CHAPTER
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5
CONSTRAINING ELITES AND MANAGING POWER
In chapter 2 I argued that for Dewey inquiry is a kind of practice whose legitimating quality draws from two different directions, the character of the individuals confronted with specific ruptures in experience and the larger environment. Legitimation is realized through a discursive medium of giving and asking for reasons for proposals, hypotheses, or plans of action—what I have referred to as a form of mutual responsiveness. This view, as seen in his reflections on both religion and morality in chapters 3 and 4, is bound up with a larger story about the absence of a common theological or ethical horizon and an increased recognition that our deeply held commitments are devoid of epistemic certainty. This need not lead us to a crisis of meaning or normative evaluation (à la Charles Hodge, Max Weber, and liberal Protestants), precisely because Dewey uncouples the value of our commitments from the visions of certainty to which they were previously linked. In other words, since inquiry develops out of fractures or problems in experience, the products of inquiry are judged as effective responses within that horizon. This opens our commitments to reflective evaluation and public contestability in the context of our ongoing social practices.
In one reading, however, Dewey’s emphasis on inquiry seemingly, and somewhat ironically, leads away from expanding the domain of public contestability that is so central to democracy.1 After all, it makes perfect sense to say that the emphasis on inquiry cannot help but signal the presence of a gradation in cognitive abilities. If what Walter Lippmann, Weber, and C. Wright Mills argue is true—that the complexity of modern democratic societies inevitably requires greater time in absorbing information and greater capacities for understanding that information—it is not clear how we can legitimately expand the domain of decision-making.2 As Weber explains, when we use modern science as a paradigm for decision-making the inevitable result is that we find ourselves replacing the citizen with the expert. For some, the situation in which expert agencies in conjunction with representative institutions are the exclusive site of decision-making is the only option—this is Lippmann’s basic claim in several works reflecting on the role of the public in democracy. But for him, it is not that contestation on the part of the governed is abandoned, but that from the perspective of policy formation, plans of action, etc., deliberation is confined to the expert few rather than those who will be affected by the results of deliberation. The question that must be raised then—one by Weber advanced in passing in chapter 1 but which we also find in Mills—is how do we remain sensitive to the complexity of modern societies and the role that intellectual elites must necessarily play without robbing democratic legitimacy of much that we find morally appealing?3 How, in other words, should we think about the relationship between the elites4 and the larger public?
This question is of critical importance here, since Dewey is accused not only of being inattentive to the way his reliance on inquiry may in fact justify a vanguard politics, albeit one guided by experts, but also of not sufficiently dealing with the exercise of power that comes with such a model. Consider Mills’ formulation of the problem:
The assimilation of problems of political power and of moral goods to a statement of thinking, of method, to a model of action and thought imputed to “science,” occurred within the social context of a growing industrialization that was spreading across a physical continent and from a position of one in close, daily contact with the rising professional and skilled groups who were central in the implementation of this conquest of nature by machine. This model was highlighted by the many fingers pointing at the technological results of science and from the success of the professions implemented by them. But that model is generalized by Dewey into education and into the discussions of politics. In these contexts and particularly in the latter, “scientific method” becomes “the method of intelligence” and this method is equated with “liberal democracy.”5
The generalization by Dewey, I take Mills to be signaling, leaves vacant the nature of the political relationship, particularly as it relates to deliberation and decision-making between those professional and skilled groups—i.e., experts—and the lay public. So if, as Mills says, the “scientific method” becomes “the method of intelligence” that in turn is equated with liberal democracy, why would the management of the latter not simply point toward exclusive reliance on experts, as Lippmann maintains? Hence Mills concludes that the connection Dewey draws between the scientific method and democracy “avoids a really definite recognition and statement of the problem of political power” that is implied by that relationship and so leaves us prey to the mercy of decision makers.6 In short, we are left powerless. As Sheldon Wolin explains, Dewey cannot avoid this problem because he “never squarely associated democracy, local or otherwise, with participation in the exercise of power.”7 As he continues: “Questions of how problems become identified, who controls the communication of results, and who evaluates the consequences were all left indeterminate.”8
If Weber, Mills, and Lippmann are right about the complexity of modern life, and Dewey’s critics are correct about his philosophy, we run once more into a twofold problem. The first is that Dewey cannot provide a framework to help us think about the relationship between experts and the lay public that is so central to modern life. In not being able to provide an answer to the first question, Dewey seems inattentive to the workings of power that inform that relationship. How, then, do we retain the thought, which I have argued for throughout, that his position redirects us away from decision-making based on blind deference and toward a view of legitimacy as expressed in the criteria of reciprocal and general acceptance among the governed? Can reason-giving, which is central to inquiry, do the real political work we need it to do in modern times?
My aim in this chapter is to address these questions and in doing so to make good on my previous assertion that the importance Dewey accords mutual responsiveness is the result of him trying to block the use of power from becoming arbitrary. I do this against the backdrop of two contrasting pictures of democracy that highlight important features of modern life to which Dewey needs to be sensitive. My argument is that on a careful reading of his political and ethical writings he absorbs the worries of these two outlooks, without falling prey to the pessimism that informs them. The first picture of democracy makes elites central to governance, advances suspicion of the masses’ cognitive abilities, worries about the anarchic possibilities that might follow if they are allowed to rule in any substantive sense, and emphasizes the complexities of modern society as an obstacle to broad-based inclusion.9 The other view agrees with the first in terms of democracy’s anarchic possibilities and also advances a view about the complexities of modern society, which undermine a robust conception of participation. This account of democracy, however, differs in that it rejects representation as a genuine substitute. Representation, stability, and order are thus ruses that conceal the fact that the people do not govern in any genuine sense. As such, democracy is most clearly at work and ought to be encouraged when, like a fugitive, it escapes the institutional form that otherwise acts as a restraint.10 The first view includes thinkers such as Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter, while the second is most clearly expressed in our time by Wolin.
Although the reason for engagement with Lippmann seems clear, readers may nonetheless worry about my selection of Wolin. But the selection is not as idiosyncratic as it may first appear. After all, he explicitly charges Dewey with not adequately understanding the function of modern democracy in terms of power dynamics and so represents a contemporary version of a standard criticism worth evaluating. But more importantly, I think, so much of Wolin’s specific account of the disruptive nature of democracy in relation to settled practices and the suspicion it generates regarding the ossification of political institutions accords nicely with Dewey’s own political outlook and anti-authoritarian impulse. The issue is how can we retain what is best in Wolin, and for that matter Lippmann as well, without taking on the problems that attend their respective positions. To engage both Lippmann and Wolin in order to tease out the complexity of Dewey’s outlook is to confront the possibilities and limitations of democracy under modern conditions.
The chapter unfolds in three sections. In the first I provide a more thorough sketch of the two positions above. While Lippmann rightly challenges exaggerated notions of participatory democracy, his disenchantment with these claims leads him to overstate the role experts ought to play. By virtue of his criticism of an exaggerated notion of popular sovereignty, Lippmann nonetheless indicates a need for an epistemic division of labor to manage political life that we cannot simply ignore. Whereas Lippmann’s criticism is against popular sovereignty, Wolin’s attack is directed against institutional structures. Although he does not believe we can abandon political institutions, he seems unable to inspire faith in them. The irony of his position, however, is that insofar as representative government is expressive of authority, it always already stands in opposition to freedom. Notwithstanding this difficulty, Wolin’s analysis does point us to the necessity of thinking about democracy as being always incomplete—an orientation, if taken seriously, that guards against the extent to which we would allow our institutions to ossify in the face of an ever-demanding public.
I turn in the second and third sections to Dewey’s account of democracy. His commitment to democracy flows from the belief that it provides the widest arena for applying inquiry to the problems of collective organization. As such, it stands to reason that those most affected ought to serve as the beginning and terminal points for developing and testing solutions. As indicated in both chapters 3 and 4, this is coupled with the belief that in post-traditional societies all proposals, no matter where they emanate from, are potentially contestable. For Dewey, however, citizens do not merely authorize the use of power and so legitimize political action, but are genuinely authoritative. Among their contributions, citizens contextualize and give purpose to expertise; otherwise such expertise would be meaningless. This view is premised on yet another claim, namely, that in matters of politics there can be no political expertise independent from the wisdom of the public. A democratic understanding of collective problem-solving thus envisions deliberation as emerging from the relationship among experts, political representatives, and the larger public. This ensures, he believes, that justification of one’s actions is not uncoupled from being accountable to the public.
Many scholars have observed the connection Dewey draws between inquiry and democracy, and the presumption of broad-based inclusion it implies.11 Yet they have not made explicit how his understanding of democracy can be recast as a preoccupation with power and domination. Robert Westbrook rightly notes, for example, that for Dewey: “The planned society left the choice of ends to the powerful who used ‘physical and psychological force’ to secure conformity and left the choice of means to technicians who asked how but not why.”12 But Dewey worries about this, I argue, not simply because reflective self-governance is central to human growth, but, more importantly, because without all participants having a say, power may easily be used to dominate. As contemporary pragmatists and republicans alike argue, without my having a say in forming and guiding the ends to which power will be put, I leave my development and the community to which I belong open to arbitrary rather than directed control.13 This makes my freedom uncertain precisely because the potential for input does not exist. It is Dewey’s profound quest to make room for self-actualization that underscores his commitment to and defense of freedom as nondomination.
In the final part of this chapter, I reflect on Dewey’s understanding of the public to anchor his commitment to nondomination. The aim is not merely to articulate a guiding principle of assessment such as freedom as nondomination, but an orientation toward power and its embodiment in representative institutions so that the principle itself is not lost from view. Our appreciation for those institutions, Dewey maintains, must be grounded in a broader understanding of democracy and the importance of the public. His account of the public, I shall argue, helps to bring into focus this broader description, in which democracy is seen from the outset as always in the process of becoming. In this regard, the public represents a permanent space of contingency—that is, there can be temporary closure to the public, delimited by specific problems in which claims are made and from which institutions and goods emerge, but not permanent closure. To make the practice of reason-giving central to legitimacy, and as a result fundamental to the functioning of the public, is to see democracy as an orientation that provides the resources for overcoming the ossification that will inevitably display itself in institutional structures. This captures the sense in which Dewey understands democracy as a “task before us” (CD [LW:14:224–230]). In reading the public in this way, Dewey encourages us to see democracy as permanently unsettled and always open to contestation and the possibility for improvement.
THE DANGER OF POLITICAL PESSIMISM: BETWEEN LIPPMANN AND WOLIN
The relationship between democracy and elites poses theoretical and practical difficulties. This is not surprising. As Wolin notes, democracy was born in revolt—emerging from a bundle of “transgressive acts” in which “the demos could not participate in power without shattering the class, status, and value systems by which it was excluded” previously.14 In the American context, we have always had problems deferring to our betters not because of an aversion to differences of intellectual abilities, as Alexis de Tocqueville argued,15 but because such differences usually become justifications for suppressing the process of contestation and deliberation that should otherwise define the space of political reflection. Historically, we have often naturalized those differences and constructed institutions and rights to support them. But once power becomes a private monopoly, once the use of power fails to track the interests of those it affects, domination will inevitably follow. This leaves us in a condition that is far from democracy.
