THE PUBLIC
AND ITS PROBLEMS
BY
JOHN DEWEY
ALAN SWALLOW
DENVER
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright renewed, 1954, by Mrs. John Dewey
PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFATORY NOTE
This volume is the result of lectures delivered during the month of
January, nineteen hundred and twenty-six, upon the Larwill Foundation
of Kenyon College, Ohio. In acknowledging the many courtesies received,
I wish to express also my appreciation of the toleration shown by the
authorities of the College to delay in publication. The intervening
period has permitted a full revision and expansion of the lectures
as originally delivered. This fact will account for an occasional
reference to books published in the interval.
J. D.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SEARCH FOR THE PUBLIC 3
Divergence of facts and theoretical interpretations
concerning the nature of the state, 3. Practical import
of theories, 5. Theories in terms of causal origin,
9. Theory in terms of perceived consequences, 12.
Distinction of private and public substituted for that of
individual and social, 13. The influence of association,
22. Plurality of associations, 26. Criterion of the
public, 27. Function of the state, 28. The state as an
experimental problem, 32. Summary, 34.
II. DISCOVERY OF THE STATE 37
Public and state, 38. Geographical extent, 39.
Multiplicity of states, 43. Spread of consequences, 47.
Law is not command, 53. Law and reasonableness, 55. The
public and long-established habits of action, 57. Fear of
the new, 59. Irreparable consequences, 62. Variation of
state-functions according to circumstances of time and
place, 65. State and government, 66. State and society,
69. The pluralistic theory, 73.
III. THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 75
Private and representative rôles of officials, 76.
Selection of rulers by irrelevant methods, 78. The
problem of control of officials, 82. Meanings of
democracy, 83. Fallacy as to origin of democratic
government, 84. Influence of non-political factors, 85.
The origin of “individualism,” 86. Influence of the
new industry; the theory of “natural” economic laws,
90. James Mill’s philosophy of democratic government,
93. Criticism of “individualism,” 95. Criticism of
antithesis of natural and artificial, 102. Wants and
aims as functions of social life, 104. Persistence of
pre-industrial institutions, 108. Final problem, 109.
IV. ECLIPSE OF THE PUBLIC 110
Local origin of American democratic government, 111.
National unification due to technological factors, 114.
Submergence of the public, 116. Disparity of inherited
ideas and machinery with actual conditions, 117.
Illustrations of resulting failures, 119. Problem of
discovering the public, 122. Democracy versus the expert,
123. Explanation of eclipse of public, 126. Illustrated
by the World War, 127. Application of criteria of the
public, 129. Failure of traditional principles, 131.
Political apathy accounted for, 134. Need of experts,
135. Rivals of political interest, 138. Ideals and
instrumentalities, 141.
V. SEARCH FOR THE GREAT COMMUNITY 143
Democracy as idea and as governmental behavior, 143.
Problem of the Great Community, 147. Meaning of the
democratic ideal, 148. Democracy and community life, 149.
Community and associated activity, 151. Communication
and the community, 152. Intellectual conditions of the
Great Community, 155. Habit and intelligence, 158.
Science and knowledge, 163. Limitations upon social
inquiry, 166. Isolation of social inquiry, 171. Pure and
applied science, 172. Communication and public opinion,
173. Limitations of distribution of knowledge, 176.
Communication as art, 183.
VI. THE PROBLEM OF METHOD 185
Antithesis between individual and social as obstruction
to method, 186. Meaning of individual, 185. Where
opposition lies, 191. Meaning of absolutistic logic,
194. Illustration from doctrine of “evolution,” 196.
From psychology, 197. Difference of human and physical
science, 199. Experimental inquiry as alternative, 202.
Method, and government by experts, 203. Democracy and
education by discussion, 206. The level of intelligence,
210. The necessity of local community life, 211.
Problem of restoration, 213. Tendencies making for
reëstablishment, 215. Connection of this problem with the
problem of political intelligence, 217.
INDEX 221
THE PUBLIC
AND ITS PROBLEMS
CHAPTER I
SEARCH FOR THE PUBLIC
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and
the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.
Many persons seem to suppose that facts carry their meaning along
with themselves on their face. Accumulate enough of them, and their
interpretation stares out at you. The development of physical science
is thought to confirm the idea. But the power of physical facts to
coerce belief does not reside in the bare phenomena. It proceeds from
method, from the technique of research and calculation. No one is ever
forced by just the collection of facts to accept a particular theory
of their meaning, so long as one retains intact some other doctrine by
which he can marshal them. Only when the facts are allowed free play
for the suggestion of new points of view is any significant conversion
of conviction as to meaning possible. Take away from physical science
its laboratory apparatus and its mathematical technique, and the human
imagination might run wild in its theories of interpretation even if we
suppose the brute facts to remain the same.
