Dewey begins by questioning observable phenomena as facts (the quotient of scientific experimentation) and the methods and research means by which those results were attained. The interpretation of a result would vary widely if the stabilizing methods weren't seen as producers of facts. He extends this example to political science and the disagreements over the role of government. Because people interpret the results of government differently, they perceive of government as having very different roles or definitions.
"The alernatives before us are not factually limited science on one hand and uncontrolled speculation on the other. The choice is between blind, unreasoned attack and defense on the one hand, and discriminating criticism employing intelligent method and a conscious criterion on the other" (7).
Political facts are different than scientific facts because they are dictated and conditioned by human activity.
Dewey is searching for a grounding for what can be a "public." He spends some time dispelling the association of governments and natural inclinations with public space. He does argue that we associate out of our nature with one another. However, natural inclinations "do not furnish us with the sufficient conditions of community life and of the forms which it takes" (12).
"human acts have consequences on others...we are led to remark that the consequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction between the private and the public" (12).
Toward page 16, I have begun to think Dewey is arguing that the public exists for and because of a system in which it must operate to regulate/uphold. The state, for example, needs a public for its existence, so a public arises when the state demands its presence. Or, when the populous needs to adjudicate matters of public interest, the public is created/invoked. The public exists only when the public requires it.
Dewey also believes the public operates in a de facto manner rather than de jure. We cannot interpret the actions of states based on the written law/theory regarding states; we should inductively reason by their actions their purpose.
Dewey faults misinterpretations in the methods of discovery. The commonality among differing points of view about the role of the government, for instance, arises from their shared scrutiny of the "cause" not the consequences. In other words, people attribute the effect of something as an indicator of the cause, which leads to arguments about the "nature" of things.
Around p. 20-21, Dewey argues for political philosophy to incorporate inductive reasoning/scientific method. Instead of operating like a syllogism, searching or cause and effect, we should analyze "what is going on and how it goes on" (21).
Dewey argues that association is universal. The public is not simply an association because association is an endemic trait of all things in the universe. One cannot disassociate. The individual, inasmuch as he/she thinks on his/her own, cogitate in relation to their associations with others (values, etiquette, etc). The mystery is not how the public affects the individual, but what accounts for the public and its values. From where does it arise? Perhaps this connects back to Dewey's beginning assertion concerning deductive reasoning vs. inductive reasoning and misattributing consequences to causes. The individual then cannot be the cause of the public; we cannot create the public individually; we are consequences thereof.
"The characteristic of the public as a state springs from the fact that all modes of associated behavior may have extensive and enduring consequences which involve others beyond those directly engaged in them. When these consequences are in turn realized in thought and sentiment recognition of them reacts to remake the conditions out of which they arose." (27).
"The obvious external mark of the organization of a public or of a state is thus the existence of officials...The public...is organized in and through those officers who act in behalf of its interests" (27-28).
Where does one draw the line between the public and the state, the private citizenry and the public officials who also must have private lives and could therefore constitute membership in the public?
Dewey asserts that publics create states that perpetuate their role long after the means by which the public forms has changed. Innovations in technology and communication outpace in their progression the public's stasis, which Dewey argues leads to revolution as a way to change existing systems (30-31).
"the state is the organization of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members...In no two ages of places is there the same public" (33).
Dewey ends chapter one with a hypothesis: empirical evidence will show that the public is the state.
Chapter 2-Discovery of the State
Dewey begins the chapter looking not for the definition of the public, but the reasons for which publics are called into being. Since, as he argues, they do not have originative powers, and because no universal law acts on associations to create publics--as evidenced by the varieties of states & governments--the public must come about through other means.
"Roughly speaking, tools and implements determine occupations, and occupations determine the consequences of associated activity. In determining consequences, they institute publics with different interests, which exact different types of political behavior to care for them" (45). Here Dewey supports his origination of a public hypothesis, asserting that publics are contingent on geography, technology, occupation, and the state. He makes these assertions to support his call for inductive reasoning in political philosophy. Whereas political philosophers use the state as the baseline for measurement of the public, Dewey embraces the contingent nature of publics in their relation to states as phenomena that should be accounted for.
Around p. 50 Dewey turns to public vs. private thought/ intellectualism. He uses the privatization of the church (its deevolution into a non-state affiliated institution) to support the odd idea of private thought. Dewey uses the legislation against science in school texts and the Ku Klux Klan as evidence that private thought regulates public ideas and what should be considered orthodox consciousness.
