The Chicago Teachers Strike and Its Public

geographical nexus of American industrial democracy, pushed Dewey to consider the problems industrial modes of organization pose for democratic theory. His re- conceptualization of democracy, and the refinements and clarifications to it that he made over the years, reflects an appreciation of the significance of work—of human transfiguration of chaotic matter into something useable, and of the corollary con - struction of human psychology as it meets with the world around it and resolves the problems it thereby encounters. By the 1920s, democratic realists contemplating the landscape of American political life in the wake of several more decades of industrialization, technological advances, and human mobility wondered if a democratic public were even possible. One hope was that, using Dewey's terms above, "matter" might have some "stan- dards" after all; the application of science and social science to the problems of the day might yield knowledge that could be employed in political decision-making. 2 Of these realists, Walter Lippmann was recognized by Dewey as particularly in- sightful. As Dewey noted, Lippmann provided "a more significant statement of the problem of knowledge than professional epistemological philosophers have been able to give." 3 Lippmann's book began with an epigraph from Plato's Republic, and, like Plato, Lippmann suggests that secure knowledge is the foundation of a good polity, with the illusions provided by the workaday world standing as a serious threat to its stability. Taking up the challenges that Lippmann's argument poses, Dewey's The Public and Its Problems provides a different account of the knowledge that should guide democratic politics, a modern account of practical judgment in lieu of technical reason. 4 A century later, the terms of work have changed again, and the problems Dewey and Lippmann considered are freshly relevant. This paper considers the 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike as an instance in which a public, in Dewey's sense, briefly emerged in response to perceived problems that raise precisely the set of ques - tions regarding knowledge and democratic governance that Dewey and Lippmann