Previous discussion has brought to light some conditions out of which
the public is generated. It has also set forth some of the causes
through which a “new age of human relationships” has been brought
into being. These two arguments form the premises which, when they
are related to each other, will provide our answer to the questions
just raised. Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of
conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having
a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine
age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated
the scope of the indirect consequences, have formed such immense and
consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community
basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish
itself. And this discovery is obviously an antecedent condition of
any effective organization on its part. Such is our thesis regarding
the eclipse which the public idea and interest have undergone. There
are too many publics and too much of public concern for our existing
resources to cope with. The problem of a democratically organized
public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem, in a
degree to which the political affairs of prior ages offer no parallel.
Our concern at this time is to state how it is that the machine age in
developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated
the small communities of former times without generating a Great
Community. The facts are familiar enough; our especial affair is
to point out their connections with the difficulties under which
the organization of a democratic public is laboring. For the very
familiarity with the phenomena conceals their significance and blinds
us to their relation to immediate political problems.
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