The history of Marxism and of pragmatism have made it difficult for us to imagine today that they were once closely related, in various respects. This has resulted in an underestimation of the affinities between the philosophies of Marx and Dewey or of the influence exercised by Dewey on Marxism in the United States, via Hook, and in China, via Mao. The latter point is indeed the one least well known. Mao drew on Dewey prior to his conversion to Marxism, his approach to which would continue to be durably influenced by the echo of a number of Deweyan themes~: the political importance of education, the instrumentalist and pluralist conception of the relation between theory and practice, the invocation of a concept of inquiry. Today it has become possible for us to acknowledge that the history of the 20th century is not exactly what we believe it to be, with the result that we can therefore reconsider the manner in which we inherit it.