THE PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC OPINION
1
The tests outlined in the preceding chapters have certain common
characteristics. They all select a few samples of behavior or a
few aspects of a proposal. They measure these samples by rough but
objective, by highly generalized but definite standards. And they yield
a judgment which is to justify the public in aligning itself for or
against certain actors in the matter at issue.
I do not, of course, set great store upon my formulation of these
tests. That is wholly tentative, being put out merely as a basis of
discussion and to demonstrate that the formulation of tests suited to
the nature of public opinion is not impracticable. But I do attach
great importance to the character of these tests.
The principles underlying them are these:
1. Executive action is not for the public. The public acts only by
aligning itself as the partisan of some one in a position to act
executively.
2. The intrinsic merits of a question are not for the public. The
public intervenes from the outside upon the work of the insiders.
3. The anticipation, the analysis and the solution of a question are
not for the public. The public’s judgment rests on a small sample of
the facts at issue.
4. The specific, technical, intimate criteria required in the handling
of a question are not for the public. The public’s criteria are
generalized for many problems; they turn essentially on procedure and
the overt, external forms of behavior.
5. What is left for the public is a judgment as to whether the actors
in the controversy are following a settled rule of behavior or their
own arbitrary desires. This judgment must be made by sampling an
external aspect of the behavior of the insiders.
6. In order that this sampling shall be pertinent, it is necessary to
discover criteria, suitable to the nature of public opinion, which can
be relied upon to distinguish between reasonable and arbitrary behavior.
7. For the purposes of social action, reasonable behavior is conduct
which follows a settled course whether in making a rule, in enforcing
it or in amending it.
It is the task of the political scientist to devise the methods of
sampling and to define the criteria of judgment. It is the task of
civic education in a democracy to train the public in the use of these
methods. It is the task of those who build institutions to take them
into account.
2
These principles differ radically from those on which democratic
reformers have proceeded. At the root of the effort to educate a
people for self-government there has, I believe, always been the
assumption that the voter should aim to approximate as nearly as he
can the knowledge and the point of view of the responsible man. He
did not, of course, in the mass, ever approximate it very nearly. But
he was supposed to. It was believed that if only he could be taught
more facts, if only he would take more interest, if only he would
read more and better newspapers, if only he would listen to more
lectures and read more reports, he would gradually be trained to direct
public affairs. The whole assumption is false. It rests upon a false
conception of public opinion and a false conception of the way the
public acts. No sound scheme of civic education can come of it. No
progress can be made toward this unattainable ideal.
This democratic conception is false because it fails to note the
radical difference between the experience of the insider and the
outsider; it is fundamentally askew because it asks the outsider to
deal as successfully with the substance of a question as the insider.
He cannot do it. No scheme of education can equip him in advance for
all the problems of mankind; no device of publicity, no machinery
of enlightenment, can endow him during a crisis with the antecedent
detailed and technical knowledge which is required for executive action.
The democratic ideal has never defined the function of the public. It
has treated the public as an immature, shadowy executive of all things.
The confusion is deep-seated in a mystical notion of society. “The
people” were regarded as a person; their wills as a will; their ideas
as a mind; their mass as an organism with an organic unity of which
the individual was a cell. Thus the voter identified himself with the
officials. He tried to think that their thoughts were his thoughts,
that their deeds were his deeds, and even that in some mysterious
way they were a part of him. All this confusion of identities led
naturally to the theory that everybody was doing everything. It
prevented democracy from arriving at a clear idea of its own limits and
attainable ends. It obscured for the purposes of government and social
education the separation of function and the specialization in training
which have gradually been established in most human activities.
Democracy, therefore, has never developed an education for the public.
It has merely given it a smattering of the kind of knowledge which
the responsible man requires. It has, in fact, aimed not at making
good citizens but at making a mass of amateur executives. It has not
taught the child how to act as a member of the public. It has merely
given him a hasty, incomplete taste of what he might have to know if he
meddled in everything. The result is a bewildered public and a mass
of insufficiently trained officials. The responsible men have obtained
their training not from the courses in “civics” but in the law schools
and law offices and in business. The public at large, which includes
everybody outside the field of his own responsible knowledge, has had
no coherent political training of any kind. Our civic education does
not even begin to tell the voter how he can reduce the maze of public
affairs to some intelligible form.
Critics have not been lacking, of course, who pointed out what a hash
democracy was making of its pretensions to government. These critics
have seen that the important decisions were taken by individuals, and
that public opinion was uninformed, irrelevant and meddlesome. They
have usually concluded that there was a congenital difference between
the masterful few and the ignorant many. They are the victims of a
superficial analysis of the evils they see so clearly. The fundamental
difference which matters is that between insiders and outsiders. Their
relations to a problem are radically different. Only the insider can
make decisions, not because he is inherently a better man but because
he is so placed that he can understand and can act. The outsider is
necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because
he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land. That is why excellent
automobile manufacturers, literary critics and scientists often talk
such nonsense about politics. Their congenital excellence, if it
exists, reveals itself only in their own activity. The aristocratic
theorists work from the fallacy of supposing that a sufficiently
excellent square peg will also fit a round hole. In short, like the
democratic theorists, they miss the essence of the matter, which is,
that competence exists only in relation to function; that men are not
good, but good for something; that men cannot be educated, but only
educated for something.
