack on the general public’s incapacity to make good judgments and the need for elitist, better informed leadership. In Human Nature and Conduct (1922/2007), Dewey responded to this again with an educative imperative for the cultivation of capacity of the “the common man” rather than abandonment, as Lippmann had recommended:

[A] democracy that was anything less than a rule by citizens possessed of the habits of intelligence was a perversion…democratic reformers should bend their efforts to cultivating a capacity for deliberation which was well within the reach of most

46Boler (2008) relates public media of the day to the contemporary political commentary by late night comedy, such as The Daily Show and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. See Boler, Digital Media and Democracy Tactics in Hard Times. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008. On the Dewey theme of the needed knowledge and competence of ordinary people to make democracy work, see. p.p. 306-318 in Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy. 101

citizens…fostering those impulses and habits which experience has shown make us sensitive to, generous, imaginative, impartial in perceiving the tendency of our inchoate dawning activities [emphasis in Boler]. (Dewey as cited in Boler, 2006, p. 34)

From the beginning of the American Dream, education was closely tied to the success of the new democracy that emerged with the Revolution. It began with the Framers, most notably John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. A century later, Dewey was to pick up the intimacy of thought between democracy and education. My next topic picks up on the symbiosis he alleged to have existed between the two phenomena.

Education about Democracy for the Public as a Primary Hope for Its Survival

In a letter of 1820 to W. Jarvis, when Jefferson expressively noted “the people themselves offer the only safe depository of the ultimate power of the society,” (as cited in Kloppenberg, 2016, p. 6), he followed that statement with a crucial caveat: “If we think them [the people] not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to enlighten their discretion” (p. 6).This was the clarion call for education, a theme that Jefferson had been advocating for decades, the need to ensure that new democracy was fully understood by the public, and in particular by the succeeding generations. This enormous challenge is one that this project will continue to focus on (and was a bright-line preoccupation of Jane Addams and John Dewey, as I look ahead to Chapters 4 and 5). The writings on democracy by Hannah Arendt thus far have been deeply pedagogical, the whole idea of democracy presupposing the epistemic understanding that is brought about by political participation.

In the Arendtian hope for political democracy, its educational character loomed large. Arendt realized that only when ordinary people became publicly engaged did they expand their understanding of the power and promise of democracy. Dewey believed also that democratic thinking was interpenetrative with education, both being forms of social engagement of a sharing, learning, cooperating nature, again with entrepreneurial drive towards bettering self and society through active participation. To advertise the symbiotic engagements of learning and thinking democratically, he titled his bestselling book Democracy and Education (1917). This

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was to give education star casting to the conjoint ideas of pedagogy and democracy, and to reveal how schools could enhance their natural affinity in curricular and methodological ways. To Jefferson, democracy and education were developmentally interdependent, a belief that Dewey was to make central to his Democracy and Education and many other treatises.

The famous clash between Lippmann and Dewey brings the importance of education into bold relief. Famously, there was only one public that Lippmann felt worthy of listening to, and that was the body of experts and elite administrators. Only people from higher education or professional administrators were qualified to give policy and practice direction to the nation. The public was a “phantom,” wrote Lippmann in his book of that title, The Phantom Public (1925/1993) and no meaningful part could or should be assigned to “the masses.” Dewey had been fighting that criticism for 40 years, when he took on Sir Henry Maine (and Carlyle) who had attacked the masses, imputing collective ignorance, which he believed would be mentally counterproductive to the efficacy of democracy. Without hesitation, Dewey counterattacked Lippmann, conceding some of the challenges that direct democracy presents, but looking to the larger issues of authentic democratic ideals eloquently framed by Jefferson, those of fairness, freedom, and equality. Relatedly, a democracy of, by and for the people would be less vulnerable to tyranny, a major belief of Dewey.

Lippmann noted in his polemics that “Thomas Jefferson and the other pioneers of democracy theory could not solve the dilemma of an uninformed citizenry.” He added that they should not have been expected to have been able to do so” (as cited in Westbrook, 1981, p. 298). Lippmann’s answer was to develop the “machinery of knowledge, and to give impetus to policy sciences. The social scientists would take his place in front of decisions instead of behind them.” (p. 29). Large scale public action or debate was also of little use. Lippmann had also argued in his two influential books, Phantom Public (1925) and Public Opinion (1922), on the strengths of elitist governance and the weaknesses of democracy. In those books, he argued that democratic publics don’t work and that most people were mere bystanders. As I have noted, Lippmann’s conclusion: “Democracy is best limited to elections that check abuses of power or to resolve crises” (as cited in Calhoun, 2013, p. 67).

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Dewey did not shy away from acknowledging the challenges that democracy faced, but disputed spiritedly the disparagement of the native intelligence of the masses. He saw the solution through the corrective lens of two initiatives—public education and increasing opportunity for public engagement in politics. A starting point in enlightening the citizenry was schooling. That point had been repeatedly made by Jefferson. In complete agreement, Dewey had made in 1916 a powerful case for uniting education and democracy in common cause. He did that by trying to introduce democratic pedagogies into schooling in his Democracy and Education, curricula ideas and methods that encourage deliberative debate and reflective thinking, engagement with the world, and emphasis on interpersonal cooperation and collaboration. He had a vision that schools had to become “supremely interesting places” (see Westbrook, 1981, pp. 331-334).Dewey’s hope extended to the ideal that he had for schooling. He had an imaginary for such a renaissance:

A day when teachers would become sufficiently courageous and emancipated to insist that education means the creation of a discriminating mind. They would cultivate the habit of suspended judgment, of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than sentiment, discussion rather than bias, inquiry rather than conventional idealizations. (as cited in Westbrook, 1981, p. 313)

His emancipative agenda would create schools that would become “the dangerous outposts of a humane civilization” (as cited in Westbrook, 1981, p. 313).Dewey was seeking an educational renaissance that was attuned in his mind with the renewal of democracy’s revolutionary hope (see Westbrook, 1981, pp. 331-334).

Lippmann’s was the most influential attack waged on democracy’s potential for ever being a viable social hope in the way that Jefferson had enunciated. His question, as noted, revolved around the lack of intelligence attributed to the masses, deficits that would thwart good decisions. Arendt was suspicious of such denigrations of public intelligence. Had the intelligentsia of Germany not fallen prey to the seductive rhetoric of Hitler? She countered that it was through opportunity of exercising the democratic spirit by the public that good judgment would prevail. She bewailed that lack of “organs” in America to make that happen, but argued that restorative hope for democracy lay not in elitism and shrinking the role of the public in

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decision-making. It was precisely the opposite that she advocated. Regenerative hope for democracy lay in the restoration of the revolutionary spirit and in broadening opportunity for political praxis, not succumbing to elitism.

Dewey granted that there were remedial changes needed in democracy, the most notable being the asymmetry of the small number of people that actually made problem-causing decisions. He noted that “the social foundations were at best underdeveloped. Modern state-unity depends on technology and far exceeds the limits of face-to-face continuity” (as cited in Calhoun, 2013, p. 77). Dewey argued that publics were still effective in responding to specific issues by drawing in all those who were affected. Dewey did worry about the abstraction of words like “The Public.” But withal, “he believed that scale and impersonality of modern society were reasons why publics were a necessity” (p. 77).

Like Hannah Arendt, Dewey distinguished between the public and the masses. The public gives form and establishes in ways that transcend mere subjectivity. “Without this transcendence, into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world, and no public realm is possible” (as cited in Calhoun, 2013. op.cit.). Jefferson seemed to have intuited this in his fervent urgings to connect with the public after the successful birth of the Constitution. Arendt and Dewey are on the same page. Here is Dewey (1916) on the “associated” life of democracy:

Whenever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect and energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is so far a community. The clear consciousness of communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of a democracy (p. 295).

In short, Dewey continued to promote hope for Jeffersonian democracy, contra Lippmann, arguing for deepening opportunities for common experience, including production, as a way to enable popular democracy to escape the Lippmannesque reliance on experts. As well, Arendt argued, he continued to see hope “in the individual actions of individuals in the face of infinitely complex, large-scale enterprises of America in the 20s” (as cited in Calhoun, 2013, pp 91-92). It was often individual actors behind large-scale effects, he noted. 105

As noted in Chapter 2, Arendt, who was also vehemently opposed to elitism, advocated public action as enabling creative and culture forming. The ways of world-building, as she termed it, depended on freedom becoming the galvanizing force to generate alternative political solutions to obstacles. World-building deepened one’s action, which in turn allowed for unexpected, startling beginnings. Such activist innovation took place in public space, not in isolation. It was making something new, not only disclosing but creating a shared world. World-building was a profoundly educative enterprise, requiring imagination, nurturing, and communal support. As discussed, her recognition of his brilliant world-building was the basis for her salute to Jefferson and the revolutionary founding process. She, like Dewey, was trying to find meaningful democratic hope for the masses. Because they have “no table to sit around,” she said, they become “worldless” (Englestadt, Larsen, Rogstad, & Steen-Johnsen, 2017, p.34). They need the kind of world for which Jefferson was striving, one of public meanings, promises, and constitutional order to establish worldly differentiation and relationships. It was action, individual action that Arendt, prized, not collective movements, but escapist from the social-as- blob syndrome, by retrieving a strong sense of social action.47

In Chapters 4 and 5, I look more deeply at the communal life of institutions—the sites of Hull House and Dewey’s Lab school—for the theories and practices on which Addams and Dewey built their philosophies of democracy and education. Education is of-a-piece with the “nature of the democratic idea in its generic social sense” (Dewey, 1927, 1998. p. 294). That sense is developmental in nature, liberating individual potentiality, socially responsive, and communally responsible. Its roots are Jeffersonian, with his vision of democracy both in its practical and best possible sense, and the larger vision manifest in the ideals of the revolutionary spirit. Benjamin Franklin, with his pragmatic hand of bringing France into the fray of the Colonies’ winning effort, also had remarkable insights into education, both its developmental and democratic importance, the latter side of Franklin largely underappreciated. Their legacy will weave its way into the attempts at reconstruction of institutional and educational philosophy of Addams and Dewey during the Progressive Era.

47 Arendt would surely have applauded the spontaneous proactive response of the Florida high school students in February 2018 (and thereafter) to the massacre of their classmates. 106

I have argued also in this chapter for the spirit of hope being kept alive by key actors in the social sphere of the new nation. Through tumultuous growth of the 19th century, personalities who grasped the importance of hope gave concrete expression to their distinctive brand of hope in word and deed. Democracy was in peril for much of the century. Public education was just getting off the ground. They were kept alive by enthusiasts from many walks of life, all who shared (with plenty of variation) in the hope-vision of what constituted the American Dream and its most compelling needs. In common, they became, in their time, extraordinary stakeholders in the dream with theories and actions of what was and was not working, and the restorative or corrective actions that were needed. In the best Arendtian tradition, they became public players, in democratic polity or education or both. To a person they were caught up in the Founders’ ideals of the revolutionary spirit. I continue to explore and assess democracy and education by arguing for the special contributions made by each individual towards the maintenance of democracy and education as key components in the American Dream.

Section D: Lincoln and the Tragic Hope of Democracy

My project began with the claim that the hope themes found in Exodus and Prometheus shaped the founding character of the American Dream. I chronicled the way that evolved with Franklin, with a shift to a more materialistic tenor, but with hope’s ingredients of freedom venturing beyond, and keeping the edification of the democratic individual still intact. From the Promethean myth had come the epistemic notion of discovery and invention, but the latter boundaried by what was in the common good.48 From the Bacon translation of Prometheus, the ideal of knowledge being power was salient. But both Bacon and Franklin recognized that power could be used for good or evil. Tension rode with hope, as I have discussed, and the hope- odyssey of the American Dream was never unproblematic. Hope involved risk, hard labour, struggle, and sometimes failure and catastrophe.

Prometheus paid dearly for the audacity of his hope. The City on the Hill was never an easy one to build, and for many years survival in the wilderness was precarious in the extreme

48 Bacon’s translation of Prometheus and other of his writings stress the importance of keeping scientific advances subordinate to the needs of the people, “the common estate.” 107

(Kloppenburg, 2016, p. 88).The ideals of the American Dream were on the minds of the Founders, but as Jefferson knew, the revolutionary spirit was idealistic, not realistic. A constitution would be written but that was just a beginning of the ideals. There would be, he knew, a mountain of resistance to extend “equality” to all. Democracy was in the air, but slavery, women’s lack of suffrage, genocide of Native Americans, the plight of the non-propertied poor were the reality on the ground. Education was valourized, and indeed deemed essential to sustain democracy—but education was only for white boys backed by parental funds. Jacksonian laissez-faire populist democracy, while it could be egalitarian, had for some, widened inequality. Laissez-faire had led to the polarization of North and South value systems with the dire consequence of states claiming their autonomy in such matters as slavery.49

In the 1860s, the country becomes engaged in a Civil War. Hope for the American Dream was at stake throughout Abraham Lincoln’s political career. He had defended the nation’s adherence to democracy at every turn. He believed that democracy was at the heart of the American Dream—at the heart of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution—and now it was at the heart of the Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln becomes the personifier of that hope, which leads to his personal victory and his re-election, only to be assassinated five days later. That tragedy forefronts a side of hope endemic to the human condition.50 Lincoln becomes a tragic figure, but at the same time a figure of consummate hope. Within 50 years he will be remembered as a figure of hope. Tolstoy will refer to him in 1909 as “the only real giant of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history”(Tolstoy, 1909).Within a hundred years, his reputation as a transcendent figure of hope will be further burnished, and in our time, another turbulent era for democracy, it glows perhaps even more universally. While he has his detractors, Lincoln is for many Americans the worthiest carrier of the American Dream, embodying not only the romantic ideals of the Dream, but the memory of the failures of the Dream narrative, the times of despair. That said, I explore how and why Lincoln is now widely

49Andrew Jackson broke the church establishment of the new English colonies. It gave white male suffrage to non-propertied males. 50 The theme of tragic hope as a philosophical concept becomes central to this section on Lincoln. 108

regarded as the individual who best demonstrated the partial redemption of the Dream and its capacity to regenerate, to re-inspire, and re-awaken ideals.

In this section, my focus is on tragic hope and its meaning, its manifestation in the Civil War, and its portrayal in the lives of Lincoln and Whitman. I explore the role of war, the division of the nation in crisis, democracy in crisis, the appalling casualty count—all of that in relation to the phenomenon of tragic hope. My context is the famous Gettysburg Address and the assassination poetry of Whitman: “Bugle Taps” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” I begin with the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s ensuing Address given in 1863, an event five months after the end of the battle, which has sparked contested historical interpretations since Garry Wills’s (1978) controversial interpretation of it in 1978.51

The Gettysburg Battle is famous for being a prologue, if not the decisive turning point, to the success of the Union Army over the Confederate Army. It led to the occasion a few months later of a commemorative ceremony that included a short address by President Lincoln. It was the occasion of a speech by Lincoln that ranks with the most famous speeches of all time. It was not so intended, I argue, or was even thought as being of much consequence at the time. In fact, the Gettysburg Address by Lincoln was totally ignored in the South, and minimally commented on in the North (Sandburg, 1939, p. 482). Its fame began to ascend after his death, and continued to ascend during the last century and continues to reign today, not just as an American oration but as an international emblem of hope in spite of its brevity, its language, and the vision it projects. Much of the argument about the speech is about the content of Lincoln’s vision and what it was meant to represent.

Some historians argue that Gettysburg was Lincoln seizing the occasion to valorize an emancipative agenda, that he was launching his reconstructive campaign for reconciliation of rights of the enslaved now that the war seemed be going his way. Against that interpretation was the context—the invitation give to a famous orator to declaim for the occasion, and a request for Lincoln to complement him with fittingly brief, complementary, “presidential remarks.” The

51 Wills has garnered some historical but not majoritarian support for his thesis. 109

pithiness of the famous speech fits that interpretation. That is not to say, however, that the much- praised appreciation of the speech’s significance does not lend itself to more prophetic interpretation. That claim is a romantic thought, but I believe not a historic one.

My chief interest in relation to this thesis, however, is how the speech, whatever Lincoln’s intention was for it, became emblematic of the American Dream, and how it mythically uplifted the Dream nationally and internationally. Lincoln, over time, becomes the embodiment of ennobling tragic hope, a phenomenon always inherent in the odyssey of the American Dream to some extent, but exalted by Lincoln’s unique style and character, vision and, of course, his martyrdom.

Walt Whitman: Civil War Poetry of Tragic Hope

There was another player at the time that helped Lincoln rise to what historian Carolyn Boyd (as cited in Carwardine & Sexton, 2009) has called the “pantheon of Saints” (p. 462). It was indeed the poet Walt Whitman who, like Lincoln, believed in the American Dream and in the American democratic way of thinking that set America apart from other national governances of the world. That belief would prompt Whitman in his 1855 collection, Leaves of Grass, to call the United States “a Poem” The romance implied in the famous poem metaphor was Whitman’s orientation of America to the ordinary man, the natural man, the common man. When war struck, Whitman began his “Bugle Corp” poems in an attempt to capture the deep sense of tragedy that had beset his country.

Tragic hope is a theme that reverberates throughout much of the Civil War. As one might imagine it became an agonizing presence in Whitman’s life as he became embroiled first as an observer and then as a nurse to the wounded and dying. Whitman biographer Stephen John Mack (2002) thinks that Whitman came to believe that any conception of a laissez-faire nature vulgarized tragedy by asserting that one’s agony and defeat are not really evils but necessary elements in the goodness of the whole (p. 111). Mack describes the Whitman epiphany:

Whitman’s accidental insight led him to the recognition of human history’s conceptual distinction from nature but also to the subsequent recognition of the moral disinterestedness of nature itself, a discovery whose ultimate consequence was to liberate 110

the poet’s democratic vision from its subservience to the dictates of laissez-faire nature (emphasis mine) (ibid.).

This was a philosophical position to be famously taken up nearly 100 years later by pragmatist Sidney Hook. To him, tragedy was an inevitable part of the human condition. The empirical phenomena of historical evil were fact of life. Pragmatic philosophy recognized that in history there had been “innumerable sites of human failure, self-destructive action and tragic defeats” (Sidorsky, 2008). The tragic in the human condition is not limited to the presence of evil, or even a matter of the necessity of death itself. Tragedy was simply a part of human life. To pragmatism fell the task of intelligent control. It is the heroic philosophy of courage.

The war was causing Whitman to develop a native pragmatism, one that would help him reconcile the democracy that was so dear to him with the tragedy that he was beholding everywhere on the battlefields. Sidney Hook (1974) was to explain that the pragmatic conception of intelligence is more serious, even more heroic because it doesn’t resign itself to the bare fact of tragedy or take easy ways out of the price of (p. 20). In that sense, Whitman was to come to believe that tragedy was not preordained doom. We become the creator of our own tragic history.

Solid, ironical, rolling orb Master of all, and matter of fact! –at last I accept your terms

Bringing to the practical; vulgar tests, of all my ideal dream

And of me, as lover and hero. LV F22

Whitman’s epiphany leads him to believe that it is not the hope of a poet secure in his place in a rationally ordered universe of another, but an author confident in the practical viability of his ideals, even when put to us in conditions of struggle and agony.“But now, ah now, to learn from the crises of anguish—advancing, grappling with direct fate, and roiling not” (LV 495).

What is taught in the tragic struggle of experience for Whitman, as a new experience of the collective identity, is the call of care-giving, to become a “wound dresser.” In his poetry he is calling himself out of the private grief as the parent of the dead son must do, to reshape grief into 111

a public memory of the private-becoming-public tragic burden of preserving the very precondition and character of sociality in union. This, Lincoln too, was doing in the Gettysburg Address, consecrating the land that had been already hallowed by the actions of the heroic dead. His conceit of the universal mother absolves the dead, memorializing them in soil. Whitman is commanding all of nature to absolve the heroic dead:

Absorb them well, O my earth, she cried—I charge you, lose not my sons! Lose not an atom

And you streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood. LIV 526, 527.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln asserts that the work of the living is impotent to consecrate land that has already been hallowed by the deeds of the heroic dead. Whitman echoes his memorable words. He personifies the unalterable processes of the natural order as the social will, the deaths of the soldiers having sufficient social meaning to demand their preservation in public memory (Mack, 2002, p. 120). Whitman biographer Stephen Mack (2002) puts it this way:

The mourning process, Whitman’s war poetry demonstrates, must also have its moral and political analogues in democratic life—a ritual recognition of the multitude of tragic phantoms (the material interest sacrificed, the moral obligations “reasonably” disregarded) that may issue as much from intelligent reflection as from majoritarian prerogative. (p.121)

The unity of the democratic society is manifest in its willingness to submit to the will of the whole. This is “the gesture of reconciliation, the fulfillment of a duty to acknowledge genuine tragedy in necessary change” (Mack, 2001, p. 121). Mourning is a democratic process, and both endemic to the meaning of tragic hope.

After the assassination, in the spring of 1866, the New York Times headlined Lincoln’s death as “Our Great Loss.” Within the North and South, in churches on Easter Sunday—the day after Lincoln’s murder—Lincoln was mourned. Notable statements were made by Frederic Douglass, the African American orator, who called the assassination “an unspeakable calamity” (as cited in Kunhardt, 2009, pp. 34-35), and Southern-born Elizabeth Blair Lee who said “people of

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Southern-born sympathies know now that they have lost a friend willing and more powerful to protect and serve them than they can now ever hope [emphasis mine] to find again” (as cited in Goodwin, 2006). Millions watched in person as the funeral train travelled from New York City to Springfield, , site of his burial ground. Whitman’s great poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” counterpointed the tragic loss that gripped the nation.

In his great elegy in which he mourns the death of President Lincoln, Whitman summons a trinity of symbols (western star, lilac bush, singing thrush) “to achieve personal and social renewal through a reconciliation with death” (Mack, 2002, p. 123). Unlike “Drum-Taps,” “Lilacs” focuses more on public rather than private grief. “The origins of grief itself are more significantly more social in ‘Lilacs’ just as its resolution is explicitly more political” (p. 123).

The western star comes to signify all the stars, thus becoming linked to Lincoln’s role as the great consolidator of the sense of national unity. Whitman elaborately models a ritual response, a narrative of the response to the death of the victorious Lincoln, symbol of hope, juxtaposed to the perpetual slow burning Civil war, the seemingly “inevitable fractiousness that defines a vigorous political democracy” (Mack, 2002, p. 122). The law of regeneration becomes a consolation, a tragic hope. Whitman’s goal is to bring the bereaved to a place of new beginnings, to give the bereaved the process and the language that will enable them to construct for themselves a meaning that makes sense of death and that lends value to their daily living.

Whitman scholar, Gregory Eiselein (1996), focuses on the purpose of “Lilacs” being not to cajole the bereaved out of their grief but to persuade them into an absolute acceptance of the law of regeneration; that idea in “Lilacs” and other poems serves only to facilitate the mourning process. To me, Whitman illuminates in that purpose the meaning and significance of tragic hope.

Whitman’s vision of dignified and moral grief suggests how the process of grieving in “Lilacs” and other poems suggest how the process also functions as a model for social and political healing (Mack, 2002, p. 130).Its progressive cycles move from an initial sorrow (grief, sadness, despair) to a moment of acceptance and reconciliation, which yields a peaceful solace to painful memories that begin the process over again. His vision, says Eiselein (1996) “provides mourners with a space in which to create a new beginning and a fresh meaning out of the debris 113

of war and death (p. 126). Instead of a closed vision, his goal is to bring the bereaved to a place of new beginnings, to give to the bereaved the process and “the language to construct for themselves a meaning that makes sense of death and lends value to their daily living” (p. 130). In the cyclical structure of “Lilacs” and other pieces, we find the process portrayed suggestively by the poet’s language.52

What was the process, what was the structure that leads to hope? It was not coercive, but it was persuasive, it was sensitive to the situation. It was empathetic, it was poetic. The words are soothing, chosen sensitively undoubtedly with the intention of alleviating suffering.

In summary, the high and bold relief of the spirit of tragic hope in the 1860s arrived with the Gettysburg moment. President Lincoln symbolized the American Dream in many ways but was facing the challenge of a “divided country” in blood-soaked conflict. The issue of slavery was taking centre stage, as was the democratic clash of national rights over state rights, with democracy being claimed as the right of both sides of the struggle. 53 Throughout the thesis, I have been emphasizing the democratic spirit inherent in the American Dream. That focus has involved struggle and suffering as well as success and glory. The years from 1863 to 1866 bear witness to catastrophe: the riving of the nation, the killing fields of Gettysburg, and the assassination of the President who, to many, had grown to be the personification of the Dream. While his persona at Gettysburg had little of the mythic proportion that it would grow to have from then until now, the ingredients were falling into place, especially after two events, his embrace of freedom for thousands of slaves in 1862, and his Gettysburg Address.54

52Whitman, as Hanna Arendt would do in the Human Condition (1958) 90 years later, valourizes in “Lilacs” the theme of natality and the importance of new beginnings as a key element of the ontology of hope. The cyclical recurrent theme differs from both linear determinism and absolute idealism. 53 In his Nobel Lecture (2009), Barack Obama was to echo the refrain of Lincoln and Whitman: “No matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier’s courage, and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.” Obama, too, saw tragic hope as life’s balancing act: “the strivings to overcome oppression and deprivation” with “justice and dignity.” This was “the hope of all the world”— to be a place where “a child’s dreams” could be realized. 54His remarks were ignored in the South, and largely slighted in the North. It is now one of the most quoted speeches on the planet. 114

The survival of the American Dream, I will argue, is partly attributable to the vast extrapolation of that personification after his death, that expanded reputation being in no small way attributable to the poetry of Walt Whitman, a key interpreter of the American Dream and a devotee of Lincoln, who complemented the transcendent reputation of Lincoln as supreme inheritor of the Dream.

Lincoln and his International Reputation of Redemptive Hope

An online gathering and interaction of Lincoln scholars in 2009, hosted by the Journal of American History and facilitated by Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton (2009), painted an international portrait of Lincoln. I have analyzed, condensed, and paraphrased the characterological dimensions of this symposium, with a view to the values and principles relative to the American Dream that he has come to symbolize around the world. For American historian Jay Sexton, Lincoln personifies a set of principles—opposing slavery, thinking creatively about how best to promote economic development, how to harness the forces of nationalism. Lincoln did not “own” these principles exclusively, but he advanced them and has been personified by them; and since the beginning of the 20th century, that identification has been interlinked with waxing American economic, political, and cultural power and influence. For renowned biographer Richard Carwardine, Lincoln’s martyrdom was far from simply being an assassinated President. Two other assassinations, those of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, produced no such monumental outpouring of grief. The breadth of Lincoln’s ideological reach was larger than that of Martin Luther King Jr. or John Kennedy, says Carwardine. Common people mourned him around the world, both for the loss of his life and for the loss of values that he symbolized.

His legendary background has added great vivacity to his persona. British scholar Adam Smith (2009) points to the way he came to be remembered in Britain: frontiersman, log cabin origin, folk wisdom, formidable physical strength, lack of formal education, education by firelight, a man of the soil. These images were bolstered by his quotations, most notably from the Gettysburg Address, making him famous not only as the personification of American exceptionalism but as a leader of exceptional moral merit. He was contrasted in the Gilded Age with the crass capitalists who incited derision in Britain. The British celebrated Lincoln’s Anglo-

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Saxon heritage and, by 1920, he had become a cult, “‘the knightly son of our blood,’ the London Times once called him” (p. 00).

The hope intrinsic in the idea of American exceptionalism was not just an American hope, says Smith (ibid). America as a redeemer nation was also present in the providential, exceptionalist vision of America. Lincoln transcended the notion of America otherness, having become a universal figure of American exceptionalism. Smith notes that Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England, captured the tragic hope represented by Lincoln in a memorable speech on the unveiling of his statue in Westminster Abbey:

In his lifetime he [Lincoln] was a great American. He is no longer so, he is one of those giant figures of whom there are very few in history, who lose their nationality in death… [T]hey belong to mankind.

Smith (ibid) also notes that Lloyd George added further words that have telling resonance for America of the present time. “This torn and bleeding earth is calling for help of the America of Abraham Lincoln.” Smith pointed to that speech in 1920 as a “contrast between the idealized [emphasis mine] America that Lincoln embodied and the reality (at the time, the rising isolationism) and, as such, gave added power to Lincoln’s image” (p. ibid).

Messages of hope from the Gettysburg Address have had worldwide resonance: “the dead shall not have died” and similar Lincoln rhetoric peppered wartime propaganda documentaries during the Second World War. The suffering, sacrifice, and final redemption trope, together with the “new birth of freedom,” made Lincoln in post-war Britain “a figure of truth and humanity.” The tragedy-hope juxtaposition was brought out by Smith (ibid) in the comparisons some British make with Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, Lincoln “demonstrated his humanity, his empathy in his language, which contained high tragedy and low humor, humbleness as well as soaring idealism” (ibid).

Carolyn Boyd, professor of history at University of California, saw him as the symbol of hope for progressives and republicans in Spain and Latin America, featured along with other European martyrs and saints, religious and secular, a figure of universal significance (as cited in Carwardine & Sexton, 2009). His hope brought veneration both to those whose hope was an 116

article of faith and others to whom it was a novelty. His triumph over poverty through hard work and education was seen as exemplary virtues to the Spanish progressives who were themselves struggling for the democratization of their own society.

Yale historian David Blight (2009) points to Lincoln’s image as “a man of the people,” “emancipator,” and “the prototype of the perfect American.” The 1862 speech about the war being “the last best hope on earth” called attention to the different and revolutionary directions that he was leading in at the time of his death. His ideas on political liberty and general human rights, rooted in the Enlightenment, “were decidedly not parochial, but worldly and international” (p. 2009).

Speaking from an African perspective, international historian of the London School of Economics Odd Arne Westad (2009) sees his international image as a liberator: “a white man who, after much debate and soul-searching, did the right thing and set his black countrymen free.” That coupled with his image of a strong advocate of national unity made him a hero all across Africa and other developing settings.

In Latin America, “his image as a nation and institution builder was predominant,” says historian Nicola Miller (2009). She adds that in Cuba he was admired as a civilian political visionary, “a natural man” committed to progress that was in harmony with nature, as Cuban independence leader Jose Marti called it.

Professor Vinay Lay (2009), scholar of Indian history, notes that Lincoln became the exemplar of hope for the lowest caste of Indians in the drafting of the Indian constitution. He was a revered figure to Gandhi, who at the start of his career, called him the greatest figure of the 19th century. Gandhi gravitated during his lifetime more to Emerson and Thoreau, says Lay.

