Thus it happens that the state, instead of being all absorbing and inclusive, is under some circumstances the most idle and empty of social arrangements.
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
I know of no better way in which to apprehend the absurdity of the claims which are sometimes made in behalf of society politically organized than to call to mind the influence upon community life of Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Aristotle…
Thomas, Shakespeare, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Locke, Rousseau and countless others, and then to ask ourselves if we conceive these men to be officers of the state.
And as all political history shows, the power and prestige which attend command of official position render rule something to be grasped and exploited for its own sake.
Power to govern is distributed by the accident of birth or by the possession of qualities which enable a person to obtain office, but which are quite irrelevant to the performance of its representative functions.
Such progress as political history records depends upon some luminous emergence of the idea from the mass of irrelevancies which obscure and clutter it.
Industry and inventions in technology, for example, create means which alter the modes of associated behavior and which radically change the quantity, character and place of impact of their indirect consequences.
These changes are extrinsic to political forms which, once established, persist of their own momentum.
They prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set political and legal molds.
To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms.
The public which generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the dying public instituted.
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.