Forthcoming and Future Research Projects

    Book 1:  The Undiscovered Dewey:  Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (New
    York: Columbia University Press, November, 2008)


    My book offers a new perspective on the foundations of John Dewey’s philosophy and so tilts our understanding
    of his religious, ethical and political reflections in a radically different direction.  To say “radically different” seems a
    bit cavalier.  After all, in the past two decades the field of Dewey scholarship has increased.  Several influential
    monographs have been written by Cornel West, Robert Westbrook, James Kloppenberg, Alan Ryan, John
    Patrick Diggins, and Steven Rockefeller, making the field a crowded one.  Yet, even in these important
    contributions, Dewey is consistently understood as a child of the Enlightenment regarding his appreciation for
    scientific inquiry. Despite his consistent rejection of philosophical and theological certainties, his outlook seems
    inescapably wedded to a progressive view of experience.  Indeed, all of these thinkers are united by a singular
    worry:  Dewey’s conception of inquiry is based on an ontology that orients human beings to the world in such a
    way that denies the fragility of life that a thorough-going experimentalism demands.  While there is much to
    recommend in the work of these scholars, their view of Dewey is at best overdrawn and at worst simply
    mistaken.  

    All of these scholars miss or diminish the profound influence of Charles Darwin’s account of evolution and the
    corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty on Dewey’s notion of inquiry. By focusing on this influence, I
    show that for Dewey, our cognitive abilities are both stimulated and potentially frustrated by contingency, and this
    beginning point guides even as it humbles the significance of human existence.  While he retains the humanistic and
    political hopes of the Enlightenment, those hopes are cautiously advanced and defended given the contingent
    background from which they follow.  The result, as Dewey explains in his 1910 essay, “The Influence of Darwin
    on Philosophy,” is that Darwin “introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of
    knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.”  To follow this line of inquiry, as this book
    does, is to encounter The Undiscovered Dewey.

    My purpose in this book is to investigate and reconstruct the historical framework in which Dewey’s appreciation
    for Darwin is located, on the one hand, and interpret and distill its epistemological and normative importance in
    guiding human life, on the other.  I trace the way in which the former—as articulated through the themes of inquiry
    and contingency—informs and appropriately directs the latter as revealed in Dewey’s engagement with religious,
    moral and democratic commitments.  As such, the book unfolds across stretches of his writings, while holding in
    view and exploring the different dimensions of the connection between inquiry and contingency.

    The line from Dewey’s essay on Darwin provides the rejoinder to his critics, but also the outline, interpretative
    goals, and organizing structure for the book.  The text is divided into two primary parts.  In Part One—“From
    Certainty to Contingency”—chapters 1-2, I analyze the importance of contingency in Dewey’s philosophy of
    action, and the precise relationship between that account and what he says about inquiry.  This requires that we
    turn our attention, as intellectual historians, to the ascendancy of Darwin’s notion of evolution within the context of
    nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism with which Dewey is often allied.  The project attempts to understand
    better than we do how each—that is, liberal Protestants and Dewey—appropriates Darwin’s vision of evolution.  
    What emerges is a startling and critical distinction, the result of which orients the reader differently to the
    foundations of Dewey’s philosophy. While his liberal Protestant counterparts exploit evolution as a story about
    progress, Dewey argues that inquiry proceeds from and does not presume to overcome the uncertainty that
    characterizes human action. The result is that Dewey separates the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger
    metaphysical story about human development, while simultaneously opening our commitments to reflective re-
    evaluation and public contestability in the context of our on-going social practices.  There is a guiding insight at
    work in this account to which scholars have paid little or no attention, but which this project uncovers for readers:  
    Dewey's account of inquiry attempts a transformation in the modern self-understanding that at once encourages a
    Promethean intervention in managing our social and natural environments, but which constrains action by
    highlighting its intimate relationship to uncertainty.  That the Enlightenment gave birth to Dewey's outlook cannot
    be denied, but it is a vision that, in his hands, has reached maturity.

    In Part Two—“Religion, The Moral Life and Democracy”—chapters 3-5, the book is more explicitly
    philosophical than historical. I explore and explicate the relationship between inquiry—now understood as
    preceding from a more contingent foundation—and Dewey’s religious, moral and political philosophy.  As I argue,
    Dewey does not seek to abandon religious commitments as many scholars have thought, but to re-describe their
    place within the context of democracy.  He is thus sensitive to modern pluralism, especially the absence of a
    dominant theological frame of reference that would otherwise guide the substantive content of our lives individually
    and collectively.  Moreover, his reliance on inquiry is attentive to the presence of moral conflict, and although
    inquiry seeks to achieve resolution among conflicting moral claims, Dewey acknowledges that the result of
    reflection may reveal the incommensurability of values.  In its political context, his position provides us with a way
    to manage the relationship among experts and the larger public so that power does not lapse into domination.
    These discrete, but connected accounts revolve around the centrality of the reflective and contestable character of
    inquiry.  Indeed, they are seen, in this study, as emerging from a mature vision of human enlightenment—an
    account that demands intervention on our part and cautions humility at every turn.  

    Book Project 2:  Democratic Excellence:  A Contribution to American Political Thought in
    Black and White

    A familiar criticism of democracy is its tendency toward mediocrity because of an inability to cultivate a balanced
    relationship between popular governance and the role of cultural, intellectual, and political excellence.  Herein lies
    the research question:  Does the tradition of American democratic thought possess the resources to resist
    this claim?  

    My hypothesis is that beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson (although I believe we can find it in Paine and
    Jefferson as well), and then finding articulation in African American intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph
    Ellison, and James Baldwin there is a consistent attempt to articulate what this relationship ought to look like in the
    context of democracy.  At the core of these thinkers' view of democracy is a belief in freedom as self-realization,
    emphasis on critical examination of the forces that govern and direct one’s life, and rejection of a presumptive
    deference to authority.  These themes figure prominently in the writings of all these thinkers and indicate that
    democracy’s appreciation for intellectual and cultural excellence must always be grounded in a relationship of
    consultation.  Consultation is the road to democratic excellence, not its obstacle.  

    Emerson, however, shows an ambivalence that is missing from those who follow him.  This is especially the case
    among African American intellectuals precisely because their argument, I suspect, is an analogical derivative of
    their resistance to racial hierarchy.  On their view, precisely because knowledge and its production is a resource in
    the context of decision-making, to restrict it to the domain of a few or bar others from access that would
    otherwise aid them, is to engage in a form of domination.  Even DuBois’ supposed vanguard politics comes to
    look strikingly different if my suspicions are accurate.    

back to first page>>>
Melvin L. Rogers
Assistant Professor of Politics
University of Virginia