Inevitably they reach out to grasp the agencies of government; they are controlling factors in legislation and administration.
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
Not chiefly because of deliberate and planned self-interest, large as may be its rôle, but because they are the most potent and best organized of social forces.
In a word, the new forms of combined action due to the modern economic régime control present politics, much as dynastic interests controlled those of two centuries ago.
They affect thinking and desire more than did the interests which formerly moved the state.
The naïveté with which the philosophy of “natural” economics ignored the effect upon industry and commerce of the legal status of property, the way in which it identified wealth and property in the legal form in which the latter had…
The engineer has worked in subordination to the business manager whose primary concern is not with wealth but with the interests of property as worked out in the feudal and semi-feudal period.
Thus the one point in which the philosophers of “Individualism” predicted truly was that in which they did not predict at all, but in which they merely clarified and simplified established wont and use: when, that is, they asserted that…
A large part of the indictments which are now drawn against technological industry are chargeable to the unchanged persistence of a legal institution inherited from the pre-industrial age.
The extent of its social utility is what blinds us to the numerous and great social disutilities that attend its present working, or at least reconcile us to its continuation.
The real issue or at least the issue to be first settled concerns the conditions under which the institution of private property legally and politically functions.
The new age of human relationships” has no political agencies worthy of it.
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.