The Public and Its Problems quotes

If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.

Many persons seem to suppose that facts carry their meaning along with themselves on their face.

Accumulate enough of them, and their interpretation stares out at you. The development of physical science is thought to confirm the idea. But the power of physical facts to coerce belief does not reside in the bare phenomena.

It is like attributing religion to a religious instinct, the family to marital and parental affection, and language to a natural endowment which impels men to speech. Such theories merely reduplicate in a so-called causal force the effects to be accounted for.

They are of a piece with the notorious potency of opium to put men to sleep because of its dormitive power.

The warning is not directed against a man of straw. The attempt to derive the state, or any other social institution, from strictly “psychological” data is in point.

Men who have lived in herds develop attachment to the horde to which they have become used; children who have perforce lived in dependence grow into habits of dependence and subjection.

The inferiority complex is socially acquired, and the “instinct” of display and mastery is but its other face.

There are structural organs which physiologically manifest themselves in vocalizations as the organs of a bird induce song. But the barking of dogs and the song of birds are enough to prove that these native tendencies do not generate language.

… pooling of the forces of single men into a massive force which single persons are unable to resist, the pooling being a measure of desperation since its sole alternative is the conflict of all with all which generates a life that is helpless and brutish.

Thus the state appears either a monster to be destroyed or as a Leviathan to be cherished.

In short, under the influence of the prime fallacy that the problem of the state concerns causal forces, individualism, as an ism, as a philosophy, has been generated.

The counterpart of this method is that philosophical anarchism which assembles all the evils that result from all forms of human grouping and attributes them en masse to the state, whose elimination would then bring in a millennium of voluntary fraternal organization.

That the state should be to some a deity and to others a devil is another evidence of the defects of the premises from which discussion sets out.

One theory is as indiscriminate as the other.

And direct action is taken by many other interests than those which employ “direct action” as a slogan, often most energetically by intrenched class-interests which profess the greatest reverence for the established “law and order” of the existing state.

By its very nature, a state is ever something to be scrutinized, investigated, searched for.

Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be remade.

By its very nature, a state is ever something to be scrutinized, investigated, searched for.

Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be remade.

Thus the problem of discovering the state is not a problem for theoretical inquirers engaged solely in surveying institutions which already exist. It is a practical problem of human beings living in association with one another, of mankind generically. It is a complex problem.

Or it may proceed more intelligently, because guided by knowledge of the conditions which must be fulfilled. But it is still experimental.

And since conditions of action and of inquiry and knowledge are always changing, the experiment must always be retried; the State must always be rediscovered.

Except, once more, in formal statement of conditions to be met, we have no idea what history may still bring forth. It is not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what the state in general should or must be.

No one would be capable of a thought or emotion which would seem strange to the others. The temper, the mood, the outlook of the individual and the village, would be the same.”

With such a condition of intimacy, the state is an impertinence.

For long periods of human history, especially in the Orient, the state is hardly more than a shadow thrown upon the family and neighborhood by remote personages, swollen to gigantic form by religious beliefs. It rules but it does not regulate;

Duties are within the family; property is possessed by the family. Personal loyalties to elders take the place of political obedience. The relationships of husband and wife, parent and children, older and younger children, friend and friend, are the bonds from which authority proceeds.

Politics is not a branch of morals; it is submerged in morals.

All virtues are summed up in filial piety. Wrongdoing is culpable because it reflects upon one’s ancestry and kin. Officials are known but only to be shunned. To submit a dispute to them is a disgrace.

it is submerged in morals. All virtues are summed up in filial piety. Wrongdoing is culpable because it reflects upon one’s ancestry and kin. Officials are known but only to be shunned. To submit a dispute to them is a disgrace.

The measure of value of the remote and theocratic state lies in what it does not do.

Its perfection is found in its identification with the processes of nature, in virtue of which the seasons travel their constant round, so that fields under the beneficent rule of sun and rain produce their harvest, and the neighborhood prospers in peace.

In the absence of some objective regulation, effects upon them are all he can be sure of in any reasonable degree.