Lincoln, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Freedom and Hope

The notion of Lincolnesque hope brings together the notion of democracy and the famous Italian champions of hope, who were contemporaries of Lincoln, Giuseppe, Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Both Mazzini and Garibaldi are remembered for promoting national unity and for their dedication to freedom, universal suffrage, and republicanism. Cambridge historian

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Euginio Biagini (2011) has noted that the supporters of Mazzini sent a copy of his writings to Lincoln in 1863, the year of both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. Biagini further notes that Mazzini used the phrase government by, for, and of the people in the 1830’s. We know from Jane Addams that Mazzini was a freedom-fighter idolized by her father. Addams’s father was an ardent supporter and friend of Lincoln (Addams, 1910).55 Clearly, Lincoln was aware of and a supporter of the Italian revolutionary movements of both Mazzini and Garibaldi. Lincoln’s papers make mention of both, and Lincoln is known to have tried to recruit Garibaldi to join the Union Army as a general against the Confederates. From the perspective of hope, all three have become global symbols of liberally minded revolutionaries and apostles of freedom. It supports the idea of Biagini (2011) that whatever Mazzini and Garibaldi’s influence on Lincoln, in the 19th century, “quintessentially American principles” of democracy and republicanism “were widely traded in the Euro-American democratic and republican debate.”

Boyd (2009) also notes that, in a number of international biographies, Lincoln is identified as a member of a “pantheon of republican saints” that was not identified with particular nationalities. Boyd adds that Lincoln is identified with the suffering and sacrifice of Lajos Kossuth, Mazzini, and Garibaldi on behalf of the rest of humanity.

In summary, Lincoln and Whitman (through his poetry after Lincoln’s death) re-wove the fabric of the American Dream in a time of its peril. Armed with their belief in the Founder’s ideals and having wrestled with the soul of America, their visions were conjoined on sustaining the coherence of the dream: commitment to equality and freedom within the framework of national democracy.

Whitman’s cause centred on adhesive fraternity and ordinariness. He was opening the door to reworking an aesthetic-ethic of democracy, which will be explored in the next chapters of this thesis, carrying forward the United States as poem, democratic vistas, and the American Dream.

55 The next chapter picks up the evolving democratic notions of Addams, as she broke ground to establish the practical institutional weight of democracy in Hull Settlement House and to promote her wider national and international contributions to further democratic ends. 118

Lincoln’s causes were a polity that worked pragmatically, one that Jane Addams (1910) recalled as “best possible.” Lincoln had come to believe that the ‘best possible’ outcome was for partial emancipation of succeeding states by the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, and full emancipation in 1865 cemented abolition. Lincoln had deemed both national unity and emancipation as “imperatives” to be achieved at all cost by the end of the war.

Carwardine (2004) has commented on the pragmatic hope that Lincoln represented to his party supporters, his adept ‘political management,’ and skill at sustaining patriotism and mobilizing through his party, the army, and the religious humanitarian agencies. Lincoln was an activist, a decisive figure “who was able to see the bigger picture and wise enough to know how far to bow to larger forces, without leaving aside all room for maneuver” (Carwardine, 2004). Jane Addams’s reflection on Lincoln’s pragmatic motto of “best possible” seems wholly in alignment with this contemporary scholar’s view. The extraordinary eloquence with which Lincoln presented his thoughts, together with his home-spun dignity, seemed to embody those attributes throughout his life; his death lent enormous and ascending gravity to his legacy.

Each passing American and world crisis seems to generate re-ignition of the Lincoln legend and nostalgia with respect to what has been now lost in the character of statesmanship that he once represented. Carwardine (2004) sums up his persona: “A figure of uncommon humanity,” “an emancipator”, “a martyr.”

Lincoln appears to fuse all of the passions and high idealism of democracy with natural and endearing gravitas that ennobles the American Hope Dream and hopefully offers a shield from the many assaults upon it. In Chapter 6, I return to critically assess his bright-line decisions that bridged, at least in a survival sense, a tragically divided country. Tolstoy (1909) in his remarkable tribute to Lincoln concluded by saying, “Lincoln is a strong type of those who make for truth and justice, for brotherhood and freedom…love is the foundation of his life…a great character who will live as long as the world lives.” Tolstoy, like Whitman, was highlighting Lincoln’s democratic love and adhesive fraternity, keynote virtues of the democratic way of life, virtues that Jane Addams and John Dewey were to build into their redefinition of democracy as a way of life.

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Chapter 4: Jane Addams: the Personification of Bright-line Social Hope and Social Justice

Addams Ushers in New Hope for Democracy at Hull House

What Churchill famously said about democracy being “the worst form of government, except for all the others” would have been anathema to Jane Addams.56 Democracy was a cherished ideal for her, seemingly of limitless potential. Her thinking about democracy was utopian, not that she envisioned a utopian democracy as a perfect end-state. Addams was, after all, a pragmatist, believing in the evolving state of human affairs, an unfinished universe in every sense of the word. That said, her 1899 comment on American democracy was uncompromising: “Our democracy is our most prized possession.” (Addams, 1997, p. 273). Addams believed in the promise of democracy while not underestimating the challenges that it would meet. Democracy over its American century had been in a constant state of needing defense, and as her understanding of its strengths and weaknesses matured, she became committed to its re- visioning. It was her drive for improving democracy along with accompanying social reform that led her early biographer, Christopher Lasch (1965), to eulogize her “daring and original thought” in his attempt to resuscitate the brilliance of her insight at a time when early pragmatism was showing its first signs of an awakening after a mid-19th century torpor.

In this chapter, I focus on the development of the “new democracy” envisioned by Addams and put into practice at Hull House. In the context of creating the new pragmatic democracy, I evaluate Addams’s unique contribution. Correlative with her philosophy of democracy as a way of living was an integrative educational philosophy. Her innovative model blended both democratic thinking with progressive pedagogy. I also analyze how Addams married theory and practice, forging an institutional role for democracy, one which evolved in sociological and social work circles to become a widely respected template of efficacy (Shields, 2014 and

56 What Churchill actually said: “Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that it is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it will be said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…” Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947, House of Commons. Accessed from the International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/ 120

Deegan, 1988, for descriptions). Addams’s influence far transcended Hull House when she became a major re-definer of democracy with its values and pedagogies on a national and international scale. It is the depth and breadth of her “originality and daring” on a local, national, and international scale that characterizes this study of Addams, a key goal of which is to relate her unique vision to democracy and public education in America today.57 My contention is that her ethical stance has vital relevance to the nurture of democracy within schools. If indeed democracy is viewed as a democracy/education nexus, as Addams assuredly saw it, this has implications for the pedagogy and ethos of educational institutions. The argument of this chapter is my claim that Jane Addams had the right grip on the epistemic and ethical issues for her times, offering an important legacy to consider in the light of critical issues now facing democracy and public education in the 21st century.

Bringing Democratic Hope to an Institution

Addams’s “daring” was manifest in her struggle to bring democracy into a new state of being within a milieu of turmoil. Her mission was to assist a population of Chicago most desperately in need of a resource base for getting immigrants productively settled into the turbulent city. Historian Steele Commager (1961) provides a graphic picture:

By 1890, just a hundred years after the founding of the Republic, the Promise of American Life was becoming an illusion… As for Chicago, all the evils and vices of American life seemed to be exaggerated there. It was, wrote Lincoln Steffens at this time, “first in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, new; an overgrown gawk of village, the teeming tough among cities. Criminally it was wide open; commercially it was brazen; socially it was thoughtless and raw.” Unemployment plagued the land…immigrants [were] not only impoverished but alien: organized labour was in retreat… Social Darwinism…promised success to the strong and the ruthless, and remorselessly condemned the weak and the helpless to defeat. (pp. xi, xii)

57 While the focus of this project is primarily American democracy and public education, a number of Canadian issues are cross-referenced throughout. 121

The immediate environs of Chicago where Addams found her mansion was a polyglot of races and ethnicity. She and her companion Ellen Gates acquired a capacious, if somewhat decrepit, mansion which was to become a community shelter and activity centre then given the British name of Settlement House. Opened in 1889, Hull Settlement House immediately began welcoming newcomers to partake in diversified learning programs aimed at providing educational and social opportunities that would enhance their integration into the working and cultural life of the neighbourhood and city. As well, its mission was to investigate the issues of poverty of the immigrant community surrounding Hull House, with a view to assembling a research database to support lobbies for establishment reform.

The advent of Hull House was not without philosophical forethought. For years, Addams had been exploring a practical way that she could marry her interest in public service with her belief in personal agency as a pragmatic way to better the life chances of others. She came by that altruistic exploration from a father who deeply believed in bettering community life, who revered the ethical principles and democratic leadership of Lincoln, and who had eulogized to his daughter the social contributions of the famed Italian revolutionist, social reformer, and statesman, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872).

All of those attributes, the life-long altruism that she pursued, her ardent belief in the unique democratic character of her country, and an awakening to the cosmopolitan struggles for freedom, derived from the inspiration of a father she idolized. In Addams’s own right, her father’s legacy was to flourish magnificently, beginning with Hull House and ramifying into national and international social reform. Her studies, travels, and reflections all became centred on a dynamic of planetary conviviality of which the inclusion of a diverse neighbourhood was but the first step in building a world solidarity of peoples. At the top of her ethical list were decisions made in the name of justice, freedom, and equality, an ethical platform of ethics that became Addams’s emancipative passion, a way of thinking about the “rights of people” as the fundamental plank of building a just society (see Boler & Zembylas, 2002). Later in this chapter, I will analyze the method by which Addams presaged the spirit of “critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism” and “ from below,” applying these first to Hull House and then to wider arenas of social justice (Boler & Zembylas, 2002; Mignolo, 2000).

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The Raising of Voices of Hope: The Women at Hull House

Hull House was a co-educational institution, having programs, speakers, recreation, arts and crafts targeted at intergenerational girls and boys, women and men, some activities in common, some not. What was of special significance was that Addams developed awareness and concern about the oppression the immigrant women had experienced and were experiencing in their lives. Her response was to creatively empower these women. A main feature became their narratives, the telling of their life stories and the sharing of their joys, struggles, and sorrows with other women in an atmosphere of safety and support. She became proactive in protecting their children from child labour, a suffrage activist for women, a leader in numerous women’s organizations, and a symbol of empowerment for women in virtually every sphere.

In her many speeches and publications Addams frequently referred to the , values and beliefs of women of diverse ethnic backgrounds and social classes. She developed a uniquely pragmatist version of feminism that recognized that women could affirm a special angle of vision, interest and values without either falling prey to false essentialism or closing themselves off from a multiplicity of identities and conditions. (Siegfried, 2002, p. xi)

Significantly, she drew around her gifted women from her own social class, well-educated young women who in effect interned with her as Hull House volunteers, or who simply lived there while undertaking key social reform activities in other sectors of society. The ferment of female leadership brought a constant infusion of progressive ideas into Hull House (Brown, 2007).

Anticipating the need for a “historicized ethics which consciously privileges the insurrectionary and dissenting voices” and forums that would address the suppressed and often silenced voices of the immigrant women, Addams provided a proto-example of affirmative action by providing discursive safe space for women to share their life issues, including the traumas and mournings of their past and present lives (Boler, 2004, p. 13). The entire ethos of Hull House, moreover, fostered equal-status conversations, stimulated no doubt by the network of activist women who were assisting Addams and Gates in varied leadership roles.

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The “institutional” side of Hull House featured cooperative living, engagement, participation, a kindergarten and nursery for children, cooperative learning activities, and an atmospheric pedagogy of relating to one another, together with communal problem-solving. Such group interactivity created a fertile, dynamic environment for the girls and women of Hull House, providing opportunities for conviviality, learning and taking on leadership roles with peers, and progressively taking on these roles within their wider community.

The values that Addams had espoused at the settlement house became the stuff of legend, a template emulated in diversified guises by hundreds of settlement houses across America.58 It became renowned as a place of tolerance, forbearance, a habitat that from its open-door policy was legendary for its hospitality, its inclusiveness, and its systemic attempt to eliminate barriers. Famously, it maintained that its doors were never locked. Hull House consciously avoided religious pre-emption. It was not exclusively secular, insofar as its values were sometimes expressed in quasi-religious or overtly religious terms, but it was profoundly ecumenical, politically non-partisan, and cosmopolitan in outlook. Its moral tissue was imbued with the newly minted values of the novel democracy of the early pragmatists, signaling a way of associated living. Unlike many of the settlement houses across the nation modeled somewhat on the paradigm of Hull House, Addams steered clear of denominational hegemony.

An Ethic of Caring: New Hope for Governance and Education

Hull House gave birth to a new “institutional” look for an old philosophic ethic, one of caring. Its inventor was Addams. This is not to overlook the Continental roots of caring, or its philosophical presence in African, Confucian, and other non-Western philosophies. David Hume had a version of “sentimentalism” that gave new importance to human feeling, and caring is also linked, not without some controversy, to Aristotle’s theory of virtue (Sandard-Staut, 2006). Care, however, had traditionally been contrasted with theories of justice. Addams married her new theory of caring to the emerging philosophy of pragmatism. It was not only a new theory of caring, however, but in the spirit of pragmatic activism; she translated the caring ethic into an

58 Its growing reputation brought world attention. Mackenzie King, future prime minister of Canada, then a student at Harvard, became a Hull House volunteer and friend of Jane Addams. 124

operational mode as a centerpiece of daily life. A descriptive vocabulary—sympathetic understanding, kindness, egalitarianism, inclusion, openness, imaginative uplift—emerged as she reflected on, and theorized about, her Hull House journey.

Many saliencies about the caring character of Hull House are material to democracy and public education. First, her appellation of choice for caring is “nurture.” In theory and practice “nurture” reflected the caring vocabulary that began to frequent her speeches and writings as noted above. By the end of her life, Addams had formulated a value system for a caring ethic in Hull House, not to mention a consonant world view that is in active philosophic conversation today (Fischer, Nackenoff, & Chmielewski, 2008). A key premise of this thesis is that her contribution, with its many presages to the field of current “ethic of care” scholarship, is germane to today’s education and democracy. Her interlocking view of democracy and pedagogy is, I will argue, relevant to counteract the current state of malaise afflicting both (Nodding, 1995).

In her formulation of nurturing care, Addams drew a bright-line between charity, as it was then generally thought of, and support based on authentic relationality. Charity ,she claimed, lent itself to abstract altruism, which kept it arm’s-length from meaningful interaction with the beneficiary. Addams’s idea of authentic caring began with “emotional kindness…the natural prompting of the heart…human love and sympathy” (Addams, 2002, pp. 13. 16, 17). The authenticity of caring, in Addams’s view, required the active mixing of the benefactor in the “heat and jostle of the crowd” (p. 9), sharing their burden or at least understanding their burden (p. 7).

Addams’s ethic of a loving, nurturing form of caring was coming from a very different source than theories of justice, which is the usual starting point for forms of governance, including democracy (see, for example, Siegfried, 2002; Kant, 1965, 2007). Addams was seeking political fairness in justice. Her thesis of the just act involved concrete, on-the-ground judgments of people affected by a given decision. Democratic thinking, the will of the people, entered at the beginning of the decision-making process. This led her to introduce notions of “caring” and “sympathy” for all of humanity as a key consideration in formulations of appropriate governing behaviour.

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Addams was averse to coercion, to decisions bereft of recognizing principles of fair play, to non-inclusiveness; her concern was with the impact of policy on citizens. Her purview was wider than the traditional liberal view of justice (Manicas, 2008; Kurth-Schai & Green, 2006). It contains an element of Rawls’s “fairness,” but it also brings virtue into public acts as an important ingredient in the new American connotation of democracy. Governance should be sensitive to the contextualized effects of a polity and not merely to whether it seems fair in the abstract. That form of liberalism was not deemed the spirit of American democracy, the genuine, originary esprit aspiring to equality and brotherhood along with freedom. Addams, Dewey, and their early pragmatist colleagues looked to interdependence of humankind rather than to human autonomy as the watchword of democratic thought.

Feminist thought of the past 40 years has added vast explications to their insight, a number of scholars pointing to the complementary relationship of ethics of care and the concept of justice (see, for example, Siegfried, 2002; Anderson, 2004). While each retains distinctive features, Addams correctly depicted the overlapping values both theoretically and in her personal pursuit of myriad social justice activities with caring as a core value. She explored care from a distinctive ethical plane, illuminating the weaknesses of paternalistic models of care that were often bereft of context for the identity of the Other.

Standpoint Epistemology: Essential to the Hope for a New Democracy

Jane Addams was to some a pioneer in what some feminist scholars have called “standpoint epistemology” (Hamington, 2010). It is also possible that her position was simply that of pluralism, an openness to other perspectives.

We know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational and democratic interest in life, and to give truth complete social expression is the endeavor upon which we are entering. Thus the identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. (Addams, 2002, p. 9)

The epistemology involved notions of context, situation, and perspectivity as a way of understanding, learning, and seeking truth. In the case of Hull House, the new epistemology was based on establishing relationships with all who entered, beginning with an understanding of

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their situation. Hers was knowledge with the added poignancy of identifying with the “beneficiary” in every way possible, and attempting the kind of “uplift” that was viewed, insofar as she could, from his or her standpoint; her uplift had fundamentally shifted from an ideal of self, or indulgence in self-aggrandizement as benefactor, to the perspective of the Other. Also in the above quote, it is noteworthy that Addams makes the direct link of perspectivity to democracy. The ethic of caring or, as she called it, “nurture” was at the heart of her allegiance to the new democracy.

The Cosmopolitan Hope of Addams

The major ethnic groups surrounding Hull House on Halstead Street included large families of Italian, Greek, Irish, German, Polish, and Russian immigrants. By the 1920s considerable numbers of African Americans and Mexicans were also living nearby. From the outset, an “intersectional notion of nurture” characterized the way Addams drew together the diversity of her working-class immigrant neighbors, both men and women, and their children.

Political scientist Wendy Sarvasy (2008) lauds the practicality and prescience of Addams’s approach to nurture that resulted in noteworthy Hull House strategies for achieving social integration. Addams might be thought of as a precursor of intersectionality, although that kind of classification might have been too categorical for her.

In the end, she crafted an intersectional notion of nurture, because it was shaped by class, gender, race and ethnicity… Her approach could be called a global social ecological understanding of how a range of issues from infectious diseases to climate change could not be addressed successfully without a multileveled response. (Sarvasy, 2008, p. 198)

Addams assumed that a role for such ecumenical nurturing was supremely relevant in prefiguring Chicago and other American cities as sites that bring “truth and reconciliation” processes and strategies to bear based on successful experiences at settlement houses operating along the similar ecumenical lines as Hull House. Her vision was the harmonious working relations between groups, many of whom had long-simmering animosities from past atrocities and conflicts. The healing process was uppermost on Addams’s agenda as she designed programs that would bring commonality to their experiences, and the kind of sharing and

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interdependency that would foster tolerance, forgiveness, practices of helping one another, and an overall sense of communal solidarity.

While her lens for a decade was the successful interblending of culture in Hull House, Addams was seeing from its successes the possibility of wider application. While her companion, John Dewey, was turning his sights on creatively interblending the new “organic” democracy with public schooling, Addams was seeing the application of intercultural solidarity on a national or even transnational scale. Accordingly, she began speaking and writing about a mission and methodology of cosmopolitan hope, based on the Hull House praxis, now replete with empirical evidence of success. She began to bring the message of social cohesion through cosmopolitanism to the nation and into kindred international organizations. Her expanding vision culminating in a major new writing project, published in 1906, captured her utopic vision of a positive, peaceful world supplanting a perpetually warring one.

Addams identified hope with social justice for everyone. Her innovative ethic for social was described in detail in Democracy and Social Ethics, her turn-of-the-century work published in 1902. She would move on to reframe the scope of ethics in broader terms with her involvement in national and international causes. New arenas in which she became involved included the Roosevelt national election campaign, labour relations (International Labor Organization),the NAACP, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Women’s Peace Party. She both founded and chaired several organizations. The world was becoming increasingly jingoistic; American seemed to be moving inexorably towards war. Addams was being called upon to bring her moral vision, her ethic of tolerance and respect, her vision of democratic dialogue, and her conflict resolution skills onto the national and international stage.

Her commitment to deliberative, participative engagement was a staple of her national and international involvements. She remained steadfast not only to her commitment of including the Other but also to her devotion to welcoming the Other with hospitality and dialogue, even in times of international quarrelling. In the face of great pressure, she held to her pacifism. The behaviors for which she became manifestly renowned were intimately and profoundly democratic in nature. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

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In stark terms, Addams (1907/2007) lobbied to substitute “nurture for warfare,” and lobbied for “imaginative pity” for the victims of war (p. 26). She appealed to the coalescing of the altruistic with the egoistic impulse on the grounds of social morality. In her argument for international peacemaking, Addams was deft and assiduous to point out the model of the “cosmopolitan neighborhood” of her homeland, and the importance of “attaining cosmopolitan relations through daily experience” (pp. 16, 18).

Her third book, Newer Ideals of Peace published in 1907, became a landmark tract for Addams by proactively pursuing themes of social justice on several fronts, the protection of children from child labour, fair dealings with unions, access of municipal governance to women, and so on. Undergirding her philosophy was her ideal of social solidarity. The shining example of mutuality and harmony that prevailed in Hull House became, to Addams and her followers, a lodestar in terms of inclusiveness, diversity, ethnic solidarity, and altruism. The local Chicago narrative that she championed for its international potential was making its mark in other American cities and abroad. Her advocacy for democratic processes on an international stage gained credibility from her extrapolations of the Hull House microcosm. The word “cosmopolitanism” was beginning to loom large in her speeches and writings. To promote world social citizenship, Addams drew on her revolutionary mentor Giuseppe Mazzini: “the duties of family, nation, and humanity are but concentric circles of one obligation” (Addams, 1930, p174.), and that each circle surrounds and completes the inner circle( Ibid).

In Newer Ideals of Peace, Addams seemed to have had an epiphany that the new ideal of a positive peace should replace imperialism and militarized nationalism. She had always had a romantic streak, idolizing some of the romantic British authors of earlier in the century, and here was a moment when her hope for humanity seemed to be taking flight.59 William James was a great admirer of the ideals for peace and pronounced that Addams had given him “new

59 Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin were particular favorites of Addams. Carlyle, she appreciated for being consumed with “action,” heroic capability of individuals with derring-do, and making a difference. Ruskin brought an aesthetic dimension. Neither Carlyle nor Ruskin were champions of democracy, certainly not in the “raw” American version of the revolutionary Founding Fathers, but they brought educative and romantic dimensions to Addams’s formulation of her life career as public activist and to her moral leadership. ( See Hamington, 2010). 129

perspectives of hope”60 (2009 Bissell Brown, 2009.) To Addams the cosmopolitan nature of the Newer Ideals of Peace (2007) could well be harbingers that “stir us with a strange hope [emphasis mine] as if new vistas of life were opening before us” (p. 19); she fervently hoped those ideals would “ascend to a more enveloping point of view” creating “the hope for discovery of a new and vital relation” (p. 19). Perhaps a new vista of life would be one of cosmic peace, one that “rejects the old and negative bonds of discipline and coercion and insists upon vital and fraternal relationship” (p.19).

Alas, it was not to be, with the “Great World War” on the threshold, America became caught up in the old patriotism and war fever that she was trying to supplant with her vision of peace. But for all her romantic dreams of a transformed peace-oriented world, we also know that Addams possessed an equally strong sense of pragmatic practicality. She believed in incremental progress, in the lateral advances of bringing people to democratic acceptance of new ideas with patience and perseverance. That trait had dominated her policies and practices at Hull House, change that was marked not by sudden vertical spurts, but brought about incrementally, by democratic dialogue and gentle persuasion. That is one of the most remarkable legacies of Addams’s hope, her felicitous blend of utopian thinking and measured, pragmatic action. The victim of much opprobrium when America did enter the war, she clung steadfastly to her progressive pacifism. Characteristically, postwar, Addams turned her attention to restorative postwar strategies for consolidating peace.

William James, reflecting on Addams’s vision for peace, spoke of the new heroism that was needed to supplant the heroism associated with war. What was needed was “something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war has done” (Addams, 2007, p.34). I believe that Addams attempted the heroic in espousing the Newer Ideals of Peace. What eluded her has continued to plague humankind, but that is surely not to discount her allegory that peace begins in the neighbourhood, and that schools can become incubators for children to experience the harmonics of constructive cosmopolitanism. Addams (2007) noted in Newer Ideals of Peace:

60This and the following quotation were from a letter to Jane Addams from William James after he had read Newer Ideals on Peace, February 12, 1907, as cited in the introduction of Addams (2007).

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“The French have a phrase, the imperieuse bonte by which they designate those impulses towards compassionate conduct” (p. 21). Perhaps that is Addams’s sustaining ideal to guide us through the 21st century.

The Ethic of Nurturing Care: Caring for versus Caring with and Its Political Implications

The ethic of nurturing care had huge implications for redefining both democracy and education. The Addams introduction of hope into an epistemology liberated the educand from doctrinally vesselled methodologies of transmitting knowledge. It opposed a pedagogy that was inherently propositional and that induced learner passivity. Such liberatory hope aligned with attempts to also remake democracy into what Dewey (1998a) called a “freer and more humane experience” (p. 343). A makeover of democracy had been given earlier voice initially by Emerson and was significantly augmented by Whitman, but such change needed substantially more philosophic explication. Pragmatism became the philosophic vehicle that offered the best hope for a coherent theory of democracy, as Addams, Dewey, and colleagues were to illustrate. That pragmatism had to contend with other emerging forces, such as with clashing ideologies of efficiency—making profits, Taylorism and behaviourism, and a constellation of materialistic forces that had “sharp elbows” in coveting centre stage in “progressivism”—should not obscure the humanitarian vision of the early pragmatists, and the legacy that they offer to us today.

Biographer Louise Knight’s research revealed that the crucial distinction between caring for and caring with was originally imported by Addams from Toynbee Hall in London (Knight, 2008, p. 65). The shift from “caring for” to “caring with” represented a paradigm shift for Addams in theory and practice, a transition that was deeply ethical and epistemological. As previously noted, caring with deeply focused the caring on a person-to-person relationship, in contrast with the infinitely more abstract caring for, which lacked the nuanced relating of benefactor to beneficiary. The crux of the new relationship involved a high degree of relationality being established, that is, becoming intimately aware of the other person’s needs and interests, and basing a response on that knowledge. It involved a variety of emancipations: suppressing “privileged” voices, releasing feelings, hearing narratives. Addams’s response was marked by attentive interest, compassion, and ensuing measures of support. Relational thinking

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also involves reciprocity, a relating of one to another, an approach some see metaphorically as tango-like.

An example of the epistemic ethic at work was her initiating indigenous art into the multiracial life of Hull House. Bypassing the convention of showcasing traditional art, Addams nurtured the arts and crafts of her residential population encouraging them to design and make arts and crafts that connected with their work lives, and to “express the best they may in wood and metal, objects d’art that were genuine and vital in their lives” (Addams, 1997, p. 261). Her pedagogical bias was for active, transactional engagement, fostering an educational policy of experiential learning at a time when such was revolutionary.

Addams was not the only pioneer in what was becoming a trail-blazing reformation in pedagogy. Her friends William James, John Dewey, and were collegially engaged in the pedagogical reforms. But Addams was the peerless initiator, not only of the praxis of experiential education but also of a vital new element of the challenge of nurturing care: she introduced the caring with dimension to a multicultural clientele, with all the cosmopolitan complexity that would entail in establishing meaningful relatedness.

Addams’s caring with brought a profusion of democratic values to Hull House. As she signaled in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, she brought political ethics into the heartland of the new pedagogy. As we have seen, democratic thinking from her perspective also relied on relationality. Her initiatives, flanked with early pragmatist collegial support, most notably Dewey, was at the forefront of equality as a political mantra. She established “classlessness” as an operating principle of Hull House and proactively sponsored full participation of Hull House attendees who participated not only in programs but in the design of programs. Her clients worked with her outside the Settlement House developing initiatives for improving the conditions of the neighbourhood and other civic reforms.

Addams’s Bright-Line Vision of Consolidative Hope

Jane Addams’s vision was not just that she Americanized the caring with ethic, nor was it simply the institutional lack of hierarchy that she inaugurated, nor was it that she explicitly united the new epistemology with democracy, but that she did all of the above within a

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multicultural praxis, one, moreover, where poverty and hardship were dominant. From the caring with ethic, plurality of race, class, and ethnicity were to promote a cosmopolitan caring with ethic that fostered a spirit of solidarity, interdependence, equality and loving kindness towards the Other. Admittedly, John Dewey was a towering support in shaping the Hull House experiment and sharing his convictions on “new learning” in the epistemological arena. But the relationship was fully reciprocal, with Addams providing the inspiration and guidance to Dewey on broadening and deepening his conception of the new democracy in a more concrete way (Jane Dewey, 1981, p. 30). In fusing democracy and education, both Addams and Dewey carried the flag. But in timing, the advent of Hull House in the arena of social welfare in America, with its interlocking theoretic of democracy and education, became the lighthouse of humanitarianism for the Progressive Era.

The degree of radicalness for democracy that Addams was postulating was thus astoundingly liberal for her time. That she was to take this into the realm of practice by establishing a democratic ethos within an actual institutional setting was beyond the pale of societal norms. Addams was experimentally radical, but, importantly, she did not wish her new habitat to fall prey to academic “experiment.” We must, she wrote, “see to it that the university does not swallow the Settlement, and turn it into one more laboratory: another place with which to analyze and depict, to observe and record” (Addams, 1997, p. 284). Addams did rely deeply on the general advice of the academy, having regular contact with William James, George Mead, and, of course, John Dewey, along with other academics. But although the University of Chicago was flourishing close by, she eschewed the blandishments of closer scientifically collaborative research. All energies were devoted to reflective practitioning, assessing what was not working in terms of programming, ameliorating the deficiencies and creating “uplift of the imagination” by way of new programs (Addams, 1997, p. 278). Her attention was towards reforming the wider environment: improving the civic culture about her—sewers and alleys, hygiene and sanitation loomed large on her reform agenda, and entailed developing constructive negotiating links with aldermen and bureaucrats. Typical of her pedagogic commitment to engagement, she brought immigrants into active service assisting her with civic reform, encouraging them to exercise their collective and individual voice in matters of neighborhood concern.

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Implications of Addams’s Form of Hope for Democracy and Public Education

I contend that an initiative that centres on an amalgam of intensified pedagogical caring and democratic thinking such as I have been discussing might well warrant resonance today as it did to the most enlightened parts of the Progressive Era. Public schooling in our time continues to struggle to find its way through a maelstrom of currents and countercurrents of reform and politics that have been diversionary to what many progressives would think of as its main purpose. The ethic of nurturing care, given concrete illustration by Addams (and a now well- developed field of scholarship) would offer an important starting place for rejuvenating education. As my project will further interrogate and argue, the notion of affective equality is intimately involved in education reform.

Taking egalitarianism seriously in relation to equal opportunity of public education is implicit in Addams’s ethical canon. That, in combination with her robust advocacy for deep democracy, adds immeasurably to her relevance in our century.61 The Addams’s vision of democracy rooted in relationality, intercultural sensitivities, equalizing opportunities, and conditions for learning, all within a setting of abiding compassion to the educand provides a nutrient education and realpolitik for addressing existing weaknesses in democracy and public education. Does that not make her and her like-minded early pragmatists vital candidates for reappropriation in our century? I probe that notion in this project.

