John Dewey

For it concerns consequences; and the nature of consequences and the ability to perceive and act upon them varies with the industrial and intellectual agencies which operate.

Thereby thought is diverted from the only fruitful questions, those of investigation into factual subject-matter, and becomes a discussion of concepts.

One reason for the comparative sterility of discussion of social matters is because so much intellectual energy has gone into the supposititious problem of the relations of individualism and collectivism at large, wholesale, and because…

It should still be put as a problem of readjusting social relationships; or, from the distributive side, as that of securing a more equable liberation of the powers of all individual members of all groupings.

The problem is now conceived as that of bringing individuals as such under the control of society as a collectivity.

When the new mode of economic association has grown strong and exercises an overweening and oppressive power over other groupings, the old fallacy persists.

The scene presents itself as the struggle of the individual as such to liberate himself from society as such and to claim his inherent or “natural” self-possessed and self-sufficing rights.

Then it is likely to be forgotten that the actual problem is one of reconstruction of the ways and forms in which men unite in associated activity.

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…

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

Then “society” becomes an unreal abstraction and “the individual” an equally unreal one.

In these facts we have the ground of the common antithesis set up between society and the individual.