  One place to start is with Dewey’s most developed and distinctive work in political theory, The Public and Its Problems, which is in part a response to Walter Lippmann’s influential sceptical attack on democratic theory in books such as Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). Lippmann (who like Dewey was influenced by William James and who shared many philosophical and political commitments with Dewey at an earlier stage of his career) agrees that contemporary moral and political thinking has not caught up with the modern world. Unlike Dewey, however, Lippmann thinks that understanding the complexity and opacity of modernity requires us to set aside the democratic illusion that citizens are “omnicompetent”, and instead embrace the legitimacy of decision-making by qualified experts. The force of this critique of democracy for Dewey in part derives from its deployment of his own intellectual strategy for ends with which he vehemently disagrees. Dewey’s response to this is to point out that experts have their own biases, and need correction from those who have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Although Dewey can sometimes appear to sound dismissive about what he calls the “political machinery” of democracy such as the vote and majority rule, he never regards this as inessential or disposable. At the minimum, for Dewey, this machinery helps to protect individuals from putative experts about where the interests of people lie. A class of experts will inevitably slide into a class whose interests diverge from those of the rest and becomes a committee of oligarchs. So “the strongest point to be made in behalf of even such rudimentary political forms as democracy has attained, popular voting, majority rule and so on, is that to some extent they involve a consultation and discussion which concerns social needs and troubles” (The Public and Its Problems, LW2, p. 364). Taken in isolation, this way of viewing the desirability of democratic political machinery seems instrumental and minimal; instrumental, in that the desirability of democracy derives from its protecting the interests of each individual against the depredations of an elite class, and minimal, in that the rationale for popular participation is limited to the need to keep the elite informed about where the shoe pinches, if its policies are not to be misguided. While Dewey sometimes refers rather scathingly to the “machinery” conception of democracy, he is committed to improving this machinery (by supporting the equal distribution of the franchise, for example) rather than merely dismissing it as unimportant. The real target of his ire is the exclusive identification of democracy with a particular current set of political institutions, particularly only with elections and majority rule. As in the case of the defunct idea of liberalism, Dewey thinks of this as a once liberating conception that now contains an inbuilt conservative bias that prevents more imaginative institutional thinking.