John Dewey

The facts are familiar enough; our especial affair is to point out their connections with the difficulties under which the organization of a democratic public is laboring.

Our concern at this time is to state how it is that the machine age in developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated the small communities of former times without generating a Great Community.

The problem of a democratically organized public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem, in a degree to which the political affairs of prior ages offer no parallel.

There are too many publics and too much of public concern for our existing resources to cope with.

And this discovery is obviously an antecedent condition of any effective organization on its part.

But the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences, have formed such immense and consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis…

Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences.

It has also set forth some of the causes through which a “new age of human relationships” has been brought into being.

What has happened to the Public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?

By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities?

But they aid in giving definiteness and point to a fundamental question: What, after all, is the public under present conditions?

They ignore forces which have to be composed and resolved before technical and specialized action can come into play.