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ОглавлениеIntroduction
Revisiting The Public and Its Problems
Melvin L. Rogers
Dewey’s Democratic Vision
Published in 1927 and reissued in 1946 with an added subtitle and introduction, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry is not John Dewey’s (1859–1952) only work on politics. Still, it is perhaps one of his richest meditations on the future of democracy in an age of mass communication, governmental bureaucracy, social complexity, and pluralism that implicitly draws on his previous writings and prefigures his later thinking. It is this work, above all others, to which scholars consistently turn when assessing Dewey’s conception of democracy and what might be imagined for democracy in our own time. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to open a book in contemporary democratic theory without finding substantive references to Dewey and his work.1 This is because these themes remain as important today as when Dewey first engaged them.
Dewey came to prominence in the late nineteenth century as a philosopher, but it was his writings on “progressive education,” ethics, democracy, and contemporary issues in the twentieth century that earned him both national and international fame as a public intellectual of the highest order.2 Born in Burlington, Vermont, and a graduate of the University of Vermont and the then newly formed graduate school of Johns Hopkins University, Dewey studied the great thinkers of liberal and democratic thinking, from John Locke (1632–1704) to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) to Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), in his efforts to reimagine politics in America. If America was viewed as the modern experiment in democracy, then Dewey was its greatest defender and most reflective critic.3 As historian Henry Commager observed in 1950, attesting to the importance of Dewey’s voice: “So faithfully did Dewey live up to his own philosophical creed that he became the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken.”4
While it is true that Dewey achieved a level of respect unmatched by his contemporaries, it is a mistake to read him as the spokesperson for his time. It has been clear since Robert Westbrook’s magisterial intellectual biography, John Dewey and American Democracy, that Dewey was not a proponent of a crass corporate liberalism that came to dominate American society beginning in the late nineteenth century.5 Rather, he was its most perceptive critic, who sought to articulate the moral demand of democratic liberalism. Properly understood, democratic liberalism locates the individual within, even as it provides him or her with resources to guide the diverse network of social relationships in which he or she is located.
Although for Dewey liberalism and modern democracy are closely related, and he often yokes the two together, it is a mistake to see them as involving the same logic. This is for two reasons. First, modern democracy places emphasis on the equality of the individual before the law and on the shared identity of the rulers and the ruled and views the people as the creative source of authority. But the constitution of “the people” in modern democracy—a view that Dewey himself advances, as we will see—is understood as resulting from politics. In other words, who constitutes the people is the result of individuals fighting to give direction to their lives, rather than something determined by the governing nation.6
Second, Dewey is critical of classical liberalism and a defender of modern liberalism. Classical liberalism involves a deep appreciation of liberty; it elevates the standing of individuals, but as it specifically relates to their taking responsibility for their own fate, it valorizes private property and is concerned to constrain the use of state power.7 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical liberalism finds its founding elements in John Locke (1632–1704) and Adam Smith (1723–1790), but its policy-oriented vision of society is most clearly located in the nineteenth century in thinkers such as David Ricardo (1772–1823) and William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), and in the twentieth-century figure Frederick Hayek (1899–1992). These last three thinkers in particular are motivated by a philosophical desire to limit state power and elucidate a laissez-faire model of political and economic development.
In The Public and Its Problems, but also in his Individualism: Old and New of 1930 and Liberalism and Social Action of 1935, Dewey is critical of the extent to which classical liberalism, with its atomistic psychology, narrow understanding of individuality, and limited role for the state, undermines the communal dimension of democracy. As he argues in last of the three works: “There still lingers in the minds of some [liberals] the notion that there are two different ‘spheres’ of action and of rightful claims; that of political society and that of the individual, and that in the interest of the latter the former must be as contracted as possible.”8 As he understands it, the problem centers on balancing the relationship between the two, no matter how difficult that proves, in the service of collective problem solving. “Liberalism,” he writes, “has to assume the responsibility for making it clear that intelligence is a social asset and is clothed with a function as public as is its origin, in the concrete, in social cooperation.”9
When Dewey speaks this way he sides with what L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) calls “new liberalism” or with those who seek to free the potentiality of individuals and elucidate the social conditions for the flourishing of life.10 Identifying those conditions often entails combating economic deprivations and political exclusions that constrain individuals. This new or modern liberalism includes such figures as John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), T. H. Green (1836–1882), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and more recently John Rawls (1921–2002).11 And while it too is concerned with freedom and elevating the standing of individuals, it is uniquely guided (albeit negatively) by extending to the state a greater role in removing inhumane conditions and constructing and underwriting (albeit positively) a welfare state.
Dewey’s aim in Liberalism and Social Action is not simply to address the contradictions of the 1930s—a deep financial depression amid technological advance, a noble belief in equality and liberty amid various forms of exclusion and oppression—by locating the responsibility of economic and social forces within the domain of democratic oversight. He is simultaneously providing an elucidation of democratic liberalism (hereafter simply referred to as “democracy”) that defines the entirety of The Public and Its Problems, published several years earlier, whether democracy applies to the market economy, the schools, or social relations more broadly. Dewey’s vision of civic participation aspires to pervade all of society. Indeed, society becomes responsible for generating the values by which it will live—values that are open to debate and refinement by its members and in response to socially and politically demanding problems. A vision of civic participation that pervades all of society implies, in Dewey’s view no less than in the view of the modern liberals with whom he is associated, self-control and self-direction in living one’s life. According to this view, individuals are capable of distancing themselves from their interests to assess the role of those interests in the flourishing of their lives and the lives of those with whom they share political society and on whom they necessarily depend.
