Introduction: Revisiting The Public and Its Problems

Abstract

This special section of Contemporary Pragmatism is about John Dewey’s book The Public and Its Problems, published in 1927. Scholars consistently turn to this work when assessing Dewey’s conception of democracy and what might be imagined for democracy in our own time. This special section contains four articles by James Bohman, Eric MacGilvray, Eddie Glaude, and myself. Published in 1927 and reissued in 1946 with an added subtitle and introduction, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry is not John Dewey’s (1859-1952) only work on politics. Indeed, at least three other works of political theory would follow: Individualism: Old and New (1930), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and Freedom and Culture (1939). Still, The Public and Its Problems is his richest and most systematic meditation on the future of democracy in an age of mass communication, governmental bureaucracy, technological complexity, and pluralism that implicitly draws on his previous writings and prefigures his later thinking. In this work, he argues for the importance of civic participation, elucidates the meaning and role of the state, the proper relationship between the public and experts in decision making, the extent to which democracy can be understood as a moral ideal or a set of institutional mechanisms, and the source of democracy’s legitimacy. In fact, it is this work, above all else, to which scholars consistently turn when assessing Dewey’s conception of democracy and what might be imagined for democracy in our own time. This is because these themes remain as important today as they did when Dewey first engaged them, and for this reason The Public and Its Problems is worth careful consideration. As many readers of this journal will undoubtedly know, Dewey came to prominence in the late nineteenth century as a philosopher, but it was his writings on education, ethics, religion, democracy, and contemporary issues in the twentieth century that garnered him both national and international fame as a public intellectual of the highest order. If America was viewed as the modern experiment in democracy, then Dewey was its greatest defender and most reflective critic. As historian Henry Commager observed in 1950, attesting to