John Dewey, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Democracy is freedom. The participatory thesis is unambiguous in the texts: the keynote of democracy is the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in the formation of the values that regulate the living of men together; all those who are affected by social institutions must have a share in producing and managing them; democracy must affect all modes of human association.
Democracy is not a method of choosing between elite teams of officeholders; it is the practice of associated life in which institutions of work, school, family, government, and culture are shaped by those they affect. The Lippmann elitism — that the public is incompetent and democracy requires expert administration — describes a real difficulty (the manipulation of public opinion in modern industrial society) but offers the wrong solution.1
The right solution is the construction of the conditions for genuine public formation: the reorganization of work and school as participatory communities, the protection of free inquiry and expression, the development of the Great Community against the inertia of the Great Society.234
In Chapter 4, "The Eclipse of the Public," Dewey characterizes as realistically as anyone the failures of actual democratic prac-tice. practice. He rivals Lippmann in itemizing voter ignorance and apathy and the corruptions of democratic intent by powerful private in-terests. interests. Dewey, however, is not resigned to these deficiencies.The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 2: 1925-1927, Essays, The Public and Its Problems
It is, as we often say, though perhaps without appreciating all that is involved in the saying, a way of life, social and individual.Liberalism and Social Action + Essays, p. 218
It is obsessed by the illusion which vitiated the "natural economy": an illusion due to failure to note the difference made in action by perception and publication of its consequences, actual and possible. It thinks in terms of antecedents, not of the eventual; of origins, not fruits.The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 2: 1925-1927, Essays, The Public and Its Problems, pp. 333–334
For to be workable democracy demands allayed passions and clarified understanding. The book is clear, extraordinarily so considering the fundamental and controverted issues it raises. Even if a summary of its argument were called for, Mr. Lippmann has already provided one covering its main points, which is better than any this reviewer could furnish.The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 2: 1925-1927, Essays, The Public and Its Problems, pp. 214–215
Genuinely held throughout the authorship from The School and Society (1899) to Freedom and Culture (1939). The textual record is unambiguous; the canonical formulations recur in dozens of essays across thirty years. Westbrook's reading recovers what the Cold War welfare-state liberal flattening had obscured: my position is more radical, more demanding, and more participatory than the liberal-progressive reception allowed. Lippmann is the canonical adversary, Schumpeter the academic formalization of the Lippmann line, modern epistocrats and AI-governance theorists the contemporary form of the same elitist-managerial alternative. The disagreement is fundamental.