THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
BY
WALTER LIPPMANN
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
Printed in the U. S. A.
TO
LEARNED HAND
“_The Voice of the People has been said to be the voice of God:
and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it
is not true in fact._”—Alexander Hamilton, June 18, 1787, at the
Federal Convention (Yates’s notes, cited _Sources and Documents
Illustrating the American Revolution_, edited by S. G. Morison).
“... _consider ‘Government by Public Opinion’ as a formula.... It
is an admirable formula: but it presupposes, not only that public
opinion exists, but that on any particular question there is a
public opinion ready to decide the issue. Indeed, it presupposes
that the supreme statesman in democratic government is public
opinion. Many of the shortcomings of democratic government are
due to the fact that public opinion is not necessarily a great
statesman at all._”—From “Some Thoughts on Public Life,” a lecture
by Viscount Grey of Fallodon, February 3, 1923.
Contents
PART I
Chapter Page
I. The Disenchanted Man 13
II. The Unattainable Ideal 22
III. Agents and Bystanders 40
IV. What the Public Does 54
V. The Neutralization of Arbitrary Force 63
PART II
VI. The Question Aristotle Asked 77
VII. The Nature of a Problem 81
VIII. Social Contracts 95
IX. The Two Questions Before the Public 107
X. The Main Value of Public Debate 110
XI. The Defective Rule 115
XII. The Criteria of Reform 125
XIII. The Principles of Public Opinion 143
PART III
XIV. Society in Its Place 155
XV. Absentee Rulers 173
XVI. The Realms of Disorder 187
Index 201
PART I
Chapter I
THE DISENCHANTED MAN
1
The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator
in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there,
but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected
by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually
and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great
drifts of circumstance.
Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They
are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed
at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.
As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or
who is doing it, or where he is being carried. No newspaper reports
his environment so that he can grasp it; no school has taught him how
to imagine it; his ideals, often, do not fit with it; listening to
speeches, uttering opinions and voting do not, he finds, enable him to
govern it. He lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand
and is unable to direct.
In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is
a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern.
Contemplating himself and his actual accomplishments in public affairs,
contrasting the influence he exerts with the influence he is supposed
according to democratic theory to exert, he must say of his sovereignty
what Bismarck said of Napoleon III.: “At a distance it is something,
but close to it is nothing at all.”[1] When, during an agitation of
some sort, say a political campaign, he hears himself and some thirty
million others described as the source of all wisdom and power and
righteousness, the prime mover and the ultimate goal, the remnants of
sanity in him protest. He cannot all the time play Chanticleer who was
so dazzled and delighted because he himself had caused the sun to rise.
For when the private man has lived through the romantic age in politics
and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is
sober and unimpressed, his own part in public affairs appears to him a
pretentious thing, a second rate, an inconsequential. You cannot move
him then with a good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor
by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to
make him vote. He is a man back home from a crusade to make the world
something or other it did not become; he has been tantalized too often
by the foam of events, has seen the gas go out of it, and, with sour
derision for the stuff, he is saying with the author of _Trivia_:[2]
“‘Self-determination,’ one of them insisted.
“‘Arbitration,’ cried another.
“‘Coöperation,’ suggested the mildest of the party.
“‘Confiscation,’ answered an uncompromising female.
“I, too, became intoxicated with the sound of these vocables. And were
they not the cure for all our ills?
“‘Inoculation!’ I chimed in. ‘Transubstantiation, alliteration,
inundation, flagellation, and afforestation!’”
2
It is well known that nothing like the whole people takes part in
public affairs. Of the eligible voters in the United States less
than half go to the polls even in a presidential year.[3] During the
campaign of 1924 a special effort was made to bring out more voters.
They did not come out. The Constitution, the nation, the party system,
the presidential succession, private property, all were supposed to be
in danger. One party prophesied red ruin, another black corruption, a
third tyranny and imperialism if the voters did not go to the polls in
greater numbers. Half the citizenship was unmoved.
The students used to write books about voting. They are now beginning
to write books about nonvoting. At the University of Chicago Professor
Merriam and Mr. Gosnell have made an elaborate inquiry[4] into the
reason why, at the typical Chicago mayoral election of 1923, there
were, out of 1,400,000 eligible electors, only 900,000 who registered,
and out of those who registered there were only 723,000 who finally
managed to vote. Thousands of persons were interviewed. About 30 per
cent of the abstainers had, or at least claimed to have had, an
insuperable difficulty about going to the polls. They were ill, they
were absent from the city, they were women detained at home by a child
or an invalid, they had had insufficient legal residence. The other 70
per cent, representing about half a million free and sovereign citizens
of this Republic, did not even pretend to have a reason for not voting,
which, in effect, was not an admission that they did not care about
voting. They were needed at their work, the polls were crowded, the
polls were inconveniently located, they were afraid to tell their age,
they did not believe in woman suffrage, the husband objected, politics
is rotten, elections are rotten, they were afraid to vote, they did
not know there was an election. About a quarter of those who were
interviewed had the honesty to say they were wholly uninterested.
Yet Bryce is authority for the statement that “the will of the
sovereign people is expressed ... in the United States ... by as large
a proportion of the registered voters as in any other country.”[5]
And certainly Mr. Lowell’s tables on the use of the initiative and
referendum in Switzerland in the main support the view that the
indifference of the American voter is not unique.[6] In fact, realistic
political thinkers in Europe long ago abandoned the notion that the
collective mass of the people direct the course of public affairs.