In any event, social philosophy exhibits an immense gap between facts
and doctrines. Compare, for example, the facts of politics with
the theories which are extant regarding the nature of the state. If
inquirers confine themselves to observed phenomena, the behavior of
kings, presidents, legislators, judges, sheriffs, assessors and all
other public officials, surely a reasonable consensus is not difficult
to attain. Contrast with this agreement the differences which exist
as to the basis, nature, functions and justification of the state,
and note the seemingly hopeless disagreement. If one asks not for an
enumeration of facts, but for a definition of the state, one is plunged
into controversy, into a medley of contradictory clamors. According
to one tradition, which claims to derive from Aristotle, the state
is associated and harmonized life lifted to its highest potency; the
state is at once the keystone of the social arch and is the arch in its
wholeness. According to another view, it is just one of many social
institutions, having a narrow but important function, that of arbiter
in the conflict of other social units. Every group springs out of and
realizes a positive human interest; the church, religious values;
guilds, unions and corporations material economic interests, and so on.
The state, however, has no concern of its own; its purpose is formal,
like that of the leader of the orchestra who plays no instrument and
makes no music, but who serves to keep other players who do produce
music in unison with one another. Still a third view has it that
the state is organized oppression, at once a social excrescence, a
parasite and a tyrant. A fourth is that it is an instrument more or
less clumsy for keeping individuals from quarreling too much with one
another.
Confusion grows when we enter subdivisions of these different views
and the grounds offered for them. In one philosophy, the state is the
apex and completion of human association, and manifests the highest
realization of all distinctively human capacities. The view had a
certain pertinency when it was first formulated. It developed in an
antique city-state, where to be fully a free man and to be a citizen
participating in the drama, the sports, the religion and the government
of the community were equivalent affairs. But the view persists and
is applied to the state of to-day. Another view coördinates the state
with the church (or as a variant view slightly subordinates it to
the latter) as the secular arm of Deity maintaining outward order
and decorum among men. A modern theory idealizes the state and its
activities by borrowing the conceptions of reason and will, magnifying
them till the state appears as the objectified manifestation of a will
and reason which far transcend the desires and purposes which can be
found among individuals or assemblages of individuals.
We are not concerned, however, with writing either a cyclopedia or
history of political doctrines. So we pause with these arbitrary
illustrations of the proposition that little common ground has been
discovered between the factual phenomena of political behavior and the
interpretation of the meaning of these phenomena. One way out of the
impasse is to consign the whole matter of meaning and interpretation
to political philosophy as distinguished from political science. Then
it can be pointed out that futile speculation is a companion of all
philosophy. The moral is to drop all doctrines of this kind overboard,
and stick to facts verifiably ascertained.
The remedy urged is simple and attractive. But it is not possible to
employ it. Political facts are not outside human desire and judgment.
Change men’s estimate of the _value_ of existing political agencies and
forms, and the latter change more or less. The different theories which
mark political philosophy do not grow up externally to the facts which
they aim to interpret; they are amplifications of selected factors
among those facts. Modifiable and altering human habits sustain and
generate political phenomena. These habits are not wholly informed
by reasoned purpose and deliberate choice--far from it--but they are
more or less amenable to them. Bodies of men are constantly engaged
in attacking and trying to change some political habits, while other
bodies of men are actively supporting and justifying them. It is mere
pretense, then, to suppose that we can stick by the _de facto_, and
not raise at some points the question of _de jure_: the question of by
what right, the question of legitimacy. And such a question has a way
of growing until it has become a question as to the nature of the state
itself. The alternatives before us are not factually limited science
on one hand and uncontrolled speculation on the other. The choice is
between blind, unreasoned attack and defense on the one hand, and
discriminating criticism employing intelligent method and a conscious
criterion on the other.
The prestige of the mathematical and physical sciences is great, and
properly so. But the difference between facts which are what they
are independent of human desire and endeavor and facts which are to
some extent what they are because of human interest and purpose, and
which alter with alteration in the latter, cannot be got rid of by
any methodology. The more sincerely we appeal to facts, the greater
is the importance of the distinction between facts which condition
human activity and facts which are conditioned by human activity. In
the degree which we ignore this difference, social science becomes
pseudo-science. Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian political ideas are
not merely theories dwelling in the human mind remote from facts of
American political behavior. They are expressions of chosen phases and
factors among those facts, but they are also something more: namely,
forces which have shaped those facts and which are still contending
to shape them in the future this way and that. There is more than a
speculative difference between a theory of the state which regards it
as an instrument in protecting individuals in the rights they already
have, and one which conceives its function to be the effecting of
a more equitable distribution of rights among individuals. For the
theories are held and applied by legislators in congress and by judges
on the bench and make a difference in the subsequent facts themselves.
I make no doubt that the practical influence of the political
philosophies of Aristotle, the Stoics, St. Thomas, Locke, Rousseau,
Kant and Hegel has often been exaggerated in comparison with the
influence of circumstances. But a due measure of efficacy cannot be
denied them on the ground which is sometimes proffered; it cannot be
denied on the ground that ideas are without potency. For ideas belong
to human beings who have bodies, and there is no separation between the
structures and processes of the part of the body that entertains the
ideas and the part that performs acts. Brain and muscles work together,
and the brains of men are much more important data for social science
than are their muscular system and their sense organs.
