Horsetails -like this Equisetum myriochaetum found in Colombia- are considered ‘living fossils’, a term Darwin used to refer to species that have hardly changed compared to their fossil record.
Historians of education in the United States often differentiate between two currents of educational progressivism. The first one is best represented by John Dewey’s ideas of collective intelligence, self-directed learning and participatory democracy. The second one, a scientific progressivism, favors effective management of schools through tracking, measuring and sorting as a means towards efficient nation building. The former – while favored within schools of education for curriculum design and pedagogical practice – has had little impact on the overall workings of American educational policy, whereas the later has not only shaped US educational institutions but also has transcended the American context to become dominant around the world. This is illustrated by the precedence of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – an assessment explicitly designed to measure job-market related skills – which today shapes much of what happens in classrooms around the world.
After spending years as a graduate student at an American school of education immersed in a deadlock between these two strands of progressivism, it was refreshing for me to find a perspective on the other side of the Atlantic that helps contextualize the impasse and link it up with today’s ecological crisis. It is French philosopher Barbara Stiegler who presents this perspective in her 2019 book “Il faut s’adapter: sur un nouvel impératif politique” (Collection NRF Essais, Gallimard). In line with Foucault’s writings on biopolitics, Stiegler seeks to understand where the constant call to adapt that characterises today’s political discourse and action comes from. Her genealogy of neoliberalism reveals its roots in evolutionary biology. While continental thinkers turned away from biology, late 19th century American intellectuals drew from theories of evolution to think about human affairs. Stiegler explains that from this evolutionary thought, during the first decades of the 20th century, Mathew Lippmann and John Dewey drew opposing visions of democracy and liberalism. Throughout the 1920s both authors developed their respective visions through several publications which were later contrasted to form what has retrospectively been called the Lippmann-Dewey debate. Dewey remains for many America’s foremost philosopher, but Lippmann’s thought has undeniably left its mark on contemporary liberalism. Indeed, the term neoliberalism was first coined during the Walter Lippmann colloquium, a meeting that took place in Paris in 1938 in which 26 intellectuals got together to come up with a new form of liberalism.
Stiegler foregrounds that despite their disagreement, Lippmann and Dewey started off from the same evolution-based belief that the human species lagged behind in a world of its own making. Specifically in the context of the early 20th century American democracy, the Jeffersonian model of democracy felt inadequate for industrialized society. Jefferson’s democratic ideal prioritized small rural communities over larger political units, but by the 1920s it was clear that Jefferson’s small, enclosed and stable polities were no longer viable. It was clear for both Dewey and Lippmann that industrialization and increasingly globalized commerce challenged the notion that people could be competent enough to have a say in an increasingly complex ‘Great Society’. However, while Dewey retained Jefferson’s faith in human nature and potential, Lippmann called for government by elites with the idea that only these could keep pace with commercial and technological progress.
Stiegler argues that Lippmann relies on dualist metaphysics that separates experience (passive) from thought (active) which in turn opposes a passive public to active leaders. In so doing, Lippmann misses the interactive nature of thought and experience that Dewey viewed as Darwin’s most important contribution. Beyond the scientific method, Dewey posits that experience implies articulating between its passive and active dimensions. Organisms are not passive spectators bombarded by raw data. They are not merely shaped by their environment, but as they act within this environment, they have to deal with the consequences of their behaviour. This interactive process is what constitutes experience for Dewey. This is how living beings participate in the world and are not just shaped by it. For Dewey this concept of participation – which also comes from biology – also applies to questions of knowledge and values (as in a democracy). In this way, Darwin repositions human life within nature, as for Dewey, his concept of participation implies that the real function of knowledge is to adapt more complex organisms – such as human beings – to their environment.
None of this is new to education scholars interested in Dewey as the concept of experience is central to his educational philosophy. Where Stiegler innovates is in locating both Dewey and Lippmann within an evolutionary framework and thereby presenting neoliberalism as having its origins in an interpretation of evolutionary biology. Here I must clarify the relationship between Lippmann’s thought and neoliberalism. Lippmann’s influence on neoliberalism is best understood through its comparison with classical liberalism. Stiegler explains that while classical liberalism and neoliberalism share the belief that the aim of history is to reach stability through globalized competition, in neoliberalism, just as for Lippmann, humans are viewed as lagging behind the wider need to make markets apt to globalized competition. As a response to the failure of laissez-faire liberalism, institutions of the state are thus charged with transforming human beings, pushing them to adapt and thereby artificially creating an efficient market. For instance, this is why within a neoliberal paradigm the goal in education is to educate populations to become competitive for a globalized market.
Now, in presenting Dewey as a thinker who early on opposed Lippmann’s ideas, Stiegler shows us another way in which Dewey’s elaborate idea of experience and non-teleological conception of history constitute an early deconstruction of neoliberalism. In these times of ecological crisis, she places Dewey’s philosophy as an alternative interpretation of the place of human beings within the wider evolution of life.
Stiegler’s book came out within what seems to be a newfound interest in Dewey’s political writings among French scholars. She focuses on the convergence of biology and philosophy and has also written about the presence of biology and the body in Nietzsche’s thought as well as about the German Bildung. I look forward to reading more of her work.