Recognition of evil consequences brought about a common interest which required for its maintenance certain measures and rules, together with the selection of certain persons as their guardians, interpreters, and, if need be, their…
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
Ultimately all deliberate choices proceed from somebody in particular; acts are performed by somebody, and all arrangements and plans are made by somebody in the most concrete sense of “somebody.” Some John Doe and Richard Roe figure in…
Some John Smith and his congeners decide whether or not to grow wheat and how much, where and how to invest money, what roads to build and travel, whether to wage war and if so how, what laws to pass and which to obey and disobey.
The actual alternative to deliberate acts of individuals is not action by the public; it is routine, impulsive and other unreflected acts also performed by individuals.
Individual human beings may lose their identity in a mob or in a political convention or in a joint-stock corporation or at the polls.
But this does not mean that some mysterious collective agency is making decisions, but that some few persons who know what they are about are taking advantage of massed force to conduct the mob their way, boss a political machine, and…
When the public or state is involved in making social arrangements like passing laws, enforcing a contract, conferring a franchise, it still acts through concrete persons.
One might argue a priori that the continual conflict of theories about the state is itself proof that the problem has been wrongly posed.
For, as we have previously remarked, the main facts of political action, while the phenomena vary immensely with diversity of time and place, are not hidden even when they are complex.
They are facts of human behavior accessible to human observation.
When various opinions all spring from a common and shared error, one is as good as another, and the accidents of education, temperament, class interest and the dominant circumstances of the age decide which is adopted.
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.