In Dewey’s estimation, the creative potential of a democratic community is fundamentally connected to debate as the community revises and develops its institutional structures and values. In fact, it is for this reason that in works such as The School and Society (1899), How We Think (1910), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Dewey attempts to elucidate the contours of human reflection (often referred to as “inquiry”) and the way it makes us responsive to the social and natural world in which we are located. His vision of participation cannot therefore be reduced to a minimalist view of democracy that is confined exclusively to voting. In fact, he rejects this account as a primary description of democracy.12
In The Public and Its Problems, he specifically ties the idea of representative government to deliberation among the citizenry (see chapters 2–3). He believes this will ensure that justification of one’s actions does not come uncoupled from being accountable to the public. This, he further maintains, will mitigate any blind faith we might otherwise place in political institutions. In Freedom and Culture of 1939—a work dedicated to elucidating the cultural outlook needed to sustain democracy against the tide of totalitarianism—Dewey argues, in a Jeffersonian fashion, that we must “get rid of the ideas that lead us to believe that democratic conditions automatically maintain themselves, or that they can be identified with fulfillment of prescriptions laid down in a constitution.”13
For him, this vision of democratic self-governance necessitates that political judgments by citizens be tested based on the extent to which they can withstand contrary arguments, reasons, and experiences. Forming the will of the democratic community, for Dewey, is a process of thoughtful interaction in which the preferences of citizens are both informed and transformed by public deliberation as citizens struggle to decide which policies will best satisfy and address the commitments and needs of the community.14 It must be the case that a vision of a shared life (rather than some narrow idea of self-interest) informs the extent to which citizens are willing to participate in this practice. But this shared life, he explains, is substantively informed and enriched through the exchange that deliberation makes possible. It is no wonder that many see Dewey as an important spokesperson for deliberative democracy.15
His vision of democracy does not exclusively or even principally refer to specific institutional arrangements and political procedures. They are important, but they do not exhaust the meaning of democracy. For him, democracy implies, as it had for Jefferson, Emerson, and Walt Whitman (1819–1892), and as it would for Jane Addams (1860–1935) and Du Bois, a public culture or ethos as the Greeks understood it that “extended to matters of the mind, heart, and spirit.”16 As Dewey explains in a 1939 address, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” “to get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal.”17 This view guides the genesis of The Public and Its Problems and determines its content; in fact, it is at the core of both his first and his last set of reflections on democracy.
The Ethics of Democracy
What is the wider context for understanding The Public and Its Problems? Dewey wrote The Public and Its Problems in the spirit of debate and disagreement about the meaning and future of democracy, particularly with the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) in mind. The Dewey-Lippmann debate is a staple of American political thought. The challenge that both democracy and Dewey faced in the figure of Lippmann—a challenge that centered on the viability of popular sovereignty and any faith placed therein—was not new to Dewey. He had encountered similar doubts decades earlier after reading Popular Government, published in 1885 by jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine (1822–1888).18
It is worth turning to Maine’s text and Dewey’s response in his 1888 essay, “The Ethics of Democracy.” Written at the age of twenty-nine, this essay marks Dewey’s first explicit reflection on democracy and contains elements of his view that he never abandoned and to which he returned almost forty years later. Although Dewey published a number of important works between 1888 and 1927 in which democracy figures as a central theme, “The Ethics of Democracy” is the most immediate thematic and conceptual predecessor to The Public and Its Problems.19 This is not simply because each work owes its existence to an intellectual provocateur. Independent of the similarities in motivation for writing each text, both center on the meaning of democracy as a political and ethical ideal, its institutional elements, the political standing of the people therein, and the relationship between citizens and their representatives. “The Ethics of Democracy” nicely provides the wider context for understanding his later engagement with Lippmann.
Maine’s challenge to democracy is part of a much larger and more sustained set of criticisms during the Victorian period—attacks that either condemned democracy wholesale or reduced it merely to a form of government unable to realize the sovereignty of the people.20 That democracy was under sustained assault may sound odd to our modern ears. But this is largely so because we forget that for the better part of its history, democracy was overwhelmingly viewed as both theoretically illegitimate and practically catastrophic. Not even the Founding Fathers of the United States—a country born in the modern era and often touted as beginning its history as a democracy—advanced praise for the term. Only in the nineteenth century did the term democracy begin to acquire a more sustained positive defense; and surely few, even in that century, could foresee that it would become the exclusive term for legitimate authority in modern times.
Maine’s specific argument against democracy rejects the view, which he associates with the political philosopher Rousseau, that the people participate in the formation of every policy. In this view, Maine argues, all citizens feel themselves to be at one with decision-making because they do not see those decisions at odds with their deeply felt interests.21 This is at the core, says Maine, of what is meant by the sovereignty of the people.
Maine argues instead that this view is a mere fiction. Rather than being derived from the true will of the people, he contends, political consensus is formed as a result of corruption and manipulation: “[I]t is absurd to suppose that, if the hard-toiled, and the needy, the artisan and the agricultural labourer, become the depositaries of power, and if they can find agents through whom it becomes possible for them to exercise it, they will not employ it for what they may be led to believe are their own interests.”22 Maine’s point is simple: it is impossible to form a general will out of a multitude of conflicting interests, and what appears to be the general will is in fact the will of a few exercised over those without political power.23
Although Maine’s political preference in the book points toward aristocracy—indeed, he attributes to aristocracy “the progress of mankind”24—he acknowledges the source of democracy’s stability. For him, that stability does not rest with the production of a common will, but is derived principally from the institutional structures that are grafted onto democracy and that increase political control, something he believes is sorely missing from the English system. Maine was essentially responding to the 1884 Franchise Bill, which provided voting rights to previously disenfranchised citizens in England and which extended formal democracy.25 But his point is clear: stability comes from without and implies the frailty of democracy if left to its own devices. He pursues this issue directly in essay 4 of Popular Government, “The Constitution of the United States.” Much in line with the trajectory of the book, Maine contends that what holds the United States government together is a system of delegation and conservative checks and balances within a constitutional structure that appropriately constrains the excesses of the masses on the one hand and their tendency to be duped by those that might undermine the entire system on the other.26
In “The Ethics of Democracy” Dewey seeks to address this indictment and lays the foundation for a number of themes to which he returns in The Public and Its Problems. He addresses the criticism by identifying Maine’s account of democracy with a narrow and faulty premise regarding the relationship between humans and society.
What makes it more surprising that Maine should adopt the numerical aggregation, the multitude conception, is the fact that in times past he has dealt such vigorous blows against a theory which is the natural and inevitable outcome of this conception. The “Social Contract” theory of states has never been more strongly attacked than by Maine, and yet the sole source of this theory is just such a conception of society, as a mass of units, as the one Maine here adopts. . . . It is the idea that men are mere individuals, without any social relations until they form a contract. The method by which they get out of their individualistic conditions is not the important matter; rather this is the fact, that they are in an individualistic condition of which they have to be got. . . . Maine rejects this artifice as unreal, but keeps the fundamental idea, the idea of men as a mere mass, which led to it.27
For Dewey, the initial problem with Maine’s view is that he begins with the assumption of humans as solitary units. Correspondingly, society appears not as a unified whole with differentiated parts, but rather as a mass of unconnected elements. This is precisely why Maine rejects the idea that we can identify political decisions with something called “the people.” “Vox Populi [Voice of the People],” he says, “may be Vox Dei [Voice of God], but . . . there never has been any agreement as to what Vox means or as to what Populus means.”28
But Maine also rejects, several times in his text, this explanation of human society as based on a priori speculation.29 Despite this, Dewey contends, Maine nonetheless rests his own view of democracy on the sociological presuppositions of the social contract theory. Thus, Maine misrepresents the relationship between the individual and society. “Men are not isolated non-social atoms,” Dewey explains, “but are men only when in intrinsic relations to men.”30 For him, there is a naturalness to our interpersonal associations that is missed by the atomistic conception of society. In fact, a theory that takes humans as situated beings whose identities take shape in society “has wholly superseded the theory of men as an aggregate, as a heap of grains of sand needing some factitious mortar to put them into semblance or order.”31
In other words, if interpersonal associations are fundamental to understanding individuals, then an account of interests formed by those individuals will be incomplete without reference to those interpersonal associations. We are socially constituted beings; living together provides us with resources to form interests that cohere with society, but community also provides the conditions of conflict. For Dewey, our interpersonal associations—a kind of prepolitical basis of social interaction—provide a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition for describing democracy.