It is not our intention to engage in a discussion of political
philosophies. The concept of the state, like most concepts which
are introduced by “The,” is both too rigid and too tied up with
controversies to be of ready use. It is a concept which can be
approached by a flank movement more easily than by a frontal attack.
The moment we utter the words “The State” a score of intellectual
ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and without
our notice, the notion of “The State” draws us imperceptibly into a
consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one
another, and away from facts of human activity. It is better, if
possible, to start from the latter and see if we are not led thereby
into an idea of something which will turn out to implicate the marks
and signs which characterize political behavior.
There is nothing novel in this method of approach. But very much
depends upon what we select from which to start and very much depends
upon whether we select our point of departure in order to tell at
the terminus what the state _ought_ to be or what it _is_. If we are
too concerned with the former, there is a likelihood that we shall
unwittingly have doctored the facts selected in order to come out at a
predetermined point. The phase of human action we should _not_ start
with is that to which direct causative power is attributed. We should
not look for state-forming forces. If we do, we are likely to get
involved in mythology. To explain the origin of the state by saying
that man is a political animal is to travel in a verbal circle. It
is like attributing religion to a religious instinct, the family to
marital and parental affection, and language to a natural endowment
which impels men to speech. Such theories merely reduplicate in a
so-called causal force the effects to be accounted for. They are of a
piece with the notorious potency of opium to put men to sleep because
of its dormitive power.
The warning is not directed against a man of straw. The attempt to
derive the state, or any other social institution, from strictly
“psychological” data is in point. Appeal to a gregarious instinct to
account for social arrangements is the outstanding example of the
lazy fallacy. Men do not run together and join in a larger mass as
do drops of quicksilver, and if they did the result would not be a
state nor any mode of human association. The instincts, whether named
gregariousness, or sympathy, or the sense of mutual dependence, or
domination on one side and abasement and subjection on the other, at
best account for everything in general and nothing in particular. And
at worst, the alleged instinct and natural endowment appealed to as
a causal force themselves represent physiological tendencies which
have previously been shaped into habits of action and expectation by
means of the very social conditions they are supposed to explain. Men
who have lived in herds develop attachment to the horde to which they
have become used; children who have perforce lived in dependence grow
into habits of dependence and subjection. The inferiority complex is
socially acquired, and the “instinct” of display and mastery is but
its other face. There are structural organs which physiologically
manifest themselves in vocalizations as the organs of a bird induce
song. But the barking of dogs and the song of birds are enough to prove
that these native tendencies do not generate language. In order to be
converted into language, native vocalization requires transformation by
extrinsic conditions, both organic and extra-organic or environmental:
formation, be it noted, not just stimulation. The cry of a baby can
doubtless be described in purely organic terms, but the wail becomes
a noun or verb only by its consequences in the responsive behavior of
others. This responsive behavior takes the form of nurture and care,
themselves dependent upon tradition, custom and social patterns. Why
not postulate an “instinct” of infanticide as well as one of guidance
and instruction? Or an “instinct” of exposing girls and taking care of
boys?
We may, however, take the argument in a less mythological form than
is found in the current appeal to social instincts of one sort or
another. The activities of animals, like those of minerals and plants,
are correlated with their structure. Quadrupeds run, worms crawl,
fish swim, birds fly. They are made that way; it is “the nature of
the beast.” We do not gain anything by inserting instincts to run,
creep, swim and fly between the structure and the act. But the strictly
organic conditions which lead men to join, assemble, foregather,
combine, are just those which lead other animals to unite in swarms and
packs and herds. In describing what is common in human and other animal
junctions and consolidations we fail to touch what is distinctively
human in human associations. These structural conditions and acts may
be _sine qua nons_ of human societies; but so are the attractions
and repulsions which are exhibited in inanimate things. Physics and
chemistry as well as zoölogy may inform us of some of the conditions
without which human beings would not associate. But they do not furnish
us with the _sufficient_ conditions of community life and of the forms
which it takes.
We must in any case start from acts which are performed, not from
hypothetical causes for those acts, and consider their consequences. We
must also introduce intelligence, or the observation of consequences
_as_ consequences, that is, in connection with the acts from which
they proceed. Since we must introduce it, it is better to do so
knowingly than it is to smuggle it in in a way which deceives not
only the customs officer--the reader--but ourselves as well. We take
then our point of departure from the objective fact that human acts
have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are
perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to
control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others.
Following this clew, we are led to remark that the consequences are
of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a
transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately
concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction
between the private and the public. When indirect consequences are
recognized and there is effort to regulate them, something having
the traits of a state comes into existence. When the consequences of
an action are confined, or are thought to be confined, mainly to the
persons directly engaged in it, the transaction is a private one. When
A and B carry on a conversation together the action is a trans-action:
both are concerned in it; its results pass, as it were, across from one
to the other. One or other or both may be helped or harmed thereby.
