against democracy rejects the view, which he associates with the political philosopher Rousseau, that the people participate in the formation of every policy. In this view, Maine argues, all citizens feel themselves to be at one with decision-making because they do not see those decisions at odds with their deeply felt interests.21 This is at the core, says Maine, of what is meant by the sovereignty of the people.
Maine argues instead that this view is a mere fiction. Rather than being derived from the true will of the people, he contends, political consensus is formed as a result of corruption and manipulation: “[I]t is absurd to suppose that, if the hard-toiled, and the needy, the artisan and the agricultural labourer, become the depositaries of power, and if they can find agents through whom it becomes possible for them to exercise it, they will not employ it for what they may be led to believe are their own interests.”22 Maine’s point is simple: it is impossible to form a general will out of a multitude of conflicting interests, and what appears to be the general will is in fact the will of a few exercised over those without political power.23
Although Maine’s political preference in the book points toward aristocracy—indeed, he attributes to aristocracy “the progress of mankind”24—he acknowledges the source of democracy’s stability. For him, that stability does not rest with the production of a common will, but is derived principally from the institutional structures that are grafted onto democracy and that increase political control, something he believes is sorely missing from the English system. Maine was essentially responding to the 1884 Franchise Bill, which provided voting rights to previously disenfranchised citizens in England and which extended formal democracy.25 But his point is clear: stability comes from without and implies the frailty of democracy if left to its own devices. He pursues this issue directly in essay 4 of Popular Government, “The Constitution of the United States.” Much in line with the trajectory of the book, Maine contends that what holds the United States government together is a system of delegation and conservative checks and balances within a constitutional structure that appropriately constrains the excesses of the masses on the one hand and their tendency to be duped by those that might undermine the entire system on the other.26
In “The Ethics of Democracy” Dewey seeks to address this indictment and lays the foundation for a number of themes to which he returns in The Public and Its Problems. He addresses the criticism by identifying Maine’s account of democracy with a narrow and faulty premise regarding the relationship between humans and society.
What makes it more surprising that Maine should adopt the numerical aggregation, the multitude conception, is the fact that in times past he has dealt such vigorous blows against a theory which is the natural and inevitable outcome of this conception. The “Social Contract” theory of states has never been more strongly attacked than by Maine, and yet the sole source of this theory is just such a conception of society, as a mass of units, as the one Maine here adopts. . . . It is the idea that men are mere individuals, without any social relations until they form a contract. The method by which they get out of their individualistic conditions is not the important matter; rather this is the fact, that they are in an individualistic condition of which they have to be got. . . . Maine rejects this artifice as unreal, but keeps the fundamental idea, the idea of men as a mere mass, which led to it.27
For Dewey, the initial problem with Maine’s view is that he begins with the assumption of humans as solitary units. Correspondingly, society appears not as a unified whole with differentiated parts, but rather as a mass of unconnected elements. This is precisely why Maine rejects the idea that we can identify political decisions with something called “the people.” “Vox Populi [Voice of the People],” he says, “may be Vox Dei [Voice of God], but . . . there never has been any agreement as to what Vox means or as to what Populus means.”28
But Maine also rejects, several times in his text, this explanation of human society as based on a priori speculation.29 Despite this, Dewey contends, Maine nonetheless rests his own view of democracy on the sociological presuppositions of the social contract theory. Thus, Maine misrepresents the relationship between the individual and society. “Men are not isolated non-social atoms,” Dewey explains, “but are men only when in intrinsic relations to men.”30 For him, there is a naturalness to our interpersonal associations that is missed by the atomistic conception of society. In fact, a theory that takes humans as situated beings whose identities take shape in society “has wholly superseded the theory of men as an aggregate, as a heap of grains of sand needing some factitious mortar to put them into semblance or order.”31
In other words, if interpersonal associations are fundamental to understanding individuals, then an account of interests formed by those individuals will be incomplete without reference to those interpersonal associations. We are socially constituted beings; living together provides us with resources to form interests that cohere with society, but community also provides the conditions of conflict. For Dewey, our interpersonal associations—a kind of prepolitical basis of social interaction—provide a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition for describing democracy.
Understanding the basis of democracy in this way allows Dewey to shift the discussion away from defending the very idea of democracy to elucidating how best to understand it. His reference to “factitious mortar” quoted above is significant in this regard. If political society is not held together by a false will imposed externally for the sake of order, it must, he concludes, imply unity that makes the idea of a coherent political community intelligible to the citizenry. For this reason, he goes on in the essay to adopt a view of society as “a social organism” in which the function of the various parts, like the human body, is conducive to overall harmony.32 The metaphor comes from both Dewey’s Congregational Christian training and the heavy influence on Dewey of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and British Idealists such as Green and F. H. Bradley (1846–1924).33 For Dewey specifically, the point of the metaphor is to provide a way to imagine the state as embodying a harmonious whole (much like an organism), the integrity of which is shaped by and expressed in the actions of individual citizens (much like the individual elements that constitute an organism).
Readers of Dewey should be careful at precisely this juncture. Dewey concedes that society is not possessed of “one interest or will”; he acknowledges, for example, that there are a diversity of interests, “struggle[s] and opposition[s] and hostilit[ies].”34 There are, he says, “classes within society, circles within the classes and cliques within the circles.”35 Yet Dewey insists that representation of those interests through one’s vote are not the result of individuals’ private reflections independent of the whole, but denote a reciprocal relation between individuals and the larger political community. This is not simply a function of Dewey’s thinking in this essay, but also appears in his ethical writings during the period such as Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891) and The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (1894). As he says in the first of the two works: “IN THE REALIZATION OF INDIVIDUALITY THERE IS FOUND ALSO THE NEEDED REALIZATION OF SOME COMMUNITY OF PERSONS OF WHICH THE INDIVIDUAL IS A MEMBER; AND, CONVERSELY, THE AGENT WHO DULY satisfies THE COMMUNITY IN WHICH HE SHARES, BY THAT SAME CONDUCT SATISFIES HIMSELF.”36 This account dovetails with Rousseau’s understanding of the centrality of the community to self-development, the Hegelian account of freedom, and more recent communitarian descriptions of self- and collective-realization.37
These previous remarks partly confront any reader of this essay with an important difficulty not simply in Dewey’s philosophy, but in democracy more generally. Given Dewey’s theory of society, he often downplays the persistence of conflict. Nor does he acknowledge that conflict among competing claims will often implicate a political community in decisions where loss is inevitable. In fact, according to Dewey, conflict appears to lead necessarily to unity. But to liken the body politic to a human organism means that different parts function to the benefit of the whole. And when we think of parts of our bodies not functioning properly, we typically see those parts as sick or abnormal.
