Such a change sometimes occurs, but when it does, it is because the social conditions, in generating a new public, have prepared the way for it; the state sets a formal seal upon forces already in operation by giving them a defined channel through which to act.
Dewey discusses how social conditions must evolve before political changes can be effective.
Share
More from John Dewey
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…
The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a reality.
Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
If the technological age can provide mankind with a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in a humane age.