A Pedagogy of Hope

Of similar importance was how Addams interlinked a new pedagogy with a new democracy by aligning education’s concern to develop “individuality” in the child with the same keystone notion of cultivating democratic citizenship for all citizens. She referred to the new method of educating in evolutionary terms, contrasting it with the hortatory approach of traditional top- down, impositional teaching. The new pedagogy brought sensitive awareness and care to locating and responding to where each child was in his or her learning journey. She drew the analogy of “relief-giving agencies” to the new pedagogy that was emerging, and which was markedly in evidence within Hull House.

61 Judith Green, Deep Democracy. 134

We are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle [Addams called the evolution “life from within”] to human affairs in general… [W]e are at last learning to follow the development of the child…to adapt methods and matters to his growing mind. No advanced educator can allow himself to be so absorbed in what the child ought to be to exclude the discovery of what he is. But in our charitable world we think much more of what a man ought to be than of what he is[emphases mine] or of what he may become; and we ruthlessly force conventions and standards upon him. (Addams, 2002,p. 32)

I have previously mentioned Addams’s commitment to collaborative innovation as it related to the phenomenon of co-learning, one of partnering in the learning process, reciprocal learning, building trusting relationships. This was the extended meaning of learning “from and with” that she appropriated and adapted from the reigning strategy of Toynbee Settlement House in London. This methodology populated much of her discourse in both theory and practice in her odyssey towards social justice, which she not only applied within Hull House but also within her national and international advisory and leadership roles. Louise Knight (2008) has unearthed that Addams’s visit to London’s Toynbee Hall revealed that its motto “Caring with, not for” was to foster the principle of self-governance (p. 68). For Toynbee Hall, this meant setting up co-ops and other business enterprises. Addams was drawn strongly to this model as a form of pedagogic empowerment. Knight writes compellingly about Addams’s fealty to the ethic of cooperation, and how personally, becoming a cooperator, was difficult for an upper-middle-class woman: “Raised to believe in the ethic of benevolence, she felt entitled…to instruct others to do what she thought was best for them” (p. 71). But Addams’s powerful belief in cooperation as a key tenet of American social democracy forced her to suppress her self-admitted, class-based sense of moral superiority. “Cooperation,” rather than dictation, became a primary technique that Addams used to ensure fulsome grassroots engagement in every facet of operation at Hull House.

With this the originality and daring that Lasch (1965) attributed to Addams begins to come into bright focus. Knight, along with Lasch, concludes that Addams is “indeed revolutionary” (Knight, 2008, p. 71). How does Addams’s “revolutionary” legacy meet up with the contemporary need of public education and the role of democracy in public schools? I have spoken of the empowerment that Addams ascribes to her style of education. But we have yet to 135

see how her belief in the new pragmatism to which she was now deeply committed involved a methodology of personal problem-solving that she called perplexity, a methodology for approaching her administrative challenges, and beyond that, translating her ameliorating passion for social reform into action in times of crisis and doubt. I explore her method for the relevance that it may offer to the solving of problems in our day.

Perplexity and Addams’s Hope-Inspired Pivot Forward

A backdrop to Addams’s perplexity was her staunch belief in meliorism, the pragmatist philosophy of “making better.” Addams had an ancillary slogan that had been handed down by her father—“best possible”—attributed to Abraham Lincoln and applied when he was assessing daunting problems. From Lincoln, a friend of her father, she adopted the “best possible” approach to guide her thinking, a motto that counseled tempering the ideal with the practical. It meshed with pragmatism, a philosophy to which Addams was orienting herself.

Addams believed, along with her early pragmatist mentor, William James, that it was all- important to honour the phenomenon of possibility as a way of keeping one’s faith in the future vibrantly alive. Cornel West (1993), a near-century later, took up the theme of the pragmatic orientation to the future, saying,

a distinctive feature of pragmatism...is that the future has ethical significance. Its emphasis on the ethical significance of the future provides pragmatism with a new way of talking about possibility and potentially of human organisms….” (p. 41)

He goes on to cite Dewey on pragmatism:

[Pragmatism] does not insist upon antecedent phenomena, but on consequent phenomena [emphasis mine]. An which is content with repeating facts, already past has no place for possibility and for liberty. Pragmatism thus has a metaphysical connection. (p. 41)

‘Perplexity thinking’ begins with doubt or perplexity within a contextualized situation. It is beginning where you are with a situation that needs addressing. Both you and your environment are implicated. That distinguishes perplexity from problem-solving. As we saw in Chapter 1, the

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imagination is brought into play, with hypotheses or scenarios that move the perplexity for active solution-seeking, the problematized situation has undergone some form of experimentation within a context, that latter having a beginning and an ending within the perplexity cycle. Addams was thus an early practitioner of pragmatic theory. As Addams’s biographer Charlene Haddock Seigfried (2002) describes it:

Addams identifies a perplexity that reveals a rupture with conventional attitudes, beliefs and practices. The perplexity cannot be resolved without developing a new understanding of the situation and calling into question received values. (pp. xxi, xxii)

Addams in her example of perplexity in Democracy and Ethics shows how social sympathy can be aroused and developed through the perplexities of clashes in everyday life. Addressing them pragmatically is to enter into a means of learning, of further growth and awareness of both our resiliency and interdependency. As Dewey was to put it How We Think, “when the feeling of a genuine perplexity lays hold of many minds (no matter how the feeling arises), that mind is alert and inquiring, because stimulated from within.” 62

In summary, while she was not a pragmatist theorist, per se, Addams was the supreme exemplar of bright-line pragmatism in practice. Her robust, melioristic hope carried her into municipal, national, and international causes, and her altruistic flagship, Hull House, sparked hundreds of emulations of her settlement vision throughout urban and rural America during the Progressive Era. Although she was not trained as a teacher, she nonetheless had educative instincts and intuitions that immediately grasped the value of “new education” that soul mate, John Dewey, was propounding, key aspects of which were in evidence in Hull House practically from its inception. A legacy of comparable stature was her influence on the reimagining of democracy, again in partnership with John Dewey and colleagues, a vision of the political grandeur that the democracy of the Founding Fathers’ ideals might indeed become if the American Hope Dream were ever to rise to its potential. The deep values of that co-developed

62 John Dewey, How We Think. P.238. 137

vision of democracy and the education associated with them are central to the discussion in Chapter 5.

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Chapter 5: John Dewey, Democracy, Education, and the American Dream

The Bright-Line as Represented by John Dewey

As Ralph Sleeper notes, John Dewey had “a commitment to philosophy in general as a force for social change.” It was “for knowledge, not for its own sake, but for action.” Dewey saw thinking “as a means of conducting transformational transactions with the world, a means of changing, or reconstructing, the world” (Sleeper, 2001, p. 3). For Dewey biographers Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy, it was Dewey’s “intelligent wholeheartedness” that was a Deweyan “key to living in hope” (Fishman & McCarthy, 2007). It was In “A Key to the New World” that Dewey (1926) brought forward his passion for life and its possibility: “Human birth is an eternal reminder of the possibility of a new and different world...The promise constantly returns...A new life, as yet one of potentiality will signify to man the possibility of a different world until all hope dies from the human breast” (pp. 410-411). Much earlier in this life, Dewey reflected the vision of Charles Darwin on the life as growth. He had opened the “gates to the garden of life; and only through this garden was there access to mind and politics” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 41). Mindful politics to Dewey, of course, meant democracy, a society characterized by democratic relationships, one that enables its member to live with creative efforts and fulfillments. Others see his passion for life in the beginning chapters of his writings on education. Education, a necessity of life, was about growth and flourishing of human life.

From his earliest writings, Dewey also evinced a passion for freedom, for the freeing up and flourishing of the individual. Democracy needed to supplant authority, whether aristocratic, monarchical, or feudal; at the same time, he also would argue for ennobling and broadening democracy’s meaning for the individual and society. Needed reform of education meant creating conditions for mental and moral expansiveness in the face of rising behaviourism at the beginning of the 20th century.

Dewey was a proponent of the new psychology, but he was determined to bring it into line with creative evolution in order to foster personal and communal freedom. Transactionalism exemplified a way forward, with progressive implications for democracy and education. I explore the concept of transaction, its implications and its Darwinian roots. Dewey saw both

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promise and peril in the new psychology. Psychology was being examined from very different perspectives, as I shall be discussing with reference to, for example, an early form of mind models that was proposing behavioural conditioning. Dewey’s model of the mind from a functional perspective held great promise for understanding through the social relational as a means for flourishing. I explore his early work in relation to his vision of democracy and explore its suggestions for the meaning of hope. I herald Dewey’s bright-line effort and vision in his determined attempt to revivify the American Dream.

I analyze the democratic values of Dewey in relation to education and argue for the reciprocity of democracy and education in Dewey’s conception of the American Dream. I argue that the distinctive strength of the American Dream is intimately bound up with the robustness of its Deweyan vision. I look through the lens of hope, justifying that perspective by focusing on Dewey’s outlook on the promise of democratic life from his early to late works. I claim that Dewey envisioned a companionate hope for democracy and education whose fruition would create and sustain a freer, more fulfilling life—one more consonant and continuous with the distinctiveness of the American Hope Dream.

I examine the unique re-imagining of democracy by Dewey and Jane Addams that still incites commentary from ethicists (J. Green, 2008), political scientists (Cunningham, 2002; Kadlec, 2007); historians (Abrams, 2007; Schulten, 2009), philosophers (Thayer-Bacon, 2010; E. Anderson, 2006), and Dewey biographers (Westbrook, 1981, 2005; Ryan, 1995). I analyze how Addams and Dewey took democracy into new terrain of human relationships by linking the ethic of caring with social justice.

It was not that these interpretations were entirely new. Some of the seeds of Dewey’s conception of democracy were prominent in the Founders’ creedal articulation and in educational ideas bruited about in Europe for some time. In America, shards of this thinking, particularly with respect to democracy, were present in the imaginative writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and James Russell Lowell. But I argue that Dewey brought democratic and educational theory to unprecedented heights of explication, while Jane Addams in praxis was the exemplar of such dimensions that, I argue, arose from the American Hope Dream.

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I further note Dewey’s relevance today, when the lens through which we normally see democracy seems to have become unusually distorted by power and privilege. The American presidency as bully pulpit would seem to many to warrant despair for the severe erosion, if not near disappearance of values associated with what I call the bright-line of the American Hope Dream.

Dewey’s fear of democracy’s vulnerability to polemics from abroad prompted his first philosophical writing of note, and such concern remained with him for much of his life, resurfacing in the early1920s and more stringently later in that decade. It blazed forth more acutely with the rise of Stalin and Hitler through the 1930s and the impending war in 1939, culminating in the famous and prophetic “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” (Dewey, 1998a). My thesis in this chapter, as in other chapters, attempts to make meaningful connections with distinctive political and educational features of the American Dream with a view to resuscitating important values that seem in danger of being lost.63

Dewey and the Critique of the Reflex Arc Concept

While Dewey’s conceptual universe became vast, it began with interest in the “new psychology,” which brought together evolutionary thinking and the new German emphasis on experimentalism. Aspects of the new psychology sought to get rid of the soul, the “Ghost in the Machine,” and with it, Cartesian dualism. It did so by viewing human behaviour in terms of the stimulus-response reflex, with cognition, or mind, as an intermediary between the two. Seen in this way human behaviour could be characterized by input-process-output terms, or stimulus, thinking and response. But Dewey argued that this view fragmented human behaviour by confusing interrelated functions that work with one another dynamically with separate things or entities (Dewey, 1896):

It assumes sensory experience and motor response as distinct physical existences, while in fact they are always inside a co-ordination and have their existence purely from the

63The American Hope Dream, it must be remembered, was a Euro-Anglo Dream with flagrant disregard for Indigenous and Afro-American peoples and their oppression. 141

part played maintaining or reconstituting the coordination; ... The result is that the reflex arc series leaves us with a disjointed psychology...from the standpoint of the development of the individual... (p. 3).

Conceived in this way, behaviour is “nothing more than a series of jerks...each jerk to be sought outside the experience itself...failing to see unity of activity” (Dewey, 1896, p. 3).

Even William James, the great synthesizer of the emerging “new psychology” came in for criticism for maintaining a linear stimulus-response or stimulus-cognition-response model. Rather than taking stimulus and response as separately definable sensory and motor events, Dewey viewed themes as functionally interrelated acts. As Eric Bredo (2006) explains: “One cannot draw a line between organism and environment, taking stimuli as experiential (stimulating) events, and responses as organismic responses since in the new conception stimulus and response involve both organism and environment” (p. 48). To Dewey, both stimulus and response react, which are themselves part of a larger act. Seeing and reaching are part of a larger act of grasping an object, seeing helping to guide one’s hand while reaching affects what one sees (such as the relation between one’s hand and a cup). In a well-functioning act each helps modify the other rather than being separately definable things.

By parsing S-R in this way we blind ourselves to the processes by which the organism itself interprets events making activity seem simpler than it is. Why is this important to education? Educators must be sensitive to what students are trying to do in the much larger sense of interpreting and responding to their experiences. By implicating the environment in an active way, Dewey was reflecting evolutionary considerations rather than the mechanistic assumptions of . Rather than viewing the form or structure being studied as static or fixed in the mechanistic way, the early pragmatists believed in fixed processes only in the sense of them being ever-changing (Bredo,1986, p. 449).

Bredo (1986) explains the difference:

An evolutionary approach thus starts with a fixed process such as the processes common to organic life, and considers how the form of objects, such as those of the member of different species emerges and changes as a result of this process. A mechanistic 142

approach, in contrast, starts with fixed forms of structures and considers how their elements interact with one another. (p. 449)

Dewey was part of what is now being widely proclaimed as the New Psychology. The core difference between new and old was the old psychology’s tendency to focus on the individual independent of society or culture. For Dewey that was a dead, mechanical approach to mental life.

As early as 1884, Dewey was writing that “man is more than a neatly dovetailed psychical machine who may be taken as an isolated individual... We know that his life is bound up with the life of society.” The new psychology, Dewey averred, could better be explained by drawing its metaphors from biology and history and emerging in social sciences more than from mechanics and logic. Man was not to be thought of as “pre-defined parts” as of old, but should “borrow the notion of the organism of a living, functioning whole from biology, in contrast to seeing “a human being [dissected] on a grid,” that having happened by associationist psychologists and empirical philosophers of the past (Bredo, 1986, p. 152).

For Dewey, a crucial approach for psychologists was that rather than starting with atomic stimulus and response elements, they should start with a “comprehensive or organic unity.” The base case in human activity is coordinated activity, or a “sensori-motor coordination,” like that evident in habitual action, rather than separate stimulus and response fragments. It is only when habitual ways of acting break down that sensing and responding become fragments of uncoordinated action, stimulating conscious attention to the need to reconstruct the habit. As I will suggest, what Dewey was proposing had important implications for not only transforming education but, if adopted, would lead to social activism and an emphasis on democratic self- governance. In School and Society (1900), Dewey pointed to revolutionary change, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the astronomical centre shifted from the earth to the sun. The wider implications involved a paradigm shift of consequence to how one might view education (as well as democracy) in an infinitely more dynamical way than happened historically, when the old psychology became more influential than the new under the new guise of behaviourism. Insofar as democracy was concerned, it led to reformulating democracy as a

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social association, a way of living together in a collaborative, mutually supportive, situational way.

Rather than viewing human beings as machines, brain-governed bodies or collective cultural patterns, the resulting psychology depicted them as agents who act to change the world and are themselves changed in the process. They are seen as self-creating, self-forming beings in collaboration with others rather than as conformists to given rules, whether environmental or organismic. All of the distinctions between objects that mechanists took as given, Dewey saw as emergent from the process of acting. What Dewey was opposing was not analysis per se but the notion of a preordained framework independent of the activity of the organisms themselves. Dewey was emphasizing the importance of context and the interdependence of organism and activity.

Transactionalism

Later on, Dewey described his approach as “transactional.” In a transaction, separate functions or roles emerge in and are defined by the transaction as a whole, much as “buyer” and “seller” are roles in an economic transaction. Sleeper (1988) notes that for Dewey, “individual thinking is transactional, with both the conditions of nature and the thinking of other individuals” (p. 135). Thinking requires the individual to explain his or her thinking to others, to enter into associative transactions. With respect to politics, Sleeper continues: “Democracy is an expression of that essential tension between the individual and those associated forms of life to which the self is inevitably drawn” (p. 135).

David Kolb (1983) importantly distinguishes between interaction and transaction:

The word transaction is more appropriate than interaction [emphases in original] to describe the relationship between the person and the environment in experiential learning theory, because the connotation of interaction is somehow too mechanical, involving unchanging separate entities that become intertwined but retain their separate identities...The concept of transaction implies a more fluid interpenetrating experience between objective conditions and subjective experience, such that once they become related, both are essentially changed (p. 36). 144

In Democracy and Education (1917), Dewey discussed many tensions in educational theory at the turn of the last century. These tensions ranged from external demands of the curriculum, the inner needs of the child, to education serving the need of social efficiency, to the emphasis on education to conserve the past or preparation for the future. Some placed emphasis on content to be taught, others on pedagogical technique, some gave priority to the social world and humanities, others to the world of nature and the sciences (Bredo, 1994). Dewey, consistent with what I have described about his approach to the New Psychology, was determined not to seek a fixed synthesis to the diversity of opposing sides. He eschewed all new dogma, which had been the bane of the old psychology. What he argued instead was to place theory within practice, rather than outside it. Activity, he believed, involved a transaction between person and environment, which changed both. Bredo (1994) uses a particularly apt metaphor of the dance, highlighting the temporal nature of organism-environment transactions in which an organism tries to get in synch with the response of its environment that it itself partly causes.

This active view sees education as a matter of learning to participate in jointly constructed social activities, where people can take the emerging and changing meaning of one another’s actions into account rather than transmitting these meanings from one head to another, which was crucial to Dewey’s conception.

Dewey’s “The Ethics of Democracy”

The “robust hope” that fuelled Dewey’s passion for democracy became a public fact early in his academic life when he took up the defense of democracy in his article “The Ethics of Democracy” (1987a) in which he responded to two recent attacks by British celebrities, Sir Henry Maine and Thomas Carlyle. It was a particularly brash move on the part of Dewey to take on Maine because of the latter’s eminence as a jurist historian basking in his authoritative, widely acclaimed legal history of the classical world, which included then-definitive thinking on the origins of democracy (Dewey, 1987, p. 183). Carlyle, a renowned man of letters, had some years earlier famously attacked American democracy, colourfully comparing belief in it to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel (Carlyle, 1867). Walt Whitman responded to that attack on democracy with characteristic flair in Democratic Vistas (1871), but such was the rhetorical persuasiveness of Carlyle that Whitman found himself almost dislodged from his mission of 145

defending and promoting American democracy. Whitman had recovered from Carlyle’s seductive argumentation with a famously powerful defence of the future of democracy for America. He took a balanced view of the current state, acknowledging the weaknesses of democracy in its present state, but also famously reinstated his confidence in American democracy having a bright future. His anchoring statement was his sentiment about his country’s democracy that “the best is yet to come.”

In his Popular Government, Maine, too, made some telling remarks on the vulnerability of democracy that Dewey realized had lethal potency. It was a hope-related issue in the sense that the masses were thought to be easily deluded and inherently non-progressive:

“Its legislation is a wild burst of destructive wantonness; an arbitrary overthrow of all existing institutions, followed by a longer period in which its principles put an end to all political activity….There can be no delusion greater than that democracy is a progressive form of government. The establishment of the masses in power is the blackest omen for all legislation founded on scientific opinion… History is a sound aristocrat.” (as cited in Dewey, 1997, p. 83)

Dewey noted that the arithmetical arguments of Maine were mechanical calculations that showed scant regard to what he considered paramount—the dignity accorded the individual voice of the citizen when democracy is considered a vehicle for direct participation in governance. Dewey was well aware that Maine’s attack was an attempt to demean the ordinary people as a viable entity for conducting polity. Their potential for sound judgment was dubious. They had dire need to rely on the upper, more formally educated classes to take enlightened control of public affairs.

Dewey’s defence of democracy was framed by his staunch belief in the rightfulness of a value system based on the sanctity of the individual, with “inalienable equality” as an American right. In “The Ethics of Democracy,” Dewey used both faith in providence and the writings of James Lowell to buttress his beliefs in democracy. Lowell was important, phrasing belief in democracy as speaking to “a sentiment, a spirit and not a form of government for the latter is an outgrowth and not its cause” (as cited in Dewey, 1997, p. 195). For Dewey, this idea becomes inordinately prominent in the essay. He repeatedly refers to democracy as an ethic in preference to a form of governance. While this defence of democracy says little about its revolutionary 146

roots, it has one capstone sentence that says volumes. In referring to the American doctrine, which is unique in this-worldly governance in “grandeur,” Dewey remarks: “true in substance, every citizen is a sovereign.” The core idea of American democracy gave to it a unique potential if not practice. The sense of that idea received some elaboration in Dewey’s second quote from Lowell, again one that was to assume major importance in the evolving Deweyan vision of a democracy befitting the American Dream. James Russell Lowell: “It is the form of society in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it,” and Dewey adds, “a chance to which no limits can be put [emphasis mine]” (Dewey, 1997). That central focus of individual potential within American democracy was one to which Dewey remained fervently devoted for the remainder of his life.

Dewey’s counterattack on Maine emanated from his ideals about being human, his reverence for the dignity and capacity of every human being who, given the right conditions, could learn to discern sensible courses of action. These beliefs included a lifelong celebration of the ordinary person that conformed with his reverence for the signal birthstones of his nation’s founding. Their hermeneutical analysis of that event caused a re-working of a conception of hope that Dewey, in collaboration with Jane Addams, would advance as a bold new way to create meaning by which democracy could become more functional for a new century. I will argue that it represented a radically important elaboration of principles inherent in the revolutionary documents.

Dewey believed that a new vision for democracy and education was given root by the Founders of the revolution. The breakaway of the 13 Colonies from the British Empire, important as that was, was matched or surpassed by the vision, especially that of Jefferson, to build a new nation based on principles of freedom and equality that had the imprimatur of the New World, a fresh and bold new nation-building agenda that would give future guidance to all of humanity. Jefferson in his personal reflections on the Founding documents described the distinctive vision to which he aspired. Dewey quotes from one as follows: “What was new and

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significant was that these ideas were now set forth as an expression of the American mind, that the American will was prepared to act upon” (Dewey, 1940).64

The notion of an ennobling democracy with ideals was critical to Dewey to transform the hope of democracy from the mechanical calculus of counting yeas and nays into the realm of the ethical responsibility for the well-being of the community. His hope was for a governance, based on the best qualities of humankind coming to the fore. That would require the barriers that were encaging or constraining much of humanity to be removed. Into his idealized democracy, he introduces fraternity along with the more familiar liberty and equality. Equality was a major pillar in Dewey’s new democracy. His addition of fraternity added a major family of related values of great significance: the ethical matrix involving caring, friendship, camaraderie, conviviality, adhesiveness, and solicitude.

Dewey’s Early Attempt to Define Hope: Bridging from Philosophy to the New Psychology

When Dewey turned towards defending democracy against Maine, he had been deeply immersed in the infant discipline of psychology. He had written several articles for the Andover Review and had established a reputation with two lead articles on psychology in Mind, the leading Anglo-American journal of philosophy. He was also at work on writing Psychology, a textbook that he published in 1887. That work joins “The Ethics of Democracy” as representing two great loves of his life, democracy and psychology. In the textbook he performs two straddles, one is to straddle the very idea of philosophy with a new science, psychology, and the other a sub-straddle that was to bring under the same roof Hegel’s absolute idealism and the empirics of psychology. The latter was thought to be a somewhat unholy mix, uniting, what to many, were irreconcilables.

For my purposes, Dewey’s book on psychology offers an early perspective on hope that is illuminatingly consistent with my Chapter 1 overview of the hope-views of Enlightenment

64 Dewey cites Jefferson multiple times, on occasion together with Lincoln. Quote above is from The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, in the introduction to Dewey’s compilation of the Document Correspondence and Memoirs of Jefferson as “Living Thoughts.” . American Library Association. 148

philosophers Spinoza, Descartes, and Hume, but is expressed in the expository language of empirics. Dewey was acutely aware, as he takes pains to say in the preface to his textbook, that he was balancing on a tightrope between philosophy, which for him was an Idealistic one, and psychology, an empirical study. He bestrides both dimensions with multiple references to the “soul,” an anachronism hardly to be found in today’s psychology textbooks, but at the same time remarkably prescient in giving “feelings” central prominence in his describing the holism of mind, thereby adumbrating the embodied mind studies of the 21st century.65

Dewey (1887) situates the topic of hope in a category that he calls “formal feeling” (p. 264). Hope involves “the putting forth of energy” in relation to a desired end and as a form of feeling it evokes either harmony, or conflict (anxiety), “either for achieving harmonious ends or perhaps conflict, which if reconciled, restores harmony” (p. 264). Hope is part of a psychic adjustment of feelings to circumstances. If successful, the feeling of hope-energy leads to the expenditure of energy which in turn leads to triumphant feelings or “exultation.” If the adjustment is, or seems to be trending towards being unsuccessful, it provokes a wide variety of feelings ranging from impotence to depression, impatience, or suspense.

Hope is “based on experience” but sponsored by a desired “end in the future.” To hope, Dewey gives enormous human scope: “All of our activities,” Dewey says, “have their end in the future.” While we draw on past experiences, hopings future-orientation includes the activities associated with that future. Dewey echoes the tension of hope previously noted by Spinoza, Descartes, and Hume. Conflicting hopes range from pleasure to anxiety. “Hoping can be thwarted by anxiety,” he says. Dewey describes the mental activity associated with hope as “stretching forward of the mind” into the future. Thus hope, he avers, is inherent in “eagerness” or expectation for “the end.” Hope thus becomes a relationship between expected ends and the action of the mind stretching forward.

65 I have in mind the works of Thomas Alexander, Mark Johnson, Megan Boler, John Kaag, and others. 149

In sum, Dewey deals with hope in a largely empirical sense, and avoids any transcendental attributions, messianic or otherwise, to religious hope.66 Hope’s importance is stressed by Dewey, since it becomes the agency of the human reach into the future, in effect the provocateur of all future activity. Hope is intrinsic to many “active feelings” that issue in pleasure and satisfaction in realization, and in its wake antimonies of frustration, anxiety, and fear are also intrinsic to failed hope.

Dewey (1887) expatiates on the process of the act of striving as hope. He points to an active hope that involves the agent “going forth to meet the future” rather than passively awaiting the outcome of “the expected event” (p. 273). Such pro-activity generates for Dewey feeling descriptors “of pressure, of effort, and of striving” (p. 273). Intentionality to finish, he calls the activity of “seeking.” If the seeking is intense, it is yearning. Hope in Dewey’s brief description allies to human action, to the human desire to plot the future. He sees agency, purpose, and goal- setting as hope’s good sides, but deftly balances the successful venture ensuing from the act of hoping with the contrasting hazards and “disappointments” of unfulfilled hopes. “In every activity (like hoping) the self finds itself either hindered or furthered, either repressed or developed, and in every activity there is accordingly pleasure or pain” (p. 274).

The hope elements presented at this very early stage of Dewey’s scholarship forecast important elements of hope that will resurface in his analyses of the thinking processes attendant to pedagogy and democracy. This might be summarized as hope’s temporal nature, its proclivity to agential action, the tension framed within the act of hoping as an inherency of the act of striving.

Dewey as Freedom Fighter

Freedom was of primary importance to Dewey—he thought of freedom as both personal and collective. It informed his political stance regarding democracy. It informed his concern regarding the nature of education. Freedom for Deweyan pedagogy meant emancipating

66 Within little more than a decade, Dewey would have totally rejected the transcendental presence of his earlier idealism, replacing it with a naturalistic approach to philosophy; that view was contained within the new of pragmatism. 150

children from the dogma and drudgery of non-engaging activities masquerading as learning. He saw much of current schooling as mindless. We know his hostility to forms of governance that were not free—he called them feudal, and it included the class system, aristocracies, and tyrannies. It also included bureaucracies in many shapes and forms that came under suspicion for using power to destroy human autonomy (Dewey, 1919, p. 77).

Freedom, then, had an ethical primacy for Dewey. We have seen in “The Ethics of Democracy” his interpretation of democracy as a form of sovereignty of the individual. That constituted hope for individual fulfillment. “[E]very citizen is a sovereign” (Dewey, 1997a, p. 192). Hope was on a different plane in this early work. The latter was an eschatological hope that is a part of a divine ethos. “Christian theory [embraces] the kingdom of God, the church, and the state, the divine and the human organization of society. [They] are one” (p. 204).

Dewey, before long, ceased believing in the divine as the ultimate source of hope, the one informing his “The Ethics of Democracy.” But that did not lessen his devotion to the idealization of sovereignty one iota, and it may well have strengthened it. For Dewey, the sea-change of his philosophy revealed vast new possibilities for human intervention in bringing about change in his country, with broader implication for the world. He was convinced that the form of government that would best enable such democracy was the one that inspired the revolutionists, and that was consummated with the ideals for democracy in the Declaration of Independence and, to a lesser extent in, the Constitution. Democracy, “for, by, and of” the people remained steadfast as a purely this-worldly emphasis—the shining example of Deweyan meta-ethics. It remained for Dewey, as it had been articulated by Jane Addams (1997), “our most precious possession” (p. 273). That Creedal articulation had taken on the patina of a distinctive form of freedom representing an ideal that had become at least one, if not the central, bright-line of the American Hope Dream. In this section I delve more deeply into the fundamental tension that was building apace between the mechanistic intellectual heirs of Isaac Newton and the organic naturalism of Charles Darwin.

Dewey viewed historiography as an important way to understand our thinking processes around hope, democracy, and education. He felt that reaching back to the Enlightenment was an instructive way of illustrating good and bad ideologies that affected the human condition. 151

Freedom or lack of it was a key criterion to be observed. So too, was the Enlightenment per se, some of which he greatly admired. For example, he pointed to scientific discoveries that he believed had been of particular benefit in marshalling new ways of thinking about the universe brought about by the Copernican revolution. He lauded Francis Bacon for his attempt to bring empiricism to thought, seeing that contribution as being of great service to the human estate, as he was wont to call society (Dewey, 1920/1988, p. 19). He had a caveat, however, about discovery—that it be carried out with the manifest interests of improving the well-being of the citizenry. As much as he admired the inventive mind of Newton and colleagues and his discoveries, “the gates of the garden of life were barred to the new ideas; and only through [Darwin] was there access to mind and life” (Darwin, 1998c, p. 41).

Julien Offray de la Mettrie, French physician and philosopher, had written an influential book in 1747 that made a startling analogy. He compared the human mind to a machine (La homme machine) which pointed to all animal minds following “laws” similar to those governing machines. It was an interesting metaphor, but it was also dangerous, since it deprived humans of the freedom of thought and action.

