John Dewey

There can be no consequences and measures to regulate the mode and quality of their occurrence without the causal nexus.

What is needed to direct and make fruitful social inquiry is a method which proceeds on the basis of the interrelations of observable acts and their results.

If we look in the wrong place for the public we shall never locate the state.

If we do not ask what are the conditions which promote and obstruct the organization of the public into a social group with definite functions, we shall never grasp the problem involved in the development and transformation of states.

If we do not perceive that this organization is equivalent to the equipment of the public with official representatives to care for the interests of the public, we shall miss the clew to the nature of government.

When we seek for the origin of states in such sources as these, a realistic regard for facts compels us to conclude in the end that we find nothing but singular persons, you, they, me.

We shall then be driven, unless we have recourse to mysticism, to decide that the public is born in a myth and is sustained by superstition.

Thus we are told that the public is the community as a whole, and a-community-as-a-whole is supposed to be a self-evident and self-explanatory phenomenon.

But a community as a whole involves not merely a variety of associative ties which hold persons together in diverse ways, but an organization of all elements by an integrated principle.

If we postulate such a thing, surely the institution which alone would answer to it is humanity, not the affairs which history exhibits as states.

The notion of an inherent universality in the associative force at once breaks against the obvious fact of a plurality of states, each localized, with its boundaries, limitations, its indifference and even hostility to other states.

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.