But his point is clear: stability comes from without and implies the frailty of democracy if left to its own devices. He pursues this issue directly in essay 4 of Popular Government, “The Constitution of the United States.” Much in line with the trajectory of the book, Maine contends that what holds the United States government together is a system of delegation and conservative checks and balances within a constitutional structure that appropriately constrains the excesses of the masses on the one hand and their tendency to be duped by those that might undermine the entire system on the other.26
In “The Ethics of Democracy” Dewey seeks to address this indictment and lays the foundation for a number of themes to which he returns in The Public and Its Problems. He addresses the criticism by identifying Maine’s account of democracy with a narrow and faulty premise regarding the relationship between humans and society.
What makes it more surprising that Maine should adopt the numerical aggregation, the multitude conception, is the fact that in times past he has dealt such vigorous blows against a theory which is the natural and inevitable outcome of this conception. The “Social Contract” theory of states has never been more strongly attacked than by Maine, and yet the sole source of this theory is just such a conception of society, as a mass of units, as the one Maine here adopts. . . . It is the idea that men are mere individuals, without any social relations until they form a contract. The method by which they get out of their individualistic conditions is not the important matter; rather this is the fact, that they are in an individualistic condition of which they have to be got. . . . Maine rejects this artifice as unreal, but keeps the fundamental idea, the idea of men as a mere mass, which led to it.27
For Dewey, the initial problem with Maine’s view is that he begins with the assumption of humans as solitary units. Correspondingly, society appears not as a unified whole with differentiated parts, but rather as a mass of unconnected elements. This is precisely why Maine rejects the idea that we can identify political decisions with something called “the people.” “Vox Populi [Voice of the People],” he says, “may be Vox Dei [Voice of God], but . . . there never has been any agreement as to what Vox means or as to what Populus means.”28
But Maine also rejects, several times in his text, this explanation of human society as based on a priori speculation.29 Despite this, Dewey contends, Maine nonetheless rests his own view of democracy on the sociological presuppositions of the social contract theory. Thus, Maine misrepresents the relationship between the individual and society. “Men are not isolated non-social atoms,” Dewey explains, “but are men only when in intrinsic relations to men.”30 For him, there is a naturalness to our interpersonal associations that is missed by the atomistic conception of society. In fact, a theory that takes humans as situated beings whose identities take shape in society “has wholly superseded the theory of men as an aggregate, as a heap of grains of sand needing some factitious mortar to put them into semblance or order.”31
In other words, if interpersonal associations are fundamental to understanding individuals, then an account of interests formed by those individuals will be incomplete without reference to those interpersonal associations. We are socially constituted beings; living together provides us with resources to form interests that cohere with society, but community also provides the conditions of conflict. For Dewey, our interpersonal associations—a kind of prepolitical basis of social interaction—provide a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition for describing democracy.
Understanding the basis of democracy in this way allows Dewey to shift the discussion away from defending the very idea of democracy to elucidating how best to understand it. His reference to “factitious mortar” quoted above is significant in this regard. If political society is not held together by a false will imposed externally for the sake of order, it must, he concludes, imply unity that makes the idea of a coherent political community intelligible to the citizenry. For this reason, he goes on in the essay to adopt a view of society as “a social organism” in which the function of the various parts, like the human body, is conducive to overall harmony.32 The metaphor comes from both Dewey’s Congregational Christian training and the heavy influence on Dewey of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and British Idealists such as Green and F. H. Bradley (1846–1924).33 For Dewey specifically, the point of the metaphor is to provide a way to imagine the state as embodying a harmonious whole (much like an organism), the integrity of which is shaped by and expressed in the actions of individual citizens (much like the individual elements that constitute an organism).
Readers of Dewey should be careful at precisely this juncture. Dewey concedes that society is not possessed of “one interest or will”; he acknowledges, for example, that there are a diversity of interests, “struggle[s] and opposition[s] and hostilit[ies].”34 There are, he says, “classes within society, circles within the classes and cliques within the circles.”35 Yet Dewey insists that representation of those interests through one’s vote are not the result of individuals’ private reflections independent of the whole, but denote a reciprocal relation between individuals and the larger political community. This is not simply a function of Dewey’s thinking in this essay, but also appears in his ethical writings during the period such as Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891) and The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (1894). As he says in the first of the two works: “IN THE REALIZATION OF INDIVIDUALITY THERE IS FOUND ALSO THE NEEDED REALIZATION OF SOME COMMUNITY OF PERSONS OF WHICH THE INDIVIDUAL IS A MEMBER; AND, CONVERSELY, THE AGENT WHO DULY satisfies THE COMMUNITY IN WHICH HE SHARES, BY THAT SAME CONDUCT SATISFIES HIMSELF.”36 This account dovetails with Rousseau’s understanding of the centrality of the community to self-development, the Hegelian account of freedom, and more recent communitarian descriptions of self- and collective-realization.37
These previous remarks partly confront any reader of this essay with an important difficulty not simply in Dewey’s philosophy, but in democracy more generally. Given Dewey’s theory of society, he often downplays the persistence of conflict. Nor does he acknowledge that conflict among competing claims will often implicate a political community in decisions where loss is inevitable. In fact, according to Dewey, conflict appears to lead necessarily to unity. But to liken the body politic to a human organism means that different parts function to the benefit of the whole. And when we think of parts of our bodies not functioning properly, we typically see those parts as sick or abnormal. But it is not at all clear that a citizen’s attempt to cultivate personality or realize some specific vision of this or that public policy will be amenable to the body politic. And yet it is often inappropriate to label that citizen as sick or abnormal. It may simply be the case that the citizen’s way of seeing things is just as legitimate, even if it cannot be reconciled with the drift of the community. In our own time, no less than in Dewey’s, the community is often torn on a host of questions and yet some of the views on each side are legitimate.38
The problem here is that while Dewey acknowledges the fact of conflict, he does not properly emphasize the mechanism that can potentially resolve it or make the persistence of conflict consonant with a political system in which the people as a collective body can be said to rule. The social organism metaphor is flawed, even as Dewey uses it to show the kind of political integrity a democratic community ought to entail. The metaphor obscures precisely what it should illuminate—namely, how it is we can speak about the coherence of the political community amid conflict.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Dewey abandons the metaphor altogether as a theoretical tool to describe society. In a 1939 biographical sketch, he explains that his earlier commitment to Hegelian unity required a transformation far more attentive to the ways conflict empirically defies the movement toward social harmony: “The Hegelian emphasis upon continuity and the function of conflict persisted on empirical grounds after my earlier confidence in dialectic had given way to skepticism.”39 Dewey retains his Hegelian commitment to unity or harmony of social life, but it has a naturalistic (rather than metaphysical) source. By naturalism here, I mean that Dewey sees knowledge and values as emerging empirically with reference to the best science of the day regarding human beings, and in relation to the larger environment in which humans are located. In this regard Dewey’s use of “empirical grounds” is meant to acknowledge