John Dewey

If the laws of economic cycles of expansion and depression were understood, means would at once be searched for to mitigate if not to do away with the swing.

The phenomena and laws are not altered, but invention based upon them modifies the human situation.

Now every such logic is fatal to free experimental social inquiry.

While it is evidently important to take this into account, it is also evident that none of the distinctive features of human association can be deduced from it.

In social theory dealing with human nature, a certain fixed and standardized “individual” has been postulated, from whose assumed traits social phenomena could be deduced.

They have isolated their subject-matter from its connections, and any isolated subject-matter becomes unqualified in the degree of its disconnection.

On the other hand, the problem of exercising “social control” over individuals is in its reality that of regulating the doings and results of some individuals in order that a larger number of individuals may have a fuller and deeper…

Life has been impoverished, not by a predominance of “society” in general over individuality, but by a domination of one form of association, the family, clan, church, economic institutions, over other actual and possible forms.

They may think they are clamoring for a purely personal liberty, but what they are doing is to bring into being a greater liberty to share in other associations, so that more of their individual potentialities will be released and their…

Individuals find themselves cramped and depressed by absorption of their potentialities in some mode of association which has been institutionalized and become dominant.

It has consisted in a continuous re-distribution of social integrations on the one hand and of capacities and energies of individuals on the other.

That social “evolution” has been either from collectivism to individualism or the reverse is sheer superstition.