Deliberative Democracy as a Matter of Public Spirit: Reconstructing the Dewey-Lippmann Debate
Shane Ralston
University of Ottawa
In the 1920s, a debate took place between several American thinkers concerned about the proper role of citizens in a democracy. Walter Lippman authored two books, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, and John Dewey penned two reviews of the aforementioned books and his own, The Public and Its Problems.[1] Commentators have seen these works as pitting Dewey against Lippmann, and some have argued that Lippmann got the better of it and some that Dewey did.[2] I, however, contend that they have grossly misunderstood the exchange; that in fact Lippmann had another target in mind, and Dewey stepped in to mediate.
Two theses about this debate punctuate the two major sections of this paper. In the first, the negative or historical thesis states that the commentators have misinterpreted the debate’s construction and dynamic. In the second section, the positive or analytic thesis is that Dewey employs a concept called public-spiritedness to mediate the two conflicting positions taken in the debate. Not only does this concept help to reach a resolution, but as suggested in section three, it also anticipates the contemporary notion of deliberative democracy.
I
Commentators on the Dewey-Lippmann debate have split over who deserved the victory laurel. Dewey’s biographer, Robert Westbrook, sides with Lippmann. He reluctantly admits “that Lippmann had the better of Dewey in their debate in the 1920s on the implications of the eclipse of citizenship and the collapse of public life in the United States.”[3] The most ardent defenders of the view that Dewey triumphed in the debate are Michael Eldridge and Raymond Boisvert.[4]
However, the commentators have misconstrued the debate’s construction and dynamic. In terms of construction, the debate took place not between Lippmann and Dewey, but instead between Lippmann and American Progressives committed to the majoritarian creed. According to this creed, democracy demands vigilance against the concentrated power of elites and deference to the decisions of majorities. To translate public opinion into government policy, patrons of the creed favour majoritarian methods—such as polls, votes, and elected representation—because these methods arouse the least suspicion of elitism.[5] Besides questioning non-majoritarian methods, proponents of the creed also doubt the average citizen’s capacity for sound judgment, and thus whether majoritarian methods translate anything other than collective irrationality. Therefore, almost paradoxically, the sceptical bent of the majoritarian creed risks undermining its own presumptive faith in majoritarian decision-making.[6]
In terms of dynamic, the debate occurred amidst a unique set of historical circumstances, in the mid to late 1920s, when the rise of America’s third political party had already reached its zenith and had since begun a spiralling decline.[7] Progressive optimism about achieving the “public good” or “common interest” ebbed, and many members either left the Party or teetered on the brink of defection.[8] It was therefore a propitious time for change in their philosophy, and Lippmann—an erstwhile Party member himself—stood ready to persuade the disillusioned Progressives to adopt his own.[9]
In order to convert them, Lippmann aims in Public Opinion to exploit the most apparent weakness in their majoritarian creed: their scepticism about the average citizen’s capacity to make sound judgments.[10] Citizens of existing democracies lack the time, interest and knowledge to make informed political decisions.[11] Since popular opinion is generated by the free association of words, images and ideas, majoritarian methods merely register these dominant, and often irrational, associations—what Lippmann calls “stereotypes” or “pictures in our heads.”[12] Following the dictum that bad-input-makes-bad-output, these stereotypes distort the citizen’s understanding of the real political environment and, as a result, disappoint their efforts to impartially judge its features. Therefore, citizens of actual democracies live in what Lippmann calls a “pseudo-environment”—their judgment influenced by arbitrarily acquired stereotypes, not purposeful intelligence, about the world-at-large.