In this section I take up two attempts to understand the relationship between democracy and elites that can be found in the writings of Lippmann and Wolin. While there is much in their respective positions to which Dewey’s vision of democracy needs to be sensitive, each position nonetheless suffers from deficiencies owing to the premises upon which it is based. The aim, then, is to get at the limitations and possibilities of each view. This will position us to see how Dewey at once overcomes these limitations while retaining what is beneficial in both.
LIPPMANN AND THE ILLUSIONS OF DEMOCRACY
Walter Lippmann’s writings on democracy in both Public Opinion and The Phantom Public are part of a much larger discourse during the 1920s that challenged the viability of popular sovereignty—that is, the vision that the public informs and authorizes political action.16 This much Lippmann explains when, in the latter work, he remarks:
My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.17
This passage contains the crux of Lippmann’s sociological critique of the democratic ideal. In his view, given the complexities of modern democratic societies, conflicts develop between the vast technical nature of political issues that emerge and the time citizens have available to address and understand those issues. This tension points to yet another claim having to do with the importance and value that citizens accord participation. As Lippmann remarks, chiding classical democratic theorists for having a narrow understanding of human nature: “Mankind was interested in all kinds of other things, in order, in its rights, in prosperity, in sights and sounds and in not being bored. In so far as spontaneous democracy does not satisfy their other interests, it seems to most men most of the time to be an empty thing.”18 His point is that democracy does not exhaust the realm of what people find meaningful. As such, it seems mistaken, Lippmann maintains, to argue that people are most authentically human when civically engaged.
Lippmann advances a more profound criticism that is in keeping with much of the psychological literature of the time. His argument on this point comes in two steps, the first relating to what he calls stereotypes, and the second regarding the manipulation to which the symbolic content of those stereotypes is potentially subject. Stereotypes are value-laden conjectures about the world that arrange experience. They are part of a wider social network in which individuals exists and do not depend for their functioning on perpetual cognitive awareness. As he says: “The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it…. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”19 This is particularly so in industrial societies precisely because people are asked to reflect on issues of which they can have no firsthand experience.
While stereotypes serve several key functions, the most important of these involves security. Lippmann thus refers to stereotypes as the “fortress of our tradition” because they stave off challenges from contrary forms of life or ways of being that appear menacing.20 Although he occasionally speaks as if there is a one-to-one correspondence between stereotypes and the phenomena of the natural and social world, more often he argues that the cultural resources that feed into and comprise stereotypes create a “pseudo-environment.”21 Stereotypes seem to economize our thinking just to the extent that they help us reconstruct the complex environment on “a simpler model before we can manage it.”22 These simpler patterns of understanding “determine a very great part of men’s political behavior.”23
Given the importance he accords stereotypes not merely for individual identity, but also for political behavior, he worries about the extent to which they are manipulated in the context of public life. Not only do stereotypes work to “censor out much that needs to be taken into account” about complex political phenomena,24 but they are uniquely susceptible to control given their already existentially charged content. “The stereotypes,” Lippmann explains, “are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope.”25 Most individuals, he says earlier, employ stereotypes with a level of “gullibility” that prevents them from seeing the partiality of their position.26 Individuals seeking to win political power use symbols that are indexed to the passions that infuse stereotypes. And they do so either to cultivate solidarity among large segments of the population or to exploit the power such symbols represent for their own distinct ends. “He who captures the symbols,” says Lippmann, “by which public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy…. A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is a master of the current situation.”27
The picture that emerges is one in which citizens have little time or desire to participate. But more strikingly, even if citizens did possess the requisite time and interest, Lippmann maintains that they are inherently resistant to information that would call into question their deeply held beliefs. My use of “inherently” is intended to be a loaded term and carries profound implications for understanding Lippmann’s position. To be clear, he shares with Dewey a similar understanding of belief-formation and the role of mutual responsiveness therein. However, he doubts that we remain “curious and open-minded” such that we are ready to rethink our beliefs if good reasons emerge.28 The fact that we do not remain curious and open-minded is, for him, bound up with the process of socialization by which we come to acquire the stereotypes that we do: “No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe. It is an attack upon the foundations of our universe, and, where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between our universe and the universe.”29
Notice that Lippmann’s argument is that for most of us our beliefs fall to the level of ontological fact. The result is that we place our beliefs beyond the reach of inquiry. Given this description, it is no wonder that he prefaces Public Opinion with an extended passage from book 7 of Plato’s Republic, presumably not only to draw an analogy between the shadows on the cave wall that are believed to be real and the way stereotypes function, but also to highlight the danger that comes when those images are threatened.30 As he says: “The public must be put in its place … so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”31
It is against this background that Lippmann begins to articulate his alternative—elitist—vision of democracy. Prefiguring Schumpeter’s view that democracy means “only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them,” Lippmann argues more pointedly that the “public does not select the candidate, write the platform, outline the policy any more than it builds the automobile or acts the play. It aligns itself for or against somebody who has offered himself.”32 Indeed, both arguments are continuous with James Madison in linking democracy to representative government, and defining the latter as the “total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.”33
Lippmann, however, holds an additional view that diverges from both Madison’s position and that of later democratic realists.34 Let us recall his previous remark: “I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy.” To do what is expected means not merely paying attention to political issues, but having the requisite knowledge to understand those issues. But Lippmann goes further in his argument, since here too he believes political decisions by elected representatives are also in need of prior supplementation and clarification. It is worth turning to two passages from Public Opinion, one from chapter 16 relating to Lippmann’s views on Congress, and the second from chapter 1 relating to representative government proper:
The congress of representatives is essentially a group of blind men in a vast, unknown world. Since the real effects of most laws are subtle and hidden, they cannot be understood by filtering local experiences through local states. They can be known only by controlled reporting and objective analysis. And just as the head of a large factory cannot know how efficient it is by talking to the foreman, but must examine cost sheets and data that only an accountant can dig out for him, so the lawmaker does not arrive at a true picture of the state of the union by putting together a mosaic of local pictures.35
[As such] representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions. I attempt, therefore, to argue that the serious acceptance of the principle that personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.36
As I read Lippmann, insofar as representatives seek to track various perspectives among their constituents to create a better picture of political reality, they will be misguided. Given the way he understands stereotypes and their hold on us, he believes that partial perspectives will either cancel each other out if they diverge or reinforce each other. In either case, the net result is an incomplete picture that corrupts decision-making. The alternative that Lippmann recommends is one in which the unseen facts are “managed only by a specialized class” of social-scientific experts who are distinct from the “men of action.”37 Presumably, locating decision-making with the elected representatives, and therefore outside the purview of experts, obstructs the extent to which they may employ their knowledge for ends that reach beyond public oversight. Their role, he explains, is to examine and report on the unseen political phenomena that are blocked from view by our stereotypes. They direct their results to political officials, rather than the public, and take their point of direction from these same individuals.
Yet Lippmann’s language in the first passage suggests much more than mere reporting, indicative of his example of the factory owner and his relationship to the foreman and the accountant. The accountant provides not only facts, but an interpretation of the current financial condition of the company, its short- and long-term problems given current operations. If we reason from this example to his understanding of the role of experts in politics, it is not an exaggeration to say that for Lippmann experts give shape to the problems that are only dimly perceived by both citizens and political officials. The cognitive authority he attaches to experts thus slides into a kind of political power that shapes the landscape in which political officials and the citizenry function from the outset.
LIMITATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES OF LIPPMANN’S ANALYSIS
This is a bare sketch of Lippmann’s argument, and, as Dewey indicates in his reviews (RPO [MW13:337–345]; RPP [LW2:213–220]) of both books, there is much to recommend within it. He agrees with Lippmann’s discussion of stereotypes and the poverty of the public’s knowledge in decision-making. He, too, is unconvinced by a view of democracy that envisions citizens as omni-competent. Yet Dewey takes issue with both the emphasis Lippmann places on educating “officials and directors” over and against the public, and his corollary belief that experts do not need to be informed by or receive input from the public (RPO [MW13:343]).
These disagreements point to a slippage in Lippmann’s argument that Dewey signals. His rejection of what he considers the classical description of democratic citizens wrongly slides into an attack on their deliberative capacities. In doing so, he obscures alternative ways of understanding the public, especially the extent to which citizens ought to serve as the beginning and ending points for understanding problems and assessing potential proposals. This slippage is largely based on Lippmann’s assertion that most of us are simply dogmatic and irrational when it comes to our beliefs.38 But there is no reason to posit this as fundamental to human psychology and human socialization, precisely because citizens invariably do move away from or rethink the beliefs they hold.39 This is not to deny that resistance to changing one’s beliefs is real; rather, the simple point for Dewey is that we cannot assume that citizens will take a dogmatic stance independent from a specific deliberative context. Lippmann’s failure on this point leads him to set up a false distinction between the objective outlook of the experts and the subjective and narrow perspective of citizens, and to identify the former as the appropriate guardians of democracy.
For Dewey, Lippmann’s position fails to acknowledge a view that has achieved normative and empirical currency within Western modernity, one which understands knowledge as being formed through the historical specificity of our social practices. Knowledge is the fruit of our transactions with the natural and social world. How we perceive political problems, as well as formulate the content of policy proposals, is constitutive of and constituted by the contexts in which we are located. In other words, how we come to understand political problems and respond implies a kind of local knowledge and communal vision that is beyond the purview of experts. As Dewey says on just this point, Lippmann’s approach “ignores [the] forces which have to be composed and resolved before technical and specialized action can come into play” (PP [LW2:313]). Indeed, while experts may be able to provide technical knowledge, they have no way of judging the “bearing of [that] knowledge” (PP [LW2:365]).40 For him, expert knowledge lacks purpose and may be subject to any number of blindnesses unless it is placed within the wider horizon of values and concerns that animate the public. That is, expertise is connected to some narrow domain, however important it may be, rather than being expertise of political affairs. Dewey’s aim, then, is to offer a vision of democracy that, in keeping with Lippmann, acknowledges the need for an epistemic division of labor, but one that does not allow inequalities in information to undermine the necessity of deliberation, as is the case in Lippmann’s account.
To be fair, Lippmann does believe that experts should be checked by a periodic plebiscite, an up-or-down vote on their performance, and that the public can serve in this role.41 This is precisely why it still makes sense to speak of him as offering an account of democracy even in its attenuated form. But it is more often than not that expertise alone is not sufficient for responding to political problems—that is, expertise needs to be contextualized by a much larger set of political imperatives and this indicates that the resources for managing political affairs cannot simply be reduced to a technical affair. This points to the need for a more robust account of deliberation and a principle of normative assessment than Lippmann can provide, even as we concede the importance of experts to modern democracies. So deference to experts cannot be the de facto position of democratic legitimacy. Even if we say, then, that the dispute, properly speaking, is between plebiscitary and deliberative democracy rather than between democracy and technocracy, the original concern remains. We need to find an approach that accommodates both elites and the demos in the service of collective problem-solving.