Much of what is called selfishness is but the outcome of limitation of observation and imagination.

Hence when consequences concern a large number, a number so mediately involved that a person cannot readily prefigure how they are to be affected, that number is constituted a public which intervenes.

And it must be offset by noting the extent to which the state of affairs upon which the public heart is most set is unfavorable to thinking in other than technical lines.

In any case, it is absurd to expect the public, because it is called in no matter how eulogistic a sense the state, to rise above the intellectual level of its average constituents.

When, however, a mode of behavior has become old and familiar, and when an instrumentality has come into use as a matter of course, provided it is a prerequisite of other customary pursuits, it tends to come within the scope of the state.

Officials may be mean, obstinate, proud and stupid and yet the nature of the state which they serve remain essentially unimpaired. Since, however, a public is organized into a state through its government, the state is as its officials are.

Only through constant watchfulness and criticism of public officials by citizens can a state be maintained in integrity and usefulness.

The discussion also returns with some added illumination to the problem of the relation of state and society. The problem of the relation of individuals to associations—sometimes posed as the relation of the individual to society—is a meaningless one.

The discussion also returns with some added illumination to the problem of the relation of state and society. The problem of the relation of individuals to associations—sometimes posed as the relation of the individual to society—is a meaningless one.

We might 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.

The mode of combination of letters with one another is obviously a matter of importance; letters form words and sentences when combined, and have no point nor sense except in some combination.

Doubtless there was a presumption that age was a sign of knowledge of group traditions and of matured experience, but it can hardly be said that this presumption was consciously the influential factor in giving old men a monopoly of rule.

Rather they had it ipso facto, because they had it.

A principle of inertia, of least resistance and least action, operated. Those who were already conspicuous in some respect, were it only for long gray beards, had political powers conferred upon them.

The emoluments, pomp and power which go with rule are not thought to need justification. They not only embellish and dignify it, but are regarded as symbols of intrinsic worthiness to possess it.

Custom consolidates what accident may have originated; established power has a way of legitimizing itself.

Alliances with other potent families within and without the country, possession of large landed estates, a retinue of courtiers and access to revenues of the state, with a multitude of other things irrelevant to the public interest, establish a dynastic position at the same time …

But one wonders whether those who so readily utter this saying have asked themselves into whose hands industry is to pass? Into those of the public?

But, alas, the public has no hands except those of individual human beings.

The essential problem is that of transforming the action of such hands so that it will be animated by regard for social ends. There is no magic by which this result can be accomplished.

Popular opinion is little troubled by questions of logical consistency. The economic theory of laissez-faire, based upon belief in beneficent natural laws which brought about harmony of personal profit and social benefit, was readily fused with the doctrine of natural rights.

They both had the same practical import, and what is logic between friends?

Thus the protest of the utilitarian school, which sponsored the economic theory of natural law in economics, against natural right theories had no effect in preventing the popular amalgam of the two sides.

The scope of the latter’s activities was so vast and their impact upon face-to-face associations so pervasive and unremitting that it is no exaggeration to speak of “a new age of human relations.”

The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a society, but it is no community.

The invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life.

Many of them suffer from the same error into which earlier laudations fell. They assume that democracy is the product of an idea, of a single and consistent intent.

Carlyle was no admirer of democracy, but in a lucid moment he said: “Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.”

Add to this: Invent the railway, the telegraph, mass manufacture and concentration of population in urban centers, and some form of democratic government is, humanly speaking, inevitable. Political democracy as it exists today calls for adverse criticism in abundance.

Political democracy as it exists today calls for adverse criticism in abundance. But the criticism is only an exhibition of querulousness and spleen or of a superiority complex, unless it takes cognizance of the conditions out of which popular government has issued.

All intelligent political criticism is comparative.

It deals not with all-or-none situations, but with practical alternatives; an absolutistic indiscriminate attitude, whether in praise or blame, testifies to the heat of feeling rather than the light of thought.

Opinion has been regimented as well as outward behavior. The temper and flavor of the pioneer have evaporated with extraordinary rapidity; their precipitate, as is often noted, is apparent only in the wild-west romance and the movie.

