No permanent solution is possible save in a radical social alteration...

No permanent solution is possible save in a radical social alteration, which affects the degree and kind of participation the worker has in the production and social distribution of the wares he produces…this modification of the nature of experience is the finally determining element in the esthetic quality of the experience of things produced.”[^54] Though he would have resisted the comparison, in such passages Dewey sounded like the late Pope John Paul II, whose 1981 Encyclical “On Human Labor” was an eloquent call to make the “subjective experience” of work the touchstone of modern economies.

John Dewey’s philosophy led him into fierce debates about the role of citizens. According to progressive intellectuals, changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century - technological developments, urbanization, the growth of scientific knowledge and the like - meant that theories of citizen involvement needed radical revision.

The modern world, wrote Walter Lippmann, “had upset the old life on the prairies, made new demands upon democracy, introduced specialization and science…and created the impersonal relationships of the modern world.”[^55] Lippmann and other progressives in the New Republic - Dewey’s political home from its founding until 1937 - argued that new forms of participation must replace face to face…