dress the deeper questions that had preoccupied theorists of republican virtue all along, the question of whether self-government could work beyond the local level. Not that Dewey failed to recognize the importance of the question. "The significant thing," he wrote in passing, "is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction, and unity of outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared." Industrialism, moreover, had "excluded" individuals from the use of thought and emotion in their daily occupations and from the "assumption of responsibility," without which "there can be no stable and balanced development of mind and character." Although he held out the hope that "the Great Society may become the Great Community," Dewey knew that it could "never possess all the qualities which mark a local community." "In its deepest and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse.... Vital and thorough attachments are bred only in the intimacy of an intercourse which is of necessity restricted in range."

What Dewey could not explain was just how loyalty and responsibility would thrive in a world dominated by large-scale production and mass communications. He took for granted the "disintegration of the family, church and neighborhood." What was to fill the resulting "void"? Dewey did not say. "It is outside the scope of our discussion," he wrote, "to look into the prospect of the reconstruction of face-to-face communities." His commitment to the idea of progress prevented him from pursuing the point. In a 1916 essay on progress, he argued that although the replacement of a "static" social structure by a "dynamic or readily changing social structure" did not guarantee progress, it created the preconditions of progress—of "constructive intelligence" and "constructive social engineering." In any case, there was "no way to 'restrain' or turn back the industrial revolution and its consequences."

Under these circumstances, it was impossible to defend his belief in the possibility of a "return movement ... into the local homes of mankind." Since nothing in Dewey's social philosophy justified any such hope, the subjects of work and loyalty had to be relegated to the margins of his work, as, increasingly, they were relegated to the margins of the liberal tradition as a whole.

-368-