ABSTRACT
John Dewey set forth in relatively traditional language a remarkable and radical view of democracy. The author wants to focus on the more immediately practical meaning and consequences of Dewey's broad view of democracy as a way of life. The social deepening problems include terrorism, fanaticism, and absolutism; illiteracy and illness; intolerance, illegality, and illiberalism; physical and psychic violence; international conflict. Democracy is much broader than a special political form, a method of conducting government, of making laws and carrying on governmental administration by means of popular suffrage and elected officers. Actual democratic decision making always takes place within some particular context, at some time and place on some issues for some people. Democratic culture contains resources that always can be directed against democracy itself. That this is possible is not a permanent defect in liberal or pragmatic or any other kind of theory; that this should happen as little as possible is an ongoing challenge to pragmatism in practice.
