agencies, for example—will often be the result of those officials and representatives, this only comes about for Dewey because the direction and purpose of these institutions are determined elsewhere. Although functioning at the fringes of the state, the public is nonetheless configured as the site from which opinion- and will-formation originate and that is institutionalized via the state.73
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” and that is beyond contestation. He thus rejects metaphysical descriptions that locate the emergence of the state in god, reason, will, nature, mind, or contractual relationships. Here, once more, we return to themes of 1888. The public refers to a space of unity and difference that functions only if we see it as indeterminate, thus allowing the state to emerge as an instrument or tool of problematic activity on the part of human beings. 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 of 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. (70–71)
His point is that connecting the state as state to particular authors who comprise a public or fixed foundations undercuts the extent to which the public can function as a sensory network for emerging problems that can then be managed by state institutions. Focusing on authorship for understanding the state ironically fixes the latter and imputes to the public a substantive unified identity that, as Dewey argues, is out of step with a pluralistic society.
For Dewey there can be no permanent closure of the public itself with a fixed political identity from which the state can be inferred, even though there will be specific delimitations of particular publics. The delimitations of particular publics imply 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, more equitable distribution of monies for public education, or better safeguards on businesses whose waste by-products are contaminating a local reservoir. The former point, that which relates to the public 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 Dewey believes that we will first assess the legitimacy of those needs by carefully paying attention to how those needs might potentially implicate us in relationships of domination. Additionally, Dewey believes the public is a space that enables the democratic state to see widely and feel deeply in order to make an informed judgment. For him, a democratic public and by that fact a democratic state is radically inclusive in theory, even though such inclusiveness means the emergence of distinct and exclusive publics.
In many ways Dewey’s discussion of the public has as its goal an inclusive state apparatus.
There is no sharp and clear line which draws itself, pointing out beyond peradventure, 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. Hence 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. (107)
Experimentally determining the nature and scope of the state means we are attempting to envision supplemental institutional and legal appendages that need to be added to address the concerns of a particular public. But we are also implicitly, Dewey believes, testing the extent to which preexisting institutions are amenable to transformation. Insofar as such institutions are not, Dewey envisions the public 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” (80). In this context, the public potentially stands in an uneasy relationship to the state, especially in its attempts to democratize the functioning of the state. Dewey captures this point in his concern about the extent to which state institutions ossify around a set of interests and so become unresponsive to new and emerging publics, thus generating 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 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. (80–81, 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 may 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 of resources and equal access to political power. We can diversify our examples to include other rebellious groups: labor unions on behalf of workers, environmental organizations, and farmers, just to name a few. These movements exist on a scale that slides from 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., the civil rights movement and women’s rights movement). But in all situations, Dewey argues, the claims of the public cannot flow directly into the administrative power of the state. Instead, publics must seek to build power externally, the result of which functions as a counterweight to publics that are entrenched via the state and wield arbitrary power. This, for Dewey, is the essence of democracy’s radical character.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, the questions that any reader must put to The Public and Its Problems are the following: How might we recapture, sustain, and employ democracy’s radical character in the face of its eclipse? How can the public reemerge given the technological, economic, bureaucratic, and psychological obstacles that stand in its way? These questions were not merely relevant in the 1920s, but seem equally, if not more, relevant in today’s political climate. And while Dewey often struggles for an answer, he is insistent that the solution is bound up with restoring a sense of communal life that can move us from the impersonal Great Society into the personal and meaningful Great Community. “Unless,” he writes, “local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself” (231). What would communal life look like given the national and, increasingly, international stage on which
