Morals and Markets: Liberal Democracy Through Dewey and Hayek Colin Koopman

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 23, Number 3, 2009, pp. 151-179 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/jsp.0.0083

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jsp/summary/v023/23.3.koopman.html

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Morals and Markets: Liberal Democracy Through Dewey and Hayek

Colin Koopman university of oregon

One of the most vexing problems in contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice is the relation between ethics and economics or morals and markets. Recent decades (indeed recent months) have been witness to an intensiﬁ cation of concern regarding this problem, surely motivated in part by at least two increasingly prominent features of contemporary politics. On the one hand, we have seen the increasing intersection of ethical activity and economic activity in the context of various social move- ments including fair trade, environmentalism, and animal rights. On the other hand, we can observe the increasing disarticulation of morals from markets in the context of a variety of political projects often proceeding under the heading of free trade. These two tendencies often clash in terms of what might be called the “fair trade or free trade” debates. These debates reveal that these two central tendencies of contemporary political practice do not always sit well with one another. These practical developments and debates raise a number of theoretical issues that are of great moment for liberal democratic political philosophers. In this article I propose a novel way of gaining a theoretical focus on these debates and the practical issues implicated therein. The novelty of my focus is enabled by adopting as my theoretical framework a combination of

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work developed by an unlikely pair of liberal democratic philosophers who were both enormously infl uential on twentieth-century political theory and practice: John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek. At fi rst glance, Dewey and Hayek seem to be paradigmatic representatives of the two opposed poles of the fair trade–versus–free trade debates. Dewey’s work has often been taken up by those who endorse Old Left labor politics or New Left participatory politics, while Hayek was decisively connected to the politics of the New Reagan Right. But such a caricatured Left-versus-Right contrast neglects important points of convergence between these two political theorists. By exploring these convergences, we can begin the project of establishing a common ground that would enable us to productively reframe debates currently framed in terms of a too-familiar opposition between fair trade Leftism and free trade Rightism. The focal range elaborated in this article is undertaken from the perspective of a Deweyan democratic theory that aims to infl ect a pragmatist conception of liberal democracy with benefi cial insights articulated in the context of Hayekian liberal theory. The time is ripe for Deweyans to take another look at Hayek. That Hayek has been inexplicably neglected by pragmatists for so long is perhaps due to his being neglected more generally by the overwhelming majority of liberal democratic political philosophers, but we are now beginning to witness an increase of interest in Hayek among political philosophers more widely (among Analytics he offers an increasingly appealing counterweight to the long-standing rationalism of the Kantian liberals, while among Continentals interest is being stirred up by the long-awaited publication in English of Foucault’s lectures on branches of American and German liberalism, on which Hayek was infl uential). In light of this more general increase of interest in Hayek it behooves Deweyans to take another look. In the end Deweyans may conclude that there is little of value in Hayekian theory. But such a conclusion must be justifi ed at the end of inquiry rather than merely assumed at the outset. I think it in fact unjustifi ed, and the effort of the present article is in part to show why. My intention here is decidedly not to suggest that Deweyans ought to become wholehearted Hayekians or that fair tradeists ought to become unabashed free tradeists. I offer a more modest claim that Deweyan ethical democrats might benefi t from certain strategies or techniques developed in the context of Hayekian liberalism. One way of cashing out the practical upshot of this proposed theoretical rapprochement would

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be a suggestion for how the Left might co-opt some of the successful strategies and techniques originating on the Right. But I have already expressed some suspicion about divisive Left-versus-Right contrasts. So a better description of the proposal offered here may be put in terms of drawing out some of the neglected lessons of a Deweyan conception of democracy as a way of life with the assistance of certain neglected insights offered by a Hayekian liberal conception of political order as an unplanned set of processes. I begin my argument in the next section by showing that the evolutionist perspective on politics elaborated by Hayek can assist Deweyans in reframing their conception of liberal democratic theory by helping pragmatists better emphasize evolutionist conceptions at the heart of a pragmatist perspective on politics. The most important connection I articulate between Hayekian and Deweyan bodies of theory concerns their attempt to develop a conception of liberal democracy as an evolving process taking place under conditions of uncertainty. I show how this connection opens up avenues for future work on ways in which Hayek’s thought could inform parts of a more effective democratic politics and ways in which Dewey’s politics proﬁ tably intersects with market-based strategies that advocates of democracy too often ignore at their peril. I am eager to emphasize the plau- sibility of a Hayekian skepticism about reliance on state-based institutions as instrumentalities for achieving the democratic ethics rightly embraced by the Deweyan. This points us in a new direction in pragmatist political theory. It is new insofar as pragmatist theories of democracy have in recent years been dominated by two competing paradigms: deliberative democracy and democracy as experience.1 I prefer an evolutionist conception of pragmatist democratic theory as an alternative to these prevailing research programs. It is plausible to presume that an evolutionist conception of pragmatist democratic theory might ﬁ nd ways to avail itself of the treasure of resources provided by the deliberative and experiential conceptions. But my strategy is motivated by the concern that when taken on their own the two dominant strands of pragmatist democratic theory leave much to be desired. I will not, however, undertake a criticism of these two bodies of theory here. I simply head in a new direction. The turn toward Hayek is meant to initiate an exploration of the potentials of a more evolutionist conception of pragmatist democratic theory. To the extent that much of contemporary democratic theory, including pragmatist democratic

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theory, is still obsessively enamored of state-based rationality, Hayekian insights can assist the Deweyan argument that successful democratic practice requires paying attention to both state-based institutions and market-based practices and not the latter only under the guidance of the former. After brieﬂ y elaborating these points of contact between Dewey and Hayek in the next section, I will in subsequent sections shift my focus to some of the major differences that continue to separate the work of these theorists. I will at that point be prepared to reframe these familiar differences in the wider context of a common ground. Noting both the differences and the commonalities helps us see that we need not ignore the many important disagreements that continue to separate these two visions of liberal democracy even as we work toward mutually enriching these two bodies of theory. The most important persisting disagreement I will focus on is at the heart of the aforementioned relations between economics and ethics as they ﬁ gure in recent fair trade–versus–free trade polem- ics. For Dewey, the most important implication of the shift from political rationalism to political pragmatism was the consequence that democracy must become an ethic and a way of life. For Hayek, the same shift from political rationalism to political evolutionism meant that we could abstract politics from ethics in order to make room for the invisible hand of the market. Whereas free tradeism entails for Hayek the evacuation of morals from markets, a Deweyan approach suggests the possibility of an interest- ing intersection of free tradeism and fair tradeism. One central goal in what follows is to engage in a comparative reex- amination of Deweyan and Hayekian theory with an eye toward reframing this central divide of twentieth-century politics. The current alternative between free trade and fair trade is merely the latest iteration of classical debates in political philosophy between libertarians and egalitarians. I aim to employ a reframing strategy that circumvents the terms on which the old familiar libertarian-versus-egalitarian debates have proceeded. To make these points I will argue that Dewey’s and Hayek’s opposed conceptions of the relations between morals and markets are best described in terms of their differing estimations of the value of one of the most frequently invoked but little understood distinctions of our liberal age: the distinction between public and private.2 While Dewey took the uncertainty of our evolved political practices to imply a breakdown of any strong distinction between public and private spheres, Hayek sought to come