Richard Posner sounded the kind of knell that had deeply infiltrated the 17th and 18th centuries. It was the broadening influence of the mechanistic interpretation of the physical universe to other domains, most notably, to the model of the human mind. As Posner (1997) notes:

Most thinking people [were persuaded] that the physical universe had a uniform structure, accessible to human reason, and it began to seem that human nature and human social systems might have similar mechanical structure. The emerging world view cast humankind in an observing mould. Through perception, measurement, and mathematics the human mind would uncover the secrets of nature—including the mind as part of nature and the laws of social interactions (pp. 428-429).

Posner went on to consider comparing the mind to a camera in its mechanical lawful function-- recording activities both natural and alike and determined by natural laws. Otherwise often called a “clockwork world,” the mechanical nature of the universe was enormously influential within

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philosophy, becoming a common background of thinkers as diverse as Leibnitz, Bentham, and Kant (Sleeper, 1988, p. 130). Noted Pragmatist Ralph Sleeper identifies the properties that the world was now thought to be reducible to: “The world was the product of solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles” (p. 130). As Posner (1997) noted, even political organizations were not immune to this way of thinking. He notes that Rousseau’s of the social contract represents an attempt to structure just such an argument from design originating in the Newtonian manner (p. 428). His position is contentious, since Rousseau adopted nature as a model and shifted to organic nature rather than to Newtonian physics.

Dewey voiced strong concern with the fixed laws and fixed ends that were the inheritance of Newton if misapplied. His was not an attack on Newtonian physics, of course, but on the applicability of its lawful thinking to mind. The mind was neither “servile” nor “administered.” “A pragmatic intelligence was a creative intelligence not a routine mechanic” (Dewey, 1997b, p. 67). “The pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the function of mind ...is not the use of thought to accomplish purposes already given... in the mechanism of the mind... Only by ignoring its primary function [forward looking] does it become a means already given” (p. 67).

The divide between the mechanical mind and individual freedom was to haunt Dewey for much of his life. In the next section I explore the grounds for his deep opposition for what he termed “repressive and mechanized efforts” within society. Admittedly he saw benefits to mechanization insofar as it helped society to be more mobile. Mechanization could be a liberating force for efficiency for industry with spinoff for human liberation, for example, the mobility offered by cars (Dewey, 1928, p. 321). But the drive for mechanization into the realm of psychology was catastrophic for the kind of freedom of the individual that Dewey had firmly in mind.

A Darwinian Centre to the Hope of John Dewey

The great liberator for Dewey was Darwin. In lauding the revolutionary significance of The Origin of Species, Dewey stressed what he regarded as its long-overdue shattering of Western orthodoxies. Dewey was enthralled by a world that he personally found transformed from his previous understanding. He firmly believed that Darwin had introduced a mode of thinking that

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in the end “was bound to transform the logic of knowledge and hence the treatment of morals, politics and religion” (Dewey, 1998b, p. 39).

Darwin was also to have a shattering effect on Dewey personally, opening his eyes to the “new intellectual temper.” He now believed the Darwinian organic metaphor should augur a radically transformed philosophy of education. Previously, as I have discussed in this chapter, Dewey had voiced grave concern over the denigration of the individual in the way democracy was being viewed. In a word, democracy was being interpreted through a quantitative lens rather than being seen as the product of qualitative thinking. Darwin had pointed to a worldview that gave grounding to matters of human learning, thought of as being organic and not mechanical in nature. That view epitomized Dewey’s passion for honoring the capacity of the individual person to grow as an active experiencer of and contributor to democracy. Such an activist role he was now envisaging for education. By the turn of the century, Dewey was embracing Darwinism wholeheartedly and working on theories that not only would give fuller liberation to democracy but would interblend the natural over-lappings of education and democracy (Dewey, 1998b, pp. 39-45). Dewey was now seeing himself as both “prophet and partisan” in full embrace of Darwin, not so in all interpretations of Darwin, by any means, but in his own interpretation of the liberating features that he perceived his evolutionary theory represented for humankind (pp. 39-45).67

Dewey had strong convictions on the freedom of thinking now ushered in by Darwin. A little less than two centuries of being held “hostage” were now being overturned from a worldview dominant since the 17th century. He was no longer looking through ancient eyes, as he put it, nor was he feeling captive to orthodoxies. He was turning to experiencing life of “intercourse of a living being with its physical and social environment” (Dewey, 1998b, pp. 39-45). Now he was planning on “using experience as a springboard.” Dewey saw like-minded philosophers “able to jump out to a world of stable things, and other selves...free from the restrictions imposed by past doctrines” (Dewey, 1997b, p. 66).

67 However, Spencer (YEAR) argues that Darwinian survival of the fittest was anathema to Dewey when thought of in human terms. (Garrison, Podeschi, & Bredo, 2002 (p. 38). 154

This elixir of new hope was, of course, tempered by his realization that a Darwinian world was a world in flux, no longer deemed a safe, eschatologically speaking, refuge. It was a world which experienced suffering and passion, where the trials and tests of ourselves no longer enjoyed the supports of the past. We “live forward” in a world “whose issues meant weal or woe,” where our living forward is “fraught with promise or charged with hostile energies… [W]hat should experience be but a future implicated in a present!” (Dewey, 1997b, p. 49).

Dewey embraced with enthusiasm the dynamic, the inventive, and the reconstructive prospects of the new post-Darwin vista. To him, “the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinction and relations [is] to convert the elements of the original into a unified whole” (Dewey, 1938). As such, it provided unfettered, contingent hope. Rather than the “static, cross-sectoral, non-temporal relation of subject to objects, the pragmatic hypothesis substitutes apprehension of a thing in terms of the results of other things…” (Dewey, 1997b, p. 67). The function of mind is “to project new and more complex ends—to free experience from routine and from caprice (ibid p. 67).

How did Darwin figure in Dewey’s work as a symbol of hope? An emancipative doctrine in terms of eschewing “fundamentals”? It gave Dewey a way forward based on agential activist hope for its effect. Individuals were unique within each species. Hope was for evolving species rather than immutability. Being was an emergent becoming within an historical and contingent life process.68

The doctrine of intelligence, which for Dewey was a socialized intelligence, develops within the sphere of action for the sake of possibilities not yet given. It is the opposite of a doctrine of mechanical determinism. Intelligence, Dewey claimed, is inherently forward-looking, only by ignoring its primary function does it become a mere method for an already given (Dewey, 1997b, p. 67). Action restricted to given and fixed ends may attain great technical efficiency, but efficiency is the only quality to which it lays claim. Such action is mechanical and loses the other qualities on might value—like kindness, humanity, acceptance, patience, and so on. A key set of

68This list is my paraphrase of Eric Bredo’s analysis of Darwinian doctrine insofar as it influenced William James (Ibid. p. 9). 155

new liberating values is attributed to the new Darwin-inspired philosophy of Dewey. He extols the liberalization of intelligence as not only being the provenance of the elite or a “capitalistic possession of a few learned specialists whether men of science or philosophy.” In Logic: The Theory of In Inquiry (1938), Dewey turns to the challenge of democracy to maintain sufficient integrity within the public sphere in the face of proliferating forms of social control. The targets of his day comprised arguments by intellectual elites for taking control of society in lieu of democratic processes of decision-making. In that and the omnipresent threat of the mechanization of society, Dewey mounted spirited rebuttals. His countervails appear to presage wider concerns, however, such as concerns with burgeoning communications that could and have become challenges to the health of American democracy.69 Society “only continues to exist...in communication,” he said in 1916 (Dewey, 1917), foreshadowing the incredible advances and pitfalls inherent in achieving common understanding through communication that was in store for the 20th century.

The concerns of protecting the long-standing values that I have pointed to in this thesis emerge clearly in Dewey’s attempts to promote disjunction of mind from manipulation, and his awareness of how the recognition of principles of freedom and human justice can readily be subject to subversion. Dewey frequently calls upon “the core of decency” not so named but highlighted in most everything he wrote on American values and its democracy. His paean for the Darwinian vision as foundational underlines his commitment to the openness and freedom of mind in the face of the forces that would usurp, manipulate, and distort values oriented to historic ideals. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (1945) famously noted in 1944 the effect of the Enlightenment on the “heroic desire for the emancipation of human nature” (p. 499). The shortcomings of the U.S. were not overlooked by Myrdal as he advised Americans regarding the social problems of the day. But the devotion to high ideals was what he felt was the quintessence of the American Dream: “They believe in their own ability and in progress....at bottom they are

69There are clamorous resonances with Dewey today, as inflected by the title and content of a recent opinion piece in The New York Times by Paul Krugman, “Fall of the American Empire” (June 18, 2018), in which he writes: “Trump isn’t making America great again; he’s trashing the things that made us great, turning us into just another bully...” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/opinion/immigration-trump- children-american-empire.html 156

moral optimists...” (p. 509). It was the efflorescence of these ideals that Dewey was drawing from Darwinian tutelage, the “the emancipation of human nature” that he so prized in a Darwinian vision. Contextualizing Darwin within the American Dream of democracy, he believed, was giving it tremendous release for constructive action in his time.

Dewey in a series of like-minded works evinces extraordinarily prescient sensitivity to the vulnerability of democracy. He stresses the crucial importance of protecting the public sphere. He traces the core threads of free and robust communication, and strongly advocates developing socialized intelligence through public schooling. In his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, he once again returns to Darwinism, now re-rubricizing it in a chapter entitled “The Existential Matrix of Inquiry, Biological.” Again, his concern is with strengthening the public sphere, protecting it from the hegemonies of his day, dubbed Taylorism and Fordism. Eminently successful assembly lines were reverberating in cultural ways that were giving the machine age not only great prosperity but cognitive influence over the way social change was managed.

Dewey revelled in the possibilities of action within the new emancipative agenda. He felt human intelligence, which was future-oriented, could at last full-throatedly embrace “as-yet- unrealized possibilities” (Dewey, 1997b, p. 67). The new liberatory approach reflected the freedom of pragmatism. It had its risks; the liberated life was a mix of “doing and suffering,” but individuals were completely free in a breakthrough sense for Dewey, free to dream, and free to try to realize their dreams, unencumbered by an imperious past.

In sum, Dewey was concerned with constraint and compulsion that he viewed as endemic to traditional philosophy. He wished, à la Wittgenstein, to liberate us from the metaphors and pictures that were holding us captive. He was conscious of distancing himself from the ideas that were once liberating to him, such as those I earlier discussed in his defence of democracy in his essay “The Ethics of Democracy” (1997a), ideas of supervention which he now viewed as intellectual straitjackets. The new threat of behaviourism was now becoming a mal-practicing model of mind that he needed to confront. Behaviourism had become a formidable regime, with a natural alliance to the economy, colluding with its cultish efficiencies. Darwinism was indeed a pivotal influence on Dewey, an influence that had a life-long impact. But biological evolution, with its hospitality towards the open and creative mind, was not the only influence of 157

importance. Darwin had supplanted divinity for pragmatism, a sea-change for Dewey with which he was feeling his way forward. In this regard his fellow pragmatists, most notably William James and his contemporary George Mead, offered support. There were other philosophers who would influence Dewey during the Progressive Era. Dewey had a fascination with the works of the mystical Maurice Maeterlinck, who gave new meaning to equality and who provided a new moral outlook on the ordinary person, whose role in life he was particularly gifted in depicting in theatre and novel. As the new century dawned, Dewey became familiar with the philosophical work of Henri Bergson. All of the above-noted were helpful in shaping the metamorphic philosophical development of Dewey’s post-Hegelian thought.

A figure of surpassing importance as a contemporary influencer of Dewey, however, was Jane Addams. Not only did she share his devotion to democracy, but she brought fresh perspective to its re-imagining. That these new insights had found grounding in the practices of Hull House, the product of her experiment in supporting new immigrants, lent critical credibility to her advice and guidance. Democracy was being reformed in praxis at Hull House (as fully discussed in Chapter 4).

Progressives’ Clashing Hopes: Dewey verses Thorndike, Humanism versus Behaviourism

Pragmatism is sometimes criticized for its ruthlessness in sweeping away traditional philosophies, or what pragmatists regarded as useless structures of bad abstractions. To its critics, pragmatism indulged in “a , cum aestheticism that verges on ” (Posner, p.xii, 1997 p. xii). Deweyan pragmatism indeed had an emancipatory agenda; however, as I have been arguing, it also had a liberating side that had major ambitions for democracy and public education. It had a distinct emphasis on “life,” which as Eric Bredo argues, gave away of looking at human beings that was natural, but did not deny a place for “spirited” action. The Darwinian account was able to integrate individuality and commonality, as well as change and necessity, within a single perspective. Its emphasis on life gave a way of looking at human beings that was natural but did not deny a place for spirited action (Bredo, 2002, p. 10).

From varying contemporary perspectives, Richard Posner, Eric Bredo, and Ralph Sleeper have all entered the theme of “spirited action” by contrasting what philosopher Richard

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Bernstein was to call, in 1988, “the pragmatic turn” (which was the title of his 2010 publication). A common starting point for pragmatism was to see in the Newtonian physics of the 17th and 18th centuries the spread of the influence of a mechanistic interpretation of the universe to other domains, most notably, the human “mind.” A noted lawyer and philosopher, Posner (1997) notes:

Most thinking people were persuaded that the physical universe had a uniform structure, accessible to human reason, and it began to seem that human nature and human social systems might have similar mechanical structure. The emerging world view cast humankind in an observing mold. Through perception, measurement, and mathematics the human mind would uncover the secrets of nature—including the mind as part of nature and the laws [emphasis mine] of social interactions. (p. 412)

In this model of mind, promoted historically by the likes of 18th-century physician cum philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the mind was a machine. Posner (1997) notes the comparison of the mind with a camera—recording activities both natural and mental as determined by natural laws. La Mettrie was to famously declare that the mind would come to be viewed as strongly analogous to the human mind. Otherwise, often reflecting a “clockwork world,” the mechanical conception of the universe was enormously influential within philosophy, becoming a common background of thinkers as diverse as Leibnitz, Bentham, and Kant (Sleeper, 1988). Even political organizations were not immune to this way of thinking. As Posner notes (1997),“Rousseau’s political philosophy of the social contract’ represents just such an attempt” to structure such an argument from design originating in the Newtonian manner”. Eric Bredo has more recently emphasized the reach and tenacity of the model of Newtonian physics in its influence over education. As he conceives of it, a mechanistic approach can be characterized as one in which “the boundaries of its parts are fixed” and “the system being considered operates according to fixed laws” Garrison, Podescu and Bredo , 2002, p. 2).

Bredo also characterizes the “modern” age as in many ways defined by a mechanistic way of thinking. As he puts it, “by this definition, is basically the same as mechanism” (Bredo, 1997, p. 3). He adds that for some social sciences, the equation of modernism with

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mechanism “seems to align with this conception pretty well.” He points out that as modernist theories became more sophisticated, that “deeper rules or laws were sought.”

Dewey had studied the “then new” science of psychology and helped to form it. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association before migrating into philosophy and education philosophy. He was wary of the orientation of psychology into stimulus-response conditioning, and the implications it was inferring first for animal and increasingly for human behaviour. The behaviourism turn in the reductive mechanistic sense was the opposite of what Dewey felt was needed by an already claustrophobic school environs. By the turn of the century, he was deeply concerned about the mechanistic model of the mind developing much along the lines that La Mettrie, and later Comte, had promoted, and he went on the attack. This was not an easy step for Dewey, since Edward Thorndike, his colleague and friend during his psychological studies and a fellow academic now at Columbia, was a formidable leader in the behaviorist movement. As the historian Ellen Lagemann famously points out, both Dewey and Thorndike thought of themselves in the “progressive idiom” (Lagemann, 2000).

Dewey’s hostility to applying what Thorndike and associates were doing did not preclude his interest and respect in some of the statistical methods nor their scientific orientation, which he shared. The schema that Thorndike was to advance could hardly have been more unlike Dewey’s. Thorndike saw educational science “as a storehouse of objective knowledge” produced by experts in laboratories and controlled research projects. He had developed a mechanistic approach that stressed the need to conform behaviour to fixed standards of truth and goodness and inherited powers. Thorndike’s book Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies (1911) advanced a model that posited explaining all aspects of learning, including the imitative and reasoning abilities of humans. Learning was simply connecting stimulus and response. Purposes were as mechanical in their nature as anything else. The legacy of this kind of thinking is well known. It had tremendous influence on the setting up of educational programs on the basis of influence that was created by the many disciples of Thorndike at Columbia, who were creating fiefdoms operating under the same dubious principles of learning.

Dewey saw behaviourism as disastrously regressive for education given its suzerainty over the schooling enterprise, not only because of its basic assumptions concerning pedagogy, but 160

because of the metastasizing collateral affects it was having on the entire educational enterprise: curriculum, materials for learning, physical layout of classrooms, and schools administration—in short, the mechanization of the entire habitus of schooling. Several socio-economic causes were propitious for the growth of behaviourism–onrushing immigration, a manufacturing boom with its hunger for assembly-line workers, the migration into cities—all of which were conducive to elevating “efficiency” to a new level of social importance in dealing with the massification of education.

Scientific management had growing prestige as the answer to promote efficiency, and its salvific mantra, aided by the manufacturing sector and political allies, became louder and louder as the Progressive Era turned into the new century. Dewey was, of course, alarmed. Everything that his research of what children needed for their well-being, their healthy development, was foreign to behaviourism. Thorndike was becoming the maestro of such curricula, which included drill sheets and other mechanical tools for teaching. In stark contrast, Dewey’s lab school in Chicago put great pressure on personalizing instruction for children, for in-depth understanding of where children were on a given topic, and improvising curricula to encourage explorative learning with communal and collaborative inquiries. The pupil–teacher ratio was very low, and the students came largely from academically privileged backgrounds. When Lagemann (2000) was to survey the situation, retrospectively, 100 years later, she famously announced that Thorndike won while Dewey lost. Others would rationalize the defeat by saying Dewey won, but on a different plane. Dewey’s theories drew much study and praise (along with criticism).What Lagemann and others have referenced is the influence, usually injuriously imputed to Thorndike’s impoverished view of what schooling should be, and the excessive and in some cases manic adoption of standardized testing at the expense of a nurturing, well-rounded program for children. Private schools world-wide, and progressive public systems had many features of Deweyism built into their curriculum.

In education, the appeal for Thorndike’s approach was aided and abetted by the explosive growth of the need for urban schooling, which, in the hand of like-minded school system planners fore-grounded cost efficiencies and job preparation as high priorities in order to achieve a modern, efficiently ordered state. As Tomlinson (1997) puts it:

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The familiar regime of behavioural objectives, drill, intelligence testing, achievement scales, tracking and vocational training are direct legacy of this mechanical model of mind and society… More than any other person, it was Thorndike who…shaped the curriculum, pedagogy, and organizational structure of the American school as well as the basic aims and methods of human nature of university-based inquiry. Indeed, broadly speaking, it is Thorndike's conception of human nature and the social good, rather than Dewey’s that permeates this century's mainstream literature and continues to generate what Henry Giroux has called “a culture of positivism” within American educational thought and practice (p. 366).

Little wonder that Dewey was appalled at what he saw happening within the education bailiwick, and the dashed hopes of those teachers and other educational professionals who were keen to pursue the Deweyan model of pedagogy that he was writing about.70 Dewey was no doubt shattered to have his friend and fellow advocate of science turn in such an authoritarian and unprogressive direction, one that degraded the role of teacher and objectified humans to be manipulated for external economic and political goals. Much turned on their differing conceptualizations of habit. For Thorndike, it was habits all the way down. Human behaviour consisted of chains of stimulus-response associations as described in his influential book, Human Nature and the Social Order (1940). Dewey’s concept of “habit” was infinitely more nuanced, habit being but one component of a large assembly line, comprising human conduct. Dewey’s watchword was inquiry, which is inherently contingent, tentative, and subject to reanalysis and further questioning. A sadness it is surely that Dewey left the active field of teaching and research when guidance was most needed to steer the education ship out of the shoals of behaviourism. While Dewey continued to theorize about education, his work broadened to include many realms of social reform, reconstruction, and particularly to a robust defense of his and Jane Addams’s theory of democracy, admittedly badly in need of bolstering.

70 Tomlinson (1997) notes that Thorndike had a “lock” on hundreds of acolyte students at Columbia who carried his philosophy into the rapidly expanding field of education to put into practice his doctrines and use his vastly expanding arsenal of educational materials. 162

New Hope for Democracy

The concept of hope has been a staple of the Judeo-Christian tradition, thus it was unsurprising that pragmatist naturalist philosophers largely stayed away from use of the concept. Ironically, I would argue that secular hope was tight with pragmatists of the Deweyan variety, Words like human dignity, freedom, and equality appear in Dewey’s eulogistic discussion of Darwinism’s vision and represented hope for its emancipative prospects. Hope and utopic daydreams have a long-standing kinship, significantly nourished by Ernst Bloch and his followers. The nexus of values of Deweyan hope are ideals that could be heard emanating from contextualized pulpits around the .

The buoyancy of Dewey detailing his dream of how a pragmatic naturalism could work to fulfill the American Dream has many similarities with Martin Luther King Jr. King, of course, was not a prophetic pragmatist. But as Cornel West (1995) points out, love, courage, and discipline are plentiful topics in his speeches. He spoke to moral renewal, and “admonished the country to be true to the founding ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy” (p.415). Dewey would have heartily concurred with West’s closing remark drawn from prophetic pragmatism (i.e., that of West). Prophetic pragmatism invites all peoples of goodwill both here and abroad to fight for an Emersonian culture of creative democracy in which the plight of the people of the earth is alleviated (p.416).

In Jane Addams, Dewey realized he had a courageous and inspirational comrade in the quest for re-imagining democracy. Jane Addams had not only been thinking along similar lines, but had been experimenting with a vastly liberating democratic praxis at Hull House. Her first step had been to insist that class distinction be dropped by her team of volunteers. Equality was to prevail. All manner of collateral democratic practices followed that promoted voice and many other forms of participation for women and men who had migrated to Chicago from Europe (details are more fully discussed in Chapters 4 and 6). Such freedom of speech, assembly, and political activism was a largely alien experience. At Hull House, “direct democracy” quickly became the norm as Addams encouraged the newcomers to actively assist her in her civic campaign for better living conditions for downtrodden neighborhoods. Dewey, upon arrival as department chair of philosophy at the University of Chicago, had become a frequenter of Hull

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House as lecturer, advisor, and intellectual companion. Biographers have noted Addams’s influence, especially in re-imagining the phenomenon of democracy (Siegfried, 2002, p. xi). Both Dewey and Addams had a deep respect for science and for the empirical evidence that sustains science. But it was not unrestricted respect for the empirical approach. Addams did not want to turn her institution into a pilot study by and for social scientists. She believed it would impinge on the trust and comfort of her clientele (Addams, 1997, p. 275). Dewey (1997b) had another deep-dyed concern about empiricism and its relation to pragmatic freedom:

Anticipation is…more primary than recollection: projection than summoning of the past. Given a world like that in which we live…imaginative recovery of the bygone is indispensable to successful invasion of the future…but to isolate the past, dwelling upon it for its own sake and giving the eulogistic name of knowledge, is to substitute reminiscence of old-age for effective intelligence… Historic empiricism has been empirical in a technical and controversial sense (p. 50).

Dewey is not discarding past knowledge, or retrospective contribution as a practical strategy, a trait of pragmatic intelligence. He is wary of that experience which “in practice has served ideas forced into experience, not gathered from it” (Dewey, 1997b, p. 50)

Dewey’s deep concern that apparently prompted him to write the “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” is his self-declared “passion” that is direly needed for the “imaginative forecast of the future.” But clearly his purpose is to edify “day-dreaming and castle-building,” “noting that the aesthetic realization of what is not practically achieved are offshoots [emphasis mine] of the practical trait… The movement of the agent-patient to meet the future is partial and passionate” (Dewey, 1997b, p. 50).

Dewey (1997b) is here expressing his passion for “genuine projection of the novel, deliberate variation and invention,” together with “the value of inventive construction.” Dewey is leery of the given in philosophy. This is in striking contrast to the “already completely given” in experience or “the adding or subtracting of the given…the experience given by traditional empiricism” (p. 53).

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The main thrust of Dewey and Addams was to import full-throated relationality into democracy. For Addams, as discussed in Chapter 4, democracy was deemed by her to be fully compatible with social justice. Her institution was all about the caring of one another, and offering sympathy and camaraderie to the Other. It was closely interwoven with empowering individuals—ways of broadening outlook, understanding the importance of honoring plurality and learning from others, putting oneself in the place of another. The ethical overlay of her settlement house was democratic in action.

Dewey, from his early scholarship on democracy, had expressed conviction that democracy was critical to the enrichment of human development. As American society underwent explosive growth, he realized community life, such as he had experienced it in Vermont, was being replaced by urban mobility. Relationship being a key factor in the “new” democracy, he envisioned networking and workplace community as other forms of behaviour. For many reasons school was critical in fostering democracy—active engagement, participating in collaborative inquiries and deliberations, habits of collegiality with peoples of other backgrounds and cultural differences, and throughout schooling the application of socialized intelligence applied to problem-solving and further experience “growing in ordered richness” (Dewey, 1998a, p. 343).

Pragmatic democracy by definition was experimental, revisable, and assumed adaptive change to evolving conditions. It was social, embracing a conviviality that betokened brotherhood. From the French revolutionists, Dewey had smuggled in the notion of fraternity in his threefold descriptor of democracy as liberty, equality, and fraternity, Americanizing those ideals (Dewey, 1927. The concepts had coursed through his lifetime from philosophers and writers he admired, most notably Whitman’s use of adhesiveness in fraternal relationships, and also from “association” that was prominent in Giuseppe Mazzini’s vocabulary to describe the ideal democracy. Democracy was the hope of the revolutionaries of the world, and solidarity in the fraternal sense was a key element.

It was Deweyan democracy that excited Richard Rorty about Dewey’s philosophy, and led to a ranking of 20th-century philosophers that placed Dewey on top. The Dewey passion for democracy motivated Rorty to recommend substituting hope for knowledge. For Rorty (1999),

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Dewey qualified pre-eminently to become America’s philosopher of democracy, a title that Dewey had bestowed on Emerson (p. 120).

Hope was of great significance to Dewey, when it is framed as being “criterionless.” In fact, Dewey’s was a very qualified hope, but it was pragmatically arrived at through processes that I have been analyzing. Rorty is right that Dewey leans heavily on a hope, as growth and hope as freedom equations, given the intricate notions of growth and freedom that Dewey exposits through his canon. The flourishing and untrammelled growth of the individual in both settings of democracy and education are supremely important to Dewey as are the “propitious conditions” that lead to growth. In Achieving Our Country (1998), Rorty links Whitman’s hope to Dewey’s hope. Again, he strips Deweyan hope to make the point that the heart of Dewey’s hope was for “a decent and civilized society” (p. 106). That is as undeniable as it is laudatory, but it drastically abstracts myriad ways and means that Dewey pragmatically moved towards realizing hope, many of which I have been discussing. All of Rorty’s grand statements about hope beg the contextualization of Deweyan hope with respect to both democracy and public education.

In his recent book The Soul of America¸ Jon Meacham gives historical evidence of the abundant American imagination for a world of goodwill and harmony that America came to symbolize for much of the world. America did enjoy being renowned as the land of milk and honey, but it was also a land of freedom, spirit, and with such soul-like attributes that were closely allied with its distinctive democracy. It used to be a land of hope, Meacham contends, but as a historian he keeps clear of the pervasive despair that clouds the present political climate concerning democracy (see Wilentz, 2018).

Pedagogically, Dewey, undoubtedly in concert with Addams, created meaningful reciprocities and overlaps with educational values. The re-imagined and re-contextualized democracy bodes interestingly for eventual rehabilitation of public schools. The crossover of values of democracy and schooling, I would argue, is strikingly promising for the authentic reform of public education. At this point in time, such thinking would seem utopic, more in line with the hope of Whitman for democracy (and, I would add, public education) being great words, “whose history...remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”

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Chapter 6: The Bright-line of the American Hope Dream and the Need for Critical Thinking

In this chapter, I continue to trace the historical course of a bright-line of hope. I show in Chapter 6 how the bright-line spotlights critical thinking as a feature of American history with special implication for the American Hope Dream. The of critical thinking is commonly identified with the Frankfurt School of , founded in Germany in 1923. My claim is that the school’s approach to critical thinking (careful analysis followed by constructive social action) was compellingly, if informally, prototyped within American history, first with Lincoln’s pattern of thought that led to ending slavery in a desperate attempt to hold his country together in 1862.71 The abyss created by slavery on the one side, and the emancipative ideal of the Declaration of Independence on the other, was steadily widening. New fractures were forming apace with the America of Lincoln’s day. I examine the fraught tensions within the political sphere, the clashing politico-moral ideals and values that were involved, and the strategic conundrums within which Lincoln became enmeshed. I examine the critical decisions that he eventually made

I then examine prototype two, the decades-later critical thinking by the team of John Dewey and Jane Addams in response to what they perceived as a flagrantly “out of touch” democracy. In chapters 4 and 5, I began to explore how Jane Addams and John Dewey attempted to set the agenda for philosophy as a problem-solving and reconstructive inquiry. Addams charted her reform career on perplexities, her term for needed ruptures with conventional attitudes, beliefs, and practices to provide fresh resolution for social injustices.72 Both Addams and Dewey sought to re-imagine American democracy in ways that would radically enhance and sustain democracy

71 There are sharply different perspectives regarding the motivation of Lincoln for ending slavery. See, for example, Eric Foner (2010), Kenneth Deutsch (2005), Garry Wills (2006), Ta-Nehisi Coates (2012), and “Allen Guelzo (1999).

72 Charlene Haddock Seigfried offers a full explicative account of “perplexity’ in her introduction to Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics (2002). 167

in the 20th century. In so doing they connected the social-relational aspect of democracy to education.

Foreshadowing Foucault: The Limits of Thought and Unlimited Critical Hope

In this chapter I also point out the ways in which these thinkers’ approaches to critical hope reveal a resonance with aspects of Foucauldian thought (Garrison, 1998b; Koopman, 2011; Rorty, 1981). Recently, critical theory has linked the names Habermas and Foucault, bypassing the fact that Habermas has derided Foucault genealogy in a thesis that sees commonality of elements with their approach to critical theory. There is a common Kantian foundation to both, claims pragmatist scholar Colin Koopman in his most recent writing, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (2013). Koopman distinguishes the ultimate transcendental plane of Kantian discourse in Genealogy as Critique from the purely historical, secular plane of Foucault, but argues that both were tracing the limits of thought (p. 15). Thought, Foucault noted in an interview with Rabinow, is a way of looking at problematization: “[T]hought allows us to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions and its goals” (Foucault, 1984, p. 388).

