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