Robert Michels, himself a Socialist, says flatly that “the majority is
permanently incapable of self-government,”[7] and quotes approvingly
the remark of a Swedish Socialist Deputy, Gustaf F. Steffen, that
“even after the victory there will always remain in political life the
leaders and the led.” Michels, who is a political thinker of great
penetration, unburdens himself finally on the subject by printing a
remark of Hertzen’s that the victory of an opposition party amounts to
“passing from the sphere of envy to the sphere of avarice.”
There is then nothing particularly new in the disenchantment which the
private citizen expresses by not voting at all, by voting only for the
head of the ticket, by staying away from the primaries, by not reading
speeches and documents, by the whole list of sins of omission for which
he is denounced. I shall not denounce him further. My sympathies are
with him, 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. And I have not happened to
meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of
political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted
ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cited Philip Guedalla, _The Second Empire_.
[2] Logan Pearsall Smith, _More Trivia_, p. 41.
[3] _Cf._ Simon Michelet, _Stay-at-Home Vote and Absentee Voters_,
pamphlet of the National Get Out the Vote Club; also A. M. Schlesinger
and E. M. Erickson, “The Vanishing Voter,” _New Republic_, Oct. 15,
1924. The percentage of the popular to the eligible vote from 1865 to
1920 declined from 83.51 per cent to 52.36 per cent.
[4] Charles Edward Merriam and Harvey Foote Gosnell, _Non-Voting:
Causes and Methods of Control_.
[5] James Bryce, _Modern Democracies_, Vol. II, p. 52.
[6] A. Lawrence Lowell, _Public Opinion and Popular Government_. _Cf._
Appendices.
[7] Robert Michels, _Political Parties_, p. 390.
Chapter II
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL
I have tried to imagine how the perfect citizen could be produced.
Some say he will have to be born of the conjunction of the right germ
plasms, and, in the pages of books written by Madison Grant, Lothrop
Stoddard and other revivalists, I have seen prescriptions as to just
who ought to marry whom to produce a great citizenry. Not being a
biologist I keep an open but hopeful mind on this point, tempered,
however, with the knowledge that certainty about how to breed ability
in human beings is on the whole in inverse proportion to the writer’s
scientific reputation.
It is then to education that logically one turns next, for education
has furnished the thesis of the last chapter of every optimistic book
on democracy written for one hundred and fifty years. Even Robert
Michels, stern and unbending antisentimentalist that he is, says
in his “final considerations” that “it is the great task of social
education to raise the intellectual level of the masses, so that they
may be enabled, within the limits of what is possible, to counteract
the oligarchical tendencies” of all collective action.
So I have been reading some of the new standard textbooks used to teach
citizenship in schools and colleges. After reading them I do not see
how any one can escape the conclusion that man must have the appetite
of an encyclopædist and infinite time ahead of him. To be sure he no
longer is expected to remember the exact salary of the county clerk
and the length of the coroner’s term. In the new civics he studies the
problems of government, and not the structural detail. He is told, in
one textbook of five hundred concise, contentious pages, which I have
been reading, about city problems, state problems, national problems,
international problems, trust problems, labor problems, transportation
problems, banking problems, rural problems, agricultural problems, and
so on _ad infinitum_. In the eleven pages devoted to problems of the
city there are described twelve sub-problems.
But nowhere in this well-meant book is the sovereign citizen of the
future given a hint as to how, while he is earning a living, rearing
children and enjoying his life, he is to keep himself informed about
the progress of this swarming confusion of problems. He is exhorted to
conserve the natural resources of the country because they are limited
in quantity. He is advised to watch public expenditures because the
taxpayers cannot pay out indefinitely increasing amounts. But he, the
voter, the citizen, the sovereign, is apparently expected to yield an
unlimited quantity of public spirit, interest, curiosity and effort.
The author of the textbook, touching on everything, as he thinks, from
city sewers to Indian opium, misses a decisive fact: the citizen gives
but a little of his time to public affairs, has but a casual interest
in facts and but a poor appetite for theory.
It never occurs to this preceptor of civic duty to provide the student
with a rule by which he can know whether on Thursday it is his duty
to consider subways in Brooklyn or the Manchurian Railway, nor how,
if he determines on Thursday to express his sovereign will on the
subway question, he is to repair those gaps in his knowledge of that
question which are due to his having been preoccupied the day before in
expressing his sovereign will about rural credits in Montana and the
rights of Britain in the Sudan. Yet he cannot know all about everything
all the time, and while he is watching one thing a thousand others
undergo great changes. Unless he can discover some rational ground for
fixing his attention where it will do the most good, and in a way that
suits his inherently amateurish equipment, he will be as bewildered as
a puppy trying to lick three bones at once.
I do not wish to say that it does the student no good to be taken on
a sightseeing tour of the problems of the world. It may teach him
that the world is complicated, even if he comes out of the adventure
“laden with germs, breathing creeds and convictions on you whenever
he opens his mouth.”[8] He may learn humility, but most certainly his
acquaintance with what a high-minded author thought were American
problems in 1925 will not equip him to master American problems ten
years later. Unless out of the study of transient issues he acquires an
intellectual attitude no education has occurred.
That is why the usual appeal to education as the remedy for the
incompetence of democracy is so barren. It is, in effect, a proposal
that school teachers shall by some magic of their own fit men to govern
after the makers of laws and the preachers of civic ideals have had a
free hand in writing the specifications. The reformers do not ask what
men can be taught. They say they should be taught whatever may be
necessary to fit them to govern the modern world.