What Bagehot called the cake of custom formed with increasing acceleration, and the cake is too often flat and soggy. Mass production is not confined to the factory.

The resulting political integration has confounded the expectations of earlier critics of popular government as much as it must surprise its early backers if they are gazing from on high upon the present scene. The critics predicted disintegration, instability.

But where is the public which these officials are supposed to represent? How much more is it than geographical names and official titles? The United States, the state of Ohio or New York, the county of this and the city of that?

Is the public much more than what a cynical diplomat once called Italy: a geographical expression?

Just as philosophers once imputed a substance to qualities and traits in order that the latter might have something in which to inhere and thereby gain a conceptual solidity and consistency which they lacked on their face, so perhaps our political “commonsense” philosophy imputes a …

the idea was endorsed by the last three of the presidents belonging to the party in power. Yet so far, the proposed amendment to the constitution has not begun to secure the needed support.

Political parties may rule, but they do not govern.

The public is so confused and eclipsed that it cannot even use the organs through which it is supposed to mediate political action and polity.

These scattered comments are not made in the belief that they convey any novel truth. Such things are familiar; they are the commonplaces of the political scene. They could be extended indefinitely by any careful observer of the scene.

The significant thing is that familiarity has bred indifference if not contempt.

Indifference is the evidence of current apathy, and apathy is testimony to the fact that the public is so bewildered that it cannot find itself. The remarks are not made with a view to drawing a conclusion.

It suggests that existing political and legal forms and arrangements are incompetent to deal with the situation. For the latter is the joint product of the existing constitution of the political state and the working of nonpolitical forces not adjusted to political forms.

We cannot expect the causes of a disease to combine effectually to cure the disease they create.

The need is that the nonpolitical forces organize themselves to transform existing political structures: that the divided and troubled publics integrate.

The developments of industry and commerce have so complicated affairs that a clear-cut, generally applicable, standard of judgment becomes practically impossible.

The forest cannot be seen for the trees nor the trees for the forest.

A striking example of the shift of the actual tenor of doctrines—that is, of their consequences in application—is presented in the history of the doctrine of Individualism, interpreted to signify a minimum of governmental “interference” with industry and trade.

In the United States the name “liberal,” as a party designation, is still employed to designate a progressive in political matters. In most other countries, the “liberal” party is that which represents established and vested commercial and financial interests in protest against governmental regulation.

The irony of history is nowhere more evident than in the reversal of the practical meaning of the term “liberalism” in spite of a literal continuity of theory.

Political apathy, which is a natural product of the discrepancies between actual practices and traditional machinery, ensues from inability to identify one’s self with definite issues. These are hard to find and locate in the vast complexities of current life.

Thousands feel their hollowness even if they cannot make their feeling articulate. The confusion which has resulted from the size and ramifications of social activities has rendered men skeptical of the efficiency of political action. Who is sufficient unto these things?

Men feel that they are caught in the sweep of forces too vast to understand or master.

Thought is brought to a standstill and action paralyzed. Even the specialist finds it difficult to trace the chain of “cause and effect”;

Political life, till recent times, bore out his belief. Those who took an active part in politics were “gentlemen,” persons who had had property and money long enough, and enough of it, so that its further pursuit was vulgar and beneath their station.

Today, so great and powerful is the sweep of the industrial current, the person of leisure is usually an idle person.

Persons have their own business to attend to, and “business” has its own precise and specialized meaning. Politics thus tends to become just another “business”: the especial concern of bosses and the managers of the machine.

The increase in the number, variety and cheapness of amusements represents a powerful diversion from political concern. The members of an inchoate public have too many ways of enjoyment, as well as of work, to give much thought to organization into an effective public.

Man is a consuming and sportive animal as well as a political one.

What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past. The present era of “prosperity” may not be enduring.

How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place? Only deep issues or those which can be made to appear such can find a common denominator among all the shifting and unstable relationships.

Attachment is a very different function of life from affection.

