If you came to this page and are checking out the above title because you are interested in Marxism and/or other "isms" as tools for fundamental social change, to turn around and defeat the injustice and brutalities brought upon working people and farmers here and around the world by this system, this book can help you a lot, as can any other book by George Novack. Here he is answering the "official philosophy" of Yankee capitalism: pragmatism, as put forward by the liberal philosopher John Dewey. While Dewey was often an opponent of the evil things this system does, Novack points out the dead end of a philosophy that is primarily concerned with "practical results"-in the short term only. Novack defends the long view of history that is the view of Marxism: history-as-present as well as the past. He defends historical materialism, which means that Marxists do not believe that history (and history-as-present) is made by a deity or deities; and that social phenomena are directly or indirectly determined by society's economic condition. Novack teaches you how to look at society and events like the New World Depression we have and entered and the string of imperial wars that go with it, in a scientific, objective way. He does this for the sole purpose of making the scientific world view first propagated by Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels useful as a weapon for today's fighter for a fundamental change in the order of things. He stands alongside them to repeat that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

This book is one of several written by the revolutionary Marxist George Novack. In it he counterposes Marxism to pragmatism, but not as one philosophy against another. Marxism is not a philosophy at all; instead it is a scientific method for understanding social history and change. As such it explains the origin, development and social significance of all forms of ideology, including specific philosophical schools of thought.

The overall course of cultural development, since the emergence of the ancient slave-based civilizations, has been driven by the motor of class conflict. Throughout history, each class can be characterized by its own distinctive features of social psychology, morality and outlook, although they are modified in different social contexts. The dominant class of modern society, the capitalist class, is no different. It has its own fundamental moral and social outlook, which is best revealed in the philosophy of pragmatism.

The philosophy of pragmatism was best explained by John Dewey, an early twentieth-century thinker who developed keen insights into the outlook of the ruling class of the United States. He pinpointed and formalized the essential elements of the outlook of the average capitalist and developed these into the principles of a philosophy he called pragmatism. These include an individualistic and optimistic approach to life, a practical, "can do" attitude, a disregard of history and its lessons ("History is bunk," said Henry Ford) and a disdain for any "theory" that does not produce practical results in short order.

Marxism, with its deep concern for the facts of history and its rigorous analysis of the inner logic of social development and change, can explain the development of classes and social modes of production. As part of this, George Novack demonstrates, Marxism can also explain how the guiding ideas of a class are linked to its historical role and needs. And this helps workers to understand the class with which they are forced to do battle, and provides them with valuable lessons they can use in winning the battle.

George Novack, the most outstanding Marxist Philosopher of the 20th Century after we lost Trotsky and Lenin, saw it as his special task to critique the Empiricism and Pragmatism that dominated American culture in his time. He felt a special duty to examine and critique John Dewey, who Novack met and respected and worked with in civil liberties struggles, especially in the defense of Leon Trotsky against Stalin's slanders.
If he began this work in his small book the Origins of Empiricism, he felt this work was completed with this work. He could have published a simpler critique of Dewey much earlier, but his goal was to get to the roots of American Pragmatism and expose its strengths and weaknesses, and to indicate the answers dialectical thought in general, and Marxism in particular had for it.
When the smoke clears, when the struggles of working people push away the confusion that the Stalinoid Moscow and Peking hacks have anything to do with Marxist Philosophy, or that petit bourgeois opponents of Marxism who masquerade as Marxist from university chairs can help fighting working people, farmers, youth, and real revolutionary intellectuals, this book by a life-long revolutionary fighter will be known as one of the classics of Marxist Philosophy.