WOLIN AND FUGITIVE DEMOCRACY
In a series of essays and books, Sheldon Wolin defends a radical notion of democracy against the constraining effects of institutions. There are affinities between Dewey’s description of democracy and Wolin’s political vision, especially when the latter speaks of democracy as a “mode of being” that is “concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them.”42 Despite the importance he attaches to community and his emphasis on inclusion and deliberation, there is a fundamental tension inherent in Wolin’s political vision that is missing from Dewey’s account. This tension emerges at the very moment in which democracy allies itself with institutional form, a union that, for Wolin, necessarily undermines the notion of popular sovereignty: “Democracy does not complete its task by establishing a form and thus being fitted into it. A political constitution is not the fulfillment of democracy but its transfiguration into a ‘regime’ and hence a stultified and partial reification.”43 To understand this tension and therefore see where Wolin goes wrong, we need to examine more carefully the content of his description of democracy and his understanding of constitutionalism.
Wolin provides us with his account of democracy in three central essays: “Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,” “Fugitive Democracy,” and “Transgression, Equality, and Voice.” All three revolve around a vision of democracy as anarchic and transgressive. But it is in the second of the three essays where the description is most clearly articulated:
Democracy is not about where the political is located but about how it is experienced. Revolutions activate the demos and destroy boundaries that bar access to political experience. Individuals from the excluded social strata take on responsibilities, deliberate about goals and choices, and share in decision that have broad consequences and affect unknown and distant others. This revolutionary transgression is the means by which the demos makes itself political. It is by stasis, not physis, that the demos acquires a civic nature.44
What we should first observe about this passage is the distinction that is at work between revolutionary and normal modes of managing collective affairs. Wolin discusses this explicitly at the outset of the essay when he defines “the political” as a moment of collective problem-solving that is forged and managed through public deliberation to preserve the collective’s well-being. He distinguishes this from what he refers to as “politics”—that is, a bitter negotiation over access to and distribution of resources among “unequal social powers.”45 In his view, democracy is an expression of the former precisely because it destabilizes what Wolin takes to be the natural state of politics. Its anarchic quality inheres in the fact that it constitutes a threat to “politics as usual,” which functions to the disadvantage of the powerless. Jacques Rancière provides a description of the demos that is in keeping with Wolin’s view and helps explain why the latter identifies democracy with the powerless: “Before being the name of a community, demos is the name of a part of the community: namely, the poor. The ‘poor,’ … simply designates the category of peoples who do not count, those who have no qualifications to part-take in arche, no qualification for being taken into account.”46
Democracy, then, is both functionally and conceptually bound up with revolution. Of course, this description has largely been the cause for suspicion—a view that was no less present in Lippmann’s image of the “bewildered herd.” For Wolin, however, this is the source of admiration: “I propose accepting the familiar charges that democracy is inherently unstable, inclined toward anarchy, and identified with revolution and using these traits as the basis for a different, a constitutional conception of democracy.”47 His language here is a bit deceptive. Although he speaks of providing a “different” conception of democracy, given what he goes on to say it seems unlikely that he would countenance any other account. His view, then, is not advanced as a competing understanding of democracy, but the only authentic description.
In terms much akin to Rancière, Wolin tells us that “the demos is created from a shared realization that powerlessness comes from being shut out of the councils where power’s authority is located.”48 Individuals thus converge around a common experience of exclusion from the political process, and this provides both the beginnings of their deliberation and the ending points for their responses. Throughout much of his writings, Wolin often invokes the image of the Athenian citizen to elucidate his understanding of democracy, but it is also the case that the link between democracy and revolution that he draws finds contemporary embodiment in the social movements of the 1960s and’70s. In the American context in particular, these extraordinary periods witnessed the consolidation of civic power outside of the normal processes of electoral politics, constraining both those processes and the larger constitutional structure in which they were located. The aim was to deepen the purchase on freedom for wider segments of the population and restructure the very constitution that was the source of exclusion from the outset. With the seductive memory of these social movements in the background, it is no wonder Wolin describes democracy as a form of “collective action that gathers its power from outside the system.”49
Wolin’s description of politics (what I have referred to as the normal mode of social organization for him) is embodied in the process of constitutionalism; it stands in opposition to his description of the political and democracy.50 Read in this light, constitutional democracy is not an attempt to formalize popular governance. Rather, it is both a strategic and clandestine attempt to put the demos in its place and contain its passion. “Constitutionalism,” writes Wolin, “might be defined as the theory of how best to restrain the politics of democracy while ensuring the predominance of the social groups and classes represented by the ‘best men.’”51 He writes more dramatically in his condemnation of theorists from Plato to Tocqueville:
It is no exaggeration to say that one of the, if not the, main projects of ancient constitutional theorists, such as Plato (The Laws), Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, as well as of modern constitutionalists, such as the authors of The Federalist and Tocqueville, was to dampen, frustrate, sublimate, and defeat the demotic passions. The main devices were: the rule of law and especially the idea of a sacrosanct “fundamental law” or constitution safeguarded from the “gust of popular passions”; the idea of checks and balances; separation of powers with its attempt to quarantine the “people” by confining its direct representation to one branch of the legislature; the “refining” process of indirect elections; and the suffrage restrictions. The aim was not simply to check democracy but to discourage it by making it difficult for those who, historically, had almost no leisure time for politics, to achieve political goals.52
Implicit in this passage is the classical distinction between democracy on the one side and oligarchy/aristocracy on the other, with the understanding that the selection of magistrates or representatives is an exclusive principle of the latter. But if this is right, as Wolin seems to think, then constitutionalism cannot help but be disingenuous when it speaks about the importance of popular participation. For democracy’s conversion into constitutional form must necessarily come about by severely constraining the involvement of the people so as to serve ends not particularly hospitable to the demos. To say that modern constitutionalism is disingenuous means that for Wolin “power to achieve a desired result [is being used] without being accountable to the system that is being influenced.”53
To be sure, traditional republican regimes often explicitly reserved tasks for the general populace and the aristocracy, involving both in a share of power as a way to manage conflict and avoid corruption. This was largely because society reflected these distinct classes more clearly. But for Wolin it was perhaps to the credit of the American system to devise a structure sensitive to the blurring of social classes, but which did not compromise the constraints that both classical thinkers and the American Framers thought necessary for a stable regime.54 Modern representative government, Wolin contends, did not find a better way to express the collective power of the populace. Instead, it transferred that power to public agents and agencies, and in so doing transmuted how the populace viewed the proper expression of that power. The problem of modern democracy, he argues, “is that any conception of democracy centered on the citizen-as-actor and politics-as-episodic-activity is incompatible with the modern choice of the state as the fixed center of political life and the corollary conception of politics as organizational activity aimed at a single, dominating objective, control of state apparatus.”55 For the modern state, and its institutional appendages, has its origins in a desire to secure the privileged position of elites—whether their privilege is based on wealth, birth, or intellectual abilities—over and against popular participation.56
POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF WOLIN’S ANALYSIS
Wolin’s argument is far more complicated than I have presented here, and addressing all of its details is beyond the scope of this chapter. For our purposes, it is enough to point out the inescapable tension in the argument, which distorts how we orient ourselves to the political landscape. This distortion takes place first at the level of how we understand representative democracy, and second at the level of how we conceive of freedom. To begin, Wolin describes the normal state of society as an oligarchy, and posits that representative government works to underwrite and protect the maintenance of that oligarchy. While he concedes in a number of different places that the complexities of modern society make representative democracy necessary, it is unclear how he is able to inspire faith in the system, given how he understands its origins. In fact, he is not encouraging a healthy sense of suspicion of representative institutions, but rather a corrosive contempt. “[A] few tokens,” he says, “supposedly representing the remarkable diversity of American society are not synonymous with democracy but a parody of equalitarianism.”57 He says elsewhere that the “Presidency … is the cruelest symbol of the impotence of the demos.”58 Wolin’s language does not advance suspicion against a particular person who may occupy the presidency, but rather against the very thought of executive authority.
The problem with his argument then is that he reifies his story of the origins of constitutionalism, placing it and democracy in an inevitable battle that defies intentionality and historical development. After all, modern liberal democrats, such as Benjamin Constant, Thomas Jefferson, and Dewey, do not glorify representative institutions, but they nonetheless understand the importance of such institutions given the size and, in Dewey’s case, the diversity of the population. To be sure, this criticism against Wolin does not imply that reliance on the institutions of representative government is the only, or even the most significant, avenue to express and deepen democracy. It only means that such institutions are not necessarily inimical to those efforts.
The second problem that emerges relates to his understanding of freedom, especially as it is bound up with self-governance. If my first worry is accurate, then we can advance the additional inference that when the normal operations of government are active, we are somehow not free: “The true question is not whether democracy can govern in the traditional sense, but why it would want to. Governing means manning and accommodating to bureaucratized institutions that, ipso facto, are hierarchical in structure and elitist, permanent rather than fugitive—in short, anti-democratic.”59 Precisely because Wolin draws a fundamental connection between freedom and insurgency, it follows that the normal operations of government, which include the presence of bureaucracy and hierarchy, function in an inverse relationship to freedom itself. In making this argument, he places institutional authority and freedom in opposition in a way that cannot be reconciled.
Yet it is not clear in his writings why the presence of bureaucracy and hierarchy is necessarily anti-democratic and hostile to freedom. Of course they may become so insofar as their purpose comes unhinged from accountability to the public, and Wolin is helpful in reminding us that we need to keep our eyes open for when this happens. But to assume this as the starting point precludes us from employing such institutions to manage and negotiate the complexities of the modern world. Indeed, Wolin’s tragic understanding of modern politics reduces freedom to a fleeting experience, suggesting that we must resign ourselves to a state of affairs in which we suffer under the weight of inevitable domination. As George Kateb keenly observes, for Wolin, “fugitive democracy is a sudden eruption of democracy that is doomed to subside and to leave the prevailing structures, nominally but not truly democratic, intact.”60
Precisely because he holds on to this tension between freedom and authority, he ironically eviscerates hope and misdescribes the nature of political struggle. So although his argument for democracy is inspired by social movements, it is doubtful Wolin could inspire the emergence of such movements, given the bleak picture he paints. This is because those movements (at least the ones Wolin has in mind) were not anti-authority. Rather, they sought to redescribe the foundation from which authority emerged. They envisioned a time in which their pleas would be given full weight through policy and thus condition the ongoing affairs of political life.61
There is an important point here that we should observe. To understand, for example, the substantive results of social movements along the lines of incorporation need not preclude us from retaining, as Wolin intends, an open-ended view of democracy—that is, to see it as an unsettled political order. Here Wolin’s contribution cannot be denied; at a practical level he orients us to the uses of power and warns us about the extent to which such power can become reified. This open-ended view potentially guards against interpreting, for example, existing inequalities and injustices as conditions to which we must resign ourselves rather than trying to overcome them. Yet for Dewey, to describe democracy as always in the process of becoming implies only a possible rather than a necessary tension between democracy’s future and the current state of political life.