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to terms with political uncertainty by rigorously dichotomizing political action into isolated spaces of public and private. Hayek’s defense of the dichotomization of our public and private lives thus refuses to engage with the very ethical criticisms of our economic lives that Dewey’s pragmatist conception brings into vivid focus. This suggests that Hayekian theory embraces the uncertainty of politics only up to a point, while Deweyan theory might yet embrace political uncertainty all the way down.

The Politics of Uncertainty: Two Theories of Political Practice

Basic to both Dewey’s and Hayek’s liberalisms is the thought that con- tinued progress depends on social and institutional mechanisms that are beyond the ken of any individual agent who acts within those mechanisms. Progress contingently emerges within complex processes—it is not the preordained result of the successful execution of a plan. Deweyan and Hayekian liberalisms thus both aim to relocate liberal political philosophy within a framework of intersubjective evolution that conceives of knowledge as embodied in practical accomplishments. For both Dewey and Hayek, knowledge (for example, the ﬁ nancial knowledge present in market transactions) cannot function outside of the practical contexts (for example, the stable market environment) in which it is made effective—knowledge is a matter of “working” or “success.” This shared antirationalist epistemology results in some important political commonalities between Dewey and Hayek. Throughout his writings on politics and economics Hayek argues that knowledge can only be accomplished within practice, not prior to practice in standards to which practice ought to conform. He thus understands knowledge as an effect of a complex coordination of a variety of actors. Rea- son, writes Hayek, “does not exist in the singular, as given or available to any particular person . . . but must be conceived as an interpersonal process.”3 Hayek here names two crucial features of rationality: process and plurality. The ﬁ rst feature is process, namely, the idea that knowledge can be effective only in the context of actual practical processes.4 It is not individuals who express rationality by themselves but, rather, processes in which individuals interact where rationality evolves. The second crucial feature of Hayek’s account of knowledge stresses its pluralism.5 There is no singular rational order in which we are all participants but, rather, a plurality of orders of

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rationality. We cannot rise above the plurality of our epistemic processes to get a monistic view of knowledge as a whole. The most important consequence of Hayek’s stress on these two features of process and plurality is a deep respect for uncertainty that in turn fuels a degree of skepticism. As another great political skeptic, Michael Oakeshott, claimed, the fact of uncertainty is “the heart of the matter” in distinguishing political evolutionists from political rationalists.6 Hayek goes on to deploy his evolutionary epistemological skepticism to credit the political claim that to “turn the whole of society into a single organization built and directed according to a single plan would be to extinguish the very forces that shaped the individual human minds that planned it.” 7 Planned organization is dangerous because, as Adam Ferguson put it at the dawn of the Scottish Enlighten- ment, civilization is the result of human action but not of human design. 8 Hayek frequently underscored his debts to the eighteenth-century Scottish liberals who ﬁ rst worked out an evolutionary conception of cultural progress: “The evolutionists made it clear that civilization was the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error; that it was the sum of experience, in part handed from generation to generation as explicit knowledge, but to a larger extent embodied in tools and institutions which had proved themselves superior.”9 Progress is achieved through coordinated and coopera- tive action. As such, it relies on social mechanisms whose complexity is so great that we cannot possibly grasp all of the information contributing to the success of the processes. Hayek’s vision of epistemic and political orders as evolving, self- creative, and free processes turns out to be remarkably resonant with Dewey’s conception of scientiﬁ c knowledge and democratic politics as, well, evolving, self-creative, and free processes. Dewey would have found particularly attractive Hayek’s reproach of attempts to replace bottom-up cultural evolution with the top-down rule of expert planning. In a passage that Hayek probably could have copied verbatim without anyone notic- ing, Dewey argues, “It is impossible for high-brows to secure a monopoly of such knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs. In the degree in which they become a specialized class, they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve.”10 Political practices, Dewey claims on behalf of democracy, simply cannot be effectively ruled from above. But Dewey and Hayek do not merely concur in their political preference for evolved rather than designed institutions. They also agree on the broader epistemological points that lead them to

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this preference. This has been recently noted by Richard Posner, who is one of a very small number of contemporary political theorists intimately familiar with both Dewey and Hayek. 11 Posner suggests that Dewey would agree with much of Hayek’s skeptical critique of subject-centered rationalism and with Hayek’s thought that such rationalism leads straight to a troubling divorce of theory and practice. Dewey would also agree with Hayek that the best counterweight to such rationalism is to allow additional freedom of movement to those evolved intersubjective practices in which our democratic forms of life have taken root. But most important, Dewey would agree with Hayek that rationalistic philosophical tendencies neglect the ever-important role that uncertainty plays in every facet of our lives. 12 Dewey’s and Hayek’s shared philosophical embrace of uncertainty has tremendous metaphilosophical consequences for how we conceive of the work of political philosophy. One such consequence concerns how we ought to conceptualize the practical, institutional, and social tasks of realizing liberal democratic justice. The classical political philosophical project is that of an ideal theory of justice that is capable of being institutionally manifested in state-based institutions and practices. The evolutionist project announced by Dewey and Hayek takes a broader view in urging that democratic betterment must draw on a number of institutional mechanisms. Deweyans following Dewey have, however, not always realized the extent to which this conception of democracy requires taking seriously certain nonstate political mechanisms, specifi cally markets and corporations, as forces for democracy. Hayekian theory can be of particular use here in expanding Deweyans’ attention to include markets alongside states as some of the tools we have at our disposal for the diffi cult work of democratic melioration. This expansion is to be recommended for two kinds of reasons. Positively, markets now have a ubiquitous presence in our political processes, and to the extent that Deweyan theory ignores them as potential mechanisms for democratic melioration, this branch of theory will fi nd itself out of touch with the possibilities for political melioration available to us in the present. Negatively, Deweyan theorists recognizing the limitations of states have thus far concentrated their exclusive attention on community organizations as forces for democratic melioration; but in an age of global- ization and Internetization the local community is increasingly limited in its potential, and whatever potentials it does possess are often best realized in connection with markets rather than in opposition to them. These

