fail to be attentive to those on whose behalf they serve. The result is that they diminish, rather than expand, their perceptual and problem-solving abilities. Even on the assumption that such rulers would remain wise, the image would still be unattractive:
The aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into their proper positions in the social organism. It is true, indeed, that when an individual has found that place in society for which he is best fitted and is exercising the function proper to that place, he has obtained his completest development, but it is also true (and this is the truth omitted by aristocracy, emphasized by democracy) that he must find this place and assume this work in the main for himself. . . . It must begin in the man himself, however much the good and the wise of society contribute.50
Because Dewey regards the good of society as legitimate to the extent that it is self-consciously recognized by the members of the community, his understanding of democracy locates itself in the freely willed actions (whether in support or contestation) of its members.
As already suggested, the themes struck in 1888—the relationship between individual and society, the significance of deliberation, the relationship between minority and majority, and the anti-elitist core of Dewey’s political thinking—reach a higher pitch in The Public and Its Problems. When taken together these themes throw into greater relief Dewey’s mature thinking on democracy and its radical and enduring quality.
The Crisis of Democracy
By the 1920s democracy had fallen on hard times. Several factors were at work.51 First, Darwinian evolution in the last decade of the nineteenth century undermined the religious backdrop of American culture. Darwin’s version of evolution so thoroughly connected contingency to biological development that many came to believe they were helpless in trying to create a just society. If God was dead, to whom should one turn for guidance? This question implied a crisis not simply of religious certainty, but of authority more broadly understood. In Drift and Mastery of 1914, Walter Lippmann, 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