But, presumably, the consequences of advantage and injury do not extend
beyond A and B; the activity lies between them; it is private. Yet if
it is found that the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two
directly concerned, that they affect the welfare of many others, the
act acquires a public capacity, whether the conversation be carried
on by a king and his prime minister or by Cataline and a fellow
conspirator or by merchants planning to monopolize a market.
The distinction between private and public is thus in no sense
equivalent to the distinction between individual and social, even if
we suppose that the latter distinction has a definite meaning. Many
private acts are social; their consequences contribute to the welfare
of the community or affect its status and prospects. In the broad
sense any transaction deliberately carried on between two or more
persons is social in quality. It is a form of associated behavior and
its consequences may influence further associations. A man may serve
others, even in the community at large, in carrying on a private
business. To some extent it is true, as Adam Smith asserted, that
our breakfast table is better supplied by the convergent outcome of
activities of farmers, grocers and butchers carrying on private
affairs with a view to private profit than it would be if we were
served on a basis of philanthropy or public spirit. Communities have
been supplied with works of art, with scientific discoveries, because
of the personal delight found by private persons in engaging in
these activities. There are private philanthropists who act so that
needy persons or the community as a whole profit by the endowment of
libraries, hospitals and educational institutions. In short, private
acts may be socially valuable both by indirect consequences and by
direct intention.
There is therefore no necessary connection between the private
character of an act and its non-social or anti-social character. The
public, moreover, cannot be identified with the socially useful. One
of the most regular activities of the politically organized community
has been waging war. Even the most bellicose of militarists will
hardly contend that all wars have been socially helpful, or deny that
some have been so destructive of social values that it would have
been infinitely better if they had not been waged. The argument for
the non-equivalence of the public and the social, in any praiseworthy
sense of social, does not rest upon the case of war alone. There is no
one, I suppose, so enamored of political action as to hold that it has
never been short-sighted, foolish and harmful. There are even those
who hold that the presumption is always that social loss will result
from agents of the public doing anything which could be done by persons
in their private capacity. There are many more who protest that some
special public activity, whether prohibition, a protective tariff or
the expanded meaning given the Monroe Doctrine, is baleful to society.
Indeed every serious political dispute turns upon the question whether
a given political act is socially beneficial or harmful.
Just as behavior is not anti-social or non-social because privately
undertaken, it is not necessarily socially valuable because carried
on in the name of the public by public agents. The argument has not
carried us far, but at least it has warned us against identifying the
community and its interests with the state or the politically organized
community. And the differentiation may dispose us to look with more
favor upon the proposition already advanced: namely, that the line
between private and public is to be drawn on the basis of the extent
and scope of the consequences of acts which are so important as to
need control, whether by inhibition or by promotion. We distinguish
private and public buildings, private and public schools, private
paths and public highways, private assets and public funds, private
persons and public officials. It is our thesis that in this distinction
we find the key to the nature and office of the state. It is not
without significance that etymologically “private” is defined in
opposition to “official,” a private person being one deprived of public
position. The public 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.
Officials are those who look out for and take care of the interests
thus affected. Since those who are indirectly affected are not direct
participants in the transactions in question, it is necessary that
certain persons be set apart to represent them, and see to it that
their interests are conserved and protected. The buildings, property,
funds, and other physical resources involved in the performance of
this office are _res publica_, the common-wealth. The public 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_.
It is a commonplace that legal agencies for protecting the persons and
properties of members of a community, and for redressing wrongs which
they suffer, did not always exist. Legal institutions derive from
an earlier period when the right of self-help obtained. If a person
was harmed, it was strictly up to him what he should do to get even.
Injuring another and exacting a penalty for an injury received were
private transactions. They were the affairs of those directly concerned
and nobody else’s direct business. But the injured party obtained
readily the help of friends and relatives, and the aggressor did
likewise. Hence consequences of the quarrel did not remain confined to
those immediately concerned. Feuds ensued, and the blood-quarrel might
implicate large numbers and endure for generations. The recognition
of this extensive and lasting embroilment and the harm wrought by it
to whole families brought a public into existence. The transaction
ceased to concern only the immediate parties to it. Those indirectly
affected formed a public which took steps to conserve its interests by
instituting composition and other means of pacification to localize the
trouble.
The facts are simple and familiar. But they seem to present in
embryonic form the traits that define a state, its agencies and
officers. The instance illustrates what was meant when it said that
it is fallacy to try to determine the nature of the state in terms
of direct causal factors. Its essential point has to do with the
enduring and extensive consequences of behavior, which like all
behavior proceeds in ultimate analysis through individual human beings.
Recognition of evil consequences brought about a common interest which
required for its maintenance certain measures and rules, together with
the selection of certain persons as their guardians, interpreters, and,
if need be, their executors.
