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Introduction (1946)

This book was written some twenty years ago. It is my belief that intervening events confirm the position about the public and its connection with the state as the political organization of human relationships that was then presented. The most obvious consideration is the effect of the Second World War in weakening the conditions to which we give the name “Isolationism.” The First World War had enough of that effect to call the League of Nations into being. But the United States refused to participate. And, while out-and-out nationalism was a prime factor in the refusal, it was reinforced by the strong belief that, after all, the main purpose of the League was to preserve the fruits of victory for the European nations that were on the winning side. There is no need to revive the old controversies by discussing how far that belief was justifiable. The important fact for the issue here discussed is that the belief that such was the case was a strongly actuating consideration in the refusal of the United States to join the League. After the Second World War, this attitude was so changed that the country joined the United Nations.

What is the bearing of this fact upon the position taken in the book regarding the public and the connection of the public with the political aspects of social life? In brief, it is as follows: The decline (though probably not for a rather long future time the obliteration) of Isolationism is evidence that there is developing the sense that relations between nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call for some measure of political organization. Just what the measure is to be, how far political authority is to extend is a question still in dispute. There are those who would hold it to the strictest possible construction of the code for the United Nations adopted at San Francisco.¹ There are others who urge the necessity of altering the code so as to provide for a World Federation having a wide political authority.

It is aside from the point here under consideration to discuss which party is right. The very fact that there are two parties, that there is an active dispute, is evidence that the question of the relations between nations which in the past have claimed and exercised singular sovereignty has now definitely entered the arena of political problems. It is pointed out in the text of this book that the scope, the range, of the public, the question of where the public shall end and the sphere of the private begin, has long been a vital political problem in domestic affairs. At last the same issue is actively raised about the relations between national units, no one of which in the past has acknowledged political responsibility in the conduct of its policies toward other national units. There has been acknowledgement of moral responsibility. But the same thing holds good in relations that are private and non-political; the chief difference is the greater ease with which moral responsibility broke down in the case of relationships between nations. The very doctrine of “Sovereignty” is a complete denial of political responsibility.

The fact that this issue is now within the active scope of political discussion also bears out another point made in the text. The matter at issue is in no way one between the “social” and the “non-social,” or between that which is moral and that which is immoral. No doubt the feeling on the part of some that the moral responsibility which concerns the relations between nations should be taken more seriously played a part in bringing about a greater emphasis on the fact that the consequences of these relations demand some kind of political organization. But only the ultra-cynical have ever denied in the past the existence of some moral responsibility. Sufficient proof of this is found in the fact that, in order to interest the citizens of any genuinely modern people in an actual war, it has been necessary to carry on a campaign to show that superior moral claims were on the side of a war policy. The change of attitude is not fundamentally an affair of moral conversion, a change from obdurate immorality to a perception of the claims of righteousness. It results from greatly intensified recognition of the factual consequences of war. And this increased perception is in turn mainly due to the fact that modern wars are indefinitely more destructive and that the destruction occurs over a much wider geographical area than was the case in the past. It is no longer possible to argue that war brings positive good. The most that can be said is that it is a choice of the lesser moral evil.

The fact that the problem of the scope of the political relations between nations has now entered the arena of political discussion, goes to confirm another point emphasized in the book. The same problem of where the line is to be drawn between affairs left to private consideration and those subject to political adjudication is formally a universal problem. But with respect to the actual content taken by the problem, the question is always a concrete one. That is, it is a question of specifying factual consequences, which are never inherently fixed nor subject to determination in terms of abstract theory. Like all facts subject to observation and specification, they are spatial-temporal, not eternal. (The State is pure myth. And, as is pointed out in the text, the very notion of the state as a universal ideal and norm arose at a particular space-time juncture to serve quite concrete aims.)

Suppose for example that the idea of federation, as distinct from both isolation and imperial rule, is accepted as a working principle. Some things are settled, but not the question of just what affairs come within the jurisdiction of the Federated Government and which are excluded and remain for decision by national units as such. The problem of what should be included and what excluded from federated authority would become acute. And in the degree in which the decision on this point is made intelligently, it will be made on the ground of foreseen, concrete consequences likely to result from adopting alternative policies. And just as in the case of domestic political affairs, there will be the problem of discovering something of common interest amid the conflict of separate interests of the distinctive units. Friendship is not the cause of arrangements that serve the common interests of several units, but the outcome of the arrangements. General theory might indeed by helpful; but it would serve intelligent decisions only if it were used as an aid to foreseeing factual consequences, not directly per se.

Thus far, I have kept discussion within what I find to be the field of acts sufficiently evident so that any one who so desires can take note of them. I come now to a point that trenches actively upon the field of important, unsettled hypotheses. In the second chapter of the text, changes in “material culture” are mentioned as an important factor in shaping the concrete conditions which determine the consequences that are of the kind called “public” and that lead to some sort of political intervention. If there were ever any reasonable doubt of the import of technological factors with respect to socially significant human consequences, that time is well past. Nor is the importance of technological development confined to domestic issues, great as it is in this field. The enormously increased destructiveness of war, previously mentioned, is the immediate outcome of modern technological developments. And the frictions and conflicts which are the immediate occasion of wars are due to the infinitely multiplied and more intricate points of contact between peoples which in turn are the direct result of technological developments.

