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individuals. Political problems, as Dewey emphasizes, are often related to the flourishing of life, and the persistence of those problems makes flourishing difficult or impossible. Second, the importance he accords inquiry is meant to free individuals and promote their development (what Dewey often called “growth”). Here Dewey encourages a more critical stance toward the status of community than was the case in his early 1888 essay. Third, this liberation requires an intimate and critical engagement with the problems that afflict individuals and the ways in which the potential resolution of those problems fits with the liberation of others—an engagement from which the input of individuals and communities cannot be expunged and that is essential to guide inquiry.
In contrast to Lippmann, Dewey views the role of experts as ancillary to that of citizens, in essence undercutting the turn to experts that we see in Lippmann. As he says of experts, “Their expertness is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon which the former depend” (225). Dewey is making two critical points. The first is that expertise, properly understood, is always tethered to a more “technical” field of investigation. As he understands it, experts come to gain intellectual authority and therefore become bearers of knowledge because of the audience they engage. Citizens are thus authorities just to the extent that it is their problems that create the framework in which expertise functions. The complexity and texture of those problems, Dewey argues, come into view through a deliberative exchange among citizens that draws out existing and emerging concerns and worries. All of this guides them as they determine what they, as a political community, will make of the information provided. But it also means that there will rarely be complete agreement on who the experts are, and this will cut against any argument for blindly deferring to some perceived “expert” authority.
The second point of the sentence indicates that if something like “expertise” of political affairs exists, it will have to emerge from the public. In other words, how citizens understand information partly depends on the goals toward which they are moving as a political community, and this can emerge only through deliberation. Central to this process are questions not merely about how we understand the problem from the outset (e.g., Who are the subjects of this problem? What may be the long-term results if the problem is allowed to persist?), but about the implication of various proposals suggested to alleviate the problem (e.g., What are the value or economic trade-offs in choosing this or that proposal?). For Dewey, answering these questions—that is, arriving at knowledge—implies a kind of collective artistry to social inquiry that draws on the specific experiences of individuals, expert knowledge, facts about the problem in question, and potential risks of action. Hence, he explains that to the extent policy experts “become a specialized class they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve” (223). Since citizens are uniquely situated to offer knowledge of their own experiences, Dewey argues, their role in the design and implementation of policies is unavoidable in addressing the problem (224–25).
There is a practical upshot to Dewey’s argument. For example, where decision making is based less on the continuous input from public hearings, town hall meetings, advisory councils, and other deliberative bodies, there is greater reason to be concerned about the ends to which those decisions aim and the background interests from which they proceed. Moreover, there is reason to be equally suspicious of bureaucratic processes that are resistant to expanding decision-making power by taking a bottom-up approach.69 Of course there may be good reason not to take such an approach, as for example when we think about the obstacles that limited resources and time pose for political decision making. Here Lippmann’s point about the obstacles to broad-based inclusion is inescapable. But Dewey’s argument implies that the burden of proof must rest with those who seek less inclusive rather than more inclusive arrangements.70 To the extent that experts guide political power without taking direction from the public in the form of deliberation, the entire decision-making process loses legitimacy and gains in suspicion.
Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy
The considerations above, which directly engage Lippmann, are part of how Dewey understands the historical emergence of democracy as a way of broadening the use of political power. Indeed, he defends this view in The Public and Its Problems. Throughout the work, but especially in chapter 3, “The Democratic State,” Dewey consistently emphasizes the fortuitous emergence of political democracy. He resists the idea that democracy was fated to happen. By political democracy he means “a mode of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their conduct as officials” through universal suffrage, that emphasizes the publicity of decision making (121). Despite its contingent emergence, Dewey argues that democracy’s development nonetheless represents an “effort in the first place to counteract the forces that have so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and irrelevant factors, and in the second place an effort to counteract the tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public ends” (121).
In keeping with his discussion in The Public and Its Problems and Liberalism and Social Action, he sees democracy emerging in an attempt to block political power from being exercised arbitrarily: “I would not minimize the advance scored in substitution of methods of discussion and conference for the method of arbitrary rule.”71 The use of power is arbitrary, for him, when it cannot be substantively informed by those over whom it will be exercised. In such instances, Dewey argues, freedom itself is threatened. Legitimate political power is not merely restrictive—that is, it does not merely constrain freedom—but more significantly, it makes freedom possible by giving citizens control over the forces that govern and enable their lives.
To be sure, Dewey argues that the early rise of modern democracy emanated from a concern over governmental intrusions on freedom. But this worry, he maintains, was mistakenly interpreted as a “natural antagonism between ruler and ruled,” subject and government, when in fact the true target was abuse of political power.72 “Freedom,” he writes, “presented itself as an end in itself, though it signified in fact liberation from oppression and tradition. . . . The revolt against old and limiting associations was converted, intellectually, into the doctrine of independence of any and all associations” (124). Dewey seeks to refocus practical and intellectual energies on the correct target. The result is that authority, insofar as it is bound up with institutional structures that track the concerns of citizens, is not necessarily inimical to freedom. Political power in The Public and Its Problems thus refers to both the role individuals play in “forming and directing the activities” of the community to which they belong and also the possibility that is open to them for “participating according to need in the values” that their community sustains (175).
Dewey’s defense of democracy is important for redefining the meaning of political participation, signaled by the last bit of quoted text. Democracy, as he describes it, defines members not simply by virtue of their actual participation in determining social possibilities, but also by the potential participation that remains open to them if need so arises. For him, to the extent that power functions to determine social possibilities, those possibilities cannot be of such a nature that they preclude the future contestability and development of how power functions. Hence the following remark: “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” (223). To be attentive to such needs and troubles means that “policies and proposals for social action [should] be treated as working hypotheses, not as programs to be rigidly adhered to and executed” (220). As he had argued much earlier, to say that we hold in reserve the power to contest indicates that the legitimacy of decision making hinges on the extent to which citizens do not feel permanently bound by those decisions in the face of new and different political changes.
The view of democracy that Dewey defends and that informs The Public and Its Problems is fundamentally linked to how he understands the function of the public and its relationship to the state. He envisions the public as the permanent space of contingency in the sense that there can be no a priori delimitation, except as it emerges from individuals and groups