Extensive and consolidated factions under the name of parties are now not only a matter of course, but popular imagination can conceive of no other way by which officials may be selected and governmental affairs carried on.
John Dewey: “Extensive and consolidated factions under the name of parties are now not only a matter of course, but popular…”
Editor's note · Context
Dewey observes that the dominance of parties has become normalized in political processes.
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Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
Competition will continue, but it will be less rivalry for acquisition of material goods, and more an emulation of local groups to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual and artistic wealth.
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…