Education for citizenship, for membership in the public, ought,
therefore, to be distinct from education for public office. Citizenship
involves a radically different relation to affairs, requires different
intellectual habits and different methods of action. The force of
public opinion is partisan, spasmodic, simple-minded and external. It
needs for its direction, as I have tried to show in these chapters,
a new intellectual method which shall provide it with its own usable
canons of judgment.
PART III
Chapter XIV
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE
1
A false ideal of democracy can lead only to disillusionment and
to meddlesome tyranny. If democracy cannot direct affairs, then a
philosophy which expects it to direct them will encourage the people
to attempt the impossible; they will fail, but that will interfere
outrageously with the productive liberties of the individual. The
public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own
powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live
free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
2
The source of that bewilderment lies, I think, in the attempt to
ascribe organic unity and purpose to society. We have been taught to
think of society as a body, with a mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a
collection of men, women and children whose minds, souls and purposes
are variously related. Instead of being allowed to think realistically
of a complex of social _relations_, we have had foisted upon us by
various great propagative movements the notion of a mythical entity,
called Society, the Nation, the Community.
In the course of the nineteenth century society was personified under
the influence largely of the nationalist and the socialist movements.
Each of these doctrinal influences in its own way insisted upon
treating the public as the agent of an overmastering social purpose.
In point of fact, the real agents were the nationalist leaders and
their lieutenants, the social reformers and their lieutenants. But they
moved behind a veil of imagery. And the public was habituated to think
that any one conforming to the stereotype of nationalism or of social
welfare was entitled to support. What the nationalist rulers thought
and did was the nation’s purpose, and the touchstone for all patriots;
what the reformers proposed was the benevolent consciousness of the
human race moving mysteriously but progressively toward perfection.
The deception was so generally practised that it was often practised
sincerely. But to maintain the fiction that their purposes were the
spirit of mankind, public men had to accustom themselves to telling the
public only a part of what they told themselves. And, incidentally,
they confessed to themselves only a part of the truth on which they
were acting. Candor in public life became a question of policy and not
a rule of life.
“He may judge rightly,” Mr. Keynes once said of Mr. Lloyd George,[27]
“that this is the best of which a democracy is capable,—to be jockeyed,
humbugged, cajoled along the right road. A prejudice for truth or for
sincerity as a method may be a prejudice based on some æsthetic or
personal standard inconsistent, in politics, with practical good. We
cannot yet tell.”
We do know, as a matter of experience, that all the cards are not laid
face up upon the table. For however deep the personal prejudice of
the statesman in favor of truth as a method, he is almost certainly
forced to treat truth as an element of policy. The evidence on this
point is overwhelming. No statesman risks the safety of an army out of
sheer devotion to truth. He does not endanger a diplomatic negotiation
in order to enlighten everybody. He does not usually forfeit his
advantages in an election in order to speak plainly. He does not admit
his own mistakes because confession is so good for the soul. In so far
as he has power to control the publication of truth, he manipulates it
to what he considers the necessities of action, of bargaining, morale
and prestige. He may misjudge the necessities. He may exaggerate the
goodness of his aims. But where there is a purpose in public affairs
there are also apparent necessities which weigh in the balance against
the indiscreet expression of belief. The public man does not and cannot
act on the fiction that his mind is also the public mind.
You cannot account for this, as angry democrats have done by dismissing
all public men as dishonest. It is not a question of personal morals.
The business man, the trade-union leader, the college president, the
minister of religion, the editor, the critic and the prophet, all feel
as Jefferson did when he wrote that “although we often wished to go
faster we slackened our pace that our less ardent colleagues might keep
pace with us ... [and] by this harmony of the bold with the cautious,
we advanced with our constituents in undivided mass.”[28]
The necessity for an “undivided mass” makes men put truth in the
second place. I do not wish to argue that the necessity is not often
a real one. When a statesman tells me that it is not safe for him to
disclose all the facts, I am content to trust him in this if I trust
him at all. There is nothing misleading in a frank refusal to tell. The
mischief comes in the pretense that all is being told, that the public
is entirely in the confidence of the public man. And that mischief has
its source in the sophistry that the public and all the individuals
composing it are one mind, one soul, one purpose. It is seen to be
an absurd sophistry, once we look it straight in the face. It is an
unnecessary sophistry. For we do well enough with doctors, though we
are ignorant of medicine, and with engine drivers, though we cannot
drive a locomotive; why not, then, with a Senator, though we cannot
pass an examination on the merits of an agricultural bill?