Understanding the basis of democracy in this way allows Dewey to shift the discussion away from defending the very idea of democracy to elucidating how best to understand it. His reference to “factitious mortar” quoted above is significant in this regard. If political society is not held together by a false will imposed externally for the sake of order, it must, he concludes, imply unity that makes the idea of a coherent political community intelligible to the citizenry. For this reason, he goes on in the essay to adopt a view of society as “a social organism” in which the function of the various parts, like the human body, is conducive to overall harmony.32 The metaphor comes from both Dewey’s Congregational Christian training and the heavy influence on Dewey of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and British Idealists such as Green and F. H. Bradley (1846–1924).33 For Dewey specifically, the point of the metaphor is to provide a way to imagine the state as embodying a harmonious whole (much like an organism), the integrity of which is shaped by and expressed in the actions of individual citizens (much like the individual elements that constitute an organism).
Readers of Dewey should be careful at precisely this juncture. Dewey concedes that society is not possessed of “one interest or will”; he acknowledges, for example, that there are a diversity of interests, “struggle[s] and opposition[s] and hostilit[ies].”34 There are, he says, “classes within society, circles within the classes and cliques within the circles.”35 Yet Dewey insists that representation of those interests through one’s vote are not the result of individuals’ private reflections independent of the whole, but denote a reciprocal relation between individuals and the larger political community. This is not simply a function of Dewey’s thinking in this essay, but also appears in his ethical writings during the period such as Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891) and The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (1894). As he says in the first of the two works: “IN THE REALIZATION OF INDIVIDUALITY THERE IS FOUND ALSO THE NEEDED REALIZATION OF SOME COMMUNITY OF PERSONS OF WHICH THE INDIVIDUAL IS A MEMBER; AND, CONVERSELY, THE AGENT WHO DULY satisfies THE COMMUNITY IN WHICH HE SHARES, BY THAT SAME CONDUCT SATISFIES HIMSELF.”36 This account dovetails with Rousseau’s understanding of the centrality of the community to self-development, the Hegelian account of freedom, and more recent communitarian descriptions of self- and collective-realization.37
These previous remarks partly confront any reader of this essay with an important difficulty not simply in Dewey’s philosophy, but in democracy more generally. Given Dewey’s theory of society, he often downplays the persistence of conflict. Nor does he acknowledge that conflict among competing claims will often implicate a political community in decisions where loss is inevitable. In fact, according to Dewey, conflict appears to lead necessarily to unity. But to liken the body politic to a human organism means that different parts function to the benefit of the whole. And when we think of parts of our bodies not functioning properly, we typically see those parts as sick or abnormal. But it is not at all clear that a citizen’s attempt to cultivate personality or realize some specific vision of this or that public policy will be amenable to the body politic. And yet it is often inappropriate to label that citizen as sick or abnormal. It may simply be the case that the citizen’s way of seeing things is just as legitimate, even if it cannot be reconciled with the drift of the community. In our own time, no less than in Dewey’s, the community is often torn on a host of questions and yet some of the views on each side are legitimate.38
The problem here is that while Dewey acknowledges the fact of conflict, he does not properly emphasize the mechanism that can potentially resolve it or make the persistence of conflict consonant with a political system in which the people as a collective body can be said to rule. The social organism metaphor is flawed, even as Dewey uses it to show the kind of political integrity a democratic community ought to entail. The metaphor obscures precisely what it should illuminate—namely, how it is we can speak about the coherence of the political community amid conflict.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey abandons the metaphor altogether as a theoretical tool to describe society. In a 1939 biographical sketch, he explains that his earlier commitment to Hegelian unity required a transformation far more attentive to the ways conflict empirically defies the movement toward social harmony: “The Hegelian emphasis upon continuity and the function of conflict persisted on empirical grounds after my earlier confidence in dialectic had given way to skepticism.”39 Dewey retains his Hegelian commitment to unity or harmony of social life, but it has a naturalistic (rather than metaphysical) source. By naturalism here, I mean that Dewey sees knowledge and values as emerging empirically with reference to the best science of the day regarding human beings, and in relation to the larger environment in which humans are located. In this regard Dewey’s use of “empirical grounds” is meant to acknowledge the persistence of uncertainty and therefore the ever-present possibility of conflict that figures prominently in both his social theory (e.g., Human Nature and Conduct of 1922) and reflection on knowledge formation (e.g., “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” of 1910, Experience and Nature of 1925, and The Quest for Certainty of 1929) once he embraced Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Indeed, during his sojourn in China between 1919 and 1921, Dewey’s lectures often describe the state as adjudicating between the conflicting interests that define social and political life.40
The reader must be attentive to the later developments in his thinking precisely because they contrast with the view in his 1888 essay, “The Ethics of Democracy.” For if politics involves real winners and losers, important questions emerge for Dewey’s view of democracy at this early stage: How do I lose in a way that makes me feel part of the people who have won? How do we retain a coherent political community that the social organism metaphor implies, while addressing the disappointments that come with political life? Maine puts the question this way: If “the People” make a sound, “is it a sound in which the note struck by minorities is entirely silent?”41
In “The Ethics of Democracy” Dewey’s reflections on majority rule show that he is sensitive to this question. In fact, he shows that his deep commitment to the necessity of unity does not completely overtake his more chastened moments of reflection regarding political life.