Dewey (1917) saw problematizing inquiry as “an organ of analysis of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, of making known the forces which have woven the pattern” (as cited in Garrison, 1998b, p. 254). Pragmatist Koopman sees the progressive pragmatism of Dewey as forerunning the more in-depth genealogical work of Foucault, but having dynamic value in constructing solutions that was not the primary concern of Foucault. Garrison, recognizing that Dewey stresses the sociality of the individual as forming “a fuller and broader self than one that is cultivated in isolation, also believed that Foucault had a strong productive side, that exceeded the mere ‘power over’ perspective” (Stefan Neubert, as cited in Garrison, 1998a, p. 231). To Garrison (1998b), it was through Foucault’s creation of one’s own space for discursive formations that self-creation lay. Koopman would take the notion of problematizing further into genealogy, attuning that phenomenon more to Foucault. His philosophy, Koopman argues, was more deeply analytical of the practices of the given periods that interested him. He was unlike Nietzsche, about whom Koopman notes:

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The point of genealogy problematization for Foucault…was to use history to denounce or vindicate some of our most central modern practices.The point was rather to use history to show the way in which certain practices have structured some of the core problematics that a given period of thought, most notably our own modernity, must face. (Koopman, 2009, p. 217)

For Koopman (2009), Nietzsche was using critique just “to clear the board” (p. 217). Foucault, according to Koopman, saw genealogy as helping us “articulate certain problems on the board, of which we were not formally aware,” that they might be addressed (p. 217). His genealogy was concerned with the “long and slow processes of emergence and descent: of problems, not their origin” (p. 217). Famously, Foucault’s quest was the opening up of problems, making them available for critique. Unlike Dewey and the pragmatic school of thought, Foucault was not on a definitive march towards solutions. Koopman’s Pragmatism and Transition (2009), and his later book on Foucault (2013), seeks a pragmatic and Foucauldian coalescence of methodology, a genealogical pragmatism, as it were.

In his first work on Foucault, Koopman (2009) would add the inquiry approach of early pragmatists and the contemporary canon of Habermas to form a triad of the methodological approaches to problematization. That analysis of Foucault had a pragmatic emphasis on arriving at the solution to a problem through inquiry. In contrast, the Foucault analysis of the problematic was “patient and intense,” with diagnosis overshadowing any attempt at solution. Like Foucault, pragmatists saw the importance of looking backward into history, but they were also vitally interested in looking forward into the future, with reconstruction and meliorism in mind (Auxier, 2002). This will be illustrated in my discussion of Addams and Dewey.

This chapter central focus is on the shared conceptualizations and understandings of the relationship of hope to crisis. My argument in this chapter, however, is less focused on a particular historical lineage and more focused on how similar or shared conceptions function inter-relationally to create a new imaginary for democracy. In the case of Lincoln, for example, he was progressively seeing slavery as threatening the very existence of the country. One concept that was clearly of great concern to him was the fragility of democracy during the time of the Civil War. The mid-war Gettysburg Address famously focused on that and two other

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concepts, claims Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo (2013), making the case that Lincoln’s use of language was of crucial importance. He first cites Lincoln’s reference to the nation being sorely tested by the Gettysburg Battle, the survivability of the nation being at risk. Lincoln then uses the trope of what brought distinction to the American government: “of, by and for” the people. That was the hope for democracy’s survival. Another hope was that the terrible loss of life had not been given in vain. It was the notion of redemptive hope, which was symbolized by the spirit of the slain who had sacrificed their lives for the cause of democratic freedom. Thought of altogether, the sacrifice of Gettysburg pointed to “a renewal, a rebirth [of] political freedom” (Guelzo, 2013). The Gettysburg Address thus embodied several forms of hope of critical importance to Lincoln, all centred on national cohesion, memorializing the fallen and preserving democracy as central to the American Hope Dream.

What links Dewey and Addams to hope in crisis was their common awareness that democracy was continuing to be under siege. Democracy had gone into near eclipse in many parts of the world, and in America, it was far from fulfilling the destiny of the Declaration of Independence. Their response was an attempt to revive the spirit of the Founders with an emphasis on reinvigorating democratic equality. Their methodology was to foreground the solidity of pragmatic egalitarian as led by Addams in Hull House and followed by Dewey in his publication Democracy and Education, his signature opus on educational theory and practice. Addams was to create a sorority of values, of caring, sympathetic understanding, and conviviality in Hull House, all in the direction of what Dewey was to call fraternity. The import of fraternity from the famous French revolutionary trio of liberty, equality, and fraternity had not been made manifest in the American Declaration, although, as Hannah Arendt and others had lauded, the concept of fraternity was exceptionally prominent in the American run-up to its Revolution.

Thus we have the vital conceptual connection of hope: a national crisis as perceived in turn by Lincoln, Addams, and Dewey. The crises of the three bright-line thinkers all revolved around restoring, revivifying, and sustaining democracy and its companionate ideals—equality and freedom—in fraternal bonding. Hope was in the ideals of the Declaration, explicit and implicit, providing ethico-moral touchstones for the American Hope Dream. My aim, in sum, is to show how the bright-line of progressive thought threads through the concepts of problem solving, 170

social relationships, and affective equality forwarded by each of these progressive radical thinkers. In an attempt to recover the thought processes in the making of decisions, I now turn to Abraham Lincoln as he wrestled with the most ominous crisis that was threatening the very survival of his country, not to mention its well-being.

The Critical Thinking and Problem Solving of Abraham Lincoln

Perhaps no example of critical hope in American history is more vivid than that of Abraham Lincoln. Today’s image of Lincoln, as explored initially in Chapter 3, revealed many kinds of hope—from audacious, to transformative, to tragic, to pragmatic, to redemptive—all variations of his hope legacy, one that has resonated around the globe, deservedly or not (Carwardine & Sexton, 2009, p. 461). This section probes the notion of criticality, focusing on the critical times when Lincoln came to the realization that he must take a stand on the future of the slave, the slave trade, and the expansion of slavery in America. Should slavery be tolerated any longer in any form? Were slaves better off returning to Africa? Was the slave as a free man a potential military ally to the army of the North? Historian James Kloppenberg sums up the passions that the issue of slavery aroused:

[T]he abstractions used by both American political parties to demonize each other became concrete over the issue of slavery….Nothing else in nineteenth century American public life fed passions as did slavery, the antithesis of reciprocity. In the first half of the century, multiple streams converged into a rising current of antislavery sentiment. Early abolitionists…had reconceptualized slavery as the sinful infliction of pain and others began arguing that those who tolerated slavery and enjoyed their comfortable lives as a result were complicit in sin. Grassroots mobilization by African Americans manifested itself in slave revolts that amplified the power of published testimony from free blacks. (Kloppenberg, 2016, p. 642)

All these issues were on Lincoln’s mind at various times in his political life, as contingencies arose: the expansion of slavery into new states, the freed slave as potential military asset, vehemence of the Southern States that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had acknowledged freedom of choice in the matter of the slave trade. Kloppenberg, while noting the many forces for emancipation, did not mince words about racism in the Northern states, which 171

was often as virulent as in the South: “The very conception of a multiracial democracy still appalled most white Americans, including Henry Clay, who advocated colonization as much because of his racism as because of his opposition to slavery” (Kloppenberg, 2016, p. 644.)

By 1854, Lincoln had determined what he must do for his country. “Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it,” he commented in a speech at Peoria, Illinois. That is, slavery must end. That enunciation was followed by a speech in Bloomington two years later in 1856: “Let us revere the Declaration of Independence” (Lehrman, 1994).

The process of coming to a decision on slavery and its related matters became critical points in time for Lincoln, and all were potential crisis-makers. The ultimate calamity, the Civil War, did ensue, culminating in catastrophic cleavage and leading to fateful events of inordinate historical significance, not just for America but with implications for “hope in the world.” Lincoln’s decisions spotlight the significance of critical hope in times of perplexity—identifying the problematic, diagnosing the problem, and discerning the vectors of practices and other contingencies bearing on the problem as steps in arriving at a decision. Pragmatism, as mentioned, invoked history in anticipation of lessons to be learned for future solutions. Genealogical pragmatism looked to conditions of possibility, with an eye to a future of making new and better futures. It considered the prospect and scope of interventions that would help solve the problem.

A close analysis of Lincoln’s strategy will find him closely analyzing the political issues at every stage. He was a prescient Foucauldian, preoccupied with the analytics of the problem, the role of power in the problem situation, and conducting robust critical inquiry, with recognition of the fateful consequence of each decision. However, unlike Foucault, Lincoln had triaged all issues but the main goal, to preserve the political integrity of his country at all costs. That meant freeing the slaves. This section traces the critical decision making, and transformative hope that was invoked by those decisions. Critical hope had yielded direction. It was time for radically constructive action, the second stage of genealogy, the turn to radical transformative hope. In our tendency to look back on epochs of history as foreordained, consideration of the role of the process of decision making can be overlooked. It is easy to think of the individual, such as

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Lincoln, as having fixed positions on critical issues. But in many respects, the Lincoln of final decisions seems not to have been the Lincoln of his early years, when he, for example, shunned a role in the Abolitionist movement and displayed considerable ambiguity on the question of emancipation.73 While Jane Addams referred repeatedly to him as the Great Emancipator, that was decidedly not Lincoln’s vision in his early years. What precipitated his decisions and what part did hope, history, and contingency play in critical decision making?

Lincoln was an aspiring politician, a lawyer, certainly not a saint or a prophet or moralizer by nature, but basically a practical aspirant for public service at a moment in time when slavery was becoming a gargantuan political issue, dividing the nation, cresting in importance with new states being added, the Abolitionist movement drums beating, and enormous stakes involved in every decision.74 Lincoln had to take a position himself in such a way that would meet two contending issues—the moral question of slavery and the right to the pursuit of happiness championed by slave-holding states whose livelihoods were dependent on slave labour. The Declaration of Independence commitment to equality was “dividing the House” (see, for example, Jaffa, 2009).

The move to open a million square miles of the former Louisiana Territory proposed by Senator Stephen Douglas by means of a popular referendum effectively created the Republican Party. It also brought Lincoln out of private life and into politics to confront the popular sovereignty that, if passed, would confirm the rights of slaveholders. I paraphrase noted historian Susan Schulten’s (2009) historical account. Lincoln’s condemnation of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became to him a betrayal of the Framers’ hope that slavery would be eroded, rather than allowed to grow.75 Douglas played the democracy “card” giving the people of a selected territory the

73 See The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner (2010) for the evolution of Lincoln’s thinking on slavery. It is widely praised for its balance. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, on the other hand, in The Real Lincoln (2003), offers an anti-Lincoln polemic and defence of the Confederacy position. 74 Not every historian agrees on Lincoln’s motives. Critics stress the pecuniary, centralizing, and strategic motives (adding militant Afro-Americans to the Union Army). Lincoln’s public positions against slavery stiffen immeasurably in his later years. His involvement in a scheme to recolonize Afro-Americans in Africa is cited by one critic as betraying anti-negro sentiment. 75 I have relied for some of this analysis on the ideas of noted historian Susan Schulten in “Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln and John Dewey” (2009). 173

right to make that decision. In 1854, Lincoln took the stand that the Declaration of Independence was a document of consequence, and opposed the legitimacy of a bill that would violate the principles of civil liberty. With that, he renounced slavery. Self-government, he averred, could only be realized through equality. He urged his fellow Republicans to “readopt the Declaration of Independence,” a move of incalculable consequence.

The clash with Douglas in the famous debates led to Douglas being re-elected to the U.S. Senate in 1858, but Lincoln had become famous for revenerating the Founders, “putting their principles to work” (Schulten, 2009, p. 812). Lincoln, like Jefferson before him, now raised the Constitution as a dynamic document, imputing to it the inherency of equality, when in fact there was no such inherency, as historian Garry Wills (1978) has famously pointed out.

Equality Moves from Declaration to Interblend with the Constitution

As mentioned, the Lincolnesque critical moment came in 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, when Lincoln used the occasion to position America in a place of distinctiveness:

Let us adopt the Declaration of Independence, and-with-it-the practices and policy which harmonize with it. Let North and South, let all America, let all lovers of liberty everywhere, join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the union, but have so saved it, as to make and keep it forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed, to the latest generation. (Wills, 1978, p. xvi)

The Declaration lends itself to the “dream of destiny” myth the way the Articles or the Constitution never did, asserts Wills (1978). They are “messier enterprises” and “with the stamp of compromise upon them.”76 To Lincoln this was simply the frailty of the flesh to live up to the high ideals of the faith. He was to continue with the special American destiny theme at Springfield in 1861. Wills (1978) contends that “the Declaration is the quintessential ‘American idea’ to Lincoln and that idea is contained in the Declaration” (p. xxi). He further writes:

76When considering critical hope theory, this first example of Lincoln rhetoric shades into the utopic thinking that is less critical and more oriented to the immediacy of solution-seeking than critique. 174

They, (the Declaration’s signers) meant simply to declare the right, so that enforcement might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard for free society, which would be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked up to, constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting its happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was not of practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be-as, thank God, it is now proving itself,—a stumbling block…to all who in after times might seek to turn free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. (p. xviii)

The Declaration and the Constitution were thus yoked as though they naturally reinforced one another. As Schulten (2009) has pointed out: “Lincoln took liberties with the constitution by turning the Framers into closet opponents of slavery,” thereby establishing a “de facto” Constitution to protect equality (p. 813).77 Wills (1978) would agree. Comparing Lincoln with the Declaration’s principal author, he argues:

Jefferson would never have accepted Lincoln’s mystique of national union as a transcendentally “given” imperative….[He] never intended it for a spiritual Covenant; but it has traveled in an Arc that got itself more revered the more it was battered. (pp. xxiii and xxiv).

This is the kind of improvisational thinking of a “critical nature” that worked superbly for Lincoln and became part of his legend of strategic wizardry. There was a seductive trickery in the rhetoric, but readily rationalized, I presume, by Lincoln’s devotion to the high moral cause at stake in the struggle.

77 Obama repeats the notion of slavery as a sin, drawing from Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address” (Schulten, 2009, p. 813). 175

In discussing critical theory generally, Seyla Benhabib offers the type of problem-solving framework to genealogical inquiry that Lincoln seems to have intuited almost a century and half earlier. Approaching a generic problematic situation through careful diagnosis, Benhabib then appropriates the “empirically fruitful analysis of the dysfunctionalities of the present; a critical social theory should always do so in the name of a better future and a more humane society” (as cited in Koopman, 2009, p. 213). It would seem that this mode of thinking entered into the critico-creative problem solving that was governing Lincoln’s strategy.78 The “more perfect Union,” as idealized by Lincoln, spoke to the possibility of radical improvement and the hope that inspired patriotism towards fulfillment of the American Dream. Lincoln had done the heavy lifting by merging the 1776 creed with 1787 thinking. The Constitution of 1787 had become the vehicle for realizing equality as the inherency of a “more perfect union.”79 The arch principle at stake was equality.

For Lincoln, his inauguration marked the ultimate test of critical hope. He had clarified his position over the years. Kloppenberg (2016) reports that Lincoln was reluctant to end his inaugural address. His parting words expressed his wish, and his hope that the continuing battle to persuade would not give way to warfare. His words came from the heart: “We are not enemies but friends….Though passions have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”80

In the second annual message to Congress, after two horrific years of civil war, Lincoln’s memorable words bear repeating: “In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly use the last best hope on earth.”81 He was, of course, speaking directly to emancipation, but his larger topic was his mission of nothing short of saving American democracy, of preserving the American Dream. His message conveyed a sense of urgency; great battles were on the horizon. It

78 This was reapplied by Obama in his speech on race in 2008 (as cited in Schulten, 2009, p. 813). 79 Pragmatic genealogical analysis and solving problem—the key approaches advanced by Jane Addams and John Dewey as outlined in Chapters 4 and 5—become the key elements of the critical hope modus operandi. 80 Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861 (as cited in Kloppenberg, 2016, pp..692, 693). 81 Annual Address to the U.S. Congress, December 1, 1862. 176

was an important voicing of hope and confidence mingled, perhaps, with fear of failure. But it also had a wider application, speaking to the global impact of the American Dream in the eyes of the world, and the hope of freedom fighters around the world of the American struggle for social justice and to salvage and repair itself as a moral beacon of hope for reformative dreamers of the world (Carwardine & Sexton, 2009, p. 462).

In using “the last best hope,” Lincoln was adapting the trope of Jefferson, “the best hope of earth,” which was more than simply a gracious compliment to distinguish the American experiment from other forms of governance. Given some 70 years between the orations, there was added poignancy to Lincoln’s expression. Historian Allen Guelzo points out that in the 1860s, it was that last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing in the Western world. “What you had in the climate of mid-century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy” (Mackaman, 2013). Lincoln, for example, saw an affinity between Heinrich Heine and Otto von Bismarck and the confederacy aristocracy of the South, notes Guelzo (Mackaman, 2013). To Lincoln, liberal democracy was in reality the last nation standing in a sea of European aristocracy, some with parliamentary trappings, albeit a form of democracy, but the power in the hands of a political elite. As historical fact, “the last great hope” for republican democracy might well have been true.

Could any nation survive in that kind of “divided house”? Lincoln found a way, managed an egotistical team of rivals, guided the nation to victory in a hard-fought war, fulfilled his dream of ending slavery, and held the nation together. His skills at creative problem solving were renowned, as his nickname the Great Fixer suggests, but as strategic as his political moves were, his vision of the high road for his country had become the lodestar of his presidency, thus revealing the critical acumen at work in synchronization with his moral aspiration. The context of Lincolnesque thinking may well have been influential in shaping his decisions. His heritage was Calvinist cum Baptist with its predestination centrepiece that seemed to ride with Lincoln, along with overlays of skepticism and Deism. Outcroppings of his spiritual leanings in his major speeches, with their profusion of biblical word choice have been noted by many biographers. It is possible that he was politically marketing the many faith groups that were drawn to his leadership; historical fact, however, shows abundant evidence of transcendental core beliefs surfacing regularly in times of crisis. The greatest national decisions, such as the emancipation of 177

slaves, were linked by him to the inscrutable will of Providence. Historian John Patrick Diggins places emphasis on the morality of Lincoln. Although he calls Lincoln a Lockean Liberal with a Calvinist , Diggins acknowledges his stellar political skills but digs deeper, tapping Lincoln’s moral compass in relation to “the ordinary woman and man.” (Diggins, 2000). Lincoln wrote, speaking of an Afro-American female slave, that he would accord her “the natural right to eat the bread that she earns with her own hands without asking leave from anyone else, she is my equal and the equal of all others” (Diggins, 2000, p. 31). Speaking in New Haven, close to the scene of a shoemaker’s strike, Lincoln stated:

I want everyman to have a chance—and I believe the black man is entitled to it—when he may look toward hope to be able to hire a laborer this year, and the next, work for himself afterword, and finally to hire men to work for him. That is the true system. (Diggins, 2000, p. 32)

As highlighted in Chapter 3, Lincoln was to become a stellar example of redemptive hope as well as an apostle of critical hope, advocating for social justice not only at home but throughout much of the world. After his death, he has been remembered for having suffered and sacrificed for the sake of his country, and for the moral liberatory purposes which were glorified by his martyrdom. He became the Redeemer President, as Whitman called him. And he was widely known as the Great Emancipator, as Jane Addams would refer to him.

Fraternity and the Bright-Line of Democracy

In my analysis of the roles deployed by Addams and Dewey, I focus on their attention to bringing fraternity, in the sense of productive human relationships, into the centre of their respective spheres, democracy and public education. Indirectly they were critically addressing the absence of fraternity in the Declaration of Independence. They joined forces to reimagine democracy as a critical response to that area of neglect in the American Dream. The theme of fraternity had been prominent in Whitman’s Vistas of Democracy. Now it was being emphasized in a fulsome way by Addams in the democratic practice of Hull House. Dewey’s theorizing of democracy in richly variegated ways brought into focus the notion of democracy as a way of associated living, a mode of living that stressed the importance of engagement and mutuality in both school and democracy.

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Caring and Democracy, and Caring as Fraternity: Addams as a Feminist Philosopher

As argued in Chapter 4, Addams broke ground in the genealogy of philosophy by combining a powerful ethic of caring with an equally powerful ethic of social justice. Seigfried and others have noted the historic divide created by the Kantian tradition of keeping social ethics at a distance from the moral law of the autonomous individual. Not to keep them apart was to introduce relativism, so traditional philosophy had claimed. There was also suspicion of the demagoguery of the masses, and fear that affect would have an adverse effect on . In contrast, early pragmatism led in both theory and practice to the ecumenical notion that caring and democracy, given their nature, should be in conversation with one another.

That was an early voice of pragmatism speaking from the late 19th century, taking a position on a matter that would lie fallow for a century until it became a powerful critique in the hands of Carol Gilligan (1982).82 In seeing caring in this way, Addams was an early feminist thinker, and a critical one, foreseeing the need for reshaping democratic thinking in ways far beyond tallying votes, but rather, as a way of associated living, with conceptual applicability in virtually all walks of life. What Addams was putting into practice was the notion that an ethic of caring is thoroughly relational. That was a central operating principle of Hull House. It was a feminist position, and a critical position insofar as it made the welfare of people a social goal. Caring was becoming intrinsic to democracy, and in that way of thinking, it was the action oriented to the Public Good. Thus Addams was also anticipating the critical stance of the Frankfurt school with its commitment to enhancing social development. Like Horkheimer, Addams was interested in emancipative agendas. The way she was now configuring democracy opened up a richer role for democracy in enhancing human life.

82 The crucial importance of caring was an ecumenical position that Carol Gilligan was to further trail- blaze a hundred years later—that is, that growth and development were of paramount social importance, and that the nurture of growth was part of a set of values, crucial to human welfare and hence intrinsic to the concept of true democracy. Gilligan’s famous breakthrough identification of caring as an “alternative moral voice,” and her dissociation of it from Kohlberg’s and Kant’s autonomy of the person, gave modern and postmodern expression to the inseparability of care and justice.

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Addams as prototypical feminist would have applauded the work of Carol Gilligan (1982), Nel Noddings (1984), and Joan Tronto (1993) all of whom unite care, relationship, and moral education under the re-imagined umbrella of democracy. Those were values that Addams was creating and fostering at Hull House, famously interblending caring with social justice and referring to caring as sympathetic understanding or sympathetic interpretation. It was all about relationality and the ethic of caring within an encompassing social ethic. Addams, as I discussed in Chapter 4, was passionately concerned with rebuilding the concept of democracy to include affect, camaraderie, equality, loving kindness, and caring as a matrix that supported democracy. That was a novel way of thinking about democracy, one stressing social relations in all walks of life as being of high moral value. In company with John Dewey, she was into “deep democracy,” defining it in such a way that the ethic of caring for others would be repositioned within the heart of democracy. Democracy was social justice practised as an associated a way of life as its mainstay, and with a political arm for governance as but one of its attributes. Early this century, Melissa Anderson (2004) brilliantly drew together supporting feminist scholarship that separated care and justice, and profiled the Addams’s bridging of ethics and democracy in a breakthrough symbiosis.

Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Addams biographer, explicated this important breakthrough at about the same time, also lauding it as a progressive breakthrough that was rediscovered only in the 1990s. That important excavation I explicated in Chapter 4 (M. Anderson, 2004). Through the late 1980s and the 1990s much new work by feminist scholars was interpreting and enlarging on the core idea that Addams had initiated and implemented at Hull House. The key concepts that she explored a century earlier have received wide philosophical acceptance and growing enthusiasm. One of the most authoritative current voices of the philosophy of care, Joan Tronto (2013), speaks forcefully to the wisdom of thinking of democracy as essentially a form of caring.83

For Addams, it was a critical failure of society that democracy was not being recognized as stemming from, and intimately related to, the ethic of caring. She devoted much of her

83 This is a lucid argument for political caring. 180

professional writing to theorizing about the importance of their shared relationship. Of surpassing importance, perhaps, is the way that she continually knotted democracy and caring into the warp and woof of Hull House activity, thereby creating a praxis of the symbiosis for all to see in action. Addams’s characterization of Hull House democracy moved far beyond its birthplace as she became involved with wider circles of urban, national, and international reform.

Dewey, as mentioned, was a loyal soulmate in Addams’s endeavor to deepen and reshape democracy; a decade after Addams’s death, he summarized their joint belief, bringing into play the ethical breadth of their thinking about the true potentiality of successful democracy:

Democracy is a way of life [emphasis mine] controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed. That belief is without basis and significance save as it means faith in the potentialities of human nature as that nature exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth. (Dewey, 1998a, p. 341)

Addams was at the forefront of social reform in many of the issues contained in the “new democracy” both in civic and national life and, of course, on her home ground of Hull House. There were many facets of hope that Addams represented, the hoping mode of audacity, amelioration, and tragedy being but three.

Addams’s Progressive Model: Perplexity and Critical Hope

I believe the overriding hope, given her life-long commitment to social action—following on problem-identification—was critical hope. From her father, Addams had inherited a sense of public service, which became her passion for social reform. That translated into issue after issue to which she applied the slogan that she had inherited via her father from Abraham Lincoln: “best possible.” That epigraph closely jibed with the pragmatic approach to problem solving, and its commitment to the practical improvement signified by meliorism (Koopman, 2009, p. 16).84

84 Koopman (2009) defines meliorism as “robust hope” (p. 16). 181

Addams identified the beginnings of “the problematic” by the word perplexity. She framed problems through the lens of what she called states of perplexity (Addams, 2002). Presciently Foucauldian, it was a problem-based organization of social issues that focused on ruptures in values, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that “cannot be resolved without developing a new understanding of the situation and calling into question received values” (Seigfried, 2002, p. xxii).85 Her book Democracy and Social Ethics (2002) used “perplexity” as a pivotal point in exploring learning, in developing deeper understanding of problems, and in making ameliorative change. Addams’s penchant for developing strategies to cope with “perplexities” would seem to have influenced John Dewey when he began addressing the thinking process of solving problems. For Addams, it meant a genealogical analysis of social ethical problems.

Addams also built support by moving incrementally, developing a broad base that would lead, as she put it, to lateral progress, a much more secure form of progression, she believed, than the top-down management style of pushing for results. Her problem solving was indeed carefully orchestrated and operated in a realistic fashion. With Lincoln’s “best possible” as her motto, she made headway in many disputant situations by working towards ameliorative solutions. She was famous for accommodative solutions when confronting contentious problems in her administrative roles.

While Addams recognized that she was not in a “controlled” laboratory setting and that she did not desire academic empirical research to be turned towards Hull House, she nevertheless was deeply experimental in providing a leadership role when it came to improving all aspects of her settlement house, from curriculum to instructional practices to organizational policies. As part of her practice, she would have reflective appraisals on the effectiveness of her many innovations, even as they were in full swing. This form of organizational improvement was to become known, in the jargon of our day, as reflective practitioning, labelled as such by its more contemporary champion, Donald Schon (1984). He spoke to the split vision of research and practice and how theory and practice could be mutually reinforcing in on-the-job situations. I would argue that Addams was doing just that, and that her management style was also consistent

85Seigfried (2002) provides an in-depth discussion about Jane Addams’s perplexities as a tool of social inquiry. 182

with the close cousin of reflective practitioning, namely “action research,” another supposedly mid-20-century style of managing that Addams was practicing at Hull House more than a century ago. The administrative styles all impart the flavour of critical thinking—problem identification, diagnoses, hypotheses, trials and revisions—all of which are the hallmarks of critical thinking. With their purpose of enhancing the welfare of the public, they qualify as manifestations of critical hope.

Addams became a consummate problem solver, but it began with a critical lens for determining the issues. In her Newer Ideals of Peace (1907/2007), chapter after chapter identified perplexities which had escalated into major social problems—militarism in civic government; failure to utilize immigrants in city government; problems with industrial legislation; failure to address the need for protective legislation for children exposed to child labour; and failure to utilize women in city governance. She also lamented the problem of war being glamorized as a virtue (Addams, 2007). Her perplexities were all in the realm of social gravitas, and, having identified them, Addams made concrete suggestions for their amelioration. Her overarching hope was unflagging as she moved from delineating problems to constructive suggestions, following the reformative modality of critical hope.

When Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in 1889, she was immediately faced with management issues. They badly needed a cadre of volunteers, but were faced with classist and caste concerns that prevailed, which were the result, she believed, of a culture of charity amongst the privileged (Addams, 1997). Once they had recruited volunteers, they coached them on how to level the “playing field” as a way to eliminate condescension and foster comradeship as peers. In all interactions, Addams endeavored through policy and practice to forefront an ethos of equality. Hull House, an instant magnet for the new immigrant, was a challenging project to manage. As a growing enterprise, it faced the inevitable challenges of institutional management, but intensified by diverse languages to navigate, and the traumatic personal histories of immigrants, especially women, who had or were experiencing spousal oppression. The constant search for resources was needed to maintain and enhance the flourishing operation. Breaking trail within the turbulence of Chicago’s hyper-growth in population, prosperity, and crime, Hull House became both a featured centre of urban life and a centre of civic involvement. As their principal leader, Addams encouraged her clientele to participate in civic petitions to 183

council to improve matters of hygiene, sanitation, housing, and to become involved in other civic matters that could benefit from the immigrant voice being heard.

Hull House rapidly became the cynosure for reformers across urban America who looked to Hull House as the touchstone for settlement houses. Addams’s growing knowledge base and skill in addressing the needs of social reform required robust problem solving not only at the city level but nationally. All her social reforms arose from perplexities and critiques regarding society’s problems, and she was being looked upon for diagnosis into the nature of problems, as well as for guidance towards finding solutions.

Addams had the audacity to identify many problems of the nation and to go public with them in memoir and polemic, an example being the aforementioned Newer Ideals of Peace (1907/2007), a wide-ranging broadside against the cultural and political malpractices that were undermining the ennobling values of her social intelligence. She criticized the growing bellicosity and imperialism of her nation and opposed American presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt’s attempt to enlarge the navy, thus incurring his wrath. The attacks on her patriotism by opposing American entry into the First World alienated all but the pacifist supporters of her fan base. She stood firm, bringing creative new thinking to the problem of creating world peace in the war’s aftermath.

Critical Thinking: Fraternity, Bright-lined as New World Distinctiveness

In 1928 John Dewey undertook a critical analysis of America’s strengths and weaknesses as a country. His study was entitled A Critique of American Civilization, and while he detailed many shortcomings, his conclusion ended with extolling one virtue that he believed set America apart: “the spirit of sharing” (p. 322). This was not simply charity or philanthropy, but forms of sharing that he attributed to Old World democracy. It was an America tightly tied to the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. While he explained that it was “the duty of any humane culture to see that others share in it,” America had broken new ground by elevating “sociability” to new heights. He asserted that “no other people of any other age has been so permeated with the spirit of sharing [emphasis mine] as our own” (p. 322). This was a new spirit—which I have argued resonates with Arendtian natality—an awakening to the value

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of practical idealism that had made America a distinctive culture. Dewey implied that it was part of the promise and potency about his country “that operates in and through voluntary association.” This was not an extension of the Old World value, but a discovery of the New World “experimenting in their own ways” (p. 322).