The foregoing discussion leaves us with a number of different questions as we shift to Dewey’s writings. Is it possible for him to offer a view of democracy that advances a healthy suspicion of the institutional structures of the state but which nonetheless views such institutions as important to democracy? Can he also capture precisely the transgressive quality that Wolin attaches to democracy without it exhausting how we understand the meaning of that term? The answer to the first question, I believe, takes us to Dewey’s concerns about power—a position that is a piece of his response to Lippmann. His answer to the second question allows us to explore the complexity and dynamism that inhere in the public. It is to these issues that we must now turn.
EMPLOYING AND LEGITIMIZING POWER
We have considered at some length the way that both Lippmann’s and Wolin’s understanding of democracy is plagued by a kind of political pessimism that either misdescribes the role of experts in decision-making or reduces democracy to fleeting moments of revolution that place political authority and freedom in perpetual opposition. The issue to which we must now turn is the precise way Dewey’s account is able to provide a more balanced perspective than either of these two positions. In doing so, I argue, we can distill from his description of democracy a concern to manage power over those on whom it will be exercised so that its use does not become arbitrary. This comes out by first attending to why he believes citizens do not merely authorize power but are authoritative in decision-making. Second, his emphasis on the communal nature of knowledge formation, which the previous point suggests, shapes how he understands the legitimacy of political power and the kind of conditions that must exist if power is to enable freedom. We are free, in Dewey’s view, not simply by virtue of the control we have over our community (an argument about exercising a capacity), but because such control does not leave us vulnerable to the arbitrary uses of power (an argument about the conditions under which we live in political society). This secondary claim is a defense of freedom understood as nondomination.
DEMOCRATIC INQUIRY AND EXPERTISE
In The Public and Its Problems of 1927, Dewey acknowledges the technical dimensions of problems facing modern citizens. For him, the various innovations in communication and transportation, the global scale of warfare, and the ongoing developments of the economy made reliance on experts unavoidable. To be sure, he recognizes that we rely not merely on specific experts trained, for example, in the areas of law and engineering, but also on the very social and material world they help construct. This latter understanding refers to what Anthony Giddens calls “expert systems.” Giddens describes a complex relationship in which the lay public passively trusts various corporate and social institutions based on the functional importance they accord those institutions and in the context of the relative security they enjoy when relying on those institutions.62 Short of some breakdown, there is no reason to rethink the way these various elements hang together. In the context of democratic decision-making, however, what is important for Dewey is that we understand that how and why we rely on experts is itself a public judgment that makes inquiry genuinely cooperative.
This claim emerges when he describes the relationship between experts and the citizenry. He takes this up most clearly when, revisiting some of the thoughts expressed in his reviews of Lippmann’s work, he writes:
The final obstacle in the way of any aristocratic rule is that in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses, the best do not and cannot remain the best, the wise cease to be wise. It is impossible for highbrows to secure a monopoly of such knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs…. The man who wears the shoes knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. (PP [LW2:364]; cf. E3 [LW7:251]; DEA [LW11:219])
This all-important passage is located in chapter 6, where he discusses the problem of method. Among the many arguments Dewey makes in that chapter, one of the chief claims he advances is that the hypotheses we form for responding to problems are only as good as the methods we employ—that is, the extent to which the methods make us receptive to data from various sectors of the environment. But problems themselves, as he understands, frame and guide our inquiry; they imply the existence of a complex horizon of value and meaning that is now fractured and in need of creative valuation to restore continuity. When we take this into consideration, his point in the passage above is not simply that without the input from the wearer of shoes the shoemaker will respond in such a way that would not address the existing pinch. Rather, without input from the individual experiencing the pinch, the expert shoemaker will not have the subject matter to initiate or guide his inquiry.
Unlike Lippmann, who elevates the role of experts—suggesting that they give shape to problems that need to be addressed—Dewey views their position as ancillary to that of citizens. As he says of experts: “[T]heir expertness is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon which the [inquiry] depends” (PP [LW1:365]). Dewey is making two critical points here that are not easily discernible because of the brevity of the sentence. The first point is that expertise, properly understood, is always indexed to a more “technical” field of investigation. In this view, experts come to gain cognitive authority and so become bearers of knowledge because of the audience with which they engage and interact. Citizens are thus authorities just to the extent that it is their problems that create the framework in which expertise functions. And the complexity and texture of those problems, Dewey maintains, come into view through a discursive exchange among citizens that draws out existing and emerging concerns and worries (which are themselves not necessarily in harmony). All of this helps them determine what they will make of the information provided (SSSC [LW6:64–67]), but it also means that there will rarely be complete agreement on who the experts are and this will cut against any argument for blind deference.
The second point of the sentence is to indicate that if something like “expertise” of political affairs exists, it will have to emerge from the public. In other words, how citizens understand information is an issue about the ends to which they are moving as a political community, and this can emerge only through deliberation and not externally to that process. Central to this process are questions not merely about how we understand the problem from the outset (e.g., who are the subjects of this problem? what may be the long-term results if the problem is allowed to persist?), but about the implication of various proposals suggested to alleviate the problem (e.g., what are the value or economic trade-offs in choosing this or that proposal?). As he explains: “Anything that may be called knowledge … marks a question answered, a difficulty disposed of, a confusion cleared up” (QC [LW4:181]). So for Dewey then, answering these questions—that is, arriving at knowledge—implies a kind of collective artisanship to social inquiry that draws on the specific experiences of individuals, facts about the problem in question, and potential risks of action. Hence he explains that policy experts cannot “secure a monopoly of such knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs. In the degree in which they become a specialized class they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve” (PP [LW2:364]). Since citizens are uniquely situated to offer knowledge of their own experiences, their role in the design and implementation of policies is unavoidable (and rightfully so) if we are to address the problem at hand. “For the tools of social inquiry,” Dewey explains, “will be clumsy as long as they are forged in places and under conditions remote from contemporary events” (PP [LW2:347]).
The significance Dewey accords deliberation among citizens yields two points. First, as he explains in Liberalism and Social Action of 1935, deliberation works to bring “conflicts [among citizens] out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised” in understanding the depth and complexity of political problems and policy proposals (LSA [LW11:55]). “The very heart of political democracy,” he says elsewhere, “is adjudication of social difference by an exchange of views” (CLT [LW15:273]).63 To say that deliberation brings conflict out into the open is not to deny that one result of this process may be a deepening of dissonance. As I argued in chapter 4, Dewey is clear that after abandoning Hegelian idealism, his interest in harmonizing the disparate features of social life remained, but it had to proceed on “empirical grounds.”64 Given how he understands the relationship between contingency and experience discussed in chapter 2, his use of the term “empirical grounds” implies that cooperative inquiry may reveal to us that the ends we seek are at odds with what the social and natural world will allow. Although in this context we engage in deliberation with the hope of constructing policy proposals that both respond to the problem and in doing so sublimate values that otherwise conflict, we must not lose sight of the fact that for Dewey this is itself a hypothesis that may go unrealized.65 As he says: “Differences of opinion in the sense of differences of judgment as to the course which it is best to follow, the policy which it is best to try out, will still exist” (PP [LW2:362]). But he continues, indicating how he views the centrality of deliberation: “But opinion in the sense of beliefs formed and held in the absence of evidence will be reduced in quantity and importance. No longer will views generated in view of special situations be frozen into absolute standards and masquerade as eternal truths” (PP [LW2:362]). Second, deliberation functions to give shape to the very purpose of expertise in precisely the way described above.
Coextensive with democratic decision-making are both the transformative role that underwrites how we come to understand political problems in their various dimensions and that contributes to the possibility of forging shared values for action, and the informational purposes of communication in contextualizing expert knowledge.66 These two elements suggest that lay and expert knowledge gains whatever vitality it has from being forged through a deliberative process that makes each responsive to the other.67 This connection, Dewey argues, generates legitimate authority—that is, decisions that are permissible and binding. This is what Hilary Putnam rightly calls Dewey’s “epistemological defense of democracy,” for it means that “without the participation of the public in the formation of … policy, it could not reflect the common needs and interests of the society because those needs and interests were known only to the public.”68 Without the participation of citizens—understood by Dewey as substantive input—justification of one’s actions would come uncoupled from being accountable to the public. So his point is that unlike other political ideals, democracy makes the practice of reason-giving constitutive to how it handles and legitimizes its ongoing affairs, the result of which is the “full application of intelligence to the solution of social problems”69
There is a practical upshot to this reading of Dewey. For example, where decision-making is based less on the continuous input from public hearings, town hall meetings, advisory councils, and other deliberative bodies there is greater reason to be concerned about the ends to which those decisions aim and the background interests from which they proceed. Moreover, there is reason to be equally suspicious of bureaucratic processes that are adverse to expanding decision-making power by taking a bottom-up approach.70 Of course there may be good reasons not to take such an approach, as for example when we think about the obstacles that limited resources and time pose for political decision-making. Here Lippmann’s point about the obstacles to broad-based inclusion is inescapable. But it follows from Dewey’s argument that the burden of proof must rest with those who seek less rather than more inclusive arrangements.71
We should notice in this regard that Dewey’s argument concedes that experts possess information that citizens facing a particular problem do not. He says, for instance, that “it is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations” (PP [LW2:365]). It follows from this that understanding the intricacies of political problems and the kinds of emerging solutions bespeaks an inequality in both information and skill sets. Instances in which scientists make the public aware of the adverse effects of their current industrial activity on the environment clearly imply special knowledge and skills that do not exist in large measure throughout the population.
Yet, and in contrast to Lippmann, recognizing the epistemic limitations of citizens need not require us to abdicate or substantially diminish the role they ought to serve. Dewey’s argument is that policy for what to do, what trade-offs will be made, and where to invest economic and educational resources is an issue that falls to the public precisely because the consequences of those decisions extend beyond the realm of experts. This is precisely why he says in that passage quoted earlier that the wise cease to be wise when they assume authority because the kind of knowledge needed for managing political affairs is a fundamental property of the public. Dewey means this in two senses. The first refers to those cases where local knowledge is needed to contextualize and certify expertise. But he also intends to include those instances in which experts give shape to the problems that are of public concern, but where the response nonetheless falls to the relevant citizenry because to do otherwise would leave them at the mercy of others. This follows from his previous claim that experts removed from common concern will undoubtedly be animated by private interests. To the extent that experts guide political power without taking direction from the public in the form of deliberation, the entire decision-making process loses in legitimacy what it gains in suspicion.
