Introduction

John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct is the most comprehensive statement of a pragmatist moral psychology and provides among the most important treatments of ethical theory in the Dewey corpus. The book’s subtitle “An introduction to social psychology” can be misleading, because the book is not about social psychology as an academic discipline. Dewey clarifies his intention in the preface to the book’s first edition in 1922, when he writes that he aims to put forth not a social psychology as such but rather “an understanding of habit” as the key to social psychology. He views the problem of social psychology as understanding how customs or “collective habit” shape the minds of individuals in the social group. With Human Nature and Conduct , he sets out to attend to just this problem, providing a way to rethink the meaning of habit and how habits – collective and individual – shape our lives.