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Title: The public and its problems

Author: John Dewey

Release date: June 20, 2023 [eBook #71000]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Alan Swallow, 1927

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THE PUBLIC
AND ITS PROBLEMS
BY
JOHN DEWEY
A L A N S WA L L O W
DENVER

COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright renewed, 1954, by Mrs. John Dewey

PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

P R E FAT O R Y N O T E
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.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Search for the Public 3
Divergence of facts and theoretical interpretations
concerning the nature of the state, 3. Practical import
of theories, 5. Theories in terms of causal origin, 9.
Theory in terms of perceived consequences, 12.
Distinction of private and public substituted for that
of individual and social, 13. The influence of
association, 22. Plurality of associations, 26.
Criterion of the public, 27. Function of the state, 28.
The state as an experimental problem, 32. Summary,
34.
II. Discovery of the State 37
Public and state, 38. Geographical extent, 39.
Multiplicity of states, 43. Spread of consequences,
47. Law is not command, 53. Law and
reasonableness, 55. The public and long-established
habits of action, 57. Fear of the new, 59. Irreparable
consequences, 62. Variation of state-functions
according to circumstances of time and place, 65.
State and government, 66. State and society, 69. The
pluralistic theory, 73.
III. The Democratic State 75
Private and representative rôles of officials, 76.
Selection of rulers by irrelevant methods, 78. The
problem of control of officials, 82. Meanings of
democracy, 83. Fallacy as to origin of democratic
government, 84. Influence of non-political factors,
85. The origin of “individualism,” 86. Influence of

the new industry; the theory of “natural” economic
laws, 90. James Mill’s philosophy of democratic
government, 93. Criticism of “individualism,” 95.
Criticism of antithesis of natural and artificial, 102.
Wants and aims as functions of social life, 104.
Persistence of pre-industrial institutions, 108. Final
problem, 109.
IV. Eclipse of the Public 110
Local origin of American democratic government,
111. National unification due to technological
factors, 114. Submergence of the public, 116.
Disparity of inherited ideas and machinery with
actual conditions, 117. Illustrations of resulting
failures, 119. Problem of discovering the public, 122.
Democracy versus the expert, 123. Explanation of
eclipse of public, 126. Illustrated by the World War,
127. Application of criteria of the public, 129. Failure
of traditional principles, 131. Political apathy
accounted for, 134. Need of experts, 135. Rivals of
political interest, 138. Ideals and instrumentalities,
141.
V. Search for the Great Community 143
Democracy as idea and as governmental behavior,
143. Problem of the Great Community, 147. Meaning
of the democratic ideal, 148. Democracy and
community life, 149. Community and associated
activity, 151. Communication and the community,
152. Intellectual conditions of the Great Community,
155. Habit and intelligence, 158. Science and
knowledge, 163. Limitations upon social inquiry,
166. Isolation of social inquiry, 171. Pure and applied
science, 172. Communication and public opinion,
173. Limitations of distribution of knowledge, 176.
Communication as art, 183.

VI. The Problem of Method 185
Antithesis between individual and social as
obstruction to method, 186. Meaning of individual,
185. Where opposition lies, 191. Meaning of
absolutistic logic, 194. Illustration from doctrine of
“evolution,” 196. From psychology, 197. Difference
of human and physical science, 199. Experimental
inquiry as alternative, 202. Method, and government
by experts, 203. Democracy and education by
discussion, 206. The level of intelligence, 210. The
necessity of local community life, 211. Problem of
restoration, 213. Tendencies making for
reëstablishment, 215. Connection of this problem
with the problem of political intelligence, 217.
Index 221

THE PUBLIC
AND ITS PROBLEMS

CHAPTER I

SEARCH FOR THE PUBLIC
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and
the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion. Many
persons seem to suppose that facts carry their meaning along with
themselves on their face. Accumulate enough of them, and their
interpretation stares out at you. The development of physical science is
thought to confirm the idea. But the power of physical facts to coerce belief
does not reside in the bare phenomena. It proceeds from method, from the
technique of research and calculation. No one is ever forced by just the
collection of facts to accept a particular theory of their meaning, so long as
one retains intact some other doctrine by which he can marshal them. Only
when the facts are allowed free play for the suggestion of new points of
view is any significant conversion of conviction as to meaning possible.
Take away from physical science its laboratory apparatus and its
mathematical technique, and the human imagination might run wild in its
theories of interpretation even if we suppose the brute facts to remain the
same.
In any event, social philosophy exhibits an immense gap between facts
and doctrines. Compare, for example, the facts of politics with the theories
which are extant regarding the nature of the state. If inquirers confine
themselves to observed phenomena, the behavior of kings, presidents,
legislators, judges, sheriffs, assessors and all other public officials, surely a
reasonable consensus is not difficult to attain. Contrast with this agreement
the differences which exist as to the basis, nature, functions and justification
of the state, and note the seemingly hopeless disagreement. If one asks not
for an enumeration of facts, but for a definition of the state, one is plunged
into controversy, into a medley of contradictory clamors. According to one
tradition, which claims to derive from Aristotle, the state is associated and
harmonized life lifted to its highest potency; the state is at once the

keystone of the social arch and is the arch in its wholeness. According to
another view, it is just one of many social institutions, having a narrow but
important function, that of arbiter in the conflict of other social units. Every
group springs out of and realizes a positive human interest; the church,
religious values; guilds, unions and corporations material economic
interests, and so on. The state, however, has no concern of its own; its
purpose is formal, like that of the leader of the orchestra who plays no
instrument and makes no music, but who serves to keep other players who
do produce music in unison with one another. Still a third view has it that
the state is organized oppression, at once a social excrescence, a parasite
and a tyrant. A fourth is that it is an instrument more or less clumsy for
keeping individuals from quarreling too much with one another.
Confusion grows when we enter subdivisions of these different views
and the grounds offered for them. In one philosophy, the state is the apex
and completion of human association, and manifests the highest realization
of all distinctively human capacities. The view had a certain pertinency
when it was first formulated. It developed in an antique city-state, where to
be fully a free man and to be a citizen participating in the drama, the sports,
the religion and the government of the community were equivalent affairs.
But the view persists and is applied to the state of to-day. Another view
coördinates the state with the church (or as a variant view slightly
subordinates it to the latter) as the secular arm of Deity maintaining
outward order and decorum among men. A modern theory idealizes the
state and its activities by borrowing the conceptions of reason and will,
magnifying them till the state appears as the objectified manifestation of a
will and reason which far transcend the desires and purposes which can be
found among individuals or assemblages of individuals.
We are not concerned, however, with writing either a cyclopedia or
history of political doctrines. So we pause with these arbitrary illustrations
of the proposition that little common ground has been discovered between
the factual phenomena of political behavior and the interpretation of the
meaning of these phenomena. One way out of the impasse is to consign the
whole matter of meaning and interpretation to political philosophy as
distinguished from political science. Then it can be pointed out that futile
speculation is a companion of all philosophy. The moral is to drop all
doctrines of this kind overboard, and stick to facts verifiably ascertained.

The remedy urged is simple and attractive. But it is not possible to
employ it. Political facts are not outside human desire and judgment.
Change men’s estimate of the value of existing political agencies and forms,
and the latter change more or less. The different theories which mark
political philosophy do not grow up externally to the facts which they aim
to interpret; they are amplifications of selected factors among those facts.
Modifiable and altering human habits sustain and generate political
phenomena. These habits are not wholly informed by reasoned purpose and
deliberate choice—far from it—but they are more or less amenable to them.
Bodies of men are constantly engaged in attacking and trying to change
some political habits, while other bodies of men are actively supporting and
justifying them. It is mere pretense, then, to suppose that we can stick by
the de facto, and not raise at some points the question of de jure: the
question of by what right, the question of legitimacy. And such a question
has a way of growing until it has become a question as to the nature of the
state itself. The alternatives before us are not factually limited science on
one hand and uncontrolled speculation on the other. The choice is between
blind, unreasoned attack and defense on the one hand, and discriminating
criticism employing intelligent method and a conscious criterion on the
other.
The prestige of the mathematical and physical sciences is great, and
properly so. But the difference between facts which are what they are
independent of human desire and endeavor and facts which are to some
extent what they are because of human interest and purpose, and which alter
with alteration in the latter, cannot be got rid of by any methodology. The
more sincerely we appeal to facts, the greater is the importance of the
distinction between facts which condition human activity and facts which
are conditioned by human activity. In the degree which we ignore this
difference, social science becomes pseudo-science. Jeffersonian and
Hamiltonian political ideas are not merely theories dwelling in the human
mind remote from facts of American political behavior. They are
expressions of chosen phases and factors among those facts, but they are
also something more: namely, forces which have shaped those facts and
which are still contending to shape them in the future this way and that.
There is more than a speculative difference between a theory of the state
which regards it as an instrument in protecting individuals in the rights they
already have, and one which conceives its function to be the effecting of a

more equitable distribution of rights among individuals. For the theories are
held and applied by legislators in congress and by judges on the bench and
make a difference in the subsequent facts themselves.
I make no doubt that the practical influence of the political
philosophies of Aristotle, the Stoics, St. Thomas, Locke, Rousseau, Kant
and Hegel has often been exaggerated in comparison with the influence of
circumstances. But a due measure of efficacy cannot be denied them on the
ground which is sometimes proffered; it cannot be denied on the ground
that ideas are without potency. For ideas belong to human beings who have
bodies, and there is no separation between the structures and processes of
the part of the body that entertains the ideas and the part that performs acts.
Brain and muscles work together, and the brains of men are much more
important data for social science than are their muscular system and their
sense organs.
It is not our intention to engage in a discussion of political
philosophies. The concept of the state, like most concepts which are
introduced by “The,” is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to
be of ready use. It is a concept which can be approached by a flank
movement more easily than by a frontal attack. The moment we utter the
words “The State” a score of intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision.
Without our intention and without our notice, the notion of “The State”
draws us imperceptibly into a consideration of the logical relationship of
various ideas to one another, and away from facts of human activity. It is
better, if possible, to start from the latter and see if we are not led thereby
into an idea of something which will turn out to implicate the marks and
signs which characterize political behavior.
There is nothing novel in this method of approach. But very much
depends upon what we select from which to start and very much depends
upon whether we select our point of departure in order to tell at the
terminus what the state ought to be or what it is. If we are too concerned
with the former, there is a likelihood that we shall unwittingly have
doctored the facts selected in order to come out at a predetermined point.
The phase of human action we should not start with is that to which direct
causative power is attributed. We should not look for state-forming forces.
If we do, we are likely to get involved in mythology. To explain the origin
of the state by saying that man is a political animal is to travel in a verbal

circle. It is like attributing religion to a religious instinct, the family to
marital and parental affection, and language to a natural endowment which
impels men to speech. Such theories merely reduplicate in a so-called
causal force the effects to be accounted for. They are of a piece with the
notorious potency of opium to put men to sleep because of its dormitive
power.
The warning is not directed against a man of straw. The attempt to
derive the state, or any other social institution, from strictly “psychological”
data is in point. Appeal to a gregarious instinct to account for social
arrangements is the outstanding example of the lazy fallacy. Men do not run
together and join in a larger mass as do drops of quicksilver, and if they did
the result would not be a state nor any mode of human association. The
instincts, whether named gregariousness, or sympathy, or the sense of
mutual dependence, or domination on one side and abasement and
subjection on the other, at best account for everything in general and
nothing in particular. And at worst, the alleged instinct and natural
endowment appealed to as a causal force themselves represent
physiological tendencies which have previously been shaped into habits of
action and expectation by means of the very social conditions they are
supposed to explain. Men who have lived in herds develop attachment to
the horde to which they have become used; children who have perforce
lived in dependence grow into habits of dependence and subjection. The
inferiority complex is socially acquired, and the “instinct” of display and
mastery is but its other face. There are structural organs which
physiologically manifest themselves in vocalizations as the organs of a bird
induce song. But the barking of dogs and the song of birds are enough to
prove that these native tendencies do not generate language. In order to be
converted into language, native vocalization requires transformation by
extrinsic conditions, both organic and extra-organic or environmental:
formation, be it noted, not just stimulation. The cry of a baby can doubtless
be described in purely organic terms, but the wail becomes a noun or verb
only by its consequences in the responsive behavior of others. This
responsive behavior takes the form of nurture and care, themselves
dependent upon tradition, custom and social patterns. Why not postulate an
“instinct” of infanticide as well as one of guidance and instruction? Or an
“instinct” of exposing girls and taking care of boys?

We may, however, take the argument in a less mythological form than
is found in the current appeal to social instincts of one sort or another. The
activities of animals, like those of minerals and plants, are correlated with
their structure. Quadrupeds run, worms crawl, fish swim, birds fly. They are
made that way; it is “the nature of the beast.” We do not gain anything by
inserting instincts to run, creep, swim and fly between the structure and the
act. But the strictly organic conditions which lead men to join, assemble,
foregather, combine, are just those which lead other animals to unite in
swarms and packs and herds. In describing what is common in human and
other animal junctions and consolidations we fail to touch what is
distinctively human in human associations. These structural conditions and
acts may be sine qua nons of human societies; but so are the attractions and
repulsions which are exhibited in inanimate things. Physics and chemistry
as well as zoölogy may inform us of some of the conditions without which
human beings would not associate. But they do not furnish us with the
sufficient conditions of community life and of the forms which it takes.
We must in any case start from acts which are performed, not from
hypothetical causes for those acts, and consider their consequences. We
must also introduce intelligence, or the observation of consequences as
consequences, that is, in connection with the acts from which they proceed.
Since we must introduce it, it is better to do so knowingly than it is to
smuggle it in in a way which deceives not only the customs officer—the
reader—but ourselves as well. We take then our point of departure from the
objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of
these consequences are perceived, and that their perception leads to
subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and
avoid others. Following this clew, we are led to remark that the
consequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly
engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those
immediately concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the
distinction between the private and the public. When indirect consequences
are recognized and there is effort to regulate them, something having the
traits of a state comes into existence. When the consequences of an action
are confined, or are thought to be confined, mainly to the persons directly
engaged in it, the transaction is a private one. When A and B carry on a
conversation together the action is a trans-action: both are concerned in it;
its results pass, as it were, across from one to the other. One or other or both

may be helped or harmed thereby. But, presumably, the consequences of
advantage and injury do not extend beyond A and B; the activity lies
between them; it is private. Yet if it is found that the consequences of
conversation extend beyond the two directly concerned, that they affect the
welfare of many others, the act acquires a public capacity, whether the
conversation be carried on by a king and his prime minister or by Cataline
and a fellow conspirator or by merchants planning to monopolize a market.
The distinction between private and public is thus in no sense
equivalent to the distinction between individual and social, even if we
suppose that the latter distinction has a definite meaning. Many private acts
are social; their consequences contribute to the welfare of the community or
affect its status and prospects. In the broad sense any transaction
deliberately carried on between two or more persons is social in quality. It
is a form of associated behavior and its consequences may influence further
associations. A man may serve others, even in the community at large, in
carrying on a private business. To some extent it is true, as Adam Smith
asserted, that our breakfast table is better supplied by the convergent
outcome of activities of farmers, grocers and butchers carrying on private
affairs with a view to private profit than it would be if we were served on a
basis of philanthropy or public spirit. Communities have been supplied with
works of art, with scientific discoveries, because of the personal delight
found by private persons in engaging in these activities. There are private
philanthropists who act so that needy persons or the community as a whole
profit by the endowment of libraries, hospitals and educational institutions.
In short, private acts may be socially valuable both by indirect
consequences and by direct intention.
There is therefore no necessary connection between the private
character of an act and its non-social or anti-social character. The public,
moreover, cannot be identified with the socially useful. One of the most
regular activities of the politically organized community has been waging
war. Even the most bellicose of militarists will hardly contend that all wars
have been socially helpful, or deny that some have been so destructive of
social values that it would have been infinitely better if they had not been
waged. The argument for the non-equivalence of the public and the social,
in any praiseworthy sense of social, does not rest upon the case of war
alone. There is no one, I suppose, so enamored of political action as to hold

that it has never been short-sighted, foolish and harmful. There are even
those who hold that the presumption is always that social loss will result
from agents of the public doing anything which could be done by persons in
their private capacity. There are many more who protest that some special
public activity, whether prohibition, a protective tariff or the expanded
meaning given the Monroe Doctrine, is baleful to society. Indeed every
serious political dispute turns upon the question whether a given political
act is socially beneficial or harmful.
Just as behavior is not anti-social or non-social because privately
undertaken, it is not necessarily socially valuable because carried on in the
name of the public by public agents. The argument has not carried us far,
but at least it has warned us against identifying the community and its
interests with the state or the politically organized community. And the
differentiation may dispose us to look with more favor upon the proposition
already advanced: namely, that 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, whether by inhibition or by
promotion. We distinguish private and public buildings, private and public
schools, private paths and public highways, private assets and public funds,
private persons and public officials. It is our thesis that in this distinction we
find the key to the nature and office of the state. It is not without
significance that etymologically “private” is defined in opposition to
“official,” a private person being one deprived of public position. The
public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of
transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those
consequences systematically cared for. Officials are those who look out for
and take care of the interests thus affected. Since those who are indirectly
affected are not direct participants in the transactions in question, it is
necessary that certain persons be set apart to represent them, and see to it
that their interests are conserved and protected. The buildings, property,
funds, and other physical resources involved in the performance of this
office are res publica, the common-wealth. The public as far as organized
by means of officials and material agencies to care for the extensive and
enduring indirect consequences of transactions between persons is the
Populus.

It is a commonplace that legal agencies for protecting the persons and
properties of members of a community, and for redressing wrongs which
they suffer, did not always exist. Legal institutions derive from an earlier
period when the right of self-help obtained. If a person was harmed, it was
strictly up to him what he should do to get even. Injuring another and
exacting a penalty for an injury received were private transactions. They
were the affairs of those directly concerned and nobody else’s direct
business. But the injured party obtained readily the help of friends and
relatives, and the aggressor did likewise. Hence consequences of the quarrel
did not remain confined to those immediately concerned. Feuds ensued, and
the blood-quarrel might implicate large numbers and endure for
generations. The recognition of this extensive and lasting embroilment and
the harm wrought by it to whole families brought a public into existence.
The transaction ceased to concern only the immediate parties to it. Those
indirectly affected formed a public which took steps to conserve its interests
by instituting composition and other means of pacification to localize the
trouble.
The facts are simple and familiar. But they seem to present in
embryonic form the traits that define a state, its agencies and officers. The
instance illustrates what was meant when it said that it is fallacy to try to
determine the nature of the state in terms of direct causal factors. Its
essential point has to do with the enduring and extensive consequences of
behavior, which like all behavior proceeds in ultimate analysis through
individual human beings. Recognition of evil consequences brought about a
common interest which required for its maintenance certain measures and
rules, together with the selection of certain persons as their guardians,
interpreters, and, if need be, their executors.
If the account given is at all in the right direction, it explains the gap
already mentioned between the facts of political action and theories of the
state. Men have looked 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 or purpose back of the 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. We shall not, then, find the public if we look for it on the side
of originators of voluntary actions. Some John Smith and his congeners
decide whether or not to grow wheat and how much, where and how to
invest money, what roads to build and travel, whether to wage war and if so
how, what laws to pass and which to obey and disobey. The actual
alternative to deliberate acts of individuals is not action by the public; it is
routine, impulsive and other unreflected acts also performed by individuals.
Individual human beings may lose their identity in a mob or in a
political convention or in a joint-stock corporation or at the polls. But this
does not mean that some mysterious collective agency is making decisions,
but that some few persons who know what they are about are taking
advantage of massed force to conduct the mob their way, boss a political
machine, and manage the affairs of corporate business. When the public or
state is involved in making social arrangements like passing laws, enforcing
a contract, conferring a franchise, it still acts through concrete persons. The
persons are now officers, representatives of a public and shared interest.
The difference is an important one. But it is not a difference between single
human beings and a collective impersonal will. It is between persons in
their private and in their official or representative character. 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. Officials are indeed public agents,
but agents in the sense of factors doing the business of others in securing
and obviating consequences that concern them.
When we look in the wrong place we naturally do not find what we are
looking for. The worst of it is, however, that looking in the wrong place, to
causal forces instead of consequences, the outcome of the looking becomes
arbitrary. There is no check on it. “Interpretation” runs wild. Hence the
variety of conflicting theories and the lack of consensus of opinion. One
might argue a priori that the continual conflict of theories about the state is
itself proof that the problem has been wrongly posed. For, as we have
previously remarked, the main facts of political action, while the
phenomena vary immensely with diversity of time and place, are not hidden
even when they are complex. They are facts of human behavior accessible
to human observation. Existence of a multitude of contradictory theories of
the state, which is so baffling from the standpoint of the theories

themselves, is readily explicable the moment we see that all the theories, in
spite of their divergence from one another, spring from a root of shared
error: the taking of causal agency instead of consequences as the heart of
the problem.
Given this attitude and postulate, some men at some time will find the
causal agency in a metaphysical nisus attributed to nature; and the state will
then be explained in terms of an “essence” of man realizing itself in an end
of perfected Society. Others, influenced by other preconceptions and other
desires, will find the required author in the will of God reproducing through
the medium of fallen humanity such an image of divine order and justice as
the corrupt material allows. Others seek for it in the meeting of the wills of
individuals who come together and by contract or mutual pledging of
loyalties bring a state into existence. Still others find it in an autonomous
and transcendent will embodied in all men as a universal within their
particular beings, a will which by its own inner nature commands the
establishment of external conditions in which it is possible for will to
express outwardly its freedom. Others find it in the fact that mind or reason
is either an attribute of reality or is reality itself, while they condole that
difference and plurality of minds, individuality, is an illusion attributable to
sense, or is merely an appearance in contrast with the monistic reality of
reason. When various opinions all spring from a common and shared error,
one is as good as another, and the accidents of education, temperament,
class interest and the dominant circumstances of the age decide which is
adopted. Reason comes into play only to find justification for the opinion
which has been adopted, instead of to analyze human behavior with respect
to its consequences and to frame polities accordingly. It is an old story that
natural philosophy steadily progressed only after an intellectual revolution.
This consisted in abandoning the search for causes and forces and turning to
the analysis of what is going on and how it goes on. Political philosophy
has still in large measure to take to heart this lesson.
The failure to note that the problem is that of perceiving in a
discriminating and thorough way the consequences of human action
(including negligence and inaction) and of instituting measures and means
of caring for these consequences is not confined to production of conflicting
and irreconcilable theories of the state. The failure has also had the effect of
perverting the views of those who, up to a certain point, perceived the truth.

We have asserted that all deliberate choices and plans are finally the work
of single human beings. Thoroughly false conclusions have been drawn
from this observation. By thinking still in terms of causal forces, the
conclusion has been drawn from this fact that the state, the public, is a
fiction, a mask for private desires for power and position. Not only the state
but society itself has been pulverized into an aggregate of unrelated wants
and wills. As a logical consequence, the state is conceived either as sheer
oppression born of arbitrary power and sustained in fraud, or as a pooling of
the forces of single men into a massive force which single persons are
unable to resist, the pooling being a measure of desperation since its sole
alternative is the conflict of all with all which generates a life that is
helpless and brutish. Thus the state appears either a monster to be destroyed
or as a Leviathan to be cherished. In short, under the influence of the prime
fallacy that the problem of the state concerns causal forces, individualism,
as an ism, as a philosophy, has been generated.
While the doctrine is false, it sets out from a fact. Wants, choices and
purposes have their locus in single beings; behavior which manifests desire,
intent and resolution proceeds from them in their singularity. But only
intellectual laziness leads us to conclude that since the form of thought and
decision is individual, their content, their subject-matter, is also something
purely personal. Even if “consciousness” were the wholly private matter
that the individualistic tradition in philosophy and psychology supposes it
to be, it would still be true that consciousness is of objects, not of itself.
Association in the sense of connection and combination is a “law” of
everything known to exist. Singular things act, but they act together.
Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation. The action of
everything is along with the action of other things. The “along with” is of
such a kind that the behavior of each is modified by its connection with
others. There are trees which can grow only in a forest. Seeds of many
plants can successfully germinate and develop only under conditions
furnished by the presence of other plants. Reproduction of kind is
dependent upon the activities of insects which bring about fertilization. The
life-history of an animal cell is conditioned upon connection with what
other cells are doing. Electrons, atoms and molecules exemplify the
omnipresence of conjoint behavior.

There is no mystery about the fact of association, of an interconnected
action which affects the activity of singular elements. There is no sense in
asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in
association. If there is any mystery about the matter, it is the mystery that
the universe is the kind of universe it is. Such a mystery could not be
explained without going outside the universe. And if one should go to an
outside source to account for it, some logician, without an excessive draft
upon his ingenuity, would rise to remark that the outsider would have to be
connected with the universe in order to account for anything in it. We
should still be just where we started, with the fact of connection as a fact to
be accepted.
There is, however, an intelligible question about human association:—
Not the question how individuals or singular beings come to be connected,
but how they come to be connected in just those ways which give human
communities traits so different from those which mark assemblies of
electrons, unions of trees in forests, swarms of insects, herds of sheep, and
constellations of stars. When we consider the difference we at once come
upon the fact that the consequences of conjoint action take on a new value
when they are observed. For notice of the effects of connected action forces
men to reflect upon the connection itself; it makes it an object of attention
and interest. Each acts, in so far as the connection is known, in view of the
connection. Individuals still do the thinking, desiring and purposing, but
what they think of is the consequences of their behavior upon that of others
and that of others upon themselves.
Each human being is born an infant. He is immature, helpless,
dependent upon the activities of others. That many of these dependent
beings survive is proof that others in some measure look out for them, take
care of them. Mature and better equipped beings are aware of the
consequences of their acts upon those of the young. They not only act
conjointly with them, but they act in that especial kind of association which
manifests interest in the consequences of their conduct upon the life and
growth of the young.
Continued physiological existence of the young is only one phase of
interest in the consequences of association. Adults are equally concerned to
act so that the immature learn to think, feel, desire and habitually conduct
themselves in certain ways. Not the least of the consequences which are

striven for is that the young shall themselves learn to judge, purpose and
choose from the standpoint of associated behavior and its consequences. In
fact, only too often this interest takes the form of endeavoring to make the
young believe and plan just as adults do. This instance alone is enough to
show that while singular beings in their singularity think, want and decide,
what they think and strive for, the content of their beliefs and intentions is a
subject-matter provided by association. Thus man is not merely de facto
associated, but he becomes a social animal in the make-up of his ideas,
sentiments and deliberate behavior. What he believes, hopes for and aims at
is the outcome of association and intercourse. The only thing which imports
obscurity and mystery into the influence of association upon what
individual persons want and act for is the effort to discover alleged, special,
original, society-making causal forces, whether instincts, fiats of will,
personal, or an immanent, universal, practical reason, or an indwelling,
metaphysical, social essence and nature. These things do not explain, for
they are more mysterious than are the facts they are evoked to account for.
The planets in a constellation would form a community if they were aware
of the connections of the activities of each with those of the others and
could use this knowledge to direct behavior.
We have made a digression from consideration of the state to the wider
topic of society. However, the excursion enables us to distinguish the state
from other forms of social life. There is an old tradition which regards the
state and completely organized society as the same thing. The state is said
to be the complete and inclusive realization of all social institutions.
Whatever values result from any and every social arrangement are gathered
together and asserted to be the work of the state. The counterpart of this
method is that philosophical anarchism which assembles all the evils that
result from all forms of human grouping and attributes them en masse to the
state, whose elimination would then bring in a millennium of voluntary
fraternal organization. That the state should be to some a deity and to others
a devil is another evidence of the defects of the premises from which
discussion sets out. One theory is as indiscriminate as the other.
There is, however, a definite criterion by which to demarcate the
organized public from other modes of community life. Friendships, for
example, are non-political forms of association. They are characterized by
an intimate and subtle sense of the fruits of intercourse. They contribute to

experience some of its most precious values. Only the exigencies of a
preconceived theory would confuse with the state that texture of friendships
and attachments which is the chief bond in any community, or would insist
that the former depends upon the latter for existence. Men group themselves
also for scientific inquiry, for religious worship, for artistic production and
enjoyment, for sport, for giving and receiving instruction, for industrial and
commercial undertakings. In each case some combined or conjoint action,
which has grown up out of “natural,” that is, biological, conditions and
from local contiguity, results in producing distinctive consequences—that
is, consequences which differ in kind from those of isolated behavior.
When these consequences are intellectually and emotionally
appreciated, a shared interest is generated and the nature of the
interconnected behavior is thereby transformed. Each form of association
has its own peculiar quality and value, and no person in his senses confuses
one with another. The characteristic of the public as a state springs from the
fact that all modes of associated behavior may have extensive and enduring
consequences which involve others beyond those directly engaged in them.
When these consequences are in turn realized in thought and sentiment,
recognition of them reacts to remake the conditions out of which they arose.
Consequences have to be taken care of, looked out for. This supervision and
regulation cannot be effected by the primary groupings themselves. For the
essence of the consequences which call a public into being is the fact that
they expand beyond those directly engaged in producing them.
Consequently special agencies and measures must be formed if they are to
be attended to; or else some existing group must take on new functions. The
obvious external mark of the organization of a public or of a state is thus the
existence of officials. Government is not the state, for that includes the
public as well as the rulers charged with special duties and powers. The
public, however, is organized in and through those officers who act in
behalf of its interests.
Thus the state represents an important although distinctive and
restricted social interest. From this point of view there is nothing
extraordinary in the preëminence of the claims of the organized public over
other interests when once they are called into play, nor in its total
indifference and irrelevancy to friendships, associations for science, art and
religion under most circumstances. If the consequences of a friendship

