John Dewey, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Liberty, individuality, and the freedom of inquiry are the wheat of the liberal tradition; the adventitious connection between liberalism and the legitimation of capitalism is the chaff. In most so-called democracies, power rests finally in the hands of finance capital, no matter what claims are made for government of, by, and for all the people. The pseudo-liberalism that has ossified and narrowed generous ideas and aspirations into property-rights-and-market-forces ideology is not liberalism; it is the corruption of liberalism by the bourgeois-capitalist legitimation function.1234
Real liberalism — radical, vigorous, willing to take a decided stand in the social conflicts going on — recovers liberty and individuality by amputating the capitalist legitimation. Individuality, in particular, is not preformed essence over against society but the product of an ongoing interaction of human capacities with an environment made up in part of other human beings. Capitalism produces stunted, underdeveloped, 'lost' individuals; democratic socialism — socialism as proximate end in service of democracy as a way of life — is the social precondition of genuine individuality.
By "bourgeois" democracy is meant one in which power rests finally in the hands of finance capitalism, no matter what claims are made for government of, by and for all the people. In the perspective of history it is clear that the rise of democratic governments has been an accompaniment of the transfer of power from agrarian interests to industrial and commercial interests.Liberalism and Social Action + Essays, pp. 296–297
In conclusion, I wish to emphasize a point implied in the earlier discussion. The question of the practical significance of liberty is much wider than that of the relation of government to the individual, to say nothing of the monstrosity of the doctrine that assumes that under all conditions governmental action and individual liberty are found in separate and independent spheres.Liberalism and Social Action + Essays, pp. 294–296
Government is one factor and an important one. But it comes into the picture only in relation to other matters. At present, these other matters are economic and cultural. With respect to the first point, it is absurd to conceive liberty as that of the business entrepreneur and ignore the immense regimentation towhich workers are subjected, intellectual as well as manual work-ers. workers.Liberalism and Social Action + Essays, pp. 295–297
I call it a pseudo-liberalism because it ossified and narrowed generous ideas and aspirations. Even when words remain the same, they mean something very different when they are uttered by a minority struggling against repressive measures, and when expressed by a group that has attained power and then uses ideas that were once weapons of emancipation as instruments for keeping the power and wealth they have obtained.Liberalism and Social Action + Essays, pp. 291–292
Genuinely held from Individualism Old and New (1930) through Freedom and Culture (1939). Westbrook is correct that I am best characterized as a socialist democrat rather than a democratic socialist — the noun is democracy, the adjective is socialist, not the reverse. I was reluctant to use the word socialism because the word's connotations had been captured by movements (state socialism, Stalinist authoritarianism, the various national-socialist contortions) I did not endorse. I can be classified as a democratic socialist. If I were permitted to define 'socialism' and 'socialist' I would so classify myself today — the letter to Jim Cork, late 1940s, says it plainly. The Cold War welfare-state Dewey, the libertarian leave-people-alone Dewey, and the orthodox-Marxist bourgeois-reformist Dewey are three different misreadings, none of them mine.