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.
THE PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS
Foreword (1927)
This volume is the result of lectures delivered during the month of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-six, upon the Larwill Foundation of Kenyon College, Ohio. In acknowledging the many courtesies received, I wish to express also my appreciation of the toleration shown by the authorities of the College to delay in publication. The intervening period has permitted a full revision and expansion of the lectures as originally delivered. This fact will account for an occasional reference to books published in the interval.
J. D.
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