threaten the public, then it is treated as a conspiracy; usually it is not the
state’s business or concern. Men join each other in partnership as a matter
of course to do a piece of work more profitably or for mutual defense. Let
its operations exceed a certain limit, and others not participating in it find
their security or prosperity menaced by it, and suddenly the gears of the
state are in mesh. Thus it happens that the state, instead of being all
absorbing and inclusive, is under some circumstances the most idle and
empty of social arrangements. Nevertheless, the temptation to generalize
from these instances and conclude that the state generically is of no
significance is at once challenged by the fact that when a family connection,
a church, a trade union, a business corporation, or an educational institution
conducts itself so as to affect large numbers outside of itself, those who are
affected form a public which endeavors to act through suitable structures,
and thus to organize itself for oversight and regulation.
I know of no better way in which to apprehend the absurdity of the
claims which are sometimes made in behalf of society politically organized
than to call to mind the influence upon community life of Socrates, Buddha,
Jesus, Aristotle, Confucius, Homer, Vergil, Dante, St. Thomas, Shakespeare,
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Locke, Rousseau and countless others,
and then to ask ourselves if we conceive these men to be officers of the
state. Any method which so broadens the scope of the state as to lead to
such conclusion merely makes the state a name for the totality of all kinds
of associations. The moment we have taken the word as loosely as that, it is
at once necessary to distinguish, within it, the state in its usual political and
legal sense. On the other hand, if one is tempted to eliminate or disregard
the state, one may think of Pericles, Alexander, Julius and Augustus Cæsar,
Elizabeth, Cromwell, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck and hundreds of
names of that kind. One dimly feels that they must have had a private life,
but how insignificant it bulks in comparison with their action as
representatives of a state!
This conception of statehood does not imply any belief as to the
propriety or reasonableness of any particular political act, measure or
system. Observations of consequences are at least as subject to error and
illusion as is perception of natural objects. Judgments about what to
undertake so as to regulate them, and how to do it, are as fallible as other
plans. Mistakes pile up and consolidate themselves into laws and methods

of administration which are more harmful than the consequences which
they were originally intended to control. And as all political history shows,
the power and prestige which attend command of official position render
rule something to be grasped and exploited for its own sake. Power to
govern is distributed by the accident of birth or by the possession of
qualities which enable a person to obtain office, but which are quite
irrelevant to the performance of its representative functions. But the need
which calls forth the organization of the public by means of rulers and
agencies of government persists and to some extent is incarnated in political
fact. Such progress as political history records depends upon some
luminous emergence of the idea from the mass of irrelevancies which
obscure and clutter it. Then some reconstruction occurs which provides the
function with organs more apt for its fulfillment. Progress is not steady and
continuous. Retrogression is as periodic as advance. Industry and inventions
in technology, for example, create means which alter the modes of
associated behavior and which radically change the quantity, character and
place of impact of their indirect consequences.
These changes 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. The creation of adequately flexible and
responsive political and legal machinery has so far been beyond the wit of
man. An epoch in which the needs of a newly forming public are
counteracted by established forms of the state is one in which there is
increasing disparagement and disregard of the state. General apathy, neglect
and contempt find expression in resort to various short-cuts of direct action.
And direct action is taken by many other interests than those which employ
“direct action” as a slogan, often most energetically by intrenched class-

interests which profess the greatest reverence for the established “law and
order” of the existing state. By its very nature, a state is ever something to
be scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is
stabilized, it needs to be re-made.
Thus the problem of discovering the state is not a problem for
theoretical inquirers engaged solely in surveying institutions which already
exist. It is a practical problem of human beings living in association with
one another, of mankind generically. It is a complex problem. It demands
power to perceive and recognize the consequences of the behavior of
individuals joined in groups and to trace them to their source and origin. It
involves selection of persons to serve as representatives of the interests
created by these perceived consequences and to define the functions which
they shall possess and employ. It requires institution of a government such
that those having the renown and power which goes with the exercise of
these functions shall employ them for the public and not turn them to their
own private benefit. It is no cause for wonder, then, that states have been
many, not only in number but in type and kind. For there have been
countless forms of joint activity with correspondingly diverse
consequences. Power to detect consequences has varied especially with the
instrumentalities of knowledge at hand. Rulers have been selected on all
kinds of different grounds. Their functions have varied and so have their
will and zeal to represent common interests. Only the exigencies of a rigid
philosophy can lead us to suppose that there is some one form or idea of
The State which these protean historic states have realized in various
degrees of perfection. The only statement which can be made is a purely
formal one: the state is the organization of the public effected through
officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members. But what
the public may be, what the officials are, how adequately they perform their
function, are things we have to go to history to discover.
Nevertheless, our conception gives a criterion for determining how
good a particular state is: namely, the degree of organization of the public
which is attained, and the degree in which its officers are so constituted as
to perform their function of caring for public interests. But there is no a
priori rule which can be laid down and by which when it is followed a good
state will be brought into existence. In no two ages or places is there the
same public. Conditions make the consequences of associated action and

the knowledge of them different. In addition the means by which a public
can determine the government to serve its interests vary. Only formally can
we say what the best state would be. In concrete fact, in actual and concrete
organization and structure, there is no form of state which can be said to be
the best: not at least till history is ended, and one can survey all its varied
forms. The formation of states must be an experimental process. The trial
process may go on with diverse degrees of blindness and accident, and at
the cost of unregulated procedures of cut and try, of fumbling and groping,
without insight into what men are after or clear knowledge of a good state
even when it is achieved. Or it may proceed more intelligently, because
guided by knowledge of the conditions which must be fulfilled. But it is
still experimental. And since conditions of action and of inquiry and
knowledge are always changing, the experiment must always be retried; the
State must always be rediscovered. Except, once more, in formal statement
of conditions to be met, we have no idea what history may still bring forth.
It is not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what
the state in general should or must be. What they may do is to aid in
creation of methods such that experimentation may go on less blindly, less
at the mercy of accident, more intelligently, so that men may learn from
their errors and profit by their successes. The belief in political fixity, of the
sanctity of some form of state consecrated by the efforts of our fathers and
hallowed by tradition, is one of the stumbling-blocks in the way of orderly
and directed change; it is an invitation to revolt and revolution.
As the argument has moved to and fro, it will conduce to clearness to
summarize its steps. Conjoint, combined, associated action is a universal
trait of the behavior of things. Such action has results. Some of the results
of human collective action are perceived, that is, they are noted in such
ways that they are taken account of. Then there arise purposes, plans,
measures and means, to secure consequences which are liked and eliminate
those which are found obnoxious. Thus perception generates a common
interest; that is, those affected by the consequences are perforce concerned
in conduct of all those who along with themselves share in bringing about
the results. Sometimes the consequences are confined to those who directly
share in the transaction which produces them. In other cases they extend far
beyond those immediately engaged in producing them. Thus two kinds of
interests and of measures of regulation of acts in view of consequences are
generated. In the first, interest and control are limited to those directly

engaged; in the second, they extend to those who do not directly share in
the performance of acts. If, then, the interest constituted by their being
affected by the actions in question is to have any practical influence, control
over the actions which produce them must occur by some indirect means.
So far the statements, it is submitted, set forth matters of actual and
ascertainable fact. Now follows the hypothesis. Those indirectly and
seriously affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough to
require recognition and a name. The name selected is The Public. This
public is organized and made effective by means of representatives who as
guardians of custom, as legislators, as executives, judges, etc., care for its
especial interests by methods intended to regulate the conjoint actions of
individuals and groups. Then and in so far, association adds to itself
political organization, and something which may be government comes into
being: the public is a political state.
The direct confirmation of the hypothesis is found in the statement of
the series of observable and verifiable matters of fact. These constitute
conditions which are sufficient to account, so it is held, for the characteristic
phenomena of political life, or state activity. If they do, it is superfluous to
seek for other explanation. In conclusion, two qualifications should be
added. The account just given is meant to be generic; it is consequently
schematic, and omits many differential conditions, some of which receive
attention in subsequent chapters. The other point is that in the negative part
of the argument, the attack upon theories which would explain the state by
means of special causal forces and agencies, there is no denial of causal
relations or connections among phenomena themselves. That is obviously
assumed at every point. There can be no consequences and measures to
regulate the mode and quality of their occurrence without the causal nexus.
What is denied is an appeal to special forces outside the series of
observable connected phenomena. Such causal powers are no different in
kind to the occult forces from which physical science had to emancipate
itself. At best, they are but phases of the related phenomena themselves
which are then employed to account for the facts. What is needed to direct
and make fruitful social inquiry is a method which proceeds on the basis of
the interrelations of observable acts and their results. Such is the gist of the
method we propose to follow.

CHAPTER II

DISCOVERY OF THE STATE
If we look in the wrong place for the public we shall never locate the
state. If we do not ask what are the conditions which promote and obstruct
the organization of the public into a social group with definite functions, we
shall never grasp the problem involved in the development and
transformation of states. If we do not perceive that this organization is
equivalent to the equipment of the public with official representatives to
care for the interests of the public, we shall miss the clew to the nature of
government. These are conclusions reached or suggested by the discussion
of the last hour. The wrong place to look, as we saw, is in the realm of
alleged causal agency, of authorship, of forces which are supposed to
produce a state by an intrinsic vis genetrix. The state is not created as a
direct result of organic contacts as offspring are conceived in the womb, nor
by direct conscious intent as a machine is invented, nor by some brooding
indwelling spirit, whether a personal deity or a metaphysical absolute will.
When we seek for the origin of states in such sources as these, a realistic
regard for facts compels us to conclude in the end that we find nothing but
singular persons, you, they, me. We shall then be driven, unless we have
recourse to mysticism, to decide that the public is born in a myth and is
sustained by superstition.
There are many answers to the question: What is the public?
Unfortunately many of them are only restatements of the question. Thus we
are told that the public is the community as a whole, and a-community-as-a-
whole is supposed to be a self-evident and self-explanatory phenomenon.
But a community as a whole involves not merely a variety of associative
ties which hold persons together in diverse ways, but an organization of all
elements by an integrated principle. And this is precisely what we are in
search of. Why should there be anything of the nature of an all-inclusive
and regulative unity? If we postulate such a thing, surely the institution

which alone would answer to it is humanity, not the affairs which history
exhibits as states. The notion of an inherent universality in the associative
force at once breaks against the obvious fact of a plurality of states, each
localized, with its boundaries, limitations, its indifference and even hostility
to other states. The best that metaphysical monistic philosophies of politics
can do with this fact is to ignore it. Or, as in the case of Hegel and his
followers, a mythical philosophy of history is constructed to eke out the
deficiencies of a mythical doctrine of statehood. The universal spirit seizes
upon one temporal and local nation after another as the vehicle for its
objectification of reason and will.
Such considerations as these reinforce our proposition that the
perception of consequences which are projected in important ways beyond
the persons and associations directly concerned in them is the source of a
public; and that its organization into a state is effected by establishing
special agencies to care for and regulate these consequences. But they also
suggest that actual states exhibit traits which perform the function that has
been stated and which serve as marks of anything to be called a state.
Discussion of these traits will define the nature of the public and the
problem of its political organization, and will also operate to test our theory.
We can hardly select a better trait to serve as a mark and sign of the
nature of a state than a point just mentioned, temporal and geographical
localization. There are associations which are too narrow and restricted in
scope to give rise to a public, just as there are associations too isolated from
one another to fall within the same public. Part of the problem of discovery
of a public capable of organization into a state is that of drawing lines
between the too close and intimate and the too remote and disconnected.
Immediate contiguity, face to face relationships, have consequences which
generate a community of interests, a sharing of values, too direct and vital
to occasion a need for political organization. Connections within a family
are familiar; they are matters of immediate acquaintance and concern. The
so-called blood-tie which has played such a part in demarcation of social
units is largely imputed on the basis of sharing immediately in the results of
conjoint behavior. What one does in the household affects others directly
and the consequences are appreciated at once and in an intimate way. As we
say, they “come home.” Special organization to care for them is a
superfluity. Only when the tie has extended to a union of families in a clan

and of clans in a tribe do consequences become so indirect that special
measures are called for. The neighborhood is constituted largely on the
same pattern of association that is exemplified in the family. Custom and
measures improvised to meet special emergencies as they arise suffice for
its regulation.
Consider the village in Wiltshire so beautifully described by Hudson:
“Each house has its center of human life with life of bird and beast, and the
centers were in touch with one another, connected like a row of children
linked together by their hands; all together forming one organism, instinct
with one life, moved by one mind, like a many-colored serpent lying at rest,
extended at full length upon the ground. I imagined the case of a cottager at
one end of the village occupied in chopping up a tough piece of wood or
stump and accidentally letting fall his heavy sharp axe on to his foot,
inflicting a grievous wound. The tidings of the accident would fly from
mouth to mouth to the other extremity of the village, a mile distant; not only
would each villager quickly know of it, but have at the same time a vivid
mental image of his fellow villager at the moment of his misadventure, the
sharp glittering axe falling on to his foot, the red blood flowing from the
wound; and he would at the same time feel the wound in his own foot and
the shock to his system. In like manner all thoughts and feelings would pass
freely from one to another, though not necessarily communicated by
speech; and all would be participants in virtue of that sympathy and
solidarity uniting the members of a small isolated community. No one
would be capable of a thought or emotion which would seem strange to the
others. The temper, the mood, the outlook of the individual and the village,
1
would be the same.” With such a condition of intimacy, the state is an
impertinence.
For long periods of human history, especially in the Orient, the state is
hardly more than a shadow thrown upon the family and neighborhood by
remote personages, swollen to gigantic form by religious beliefs. It rules but
it does not regulate; for its rule is confined to receipt of tribute and
ceremonial deference. Duties are within the family; property is possessed
by the family. Personal loyalties to elders take the place of political
obedience. The relationships of husband and wife, parent and children,
older and younger children, friend and friend, are the bonds from which
authority proceeds. Politics is not a branch of morals; it is submerged in

morals. All virtues are summed up in filial piety. Wrongdoing is culpable
because it reflects upon one’s ancestry and kin. Officials are known but
only to be shunned. To submit a dispute to them is a disgrace. The measure
of value of the remote and theocratic state lies in what it does not do. Its
perfection is found in its identification with the processes of nature, in
virtue of which the seasons travel their constant round, so that fields under
the beneficent rule of sun and rain produce their harvest, and the
neighborhood prospers in peace. The intimate and familiar propinquity
group is not a social unity within an inclusive whole. It is, for almost all
purposes, society itself.
At the other limit there are social groups so separated by rivers, seas
and mountains, by strange languages and gods, that what one of them does
—save in war—has no appreciable consequences for another. There is
therefore no common interest, no public, and no need nor possibility of an
inclusive state. The plurality of states is such a universal and notorious
phenomenon that it is taken for granted. It does not seem to require
explanation. But it sets up, as we have noted, a test difficult for some
theories to meet. Except upon the basis of a freakish limitation in the
common will and reason which is alleged to be the foundation of the state,
the difficulty is insuperable. It is peculiar, to say the least, that universal
reason should be unable to cross a mountain range and objective will be
balked by a river current. The difficulty is not so great for many other
theories. But only the theory which makes recognition of consequences the
critical factor can find in the fact of many states a corroborating trait.
Whatever is a barrier to the spread of the consequences of associated
behavior by that very fact operates to set up political boundaries. The
explanation is as commonplace as is the thing to be explained.
Somewhere between associations that are narrow, close and intimate
and those which are so remote as to have only infrequent and casual contact
lies, then, the province of a state. We do not find and should not expect to
find sharp and fast demarcations. Villages and neighborhoods shade
imperceptibly into a political public. Different states may pass through
federations and alliances into a larger whole which has some of the marks
of statehood. This condition, which we should anticipate in virtue of the
theory, is confirmed by historical facts. The wavering and shifting line of
distinction between a state and other forms of social union is, again, an

obstacle in the way of theories of the state which imply as their concrete
counterpart something as sharply marked off as is the concept. On the basis
of empirical consequences, it is just the sort of thing which should occur.
There are empires due to conquest where political rule exists only in forced
levies of taxes and soldiers, and in which, though the word state may be
used, the characteristic signs of a public are notable for their absence. There
are political communities like the city-states of ancient Greece in which the
fiction of common descent is a vital factor, in which household gods and
worship are replaced by community divinities, shrines, and cults: states in
which much of the intimacy of the vivid and prompt personal touch of the
family endures, while there has been added the transforming inspiration of a
varied, freer, fuller life, whose issues are so momentous that in comparison
the life of the neighborhood is parochial and that of the household dull.
Multiplicity and constant transformation in the forms which the state
assumes are as comprehensible upon the hypothesis proposed as is the
numerical diversity of independent states. The consequences of conjoint
behavior differ in kind and in range with changes in “material culture,”
especially those involved in exchange of raw materials, finished products
and above all in technology, in tools, weapons and utensils. These in turn
are immediately affected by inventions in means of transit, transportation
and intercommunication. A people that lives by tending flocks of sheep and
cattle adapts itself to very different conditions than those of a people which
ranges freely, mounted on horses. One form of nomadism is usually
peaceful; the other warlike. Roughly speaking, tools and implements
determine occupations, and occupations determine the consequences of
associated activity. In determining consequences, they institute publics with
different interests, which exact different types of political behavior to care
for them.
In spite of the fact that diversity of political forms rather than
uniformity is the rule, belief in the state as an archetypal entity persists in
political philosophy and science. Much dialectical ingenuity has been
expended in construction of an essence or intrinsic nature in virtue of which
any particular association is entitled to have applied to it the concept of
statehood. Equal ingenuity has been expended in explaining away all
divergencies from this morphological type, and (the favored device) in
ranking states in a hierarchical order of value as they approach the defining

essence. The idea that there is a model pattern which makes a state a good
or true state has affected practice as well as theory. It, more than anything
else, is responsible for the effort to form constitutions offhand and impose
them ready-made on peoples. Unfortunately, when the falsity of this view
was perceived, it was replaced by the idea that states “grow” or develop
instead of being made. This “growth” did not mean simply that states alter.
Growth signified an evolution through regular stages to a predetermined
end because of some intrinsic nisus or principle. This theory discouraged
recourse to the only method by which alterations of political forms might be
directed: namely, the use of intelligence to judge consequences. Equally
with the theory which it displaced, it presumed the existence of a single
standard form which defines the state as the essential and true article. After
a false analogy with physical science, it was asserted that only the
assumption of such a uniformity of process renders a “scientific” treatment
of society possible. Incidentally, the theory flattered the conceit of those
nations which, being politically “advanced,” assumed that they were so near
the apex of evolution as to wear the crown of statehood.
The hypothesis presented makes possible a consistently empirical or
historical treatment of the changes in political forms and arrangements, free
from any overriding conceptual domination such as is inevitable when a
“true” state is postulated, whether that be thought of as deliberately made or
as evolving by its own inner law. Intrusions from non-political internal
occurrences, industrial and technological, and from external events,
borrowings, travel, migrations, explorations, wars, modify the
consequences of preëxisting associations to such an extent that new
agencies and functions are necessitated. Political forms are also subject to
alterations of a more indirect sort. Developments of better methods of
thinking bring about observation of consequences which were concealed
from a vision which used coarser intellectual tools. Quickened intellectual
insight also makes possible invention of new political devices. Science has
not indeed played a large rôle. But intuitions of statesmen and of political
theorists have occasionally penetrated into the operations of social forces in
such a way that a new turn has been given to legislation and to
administration. There is a margin of toleration in the body politic as well as
in an organic body. Measures not in any sense inevitable are accommodated
to after they have once been taken; and a further diversity is thereby
introduced in political manners.

In short, the hypothesis which holds that publics are constituted by
recognition of extensive and enduring indirect consequences of acts
accounts for the relativity of states, while the theories which define them in
terms of specific causal authorship imply an absoluteness which is
contradicted by facts. The attempt to find by the “comparative method”
structures which are common to antique and modern, to occidental and
oriental states, has involved a great waste of industry. The only constant is
the function of caring for and regulating the interests which accrue as the
result of the complex indirect expansion and radiation of conjoint behavior.
We conclude, then, that temporal and local diversification is a prime
mark of political organization, and one which, when it is analyzed, supplies
a confirming test of our theory. A second mark and evidence is found in an
otherwise inexplicable fact that the quantitative scope of results of conjoint
behavior generates a public with need for organization. As we already
noted, what are now crimes subject to public cognizance and adjudication
were once private ebullitions, having the status now possessed by an insult
proffered by one to another. An interesting phase of the transition from the
relatively private to the public, at least from a limited public to a larger one,
is seen in the development in England of the King’s Peace. Justice until the
twelfth century was administered mainly by feudal and shire courts, courts
of hundreds, etc. Any lord who had a sufficient number of subjects and
tenants decided controversies and imposed penalties. The court and justice
of the king was but one among many, and primarily concerned with
royalty’s tenants, servants, properties and dignities. The monarchs wished,
however, to increase their revenues and expand their power and prestige.
Various devices were invented and fictions set up by means of which the
jurisdiction of kingly courts was extended. The method was to allege that
various offenses, formerly attended to by local courts, were infractions of
the king’s peace. The centralizing movement went on till the king’s justice
had a monopoly. The instance is significant. A measure instigated by desire
to increase the power and profit of the royal dynasty became an impersonal
public function by bare extension. The same sort of thing has repeatedly
occurred when personal prerogatives have passed into normal political
processes. Something of the same sort is manifested in contemporary life
when modes of private business become “affected with a public interest”
because of quantitative expansion.

A converse instance is presented in transfer from public to private
domain of religious rites and beliefs. As long as the prevailing mentality
thought that the consequences of piety and irreligion affected the entire
community, religion was of necessity a public affair. Scrupulous adherence
to the customary cult was of the highest political import. Gods were tribal
ancestors or founders of the community. They granted communal prosperity
when they were duly acknowledged and were the authors of famine,
pestilence and defeat in war if their interests were not zealously attended to.
Naturally when religious acts had such extended consequences, temples
were public buildings, like the agora and forum; rites were civic functions
and priests public officials. Long after theocracy vanished, theurgy was a
political institution. Even when disbelief was rife, few there were who
would run the risk of neglecting the ceremonials.
The revolution by which piety and worship were relegated to the
private sphere is often attributed to the rise of personal conscience and
assertion of its rights. But this rise is just the thing to be accounted for. The
supposition that it was there all the time in a submerged condition and
finally dared to show itself reverses the order of events. Social changes,
both intellectual and in the internal composition and external relations of
peoples, took place so that men no longer connected attitudes of reverence
or disrespect to the gods with the weal and woe of the community. Faith and
unbelief still had serious consequences, but these were now thought to be
confined to the temporal and eternal happiness of the persons directly
concerned. Given the other belief, and persecution and intolerance are as
justifiable as is organized hostility to any crime; impiety is the most
dangerous of all threats to public peace and well-being. But social changes
gradually effected as one of the new functions of the life of the community
the rights of private conscience and creed.
In general, behavior in intellectual matters has moved from the public
to the private realm. This radical change was, of course, urged and justified
on the ground of intrinsic and sacred private right. But, as in the special
case of religious beliefs, it is strange, if this reason be accepted, that
mankind lived so long in total unawareness of the existence of the right. In
fact, the idea of a purely private area of consciousness, where whatever
goes on has no external consequences, was in the first instance a product of
institutional change, political and ecclesiastic, although, like other beliefs,

once it was established it had political results. The observation that the
interests of the community are better cared for when there is permitted a
large measure of personal judgment and choice in the formation of
intellectual conclusions, is an observation which could hardly have been
made until social mobility and heterogeneity had brought about initiation
and invention in technological matters and industry, and until secular
pursuits had become formidable rivals to church and state. Even yet,
however, toleration in matters of judgment and belief is largely a negative
matter. We agree to leave one another alone (within limits) more from
recognition of evil consequences which have resulted from the opposite
course rather than from any profound belief in its positive social
beneficence. As long as the latter consequence is not widely perceived, the
so-called natural right to private judgment will remain a somewhat
precarious rationalization of the moderate amount of toleration which has
come into being. Such phenomena as the Ku Klux and legislative activity to
regulate science show that the belief in liberty of thought is still superficial.
If I make an appointment with a dentist or doctor, the transaction is
primarily between us. It is my health which is affected and his pocket-book,
skill and reputation. But exercise of the professions has consequences so
widespread that the examination and licensing of persons who practice
them becomes a public matter. John Smith buys or sells real estate. The
transaction is effected by himself and some other person. Land, however, is
of prime importance to society, and the private transaction is hedged about
with legal regulations; evidence of transfer and ownership has to be
recorded with a public official in forms publicly prescribed. The choice of a
mate and the act of sexual union are intimately personal. But the act is the
condition of bearing of offspring who are the means of the perpetuation of
the community. The public interest is manifested in formalities which are
necessary to make a union legal and for its legal termination.
Consequences, in a word, affect large numbers beyond those immediately
concerned in the transaction. It is often thought that in a socialistic state the
formation and dissolution of marriages would cease to have a public phase.
It is possible. But it is also possible that such a state would be even more
alive than is the community at present to the consequences of the union of
man and woman not only upon children but upon its own well-being and
stability. In that case certain regulations would be relaxed, but there might

be imposed stringent rules as to health, economic capacity and psychologic
compatibility as preconditions of wedlock.
No one can take into account all the consequences of the acts he
performs. It is a matter of necessity for him, as a rule, to limit his attention
and foresight to matters which, as we say, are distinctively his own
business. Any one who looked too far abroad with regard to the outcome of
what he is proposing to do would, if there were no general rules in
existence, soon be lost in a hopelessly complicated muddle of
considerations. The man of most generous outlook has to draw the line
somewhere, and he is forced to draw it in whatever concerns those closely
associated with himself. In the absence of some objective regulation, effects
upon them are all he can be sure of in any reasonable degree. Much of what
is called selfishness is but the outcome of limitation of observation and
imagination. Hence when consequences concern a large number, a number
so mediately involved that a person cannot readily prefigure how they are to
be affected, that number is constituted a public which intervenes. It is not
merely that the combined observations of a number cover more ground than
those of a single person. It is rather that the public itself, being unable to
forecast and estimate all consequences, establishes certain dikes and
channels so that actions are confined within prescribed limits, and insofar
have moderately predictable consequences.
The regulations and laws of the state are therefore misconceived when
they are viewed as commands. The “command” theory of common and
statute law is in reality a dialectical consequence of the theories, previously
criticized, which define the state in terms of an antecedent causation,
specifically of that theory which takes “will” to be the causal force which
generates the state. If a will is the origin of the state, then state-action
expresses itself in injunctions and prohibitions imposed by its will upon the
wills of subjects. Sooner or later, however, the question arises as to the
justification of the will which issues commands. Why should the will of the
rulers have more authority than that of others? Why should the latter
submit? The logical conclusion is that the ground of obedience lies
ultimately in superior force. But this conclusion is an obvious invitation to
trial of forces to see where superior force lies. In fact the idea of authority is
abolished, and that of force substituted. The next dialectical conclusion is
that the will in question is something over and above any private will or any

collection of such wills: is some overruling “general will.” This conclusion
was drawn by Rousseau, and under the influence of German metaphysics
was erected into a dogma of a mystic and transcendent absolute will, which
in turn was not another name for force only because it was identified with
absolute reason. The alternative to one or other of these conclusions is
surrender of the causal authorship theory and the adoption of that of widely
distributed consequences, which, when they are perceived, create a
common interest and the need of special agencies to care for it.
Rules of law are in fact the institution of conditions under which
persons make their arrangements with one another. They are structures
which canalize action; they are active forces only as are banks which
confine the flow of a stream, and are commands only in the sense in which
the banks command the current. If individuals had no stated conditions
under which they come to agreement with one another, any agreement
would either terminate in a twilight zone of vagueness or would have to
cover such an enormous amount of detail as to be unwieldy and
unworkable. Each agreement, moreover, might vary so from every other
that nothing could be inferred from one arrangement as to the probable
consequences of any other. Legal rules state certain conditions which when
met make an agreement a contract. The terms of the agreement are thereby
canalized within manageable limits, and it is possible to generalize and
predict from one to another. Only the exigencies of a theory lead one to
hold that there is a command that an agreement be made in such and such a
2
form. What happens is that certain conditions are set such that if a person
conform to them, he can count on certain consequences, while if he fails to
do so he cannot forecast consequences. He takes a chance and runs the risk
of having the whole transaction invalidated to his loss. There is no reason to
interpret even the “prohibitions” of criminal law in any other way.
Conditions are stated in reference to consequences which may be incurred if
they are infringed or transgressed. We can similarly state the undesirable
results which will happen if a stream breaks through its banks; if the stream
were capable of foreseeing these consequences and directing its behavior by
the foresight, we might metaphorically construe the banks as issuing a
prohibition.
This account explains both the large arbitrary and contingent element in
laws and their plausible identification with reason, dissimilar as are the two