DEMOCRACY AS MANAGING POWER
The considerations above are part of how Dewey understands the historical emergence of modern liberal democracy as a way of broadening the use of political power.72 In a number of works, for example, he consistently emphasizes the fortuitous emergence of political democracy (PP [LW2: chap. 3]; DEA [LW11:217–225]). By political democracy he means “a mode of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their conduct as officials” through universal suffrage, that emphasizes the transparency of decision-making (PP [LW2:286]; cf. ED [EW1:227–249]). Despite its contingent emergence, democracy’s development nonetheless represents an “effort in the first place to counteract the forces that have so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors, and in the second place an effort to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public ends” (PP [LW2:287] [emphasis added]; cf. DEA [LW11:224–225]).
Although Dewey does not provide us with a definition of political power, we can nevertheless distill one from his writings. To be clear, in saying that Dewey’s account of democracy implies a description of power, I do not mean to suggest that he provides us with a theoretical framework that is currently missing from the literature on power. I therefore do not seek to engage the theoretical complexities that inform the multiple faces of power.73 Rather, my purpose is to indicate that Dewey’s concern with political power helps us understand how he thinks about democracy and how we ought to orient ourselves to its use if it is to be employed legitimately.
In his 1936 address, “Authority and Social Change,” at the Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences, Dewey discusses the relationship between freedom and authority that informed the historical development of liberal democracy. In keeping with his discussions in The Public and Its Problems and Liberalism and Social Action, he sees liberal democracy emerging in an attempt to block political power from being exercised arbitrarily: “I would not minimize the advance scored in substitution of methods of discussion and conference for the method of arbitrary rule” (LSA [LW11:50]). The use of “arbitrary” functions for him in precisely the way it did in the previous chapter, where we examined his understanding of how specific rights and duties achieve legitimacy. Political power is arbitrary when it cannot be substantively informed by those over whom it will be exercised. This much he explains:
[Liberal democracy] was also a struggle between groups and classes of individuals—between those who were enjoying the advantages that spring from possession of power to which authoritative right accrues, and individuals who found themselves excluded from the powers and enjoyments to which they felt themselves entitled. The [individualistic] philosophy which transforms this historic and relative struggle into an inherent and fixed conflict between the principle of authority and the principle of freedom tends, when accepted and acted upon, to present authority as purely restrictive power and to leave the exercise of freedom without direction. (ASC [LW11:133]; cf. LSA [LW11: chap. 1])
I shall come back in a moment to precisely how power, for Dewey, implies a corresponding account of freedom. At this juncture, however, we can say that for him political power is not merely restrictive—that is, it does not merely constrain freedom—but more significantly, it makes freedom possible. To be sure, the early rise of liberal democracy did worry about governmental intrusion on freedom, but this, Dewey maintains, was mistakenly interpreted as a “natural antagonism between ruler and ruled” when in fact the true target was abuse of political power (LSA [LW11:8]). Shifting our aim more accurately to this target, this means that authority, insofar as it is bound up with institutional structures that track the concerns of citizens, is not necessarily inimical to freedom. Political power thus refers to both the policing apparatus of communities and the way in which managing collective affairs is coextensive with enabling citizens to determine the area of potential action. Political power is also expressive of both the role individuals play in “forming and directing the activities” of the community to which they belong, and also the possibility that is open to them for “participating according to need in the values” that their community sustains (PP [LW2:328]). As he says above, this is the central advantage that emerges from the “possession of power to which authoritative right accrues.”
This emphasis on power means that for Dewey the standard in assessing democracy is not whether it produces consensus or if it meets some distributional criteria regarding goods. Rather, democracy is assessed according to whether it does a better job than other ways of managing collective affairs in preventing power from becoming arbitrary.74 This comparative approach makes sense from the perspective of Dewey’s larger reliance on reason-giving. Alternative reasons must be offered for why democracy is less effective than other regimes for managing power. But we are likely to miss the importance of democracy if it is understood outside the context of “its historic[al] background” (PP [LW2:287]). Indeed, he continues, that when “men … damn democratic government absolutely” they usually do so “without comparing it with alternative polities” (PP [LW2:287]). The result is that they implicitly deny that all-important component of social criticism—namely, that “all intelligent political criticism … deals not with all-or-none situations, but with practical alternatives; an absolutistic indiscriminate attitude, whether in praise or blame, testifies to the heat of feeling rather than the light of thought” (PP [LW2:304]).
As Dewey describes it, democracy configures the political landscape differently, so as to keep in view the problem of arbitrary power. It defines membership not simply by virtue of the actual participation with which we engage in determining social possibilities, but also by the potential participation that remains open to us if need so arises. He makes this point in “Democracy and Educational Administration” of 1937 when he remarks that the “democratic faith in equality is the faith that each individual shall have a chance and opportunity to contribute” (DEA [LW11:220]). The operative thought here is that to the extent that power functions to determine social possibilities, those possibilities cannot be of such a nature that they preclude the future contestability and development of how power functions. Hence the following remark: “The strongest point to be made in behalf of even such rudimentary political forms as democracy has already attained, popular voting, majority rule and so on, is that to some extent they involve a consultation and discussion which uncover social needs and troubles” (PP [LW2:364]). This means that “policies and proposals for social action [must] be treated as working hypotheses, not as programs to be rigidly adhered to and executed” (PP [LW2:362]). That we hold in reserve the power to contest—that is, to initiate the practice of mutual responsiveness—indicates that the legitimacy of decision-making hinges on the extent to which citizens do not feel permanently bound by those decisions in the face of new and different political changes. Of course Lippmann would not deny this, but he is unable to flesh out a meaningful view of contestation that relies on the necessary input of the public.
From this follow two implications about how Dewey understands democratic governance. The first is an acknowledgment that insofar as power is social we will rarely escape from being subjected to how it functions. There is a habitual dimension to the functioning of social life that does not require our active involvement at every moment (PP [LW2:334–336]; cf. HNC [MW14: chaps. 4–5]). I take him to mean that power will often work on and through us for purposes of efficiency and productivity, leaving us to direct our cognitive interventions elsewhere. “Thus man,” he says, “is not merely de facto associated, but he becomes a social animal in the make-up of his ideas, sentiments and deliberate behavior. What he believes, hopes for and aims at is the outcome of association and intercourse” (PP [LW2:251] [original emphases]).
The formulation is intentionally broad. Dewey is sensitive to the fact that society’s functioning will often require us to be habituated for its stability. This may include, in contrast to Wolin’s view, reliance on hierarchical relationships such as we see, for example, in the management of schools and government agencies. As scholars of social capital underscore, political institutions must involve a level of trust among participants if those institutions are to function without perpetual oversight.75 As an earlier contributor to the social capital debates, Dewey understands that trust and habituation are the invisible institutions of society that make social coordination possible.76 But that society may include hierarchies does not mean we are left to the mercy of how they function. That is, our trust is never completely passive, precisely because it implies an active reflexive interaction with those institutional arrangements. The fact that power exists in society does not necessarily imply that its use is illegitimate.
The second point says that to the extent that the first holds, the possibility must exist for sharing in and regulating the uses to which power will be put. Having no way to express grievances, for instance, against one’s parents, bureaucratic policies, or state action implies not merely the incorrect working of power but relationships of domination. This point is of critical importance because it addresses John Patrick Diggins’ criticism of Dewey specifically and democracy more generally. As he argues: “Democracy offers no guarantee that power will not become alienated from its legitimate source.”77 The quest for certainty implicit in this statement is far too strong for Dewey. No such guarantee can be provided. But taking a comparative approach, however, we might say that democracy offers better safeguards than other political ideals. As Dewey explains, the “two facts that each one is influenced in what he does and enjoys and in what he becomes by the institutions under which he lives, and that therefore he shall have, in a democracy, a voice in shaping them, are the passive and active sides of the same fact” (DEA [LW11:218]). To say that one shall have a voice—earlier he used the term “opportunity”—is to fracture participation itself into active and passive elements. The first refers to when individuals are literally vocal and participate in the use of power, while the other denotes a background condition in which the possibility for voice informs our orientation to political power from the outset even as we are being shaped by that power. The latter is a security mechanism to ensure that political power does not degenerate into a system that places us at the arbitrary will of another. (As I will argue in the final section below, it is the latter feature that is central to Dewey’s description of the public.)
There is a stronger point here, I think, to be inferred from Dewey’s position. His account prevents us, as Henry Richardson rightly worries, from “putting the day-to-day routines of administrators on par with the habits of autonomous individuals.”78 To do this may blind us to the fact that we have simply been “socialized to go on” with the way things are. To be sure, Dewey’s language of habituation may potentially contribute to this worry.79 Or the language of habituation may conceal the fact that Dewey simply shifts the burden to the role of mutual trust in sustaining the relationship between the lay public and experts, political officials, or bureaucratic structures. But as James Bohman highlights, “while trust is involved … it cannot bear the primary explanatory burden of explaining how the democratic and experimental cognitive division of labor is possible.”80 In my reading, Dewey does not need to rely heavily on mutual trust; in fact, to do so is to idealize a feature of modern democracy that, while important, simply cannot do all of the work that is necessary for sustaining political life. By making the management of political power central to his outlook, however, we can simultaneously absorb two important features of modern societies without any obvious cost to democracy and address both Richardson’s and Bohman’s worries. The first feature is the epistemic division of labor, which can be advantageous from the perspective of forming public policy, and the second is the presence of hierarchically organized relationships that can have gains in terms of efficiency and productivity.
