If one asks not for an enumeration of facts, but for a definition of the state, one is plunged into controversy, into a medley of contradictory clamors.
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
Every group springs out of and realizes a positive human interest; the church, religious values; guilds, unions and corporations material economic interests, and so on.
The state, however, has no concern of its own; its purpose is formal, like that of the leader of the orchestra who plays no instrument and makes no music, but who serves to keep other players who do produce music in unison with one another.
Still a third view has it that the state is organized oppression, at once a social excrescence, a parasite and a tyrant.
A fourth is that it is an instrument more or less clumsy for keeping individuals from quarreling too much with one another.
One way out of the impasse is to consign the whole matter of meaning and interpretation to political philosophy as distinguished from political science.
The moral is to drop all doctrines of this kind overboard, and stick to facts verifiably ascertained.
Political facts are not outside human desire and judgment.
Change men’s estimate of the value of existing political agencies and forms, and the latter change more or less.
The different theories which mark political philosophy do not grow up externally to the facts which they aim to interpret; they are amplifications of selected factors among those facts.
Modifiable and altering human habits sustain and generate political phenomena.
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.