But this conclusion is an obvious invitation to trial of forces to see where superior force lies.
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.
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Nor can the liberating and confirming results of public action be construed to yield a wholesale idealization of states in contrast with other associations.
But in this respect he does not differ from those explicitly designated public officials who have also been known to betray the interest committed to them instead of faithfully representing it.
In other words, every officer of the public, whether he represents it as a voter or as a stated official, has a dual capacity.
Custom consolidates what accident may have originated; established power has a way of legitimizing itself.
But it indicates where the problem resides, whatever guise it assumes.
Freedom presented itself as an end in itself, though it signified in fact liberation from oppression and tradition.
There was no logic which rendered necessary the appeal to the individual as an independent and isolated being.
The easiest way out was to go back to the naked individual, to sweep away all associations as foreign to his nature and rights save as they proceeded from his own voluntary choice, and guaranteed his own private ends.
Nothing better exhibits the scope of the movement than the fact that philosophic theories of knowledge made the same appeal to the self, or ego, in the form of personal consciousness identified with mind itself, that political theory made…
Wealth and security are the natural rewards of economic virtues.
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.