Abstract

The 2013 Past President’s Panel at the Dewey Society annual meeting invited scholars to revisit the classic political text, The Public and Its Problems . Four exceptional papers were presented at the session and are now gathered here to gain the wider audience they deserve.Dewey’s most comprehensive work of political theory and democratic politics, The Public and Its Problems was a response to the deeply embedded skepticism about participatory democracy and public life expressed by democratic realists of the era, most famously, Walter Lippmann in his The Phantom Public . In response to Lippmann, Dewey offered a thorough analysis of early 20th century democracy and some of his best thinking on both the ..