The Public and Its Problems

Dewey defines a public as a group of people who are indirectly and seriously affected by the transactions of others, and who consequently have a shared interest in regulating those transactions. The definition is functional and emergent, not substantial: there is no pre-political 'people' or sovereign mass that precedes the formation of publics. This rejects both the contractualist notion of a founding popular will and the nationalist assumption of a naturally unified demos. A public exists only when the consequences of conjoint action are perceived, and it ceases to exist when those consequences become too remote, too complex, or too obscured by propaganda to be apprehended.

The eclipse is Dewey's diagnosis of modern democracy's central pathology: the public has become lost, confused about its own identity, and unable to identify itself or its interests. The causes are structural. Industrialization and mass communication have produced a 'Great Society' in which the consequences of action ripple across vast distances and populations, far beyond the perceptual grasp of any individual or local community. At the same time, inherited political ideas and institutions remain scaled to small-town face-to-face democracy, creating a mismatch between the new conditions of associated life and the old vocabulary of individualism and majority rule. The public is not absent; it is obscured, unable to find itself.

Dewey agrees with Lippmann's diagnosis: the modern public is too vast, too uninformed, and too manipulated to govern complex affairs directly. Where they diverge is the remedy. Lippmann concludes that a technocratic elite of experts must manage public affairs, with the demos reduced to occasional vetoes or spectator status. Dewey rejects this because experts, however competent, remain captive to the interests and habits of their class and institutions, and because a democracy of experts is not a democracy at all. Instead, Dewey calls for reconstructing the conditions of communication so that the public can form and act—simplifying economic arrangements, decentralizing to face-to-face communities, and using inquiry to make consequences visible. The disagreement is not about facts but about whether democracy is worth reconstructing.

Dewey's claim that democracy's home is the 'neighborly community' is not nostalgia for small-town life but a claim about the conditions of democratic perception and communication. The Great Society's scale makes the indirect consequences of action invisible; only in face-to-face association can people directly perceive how their actions affect others and jointly deliberate about regulation. This is why he invoked Jefferson's unrealized proposal for small ward republics: not because local government is inherently virtuous, but because it provides the experiential basis for democratic habits and the communicative conditions for a public to recognize itself. James Bohman has criticized this move as a retreat from Dewey's own reconstructive logic—a romantic turn to community that abandons the possibility of publics organized around nonlocal issues.

The Great Community is Dewey's normative horizon: a form of associated life in which the consequences of conjoint action are fully communicated and shared, so that individuals can perceive their participation in a common life and direct it intelligently. It is not a blueprint for institutions or a utopian scheme. Dewey is notably vague about how the transition from Great Society to Great Community is to be achieved, and critics have long noted this gap. What he does specify is the method: the arts of communication, the use of social inquiry to make consequences visible, and the cultivation of face-to-face associations. The Great Community is less a destination than a criterion for judging whether existing publics are adequately formed and adequately informed.

Democracy and Education (1916) treats communication as the means by which a society transmits its culture and forms democratic dispositions in the young. The Public and Its Problems (1927) takes that communicative theory and applies it to the problem of political publics under conditions of industrial scale and mass media. Where the earlier book is pedagogical and reconstructive, the later book is diagnostic and political: it asks how a public can come to exist at all when the conditions of communication have been corrupted by distance, propaganda, and the sheer complexity of consequences. The later work extends the earlier one by showing that the educational task of forming democratic habits is not confined to schools but is a problem for the entire organization of public life.