If the account given is at all in the right direction, it explains
the gap already mentioned between the facts of political action and
theories of the state. Men have looked 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 the
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. We shall not, then, find
the public if we look for it on the side of originators of voluntary
actions. Some John Smith and his congeners decide whether or not to
grow wheat and how much, where and how to invest money, what roads to
build and travel, whether to wage war and if so how, what laws to pass
and which to obey and disobey. The actual alternative to deliberate
acts of individuals is not action by the public; it is routine,
impulsive and other unreflected acts also performed by individuals.
Individual human beings may lose their identity in a mob or in a
political convention or in a joint-stock corporation or at the polls.
But this does not mean that some mysterious collective agency is making
decisions, but that some few persons who know what they are about are
taking advantage of massed force to conduct the mob their way, boss
a political machine, and manage the affairs of corporate business.
When the public or state 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 and shared interest. The difference is
an important one. But it is not a difference between single human
beings and a collective impersonal will. It is between persons in their
private and in their official or representative character. 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. Officials are indeed
public agents, but agents in the sense of factors doing the business of
others in securing and obviating consequences that concern them.
When we look in the wrong place we naturally do not find what we are
looking for. The worst of it is, however, that looking in the wrong
place, to causal forces instead of consequences, the outcome of the
looking becomes arbitrary. There is no check on it. “Interpretation”
runs wild. Hence the variety of conflicting theories and the lack of
consensus of opinion. One might argue _a priori_ that the continual
conflict of theories about the state is itself proof that the problem
has been wrongly posed. For, as we have previously remarked, the main
facts of political action, while the phenomena vary immensely with
diversity of time and place, are not hidden even when they are complex.
They are facts of human behavior accessible to human observation.
Existence of a multitude of contradictory theories of the state, which
is so baffling from the standpoint of the theories themselves, is
readily explicable the moment we see that all the theories, in spite of
their divergence from one another, spring from a root of shared error:
the taking of causal agency instead of consequences as the heart of the
problem.
Given this attitude and postulate, some men at some time will find the
causal agency in a metaphysical nisus attributed to nature; and the
state will then be explained in terms of an “essence” of man realizing
itself in an end of perfected Society. Others, influenced by other
preconceptions and other desires, will find the required author in
the will of God reproducing through the medium of fallen humanity
such an image of divine order and justice as the corrupt material
allows. Others seek for it in the meeting of the wills of individuals
who come together and by contract or mutual pledging of loyalties
bring a state into existence. Still others find it in an autonomous
and transcendent will embodied in all men as a universal within their
particular beings, a will which by its own inner nature commands the
establishment of external conditions in which it is possible for will
to express outwardly its freedom. Others find it in the fact that mind
or reason is either an attribute of reality or is reality itself, while
they condole that difference and plurality of minds, individuality,
is an illusion attributable to sense, or is merely an appearance in
contrast with the monistic reality of reason. When various opinions
all spring from a common and shared error, one is as good as another,
and the accidents of education, temperament, class interest and the
dominant circumstances of the age decide which is adopted. Reason
comes into play only to find justification for the opinion which has
been adopted, instead of to analyze human behavior with respect to its
consequences and to frame polities accordingly. It is an old story
that natural philosophy steadily progressed only after an intellectual
revolution. This consisted in abandoning the search for causes and
forces and turning to the analysis of what is going on and how it goes
on. Political philosophy has still in large measure to take to heart
this lesson.
The failure to note that the problem is that of perceiving in a
discriminating and thorough way the consequences of human action
(including negligence and inaction) and of instituting measures and
means of caring for these consequences is not confined to production
of conflicting and irreconcilable theories of the state. The failure
has also had the effect of perverting the views of those who, up
to a certain point, perceived the truth. We have asserted that
all deliberate choices and plans are finally the work of single
human beings. Thoroughly false conclusions have been drawn from
this observation. By thinking still in terms of causal forces, the
conclusion has been drawn from this fact that the state, the public,
is a fiction, a mask for private desires for power and position.
Not only the state but society itself has been pulverized into an
aggregate of unrelated wants and wills. As a logical consequence, the
state is conceived either as sheer oppression born of arbitrary power
and sustained in fraud, or as a pooling of the forces of single men
into a massive force which single persons are unable to resist, the
pooling being a measure of desperation since its sole alternative is
the conflict of all with all which generates a life that is helpless
and brutish. Thus the state appears either a monster to be destroyed or
as a Leviathan to be cherished. In short, under the influence of the
prime fallacy that the problem of the state concerns causal forces,
individualism, as an ism, as a philosophy, has been generated.
While the doctrine is false, it sets out from a fact. Wants, choices
and purposes have their locus in single beings; behavior which
manifests desire, intent and resolution proceeds from them in their
singularity. But only intellectual laziness leads us to conclude that
since the form of thought and decision is individual, their content,
their subject-matter, is also something purely personal. Even if
“consciousness” were the wholly private matter that the individualistic
tradition in philosophy and psychology supposes it to be, it would
still be true that consciousness is _of_ objects, not of itself.
