We object to the common supposition of the foes of existing democratic government that the accusations against it touch the social and moral aspirations and ideas which underlie the political forms.
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
What the faithful insist upon, however, is that the idea and its external organs and structures are not to be identified.
For, as far as they are justified--and no candid believer can deny that many of them are only too well grounded--they arouse him to bestir himself in order that the idea may find a more adequate machinery through which to work.
And even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation.
To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion.
The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best.
The idea remains barren and empty save as it is incarnated in human relationships.
Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible.
Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse.
Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance.
The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common.
The ties which hold men together in action are numerous, tough and subtle.