The local communities without intent or forecast found their affairs conditioned by remote and invisible organizations.
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 invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life.
They are reflections into the singular human being of customs and institutions; they are not natural, that is, “native,” organic propensities.
The democratic public is still largely inchoate and unorganized.
Is the public much more than what a cynical diplomat once called Italy: a geographical expression?
There are those who speak as if ability to choose between two tickets were a high exercise of individual freedom.
For the very familiarity with the phenomena conceals their significance and blinds us to their relation to immediate political problems.
Extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of the conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the globe.
They persist as emotional cries rather than as reasoned ideas.
What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past.
For the older symbols of ideal life still engage thought and command loyalty.
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.