John Dewey

The need is that the non-political forces organize themselves to transform existing political structures: that the divided and troubled publics integrate.

We cannot expect the causes of a disease to combine effectually to cure the disease they create.

It suggests that existing political and legal forms and arrangements are incompetent to deal with the situation.

But the war is there to show that they are as real, and to prove that they are not organized and regulated.

The connections and ties which transferred energies set in motion in one spot to all parts of the earth were not tangible and visible; they do not stand out as do politically bounded states.

The consolidation of peoples in enclosed, nominally independent, national states has its counterpart in the fact that their acts affect groups and individuals in other states all over the world.

The similes of the stone cast into the pool, ninepins in a row, the spark which kindles a vast conflagration, are pale in comparison with the reality.

Extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of the conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the globe.

Any one who even partially visualizes the scene has a convincing reminder of the meaning of the Great Society: that it exists, and that it is not integrated.

The World War stands out as an indubitable proof that what then happened for a region has now happened for the world, only there is now no comprehensive political organization to include the various divided yet interdependent countries.

The dynastic conflicts of the seventeenth century are called by the same name: we have only one word, “war.” The sameness of the word too easily conceals from us the difference in significance.

For the very familiarity with the phenomena conceals their significance and blinds us to their relation to immediate political problems.