On this reading, it follows from Dewey’s argument that any gains we could potentially receive from the specific functioning of experts or the presence of specific hierarchical relationships must always be assessed, both before and after, based on whether such gains potentially leave us open to the abuse of power. Seeking to limit precisely the extent to which the routines of administrators and legislators are taken for granted, Dewey says the following in Freedom and Culture of 1939: “Tradition may result in habits that obstruct observation of what is actually going on; a mirage may be created in which republican institutions are seen as if they were in full vigor after they have gone into decline” (FC [LW13:102]). I take Dewey to mean that we must not rely simply on an ex post inquiry of specific abuses of power. In fact, it may often be the case that because we take the proper functioning of our institutions or the political goodwill of our legislators, experts, or bureaucratic agencies for granted, we become inattentive to corruption and misuse of power. His argument thus commits us to invoke ex ante the principle of avoiding such abuses as we structure and revise our institutions. The ex ante invocation forces us to focus on the extent to which such institutions or reforms do not emerge from a process that meaningfully involves those who will be affected in precisely the way Dewey indicated above.81
Tying the practice of reason-giving to Dewey’s larger concern with managing and participating in the use of power entails that we look beyond the extent to which citizens are committed to, and institutional structures embody, the epistemic virtues of democracy. Both here and elsewhere his argument for the importance of inquiry has focused on its epistemic benefits to problem-solving—benefits that include a commitment to fallibilism, openness, testing consequences against expectations, and sensitivity to evidence and the texture of the landscape in which one acts. All of these elements are about how one cognitively orients oneself to problem-solving. And the virtues of inquiry, as indicated in previous chapters, provide resources for criticizing those who seem unwilling to engage in a deliberative process that is reciprocal. For Dewey, in such instances the issue, as I have said throughout, is not what you will say to those individuals but what you will say about them. Contemporary pragmatists such as Cheryl Misak, Jeffrey Stout, and Robert Talisse have picked up on the benefits of this point from an epistemic perspective.82 Unfortunately, we need to say more if we are concerned about contemporary politics, since the absence of epistemic virtues does not relieve us from having to deal with such people or rely on institutions of which they are a part that affect our life chances. The account of reason-giving these thinkers above offer and which they share with deliberative democrats says very little regarding what Archon Fung refers to as the “decidedly nonideal circumstances that characterize contemporary politics.”83
Given Dewey’s concern to diminish the use of arbitrary power as I have construed it, we are not only positioned to focus on the fact that individuals fail to deploy the epistemic virtues of inquiry, but we can also highlight why they refuse. From his perspective this will not always relate to epistemic vices, but will also point more directly to material, social, and institutional incentives that discourage one from engaging in deliberation and genuine problem-solving. Such conditions highlight the extent to which power has become concentrated in the hands of a few to the disadvantage of broad-based inclusion and allow us to recognize, at the very least, when we have exhausted the quest to transform our institutions from within and must now stand in a more oppositional relationship to them. It may very well be the case that various incentives undermine the necessity of mutual responsiveness and block the road of collective inquiry. The result is that citizens will need to create, through protest or violence, a new space where inquiry may once again thrive in the service of collective problem-solving. Dewey’s argument on this point relates more to his description of the public properly speaking, but it is important to flag it at this stage since it helps us see the kind of normative work his concern with managing power does and how it potentially enables radical transformation in practice.
FREEDOM AS NONDOMINATION
At several junctures I have invoked the language of freedom in discussing Dewey’s attentiveness to power. I argued that he is concerned with a vision of freedom that points to nonarbitrary power and thus to nondomination. If this is correct, then freedom itself, when realized, implies an account of power on the part of agents. Let me clarify this view more carefully and so tie the realization of freedom more tightly to nondomination before turning to Dewey’s account of the public.
When Dewey discusses freedom he often emphasizes its positive dimension. For example, in his Ethics of 1932 he argues that “freedom in its practical and moral sense is connected with possibility of growth, learning, and modification of character, just as is responsibility” (E3 [LW7:305]; cf. HNC [MW14: chap. 25]). Here freedom is understood as reflective self-control—that is, the ability to engage in evaluation of one’s actions, proposals, and life projects to assess their feasibility. As we have seen in previous chapters, reflective self-control implies a perceptual sensitivity not merely to the inner workings of one’s character and the life experiences it suggests, but to one’s larger social horizon. Freedom is measured, Dewey says in Human Nature and Conduct of 1922, in the ability to “foresee future objective alternatives and … by deliberation to choose one of them and thereby weight its chances in the struggle for future existence” (HNC [MW14:214]). So understood, “positive freedom is not a native gift or endowment but is acquired” (E3 [LW7:306]). In being acquired, he says, it requires “freedom of mind and whatever degree of freedom of action and experience is necessary to produce freedom of intelligence” (DEA [LW11:220]).
When Dewey’s conception of freedom, particularly this positive character, is discussed what is usually emphasized is the connection between reflective self-control and human growth. The tendency is to then investigate what he means by human growth, its content, and to ask if it can it be rendered intelligible when shorn of a thick ethical notion of the good. But as I have argued in previous chapters, he is more than capable of discussing freedom without such a thick vision of the good. Indeed, he is suspicious of such a unitary notion.
More importantly, however, this way of engaging his positive notion of freedom often obscures the feature of democracy that he believes makes reflective self-control possible in the first instance. The aim is not to diminish this positive character, but to understand the larger horizon in which it is framed. Here I mean the very orientation that we are capable of assuming in relation to political institutions. When he discusses, for example, the relationship between freedom and organizational structures in Human Nature and Conduct he signals this point: “Organization tends … to become rigid and to limit freedom. In addition to security and energy in action, novelty, risk and change are ingredients of the freedom which men desire” (HNC [MW14:212]). The possibility for changing the ways in which the organizational structures of the state are managed marks the difference, he contends, between “the free and the enslaved” (HNC [MW14:212]; cf. POF [LW3:92–114]). Dewey invokes this contrast most clearly in 1908 when he writes:
The Two Senses of Freedom.—In its external aspect, freedom is negative and formal. It signifies freedom from subjection to the will and control of others; exemption from bondage; release from servitude; capacity to act without being exposed to direct obstructions or interferences from others. It means a clear road, cleared of impediments, for action. It contrasts with the limitations of prisoner, slave, and serf, who have to carry out the will of others. (E2 [MW5:392])
Connecting the distinction between the free and the enslaved to the possibility of change means that where we do not have the opportunity to redescribe the boundaries of such organizations, we are not free. To be enslaved, then, does not imply a diminution in choices and the ability to act on those choices. This is not a question of exercising one’s freedom understood as reflective self-control that is somehow now obstructed by the actions of some person or institutions. Dewey’s point is more expansive. To be enslaved denotes a prior and more general condition in which the choices we make are framed from the outset by institutions or practices that preclude the possibility of genuine change. Indeed, it is his profound interest in human growth that prompts this deeper elucidation of what can potentially undercut its realization.
What exactly does this mean? What does “genuine,” as I have used it above, explain about Dewey’s position? The best way to elucidate his point is to think about the institution of slavery that he invokes in the passage above. And notice in the quoted passage that he slides from understanding negative freedom as actual interference to understanding negative freedom as being subjected to the will and control of others. We can clarify this latter description and so the invocations of slavery with a brief appeal to Philip Pettit’s work on domination. As Pettit explains, although slavery is a terrible institution it can exist without actual interference:
I may be the slave of another—for example, to go to the extreme case—without actually being interfered with in any of my choices. It may just happen that my master is of a kindly and non-interfering disposition. Or it may just happen that I am cunning or fawning enough to be able to get away with doing whatever I like. I suffer domination to the extent that I have a master.84
“Master” in this instance denotes a person or institution that has the capacity to arbitrarily exercise power over me. Where a master exists there will always already be a limit on the extent to which I can engage in novelty, risk, and change of the political practices and institutions to which I belong. These limits are beyond my power to influence, and indeed may reveal themselves at any unspecified moment. This is simply to say that the possibility of change is chimerical and so not genuine.
To enjoy freedom as nondomination means, for both Dewey and Pettit, that I am not subjected to the will of another under this specific temporal order or any future temporal order. For both, this “futural” dimension of nondomination is what makes novelty, risk, and change of political practices and institutions a genuine possibility. Consider Pettit’s words once more:
To enjoy … non-interference with the security of non-domination is to satisfy that condition plus a further modal condition: it is also not to be interfered with in those possible worlds where the attitudes of powerful agents vary, or my ingratiating capacities are lessened, or my native cunning is not what it was, and so on. It is to remain resiliently possessed of non-interference across this range of possible worlds, as well as in the worlds originally considered.85
Perhaps we can give more texture to the point I am making here with specific reference to Dewey’s understanding of freedom. Consider Dewey’s 1937 essay “Freedom”:
The immediate result of the condition under which the people of the United States won their independence was, then, to identify freedom for the most part with political freedom, and to think of even this form of freedom largely in a negative way. Its positive expression was confined pretty much to the right to vote, to choose public officials, and thereby share indirectly in the formation of public policies, and perchance to be elected to office oneself. The ballot became the glorified symbol of freedom and every Fourth of July speech conjured up the spectacle of the procession of freemen wending their way to the polls to exercise the priceless gift of freedom. Meantime, the conditions under which citizens exercised the right of suffrage, conditions which in larger measure so circumscribed and controlled the right as to reduce it for many, perhaps for the masses, to something like an empty formality, were neglected. Corruption became rife; bosses and factional political machines managed from behind the scenes by bosses grew and flourished…. But the present political situation as well as the historic past should convince us that exclusive identification of freedom with political freedom means in the end the loss of even political freedom. (F [LW11:248]; cf. PP [LW2:298–299])
Dewey’s worry in this passage, which has parallels elsewhere in his writings, is nicely indexed to the importance he accords change in understanding freedom, what I have referred to earlier as the ability to contest and influence the development of how power functions. Having the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of America as his background, he speaks of the reification of conditions that “circumscribed and controlled” the right of suffrage and made its purpose empty. Both control and circumspection, he maintains, resulted from the emergence of “bosses and factional political machines” whose distinct interests framed the ends to which political democracy was put. Here he is describing a situation in which the interests of the state and its institutional structures came unhinged from the demos as such (PP [LW2:255]). In this instance, to appropriate Pettit’s language, power is exercised in a way that “tracks … the power-holder’s personal welfare or world-view … rather than the welfare and world-view of the public.”86 For this reason, Dewey cautions us not to completely identify the protection of freedom with the institutional elements of democracy. If freedom understood as reflective self-control is going to be as robust as we often intend, it must imply the prospect of giving shape to the area of social possibilities. And when this does not exist, “political democracy is insecure” (DEA [LW11:225]). To be able to shape the area of social possibilities means that the space of political reflection in which citizens work is neither controlled nor circumscribed by the intentions of bosses, whether we describe those bosses based on their economic status or their intellectual abilities.
Negatively, this means we must always be cautious about how we orient ourselves to our political institutions. As Dewey says of the state, it is “something to be scrutinized, investigated, [and] searched for. Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be re-made” (PP [LW2:255]). We must be careful how we understand this claim, lest we describe the relationship between the demos and the state from the outset as oppositional. As we have seen in Wolin’s case, this can only erode any faith we might otherwise place in the government.
But there is a more realistic and moderate position we can assume. In saying that the state will need to be remade Dewey does not intend for us to abandon the institutions wholesale. Rather, his claim is that those institutions must be receptive to revision and expansion. They must be receptive in this way not simply because political problems are always about us, but also because, as Ian Shapiro explains, “power need not be abused, but it often is, and it is wise for democrats to guard against that possibility.”87 From a Deweyan perspective, the proviso “need not be” is what prevents us from describing the state and the demos in oppositional terms, even as it encourages us to “get rid of the ideas that lead us to believe that democratic conditions automatically maintain themselves, or that they can be identified with fulfillment of prescriptions laid down in a constitution” (FC [LW13:87]).