"Hence when consequences concern a large number so mediately involved that a person cannot readily prefigure how they are to be affected, that number is constituted a public which intervenes...It is rather that the public itself, being unable to forecast and estimate all consequences, establishes certain dikes and channels so that actions are confined within prescribed limits, and insofar have moderately predictable consequences" (53).
Ca. p.56 Dewey gets into the function of laws insofar as they originate from the state/public. He argues that they serve to exact an end/behavior. They are consequentialist in their nature and don't originate from reason as much as they encourage reason. The reason employed in the formation of law is proportional to the thing desired.
Dewey then turns to intellectual property, innovation and invention, as a private act that arises in the security and environment maintained by the public.
Dewey argues against eliding the government, state, and public. Instead of arguing that the government and state are individualized entities, Dewey asserts that they are interconnected, contingent, and self-emanating. "The lasting, extensive and serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a public. In itself it is unorganized and formless. By means of officials and their special powers it becomes a state. A public articulated and operating through representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is non without the public" (67).
"The problem of the relation of individuals to associations...is a meaningless one. We mght as well make a problem out of the relation of the letters of an alphabet to the alphabet. An alphabet is letters, and 'society' is individuals in their connections with one another" (69). What then is public about a "public intellectual"? Shouldn't they just be "intellectuals"?
Chapter 3-The Democratic State
In our system, voters, like the representatives they elect are officers of the public as they are individuals acting to affect the state. As such, representatives serve dual roles: the public and private interests.
The first part of this chapter concerns how power and positions of power come to be in governments/states. He emphasizes dynastic tradition.
He concludes that history shows the inability of public officers to fully recognize their public responsibilities over private ambitions.
Democracy, as a polity, has evolved contingent on time and space without any particular, idealistic end in sight. It is not the reification of pure reason or the public will.
American democracy has its roots in the coupling of freedom with liberty from oppression and tradition. Intellectually, the founders utilized natural rights of liberty from God as native "individualism," "a theory which endowed singular persons in isolation from any associations, expect those which they deliberately formed for their own ends with native or natural rights. The revolt against old and limiting associations was converted, intellectually, into the doctrine of independence of any and all associations" (86-87).
In addition to its metaphysical iterations, natural laws in the establishment of American democracy were linked to physical/natural laws in economics. Freedom from government--vested in Adam Smith's laissez faire economics--meant that governments couldn't impinge on the universal laws of supply and demand. The two--individual rights from God and natural economic laws--merged into the fabric of democracy.
Dewey provides a brief outline of pure capitalism and utilitarian philosophies view that government should protect contracts and private property. However, whose to say that public officers can ignore their private interests and operate solely for the benefit of the public. Frequent election and short appointments could impede corruption.
P. 106 Dewey argues against the assumption of natural laws, both individual and economic, based on the byproduct of those "natural laws." He asserts that the products of such action are as "natural" as the laws themselves. The quotient of natural laws is not commodification.
Chapter 4-The Eclipse of the Public
Dewey begins this chapter acknowledging the discontent with the current state of democracy, but he explains its trepidation as one manifested by the inability to fit the communal origins of our democracy to the large nation-state it became.
We treat US democracy as if it works on a small community level without taking into consideration the geographically massive and culturally diverse traits.
Dewey argues that America has organized its democracy mechanically; we have mass produced our affiliations and political process to help assimilate and conquer sheer size and heterogeneity. This, however, operates in stark contrast to the individualism ethic the founders espoused.
Dewey wonders where the locus of a public can reside if the officers of the public (government officials) do not seem to serve the public's interest. "so perhaps our political 'common sense' philosophy imputes a public only to support and substantiate the behavior of officials...If a public exists, it is surely as uncertain about its own whereabouts as philosophers since Hume have been about the residence and make-up of the self" (117).
Dewey detests factionalism (political parties) as they are the destroyer of political stability.
Beneath the surface, Dewey believes firmly, against cynicism, that the state/government are the "organs" of the public. He decries cronyism, corruption, nepotism, and factionalism because he wants the people to be operatives in the political/public process. His dislike of the electoral caucus and shady caucus procedures make me think he's against any sort of Republican elitism that eschews the common man from the public table.
