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, to argue that the serious acceptance of the principle that personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.64
For Lippmann, insofar as representatives seek to track various perspectives among their constituents to create a better picture of political reality, they will be misguided. Given the way he understands stereotypes and their hold on us, partial perspectives will either cancel each other out if they diverge or reinforce each other. In either case, the net result is an incomplete picture that corrupts decision making. The alternative that Lippmann recommends is one in which the unseen facts are “managed only by a specialized class” of social scientific experts who are distinct from the “men of action.”65 Presumably, locating decision making outside the purview of experts obstructs the extent to which they may employ their knowledge for ends that reach beyond public oversight. Their role, he explains, is to examine and report on the unseen political phenomena that are blocked from view by our stereotypes. They direct their results to political officials, rather than to the public, and take their point of direction from these same individuals.
Yet Lippmann’s language in the first passage suggests much more than mere reporting, indicative of his example of the factory owner and his relationship to the foreman and the accountant. The accountant provides not only facts, but also an interpretation of the current financial condition of the company, its short- and long-term problems given current operations. If we reason from this example to his understanding of the role of experts in politics, it is not an exaggeration to say that for Lippmann experts give shape to the problems that are only dimly perceived by both citizens and political officials. The intellectual authority he attaches to experts thus slides into a kind of political power that shapes the landscape in which political officials and the citizenry function from the outset. To be sure, he frees citizens from an oppressive fiction, but is it at the expense of much that we find morally appealing about democracy?
Dewey does not deny the brilliance or force of Lippmann’s critique in his review of Public Opinion: “The figures of the scene are so composed and so stand out, the manner of presentation is so objective and projective, that one finishes the book almost without realizing that it is perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”66 He agrees with Lippmann’s discussion of stereotypes and the poverty of the public’s knowledge in decision making. And he, too, is unconvinced by a view of democracy that envisions citizens as omnicompetent. Yet he takes issue with both the emphasis Lippmann places on educating “officials and directors” over and against the public and his corollary belief that experts do not need to be informed by or receive input from the public.67 The problem here, for Dewey, is not simply the role envisioned by Lippmann for experts, but rather, and consistent with the view expressed almost forty years earlier, the problem of power implied by their role in democracy. As he says more forcefully in The Public and Its Problems: “No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few” (225). Lippmann’s criticism was so perfectly directed that it seemingly left little room for reflection regarding a solution—a view which, in Dewey’s estimation, led to Lippmann’s elitism.
The Public and Its Problems
In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey is sensitive to the worry Lippmann advances, and even to the need for a division of intellectual labor between experts and the larger public that worry implies. This position, however, is located in a larger framework regarding the relationship between experts and citizens that keeps in view the problem of power and that sees citizens not merely as authorizing power, but as genuinely authoritative in decision making. The desire to keep in view the issue of power partly helps explain his defense of democracy and the distinct and important descriptions of the role of the public and the state that he elucidates in the first three chapters of the book.
For Dewey, the vast complexities of the modern age have radically transformed the meaning of democracy and the role of the ordinary citizen. For him, the various innovations in communication and transportation, the global scale of warfare, and the ever-changing dynamics of a market economy make reliance on experts simply unavoidable. “The Eclipse of the Public,” chapter 4 of The Public and Its Problems, is fundamentally about the ways in which citizens’ inherited habits for sustaining democracy are no longer consonant with the vast changes of the modern world. “We have,” explains Dewey, “inherited, in short, local town-meeting practices and ideas. But we live and act and have our being in a continental national state” (147). The incompatibility of citizens’ political and social habits and the circumstances in which they find themselves produces what Dewey, following Wallas, refers to as the “Great Society”—a collection of individuals tied together through bureaucratic structures and impersonal forces.68 As a result, the view of the omnicompetent citizen can only appear as an illusion. Dewey concedes this point to Lippmann. But in the context of democratic decision making, what is important, he argues, is that we understand that how and why we rely on experts is itself a public judgment that makes social inquiry genuinely cooperative.
The Public and Its Problems, then, is concerned to answer two distinct but related questions. First, what is the proper relationship between citizens and experts in the context of modern complexity, which nonetheless retains the self-governing dimension that we associate with democracy? Second, what is the proper method for helping the public emerge from its eclipse in the face of modern complexity so that it can fill the charge of self-governance?
The