Association in the sense of connection and combination is a “law” of
everything known to exist. Singular things act, but they act together.
Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation. The action
of everything is along with the action of other things. The “along
with” is of such a kind that the behavior of each is modified by its
connection with others. There are trees which can grow only in a
forest. Seeds of many plants can successfully germinate and develop
only under conditions furnished by the presence of other plants.
Reproduction of kind is dependent upon the activities of insects which
bring about fertilization. The life-history of an animal cell is
conditioned upon connection with what other cells are doing. Electrons,
atoms and molecules exemplify the omnipresence of conjoint behavior.
There is no mystery about the fact of association, of an interconnected
action which affects the activity of singular elements. There is no
sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and
operate in association. If there is any mystery about the matter, it
is the mystery that the universe is the kind of universe it is. Such a
mystery could not be explained without going outside the universe. And
if one should go to an outside source to account for it, some logician,
without an excessive draft upon his ingenuity, would rise to remark
that the outsider would have to be connected with the universe in
order to account for anything in it. We should still be just where we
started, with the fact of connection as a fact to be accepted.
There is, however, an intelligible question about human
association:--Not the question how individuals or singular beings come
to be connected, but how they come to be connected in just those ways
which give human communities traits so different from those which
mark assemblies of electrons, unions of trees in forests, swarms of
insects, herds of sheep, and constellations of stars. When we consider
the difference we at once come upon the fact that the consequences of
conjoint action take on a new value when they are observed. For notice
of the effects of connected action forces men to reflect upon the
connection itself; it makes it an object of attention and interest.
Each acts, in so far as the connection is known, in view of the
connection. Individuals still do the thinking, desiring and purposing,
but _what_ they think of is the consequences of their behavior upon
that of others and that of others upon themselves.
Each human being is born an infant. He is immature, helpless, dependent
upon the activities of others. That many of these dependent beings
survive is proof that others in some measure look out for them, take
care of them. Mature and better equipped beings are aware of the
consequences of their acts upon those of the young. They not only act
conjointly with them, but they act in that especial kind of association
which manifests interest in the consequences of their conduct upon the
life and growth of the young.
Continued physiological existence of the young is only one phase
of interest in the consequences of association. Adults are equally
concerned to act so that the immature learn to think, feel, desire and
habitually conduct themselves in certain ways. Not the least of the
consequences which are striven for is that the young shall themselves
learn to judge, purpose and choose from the standpoint of associated
behavior and its consequences. In fact, only too often this interest
takes the form of endeavoring to make the young believe and plan
just as adults do. This instance alone is enough to show that while
singular beings in their singularity think, want and decide, _what_
they think and strive for, the content of their beliefs and intentions
is a subject-matter provided by association. Thus man 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.
The only thing which imports obscurity and mystery into the influence
of association upon what individual persons want and act for is the
effort to discover alleged, special, original, society-making causal
forces, whether instincts, fiats of will, personal, or an immanent,
universal, practical reason, or an indwelling, metaphysical, social
essence and nature. These things do not explain, for they are more
mysterious than are the facts they are evoked to account for. The
planets in a constellation would form a community if they were aware of
the connections of the activities of each with those of the others and
could use this knowledge to direct behavior.
We have made a digression from consideration of the state to the wider
topic of society. However, the excursion enables us to distinguish the
state from other forms of social life. There is an old tradition which
regards the state and completely organized society as the same thing.
The state is said to be the complete and inclusive realization of all
social institutions. Whatever values result from any and every social
arrangement are gathered together and asserted to be the work of the
state. The counterpart of this method is that philosophical anarchism
which assembles all the evils that result from all forms of human
grouping and attributes them _en masse_ to the state, whose elimination
would then bring in a millennium of voluntary fraternal organization.
That the state should be to some a deity and to others a devil is
another evidence of the defects of the premises from which discussion
sets out. One theory is as indiscriminate as the other.
There is, however, a definite criterion by which to demarcate the
organized public from other modes of community life. Friendships, for
example, are non-political forms of association. They are characterized
by an intimate and subtle sense of the fruits of intercourse. They
contribute to experience some of its most precious values. Only the
exigencies of a preconceived theory would confuse with the state that
texture of friendships and attachments which is the chief bond in any
community, or would insist that the former depends upon the latter
for existence. Men group themselves also for scientific inquiry, for
religious worship, for artistic production and enjoyment, for sport,
for giving and receiving instruction, for industrial and commercial
undertakings. In each case some combined or conjoint action, which has
grown up out of “natural,” that is, biological, conditions and from
local contiguity, results in producing distinctive consequences--that
is, consequences which differ in kind from those of isolated behavior.
