The same causes which have led men to utilize concentrated political power to serve private purposes will continue to act to induce men to employ concentrated economic power in behalf of non-public aims.
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
They represent an effort in the first place to counteract the forces that have so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors, and in the second place an effort to counteract the tendency to employ…
To discuss democratic government at large apart from its historic background is to miss its point and to throw away all means for an intelligent criticism of it.
There is a current legend to the effect that the movement originated in a single clear-cut idea, and has proceeded by a single unbroken impetus to unfold itself to a predestined end, whether triumphantly glorious or fatally catastrophic.
But something approaching it is found whenever men either praise or damn democratic government absolutely, that is, without comparing it with alternative polities.
Even the least accidental, the most deliberately planned, political forms do not embody some absolute and unquestioned good.
They represent a choice, amid a complex of contending forces, of that particular possibility which appears to promise the most good with the least attendant evil.
The greatest change, once it is accomplished, is simply the outcome of a vast series of adaptations and responsive accommodations, each to its own particular situation.
But it is, we repeat, mere mythology to attribute such unity of result as exists (which is always easy to exaggerate) to single force or principle.
Political democracy has emerged as a kind of net consequence of a vast multitude of responsive adjustments to a vast number of situations, no two of which were alike, but which tended to converge to a common outcome.
Much less is democracy the product of democracy, of some inherent nisus, or immanent idea.
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.