I refer to John Dewey and democracy fairly often, but the new and improved blog version of Not News doesn’t really have a handy explanation of what I mean. Over the next few days I hope to make a series of posts that discuss the very basics of how we think about what a democracy is, and I can think of no better starting point. When Dewey referred to democracy, he did not primarily have in mind a system for enacting policies and selecting representatives to govern society. He refers to those questions as the domain of “political democracyâ€? in The Public and Its Problems, and considers them too limited a domain to contain the entire concept of democracy. (All page citations refer to the volume of The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953 in which that book is reprinted.)
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. (PP 325)
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