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two sets of reasons provide a warrant for charting out new directions in Deweyan theory beyond the familiar paradigms of deliberation-centric and experience-centric views now dominant. The positive reasons encourage us to move beyond deliberativism, which too often ignores the coordination of markets and states due to a preference for state-centered deliberation as against market-centered exchange. The negative reasons encourage us to look beyond experientialism, which too often ignores markets due to a preference for face-to-face community-centered organizations that are supposedly distorted by market-centered exchange. Now there is no need to deny that at a certain point the rich connec- tions between Dewey’s democratic pragmatism and Hayek’s evolutionary liberalism that I am here featuring begin to break down. This is particularly evident in considering their respective viewpoints on what is required for the most effective melioration of the ever-evolving relations among our ethical and economic orders. For Dewey, political progress on the evolutionist view is primarily a problem of ethics. As he puts it, “The old time separation between politics and morals is abolished at its root.” 13 Hayek quickly recoiled from the ethical conception of democracy that Dewey fully embraced. For Hayek, the economic order must remain wertfrei so that market effi ciency is not distorted by ineffi cient ethical interventions. So although they share a generally evolutionist account of political progress, Dewey embraces but Hayek refuses the political potentiality of an integration of ethics and economics. My point here is anticipated in a brief remark by Posner that remains rather undeveloped: “Hayek’s infl uential idea that socially valuable knowledge is widely distributed throughout the community . . . resembles Dewey’s notion of distributed intelligence. Yet he and Hayek drew opposite implications for policy.”14 By further develop- ing Posner’s point I hope to draw attention to a basic ambiguity according to which the general philosophical framework that I am calling evolutionism can be understood as either enabling or disabling our ethical-political commitments.15 Dewey and Hayek thus sketch two quite different ways of appreciating the importance that deep uncertainty plays in our evolving political contexts. Finding no certainty in the rational organization of politics, Hayek’s liberalism looks for it instead in the constitutional purifi cation of politics into isolated spheres of public and private, while Dewey’s pragmatism strives to develop a politics of uncertainty that runs all the way down. Dewey expressed a generous hope in the spaces of ethical commitment opened up by a politics of uncertainty, while Hayek turned out to

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be rather wary of the ethical possibilities of a politics without guarantees. These contrary understandings of the implications of political evolutionism are crucial for the prospects of liberal democratic theory and practice. I now turn to more fully unpacking these two contrary views.

The Dichotomization of Public and Private in Hayek’s Liberalism

Hayek defi nes the central value of liberalism—liberty—as a “state in which a man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another.”16 Liberty for Hayekian neoliberals is not a quality of persons but a quality of relations between persons. “Freedom,” argued Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises, “is a sociological concept.”17 It follows that liberty can be maximized, and coercion minimized, only as qualities of social processes. Hayekian liberalism is therefore a defense of that social order that maximizes freedom. The essential quality of the social order posited by this branch of liberals is a strict and unassailable separation of public and private spheres. These liberals further hold that this most crucial act of political separation can only be achieved by a constitutional specifi cation of separate public and private spheres. A central point of Hayek’s neoliberalism is that we can strictly isolate freedom from coercion by containing each in the mutually exclusive political spheres of the public and the private. Coercion can never be fully eliminated and freedom made absolute. But freedom can be increased and coercion minimized “by conferring the monopoly of coercion on the state” and enabling “the state’s protecting known private spheres of the individuals against interference by others.”18 The idea is that all coercive power will be consolidated in the public sphere so that the private sphere can be a space of maximal liberty. Hayek puts it this way: “What distinguishes a free from an unfree society is that in the former each individual has a recognized private sphere clearly distinct from the public sphere.” 19 Hayekian liberalism aims to provide a public framework of rules within which we can privately pursue our own projects. The essential quality of the private sphere, from which all its other qualities emanate, is the exclusive control of individuals over their property and their selves. 20 The public sphere, on the other hand, is defi ned as the exclusive control of the entirety of society by universal and necessary rules of interaction, a control optimally achieved by the impersonal rule of law. 21 These two concepts, private property and

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the public rule of law, serve as the cornerstones of neoliberalism. Showing that they can function together with mutual benefi t for each is the burden of one of the centermost theoretical innovations of neoliberalism: the invisible hand. It appears that neoliberals adopt two seemingly incompatible commitments. The fi rst is a separation of individual and social tendencies in the exclusive spheres of private and public. The second is a commitment to human progress in both its individual and social aspects. Neoliberals do not isolate individual from social pursuits so that we may fl ourish only indi- vidually or only socially. Rather, they isolate social interests from individual interests precisely so that we may have both and to the maximal degree possible. This seemingly paradoxical logic—cultivation through purifi cation, harmonization through opposition—stands in need of explanation. Hayek’s claim on behalf of the purifi cation of public and private spheres is that we can do more good for others by successfully doing well for ourselves than we can by attempting to do them well directly. Hayek’s basic idea, an idea basic for the entire neoliberal tradition, is that we can do more social good by profi tably employing capital than we can by delib- erately directing our capital toward socially useful employments. This leads many to worry that the classical liberal position countenances moral relativism under the benign banner of wertfrei economic theory. Classical liberals have tended to respond to this worry by offering explanations of how socially useful results can fl ow from morally blind individual actions in social contexts. Contemporary classical liberal Richard Epstein, a pro- fessor of law at the University of Chicago, where both Hayek and Dewey held positions, points to the terms of the standard explanations they offer: “Hayek’s unfl agging devotion to open markets prevents his fascination with ignorance from turning him into a moral relativist.” 22 Market liberalism blocks moral relativism. So says the tradition. The explanation of how the pursuit of self-interest is automatically converted into the cultivation of other-interest was most convincingly articulated by Adam Smith at the dawn of the liberal age. Smith’s famous metaphor for this mechanism is that of the invisible hand. Smith employs this metaphor in only one passage in The Wealth of Nations, where he says that the individual who “intends only his own gain” is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Smith con- cludes that “by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”23

