The political forms of democracy and quasi-democratic habits of thought on social matters have compelled a certain amount of public discussion and at least the simulation of general consultation in arriving at political decisions.
Dewey discusses how democratic processes necessitate public discourse and the appearance of consultation in political decision-making.
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If the technological age can provide mankind with a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in a humane age.
Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public.
Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.
So to the patent objection that the state is a very modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of those structures which go by the name of states, yet all history, or almost all, records the exercise of analogous…