considerations. There are many transactions in which the thing of chief
importance is that consequences be determinate in some fashion rather than
that they be determined by some inherent principle to be just such and such.
In other words, within limits it is indifferent what results are fixed by the
conditions settled upon; what is important is that the consequences be
certain enough to be predictable. The rule of the road is typical of a large
number of rules. So is the fixing of sunset or of a specified hour as the exact
time when the felonious entering of the premises of another takes on a more
serious quality. On the other hand, rules of law are reasonable so that
“reason” is appealed to by some as their fount and origin on the ground
3
pointed out by Hume. Men are naturally shortsighted, and the
shortsightedness is increased and perverted by the influence of appetite and
passion. “The law” formulates remote and long-run consequences. It then
operates as a condensed available check on the naturally overweening
influence of immediate desire and interest over decision. It is a means of
doing for a person what otherwise only his own foresight, if thoroughly
reasonable, could do. For a rule of law, although it may be laid down
because of a special act as its occasion, is formulated in view of an
indefinite variety of other possible acts. It is necessarily a generalization;
for it is generic as to the predictable consequences of a class of facts. If the
incidents of a particular occasion exercise undue influence upon the content
of a rule of law, it will soon be overruled, either explicitly or by neglect.
Upon this theory, the law as “embodied reason” means a formulated
generalization of means and procedures in behavior which are adapted to
secure what is wanted. Reason expresses a function, not a causal origin.
Law is reasonable as a man is sensible who selects and arranges conditions
adapted to produce the ends he regards as desirable. A recent writer, who
regards “reason” as that which generates laws, says, “A debt does not in
reason cease to be a debt because time has passed, but the law sets up a
limitation. A trespass does not cease in reason to be a trespass because it is
indefinitely repeated, yet the law shows a tendency to admit an unresisted
trespass in time to the status of right. Time, distance and chance are
4
indifferent to pure reason; but they play their part in the legal order.” But if
reasonableness is a matter of adaptation of means to consequences, time
and distance are things to be given great weight; for they effect both
consequences and the ability to foresee them and to act upon them. Indeed,

we might select statutes of limitation as excellent examples of the kind of
rationality the law contains. Only if reason is looked upon as “pure,” that is
as a matter of formal logic, do the instances cited manifest limitation of
reason.
A third mark of the public organized as a state, a mark which also
provides a test of our hypothesis, is that it is concerned with modes of
behavior which are old and hence well established, engrained. Invention is a
peculiarly personal act, even when a number of persons combine to make
something new. A novel idea is the kind of thing that has to occur to
somebody in the singular sense. A new project is something to be
undertaken and set agoing by private initiative. The newer an idea or plan,
the more it deviates from what is already recognized and established in
practice. By the nature of the case an innovation is a departure from the
customary. Hence the resistance it is likely to encounter. We, to be sure, live
in an era of discoveries and inventions. Speaking generically, innovation
itself has become a custom. Imagination is wonted to it; it is expected.
When novelties take the form of mechanical appliances, we incline to
welcome them. But this is far from always having been the case. The rule
has been to look with suspicion and greet with hostility the appearance of
anything new, even a tool or utensil. For an innovation is a departure, and
one which brings in its train some incalculable disturbance of the behavior
to which we have grown used and which seems “natural.” As a recent writer
has clearly shown, inventions have made their way insidiously; and because
of some immediate convenience. If their effects, their long-run
consequences, in altering habits of behavior had been foreseen, it is safe to
say that most of them would have been destroyed as wicked, just as many
of them were retarded in adoption because they were felt to be
5
sacrilegious. In any case, we cannot think of their invention being the work
6
of the state.
The organized community is still hesitant with reference to new ideas
of a non-technical and non-technological nature. They are felt to be
disturbing to social behavior; and rightly so, as far as old and established
behavior is concerned. Most persons object to having their habits unsettled,
their habits of belief no less than habits of overt action. A new idea is an
unsettling of received beliefs; otherwise, it would not be a new idea. This is
only to say that the production of new ideas is peculiarly a private

performance. About the most we can ask of the state, judging from states
which have so far existed, is that it put up with their production by private
individuals without undue meddling. A state which will organize to
manufacture and disseminate new ideas and new ways of thinking may
come into existence some time, but such a state is a matter of faith, not
sight. When it comes it will arrive because the beneficial consequences of
new ideas have become an article of common faith and repute. It may,
indeed, be said that even now the state provides those conditions of security
which are necessary if private persons are to engage effectually in discovery
and invention. But this service is a by-product; it is foreign to the grounds
on which the conditions in question are maintained by the public. And it
must be offset by noting the extent to which the state of affairs upon which
the public heart is most set is unfavorable to thinking in other than technical
lines. In any case, it is absurd to expect the public, because it is called in no
matter how eulogistic a sense the state, to rise above the intellectual level of
its average constituents.
When, however, a mode of behavior has become old and familiar, and
when an instrumentality has come into use as a matter of course, provided it
is a prerequisite of other customary pursuits, it tends to come within the
scope of the state. An individual may make his own track in a forest; but
highways are usually public concerns. Without roads which one is free to
use at will, men might almost as well be castaways on a desert island.
Means of transit and communication affect not only those who utilize them
but all who are dependent in any way upon what is transported, whether as
producers or consumers. The increase of easy and rapid intercommunication
means that production takes place more and more for distant markets and it
puts a premium upon mass-production. Thus it becomes a disputed question
whether railroads as well as highways should not be administered by public
officials, and in any case some measure of official regulation is instituted,
as they become settled bases of social life.
The tendency to put what is old and established in uniform lines under
the regulation of the state has psychological support. Habits economize
intellectual as well as muscular energy. They relieve the mind from thought
of means, thus freeing thought to deal with new conditions and purposes.
Moreover, interference with a well-established habit is followed by
uneasiness and antipathy. The efficiency of liberation from attention to

whatever is regularly recurrent is reënforced by an emotional tendency to
get rid of bother. Hence there is a general disposition to turn over activities
which have become highly standardized and uniform to representatives of
the public. It is possible that the time will come when not only railways will
have become routine in their operation and management, but also existing
modes of machine production, so that business men instead of opposing
public ownership will clamor for it in order that they may devote their
energies to affairs which involve more novelty, variation and opportunities
for risk and gain. They might conceivably, even under a régime of
continued private property in general, no more wish to be bothered with
routinized operations than they would want to take over the care of public
streets. Even now the question of the public’s taking charge of the
machinery of the manufacture of goods is less a matter of wholesale
“individualism” versus “socialism” than it is of the ratio of the experimental
and novel in their management to the habitual and matter-of-course; of that
which is taken for granted as a condition of other things to that which is
significant in its own operation.
A fourth mark of the public is indicated by the idea that children and
other dependents (such as the insane, the permanently helpless) are
peculiarly its wards. When the parties involved in any transaction are
unequal in status, the relationship is likely to be one-sided, and the interests
of one party to suffer. If the consequences appear serious, especially if they
seem to be irretrievable, the public brings to bear a weight that will equalize
conditions. Legislatures are more ready to regulate the hours of labor of
children than of adults, of women than of men. In general, labor legislation
is justified against the charge that it violates liberty of contract on the
ground that the economic resources of the parties to the arrangement are so
disparate that the conditions of a genuine contract are absent; action by the
state is introduced to form a level on which bargaining takes place. Labor
unions often object, however, to such “paternalistic” legislation on the
ground that voluntary combinations to ensure collective bargaining is better
for those concerned than action taken without the active participation of
laborers. The general objection that paternalism tends to keep those affected
by it permanently in the status of children, without an impetus to help
themselves, rests on the same basis. The difference here is nevertheless not
as to the principle that inequality of status may call for public intervention,
but as to the best means of securing and maintaining equality.

There has been a steady tendency for the education of children to be
regarded as properly a state charge in spite of the fact that children are
primarily the care of a family. But the period in which education is possible
to an effective degree is that of childhood; if this time is not taken
advantage of the consequences are irreparable. The neglect can rarely be
made up later. In the degree, then, that a certain measure of instruction and
training is deemed to have significant consequences for the social body,
rules are laid down affecting the action of parents in relation to their
children, and those who are not parents are taxed—Herbert Spencer to the
contrary notwithstanding—to maintain schools. Again, the consequences of
neglect of safeguards in industries involving machines which are dangerous
and those presenting unhygienic conditions, are so serious and irretrievable
that the modern public has intervened to maintain conditions conducive to
safety and health. Movements which aim at insurance against illness and
old-age under governmental auspices illustrate the same principle. While
public regulation of a minimum wage is still a disputed matter, the
argument in behalf of it appeals to the criterion stated. The argument in
effect is that a living wage is a matter of such serious indirect consequences
to society that it cannot be safely left to the parties directly concerned,
owing to the fact that immediate need may incapacitate one party to the
transaction from effective bargaining.
In what has been said there is no attempt to lay down criteria to be
applied in a predetermined way to ensure just such and such results. We are
not concerned to predict the special forms which state action will take in the
future. We have simply been engaged in pointing out the marks by which
public action as distinct from private is characterized. Transactions between
singular persons and groups bring a public into being when their indirect
consequences—their effects beyond those immediately engaged in them—
are of importance. Vagueness is not eliminated from the idea of importance.
But at least we have pointed out some of the factors which go to make up
importance: namely, the far-reaching character of consequences, whether in
space or time; their settled, uniform and recurrent nature, and their
irreparableness. Each one of these matters involves questions of degree.
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.
As we shall see later, there are assignable reasons why it will be drawn
very differently at different times and places. The very fact that the public
depends upon consequences of acts and the perception of consequences,
while its organization into a state depends upon the ability to invent and
employ special instrumentalities, shows how and why publics and political
institutions differ widely from epoch to epoch and from place to place. To
suppose that an a priori conception of the intrinsic nature and limits of the
individual on one side and the state on the other will yield good results once
for all is absurd. If, however, the state has a definite nature, as it should
have if it were formed by fixed causal agencies, or if individuals have a
nature fixed once for all apart from conditions of association, a final and
wholesale partitioning of the realms of personal and state activity is the
logical conclusion. The failure of such a theory to reach practical solutions
is, therefore, a further confirmation of the theory which emphasizes the
consequences of activity as the essential affair.
In conclusion, we shall make explicit what has been implied regarding
7
the relation to one another of public, government and state. There have
been two extreme views about this point. On one hand, the state has been
identified with government. On the other hand, the state, having a necessary
existence of its own, per se, is said then to proceed to form and employ
certain agencies forming government, much as a man hires servants and
assigns them duties. The latter view is appropriate when the causal agency
theory is relied upon. Some force, whether a general will or the singular
wills of assembled individuals, calls the state into being. Then the latter as a
secondary operation chooses certain persons through whom to act. Such a
theory helps those who entertain it to retain the idea of the inherent sanctity
of the state. Concrete political evils such as history exhibits in abundance
can be laid at the door of fallible and corrupt governments, while the state
keeps its honor unbesmirched. The identification of the state with
government has the advantage of keeping the mind’s eye upon concrete and
observable facts; but it involves an unaccountable separation between rulers
and people. If a government exists by itself and on its own account, why

should there be government? Why should there persist the habits of loyalty
and obedience which permit it to rule?
The hypothesis which has been advanced frees us from the perplexities
which cluster about both of these two notions. The lasting, extensive and
serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a public. In
itself it is unorganized and formless. By means of officials and their special
powers it becomes a state. A public articulated and operating through
representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government,
but also there is none without the public. The officers are still singular
beings, but they exercise new and special powers. These may be turned to
their private account. Then government is corrupt and arbitrary. Quite apart
from deliberate graft, from using unusual powers for private glorification
and profit, density of mind and pomposity of behavior, adherence to class-
interest and its prejudices, are strengthened by position. “Power is poison”
was the remark of one of the best, shrewdest and most experienced
observers of Washington politicians. On the other hand, occupancy of office
may enlarge a man’s views and stimulate his social interest so that he
exhibits as a statesman traits foreign to his private life.
But since the public forms a state only by and through officials and
their acts, and since holding official position does not work a miracle of
transubstantiation, there is nothing perplexing nor even discouraging in the
spectacle of the stupidities and errors of political behavior. The facts which
give rise to the spectacle should, however, protect us from the illusion of
expecting extraordinary change to follow from a mere change in political
agencies and methods. Such a change sometimes occurs, but when it does,
it is because the social conditions, in generating a new public, have
prepared the way for it; the state sets a formal seal upon forces already in
operation by giving them a defined channel through which to act.
Conceptions of “The State” as something per se, something intrinsically
manifesting a general will and reason, lend themselves to illusions. They
make such a sharp distinction between the state and a government that,
from the standpoint of the theories, a government may be corrupt and
injurious and yet The State by the same idea retain its inherent dignity and
nobility. Officials may be mean, obstinate, proud and stupid and yet the
nature of the state which they serve remain essentially unimpaired. Since,
however, a public is organized into a state through its government, the state

is as its officials are. Only through constant watchfulness and criticism of
public officials by citizens can a state be maintained in integrity and
usefulness.
The discussion also returns with some added illumination to the
problem of the relation of state and society. The problem of the relation of
individuals to associations—sometimes posed as the relation of the
individual to society—is a meaningless one. We might as well make a
problem out of the relation of the letters of an alphabet to the alphabet. An
alphabet is letters, and “society” is individuals in their connections with one
another. The mode of combination of letters with one another is obviously a
matter of importance; letters form words and sentences when combined,
and have no point nor sense except in some combination. I would not say
that the latter statement applies literally to individuals, but it cannot be
gainsaid that singular human beings exist and behave in constant and varied
association with one another. These modes of conjoint action and their
consequences profoundly affect not only the outer habits of singular
persons, but their dispositions in emotion, desire, planning and valuing.
“Society,” however, is either an abstract or a collective noun. In the
concrete, there are societies, associations, groups of an immense number of
kinds, having different ties and instituting different interests. They may be
gangs, criminal bands; clubs for sport, sociability and eating; scientific and
professional organizations; political parties and unions within them;
families; religious denominations, business partnerships and corporations;
and so on in an endless list. The associations may be local, nationwide and
trans-national. Since there is no one thing which may be called society,
except their indefinite overlapping, there is no unqualified eulogistic
connotation adhering to the term “society.” Some societies are in the main
to be approved; some to be condemned, on account of their consequences
upon the character and conduct of those engaged in them and because of
their remoter consequences upon others. All of them, like all things human,
are mixed in quality; “society” is something to be approached and judged
critically and discriminatingly. “Socialization” of some sort—that is, the
reflex modification of wants, beliefs and work because of share in a united
action—is inevitable. But it is as marked in the formation of frivolous,
dissipated, fanatical, narrow-minded and criminal persons as in that of
competent inquirers, learned scholars, creative artists and good neighbors.

Confining our notice to the results which are desirable, it appears that
there is no reason for assigning all the values which are generated and
maintained by means of human associations to the work of states. Yet the
same unbridled generalizing and fixating tendency of the mind which leads
to a monistic fixation of society has extended beyond the hypostatizing of
“society” and produced a magnified idealization of The State. All values
which result from any kind of association are habitually imputed by one
school of social philosophers to the state. Naturally the result is to place the
state beyond criticism. Revolt against the state is then thought to be the one
unforgivable social sin. Sometimes the deification proceeds from a special
need of the time, as in the cases of Spinoza and Hegel. Sometimes it springs
from a prior belief in universal will and reason and a consequent need of
finding some empirical phenomena which may be identified with the
externalization of this absolute spirit. Then this is employed, by circular
logic, as evidence for the existence of such a spirit. The net import of our
discussion is that a state is a distinctive and secondary form of association,
having a specifiable work to do and specified organs of operation.
It is quite true that most states, after they have been brought into being,
react upon the primary groupings. When a state is a good state, when the
officers of the public genuinely serve the public interests, this reflex effect
is of great importance. It renders the desirable associations solider and more
coherent; indirectly it clarifies their aims and purges their activities. It
places a discount upon injurious groupings and renders their tenure of life
precarious. In performing these services, it gives the individual members of
valued associations greater liberty and security: it relieves them of
hampering conditions which if they had to cope with personally would
absorb their energies in mere negative struggle against evils. It enables
individual members to count with reasonable certainty upon what others
will do, and thus facilitates mutually helpful coöperations. It creates respect
for others and for one’s self. A measure of the goodness of a state is the
degree in which it relieves individuals from the waste of negative struggle
and needless conflict and confers upon him positive assurance and
reënforcement in what he undertakes. This is a great service, and there is no
call to be niggardly in acknowledging the transformations of group and
personal action which states have historically effected.

But this recognition cannot be legitimately converted into the
monopolistic absorption of all associations into The State, nor of all social
values into political value. The all-inclusive nature of the state signifies
only that officers of the public (including, of course, law-makers) may act
so as to fix conditions under which any form of association operates; its
comprehensive character refers only to the impact of its behavior. A war
like an earthquake may “include” in its consequences all elements in a
given territory, but the inclusion is by way of effects, not by inherent nature
or right. A beneficent law, like a condition of general economic prosperity,
may favorably affect all interests in a particular region, but it cannot be
called a whole of which the elements influenced are parts. Nor can the
liberating and confirming results of public action be construed to yield a
wholesale idealization of states in contrast with other associations. For state
activity is often injurious to the latter. One of the chief occupations of states
has been the waging of war and the suppression of dissentient minorities.
Moreover, their action, even when benign, presupposes values due to non-
political forms of living together which are but extended and reënforced by
the public through its agents.
The hypothesis which we have supported has obvious points of contact
with what is known as the pluralistic conception of the state. It presents also
a marked point of difference. Our doctrine of plural forms is a statement of
a fact: that there exist a plurality of social groupings, good, bad and
indifferent. It is not a doctrine which prescribes inherent limits to state
action. It does not intimate that the function of the state is limited to settling
conflicts among other groups, as if each one of them had a fixed scope of
action of its own. Were that true, the state would be only an umpire to avert
and remedy trespasses of one group upon another. Our hypothesis is neutral
as to any general, sweeping implications as to how far state activity may
extend. It does not indicate any particular polity of public action. At times,
the consequences of the conjoint behavior of some persons may be such
that a large public interest is generated which can be fulfilled only by laying
down conditions which involve a large measure of reconstruction within
that group. There is no more an inherent sanctity in a church, trade-union,
business corporation, or family institution than there is in the state. Their
value is also to be measured by their consequences. The consequences vary
with concrete conditions; hence at one time and place a large measure of
state activity may be indicated and at another time a policy of quiescence

and laissez-faire. Just as publics and states vary with conditions of time and
place, so do the concrete functions which should be carried on by states.
There is no antecedent universal proposition which can be laid down
because of which the functions of a state should be limited or should be
expanded. Their scope is something to be critically and experimentally
determined.

CHAPTER III

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
Singular persons are the foci of action, mental and moral, as well as
overt. They are subject to all kinds of social influences which determine
what they can think of, plan and choose. The conflicting streams of social
influence come to a single and conclusive issue only in personal
consciousness and deed. When a public is generated, the same law holds. It
arrives at decisions, makes terms and executes resolves only through the
medium of individuals. They are officers; they represent a Public, but the
Public acts only through them. We say in a country like our own that
legislators and executives are elected by the public. The phrase might
appear to indicate that the Public acts. But, after all, individual men and
women exercise the franchise; the public is here a collective name for a
multitude of persons each voting as an anonymous unit. As a citizen-voter
each one of these persons is, however, an officer of the public. He expresses
his will as a representative of the public interest as much so as does a
senator or sheriff. His vote may express his hope to profit in private purse
by the election of some man or the ratification of some proposed law. He
may fail, in other words, in effort to represent the interest entrusted to him.
But in this respect he does not differ from those explicitly designated public
officials who have also been known to betray the interest committed to
them instead of faithfully representing it.
In other words, every officer of the public, whether he represents it as a
voter or as a stated official, has a dual capacity. From this fact the most
serious problem of government arises. We commonly speak of some
governments as representative in contrast with others which are not. By our
hypothesis all governments are representative in that they purport to stand
for the interests which a public has in the behavior of individuals and
groups. There is, however, no contradiction here. Those concerned in
government are still human beings. They retain their share of the ordinary

traits of human nature. They still have private interests to serve and interests
of special groups, those of the family, clique or class to which they belong.
Rarely can a person sink himself in his political function; the best which
most men attain to is the domination by the public weal of their other
desires. What is meant by “representative” government is that the public is
definitely organized with the intent to secure this dominance. The dual
capacity of every officer of the public leads to conflict in individuals
between their genuinely political aims and acts and those which they
possess in their non-political rôles. When the public adopts special
measures to see to it that the conflict is minimized and that the
representative function overrides the private one, political institutions are
termed representative.
It may be said that not until recently have publics been conscious that
they were publics, so that it is absurd to speak of their organizing
themselves to protect and secure their interests. Hence states are a recent
development. The facts are, indeed, fatally against attribution of any long
history to states provided we use a hard and fast conceptual definition of
states. But our definition is founded on the exercise of a function, not on
any inherent essence or structural nature. Hence it is more or less a verbal
matter just what countries and peoples are called states. What is of
importance is that the facts which significantly differentiate various forms
from one another be recognized. The objection just urged points to a fact of
great significance, whether the word “state” be used or not. It indicates that
for long stretches of time the public rôle of rulers has been incidental to
other ends for which they have used their powers. There has been a
machinery of government, but it has been employed for purposes which in
the strict sense are non-political, the deliberate advancement of dynastic
interests. Thus we come upon the primary problem of the public: to achieve
such recognition of itself as will give it weight in the selection of official
representatives and in the definition of their responsibilities and rights.
Consideration of this problem leads us, as we shall see, into the discussion
of the democratic state.
Taking history as a whole, the selection of rulers and equipment of
them with powers has been a matter of political accident. Persons have been
selected as judges, executives and administrators for reasons independent of
capacity to serve public interests. Some of the Greek states of antiquity and

the examination system of China stand out for the very reason that they are
exceptions to this statement. History shows that, in the main, persons have
ruled because of some prerogative and conspicuous place which was
independent of their definitively public rôle. If we introduce the idea of the
public at all, we are bound to say that it was assumed without question that
certain persons were fit to be rulers because of traits independent of
political considerations. Thus in many societies the male elders exercised
such rule as obtained in virtue of the mere fact that they were old men.
Gerontocracy is a familiar and widespread fact. Doubtless there was a
presumption that age was a sign of knowledge of group traditions and of
matured experience, but it can hardly be said that this presumption was
consciously the influential factor in giving old men a monopoly of rule.
Rather they had it ipso facto, because they had it. A principle of inertia, of
least resistance and least action, operated. Those who were already
conspicuous in some respect, were it only for long gray beards, had political
powers conferred upon them.
Success in military achievement is an irrelevant factor which has
controlled the selection of men to rule. Whether or no “camps are the true
mothers of cities,” whether or no Herbert Spencer was right in declaring
that government originated in chieftainship for war purposes, there is no
doubt that, in most communities, the ability of a man to win battles has
seemed to mark him out as a predestined manager of the civil affairs of a
community. There is no need to argue that the two positions demand
different gifts, and that achievement in one is no proof of fitness for the
other. The fact remains. Nor do we have to look at ancient states for
evidence of its effective operation. States nominally democratic show the
same tendency to assume that a winning general has some quasi-divine
appointment to political office. Reason would teach that oftentimes even the
politicians who are most successful in instigating the willingness of the
civilian population to support a war are by that very fact incapacitated for
the offices of making a just and enduring peace. But the treaty of Versailles
is there to show how difficult it is to make a shift of personnel even when
conditions radically alter so that there is need for men of a changed outlook
and interests. To those who have, it shall be given. It is human nature to
think along the easiest lines, and this induces men when they want
conspicuous leaders in the civil function to fasten upon those who are
already conspicuous, no matter what the reason.

Aside from old men and warriors, medicine men and priests have had a
ready-made, predestined vocation to rule. Where the community welfare is
precarious and dependent upon the favor of supernatural beings, those
skilled in the arts by which the wrath and jealousy of the gods are averted
and their favor procured, have the marks of superior capacity to administer
states. Success in living to an old age, in battle and in occult arts, have,
however, been most signalized in the initiation of political régimes. What
has counted most in the long run is the dynastic factor. Beati possidentes.
The family from which a ruler has been taken occupies in virtue of that fact
a conspicuous position and superior power. Preëminence in status is readily
taken for excellence. Divine favor ex officio attends a family in which rule
has been exercised for enough generations so that the memory of original
exploits has grown dim or become legendary. The emoluments, pomp and
power which go with rule are not thought to need justification. They not
only embellish and dignify it, but are regarded as symbols of intrinsic
worthiness to possess it. Custom consolidates what accident may have
originated; established power has a way of legitimizing itself. Alliances
with other potent families within and without the country, possession of
large landed estates, a retinue of courtiers and access to revenues of the
state, with a multitude of other things irrelevant to the public interest,
establish a dynastic position at the same time that they divert the genuine
political function to private ends.
An additional complication is introduced because the glory, wealth and
power of rulers constitutes in itself an invitation to seize and exploit office.
The causes which operate to induce men to strive for any shining object
operate with increased appeal in the case of governmental power. The
centralization and scope of functions which are needed in order to serve the
interests of the public become, in other words, seductions to draw state
officials into subserving private ends. All history shows how difficult it is
for human beings to bear effectually in mind the objects for the nominal
sake of which they are clothed with power and pomp; it shows the ease with
which they employ their panoply to advance private and class interests.
Were actual dishonesty the only, or even chief, foe, the problem would be
much simpler. The ease of routine, the difficulty of ascertaining public
needs, the intensity of the glare which attends the seat of the mighty, desire
for immediate and visible results, play the larger part. One often hears it
said by socialists justly impatient with the present economic régime that

“industry should be taken out of private hands.” One recognizes what they
intend: that it should cease to be regulated by desire for private profit and
should function for the benefit of producers and consumers, instead of
being sidetracked to the advantage of financiers and stockholders. But one
wonders whether those who so readily utter this saying have asked
themselves into whose hands industry is to pass? Into those of the public?
But, alas, the public has no hands except those of individual human beings.
The essential problem is that of transforming the action of such hands so
that it will be animated by regard for social ends. There is no magic by
which this result can be accomplished. The same causes which have led
men to utilize concentrated political power to serve private purposes will
continue to act to induce men to employ concentrated economic power in
behalf of non-public aims. This fact does not imply the problem is
insoluble. But it indicates where the problem resides, whatever guise it
assumes. Since officers of the public have a dual make-up and capacity,
what conditions and what technique are necessary in order that insight,
loyalty and energy may be enlisted on the side of the public and political
rôle?
These commonplace considerations have been adduced as a
background for discussion of the problems and prospects of democratic
government. Democracy is a word of many meanings. Some of them are of
such a broad social and moral import as to be irrelevant to our immediate
theme. But one of the meanings is distinctly political, for it denotes a mode
of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their
conduct as officials. This is not the most inspiring of the different meanings
of democracy; it is comparatively special in character. But it contains about
all that is relevant to political democracy. Now the theories and practices
regarding the selection and behavior of public officials which constitute
political democracy have been worked out against the historical background
just alluded to. They represent 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.
To discuss democratic government at large apart from its historic
background is to miss its point and to throw away all means for an
intelligent criticism of it. In taking the distinctively historical point of view
we do not derogate from the important and even superior claims of

democracy as an ethical and social ideal. We limit the topic for discussion
in such a way as to avoid “the great bad,” the mixing of things which need
to be kept distinct.
Viewed as a historical tendency exhibited in a chain of movements
which have affected the forms of government over almost the entire globe
during the last century and a half, democracy is a complex affair. There is a
current legend to the effect that the movement originated in a single clear-
cut idea, and has proceeded by a single unbroken impetus to unfold itself to
a predestined end, whether triumphantly glorious or fatally catastrophic.
The myth is perhaps rarely held in so simple and unmixed a form. But
something approaching it is found whenever men either praise or damn
democratic government absolutely, that is, without comparing it with
alternative polities. Even the least accidental, the most deliberately planned,
political forms do not embody some absolute and unquestioned good. They
represent a choice, amid a complex of contending forces, of that particular
possibility which appears to promise the most good with the least attendant
evil.
Such a statement, moreover, immensely oversimplifies. Political forms
do not originate in a once for all way. The greatest change, once it is
accomplished, is simply the outcome of a vast series of adaptations and
responsive accommodations, each to its own particular situation. Looking
back, it is possible to make out a trend of more or less steady change in a
single direction. But it is, we repeat, mere mythology to attribute such unity
of result as exists (which is always easy to exaggerate) to single force or
principle. Political democracy has emerged as a kind of net consequence of
a vast multitude of responsive adjustments to a vast number of situations,
no two of which were alike, but which tended to converge to a common
outcome. The democratic convergence, moreover, was not the result of
distinctively political forces and agencies. Much less is democracy the
product of democracy, of some inherent nisus, or immanent idea. The
temperate generalization to the effect that the unity of the democratic
movement is found in effort to remedy evils experienced in consequence of
prior political institutions realizes that it proceeded step by step, and that
each step was taken without foreknowledge of any ultimate result, and, for
the most part, under the immediate influence of a number of differing
impulses and slogans.

