  The debate between Dewey and Lippmann about the public sphere and its role in democracy is precisely praxeological in the sense that I defined the term earlier. In response to Lippmann’s insistence on the preeminence of expertise, Dewey criticised “existing political practice” for the reason that it largely ignored “occupational groups and the organized knowledge and purposes that are involved in the existence of such groups, manifests a dependence upon a summation of individuals quantitatively” (Dewey 1927a, 50–51). At the same time, he recognised that existing institutions were obstacles to the emergence of such a form of participatory democracy in an era when “the machine age has enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified, and complicated the scope of indirect consequences” of collective action and where the collectives—affected by actions of such a scope—are so large and diverse “that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself” (Dewey 1927b, 314). Dewey saw the solution in a transformation both of what it is to be a public and of the institutions with which the public interacts. Such interaction will provide the basis for determining how the functions of the new form of political organization will be limited and expanded, the scope of which is “something to be critically and experimentally determined” in democracy as a mode of practical inquiry (Dewey 1927b, 281). The question is not just one of current political feasibility, but also of possibility, given that we want to remain committed in some broad sense to democratic principles of self-rule even if not to the set of possibilities provided by current institutions. How do we identify such fundamentally unsettling facts? I turn next to the discussion of a specific social fact, the “fact of globalization” and interpret it not as a uniform and aggregative process but as a problematic situation that is experienced in different and even contradictory ways at different locations and from a variety of perspectives, and is differently assessed with respect to different normative ideals of democracy. Since this is a relatively recent and unsettled debate, through this example we can see Critical Theory in the making.