Introduction

       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