In the foregoing passage, Dewey focuses on one of the major values of democracy that he and Jane Addams realized remained unarticulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that of fraternity. For years, Addams with her initiatives at Hull House and Dewey with his research into public education had been addressing the concept of fraternity and its associated meanings of friendship, conviviality, mutuality, and solidarity. Fraternity, as I have shown, represented a nesting of vital needs within society to go along with the “freedom and equality” of the Declaration of Independence. The fact that fraternity had been included with liberty and equality of the French Revolution gave it legitimacy to be taken on board by Dewey in his discussion of the constituents’ need for effective democracy. Dewey repeatedly testified to fraternity’s social significance in his writing on democracy and education. In “Philosophy and Democracy” (1998d), he spoke glowingly about the greatest liberal movement of history— liberty, equality, and fraternity (p. 75). There, too, he contrasted equality and its orientation to individuality, with fraternity being about association, interaction, and continuity with others (p. 78). Fraternity, operating under the rubric of democracy, was “amity and good will” (Dewey, 1916, p. 269). Cultivating “sentiments of respect and friendships for all men and women wherever they live” was essential to building community (p. 269). Fraternity was the soul of communal life:

Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions….Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with other (Dewey, 1927, p. 295).

John Dewey, even as a well-known champion of the inquiry method of experiencing, has sometimes been criticized for under-identifying and under-explicating critically important social problems of his day, even as he was brilliantly extolling the importance of inquiry in solving problems (see, for example, Koopman, 2009; Luntley, 2016). The irony of that criticism is that Dewey was continually faced with consequential problems, such as his career-beginning attempt

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to defend his country’s version of democracy from the “imperial polemics” of Sir Henry Maine and Thomas Carlyle, wherein Dewey countered with a stirring defense of American democracy, one that included a counterattack on the patronizing and imperialistic British version (Dewey, 1997a). Dewey was forever parsing and otherwise ruminating about the problems within his society, all in an ameliorative sense of what he might be able to do—if not rectify them, then at least effect some form of improvement.

As his career progressed, it became clear to Dewey that democracy, as it was being practised in America, was not in accord with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Democracy was in need of reconstructive thinking to recapture the ethos and sense of purpose of its Founders’ ideals. As noted in Chapter 5, Dewey found a soulmate in that regard in Jane Addams. In her own inimitable style, Addams had brought democracy, what she regarded as “our most precious possession,” into active service within Hull House, and had been dynamically engaged in attempting to reconfigure the serious implications of theoretical democracy by creating an ethos of democracy (Addams, 1997, p. 273). In Hull House, equality was earnestly practised; it was not simply an ideal. Dewey had expressed a keen interest in Hull House from his university perch in Michigan and, from its inception, visited it regularly when in Chicago. Upon transferring to the University of Chicago, he intensified his involvement as participant and advisor. Dewey’s theorizing about democracy seemed to incorporate more and more of the democratic zeitgeist that he was experiencing at Hull House when he visited there. Addams’s influence on his socio-educational theorizing of the late 1890s has been excavated by contemporary scholars within their canons of philosophic writing and noted in the memoirs of Dewey by his daughter.86

Dewey and the Critical Problem of Education: The Needed Revolution in Pedagogy

Within the early stages of his career, Dewey became alarmed about the poor quality of education that students in public and high schools were receiving. He began to delineate the problem in three early works, “My Pedagogic Creed” (1897), The School and Society (1899),

86 Biographer Charlene Haddock Seigfried has written extensively about Addams’s influence, and Dewey’s daughter Jane has written about her father’s. 186

and The Child and the Curriculum (1902), all written in the decade that he spent at the University of Chicago. Alison Kadlec, in her book Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism (2007), asserts that it is within these earlier works that Dewey’s critical vision regarding the function of education is the sharpest.

Dewey’s interest in the implications of Darwin’s Origin of Species led him to a variety of epistemological positions, the foremost being his definition and exploration of problem solving, its origins, and the mental processing that would lead towards solutions. While this was pragmatically and not “genealogically oriented,” it revealed the centrality that problem solving had in Dewey’s thought: “Problem solving is…not all of living, but it is a major part, and a precondition of the rest…The organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it” (LW 10.19). He says about the process of inquiry: “Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (LW12:108). He continues: “An object or event is always a special part, phase or aspect of an environing experienced world” (LW 12:72).

While perplexity and doubt are the trigger points for inquiry, we are “capable of enjoying the doubtful,” and can make “productive use of doubt by converting it into operations of definite inquiry” (LW 4.182). A further stage, having established that there is a problem, is its diagnosis by searching out the “constituents of a given situation which, as constituents, are settled” (LW 12:11.2). Proceeding, while still in a speculative stage, “[w]e attempt to use all the ideas that pop into our heads” (LW.12.14) that we see while working towards “a guiding idea, a working hypothesis” (LW 8:203). What is becoming the solution to a problem thus far is the trial by “imagination.” It is thus “retrievable” and can be blotted out (MW 14:133). If further overtly experimental testing is found to “agree with the theoretical” we thus have at least a provisional conclusion, however, not one that is open to continuing revision with ongoing reflection. (MW 6: 240-41). The foregoing pattern in the logic of inquiry: “[N]o cast iron rules can be laid down” (MW 6: 241). Dewey emphasizes the importance of suspending final judgment in problem solving by not cutting the reflection and patient ‘review and revision’ stage short. By so doing

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we are able “to protect the mind against itself” guarding against our inclination to cut inquiry as short as possible MW 1:151, and MW 12: 99.87

In Democracy and Education (1917), Dewey anatomized the issues around education, their intimate connection with democracy, and offered historical analysis of pedagogical strengths and weaknesses of educational philosophy of the past. He drew implications for experientially oriented curriculum and methodologies for children and youth, interblending them with his radical reconfiguring of democracy. Both embraced mutuality, respective motifs of transactive dynamism, and associated ways of living with highly participative engagement. In education, Dewey’s overall thesis was revolutionary. Dewey’s biographer, Robert Westbrook (1991), was to put his extraordinary vision this way:

The legacy that he left behind is less that of established practice than of critical vision [emphasis mine]. Most schools are far from these “supremely interesting places” and these outposts dangerous of a humanistic civilization that he wanted them to become … (p. 313).

In short, Dewey believed a transformation in education was needed. He charted a progressive way forward that was in startling contrast to the behaviorist models, which, under modernist guise, perpetuated the orthodox mechanistic practices. Unfortunately, these regressive measures played into the cult of efficiency then sweeping the country, while the Deweyan education was much more complex, pedagogically demanding, and very labour intensive. Accordingly, it was more expensive, requiring more teachers and highly trained ones at that. Echoing the Mayhew and Edwards’ Report of 1930, Dewey conceded that the average teacher had neither the knowledge nor the know-how to wholeheartedly each this way, but he argued that they could learn to do it (Robert Westbrook, UNESCO Report. John Dewey, 1999. Online, p. 5). Referring to the report by the teachers at the Laboratory School, Westbrook noted that Deweyan pedagogy required a teacher to perform a task which was extremely difficult, namely to integrate subject matter into the experience of the child (p. 4). The research that Dewey was undertaking in his lab school and the findings rising from it, led to his new design for education. It was supplemented

87 I am indebted to the deeper, detailed sequencing of problem solving (from which I have paraphrased this section) provided by James Campbell in Understanding John Dewey (1995, pp. 45–53). 188

by an understanding of the psychology of growth (as represented by the transactional arc), a philosophy of learning that I argue embodies the essence of critical hope.

Deweyan critical hope, thought of in schooling terms, meant forays into the world and experience processed through the techniques of inquiry and discernment that would lead to discovery and to evidence evaluating that discovery. It was an open process, critically informed, and dynamic, wherein hope was engendered in the flourishing growth of the individual in social communion with others. The art/science of effective teaching was to facilitate, constructively intervene as needed, and coach the process to fruition. The most stringent critical hope of Dewey was directed towards the form of behaviorist theory and practice that was oriented to mechanistic, reductive education.

Democracy and Education became revered by educational thinkers who took the time to savor the intellectual breakthrough that it represented. In comparison with its theoretical competitor, it lacked the “education by numbers” approach beloved by behaviorists, with their accompanying flair for promoting “aids” of teaching, including the vigorous marketing of quantitatively designed assessment tools—again aligning with the appeal for both efficiency and simplistic efficacy for teachers. As Ellen Lagemann (2000) famously noted, “Thorndike was the principal victor in Thorndike vs. Dewey although it was less than a total victory” (p. xi).88 Others have put it in another way: Dewey won in the air, Thorndike on the ground.

Dewey and the Pre-War Crisis of Democracy

During the 1930s, Dewey’s concern for the state of society and democracy deepened. His prolific critiques ranged from the mechanization of society to loss of individuality, rampant , too much social standardization, and lack of community spirit. Critiquing democracy, he lamented that the founding shibboleths no longer furnished the moral compass that had been idealized. In the “Search for the Great Community” (1927, 1998f, p.395) his

88 Thorndike’s victory was not complete. Dewey supporters staged a comeback in the 1920s and 1930s and again during the 1960s. The Canadian experience is roughly parallel, with strong progressive support coming from the 1968 provincial report commissioned by Hall Dennis and from considerable support in Alberta during the 1930s (the Donald Dickie Enterprise Project). Both were inspired by Dewey. 189

analysis was that democracy lacked concomitant social support to sustain it. Liberalism was waning and in need of a renaissance (p.1998c, 323n.). Critique after critique poured forth from Dewey, who was by now a greatly respected public intellectual with opinion pieces and articles populating both academic journals and popular magazines journals of his day. His restorative hope themes had not changed, but were reapplied to current events. He noted the need for reconstituting community with less geographic orientation caused by societal fragmentation. Dewey called for more adaptation to work migrations, citing the need for better communication, and adaptive democracy to organizational life with the goal of maintaining communal ways of democratic living. He repeats the trilogy of virtues, “fraternity, liberty and equality” that must be recovered and fortified through communal practice (Dewey, 1998, p. 295).

As war clouds gathered over Europe and the Pacific, and the ideologies of communism and fascism became stronger, democracy in America seemed to be in peril. Both fascist and communist movements had growing followings within his country. For Dewey, the cause of salvation of liberal democracy supplanted the critiquing of social problems. The premise of his task was captured in the title “Creative Democracy--the Task Before Us” (1939). Democracy was a supremely generative process at a time when creativity was desperately needed, but its salvation needed the “hard pan” of sustained effort to ward off threats towards its survival.

“Creative Democracy--the Task Before Us” (1998a) became an anthem of hope for American democracy. Putting aside all of the critiques, some of them Foucauldian with respect to their deep analysis of the negative aspects of the American life in the late 1920s and 1930s, “Creative Democracy” was also a proclamation of hope for a democratic way of life published on the eve of war in Europe, it reflects a drastically ratcheted-up angst for the future. But it heralds a powerful anodyne in the form of a tribute to the legacy of America’s democratic spirit. In characteristic style, Dewey re-appropriated the lessons of history, the spiritedness and “wisdom of the Founders,” the pioneering spirit of the frontier people who were “extraordinarily gifted in political invention” (p. 340). Bringing his focus back to the present moment, Dewey noted that

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he was addressing an infinitely more complicated and complex country than what the 89Founders had known, and a major infusion of creativity was needed to solve its problems.

As in many of his attempts to initiate reconstructive action in theory and practice, he began the reconstructive theme in philosophy. Initially, in this instance, Dewey located the thinking processes around democracy historically, beginning with the Founders’ spirit of democratic thought. His mission in this case was to reconstruct thinking that would be useful for his time.90 Building his case, Dewey did opine negatively on the state of democracy, lamenting that it had become remote, institutionalized, and external to personhood. This, then, became Dewey’s rallying cry for a revitalized democracy that would become, as it was intended to be, a personalized way of associative life. Democracy was preeminently about attitude, personal and collective, towards one another, such as was reflected in “good working relationships.” Democracy required faith in one another, and high levels of cooperative action, recognizing the worth and potential of contributions of everyone working together in harmony. It was of course, also about personal freedoms.

In “Creative Democracy” (1998a), Dewey knew he had vivid contrasts on the American doorstep to make his point. Lurid tales of Nazi (and Stalinist) evils were permeating the news media of the day, giving fresh poignancy to his plea for tolerance, and high relevance to cherishing the values of being free from coercion, enjoying basic rights of freedom and lack of censorship (p. 342). Blithely ignoring the many injustices in American life at the time, Dewey painted a wholly positive portrait of the America of his day, a romantic version that blended a sense of what democracy could and should be like, and he delineated some of the virtues that contrasted American reality with the repressive ideologies abroad. He extolled America’s way of undergirding values—decisions made by deliberation, persuasion and conference, free

90 Eric Bredo in “Notes on Reconstruction in Philosophy” (unpublished document). Bredo notes that “like all of Dewey’s work, Reconstruction in Philosophy attempts to give a reinterpretation that places thinking in the context of an evolving situation rather than view it in the abstract or as mirroring reality.…His call is for a new ‘reconstructed’ philosophy that will be useful for our time” (p. 1). 191

inquiry, free assembly and free communication—reminding his readers that all such values were “intrinsic to democracy” (p. 342).

Dewey (1998a) condemned barriers to freedom and valorized the American liberty as the capacity of each individual to reach fulfillment as a democratic tenet of democratic operation. As rationale, he focused on the American belief in the capacities of all individuals to make a contribution to society when given the conditions for success and implied that such conditions were the legacy of the American democratic tradition. Democracy itself, with its attendant freedoms, was the key condition. Dewey praised the democratic American habits of not only amicable cooperation with one another but also their eschewal of violence and their faith in peace, and he claimed such habits to be essential features of the democratic way of life. Going further, he claimed American democracy as welcoming difference, and attributed that to an enrichment of life (p. 342). Dewey then focused on the heartland of his long-standing love for democracy, claiming it as “a moral idea and insofar as it becomes a moral fact is a moral fact [emphasis mine]” (p.343). Authority of democracy, he claimed, was internal; it was not externally derived or beholden to external authority. In patent Dewey tradition, he edified growth and faith in experience. Democrats “grow in ordered richness, through experience and education” (p. 343). The glories of democracy, highlighted against the backdrop of authoritarian regimes, stressed American liberal democracy being based on a climate of free interaction and a sense of wholeheartedness in approaching life as source of “enlargement and enrichment.” His conclusion re-enunciated the challenge and responsibility that lay before America, framed in the characteristic Dewey activist language: “[The] task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane existence in which all share and contribute” (p. 343).

In this short article published in 1939, Dewey makes the case for the democracy of the American Hope Dream. He reverts to the notion of world-building, and a City on a Hill in spirit, but a world-making that is essentially secular, not divinely covenanted in the John Winthrop sense. It was the product of citizen-building, in good faith and in cooperation with one another, while cherishing the values that supported freedom to create such a City on a Hill. With alternative forms of governance raging across international countries and generating rising dissent within, Dewey hewed to the democratic lineage of Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, and Whitman. He reconfigured vistas of the revolutionary spirit of democracy in the context of a 192

transformative critical hope, one more closely aligned with the democratically progressive pragmatism of his personal legacy. It was a survivalist hope theme: American democracy as an endangered species, in urgent need of constructive, united, moral faith and action.

Pragmatic Genealogical Analysis and Problem Solving

Key approaches advanced by Jane Addams and John Dewey as outlined in Chapters 4 and 5 became the key elements of the critical hope modus operandi. We have seen the method at work now in Lincoln, Dewey, and Addams. All were looking for what is valued, what works, and what brings “the good” as touchstones. In an attempt to get beyond democracy as an empty procedural doctrine, Addams and Dewey both tried to treat governments as a vibrant working relationship with the public, by maximizing participation and bringing public values to life. They embraced the ethic of community living in ways that far transcended geography. The passion of Addams and Dewey was to enrich the qualitative aspects of the communal relations in daily lives of Americans and to illuminate the importance of the principles that informed those transactions.

Conclusion: An Audacious American Hope Dream for a Re-Imagined Democracy

For Jane Addams and John Dewey, America’s “most precious possession” (Addams, 1997) had been in dire need of reform. While they deeply respected the ideals of the Founders, they were exasperated that the qualitative aspects and potential for democracy had not materialized. Their vision was the egalitarian nature of democracy, derived from the Declaration of Independence’s striking commitment to equality. As Chapters 4 and 5 reveal, the bright-line thread of idealization found itself entwining the ideals espoused by the progressives. Equality, for example, resonated deeply in the philosophical outlook of the budding social activist Jane Addams and the youthful university lecturer John Dewey, as in their separate ways, they were wrestling with the meaning of democracy and its potential for the United States a hundred years after its debut.

Dewey had realized the dangers of democracy from his early years when he challenged polemical attacks on democracy by two British intellectual heavyweights, Sir Henry Maine and Thomas Carlyle. Maine was one of England’s foremost jurists, with extensive writings on polity. Carlyle was also prominent, a public intellectual in Britain, with a large readership nationally and

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internationally. The issue was the incompetence of the masses to make good decisions. Democracy ends, said Maine,

in producing monstrous and morbid forms of monarchy and aristocracy. Democracy leads to legislation that is a wild burst of destructive wantonness, and the arbitrary overthrow of all existing institutions. There can be no delusion greater that democracy is a progressive form of Government. (Dewey, 1997a, p. 183)

Dewey was to face that line of thinking during much of his life, and as he did with Maine and Carlyle, he mounted a stirring defense against those, like Walter Lippmann, who pointed to the perils of democracy as outweighing any advantages. The critiques of democracy, its fragility and other vulnerabilities will be revisited in a moment in the light of our contemporary state of democracy. Such critiques, however, need to be considered in the light of what had been advanced about democracy by Jane Addams, John Dewey, and their progressive colleagues.

As previously discussed, both Addams and Dewey viewed democracy—as had Jefferson and several of his fellow Founders—to be the signal American experiment. Following Jefferson, Addams and Dewey explored the power of participation as key to vitalizing democracy. Addams did so in the everyday life of Hull House. Dewey pursued the democratic idea as a direly needed galvanizing force to animate public education. For both, the sociality inherent in democracy was keynote. Democracy, tied to the ideal of equality, was to hail a radically transformative meaning for democracy, that of human relationality as the linchpin to both democracy and education. Democracy was not to be thought of as “only a form of government,” declared Dewey in his 1887 article “The Ethics of Democracy” (1997a, p. 184), but as a transcending ethic that embodied “liberty, equality, fraternity.” As such, it was for Dewey “the highest ethical idea [of individuality] which humanity has yet reached” (p. 199).

This chapter has highlighted the critical reappraisal of democracy that was famously translated from ideal to actuality by Jane Addams who, in her famous institution, devoted much of her life to helping the burgeoning immigrant population of Chicago. From inception, Addams insisted on classlessness, participation, and other forms of non-hierarchical activity, and her programming focused on active listening, cooperation, and collaboration. That democratic ethos also became central to Dewey’s critique of traditional education and to his attempt in his lab 194

school to create a similar climate of collaborative inquiry, whereby children were respected for both their individuality and their need for nurture. It was critically important for Dewey that the nurturance of the individual be undertaken in cooperative association with his or her classmates, thus providing the value nexus of freedom, fraternity, and equality that characterized his idealized democracy.

The radical transformation of democracy from an exercise in counting votes to a plane of “the highest ethic” was one that Dewey had prefigured in his defense of democracy against Maine, and a conception that was an attempt to provide fresh inspiration to the American Hope Dream. The demagoguery that Maine and Carlyle believed would lead to overthrowing all existing institutions has recently been on the minds of many Americans since their current President began to run successfully for office. Several contemporary books point to the rise of populism and the worldwide backlash, seemingly Trump-inspired against liberal values (see, for example, Snyder, 2018; Mounk, 2018).

Precisely because the Founders anticipated that a populist demagogue would one day become president, they created checks and balances in their Constitution. Right-wing historian Niall Ferguson (2018) points out that the Founders of America knew enough European history to know “the odds against the success of a republican form of government were very high. Every republic tended to slide into tyranny, usually because the people threw in their lot with a demagogue” (and he believes that America will survive Donald Trump).

Dewey and Addams were seeking out a radically different space for democracy, one with far greater moral heft than it had evinced in its first American century. The analyses of Addams and Dewey in this chapter and in Chapters 4 and 5 have highlighted their American Hope Dream, beginning with critique, progressing to their utopic-oriented dreams of a better America for all, and followed by their attempts at concretizing those dreams. The breakthrough that Addams achieved took a century to be recognized for the vision it embodied (Noddings, 1992; Seigfried, 2002; M. Anderson, 2004). Similarly the full-fledged pioneering feminist studies of Gilligan (1982), Boler (1999, 2002), and Tronto (2013), to cite a partial list, have built upon the ethics of given presaging voice by the progressives. In the conclusion of this thesis, I will feature sites for current and explorative work of feminist scholarship in furthering the notion

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of the relational and caring ethics in ways that place solicitude at the heart of democracy. Similarly, while the Deweyan vision of education has never had the whole-hearted attention it deserves, I point to the living legacy of bright-line thinking about the important relation of education and democracy established by Addams and Dewey in praxis and theory.

The progressive’s epiphany of our being in relation with other and of living as though the lives of others matter add to the distinctiveness of the American Hope Dream. This thinking lay in the direction of evolving a newly defined democracy, one which profiled feeling and concern for the ordinary person, with both the public and the individual as important resources for the emancipative project of recreating democracy. Education was being re-imagined by Dewey as having a cooperative and collaborative communication, and where sharing and caring for one another were correlatives. It was at the same time, “the soul, the spirit of a nationalized education” (Dewey, 1916, 1998. p. 269). The re-conceptualized democracy was communal but it was also supremely interested in the development of the individual within his or her social context. It was audacious leadership that gave new hope to education, as well as to democracy. Education was now being thought of in reciprocation with democracy. That dynamic was part of what gives significance to Dewey’s and Addams’s efforts. Theirs is a living legacy, a topic to be taken up in the conclusion to this thesis and that will identify current efforts to extend their thinking. They opened new space for hope, bringing novel bright-line ethical values to bear on the Declaration’s idealizations of freedom and equality. Democratic action was infused in public education, signaling ways to promote individual and social growth. Democracy was thus firmly linked to lifelong education. In that regard we have seen how Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1917) was a landmark publication.

When, with war threatening, Dewey turned to summarize why American society and other democratic societies must not fall victim to Stalinism or Hitlerism, he framed his argument more on the dynamic future of democracy than on its past. The title that he chose, “Creative Democracy, the Task Before Us,” was not a paean of America’s past performance, but a hymn of praise to the promise and possibility of democracy as a symbol of future hope. In marquis terms, it was about the dynamic future that awaited democracy, the bright day that creative democracy would awaken. The task ahead was to give to the idealization the practical

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brightness that was needed. It was the concretization of the bright-line hope that for Dewey was the task before us.

Thus far, this thesis has argued that democracy as envisioned by the progressives possessed the ethico-moral capacity to spur transformable growth in more and more humanely liberating ways to bring justice, equity, appreciation of difference, and sympathetic understanding into common focus under the banner of re-imagined democracy. For example, the morality of fraternity—in the sense of compassionate sympathy, equality of opportunity, intercultural harmony, and the inherency of American democracy—needs and deserves to be firmly relocated to the heartland of the American Hope Dream. Political democracy would then become an important beneficiary to supplement the infinitely broader vision of what must become thoroughly democratic in every domain of American life. In Chapter 7, I explore additional bright-line attempts at implementation of the American Hope Dream, with particular focus on Elizabeth Anderson and Paulo Freire.

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Chapter 7: Legacies of Critical Hope for Democracy and Education

In this chapter, I first set the stage for practical vistas of hope with theoretical philosophical issues germane to practice, and then move to examples of research, theory, and practice that I believe are oriented towards ameliorating the problems raised about democracy and education in this thesis. This final chapter addresses the tension within conceptions of hope: How do we best balance idealism with the pressing matter of pragmatic action? Critical hope to some scholars has a marked affinity to utopian hope, interblending utopianism with activist praxis.91 In earlier chapters, the world-building, world-making phenomena of hope was explored, and with hope now being considered in the narrower light of criticality, the three notions of critique, utopianism, and concrete action are hybridized into the category of critical hope. This interblend, I will argue, is crucial to our understanding of the American Hope Dream, its past and future, and the bright-line idealism that I have been investigating.

To explore this long-standing conundrum, I begin with a brief review of key aspects of critical hope, making linkages back to my previous chapters. Throughout this chapter I make particular reference to how John Dewey’s and Jane Addams’s visions contribute to this synthesis. I also highlight how several contemporary philosophers envision moving the utopic dream towards a solution. I then outline critical hope as envisioned by Paulo Freire, marking the last major bright-line figure of my thesis. My concern is to probe more deeply into several bright-line idealists by focusing on how they attempt to concretize their hope through strategic actions. I then set the stage for ways in which my three bright-liners, Addams, Dewey, and Freire, provide a living legacy and foreshadow routes to action that I will be exploring in my conclusion. I review why Freire’s revolutionary hope connects with the ideals and spirit of the American Revolutionists and how it has provided nutrient inspiration to freedom fighters around the world. I argue in this chapter that progressives not only provided strong theoretic and practical leadership for constructive revival of democracy and education in their day, but they offer an important forward reach into our times for needed reconstructive action in both

91Hannah Arendt (1958, p. 7) and Selma Benhabib (1986, p. 226) are notable exemplars, in differing ways. 198

domains. I focus on the living legacies of Jane Addams and John Dewey in that regard. I justify their value as lodestone guides on the basis not only of their imaginative breakthroughs during their own Progressive Era, but also for the bridgings that have taken place as a result of their germinations and for their ongoing influence on current research. They, and Freire in his own distinctive way, offer an important forward reach to our time for needed reconstructive actions on both democracy and public education. They offer hope that the ideals of the American Hope Dream can survive.

In light of the gravitas of that challenge in the light of America today, I conclude this chapter with the stirring wisdom of Raymond Williams with respect to the splendid worthiness of the worthiness of the ‘journey of hope,’ the title he gave to his well-known book. His caveat that a combination of fortitude, tenacity, patience, and perseverance is needed to stay the course rings with important resonance for this thesis.

Navigating Space between Idealism and Pragmatism: Critical Hope

My analysis of hope in this thesis would suggest that to hope is to partake of a multi- faceted, multi-functional, and protean phenomenon, perhaps unique in its conceptual complexity. Many of the modalities of hope under interrogation I posit as having had significant presence in the historical trajectories within the American Dream, again with special focus on democracy and education. Examples of modes of hope include the contagion of hope, intellectual revolutions that have engendered hope, tragic and recurring hope, redemptive hope, and open- endedness.

Tragic hope, previously exemplified in the assassination of Lincoln, can itself have multiple dimensions, including the phenomenon of absent hope or despair. Much attention in this thesis has been given to the struggle associated with the act of hoping. That leads in extreme cases to hoping against hope; in other words, taking the notion of hope to the nth degree, when all evidence points against success. Hope can also become largely absent or, in extreme cases, seemingly non-existent. After the Second World War, Victor Frankl famously spoke of the absence of hope among some of his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz and documented the fateful consequences of absent hope (Frankl, 1946/2006). In France in the 1950s, Albert Camus vividly etched his despair in the retelling of the Sisyphus myth. Camus’s existential exegesis focused on 199

the absurdity of life and the illusory nature of hope (Camus, 1959).As well, it was in this postwar era that Karl Menninger opened his famous psychiatric clinic, alarmed at the widespread hopelessness and accompanying depression that had beset veterans of the war (Menninger, 1951). This chapter takes note of the absence of hope in children, an especially poignant thought in sites where violence and poverty are rife with all the circumstances that would seem to beggar the very presence of hope in their lives.

Critical hope not only incites and marshals analytical problematizing as a formidable force, but has strong affinities to world-building, generating new beginnings, and creating democratically sponsored visions that Hannah Arendt (1963/2006) attributed to the purveyors of the spirit of the revolutionary hope. Critical hope warrants stand-alone attention as a mode of hope with distinctive attributes. Michael Apple (2014) has encapsulated critical hope with characteristic succinctness: critical hope “bears witness to negativity”(p xvii). He combines that notion with the educative responsibility with which critical hope is associated, that of illuminating the way in which “educational policy and practice[emphasis mine] are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination—and to struggles against such relations—in the larger society” (Apple, 2010, ibid. Protagonists combating “negativity” have been a common occurrence in Chapters 2 to 5 of my thesis, and this chapter puts the focus on the kind of criticality that precipitated their hope-incited responses. The focus by Michael Apple on the “negativity of critical hope” is genealogically related to the trio of famous critiques by Kant, insofar as they look analytically and judgmentally at life situations (Kant, 1965, 2007, 2015).

As previously noted, the utopic idealism of hopers became a concern with Ernst Bloch in his epic work, The Principle of Hope, and with both Bloch and Dewey attempting to ground hope with “concretization,” in the language of Bloch, and with “reconciliation of ends and means,” in the language of Dewey. When contemporary thinking has turned its attention to hope, its focus on “negativity” has principally been on social injustice and on what Sigmund Baumancalls “the hard currency of human suffering” (as cited in Giroux, 2004, p. 62).Last century, Bloch saw a pedagogic side to critical hope and wrote extensively about the need for doxa spes (education in hope) within an epic three volumes on what he referred to as “the principle of hope.” Having reviewed key debates around critical hope, I now discuss insights from contemporary

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philosophers who provide important frameworks for thinking about future directions related to democracy and education.

Contemporary Frameworks for Critical Hope

My theoretical emphasis in summing up is to point to the role of hope in inciting ideals and the values behind goals while recognizing the hard slogging needed to bring about their achievement. Important leadership in this direction is being given by philosophers in a large philosophic tent—populated by the likes of Linda Zerilli, Elizabeth Anderson, and Katra Vogt, who have philosophical kinship with the classic pragmatist progressive liberals Dewey and Addams, and who are seeking social justice dominated by democratic values but who are also actively seeking a paradigm of mind that is hospitable to both flourishing imagination and feeling.92 The latter two aspects of mind are crucial agencies of social change that such philosophers are heralding in their scholarship. I have appropriated their thinking as theoretic backdrop to identifying in research and practice that I believe will bring vitally needed improvement in democracy and education.

There is needed scope, Zerilli (2004, 2016) claims, of “renascent political thinking” within the latter inquiries on thinking of the later Kant that marked an effort to bring innovation to polity. Such a reconciliation of subjective and objective strength of Kantian cognition has been forming the backdrop of my analyses of hope at work in the revolutionary figures of the American Revolution, most notably in the Founders of the Revolution and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Jefferson, an empiricist, was particularly prominent in embedding “romantic” idealism within the Declaration—the utopic notion of equality—while recognizing that gaining acceptance of the Constitution would require pragmatic compromises with the realities of everyday life as practised in the colonies.

