Chapters
1. The House Divided Against Itself: Ironically, this references Abraham Lincoln's nomination acceptance speech, but Dewey is claiming that the new division is in the American mind. Americans still claim that people should act morally, and not solely out of selfish desire for profit, yet in all practical matters, they pursue and reward behavior that is selfish and profit-driven.
2. "America"—By Formula: American capitalism is not completely bad because it has brought people in the world together in some senses. However, American culture is flawed because it is materialistic and has become characterized by three things: quantification, mechanization, and standardization. As a result, in America the human soul is impersonalized and its spiritual growth is stunted.
3. The United States, Incorporated: In the U.S., pioneer individualism has been replaced by corporateness in the sense that the choices and actions of individuals are increasingly defined by more or less organized associations. Organized associations rather than isolated individuals direct and animate amusements (theater chains), sports (college sports), organized crime, and apartments and subways. Without awareness of the changed conditions, the influence of corporateness is largely mechanical and quantitative. But when corporateness is acknowledged and understood, the quality of experience changes. Individuals will understand choices and actions in a context of associations and can begin to act intelligently.
4. The Lost Individual: Stable individuality depends on stable objects of allegiance and clear ends of action, but these have disappeared. The past is too intellectually empty to provide guidance, and the present is too chaotic and diverse. Individuals become lost, lacking solid support, clear direction, and a unified outlook in the economic realm, in politics, in religion, in legislation, and in intellectual and artistic pursuits. Individualism taken to be private and exclusive economic gain will impede efforts to conceive the possibilities for freedom in the new corporateness and will promote confusion, detachment, and exploitation. The lost individual will only refind him or herself when traditional ideals are jettisoned, making way for a clear view of present conditions and the free exercise of imagination in conceiving a corporate society that promotes freedom for its members.
5. Toward a New Individualism: Individualism is not static and changes with the constitution of society. The rejection of older forms of individualism in light of a new corporateness is not a call for conformity. Individuals necessarily depend on social interaction, but there is a vital distinction between social relations that expand and deepen the meaning of those interactions and social conformity that constrains and standardizes those interactions thereby limiting meaningful experience. A new individualism will emerge when we take account of resources, including those of science and technology, and harness them not for individual pecuniary gain but for intelligent social and cultural ends that allow individuals to interact freely and meaningfully.
6. Capitalistic or Public Socialism?: This chapter considers the political phase of the changing character of individualism. Retaining the old notion of individualism creates confusion when considering the direction of the undeniably increasing social control of economic matters. Political leaders decry bureaucracy and laud individualism as the source of prosperity while also initiating social control of economic matters. This obscures the question referred to in the chapter title of whether this social control will consist of haphazard responses to events that threaten business aimed at pecuniary profit or else from public and intelligent planning aimed at ordered social development. The chapter accepts economic determinism as a fact and regards politics as secondary. Politics is a means, and acknowledged as such attention then can be paid to the ends it serves.
7. The Crisis in Culture: The American pecuniary culture hinders the growth of reason and the social nature of man in three ways: mentally, because of the formative effect of turning people into mindless parts of a machine in their work; Materially, because of inadequate distribution of wealth; and by corrupting education, because education too often directed only towards obtaining a job and not learning for the sake of learning.
8. Individuality in Our Day: Man needs to reexamine his old beliefs such as science and religion being ends in themselves. Man should then realize that all things need to be directed towards social ends, not selfish ends such as profit. He closes with a metaphor that new individualism is each cultivating his own garden without a fence, because the garden is the world and how he participates in its being.
In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants.
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, and social outlook that emphasizes the intrinsic worth of the individual. Individualists promote realizing one's goals and desires, valuing independence and self-reliance, and advocating that the interests of the individual should gain precedence over the state or a social group, while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government. Individualism makes the individual its focus, and so starts "with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation".
Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is considered the standard left wing ideology in most countries of the world. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.
Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism. In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, such as socialism or communism.
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise of economics and sociology, and a critique of conspicuous consumption as a function of social class and of consumerism, which are social activities derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor; the social institutions of the feudal period that have continued to the modern era.
Selfishness is being concerned excessively or exclusively for oneself or one's own advantage, pleasure, or welfare, regardless of others.
Institutional economics focuses on understanding the role of the evolutionary process and the role of institutions in shaping economic behavior. Its original focus lay in Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented dichotomy between technology on the one side and the "ceremonial" sphere of society on the other. Its name and core elements trace back to a 1919 American Economic Review article by Walton H. Hamilton. Institutional economics emphasizes a broader study of institutions and views markets as a result of the complex interaction of these various institutions. The earlier tradition continues today as a leading heterodox approach to economics.
The nature of capitalism is criticized by left-wing anarchists, who reject hierarchy and advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical voluntary associations. Anarchism is generally defined as the libertarian philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful as well as opposing authoritarianism, illegitimate authority and hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations. Capitalism is generally considered by scholars to be an economic system that includes private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit or income, the accumulation of capital, competitive markets, voluntary exchange and wage labor, which have generally been opposed by most anarchists historically. Since capitalism is variously defined by sources and there is no general consensus among scholars on the definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category, the designation is applied to a variety of historical cases, varying in time, geography, politics and culture.
Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of, or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety.
Criticism of Marxism has come from various political ideologies, campaigns and academic disciplines. This includes general intellectual criticism about dogmatism, a lack of internal consistency, criticism related to materialism, arguments that Marxism is a type of historical determinism or that it necessitates a suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives. In addition, empirical and epistemological problems are frequently identified.
The Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) was a socialist student organization active from 1905 to 1921. It attracted many prominent intellectuals and writers and acted as an unofficial student wing of the Socialist Party of America. The Society sponsored lecture tours, magazines, seminars and discussion circles all over the US to propagate socialist ideas among America's college population. The group expanded into a philosophy in the 1920s that did not focus exclusively or even primarily on college students. To symbolize the shift in emphasis, the group changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy in 1921.
Freedom and Culture is a book by John Dewey. Published in 1939, the book is an analytical defense of democracy written in a time when democratic regimes had recently been replaced by non-democratic ones, and at a time when Marxism was considered a powerful political force.
The Public and Its Problems is a 1927 book by American philosopher John Dewey. In his first major work on political philosophy, Dewey explores the viability and creation of a genuinely democratic society in the face of the major technological and social changes of the 20th century, and seeks to better define what both the 'public' and the 'state' constitute, how they are created, and their major weaknesses in understanding and propagating their own interests and the public good. Dewey rejects a then-popular notion of political technocracy as an alternative system of governing an increasingly complex society, but rather sees democracy as the most viable and sustainable means to achieving the public interest, albeit a flawed and routinely subverted one. He contends that democracy is an ethos and an ongoing project that requires constant public vigilance and engagement to be effective, rather than merely a set of institutional arrangements, an argument he would later expand upon most influentially in his essay "Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us". The Public and its Problems is a major contribution on pragmatism in political philosophy and continued to promote discussion and debate long after its publication.
New Worlds for Old (1908), which appeared in some later editions with the subtitle "A Plain Account of Modern Socialism," was one of several books and pamphlets that H. G. Wells wrote about the socialist future in the period 1901–1908, while he was engaged in an effort to reform the Fabian Society.
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is a 1982 book by philosopher Michael Novak, in which Novak aims to understand and analyze the theological assumptions of democratic capitalism, its spirit, its values, and its intentions. Novak defines democratic capitalism as a pluralistic social system that contrasts with the unitary state of the traditional society and the modern socialist state. He analyzes it as a differentiation of society into three distinct yet interdependent power centers: a political sector, an economic sector, and a moral-cultural sector. Democracy needs the market economy and both need a pluralistic liberal culture. Against the continuing growth of democratic capitalism, modern socialism has contracted from a robust utopian program into vague "idealism about equality" and overwrought criticism of capitalism, most notably in the "liberation theology" of Latin America. Novak ends with the "beginnings of a theological perspective on democratic capitalism" illuminated by the journey from Marxism to Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Types of socialism include a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and organizational self-management of enterprises as well as the political theories and movements associated with socialism. Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity in which surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole. There are many varieties of socialism and no single definition encapsulates all of them, but social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms Socialists disagree about the degree to which social control or regulation of the economy is necessary, how far society should intervene, and whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change.
Social ownership is a type of property where an asset is recognized to be in the possession of society as a whole rather than individual members or groups within it. Social ownership of the means of production is the defining characteristic of a libretarian socialist economy, and can take the form of community ownership, state ownership, common ownership, employee ownership, cooperative ownership, and citizen ownership of equity. Within the context of socialist economics it refers particularly to the appropriation of the surplus product, produced by the means of production, or the wealth that comes from it, to society at large or the workers themselves. Traditionally, social ownership implied that capital and factor markets would cease to exist under the assumption that market exchanges within the production process would be made redundant if capital goods were owned and integrated by a single entity or network of entities representing society. However, the articulation of models of market socialism where factor markets are utilized for allocating capital goods between socially owned enterprises broadened the definition to include autonomous entities within a market economy.
A classless society is a society in which no one is born into a social class like in a class society. Distinctions of wealth, income, education, culture, or social network might arise and would only be determined by individual experience and achievement in such a society. Thus, the concept posits not the absence of a social hierarchy but the uninheritability of class status. Helen Codere defines social class as a segment of the community, the members of which show a common social position in a hierarchical ranking. Codere suggest that a true class-organized society is one in which the hierarchy of prestige and social status is divisible into groups. Each group with its own social, economic, attitudinal and cultural characteristics, and each having differential degrees of power in community decision.
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition is a 2017 book by English philosopher Roger Scruton, in which the author outlines the development of modern conservatism. It is intended as an introduction to conservatism, with the author stating, "I have written this book in the hope of encouraging well-meaning liberals to take a look at what [the] arguments [for conservatism] really are”.