Dewey thinks the apathy of the public concerning the political process rests in the "irrelevant artificiality of the issues with which it is attempted to work up factitious excitement" (124). He cites the public's role in determining the role of evolution (Scopes monkey trial) instead of experts. We still believe that the public has a role in shaping policy they're not experts in.
"But the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences, have formed such immense and consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself. And this discovery is obviously an antecedent condition of any effective organization on its part...There are too many publics and too much of public concern for out existing resources to cope with. The problem of a democratically organized public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem, in a degree to which the political affairs of prior ages offer no parallel" (126).
The machine age expanded us into a Great Society, but it did not turn the community which served as the origin of our democracy into a Great Community.
Dewey uses WWI to illustrate the distance created between publics (communities) and states by globalization and war. "An inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies which order their occurrence...Hence the publics are amorphous and unarticulated" (131). This sounds like Marx's prediction that capitalism separates man from his labor. In effect, globalization and mass production--in war, in economics, in political oligarchies--distances and dissolves the binds between the public and its state. If publics arise to combat certain conditions, their awakening can't be known without knowing the source of the problem.
"Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather that its substance. Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible" (142).
Chapter 5-Search for the Great Community
Democracy as a social idea and system of government are discrete but connected. "The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion" (143).
Democracies haven't caused suffrage, elected reps, majority rule; democracy engendered it but did not create it.
Dewey believes the promotion of democracy over dynastic despotism is thanks to technological and mechanical innovations, not the "doctrines of doctinaires" (144). Essentially, the needs of the public created the purposes of the state. The state and government weren't venerated moments of pure reason or will; rather, they rose out of the problems that were too big to be ignored (145).
The creation of Democracy during a specific time for specific needs becomes problematic when the Democracy is dogmatically venerated as Truth. Dewey says such lionizing lives "to cumber the political ground, obstructing progress" (145).
We shouldn't try to retool democracy, retool the political machinery, until we can establish the conditions upon which the Great Community can be realized. In this Great Community, the public, despite its "mobile and manifold" qualities, will be able "to define and express its interests" (146).
Democracies must spring forth from communities. Dewey (around p. 150-151) struggles with the idea of a democracy that is individual instead of fraternal. Liberty and equality in a democracy must be defined in communal relations, in one's association with others.
Though humans associate naturally, associations do not a community make. Communities arise "only when the consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of desire and effort" (151). Communities also depend on communication, which depends on symbols.
Through education and upbringing, humans learn to be human, which is to say they learn to be part of a community. However, since we are "fallen," humans can relegate to force instead of enlightenment and communication.
To overcome the desire of some to exploit our interdependence for independent gain, Dewey provides a solution: "the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action" (155).
"The objective of the analysis will be to show that unless ascertained specifications are realized, the Community cannot be organized as a democratically effective Public" (157).
Dewey argues against two prevailing tenets: individuals are smart enough to engage in political affairs; and the political apparatus (general suffrage, frequent elections, term limits) can respond to the needs of the public.
Dewey takes issue with the inherent idea of in-born, ready-made knowledge free of its social and traditional constraints and origins. Man doesn't always act rationally. The dominant idea that the individual is rational and objectively formed originates in an aristocracy. "the idea that men are moved from an intelligent and calculated regard for their own good is pure mythology" (160). Dewey makes this claim because he believes people are bound by habit and can only think within the channels of the habits their occupations create. The universally reasonable man is therefore false.
How can a public, in which habit and vocation limit their knowledge and ability, become effective?
"An obvious requirement is freedom of social inquiry and of distribution of its conclusions" (166). Like academic freedom, people should be allowed the liberty of expression in though like they are allowed to liberty to think. The public should have access to the knowledge that concerns it.
Dewey fears the rise of public relations, in which agents can sway the "public" by exploiting "emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes" (169).
Dewey seems to be suggesting around p. 173 that knowledge be communicated to the layperson so that they may act as a knowledgeable public. But the assumes a neutral and universal language. Without translating the knowledge and applying it, the public is exploited. Knowledge then becomes a means to an end instead of an investment and distribution to the benefit of the public.
Dewey is certainly troubled with the way the public receives information and how that information can be formed by certain interests to shape public opinion, which becomes the main currency of shaping the actions of the state. Whereas knowledge emanates from what has happened, policy concerns itself with the future. Therefore, public opinion is necessary in gauging desired action. But if that opinion can be tampered with via communication and adulterated information, the public cannot recognize itself.
