Bodies of men are constantly engaged in attacking and trying to change some political habits, while other bodies of men are actively supporting and justifying them.
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
It is mere pretense, then, to suppose that we can stick by the de facto, and not raise at some points the question of de jure: the question of by what right, the question of legitimacy.
The alternatives before us are not factually limited science on one hand and uncontrolled speculation on the other.
The choice is between blind, unreasoned attack and defense on the one hand, and discriminating criticism employing intelligent method and a conscious criterion on the other.
But the difference between facts which are what they are independent of human desire and endeavor and facts which are to some extent what they are because of human interest and purpose, and which alter with alteration in the latter, cannot…
The more sincerely we appeal to facts, the greater is the importance of the distinction between facts which condition human activity and facts which are conditioned by human activity.
In the degree which we ignore this difference, social science becomes pseudo-science.
Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian political ideas are not merely theories dwelling in the human mind remote from facts of American political behavior.
They are expressions of chosen phases and factors among those facts, but they are also something more: namely, forces which have shaped those facts and which are still contending to shape them in the future this way and that.
There is more than a speculative difference between a theory of the state which regards it as an instrument in protecting individuals in the rights they already have, and one which conceives its function to be the effecting of a more…
For the theories are held and applied by legislators in congress and by judges on the bench and make a difference in the subsequent facts themselves.
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.