us understand how Dewey views the relationship between citizens and experts (chapter 6) and underscores the radical character of the democratic public (chapters 1–3). The answer to the second question emerges in Dewey’s discussion of what he believes are the preconditions for the public to assume its role under modern conditions. These themes emerge in chapters 4 and 5. For the remainder of the introduction I shall concentrate on the first of these issues, leaving it to the reader to assess Dewey’s engagement with the second.
The first issue emerges when he describes the relationship between experts and the citizenry, revisiting some of the themes expressed in his review of Lippmann’s work. In fact, the passage to which we will now refer sends us back to some of his reflections in 1888:
The final obstacle in the way of any aristocratic rule is that in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses, the best do not and cannot remain the best, the wise ceases to be wise. It is impossible for highbrows to secure a monopoly of such knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs. . . .
. . . The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. (223–24)
This passage is located in chapter 6, where Dewey discusses the problem of method in democratic decision making. One of the central claims he advances in that chapter is that the hypotheses we form for responding to political problems are only as good as the methods we employ—that is, the extent to which the methods make us receptive to data from various parts of the environment. But problems themselves, as he argues, frame and guide our inquiry; they imply the existence of a complex horizon of value and meaning that is now fractured and in need of creative valuation to restore continuity. Dewey’s point is not simply that without the input of the wearer of shoes the shoemaker will respond in a way that would not address the existing pinch. Rather, without input from the individual experiencing the pinch, the expert shoemaker will not have the subject matter to initiate or guide his inquiry.
Dewey is offering a rich account of democracy and the status of citizens and experts therein. First, the experiential aspect of the example—feeling the pinch—localizes problems in the life of communities and individuals. Political problems, as Dewey emphasizes, are often related to the flourishing of life, and the persistence of those problems makes flourishing difficult or impossible. Second, the importance he accords inquiry is meant to free individuals and promote their development (what Dewey often called “growth”). Here Dewey encourages a more critical stance toward the status of community than was the case in his early 1888 essay. Third, this liberation requires an intimate and critical engagement with the problems that afflict individuals and the ways in which the potential resolution of those problems fits with the liberation of others—an engagement from which the input of individuals and communities cannot be expunged and that is essential to guide inquiry.
In contrast to Lippmann, Dewey views the role of experts as ancillary to that of citizens, in essence undercutting the turn to experts that we see in Lippmann. As he says of experts, “Their expertness is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon which the former depend” (225). Dewey is making two critical points. The first is that expertise, properly understood, is always tethered to a more “technical” field of investigation. As he understands it, experts come to gain intellectual authority and therefore become bearers of knowledge because of the audience they engage. Citizens are thus authorities just to the extent that it is their problems that create the framework in which expertise functions. The complexity and texture of those problems, Dewey argues, come into view through a deliberative exchange among citizens that draws out existing and emerging concerns and worries. All of this guides them as they determine what they, as a political community, will make of the information provided. But it also means that there will rarely be complete agreement on who the experts are, and this will cut against any argument for blindly deferring to some perceived “expert” authority.
The second point of the sentence indicates that if something like “expertise” of political affairs exists, it will have to emerge from the public. In other words, how citizens understand information partly depends on the goals toward which they are moving as a political community, and this can emerge only through deliberation. Central to this process are questions not merely about how we understand the problem from the outset (e.g., Who are the subjects of this problem? What may be the long-term results if the problem is allowed to persist?), but about the implication of various proposals suggested to alleviate the problem (e.g., What are the value or economic trade-offs in choosing this or that proposal?). For Dewey, answering these questions—that is, arriving at knowledge—implies a kind of collective artistry to social inquiry that draws on the specific experiences of individuals, expert knowledge, facts about the problem in question, and potential risks of action. Hence, he explains that to the extent policy experts “become a specialized class they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve” (223). Since citizens are uniquely situated to offer knowledge of their own experiences, Dewey argues, their role in the design and implementation of policies is unavoidable in addressing the problem (224–25).
There is a practical upshot to Dewey’s argument. For example, where decision making is based less on the continuous input from public hearings, town hall meetings, advisory councils, and other deliberative bodies, there is greater reason to be concerned about the ends to which those decisions aim and the background interests from which they proceed. Moreover, there is reason to be equally suspicious of bureaucratic processes that are resistant to expanding decision-making power by taking a bottom-up approach.69 Of course there may be good reason not to take such an approach, as for example when we think about the obstacles that limited resources and time pose for political decision making. Here Lippmann’s point about the obstacles to broad-based inclusion is inescapable. But Dewey’s argument implies that the burden of proof must rest with those who seek less inclusive rather than more inclusive arrangements.70 To the extent that experts guide political power without taking direction from the public in the form of deliberation, the entire decision-making process loses legitimacy and gains in suspicion.
Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy
The considerations above, which directly engage Lippmann, are part of how Dewey understands the historical emergence of democracy as a way of broadening the use of political power. Indeed, he defends this view in The Public and Its Problems. Throughout the work, but especially in chapter 3, “The Democratic State,” Dewey consistently emphasizes the fortuitous emergence of political democracy. He resists the idea that democracy was fated to happen. By political democracy he means “a mode of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their conduct as officials” through universal suffrage, that emphasizes the publicity of decision making (121). Despite its contingent emergence, Dewey argues that democracy’s development nonetheless represents an “effort in the first place to counteract the forces that have so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors, and in the second place an effort to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public ends” (121).
In keeping with his discussion in The Public and Its Problems and Liberalism and Social Action, he sees democracy emerging in an attempt to block political power from being exercised arbitrarily: “I would not minimize the advance scored in substitution of methods of discussion and conference for the method of arbitrary rule.”71 The use of power is arbitrary, for him, when it cannot be substantively informed by those over whom it will be exercised. In such instances, Dewey argues,