When these consequences are intellectually and emotionally appreciated,
a shared interest is generated and the nature of the interconnected
behavior is thereby transformed. Each form of association has its own
peculiar quality and value, and no person in his senses confuses one
with another. The characteristic of the public as a state springs from
the fact that all modes of associated behavior may have extensive
and enduring consequences which involve others beyond those directly
engaged in them. When these consequences are in turn realized in
thought and sentiment, recognition of them reacts to remake the
conditions out of which they arose. Consequences have to be taken
care of, looked out for. This supervision and regulation cannot be
effected by the primary groupings themselves. For the essence of the
consequences which call a public into being is the fact that they
expand beyond those directly engaged in producing them. Consequently
special agencies and measures must be formed if they are to be attended
to; or else some existing group must take on new functions. The obvious
external mark of the organization of a public or of a state is thus the
existence of officials. Government is not the state, for that includes
the public as well as the rulers charged with special duties and
powers. The public, however, is organized in and through those officers
who act in behalf of its interests.
Thus the state represents an important although distinctive and
restricted social interest. From this point of view there is nothing
extraordinary in the preëminence of the claims of the organized public
over other interests when once they are called into play, nor in
its total indifference and irrelevancy to friendships, associations
for science, art and religion under most circumstances. If the
consequences of a friendship threaten the public, then it is treated
as a conspiracy; usually it is not the state’s business or concern.
Men join each other in partnership as a matter of course to do a piece
of work more profitably or for mutual defense. Let its operations
exceed a certain limit, and others not participating in it find their
security or prosperity menaced by it, and suddenly the gears of the
state are in mesh. Thus it happens that the state, instead of being
all absorbing and inclusive, is under some circumstances the most idle
and empty of social arrangements. Nevertheless, the temptation to
generalize from these instances and conclude that the state generically
is of no significance is at once challenged by the fact that when a
family connection, a church, a trade union, a business corporation,
or an educational institution conducts itself so as to affect large
numbers outside of itself, those who are affected form a public which
endeavors to act through suitable structures, and thus to organize
itself for oversight and regulation.
I know of no better way in which to apprehend the absurdity of the
claims which are sometimes made in behalf of society politically
organized than to call to mind the influence upon community life of
Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Aristotle, Confucius, Homer, Vergil, Dante,
St. Thomas, Shakespeare, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Locke,
Rousseau and countless others, and then to ask ourselves if we conceive
these men to be officers of the state. Any method which so broadens
the scope of the state as to lead to such conclusion merely makes the
state a name for the totality of all kinds of associations. The moment
we have taken the word as loosely as that, it is at once necessary to
distinguish, within it, the state in its usual political and legal
sense. On the other hand, if one is tempted to eliminate or disregard
the state, one may think of Pericles, Alexander, Julius and Augustus
Cæsar, Elizabeth, Cromwell, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck and hundreds
of names of that kind. One dimly feels that they must have had a
private life, but how insignificant it bulks in comparison with their
action as representatives of a state!
This conception of statehood does not imply any belief as to the
propriety or reasonableness of any particular political act, measure or
system. Observations of consequences are at least as subject to error
and illusion as is perception of natural objects. Judgments about
what to undertake so as to regulate them, and how to do it, are as
fallible as other plans. Mistakes pile up and consolidate themselves
into laws and methods of administration which are more harmful than
the consequences which they were originally intended to control. And
as all political history shows, the power and prestige which attend
command of official position render rule something to be grasped and
exploited for its own sake. Power to govern is distributed by the
accident of birth or by the possession of qualities which enable
a person to obtain office, but which are quite irrelevant to the
performance of its representative functions. But the need which calls
forth the organization of the public by means of rulers and agencies of
government persists and to some extent is incarnated in political fact.
Such progress as political history records depends upon some luminous
emergence of the idea from the mass of irrelevancies which obscure and
clutter it. Then some reconstruction occurs which provides the function
with organs more apt for its fulfillment. Progress is not steady and
continuous. Retrogression is as periodic as advance. Industry and
inventions in technology, for example, create means which alter the
modes of associated behavior and which radically change the quantity,
character and place of impact of their indirect consequences.
These changes 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 and 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. The creation of adequately
flexible and responsive political and legal machinery has so far been
beyond the wit of man. An epoch in which the needs of a newly forming
public are counteracted by established forms of the state is one in
which there is increasing disparagement and disregard of the state.
General apathy, neglect and contempt find expression in resort to
various short-cuts of direct action. And direct action is taken by many
other interests than those which employ “direct action” as a slogan,
often most energetically by intrenched class-interests which profess
the greatest reverence for the established “law and order” of the
existing state. By its very nature, a state is ever something to be
scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is
stabilized, it needs to be re-made.