The usual appeal to education can bring only disappointment. For the
problems of the modern world appear and change faster than any set
of teachers can grasp them, much faster than they can convey their
substance to a population of children. If the schools attempt to teach
children how to solve the problems of the day, they are bound always to
be in arrears. The most they can conceivably attempt is the teaching
of a pattern of thought and feeling which will enable the citizen to
approach a new problem in some useful fashion. But that pattern cannot
be invented by the pedagogue. It is the political theorist’s business
to trace out that pattern. In that task he must not assume that the
mass has political genius, but that men, even if they had genius, would
give only a little time and attention to public affairs.
The moralist, I am afraid, will agree all too readily with the idea
that social education must deal primarily not with the elements and
solutions of particular phases of transient problems but with the
principles that constitute an attitude toward all problems. I warn
him off. It will require more than a good conscience to govern modern
society, for conscience is no guide in situations where the essence of
the difficulty is to find a guide for the conscience.
When I am tempted to think that men can be fitted out to deal with the
modern world simply by teaching morals, manners and patriotism, I try
to remember the fable of the pensive professor walking in the woods at
twilight. He stumbled into a tree. This experience compelled him to
act. Being a man of honor and breeding, he raised his hat, bowed deeply
to the tree, and exclaimed with sincere regret: “Excuse me, sir, I
thought you were a tree.”
Is it fair, I ask, as a matter of morality, to chide him for his
conduct? If he had encountered a tree, can any one deny his right to
collide with it? If he had stumbled into a man, was his apology not
sufficient? Here was a moral code in perfect working order, and the
only questionable aspect of his conduct turned not on the goodness of
his heart or the firmness of his principles but on a point of fact.
You may retort that he had a moral obligation to know the difference
between a man and a tree. Perhaps so. But suppose that instead of
walking in the woods he had been casting a ballot; suppose that instead
of a tree he had encountered the Fordney-McCumber tariff. How much more
obligation to know the truth would you have imposed on him then? After
all, this walker in the woods at twilight with his mind on other things
was facing, as all of us think we are, the facts he imagined were
there, and was doing his duty as he had learned it.
In some degree the whole animate world seems to share the inexpertness
of the thoughtful professor. Pawlow showed by his experiments on dogs
that an animal with a false stomach can experience all the pleasures
of eating, and the number of mice and monkeys known to have been
deceived in laboratories is surpassed only by the hopeful citizens of a
democracy. Man’s reflexes are, as the psychologists say, conditioned.
And, therefore, he responds quite readily to a glass egg, a decoy duck,
a stuffed shirt or a political platform. No moral code, as such, will
enable him to know whether he is exercising his moral faculties on a
real and an important event. For effective virtue, as Socrates pointed
out long ago, is knowledge; and a code of the right and the wrong must
wait upon a perception of the true and the false.
But even the successful practice of a moral code would not emancipate
democracy. There are too many moral codes. In our immediate lives,
within the boundaries of our own society, there may be commonly
accepted standards. But a political theorist who asks that a local
standard be universally applied is merely begging one of the questions
he ought to be trying to solve. For, while possibly it may be an aim
of political organization to arrive at a common standard of judgment,
one of the conditions which engenders politics and makes political
organization necessary is the conflict of standards.
Darwin’s story of the cats and clover[9] may be recommended to any
one who finds it difficult to free his mind of the assumption that
his notions of good and bad are universal. The purple clover is
cross-fertilized by the bumblebee, and, therefore, the more bumblebees
the better next year’s crop of clover. But the nests of bumblebees are
rifled by field mice which are fond of the white grubs. Therefore, the
more field mice the fewer bumblebees and the poorer the crop. But in
the neighborhood of villages the cats hunt down the field mice. And so
the more cats the fewer mice, the more bumblebees the better the crop.
And the more kindly old ladies there are in the village the more cats
there will be.
If you happen not to be a Hindu or a vegetarian and are a beef-eating
Occidental you will commend the old ladies who keep the cats who hunt
the mice who destroy the bumblebees who make the pasture of clover
for the cattle. If you are a cat you also will be in favor of the old
ladies. But if you are a field mouse, how different the rights and
wrongs of that section of the universe! The old ladies who keep cats
will seem about as kindly as witches with pet tigers, and the Old Lady
Peril will be debated hysterically by the Field Mouse Security League.
For what could a patriotic mouse think of a world in which bumblebees
did not exist for the sole purpose of producing white grubs for field
mice? There would seem to be no law and order in such a world; and
only a highly philosophical mouse would admit with Bergson that “the
idea of disorder objectifies for the convenience of language, the
disappointment of a mind that finds before it an order different from
what it wants.”[10] For the order which we recognize as good is an
order suited to our needs and hopes and habits.
There is nothing universal or eternal or unchangeable about our
expectations. For rhetorical effect we often say there is. But in
concrete cases it is not easy to explain why the thing we desire is so
righteous. If the farmers are able to buy less than their accustomed
amount of manufactured foods there is disorder and a problem. But what
absolute standard is there which determines whether a bushel of wheat
in 1925 should, as compared with 1913, exchange for more, as many,
or less manufactures? Can any one define a principle which shall say
whether the standard of living of the farmers or of any other class
should rise or fall, and how fast and how much? There may be more jobs
than workingmen at the wage offered: the employers will complain and
will call it a problem, but who knows any rule which tells how large a
surplus of labor there ought to be and at what price? There may be more
workingmen than jobs of the kind and at the places and for the wages
they will or can take. But, although the problem will be acute, there
is no principle which determines how many machinists, clerks, coal
miners, bankers, or salesmen it is the duty of society to provide work
for.
