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prominently in both his social theory (e.g., Human Nature and Conduct of 1922) and reflection on knowledge formation (e.g., “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” of 1910, Experience and Nature of 1925, and The Quest for Certainty of 1929) once he embraced Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Indeed, during his sojourn in China between 1919 and 1921, Dewey’s lectures often describe the state as adjudicating between the conflicting interests that define social and political life.40
The reader must be attentive to the later developments in his thinking precisely because they contrast with the view in his 1888 essay, “The Ethics of Democracy.” For if politics involves real winners and losers, important questions emerge for Dewey’s view of democracy at this early stage: How do I lose in a way that makes me feel part of the people who have won? How do we retain a coherent political community that the social organism metaphor implies, while addressing the disappointments that come with political life? Maine puts the question this way: If “the People” make a sound, “is it a sound in which the note struck by minorities is entirely silent?”41
In “The Ethics of Democracy” Dewey’s reflections on majority rule show that he is sensitive to this question. In fact, he shows that his deep commitment to the necessity of unity does not completely overtake his more chastened moments of reflection regarding political life.
There still appears to be in majority rule an instrument for putting all on a dead level, and allowing numerical surplus to determine the outcome. But the heart of the matter is found not in the voting nor in the counting the votes to see where the majority lies. It is in the process by which the majority is formed. The minority are represented in the policy which they force the majority to accept in order to be a majority; the majority have the right to “rule” because their majority is not the mere sign of a surplus in numbers, but is the manifestation of the purpose of the social organism. Were this not so, every election would be followed by a civil war.42
In his view, a decision is not merely the result of a calculation in which one group—51 percent of the community—has the votes to carry the title majority. We often reduce democratic decision making to this calculus, and this is precisely the view at work in Maine’s account. This misses, Dewey argues, the prior process that majority rule entails. For decision making is a “process by which the social organism weighs considerations and forms its consequent judgment; that the voting of the individual represents in reality, a deliberation, a tentative opinion on the part of the whole organism.”43 Deliberation, then, to appropriate Dewey’s words, is the “instrument for putting all on a dead level.” The very position the majority comes to occupy is formed, for that position to be deemed legitimate, through an antagonistic exchange with the minority.
Dewey’s linking of majoritarianism to deliberation as a way to explain political legitimacy is at the core of understanding democracy for him. For if there were complete alienation by the people from the source of power that ruled over them, Dewey argues, “every election would be followed by a civil war”—that is, a conflict so deep that it warrants dividing the nation between friends and enemies, thus destroying the integrity of the community. The absence of civil war after every election, Dewey reasons, means that in a representative system “the governors and the governed” do not form “two classes” (as Maine believes) but are rather “two aspects of the same fact”—namely, the ruling people.44
The integrity of democracy hinges on the extent to which the minority never feels permanently alienated from the process of decision making. Because the status of the minority is not perpetual, and as a result the minority does not exist under the weight of a tyrannical majority, the idea of political loss becomes an institutionalized reciprocal practice of decision making. This reciprocal practice is the deliberative “process” to which Dewey referred earlier. Part of its function is to encode both the habits of reciprocity and mutual trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives.45 To cultivate such habits is part of the process of mitigating the remainders of disappointment. The normative significance of this process, however, is that while the voice of the people is always unified, its tenor and content is never permanently settled—that is, in a democracy no embodiment of power, whether in the law, public agencies, or a majority opinion, is beyond reproach.
By conceiving of political reciprocity in this manner, Dewey also articulates the anti-elitist element at the core of his understanding of democracy to which he returns in The Public and Its Problems. This differs dramatically from Maine’s political preference. Consider the comparison Dewey draws between democracy and aristocracy:
What distinguishes the ethical basis and ideal of one from that of the other? It may appear a roundabout way to reach a simple end, to refer to Plato and to Greek life to get data for an answer; but I know of no way in which I can so easily bring out what seems to me the truth. The Platonic Republic is a splendid and imperishable formulation of the aristocratic ideal. . . . But the Republic is more; it seizes upon the heart of the ethical problem, the relation of the individual to the universal, and states a solution. The question of the Republic is as to the ideal of men’s conduct; the answer is such a development of man’s nature as brings him into complete harmony with the universe of spiritual relations, or, in Platonic language, the state.46
As the passage suggests, Dewey sees in aristocracy a longing that is much akin to democracy—namely, a desire for “unity of purpose, the fulfilling of function in devotion to the interests of the social organism.”47
The key difference between the two, he argues, is that aristocracy expresses a deep skepticism about the abilities of individuals to recognize the importance of their relationship to the community. Moreover, aristocracy simply turns the responsibility of governance over to the elites. But such a view, he argues, fails “because the practical consequences of giving the few wise and good power [are] that they cease to remain wise and good.”48 In this he agrees with the Founders on the corrupting influence of power, especially when it is disconnected from oversight. Indeed, this is an argument he reiterates decades later in The Public and Its Problems (221–25). As Aristotle originally noted, and Dewey concurs, the wise cannot help but regard themselves as the exclusive site for knowledge.49 They fail to be attentive to those on whose behalf they serve. The result is that they diminish, rather than expand, their perceptual and problem-solving abilities. Even on the assumption that such rulers would remain wise, the image would still be unattractive:
The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into their proper positions in the social organism. It is true, indeed, that when an individual has found that place in society for which he is best fitted and is exercising the function proper to that place, he has obtained his completest development, but it is also true (and this is the truth omitted by aristocracy, emphasized by democracy) that he must find this place and assume this work in the main for himself. . . . It must begin in the man himself, however much the good and the wise of society contribute.50
Because Dewey regards the good of society as legitimate to the extent that it is self-consciously recognized by the members of the community, his understanding of democracy locates itself in the freely willed actions (whether in support or contestation) of its members.
As already suggested, the themes struck in 1888—the relationship between individual and society, the significance of deliberation, the relationship between minority and majority, and the anti-elitist core of Dewey’s political thinking—reach a higher pitch in The Public and Its Problems. When taken together these themes throw into greater relief Dewey’s mature thinking on democracy and its radical and enduring quality.
The Crisis of Democracy
By the 1920s democracy had fallen on hard times. Several factors were at work.51 First, Darwinian evolution in the last decade of the nineteenth century undermined the religious backdrop of American culture. Darwin’s version of evolution so thoroughly connected contingency to biological development that many came to believe they were helpless in trying to create a just society. If God was dead, to whom should one turn for guidance? This question implied a crisis not simply of religious certainty, but of