The Democratic Public To Be Brought into Existence and Education as Secularization

Introduction: Democracy as the ‘Dead God’ of Modernity and the Dimensions of the ‘Office’

A decade ago the German sociologist Ulrich Beck seemed to consign democracy to the past and, significantly, drew upon an ironically religion-inspired vocabulary:

Democracy becomes the religion of the past epoch. One still practises it—on Sunday or on Christmas under the ‘Christmas tree’ of polls. But no one really still believes in it. It is the dead God of the first modernity.¹

When Ulrich Beck dismisses democracy as “the dead god” of a past era or as a liturgy drained of any substantial meaning, he misses the target principally in reference to modernity: indeed, from a Deweyan perspective, if democracy is really going to expire it may be not because of the end of modernity but precisely because modernity is “as yet unformed, inchoate.”² Against this backdrop the question this paper would like to explore is whether (and in what sense) the engagement with a genuine democracy is, in the final analysis, the engagement with modernization as secularization (in a sense which needs to be investigated). And whether (and in what sense) such an engagement is also (if not primarily) an educational one.

I will deal with this thematic constellation (weaving together the themes of God and a [bygone?] liturgy, democracy and modernity, secularization and education) through a reading of The Public and Its Problems and, in particular, through an investigation of what official means, the latter being a notion which is pivotal in Dewey’s political theory. Indeed, the very first illustration of what ‘public’ means is realized by referring to ‘official’ as opposed to ‘private,’³ and the very definition of ‘public’ implies a mobilization of the notion of ‘officials.’ By resorting to an archaeological analysis of sorts in the wake of Giorgio Agamben,⁴ I will investigate how and in what sense the notion of ‘official’ is interlaced with that of ‘community’ up to the point that they come to constitute a sort of dyad.

I will take my cue from and build on a peculiar expression that Dewey uses after summarizing his hypothesis on the public: officials and their special powers give form and organization to the public, which otherwise would be formless,⁵ but

since the public forms a state only by and through officials and their acts, and since holding official position does not work a miracle of transubstantiation, there is nothing perplexing nor even discouraging in the spectacle of the stupidities and errors of political behavior.⁶

I am not interested here in the sociological remark about possible crimes and misdemeanors but, firstly, in the occurrence (very rare but very significant in Dewey⁷) of such a momentous word as “transubstantiation” in the context where the ‘forming power’—in a non-substantialist but rather purely functionalist sense—of officials is highlighted and, secondly, in the fact that, in terms of the history of ideas, the officials’ position has much to do with the miracle of transubstantiation. In a sense, to speak with a taste for the paradox, the question of ‘democratic officialdom’ amounts to how transubstantiation occurs in human communities. Inadvertently and independently from any clear historical and genealogical consciousness that he could have had about it, Dewey is here hinting at one of the depths of the idea of the office as officium (I am using the Latin word here to signal that the concept is being used in reference to its long-standing history).

Investigating this idea, by capturing and elaborating the clue offered in the text, will allow us to understand what is at stake when the question of officialdom emerges and when it reacts with those of democracy and of community. This will require an exploration of the idea of officium and the distinction between three different (but interrelated) senses of it (I will speak, then, of officium₀, officium₁, officium₂, for the sake of brevity). By officium₀ I refer to the anthropological dimension of the notion, related to the institution and management...