There still appears to be in majority rule an instrument for putting all on a dead level, and allowing numerical surplus to determine the outcome. But the heart of the matter is found not in the voting nor in the counting the votes to see where the majority lies. It is in the process by which the majority is formed. The minority are represented in the policy which they force the majority to accept in order to be a majority; the majority have the right to “rule” because their majority is not the mere sign of a surplus in numbers, but is the manifestation of the purpose of the social organism. Were this not so, every election would be followed by a civil war.42
In his view, a decision is not merely the result of a calculation in which one group—51 percent of the community—has the votes to carry the title majority. We often reduce democratic decision making to this calculus, and this is precisely the view at work in Maine’s account. This misses, Dewey argues, the prior process that majority rule entails. For decision making is a “process by which the social organism weighs considerations and forms its consequent judgment; that the voting of the individual represents in reality, a deliberation, a tentative opinion on the part of the whole organism.”43 Deliberation, then, to appropriate Dewey’s words, is the “instrument for putting all on a dead level.” The very position the majority comes to occupy is formed, for that position to be deemed legitimate, through an antagonistic exchange with the minority.
Dewey’s linking of majoritarianism to deliberation as a way to explain political legitimacy is at the core of understanding democracy for him. For if there were complete alienation by the people from the source of power that ruled over them, Dewey argues, “every election would be followed by a civil war”—that is, a conflict so deep that it warrants dividing the nation between friends and enemies, thus destroying the integrity of the community. The absence of civil war after every election, Dewey reasons, means that in a representative system “the governors and the governed” do not form “two classes” (as Maine believes) but are rather “two aspects of the same fact”—namely, the ruling people.44
The integrity of democracy hinges on the extent to which the minority never feels permanently alienated from the process of decision making. Because the status of the minority is not perpetual, and as a result the minority does not exist under the weight of a tyrannical majority, the idea of political loss becomes an institutionalized reciprocal practice of decision making. This reciprocal practice is the deliberative “process” to which Dewey referred earlier. Part of its function is to encode both the habits of reciprocity and mutual trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives.45 To cultivate such habits is part of the process of mitigating the remainders of disappointment. The normative significance of this process, however, is that while the voice of the people is always unified, its tenor and content is never permanently settled—that is, in a democracy no embodiment of power, whether in the law, public agencies, or a majority opinion, is beyond reproach.
By conceiving of political reciprocity in this manner, Dewey also articulates the anti-elitist element at the core of his understanding of democracy to which he returns in The Public and Its Problems. This differs dramatically from Maine’s political preference. Consider the comparison Dewey draws between democracy and aristocracy:
What distinguishes the ethical basis and ideal of one from that of the other? It may appear a roundabout way to reach a simple end, to refer to Plato and to Greek life to get data for an answer; but I know of no way in which I can so easily bring out what seems to me the truth. The Platonic Republic is a splendid and imperishable formulation of the aristocratic ideal. . . . But the Republic is more; it seizes upon the heart of the ethical problem, the relation of the individual to the universal, and states a solution. The question of the Republic is as to the ideal of men’s conduct; the answer is such a development of man’s nature as brings him into complete harmony with the universe of spiritual relations, or, in Platonic language, the state.46
As the passage suggests, Dewey sees in aristocracy a longing that is much akin to democracy—namely, a desire for “unity of purpose, the fulfilling of function in devotion to the interests of the social organism.”47
The key difference between the two, he argues, is that aristocracy expresses a deep skepticism about the abilities of individuals to recognize the importance of their relationship to the community. Moreover, aristocracy simply turns the responsibility of governance over to the elites. But such a view, he argues, fails “because the practical consequences of giving the few wise and good power [are] that they cease to remain wise and good.”48 In this he agrees with the Founders on the corrupting influence of power, especially when it is disconnected from oversight. Indeed, this is an argument he reiterates decades later in The Public and Its Problems (221–25). As Aristotle originally noted, and Dewey concurs, the wise cannot help but regard themselves as the exclusive site for knowledge.49 They fail to be attentive to those on whose behalf they serve. The result is that they diminish, rather than expand, their perceptual and problem-solving abilities. Even on the assumption that such rulers would remain wise, the image would still be unattractive:
The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into their proper positions in the social organism. It is true, indeed, that when an individual has found that place in society for which he is best fitted and is exercising the function proper to that place, he has obtained his completest development, but it is also true (and this is the truth omitted by aristocracy, emphasized by democracy) that he must find this place and assume this work in the main for himself. . . . It must begin in the man himself, however much the good and the wise of society contribute.50
Because Dewey regards the good of society as legitimate to the extent that it is self-consciously recognized by the members of the community, his understanding of democracy locates itself in the freely willed actions (whether in support or contestation) of its members.
As already suggested, the themes struck in 1888—the relationship between individual and society, the significance of deliberation, the relationship between minority and majority, and the anti-elitist core of Dewey’s political thinking—reach a higher pitch in The Public and Its Problems. When taken together these themes throw into greater relief Dewey’s mature thinking on democracy and its radical and enduring quality.
The Crisis of Democracy
By the 1920s democracy had fallen on hard times. Several factors were at work.51 First, Darwinian evolution in the last decade of the nineteenth century undermined the religious backdrop of American culture. Darwin’s version of evolution so thoroughly connected contingency to biological development that many came to believe they were helpless in trying to create a just society. If God was dead, to whom should one turn for guidance? This question implied a crisis not simply of religious certainty, but of authority more broadly understood. In Drift and Mastery of 1914, Walter Lippmann, then editor of the New Republic and adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, nicely captured the psychological anxieties of the age: “What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts didn’t free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.”52
Second, while World War I elevated America’s status as an international force, it did so alongside an already waning belief in progress that had otherwise defined the Progressive Era. American intellectuals did not abandon the belief in progress as such, but that belief was severely chastened by the devastation of the war. It made clear that retrogression was as likely as the progress that many thought was inevitable. But the war also revealed how easily the people, who otherwise were considered the source of sovereignty, were duped by propaganda.
Third, new studies in human psychology and politics at the beginning of the twentieth century merely confirmed the ease with which the people were manipulated. In doing so, these studies undermined the very premise on which democracy rested—that ordinary individuals were capable of collectively governing themselves if given the opportunity. What Maine had argued polemically in the 1880s, a new breed of scholar would maintain, but now with the support of empirical facts. French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) and British sociologist and political scientist Graham Wallas (1858–1932) effectively elucidated the irrationality of the democratic public and its tendency to be short-sighted and biased.53 By the beginning of the 1930s, Harold Laswell (1902–1978), a leading American political scientist, could declare, “The findings of personality research show that the individual is a poor judge of his own interest.”54 Amid the constant evidence that public opinion was irrational, that the people were easily duped, and that partisan politics exacerbated these problems, many believed that if democracy continued it would have to be grounded in something other than the shifting and conflicting desires of ordinary people.