This statement from Dewey’s Freedom and Culture is the closest he gets to Wolin’s more contemporary position without falling prey to its problems, and is advanced, somewhat ironically, in the context of a discussion about the relationship between totalitarianism and democracy. His point in this context is to immediately disrupt, as we have seen in Wolin’s own work, our congratulatory attitude toward democratic institutions. Dewey specifically rejects the claim that totalitarian regimes emerge in countries where a scientific spirit never existed, since some form of mutual responsiveness is essential to political governance (FC [LW13:87–88]). However, drawing a sharp divide between totalitarian and democratic regimes, with the former representing the absence of the scientific spirit and the latter embodying this spirit, blocks us from evaluating “what it is that commends, at least for a time, totalitarian conditions to persons otherwise intelligent and honorable” (FC [LW13:88]). But it also, and perhaps more significantly for Dewey, obscures the fact that our own institutions, even when formed in the name of democracy, may conspire against our best ideals:
Beliefs of this sort[—namely, that democratic institutions maintain themselves automatically—]merely divert attention from what is going on, just as the patter of the prestidigitator enables him to do things that are not noticed by those whom he is engaged in fooling. For what is actually going on may be the formation of conditions that are hostile to any kind of democratic liberties. This would be too trite to repeat were it not that so many persons in the high places of business talk as if they believed or could get others to believe that the observance of formulae that have become ritualistic are effective safeguards of our democratic heritage. (FC [LW13:87])
His point, consistent with his earlier reflections in The Public and Its Problems and Liberalism and Social Action, is not that such ritualistic activities or the institutions associated with them are necessarily hostile to freedom and so will become a source of domination. After all, just as belief for him must be justified, so too must doubt. His claim is that even the best institutions may themselves become the locus of abuse precisely because their proper functioning does not require an unmediated use of power by ordinary citizens. Our faith in those institutions, then, must never run so deep that it prevents us from seeing the extent to which they degenerate into something antidemocratic.
THE PERMANENCE OF CONTINGENCY: ON THE PRECARIOUS AND STABLE PUBLIC
Thus far I have argued that for Dewey the relationship between experts and citizens is grounded in a relationship of mutual responsiveness in order for them to understand political problems and frame policy proposals. I have maintained that the emphasis he attaches to mutual responsiveness is fundamentally a concern about preventing the use of power from becoming arbitrary. I have also elucidated his concern with both the actual involvement we have in managing power and the future possibilities that are open to us in managing the uses to which power will be put. The latter is bound up with a specific view of freedom as nondomination. Keeping this account of freedom in view allows us to do two things simultaneously: we can attach practical and normative weight to political democracy, in contrast to Wolin’s position, even while we hold at bay the desire to completely identify the security of freedom with the institutions of political democracy.
This moderate position that Dewey carves out is most clearly embodied in how he understands the function of the public and its relationship to the state. His account envisions the public, I argue, as the permanent space of contingency in the sense that there can be no a priori delimitation, except as it emerges from individuals and groups that coalesce in the service of problem-solving and that therefore require the administrative power of the state to address their concerns. This description of the public envisions it as standing in a directive and supportive relationship to the state and its representative and administrative institutions. But insofar as the state is resistant to transformation because of ossification, the public then functions in a more oppositional role that builds its power external to the state. It is to this final issue that we must now turn.
CONTINUITY BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND THE STATE
The obvious place to begin is with Dewey’s understanding of the public as evidenced in chapter 1 of The Public and Its Problems. “The public,” says Dewey, “consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (PP [LW2:245–246]). The emergence of the public is prompted by a set of transactions within society whose impact on a group of individuals is of such a nature that it requires focused action beyond what they themselves can provide. This need not imply that the association of individuals that comes to comprise the public was in existence prior to the problem; it will often be the case that the indirect consequences of transactions now perceived as problematic determine the members that make up the public.
This should not be confusing if we insert a distinction to clarify the description. For Dewey, society is an arrangement of individuals who simultaneously belong to distinct and overlapping associations, what he refers to in his 1908 edition of Ethics as “civil society.” Civil society, he explains there, “represents those forms of associated life which are orderly and authorized, because constituted by individuals in the exercise of their rights, together with those special forms which protect and insure them” (E2 [MW5:404]). In civil society, information and pressures get communicated across those associations. In such pluralistic conditions, problems and conflicts are bound to emerge, some of which may very well come from the functioning of governmental regulation or activities of the market economy. The result of such problems is that groups within civil society are politicized and so become a public. To say they become politicized only means that indirect consequences have affected individuals to such an extent that a distinct apparatus is needed to address their concerns. The associated group that emerges may already be in existence, albeit in a nonpolitical mode (e.g., religious organizations, professional associations, or cultural organizations), in civil society. Or it may be the case that the public is comprised of multiple associations that were already in existence, having no discernible relationship to each other until the problem emerged. The problem helps focus what is shared and provides the point of departure for collective problem-solving. If Dewey is to remain consistent with his general account of inquiry, it must follow that a shared problem does not yet imply agreement on a particular resolution or what to do. This would have to emerge from a deliberative process. If this seems to be ambiguous, as Matthew Festenstein argues,88 I am inclined to say that for Dewey it inheres in the nature of democratic politics. For Dewey, we cannot determine prior to deliberation either what the response should be or the trade-offs that may potentially be involved.
A concern may nonetheless emerge at precisely this juncture regarding Dewey’s account of the public. On the one hand, he speaks of “the public.” Yet he seems quite clear that multiple groups and associations of individuals advance claims requiring systematic care. The former suggests a homogenous domain in which the whole of society is directed through a deliberative mechanism, while the latter points to a site that is internally plural in which deliberation is context-specific. As Westbrook observes, the ambiguity is something Dewey never addresses. But as he explains, and here I agree, this issue can be clarified in a way that is consistent with Dewey’s description of the public: “The Public was, at most, a collective noun designating plural publics that concerned themselves with the indirect consequences of particular forms of associated activity.”89 We can go a bit further than Westbrook’s already helpful point. Using a collective noun, Dewey is articulating a politicized domain between civil society and the government in which claims regarding the need for systematic care are mutually acknowledged among citizens who consolidate their identity for that reason. Because for Dewey there is no privileged access to mutually recognized concerns or solutions—that is, they are built up discursively—all members stand on equal footing. Here we can do justice to his earlier claim that citizens must have a voice in shaping institutions under which they live or the decisions by which they will be bound. “The public” becomes a politicized sphere in which citizens seek to translate the claims and grievances of specific publics into state power.
In explaining the meaning of systematic care, Dewey invokes the image of the state precisely to institutionalize claims built up from the public sphere that consolidate into a public. He writes the following: “[T]he state is the organization of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members” (PP [LW2:256]). So the translation of claims and grievances into state power requires officers and administrators who are charged as trustees of a public, holding fiduciary power: “Officials are those who look out for and take care of the interests thus affected” (PP [LW2:246]). In his understanding of the public sphere, the state does not necessarily need to find its organization through national officials. That is, we need to allow for the formation of both a particular public whose interests and concerns extend no further than a small town and one that extends across multiple boundaries and territories. In either case, Dewey imagines, as Jürgen Habermas does much later, that publics cannot rule by themselves, but must be articulated through a distinct administrative apparatus in which power is physically located, what he refers to as the officials and representatives. As Habermas writes on precisely this point: “The power available to the administration alters its aggregate condition as long as it remains tied in with a democratic opinion- and will-formation that does not just monitor the exercise of political power ex post facto but more or less programs it as well.”90 For Dewey, this means that publics, whether on the local or national level, do not just supervise how that power functions, but in many respects determine and influence the ends to which it will be put: “A public articulated and operating through representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is none without the public” (PP [LW2:277]). Hence the state, from his perspective, is a “secondary form of association” (PP [LW2:279]). In other words, although the activity of political institutions—that is, the formation of laws, statutes, and binding regulations, or the establishment of administrative agencies, for example—will often be the result of those officials and representatives, this only comes about for Dewey and Habermas because the direction and purpose of these institutions is determined elsewhere. Although functioning at the fringes of the state, the public sphere is nonetheless configured as the site from which opinion- and will-formation originate and which is institutionalized via the state.
Dewey’s account of the relationship between publics and the state specifically rejects the notion of a unified deliberative public that makes claims in the name of “the people.” This is yet another reason for thinking that “the public,” in his view, refers to a collective noun of unity and difference. He agrees in this regard with Iris Marion Young’s claim that “processes of deliberation in complex mass society must be understood as subjectless … decentered” and so indeterminate.91 This much Dewey explains when he says that scholars have looked for the state in the wrong place:
They have sought for the key to the nature of the state in the field of agencies, in that of doers of deeds, or in some will or purpose back of deeds. They have sought to explain the state in terms of authorship. Ultimately all deliberate choices proceed from somebody in particular; acts are performed by somebody, and all arrangements and plans are made by somebody in the most concrete sense of somebody. Some John Doe and Richard Roe figure in every transaction…. The quality presented is not authorship but authority, the authority of recognized consequences to control the behavior which generates and averts extensive and enduring results of weal and woe. (PP [LW2:247])
His point here is that indexing the state as state to particular authors who comprise a public undercuts the extent to which the public sphere itself can function as a sensory network to register emerging problems that can then be managed by state institutions. Focusing on authorship for understanding the state fixes the character of the latter and imputes to the public sphere a substantively unified identity that in Dewey’s own account is simply out of step with a pluralistic society. But if we understand the public as a “subjectless” sphere, then we are better able to see publics as the expression of “recognized consequences” among its members to “control the behavior which generates and averts extensive and enduring results of weal and woe.”
So for Dewey there can be no permanent closure of the public sphere itself with a fixed identity from which the state can be inferred, even though there will be specific delimitations of particular publics. The latter—delimitations of particular publics—implies that state institutions and the substantive decisions that follow from those institutions (at both national and local levels of governance) will very well come into existence in response to the specific claims of a public, as for instance, those arguing for health-care reform (national), more equitable distribution of monies for public education (national and local), or better safeguards on businesses whose waste by-products are contaminating a local reservoir (local). The former point, that which relates to the public sphere as such, means that insofar as the claims of a particular public are instantiated in the state, they cannot exclude the possibility of addressing developing needs that require systematic care. To be sure, all developing needs may not be legitimate in this regard, but the first step in assessing their legitimacy will have to rest with the extent to which addressing those needs might potentially implicate us in relationships of domination. But insofar as reason-giving is central to how democracy conducts its ongoing affairs and is employed to potentially avoid the arbitrary uses of power, Dewey’s point is that the public sphere is that site in which the democratic state attempts to see widely and feel deeply in order to make informed judgments.92
Dewey concedes, in this regard, that his account of the state is vague (PP [LW2:274]). “There is,” he explains, “no sharp and clear line which draws itself … like the line left by a receding high tide, just where a public comes into existence which has interests so significant that they must be looked after and administered by special agencies, or governmental officers” (PP [LW2:275]). As he says, “there is often room for dispute. The line of demarcation between actions left to private initiative and management and those regulated by the state has to be discovered experimentally” (PP [LW2:275]; cf. PPI [LW2:375–376]). That is, the scope of the state understood in this sense “is something to be critically and experimentally determined” (PP [LW2:281]).