Philosopher Zerilli’s (ibid) work sheds light on the complexities involved in manifesting democracy that helps frame the challenges of critical hope. In Chapter 2, I explored how, in her

92For more on these authors, see Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment(2016), Elizabeth Anderson,The Imperative of Integration (2010);Katra Vogt, Chapter 1ofthis thesis; JaneAddams, Chapter 4of this thesis; and John Dewey, Chapter 5 of this thesis. 201

influential works on Hannah Arendt, including Arendt’s lectures on Immanuel Kant, Zerilli (2017) probed the question of freedom and democracy with special focus on Kant’s critiques. Zerilli analyzed Critique of Judgment opening up the “free play” of the imagination, as typified by Kant’s “we feel the freedom” dictum of the revolutionary spirit of the liberating movements sweeping Europe during the late 1700s. In her recent book on democracy, Zerilli (2016) balanced the new freedom that Kant was experiencing with the judging role, one which had been traditionally incorporated in the “cognition” that was limited to rule-following, as predominated in Critiques of Reason, both theoretical and practical. Zerilli turns to Wittgenstein’s “life world” in support of explicating that balance between theory and practice, ideals and action.

In an explication of Wittgenstein’s Forms of Life and the Nature of Experience, Philosophical Investigations (2010), Part II, it is noted that Wittgenstein speaks to the concept of hope as the life pattern of which “hope or hoping is a part” of a complicated pattern in a complicated life world. The modes of hope that I have been discussing, and continue to discuss in this chapter, are part of this complicated life form. In a somewhat opaque passage in which Wittgenstein refers to the complexity of hope, the author, a specialist translator and interpreter of Wittgenstein, quotes Wittgenstein as denoting hope as “a complicated concept” (Majetschak, 2010, pp. 86-88).The interpretations seem to concur that what he is saying is that hope is either in itself a “complicated form of life,” or part of a complicated form of life. While ambiguity and textual issues of the manuscript make the text meaning somewhat unclear, Wittgenstein is declaring the life pattern of hope to be both a complex and complicated phenomenon, more so than any of its empirical realizations in certain signs: “the phenomena that make up hope have far reaching ramifications and are very complex” (pp. 86-88).

Another contemporary scholar, Elizabeth Anderson (2010), has been particularly provocative in her quest for social justice, and her insights have helped me to consider how we may address the tensions between idealism and action. While she is a strong supporter of democratic processes, she raises the issue of how naked idealism can actually be counter-productive, putting practical solutions seemingly out of reach. Inordinately complex problems, her prime example being segregation, can be, in effect, suffocated by idealism. She identifies segregation as of such profound complexity and deep rootedness that what is called for is non-ideal theory “from a

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diagnosis of injustices in our social world, rather than from a picture of an ideal world.” Anderson (2010) explains non-ideal theory this way:

First, we need to tailor our principles to the motivational and cognitive capacities of human beings, to “people as they are.” In non-ideal theory, ideals embody imagined solutions to identified problems in a society. They function as hypotheses, to be tested in experience. We test our ideals by putting them into practice and seeing whether they solve the problems for which they were devised, settle people’s reasonable complaints, and offer a way of life that people find superior to what they had before. Reflection on our experience can give rise to new conceptions of successful conduct....When a medicine fails to cure illness, we don’t just keep trying other medicines for the same disease. Sometimes we revise the diagnosis. (p. 3)

We must look painstakingly for underlying causes, Anderson (2010) argues, and in such extraordinary cases, shelve the grand ideals. The task she has set before her country is to reintegrate. She offers a compelling vision of what must happen to overcome a history of slavery, alienation, and disharmony, but her vision is not of idealizing what integrated ideals must look like but to start on the ground with the symptoms, working with a thorough diagnosis and evaluation to measures of improvement. She disavows the ideal, citing that improvement by legal fiat has not endured the Civil Rights movement.

Anderson’s (2010) guideline metaphor for addressing the problem is drawn from medicine: while the symptoms of the problem may be superficially evident, the underlying causes often are deep-seated, and in need of thorough diagnosis and evaluation. Space does not permit the further unfolding of the Anderson methodology—her entire book is devoted to explicating and illustrating her theory for fostering integration. With a problem of the magnitude of segregation, she believes that utopic thinking gets bogged down, and can actually negate or even setback improvement. Rather, Anderson advocates empirical searching for the root of the problem. The goal is to make better, not perfect.

What have I taken from the Anderson paradigm? She strives throughout for a balanced role for imaginative thinking and practical strategies. She speaks insightfully to key issues of

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democracy and education embedded in the struggle of integration. Anderson’s (2010) formula for promoting integration is an interplay of pragmatist problem solving with the overlay of Foucauldian, in-depth problem analysis, the strengths of which I have discussed in the last chapter. This is not to discount the utopic thinking that Anderson obviously has undergone in identifying “the imperative of integration” as being of utmost importance in producing effective democracy, education, and other forms of social justice within America. But in the case of problems of extraordinary thickness, her quest becomes a search for starting points that augur hope.

In the case of the critical problems that Anderson (2010) has identified and the methodology that she has called for, and in the case of my own problem sites of democracy and public education, there is not only a need for in-depth research, but also for beginning on the ground with everyday manifestations of the problem, in rigorous inquiry, hypothesis development, testing and revision to ensure that gains are being made. Genealogical inquiry is an apt method in both my topics of investigation if reform is to be achieved.

Connecting directly with Anderson’s (2010) approach of bringing caution and circumspection to utopic hope, Justice Wendell Holmes, famous for his classic pragmatic wisdom, states:

The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort. Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of world that we like…there is every reason for trying to make our desires intelligent. The trouble is our ideals for the most part are inarticulate, and that even if we have made them definite we have very little experimental knowledge of the way to bring them about….I do not see any rational ground for demanding the superlative [emphases mine]—for being dissatisfied unless we are assured that our truth is cosmic truth, if there is such a thing. (as cited in Dewey,1998g, p. 93)

Dewey (1998g) brings Holmes’s comment to us to buttress his thoughts in a similar vein. He eschews “the ideal that it is too sacredly ideal to have any point of contact whatever with existence….But an ideal realm that has no roots in existence, has no efficacy nor relevancy. It is

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a light which is darkness, for shining in the void…and becomes whimsical fantasy or linguistic sophistication” (p. 93)

With the Founders of America contemplating breaking away from the British Empire, we know that the critiquing of Enlightenment views regarding political rights and responsibilities became topics of discussion. Moving a century later into the pragmatic world of the progressives, the process of problematizing became one way of thinking about problem solving. The origin and development of solving problems became a central issue in defining the pragmatic approach to or, as the pragmatist author Louis Menard (1997) put it, pragmatism was a new mode of thinking, it became “the way of our everyday efforts to cope with the world” (p. xi).And, thanks to the influential work of Paulo Freire, new life was breathed into questions of critical hope by the second half of the 20th century.

Paulo Freire’s Critical Hope

To explore the evolution of critical hope, I turn to the renowned critical thinking approach personified in Paulo Freire who gave voice in the 20thcentury to New World oppression, thereby striking a powerful chord amongst American educator reformers about the widespread inequity in American education. Many consider Paulo Freire to be the dean of the critical hope movement in America, that honour stemming from his influential presence at Harvard during 1969 and from the impact of his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), the reach of which, having just been translated and published into English at that time, gave birth to a wave of critical pedagogy.93 His famous challenge to cultures of enforced silence and his seeing in dialogical encounter the hope for change became his operational dialectic. For a growing sector of American educators in the late 1960s and 1970s, hegemonic cultural oppression on the home front was especially prevalent in zones of the urban poor (Freire, 1970). The notion of educated hope was to become a common theme, the first and most celebrated exponent of that being Paulo Freire.

93 For example, Bowles and Gintis, Schools in Capitalist America, 1976. Henri Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (1983); Peter McLaren, Cries from the Corridor(1980); bell hooks, I a Woman (1981). 205

Freire became the spear-carrier of the need to reform through democratically oriented means targeted at reducing oppression. His model was looked at by Americans for its local, as well as its global, insight into the hegemony of inequitable opportunity for emancipative progress and the undemocratic nature of that inequity. America’s New World urban child became such a target.94 While in America, Freire became a catalytic figure in a movement of emancipative hope that began with framing oppression before he turned to finding a social solution.

Near the end of his career, Paulo Freire wrote a book with a title that sums up his great passion, Pedagogy of Hope (1994), the story of a life-long struggle to understand and communicate what education is really about, and the role that hope played in that quest. Reflecting the theme of critically crucial hope he said, “I do not understand existence, apart from hope and dream” (p.2). Hope is a human and ontological need, a concrete imperative. But hope, by itself, is not enough. Hope has to be embedded in the larger struggle, or praxis, which cycles through theory, application, reflection, and returns to theory. Hope is a crucial starting point, says Freire, but hope needs anchoring in practice in order to become historical consciousness. The progressive educator unveils opportunities for hope whatever the obstacles may be. Hope evokes passion. Without “range and love,” there is no hope (p.4).

Freire is deservedly the most universally celebrated of critical educators. Beginning with his attack on the banking model of education, one which conceives of the student as an empty account to be filled by a teacher, Freire (1994) sees the teacher’s role to “instill awakening of critical consciousness” (p.19). As Freire points out, attaining conscientization was essential to becoming an authentic person, a responsible subject with an awareness of the world that impinges on one’s consciousness. In Freire’s landmark work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), his message is a cri de coeur on behalf of the oppressed. The methodology, he warns readers, is radicalization, a form of pedagogy “committed to human liberation” (p.230).

94 For example, Loren Lind, The Learning Machine (1973); McLaren, Cries from the Corridor (1981); Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (1983); Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (1991) and The Shame of a Nation (2005). 206

To understand the revolutionary tenor of Freire’s critical work, it is important to recognize the personal and geographical context in which Pedagogy of the Oppressed was written. Freire had spent 25 years in the midst of dehumanizing living and working conditions forced upon illiterate Brazilian peasants. Only by immersing himself in their culture, he believed, could he problematize and then empower people to alter their relations with society.

Initially embedded in the oppressive condition of northeast Brazil, and later in the economic marginalization of rural Chile, it is little wonder that Freire compares these people to the “wretched of the earth” vividly described by Frantz Fanon (1963) some 20 years earlier in his book of that title. Also, little wonder that Freire identifies with the arch-revolutionist of the time, Che Guevera, seeing his humility and capacity to love as making possible communion with the people (Freire, 1970, p.170). Freire himself had experienced poverty and hunger as a child. His zeal to help the socially afflicted had led him to reject the practice of law, for which he had qualified, and immerse himself with the peasantry in the fields of Brazil, striving to unlock a methodology that would give hope to their lives. His efforts, plus giving a published voice to his beliefs in “education in the praxis of liberation,” were to lead to his exile from his country.

Freire’s (1970) challenge to the establishment articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed was an attack on what he called the culture of science, the many forms of domination by race, class, and education that would shut down paths of thought that lead to a language of critique. The revolutionary pedagogy that has become universally associated with his name is the dialogical encounter. Dialogue for Freire meant first recognizing the “true word” by which he meant the educand being encouraged to name the world “as it really is.” Maxine Greene (1995) connects the Freirean notions of “reading the world” with Michel Foucault’s notion of breaking with the habitual human capacity to “step back” (p.190) from the enmeshments of society, with its blockages and manipulations. As Foucault (1984) puts it: “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem” (p.388).

For Freire (1970), uttering the authentic happens as an encounter with the world, in dialogue with “the Other.” True dialogue is an act of creation, an act of love, and an act of freedom. In dialogical theory, at no stage can revolutionary action forego communion with the people. 207

“Communion, in turn, enlists cooperation which brings leaders and people…to fusion. This fusion can exist only if revolutionary action is really human, empathetic loving, communicative and humble in order to be liberating” (p. 171). Thus we see that the language of liberation and the language of development become symbiotic. It is in this silence-shattering verbal communication that learners come to an understanding of the new possibilities, what Freire called the possibility of a “lovelier world” to which they aspired.

The lovelier world to Freire is the product of a pedagogy of hope, a liberating hope. It enables the development of one’s own language, the language of conjecture, design, and anticipation of a new world—this is the pedagogy of hope.

In Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope (1994), we note his dramatic testimonial to the emotive side of hope, its capacity to evoke rage, love, and the concomitant fortitude for struggle that hope induces. Freirean hope comingles the passion inherent in hope with the leitmotif of this chapter, a critique leading to freedom. Freire is a Promethean figure, a struggling, transgressive, and combative activist in the service of justice for humanity.

The originality and force of Freire’s praxis has brought widespread acknowledgements of his inspiration and influence. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) opened a floodgate of contributions on critical hope in many domains. Eminent educators such as Michael Apple, bell hooks, Megan Boler, Maxine Greene, Henri Giroux, Myles Horton, Cornell West, John Portelli, Joe Kinchelo among many others, pay explicit homage to Freire’s inspiring and empowering vision. Freire’s recognition of the importance of dialogue, says Megan Boler (2004), reminds us that “our perspectives and vision are partial and striving and must remain open to change” (p. 131). To Cornell West (1993), the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a “world historical event” (p.1). Nel Noddings (1995) credits Freire’s explication of dialogue as the most fundamental component of moral education, the care model (p. 140). Their writings, in turn, reflect Freire’s valorization of hope, the creative-critical spirit and the “life necessary” importance of self-liberation.

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The Legacy of Paulo Freire

I posit that all the modalities of hope under interrogation have had significant presence in the historical trajectories within the American Hope Dream, again with special focus on democracy and education. Examples of modes of hope include the contagion of hope, intellectual revolutions that have engendered hope, tragic and recurring hope, and redemptive hope. Many modes of hope arise from the phenomenon of critical hope. Critical hope was, as I have indicated in this chapter, foundational to a democratic way of life as indeed it was to the educative act.

The phenomenon of tragic hope, discussed and cited in previous chapters, was exemplified in the assassination of Lincoln. But Freire movingly adds indentured labour to the category of tragic hope, with its denial of fundamental freedoms. Tragic hope, in itself, can have multiple dimensions, including the phenomenon of absence, which in extremity becomes despair. Much attention in this thesis has been given to the struggle associated with the act of hoping. That leads in extreme cases to hoping against hope; in other words, taking the notion of hope to the nth degree, when all evidence points against success. Hope can also become largely absent or, in extreme cases, seemingly non-existent.

Critical hope for Freire was a vivid example of revolutionary hope, engaging not only the critique of ideology but also taking part in utopian praxis. It was the epitome of hope as struggle, attested to poignantly with his personal safety being continually put at risk, his imprisonment for 70 days, and his years of exile from his homeland, all marking the personal cost of his revolutionary odyssey. While it began with a utopic critique of the oppressive relations and privilege of a dominant culture, he believed that to be only the beginning of what must become a full-fledged revolutionary praxis. Critique led to an education that must be put into practice if hope were to become transformative in the sense of recreating the world. It was an extraordinarily dynamic process that Freire outlined in Politics of Education (1985, pp. 80, 81).

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It was also radical, especially in the light of the cultural ultra-conservatism that was sweeping the 95 United States in the Reagan Era of the 1980s. Freire’s (1985) radicalism was profound:

Revolutionary utopia tends to be dynamic…tends to life rather than death…to love as liberation of subjects rather than as pathological possessiveness, to the emotion of life rather than cold abstractions, to living together in harmony…to dialogue rather than to mutism, to praxis rather than to “law and order”;[for] action rather than…for passivity, to creative challenges rather than domesticating slogan, and to values that are lived rather than myths that are imposed. (pp. 80, 81)

This was the language of revolution, in tune certainly with the language of the new liberatory thrust then operating in the South American wing of the Roman Catholic Church, but with growing opposition from the orthodoxy of the Vatican.

Freire’s (1985) revolutionary doctrine, as reflected in the excerpt above, was strikingly in harmony with much of the 18th-century revolutionary rhetoric of Tom Paine to whip up colonial support for rebelling against the British hierarchical control. But fast forwarding to the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, the appetite for bottom-up, Marxist- inflected revolution resonated only on the edges of mainstream politics. It was, as Freire insisted, a praxis that was called for, and while there was sympathy in many liberal quarters for the plight of the poor in Latin America, and the United States, the appetite for revolutionary action did not enter the terrain of the American Hope Dream. It did seemingly galvanize support for many social movements of the time, feminism being notably on the rise during the 1970s and Black theology and Black Power movements, together with peace and nascent environmental movements seemed to share common platforms for significant if not radical social reform. Freire’s mission of reform did create a world-wide audience. It failed, however, to penetrate to the core of the American dreamers. The ideals of the American dreamers were still more or less

95 Strong right-wing currents were dominant in American political life, with impact on education and democracy. An active foreign policy tried to undermine and suppress revolutionary movements in South and Central America. The Cold War was used as justification for American intervention. Noam Chomsky was perhaps the most vociferous and articulate opponent from the left of the American political spectrum. 210

intact, but the will for social reform was actually moving more to the political right than the political left during the Reagan epoch.

Freire (1985) had a sense of the dramatic, the romantic. He aspired to live a life that he called a “revolutionary praxis.” Like Dewey, he rejected the spectator approach to life in favor of a dynamic tension which that avoids, the alienating, dead-end, intellectualism, empty and hopeless, which contrasts for Freire dramatically with “myself as a conscious presence in the world.” (129)

Henri Giroux and Peter McLaren (1997), longtime students and supporters of Freire, speak of Freire’s “language of hope” (p. 150). Giroux also notes that Freire’s utopian praxis is pitted against the oppressive relation of the privileged and dominant culture. Freire (1985) writes that “cultural action for conscientization is always a utopian enterprise...[which] distinguishes it above all from cultural action for domination” (p.129).

Freire’s Educational Legacy

Freire’s (1985) injunction is part of his utopic dream. Education must always speak to the “annunciation of a new reality “which becomes not only a temporary reality but a permanent cultural reality, a “permanent cultural revolution” (p. 86). He addresses the need for a fundamental faith in community and dialogue. His notion of dialogue was, of course, his core belief that becoming literate was not simply a cognitive process of decoding signs but a critical engagement of lived experience in relation to others. That is the stepping stone to a form of cultural action for freedom. The utopian dream of Freire was about the importance of otherness.

The Dream of Freire and the American Hope Dream: The Challenge Remains

A feature of the American Hope Dream that has been more pronounced in recent decades was one highlighted by Jim Cullen in his book The American Dream (2003). He begins his book with a discussion of the 1931 book by James Truslow Adams called the Epic of America—a work that mentions the phrase American Dream many times, which thus gave the phrase entry into the common parlance as a byword for what he thought his country was all about. It included Adams’s retrospective view of the American Dream and that appellation became popular as a slogan, compared with its long-understood manifestation of the distinctive American destiny but informally referenced Dream.

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Cullen (2003) notes that the deep roots of a phenomenon about the American Dream, which I paid scant attention to in this thesis, that of the materialistic dimension of the Hope Dream. Material prosperity was, of course, a major element of the Dream, a lure for immigration and an ambition to be reckoned with. Cullen dates it to the era of the 1920s and 1930s when the world’s eyes turned to America as a land of opportunity for immigrants, and land where there was freedom from want and free access to other rights and liberties that had been made scarce by the First World War.

With my focus on the ideals, I have consciously stayed away from the materialistic dimension, in part because the prosperity-soil of the American Dream has been well-tilled by the social sciences, American fiction and the media in general, and is thus more self-evident in its character. I raise the prosperity of the Dream dimension now in comparison to the ideals of Paulo Freire. I deliberately juxtapose it to what I regard as the vulnerabilities of current democracy and public education in the United States. Freire does speak, I argue in this thesis, to the serious limitations in strengthening democracy and public education as long as more emancipative agendas for the American marginalized remain unaddressed. The robustness of material success in America is obvious as is the oft-reported growing gap between the rich and poor in the United States. This is not, per se, a part of my American Hope Dream argument, except in noting that the revolutionary hope of a Paulo Freire was based on governance that offered no meaningful opportunity for emancipation from indenture, that is, no escape from social fixity. It was the degree of oppression that prompted Freire’s passion for social transformation. His message has continually resonated in some echelons of America since publication of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). My thesis speaks to the inequality within American society which, rightly or wrongly, became identified with the downtrodden peasantry to which Freire was attempting to bring hope.

The particular importance of Freire to my thesis is to connect his ideals with the Founders’ ideals. This would seem to transcend the materialistic dimensions in ways of surpassing importance when publics on the margins face alienation and oppression. I pursue the bright-line of social justice, which has been to remind us of the upsurge of reforms that have occurred in which the ideals became reannunciated with the added dimension of American social reform. Dewey and Addams were particularly engaged in brightening the ideals, giving serious content 212

to equality and democracy, and thereby getting beyond the shibboleths to engage with what they believed to be the Founders’ long-term intention for the nation. As well, I will continue to emphasize in this chapter that there are other bright-liners who are bringing fresh insight into play every day.

For the reasons I have been advancing, the freedom that was of supreme importance to the revolutionary cause in 1776 embraced a kind of fraternity, solidarity, and interdependence that has undergone many changes. A term like freedom for them did not embrace “conversion to the other” in the radical sense that Freire stresses. There are relational elements of freedom within the historical American Hope Dream, but they partake largely of family, social, and neighbourly relationships, certainly not with the universally ethical, unconditionally embraced, in the sense that Freire envisions. Freire had a world ecumenicism as his ideal, a cosmopolitan view that was very similar to that of Jane Addams. It is conspicuously contested and rejected in relation to the American Hope Dream by a sizeable American public. The contribution of this thesis lies in the direction of edifying the significance of moving in the direction of the “relating ethic” as a vital step in bringing about improvement in both the current state of democracy and public education. The fact that democracy and education were united in common purpose by Dewey in theory and Addams in practice, adds poignancy to their need to be profiled and addressed for the health of the Hope Dream to be repaired (Urban Walker, 2006).96

In his canon on critical hope, Giroux (2001) highlights a hope-democracy-education axis, with hope being the inciting force that begins with what Bloch called the not-yet of possibility, our awareness of the need for a better world, and yearning for what might be possible. That, as an educational awareness, Giroux links to the understanding of the politics of change, and how the world works in terms of structures. There is, of course, a schooling implication for educated hope (that political dimension of understanding having been a topic, also by the Founders, vis-à- vis the very preservation of democracy), and Giroux seeks productive means with which to engage students in understanding the political forces of our day and to reflect on the processes of

96 Urban Walker (2006) explores different ways with which hope connects with moral repair. 213

structural amelioration. Laura Pinto and John Portelli (2009) also interpret the Freirean manifesto in ways relevant to public education:

Critical thinking is sometimes misinterpreted to refer simply to criticism, or creative thinking, or problem solving, or decision-making (Portelli, 2000). While aspects of these are consistent with critical thinking, in our view critical thinking is much more…critical thinking for democratic life must include a dispositional element. We suggest that, in a democracy this dispositional component includes an individual’s propensity to “act” by using critical thinking in appropriate situations in the classroom and outside the classroom. Application…is necessary for democracy….We must acknowledge that we are defining critical thinking as a particular way of life which requires individual citizens to demonstrate both skills and dispositions….Critical thinking is not value neutral. (p. 2)

Giroux (2001) also reinforces the Freirean theoretic, which was of equally paramount importance to hope scholar Ernst Bloch: the third principle of critical hope, beyond awareness and understanding, and one championed by Bloch throughout his lifetime, was to legitimize the dream of change by taking concrete action in its realization. Giroux, following Bloch, advocates student engagement in political action, becoming part of a struggle to effect transformative change. Similar to Dewey, Giroux sees schooling as intimately engaged in promoting liberal democracy, particularly “the liberation of individuals so that realization of their capacities may be the law of their life” (Dewey, 1998e, p. 323). Unlike Dewey, Giroux would recommend critical hope plumbing and participating in deeper forms of opposition to illiberalism, ones with more radical prospects for social upheaval, as indeed did Bloch, the latter having espoused the aims of the Revolution of 1917 and defended the Soviet Regime’s prosecution of Communism for the rest of his life.97

97Much to his admirer’s chagrin, Bloch refused to repudiate the criminality of Stalin and referred to the human rights’ abuses of the Soviet Union as growing pains. He did, however, believe that Communism was an evolving not a static utopic polity, but it was a decidedly a master narrative (if open to change). 214

The Bright-line of Critical Hopers

American youth have historically embraced idealist causes. One need only to recall the Civil Rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. Youth involvement was also a part of the protest movements directed at the World Trade Organization in Toronto, Melbourne, Quebec City, Seattle, and Rome. The Occupy movement included American youth, as did the recent Women’s Marches held around the world in January 2018 to protest the policies of the Donald Trump administration.

The Parkland School Tragedy (the mass shooting of students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in the spring of 2018), took the lives of 17 people and wounded 17 more, making it one of the world’s deadliest school massacres. It added to the narrative of mass killings of children in America schools as regular occurrences. Youth stepped forward in large numbers and adapted civil rights–era principles to organize this movement. Since firsthand witness is recognized as the essence of every great American movement for reform, the question being asked is,Will this point the way towards a revivification of democratic action, reconnecting the streets with the legislature? The movement since the tragedy has united children, their parents, and the public in several mass protests. Will it lead to legislative action that works to reducethe availability of guns intended for war to citizenry? It represents that kind of student engagement in their world that Henri Giroux, Michael Apple, and other vocal social activist educators believe is crucial to bringing social awareness and active resistance to injustice. As Nancy Fraser (2010) puts it, locating political space and using one’s political agency against injustice is a critically important life skill.

Other forms of youth involvement in subversion have found activism in ecological protests, and a wide variety of local causes for better education. What is common to critical hope is, as Judith Butler points out, its embrace of the notion of “what it is to be human in the world” (Butler, as cited in Giroux, 2001, p.62). Butler’s enunciation serves as a suitable starting point for working with children at any age to provide them with an education. Given age-

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appropriateness, it is grounds for “prodding human society to go on questioning itself, from ever stalling or being declared finished” (Zygmunt Bauman, as cited in Giroux, 2001, p.64).98

The Pragmatist-Progressives’ Living Legacy

One of the dominant themes of hope has been to explore the Founding pragmatists’ attention to changing the world for the better. How they went about designing and trying to effect world improvement, I have argued, led to ideas and methods of great epistemic importance. Of particular significance was their challenge to the conceptual-propositional theory of meaning as the dominant explication of mind functioning. Bringing the lessons of Darwin’s biology to the forefront, Dewey asserted a revolutionary new description of mind: “Every thought and meaning has its substratum in some organic act…It roots in some definite action of biological behavior” L.W.1. 221. (Experience and Nature). The anticipatory reach of this Deweyan insight into the work of Thomas Alexander and Mark Johnson more than half a century later, led to a shift in the intellectual paradigm concerning the relation of body to meaning. Johnson (2007) explains how it is being re-expressed in this century:

If babies are learning the meaning of things and events, and if babies are not yet formulating propositions, then meaning and understanding must involve a great deal more than the ability to create and understand propositions and their corresponding linguistic utterances….Meaning traffics in patterns, images, qualities, feelings and eventually concepts and propositions. (pp. 8–9)

In the late 20th century, the Addams-Dewey-Alexander-Johnson axis of embodied meaning launched, encouraged, and gave a form of reinforcement to a number of ancillary epistemic movements. Significant feminist scholarship emerged, for example, on the issues of aesthetic embodiment and its bearing of the revaluing of gender rights, creating forms of resistance and protecting the rights of the child for education and generic well-being (see Seigfried, 1998; Boler, 2004, 2005; Ahmed, 2004; Bammer, 1991; Noddings, 1995; Gilligan, 1982). I have hailed Jane Addams as a key figure in presaging the ethic of the caring movement by adopting the

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principle of caring as central to Hull House. Her insistence that caring be a crucial element of democracy was a second landmark thesis. She also championed her own reform on the protection of children from industrial exploitation.

The aesthetic theory of meaning offered many fresh insights that have proven influential in philosophy, literature, theology, neurology, and psychology. The lines of scholarship provoked by the embodied meaning movement begun by the early pragmatists broadened epistemological understanding, while also providing impetus to concerns within the fields of social justice, democratic theory, and equity theory. It was only an epistemic revolution. Axiological and ontological issues as well were impacted; new ideas were generated that were oriented to rehabilitative hope for the human condition.99 The movement towards the end of the 20th century vastly broadened the thinking for the future within the disciplines traditionally associated with studies of mind, and carried with it implications for progressive change across the arts and sciences.

Dewey’s Living Legacy on Democracy

Dewey’s living legacy has been well chronicled by Larry Hickman in a number of fields. Dewey’s work is so vast within the field of democracy, that this section is limited to a synopsis of the numerous ways modern political theories of democracy build on his ideas.

Example 1: A basic idea that Dewey articulated in his 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy”(1997a) was that democracy must further human capability (pp. 201-204). This idea of democracy being a developmental process that moves onto the terrain of democratic participation was extensively elaborated by Carol Pateman (1970) a century later. A core argument of Carol Gould (1998) had also revolved around the Deweyan notion that all people should be enabled to develop their potentialities and capacities (p. 316).

99For example, the Women’s Rights movement, revisions of descriptions of rights and normative entitlements, liberatory struggles, feminist political philosophy, standpoint philosophy, perspectives on sexism and trans issues, and equal opportunity. 217

Example 2: John Rawls’s first principle of justice is that people should enjoy equal rights to the extent liberty is possible under a liberal democracy. For Rawls (1971) this means the right of equal participation and formal opportunities for political participation, and maintaining equal formal opportunities for their effective use (pp. 224-228). Dewey included both the right to equally share in making collective decisions and the right to demand formal and informal obstacles to full human development, for instance based on birth, wealth, gender, or race (Dewey and Tufts, 1932/1985, pp. 348-349).

Example 3: Frank Cunningham, following C.B. Macpherson, agrees that democratic participation nurtures attitudes of self-confidence, solidarity, tolerance, and the like which in the long run encourages self-development (Cunningham 2002 pp. 53,54) (Macpherson 1973). This notion, straight from Dewey, was one of the key reasons that he entitled his book Democracy and Education. He saw the vital importance of the reciprocal relationship. The book is full of examples of how public school pedagogy should be attentive to nurturing human development in the above ways.

Example 4: “The absence of mastery by others” (Pettit, 1999, p.165). “Republican Freedom and Democratization.”Freedom from elitism and hierarchy was a favorite theme of Dewey, who argued that authentic democracy meant freedom from the feudalization of humanity. The Dewey versus Lippmann debate serves as an example.

These are but four of many examples of how Dewey’s and Addams’s re-imagining of democracy within the frame of an associative way of living, while still underdeveloped in mainstream practice, is far from being in eclipse. Their interpretation has become integral to conversations on the meaning of democracy in our time. More important, it is crucial, as I have been discussing in this thesis, that their redefinition of democracy is (1) highly relevant to education and (2) is broad-based as a way of giving enriched meaning to many aspects of daily life. It is the kind of imaginative thinking about American democracy that Rorty had in mind

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when he claimed that Dewey deserved to be ranked with Heidegger and Wittgenstein among the 100 best philosophers of the 20thcentury.