Democracy required a dose of realism to chasten its loftier vision. The emergence of democratic realism constituted a fundamental shift away from the idea of a deliberative public that was central to the Progressive Era. Searching for a new basis of authority, grappling with the possibility of retrogression and the irrationality of the public, many turned to a vision of democracy based on scientific expertise and administrative efficiency. “The world over,” explained the Australian sociologist Elton Mayo (1880–1949) in 1933, “we are greatly in need of an administrative elite.”55 Situated between Tarde and Wallas on the one hand, and Lasswell and Mayo on the other, Lippmann popularized the arguments of the former and prefigured the reflections of the latter. Lippmann further supported the irrationality of the democratic public in his two works Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), while simultaneously offering an attenuated vision of democracy. What Americans seemed to be without in 1914—namely, masters and guardians—Lippmann would now address in these two somber works. Understanding the meaning of Dewey’s argument as found in The Public and Its Problems requires that we first understand Lippmann’s position.
In Public Opinion, Lippmann advances a criticism that is in keeping with much of the psychological literature of the time. His argument comes in two steps. The first relates to what he calls stereotypes and the second is about the manipulation to which the symbolic content of those stereotypes is potentially subject. Stereotypes are value-laden conjectures about the world that arranges our experiences. They are part of a wider social network in which individuals exist and do not depend for their functioning on perpetual cognitive awareness. As he says, “The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. . . . And those preconceptions . . . govern deeply the whole process of perception.”56 This is particularly so in industrial societies because people are asked to reflect on issues of which they can have no firsthand experience.
Given the importance he accords stereotypes, not merely for individual identity, but also for political behavior, Lippmann worries about the extent to which they can be manipulated in the context of public life. Having served on the Committee on Public Information to enlist public support for America’s involvement in World War I, Lippmann witnessed firsthand how susceptible the public was to manipulation. And for him, stereotypes not only work to “censor out much that needs to be taken into account” about complex political phenomena but also are uniquely susceptible to control, given their already existentially charged content.57 “The stereotypes,” Lippmann explains, “are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope.”58 Most individuals, he says earlier, employ stereotypes with a level of “gullibility” that prevents them from seeing the partiality of their position, and this blunts their responsiveness to new and, at times, contrary information. Individuals who seek to win political power use symbols that are tied to the passions that infuse stereotypes; they play on our passions and on the fear of insecurity and uncertainty involved. Political entrepreneurs do not, in Lippmann’s analysis, take their point of departure from the opinion of the public—in fact, they give to the public its opinion. It is in this sense that public opinion, not being formed by the public, is merely a phantom.
But more significantly, Lippmann argues, citizens are inherently resistant to information that would call into question their deeply held beliefs. This is precisely why deliberation among the citizenry cannot lift citizens above their private or narrow interest: “There is nothing so obdurate to education or to criticism as the stereotype. It stamps itself upon the evidence in the very act of securing the evidence.”59 For this reason, Lippmann concludes in the more somber Phantom Public, “the public must be put in its place . . . so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”60
These considerations frame Lippmann’s alternative—elitist—vision of democracy. If we are to retain democracy, it must now mean, he argues, that the “public does not select the candidate, write the platform, outline the policy any more than it builds the automobile or acts the play. It aligns itself for or against somebody who has offered himself.”61 But this position goes further. As he explains, lamenting the exaggerated role attached to the citizen in democratic theory:
My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.62
For him, to do what is expected means not merely paying attention to political issues but also having the requisite knowledge to understand those issues—something ordinary citizens lack and will typically be resistant to acquiring. But strikingly, Lippmann also argues that political decisions by elected representatives are in need of prior supplementation and clarification. It is worth turning to two passages from Public Opinion: one from chapter 16 relating to Lippmann’s views on Congress, and the second from chapter 1 relating to representative government proper:
A congress of representatives is essentially a group of blind men in a vast, unknown world. . . . Since the real effects of most laws are subtle and hidden, they cannot be understood by filtering local experiences through local states of mind. They can be known only by controlled reporting and objective analysis. And just as the head of a large factory cannot know how efficient it is by talking to the foreman, but must examine cost sheets and data that only an accountant can dig out for him, so the lawmaker does not arrive at a true picture of the state of the union by putting together a mosaic of local pictures.63
[As such] representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions. I attempt, therefore, to argue that the serious acceptance of the principle that personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.64
For Lippmann, insofar as representatives seek to track various perspectives among their constituents to create a better picture of political reality, they will be misguided. Given the way he understands stereotypes and their hold on us, partial perspectives will either cancel each other out if they diverge or reinforce each other. In either case, the net result is an incomplete picture that corrupts decision making. The alternative that Lippmann recommends is one in which the unseen facts are “managed only by a specialized class” of social scientific experts who are distinct from the “men of action.”65 Presumably, locating decision making outside the purview of experts obstructs the extent to which they may employ their knowledge for ends that reach beyond public oversight. Their role, he explains, is to examine and report on the unseen political phenomena that are blocked from view by our stereotypes. They direct their results to political officials, rather than to the public, and take their point of direction from these same individuals.
Yet Lippmann’s language in the first passage suggests much more than mere reporting, indicative of his example of the factory owner and his relationship to the foreman and the accountant. The accountant provides not only facts, but also an interpretation of the current financial condition of the company, its short- and long-term problems given current operations. If we reason from this example to his understanding of the role of experts in politics, it is not an exaggeration to say that for Lippmann experts give shape to the problems that are only dimly perceived by both citizens and political officials. The intellectual authority he attaches to experts thus slides into a kind of political power that shapes the landscape in which political officials and the citizenry function from the outset. To be sure, he frees citizens from an oppressive fiction, but is it at the expense of much that we find morally appealing about democracy?
Dewey does not deny the brilliance or force of Lippmann’s critique in his review of Public Opinion: “The figures of the scene are so composed and so stand out, the manner of presentation is so objective and projective, that one finishes the book almost without realizing that it is perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”66 He agrees with Lippmann’s discussion of stereotypes and the poverty of the public’s knowledge in decision making. And he, too, is unconvinced by a view of democracy that envisions citizens as omnicompetent. Yet he takes issue with both the emphasis Lippmann places on educating “officials and directors” over and against the public and his corollary belief that experts do not need to be informed by or receive input from the public.67 The problem here, for Dewey, is not simply the role envisioned by Lippmann for experts, but rather, and consistent with the view expressed almost forty years earlier, the problem of power implied by their role in democracy. As he says more forcefully in The Public and Its Problems: “No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few” (225). Lippmann’s criticism was so perfectly directed that it seemingly left little room for reflection regarding a solution—a view which, in Dewey’s estimation, led to Lippmann’s elitism.