It is even more important to realize that the conditions out of which the
efforts at remedy grew and which it made possible for them to succeed were
primarily non-political in nature. For the evils were of long standing, and
any account of the movement must raise two questions: Why were efforts at
improvement not made earlier, and, when they were made, why did they
take just the form which they did take? The answers to both questions will
be found in distinctive religious, scientific and economic changes which
finally took effect in the political field, being themselves primarily non-
political and innocent of democratic intent. Large questions and far-ranging
ideas and ideals arose during the course of the movement. But theories of
the nature of the individual and his rights, of freedom and authority,
progress and order, liberty and law, of the common good and a general will,
of democracy itself, did not produce the movement. They reflected it in
thought; after they emerged, they entered into subsequent strivings and had
practical effect.
We have insisted that the development of political democracy
represents the convergence of a great number of social movements, no one
of which owed either its origin or its impetus to inspiration of democratic
ideals or to planning for the eventual outcome. This fact makes irrelevant
both pæans and condemnations based upon conceptual interpretations of
democracy, which, whether true or false, good or bad, are reflections of
facts in thought, not their causal authors. In any case, the complexity of the
historic events which have operated is such as to preclude any thought of
rehearsing them in these pages, even if I had a knowledge and competency
which are lacking. Two general and obvious considerations need, however,
to be mentioned. Born in revolt against established forms of government
and the state, the events which finally culminated in democratic political
forms were deeply tinged by fear of government, and were actuated by a
desire to reduce it to a minimum so as to limit the evil it could do.
Since established political forms were tied up with other institutions,
especially ecclesiastical, and with a solid body of tradition and inherited
belief, the revolt also extended to the latter. Thus it happened that the
intellectual terms in which the movement expressed itself had a negative
import even when they seemed to be positive. Freedom presented itself as
an end in itself, though it signified in fact liberation from oppression and
tradition. Since it was necessary, upon the intellectual side, to find

justification for the movements of revolt, and since established authority
was upon the side of institutional life, the natural recourse was appeal to
some inalienable sacred authority resident in the protesting individuals.
Thus “individualism” was born, a theory which endowed singular persons
in isolation from any associations, except those which they deliberately
formed for their own ends, with native or natural rights. The revolt against
old and limiting associations was converted, intellectually, into the doctrine
of independence of any and all associations.
Thus the practical movement for the limitation of the powers of
government became associated, as in the influential philosophy of John
Locke, with the doctrine that the ground and justification of the restriction
was prior non-political rights inherent in the very structure of the
individual. From these tenets, it was a short step to the conclusion that the
sole end of government was the protection of individuals in the rights which
were theirs by nature. The American revolution was a rebellion against an
established government, and it naturally borrowed and expanded these ideas
as the ideological interpretation of the effort to obtain independence of the
colonies. It is now easy for the imagination to conceive circumstances
under which revolts against prior governmental forms would have found its
theoretical formulation in an assertion of the rights of groups, of other
associations than those of a political nature. There was no logic which
rendered necessary the appeal to the individual as an independent and
isolated being. In abstract logic, it would have sufficed to assert that some
primary groupings had claims which the state could not legitimately
encroach upon. In that case, the celebrated modern antithesis of the
Individual and Social, and the problem of their reconciliation, would not
have arisen. The problem would have taken the form of defining the
relationship which non-political groups bear to political union. But, as we
have already remarked, the obnoxious state was closely bound up in fact
and in tradition with other associations, ecclesiastic (and through its
influence with the family), and economic, such as gilds and corporations,
and, by means of the church-state, even with unions for scientific inquiry
and with educational institutions. The easiest way out was to go back to the
naked individual, to sweep away all associations as foreign to his nature and
rights save as they proceeded from his own voluntary choice, and
guaranteed his own private ends.

Nothing better exhibits the scope of the movement than the fact that
philosophic theories of knowledge made the same appeal to the self, or ego,
in the form of personal consciousness identified with mind itself, that
political theory made to the natural individual, as the court of ultimate
resort. The schools of Locke and Descartes, however much they were
opposed in other respects, agreed in this, differing only as to whether the
sentient or rational nature of the individual was the fundamental thing.
From philosophy the idea crept into psychology, which became an
introspective and introverted account of isolated and ultimate private
consciousness. Henceforth moral and political individualism could appeal
to “scientific” warrant for its tenets and employ a vocabulary made current
by psychology:—although in fact the psychology appealed to as its
scientific foundation was its own offspring.
The “individualistic” movement finds a classic expression in the great
documents of the French Revolution, which at one stroke did away with all
forms of association, leaving, in theory, the bare individual face to face with
the state. It would hardly have reached this point, however, if it had not
been for a second factor, which must be noted. A new scientific movement
had been made possible by the invention and use of new mechanical
appliances—the lens is typical—which focused attention upon tools like the
lever and pendulum, which, although they had long been in use, had not
formed points of departure for scientific theory. This new development in
inquiry brought, as Bacon foretold, great economic changes in its wake. It
more than paid its debt to tools by leading to the invention of machines. The
use of machinery in production and commerce was followed by the creation
of new powerful social conditions, personal opportunities and wants. Their
adequate manifestation was limited by established political and legal
practices. The legal regulations so affected every phase of life which was
interested in taking advantage of the new economic agencies as to hamper
and oppress the free play of manufacture and exchange. The established
custom of states, expressed intellectually in the theory of mercantilism
against which Adam Smith wrote his account of “The (True) Wealth of
Nations,” prevented the expansion of trade between nations, a restriction
which reacted to limit domestic industry. Internally, there was a network of
restrictions inherited from feudalism. The prices of labor and staples were
not framed in the market by higgling but were set by justices of the peace.
The development of industry was hampered by laws regulating choice of a

calling, apprenticeship, migration of workers from place to place,—and so
on.
Thus fear of government and desire to limit its operations, because they
were hostile to the development of the new agencies of production and
distribution of services and commodities, received powerful reënforcement.
The economic movement was perhaps the more influential because it
operated, not in the name of the individual and his inherent rights, but in the
name of Nature. Economic “laws,” that of labor springing from natural
wants and leading to the creation of wealth, of present abstinence in behalf
of future enjoyment leading to creation of capital effective in piling up still
more wealth, the free play of competitive exchange, designated the law of
supply and demand, were “natural” laws. They were set in opposition to
political laws as artificial, man-made affairs. The inherited tradition which
remained least questioned was a conception of Nature which made Nature
something to conjure with. The older metaphysical conception of Natural
Law was, however, changed into an economic conception; laws of nature,
implanted in human nature, regulated the production and exchange of goods
and services, and in such a way that when they were kept free from
artificial, that is political, meddling, they resulted in the maximum possible
social prosperity and progress. Popular opinion is little troubled by
questions of logical consistency. The economic theory of laissez-faire,
based upon belief in beneficent natural laws which brought about harmony
of personal profit and social benefit, was readily fused with the doctrine of
natural rights. They both had the same practical import, and what is logic
between friends? Thus the protest of the utilitarian school, which sponsored
the economic theory of natural law in economics, against natural right
theories had no effect in preventing the popular amalgam of the two sides.
The utilitarian economic theory was such an important factor in
developing the theory, as distinct from the practice, of democratic
government that it is worth while to expound it in outline. Each person
naturally seeks the betterment of his own lot. This can be attained only by
industry. Each person is naturally the best judge of his own interests, and, if
left free from the influence of artificially imposed restrictions, will express
his judgment in his choice of work and exchange of services and goods.
Thus, barring accident, he will contribute to his own happiness in the
measure of his energy in work, his shrewdness in exchange and his self-

denying thrift. Wealth and security are the natural rewards of economic
virtues. At the same time, the industry, commercial zeal, and ability of
individuals contribute to the social good. Under the invisible hand of a
beneficent providence which has framed natural laws, work, capital and
trade operate harmoniously to the advantage and advance of men
collectively and individually. The foe to be dreaded is interference of
government. Political regulation is needed only because individuals
accidentally and purposely—since the possession of property by the
industrious and able is a temptation to the idle and shiftless—encroach upon
one another’s activities and properties. This encroachment is the essence of
injustice, and the function of government is to secure justice—which
signifies chiefly the protection of property and of the contracts which attend
commercial exchange. Without the existence of the state men might
appropriate one another’s property. This appropriation is not only unfair to
the laborious individual, but by making property insecure discourages the
forthputting of energy at all and thus weakens or destroys the spring of
social progress. On the other hand, this doctrine of the function of the state
operates automatically as a limit imposed to governmental activities. The
state is itself just only when it acts to secure justice—in the sense just
defined.
The political problem thus conceived is essentially a problem of
discovering and instating a technique which will confine the operations of
government as far as may be to its legitimate business of protecting
economic interests, of which the interest a man has in the integrity of his
own life and body is a part. Rulers share the ordinary cupidity to possess
property with a minimum of personal effort. Left to themselves they take
advantage of the power with which their official position endows them to
levy arbitrarily on the wealth of others. If they protect the industry and
property of private citizens against the invasions of other private citizens, it
is only that they may have more resources upon which to draw for their
own ends. The essential problem of government thus reduces itself to this:
What arrangements will prevent rulers from advancing their own interests
at the expense of the ruled? Or, in positive terms, by what political means
shall the interests of the governors be identified with those of the governed?
The answer was given, notably by James Mill, in a classic formulation
of the nature of political democracy. Its significant features were popular

election of officials, short terms of office and frequent elections. If public
officials were dependent upon citizens for official position and its rewards,
their personal interests would coincide with those of people at large—at
least of industrious and property-owning persons. Officials chosen by
popular vote would find their election to office dependent upon presenting
evidence of their zeal and skill in protecting the interests of the populace.
Short terms and frequent elections would ensure their being held to regular
account; the polling-booth would constitute their day of judgment. The fear
of it would operate as a constant check.
Of course in this account I have oversimplified what was already an
oversimplification. The dissertation of James Mill was written before the
passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. Taken pragmatically, it was an
argument for the extension of the suffrage, then largely in the hands of
hereditary landowners, to manufacturers and merchants. James Mill had
nothing but dread of pure democracies. He opposed the extension of the
8
franchise to women. He was interested in the new “middle-class” forming
under the influence of the application of steam to manufacture and trade.
His attitude is well expressed in his conviction that even if the suffrage
were extended downwards, the middle-class “which gives to science, art
and legislation itself its most distinguished ornaments, and which is the
chief source of all that is refined and exalted in human nature, is that
portion of the community of which the influence would ultimately decide.”
In spite, however, of oversimplification, and of its special historic
motivation, the doctrine claimed to rest upon universal psychological truth;
it affords a fair picture of the principles which were supposed to justify the
movement toward democratic government. It is unnecessary to indulge in
extensive criticism. The differences between the conditions postulated by
the theory and those which have actually obtained with the development of
democratic governments speak for themselves. The discrepancy is a
sufficient criticism. This disparity itself shows, however, that what has
happened sprang from no theory but was inherent in what was going on not
only without respect to theories but without regard to politics: because,
generally speaking, of the use of steam applied to mechanical inventions.
It would be a great mistake, however, to regard the idea of the isolated
individual possessed of inherent rights “by nature” apart from association,
and the idea of economic laws as natural, in comparison with which

political laws being artificial are injurious (save when carefully
subordinated), as idle and impotent. The ideas were something more than
flies on the turning wheels. They did not originate the movement toward
popular government, but they did profoundly influence the forms which it
assumed. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that persistent older
conditions, to which the theories were more faithful than to the state of
affairs they professed to report, were so reënforced by the professed
philosophy of the democratic state, as to exercise a great influence. The
result was a skew, a deflection and distortion, in democratic forms. Putting
the “individualistic” matter in a gross statement, which has to be corrected
by later qualifications, we may say that “the individual,” about which the
new philosophy centered itself, was in process of complete submergence in
fact at the very time in which he was being elevated on high in theory. As to
the alleged subordination of political affairs to natural forces and laws, we
may say that actual economic conditions were thoroughly artificial, in the
sense in which the theory condemned the artificial. They supplied the man-
made instrumentalities by which the new governmental agencies were
grasped and used to suit the desires of the new class of business men.
Both of these statements are formal as well as sweeping. To acquire
intelligible meaning they must be developed in some detail. Graham Wallas
prefixed to the first chapter of his book entitled “The Great Society” the
following words of Woodrow Wilson, taken from The New Freedom:
“Yesterday and ever since history began, men were related to one another as
individuals.... To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with
great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individuals.
Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new age of human
relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.” If we accept these
words as containing even a moderate degree of truth, they indicate the
enormous ineptitude of the individualistic philosophy to meet the needs and
direct the factors of the new age. They suggest what is meant by saying the
theory of an individual possessed of desires and claims and endued with
foresight and prudence and love of bettering himself was framed at just the
time when the individual was counting for less in the direction of social
affairs, at a time when mechanical forces and vast impersonal organizations
were determining the frame of things.

The statement that “yesterday and even since history began, men were
related to one another as individuals” is not true. Men have always been
associated together in living, and association in conjoint behavior has
affected their relations to one another as individuals. It is enough to recall
how largely human relations have been permeated by patterns derived
directly and indirectly from the family; even the state was a dynastic affair.
But none the less the contrast which Mr. Wilson had in mind is a fact. The
9
earlier associations were mostly of the type well termed by Cooley “face-
to-face.” Those which were important, which really counted in forming
emotional and intellectual dispositions, were local and contiguous and
consequently visible. Human beings, if they shared in them at all, shared
directly and in a way of which they were aware in both their affections and
their beliefs. The state, even when it despotically interfered, was remote, an
agency alien to daily life. Otherwise it entered men’s lives through custom
and common law. No matter how widespread their operation might be, it
was not their breadth and inclusiveness which counted but their immediate
local presence. The church was indeed both a universal and an intimate
affair. But it entered into the life of most human beings not through its
universality, as far as their thoughts and habits were concerned, but through
an immediate ministration of rites and sacraments. The new technology
applied in production and commerce resulted in a social revolution. The
local communities without intent or forecast found their affairs conditioned
by remote and invisible organizations. The scope of the latter’s activities
was so vast and their impact upon face-to-face associations so pervasive
and unremitting that it is no exaggeration to speak of “a new age of human
relations.” The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a
society, but it is no community. The invasion of the community by the new
and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human
behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life. In these ways of aggregate
activity the community, in its strict sense, is not a conscious partner, and
over them it has no direct control. They were, however, the chief factors in
bringing into being national and territorial states. The need of some control
over them was the chief agency in making the government of these states
democratic or popular in the current sense of these words.
Why, then, was a movement, which involved so much submerging of
personal action in the overflowing consequences of remote and inaccessible

collective actions, reflected in a philosophy of individualism? A complete
answer is out of the question. Two considerations are, however, obvious and
significant. The new conditions involved a release of human potentialities
previously dormant. While their impact was unsettling to the community, it
was liberating with respect to single persons, while its oppressive phase was
hidden in the impenetrable mists of the future. Speaking with greater
correctness, the oppressive phase affected primarily the elements of the
community which were also depressed in the older and semi-feudal
conditions. Since they did not count for much anyway, being traditionally
the drawers of water and hewers of wood, having emerged only in a legal
sense from serfdom, the effect of new economic conditions upon the
laboring masses went largely unnoted. Day laborers were still in effect, as
openly in the classic philosophy, underlying conditions of community life
rather than members of it. Only gradually did the effect upon them become
apparent; by that time they had attained enough power—were sufficiently
important factors in the new economic régime—to obtain political
emancipation, and thus figure in the forms of the democratic state.
Meanwhile the liberating effect was markedly conspicuous with respect to
the members of the “middle-class,” the manufacturing and mercantile class.
It would be short-sighted to limit the release of powers to opportunities to
procure wealth and enjoy its fruits, although the creation of material wants
and ability to satisfy them are not to be lightly passed over. Initiative,
inventiveness, foresight and planning were also stimulated and confirmed.
This manifestation of new powers was on a sufficiently large scale to strike
and absorb attention. The result was formulated as the discovery of the
individual. The customary is taken for granted; it operates subconsciously.
Breach of wont and use is focal; it forms “consciousness.” The necessary
and persistent modes of association went unnoticed. The new ones, which
were voluntarily undertaken, occupied thought exclusively. They
monopolized the observed horizon. “Individualism” was a doctrine which
stated what was focal in thought and purpose.
The other consideration is akin. In the release of new powers singular
persons were emancipated from a mass of old habits, regulations and
institutions. We have already noted how the methods of production and
exchange made possible by the new technology were hampered by the rules
and customs of the prior régime. The latter were then felt to be intolerably
restrictive and oppressive. Since they hampered the free play of initiative

and commercial activity, they were artificial and enslaving. The struggle for
emancipation from their influence was identified with the liberty of the
individual as such; in the intensity of the struggle, associations and
institutions were condemned wholesale as foes of freedom save as they
were products of personal agreement and voluntary choice. That many
forms of association remained practically untouched was easily overlooked,
just because they were matters of course. Indeed, any attempt to touch
them, notably the established form of family association and the legal
institution of property, were looked upon as subversive, as license, not
liberty, in the sanctified phrase. The identification of democratic forms of
government with this individualism was easy. The right of suffrage
represented for the mass a release of hitherto dormant capacity and also, in
appearance at least, a power to shape social relations on the basis of
individual volition.
Popular franchise and majority rule afforded the imagination a picture
of individuals in their untrammeled individual sovereignty making the state.
To adherents and opponents alike it presented the spectacle of a pulverizing
of established associations into the desires and intentions of atomic
individuals. The forces, springing from combination and institutional
organization which controlled below the surface the acts which formally
issued from individuals, went unnoted. It is the essence of ordinary thought
to grasp the external scene and hold it as reality. The familiar eulogies of
the spectacle of “free men” going to the polls to determine by their personal
volitions the political forms under which they should live is a specimen of
this tendency to take whatever is readily seen as the full reality of a
situation. In physical matters natural science has successfully challenged
this attitude. In human matters it remains in almost full force.
The opponents of popular government were no more prescient than its
supporters, although they showed more logical sense in following the
assumed individualistic premise to its conclusion: the disintegration of
society. Carlyle’s savage attacks upon the notion of a society held together
only by a “cash-nexus” are well known. Its inevitable terminus to him was
“anarchy plus a constable.” He did not see that the new industrial régime
was forging social bonds as rigid as those which were disappearing and
much more extensive—whether desirable ties or not is another matter.
Macaulay, the intellectualist of the Whigs, asserted that the extension of

suffrage to the masses would surely result in arousing the predatory
impulses of the propertyless masses who would use their new political
power to despoil the middle as well as upper class. He added that while
there was no longer danger that the civilized portions of humanity would be
overthrown by the savage and barbarous portions, it was possible that in the
bosom of civilization would be engendered the malady which would
destroy it.
Incidentally we have trenched upon the other doctrine, the idea that
there is something inherently “natural” and amenable to “natural law” in the
working of economic forces, in contrast with the man-made artificiality of
political institutions. The idea of a natural individual in his isolation
possessed of full-fledged wants, of energies to be expended according to his
own volition, and of a ready-made faculty of foresight and prudent
calculation is as much a fiction in psychology as the doctrine of the
individual in possession of antecedent political rights is one in politics. The
liberalist school made much of desires, but to them desire was a conscious
matter deliberately directed upon a known goal of pleasures. Desire and
pleasure were both open and above-board affairs. The mind was seen as if
always in the bright sunlight, having no hidden recesses, no unexplorable
nooks, nothing underground. Its operations were like the moves in a fair
game of chess. They are in the open; the players have nothing up their
sleeves; the changes of position take place by express intent and in plain
sight; they take place according to rules all of which are known in advance.
Calculation and skill, or dullness and inaptitude, determine the result. Mind
was “consciousness,” and the latter was a clear, transparent, self-revealing
medium in which wants, efforts and purposes were exposed without
distortion.
To-day it is generally admitted that conduct proceeds from conditions
which are largely out of focal attention, and which can be discovered and
brought to light only by inquiries more exacting than those which teach us
the concealed relationships involved in gross physical phenomena. What is
not so generally acknowledged is that the underlying and generative
conditions of concrete behavior are social as well as organic: much more
social than organic as far as the manifestation of differential wants,
purposes and methods of operation is concerned. To those who appreciate
this fact, it is evident that the desires, aims and standards of satisfaction

which the dogma of “natural” economic processes and laws assumes are
themselves socially conditioned phenomena. They are reflections into the
singular human being of customs and institutions; they are not natural, that
is, “native,” organic propensities. They mirror a state of civilization. Even
more true, if possible, is it that the form in which work is done, industry
carried on, is the outcome of accumulated culture, not an original
possession of persons in their own structure. There is little that can be called
industry and still less that constitutes a store of wealth until tools exist, and
tools are the results of slow processes of transmission. The development of
tools into machines, the characteristic of the industrial age, was made
possible only by taking advantage of science socially accumulated and
transmitted. The technique of employing tools and machines was equally
something which had to be learned; it was no natural endowment but
something acquired by observing others, by instruction and communication.
These sentences are a poor and pallid way of conveying the outstanding
fact. There are organic or native needs, of course, as for food, protection
and mates. There are innate structures which facilitate them in securing the
external objects through which they are met. But the only kind of industry
they are capable of giving rise to is a precarious livelihood obtained by
gathering such edible plants and animals as chance might throw in the way:
the lowest type of savagery just emerging from a brute condition. Nor,
strictly speaking, could they effect even this meager result. For because of
the phenomenon of helpless infancy even such a primitive régime depends
upon the assistance of associated action, including that most valuable form
of assistance: learning from others. What would even savage industry be
without the use of fire, of weapons, of woven articles, all of which involve
communication and tradition? The industrial régime which the authors of
“natural” economy contemplated presupposed wants, tools, materials,
purposes, techniques and abilities in a thousand ways dependent upon
associated behavior. Thus in the sense in which the authors of the doctrine
employed the word “artificial,” these things were intensely and
cumulatively artificial. What they were really after was a changed direction
of custom and institutions. The outcome of the acts of those who were
engaged in forwarding the new industry and commerce was a new set of
customs and institutions. The latter were as much extensive and enduring
conjoint modes of life as were those which they displaced; more so in their
sweep and force.

The bearing of this fact upon political theory and practice is evident.
Not only were the wants and intentions which actually operated functions of
associated life, but they re-determined the forms and temper of this life.
Athenians did not buy Sunday newspapers, make investments in stocks and
bonds, nor want motor cars. Nor do we to-day want for the most part
beautiful bodies and beauty of architectural surroundings. We are mostly
satisfied with the result of cosmetics and with ugly slums, and oftentimes
with equally ugly palaces. We do not “naturally” or organically need them,
but we want them. If we do not demand them directly we demand them
none the less effectively. For they are necessary consequences of the things
upon which we have set our hearts. In other words, a community wants (in
the only intelligible sense of wanting, effective demand) either education or
ignorance, lovely or squalid surroundings, railway trains or ox-carts, stocks
and bonds, pecuniary profit or constructive arts, according as associated
activity presents these things to them habitually, esteems them, and supplies
the means of attaining them. But that is only half the tale.
Associated behavior directed toward objects which fulfill wants not
only produces those objects, but brings customs and institutions into being.
The indirect and unthought-of consequences are usually more important
than the direct. The fallacy of supposing that the new industrial régime
would produce just and for the most part only the consequences consciously
forecast and aimed at was the counterpart of the fallacy that the wants and
efforts characteristic of it were functions of “natural” human beings. They
arose out of institutionalized action and they resulted in institutionalized
action. The disparity between the results of the industrial revolution and the
conscious intentions of those engaged in it is a remarkable case of the
extent to which indirect consequences of conjoint activity outweigh, beyond
the possibility of reckoning, the results directly contemplated. Its outcome
was the development of those extensive and invisible bonds, those “great
impersonal concerns, organizations,” which now pervasively affect the
thinking, willing and doing of everybody, and which have ushered in the
“new era of human relationships.”
Equally undreamed of was the effect of the massive organizations and
complicated interactions upon the state. Instead of the independent, self-
moved individuals contemplated by the theory, we have standardized
interchangeable units. Persons are joined together, not because they have

voluntarily chosen to be united in these forms, but because vast currents are
running which bring men together. Green and red lines, marking out
political boundaries, are on the maps and affect legislation and jurisdiction
of courts, but railways, mails and telegraph-wires disregard them. The
consequences of the latter influence more profoundly those living within
the legal local units than do boundary lines. The forms of associated action
characteristic of the present economic order are so massive and extensive
that they determine the most significant constituents of the public and the
residence of power. Inevitably they reach out to grasp the agencies of
government; they are controlling factors in legislation and administration.
Not chiefly because of deliberate and planned self-interest, large as may be
its rôle, but because they are the most potent and best organized of social
forces. In a word, the new forms of combined action due to the modern
economic régime control present politics, much as dynastic interests
controlled those of two centuries ago. They affect thinking and desire more
than did the interests which formerly moved the state.
We have spoken as if the displacement of old legal and political
institutions was all but complete. That is a gross exaggeration. Some of the
most fundamental of traditions and habits have hardly been affected at all. It
is enough to mention the institution of property. The naïveté with which the
philosophy of “natural” economics ignored the effect upon industry and
commerce of the legal status of property, the way in which it identified
wealth and property in the legal form in which the latter had existed, is
almost incredible to-day. But the simple fact is that technological industry
has not operated with any great degree of freedom. It has been confined and
deflected at every point; it has never taken its own course. The engineer has
worked in subordination to the business manager whose primary concern is
not with wealth but with the interests of property as worked out in the
feudal and semi-feudal period. Thus the one point in which the philosophers
of “Individualism” predicted truly was that in which they did not predict at
all, but in which they merely clarified and simplified established wont and
use: when, that is, they asserted that the main business of government is to
make property interests secure.
A large part of the indictments which are now drawn against
technological industry are chargeable to the unchanged persistence of a
legal institution inherited from the pre-industrial age. It is confusing,

however, to identify in a wholesale way this issue with the question of
private property. It is conceivable that private property may function
socially. It does so even now to a considerable degree. Otherwise it could
not be supported for a day. The extent of its social utility is what blinds us
to the numerous and great social disutilities that attend its present working,
or at least reconcile us to its continuation. The real issue or at least the issue
to be first settled concerns the conditions under which the institution of
private property legally and politically functions.
We thus reach our conclusion. The same forces which have brought
about the forms of democratic government, general suffrage, executives and
legislators chosen by majority vote, have also brought about conditions
which halt the social and humane ideals that demand the utilization of
government as the genuine instrumentality of an inclusive and fraternally
associated public. “The new age of human relationships” has no political
agencies worthy of it. The democratic public is still largely inchoate and
unorganized.