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The invisible hand metaphor is meant to focus attention on the unwitting promotion of social goods by actors who do not consciously intend it. Fol- lowing Smith, Hayek’s claim is that every person is “led to benefi t more people by aiming at the largest gain than he could if he concentrated on the satisfaction of the needs of known persons.” Hayek continues, explicitly using Smith’s metaphor, “He is led by the invisible hand of the market to bring the succour of modern conveniences to the poorest homes he does not even know.” 24 Epstein more recently has offered an empirically based account of how the invisible hand actually is instantiated over time as social systems evolve.25 Smith held that the harmonious relationship between private and public interests is best achieved by way of a “system of natural liberty.” Such a system seeks nothing more than to constitute a stable social order in which individuals can employ their skills toward ends that are profi table to both themselves and the wider public. Smith’s idea was that if we leave people to determine their own capital employments, then they will naturally and necessarily, as if led by a benevolent invisible hand, fi nd the most effi cient allocation of resources possible. Smith thus confi dently dis- missed anticapitalist political economy: “The sovereign is completely dis- charged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be suffi cient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of society.” 26 By dictating patterns of capital employment to the market, the sovereign undermines the tacit knowledge of effi ciencies embodied in market processes. This is because the sovereign planner rationalistically imposes itself on a process that relies on forms of knowledge that no agent external to market processes could ever possess. Smith’s argument was also a skeptical one. His mentor, recall, was David Hume. In order to mitigate any concern that Smith’s concept of the pursuit of self-interest leads to a selfi sh war of all against all, it is important to recognize that for Smith social progress depends on a rational pursuit of “self-interest” or what Tocqueville later called “self-interest rightly understood.” The reason-directed pursuit of self-interest can be contrasted to two passion-led forms of irrationalism: selfi shness and altruistic other-interest. Self-interest must be viewed in terms of what it is rational for an individual to will, rather than in terms of actual desires that individuals may seek to

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satisfy (whether these desires are their own, and selfi shly satisfi ed, or those of others, and altruistically satisfi ed). I may think it is in my self-interest to switch to less costly inputs, but if I rightly understand my self-interest I will realize that these will diminish customer satisfaction and profi t. Self- interest rightly understood favors profi ts that are to the benefi t of all: “The study of [one’s] own advantage, naturally, or rather necessarily [and invisi- bly] leads him to prefer that employment [of capital] which is most advanta- geous to the society.”27 The crucial point that Smith hoped to establish with the invisible hand metaphor is that private interests tend on the whole to be socially benefi cial even if they are not intended as such—the only intention one needs is that of pursuing one’s own self-interest in the most effi cient way possible. The pursuit of self-interest does not lead to the immiseration of others if the system of natural liberty prevails, because “in civilized society [man] stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes.”28 Rightly understanding my interests implies doing well at satisfying yours. Mises, following Smith and anticipating Hayek, rejected the socialists’ rationalist theorem that “no man profi ts but by the loss of others,” referring to this as the Montaigne dogma.29 He substituted for this “the theorem of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of the market society,” a vision of the invisible hand all dressed up in the garb of rigorous science.30 Mises is clearly right that on balance we gain more by rationally fulfi lling the needs of others than by stealing from them. But beyond this, Mises may just be replacing one dogma with another—the optimistic Smith dogma is substituted for the pessimistic Montaigne dogma. Certainly one person’s profi t does not always imply another person’s loss. But neither does one person’s profi t always imply another person’s gain. Sometimes we get rich by producing goods that others want—and sometimes we get rich by robbing them blind. “War and commerce are two different things,” Mises boldly claims.31 But the line is not nearly as clear in practice as his theory supposes. The nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-fi rst centuries offer ample examples of enormous economic benefi ts accrued as the result of, among other things, war efforts. While neoliberals rightly point out that on balance productive commerce is more profi table for everyone than pillaging war, the most press- ing political crises occur precisely where the line between the two is too ambiguous for abstract assurances. The certainty with which these liberals proffer their distinctions betrays a new form of rationalism insensitive to

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the richness and complexity of practices that exceed the cozy confi nes of their dichotomies. Their claim is that the pursuit of rightly understood self-interest within a free market environment is on balance benefi cial to society. One problem, however, is that persons are not always going to be rational in the sense of understanding what is best for them. Another problem is that it may not be possible for markets to be consistently free of government interferences unfairly privileging some persons at the expense of others. Two big assumptions made by invisible hand theorists are that we really can create free markets and that we really can act rationally within them. Neoliberal theorist Milton Friedman concisely captures both assumptions in his statement of the invisible hand: “Both parties to an economic transaction benefi t from it, provided the transaction is bi-laterally voluntary and informed .” 32 All of the weight of the invisible hand argument falls on the undefended assumption that the provisos of voluntariness and information can be fulfi lled with suffi cient frequency. Despite the obvious problems with this assumption, there is an even more debilitating problem facing the system of natural liberty as expounded by many neoliberals. This problem concerns the implausibility of any mechanism that might establish, especially with the force of natural necessity, a harmony between individual and social interests. Such a mechanism seems particularly implausible where there is overwhelming empirical evi- dence against the attributed inevitability. Rationally pursued self-interest has in many free market contexts led to immiseration rather than enrichment. The coercive powers of governments that neoliberals are rightly wary of are unfortunately also readily available to the monolith private enter- prises increasingly colonizing every corner of our planet. Private agencies (megacorporations) are just as capable as public agencies (megagovern- ments) of extravagant vice.33 My concern is not that sometimes governments unfairly privilege corporations or that sometimes irrational corporate behavior escapes govern- mental control. Indeed these both occur and are a persisting threat to the successful functioning of the invisible hand. Regardless of such problems, the more decisive concern is the possibility that the pursuit of rightly understood (i.e., informed) self-interest within a suitably free (i.e., voluntary) market environment may too often cause immiseration rather than enrichment. Even if we grant the fantastic provisos required by the invisible hand, there remains a problem: rational actors in free markets still manage to make tremendous messes for themselves and others. The great classical

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liberal tradition inclusive of Smith, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Epstein, and many others in between has yet to fully reckon with this problem.