Affections will continue as long as the heart beats. But attachment requires something more than organic causes. The very things which stimulate and intensify affections may undermine attachments. For these are bred in tranquil stability; they are nourished in constant relationships.

Mental and moral beliefs and ideals change more slowly than outward conditions. If the ideals associated with the higher life of our cultural past have been impaired, the fault is primarily with them.

Ideals and standards formed without regard to the means by which they are to be achieved and incarnated in flesh are bound to be thin and wavering.

Since the aims, desires and purposes created by a machine age do not connect with tradition, there are two sets of rival ideals, and those which have actual instrumentalities at their disposal have the advantage.

For the older symbols of ideal life still engage thought and command loyalty. Conditions have changed, but every aspect of life, from religion and education to property and trade, shows that nothing approaching a transformation has taken place in ideas and ideals.

Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities.

Intellectual instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public are more inadequate than its overt means. The ties which hold men together in action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are invisible and intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as never before.

The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by mass production for remote markets, by cable and telephone, by cheap printing, by railway and steam navigation.

Only geographically did Columbus discover a new world.

The actual new world has been generated in the last hundred years. Steam and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time.

The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than 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.

Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than 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.

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.

Steam and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time. There are those who lay the blame for all the evils of our lives on steam, electricity and machinery.

It is always convenient to have a devil as well as a savior to bear the responsibilities of humanity.

In reality, the trouble springs rather from the ideas and absence of ideas in connection with which technological factors operate. Mental and moral beliefs and ideals change more slowly than outward conditions.

It is always convenient to have a devil as well as a savior to bear the responsibilities of humanity. In reality, the trouble springs rather from the ideas and absence of ideas in connection with which technological factors operate.

Mental and moral beliefs and ideals change more slowly than outward conditions.

If the ideals associated with the higher life of our cultural past have been impaired, the fault is primarily with them.

… whatever changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be of a sort to make the interest of the public a more supreme guide and criterion of governmental activity, and to enable the public to form and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively.

In this sense the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy.

The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery.

Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life.

It is the idea of community life itself.

It is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected.

The conceptions and shibboleths which are traditionally associated with the idea of democracy take on a veridical and directive meaning only when they are construed as marks and traits of an association which realizes the defining characteristics of a community.

Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions.

Their separate assertion leads to mushy sentimentalism or else to extravagant and fanatical violence which in the end defeats its own aims. Equality then becomes a creed of mechanical identity which is false to facts and impossible of realization.

They do so from external circumstances, pressure from without, as atoms combine or separate in presence of an electric charge, or as sheep huddle together from the cold.

Associated activity needs no explanation; things are made that way.

But no amount of aggregated collective action of itself constitutes a community. For beings who observe and think, and whose ideas are absorbed by impulses and become sentiments and interests, “we” is as inevitable as “I.”

Associated activity needs no explanation; things are made that way. But no amount of aggregated collective action of itself constitutes a community.

For beings who observe and think, and whose ideas are absorbed by impulses and become sentiments and interests, “we” is as inevitable as “I.”

But “we” and “our” exist only when the consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of desire and effort, just as “I” and “mine” appear on the scene only when a distinctive share in mutual action is consciously asserted or claimed.

At any given time, it sets a problem rather than marks a settled achievement.

We are born organic beings associated with others, but we are not born members of a community.

The young have to be brought within the traditions, outlook and interests which characterize a community by means of education: by unremitting instruction and by learning in connection with the phenomena of overt association.

one who understands and appreciates its beliefs, desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic powers into human resources and values. But this translation is never finished.

The old Adam, the unregenerate element in human nature, persists.

It shows itself wherever the method obtains of attaining results by use of force instead of by the method of communication and enlightenment.

It is obsessed by the illusion which vitiated the “natural economy”: an illusion due to failure to note the difference made in action by perception and publication of its consequences, actual and possible.

It thinks in terms of antecedents, not of the eventual; of origins, not fruits.

We have returned, through this apparent excursion, to the question in which our earlier discussion culminated:

We have in our prior account sufficiently emphasized the role of technological and industrial factors in creating the Great Society. What was said may even have seemed to imply acceptance of the deterministic version of an economic interpretation of history and institutions.

