Cedric Braun

In this chapter, Braun explains John Dewey’s account in Human Nature and Conduct (1922) of character as a dynamic process of growth and readjustment rather than a fixed set of traits. For Dewey, character results from the interpenetration of habits. Dewey defines good conduct as the capacity to continually adapt one’s habits to changing circumstances, integrating intelligence, emotion, and action. Dewey rejects static virtues, framing them instead as working adaptations. Good character emerges through flexible coordination of habits, fostering responsiveness to new moral challenges. Dewey’s Burglar Example illustrates this idea, showing the contrast between the rigid, specialized habits of criminals and the rich, adaptive habits shaped by democratic engagement. Drawing comparisons with Aristotle’s Unity of the Virtues and Humboldt’s Bildung, Braun highlights Dewey’s distinct contribution – his experimental approach to character formation. Rather than inheriting or imposing virtues, Dewey sees self-creation as an ongoing, improvisational process. Braun concludes that Dewey’s ethical vision challenges rigid moral frameworks, advocating for adaptability, openness, and moral experimentation as essential to ethical growth in an ever-changing social world.

This article aims to combine the strengths of Erich Fromm’s and John Dewey’s social philosophies. I argue that the merits of this comparison become particularly clear when the theories are outlined and compared in the following three steps. First, a social theoretical common ground of Dewey and Fromm will be illustrated. Their “World War genealogies” share the same defense mechanism as the major explanation of the Germans’ tendency to voluntary submission, which involves a strong feeling of powerlessness. Against this background, the next step elaborates the ethical side of their argument. Already the World War genealogies are written with melioristic intent, and especially later works (in case of both authors) elaborate the respective ethical theory as well as the ideas concerning melioristic social science and social psychology. These ethics aim at good communication (in a broad sense), while the melioristic social research focuses on the concrete manifestations of social character, allowing to empirically identify hindering and facilitating factors of social amelioration. Both can be linked using the concept of communicative power(lessness). By way of outlook, I will finally consider the combination of a democratic, communication-oriented ethics with qualitative sociopsychoanalytic research in Fromm’s sense as a straightforward and promising approach for an interdisciplinary social philosophy.

This chapter discusses the controversy over the legacy of Kantian moral philosophy in Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics. It argues that the polemical reaction to Dewey’s book by Julius Ebbinghaus, reiterated through Axel Honneth and Ebbinghaus’s student Georg Geismann, is based on talking at cross-purposes. While Dewey’s reading of Kant is, indeed, flawed, Ebbinghaus and Geismann misconceive Dewey’s argumentative intent. Nevertheless, the controversy serves to clarify Dewey’s line of argument and to discuss parallels with and differences from the world war genealogy and the Frankfurt School’s theory of immanent critique. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that the role of Hegel’s Emptiness Charge in German Philosophy and Politics should be considered in light of Dewey’s theory of growth. Accordingly, Dewey’s book is not merely a piece of “world war literature”, first, because its line of argument also appears in books by Dewey, which are surely not part of this category, and second, because the Hegelian Emptiness Charge is a variant of what Dewey calls a philosophical fallacy.