The Public and Its Problems
In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey is sensitive to the worry Lippmann advances, and even to the need for a division of intellectual labor between experts and the larger public that worry implies. This position, however, is located in a larger framework regarding the relationship between experts and citizens that keeps in view the problem of power and that sees citizens not merely as authorizing power, but as genuinely authoritative in decision making. The desire to keep in view the issue of power partly helps explain his defense of democracy and the distinct and important descriptions of the role of the public and the state that he elucidates in the first three chapters of the book.
For Dewey, the vast complexities of the modern age have radically transformed the meaning of democracy and the role of the ordinary citizen. For him, the various innovations in communication and transportation, the global scale of warfare, and the ever-changing dynamics of a market economy make reliance on experts simply unavoidable. “The Eclipse of the Public,” chapter 4 of The Public and Its Problems, is fundamentally about the ways in which citizens’ inherited habits for sustaining democracy are no longer consonant with the vast changes of the modern world. “We have,” explains Dewey, “inherited, in short, local town-meeting practices and ideas. But we live and act and have our being in a continental national state” (147). The incompatibility of citizens’ political and social habits and the circumstances in which they find themselves produces what Dewey, following Wallas, refers to as the “Great Society”—a collection of individuals tied together through bureaucratic structures and impersonal forces.68 As a result, the view of the omnicompetent citizen can only appear as an illusion. Dewey concedes this point to Lippmann. But in the context of democratic decision making, what is important, he argues, is that we understand that how and why we rely on experts is itself a public judgment that makes social inquiry genuinely cooperative.
The Public and Its Problems, then, is concerned to answer two distinct but related questions. First, what is the proper relationship between citizens and experts in the context of modern complexity, which nonetheless retains the self-governing dimension that we associate with democracy? Second, what is the proper method for helping the public emerge from its eclipse in the face of modern complexity so that it can fill the charge of self-governance?
The answer to the first question helps us understand how Dewey views the relationship between citizens and experts (chapter 6) and underscores the radical character of the democratic public (chapters 1–3). The answer to the second question emerges in Dewey’s discussion of what he believes are the preconditions for the public to assume its role under modern conditions. These themes emerge in chapters 4 and 5. For the remainder of the introduction I shall concentrate on the first of these issues, leaving it to the reader to assess Dewey’s engagement with the second.
The first issue emerges when he describes the relationship between experts and the citizenry, revisiting some of the themes expressed in his review of Lippmann’s work. In fact, the passage to which we will now refer sends us back to some of his reflections in 1888:
The final obstacle in the way of any aristocratic rule is that in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses, the best do not and cannot remain the best, the wise ceases to be wise. It is impossible for highbrows to secure a monopoly of such knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs. . . .
. . . The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. (223–24)
This passage is located in chapter 6, where Dewey discusses the problem of method in democratic decision making. One of the central claims he advances in that chapter is that the hypotheses we form for responding to political problems are only as good as the methods we employ—that is, the extent to which the methods make us receptive to data from various parts of the environment. But problems themselves, as he argues, frame and guide our inquiry; they imply the existence of a complex horizon of value and meaning that is now fractured and in need of creative valuation to restore continuity. Dewey’s point is not simply that without the input of the wearer of shoes the shoemaker will respond in a way that would not address the existing pinch. Rather, without input from the individual experiencing the pinch, the expert shoemaker will not have the subject matter to initiate or guide his inquiry.
Dewey is offering a rich account of democracy and the status of citizens and experts therein. First, the experiential aspect of the example—feeling the pinch—localizes problems in the life of communities and individuals. Political problems, as Dewey emphasizes, are often related to the flourishing of life, and the persistence of those problems makes flourishing difficult or impossible. Second, the importance he accords inquiry is meant to free individuals and promote their development (what Dewey often called “growth”). Here Dewey encourages a more critical stance toward the status of community than was the case in his early 1888 essay. Third, this liberation requires an intimate and critical engagement with the problems that afflict individuals and the ways in which the potential resolution of those problems fits with the liberation of others—an engagement from which the input of individuals and communities cannot be expunged and that is essential to guide inquiry.
In contrast to Lippmann, Dewey views the role of experts as ancillary to that of citizens, in essence undercutting the turn to experts that we see in Lippmann. As he says of experts, “Their expertness is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon which the former depend” (225). Dewey is making two critical points. The first is that expertise, properly understood, is always tethered to a more “technical” field of investigation. As he understands it, experts come to gain intellectual authority and therefore become bearers of knowledge because of the audience they engage. Citizens are thus authorities just to the extent that it is their problems that create the framework in which expertise functions. The complexity and texture of those problems, Dewey argues, come into view through a deliberative exchange among citizens that draws out existing and emerging concerns and worries. All of this guides them as they determine what they, as a political community, will make of the information provided. But it also means that there will rarely be complete agreement on who the experts are, and this will cut against any argument for blindly deferring to some perceived “expert” authority.
The second point of the sentence indicates that if something like “expertise” of political affairs exists, it will have to emerge from the public. In other words, how citizens understand information partly depends on the goals toward which they are moving as a political community, and this can emerge only through deliberation. Central to this process are questions not merely about how we understand the problem from the outset (e.g., Who are the subjects of this problem? What may be the long-term results if the problem is allowed to persist?), but about the implication of various proposals suggested to alleviate the problem (e.g., What are the value or economic trade-offs in choosing this or that proposal?). For Dewey, answering these questions—that is, arriving at knowledge—implies a kind of collective artistry to social inquiry that draws on the specific experiences of individuals, expert knowledge, facts about the problem in question, and potential risks of action. Hence, he explains that to the extent policy experts “become a specialized class they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve” (223). Since citizens are uniquely situated to offer knowledge of their own experiences, Dewey argues, their role in the design and implementation of policies is unavoidable in addressing the problem (224–25).
There is a practical upshot to Dewey’s argument. For example, where decision making is based less on the continuous input from public hearings, town hall meetings, advisory councils, and other deliberative bodies, there is greater reason to be concerned about the ends to which those decisions aim and the background interests from which they proceed. Moreover, there is reason to be equally suspicious of bureaucratic processes that are resistant to expanding decision-making power by taking a bottom-up approach.69 Of course there may be good reason not to take such an approach, as for example when we think about the obstacles that limited resources and time pose for political decision making. Here Lippmann’s point about the obstacles to broad-based inclusion is inescapable. But Dewey’s argument implies that the burden of proof must rest with those who seek less inclusive rather than more inclusive arrangements.70 To the extent that experts guide political power without taking direction from the public in the form of deliberation, the entire decision-making process loses legitimacy and gains in suspicion.
Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy
The considerations above, which directly engage Lippmann, are part of how Dewey understands the historical emergence of democracy as a way of broadening the use of political power. Indeed, he defends this view in The Public and Its Problems. Throughout the work, but especially in chapter 3, “The Democratic State,” Dewey consistently emphasizes the fortuitous emergence of political democracy. He resists the idea that democracy was fated to happen. By political democracy he means “a mode of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their conduct as officials” through universal suffrage, that emphasizes the publicity of decision making (121). Despite its contingent emergence, Dewey argues that democracy’s development nonetheless represents an “effort in the first place to counteract the forces that have so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors, and in the second place an effort to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public ends” (121).
In keeping with his discussion in The Public and Its Problems and Liberalism and Social Action, he sees democracy emerging in an attempt to block political power from being exercised arbitrarily: “I would not minimize the advance scored in substitution of methods of discussion and conference for the method of arbitrary rule.”71 The use of power is arbitrary, for him, when it cannot be substantively informed by those over whom it will be exercised. In such instances, Dewey argues, freedom itself is threatened. Legitimate political power is not merely restrictive—that is, it does not merely constrain freedom—but more significantly, it makes freedom possible by giving citizens control over the forces that govern and enable their lives.
To be sure, Dewey argues that the early rise of modern democracy emanated from a concern over governmental intrusions on freedom. But this worry, he maintains, was mistakenly interpreted as a “natural antagonism between ruler and ruled,” subject and government, when in fact the true target was abuse of political power.72 “Freedom,” he writes, “presented itself as an end in itself, though it signified in fact liberation from oppression and tradition. . . . The revolt against old and limiting associations was converted, intellectually, into the doctrine of independence of any and all associations” (124). Dewey seeks to refocus practical and intellectual energies on the correct target. The result is that authority, insofar as it is bound up with institutional structures that track the concerns of citizens, is not necessarily inimical to freedom. Political power in The Public and Its Problems thus refers to both the role individuals play in “forming and directing the activities” of the community to which they belong and also the possibility that is open to them for “participating according to need in the values” that their community sustains (175).
Dewey’s defense of democracy is important for redefining the meaning of political participation, signaled by the last bit of quoted text. Democracy, as he describes it, defines members not simply by virtue of their actual participation in determining social possibilities, but also by the potential participation that remains open to them if need so arises. For him, to the extent that power functions to determine social possibilities, those possibilities cannot be of such a nature that they preclude the future contestability and development of how power functions. Hence the following remark: “The strongest point to be made in behalf of even such rudimentary political forms as democracy has already attained, popular voting, majority rule and so on, is that to some extent they involve a consultation and discussion which uncover social needs and troubles” (223). To be attentive to such needs and troubles means that “policies and proposals for social action [should] be treated as working hypotheses, not as programs to be rigidly adhered to and executed” (220). As he had argued much earlier, to say that we hold in reserve the power to contest indicates that the legitimacy of decision making hinges on the extent to which citizens do not feel permanently bound by those decisions in the face of new and different political changes.
The view of democracy that Dewey defends and that informs The Public and Its Problems is fundamentally linked to how he understands the function of the public and its relationship to the state. He envisions the public as the permanent space of contingency in the sense that there can be no a priori delimitation, except as it emerges from individuals and groups that coalesce in the service of problem solving. He envisions publics as standing in a supportive relationship to the state and its representative and administrative institutions. But insofar as the state is resistant to transformation because it is defined by a set of fixed interests, publics then function in a more oppositional role that builds their power external to the state. Democracy, then, entails a kind of openness in which its substantive meaning—that is, what concerns it addresses and what ends it pursues—is always in the process of being determined.
Dewey’s understanding of the public is described in chapter 1, “Search for the Public.” “The public,” he says, “consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (69). Dewey’s language of “indirect” is deceptive because he appears to also mean harmful or unwanted consequences, indirect or not. Notwithstanding, the emergence of the public is prompted by a set of transactions within society whose impact on a group of individuals is of such a nature that it requires focused action that cannot otherwise be provided by them. This need not imply that the association of individuals that comes to constitute the public was in existence prior to the problem; it will often be the case that the consequences of transactions now perceived as problematic determine the members that comprise the public.
We need to be clear at this point. For Dewey, society is an arrangement of individuals who simultaneously belong to distinct and overlapping associations, what we often refer to as civil society. Dewey thus belongs to the tradition of pluralism that includes thinkers such as Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), Arthur Bentley (1870–1957), Ernest Barker (1874–1960), and Harold Laski (1893–1950), in which individuals are viewed as emerging from the nexus of multiple and sometimes conflicting social groupings, among which is the state itself (110–11). In civil society, information and pressures are communicated across those associations. In such pluralistic conditions, problems and conflicts are bound to emerge; some of these may very well come from the functioning of governmental regulation or activities of the market economy. The result of such problems is that groups within civil society are politicized and so become a public. To say they become politicized only means that indirect consequences have affected individuals to such an extent that a distinct apparatus is needed to address their concerns. The associated groups that emerge may already be in existence, albeit in a nonpolitical mode (e.g., religious organizations, professional associations, or cultural organizations), in civil society. Or it may be the case that the public comprises multiple associations that were already in existence, having no discernible relationship to each other until the problem emerged. The problem helps focus what is shared and provides the point of departure for collective problem solving, even as its members debate and argue over how best to address the problem.
A concern should emerge at this point regarding Dewey’s account of the public. On the one hand, he speaks of “the public.” Yet he seems quite clear in chapter 2, “Discovery of the State,” that multiple groups and associations of individuals advance claims requiring systematic care. This is why he cautions those theorists in the previous chapter who make use of the definite article, saying that “the concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by ‘The,’ is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use” (63). The use of the when used in conjunction with public suggests a homogenous domain in which the whole of society is directed through a deliberative mechanism, while the absence of the definite article points to a space that is internally plural, in which deliberation is context specific. How does Dewey address this ambiguity?
Dewey’s answer seems to be that the public denotes a space of pluralism in which the indirect consequences of various and distinct groups require systematic care. In other words, it is a space not quite reducible to civil society, but not yet identifiable with governmental institutions, a space in which claims regarding the need for systematic care are acknowledged by citizens and around which they consolidate their political identity. Citizens seek to translate their power of voice as a specific public into state power. State power becomes the administrative component that can effect change. So the public refers to a space internally differentiated between specific publics.