Pragmatism’s Alternative to the Separation of Public and Private

The invisible hand is one of the centermost conceptual devices for neoliberalism. This device works only if the relation between individual values and social values can be harmonized with the necessity of law, if only we leave this relation alone to follow its natural course. Pragmatists like Dewey have argued that the relation between individual and social values is a contingent one subject to the impact of our ethical commitments. There is, on the pragmatist view, no such thing as a natural relation between individual- ity and sociality, if by “natural” we mean a factual relation puriﬁ ed of ethical valuation. Hayekian liberals tend to think of the relations between individual values and social values as if they were determined by factual natural laws that are themselves opposed to values. Pragmatists, by contrast, think that the relations that hold among values are themselves thoroughly value laden. This is because pragmatists do not countenance a dichotomy of facts and values. What Dewey once ridiculed as “the separation alleged to exist between the ‘world of facts’ and the ‘realm of values’” is a central theme of all pragmatist thought.34 Dewey wrote of this quintessential pragmatist theme: “The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life.”35 Hilary Putnam has recently explained and defended, in great detail, this core pragmatist thesis of the continuity of facts and values.36 In the process of explicating Dewey’s pragmatism about facts and values Putnam also considers Amartya Sen’s work on the relations of ethics and economics. Sen shows that “the efﬁ cient working of the capitalist economy is, in fact, dependent on powerful systems of values and norms.”37 Recent interest in the continuity of facts and values within a number of different traditions in economics (bucking older mainstream faith in the market’s mechanical prowess) is indeed encouraging for the pragmatist perspective.38 From the pragmatist precept that there is no way of stabilizing a dichotomy between facts and values we can infer a great deal, including a great

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deal about the relation between markets and morals. The pragmatist view thus generates a great number of its theses relevant to the present issues on the basis of the relatively simple and yet enormously contested asser- tion of the continuity of facts and values. I shall not here attempt to defend this core thesis of pragmatism, in part because Putnam has already done so quite convincingly and in part because it implicates philosophical issues of enormous complexity that would take us quite far indeed from the concerns central to this article. In this section I unpack some of the consequences of this core pragmatist thesis. In the fi nal section I argue for some of the comparative advantages of the Deweyan pragmatist view over the Hayekian neoliberal view. The pragmatist claim for the continuity of facts and values seems to suggest that the relation between self-interest and other-interest ought not to be conceived as necessary and natural because the very phenomena in question are already imbued with contingent ethical commitments. Dewey diagnosed this error as the cleaving of ethics from economics: “When economists were told that their subject-matter was merely material, they naturally thought they could be ‘scientifi c’ only by excluding all reference to distinctively human values.” 39 Dewey’s pragmatist alternative to this mistaken view is that values in economics are expressions of ethical commitments rather than refl ections of natural order. A pair of examples can illustrate this point. First consider as a hypo- thetical example a group of entrepreneurs searching for a new labor force in a remote land and fi nding slaves for sale in a shadowy labor market. None would, we hope, put in a bid. In a case such as this the refusal of the entrepreneurs to purchase labor of this type is not a consequence of concerns about purchase price or potential extraordinary costs associated with legal ramifi cations but, rather, a consequence of the ethical concerns impacting their market valuations. Now consider as another example, this one a little closer to our ordinary reality, consumers who are willing to pay higher prices for ethically enhanced consumer goods such as fair-trade coffees, organic vegetables, or free-range animal products. In the case of the cof- fee the beans usually taste the same—the willingness to pay a higher price indicates a contingent ethical commitment that impacts the economic decision. Some consumers are willing to pay more for a product that is produced at what they believe to be a fairer price paid to producers, and other consumers are not. The point that is often passed over by economists

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is that both groups of consumers exhibit ethical commitments and do so regardless of whether their commitments are inherited from tradition or chosen reﬂ ectively. Now it follows from the general fact that economic choices are per- vaded by ethical commitments that the particular ethical concerns at work in particular market valuations will not always be virtuous (assuming also, of course, that at least some ethical decisions will be vicious rather than virtuous). This is precisely why it is important to recognize that market values are not natural and given but are, rather, informed by contingent ethical commitments. Conceiving of a market under the necessary and natural logic of an invisible harmony often serves to underwrite the ethical values already expressed in that market insofar as extant ethical commitments are wrongly taken as necessary rather than contingent. This suggests that the eventual result of the neoliberal doctrine of an automatic synergy between individual and social value will be an ethically complacent culture. The danger of this form of complacency is a point about which pragmatist critics have been particularly perceptive. Walter Lippmann, in his youthful pragmatist period, noted that “when you have called progress inevitable and imperceptible, you have done about all that philosophy could do to justify impotence.”40 The alternative to such deadening complacency can be aroused by accepting the challenge implicit in free and intelligent ethical action: by re-embedding economics in its ethical contexts we can develop effective means of impacting market growth with concerns rooted in a democratic ethics. An example of this from among contemporary political practice are the market-centered moral-reform strategies, such as the fair trade movement just mentioned, which seeks to increase the quality of labor conditions in third world countries not by way of state intervention but by way of a form of moral action that is also a form of market action. I regard such ethical potentials of free market capitalism as resonant with Dewey’s pragmatist conception of democracy as an ethical way of living. But clearly a pragmatist argument on behalf of a democratic capitalism cannot take the form of an apologia for free market capitalism as it currently exists. Indeed the aim of a pragmatist politics would be precisely the opposite. That free markets are a necessary condition does not imply that free markets are a sufﬁ cient condition for fair markets. Much of current capitalist practice is viciously unfair by anyone’s standards. The point is only that there is much to be gained by democratizing our market practices under the guidance of an ethical conception of democratic practice.