So far we are still within the bounds of the observable facts of the transactions that occur between national units in the same way they occur between the members of a given domestic unit. The unsettled question that now looms as the irrepressible conflict of the future pertains to the actual range of the economic factor in determination of specific consequences. As will be seen by consulting the index, s.v. “Economic Forces and Politics,” the immense influence exercised by economic aspects of modern life receives attention. But as far as concerned political relations between national units, the question then had to do mainly with special issues such as tariffs, most favored treatment, retaliation, etc. The view that economics is the sole condition affecting the entire range of political organization and that present day industry imperatively demands a certain single type of social organization has been a theoretical issue because of the influence of the writings of Marx.² But, in spite of the revolution in Soviet Russia, it was hardly an immediate practical issue of international politics. Now it is definitely becoming such an issue, and present signs point to its being a predominant issue in determining the future of international political relationships.

The position that economics is the sole conditioning factor of political organization, together with the position that all phases and aspects of social life, science, art, education and all the agencies of public communication included, are determined by the type of economy that prevails is identical with that type of life to which the name “totalitarian” justly applies. Given the view that there is but one form of economic organization that properly fulfills social conditions, and that one country of all the peoples of the earth has attained that state in an adequate degree, there is in existence an outstanding and overshadowing practical problem.

For Soviet Russia has now arrived at a state of power and influence in which an intrinsically totalitarian philosophy has passed from the realm of theory into that of the practical political relations of the national states of the globe. The problem of adjusting the relations of states sufficiently democratic to put a considerable measure of trust in free inquiry and open discussion, as a fundamental method in peaceable negotiation of social conflicts, with the point of view that there is but one Truth, fixed and absolute and hence not open to inquiry and public discussion, is now a vital one. Although my own belief as to where the line of social progress is to be drawn between the two positions is firmly in accord with that of the great majority of members of democratic states, I am not here concerned with considerations of right and wrong, of truth or falsity. I cannot refrain, however, from pointing out how the world situation bears out the hypothesis that the matter of the scope of range and of the seriousness of the factual consequences of associated human transactions is the determining factor in affecting social behavior with political properties too evident to be ignored. The problem of discovering and implementing politically areas of common interest is henceforth imperative.

There is one other point that demands attention. The text points out in a number of places, firstly, that noting of consequences is an indispensable condition over and above their mere occurrence and, secondly, that this noting (on anything like an adequate scale) depends upon the state of knowledge at the time, especially upon the degree to which the kind of method called scientific is applied to social affairs. Some of us have been insisting for some time that science bears exactly the same relation to the progress of culture as do the affairs acknowledged to be technological (like the state of invention in the case, say, of tools and machinery, or the progress reached in the arts, say, the medical). We have also held that a considerable part of the remediable evils of present life are due to the state of imbalance of scientific method with respect to its application to physical facts on one side and to specifically human facts on the other side; and that the most direct and effective way out of these evils is steady and systematic effort to develop that effective intelligence named scientific method in the case of human transactions.

Our theorizing on this point cannot be said to have had much effect. The relative importance of the consequences of events which are of the nature of theorizing, and of events which are so overt as to force themselves upon general attention is well exhibited in what has followed upon the fission of the atom. Its consequences are so impressive that there is not only a clamor, approaching a Babel, about the utility and disutility of physical sciences, but some aspects of the control of science in the interest of social well-being have entered the arena of politics,—of governmental discussion and action. In evidence, it is enough to point to the controversy going on in the Congress of the United Nations as these pages are written as to civilian and military participation in control, and in the United States as to the best method in general of managing the needed control.³

Aspects of the moral problem of the status of physical science have been with us for a long time. But the consequences of the physical sciences, though immeasurably important to industry and through industry in society generally, failed to obtain the kind of observation that would bring the conduct and state of science into the specifically political field. The use of these sciences to increase the destructiveness of war was brought to such a sensationally obvious focus with the splitting of the atom that the political issue is now with us, whether or no.

There are those who not only insist upon taking an exclusively moralistic view of science but who also insist upon doing so in an extremely one-sided way.⁴ They put the blame for the present evils on physical science as if it were a causal entity per se, and not a human product which does what prevailing human institutions exact of it. They then use the evils that are apparent as a ground for the subjection of science to what they take to be moral ideals and standards, in disregard of the fact, hortatory preaching aside, there is no method of accomplishing this subordination save setting up some institution equipped with absolute authority—the sure way to restore the kind of conflict that once marked the attempt of the Church to control scientific inquiry. The net outcome of their position, were it adopted, would not be the subordination of science to ideal moral aims, in disregard of political or public interests, but the production of political despotism with all the moral evils which attend that mode of social organization.

Science, being a human construction, is as much subject to human use as any other technological development. But, unfortunately, “use” includes misuse and abuse. Holding science to be an entity by itself, as is done in most of the current distinctions between science as “pure” and “applied,” and then blaming it for social evils, like those of economic maladjustment and destruction in war, with a view to subordinating it to moral ideals, is of no positive benefit. On the contrary, it distracts us from using our knowledge and our most competent methods of observation in the performance of the work they are able to do. This work is the promotion of effective foresight of the consequence of social policies and institutional arrangements.

John Dewey

Hubbards, Nova Scotia

July 22, 1946