Many descendants of John Dewey’s emphasis on communication...

Many descendants of John Dewey’s emphasis on communication and “socialized intelligence” describe it as an emerging world wide movement for “deliberative democracy.” Others, such as Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett in their book, Dewey’s Dream, see it as a movement for democratic education reform.

They propose that a movement for “university-assisted community schools constitute[s] the best practical means to help realize Dewey’s general theory of participatory democracy.”[^105] I have much respect for these practices, sites, and those who make these arguments.

Deliberation at its inclusive best, in ways urged by authors such as David Mathews, Daniel Yankelovitch, Hal Saunders, Nöelle McAfee, Alison Kadlec, Matt Leiningher and others, challenges the stranglehold that technocrats have gained over policy making. Kadlec, following Dewey, observes insightfully that deliberation can disclose public problems, injustices and power inequalities.[^106] Deliberative democrats help bring back a respect for the intelligence of ordinary citizens.

And, like Dewey, they emphasize democratic “habits,” such as the capacities to engage people of other views and interests. Because deliberative democracy is so clearly related to Dewey’s focus on communication while it also provides part of the missing answer to the “democratic realists,” it is not surprising that he has become a foundational theorist in this movement. But the democratic movement needs to put deliberation in a larger context of practices.

Public work that solves public problems and creates public wealth involves a continuing conversation about the meaning of its products. It also points toward a thicker conception of civic agency than the deliberative citizen. A populist conception of agency highlights not only citizen judgments about problems and what government might do about them.

This was Dewey’s view, reflected in The Public and Its Problems , in which citizens, when they recognize public problems, become a public as they form a state to act on them*.* Dewey’s perspective is the common approach taken in most deliberative efforts - people deliberate mainly about government’s proper course of action.

In a populist perspective, by contrast, the question is not “what can government do?” but “what can we all do?,” posing “problems” or “issues” as parts of larger cultural dynamics. Publics form as they do public work. They are not formed, as Dewey proposed, through government.