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 its members 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 in the view of the modern liberals with whom he is associated, self-control and self-direction in living one’s life. According to 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 (1899), 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 cannot therefore be reduced to a minimalist view of democracy that is confined exclusively to voting. In fact, he rejects this account as a primary description of democracy.12
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 does not come uncoupled from being 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.”13
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.14 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.15
His vision of democracy does not exclusively or even principally refer to specific institutional arrangements and political procedures. They are important, but they 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.”16 As Dewey explains in a 1939 address, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” “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.”17 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 his last set of reflections on democracy.
The Ethics of Democracy
What is the wider context for understanding The Public and Its Problems? Dewey wrote The Public and Its Problems in the spirit of debate and disagreement about the meaning and future of democracy, particularly with the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) in mind. The Dewey-Lippmann debate is a staple of American political thought. The challenge that both democracy and Dewey faced in the figure of Lippmann—a challenge that centered on the viability of popular sovereignty and any faith placed therein—was not new to Dewey. He had encountered similar doubts decades earlier after reading Popular Government, published in 1885 by jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine (1822–1888).18
It is worth turning to Maine’s text and Dewey’s response in his 1888 essay, “The Ethics of Democracy.” Written at the age of twenty-nine, this essay marks Dewey’s first explicit reflection on democracy and contains elements of his view that he never abandoned and to which he returned almost forty years later. Although Dewey published a number of important works between 1888 and 1927 in which democracy figures as a central theme, “The Ethics of Democracy” is the most immediate thematic and conceptual predecessor to The Public and Its Problems.19 This is not simply because each work owes its existence to an intellectual provocateur. Independent of the similarities in motivation for writing each text, both center on the meaning of democracy as a political and ethical ideal, its institutional elements, the political standing of the people therein, and the relationship between citizens and their representatives. “The Ethics of Democracy” nicely provides the wider context for understanding his later engagement with Lippmann.
Maine’s challenge to democracy is part of a much larger and more sustained set of criticisms during the Victorian period—attacks that either condemned democracy wholesale or reduced it merely to a form of government unable to realize the sovereignty of the people.20 That democracy was under sustained assault may sound odd to our modern ears. But this is largely so because we forget that for the better part of its history, democracy was overwhelmingly viewed as both theoretically illegitimate and practically catastrophic. Not even the Founding Fathers of the United States—a country born in the modern era and often touted as beginning its history as a democracy—advanced praise for the term. Only in the nineteenth century did the term democracy begin to acquire a more sustained positive defense; and surely few, even in that century, could foresee that it would become the exclusive term for legitimate authority in modern times.
Maine’s specific argument against democracy rejects the view, which he associates with the political philosopher Rousseau, that the people participate in the formation of every policy. In this view, Maine argues, all citizens feel themselves to be at one with decision-making because they do not see those decisions at odds with their deeply felt interests.21 This is at the core, says Maine, of what is meant by the sovereignty of the people.
Maine argues instead that this view is a mere fiction. Rather than being derived from the true will of the people, he contends, political consensus is formed as a result of corruption and manipulation: “[I]t is absurd to suppose that, if the hard-toiled, and the needy, the artisan and the agricultural labourer, become the depositaries of power, and if they can find agents through whom it becomes possible for them to exercise it, they will not employ it for what they may be led to believe are their own interests.”22 Maine’s point is simple: it is impossible to form a general will out of a multitude of conflicting interests, and what appears to be the general will is in fact the will of a few exercised over those without political power.23
Although Maine’s political preference in the book points toward aristocracy—indeed, he attributes to aristocracy “the progress of mankind”24—he acknowledges the source of democracy’s stability. For him, that stability does not rest with the production of a common will, but is derived principally from the institutional structures that are grafted onto democracy and that increase political control, something he believes is sorely missing from the English system. Maine was essentially responding to the 1884 Franchise Bill, which