Thus the problem of discovering the state is not a problem for
theoretical inquirers engaged solely in surveying institutions which
already exist. It is a practical problem of human beings living in
association with one another, of mankind generically. It is a complex
problem. It demands power to perceive and recognize the consequences
of the behavior of individuals joined in groups and to trace them
to their source and origin. It involves selection of persons to
serve as representatives of the interests created by these perceived
consequences and to define the functions which they shall possess
and employ. It requires institution of a government such that those
having the renown and power which goes with the exercise of these
functions shall employ them for the public and not turn them to their
own private benefit. It is no cause for wonder, then, that states have
been many, not only in number but in type and kind. For there have
been countless forms of joint activity with correspondingly diverse
consequences. Power to detect consequences has varied especially with
the instrumentalities of knowledge at hand. Rulers have been selected
on all kinds of different grounds. Their functions have varied and
so have their will and zeal to represent common interests. Only the
exigencies of a rigid philosophy can lead us to suppose that there is
some one form or idea of The State which these protean historic states
have realized in various degrees of perfection. The only statement
which can be made is a purely formal one: the state is the organization
of the public effected through officials for the protection of the
interests shared by its members. But what the public may be, what the
officials are, how adequately they perform their function, are things
we have to go to history to discover.
Nevertheless, our conception gives a criterion for determining how
good a particular state is: namely, the degree of organization of
the public which is attained, and the degree in which its officers
are so constituted as to perform their function of caring for
public interests. But there is no _a priori_ rule which can be laid
down and by which when it is followed a good state will be brought
into existence. In no two ages or places is there the same public.
Conditions make the consequences of associated action and the knowledge
of them different. In addition the means by which a public can
determine the government to serve its interests vary. Only formally can
we say what the best state would be. In concrete fact, in actual and
concrete organization and structure, there is no form of state which
can be said to be the best: not at least till history is ended, and one
can survey all its varied forms. The formation of states must be an
experimental process. The trial process may go on with diverse degrees
of blindness and accident, and at the cost of unregulated procedures
of cut and try, of fumbling and groping, without insight into what men
are after or clear knowledge of a good state even when it is achieved.
Or it may proceed more intelligently, because guided by knowledge of
the conditions which must be fulfilled. But it is still experimental.
And since conditions of action and of inquiry and knowledge are always
changing, the experiment must always be retried; the State must always
be rediscovered. Except, once more, in formal statement of conditions
to be met, we have no idea what history may still bring forth. It is
not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what
the state in general should or must be. What they may do is to aid in
creation of methods such that experimentation may go on less blindly,
less at the mercy of accident, more intelligently, so that men may
learn from their errors and profit by their successes. The belief in
political fixity, of the sanctity of some form of state consecrated by
the efforts of our fathers and hallowed by tradition, is one of the
stumbling-blocks in the way of orderly and directed change; it is an
invitation to revolt and revolution.
As the argument has moved to and fro, it will conduce to clearness
to summarize its steps. Conjoint, combined, associated action is a
universal trait of the behavior of things. Such action has results.
Some of the results of human collective action are perceived, that
is, they are noted in such ways that they are taken account of. Then
there arise purposes, plans, measures and means, to secure consequences
which are liked and eliminate those which are found obnoxious. Thus
perception generates a common interest; that is, those affected by
the consequences are perforce concerned in conduct of all those who
along with themselves share in bringing about the results. Sometimes
the consequences are confined to those who directly share in the
transaction which produces them. In other cases they extend far
beyond those immediately engaged in producing them. Thus two kinds of
interests and of measures of regulation of acts in view of consequences
are generated. In the first, interest and control are limited to
those directly engaged; in the second, they extend to those who do
not directly share in the performance of acts. If, then, the interest
constituted by their being affected by the actions in question is to
have any practical influence, control over the actions which produce
them must occur by some indirect means.
So far the statements, it is submitted, set forth matters of actual and
ascertainable fact. Now follows the hypothesis. Those indirectly and
seriously affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough
to require recognition and a name. The name selected is The Public.
This public is organized and made effective by means of representatives
who as guardians of custom, as legislators, as executives, judges,
etc., care for its especial interests by methods intended to regulate
the conjoint actions of individuals and groups. Then and in so far,
association adds to itself political organization, and something which
may be government comes into being: the public is a political state.
The direct confirmation of the hypothesis is found in the statement
of the series of observable and verifiable matters of fact. These
constitute conditions which are sufficient to account, so it is held,
for the characteristic phenomena of political life, or state activity.
If they do, it is superfluous to seek for other explanation. In
conclusion, two qualifications should be added. The account just given
is meant to be generic; it is consequently schematic, and omits many
differential conditions, some of which receive attention in subsequent
chapters. The other point is that in the negative part of the argument,
the attack upon theories which would explain the state by means of
special causal forces and agencies, there is no denial of causal
relations or connections among phenomena themselves. That is obviously
assumed at every point. There can be no consequences and measures to
regulate the mode and quality of their occurrence without the causal
nexus. What is denied is an appeal to _special_ forces outside the
series of observable connected phenomena. Such causal powers are no
different in kind to the occult forces from which physical science
had to emancipate itself. At best, they are but phases of the related
phenomena themselves which are then employed to account for the facts.
What is needed to direct and make fruitful social inquiry is a method
which proceeds on the basis of the interrelations of observable acts
and their results. Such is the gist of the method we propose to follow.