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This is a point that is unfortunately lost on many contemporary Leftist and Rightist political traditions: those on the Right fail to recognize the valuable role that ethics can play in politics, while those on the Left fail to recognize the degree to which ethical forms of politics and market forms of economics can profi tably intersect. Deweyan pragmatism cuts diagonally across these positions by recognizing the potential of a democratic ethics at work in our market relations. This point is important particularly insofar as pragmatist proponents of democracy have too often shied away from market-based capitalist strategies due to their mistaken assumption that the neoliberal opposition between other-interest and self-interest is an inherent feature of capitalist practice. In fact this conception is not at all inherent to capitalism but is, rather, an ethical failure of specifi c forms of current and past capitalism. These failings may in fact be strengthened by prevailing forms of regulatory capitalism that embolden the view that markets are incapable of self- regulation and can only be properly regulated by states. Dewey recognized that these failings on the part of actual past capitalisms can be overcome by potential future capitalisms. Indeed in such works as Individualism Old and New and Liberalism and Social Action he pins much of his hopes for the future of our industrial liberal democracy precisely on these potentials. These and other works contain numerous favorable references to corpo- rateness and industrialism.41 What all this suggests is that Dewey rejects the central public–private dichotomy at the heart of so many other versions of liberalism. This is a central part of the argument of The Public and Its Problems insofar as Dewey in that text clearly and unambiguously asserts that “the idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplifi ed in the state even at its best.”42 So despite the many ways in which Hayekian liberalism can enrich the evolutionist conceptions at the heart of pragmatist political philosophy, we must not stretch the comparison too far given that Dewey and Hayek deeply diverge on this question of the strict separation of public state institutions and private market institutions. Whereas Hayek is a vintage liberal in assuming that the public sphere of state control is the only viable instru- mentality for achieving whatever minimal ethical goals an evolutionist liberal should endorse, Dewey offers a novel liberalism that suggests that the robust ethics of democracy that we should endorse on evolutionist grounds can and should avail themselves of a variety of political instrumentalities to realize their ethical desiderata. We can appropriately see the Deweyan

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view I am proposing as co-opting Hayekian arguments in order to show against Hayekian liberals that democracy is a robust ideal that can only be realized if implemented across a variety of political venues including both state-based and market-based institutions. This commitment to the possibility of a democratic way of life realized simultaneously through liberal state institutions and capitalist market institutions helps explain Dewey’s voluminous favorable references to market-based strategies. It is unfortunate that contemporary Deweyan polit ical philosophers, such as the state-focused deliberativists and community-focused experientialists noted above, rarely take these favorable references seriously. Existing scholarship does, however, offer a few leads that Deweyans might usefully begin following up on. I will mention just two sources, one philosophical and one historical, deserving the increased attention of pragmatists. From a more philosophical perspective, Carol Gould’s recent work on democracy and human rights rightly emphasizes the diversity of institutional and practical contexts necessary for realizing a Deweyan vision of democracy.43 While Gould’s work is not explicitly Deweyan in orientation, she does note the Deweyan resonances of her own pluralistic approach.44 Of further note is the generally evolutionist tenor of her attempt to ground a global theory of democracy and human rights in a conception of freedom as self-development and self-transformation.45 What Gould’s work helps us to recognize is that a conception of democracy based in an evolutionist account of democracy as developmental and transformational can lead to a context-diverse conception of the democratic process that cuts across familiar distinctions between public and private, state and market, ethics and economics. From a more historical perspective, these crucial aspects of Dewey’s democratic theory have been ably explicated by intellectual historian James Livingston in his work on pragmatism’s place midst the profound political economic transformation into corporate consumer capitalism in the early twentieth century.46 Livingston casts doubt on the common view that Deweyan democracy is best seen as opposed to the familiar corporate- ness and consumerism engendered by capitalism. Livingston accurately pegs such an interpretation as rooted in a nostalgic mix of nineteenth- century populism-cum-producerism. Livingston helps motivate an alternative interpretation according to which Deweyan pragmatism enables us to discern the unique democratic beneﬁ ts of capitalism. This does not

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entail that twentieth-century capitalist practice actually lived up to Dewey’s democratic expectations but, rather, that Deweyan democratic theory has high expectations for a politics that draws on market-based strategies to realize its democratic ambitions.

Conclusion: Morals and Markets

The uses and disuses of Hayekian political theory for Deweyan political theory I have been discussing can be summarized in the terms offered by a more prominent comparative effort in political philosophy: the much- discussed Dewey–Lippmann debates of the 1920s. 47 In his 1922 Public Opinion the erstwhile pragmatist Walter Lippmann offers a skeptical argument against participatory democracy that in many ways anticipated the skeptical arguments presented by Hayek in subsequent decades. The core of Lippmann’s argument was that advocates of democracy had failed to reckon with the presence of ineliminable uncertainty in our political and economic orders. Recognition of this would require confronting the severe limits on our knowledge that theorists of democracy have tended to downplay. Lippmann’s argument was, as Hayek’s would later be, an epistemological expression of skepticism not global in scope and rooted in foundationalist epistemology so much as practical in intention and rooted in empirical analysis. Dewey certainly had as much respect for this kind of skeptical argument as any democratic realist of Lippmann’s generation or any neoliberal of Hayek’s generation. Although Dewey’s 1927 The Public and Its Problems remains the sharpest critique of Lippmann’s realism, it is important to understand that Dewey offers there not exactly a defense of participatory democracy so much as a reconstruction of it in light of the problems compellingly captured by Lippmann’s (and later Hayek’s) skeptical arguments. Later pragmatists following Dewey have, however, not been attentive enough to the ways in which Dewey shared much with skeptics like Lippmann and Hayek despite his explicit disagreement with certain inferences they have drawn from their skepticism. 48 It is time to recognize that Dewey too gives us reasons for being skeptical about the idea that we citizens can establish by ourselves governance of ourselves solely through the singular context of a uniﬁ ed and closed political organization. Dewey, in short, shared the skepticism of Lippmann and Hayek and so also some of their modesty about democracy as traditionally conceived. But his

