The Public and Its Problems

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Introduction

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 else, 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 up a book in contemporary democratic theory without finding substantive references to Dewey and his work. This is because these themes remain as important today as they were 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 garnered him both national and international fame as a public intellectual of the highest order. Born in Burlington, Vermont, and a graduate of the University of Vermont and the then newly formed graduate school of John Hopkins University, Dewey studied the great thinkers of liberal and democratic philosophy, 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. 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.”

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. 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 yoked 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 individuals before the law and 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 an emergent property among individuals fighting to give direction to their lives, rather than something determined by the governing nation.

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. 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 oriented 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 the 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.” As he understands it the problem centers on balancing the relationship between the two, no matter how difficult, 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.”

When Dewey speaks this way he sides with what L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) calls “new liberalism” or those who seek to free the potentiality of individuals and elucidate the social conditions for the flourishing of life. 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, T. H. Green (1836–1882), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and more recently John Rawls (1921–2002). 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 inhuman 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 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 members that will be affected 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 the view of the modern liberals with whom he is associated, self-control and self-direction in living one’s life. On 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 (1989), 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 therefore cannot be reduced to a view of democracy that is confined exclusively to voting. In fact, he rejects this account as a primary description of democracy.

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 remains 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.”

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. 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.

His vision of democracy does not exclusively or even principally refer to specific institutional arrangements and political procedures. They are important, but 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.” As Dewey explains in a 1939 address, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” “For 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.” 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 last set of reflections on democracy.

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