It requires intense partisanship and much self-deception to argue that
some sort of peculiar righteousness adheres to the farmers’ claims as
against the manufacturers’, the employers’ against the wage-earners’,
the creditors’ against the debtors’, or the other way around. These
conflicts of interest are problems. They require solution. But there
is no moral pattern available from which the precise nature of the
solution can be deduced.
If then eugenics cannot produce the ideal democratic citizen,
omnicompetent and sovereign, because biology knows neither how to breed
political excellence nor what that excellence is; if education cannot
equip the citizen, because the school teacher cannot anticipate the
issues of the future; if morality cannot direct him, first, because
right or wrong in specific cases depends upon the perception of true
or false, and, second, on the assumption that there is a universal
moral code, which, in fact, does not exist, where else shall we look
for the method of making the competent citizen? Democratic theorists
in the nineteenth century had several other prescriptions which still
influence the thinking of many hopeful persons.
One school based their reforms on the aphorism that the cure for the
evils of democracy is more democracy. It was assumed that the popular
will was wise and good if only you could get at it. They proposed
extensions of the suffrage, and as much voting as possible by means of
the initiative, referendum and recall, direct election of Senators,
direct primaries, an elected judiciary, and the like. They begged the
question, for it has never been proved that there exists the kind of
public opinion which they presupposed. Since the Bryan campaign of
1896 this school of thought has made great conquests in most of the
states, and has profoundly influenced the federal government. The
eligible vote has trebled since 1896; the direct action of the voter
has been enormously extended. Yet that same period has seen a decline
in the percentage of the popular vote cast at presidential elections
from 80.75 per cent in 1896 to 52.36 per cent in 1920. Apparently there
is a fallacy in the first assumption of this school that “the whole
people” desires to participate actively in government. Nor is there any
evidence to show that the persons who do participate are in any real
sense directing the course of affairs. The party machines have survived
every attack. And why should they not? If the voter cannot grasp the
details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the
interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion
because he is asked to express his opinion more often. He will simply
be more bewildered, more bored and more ready to follow along.
Another school, calling themselves revolutionary, have ascribed the
disenchantment of democracy to the capitalistic system. They have
argued that property is power, and that until there is as wide a
distribution of economic power as there is of the right to vote the
suffrage cannot be more effective. No serious student, I think,
would dispute that socialist premise which asserts that the weight
of influence on society exercised by an individual is more nearly
related to the character of his property than to his abstract legal
citizenship. But the socialist conclusion that economic power can be
distributed by concentrating the ownership of great utilities in the
state, the conclusion that the pervasion of industrial life by voting
and referenda will yield competent popular decisions, seems to me again
to beg the question. For what reason is there to think that subjecting
so many more affairs to the method of the vote will reveal hitherto
undiscovered wisdom and technical competence and reservoirs of public
interest in men? The socialist scheme has at its root the mystical
fallacy of democracy, that the people, all of them, are competent; at
its top it suffers from the homeopathic fallacy that adding new tasks
to a burden the people will not and cannot carry now will make the
burden of citizenship easily borne. The socialist theory presupposes an
unceasing, untiring round of civic duties, an enormous complication of
the political interests that are already much too complicated.
These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and
socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent
to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress
toward such an ideal. I think it is a false ideal. I do not mean an
undesirable ideal. I mean an unattainable ideal, bad only in the sense
that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer. An ideal
should express the true possibilities of its subject. When it does not
it perverts the true possibilities. The ideal of the omnicompetent,
sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal. It is
unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve
it has produced the current disenchantment.
The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He
does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is
happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine
how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as
mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual
ignorances in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force
in public affairs.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Logan Pearsall Smith.
[9] As told by J. Arthur Thomson, _The Outline of Science_, Vol. III,
p. 646.
[10] _Creative Evolution_, Ch. III.
Chapter III
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS
1
When a citizen has qualified as a voter he finds himself one of the
theoretical rulers of a great going concern. He has not made the
complicated machine with its five hundred thousand federal officers
and its uncounted local offices. He has not seen much of it. He is
bound by contracts, by debts, by treaties, by laws, made before he
was aware of them. He does not from day to day decide who shall do
what in the business of government. Only some small fraction of it
comes intermittently to his notice. And in those episodic moments
when he stands in the polling booth he is a highly intelligent and
public-spirited voter indeed who can discover two real alternatives
and enlist his influence for a party which promises something he can
understand.
The actual governing is made up of a multitude of arrangements on
specific questions by particular individuals. These rarely become
visible to the private citizen. Government, in the long intervals
between elections, is carried on by politicians, officeholders
and influential men who make settlements with other politicians,
officeholders and influential men. The mass of people see these
settlements, judge them, and affect them only now and then. They are
altogether too numerous, too complicated, too obscure in their effects
to become the subject of any continuing exercise of public opinion.
Nor in any exact and literal sense are those who conduct the daily
business of government accountable after the fact to the great mass of
the voters. They are accountable only, except in spectacular cases,
to the other politicians, officeholders and influential men directly
interested in the particular act. Modern society is not visible to
anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole. One section is
visible to another section, one series of acts is intelligible to this
group and another to that.