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modesty motivated different deductions. Lippmann took this skepticism to show that unifi ed self-government must be expert driven and rather limited in aspiration. Hayek took it to show that unifi ed self-government must be even more limited than Lippmann had anticipated, insofar as many problems cannot even be grasped by supposed experts. Dewey, by contrast, took this skepticism to show the need for a reinvigoration of participatory democracy in the context not of singular overarching forms seeking political consolidation but, rather, in multiple contexts of pluralities of publics. Unlike Lippmann and Hayek, Dewey still expressed earnest hope that we could evolve a plurality of political projects through which we will purpo- sively realize the expansion and deepening of the core values of that great experiment in American liberal democracy. Returning to my opening theme of the relations between morals and markets, we can now see why one of the most critical questions we face in contemporary politics concerns how we might transition our current capitalist practices into more democratic forms. The pragmatist response to this question is that democracy today requires that we look beyond the distinction between public and private spheres in order to grasp the full range of contexts in which our democratic energies can be put to use. This shift in orientation might enable us to begin bringing ethical commitments to bear in both market-based venues and state-based venues in order to pursue democratic synergies between individuation and association that have hitherto been foreclosed. If this is right, then Dewey can help us learn why market-based strategies, alongside state-based strategies, may yet become both profi table and ethical forces for democracy. Market entities such as corporations can, and many already do, explicitly connect their self-interest to the interests of others by conceiving of their profi ts in terms of benefi ts to wider social constituencies (organic and fair-trade agribusiness corporations are just two familiar families of examples). Whether or not such market entities will survive and grow in the long run depends entirely on the contingent efforts of those supporting the corporations’ ethical values— shareholders, directors, employees, and especially consumers. Unfortu- nately, such market-based opportunities for ethical innovation have been consistently ignored throughout the history of liberal democratic political theory, and they are only just now being taken seriously in contemporary liberal democratic practice.49 Allow me to conclude, then, by considering some of these opportunities as they might appear in the present moment. Recent (as of the time of

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writing in the late months of 2008) turmoil in the fi nancial markets and its subsequent outward spread to other economic sectors offer an occasion for refl ection on these possibilities. I believe that such philosophical refl ections should take the form of a considered diagnosis of our current problems as preparatory for an eventual ameliorative reconstruction of our situation. I can here only sketch bare outlines of what such a philosophical diagnosis and reconstruction should look like. That is because this sketch is more of an attempt to explicate the upshot of the preceding discussion than it is a serious attempt at a policy proposal or a political predication. I do not make predictions, and policies require far more work than I here have space for. It is unsurprising that recent market turmoil has given rise to the renewal of fruitless debates over the issue of the pros and cons of regulation. These debates reiterate that much-loved great debate in the twentieth century between pro-planning egalitarian-leaning fi gures like Keynes or Roosevelt and anti-planning libertarian-leaning fi gures like Hayek or Reagan. But the questions fueling these debates are really red herrings. The question we should be asking is not “whether regulation?” but “how regulation?” On a Deweyan view part of our problems can be seen as stemming from an overplayed dichotomy between public and private that has bewitched those on both Left and Right. By thinking in the terms offered by this dichotomy we have failed to seriously rethink questions about how we might regulate. A classical conception of regulation thus proceeds unques- tioned. Leftists like Keynes, Johnson, and Rawls and Rightists like Hayek, Reagan, and Nozick are all in agreement that regulation is a matter of using the public power of the state to infl uence the private powers of the market. On their view public and private are opposed such that regulation generally takes one of two forms. In one form the state opposes market action by pre- scribing limits that put a check on market agents. In another form the state is co-opted by market forces seeking subsidies, bailouts, and other such privileges. Both of these forms of regulation are proving inadequate as tools for addressing the problems of the present. And yet few politicians, com- mentators, and theorists have managed to think beyond these dualisms midst the present turmoil. Hence the supposedly needed reiteration of the misleading “whether regulation?” question. If these are the only forms that regulation might take, then we rightly ought to wonder whether we should do something drastic or do nothing at all. But are there other tools for regulation? On a Deweyan view we can begin to consider this important question from a standpoint no longer

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beholden to the rigid separation of public and private spheres. On Dewey’s view we can afﬁ rm that regulation is already present in both state and market contexts. On this view states and markets represent different sets of publics in which our lives are always already being organized. If we want our lives to be organized otherwise than they are, then we must more ener- getically participate in whatever publics are organizing us. At times this may take the form of playing one public off of another (using states to oppose markets or using markets to direct states, two forms we are already quite familiar with), but at other times it might take other forms such as intervening in certain aspects of our state publics and market publics in concert. The Deweyan view thus acknowledges that the familiar regulatory tools of state limitations on market actions and market uses of state powers are in some contexts quite useful. But the view goes on to suggest that there are other contexts where we need newer regulatory practices that are not well framed in terms of the separation of public and private spheres. In these other contexts we might do better to think of both states and markets as public venues in which we can effectively deploy our democratic energies. In these other contexts we would do well to make simultaneous use of both states and markets, both governments and corporations. In the present (as of this writing) context in which we are faced with the problem of severe economic volatility resulting from unwise capital allocations, we would do well to remember that there are plenty of start- up ﬁ nancial institutions, automobile manufacturers, and eager entrepreneurs who are waiting to reallocate capital until market opportunities are stabilized by market actions rather than volatile state-sponsored subsidy programs. The state can facilitate economic stability and growth by, for instance, lowering lending rates and providing incentives for consumer spending such as consumer stimulus payments to those in the lower and middle classes. The thinking here is that capital can be reallocated to saner economic cycles through consumer-side expenditures more effectively than through producer-side subsidies. This is because in a consumption-driven and surplus-based economy the allocation of capital is best dictated not by production (investors) but by consumption (consumers). By fostering consumer-led growth the state furthers the realization of a broad economic agenda through market activities. This strategy offers an example of a Deweyan integration of public and private that carefully refuses to collapse public into private or private into public. For if either state or market by itself sets both the agenda and the means for realizing it, then we will not

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fi nd ourselves coordinating our manifold publics so much as imposing one public on other publics. Using state powers to subsidize certain market actors not only creates market inequalities (note all the clamor among corporations seeking subsidies or insisting that they too are banks) but can also easily perpetuate unproductive capital allocation cycles. Using state powers to oppose certain market activities not only can create unmanage- able market ineffi ciencies but also presupposes that state regulators can always stay one step ahead of market actors (and this is almost never the case). We ought to acknowledge that it takes time to deleverage bad investments in order to reroute capital into more productive cycles. Hayek is right that if the state plays manager by insisting that certain bad investments are really good investments, then this rerouting process will take even longer and be even more painful. But Hayek is wrong to think that market agents need to divest and reinvest on their own without coordinated involvement of agents from other publics, such as states. If state agents and market agents work together, then those in a position to reap the rewards of saner allocations can help everyone restabilize. The key point is that restabiliza- tion can occur through neither the state alone nor the market alone, insofar as we are already embroiled in and organized by both sets of publics. A Deweyan view is invaluable for recognizing this crucial feature of our situation. But, Deweyan democrats will wonder at this point, what insures that in reorganized conditions our democratic values will not go missing? Noth- ing does. In a democracy the fl ourishing of democracy is incumbent on us. Democracy is a politics of hunches, hedges, and hopes. It is not a politics of certainty. Democracy requires that we put forth our energies in all of the public contexts where we fi nd our lives being organized (these include states, markets, schools, churches, even friendships). Lippmann and Hayek thought that we frail humans are generally incapable of purposive democratic self-organization. Perhaps we are. But we shall better equip ourselves to experimentally test our democratic hopes if we understand with Dewey that democracy is a way of life that must be practiced throughout our lives, in our halls of government as offi cials and voters, in our marketplaces as managers and consumers, and in many other venues besides. Democracy and pragmatism are tailored to one another because at the core of both is a meliorism according to which we can achieve political betterment only by our own lights.50 There is no guarantee that democracy will win out over the many formidable alternative ethics now competing

