Gutmann, Amy (1949-)

Amy Gutmann (1949–) is a political philosopher who brings a critical, feminist, and multicultural read to John Dewey’s concept of democratic education. I begin by turning to Gutmann’s (Democratic education. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987) Democratic Education to see how she amends and extends Dewey’s concept of democracy in relation to education. I then explore her further development of deliberative democracy as a political theory in Democracy and Deliberation (1996). We learn about her basic principles for democratic education, nonrepression and nondiscrimination, developed in her earlier work and the addition of a third principle, deliberation, in Democracy and Disagreement, as she continues to aim to find ways for basic democratic values of liberty, opportunity, and mutual respect to thrive and for acceptable terms for social cooperation to further develop in a world where people disagree in significant ways. We find that Gutmann relies on a separation between moral ideals and political ideals to maintain the case for the value of deliberative democracy as a political ideal. There are problems such a separation creates from a transactional perspective of democracy-always-in-the-making. We consider if Gutmann’s theory will help us improve conditions for democracy someday, or not.