Even this degree of responsible understanding is attainable only by the
development of fact-finding agencies of great scope and complexity.[11]
These agencies give only a remote and incidental assistance to the
general public. Their findings are too intricate for the casual reader.
They are also almost always much too uninteresting. Indeed the popular
boredom and contempt for the expert and for statistical measurement are
such that the organization of intelligence to administer modern affairs
would probably be entirely neglected were it not that departments of
government, corporations, trade unions and trade associations are being
compelled by their own internal necessities of administration, and
by compulsion of other corporate groups, to record their own acts,
measure them, publish them and stand accountable for them.
The need in the Great Society not only for publicity but for
uninterrupted publicity is indisputable. But we shall misunderstand
the need seriously if we imagine that the purpose of the publication
can possibly be the informing of every voter. We live at the mere
beginnings of public accounting. Yet the facts far exceed our
curiosity. The railroads, for example, make an accounting. Do we read
the results? Hardly. A few executives here and there, some bankers,
some regulating officials, some representatives of shippers and the
like read them. The rest of us ignore them for the good and sufficient
reason that we have other things to do.
For the man does not live who can read all the reports that drift
across his doorstep or all the dispatches in his newspaper. And if
by some development of the radio every man could see and hear all
that was happening everywhere, if publicity, in other words, became
absolute, how much time could or would he spend watching the Sinking
Fund Commission and the Geological Survey? He would probably tune in
on the Prince of Wales, or, in desperation, throw off the switch and
seek peace in ignorance. It is bad enough today—with morning newspapers
published in the evening and evening newspapers in the morning, with
October magazines in September, with the movies and the radio—to be
condemned to live under a barrage of eclectic information, to have
one’s mind made the receptacle for a hullabaloo of speeches, arguments
and unrelated episodes. General information for the informing of public
opinion is altogether too general for intellectual decency. And life is
too short for the pursuit of omniscience by the counting in a state of
nervous excitement of all the leaves on all the trees.
2
If all men had to conceive the whole process of government all the time
the world’s work would obviously never be carried on. Men make no
attempt to consider society as a whole. The farmer decides whether to
plant wheat or corn, the mechanic whether to take the job offered at
the Pennsylvania or the Erie shops, whether to buy a Ford or a piano,
and, if a Ford, whether to buy it from the garage on Elm Street or from
the dealer who sent him a circular. These decisions are among fairly
narrow choices offered to him; he can no more choose among all the jobs
in the world than he can consider marrying any woman in the world.
These choices in detail are in their cumulative mass the government
of society. They may rest on ignorant or enlightened opinions, but,
whether he comes to them by accident or scientific instruction, they
are specific and particular among at best a few concrete alternatives
and they lead to a definite, visible result.
But men are supposed also to hold public opinions about the general
conduct of society. The mechanic is supposed not only to choose
between working for the Pennsylvania or the Erie but to decide how
in the interests of the nation all the railroads of the country shall
be regulated. The two kinds of opinion merge insensibly one into the
other; men have general notions which influence their individual
decisions and their direct experiences unconsciously govern their
general notions. Yet it is useful to distinguish between the two kinds
of opinion, the specific and direct, the general and the indirect.
Specific opinions give rise to immediate executive acts; to take a job,
to do a particular piece of work, to hire or fire, to buy or sell,
to stay here or go there, to accept or refuse, to command or obey.
General opinions give rise to delegated, indirect, symbolic, intangible
results: to a vote, to a resolution, to applause, to criticism,
to praise or dispraise, to audiences, circulations, followings,
contentment or discontent. The specific opinion may lead to a decision
to act within the area where a man has personal jurisdiction; that
is, within the limits set by law and custom, his personal power and
his personal desire. But general opinions lead only to some sort of
expression, such as voting, and do not result in executive acts except
in coöperation with the general opinions of large numbers of other
persons.
Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost
certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken
until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed
and made uniform. The making of one general will out of a multitude
of general wishes is not an Hegelian mystery, as so many social
philosophers have imagined, but an art well known to leaders,
politicians and steering committees.[12] It consists essentially in the
use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached
from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas,
and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogeneous
will out of a heterogeneous mass of desires. The process, therefore,
by which general opinions are brought to coöperation consists of an
intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance. Before a
mass of general opinions can eventuate in executive action, the choice
is narrowed down to a few alternatives. The victorious alternative is
executed not by the mass but by individuals in control of its energy.
A private opinion may be quite complicated, and may issue in quite
complicated actions, in a whole train of subsidiary opinions, as when
a man decides to build a house and then makes a hundred judgments as
to how it shall be built. But a public opinion has no such immediate
responsibility or continuous result. It leads in politics to the making
of a pencil mark on a piece of paper, and then to a period of waiting
and watching as to whether one or two years hence the mark shall be
made in the same column or in the adjoining one. The decision to make
the mark may be for reasons _a_^1, _a_^2, _a_^3 ... _a_^n: the result,
whether an idiot or genius has voted, is A.
For great masses of people, though each of them may have more or less
distinct views, must when they act converge to an identical result. And
the more complex the collection of men the more ambiguous must be the
unity and the simpler the common ideas.