To achieve accuracy and intelligence in surveying the political landscape, the public requires at least two kinds of elites. The first, experts, record information and coordinate research about the environment, thereby “making the invisible visible.” [13] The second, leaders, make and execute public policy decisions based on the findings of experts. In this scheme, little opportunity is left for deliberation by the average citizen.[14] Moreover, to preserve popular support for government policies and leadership, elites must also “manufacture consent,” or produce propaganda that manipulates the dominant stereotypes in the minds of citizens.[15] Thus, Lippmann contends, the elites, rather than the average citizens, of a democracy administer the government’s affairs.[16]
In The Phantom Public, Lippmann arrives at even more nihilistic conclusions than in Public Opinion. Not only is the “public” in traditional democratic theory ultimately a fiction or “phantom,” citizens of real democracies have a negligible role to play in practical politics, one circumscribed heavily by the authority of elites.[17] Since, for Lippmann, elections represent sublimated or mock battles, the ritualistic trip to the voting booths functions to reduce the conflict between elites, but never to uplift or edify the citizen-voter.[18] In the end, Lippmann hoped that Progressive democrats would acknowledge this dismal reality, abandon their majoritarian creed and, in their final act of conversion, substitute for it a newfound faith in the sagacity of elites—or what would later become known as the theory of “democratic elitism.”[19]
Particularly prominent among the old guard Progressives who embraced the majoritarian creed was the American jurist Learned Hand, to whom Lippmann dedicated his book The Phantom Public. The dedication was itself symbolic of Lippmann’s desire to sway Hand’s intellectual sympathies to his elitist position. In a strikingly similar event sixteen years prior, Graham Wallas dedicated his book, The Great Society, to Lippmann, his former student at Harvard. [20] Wallas intended to convince Lippmann of the soundness of his view that the environment of modern life was so complicated as to be inscrutable to all but the very few. As might be expected, Wallas’ efforts to convert Lippmann were not made in vain. Lippmann’s mature elitist views and especially his notion of a pseudo-environment bear the stamp of Wallas’ influence. To persuade Hand and his Progressive ilk, as Wallas had done to Lippmann years earlier, Lippmann had to do more than simply dedicate a book. He had to attack and exploit the vulnerable underbelly in their majoritarian creed.
However, if the case of Learned Hand is representative, then Lippmann’s efforts to convert Progressives en masse failed. It is easy to overlook Hand’s resistance to Lippmann’s brand of elitism, and conclude that the American jurist was, on all accounts, an easy convert. For one, Hand accepted the dedication and, two, if his silence is interpreted as assent, he implicitly agreed with The Phantom Public’s conclusions.[21] Yet Hand’s biographer, Gerald Gunther, infers the opposite conclusion, namely that, “Hand must have read the book with very mixed, often disappointed emotions. He never wrote to Lippmann about it; unlike Public Opinion, it elicited no superlatives from him.”[22] Therefore, according to Gunther, The Phantom Public’s arguments could topple Hand’s faith that citizens should direct the affairs of government through majoritarian political processes.
Gunther’s conclusion that the American jurist rejected Lippmann’s arguments proves more persuasive in light of Hand’s conviction, shared with other Progressives, that some powers integral to self-government cannot be delegated to leaders and experts. For instance, in the Masses decision, Judge Hand affirmed the right of citizens to freely discuss and decide what government policies and practices should be tolerated, on the ground that “public opinion . . . is the final source of government in a democratic state.”[23] Years later in the Holmes Lectures at Harvard, Hand would declare that,
For myself it would be irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not. If they were in charge I should miss the stimulus of living in a society where I have, at least theoretically, some part in public affairs.[24]
Among the Progressives who embraced the majoritarian creed, Hand could not have made a firmer denunciation of Lippmann’s elitism, and a more resounding battle cry in favour of the majoritarian creed. In the end, despite his effort to exploit the critical weakness in their majoritarian creed, Lippmann did not achieve the widespread conversion of American Progressives that he had planned.
II
Dewey’s role in the debate between Lippmann and the Progressives was not in the capacity of a disputant. [25] Instead, and apropos of the positive or analytic thesis of this paper, Dewey navigates a safe course between two flawed alternatives: on the one hand, the Progressive or majoritarian way, which defends majoritarian procedures as the sole method for gauging the public’s preferences and, on the other, the Lippmann or elitist way, which disregards public preferences and entrusts policy decisions to the judgment of elites. Dewey accomplishes this feat by proposing a third way in the form of a mediating concept known as public-spiritedness.
