Recontextualizing John Dewey's the public and its problems

John Dewey's political thought, particularly his best known The Public and Its Problems, is better understood in the context of his lecture notes on social and political theory from the 1920s. This article sketches his unpublished triad of economic processes, political-legal structures and social-moral functions. Particular emphasis is given to the priority of basic social groups as mediators of our transaction with nature and the function of the state to harmonize these groups, and to the slippage between economic processes and political-legal structures. The former deepens Dewey's connection to early twentieth-century political pluralism while the latter connects his thought to cultural lag theory.