Dewey on Publics

In his 1927 The Public and Its Problems John Dewey offered an argument concerning the relationship between publics and the state which is useful for thinking about the changing forms of public space and practice today, especially in the context of my current research on emerging internet practices. Although Dewey’s book is in my opinion needlessly difficult to follow (a common stylistic feature of Dewey’s labored prose), the core of the argument runs as follows. Dewey argues that public associations conceptually precede state associations such that states impress coherence upon publics. This, however, leads to a seeming paradox about contemporary political reality insofar as the state in Dewey’s day seemed very strong and efficient but the public it was supposed to organize was hardly perceptible. Had the state outgrown the public, thus becoming an empty husk of a political form? Dewey suggests that in response to this difficult problem we must work to reorganize the new public forms in which we find ourselves. Such reorganization, however, may require that we abandon the terms according to which the old public forms were organized. These terms were: organization shall take primarily on the basis of a liberal state which will proceed by way of instituting a distinction between public and private spheres. Dewey is not clear what new alternative terms are required but he does at least say this much: the new political organization shall be democratic and is likely to invoke democracy through a plurality of means including states, corporations, civic associations, and other public forms.

In his early chapters Dewey specifies (it is not clear if these are stipulations or explications although presumably they are meant to be both) the conceptual relations between public spaces, private spaces, and states in a way that pretty much tracks the traditional logic of liberalism. Dewey is concerned with the tradition way of demarcating public and private. He argues against the traditional liberal demarcation on the basis of opposing individuality and sociality (13). Instead he offers this distinction: “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” (15). Publics are constituted and maintained by actions which form intersections of persons, claims, and values in such a way as to call for the “control” (15) and “organization” (26) of these actions. Those acts and practices are private which do not require such control and organization even though they may form intersections of persons, claims, and values. Now Dewey argues in the early chapters that “in this distinction we find the key to the nature and office of the state” (15). But while the early chapters of The Public and Its Problems seem primarily concerned with the state, it should be noticed that Dewey’s new way of demarcating public from private leaves open the crucial question of whether or not the state is the only means available for achieving the control and organization of the public? While in his early chapters Dewey seems concerned to explicate the issue in the traditional statist terms of liberal democratic political philosophy, things change when he turns his attention to the actual relation between publicity, privacy, and the state in the historic present in which he was writing.

In the fourth chapter the tone of the book shifts dramatically. Dewey begins insisting that the traditional liberal democratic approach is increasingly failing insofar as we find ourselves with a shell of a state which has no coherent public to organize. Here is Dewey: “the Public seems to be lost; it is certainly bewildered. The government, officials, and their activities, are plainly with us…. But where is the public which these officials are supposed to represent?” (117). The problem, for Dewey as for many others in his day including Walter Lippmann and not long before them both William James and Randolph Bourne, is that of ‘the lost public’. The problem, Dewey eventually gets around to saying, is that we find ourselves amidst new public forms for which the old organizational powers of the state are inadequate. The new public forms are plural (126), diffuse (137), and mobile (140). Dewey sums up the difficulty thus: “[A]gencies are not established which canalize the streams of social action and thereby regulate them. Hence the publics are amorphous and unarticulated…. The prime difficulty is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests” (131, 146).

In the final chapters Dewey sketches the terms by which the problem of the lost public might be approached, reconstructed, and solved. Dewey is here clear that we cannot specify in advance what forms of political life will be necessary for constituting coherence and organization out of the currently-disorganized plurality of publics (147, 166). This suggests a point which I find important but which Dewey does not make sufficiently explicit, namely that his analysis indicates that the traditional liberal solution of a separation of public and private spheres as achieved by the state will no longer do. That Dewey seems to be moving in this sort of post-statist direction is further suggested by the fact that he insists that the answer to the problem of disorganized publics must be democratic in its approach (148) and yet he emphatically proclaims that, “The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best” (148). Dewey is not at all direct about his answer but he is clear enough: our pluralistic publics shall be made coherent by democracy but we must not identify democracy with the singular organizational form of the state as liberalism traditionally has done.

In short, then, I read Dewey as urging that the old liberal compromise between a unified public sphere organized by the state and a highly differentiated private sphere insulated from state organization was in 1927 quickly losing its intelligibility. As such, Dewey might be seen as occupying the front end of a long and slow historical process which we are now almost eight decades later nearing the tail end of. That process is the increasing blurring of the distinction between public and private, and the corollary loosening of the grip of statism on liberal democratic politics. As the distinction between public and private blurs, the statist idea that public life can be organized according to one single logic as embodied in state institutions, loses its grip. We recognize around us, instead, a pluralization of public spaces and a politicization of private spaces such that the state turns out to be just amongst many tools of political organization. The long and slow historical process which Dewey was at the front end of was one that will culminate not in a post-state politics but in a post-statist politics.

Among those emerging political practices which seem increasingly post-statist in the sense just described are: forms of economic and cultural globalization, new forms of social affiliation as exemplified by crucial categories of race and gender, and new technological forms such as internetworking. All of these are breeding new forms of publics which I suspect can be organized only on a post-statist model of politics.

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