Dewey's selective and moulding reception in Spain (1898-1936) was determined by the academic and professional "episteme" as "externationalisation mould". Dewey was translated by members of the bourgeois-reformist Institución Libre de Enseñanza mainly after 1925, as his thought didn't fit in their "episteme " and political project. Searching for justification, they construed him as one of them, an Ideal-Realist, syncretising Pragmatism with Spiritualism-Vitalism, and rejecting his Naturalism, social definition of morality and communitarian-participative democracy as contrary to elitist nationalising regeneration. Dewey became a prestige brand and adverecundiam argument for supporting different stances. The failure of top-down regeneration and the problems of the extension of schooling, and pedagogic and scientific institutionalisation made possible a deeper reception. Socialist and teachers' self-educational participative practices and professionalisation allowed practitioners to understand Dewey. Practitioners used him to defend a socialising and active-cooperative education through the project method, and the republican school, as remedies against the central Spanish social aetiology, individualism. Dewey gained specific illocutionary meanings: school teachers used him to claim intellectual independence from higher pedagogy. However, teachers, as academics, maintained anthropological and social-educational dualism and didn't fully embrace Naturalism or a communitarian democratic-participative school that would have questioned their role as community reformers.