CHAPTER IV

THE ECLIPSE OF THE PUBLIC
Optimism about democracy is to-day under a cloud. We are familiar
with denunciation and criticism which, however, often reveal their
emotional source in their peevish and undiscriminating tone. Many of them
suffer from the same error into which earlier laudations fell. They assume
that democracy is the product of an idea, of a single and consistent intent.
Carlyle was no admirer of democracy, but in a lucid moment he said:
“Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.” Add to this: Invent
the railway, the telegraph, mass manufacture and concentration of
population in urban centers, and some form of democratic government is,
humanly speaking, inevitable. Political democracy as it exists to-day calls
for adverse criticism in abundance. But the criticism is only an exhibition of
querulousness and spleen or of a superiority complex, unless it takes
cognizance of the conditions out of which popular government has issued.
All intelligent political criticism is comparative. It deals not with all-or-
none situations, but with practical alternatives; an absolutistic
indiscriminate attitude, whether in praise or blame, testifies to the heat of
feeling rather than the light of thought.
American democratic polity was developed out of genuine community
life, that is, association in local and small centers where industry was
mainly agricultural and where production was carried on mainly with hand
tools. It took form when English political habits and legal institutions
worked under pioneer conditions. The forms of association were stable,
even though their units were mobile and migratory. Pioneer conditions put a
high premium upon personal work, skill, ingenuity, initiative and
adaptability, and upon neighborly sociability. The township or some not
much larger area was the political unit, the town meeting the political
medium, and roads, schools, the peace of the community, were the political
objectives. The state was a sum of such units, and the national state a

federation—unless perchance a confederation—of states. The imagination
of the founders did not travel far beyond what could be accomplished and
understood in a congeries of self-governing communities. The machinery
provided for the selection of the chief executive of the federal union is
illustrative evidence. The electoral college assumed that citizens would
choose men locally known for their high standing; and that these men when
chosen would gather together for consultation to name some one known to
them for his probity and public spirit and knowledge. The rapidity with
which the scheme fell into disuse is evidence of the transitoriness of the
state of affairs that was predicated. But at the outset there was no dream of
the time when the very names of the presidential electors would be
unknown to the mass of the voters, when they would plump for a “ticket”
arranged in a more or less private caucus, and when the electoral college
would be an impersonal registering machine, such that it would be
treachery to employ the personal judgment which was originally
contemplated as the essence of the affair.
The local conditions under which our institutions took shape is well
indicated by our system, apparently so systemless, of public education. Any
one who has tried to explain it to a European will understand what is meant.
One is asked, say, what method of administration is followed, what is the
course of study and what the authorized methods of teaching. The American
member to the dialogue replies that in this state, or more likely county, or
town, or even some section of a town called a district, matters stand thus
and thus; somewhere else, so and so. The participant from this side is
perhaps thought by the foreigner to be engaged in concealing his ignorance;
and it would certainly take a veritable cyclopedic knowledge to state the
matter in its entirety. The impossibility of making any moderately
generalized reply renders it almost indispensable to resort to a historical
account in order to be intelligible. A little colony, the members of which are
probably mostly known to one another in advance, settle in what is almost,
or quite, a wilderness. From belief in its benefits and by tradition, chiefly
religious, they wish their children to know at least how to read, write and
figure. Families can only rarely provide a tutor; the neighbors over a certain
area, in New England an area smaller even than the township, combine in a
“school district.” They get a schoolhouse built, perhaps by their own labor,
and hire a teacher by means of a committee, and the teacher is paid from the
taxes. Custom determines the limited course of study, and tradition the

methods of the teacher, modified by whatever personal insight and skill he
may bring to bear. The wilderness is gradually subdued; a network of
highways, then of railways, unite the previously scattered communities.
Large cities grow up; studies grow more numerous and methods more
carefully scrutinized. The larger unit, the state, but not the federal state,
provides schools for training teachers and their qualifications are more
carefully looked into and tested. But subject to certain quite general
conditions imposed by the state-legislature, but not the national state, local
maintenance and control remain the rule. The community pattern is more
complicated, but is not destroyed. The instance seems richly instructive as
to the state of affairs under which our borrowed, English, political
institutions were reshaped and forwarded.
We have inherited, in short, local town-meeting practices and ideas. But
we live and act and have our being in a continental national state. We are
held together by non-political bonds, and the political forms are stretched
and legal institutions patched in an ad hoc and improvised manner to do the
work they have to do. Political structures fix the channels in which non-
political, industrialized currents flow. Railways, travel and transportation,
commerce, the mails, telegraph and telephone, newspapers, create enough
similarity of ideas and sentiments to keep the thing going as a whole, for
they create interaction and interdependence. The unprecedented thing is that
states, as distinguished from military empires, can exist over such a wide
area. The notion of maintaining a unified state, even nominally self-
governing, over a country as extended as the United States and consisting of
a large and racially diversified population would once have seemed the
wildest of fancies. It was assumed that such a state could be found only in
territories hardly larger than a city-state and with a homogeneous
population. It seemed almost self-evident to Plato—as to Rousseau later—
that a genuine state could hardly be larger than the number of persons
capable of personal acquaintance with one another. Our modern state-unity
is due to the consequences of technology employed so as to facilitate the
rapid and easy circulation of opinions and information, and so as to
generate constant and intricate interaction far beyond the limits of face-to-
face communities. Political and legal forms have only piece-meal and
haltingly, with great lag, accommodated themselves to the industrial
transformation. The elimination of distance, at the base of which are

physical agencies, has called into being the new form of political
association.
The wonder of the performance is the greater because of the odds
against which it has been achieved. The stream of immigrants which has
poured in is so large and heterogeneous that under conditions which
formerly obtained it would have disrupted any semblance of unity as surely
as the migratory invasion of alien hordes once upset the social equilibrium
of the European continent. No deliberately adopted measures could have
accomplished what has actually happened. Mechanical forces have
operated, and it is no cause for surprise if the effect is more mechanical than
vital. The reception of new elements of population in large number from
heterogeneous peoples, often hostile to one another at home, and the
welding them into even an outward show of unity is an extraordinary feat.
In many respects, the consolidation has occurred so rapidly and ruthlessly
that much of value has been lost which different peoples might have
contributed. The creation of political unity has also promoted social and
intellectual uniformity, a standardization favorable to mediocrity. Opinion
has been regimented as well as outward behavior. The temper and flavor of
the pioneer have evaporated with extraordinary rapidity; their precipitate, as
is often noted, is apparent only in the wild-west romance and the movie.
What Bagehot called the cake of custom formed with increasing
acceleration, and the cake is too often flat and soggy. Mass production is
not confined to the factory.
The resulting political integration has confounded the expectations of
earlier critics of popular government as much as it must surprise its early
backers if they are gazing from on high upon the present scene. The critics
predicted disintegration, instability. They foresaw the new society falling
apart, dissolving into mutually repellent animated grains of sand. They, too,
took seriously the theory of “Individualism” as the basis of democratic
government. A stratification of society into immemorial classes within
which each person performed his stated duties according to his fixed
position seemed to them the only warrant of stability. They had no faith that
human beings released from the pressure of this system could hold together
in any unity. Hence they prophesied a flux of governmental régimes, as
individuals formed factions, seized power, and then lost it as some newly
improvised faction proved stronger. Had the facts conformed to the theory

of Individualism, they would doubtless have been right. But, like the
authors of the theory, they ignored the technological forces making for
consolidation.
In spite of attained integration, or rather perhaps because of its nature,
10
the Public seems to be lost; it is certainly bewildered. The government,
officials and their activities, are plainly with us. Legislatures make laws
with luxurious abandon; subordinate officials engage in a losing struggle to
enforce some of them; judges on the bench deal as best they can with the
steadily mounting pile of disputes that come before them. But where is the
public which these officials are supposed to represent? How much more is it
than geographical names and official titles? The United States, the state of
Ohio or New York, the county of this and the city of that? Is the public
much more than what a cynical diplomat once called Italy: a geographical
expression? Just as philosophers once imputed a substance to qualities and
traits in order that the latter might have something in which to inhere and
thereby gain a conceptual solidity and consistency which they lacked on
their face, so perhaps our political “common-sense” philosophy imputes a
public only to support and substantiate the behavior of officials. How can
the latter be public officers, we despairingly ask, unless there is a public? If
a public exists, it is surely as uncertain about its own whereabouts as
philosophers since Hume have been about the residence and make-up of the
self. The number of voters who take advantage of their majestic right is
steadily decreasing in proportion to those who might use it. The ratio of
actual to eligible voters is now about one-half. In spite of somewhat frantic
appeal and organized effort, the endeavor to bring voters to a sense of their
privileges and duties has so far been noted for failure. A few preach the
impotence of all politics; the many nonchalantly practice abstinence and
indulge in indirect action. Skepticism regarding the efficacy of voting is
openly expressed, not only in the theories of intellectuals, but in the words
of lowbrow masses: “What difference does it make whether I vote or not?
Things go on just the same anyway. My vote never changed anything.”
Those somewhat more reflective add: “It is nothing but a fight between the
ins and the outs. The only difference made by an election is as to who get
the jobs, draw the salaries and shake down the plum tree.”
Those still more inclined to generalization assert that the whole
apparatus of political activities is a kind of protective coloration to conceal

the fact that big business rules the governmental roost in any case. Business
is the order of the day, and the attempt to stop or deflect its course is as
futile as Mrs. Partington essaying to sweep back the tides with a broom.
Most of those who hold these opinions would profess to be shocked if the
doctrine of economic determinism were argumentatively expounded to
them, but they act upon a virtual belief in it. Nor is acceptance of the
doctrine limited to radical socialists. It is implicit in the attitude of men of
big business and financial interests, who revile the former as destructive
“Bolshevists.” For it is their firm belief that “prosperity”—a word which
has taken on religious color—is the great need of the country, that they are
its authors and guardians, and hence by right the determiners of polity.
Their denunciations of the “materialism” of socialists is based simply upon
the fact that the latter want a different distribution of material force and
well-being than that which satisfies those now in control.
The unfitness of whatever public exists, with respect to the government
which is nominally its organ, is made manifest in the extra-legal agencies
which have grown up. Intermediary groups are closest to the political
conduct of affairs. It is interesting to compare the English literature of the
eighteenth century regarding factions with the status actually occupied by
parties. Factionalism was decried by all thinkers as the chief enemy to
political stability. Their voice of condemnation is reëchoed in the writing of
early nineteenth-century American writers on politics. Extensive and
consolidated factions under the name of parties are now not only a matter of
course, but popular imagination can conceive of no other way by which
officials may be selected and governmental affairs carried on. The
centralizing movement has reached a point where even a third party can
lead only a spasmodic and precarious existence. Instead of individuals who
in the privacy of their consciousness make choices which are carried into
effect by personal volition, there are citizens who have the blessed
opportunity to vote for a ticket of men mostly unknown to them, and which
is made up for them by an under-cover machine in a caucus whose
operations constitute a kind of political predestination. There are those who
speak as if ability to choose between two tickets were a high exercise of
individual freedom. But it is hardly the kind of liberty contemplated by the
authors of the individualistic doctrine. “Nature abhors a vacuum.” When the
public is as uncertain and obscure as it is to-day, and hence as remote from
government, bosses with their political machines fill the void between

government and the public. Who pulls the strings which move the bosses
and generates power to run the machines is a matter of surmise rather than
of record, save for an occasional overt scandal.
Quite aside, however, from the allegation that “Big Business” plays the
tune and pulls the strings to which bosses dance, it is true that parties are
not creators of policies to any large extent at the present time. For parties
yield in piece-meal accommodation to social currents, irrespective of
professed principles. As these lines are written a weekly periodical remarks:
“Since the end of the Civil War practically all the more important measures
which have been embodied in federal legislation have been reached without
a national election which turned upon the issue and which divided the two
major parties.” Reform of civil service, regulation of railways, popular
election of senators, national income tax, suffrage for women, and
prohibition are supported to substantiate the statement. Hence its other
remark appears justified: “American party politics seem at times to be a
device for preventing issues which may excite popular feeling and involve
bitter controversies from being put up to the American people.”
A negatively corroborating fact is seen in the fate of the Child Labor
amendment. The need of giving to Congress power to regulate child labor,
denied it by decisions of the Supreme Court, had been asserted in the
platforms of all political parties; the idea was endorsed by the last three of
the presidents belonging to the party in power. Yet so far, the proposed
amendment to the constitution has not begun to secure the needed support.
Political parties may rule, but they do not govern. The public is so confused
and eclipsed that it cannot even use the organs through which it is supposed
to mediate political action and polity.
The same lesson is taught by the breakdown of the theory of the
responsibility of elected representatives to the electorate, to say nothing of
their alleged liability to be called before the bar of the private judgment of
individuals. It is at least suggestive that the terms of the theory are best met
in legislation of the “pork-barrel” type. There a representative may be called
to account for failure to meet local desire, or be rewarded for pertinacity
and success in fulfilling its wishes. But only rarely is the theory borne out in
important matters, although occasionally it works. But the instances are so
infrequent that any skilled political observer could enumerate them by
name. The reason for the lack of personal liability to the electorate is

evident. The latter is composed of rather amorphous groups. Their political
ideas and beliefs are mostly in abeyance between elections. Even in times
of political excitement, artificially accelerated, their opinions are moved
collectively by the current of the group rather than by independent personal
judgment. As a rule, what decides the fate of a person who comes up for
election is neither his political excellence nor his political defects. The
current runs for or against the party in power and the individual candidate
sinks or swims as runs the current. At times there is a general consensus of
sentiment, a definite trend in favor of “progressive legislation” or a desire
for a “return to normalcy.” But even then only exceptional candidates get by
on any basis of personal responsibility to the electorate. The “tidal wave”
swamps some; the “landslide” carries others into office. At other times,
habit, party funds, the skill of managers of the machine, the portrait of a
candidate with his firm jaw, his lovely wife and children, and a multitude of
other irrelevancies, determine the issue.
These scattered comments are not made in the belief that they convey
any novel truth. Such things are familiar; they are the common-places of the
political scene. They could be extended indefinitely by any careful observer
of the scene. The significant thing is that familiarity has bred indifference if
not contempt. Indifference is the evidence of current apathy, and apathy is
testimony to the fact that the public is so bewildered that it cannot find
itself. The remarks are not made with a view to drawing a conclusion. They
are offered with a view to outlining a problem: What is the public? If there
is a public, what are the obstacles in the way of its recognizing and
articulating itself? Is the public a myth? Or does it come into being only in
periods of marked social transition when crucial alternative issues stand out,
such as that between throwing one’s lot in with the conservation of
established institutions or with forwarding new tendencies? In a reaction
against dynastic rule which has come to be felt as despotically oppressive?
In a transfer of social power from agrarian classes to industrial?
Is not the problem at the present time that of securing experts to
manage administrative matters, other than the framing of policies? It may
be urged that the present confusion and apathy are due to the fact that the
real energy of society is now directed in all non-political matters by trained
specialists who manage things, while politics are carried on with a
machinery and ideas formed in the past to deal with quite another sort of

situation. There is no particular public concerned in finding expert school
instructors, competent doctors, or business managers. Nothing called a
public intervenes to instruct physicians in the practice of the healing art or
merchants in the art of salesmanship. The conduct of these callings and
others characteristic of our time are decided by science and pseudo-science.
The important governmental affairs at present, it may be argued, are also
technically complicated matters to be conducted properly by experts. And if
at present people are not educated to the recognition of the importance of
finding experts and of entrusting administration to them, it may plausibly be
asserted that the prime obstruction lies in the superstitious belief that there
is a public concerned to determine the formation and execution of general
social policies. Perhaps the apathy of the electorate is due to the irrelevant
artificiality of the issues with which it is attempted to work up factitious
excitement. Perhaps this artificiality is in turn mainly due to the survival of
political beliefs and machinery from a period when science and technology
were so immature as not to permit of a definite technique for handling
definite social situations and meeting specific social needs. The attempt to
decide by law that the legends of a primitive Hebrew people regarding the
genesis of man are more authoritative than the results of scientific inquiry
might be cited as a typical example of the sort of thing which is bound to
happen when the accepted doctrine is that a public organized for political
purposes, rather than experts guided by specialized inquiry, is the final
umpire and arbiter of issues.
The questions of most concern at present may be said to be matters like
sanitation, public health, healthful and adequate housing, transportation,
planning of cities, regulation and distribution of immigrants, selection and
management of personnel, right methods of instruction and preparation of
competent teachers, scientific adjustment of taxation, efficient management
of funds, and so on. These are technical matters, as much so as the
construction of an efficient engine for purposes of traction or locomotion.
Like it they are to be settled by inquiry into facts; and as the inquiry can be
carried on only by those especially equipped, so the results of inquiry can
be utilized only by trained technicians. What has counting heads, decision
by majority and the whole apparatus of traditional government to do with
such things? Given such considerations, and the public and its organization
for political ends is not only a ghost, but a ghost which walks and talks, and
obscures, confuses and misleads governmental action in a disastrous way.

Personally I am far from thinking that such considerations, pertinent as
they are to administrative activities, cover the entire political field. They
ignore forces which have to be composed and resolved before technical and
specialized action can come into play. But they aid in giving definiteness
and point to a fundamental question: What, after all, is the public under
present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it
from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and
amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to
present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the Public in
the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged
with such assurance and hope?
Previous discussion has brought to light some conditions out of which
the public is generated. It has also set forth some of the causes through
which a “new age of human relationships” has been brought into being.
These two arguments form the premises which, when they are related to
each other, will provide our answer to the questions just raised. Indirect,
extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting
behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in
controlling these consequences. But the machine age has so enormously
expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect
consequences, have formed such immense and consolidated unions in
action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis, that the resultant
public cannot identify and distinguish itself. And this discovery is obviously
an antecedent condition of any effective organization on its part. Such is our
thesis regarding the eclipse which the public idea and interest have
undergone. There are too many publics and too much of public concern for
our existing resources to cope with. The problem of a democratically
organized public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem, in a
degree to which the political affairs of prior ages offer no parallel.
Our concern at this time is to state how it is that the machine age in
developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated the
small communities of former times without generating a Great Community.
The facts are familiar enough; our especial affair is to point out their
connections with the difficulties under which the organization of a
democratic public is laboring. For the very familiarity with the phenomena

conceals their significance and blinds us to their relation to immediate
political problems.
The scope of the Great War furnishes an urgent as well as convenient
starting point for the discussion. The extent of that war is unparalleled,
because the conditions involved in it are so new. The dynastic conflicts of
the seventeenth century are called by the same name: we have only one
word, “war.” The sameness of the word too easily conceals from us the
difference in significance. We think of all wars as much the same thing,
only the last one was horrible beyond others. Colonies were drawn in: self-
governing ones entered voluntarily; possessions were levied upon for
troops; alliances were formed with remote countries in spite of diversities of
race and culture, as in the cases of Great Britain and Japan, Germany and
Turkey. Literally every continent upon the globe was involved. Indirect
effects were as broad as direct. Not merely soldiers, but finance, industry
and opinion were mobilized and consolidated. Neutrality was a precarious
affair. There was a critical epoch in the history of the world when the
Roman Empire assembled in itself the lands and peoples of the
Mediterranean basin. The World War stands out as an indubitable proof that
what then happened for a region has now happened for the world, only
there is now no comprehensive political organization to include the various
divided yet interdependent countries. Any one who even partially visualizes
the scene has a convincing reminder of the meaning of the Great Society:
that it exists, and that it is not integrated.
Extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of the
conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the globe. The
similes of the stone cast into the pool, ninepins in a row, the spark which
kindles a vast conflagration, are pale in comparison with the reality. The
spread of the war seemed like the movement of an uncontrolled natural
catastrophe. The consolidation of peoples in enclosed, nominally
independent, national states has its counterpart in the fact that their acts
affect groups and individuals in other states all over the world. The
connections and ties which transferred energies set in motion in one spot to
all parts of the earth were not tangible and visible; they do not stand out as
do politically bounded states. But the war is there to show that they are as
real, and to prove that they are not organized and regulated. It suggests that
existing political and legal forms and arrangements are incompetent to deal

with the situation. For the latter is the joint product of the existing
constitution of the political state and the working of non-political forces not
adjusted to political forms. We cannot expect the causes of a disease to
combine effectually to cure the disease they create. The need is that the
non-political forces organize themselves to transform existing political
structures: that the divided and troubled publics integrate.
In general, the non-political forces are the expressions of a
technological age injected into an inherited political scheme which operates
to deflect and distort their normal operation. The industrial and commercial
relations that created the situation of which the war is a manifestation are as
evident in small things as great. They were exhibited, not only in the
struggle for raw materials, for distant markets, and in staggering national
debts, but in local and unimportant phenomena. Travelers finding
themselves away from home could not get their letters of credit cashed even
in countries not then at war. Stock-markets closed on one hand, and
profiteers piled up their millions on the other. One instance may be cited
from domestic affairs. The plight of the farmer since the war has created a
domestic political issue. A great demand was generated for food and other
agricultural products; prices rose. In addition to this economic stimulus,
farmers were objects of constant political exhortation to increase their
crops. Inflation and temporary prosperity followed. The end of active
warfare came. Impoverished countries could not buy and pay for foodstuffs
up to even a pre-war level. Taxes were enormously increased. Currencies
were depreciated; the world’s gold supply centered here. The stimulus of
war and of national extravagance piled up the inventories of factories and
merchants. Wages and the prices of agricultural implements increased.
When deflation came it found a restricted market, increased costs of
production, and farmers burdened with mortgages lightly assumed during
the period of frenzied expansion.
This instance is not cited because it is peculiarly important in
comparison with other consequences which have happened, especially in
Europe. It is relatively insignificant by contrast with them, and in contrast
with the arousal of nationalistic sentiments which has everywhere taken
place since the war in so-called backward countries. But it shows the
ramifying consequences of our intricate and interdependent economic
relations, and it shows how little prevision and regulation exist. The

farming population could hardly have acted with knowledge of the
consequences of the fundamental relations in which they were implicated.
They could make a momentary and improvised response to them, but they
could not manage their affairs in controlled adaptation to the course of
events. They present themselves as hapless subjects of overwhelming
operations with which they were hardly acquainted and over which they had
no more control than over the vicissitudes of climate.
The illustration cannot be objected to on the ground that it rests upon
the abnormal situation of war. The war itself was a normal manifestation of
the underlying unintegrated state of society. The local face-to-face
community has been invaded by forces so vast, so remote in initiation, so
far-reaching in scope and so complexly indirect in operation, that they are,
from the standpoint of the members of local social units, unknown. Man, as
has been often remarked, has difficulty in getting on either with or without
his fellows, even in neighborhoods. He is not more successful in getting on
with them when they act at a great distance in ways invisible to him. An
inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect consequences
are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies which order their
occurrence. At present, many consequences are felt rather than perceived;
they are suffered, but they cannot be said to be known, for they are not, by
those who experience them, referred to their origins. It goes, then, without
saying that agencies are not established which canalize the streams of social
action and thereby regulate them. Hence the publics are amorphous and
unarticulated.
There was a time when a man might entertain a few general political
principles and apply them with some confidence. A citizen believed in
states’ rights or in a centralized federal government; in free trade or
protection. It did not involve much mental strain to imagine that by
throwing in his lot with one party or another he could so express his views
that his belief would count in government. For the average voter to-day the
tariff question is a complicated medley of infinite detail, schedules of rates
specific and ad valorem on countless things, many of which he does not
recognize by name, and with respect to which he can form no judgment.
Probably not one voter in a thousand even reads the scores of pages in
which the rates of toll are enumerated and he would not be much wiser if he
did. The average man gives it up as a bad job. At election time, appeal to

some time-worn slogan may galvanize him into a temporary notion that he
has convictions on an important subject, but except for manufacturers and
dealers who have some interest at stake in this or that schedule, belief lacks
the qualities which attach to beliefs about matters of personal concern.
Industry is too complex and intricate.
Again the voter may by personal predilection or inherited belief incline
towards magnifying the scope of local governments and inveigh against the
evils of centralization. But he is vehemently sure of social evils attending
the liquor traffic. He finds that the prohibitory law of his locality, township,
county or state, is largely nullified by the importation of liquor from
outside, made easy by modern means of transportation. So he becomes an
advocate of a national amendment giving the central government power to
regulate the manufacture and sale of intoxicating drinks. This brings in its
train a necessary extension of federal officials and powers. Thus to-day, the
south, the traditional home of the states’ rights doctrine, is the chief
supporter of national prohibition and Volstead Act. It would not be possible
to say how many voters have thought of the relation between their
professed general principle and their special position on the liquor question:
probably not many. On the other hand, life-long Hamiltonians, proclaimers
of the dangers of particularistic local autonomy, are opposed to prohibition.
Hence they play a tune ad hoc on the Jeffersonian flute. Gibes at
inconsistency are, however, as irrelevant as they are easy. The social
situation has been so changed by the factors of an industrial age that
traditional general principles have little practical meaning. They persist as
emotional cries rather than as reasoned ideas.
The same criss-crossing occurs with reference to regulation of railways.
The opponent of a strong federal government finds, being a farmer or
shipper, that rates are too high; he also finds that railways pay little
attention to state boundaries, that lines once local are parts of vast systems
and that state legislation and administration are ineffectual for his purpose.
He calls for national regulation. Some partisan of the powers of the central
government, on the other hand, being an investor in stocks and bonds, finds
that his income is likely to be unfavorably affected by federal action and he
promptly protests against the vexatious tendency to appeal to national aid,
which has now become in his eyes a foolish paternalism. The developments
of industry and commerce have so complicated affairs that a clear-cut,

generally applicable, standard of judgment becomes practically impossible.
The forest cannot be seen for the trees nor the trees for the forest.
A striking example of the shift of the actual tenor of doctrines—that is,
of their consequences in application—is presented in the history of the
doctrine of Individualism, interpreted to signify a minimum of
governmental “interference” with industry and trade. At the outset, it was
held by “progressives,” by those who were protesting against the inherited
régime of rules of law and administration. Vested interests, on the contrary,
were mainly in favor of the old status. To-day the industrial-property régime
being established, the doctrine is the intellectual bulwark of the standpatter
and reactionary. He it is that now wants to be let alone, and who utters the
war-cry of liberty for private industry, thrift, contract and their pecuniary
fruit. In the United States the name “liberal,” as a party designation, is still
employed to designate a progressive in political matters. In most other
countries, the “liberal” party is that which represents established and vested
commercial and financial interests in protest against governmental
regulation. The irony of history is nowhere more evident than in the
reversal of the practical meaning of the term “liberalism” in spite of a literal
continuity of theory.
Political apathy, which is a natural product of the discrepancies
between actual practices and traditional machinery, ensues from inability to
identify one’s self with definite issues. These are hard to find and locate in
the vast complexities of current life. When traditional war-cries have lost
their import in practical policies which are consonant with them, they are
readily dismissed as bunk. Only habit and tradition, rather than reasoned
conviction, together with a vague faith in doing one’s civic duty, send to the
polls a considerable percentage of the fifty per cent. who still vote. And of
them it is a common remark that a large number vote against something or
somebody rather than for anything or anybody, except when powerful
agencies create a scare. The old principles do not fit contemporary life as it
is lived, however well they may have expressed the vital interests of the
times in which they arose. Thousands feel their hollowness even if they
cannot make their feeling articulate. The confusion which has resulted from
the size and ramifications of social activities has rendered men skeptical of
the efficiency of political action. Who is sufficient unto these things? Men
feel that they are caught in the sweep of forces too vast to understand or

master. Thought is brought to a standstill and action paralyzed. Even the
specialist finds it difficult to trace the chain of “cause and effect”; and even
he operates only after the event, looking backward, while meantime social
activities have moved on to effect a new state of affairs.
Similar considerations account for depreciation of the machinery of
democratic political action in contrast with a rising appreciation of the need
of expert administrators. For example, one of the by-products of the war
was the investment of the government at Muscle Shoals for the manufacture
of nitrogen, a chemical product of great importance to the farmer, as well as
to armies in the field. The disposition and utilization of the plant have
become matters of political dispute. The questions involved, questions of
science, agriculture, industry and finance, are highly technical. How many
voters are competent to measure all the factors involved in arriving at a
decision? And if they were competent after studying it, how many have the
time to devote to it? It is true that this matter does not come before the
electorate directly, but the technical difficulty of the problem is reflected in
the confused paralysis of the legislators whose business it is to deal with it.
The confused situation is further complicated by the invention of other and
cheaper methods of producing nitrates. Again, the rapid development of
hydro-electric and super-power is a matter of public concern. In the long
run, few questions exceed it in importance. Aside from business
corporations which have a direct interest in it and some engineers, how
many citizens have the data or the ability to secure and estimate the facts
involved in its settlement? One further illustration: Two things which
intimately concern a local public are street-railway transportation and the
marketing of food products. But the history of municipal politics shows in
most cases a flare-up of intense interest followed by a period of
indifference. Results come home to the masses of the people. But the very
size, heterogeneity and nobility of urban populations, the vast capital
required, the technical character of the engineering problems involved, soon
tire the attention of the average voter. I think the three instances are fairly
typical. The ramification of the issues before the public is so wide and
intricate, the technical matters involved are so specialized, the details are so
many and so shifting, that the public cannot for any length of time identify
and hold itself. It is not that there is no public, no large body of persons
having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions. There
is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in

composition. And there are too many publics, for conjoint actions which
have indirect, serious and enduring consequences are multitudinous beyond
comparison, and each one of them crosses the others and generates its own
group of persons especially affected with little to hold these different
publics together in an integrated whole.
The picture is not complete without taking into account the many
competitors with effective political interest. Political concerns have, of
course, always had strong rivals. Persons have always been, for the most
part, taken up with their more immediate work and play. The power of
“bread and the circus” to divert attention from public matters is an old story.
But now the industrial conditions which have enlarged, complicated and
multiplied public interests have also multiplied and intensified formidable
rivals to them. In countries where political life has been most successfully
conducted in the past, there was a class specially set aside, as it were, who
made political affairs their special business. Aristotle could not conceive a
body of citizens competent to carry on politics consisting of others than
those who had leisure, that is, of those who were relieved from all other
preoccupations, especially that of making a livelihood. Political life, till
recent times, bore out his belief. Those who took an active part in politics
were “gentlemen,” persons who had had property and money long enough,
and enough of it, so that its further pursuit was vulgar and beneath their
station. To-day, so great and powerful is the sweep of the industrial current,
the person of leisure is usually an idle person. Persons have their own
business to attend to, and “business” has its own precise and specialized
meaning. Politics thus tends to become just another “business”: the especial
concern of bosses and the managers of the machine.
The increase in the number, variety and cheapness of amusements
represents a powerful diversion from political concern. The members of an
inchoate public have too many ways of enjoyment, as well as of work, to
give much thought to organization into an effective public. Man is a
consuming and sportive animal as well as a political one. What is
significant is that access to means of amusement has been rendered easy
and cheap beyond anything known in the past. The present era of
“prosperity” may not be enduring. But the movie, radio, cheap reading
matter and motor car with all they stand for have come to stay. That they
did not originate in deliberate desire to divert attention from political

interests does not lessen their effectiveness in that direction. The political
elements in the constitution of the human being, those having to do with
citizenship, are crowded to one side. In most circles it is hard work to
sustain conversation on a political theme; and once initiated, it is quickly
dismissed with a yawn. Let there be introduced the topic of the mechanism
and accomplishment of various makes of motor cars or the respective merits
of actresses, and the dialogue goes on at a lively pace. The thing to be
remembered is that this cheapened and multiplied access to amusement is
the product of the machine age, intensified by the business tradition which
causes provision of means for an enjoyable passing of time to be one of the
most profitable of occupations.
One phase of the workings of a technological age, with its
unprecedented command of natural energies, while it is implied in what has
been said, needs explicit attention. The older publics, in being local
communities, largely homogeneous with one another, were also, as the
phrase goes, static. They changed, of course, but barring war, catastrophe
and great migrations, the modifications were gradual. They proceeded
slowly and were largely unperceived by those undergoing them. The newer
forces have created mobile and fluctuating associational forms. The
common complaints of the disintegration of family life may be placed in
evidence. The movement from rural to urban assemblies is also the result
and proof of this mobility. Nothing stays long put, not even the associations
by which business and industry are carried on. The mania for motion and
speed is a symptom of the restless instability of social life, and it operates to
intensify the causes from which it springs. Steel replaces wood and
masonry for buildings; ferro-concrete modifies steel, and some invention
may work a further revolution. Muscle Shoals was acquired to produce
nitrogen, and new methods have already made antiquated the supposed
need of great accumulation of water power. Any selected illustration suffers
because of the heterogeneous mass of cases to select from. How can a
public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?
Only deep issues or those which can be made to appear such can find a
common denominator among all the shifting and unstable relationships.
Attachment is a very different function of life from affection. Affections
will continue as long as the heart beats. But attachment requires something
more than organic causes. The very things which stimulate and intensify
affections may undermine attachments. For these are bred in tranquil

stability; they are nourished in constant relationships. Acceleration of
mobility disturbs them at their root. And without abiding attachments
associations are too shifting and shaken to permit a public readily to locate
and identify itself.
The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by
mass production for remote markets, by cable and telephone, by cheap
printing, by railway and steam navigation. Only geographically did
Columbus discover a new world. The actual new world has been generated
in the last hundred years. Steam and electricity have done more to alter the
conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which
affected human relationships before our time. There are those who lay the
blame for all the evils of our lives on steam, electricity and machinery. It is
always convenient to have a devil as well as a savior to bear the
responsibilities of humanity. In reality, the trouble springs rather from the
ideas and absence of ideas in connection with which technological factors
operate. Mental and moral beliefs and ideals change more slowly than
outward conditions. If the ideals associated with the higher life of our
cultural past have been impaired, the fault is primarily with them. Ideals
and standards formed without regard to the means by which they are to be
achieved and incarnated in flesh are bound to be thin and wavering. Since
the aims, desires and purposes created by a machine age do not connect
with tradition, there are two sets of rival ideals, and those which have actual
instrumentalities at their disposal have the advantage. Because the two are
rivals and because the older ones retain their glamor and sentimental
prestige in literature and religion, the newer ones are perforce harsh and
narrow. For the older symbols of ideal life still engage thought and
command loyalty. Conditions have changed, but every aspect of life, from
religion and education to property and trade, shows that nothing
approaching a transformation has taken place in ideas and ideals. Symbols
control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant
with its activities. Intellectual instrumentalities for the formation of an
organized public are more inadequate than its overt means. The ties which
hold men together in action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are
invisible and intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as
never before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not
communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication
the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for

itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance. Till the
Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain
in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel
is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared
experience is impossible.

