Literary Art in the Formation of the Great Community: John Dewey’s Theory of Public Ideas in The Public and Its Problems

Introduction

John Dewey presented The Public and Its Problems in a series of lectures in 1926, shortly after Walter Lippmann published two influential works, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). In those works, Lippmann had denied that broad publics should share in determining public policy. He argued that the policy issues were far removed from the lives of ordinary citizens, whose collective opinion, as a result, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated.

Dewey countered that the problem of public opinion was not primarily lack of information, but rather of community formation. A democratic community, he argued, could overcome the ignorance and narrow self-interest that plagued its members as isolated individuals. Thus Dewey shifted the question; he asked how a democratic community in the relevant sense could form and intelligently exert its influence upon its governors under modern conditions. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey sets out to state the necessary conditions of community formation.

His answer focuses on “freedom of social inquiry and of distribution of its conclusions.”¹ But he acknowledges that free inquiry and free distribution of its results are not enough; they must be accompanied by a corresponding freedom in the “art of presentation.”² The reading public, he said, rarely attends to serious investigations of social problems. But they can be engaged by presentations drawing on the “potency of art.”³ Social investigation freed from technical jargon and narrow disciplinary specialization would, he argued, have

. . . such an enormous and widespread human bearing that its bare existence would be an irresistible invitation to a presentation of it which would have a direct popular appeal. The freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in other words, is as much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry.⁴

Artistic presentation of social investigations could thus transform members of the Great Society into a Great Community, breaking through the crust of habits that isolate members as atomic individuals.

Dewey has nothing more to say in The Public and Its Problems about just how art can weld individuals into a community, thus leaving an important gap in his argument. This topic, however, is addressed throughout Dewey’s middle and later works. In this paper, I draw on this body of work to flesh out that crucial phase of argument in PP. The double merger account I offer of Dewey’s conception of literary art in the formation of democratic community also illuminates hidden connections between the ‘Great Community’ (chapter 5) and local face-to-face communities highlighted in ‘The Problem of Method’ (chapter 6). The paper aims to make the argument of The Public and its Problems clear; it should not be read as endorsing Dewey’s theory of art and society in all particulars.

A natural place to start in explicating Dewey’s notion of the power of art is Art as Experience. While Dewey wrote that work after The Public and Its Problems, he had already developed many of its key themes in Democracy and Education and Experience and Nature, as well as in several minor works. We can thus draw on works subsequent to The Public and Its Problems to the extent that these later works are continuous with such earlier works.

The Artist and the Work of Art

In Art as Experience, Dewey shifted attention from finished works of art to processes of making and appreciating art. Dewey’s analysis involves a triadic relationship of artist, work, and audience. He conceived artist and audiences as live creatures, engaged in a continuous and cumulative interaction with their worlds, with experience as a natural byproduct. To understand finished art products, he argued, we must start with the materials of everyday experience.

Humans shape these materials in experience as they pursue their aims in every area of life. Sometimes the situation of action is well-organized in experience; it makes sense and actors, relying on settled habits...