On Ayn Rand Book

Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes remarked that Dewey wrote as, "God would have spoken had he been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was."

John Dewey's writing is notoriously difficult to understand as he sometimes lacked the precision and clarity of language to present his ideas clearly, however, thanks to Westbrook's in-depth chronology of both the development of Dewey's ideas and his debate with "democratic elitists", Dewey is now much more comprehensible to me, and I find myself genuinely admiring this work and Dewey for his unshakable faith in participatory democracy.

A minority outside of the mainstream American liberalism, Dewey never lost his belief in the maximum participation of the people in a democracy (as opposed to democratic realists who thought the average citizen should stay out of politics and only involve themselves in voting during elections). Dewey has largely lost the battle in Western intellectual history for influence of ideas, even in the early 20th century, social theorists had already dismissed participatory democracy as hopelessly utopian, and the recent US election would seem to concur with that pessimistic sentiment, however, there is something so wonderful in Dewey's belief, a faith in human dignity that I am not ready to abandon in its entirety.