The planets in a constellation would form a community if they were aware of the connections of the activities of each with those of the others and could use this knowledge to direct behavior.
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
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…
There is, however, a definite criterion by which to demarcate the organized public from other modes of community life.
Only the exigencies of a preconceived theory would confuse with the state that texture of friendships and attachments which is the chief bond in any community, or would insist that the former depends upon the latter for existence.
Men group themselves also for scientific inquiry, for religious worship, for artistic production and enjoyment, for sport, for giving and receiving instruction, for industrial and commercial undertakings.
When these consequences are intellectually and emotionally appreciated, a shared interest is generated and the nature of the interconnected behavior is thereby transformed.
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.
For the essence of the consequences which call a public into being is the fact that they expand beyond those directly engaged in producing them.
Government is not the state, for that includes the public as well as the rulers charged with special duties and powers.
From this point of view there is nothing extraordinary in the preëminence of the claims of the organized public over other interests when once they are called into play, nor in its total indifference and irrelevancy to friendships…
If the consequences of a friendship threaten the public, then it is treated as a conspiracy; usually it is not the state’s business or concern.
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.