 Dewey’s pragmatism was always highly contentious and by the mid-twentieth century to some extent staled in the face of stimulating new research programmes, such as logical empiricism, the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and other approaches. To skeptics in democratic theory, following in the tracks of Lippmann and other of Dewey’s contemporaries such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Dewey’s radical and unconventional idea of democracy is extravagantly optimistic about the epistemic capacities of the individual citizen and of democratic institutions. 