Addams’s Living Legacy

Scholarship on Jane Addams as discussed in Chapters 4 and 6 has similarly revealed and explicated many progressive strands in her research and writing that are now firmly embedded in contemporaneous thinking about community development, organizational improvement, social work, race relations, women’s rights, the peace movement, and promoting postwar international peace, workers’ rights, and the recreational and improvisational theatre movement. Other lines of thinking that she innovated were in organizational improvement, reflective practitioning, and action research (see Shields, 2018; Seigfried, 2002; Hamington, 2010; Knight, 2008); The values of founding liberal pragmatism, I have argued, presented an emancipative agenda that has much to offer to those looking to address the crises in democracy and education today. I attributed key areas of pedagogic reform to the reform-mindedness of Addams and Dewey earlier in this thesis. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 identified and explicated their significance. Key pedagogic issues that Addams implemented in Hull House and that Dewey extolled in his theories on pedagogy were the cultivation of cooperation and collaboration. To Dewey they were intimately related to both democracy as a way of life and to the educational enterprise. They were part of the democratic ambiance of Hull House. To Addams’s biographer, Louise Knight (2008), cooperation was central “to her work in all its dimensions” (p. 78). Hull House’s numerous social clubs for children and adults were self-governing, run on the principle of collaboration and cooperation. In her extensive political life, Addams’s style was also collaborative and cooperative. “Cooperation involved mutual agreement on a policy goal, and an ability to set aside other differences to work effectively together. Most of all, the principle of cooperation authorized Addams’s belief in a pragmatic, rather than symbolic, approach to political reform” (pp. 73, 76).

100 Jane Addams, too, was a key co-shaper of the re-imagining of democracy. 219

A Synoptic Survey of Bright-Line Thought-Lineage

The values and strategies that Addams and Dewey identified, worked on, theorized about, and practised were breathtakingly audacious and imaginative for their day. My purpose has been to flag them not only for their historic importance but for their aptness as guideposts to entering into today’s problem-solving milieu.

Richard Rorty (1982) famously observed that John Dewey and William James were waiting at the end of the postmodern road (p. xviii).101 That is true, insofar as theories of “extended mind” are concerned. Extension of mind theorizing has been proliferating at a feverish pace over these past few decades, some of the drivers being artificial intelligence, the computer modeling of mind, the embodied mind theory, the dynamic system of mind theory, and neuroplasticity (Doidge, 2007).Others included distributed cognition (Spurrett and Cowley, 2010) and scaffolding of language (Rupert, 2010). Current scholarship has reached back to C.S. Peirce (abduction and imagination. William James’s stream of consciousness was tapped by Susanne Langer (1953), and Dewey was prolifically mined by many scholars such as Thomas Alexander (1987) and Mark Johnson (2007) for their organic theories of embedded mind. Dewey has been the subject of many forays beyond ideas on cognitive embeddedness, with more recent mind theories of neuropsychology, neuropragmatism, and dynamic systems theory. The science of extended thought in is bewilderingly confusing to some but “still in its theoretical and empirical infancy” to others (Menary, 2016, p. 18).

My analysis has included modes of hoping and their historical role in the shaping of the American Hope Dream. In the early stages of colonial settlement, I emphasized the idealistic hope that stemmed from religious faith, and how that faith over time transmogrified into hopes that included entrepreneurship, invention, experiential education as personified in Benjamin Franklin, and the political spirit of revolution of the Founding Fathers. The hope bright-line of the 19th century was kept alive through other vision: Horace Mann for universal education, through the wide-ranging inspirational essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the emancipatory oratory of Frederick Douglass, the activist underground-railroad hope of Harriet

101 At the end of the analytical and the postmodern road is what Rorty asserted. 220

Tubman, and the famous democratic vistas of Whitman, not to mention Susan Anthony’s and Elizabeth Stanton’s hopes for women that was ignited in Seneca Falls in 1853. I have attributed multiple modes of hope to Abraham Lincoln before moving to the Progressive Era, where new hopes emerged for the fulfillment of the American Dream. Philosophers James, Addams, Dewey, and Mead brought pragmatic hope to the fore with Dewey and Mead giving special leadership to hope within a new secular “metaphysic” labeled meliorism (social reform) highlighted by a socio-moral dynamic of solicitude—an ambitious ethic of sympathy, caring, and transactional engagement. The latter hope was transformative in ambition for democracy, public education, and, for Addams and Dewey, broad-based social and political reform for America and the world. Pragmatic “hopes,” as Justice Holmes was to put it, opened vistas “of the farthest stretch of human thought, the chords of a harmony that breathes from the unknown” (as cited by Dewey, 1998g, p. 94). (Dewey emphasis added)

Ongoing projects are of-a-piece insofar as they are travelling a similar direction—towards the reform of democracy and education—such as that represented by Elizabeth Anderson’s (2010) brave attempt at addressing the imperative of integration in America. Anderson’s cautionary note about runaway utopianism, whose idealism can demoralize and retard the solving of some of the thickest and thorniest social problems, brought her back to the pragmatic strategy of starting with the known, everyday problematics, turning the problem-solving direction towards conjectural experimental steps, and building through a process of hypothesizing, testing and revision. The pragmatism approach that she features blends importantly with my leitmotif of hope.

Another bright-line mission is underway by Colombia University scholar Katja Vogt to further research and advance her imagination and agency project to connect motivation and agency through envisioning positive future scenarios.

Similar in reflecting creative vision is the work of Joan Tronto (1993), who is determined to supplant neo-economic thinking with the “ethic of caring” as the authentic moral heart of the democratic vision. Tronto’s work is in the lineage of Jane Addams, I would argue, seeking radical reworking of democracy that emphasizes universal human needs as having been upstaged

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by neo-liberal economics in ways that badly distort her infinitely more enlightened conception of democracy.102

Deweyan Hope and Its Broad Based Legacy of Naturalistic Metaphysics

As discussed in Chapter 5, pragmatist scholar Larry Hickman sees Dewey’s 1896 essay, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” leapfrogging behaviourism into a depiction of a mind that is remarkably attuned to the dynamic systems of the mind as touted by neo-pragmatists Teed Rockwell and Alva Noe. The legacy of Dewey experienced a philosophic revival as well as a psychological revival in the latter decades of the century, in part by the attention given to him by Richard Rorty for his visionary interest and role in imagining an improved form of democracy. Hickman, himself an important figure in restoring Dewey’s reputation in past decades, and more recently from his vantage point as Director at the Centre of John Dewey Studies (University of Southern Illinois), has noted a number of significant areas of current research to which Dewey gives important leads (Hickman).

This project has brought attention to the role of hope as a key epistemic and axiological force. One key element of hope is imagination. Dewey exalted the role of imagination, “the chief instrument of the good,” crucial because “the ideal factors of every moral outlook and human loyalist are imaginative” (Dewey, 1934/2005, p. 362). Imaginative experience, Dewey tells us, is that “when sense of quality, emotion and meaning come together in union, that marks a new birth in the world” (p. 279). Consistent with this belief, Dewey was determined to keep meta-ethics and meta-aesthetics as highpoints of fulfillment of the human life.

Deweyan hope, manifested as meliorism or social altruism, was of supreme importance to his weltanschauung. With his conversion to natural secularism, he was determined the ideals and the values of religious faith, now shorn of the supernatural, be re-characterized in a naturalistic form.103 It was critically important to him, for example, to maintain a meta-ethical perspective on

102 Joan Tronto has written on this topic prolifically in Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice (2013). 103 Philip Kitcher refers to evolutionary altruism as The Ethical Project. 222

altruism. As well, the notion of possibility took centre stage. Dewey devoutly believed in the possibility of progress, and the possibility of progressive change. But his metaphysics was broader than the ethics of altruism. When Charles Taylor (2007) discussed secularism, he raised the question of whether a “sense of fullness” of life was accessible to those who were oriented to naturalistic secularism. Dewey stoutly believed it decidedly was. Naming his alternate vision naturalistic metaphysics, he gave it a panoramic metaphysics in the operation of mind, lending to it his vision of reconstruction

Dewey’s vivid understanding of the embodiment of meaning in experience was not to be diminished by secularization, just reoriented. For example, he implied that the epiphanies common to religious experience were still possible, notes philosopher Kitcher (2012) In A Common Faith (1934/2013), Dewey speaks to the power of the religious outlook and function, such as on the occasions of uplift that accompany epiphanies, well-known for their capacity to sustain and evoke religious-like attitudes of awe and wonder, for example, in the evocations of art, music, and ceremony. Can cultivate and inspire in ways that make one aware of how life could be? Philosophers Kitcher (2012) and Connelly (2011) believe with Dewey that the “non-theistic reverence for life remains to be cultivated.” Dewey is determined to retain the “metaphysical” experience thus aroused, but not the divine sourcing. His secularism gave up on supernatural intervention but not on the richness, the meaningfulness, the dreams of fulfillment, the hope-incited quest for a full life.

Dewey’s naturalist metaphysics was to give status to values that are arrived at through a process of experiencing through inquiry that disclosed generic traits of existence. Dewey invoked the educational experience of experimental learning and constructivism in discerning the pervasive traits of experience and nature. James Garrison (2009) describes the process of understanding Deweyan metaphysics as the “socially constructed linguistic meanings and logical essences from ordered discourse” (p. 91). As noted above, the keynote belief that Dewey had about the importance of retaining the metaphysical outlook with pragmatic naturalism was to develop the capacity to recognize and participate in the multifarious richness of human experience. That was the vivid and forcefully expressed Deweyan hope for his metaphysics. It is his attempt to free “the metaphysics from confusion and with ultimate origins and ultimate ends—that is, from questions of creation and eschatology” (Dewey, 1998h, p. 180). 223

The Long Journey of Hope

Patience with and endurance for such an intense and laborious process was recognized and lauded by Raymond Williams in his many efforts to produce hopeful social change. In his book, A Short Revolution: Towards 2000, Revisited (1983), he wrote about seemingly profound, intractable problems. “It is not by staring at these blocks that there is any change of movement past them. There are practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begin to alter if we just have the heart to pursue them” (p. 219). Williams metaphorizes the endeavor famously as a journey, a journey of hope.

Once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of hope[emphasis mine]. If there are no easy answers there are still available and discoverable hard answers and it is these that we can now learn to make and share. This has been, from the beginning, the sense and the impulse of the long revolution. (p. 219)

These sentiments by Williams frame the formidable tasks before America in the domains of democracy and education for the 21stcentury. In the conclusion that follows, I map areas of prospective promise for the continuing hope-journey. To me, they offer points of departure for this worthwhile journey, starting points germane to tackling the contemporary problems, both theoretical and empirical.

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Conclusion

The Continuing Quest for “the Sunlit Path of Hope” for Democracy and Public Education

Martin Luther King Jr. enunciated his hope at a time of personal peril and malevolent opposition to his cause of civil liberty. “The bright day must come,” he said, “the sunlit path of democracy and its promises of brotherhood, freedom and security of life and equality must be honoured” (King Jr., 1963). Hope, we know, does not always successfully find a sunlit path to traverse. It has now been 50 years since M.L. King Jr. was assassinated, and as I have argued, in this thesis, it is important to review the challenge and opportunity that bright-line thought leaders provided along the way. In this Conclusion, I assemble saliencies for strengthening democracy and its close correlative, public education. As I have argued throughout, now is not the time to be overwhelmed by the negativity, pessimism, and nihilism of our age (see, for example, Lepore, 2017)

At the turn of the last century, Anglo-American author David Harvey wrote about the need to find space for hope. In Spaces of Hope (2000), he explained that his search was in response to the widespread lament in Britain of the Thatcher Era regarding “the inability to find an optimism of the intellect with which to work through alternatives has now become one of our most serious barriers to progressive politics” (p. 17). Harvey drew on Raymond Williams’s Resources of Hope (1989) for inspiration to “open up spaces [of hope] that have far too long remained foreclosed” (p. 17).

The last few years in America have been filled with seeming division, fear-mongering, and America- Firstism against which there are evocative calls to recover an earlier American spirit that extolled peace, freedom, and human dignity (see Krugman, 2018; Nilsen, 2017). The week- long bipartisan tributes to the late Senator John McCain, August 26 to September 2, 2018, as he lay in state, gave ample and poignant evidence that the American Dream ideals were still cherished by the Congress of American legislators.104

104 Many speakers—including George Bush, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama—spoke to the ideals of the Republic as the touchstones of American political life and of their views that were upheld by Senator John McCain. 225

The 1904 revised version of the anthem “America, the Beautiful,” for example, illustrates a very different vision of America, one whose roots I have been analyzing in this project in relation to the American Hope Dream. It also points to the conundrum of the status of today’s American Hope Dream. In aspiration at least, America still has a vision of the desirable, and that, I argue, speaks not only to material issues but also to the ideals of the Founding Fathers. How to address this constructively at a time of extreme populism and considerable alienation and national division is where hope has a role to play. It is in the constructive voices towards alternatives that shards of reasonableness and democracy need salience. At their best, such shards populate my view of the need for the bright-line and possibility for the future of the Hope Dream.

The stream of images of America that now dominate our screens and press are in startling contrast to the rhetorical beauty of ideals that are praised in “America, the Beautiful,”whose verses include not only the scenic charms of the country but also the values that were once widely cherished. The anthem’s descriptive phrases of America include “the banner of the free, thy soul in self-control, a thoroughfare of freedom, till all success be nobleness, good crowned with brotherhood”—all values that are arguably under serious threat. As the plethora of parting tributes to Senator John McCain attest, the ideals, at least, of the American Dream still have their pristine character in the lives of mainline American citizenry even as their authority of institutional support and capacity for practical application have been increasingly undermined.

I conclude on the note that in such a time as we are now in, the identification, reporting and lauding of the spaces and activities of hopefulness is a productive avenue. The ideals of my focus reflect the content of my thesis: freedom, equality, fraternity, democracy, and a special category of ideal, democracy in symbiosis with public education. In keeping with the bright-line identification of my thesis, my selection of the ideals that constitute the moral core of the American Hope Dream is closely tied to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and, to some extent, with other Creeds that followed.

Bright-line Hope with New Horizons

In this thesis, I have found a plenitude of bright-lines within American history, and I now conclude this project by projecting forward an expanded resource base with hopeful examples of 226

work that is the product of my research. These resources also signify the ongoing effort to repair the bright-line and restore the ideals of the Founding Framers and their Creeds and their relevance to democracy and public education.

My identification consolidates hope-oriented resources based on the above-identified concepts that are aimed at offering new horizons of hope on topics that I introduced in my thesis. I briefly preface that with background commentary on their relevance to the phenomenon of hope, democracy, and education, and why I regard these areas of current endeavours as outstanding candidates of progressive thought and action in the direction of strengthened democracy and public education. My selections are chosen to be of service to those who might be interested in pursuing and building on the topics of my thesis.

The Need for Bright-Line Praxis for the Bright-Line Ideals

In my thesis, I discuss both the brightness and seeming eclipses of the sun on the pathways of American life. The darkness that beset democracy, for example, included times of needed rescue, of recovery, and, especially noteworthy within the Progressive Era, of inventive and enriching interpretations and imaginaries of the ideals. The notion of fraternity, for example, while it was prominent in the run-up to the American Revolution, was not specifically identified in the Declaration as an ideal. That omission was strikingly taken aboard first by Jane Addams in her praxis at Hull House, and later by John Dewey who simply co-opted fraternity as the third member of the liberty, equality fraternity trinity into his powerful discourses of why the survival of American democracy was critical to ward off Hitler and Stalin in their aggressive thrusts for world dominance. Fraternity was also, as noted above, a paramount ideal enunciated by Martin Luther King Jr., as he struggled to bring a new plane of interracial brotherhood to the discourse of the civil rights movement.

It is possible to think of the dream of M.L. King Jr. as unrealistically utopian, and that the Founders, too, were indulging in wishful thinking. Ernst Bloch (1986) argued that the hope of daydreams offered enormous potential for changes of similar magnitude. Bloch spent a lifetime talking about the latency of our daydreams, and why the harnessing of them for constructive world change gives to hope such consequence.

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Bloch’s (1986) argument about the power of hope carried with it the caveat that the dream be combined with resolve to make it happen. The wishful must combine the wilful. It was the actualizing of the daydream that unleashed the real possible future. My focus has been to discuss the importance of the utopian function insofar as the utopia impulse, its anticipation, and efforts qualify it as authentic hope.

In assembling bright-lines of hope in the project and following their entwining threads through history, I have argued that the Founders were coalescing dreams around what would be a better life. Utopic thinking, as I have argued, is not only a wish or desire combined with human emotion, but as Bloch (1986) famously asserted time and again, it is the utopian impulse combined with the potential to become “more essentially a direction [emphasis added] of a cognitive kind” (p. 12).

Hope in Dark Times

One interest of this thesis has been to analyze how hope in dark times addresses the plight of institutions under siege that are designed to keep alive the ideals that M.L. King Jr. extols— brotherhood, freedom, equality. Dark times have haunted American democracy through the years, and there is pertinence to questions about its shaky health today. There seem to be systematic attempts to smother democracy, the guardian of America’s inherited ideal.105 To Bloch, such predicaments underrate the resilience of hope to provoke reawakenings. Bloch (1986) put it this way:

[The] utopian function, the hope premonition, maintains the alliance with all that is still morning-like in the world. Utopian function thus understands what is exploding because it is this itself in a very condensed way...a militant optimism p. 456).

…

105 For example, President Obama’s tribute to Senator John McCain read, in part:“Isn’t that the spirit we celebrate this week that striving to be better, to do better, to be worthy of the great inheritance that our founders bestowed? So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult in phony controversies and manufactured outrage”(Martinez, 2018). 228

The utopian function...opens up, on truly attained summits, the ideologically unobstructed view of human hope (p. 158).

In the writings of Bloch, one finds both urgency and pathos, a spirit of breaking away and a projection towards a new way of seeing, thinking, and living together. His view of us living beyond ourselves, anticipating ourselves, and never positively being there, expresses itself in wishes, hopes, fantasies, dreams, and utopian projects. Bloch’s attention, as always, alerts us to our latent energies with potential for political transcendence.

American Democracy, the Foremost Carrier of the American Hope Dream

It is a tossup as to which is the foremost carrier of the American Hope Dream—democracy or the Declaration with its famous ideals. They were intertwined in charting the way forward to the exceptional destiny that the Founders portended. The constituent ideals were embedded in the Declaration. Keynote was the character of the new democracy as being experimental, a form of governance that it was assumed would change with a changing world. As has been noted, change was the keynote frame for Bloch in explaining what was needed to address the human condition. Bloch (1986) saw hope in a temporal way recognizing that it was not always accessible in the now. Not every present opens up for the now:“ That which we call the propelling now, with unfulfilled hope being the repressed, the interrupted, the undischarged on which in one and the same act fall back upon while it reaches forward to us in order to develop a better way” (pp. 129–130). This unfulfilled hope reaches forward to us with points of the now that spark and transmit each other. Walter Benjamin (1922) also refers to the spark of hope in the past which flies up in the midst of radical temporal reorientation into the present. In other words, the past has its own directionality, its own internal drive towards fulfillment. Bloch sees a prospective perspective to philosophy’s retrospective reflection. Benjamin also sees a retrospective intervention that relates past and present as a form of eschatological future. Benjamin, in calling attention to unfulfilled hope, sees its sparking forward as the basis of new hope. Bloch’s doctrine

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of hope, likewise, has an anticipatory ontology, our repressed tendencies that project into the future.106

The Living Legacy of Bright-line Thinkers of the Past and Present

In the Appendix that follows, I give my sense of the ‘sparking forward’ of research and scholarship that moves in the direction of the ideal that the Founders had for fulfillment of the American Dream. I have mentioned many of the scholars in this thesis, calling them bright-line thought leaders, who contributed to keeping alive the democratic distinctiveness of that Dream. The Appendix is intended to be invitational to readers to become more fully acquainted with the new frontiers represented in this thesis. The frontier women and men are looking at ideals such as equality, fraternity and democracy through a 21st Century lens. While I list major works in my thesis-end References, I undertook thematic groupings in the Appendix to add breadth and depth to the ‘living legacies’ of the early most promising early developments.

In Sum, the Transcending Nature of Hope

In sum, the hope for democracy as a world-changing phenomenon was congruent with Bloch’s interpretation of hope’s potential for political transcendence. We have seen how hope reaches forward to us from the unfulfilled past in order to develop a better way. The hope of the Founders for democracy resonates with Bloch and also with Richard Rorty who, like Dewey, was seeking the nation’s democratic promise by describing the radical temporal reorientation of knowledge in Achieving Our Country (1998). Bloch’s great passion was to reinvent philosophy towards a more ideal future. Hope becomes a method for overcoming the not-yet consciousness that we have as we apprehend the immanence of hope in the form of our imaginaries of a better world. Bloch (1986) objected to depictions of a closed world, the future in effect sealed off (p.8).

Our hope is disposed to something new that is a “dawning up of new frontiers of our thinking” (Rorty,1999a). Rorty, who read John Dewey’s pragmatism as a proposal to replace knowledge with hope, also aligns with Bloch and Benjamin insofar as attributing to hope a shift

106 I am indebted to anthropologist Hirozaki Miyazaki’s book The Method of Hope (2004) for some of the comparisons between Bloch’s and Benjamin’s interpretations of hope. 230

of temporal orientation of philosophy towards the future but with a pragmatist orientation.“Pragmatism is the apotheosis of the future, he said, placing his belief in the role of pragmatic hope changing the world in a more democratic way. Like Bloch, this was deemed human capacity to change the world, if we could achieve future-oriented faith in ourselves. What the future holds, wrote Rorty (1999a), “will astonish and exhilarate” (p.28). Both Bloch and Rorty saw the indeterminant character of the direction of the world, the abandonment of the notion of a predetermined end, and hence the notion of hope emerging into engagement with the world open to the future.

The Compelling Argument for Comprehensive Democracy

For Jane Addams and John Dewey, a more comprehensive democracy was essential for its efficacy. Democracy was not a solitary activity, of course, but intersubjective and communal. That, as Addams recognized and acted upon, brought democracy into the ken of caring. The insertion of caring into a more inclusive interpretation of democracy also brought democracy into play as a form of social justice in striking new ways. Democracy was not to be thought of as the abstract notion that Hobbes depicted, of autonomous individuality, but as a form of communal obligation. It was a form of egotism. The progressives departed from the liberal emphasis of eliminating or subordinating fraternity on the grounds of it leading to socialism and edifying only liberty and equality as human rights. Addams tried for balancing the trio of liberty and equality with fraternity to exalt the social ethical practice as a vital way to encourage responsible social practice. Dewey agreed and famously expanded democracy into a way of living in communal harmony.

A corollary to the notion of democracy being re-imagined by Addams and Dewey for its essential sociality and the inherent ethic of caring was education. It too, seemed to fit the new paradigm of a democracy that was vibrantly active and expansive in nature as Dewey prescribed. Pragmatist Richard Bernstein (2010) put it this way: “Democracy requires a robust culture in which the attitudes, emotions and habits that constitute a democratic ethos are embodied” (p. 86). In the Deweyan model, education was like the ethic of caring: also an inherent property of democracy.

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The logic of that notion rides with the concept of participation. To Dewey and Addams, participation was keynote to the modus operandi of democracy. In the locus, it presumed a level of equality, for example at Hull House, and the concomitant expectation that everyone would participate on a level playing field, that there would be give and take, and that problem-solving be central to inquiry. Social responsibility was part of the ethos of democratic participation. All of these became cardinal pedagogical principles of Dewey, as well as praxis for Addams. Dewey theorized extensively on modes of participation, drawing on the educational innovations occurring in the Chicago “lab school.”

Frank Cunningham, in his book on Theories of Democracy (2002), saw Dewey’s pragmatism as behind the notion that problem solving was at the heart of democracy. What Dewey believed about problem solving within democratic governance also applied, of course, to problem solving as key to the process of inquiry. Inquiry, for Dewey, was a lodestone to meaningful schooling. The cross-pollination was dramatic in the way that the progressives fused strong democratic behaviour with dynamic schooling. It was a symbiotic relationship, fully reciprocal, growing in harmony. A key outcome was, of course, that democracy and education would be mutually reinforcing.

The Appendix Provides Forward Thinking in Democracy and Education

As this thesis has discussed, exciting new ideals are in social circulation about the relation of democracy and education. In the Appendix that follows this Conclusion, I give focus to ways of participating in further study within this field. I draw together key actors who share my partisan view of the needed synergy of education and democracy in ways that focus on developing relationships through democratic practices in schooling. There are models and best practices in both the history of this idea—so prominent in the Progressive era—and in the current research and analysis of schools, parent partners, community support groups and public agencies who believe that the democratic root must be given critical important nutrient birth and development at every level of schooling. My Appendix attempts to showcase some of the Projects that exemplify this approach to strengthening the concept of Democracy working symbiotically with Public Education. I also identify key References whose writings have influenced this thesis and thematically align them in the Appendix that follows this Conclusion.

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Participation: A Key Concept in Furthering Democracy in Myriad Ways

Participation, as I have explicated it in this project, is a concept intensely involved with intersubjectivity, fraternity, and active learning. Participation was also, beginning with Jefferson, keystone to the flourishing of democracy. Dewey came to position participation as crucial to reforming education as it was to revitalizing democracy, with a great many of the dynamics overlapping. Education to Dewey was inconceivable without participation (EW5, p.60). “Apart from thorough participation in social life the school has no end nor aim” (p. 60). I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race (MW3.p.248).

The range of activities, the activism involved, and the cooperation and collaboration entailed, all speak to a dynamic engagement. From John Adams to Jefferson and beyond, many of the Founders saw the relationship of education to democracy as being supremely important. But it took a hundred years for a new bright-line wave of progressives to fully recognize the promise of marrying democracy to education in a whole-hearted manner. That development, I have averred, led by feminists in the latter part of the last century holds great promise for rejuvenating democracy. Their living legacy provides the most auspicious foundation for lifting democracy to a plane of worthiness in keeping with the ideals of the American Hope Dream.

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Appendix A

Resources of Hope: Future Horizons

With the focus of my thesis being democracy and education in the American Hope Dream, the ideals that I have researched and discussed are annotated and listed for their legacy of what might be of service for further study. They represent bright-line thinking for future consideration. This is provided in addition to my references with special consideration of their importance in furthering the ideals of democracy and education, the two saliencies of my research.

Forward-Looking Resources in Democracy Related to This Thesis

*Please note, Titles of Books without complete publishing data are included in my References above.

The Role of the Internet and Social Media

Megan Boler, Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008)

Megan Boler, “Marshall McLuhan Lecture,” Transmedial Marshal McLuhan Lecture, May 29, 2018. YouTube

Zeynep Tufecki, “How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump,” MIT Technology Review, August 14, 2018. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir- square-to-donald-trump/

…and Related Organizations

The Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University https://networkofcenters.net/center/berkman-center-internet-society-harvard-university- cambridge-ma

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Centers for American Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School

Ash Centre for American Democratic Governance and Innovation https://ash.harvard.edu/

PEW Research Centre http://www.pewresearch.org/

Portland State University

Care Ethics Research Consortium https://care-ethics.org/locations/portland-state-university/

Stanford University

Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/

Organizations for Democracy

America Speaks http://www.americaspeaks.org/

Demos: An Equal Say and an Equal Chance for All https://www.demos.org/

Everyday Democracy: Ideas and Tools for Community Change https://www.everyday-democracy.org/

Books on Democracy 253

Michael Apple, Can Education Change Society? (New York: Routledge, 2012)

Alison Kadlec, Critical Democracy, (Lanham MD. Lexington Books. 2004)

Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy

John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Frank Cunningham, Democratic Theory

Joan Tronto Caring Democracy

Judith Green, Pragmatism and Social Hope

David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd ed.(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006

Nel Noddings, Education and Democracy in the 2st Century (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013)

Articles on Democracy

Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy. John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope.

Peter Thompson, Emil Visnovksy, “The Deweyan Conception of Participatory Democracy,” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 3(2) (2007) http://americanaejournal.hu/vol3no2/visnovsky

Robert Westbrook; Democratic Hope.

School Sites & Related Works

HCZ Harlem Children’s Zone® https://hcz.org/

HCZ CEO Anne Williams-Isom on the “Here and Now” https://hcz.org/news/ceo-anne-williams-isom-here-and-now/ 254

HCZ Geoffrey Canada, “Leadership” https://hcz.org/about-us/leadership/geoffrey-canada/

Mission School K-8 School: A Boston Public Pilate School

Founded by Deborah W. Meier http://www.missionhillschool.org/external-affairs/founder/

Matthew Knoester, Democratic Education in Practice: Inside the Mission Hill School (New York: Teachers College Press, 2012)

Critiques of American Democracy

Yahsya Mounk, “America Is Not a Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly, March, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america-is-not-a- democracy/550931/

Yahsha Mounk, The People Versus Democracy, Why Our Freedom is in Danger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Forward-Looking Resources in Education Emerging from This Thesis

Reintegration of School Movements

Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration

Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2005)

Sheryll Cashin, Loving: Interracial intimacy in America and The Threat to White Supremacy (New York: Beacon Press, 2017)

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation

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Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (New York: Crown Publishing, 1995)

School Sites:

Mission School (Deborah Meier) Boston. Democratic Education in Practice.

Matthew Knoester. HCZ Harlem Children’s Zone, Anne Williams-Isom, CEO, New York City: Experimental School founded by Geoffrey Canada. Dedicated to “cradle to college pipeline.”

Equity in Education with Emphasis on Affective Equity

Equality Studies Centre, University College, Dublin http://www.ucd.ie/socialpolicyworkjustice/research/institutesandcentres/equalitystudiescentre/

Kathleen Lynch, John Baker, and Maureen Lyons, eds. Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Paulo Freire

Freire Summer Institute UCLA http://pfiucla.blogspot.com/

Freire Institute https://www.freire.org

Pedagogical Strategies Based on Deweyan Theories of Education Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University https://deweycenter.siu.edu/ Larry Hickman, “John Dewey’s Legacy for the 21st Century.” Chronicle of Higher Education July 30, 2012, p.9.

Opposition to Overuse and Misuse of Reductive Practices in Pedagogy

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James Garrison, Living as Learning: John Dewey in the 2Ist Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Ben Harper and Natalie Milman, “One-to-One Technology in K-12 Classrooms: A Review of the Literature from 2004 through to 2014,” Journal of Research on Technology in Education 48(2) (2016). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15391523.2016.1146564

Karl Hostetler, Seducing Souls: Education and the Experience of Human Well-Being (New York: Continuum, 2011)

Deborah Meir and George Woodcock,eds.,Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools (New York: Beacon Press, 2004)

“Stanford University Critique of ‘For Profit On-line Schools’.” The mogul attempts to revolutionize education with technology. Credo (and other researcher institutions) looking at the impact of replacing teachers with computers. Empirical results of publically traded companies have pointed to damaging effects on students.

Reports from National Public Radio (NPR), and OECD on Online schools.

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