Democracy "will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication" (184).
Chapter 5-The Problem of Method
A reliable method of social inquiry must first overcome the abstract, and ill-founded, notion of a disparate "individual" and a collective "society." Just as individuals exist in relation to others and things around them, simple association does not establish a society.
Dewey also takes issue with the totalization and disassociation with contingencies political philosophy and social science assume. They divorce themselves from time and human nature, which renders them unqualified.
Dewey contends that government by experts would be another oligarchy. Instead, democracy allows for the public to let the problems be known and let the experts react to how to assuage those problems. Democracies also allow for minority views, which are the lifeblood of innovation.
"The essential need...is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is THE problem of the public" (208).
"Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and the dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public" (218).
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Class Notes (From Cathy Chaput)
Historical moment of the text:
- Discussion/response to Lippmann. Dealing heavily with psychology.
- Psychology ca. 1920: the unconscious guides us. We are irrational animals. We are unaware of it and, therefore, unable to rationalize the unconscious that drives us. We have to harmonize those unconscious drives in society, so we have to funnel that into socially appropriate behaviors.
- But what happens when that doesn't work? Talk therapy (psychoanalysis) can access the unconscious and correct the improper convergence between societal norms and unconscious drive.
- Freud's ideas about the individual gets picked up and applied to groups. What happens to the rational self when we get into crowds? Herd mentality. Some other thing takes over. No longer rational human being.
- People use these arguments for use in propaganda. Used to encourage people to enlist for the war. Psychological knowledge was sold for political products. Developed slogans, campaigns, products.
- Bernays: father of public relations. Turns propaganda into socially acceptable marketing. Corporations pick it up and he helps sell cigarettes to women. Wrote Propaganda.
- Walter Lippmann: Journalist. Part of the WWI campaign. At Treaty of Versailles. He saw his job as disseminating expert information, from universities, profession, politicians. He wrote Public Opinion 1922 and The Phantom Public 1925. Argument: the individual cannot know things. The world is too complicated. Public opinion should be shaped by experts and borne of universities. He argues in The Phantom Public that the public doesn't even exist. No citizens that engage and shape communities.
- Dewey responds to Lippmann in The Public and Its Problems. In the context of rational vs. irrational; logical vs. emotion; experts or engaged community members. Fact vs. myth/opinion. Conscious vs. Unconscious. Individual vs. the masses. Public vs. Private. Lippmann and Dewey represent two different sides of that debate.
- Dewey from the pragmatist school. With William James, who said we're driven by emotions, but we're driven in ways that are habituated from our daily practices. People needs to reflect between what they experience and how they make sense of it. We should be more reflexive about instinctual drives.
- Dewey is a major player in democracy and education. Publics can be a contributing factor to a democratic community. He was a founding member of The New School in NYC. Took in exiled academics from Europe in WWII. Very progressive school.
- Lippmann's idea about the experts leading the masses can be extended to creating products for consumption. Different from Dewey's notion of democracy.
- The only way to know what is public is how people are affected directly or indirectly. There's no a priori private vs. public space.
- Per Dewey, the state is not a Leviathan; there's not one body politic with set roles; when we break with tradition, the body politic falls apart.
- Lippmann: limit the state; limit the dangers to the individual. The unit, for Lippmann, is the individual/family. The gov. should enable those individuals to act freely.
- Publics emerge when they break with tradition: the publics only emerges with the nation-state and capitalism. Historically, publics emerge with changes in the 18th and 19th century.
- The water crisis in Flint, MI shows how publics form to confront problems. It creates the unifying bond necessary to form a public. Temporally terminal. Once the problem goes away so does the public.
- Dewey is concerned with the portrayal of "imaginary issues" (entertainment) as a way to anesthetize the masses.
- Dewey formula: use human energy through communication, which will culminate in action.
- People learn to habituate their energies into proper ways of acting in society, but when those proper ways of acting crack and come into contradiction, then the potential for the public to arise emerges.
- Knowledge (lived experience) vs. Science (abstraction); lived experience becomes the mouth that calls into awareness the problem that science should deal with and work to discover. Public developed and constructed in connection with experts.
- Fundamental questions: where does knowledge emerge? Where does it move? What knowledge do we privilege?
- The solution is that publics must become savvy in publicizing their interests. A democracy where publics can't publicize its interests is not a democracy.
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