John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and democratic virtue

I offer an interpretation of John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr that highlights the role of virtue in the visions of democracy that both writers articulated. Based on this interpretation, I argue that Dewey and Niebuhr both implied that virtue is necessary for democracy to thrive, despite the fact that they spent much of their careers in intellectual conflict with each other. Specifically, I claim that they were both committed to the value of humility and mutuality for democratic society. Humility and mutuality are virtues with profound importance for democracy that logically flow from Dewey's framework of American pragmatism and Niebuhr's Augustinian Christian theology. I argue that their ironic and unnoticed commitment to humility and mutuality as democratic virtues helps us to understand their shared critique of capitalism. For Niebuhr and Dewey, the democratic self stands in contrast with the capitalist self: the moral agent required and rewarded by capitalism is one who is severely deficient in humility and mutuality. I contend that the conception of democratic virtue that Dewey and Niebuhr shared, which informed their common critique of capitalism, led them to revise socially-inherited notions of property ownership, enact political solidarity with the working class, and support the struggles of labor unions. This virtue-ethical interpretation demonstrates that two writers with deeply conflicting worldviews can both hold that democracy and capitalism are irreconcilable at the level of the moral agent.