Accusing a democracy of a tendency to prefer mediocrity in its elected rulers, and admitting its exposure to gusts of passion and its openness to folly, he pointed out in effect that popular government is educative as other modes of political regulation are not.
Dewey references De Tocqueville's observations on the educational aspects of popular government.
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Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.
Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator.
But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech.
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…