Ethics of Democracy
In 1888, Dewey published the essay "Ethics of Democracy" in the University of Michigan Philosophical Papersseries. It was written as a critique of Sir Henry Maine's attack on democracy in Popular Government, and in it, Dewey began to apply the organic concept of the individual to the broader context of society and systems of government. If society and the individual are organic to each other, Dewey ventured, "then the individual is society concentrated." He went on to conclude that the ethical idea of democracy is "the idea of a personality." In the essay, Dewey spoke of industrial equality in a nascent attempt to apply philosophical and psychological constructs at the broadest level, something he would accomplish more effectively by 1916 when he united his democratic ideals with his educational philosophy in Democracy and Education.30 "Ethics of Democracy" also suggests an intellectual link to his Michigan colleague and friend Henry Carter Adams. At the time the essay appeared, Adams was teaching a political economy seminar on industrial society, and his earlier writings and lectures on democracy, labor, and socialism presaged many of Dewey's comments.31
