They may think they are clamoring for a purely personal liberty, but what they are doing is to bring into being a greater liberty to share in other associations, so that more of their individual potentialities will be released and their personal experience enriched.
Dewey suggests that the pursuit of personal liberty can lead to greater collective freedom and enriched experiences.
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Nothing better exhibits the scope of the movement than the fact that philosophic theories of knowledge made the same appeal to the self, or ego, in the form of personal consciousness identified with mind itself, that political theory made…
There is therefore no necessary connection between the private character of an act and its non-social or anti-social character.
Nor can the liberating and confirming results of public action be construed to yield a wholesale idealization of states in contrast with other associations.
The democratic public is still largely inchoate and unorganized.