ABSTRACT
The 1930s was one of the most eventful and productive decades in Dewey’s life. He published more than a half-dozen books including Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. It was during this decade that he sharpened his understanding of radical democracy and a renascent liberalism. He interrupted his scholarly work to travel to Mexico as the chair of the Dewey Commission—or to give its full title, ‘The Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials’. To appreciate the role that Dewey played in the Commission and the significance of his subsequent intellectual exchange with Trotsky, we need to understand the context of his thinking and activities. Dewey began the decade in the midst of the Depression with a sharp critique of what was going in the United States. Citing a few passages shows something of the pungency of his criticisms of the failures of American capitalism. In 1933, addressing the economic situation in the United States and the steps needed for recovery, he wrote,
What are the most evident sore spots of the present? The answer is clear. Unemployment, extreme inequality in the distribution of national income … a crazy, cumbrous, inequitable tax system that puts the burden on the producer, and the ultimate consumer, and lets off the parasites, exploiters and the privileged,—who ought to be relieved entirely of their gorged excess … a vicious and incompetent banking system.1
