To Maxine Greene on Her 90th Birthday

I couldn’t help beginning this paean to Maxine Greene on her 90th birthday without thinking of John Dewey’s 90th birthday on October 20, 1949. There were a couple of festschrift volumes growing out of conferences at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin, letters from scholars, artists, activists, and public figures, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and much public notice and tribute. A lot of nice things were said about Dewey and science, reflective thinking, social planning, the great community, and other ideas central to his storied career. In 1949, it seemed the Anglo-American imperium was in triumph, the world had been made safe for capitalism, and the stage was set for analytic philosophy to exert its hegemony. But at the very same time, a different swell was moving through the world, stained by Hiroshima, the Holocausts, and the banality of evil, cultural malaise, political repression, and social hucksterism; represented dangerously in a deeper undercurrent of literary and aesthetic misgiving and uncertainty