The Future of Democracy Emancipatory Imagination and Reality of Capitalism in John Dewey's Later Works

It seems that it has for long been anticipated what, actually, might have gone wrong with liberalism itself One of the greatest thinkers of liberalism, John Dewey, had written extensively about this topic in his "late works" where he rather precisely described what he termed an absolutist defect of liberalist doctrine. This potent description, in author's view, is still plausible today. Dewey's insight can serve us as a particular warning about what contemporary liberals, faced with "neo-liberal" deviations should avoid in the near future. This text is particular analysis of various possibilities opened by Dewey's key insight that liberalism indeed must defend itself from its own essentialist, that is absolutist intentions. Such a "de-essentialized" liberalism resides on Dewey's inspirational insight that an "individual is nothing fixed (as a consumer, a class-member: an ethnic-group-member, etc. - A. M.), given, but it is achieved, not in an isolation" but in a specific wider social and cultural context. In that sense liberalism is meaningful only if it is the liberal socialism.