  We can see some of Dewey’s abiding concerns in political philosophy sketched in some of his early, overtly Idealist work.  In texts such as “The Ethics of Democracy” (EW1) and “Christianity and Democracy” (EW4), Dewey elaborates a version of the Idealist criticisms of classical liberal individualism. For this line of criticism, classical liberalism envisages the individual as an independent entity in competition with other individuals, and takes social and political life as a sphere in which this competitive pursuit of self-interest is coordinated. By contrast, the Idealists rejected this view of social and political life as the aggregation of inherently conflicting private interests. Instead, they sought to view individuals relationally: individuality could be sustained only where social life was understood as an organism in which the well-being of each part was tied to the well-being of the whole. Freedom in a positive sense consisted not merely in the absence of external constraints but the positive fact of participation in such an ethically desirable social order. On this foundation, Dewey rebuts Henry Maine’s bleak assessment in Popular Government that democracy is the rule of the ignorant majority. While it is important that voters can reject their rulers and so control them to some extent, democracy is not simply a form of government defined by the distribution of the franchise or majority rule. Rather what matters, as Dewey puts it, is the way that the majority is formed. To understand that requires grasping what Maine misses, in Dewey’s view: that “men are not isolated non-social atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations” to one another, and the state in turn only represents them “so far as they have become organically related to one another, or are possessed of unity of purpose and interest” (“The Ethics of Democracy”, EW1, 231-2). Democracy is a form of moral and spiritual association that recognizes the contribution that each member can make in his or her particular way to this ethical community. And each of us can contribute to this community since we each only become the individuals we are through our engagement in the institutions and practices of our society.