SOURCE: 'The Real John Dewey," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIX, No. 12, June 25, 1992, pp. 50-55.

In the following review of Robert B. Westbrook's John Dewey and American Democracy, Menand gives an overview of Dewey's life and work, and touches briefly on the influence Jane Addams and Dewey's wife, Alice Chapman, had on his social consciousness.

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In the minds of most people born after the Second World War, John Dewey is an exceedingly dim presence, a figure apparently left stranded on the far side of the Sixties. He has seemed the spokesman for a world view whose day has passed. His ideas have not been thought worth knowing better, and his books, by and large, have not been read.

Once, of course, it was different. For more than half a century, from the time his experimental school for children, founded in 1896, achieved its worldwide renown until...