3
In English-speaking countries during the last century the contrast
between the action of men individually and in the mass has been much
emphasized, and yet greatly misunderstood. Macaulay, for example,
speaking on the Reform Bill of 1832, drew the conventional distinction
between private enterprise and public action:
“In all those things which depend on the intelligence, the knowledge,
the industry, the energy of individuals, this country stands preëminent
among all countries of the world ancient and modern. But in those
things which it belongs to the state to direct we have no such claim to
superiority ... can there be a stronger contrast than that which exists
between the beauty, the completeness, the speed, the precision with
which every process is performed in our factories, and the awkwardness,
the crudeness, the slowness, the uncertainty of the apparatus by which
offenses are punished and rights vindicated?... Surely we see the
barbarism of the Thirteenth Century and the highest civilization of the
Nineteenth Century side by side, and we see that the barbarism belongs
to the government, and the civilization to the people.”[13]
Macaulay was, of course, thinking of the contrast between factory
production and government as it existed in England under Queen
Victoria’s uncles and the hard-drinking, hard-riding squirearchy. But
the Prussian bureaucracy amply demonstrated that there is no such
necessary contrast between governmental and private action. There is
a contrast between action by and through great masses of people and
action that moves without them.
The fundamental contrast is not between public and private enterprises,
between “crowd” psychology and individual, but between men doing
specific things and men attempting to command general results. The
work of the world is carried on by men in their executive capacity,
by an infinite number of concrete acts, plowing and planting and
reaping, building and destroying, fitting this to that, going from
here to there, transforming A into B and moving B from X to Y. The
relationships between the individuals doing these specific things are
balanced by a most intricate mechanism of exchange, of contract, of
custom and of implied promises. Where men are performing their work
they must learn to understand the process and the substance of these
obligations if they are to do it at all. But in governing the work of
other men by votes or by the expression of opinion they can only reward
or punish a result, accept or reject alternatives presented to them.
They can say yes or no to something which has been done, yes or no to
a proposal, but they cannot create, administer and actually perform
the act they have in mind. Persons uttering public opinions may now
and then be able to define the acts of men, but their opinions do not
execute these acts.
4
To the realm of executive acts, each of us, as a member of the public,
remains always external. Our public opinions are always and forever,
by their very nature, an attempt to control the actions of others from
the outside. If we can grasp the full significance of that conclusion
we shall, I think, have found a way of fixing the rôle of public
opinion in its true perspective; we shall know how to account for the
disenchantment of democracy, and we shall begin to see the outline of
an ideal of public opinion which, unlike that accepted in the dogma of
democracy, may be really attainable.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XXV and XXVI.
[12] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XIII and XIV.
[13] Speech on the Reform Bill of 1832, quoted in the _Times_
(London), July 12, 1923.
Chapter IV
WHAT THE PUBLIC DOES
1
I do not mean to say that there is no other attainable ideal of public
opinion but that severely practical one which this essay is meant
to disclose. One might aim to enrich the minds of men with charming
fantasies, animate nature and society with spirits, set up an Olympus
in the skies and an Atlantis at the end of the world. And one might
then assert that, so the quality of ideas be fine or give peace, it
does not matter how or whether they eventuate in the government of
affairs.
Utopia and Nirvana are by definition their own sufficient reason, and
it may be that to contemplate them is well worth the abandonment of
feeble attempts to control the action of events. Renunciation, however,
is a luxury in which all men cannot indulge. They will somehow seek to
control the behavior of others, if not by positive law then at least
by persuasion. When men are in that posture toward events they are a
public, as I am here defining the term; their opinions as to how others
ought to behave are public opinions. The more clearly it is understood
what the public can do and what it cannot, the more effectively it will
do what lies within its power to do well and the less it will interfere
with the liberties of men.
The rôle of public opinion is determined by the fact that its relation
to a problem is external. The opinion affects an opinion, but does not
itself control the executive act. A public opinion is expressed by a
vote, a demonstration of praise or blame, a following or a boycotting.
But these manifestations are in themselves nothing. They count only
if they influence the course of affairs. They influence it, however,
only if they influence an actor in the affair. And it is, I believe,
precisely in this secondary, indirect relationship between public
opinion and public affairs that we have the clue to the limits and the
possibilities of public opinion.
2
It may be objected at once that an election which turns one set of
men out of office and installs another is an expression of public
opinion which is neither secondary nor indirect. But what in fact is an
election? We call it an expression of the popular will. But is it? We
go into a polling booth and mark a cross on a piece of paper for one of
two, or perhaps three or four names. Have we expressed our thoughts on
the public policy of the United States? Presumably we have a number of
thoughts on this and that with many buts and ifs and ors. Surely the
cross on a piece of paper does not express them. It would take us hours
to express our thoughts, and calling a vote the expression of our mind
is an empty fiction.
A vote is a promise of support. It is a way of saying: I am lined up
with these men, on this side. I enlist with them. I will follow. I will
buy. I will boycott. I will strike. I applaud. I jeer. The force I can
exert is placed here, not there.
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, has made
a promise, has produced a play, is selling an automobile. The action of
a group as a group is the mobilization of the force it possesses.
The attempt has been made to ascribe some intrinsic moral and
intellectual virtue to majority rule. It was said often in the
nineteenth century that there was a deep wisdom in majorities which
was the voice of God. Sometimes this flattery was a sincere mysticism,
sometimes it was the self-deception which always accompanies the
idealization of power. In substance it was nothing but a transfer to
the new sovereign of the divine attributes of kings. Yet the inherent
absurdity of making virtue and wisdom dependent on 51 per cent of any
collection of men has always been apparent. The practical realization
that the claim was absurd has resulted in a whole code of civil
rights to protect minorities and in all sorts of elaborate methods of
subsidizing the arts and sciences and other human interests so they
might be independent of the operation of majority rule.
