John Dewey’s pragmatism, championed and revived almost singlehandedly by Richard Rorty ( Citation1979), is a form of naturalism that holds knowledge arises from the experience of the human organism in the process of adapting to its environment. While the identified turns have indeed significantly changed circumstances in which Dewey produced his understanding of democracy, we conclude that his work still carries a lot of value and call for its reinvention in and for the age of digital reason. We analyse complex interplay between the turns, and show that they cannot be understood and / or analysed in separation. We identify the three turns which separate democracy of Dewey’s times and democracy of today – the global, the ecological, and the digital turn – and relate them to changing notions of citizenship. An introduction to the philosophy of education (1916/2001) in order to evaluate the growth and development of democracy against the decline of social democracy in the West.

In this paper we revisit Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Dewey was perhaps the foremost theorist and advocate of participatory democracy as an ethical ideal based on a belief and faith in human experience as a general theory of education that would generate the requisite aims and methods for what he called ‘organized intelligence’ and what we might call today ‘collective intelligence’ – that is, as he says, ‘faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education’.

Dewey democracy and education