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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 answer to the first question helps us understand how Dewey views the relationship between citizens and experts (chapter 6) and underscores the radical character of the democratic public (chapters 1–3). The answer to the second question emerges in Dewey’s discussion of what he believes are the preconditions for the public to assume its role under modern conditions. These themes emerge in chapters 4 and 5. For the remainder of the introduction I shall concentrate on the first of these issues, leaving it to the reader to assess Dewey’s engagement with the second.
The first issue emerges when he describes the relationship between experts and the citizenry, revisiting some of the themes expressed in his review of Lippmann’s work. In fact, the passage to which we will now refer sends us back to some of his reflections in 1888:
The final obstacle in the way of any aristocratic rule is that in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses, the best do not and cannot remain the best, the wise ceases to be wise. It is impossible for highbrows to secure a monopoly of such knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs. . . .
. . . The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. (223–24)
This passage is located in chapter 6, where Dewey discusses the problem of method in democratic decision making. One of the central claims he advances in that chapter is that the hypotheses we form for responding to political problems are only as good as the methods we employ—that is, the extent to which the methods make us receptive to data from various parts of the environment. But problems themselves, as he argues, frame and guide our inquiry; they imply the existence of a complex horizon of value and meaning that is now fractured and in need of creative valuation to restore continuity. Dewey’s point is not simply that without the input of the wearer of shoes the shoemaker will respond in a way that would not address the existing pinch. Rather, without input from the individual experiencing the pinch, the expert shoemaker will not have the subject matter to initiate or guide his inquiry.
Dewey is offering a rich account of democracy and the status of citizens and experts therein. First, the experiential