An excerpt of the preface written by the author, about the main idea of the whole book:

No Ameican philosopher has been more widely discussed and criticized than John Dewey. Yet despite this -- or perhaps because of this -- there is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about what he really believed and what is the heart of his philosophic outlook. I have tried to present a sympathetic, comprehensive statement of Dewey's intellectual vision. I believe that this is the most effective way to discover what Dewey "stood for" and, thereby, enable us to evaluate his contribution to philosophic inquiry and American thought.

The following text is coppied from Wikipedia:

Richard J. Bernstein (born May 14, 1932) is an American philosopher, the Vera List Professor of Philosophy and former dean of the graduate faculty at The New School.[1][2]

Bernstein grew up as part of a middle-class Jewish family in Borough Park, Brooklyn; his family moved to Long Island, New York following World War II.[3] He received an A.B (1951) from the University of Chicago, a B.S. summa cum laude (1953) from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. (1958) from Yale University. He took a faculty position at Yale, but in 1965, the university denied him tenure despite the initial unanimous support of his department, leading to student protests[4][5][6][7][8][9] and eventually to reforms of the tenure system at Yale.[10][11] This event, now called the Bernstein Affair, was “one of the most contested cases of tenure in the United States.”[3] Bernstein then moved to a tenured position at Haverford College,[12] where he taught for 23 years and became the T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy before later moving to The New School.[1] At The New School, the Richard J. Bernstein Endowed Prize Fellowship in Philosophy is awarded to distinguished philosophy students in his honor.[13] In 1981, Bernstein became founding co-editor of Praxis International, the revived journal of the Yugoslav Praxis School philosophical movement. In 1988, he served as President of the Metaphysical Society of America.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Bernstein)