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in
its ethical superiority. It is to be found in the sheer necessity of
finding a place in civilized society for the force which resides in
the weight of numbers. I have called voting an act of enlistment, an
alignment for or against, a mobilization. These are military metaphors,
and rightly so, I think, for an election based on the principle
of majority rule is historically and practically a sublimated and
denatured civil war, a paper mobilization without physical violence.
Constitutional democrats, in the intervals when they were not
idealizing the majority, have acknowledged that a ballot was a
civilized substitute for a bullet. “The French Revolution,” says
Bernard Shaw, “overthrew one set of rulers and substituted another
with different interests and different views. That is what a general
election enables the people to do in England every seven years if they
choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution in England;
and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology.”[14] It makes an
enormous difference, of course, whether the people fight or vote,
but we shall understand the nature of voting better if we recognize
it to be a substitute for fighting. “There grew up in the 17th and
18th Centuries in England,” says Dwight Morrow in his introduction to
Professor Morse’s book, “and there has been carried from England to
almost every civilized government in the world, a procedure through
which party government becomes in large measure a substitute for
revolution.”[15] Hans Delbrück puts the matter simply when he says that
the principle of majority rule is “a purely practical principle. If one
wants to avoid a civil war, one lets those rule who in any case would
obtain the upper hand if there should be a struggle; and they are the
superior numbers.”[16]
But, while an election is in essence sublimated warfare, we must take
care not to miss the importance of the sublimation. There have been
pedantic theorists who wished to disqualify all who could not bear
arms, and woman suffrage has been deplored as a falsification of the
value of an election in uncovering the alignment of martial force in
the community. One can safely ignore such theorizing. For, while the
institution of an election is in its historical origins an alignment
of the physical force, it has come to be an alignment of all kinds of
force. It remains an alignment, though in advanced democracies it has
lost most of its primitive association with military combat. It has
not lost it in the South where the Negro population is disfranchised
by force, and not permitted to make its weight felt in an election. It
has not lost it in the unstable Latin American republics where every
election is in some measure still an armed revolution. In fact, the
United States has officially recognized this truth by proclaiming that
the substitution of election for revolution in Central America is the
test of political progress.
I do not wish to labor the argument any further than may be necessary
to establish the theory that what the public does is not to express its
opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory
is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can
be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon
the notion that the people govern. Instead we must adopt the theory
that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support
or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the
popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes
occasionally.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Preface to _The Revolutionist’s Handbook_, p. 179.
[15] _Parties and Party Leaders_, p. xvi.
[16] H. Delbrück, _Government and the Will of the People_, p. 15.
Translated by Roy S. MacElwee.
Chapter V
THE NEUTRALIZATION OF ARBITRARY FORCE
1
If this is the nature of public action, what ideal can be formulated
which shall conform to it?
We are bound, I think, to express the ideal in its lowest terms,
to state it not as an ideal which might conceivably be realized by
exceptional groups now and then or in some distant future but as an
ideal which normally might be taught and attained. In estimating the
burden which a public can carry, a sound political theory must insist
upon the largest factor of safety. It must understate the possibilities
of public action.
The action of a public, we had concluded, is principally confined
to an occasional intervention in affairs by means of an alignment
of the force which a dominant section of that public can wield. We
must assume, then, that the members of a public will not possess an
insider’s knowledge of events or share his point of view. They cannot,
therefore, construe intent, or appraise the exact circumstances, enter
intimately into the minds of the actors or into the details of the
argument. They can watch only for coarse signs indicating where their
sympathies ought to turn.
We must assume that the members of a public will not anticipate a
problem much before its crisis has become obvious, nor stay with
the problem long after its crisis is past. They will not know the
antecedent events, will not have seen the issue as it developed, will
not have thought out or willed a program, and will not be able to
predict the consequences of acting on that program. We must assume as a
theoretically fixed premise of popular government that normally men as
members of a public will not be well informed, continuously interested,
nonpartisan, creative or executive. We must assume that a public is
inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, that it discerns only gross
distinctions, is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted; that, since
it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes whatever it considers, and
is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.
The public will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave
before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to
decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece. Yet usually
that judgment will necessarily be made apart from the intrinsic merits,
on the basis of a sample of behavior, an aspect of a situation, by very
rough external evidence.
We cannot, then, think of public opinion as a conserving or creating
force directing society to clearly conceived ends, making deliberately
toward socialism or away from it, toward nationalism, an empire, a
league of nations or any other doctrinal goal. For men do not agree as
to their aims, and it is precisely the lack of agreement which creates
the problems that excite public attention. It is idle, then, to argue
that though men evidently have conflicting purposes, mankind has some
all-embracing purpose of which you or I happen to be the authorized
spokesman. We merely should have moved in a circle were we to conclude
that the public is in some deep way a messianic force.
2
The work of the world goes on continually without conscious direction
from public opinion. At certain junctures problems arise. It is only
with the crises of some of these problems that public opinion is
concerned. And its object in dealing with a crisis is to help allay
that crisis.