But here once again the openness of the state itself is required if we are not to court domination or become inattentive to enduring consequences affecting people that require action beyond what they can provide. An “experimentally determined state” means that its identity is always evolving and changing via the demands of multiple publics. And it may be necessary that we create institutional mechanisms (e.g., courts and bodies of arbitration) to partly assess and decide when the intervention of the state is necessary. Such institutions, as Shapiro points out, will simultaneously involve assessing and managing “conflicting claims about how pertinent interests are affected.”93 But all of this indicates that for Dewey, a democratic public sphere and by that fact a democratic state is radically inclusive, even though such inclusiveness means the emergence of distinct and exclusive publics.
Understanding the democratic public sphere and the state as undetermined is not based on a principle to which Dewey independently subscribes. It is important to see that this conclusion follows directly from the emphasis he places on reason-giving as being central to democratic legitimacy. Recall that democracy’s comparative advantage is that it rejects the presumptive belief that citizens ought to defer to individuals or institutions that seemingly occupy some privileged position of authority. This is because from the perspective of knowledge formation, there can be no such privileged position. As a result, no one is exempt from having to participate in the practice of giving and asking for reasons. The upshot is that the very act of using political power and what the exercise of power becomes (e.g., institutions and/or laws) is coextensive with and based upon the principle of conditionality. The necessity of inclusiveness and openness follows directly from this principle and makes the “who” of the public sphere and state contingent, despite the relative stability that comes from distinct publics. Dewey’s argument, as I understand it, is premised on what Claude Lefort identifies as “two apparently contradictory principles: on the one hand, power emanates from the people; on the other, it is the power of nobody [in particular]. And democracy thrives on this contradiction. Whenever the latter risks being resolved or is resolved, democracy is either close to destruction or already destroyed.”94
Notwithstanding, what should be observed about Dewey’s discussion of the public is the seamless continuity he draws between it and the state. As indicated earlier, when he says the state must be experimentally discovered he does not mean, for instance, that the United States, as the site of coercive power and from which legally binding decisions for society come, must be restructured. His point is more practical and centers on the substantive developments that need to take place within the state in order to respond to the public. “The public,” he explains, “as far as organized by means of officials and material agencies to care for the extensive and enduring indirect consequences of transactions between persons is the Populus” (PP [LW2:246]). And when the “public … is involved in making social arrangements like passing laws, enforcing a contract, conferring a franchise, it still acts through concrete persons. The persons are now officers, representatives of a public” (PP [LW2:247]). He is not denying that the state is already in existence and functioning according to a number of preexisting imperatives—imperatives relating to economic stability, foreign relations, and domestic welfare—that are themselves the result of publics. We cannot deny, he writes, that “actual states exhibit traits which perform the function that has been stated and which serve as marks of anything to be called a state” (PP [LW2:260]). His point, however, is that such preexisting imperatives must be sufficiently flexible to absorb and address the demands of emerging publics. This is precisely why the emergence of publics should be interpreted as providing guidance for institutional transformation, but not as ultimately fixing the nature of those institutions. As Westbrook explains: “Consequently, the State was also a plural phenomenon, a collection of publics organized into representative institutions (though presumably one institution or collection of officials might serve several publics).”95 Such a description allows for Dewey to envision, at least ideally, a fluid connection between the public and the state.
DISCONTINUITY BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND THE STATE
In many ways Dewey’s discussion of the public as laid out above has as its goal an inclusive state apparatus. This fits with his position more generally that their can be no de facto opposition to the institutions of the state. Experimentally determining the nature and scope of the state means we are attempting to envision supplemental appendages that need to be added to address the concerns of a particular public. But we are also implicitly testing the extent to which preexisting institutions are amenable to transformation. Insofar as such institutions are not, Dewey envisions the public sphere as standing in a more oppositional rather than supportive and guiding relationship to the state. In this instance, the claims of specific publics may ultimately point to the entrenched resistance and limitation of state institutions. As he explains of political development, “progress is not steady and continuous. Retrogression is as periodic as advance” (PP [LW2:254]).
In this context, the public sphere potentially stands in an uneasy relationship to the state, especially in its attempts to democratize the functioning of the state. Dewey captures this point where he worries about the extent to which state institutions ossify around a set of interests and so become unresponsive to new and emerging publics, the result of which generates a revolutionary impulse.
These changes [relating to associated relationships] are extrinsic to political forms which, once established, persist of their own momentum. The new public which is generated remains long inchoate, unorganized, because it cannot use inherited political agencies. The latter, if elaborate and well institutionalized, obstruct the organization of the new public. They prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set political legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms. This is hard to do because these forms are themselves the regular means of instituting change. The public which generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the dying public instituted. This is why the change of the form of states is so often effected only by revolution. (PP [LW2:254–255] [emphasis added])
We should not understate the importance of this passage in The Public and Its Problems precisely because it points to the radical character of Dewey’s outlook. His claim is not simply that emerging publics cannot use existing state institutions because they are insufficient to address developing needs. Rather, existing institutions may be inimical to those new needs. Here, we might think, for example, of the legally instantiated power of white males in the American context—power that formed in direct resistance to the demands of women and black Americans seeking more equitable distribution and equal access. We can diversify our examples to include other rebellious groups: labor unions on behalf of workers, environmental organizations, and framers, just to name a few. To be sure, these movements exist on a scale that slides from being reform movements aimed at transformation of legal or institutional norms (e.g., trade unions and green organizations) to radical associations looking to redescribe the value system upon which institutional structures are based (e.g., civil rights movement and women’s rights movement). But in all situations, Dewey argues, the claims of the public cannot flow fluidly into the administrative power of the state. Instead, publics must seek to build power externally, the result of which functions as a counterweight to public(s) that are entrenched via the state and wield arbitrary power. I take Nancy Fraser to mean precisely this when she remarks: “These subaltern counterpublics … are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”96
Given his larger account, Dewey’s point is that the public sphere is always already internally differentiated. That is, the term incorporates both the substantively smooth incorporation of publics into the state, and the possibility of insurgent publics whose character is determined by virtue of state resistance and illegitimate acts of political authority. And they emerge not simply to offer oppositional interpretations of their needs, as Fraser describes, but to see a transformation in the state that substantively addresses those needs. This is precisely why Dewey says in that last sentence that when the power of the state ossifies, transformation often comes about through revolution.
Dewey is clear that much of the transformation in the democratic state will not come from the fluid relationship between the public sphere and state, although he envisions this as a genuine possibility and so sounds strikingly different from Wolin. Nonetheless, radical transformation comes about, he argues—and here he is in agreement with Wolin—from these more insurgent moments. He advances this point in an essay written in 1939, entitled “I Believe,” where he specifically discusses the politicized function of civil society and so signals a relationship between these claims and his remarks from The Public and Its Problems: “For if history teaches anything it is that judgments regarding the future have been predicated upon the basis of the tendencies that are most conspicuous at the time, while in fact the great social changes which have produced new social institutions have been the cumulative effect of flank movements that were not obvious at the time of their origin” (IB [LW14:96]). The example Dewey offers to illustrate this is of a medieval lord who does not imagine that “the future of society was with the forces that were represented by the humble trader who set up his post under the walls of his castle” (IB [LW14:96]). The picture Dewey is painting is one in which the status of both lord and his seat of power in the castle is radically transformed by a power external to it.
When he uses the language of flank movements and indicates the necessity of disrupting ossified state power from without, I encourage us to read him as describing what we have today come to identify as social movements. Such movements are distinctive precisely because they represent unmediated experiences of power that potentially tilt public discourse in new directions, that envision alternative policy ideas aimed at alleviating specific problems, or that legitimize new forms of collective action that threaten the stability of the state.97 That Dewey does not say much more about flank movements or these counterpublics than I can elucidate here, or legitimately infer from, should not diminish the fact that they easily find a home in his vision of democracy. More significant, the fact that these counterforces also, for him, emanate from the public sphere means that the state and its institutions are always a fiduciary power, the source of which lies elsewhere and is always in ready position to reclaim power if necessary.
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The interpretation of Dewey’s view of democracy advanced here derives from his desire to manage power and prevent its use from becoming arbitrary. As I have suggested, this complements and frames his understanding of the relationship between experts and citizens. For Dewey, power may often function without our explicit involvement or control. Nonetheless, the ends to which power will be put cannot be of such a nature that they block the future contestability of how that power functions. Managing political power is not, as he sees it, merely about the range of choices that may exist at any given moment for human beings, but more significantly the ability to initiate change to expand the area in which choice is made possible. To the extent that this possibility is open, freedom remains secure. And to the extent that such possibilities are closed to us, the state apparatus invites a more oppositional relationship between itself and the public sphere from which it otherwise receives its directives. This implies caution about how our institutions function, but not perpetual doubt. The first of these is healthy for a democracy because it guards against our natural tendency to see our political order as settled—a position that will seduce us into believing that existing inequalities and injustices are conditions not to be overcome but rather to which we must resign ourselves. Yet, the second of these—perpetual doubt—can only have a corrosive effect on how we see our political institutions.
Still, it might be said that Dewey’s formulations are terribly imprecise. After all, he says nothing about institutions in concrete terms nor does he provide us with a blueprint for managing power relations as such. This worry, I think, misses its mark by wrongly assuming that the only way to speak meaningfully about democracy is through institutions, never realizing that such an approach often preempts precisely the kind of work that democratic citizens are suppose to do for themselves. It also loses sight, as Dewey reminds us, of the reality that there can be no final description of institutional arrangements that will be permanently responsive to problems that plague publics. The moment we believe otherwise, we will have ironically undermined the inclusiveness that ought properly to be the hallmark of democracy.
A more reasonable approach, the one taken here, says the following: By making power and the contestability of how power functions central to democracy, we have found a standard for assessing the construction of new institutions and the revision of institutions already in existence. This is not to say that power exhausts the field of inquiry when it comes to understanding democracy. But as Dewey well knows, many of democracy’s problems emanate from situations in which individuals feel that they no longer have control over the forces that govern their lives. Another way to say this is that they feel that they are at the mercy of another’s will, whether that is a large corporation, an impersonal school board, or their local politicians. To the extent that government institutions are complicit in this process of political alienation and domination, citizens are well within their rights to rethink the purpose and boundaries of those institutions. Whether or not citizens will do that is entirely another matter and cannot be answered in the abstract. For at the end of the day, it requires courage and the willingness to court danger.
But that democracy makes the practice of reason-giving central to the very essence of problem-solving and legitimacy means that whatever danger we court, it need not necessarily cripple us. In fact, the danger itself points to the openness of democracy—that is, the nonsovereign character of human action that is central to it and which is the hallmark of genuine freedom—and democracy’s redemptive possibilities. For Dewey, this is the source of enduring allegiance and political hope. Such hope is what makes democracy under modern conditions of pluralism and complexity at once difficult and necessary if we are to realize a world better than the one we were given. As Dewey says: “The democratic road is the hard one to take. It is the road which places the greatest burden of responsibility on the greatest number of human beings. Backsets and deviations occur and will continue to occur. But that which is its weakness at particular times is its strength in the long course of human history” (FC [LW13:154]).