It is silly and futile to ignore and deny economic facts.

They do not cease to operate because we refuse to note them, or because we smear them over with sentimental idealizations.

The dependence of habit-forming upon those habits of a group which constitute customs and institutions is a natural consequence of the helplessness of infancy. The social consequences of habit have been stated once for all by James: “

Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative influence.

It alone is what keeps us within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.

a specialized occupation. Scientific men, philosophers, literary persons, are not men and women who have so broken the bonds of habits that pure reason and emotion undefiled by use and wont speak through them. They are persons of a specialized infrequent habit.

Hence the idea that men are moved by an intelligent and calculated regard for their own good is pure mythology.

Even if the principle of self-love actuated behavior, it would still be true that the objects in which men find their love manifested, the objects which they take as constituting their peculiar interests, are set by habits reflecting social customs.

Habit does not preclude the use of thought, but it determines the channels within which it operates.

Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habits.

The sailor, miner, fisherman and farmer think, but their thoughts fall within the framework of accustomed occupations and relationships. We dream beyond the limits of use and wont, but only rarely does revery become a source of acts which break bounds;

When a certain state of accumulated knowledge, of techniques and instrumentalities is attained, the process of change is so accelerated, that, as today, it appears externally to be the dominant trait. But there is a marked lag in any corresponding change of ideas and desires.

Habits of opinion are the toughest of all habits; when they have become second nature, and are supposedly thrown out of the door, they creep in again as stealthily and surely as does first nature.

And as they are modified, the alteration first shows itself negatively, in the disintegration of old beliefs, to be replaced by floating, volatile and accidentally snatched up opinions.

… salesmanship and personnel selection and management, and until, through psychiatry, it spilled over into life and popular consciousness, through its bearings upon “nerves,” the morbidities and common forms of crankiness which make it difficult for persons to get along with one another and with themselves.

Even now, popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.

Meanwhile the technological application of the complex apparatus which is science has revolutionized the conditions under which associated life goes on. This may be known as a fact which is stated in a proposition and assented to.

That within limits those successful in affairs have knowledge and skill is not to be doubted. But such knowledge goes relatively but little further than that of the competent skilled operator who manages a machine. It suffices to employ the conditions which are before him.

Skill enables him to turn the flux of events this way or that in his own neighborhood. It gives him no control of the flux.

Why should the public and its officers, even if the latter are termed statesmen, be wiser and more effective? The prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist.

Such a consciousness presents in fact the spectacle of mind deprived of its normal functioning, because it is baffled by the actualities in connection with which alone it is truly mind, and is driven back into secluded and impotent revery.

There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it.

Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on social affairs. Without freedom of expression, not even methods of social inquiry can be developed. For tools can be evolved and perfected only in operation;

Its currency perpetuates the infantile state of social knowledge. For it blurs recognition of our central need to possess conceptions which are used as tools of directed inquiry and which are tested, rectified and caused to grow in actual use.

No man and no mind was ever emancipated merely by being left alone.

Removal of formal limitations is but a negative condition; positive freedom is not a state but an act which involves methods and instrumentalities for control of conditions.

Emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the mass of men create the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment and opinion only take advantage.

Men have got used to an experimental method in physical and technical matters. They are still afraid of it in human concerns.

The fear is the more efficacious because like all deep-lying fears it is covered up and disguised by all kinds of rationalizations. One of its commonest forms is a truly religious idealization of, and reverence for, established institutions;

It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war.

Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power.

He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident.

Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power.

He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident.

The instrumentality becomes a master and works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own—not because it has a will but because man has not.

A fact of community life which is not spread abroad so as to be a common possession is a contradiction in terms. Dissemination is something other than scattering at large.

Seeds are sown, not by virtue of being thrown out at random, but by being so distributed as to take root and have a chance of growth.

Communication of the results of social inquiry is the same thing as the formation of public opinion. This marks one of the first ideas framed in the growth of political democracy as it will be one of the last to be fulfilled.

