Democracy as Culture

At the National University of Singapore, Sor-hoon Tan is Associate Professor of Philosophy, and John Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature. Tan is the author of Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction, also published by SUNY Press, and editor of Challenging Citizenship: Group Membership and Cultural Identity in a Global Age. Whalen-Bridge is the author of Political Fiction and the American Self.

"It is high time, the editors suggest, that we stop bundling democracy with Western political systems in the way that Explorer has been automatically bundled with the Windows operating system. There is much valuable material in this book to aid the project of reconstructing democracy as an open-source conception—a conception applicable in many cultural architectures to guide the realization of a better quality community." — J. E. Tiles, author of Dewey"This book as a whole exhibits the fresh thinking Dewey called 'experimental intelligence': exploratory not dogmatic, boldly imaginative not clichéd, constructive not nugatory." — George Allan, author of Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon

• AcknowledgmentsOn Richard RortyBruce Robbins1. Introduction—Pragmatism’s Passport: Dewey, Democracy, and GlobalizationSor-hoon Tan and John Whalen-BridgeI. Universalizing Democracy Pragmatically 2. The Genesis of Democratic Norms: Some Insights from Classical PragmatismLarry A. Hickman3. Reconstructing ‘Culture’—A Deweyan Response to Antidemocratic CulturalismSor-hoon TanII. Imposing Democracy 4. Globalizing Democracy—A Deweyan Critique of Bush’s Second-Term National Security StrategySun Youzhong5. Can Democratic Inquiry Be Exported? Dewey and the Globalization of EducationJames Scott Johnston6. Jane Addams: Pragmatist-Feminist Democracy in a Global ContextJudy D. Whipps7. War Without Belief—On Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in AmericaBruce RobbinsIII. De-centering Dewey 8. Dewey’s Difficult Recovery, Analytic Philosophy’s Attempted TurnJohn Holbo9. Descartes, Dewey, and DemocracyCecilia Wee10. Nonduality and Aesthetic Experience—Dewey’s Theory and Johnson’s PracticeJohn Whalen-Bridge11. When Dewey’s Confucian Admirer Meets His Liberal Critic—Liang Shuming and Eammon Callan on John Dewey’s Democracy and EducationJessica Ching-Sze Wang12. Tang Junyi and the Very ‘Idea’ of Confucian DemocracyRoger T. AmesWorks CitedList of ContributorsIndex