Yet we are so deeply indoctrinated with the notion of union based
upon identity, that we are most reluctant to admit that there is
room in the world for different and more or less separate purposes.
The monistic theory has an air of great stability about it; we are
afraid if we do not hang together we shall all hang separately. The
pluralistic theory, as its leading advocate, Mr. Laski, has pointed
out, seems to carry with it “a hint of anarchy.”[29] Yet the suggestion
is grossly exaggerated. There is least anarchy precisely in those
areas of society where separate functions are most clearly defined
and brought into orderly adjustment; there is most anarchy in those
twilight zones between nations, between employers and employees,
between sections and classes and races, where nothing is clearly
defined, where separateness of purpose is covered up and confused,
where false unities are worshiped, and each special interest is forever
proclaiming itself the voice of the people and attempting to impose its
purpose upon everybody as the purpose of all mankind.
3
To this confusion liberalism has with the kindest intentions
contributed greatly. Its main insight was into the prejudices of the
individual; the liberal discovered a method of proving that men are
finite, that they cannot escape from the flesh. From the so-called age
of enlightenment down to our day the heavy guns of criticism have been
used to make men realize that they submit, as Bacon said, the shadows
of things to the desires of the mind. Once the resistance was broken
by proof that man belonged to the natural world, his pretensions to
absolute certainty were attacked from every quarter. He was shown
the history of his ideas and of his customs, and he was driven to
acknowledge that they were bounded by time and space and circumstance.
He was shown that there is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion
purged of desire, for the man who holds the opinion must stand at some
point in space and time and can see not the whole world but only the
world as seen from that point. So men learned that they saw a little
through their own eyes, and much more through reports of what other men
thought they had seen. They were made to understand that all human eyes
have habits of vision, which are often stereotyped, which always throw
facts into a perspective; and that the whole of experience is more
sophisticated than the naïve mind suspects. For its pictures of the
world are drawn from things half heard and of things half seen; they
deal with the shadows of things unsteadily, and submit unconsciously to
the desires of the mind.
It was an amazing and unsettling revelation, and liberalism never quite
knew what to do with it. In a theater in Moscow a certain M. Yevreynoff
carried the revelation to one of its logical conclusions. He produced
the monodrama.[30] This is a play in which the action, the setting and
all the characters are seen by the audience through the eyes of one
character only, as the hero sees them, and they take on the quality
which his mind imagines they possess. Thus in the old theater, if the
hero drank too much, he reeled in the midst of a sober environment.
But in M. Yevreynoff’s supremely liberal theater, if I understand
Mr. Macgowan’s account of it correctly, the drunkard will not reel
about the lamppost; two lampposts will reel about him, and he will be
dressed, because that is the way he feels, like Napoleon Bonaparte.
M. Yevreynoff has troubled me a good deal, for he seemed to have
finished off the liberal with a fool’s cap, and left him sitting in a
world that does not exist, except as so many crazy mirrors reflecting
his own follies one upon the other. But then I recalled that M.
Yevreynoff’s logic was defective and make-believe. He had all the time
stood soberly outside his own drunken hero, and so had his audience;
the universe had not after all gone up in the smoke of one fantasy; the
drunken hero had his point of view, but, after all, there were others,
just as authentic, with which in the course of his career he might
collide. There might be a policeman, for example, with fantasies to be
sure, but his own, who would break in upon the monodrama and remind the
hero, and us, that when we submit the shadows of things to the desires
of the mind we do not submit the things themselves.
But while all this does vindicate the sanity of the liberal criticism,
it does not answer the question: since every action has to be taken by
somebody, since everybody is in some degree a drunken hero with two
lampposts teetering about him, how can any common good be furthered by
this creature who is dominated by his special purposes? The answer was
that it could be furthered by taming his purposes, enlightening them
and fitting them into each other as the violin and the drum are fitted
together into the orchestra. The answer was not acceptable in the
nineteenth century, when men, in spite of all their iconoclasm, were
still haunted by the phantom of identity. So liberals refused to write
harmonious but separate parts for the violinist and the drummer. They
made, instead, a noble appeal to their highest instincts. They spoke
over the heads of men to man.
These general appeals were as vague as they were broad. They gave
particular men no clue as to how to behave sincerely, but they
furnished them with an excellent masquerade when they behaved
arbitrarily. Thus the trappings of liberalism came into the service of
commercial exploiters, of profiteers and prohibitionists and jingoes,
of charlatans and the makers of buncombe.
