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Through the public debates which are unfolding about Genetically Modified Organisms in Europe, new issues have taken shape. This article attempts to understand the possibility of such novelties in light of the political positions taken by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. In order to bring about the necessity of an active public, taking an active part in the definition and realisation of political ends, he makes two radical proposals: a perspective of the emergence of the State, and political experimentation as the method needed by this perspective. The possibility of the emergence of new forms of the State, of new public issues, is the goal of political experimentation. And the formation of a public — a public taking active part in the elaboration of the knowledge needed to decide on issues which are always specific — is the causal event which has to emerge in and through such experimentation.