One of Dewey’s biographers, Alan Ryan, laments that the “difficulty for readers of The Public and Its Problems . . . is that Dewey accepted most of Lippmann’s complaints against the existing order of things.”[26] While Ryan’s observation is astute, it only poses a challenge to readers if the debate is understood as between Lippmann and Dewey. Appreciated as it should be, that is, as between Lippmann and American Progressives committed to the majoritarian creed, the reader comprehends the rationale for his early concessions to Lippmann. Dewey’s role in the debate is that of a mediator, rather than that of a disputant.[27]
As all proficient mediators do, he must first acknowledge the strengths of both disputants’ positions. First, to Lippmann, Dewey echoes his criticism that the theory and practice of democracy admit of increasing disparity.[28] Likewise, Dewey acknowledges the multifarious complexities of modern, industrialized society.[29] Also, in a similar vein as Lippmann, he recognizes the power of propagandists to manipulate public opinion by “enlisting upon their side the inertia, prejudices and emotional partisanship of the masses.”[30] But, most revealing of all, Dewey concludes, “the democratic public is still largely inchoate and unorganized.”[31]
Switching to the Progressives, Dewey stresses the importance of elected representation and social experimentation. Given Dewey’s definition of the “public,” that is, as “all those affected by the indirect consequences of transactions,” those publics qua publics must be empowered to select “representatives of . . . [their] interests, created by these perceived consequences and to define the functions which they shall possess and employ.”[32] In addition, given Dewey’s definition of the “state,” that is, as “the organization of the public effected through officials,” representatives become the caretakers for their constituent publics, as well as initiators of state-sponsored social experiments.[33] Therefore, Dewey affirms the value of the majoritarian method of elected representation and the experimental process of social reform, two conventions prized by Progressives committed to the majoritarian creed.
Besides citing the strengths, Dewey also critically examines the weakness of their respective positions. In Public Opinion, Lippmann reveals his epistemological assumptions from the outset with an extensive passage quoted from Book VII of Plato’s Republic, the well-known allegory of the cave. From this passage and his notion of a pseudo-environment, it is easy to adduce that Lippmann assumes the bipolar “spectator-object” framework of classical epistemology.[34] According to this framework, knowledge is analogous to sight. The spectator—in Lippmann’s case, the citizen—views the illusory appearances of the world, “the pictures in our heads,” but cannot access its real or “really real” objects—which, in Lippmann’s estimation, demands “intelligence work.” Almost identical to Plato’s solution in the Republic, Lippmann grants access only to the sagacious few, the experts, in what Dewey characterizes as “the revival of the Platonic notion that philosophers should be kings . . . [wherein] the idea of experts is substituted for that of philosophers.”[35] Not only does Dewey disagree that the masses would willingly bequeath the ruling power to experts, he also rejects the classical epistemological framework that Lippmann inherits.[36] Organisms do not passively intellectualize the appearances of their environment for the sake of discovering hidden objects; instead, they actively interact with it.[37] As dynamic inquirers and problem-solvers, Dewey’s citizens can thus more faithfully be compared with scientists or artists than with spectators.[38] Rather than bending to deceptive stereotypes, a community of inquirers reconstructs their environment in the expectation that it will, in time, come nearer to approximating a communally shared ideal.[39]
Lippmann’s opponents in the debate also receive critical treatment from Dewey. Dewey indirectly criticizes the Progressives for failing to appreciate the significance of non-majoritarian methods, such as debate and discussion.[40] Despite the Progressives’ push for legislative experimentation, they ignored the educative and community-building effects of the activity that precedes majority decision-making: namely, deliberation.[41] If reformers remove barriers to free inquiry, discussion and debate, Dewey suggests that they will foster more than an increase in the quantity of citizen deliberation; he also foresees a corresponding increase in the quality of deliberation.[42] More and better deliberation educates average citizens; it improves their capacities for clear judgment and intelligent inquiry; it allows them to express enlightened voting preferences; and, most importantly, it empowers them to take part in political debates and contests as informed participants.[43] The Progressive reformer can then substitute a more optimistic vision for Lippmann’s: elections conceived, not as sublimated battles, but as opportunities to improve civic judgment and to build a stronger deliberative community. In sum, acknowledging the value of deliberation rewards the Progressive democrat two-fold: one, it ameliorates his scepticism about the citizen’s capacity to make sound judgments; and, two, it reinforces his faith in majoritarian methods.