John Dewey: “Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible.”

The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a reality.

Publication is partial and the public which results is partially informed and formed until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth.

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.

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…