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against it. But those who favor democracy ought to make full use of all the tools available to them to further their democratic aspirations. There is much to be gained for a democratic ethics by making simultaneous use of both governments and markets in our democratic practices. Failing this dif- ﬁ cult work, our increasing complacency can only result in the desiccation of our ever fragile futures.

notes

For comments on this article I thank Barry Allen, Lawrence Cahoone, Jeffrey Friedman (who saw a much earlier version), Jeremy Livingston, G. B. Madison, Patrick Maley, Robert Mayer (for his commentary at the Midwest Political Science Association), Shane Ralston, David Rondel, and Tommy Thornhill. I also thank the reviewers and editors of this journal for their helpful suggestions for ﬁ nal improvements. I gratefully acknowledge Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which assisted in the preparation of this article. 1. For compelling statements of the deliberativist view, see Anderson 2006, Bohman 2007, Putnam 1990, and Stout 2004, as well as Peircean work including Misak 2000 and Talisse 2007. For compelling statements of the experience- centric view, see Gouinlock 1993; Green 1999; McDermott 1976, 2007; and Pappas 2008. 2. For further criticisms of the liberal public–private dichotomy from a pragmatist perspective, see Koopman 2007. 3. Hayek 1946, 15. 4. See discussions by Horwitz (2001, 92ff.) and Madison (1990, 41ff.). 5. See discussion by Cahoone (2002, 227ff.). 6. Oakeshott 1947, 16. 7. Hayek 1960a, 37. 8. See Ferguson 1767, 122. 9. Hayek 1960a, 60; for his frequent contrasts of the leading thinkers of the Scottish and French enlightenments, see Hayek 1960a, 55ff.; 1964, 249; 1966, 161; and especially 1967a. 10. Dewey 1927, 206. 11. See Posner 2005 and brieﬂ y 2003, 102ff.; for criticisms of Posner’s further arguments concerning political democracy in Dewey, see Sullivan and Solove 2003; and for other comments on Dewey and Hayek, see Dupuy 2004 and Mulligan 2006. Mulligan disagrees with my attribution of a shared epistemological skepticism to Hayek and Dewey though agreeing with the idea that there is a shared political skepticism. 12. The importance of uncertainty for Dewey’s politics and epistemology is described in convincing detail by James Kloppenberg (1986).

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13. Dewey 1920, 197. 14. Posner 2003, 102. 15. For another discussion of this ambiguity, see Cahoone 2002, 40–44. 16. Hayek 1960a, 11. 17. Mises 1932, as quoted in Hayek 1960a, 422n6. 18. Hayek 1960a, 21. 19. Hayek 1960a, 207; see discussions of this point in Hayek by Kukathas (1989, 153) and Gray (1986, 61). 20. See Hayek 1960a, 140, and Mises 1927, 19, on private property. 21. See Hayek 1960a, 148–61, on public law. 22. Epstein 2003, 66. 23. Smith 1776, 485. A precedent for Smith can be found in protocapitalists writing earlier in the eighteenth century. Smith’s teacher David Hume wrote that “the encrease of the riches and commerce in any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches and commerce of all its neighbors” (1752, 328). Smith simply replaced “promotes” with “promotes as if by an invisible hand.” A more distant precedent can also be discerned in the work of Bernard Mandeville (1705). 24. Hayek 1976, 145. 25. Epstein 2003, 13–31. 26. Smith 1776, 745. 27. Smith 1776, 482. 28. Smith 1776, 15. 29. Mises 1949, 660. 30. Mises 1949, 670; see the earlier and more precise formulations in Mises 1927, 162. 31. Mises 1949, 662. 32. Friedman 1962, 13. 33. Cf. Scott 1998, 8 (explicitly referring to the views of Hayek and Friedman); see also diZerega 1997. 34. Dewey 1939, 64. 35. Dewey 1929, 255. 36. Putnam 2002. 37. Sen 1999, 262. 38. While Sen’s are the best-known criticisms of feigned market neutrality, other schools of economic thought advancing similar ideas about economics and ethics include institutionalist economics (Hodgson 1998), feminist economics (Nelson and Ferber 1993; Peterson and Lewis 1999; Strober 1994), work in the rhetoric of economics (McCloskey 1998), and early work in pragmatist economics (Klamer 2003). 39. Dewey 1929, 283. 40. Lippmann 1914, 105. 41. Dewey 1930, 1935.

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42. Dewey 1927, 148. 43. See Gould 2004. 44. Gould 2004, 47. 45. Gould 2004, 33. 46. See Livingston 1994, 2001, and the generally favorable commentary on Livings- ton’s interpretation of Dewey (though not of James) by Robert Westbrook (2005). 47. On the Dewey–Lippmann debates, see Lippmann 1922 and Dewey 1927 and commentary by Westbrook (1991), Narres (2005), Whipple (2005), and Rogers (forthcoming). 48. This has recently led to critiques of Deweyan democracy as an overzealous comprehensive doctrine that seeks to impose itself on citizens of differing political persuasions. This critique, most recently formulated by Robert Talisse (2007), though perhaps true of certain contemporary Deweyans, is not true of Dewey himself. See my response to Talisse in Koopman 2009b, published alongside seven other responses. 49. That they have been ignored by Leftist liberals is obvious, and that Rightist liberals are also suspicious of the idea of ethical corporate activity is evidenced by Hayek (1960b) and Friedman (1970). 50. For a melioristic interpretation of pragmatism, see Koopman 2006, outlining a view I develop at greater length in my Pragmatism as Transition (2009a).

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