CHAPTER V

SEARCH FOR THE GREAT COMMUNITY
We have had occasion to refer in passing to the distinction between
democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of
government. The two are, of course, connected. The idea remains barren
and empty save as it is incarnated in human relationships. Yet in discussion
they must be distinguished. The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea
than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must
affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry,
religion. And even as far as political arrangements are concerned,
governmental institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea
channels of effective operation. It will hardly do to say that criticisms of the
political machinery leave the believer in the idea untouched. For, as far as
they are justified—and no candid believer can deny that many of them are
only too well grounded—they arouse him to bestir himself in order that the
idea may find a more adequate machinery through which to work. What the
faithful insist upon, however, is that the idea and its external organs and
structures are not to be identified. We object to the common supposition of
the foes of existing democratic government that the accusations against it
touch the social and moral aspirations and ideas which underlie the political
forms. The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more
democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by
introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists,
or by refining and perfecting that machinery. But the phrase may also
indicate the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening
our apprehension of it, and of employing our sense of its meaning to
criticize and re-make its political manifestations.
Confining ourselves, for the moment, to political democracy, we must,
in any case, renew our protest against the assumption that the idea has itself
produced the governmental practices which obtain in democratic states:

General suffrage, elected representatives, majority rule, and so on. The idea
has influenced the concrete political movement, but it has not caused it. The
transition from family and dynastic government supported by the loyalties
of tradition to popular government was the outcome primarily of
technological discoveries and inventions working a change in the customs
by which men had been bound together. It was not due to the doctrines of
doctrinaires. The forms to which we are accustomed in democratic
governments represent the cumulative effect of a multitude of events,
unpremeditated as far as political effects were concerned and having
unpredictable consequences. There is no sanctity in universal suffrage,
frequent elections, majority rule, congressional and cabinet government.
These things are devices evolved in the direction in which the current was
moving, each wave of which involved at the time of its impulsion a
minimum of departure from antecedent custom and law. The devices served
a purpose; but the purpose was rather that of meeting existing needs which
had become too intense to be ignored, than that of forwarding the
democratic idea. In spite of all defects, they served their own purpose well.
Looking back, with the aid which ex post facto experience can give, it
would be hard for the wisest to devise schemes which, under the
circumstances, would have met the needs better. In this retrospective
glance, it is possible, however, to see how the doctrinal formulations which
accompanied them were inadequate, one-sided and positively erroneous. In
fact they were hardly more than political war-cries adopted to help in
carrying on some immediate agitation or in justifying some particular
practical polity struggling for recognition, even though they were asserted
to be absolute truths of human nature or of morals. The doctrines served a
particular local pragmatic need. But often their very adaptation to
immediate circumstances unfitted them, pragmatically, to meet more
enduring and more extensive needs. They lived to cumber the political
ground, obstructing progress, all the more so because they were uttered and
held not as hypotheses with which to direct social experimentation but as
final truths, dogmas. No wonder they call urgently for revision and
displacement.
Nevertheless the current has set steadily in one direction: toward
democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and that
this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself shares in

selecting its governors and determining their policies, are a deposit of fact
left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake of doctrines and forms,
however transitory the latter. They are not the whole of the democratic idea,
but they express it in its political phase. Belief in this political aspect is not
a mystic faith as if in some overruling providence that cares for children,
drunkards and others unable to help themselves. It marks a well-attested
conclusion from historic facts. We have every reason to think that whatever
changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be of a
sort to make the interest of the public a more supreme guide and criterion of
governmental activity, and to enable the public to form and manifest its
purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense the cure for the ailments of
democracy is more democracy. The prime difficulty, as we have seen, 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. This discovery
is necessarily precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery. We
are not concerned therefore to set forth counsels as to advisable
improvements in the political forms of democracy. Many have been
suggested. It is no derogation of their relative worth to say that
consideration of these changes is not at present an affair of primary
importance. The problem lies deeper; it is in the first instance an intellectual
problem: the search for conditions under which the Great Society may
become the Great Community. When these conditions are brought into
being they will make their own forms. Until they have come about, it is
somewhat futile to consider what political machinery will suit them.
In a search for the conditions under which the inchoate public now
extant may function democratically, we may proceed from a statement of
11
the nature of the democratic idea in its generic social sense. From the
standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible share
according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to
which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values
which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of the groups, it demands
liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the
interests and goods which are common. Since every individual is a member
of many groups, this specification cannot be fulfilled except when different
groups interact flexibly and fully in connection with other groups. A
member of a robber band may express his powers in a way consonant with

belonging to that group and be directed by the interest common to its
members. But he does so only at the cost of repression of those of his
potentialities which can be realized only through membership in other
groups. The robber band cannot interact flexibly with other groups; it can
act only through isolating itself. It must prevent the operation of all interests
save those which circumscribe it in its separateness. But a good citizen
finds his conduct as a member of a political group enriching and enriched
by his participation in family life, industry, scientific and artistic
associations. There is a free give-and-take: fullness of integrated personality
is therefore possible of achievement, since the pulls and responses of
different groups reënforce one another and their values accord.
Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles
of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself. It is an ideal in the
only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of
some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed,
perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality
distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and
never will be. But neither in this sense is there or has there ever been
anything which is a community in its full measure, a community unalloyed
by alien elements. The idea or ideal of a community presents, however,
actual phases of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and
disturbing elements, and are contemplated as having attained their limit of
development. Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are
appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where
the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort
to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far
a community. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its
implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.
Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in
thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach
an idea of democracy which is not utopian. The conceptions and shibboleths
which are traditionally associated with the idea of democracy take on a
veridical and directive meaning only when they are construed as marks and
traits of an association which realizes the defining characteristics of a
community. Fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are
hopeless abstractions. Their separate assertion leads to mushy

sentimentalism or else to extravagant and fanatical violence which in the
end defeats its own aims. Equality then becomes a creed of mechanical
identity which is false to facts and impossible of realization. Effort to attain
it is divisive of the vital bonds which hold men together; as far as it puts
forth issue, the outcome is a mediocrity in which good is common only in
the sense of being average and vulgar. Liberty is then thought of as
independence of social ties, and ends in dissolution and anarchy. It is more
difficult to sever the idea of brotherhood from that of a community, and
hence it is either practically ignored in the movements which identify
democracy with Individualism, or else it is a sentimentally appended tag. In
its just connection with communal experience, fraternity is another name
for the consciously appreciated goods which accrue from an association in
which all share, and which give direction to the conduct of each. Liberty is
that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take
place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an
individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its
own way the fruits of association. Equality denotes the unhampered share
which each individual member of the community has in the consequences
of associated action. It is equitable because it is measured only by need and
capacity to utilize, not by extraneous factors which deprive one in order that
another may take and have. A baby in the family is equal with others, not
because of some antecedent and structural quality which is the same as that
of others, but in so far as his needs for care and development are attended to
without being sacrificed to the superior strength, possessions and matured
abilities of others. Equality does not signify that kind of mathematical or
physical equivalence in virtue of which any one element may be substituted
for another. It denotes effective regard for whatever is distinctive and
unique in each, irrespective of physical and psychological inequalities. It is
not a natural possession but is a fruit of the community when its action is
directed by its character as a community.
Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a
community. But association itself is physical and organic, while communal
life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained.
Human beings combine in behavior as directly and unconsciously as do
atoms, stellar masses and cells; as directly and unknowingly as they divide
and repel. They do so in virtue of their own structure, as man and woman
unite, as the baby seeks the breast and the breast is there to supply its need.

They do so from external circumstances, pressure from without, as atoms
combine or separate in presence of an electric charge, or as sheep huddle
together from the cold. Associated activity needs no explanation; things are
made that way. But no amount of aggregated collective action of itself
constitutes a community. For beings who observe and think, and whose
ideas are absorbed by impulses and become sentiments and interests, “we”
is as inevitable as “I.” But “we” and “our” exist only when the
consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of
desire and effort, just as “I” and “mine” appear on the scene only when a
distinctive share in mutual action is consciously asserted or claimed.
Human associations may be ever so organic in origin and firm in operation,
but they develop into societies in a human sense only as their consequences,
being known, are esteemed and sought for. Even if “society” were as much
an organism as some writers have held, it would not on that account be
society. Interactions, transactions, occur de facto and the results of
interdependence follow. But participation in activities and sharing in results
are additive concerns. They demand communication as a prerequisite.
Combined activity happens among human beings; but when nothing
else happens it passes as inevitably into some other mode of interconnected
activity as does the interplay of iron and the oxygen of water. What takes
place is wholly describable in terms of energy, or, as we say in the case of
human interactions, of force. Only when there exist signs or symbols of
activities and of their outcome can the flux be viewed as from without, be
arrested for consideration and esteem, and be regulated. Lightning strikes
and rives a tree or rock, and the resulting fragments take up and continue
the process of interaction, and so on and on. But when phases of the process
are represented by signs, a new medium is interposed. As symbols are
related to one another, the important relations of a course of events are
recorded and are preserved as meanings. Recollection and foresight are
possible; the new medium facilitates calculation, planning, and a new kind
of action which intervenes in what happens to direct its course in the
interest of what is foreseen and desired.
Symbols in turn depend upon and promote communication. The results
of conjoint experience are considered and transmitted. Events cannot be
passed from one to another, but meanings may be shared by means of signs.
Wants and impulses are then attached to common meanings. They are

thereby transformed into desires and purposes, which, since they implicate
a common or mutually understood meaning, present new ties, converting a
conjoint activity into a community of interest and endeavor. Thus there is
generated what, metaphorically, may be termed a general will and social
consciousness: desire and choice on the part of individuals in behalf of
activities that, by means of symbols, are communicable and shared by all
concerned. A community thus presents an order of energies transmuted into
one of meanings which are appreciated and mutually referred by each to
every other on the part of those engaged in combined action. “Force” is not
eliminated but is transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments
made possible by means of symbols.
The work of conversion of the physical and organic phase of associated
behavior into a community of action saturated and regulated by mutual
interest in shared meanings, consequences which are translated into ideas
and desired objects by means of symbols, does not occur all at once nor
completely. At any given time, it sets a problem rather than marks a settled
achievement. We are born organic beings associated with others, but we are
not born members of a community. The young have to be brought within
the traditions, outlook and interests which characterize a community by
means of education: by unremitting instruction and by learning in
connection with the phenomena of overt association. Everything which is
distinctively human is learned, not native, even though it could not be
learned without native structures which mark man off from other animals.
To learn in a human way and to human effect is not just to acquire added
skill through refinement of original capacities.
To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of
communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive
member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its beliefs,
desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic
powers into human resources and values. But this translation is never
finished. The old Adam, the unregenerate element in human nature, persists.
It shows itself wherever the method obtains of attaining results by use of
force instead of by the method of communication and enlightenment. It
manifests itself more subtly, pervasively and effectually when knowledge
and the instrumentalities of skill which are the product of communal life are
employed in the service of wants and impulses which have not themselves

been modified by reference to a shared interest. To the doctrine of “natural”
economy which held that commercial exchange would bring about such an
interdependence that harmony would automatically result, Rousseau gave
an adequate answer in advance. He pointed out that interdependence
provides just the situation which makes it possible and worth while for the
stronger and abler to exploit others for their own ends, to keep others in a
state of subjection where they can be utilized as animated tools. The remedy
he suggested, a return to a condition of independence based on isolation,
was hardly seriously meant. But its desperateness is evidence of the urgency
of the problem. Its negative character was equivalent to surrender of any
hope of solution. By contrast it indicates the nature of the only possible
solution: the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of
meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of
interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct
action.
This is the meaning of the statement that the problem is a moral one
dependent upon intelligence and education. We have in our prior account
sufficiently emphasized the rôle of technological and industrial factors in
creating the Great Society. What was said may even have seemed to imply
acceptance of the deterministic version of an economic interpretation of
history and institutions. It is silly and futile to ignore and deny economic
facts. They do not cease to operate because we refuse to note them, or
because we smear them over with sentimental idealizations. As we have
also noted, they generate as their result overt and external conditions of
action and these are known with various degrees of adequacy. What actually
happens in consequence of industrial forces is dependent upon the presence
or absence of perception and communication of consequences, upon
foresight and its effect upon desire and endeavor. Economic agencies
produce one result when they are left to work themselves out on the merely
physical level, or on that level modified only as the knowledge, skill and
technique which the community has accumulated are transmitted to its
members unequally and by chance. They have a different outcome in the
degree in which knowledge of consequences is equitably distributed, and
action is animated by an informed and lively sense of a shared interest. The
doctrine of economic interpretation as usually stated ignores the
transformation which meanings may effect; it passes over the new medium
which communication may interpose between industry and its eventual

consequences. It is obsessed by the illusion which vitiated the “natural
economy”: an illusion due to failure to note the difference made in action
by perception and publication of its consequences, actual and possible. It
thinks in terms of antecedents, not of the eventual; of origins, not fruits.
We have returned, through this apparent excursion, to the question in
which our earlier discussion culminated: What are the conditions under
which it is possible for the Great Society to approach more closely and
vitally the status of a Great Community, and thus take form in genuinely
democratic societies and state? What are the conditions under which we
may reasonably picture the Public emerging from its eclipse?
The study will be an intellectual or hypothetical one. There will be no
attempt to state how the required conditions might come into existence, nor
to prophesy that they will occur. The object of the analysis will be to show
that unless ascertained specifications are realized, the Community cannot be
organized as a democratically effective Public. It is not claimed that the
conditions which will be noted will suffice, but only that at least they are
indispensable. In other words, we shall endeavor to frame a hypothesis
regarding the democratic state to stand in contrast with the earlier doctrine
which has been nullified by the course of events.
Two essential constituents in that older theory, as will be recalled, were
the notions that each individual is of himself equipped with the intelligence
needed, under the operation of self-interest, to engage in political affairs;
and that general suffrage, frequent elections of officials and majority rule
are sufficient to ensure the responsibility of elected rulers to the desires and
interests of the public. As we shall see, the second conception is logically
bound up with the first and stands or falls with it. At the basis of the scheme
lies what Lippmann has well called the idea of the “omni-competent”
individual: competent to frame policies, to judge their results; competent to
know in all situations demanding political action what is for his own good,
and competent to enforce his idea of good and the will to effect it against
contrary forces. Subsequent history has proved that the assumption
involved illusion. Had it not been for the misleading influence of a false
psychology, the illusion might have been detected in advance. But current
philosophy held that ideas and knowledge were functions of a mind or
consciousness which originated in individuals by means of isolated contact
with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a function of association and

communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially
transmitted, developed and sanctioned. Faculties of effectual observation,
reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture
and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers. The fact that
man acts from crudely intelligized emotion and from habit rather than from
rational consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate
that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and political
philosophy. The measure of truth which it contains was derived from
observation of a relatively small group of shrewd business men who
regulated their enterprises by calculation and accounting, and of citizens of
small and stable local communities who were so intimately acquainted with
the persons and affairs of their locality that they could pass competent
judgment upon the bearing of proposed measures upon their own concerns.
Habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the
most part under the influence of the customs of a group. The organic
structure of man entails the formation of habit, for, whether we wish it or
not, whether we are aware of it or not, every act effects a modification of
attitude and set which directs future behavior. The dependence of habit-
forming upon those habits of a group which constitute customs and
institutions is a natural consequence of the helplessness of infancy. The
social consequences of habit have been stated once for all by James: “Habit
is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative
influence. It alone is what keeps us within the bounds of ordinance, and
saves the children of fortune from the uprisings of the poor. It alone
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted
by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-
hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails
the country-man to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months
of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the
frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of
our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that
disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted and it is too late
to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing.”
The influence of habit is decisive because all distinctively human
action has to be learned, and the very heart, blood and sinews of learning is
creation of habitudes. Habits bind us to orderly and established ways of

action because they generate ease, skill and interest in things to which we
have grown used and because they instigate fear to walk in different ways,
and because they leave us incapacitated for the trial of them. Habit does not
preclude the use of thought, but it determines the channels within which it
operates. Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habits. The sailor, miner,
fisherman and farmer think, but their thoughts fall within the framework of
accustomed occupations and relationships. We dream beyond the limits of
use and wont, but only rarely does revery become a source of acts which
break bounds; so rarely that we name those in whom it happens demonic
geniuses and marvel at the spectacle. Thinking itself becomes habitual
along certain lines; a specialized occupation. Scientific men, philosophers,
literary persons, are not men and women who have so broken the bonds of
habits that pure reason and emotion undefiled by use and wont speak
through them. They are persons of a specialized infrequent habit. Hence the
idea that men are moved by an intelligent and calculated regard for their
own good is pure mythology. Even if the principle of self-love actuated
behavior, it would still be true that the objects in which men find their love
manifested, the objects which they take as constituting their peculiar
interests, are set by habits reflecting social customs.
These facts explain why the social doctrinaires of the new industrial
movement had so little prescience of what was to follow in consequence of
it. These facts explain why the more things changed, the more they were the
same; they account, that is, for the fact that instead of the sweeping
revolution which was expected to result from democratic political
machinery, there was in the main but a transfer of vested power from one
class to another. A few men, whether or not they were good judges of their
own true interest and good, were competent judges of the conduct of
business for pecuniary profit, and of how the new governmental machinery
could be made to serve their ends. It would have taken a new race of human
beings to escape, in the use made of political forms, from the influence of
deeply engrained habits, of old institutions and customary social status,
with their inwrought limitations of expectation, desire and demand. And
such a race, unless of disembodied angelic constitution, would simply have
taken up the task where human beings assumed it upon emergence from the
condition of anthropoid apes. In spite of sudden and catastrophic
revolutions, the essential continuity of history is doubly guaranteed. Not
only are personal desire and belief functions of habit and custom, but the

objective conditions which provide the resources and tools of action,
together with its limitations, obstructions and traps, are precipitates of the
past, perpetuating, willy-nilly, its hold and power. The creation of a tabula
rasa in order to permit the creation of a new order is so impossible as to set
at naught both the hope of buoyant revolutionaries and the timidity of
scared conservatives.
Nevertheless, changes take place and are cumulative in character.
Observation of them in the light of their recognized consequences arouses
reflection, discovery, invention, experimentation. When a certain state of
accumulated knowledge, of techniques and instrumentalities is attained, the
process of change is so accelerated, that, as to-day, it appears externally to
be the dominant trait. But there is a marked lag in any corresponding
change of ideas and desires. Habits of opinion are the toughest of all habits;
when they have become second nature, and are supposedly thrown out of
the door, they creep in again as stealthily and surely as does first nature.
And as they are modified, the alteration first shows itself negatively, in the
disintegration of old beliefs, to be replaced by floating, volatile and
accidentally snatched up opinions. Of course there has been an enormous
increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by mankind, but it does not
equal, probably, the increase in the amount of errors and half-truths which
have got into circulation. In social and human matters, especially, the
development of a critical sense and methods of discriminating judgment has
not kept pace with the growth of careless reports and of motives for positive
misrepresentation.
What is more important, however, is that so much of knowledge is not
knowledge in the ordinary sense of the word, but is “science.” The
quotation marks are not used disrespectfully, but to suggest the technical
character of scientific material. The layman takes certain conclusions which
get into circulation to be science. But the scientific inquirer knows that they
constitute science only in connection with the methods by which they are
reached. Even when true, they are not science in virtue of their correctness,
but by reason of the apparatus which is employed in reaching them. This
apparatus is so highly specialized that it requires more labor to acquire
ability to use and understand it than to get skill in any other
instrumentalities possessed by man. Science, in other words, is a highly
specialized language, more difficult to learn than any natural language. It is

an artificial language, not in the sense of being factitious, but in that of
being a work of intricate art, devoted to a particular purpose and not
capable of being acquired nor understood in the way in which the mother
tongue is learned. It is, indeed, conceivable that sometime methods of
instruction will be devised which will enable laymen to read and hear
scientific material with comprehension, even when they do not themselves
use the apparatus which is science. The latter may then become for large
numbers what students of language call a passive, if not an active,
vocabulary. But that time is in the future.
For most men, save the scientific workers, science is a mystery in the
hands of initiates, who have become adepts in virtue of following ritualistic
ceremonies from which the profane herd is excluded. They are fortunate
who get as far as a sympathetic appreciation of the methods which give
pattern to the complicated apparatus: methods of analytic, experimental
observation, mathematical formulation and deduction, constant and
elaborate check and test. For most persons, the reality of the apparatus is
found only in its embodiments in practical affairs, in mechanical devices
and in techniques which touch life as it is lived. For them, electricity is
known by means of the telephones, bells and lights they use, by the
generators and magnetos in the automobiles they drive, by the trolley cars
in which they ride. The physiology and biology they are acquainted with is
that they have learned in taking precautions against germs and from the
physicians they depend upon for health. The science of what might be
supposed to be closest to them, of human nature, was for them an esoteric
mystery until it was applied in advertising, salesmanship and personnel
selection and management, and until, through psychiatry, it spilled over into
life and popular consciousness, through its bearings upon “nerves,” the
morbidities and common forms of crankiness which make it difficult for
persons to get along with one another and with themselves. Even now,
popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of
the most flourishing days of the medicine man.
Meanwhile the technological application of the complex apparatus
which is science has revolutionized the conditions under which associated
life goes on. This may be known as a fact which is stated in a proposition
and assented to. But it is not known in the sense that men understand it.
They do not know it as they know some machine which they operate, or as

they know electric light and steam locomotives. They do not understand
how the change has gone on nor how it affects their conduct. Not
understanding its “how,” they cannot use and control its manifestations.
They undergo the consequences, they are affected by them. They cannot
manage them, though some are fortunate enough—what is commonly
called good fortune—to be able to exploit some phase of the process for
their own personal profit. But even the most shrewd and successful man
does not in any analytic and systematic way—in a way worthy to compare
with the knowledge which he has won in lesser affairs by means of the
stress of experience—know the system within which he operates. Skill and
ability work within a framework which we have not created and do not
comprehend. Some occupy strategic positions which give them advance
information of forces that affect the market; and by training and an innate
turn that way they have acquired a special technique which enables them to
use the vast impersonal tide to turn their own wheels. They can dam the
current here and release it there. The current itself is as much beyond them
as was ever the river by the side of which some ingenious mechanic,
employing a knowledge which was transmitted to him, erected his saw-mill
to make boards of trees which he had not grown. That within limits those
successful in affairs have knowledge and skill is not to be doubted. But such
knowledge goes relatively but little further than that of the competent
skilled operator who manages a machine. It suffices to employ the
conditions which are before him. Skill enables him to turn the flux of events
this way or that in his own neighborhood. It gives him no control of the
flux.
Why should the public and its officers, even if the latter are termed
statesmen, be wiser and more effective? The prime condition of a
democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which
does not yet exist. In its absence, it would be the height of absurdity to try
to tell what it would be like if it existed. But some of the conditions which
must be fulfilled if it is to exist can be indicated. We can borrow that much
from the spirit and method of science even if we are ignorant of it as a
specialized apparatus. An obvious requirement is freedom of social inquiry
and of distribution of its conclusions. The notion that men may be free in
their thought even when they are not in its expression and dissemination has
been sedulously propagated. It had its origin in the idea of a mind complete
in itself, apart from action and from objects. Such a consciousness presents

in fact the spectacle of mind deprived of its normal functioning, because it
is baffled by the actualities in connection with which alone it is truly mind,
and is driven back into secluded and impotent revery.
There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all
consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity,
limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on social
affairs. Without freedom of expression, not even methods of social inquiry
can be developed. For tools can be evolved and perfected only in operation;
in application to observing, reporting and organizing actual subject-matter;
and this application cannot occur save through free and systematic
communication. The early history of physical knowledge, of Greek
conceptions of natural phenomena, proves how inept become the
conceptions of the best endowed minds when those ideas are elaborated
apart from the closest contact with the events which they purport to state
and explain. The ruling ideas and methods of the human sciences are in
much the same condition to-day. They are also evolved on the basis of past
gross observations, remote from constant use in regulation of the material
of new observations.
The belief that thought and its communication are now free simply
because legal restrictions which once obtained have been done away with is
absurd. Its currency perpetuates the infantile state of social knowledge. For
it blurs recognition of our central need to possess conceptions which are
used as tools of directed inquiry and which are tested, rectified and caused
to grow in actual use. No man and no mind was ever emancipated merely
by being left alone. Removal of formal limitations is but a negative
condition; positive freedom is not a state but an act which involves methods
and instrumentalities for control of conditions. Experience shows that
sometimes the sense of external oppression, as by censorship, acts as a
challenge and arouses intellectual energy and excites courage. But a belief
in intellectual freedom where it does not exist contributes only to
complacency in virtual enslavement, to sloppiness, superficiality and
recourse to sensations as a substitute for ideas: marked traits of our present
estate with respect to social knowledge. On one hand, thinking deprived of
its normal course takes refuge in academic specialism, comparable in its
way to what is called scholasticism. On the other hand, the physical
agencies of publicity which exist in such abundance are utilized in ways

which constitute a large part of the present meaning of publicity:
advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the “featuring” of passing
incidents in a way which violates all the moving logic of continuity, and
which leaves us with those isolated intrusions and shocks which are the
essence of “sensations.”
It would be a mistake to identify the conditions which limit free
communication and circulation of facts and ideas, and which thereby arrest
and pervert social thought or inquiry, merely with overt forces which are
obstructive. It is true that those who have ability to manipulate social
relations for their own advantage have to be reckoned with. They have an
uncanny instinct for detecting whatever intellectual tendencies even
remotely threaten to encroach upon their control. They have developed an
extraordinary facility in enlisting upon their side the inertia, prejudices and
emotional partisanship of the masses by use of a technique which impedes
free inquiry and expression. We seem to be approaching a state of
government by hired promoters of opinion called publicity agents. But the
more serious enemy is deeply concealed in hidden entrenchments.
Emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the
mass of men create the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment and
opinion only take advantage. Men have got used to an experimental method
in physical and technical matters. They are still afraid of it in human
concerns. The fear is the more efficacious because like all deep-lying fears
it is covered up and disguised by all kinds of rationalizations. One of its
commonest forms is a truly religious idealization of, and reverence for,
established institutions; for example in our own politics, the Constitution,
the Supreme Court, private property, free contract and so on. The words
“sacred” and “sanctity” come readily to our lips when such things come
under discussion. They testify to the religious aureole which protects the
institutions. If “holy” means that which is not to be approached nor
touched, save with ceremonial precautions and by specially anointed
officials, then such things are holy in contemporary political life. As
supernatural matters have progressively been left high and dry upon a
secluded beach, the actuality of religious taboos has more and more
gathered about secular institutions, especially those connected with the
12
nationalistic state. Psychiatrists have discovered that one of the
commonest causes of mental disturbance is an underlying fear of which the

subject is not aware, but which leads to withdrawal from reality and to
unwillingness to think things through. There is a social pathology which
works powerfully against effective inquiry into social institutions and
conditions. It manifests itself in a thousand ways; in querulousness, in
impotent drifting, in uneasy snatching at distractions, in idealization of the
long established, in a facile optimism assumed as a cloak, in riotous
glorification of things “as they are,” in intimidation of all dissenters—ways
which depress and dissipate thought all the more effectually because they
operate with subtle and unconscious pervasiveness.
The backwardness of social knowledge is marked in its division into
independent and insulated branches of learning. Anthropology, history,
sociology, morals, economics, political science, go their own ways without
constant and systematized fruitful interaction. Only in appearance is there a
similar division in physical knowledge. There is continuous cross-
fertilization between astronomy, physics, chemistry and the biological
sciences. Discoveries and improved methods are so recorded and organized
that constant exchange and intercommunication take place. The isolation of
the humane subjects from one another is connected with their aloofness
from physical knowledge. The mind still draws a sharp separation between
the world in which man lives and the life of man in and by that world, a
cleft reflected in the separation of man himself into a body and a mind,
which, it is currently supposed, can be known and dealt with apart. That for
the past three centuries energy should have gone chiefly into physical
inquiry, beginning with the things most remote from man such as heavenly
bodies, was to have been expected. The history of the physical sciences
reveals a certain order in which they developed. Mathematical tools had to
be employed before a new astronomy could be constructed. Physics
advanced when ideas worked out in connection with the solar system were
used to describe happenings on the earth. Chemistry waited on the advance
of physics; the sciences of living things required the material and methods
of physics and chemistry in order to make headway. Human psychology
ceased to be chiefly speculative opinion only when biological and
physiological conclusions were available. All this is natural and seemingly
inevitable. Things which had the most outlying and indirect connection with
human interests had to be mastered in some degree before inquiries could
competently converge upon man himself.

