The Public and Its Problems. Джон Дьюи
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then editor of the New Republic and adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, nicely captured the psychological anxieties of the age: “What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts didn’t free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.”52
Second, while World War I elevated America’s status as an international force, it did so alongside an already waning belief in progress that had otherwise defined the Progressive Era. American intellectuals did not abandon the belief in progress as such, but that belief was severely chastened by the devastation of the war. It made clear that retrogression was as likely as the progress that many thought was inevitable. But the war also revealed how easily the people, who otherwise were considered the source of sovereignty, were duped by propaganda.
Third, new studies in human psychology and politics at the beginning of the twentieth century merely confirmed the ease with which the people were manipulated. In doing so, these studies undermined the very premise on which democracy rested—that ordinary individuals were capable of collectively governing themselves if given the opportunity. What Maine had argued polemically in the 1880s, a new breed of scholar would maintain, but now with the support of empirical facts. French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) and British sociologist and political scientist Graham Wallas (1858–1932) effectively elucidated the irrationality of the democratic public and its tendency to be short-sighted and biased.53 By the beginning of the 1930s, Harold Laswell (1902–1978), a leading American political scientist, could declare, “The findings of personality research show that the individual is a poor judge of his own interest.”54 Amid the constant evidence that public opinion was irrational, that the people were easily duped, and that partisan politics exacerbated these problems, many believed that if democracy continued it would have to be grounded in something other than the shifting and conflicting desires of ordinary people.
Democracy required a dose of realism to chasten its loftier vision. The emergence of democratic realism constituted a fundamental shift away from the idea of a deliberative public that was central to the Progressive Era. Searching for a new basis of authority, grappling with the possibility of retrogression and the irrationality of the public, many turned to a vision of democracy based on scientific expertise and administrative efficiency. “The world over,” explained the Australian sociologist Elton Mayo (1880–1949) in 1933, “we are greatly in need of an administrative elite.”55 Situated between Tarde and Wallas on the one hand, and Lasswell and Mayo on the other, Lippmann popularized the arguments of the former and prefigured the reflections of the latter. Lippmann further supported the irrationality of the democratic public in his two works Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), while simultaneously offering an attenuated vision of democracy. What Americans seemed to be without in 1914—namely, masters and guardians—Lippmann would now address in these two somber works. Understanding the meaning of Dewey’s argument as found in The Public and Its Problems requires that we first understand Lippmann’s position.
In Public Opinion, Lippmann advances a criticism that is in keeping with much of the psychological literature of the time. His argument comes in two steps. The first relates to what he calls stereotypes and the second is about the manipulation to which the symbolic content of those stereotypes is potentially subject. Stereotypes are value-laden conjectures about the world that arranges our experiences. They are part of a wider social network in which individuals exist and do not depend for their functioning on perpetual cognitive awareness. As he says, “The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. . . . And those preconceptions . . . govern deeply the whole process of perception.”56 This is particularly so in industrial societies because people are asked to reflect on issues of which they can have no firsthand experience.
Given the importance he accords stereotypes, not merely for individual identity, but also for political behavior, Lippmann worries about the extent to which they can be manipulated in the context of public life. Having served on the Committee on Public Information to enlist public support for America’s involvement in World War I, Lippmann witnessed firsthand how susceptible the public was to manipulation. And for him, stereotypes not only work to “censor out much that needs to be taken into account” about complex political phenomena but also are uniquely susceptible to control, given their already existentially charged content.57 “The stereotypes,” Lippmann explains, “are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope.”58 Most individuals, he says earlier, employ stereotypes with a level of “gullibility” that prevents them from seeing the partiality of their position, and this blunts their responsiveness to new and, at times, contrary information. Individuals who seek to win political power use symbols that are tied to the passions that infuse stereotypes; they play on our passions and on the fear of insecurity and uncertainty involved. Political entrepreneurs do not, in Lippmann’s analysis, take their point of departure from the opinion of the public—in fact, they give to the public its opinion. It is in this sense that public opinion, not being formed by the public, is merely a phantom.
But more significantly, Lippmann argues, citizens are inherently resistant to information that would call into question their deeply held beliefs. This is precisely why deliberation among the citizenry cannot lift citizens above their private or narrow interest: “There is nothing so obdurate to education or to criticism as the stereotype. It stamps itself upon the evidence in the very act of securing the evidence.”59 For this reason, Lippmann concludes in the more somber Phantom Public, “the public must be put in its place . . . so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”60
These considerations frame Lippmann’s alternative—elitist—vision of democracy. If we are to retain democracy, it must now mean, he argues, that the “public does not select the candidate, write the platform, outline the policy any more than it builds the automobile or acts the play. It aligns itself for or against somebody who has offered himself.”61 But this position goes further. As he explains, lamenting the exaggerated role attached to the citizen in democratic theory:
My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.62
For him, to do what is expected means not merely paying attention to political issues but also having the requisite knowledge to understand those issues—something ordinary citizens lack and will typically be resistant to acquiring. But strikingly, Lippmann also argues that political decisions by elected representatives are in need of prior supplementation and clarification. It is worth turning to two passages from Public Opinion: one from chapter 16 relating to Lippmann’s views on Congress, and the second from chapter 1 relating to representative government proper:
A congress of representatives is essentially a group of blind men in a vast, unknown world. . . . Since the real effects of most laws are subtle and hidden, they cannot be understood by filtering local experiences through local states of mind. They can be known only by controlled reporting and objective analysis. And just as the head of a large factory cannot know how efficient it is by talking to the foreman, but must examine cost sheets and data that only an accountant can dig out for him, so the lawmaker does not arrive at a true picture of the state of the union by putting together a mosaic of local pictures.63
[As such] representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions. I attempt, therefore,