Terry Hoy seeks to establish the enduring relevance of John Dewey's political philosophy. As Professor Hoy illustrates, Dewey focused on the distortions in American political thought resulting from the Lockean-Utilitarian tradition of classical liberalism; the growing standardization and quantification of American life; the erosion of traditional face-to-face communal public life; the manipulation of public opinion by mass media propaganda; and the ascendancy of capitalist economic priorities.

Dewey was convinced that a corrective to such distortions would require a renascent liberalism...

Hoy establishes a basis for a naturalistic political theory that can be sustained as a continuity from Aristotle through the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment contributions of David Hume, John Dewey, Evolutionary Biology, and Deep Ecology.

This entails several contentions. First he argues that the contemporary relevance of Aristotelian naturalism can be defended within the context of a pragmatic realism without recourse to a no-longer-tenable metaphysical biology. Second, he calls for an emphasis on a historicized nature--the human capacities for language, sociality, and habituation...