The number who share error as to fact and who partake of a false belief measures power for harm.

Opinion casually formed and formed under the direction of those who have something at stake in having a lie believed can be public opinion only in name.

Calling it by this name, acceptance of the name as a kind of warrant, magnifies its capacity to lead action estray. The more who share it, the more injurious its influence.

Calling it by this name, acceptance of the name as a kind of warrant, magnifies its capacity to lead action estray.

The more who share it, the more injurious its influence.

Public opinion, even if it happens to be correct, is intermittent when it is not the product of methods of investigation and reporting constantly at work. It appears only in crises. Hence its “rightness” concerns only an immediate emergency.

But its meaning depends upon relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what has happened and been integrated into the course of events.

Without coordination and consecutiveness, events are not events, but mere occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening proceeds.

Hence even if we discount the influence of private interests in procuring suppression, secrecy and misrepresentation, we have here an explanation of the triviality and “sensational” quality of so much of what passes as news.

No current of energy flowed from them. Today the judgments popularly formed on political matters are so important, in spite of all factors to the contrary, that there is an enormous premium upon all methods which affect their formation.

The smoothest road to control of political conduct is by control of opinion.

As long as interests of pecuniary profit are powerful, and a public has not located and identified itself, those who have this interest will have an unresisted motive for tampering with the springs of political action in all that affects them.

Men’s conscious life of opinion and judgment often proceeds on a superficial and trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level.

The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.

Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought. This process is art.

This process is art. Poetry, the drama, the novel, are proofs that the problem of presentation is not insoluble.

Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation.

We have but touched lightly and in passing upon the conditions which must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community;

When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master.

Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion.

It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.

From this premise, and from this only, there develops the unreal question of how individuals come to be united in societies and groups: the individual and the social are now opposed to each other, and there is the problem of “reconciling” them.

Meanwhile, the genuine problem is that of adjusting groups and individuals to one another.

The unreal problem becomes particularly acute, as we have already noted in another connection, in times of rapid social change, as when a newly forming industrial grouping with its special needs and energies finds itself in conflict with old established political institutions and their demands.

… long as the conditions of the social medium remained substantially unaltered, will still have his experience and the direction of his restored energies affected by the objects and instrumentalities of the human environment, and by what men at the time currently prize and hold dear.

The warrior and merchant would be better warriors and merchants, more efficient, but warriors and merchants still.

These considerations suggest a brief discussion of the effect of the present absolutistic logic upon the method and aims of education, not just in the sense of schooling but with respect to all the ways in which communities attempt to shape the disposition and beliefs …

It forces a recognition that there are common interests, even though the recognition of what they are is confused; and the need it enforces of discussion and publicity brings about some clarification of what they are.

The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.

Popular government has at least created public spirit even if its success in informing that spirit has not been great.

And the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative specialists to take account of the needs.

The world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses.

The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.

The ballot is, as often said, a substitute for bullets. But what is more significant is that counting of heads compels prior recourse to methods of discussion, consultation and persuasion, while the essence of appeal to force is to cut short resort to such methods.

Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as foolish as its critics charge it with being.

But it never is merely majority rule. As a practical politician, Samuel J. Tilden, said a long time ago: “The means by which a majority comes to be a majority is the more important thing”:

It has not been for want of keen senses, or personal genius, or a constant order in the outer world, that mankind has fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and superstition. It has been for want of good character, good example, and good government.”

The notion that intelligence is a personal endowment or personal attainment is the great conceit of the intellectual class, as that of the commercial class is that wealth is something which they personally have wrought and possess.

A point which concerns us in conclusion passes beyond the field of intellectual method, and trenches upon the question of practical reformation of social conditions. In its deepest and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse.

The theory, as far as it relies upon associations which are remote and indirect, would if carried into effect soon be confronted by all the troubles and evils of the present situation in a transposed form.

There is no substitute for the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment.

It is said, and said truly, that for the world’s peace it is necessary that we understand the peoples of foreign lands. How well do we understand, I wonder, our next door neighbors?