Nevertheless the course of development has left us of this age in a
plight. When we say that a subject of science is technically specialized, or
that it is highly “abstract,” what we practically mean is that it is not
conceived in terms of its bearing upon human life. All merely physical
knowledge is technical, couched in a technical vocabulary communicable
only to the few. Even physical knowledge which does affect human
conduct, which does modify what we do and undergo, is also technical and
remote in the degree in which its bearings are not understood and used. The
sunlight, rain, air and soil have always entered in visible ways into human
experience; atoms and molecules and cells and most other things with
which the sciences are occupied affect us, but not visibly. Because they
enter life and modify experience in imperceptible ways, and their
consequences are not realized, speech about them is technical;
communication is by means of peculiar symbols. One would think, then,
that a fundamental and ever-operating aim would be to translate knowledge
of the subject-matter of physical conditions into terms which are generally
understood, into signs denoting human consequences of services and
disservices rendered. For ultimately all consequences which enter human
life depend upon physical conditions; they can be understood and mastered
only as the latter are taken into account. One would think, then, that any
state of affairs which tends to render the things of the environment
unknown and incommunicable by human beings in terms of their own
activities and sufferings would be deplored as a disaster; that it would be
felt to be intolerable, and to be put up with only as far as it is, at any given
time, inevitable.
But the facts are to the contrary. Matter and the material are words
which in the minds of many convey a note of disparagement. They are
taken to be foes of whatever is of ideal value in life, instead of as conditions
of its manifestation and sustained being. In consequence of this division,
they do become in fact enemies, for whatever is consistently kept apart
from human values depresses thought and renders values sparse and
precarious in fact. There are even some who regard the materialism and
dominance of commercialism of modern life as fruits of undue devotion to
physical science, not seeing that the split between man and nature,
artificially made by a tradition which originated before there was
understanding of the physical conditions that are the medium of human
activities, is the benumbing factor. The most influential form of the divorce

is separation between pure and applied science. Since “application”
signifies recognized bearing upon human experience and well-being, honor
of what is “pure” and contempt for what is “applied” has for its outcome a
science which is remote and technical, communicable only to specialists,
and a conduct of human affairs which is haphazard, biased, unfair in
distribution of values. What is applied and employed as the alternative to
knowledge in regulation of society is ignorance, prejudice, class-interest
and accident. Science is converted into knowledge in its honorable and
emphatic sense only in application. Otherwise it is truncated, blind,
distorted. When it is then applied, it is in ways which explain the
unfavorable sense so often attached to “application” and the “utilitarian”:
namely, use for pecuniary ends to the profit of a few.
At present, the application of physical science is rather to human
concerns than in them. That is, it is external, made in the interests of its
consequences for a possessing and acquisitive class. Application in life
would signify that science was absorbed and distributed; that it was the
instrumentality of that common understanding and thorough
communication which is the precondition of the existence of a genuine and
effective public. The use of science to regulate industry and trade has gone
on steadily. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was the
precursor of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth. In
consequence, man has suffered the impact of an enormously enlarged
control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control
himself and his own affairs. Knowledge divided against itself, a science to
whose incompleteness is added an artificial split, has played its part in
generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which
they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines. It has maintained
sordid slums, flurried and discontented careers, grinding poverty and
luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace
and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war. Man, a child in
understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of
incalculable power. He plays with them like a child, and whether they work
harm or good is largely a matter of accident. The instrumentality becomes a
master and works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own—not because it
has a will but because man has not.

The glorification of “pure” science under such conditions is a
rationalization of an escape; it marks a construction of an asylum of refuge,
a shirking of responsibility. The true purity of knowledge exists not when it
is uncontaminated by contact with use and service. It is wholly a moral
matter, an affair of honesty, impartiality and generous breadth of intent in
search and communication. The adulteration of knowledge is due not to its
use, but to vested bias and prejudice, to one-sidedness of outlook, to vanity,
to conceit of possession and authority, to contempt or disregard of human
concern in its use. Humanity is not, as was once thought, the end for which
all things were formed; it is but a slight and feeble thing, perhaps an
episodic one, in the vast stretch of the universe. But for man, man is the
center of interest and the measure of importance. The magnifying of the
physical realm at the cost of man is but an abdication and a flight. To make
physical science a rival of human interests is bad enough, for it forms a
diversion of energy which can ill be afforded. But the evil does not stop
there. The ultimate harm is that the understanding by man of his own affairs
and his ability to direct them are sapped at their root when knowledge of
nature is disconnected from its human function.
It has been implied throughout that knowledge is communication as
well as understanding. I well remember the saying of a man, uneducated
from the standpoint of the schools, in speaking of certain matters:
“Sometime they will be found out and not only found out, but they will be
known.” The schools may suppose that a thing is known when it is found
out. My old friend was aware that a thing is fully known only when it is
published, shared, socially accessible. Record and communication are
indispensable to knowledge. Knowledge cooped up in a private
consciousness is a myth, and knowledge of social phenomena is peculiarly
dependent upon dissemination, for only by distribution can such knowledge
be either obtained or tested. A fact of community life which is not spread
abroad so as to be a common possession is a contradiction in terms.
Dissemination is something other than scattering at large. Seeds are sown,
not by virtue of being thrown out at random, but by being so distributed as
to take root and have a chance of growth. Communication of the results of
social inquiry is the same thing as the formation of public opinion. This
marks one of the first ideas framed in the growth of political democracy as
it will be one of the last to be fulfilled. For public opinion is judgment
which is formed and entertained by those who constitute the public and is

about public affairs. Each of the two phases imposes for its realization
conditions hard to meet.
Opinions and beliefs concerning the public presuppose effective and
organized inquiry. Unless there are methods for detecting the energies
which are at work and tracing them through an intricate network of
interactions to their consequences, what passes as public opinion will be
“opinion” in its derogatory sense rather than truly public, no matter how
widespread the opinion is. The number who share error as to fact and who
partake of a false belief measures power for harm. Opinion casually formed
and formed under the direction of those who have something at stake in
having a lie believed can be public opinion only in name. Calling it by this
name, acceptance of the name as a kind of warrant, magnifies its capacity to
lead action estray. The more who share it, the more injurious its influence.
Public opinion, even if it happens to be correct, is intermittent when it is not
the product of methods of investigation and reporting constantly at work. It
appears only in crises. Hence its “rightness” concerns only an immediate
emergency. Its lack of continuity makes it wrong from the standpoint of the
course of events. It is as if a physician were able to deal for the moment
with an emergency in disease but could not adapt his treatment of it to the
underlying conditions which brought it about. He may then “cure” the
disease—that is, cause its present alarming symptoms to subside—but he
does not modify its causes; his treatment may even affect them for the
worse. Only continuous inquiry, continuous in the sense of being connected
as well as persistent, can provide the material of enduring opinion about
public matters.
There is a sense in which “opinion” rather than knowledge, even under
the most favorable circumstances, is the proper term to use—namely, in the
sense of judgment, estimate. For in its strict sense, knowledge can refer
only to what has happened and been done. What is still to be done involves
a forecast of a future still contingent, and cannot escape the liability to error
in judgment involved in all anticipation of probabilities. There may well be
honest divergence as to policies to be pursued, even when plans spring from
knowledge of the same facts. But genuinely public policy cannot be
generated unless it be informed by knowledge, and this knowledge does not
exist except when there is systematic, thorough, and well-equipped search
and record.

Moreover, inquiry must be as nearly contemporaneous as possible;
otherwise it is only of antiquarian interest. Knowledge of history is
evidently necessary for connectedness of knowledge. But history which is
not brought down close to the actual scene of events leaves a gap and
exercises influence upon the formation of judgments about the public
interest only by guess-work about intervening events. Here, only too
conspicuously, is a limitation of the existing social sciences. Their material
comes too late, too far after the event, to enter effectively into the formation
of public opinion about the immediate public concern and what is to be
done about it.
A glance at the situation shows that the physical and external means of
collecting information in regard to what is happening in the world have far
outrun the intellectual phase of inquiry and organization of its results.
Telegraph, telephone, and now the radio, cheap and quick mails, the
printing press, capable of swift reduplication of material at low cost, have
attained a remarkable development. But when we ask what sort of material
is recorded and how it is organized, when we ask about the intellectual form
in which the material is presented, the tale to be told is very different.
“News” signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just
because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends upon
relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are. This import
cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what
has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without
coördination and consecutiveness, events are not events, but mere
occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening
proceeds. Hence even if we discount the influence of private interests in
procuring suppression, secrecy and misrepresentation, we have here an
explanation of the triviality and “sensational” quality of so much of what
passes as news. The catastrophic, namely, crime, accident, family rows,
personal clashes and conflicts, are the most obvious forms of breaches of
continuity; they supply the element of shock which is the strictest meaning
of sensation; they are the new par excellence, even though only the date of
the newspaper could inform us whether they happened last year or this, so
completely are they isolated from their connections.
So accustomed are we to this method of collecting, recording and
presenting social changes, that it may well sound ridiculous to say that a

genuine social science would manifest its reality in the daily press, while
learned books and articles supply and polish tools of inquiry. But the
inquiry which alone can furnish knowledge as a precondition of public
judgments must be contemporary and quotidian. Even if social sciences as a
specialized apparatus of inquiry were more advanced than they are, they
would be comparatively impotent in the office of directing opinion on
matters of concern to the public as long as they are remote from application
in the daily and unremitting assembly and interpretation of “news.” On the
other hand, the tools of social inquiry will be clumsy as long as they are
forged in places and under conditions remote from contemporary events.
What has been said about the formation of ideas and judgments
concerning the public apply as well to the distribution of the knowledge
which makes it an effective possession of the members of the public. Any
separation between the two sides of the problem is artificial. The discussion
of propaganda and propagandism would alone, however, demand a volume,
and could be written only by one much more experienced than the present
writer. Propaganda can accordingly only be mentioned, with the remark that
the present situation is one unprecedented in history. The political forms of
democracy and quasi-democratic habits of thought on social matters have
compelled a certain amount of public discussion and at least the simulation
of general consultation in arriving at political decisions. Representative
government must at least seem to be founded on public interests as they are
revealed to public belief. The days are past when government can be carried
on without any pretense of ascertaining the wishes of the governed. In
theory, their assent must be secured. Under the older forms, there was no
need to muddy the sources of opinion on political matters. No current of
energy flowed from them. To-day the judgments popularly formed on
political matters are so important, in spite of all factors to the contrary, that
there is an enormous premium upon all methods which affect their
formation.
The smoothest road to control of political conduct is by control of
opinion. As long as interests of pecuniary profit are powerful, and a public
has not located and identified itself, those who have this interest will have
an unresisted motive for tampering with the springs of political action in all
that affects them. Just as in the conduct of industry and exchange generally
the technological factor is obscured, deflected and defeated by “business,”

so specifically in the management of publicity. The gathering and sale of
subject-matter having a public import is part of the existing pecuniary
system. Just as industry conducted by engineers on a factual technological
basis would be a very different thing from what it actually is, so the
assembling and reporting of news would be a very different thing if the
genuine interests of reporters were permitted to work freely.
One aspect of the matter concerns particularly the side of
dissemination. It is often said, and with a great appearance of truth, that the
freeing and perfecting of inquiry would not have any especial effect. For, it
is argued, the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and
assimilating the results of accurate investigation. Unless these are read, they
cannot seriously affect the thought and action of members of the public;
they remain in secluded library alcoves, and are studied and understood
only by a few intellectuals. The objection is well taken save as the potency
of art is taken into account. A technical high-brow presentation would
appeal only to those technically high-brow; it would not be news to the
masses. Presentation is fundamentally important, and presentation is a
question of art. A newspaper which was only a daily edition of a quarterly
journal of sociology or political science would undoubtedly possess a
limited circulation and a narrow influence. Even at that, however, the mere
existence and accessibility of such material would have some regulative
effect. But we can look much further than that. The material would have
such an enormous and widespread human bearing that its bare existence
would be an irresistible invitation to a presentation of it which would have a
direct popular appeal. The freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in
other words, is as much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate
opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Men’s
conscious life of opinion and judgment often proceeds on a superficial and
trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level. The function of art has
always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine
consciousness. Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of
a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels
of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought. This process
is art. Poetry, the drama, the novel, are proofs that the problem of
presentation is not insoluble. Artists have always been the real purveyors of
news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the
kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation.

We have but touched lightly and in passing upon the conditions which
must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community; a
society in which the ever-expanding and intricately ramifying consequences
of associated activities shall be known in the full sense of that word, so that
an organized, articulate Public comes into being. The highest and most
difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of
communication must take possession of the physical machinery of
transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age
has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its
despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a
name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt
Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is
indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.

CHAPTER VI

THE PROBLEM OF METHOD
Perhaps to most, probably to many, the conclusions which have been
stated as to the conditions upon which depends the emergence of the Public
from its eclipse will seem close to denial of the possibility of realizing the
idea of a democratic public. One might indeed point for what it is worth to
the enormous obstacles with which the rise of a science of physical things
was confronted a few short centuries ago, as evidence that hope need not be
wholly desperate nor faith wholly blind. But we are not concerned with
prophecy but with analysis. It is enough for present purposes if the problem
has been clarified:—if we have seen that the outstanding problem of the
Public is discovery and identification of itself, and if we have succeeded, in
however groping a manner, in apprehending the conditions upon which the
resolution of the problem depends. We shall conclude with suggesting some
implications and corollaries as to method, not, indeed, as to the method of
resolution, but, once more, the intellectual antecedents of such a method.
The preliminary to fruitful discussion of social matters is that certain
obstacles shall be overcome, obstacles residing in our present conceptions
of the method of social inquiry. One of the obstructions in the path is the
seemingly engrained notion that the first and the last problem which must
be solved is the relation of the individual and the social:—or that the
outstanding question is to determine the relative merits of individualism and
collective or of some compromise between them. In fact, both words,
individual and social, are hopelessly ambiguous, and the ambiguity will
never cease as long as we think in terms of an antithesis.
In its approximate sense, anything is individual which moves and acts
as a unitary thing. For common sense, a certain spatial separateness is the
mark of this individuality. A thing is one when it stands, lies or moves as a
unit independently of other things, whether it be a stone, tree, molecule or
drop of water, or a human being. But even vulgar common sense at once

introduces certain qualifications. The tree stands only when rooted in the
soil; it lives or dies in the mode of its connections with sunlight, air and
water. Then too the tree is a collection of interacting parts; is the tree more a
single whole than its cells? A stone moves, apparently alone. But it is
moved by something else and the course of its flight is dependent not only
upon initial propulsion but upon wind and gravity. A hammer falls, and
what was one stone becomes a heap of dusty particles. A chemist operates
with one of the grains of dust, and forthwith it disappears in molecules,
atoms and electrons—and then? Have we now reached a lonely, but not
lonesome, individual? Or does, perhaps, an electron depend for its single
and unitary mode of action upon its connections, as much as the stone with
which we started? Is its action also a function of some more inclusive and
interacting scene?
From another point of view, we have to qualify our approximate notion
of an individual as being that which acts and moves as a unitary thing. We
have to consider not only its connections and ties, but the consequences
with respect to which it acts and moves. We are compelled to say that for
some purposes, for some results, the tree is the individual, for others the
cell, and for a third, the forest or the landscape. Is a book or a leaf or a folio
or a paragraph, or a printer’s em the individual? Is the binding or the
contained thought that which gives individual unity to a book? Or are all of
these things definers of an individual according to the consequences which
are relevant in a particular situation? Unless we betake ourselves to the
stock resort of common sense, dismissing all questions as useless quibbles,
it seems as if we could not determine an individual without reference to
differences made as well as to antecedent and contemporary connections. If
so, an individual, whatever else it is or is not, is not just the spatially
isolated thing our imagination inclines to take it to be.
Such a discussion does not proceed upon a particularly high nor an
especially deep level. But it may at least render us wary of any definition of
an individual which operates in terms of separateness. A distinctive way of
behaving in conjunction and connection with other distinctive ways of
acting, not a self-enclosed way of acting, independent of everything else, is
that toward which we are pointed. Any human being is in one respect an
association, consisting of a multitude of cells each living its own life. And
as the activity of each cell is conditioned and directed by those with which

it interacts, so the human being whom we fasten upon as individual par
excellence is moved and regulated by his associations with others; what he
does and what the consequences of his behavior are, what his experience
consists of, cannot even be described, much less accounted for, in isolation.
But while associated behavior is, as we have already noted, a universal
law, the fact of association does not of itself make a society. This demands,
as we have also seen, perception of the consequences of a joint activity and
of the distinctive share of each element in producing it. Such perception
creates a common interest; that is concern on the part of each in the joint
action and in the contribution of each of its members to it. Then there exists
something truly social and not merely associative. But it is absurd to
suppose that a society does away with the traits of its own constituents so
that it can be set over against them. It can only be set over against the traits
which they and their like present in some other combination. A molecule of
oxygen in water may act in certain respects differently than it would in
some other chemical union. But as a constituent of water it acts as water
does as long as water is water. The only intelligible distinction which can be
drawn is between the behaviors of oxygen in its different relations, and
between those of water in its relations to various conditions, not between
that of water and the oxygen which is conjoined with hydrogen in water.
A single man when he is joined in marriage is different in that
connection to what he was as single or to what he is in some other union, as
a member, say, of a club. He has new powers and immunities, new
responsibilities. He can be contrasted with himself as he behaves in other
connections. He may be compared and contrasted with his wife in their
distinctive rôles within the union. But as a member of the union he cannot
be treated as antithetical to the union in which he belongs. As a member of
the union, his traits and acts are evidently those which he possesses in
virtue of it, while those of the integrated association are what they are in
virtue of his status in the union. The only reason we fail to see this, or are
confused by the statement of it, is because we pass so easily from the man
in one connection to the man in some other connection, to the man not as
husband but as business man, scientific investigator, church-member or
citizen, in which connections his acts and their consequences are obviously
different to those due to union in wedlock.

A good example of the fact and of the current confusion as to its
interpretation is found in the case of associations known as limited liability
joint-stock companies. A corporation as such is an integrated collective
mode of action having powers, rights, duties and immunities different from
those of its singular members in their other connections. Its different
constituents have also diverse statuses—for example, the owners of stock
from the officers and directors in certain matters. If we do not bear the facts
steadily in mind, it is easy—as frequently happens—to create an artificial
problem. Since the corporation can do things which its individual members,
in their many relationships outside of their connections in the corporation,
cannot do, the problem is raised as to the relation of the corporate collective
union to that of individuals as such. It is forgotten that as members of the
corporation the individuals themselves are different, have different
characteristics, rights and duties, than they would possess if they were not
its members and different from those which they possess in other forms of
conjoint behavior. But what the individuals may do legitimately as
members of the corporation in their respective corporate rôles, the
corporation does, and vice versa. A collective unity may be taken either
distributively or collectively, but when taken collectively it is the union of
its distributive constituents, and when taken distributively, it is a
distribution of and within the collectivity. It makes nonsense to set up an
antithesis between the distributive phase and the collective. An individual
cannot be opposed to the association of which he is an integral part nor can
the association be set against its integrated members.
But groups may be opposed to one another, and individuals may be
opposed to one another; and an individual as a member of different groups
may be divided within himself, and in a true sense have conflicting selves,
or be a relatively disintegrated individual. A man may be one thing as a
church member and another thing as a member of the business community.
The difference may be carried as if in water-tight compartments, or it may
become such a division as to entail internal conflict. In these facts we have
the ground of the common antithesis set up between society and the
individual. Then “society” becomes an unreal abstraction and “the
individual” an equally unreal one. Because an individual can be
disassociated from this, that and the other grouping, since he need not be
married, or be a church-member or a voter, or belong to a club or scientific
organization, there grows up in the mind an image of a residual individual

who is not a member of any association at all. From this premise, and from
this only, there develops the unreal question of how individuals come to be
united in societies and groups: the individual and the social are now
opposed to each other, and there is the problem of “reconciling” them.
Meanwhile, the genuine problem is that of adjusting groups and individuals
to one another.
The unreal problem becomes particularly acute, as we have already
noted in another connection, in times of rapid social change, as when a
newly forming industrial grouping with its special needs and energies finds
itself in conflict with old established political institutions and their
demands. Then it is likely to be forgotten that the actual problem is one of
reconstruction of the ways and forms in which men unite in associated
activity. The scene presents itself as the struggle of the individual as such to
liberate himself from society as such and to claim his inherent or “natural”
self-possessed and self-sufficing rights. When the new mode of economic
association has grown strong and exercises an overweening and oppressive
power over other groupings, the old fallacy persists. The problem is now
conceived as that of bringing individuals as such under the control of
society as a collectivity. It should still be put as a problem of readjusting
social relationships; or, from the distributive side, as that of securing a more
equable liberation of the powers of all individual members of all groupings.
Thus our excursion has brought us back to the theme of method, in the
interest of which the excursion was taken. One reason for the comparative
sterility of discussion of social matters is because so much intellectual
energy has gone into the supposititious problem of the relations of
individualism and collectivism at large, wholesale, and because the image
of the antithesis infects so many specific questions. Thereby thought is
diverted from the only fruitful questions, those of investigation into factual
subject-matter, and becomes a discussion of concepts. The “problem” of the
relation of the concept of authority to that of freedom, of personal rights to
social obligations, with only a subsumptive illustrative reference to
empirical facts, has been substituted for inquiry into the consequences of
some particular distribution, under given conditions, of specific freedoms
and authorities, and for inquiry into what altered distribution would yield
more desirable consequences.

As we saw in our early consideration of the theme of the public, the
question of what transactions should be left as far as possible to voluntary
initiative and agreement and what should come under the regulation of the
public is a question of time, place and concrete conditions that can be
known only by careful observation and reflective investigation. For it
concerns consequences; and the nature of consequences and the ability to
perceive and act upon them varies with the industrial and intellectual
agencies which operate. A solution, or distributive adjustment, needed at
one time is totally unfitted to another situation. That social “evolution” has
been either from collectivism to individualism or the reverse is sheer
superstition. It has consisted in a continuous re-distribution of social
integrations on the one hand and of capacities and energies of individuals
on the other. Individuals find themselves cramped and depressed by
absorption of their potentialities in some mode of association which has
been institutionalized and become dominant. They may think they are
clamoring for a purely personal liberty, but what they are doing is to bring
into being a greater liberty to share in other associations, so that more of
their individual potentialities will be released and their personal experience
enriched. Life has been impoverished, not by a predominance of “society”
in general over individuality, but by a domination of one form of
association, the family, clan, church, economic institutions, over other
actual and possible forms. On the other hand, the problem of exercising
“social control” over individuals is in its reality that of regulating the doings
and results of some individuals in order that a larger number of individuals
may have a fuller and deeper experience. Since both ends can be
intelligently attained only by knowledge of actual conditions in their modes
of operation and their consequences, it may be confidently asserted that the
chief enemy of a social thinking which would count in public affairs is the
sterile and impotent, because totally irrelevant, channels in which so much
intellectual energy has been expended.
The second point with respect to method is closely related. Political
theories have shared in the absolutistic character of philosophy generally.
By this is meant something much more than philosophies of the Absolute.
Even professedly empirical philosophies have assumed a certain finality
and foreverness in their theories which may be expressed by saying that
they have been non-historical in character. They have isolated their subject-
matter from its connections, and any isolated subject-matter becomes

unqualified in the degree of its disconnection. In social theory dealing with
human nature, a certain fixed and standardized “individual” has been
postulated, from whose assumed traits social phenomena could be deduced.
Thus Mill says in his discussion of the logic of the moral and social
sciences: “The laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing
but the laws of the actions and passions of human beings united together in
the social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men; their
13
actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature.”
Obviously what is ignored in such a statement is that “the actions and
passions” of individual men are in the concrete what they are, their beliefs
and purposes included, because of the social medium in which they live;
that they are influenced throughout by contemporary and transmitted
culture, whether in conformity or protest. What is generic and the same
everywhere is at best the organic structure of man, his biological make-up.
While it is evidently important to take this into account, it is also evident
that none of the distinctive features of human association can be deduced
from it. Thus, in spite of Mill’s horror of the metaphysical absolute, his
leading social conceptions were, logically, absolutistic. Certain social laws,
normative and regulative, at all periods and under all circumstances of
proper social life were assumed to exist.
The doctrine of evolution modified this idea of method only
superficially. For “evolution” was itself often understood non-historically.
That is, it was assumed that there is a predestined course of fixed stages
through which social development must proceed. Under the influence of
concepts borrowed from the physical science of the time, it was taken for
granted that the very possibility of a social science stood or fell with the
determination of fixed uniformities. Now every such logic is fatal to free
experimental social inquiry. Investigation into empirical facts was
undertaken, of course, but its results had to fit into certain ready-made and
second-hand rubrics. When even physical facts and laws are perceived and
used, social change takes place. The phenomena and laws are not altered,
but invention based upon them modifies the human situation. For there is at
once an effort to regulate their impact in life. The discovery of malaria does
not alter its existential causation, intellectually viewed, but it does finally
alter the facts from which the production of malaria arises, through draining
and oiling swamps, etc., and by taking other measures of precaution. If the

laws of economic cycles of expansion and depression were understood,
means would at once be searched for to mitigate if not to do away with the
swing. When men have an idea of how social agencies work and their
consequences are wrought, they at once strive to secure consequences as far
as desirable and to avert them if undesirable. These are facts of the most
ordinary observation. But it is not often noted how fatal they are to the
identification of social with physical uniformities. “Laws” of social life,
when it is genuinely human, are like laws of engineering. If you want
certain results, certain means must be found and employed. The key to the
situation is a clear conception of consequences wanted, and of the technique
for reaching them, together with, of course, the state of desires and
aversions which causes some consequences to be wanted rather than others.
All of these things are functions of the prevalent culture of the period.
While the backwardness of social knowledge and art is of course
connected with retarded knowledge of human nature, or psychology, it is
also absurd to suppose that an adequate psychological science would flower
in a control of human activities similar to the control which physical
science has procured of physical energies. For increased knowledge of
human nature would directly and in unpredictable ways modify the
workings of human nature, and lead to the need of new methods of
regulation, and so on without end. It is a matter of analysis rather than of
prophecy to say that the primary and chief effect of a better psychology
would be found in education. The growth and diseases of grains and hogs
are now recognized as proper subjects of governmental subsidy and
attention. Instrumental agencies for a similar investigation of the conditions
which make for the physical and moral hygiene of the young are in a state
of infancy. We spend large sums of money for school buildings and their
physical equipment. But systematic expenditure of public funds for
scientific inquiry into the conditions which affect the mental and moral
development of children is just beginning, and demands for a large increase
in this direction are looked upon askance.
Again, it is reported that there are more beds in hospitals and asylums
for cases of mental disturbance and retardation than for all diseases
combined. The public pays generously to take care of the results of bad
conditions. But there is no comparable attention and willingness to expend
funds to investigate the causes of these troubles. The reason for these

anomalies is evident enough. There is no conviction that the sciences of
human nature are far enough advanced to make public support of such
activities worth while. A marked development of psychology and kindred
subjects would change this situation. And we have been speaking only of
antecedent conditions of education. To complete the picture we have to
realize the difference which would be made in the methods of parents and
teachers were there an adequate and generally shared knowledge of human
nature.
But such an educational development, though intrinsically precious to
the last degree, would not entail a control of human energies comparable to
that which already obtains of physical energies. To imagine that it would is
simply to reduce human beings to the plane of inanimate things
mechanically manipulated from without; it makes human education
something like the training of fleas, dogs and horses. What stands in the
way is not anything called “free-will,” but the fact that such a change in
educational methods would release new potentialities, capable of all kinds
of permutations and combinations, which would then modify social
phenomena, while this modification would in its turn affect human nature
and its educative transformation in a continuous and endless procession.
The assimilation of human science to physical science represents, in
other words, only another form of absolutistic logic, a kind of physical
absolutism. We are doubtless but at the beginning of the possibilities of
control of the physical conditions of mental and moral life. Physiological
chemistry, increased knowledge of the nervous system, of the processes and
functions of glandular secretions, may in time enable us to deal with
phenomena of emotional and intellectual disturbance before which mankind
has been helpless. But control of these conditions will not determine the
uses to which human beings will put their normalized potentialities. If any
one supposes that it will, let him consider the applications of such remedial
or preventive measures to a man in a state of savage culture and one in a
modern community. Each, as long as the conditions of the social medium
remained substantially unaltered, will still have his experience and the
direction of his restored energies affected by the objects and
instrumentalities of the human environment, and by what men at the time
currently prize and hold dear. The warrior and merchant would be better
warriors and merchants, more efficient, but warriors and merchants still.