In explaining the meaning of systematic care, Dewey invokes the image of the state precisely to institutionalize political claims built up from the public that consolidate into a public. He writes that “the state is the organization of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members” (82). So the translation of political claims and grievances into state power requires officers and administrators who are charged as trustees of a public, holding fiduciary power: “Officials are those who look out for and take care of the interests thus affected” (69). For Dewey, this means that publics, whether on the local or national level, not only supervise how power functions, but in many respects determine and influence the ends to which it will be put: “A public articulated and operating through representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is none without the public” (109). Hence, the state, although important for Dewey, is nonetheless a “secondary form of association” (112). In other words, although the activity of political institutions—that is, the formation of laws, statutes, and binding regulations, or the establishment of administrative agencies, for example—will often be the result of those officials and representatives, this only comes about for Dewey because the direction and purpose of these institutions are determined elsewhere. Although functioning at the fringes of the state, the public is nonetheless configured as the site from which opinion- and will-formation originate and that is institutionalized via the state.73
Dewey’s account of the relationship between publics and the state specifically rejects the notion of a unified deliberative public that makes claims in the name of “the people” and that is beyond contestation. He thus rejects metaphysical descriptions that locate the emergence of the state in god, reason, will, nature, mind, or contractual relationships. Here, once more, we return to themes of 1888. The public refers to a space of unity and difference that functions only if we see it as indeterminate, thus allowing the state to emerge as an instrument or tool of problematic activity on the part of human beings. This much Dewey explains when he says that scholars have looked for the state in the wrong place:
They have sought for the key to the nature of the state in the field of agencies, in that of doers of deeds, or in some will of purpose back of deeds. They have sought to explain the state in terms of authorship. Ultimately all deliberate choices proceed from somebody in particular; acts are performed by somebody, and all arrangements and plans are made by somebody in the most concrete sense of somebody. Some John Doe and Richard Roe figure in every transaction. . . .
. . . The quality presented is not authorship but authority, the authority of recognized consequences to control the behavior which generates and averts extensive and enduring results of weal and woe. (70–71)
His point is that connecting the state as state to particular authors who comprise a public or fixed foundations undercuts the extent to which the public can function as a sensory network for emerging problems that can then be managed by state institutions. Focusing on authorship for understanding the state ironically fixes the latter and imputes to the public a substantive unified identity that, as Dewey argues, is out of step with a pluralistic society.
For Dewey there can be no permanent closure of the public itself with a fixed political identity from which the state can be inferred, even though there will be specific delimitations of particular publics. The delimitations of particular publics imply that state institutions and the substantive decisions that follow from those institutions (at both national and local levels of governance) will very well come into existence in response to the specific claims of a public, as for instance, those arguing for health-care reform, more equitable distribution of monies for public education, or better safeguards on businesses whose waste by-products are contaminating a local reservoir. The former point, that which relates to the public as such, means that insofar as the claims of a particular public are instantiated in the state, they cannot exclude the possibility of addressing developing needs that require systematic care. To be sure, all developing needs may not be legitimate in this regard. But Dewey believes that we will first assess the legitimacy of those needs by carefully paying attention to how those needs might potentially implicate us in relationships of domination. Additionally, Dewey believes the public is a space that enables the democratic state to see widely and feel deeply in order to make an informed judgment. For him, a democratic public and by that fact a democratic state is radically inclusive in theory, even though such inclusiveness means the emergence of distinct and exclusive publics.
In many ways Dewey’s discussion of the public has as its goal an inclusive state apparatus.
There is no sharp and clear line which draws itself, pointing out beyond peradventure, like the line left by a receding high tide, just where a public comes into existence which has interests so significant that they must be looked after and administered by special agencies, or governmental officers. Hence there is often room for dispute. The line of demarcation between actions left to private initiative and management and those regulated by the state has to be discovered experimentally. (107)
Experimentally determining the nature and scope of the state means we are attempting to envision supplemental institutional and legal appendages that need to be added to address the concerns of a particular public. But we are also implicitly, Dewey believes, testing the extent to which preexisting institutions are amenable to transformation. Insofar as such institutions are not, Dewey envisions the public as standing in a more oppositional rather than supportive and guiding relationship to the state. In this instance, the claims of specific publics may ultimately point to the entrenched resistance and limitation of state institutions. As he explains of political development, “Progress is not steady and continuous. Retrogression is as periodic as advance” (80). In this context, the public potentially stands in an uneasy relationship to the state, especially in its attempts to democratize the functioning of the state. Dewey captures this point in his concern about the extent to which state institutions ossify around a set of interests and so become unresponsive to new and emerging publics, thus generating a revolutionary impulse.
These changes [relating to associated relationships] are extrinsic to political forms which, once established, persist of their own momentum. The new public which is generated remains long inchoate, unorganized, because it cannot use inherited political agencies. The latter, if elaborate and well institutionalized, obstruct the organization of the new public. They prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set political and legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms. This is hard to do because these forms are themselves the regular means of instituting change. The public which generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the dying public instituted. This is why the change of the form of states is so often effected only by revolution. (80–81, emphasis added)
We should not understate the importance of this passage in The Public and Its Problems precisely because it points to the radical character of Dewey’s outlook. His claim is not simply that emerging publics cannot use existing state institutions because they are insufficient to address developing needs. Rather, existing institutions may be inimical to those new needs. Here, we may think, for example, of the legally instantiated power of white males in the American context—power that formed in direct resistance to the demands of women and black Americans seeking more equitable distribution of resources and equal access to political power. We can diversify our examples to include other rebellious groups: labor unions on behalf of workers, environmental organizations, and farmers, just to name a few. These movements exist on a scale that slides from reform movements aimed at transformation of legal or institutional norms (e.g., trade unions and green organizations) to radical associations looking to redescribe the value system upon which institutional structures are based (e.g., the civil rights movement and women’s rights movement). But in all situations, Dewey argues, the claims of the public cannot flow directly into the administrative power of the state. Instead, publics must seek to build power externally, the result of which functions as a counterweight to publics that are entrenched via the state and wield arbitrary power. This, for Dewey, is the essence of democracy’s radical character.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, the questions that any reader must put to The Public and Its Problems are the following: How might we recapture, sustain, and employ democracy’s radical character in the face of its eclipse? How can the public reemerge given the technological, economic, bureaucratic, and psychological obstacles that stand in its way? These questions were not merely relevant in the 1920s, but seem equally, if not more, relevant in today’s political climate. And while Dewey often struggles for an answer, he is insistent that the solution is bound up with restoring a sense of communal life that can move us from the impersonal Great Society into the personal and meaningful Great Community. “Unless,” he writes, “local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself” (231). What would communal life look like given the national and, increasingly, international stage on which political problems play themselves out? This is the primary question whose answer seems terribly and perhaps tragically elusive.