I think this conclusion is unescapable. For though we may prefer to
believe that the aim of popular action should be to do justice or
promote the true, the beautiful and the good, the belief will not
maintain itself in the face of plain experience. The public does not
know in most crises what specifically is the truth or the justice of
the case, and men are not agreed on what is beautiful and good. Nor
does the public rouse itself normally at the existence of evil. It is
aroused at evil made manifest by the interruption of a habitual process
of life. And finally, a problem ceases to occupy attention not when
justice, as we happen to define it, has been done but when a workable
adjustment that overcomes the crisis has been made. If all this were
not the necessary manner of public opinion, if it had seriously to
crusade for justice in every issue it touches, the public would have to
be dealing with all situations all the time. That is impossible. It is
also undesirable. For did justice, truth, goodness and beauty depend on
the spasmodic and crude interventions of public opinion there would be
little hope for them in this world.
Thus we strip public opinion of any implied duty to deal with the
substance of a problem, to make technical decisions, to attempt justice
or impose a moral precept. And instead we say that the ideal of public
opinion is to align men during the crisis of a problem in such a way
as to favor the action of those individuals who may be able to compose
the crisis. The power to discern those individuals is the end of the
effort to educate public opinion. The aim of research designed to
facilitate public action is the discovery of clear signs by which these
individuals may be discerned.
The signs are relevant when they reveal by coarse, simple and objective
tests which side in a controversy upholds a workable social rule, or
which is attacking an unworkable rule, or which proposes a promising
new rule. By following such signs the public might know where to
align itself. In such an alignment it does not, let us remember,
pass judgment on the intrinsic merits. It merely places its force at
the disposal of the side which, according to objective signs, seems
to be standing for human adjustments according to a clear rule of
behavior and against the side which appears to stand for settlement in
accordance with its own unaccountable will.
Public opinion, in this theory, is a reserve of force brought into
action during a crisis in public affairs. Though it is itself an
irrational force, under favorable institutions, sound leadership
and decent training the power of public opinion might be placed at
the disposal of those who stood for workable law as against brute
assertion. In this theory, public opinion does not make the law. But by
canceling lawless power it may establish the condition under which law
can be made. It does not reason, investigate, invent, persuade, bargain
or settle. But, by holding the aggressive party in check, it may
liberate intelligence. Public opinion in its highest ideal will defend
those who are prepared to act on their reason against the interrupting
force of those who merely assert their will.
The action of public opinion at its best would not, let it be noted,
be a continual crusade on behalf of reason. When power, however
absolute and unaccountable, reigns without provoking a crisis, public
opinion does not challenge it. Somebody must challenge arbitrary power
first. The public can only come to his assistance.
3
That, I think, is the utmost that public opinion can effectively do.
With the substance of the problem it can do nothing usually but meddle
ignorantly or tyrannically. It has no need to meddle with it. Men in
their active relation to affairs have to deal with the substance, but
in that indirect relationship when they can act only through uttering
praise or blame, making black crosses on white paper, they have done
enough, they have done all they can do if they help to make it possible
for the reason of other men to assert itself.
For when public opinion attempts to govern directly it is either
a failure or a tyranny. It is not able to master the problem
intellectually, nor to deal with it except by wholesale impact. The
theory of democracy has not recognized this truth because it has
identified the functioning of government with the will of the people.
This is a fiction. The intricate business of framing laws and of
administering them through several hundred thousand public officials is
in no sense the act of the voters nor a translation of their will.
But although the acts of government are not a translation of public
opinion, the principal function of government is to do specifically, in
greater detail, and more continually what public opinion does crudely,
by wholesale, and spasmodically. It enforces some of the working rules
of society. It interprets them. It detects and punishes certain kinds
of aggression. It presides over the framing of new rules. It has
organized force which is used to counteract irregular force.
It is also subject to the same corruption as public opinion. For when
government attempts to impose the will of its officials, instead of
intervening so as to steady adjustments by consent among the parties
directly interested, it becomes heavy-handed, stupid, imperious, even
predatory. For the public official, though he is better placed to
understand the problem than a reader of newspapers, and though he is
much better able to act, is still fundamentally external to the real
problems in which he intervenes. Being external, his point of view is
indirect, and so his action is most appropriate when it is confined to
rendering indirect assistance to those who are directly responsible.
Therefore, instead of describing government as an expression of the
people’s will, it would seem better to say that government consists
of a body of officials, some elected, some appointed, who handle
professionally, and in the first instance, problems which come to
public opinion spasmodically and on appeal. Where the parties directly
responsible do not work out an adjustment, public officials intervene.
When the officials fail, public opinion is brought to bear on the issue.
4
This, then, is the ideal of public action which our inquiry suggests.
Those who happen in any question to constitute the public should
attempt only to create an equilibrium in which settlements can be
reached directly and by consent. The burden of carrying on the work of
the world, of inventing, creating, executing, of attempting justice,
formulating laws and moral codes, of dealing with the technic and the
substance, lies not upon public opinion and not upon government but
on those who are responsibly concerned as agents in the affair. Where
problems arise, the ideal is a settlement by the particular interests
involved. They alone know what the trouble really is. No decision by
public officials or by commuters reading headlines in the train can
usually and in the long run be so good as settlement by consent among
the parties at interest. No moral code, no political theory can usually
and in the long run be imposed from the heights of public opinion,
which will fit a case so well as direct agreement reached where
arbitrary power has been disarmed.
It is the function of public opinion to check the use of force in a
crisis, so that men, driven to make terms, may live and let live.
PART II