These considerations suggest a brief discussion of the effect of the
present absolutistic logic upon the method and aims of education, not just in
the sense of schooling but with respect to all the ways in which
communities attempt to shape the disposition and beliefs of their members.
Even when the processes of education do not aim at the unchanged
perpetuation of existing institutions, it is assumed that there must be a
mental picture of some desired end, personal and social, which is to be
attained, and that this conception of a fixed determinate end ought to
control educative processes. Reformers share this conviction with
conservatives. The disciples of Lenin and Mussolini vie with the captains of
capitalistic society in endeavoring to bring about a formation of dispositions
and ideas which will conduce to a preconceived goal. If there is a
difference, it is that the former proceed more consciously. An experimental
social method would probably manifest itself first of all in surrender of this
notion. Every care would be taken to surround the young with the physical
and social conditions which best conduce, as far as freed knowledge
extends, to release of personal potentialities. The habits thus formed would
have entrusted to them the meeting of future social requirements and the
development of the future state of society. Then and then only would all
social agencies that are available operate as resources in behalf of a bettered
community life.
What we have termed the absolutistic logic ends, as far as method in
social matters is concerned, in a substitution of discussion of concepts and
their logical relations to one another for inquiry. Whatever form it assumes,
it results in strengthening the reign of dogma. Their contents may vary, but
dogma persists. At the outset we noted in discussion of the state the
influence of methods which look for causal forces. Long ago, physical
science abandoned this method and took up that of detection of correlation
of events. Our language and our thinking is still saturated with the idea of
laws which phenomena “obey.” But in his actual procedures, the scientific
inquirer into physical events treats a law simply as a stable correlation of
changes in what happens, a statement of the way in which one
phenomenon, or some aspect or phase of it, varies when some other
specified phenomenon varies. “Causation” is an affair of historical
sequence, of the order in which a series of changes takes place. To know
cause and effect is to know, in the abstract, the formula of correlation in
change, and, in the concrete, a certain historical career of sequential events.

The appeal to causal forces at large not only misleads inquiry into social
facts, but it affects equally seriously the formation of purposes and policies.
The person who holds the doctrine of “individualism” or “collectivism” has
his program determined for him in advance. It is not with him a matter of
finding out the particular thing which needs to be done and the best way,
under the circumstances, of doing it. It is an affair of applying a hard and
fast doctrine which follows logically from his preconception of the nature
of ultimate causes. He is exempt from the responsibility of discovering the
concrete correlation of changes, from the need of tracing particular
sequences or histories of events through their complicated careers. He
knows in advance the sort of thing which must be done, just as in ancient
physical philosophy the thinker knew in advance what must happen, so that
all he had to do was to supply a logical framework of definitions and
classifications.
When we say that thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not
absolutistic, we have then in mind a certain logic of method, not, primarily,
the carrying on of experimentation like that of laboratories. Such a logic
involves the following factors: First, that those concepts, general principles,
theories and dialectical developments which are indispensable to any
systematic knowledge be shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly,
that policies and proposals for social action be treated as working
hypotheses, not as programs to be rigidly adhered to and executed. They
will be experimental in the sense that they will be entertained subject to
constant and well-equipped observation of the consequences they entail
when acted upon, and subject to ready and flexible revision in the light of
observed consequences. The social sciences, if these two stipulations are
fulfilled, will then be an apparatus for conducting investigation, and for
recording and interpreting (organizing) its results. The apparatus will no
longer be taken to be itself knowledge, but will be seen to be intellectual
means of making discoveries of phenomena having social import and
understanding their meaning. Differences of opinion in the sense of
differences of judgment as to the course which it is best to follow, the
policy which it is best to try out, will still exist. But opinion in the sense of
beliefs formed and held in the absence of evidence will be reduced in
quantity and importance. No longer will views generated in view of special
situations be frozen into absolute standards and masquerade as eternal
truths.

This phase of the discussion may be concluded by consideration of the
relation of experts to a democratic public. A negative phase of the earlier
argument for political democracy has largely lost its force. For it was based
upon hostility to dynastic and oligarchic aristocracies, and these have
largely been bereft of power. The oligarchy which now dominates is that of
an economic class. It claims to rule, not in virtue of birth and hereditary
status, but in virtue of ability in management and of the burden of social
responsibilities which it carries, in virtue of the position which superior
abilities have conferred upon it. At all events, it is a shifting, unstable
oligarchy, rapidly changing its constituents, who are more or less at the
mercy of accidents they cannot control and of technological inventions.
Consequently, the shoe is now on the other foot. It is argued that the check
upon the oppressive power of this particular oligarchy lies in an intellectual
aristocracy, not in appeal to an ignorant, fickle mass whose interests are
superficial and trivial, and whose judgments are saved from incredible
levity only when weighted down by heavy prejudice.
It may be argued that the democratic movement was essentially
transitional. It marked the passage from feudal institutions to industrialism,
and was coincident with the transfer of power from landed proprietors,
allied to churchly authorities, to captains of industry, under conditions
which involved an emancipation of the masses from legal limitations which
had previously hemmed them in. But, so it is contended in effect, it is
absurd to convert this legal liberation into a dogma which alleges that
release from old oppressions confers upon those emancipated the
intellectual and moral qualities which fit them for sharing in regulation of
affairs of state. The essential fallacy of the democratic creed, it is urged, is
the notion that a historic movement which effected an important and
desirable release from restrictions is either a source or a proof of capacity in
those thus emancipated to rule, when in fact there is no factor common in
the two things. The obvious alternative is rule by those intellectually
qualified, by expert intellectuals.
This revival of the Platonic notion that philosophers should be kings is
the more taking because the idea of experts is substituted for that of
philosophers, since philosophy has become something of a joke, while the
image of the specialist, the expert in operation, is rendered familiar and
congenial by the rise of the physical sciences and by the conduct of

industry. A cynic might indeed say that the notion is a pipe-dream, a revery
entertained by the intellectual class in compensation for an impotence
consequent upon the divorce of theory and practice, upon the remoteness of
specialized science from the affairs of life: the gulf being bridged not by the
intellectuals but by inventors and engineers hired by captains of industry.
One approaches the truth more nearly when one says that the argument
proves too much for its own cause. If the masses are as intellectually
irredeemable as its premise implies, they at all events have both too many
desires and too much power to permit rule by experts to obtain. The very
ignorance, bias, frivolity, jealousy, instability, which are alleged to
incapacitate them from share in political affairs, unfit them still more for
passive submission to rule by intellectuals. Rule by an economic class may
be disguised from the masses; rule by experts could not be covered up. It
could be made to work only if the intellectuals became the willing tools of
big economic interests. Otherwise they would have to ally themselves with
the masses, and that implies, once more, a share in government by the latter.
A more serious objection is that expertness is most readily attained in
specialized technical matters, matters of administration and execution
which postulate that general policies are already satisfactorily framed. It is
assumed that the policies of the experts are in the main both wise and
benevolent, that is, framed to conserve the genuine interests of society. 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 cease to be wise. It is impossible for high-brows to secure
a monopoly of such knowledge as must be used for the regulation of
common affairs. In the degree in which they become a specialized class,
they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to
serve.
The strongest point to be made in behalf of even such rudimentary
political forms as democracy has already attained, popular voting, majority
rule and so on, is that to some extent they involve a consultation and
discussion which uncover social needs and troubles. This fact is the great
asset on the side of the political ledger. De Tocqueville wrote it down
almost a century ago in his survey of the prospects of democracy in the
United States. Accusing a democracy of a tendency to prefer mediocrity in
its elected rulers, and admitting its exposure to gusts of passion and its

openness to folly, he pointed out in effect that popular government is
educative as other modes of political regulation are not. It forces a
recognition that there are common interests, even though the recognition of
what they are is confused; and the need it enforces of discussion and
publicity brings about some clarification of what they are. 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.
Popular government has at least created public spirit even if its success in
informing that spirit has not been great.
A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to
become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in
social matters is not knowledge at all. The ballot is, as often said, a
substitute for bullets. But what is more significant is that counting of heads
compels prior recourse to methods of discussion, consultation and
persuasion, while the essence of appeal to force is to cut short resort to such
methods. Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as foolish as its critics
charge it with being. But it never is merely majority rule. As a practical
politician, Samuel J. Tilden, said a long time ago: “The means by which a
majority comes to be a majority is the more important thing”: antecedent
debates, modification of views to meet the opinions of minorities, the
relative satisfaction given the latter by the fact that it has had a chance and
that next time it may be successful in becoming a majority. Think of the
meaning of the “problem of minorities” in certain European states, and
compare it with the status of minorities in countries having popular
government. It is true that all valuable as well as new ideas begin with
minorities, perhaps a minority of one. The important consideration is that
opportunity be given that idea to spread and to become the possession of the
multitude. No government by experts in which the masses do not have the
chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an
oligarchy managed in the interests of the few. And the enlightenment must
proceed in ways which force the administrative specialists to take account
of the needs. The world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than
from the masses.
The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods
and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of
the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends essentially

upon freeing and perfecting the processes of inquiry and of dissemination of
their conclusions. Inquiry, indeed, is a work which devolves upon experts.
But their expertness is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in
discovering and making known the facts upon which the former depend.
They are technical experts in the sense that scientific investigators and
artists manifest expertise. It is not necessary that the many should have the
knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations; what is required
is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge
supplied by others upon common concerns.
It is easy to exaggerate the amount of intelligence and ability demanded
to render such judgments fitted for their purpose. In the first place, we are
likely to form our estimate on the basis of present conditions. But
indubitably one great trouble at present is that the data for good judgment
are lacking; and no innate faculty of mind can make up for the absence of
facts. Until secrecy, prejudice, bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as
well as sheer ignorance are replaced by inquiry and publicity, we have no
way of telling how apt for judgment of social policies the existing
intelligence of the masses may be. It would certainly go much further than
at present. In the second place, effective intelligence is not an original,
innate endowment. No matter what are the differences in native intelligence
(allowing for the moment that intelligence can be native), the actuality of
mind is dependent upon the education which social conditions effect. Just as
the specialized mind and knowledge of the past is embodied in implements,
utensils, devices and technologies which those of a grade of intelligence
which could not produce them can now intelligently use, so it will be when
currents of public knowledge blow through social affairs.
The level of action fixed by embodied intelligence is always the
important thing. In savage culture a superior man will be superior to his
fellows, but his knowledge and judgment will lag in many matters far
behind that of an inferiorly endowed person in an advanced civilization.
Capacities are limited by the objects and tools at hand. They are still more
dependent upon the prevailing habits of attention and interest which are set
by tradition and institutional customs. Meanings run in the channels formed
by instrumentalities of which, in the end, language, the vehicle of thought
as well as of communication, is the most important. A mechanic can
discourse of ohms and amperes as Sir Isaac Newton could not in his day.

Many a man who has tinkered with radios can judge of things which
Faraday did not dream of. It is aside from the point to say that if Newton
and Faraday were now here, the amateur and mechanic would be infants
beside them. The retort only brings out the point: the difference made by
different objects to think of and by different meanings in circulation. A
more intelligent state of social affairs, one more informed with knowledge,
more directed by intelligence, would not improve original endowments one
whit, but it would raise the level upon which the intelligence of all operates.
The height of this level is much more important for judgment of public
concerns than are differences in intelligence quotients. As Santayana has
said: “Could a better system prevail in our lives a better order would
establish itself in our thinking. It has not been for want of keen senses, or
personal genius, or a constant order in the outer world, that mankind has
fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and superstition. It has been for want
of good character, good example, and good government.” The notion that
intelligence is a personal endowment or personal attainment is the great
conceit of the intellectual class, as that of the commercial class is that
wealth is something which they personally have wrought and possess.
A point which concerns us in conclusion passes beyond the field of
intellectual method, and trenches upon the question of practical re-
formation of social conditions. In its deepest and richest sense a community
must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse. This is why the
family and neighborhood, with all their deficiencies, have always been the
chief agencies of nurture, the means by which dispositions are stably
formed and ideas acquired which laid hold on the roots of character. The
Great Community, in the sense of free and full intercommunication, is
conceivable. But it can never possess all the qualities which mark a local
community. It will do its final work in ordering the relations and enriching
the experience of local associations. The invasion and partial destruction of
the life of the latter by outside uncontrolled agencies is the immediate
source of the instability, disintegration and restlessness which characterize
the present epoch. Evils which are uncritically and indiscriminately laid at
the door of industrialism and democracy might, with greater intelligence, be
referred to the dislocation and unsettlement of local communities. Vital and
thorough attachments are bred only in the intimacy of an intercourse which
is of necessity restricted in range.

Is it possible for local communities to be stable without being static,
progressive without being merely mobile? Can the vast, innumerable and
intricate currents of trans-local associations be so banked and conducted
that they will pour the generous and abundant meanings of which they are
potential bearers into the smaller intimate unions of human beings living in
immediate contact with one another? Is it possible to restore the reality of
the lesser communal organizations and to penetrate and saturate their
members with a sense of local community life? There is at present, at least
in theory, a movement away from the principle of territorial organization to
that of “functional,” that is to say, occupational, organization. It is true
enough that older forms of territorial association do not satisfy present
needs. It is true that ties formed by sharing in common work, whether in
what is called industry or what are called professions, have now a force
which formerly they did not possess. But these ties can be counted upon for
an enduring and stable organization, which at the same time is flexible and
moving, only as they grow out of immediate intercourse and attachment.
The theory, as far as it relies upon associations which are remote and
indirect, would if carried into effect soon be confronted by all the troubles
and evils of the present situation in a transposed form. There is no substitute
for the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment.
It is said, and said truly, that for the world’s peace it is necessary that
we understand the peoples of foreign lands. How well do we understand, I
wonder, our next door neighbors? It has also been said that if a man love
not his fellow man whom he has seen, he cannot love the God whom he has
not seen. The chances of regard for distant peoples being effective as long
as there is no close neighborhood experience to bring with it insight and
understanding of neighbors do not seem better. A man who has not been
seen in the daily relations of life may inspire admiration, emulation, servile
subjection, fanatical partisanship, hero worship; but not love and
understanding, save as they radiate from the attachments of a near-by union.
Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
It is outside the scope of our discussion to look into the prospects of the
reconstruction of face-to-face communities. But there is something deep
within human nature itself which pulls toward settled relationships. Inertia
and the tendency toward stability belong to emotions and desires as well as
to masses and molecules. That happiness which is full of content and peace

is found only in enduring ties with others, which reach to such depths that
they go below the surface of conscious experience to form its undisturbed
foundation. No one knows how much of the frothy excitement of life, of
mania for motion, of fretful discontent, of need for artificial stimulation, is
the expression of frantic search for something to fill the void caused by the
loosening of the bonds which hold persons together in immediate
community of experience. If there is anything in human psychology to be
counted upon, it may be urged that when man is satiated with restless
seeking for the remote which yields no enduring satisfaction, the human
spirit will return to seek calm and order within itself. This, we repeat, can
be found only in the vital, steady, and deep relationships which are present
only in an immediate community.
The psychological tendency can, however, manifest itself only when it
is in harmonious conjunction with the objective course of events. Analysis
finds itself in troubled waters if it attempts to discover whether the tide of
events is turning away from dispersion of energies and acceleration of
motion. Physically and externally, conditions have made, of course, for
concentration; the development of urban, at the expense of rural,
populations; the corporate organization of aggregated wealth, the growth of
all sorts of organizations, are evidence enough. But enormous organization
is compatible with demolition of the ties that form local communities and
with substitution of impersonal bonds for personal unions, with a flux
which is hostile to stability. The character of our cities, of organized
business and the nature of the comprehensive associations in which
individuality is lost, testify also to this fact. Yet there are contrary signs.
“Community” and community activities are becoming words to conjure
with. The local is the ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists. It
is easy to point to many signs which indicate that unconscious agencies as
well as deliberate planning are making for such an enrichment of the
experience of local communities as will conduce to render them genuine
centers of the attention, interest and devotion for their constituent members.
The unanswered question is how far these tendencies will reëstablish
the void left by the disintegration of the family, church and neighborhood.
We cannot predict the outcome. But we can assert with confidence that
there is nothing intrinsic in the forces which have effected uniform
standardization, mobility and remote invisible relationships that is fatally

obstructive to the return movement of their consequences into the local
homes of mankind. Uniformity and standardization may provide an
underlying basis for differentiation and liberation of individual
potentialities. They may sink to the plane of unconscious habituations,
taken for granted in the mechanical phases of life, and deposit a soil from
which personal susceptibilities and endowments may richly and stably
flower. Mobility may in the end supply the means by which the spoils of
remote and indirect interaction and interdependence flow back into local
life, keeping it flexible, preventing the stagnancy which has attended
stability in the past, and furnishing it with the elements of a variegated and
many-hued experience. Organization may cease to be taken as an end in
itself. Then it will no longer be mechanical and external, hampering the free
play of artistic gifts, fettering men and women with chains of conformity,
conducing to abdication of all which does not fit into the automatic
movement of organization as a self-sufficing thing. Organization as a means
to an end would reënforce individuality and enable it to be securely itself by
enduing it with resources beyond its unaided reach.
Whatever the future may have in store, one thing is certain. Unless
local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve
its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself. But if it be re-
established, it will manifest a fullness, variety and freedom of possession
and enjoyment of meanings and goods unknown in the contiguous
associations of the past. For it will be alive and flexible as well as stable,
responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in which it is enmeshed.
While local, it will not be isolated. Its larger relationships will provide an
exhaustible and flowing fund of meanings upon which to draw, with
assurance that its drafts will be honored. Territorial states and political
boundaries will persist; but they will not be barriers which impoverish
experience by cutting man off from his fellows; they will not be hard and
fast divisions whereby external separation is converted into inner jealousy,
fear, suspicion and hostility. Competition will continue, but it will be less
rivalry for acquisition of material goods, and more an emulation of local
groups to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual
and artistic wealth. If the technological age can provide mankind with a
firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in a humane
age. It will take its place as an instrumentality of shared and communicated
experience. But without passage through a machine age, mankind’s hold

upon what is needful as the precondition of a free, flexible and many-
colored life is so precarious and inequitable that competitive scramble for
acquisition and frenzied use of the results of acquisition for purposes of
excitation and display will be perpetuated.
We have said that consideration of this particular condition of the
generation of democratic communities and an articulate democratic public
carries us beyond the question of intellectual method into that of practical
procedure. But the two questions are not disconnected. The problem of
securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be solved only in the degree
in which local communal life becomes a reality. Signs and symbols,
language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared
experience is ushered in and sustained. But the wingèd words of
conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the
fixed and frozen words of written speech. Systematic and continuous
inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their
dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public. But
it and its results are but tools after all. Their final actuality is accomplished
in face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take. Logic in its
fulfillment recurs to the primitive sense of the word: dialogue. Ideas which
are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy,
and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought. It, like the acquisition of
material wealth, marks a diversion of the wealth created by associated
endeavor and exchange to private ends. It is more genteel, and it is called
more noble. But there is no difference in kind.
In a word, that expansion and reënforcement of personal understanding
and judgment by the cumulative and transmitted intellectual wealth of the
community which may render nugatory the indictment of democracy drawn
on the basis of the ignorance, bias and levity of the masses, can be fulfilled
only in the relations of personal intercourse in the local community. The
connections of the ear with vital and out-going thought and emotion are
immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a
spectator; hearing is a participator. Publication is partial and the public
which results is partially informed and formed until the meanings it purveys
pass from mouth to mouth. There is no limit to the liberal expansion and
confirmation of limited personal intellectual endowment which may
proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of

mouth from one to another in the communications of the local community.
That and that only gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson said,
in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and
its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the
local community as its medium.

FOOTNOTES
1
W. H. Hudson, “A Traveller in Little Things,” pp. 110–112.
2
Judges make rules of law. On the “will” theory this is an
encroachment on the legislative function. Not so, if the judges further
define conditions of action.
3
“A Treatise on Human Nature,” Part II, sec. vii.
4
Hocking, “Man and the State,” p. 51.
5
Ayers, “Science: The False Messiah,” Chapter IV, The Lure of
Machinery.
6
The one obvious exception concerns the tools of waging war. With
respect to them, the state has often shown itself as greedy as it has
been reluctant and behindhand with reference to other inventions.
7
This is a convenient place for making explicit a qualification which
has to be understood throughout but which is slighted in the text. The
words “government” and “officers” are taken functionally, not in
terms of some particular structure which is so familiar to us that it
leaps to the eyes when these words are used. Both words in their
functional meaning are much wider in application than what is meant
when we speak, say, of the government and officers of Great Britain
or the United States. In households, for example, there have usually
been rule and “heads”; the parents, for most purposes the father, have
been officers of the family interest. The “patriarchal family” presents
an emphatic intensification, on account of comparative isolation of
the household from other social forms, of what exists in lesser degree
in almost all families. The same sort of remark applies to the use of

the term “states,” in connection with publics. The text is concerned
with modern conditions, but the hypothesis propounded is meant to
hold good generally. So to the patent objection that the state is a very
modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of
those structures which go by the name of states, yet all history, or
almost all, records the exercise of analogous functions. The argument
concerns these functions and the mode of their operation, no matter
what word be used, though for the sake of brevity the word “state,”
like the words “government” and “officer,” has been freely
employed.
8
This last position promptly called forth a protest from the head of the
utilitarian school, Jeremy Bentham.
9
C. H. Cooley, “Social Organization,” Ch. iii, on “Primary Groups.”
10
See Walter Lippmann’s “The Phantom Public.” To this as well as to
his “Public Opinion,” I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness, not
only as to this particular point, but for ideas involved in my entire
discussion even when it reaches conclusions diverging from his.
11
The most adequate discussion of this ideal with which I am
acquainted is T. V. Smith’s “The Democratic Way of Life.”
12
The religious character of nationalism has been forcibly brought out
by Carleton Hayes, in his “Essays on Nationalism,” especially Chap.
IV.
13
J. S. Mill, Logic, Book VI, ch. 7, sec. I. Italics mine.

INDEX

Absolutism, in method, 194–202
Amusements, rivals to political interest, 139
Anarchism, 26
Aristotle, 4, 8, 138
Art, of communication, 182–84
Association, a universal fact, 22–23, 34, 151, 181;
distinctive traits of human, 24;
revolt against, 88, 98–100;
economic, 105–07;
and democracy, 143;
rigid and flexible, 148;
distinguished from community, 151–53;
domination of isolated, 194;
territorial and functional, 212–13.
See Community, Groups, Society
Attachment, a political need, 140, 214
Ayers, C. E., 59 n.

Bentham, J., 54 n.
Biological, and social, 11–12, 152, 195
Business, rival to political interest, 138;
political control by, 182.
See Economic Forces

Carlyle, T., 102, 110
Causal forces, and state, 9, 17–21, 25, 36, 37, 47, 53, 65, 66;
versus the causal order, 201–02
Child Labor Amendment, 121
Common Interest, nature of, 17, 34–35.

See Consequences, Public
Communication, a public function, 60, 208;
social necessity of, 152, 217–19;
necessary to knowledge, 176–79;
an art, 182–84.
See Symbols
Community, 38;
and society, 98, 157;
conditioning wants, 105–06;
and communication, 152–54;
importance of local, 211–19.
See Great Society
Comparative Method, 47
Conjoint Behavior, see Association
Conscience, private, origin of, 49–50
Consequences, importance of for politics, 12–13, 15, 17, 24–25, 27, 32, 39,
43, 47, 65, 126, 156, 197;
effect of expansion, 47–57;
and rules of law, 56;
effect of enduring, 57–62;
effect of irreparable, 62–64;
relation to state and government, 66–69;
to antithesis of individual and social, 193
Control, political, 12, 16;
of human nature, 197–99
Cooley, C. H., 97 n.
Corporations, illustration of relation of individual and social, 190

Democracy, political, 77;
significance of, 83;
historic genesis, 83–87;
alleged unity, 83;
pure, 94;
and “individualism”, 86–96;
inchoate, 109;
pessimism about, 110;

American, 111–15;
as a moral idea, 143–44;
machinery of
political, 143–46;
nature of ideal, 147–51;
and experts, 203–08;
and local community, 212
Descartes, R., 88
De Tocqueville, 20
Direct Action, 31
Dissemination, and social knowledge, 176–77;
physical means of, 179;
and art, 182–84.
See Communication
Dynastic States, 89

Economic Determinism, 118–89, 155–56
Economic Forces and Politics, 89–93, 98, 100, 103–07, 114, 118–20, 129–
31, 141–42, 144, 155, 175, 182
Education, and social control, 197–99;
and absolutistic method, 200;
and political democracy, 206–08
Electoral College, 111
Emerson, R. W., 217
Equality, nature of, 149–50
Experimental Method, in politics, 194–202;
defined, 203
Experts, importance of, 123–25, 136–37;
and democracy, 203–04

Factions, 119
Facts, and meanings, 3;
physical and social, 6–7, 11–12;
and theories, 17
Farmers, condition of, 129–30

Gerontocracy, 78
Government, and the public, 27–28, 32, 33, 37, 65–69;
as representative, 76;
dynastic, 81–82;
fear of, 86, 90, 92;
economic control of, 107;
and opinion, 192–93
Great Society, The, 96, 98, 126, 128, 142, 147, 155, 157, 184
Groups, and the state, 4, 26, 71–73;
local, 41–42.
See Community

Habit, political effects, 61, 169;
and “individualism,” 158–61
Hayes, C., 170 n.
Hegel, G. W. F., 28, 71
History, continuity of, 161;
contemporaneous, 179
Hocking, W. E., quoted, 57
Hudson, W. H., quoted, 40–41
Hume, D., 56

Individual, antithesis to social, 13–15, 23, 63, 88, 147, 151, 186–191;
and acts, 18, 21;
and officials, 18, 75, 82;
and invention, 58;
economic, 91;
as fiction, 102, 157–58;
defined, 186–88
Individualism, origin of, 22, 87–94;
and private property, 61;
explanation of, 98–102;
influence, 116;
economic, 134;
and collectivism, 186–193;

and method, 195.
See Psychology
Instincts, and social theory, 9–12
Intelligence, necessary for social facts, 12, 24, 151–62, 188;
and democracy, 208–10;
embodied, 200–01.
See Consequences, Knowledge
Interdependence, 155

James, W., quoted, 159–60
Justice, and property, 92

Kings’s Peace, 48
Knowledge, political, 162–67;
divided, 175;
and communication, 176–79, 218–19

Labor Legislation, 62
Laissez-faire, 91, 134
Law, not command, 53–54;
nature of, 54–57;
“natural,” 90, 95, 102, 155;
social and physical, 196–97
Legal Institutions, 16, 47
Liberalism, 134
Liberty, made an end in itself, 86;
and “individualism,” 98–100, 192–94;
nature of, 150;
of thought, 168–70;
and uniformity, 215–16
Lippmann, W., 116 n, 158
Locke, J., on natural rights, 87

Macaulay, 102
Majorities and Minorities, 207–08

Materialism, 173–74
Method, problem of, 192–203
Mill, J., theory of democratic government, 93–95
Mill, J. S., 195
Mobility, social effect, 140

Nationalism, 170
News, 179–81

Officers, agents of public, 16, 17, 33, 35, 67–68, 75;
dual capacity, 77, 82;
selection of, 78–82
Opinion, 177, 179

Parties, 119–21
Paternalism, 62
Perception, see Intelligence, Consequences
Pioneer Conditions, effect on American democracy, 111
Pluralism, political, 73–74
Populus, defined, 16
Private, defined, 15.
See Public.
Prohibition, 132–33
Propaganda, 181–82
Property, and government, 91–93.
See Economic Forces.
Psychology, of habit, 61, 159–60;
of individualism, 88;
of private consciousness, 100, 158;
social effects of science of, 197–99
Public, and private, 12–17, 47–52;
and political agencies, 31, 35, 38, 67;
marks of, 39–64;
ownership, 61;

democratic, 77;
education, 112–13;
eclipse of, 115, 122, 131, 137, 185;
problem of, 125, 185, 208, 216;
complexity of, 126;
as intellectual problem, 152;
and publicity, 167–171, 219;
and opinion, 177

Railways, and government, 133–34
Reason, and the state, 20;
and law, 55–57
Religion, and social institutions, 41, 49, 169–70
Rights, natural, 87, 95, 102
Rousseau, J. J., 155
Rulers, see Officers, Government

Santayana, G., quoted, 211
Science, distinction from knowledge, 163–65, 172;
social and physical, 171, 179, 199;
and the press, 181–82;
applied, 172–76;
method, 201
Smith, Adam, 13, 89
Smith, T. V., 147 n
“Socialization,” 70
Society, human, 24–25;
and states, 26–29, 69–74, 147–49.
See Association, Community, Consequences, Great Society, Groups,
Individual, Public.
Spencer, H., 63, 79
Symbols, social import of, 141–42, 152–54, 218

Tariff, 131–32
Theocracy, 41, 49, 80

Tilden, S. J., 208
Theories, political, 4, 5, 8, 85.
See Causal Forces, Economic Forces, Individualism, Mill, J.,
Utilitarianism
Toleration, 49–51
Tradition, revolt against, 86

Utilitarianism, 91

Wallas, G., 96
Wants, individualistic theory of, 102;
socially conditioned, 103–04
War, and selection of rulers, 79;
the World, 127–28
Whitman, Walt, 184
Will, as cause of state, 20, 38;
and the command theory of law, 53;
and government, 68;
general, 153
Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 96–97
Workers, political neglect and emancipation, 99–100.
See Economic Forces

Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made
consistent when a predominant preference was found in the
original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was
obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or
correct page references.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages on which
they were referenced, have been collected, renumbered, and
placed just before the Index.
Some page numbers in the Table of Contents are out of
sequence, as they were in the original book.
The correct spelling of the name, “Ayers”, likely is “Ayres”.

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