out? This is the primary question whose answer seems terribly and perhaps tragically elusive.
THE PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS
Foreword (1927)
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.
Introduction (1946)
This book was written some twenty years ago. It is my belief that intervening events confirm the position about the public and its connection with the state as the political organization of human relationships that was then presented. The most obvious consideration is the effect of the Second World War in weakening the conditions to which we give the name “Isolationism.” The First World War had enough of that effect to call the League of Nations into being. But the United States refused to participate. And, while out-and-out nationalism was a prime factor in the refusal, it was reinforced by the strong belief that, after all, the main purpose of the League was to preserve the fruits of victory for the European nations that were on the winning side. There is no need to revive the old controversies by discussing how far that belief was justifiable. The important fact for the issue here discussed is that the belief that such was the case was a strongly actuating consideration in the refusal of the United States to join the League. After the Second World War, this attitude was so changed that the country joined the United Nations.
What is the bearing of this fact upon the position taken in the book regarding the public and the connection of the public with the political aspects of social life? In brief, it is as follows: The decline (though probably not for a rather long future time the obliteration) of Isolationism is evidence that there is developing the sense that relations between nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call for some measure of political organization. Just what the measure is to be, how far political authority is to extend is a question still in dispute. There are those who would hold it to the strictest possible construction of the code for the United Nations adopted at San Francisco.1 There are others who urge the necessity of altering the code so as to provide for a World Federation having a wide political authority.
It is aside from the point here under consideration to discuss which party is right. The very fact that there are two parties, that there is an active dispute, is evidence that the question of the relations between nations which in the past have claimed and exercised singular sovereignty has now definitely entered the arena of political problems. It is pointed out in the text of this book that the scope, the range, of the public, the question of where the public shall end and the sphere of the private begin, has long been a vital political problem in domestic affairs. At last the same issue is actively raised about the relations between national units, no one of which in the past has acknowledged political responsibility in the conduct of its policies toward other national units. There has been acknowledgement of moral responsibility. But the same thing holds good in relations that are private and non-political; the chief difference is the greater ease with which moral responsibility broke down in the case of relationships between nations. The very doctrine of “Sovereignty” is a complete denial of political responsibility.
The fact that this issue is now within the active scope of political discussion also bears out another point made in the text. The matter at issue is in no way one between the “social” and the “non-social,” or between that which is moral and that which is immoral. No doubt the feeling on the part of some that the moral responsibility which concerns the relations between nations should be taken more seriously played a part in bringing about a greater emphasis on the fact that the consequences of these relations demand some kind of political organization. But only the ultra-cynical have ever denied in the past the existence of some moral responsibility. Sufficient proof of this is found in the fact that, in order to interest the citizens of any genuinely modern people in an actual war, it has been necessary to carry on a campaign to show that superior moral claims were on the side of a war policy. The change of attitude is not fundamentally an affair of moral conversion, a change from obdurate immorality to a perception of the claims of righteousness. It results from greatly intensified recognition of the factual consequences of war. And this increased perception is in turn mainly due to the fact that modern wars are indefinitely more destructive and that the destruction occurs over a much wider geographical area than was the case in the past. It is no longer possible to argue that war brings positive good. The most that can be said is that it is a choice of the lesser moral evil.
The fact that the problem of the scope of the political relations between nations has now entered the arena of political discussion, goes to confirm another point emphasized in the book. The same problem of where the line is to be drawn between affairs left to private consideration and those subject to political adjudication is formally a universal problem. But with respect to the actual content taken by the problem, the question is always a concrete one. That is, it is a question of specifying factual consequences, which are never inherently fixed nor subject to determination in terms of abstract theory. Like all facts subject to observation and specification, they are spatial-temporal, not eternal. (The State is pure myth. And, as is pointed out in the text, the very notion of the state as a universal ideal and norm arose at a particular space-time juncture to serve quite concrete aims.)
Suppose for example that the idea of federation, as distinct from both isolation and imperial rule, is accepted as a working principle. Some things are settled, but not the question of just what affairs come within the jurisdiction of the Federated Government and which are excluded and remain for decision by national units as such. The problem of what should be included and what excluded from federated authority would become acute. And in the degree in which the decision on this point is made intelligently, it will be made on the ground of foreseen, concrete consequences likely to result from adopting alternative policies. And just as in the case of domestic political affairs, there will be the problem of discovering something of common interest amid the conflict of separate interests of the distinctive units. Friendship is not the cause of arrangements that serve the common interests of several units, but the outcome of the arrangements. General theory might indeed by helpful; but it would serve intelligent decisions only if it were used as an aid to foreseeing factual consequences, not directly per se.
Thus far, I have kept discussion within what I find to be the field of acts sufficiently evident so that any one who so desires can take note of them. I come now to a point that trenches actively upon the field of important, unsettled hypotheses. In the second chapter of the text, changes in “material culture” are mentioned as an important factor in shaping the concrete conditions which determine the consequences that are of the kind called “public” and that lead to some sort of political intervention. If there were ever any reasonable doubt of the import of technological factors with respect to socially significant human consequences, that time is well past. Nor is the importance of technological development confined to domestic issues, great as it is in this field. The enormously increased destructiveness of war, previously mentioned, is the immediate outcome of modern technological developments. And the frictions and conflicts which are the immediate occasion of wars are due to the infinitely multiplied and more intricate points of contact between peoples which in turn are the direct result of technological developments.
So far we are still within the bounds of the observable facts of the transactions that occur between national units in the same way they occur between the members of a given domestic unit. The unsettled question that now looms as the irrepressible conflict of the future pertains