For liberalism had burned down the barn to roast the pig. The discovery
of prejudice in all particular men gave the liberal a shock from
which he never recovered. He was so utterly disconcerted by his own
discovery of a necessary but perfectly obvious truth, that he took
flight into generalities. The appeal to everybody’s conscience gave
nobody a clue how to act; the voter, the politician, the laborer, the
capitalist had to construct their own codes _ad hoc_, accompanied
perhaps by an expansive liberal sentiment, but without intellectual
guidance from liberal thought. In time, when liberalism had lost its
accidental association with free trade and _laissez faire_, through
their abandonment in practice, it sadly justified itself as a necessary
and useful spirit, as a kind of genial spook worth having around the
place. For when individual men, guided by no philosophy but their own
temporary rationalizations, got themselves embroiled, the spook would
appear and in a peroration straighten out the more arbitrary biases
they displayed.
Yet even in this disembodied state liberalism is important. It tends
to awaken a milder spirit; it softens the hardness of action. But it
does not dominate action, because it has eliminated the actor from its
scheme of things. It cannot say: You do this and you do that, as all
ruling philosophies must. It can only say: That isn’t fair, that’s
selfish, that’s tyrannical. Liberalism has been, therefore, a defender
of the under dog, and his liberator, but not his guide, when he is
free. Top dog himself, he easily leaves his liberalism aside, and to
liberals the sour reflection that they have forged a weapon of release
but not a way of life.
The liberals have misunderstood the nature of the public to which
they appealed. The public in any situation is, in fact, merely those
persons, indirectly concerned, who might align themselves in support
of one of the actors. But the liberal took no such uninflated view of
the public. He assumed that all mankind was within hearing, that all
mankind when it heard would respond homogeneously because it had a
single soul. His appeal to this cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested
intuition in everybody was equivalent to an appeal to nobody.
No such fallacy is to be found in the political philosophies which
active men have lived by. They have all assumed, as a matter of course,
that in the struggle against evil it was necessary to call upon some
specific agent to do the work. Even when the thinker was out of temper
with the human race, he had always hitherto made somebody the hero of
his campaign. It was the peculiarity of liberalism among theories which
have played a great part in the world that it attempted to eliminate
the hero entirely.
Plato would certainly have thought this strange: his _Republic_ is a
tract on the proper education of a ruling class. Dante, in the turmoil
of thirteenth century Florence, seeking order and stability, addressed
himself not to the conscience of Christendom but to the Imperial Party.
The great state builders of modern times, Hamilton, Cavour, Bismarck,
Lenin, each had in mind somebody, some group of real people, who
were to realize his program. The agents in the theory have varied,
of course; here they are the landlords, then the peasants, or the
unions, or the military class, or the manufacturers; there are theories
addressed to a church, to the ruling classes in particular nations, to
some nation or race. The theories are always, except in the liberal
philosophy, addressed to somebody.
By comparison the liberal philosophy has an air of vague unworldiness.
Yet the regard of men for it has been persistent; somehow or other with
all the lapses in its logic and with all its practical weaknesses it
touches a human need. These appeals from men to man: are they not a way
of saying that men desire peace, that there is a harmony attainable in
which all men can live and let live? It seems so to me. The attempt
to escape from particular purposes into some universal purpose, from
personality into something impersonal, is, to be sure, a flight from
the human problem, but it is at the same time a demonstration of how
we wish to see that problem solved. We seek an adjustment, as perfect
as possible, as untroubled as it was before we were born. Even if
man were a fighting animal, as some say he is, he would wish for a
world in which he could fight perfectly, with enemies fleet enough to
extend him and not too fleet to elude him. All men desire their own
perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own
terms. Because liberalism could not accommodate the universal need of
adjustment to the permanence and the reality of individual purpose, it
remained an incomplete, a disembodied philosophy. It was frustrated
over the ancient problem of the One and the Many. Yet the problem is
not so insoluble once we cease to personify society. It is only when
we are compelled to personify society that we are puzzled as to how
many separate organic individuals can be united in one homogeneous
organic individual. This logical underbrush is cleared away if we
think of society not as the name of a thing but as the name of all
the adjustments between individuals and their things. Then, we can
say without theoretical qualms what common sense plainly tells us is
so: it is the individuals who act, not society; it is the individuals
who think, not the collective mind; it is the painters who paint,
not the artistic spirit of the age; it is the soldiers who fight
and are killed, not the nation; it is the merchant who exports, not
the country. It is their relations with each other that constitute
a society. And it is about the ordering of those relations that the
individuals not executively concerned in a specific disorder may have
public opinions and may intervene as a public.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] John Maynard Keynes, _A Revision of the Treaty_, p. 4.
[28] In a letter to William Wirt, cited by John Sharp Williams, _Thomas
Jefferson_, p. 7.
[29] Harold J. Laski, _Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty_, p. 24.
[30] Kenneth Macgowan, _The Theatre of Tomorrow_, pp. 249–50.
Chapter XV
ABSENTEE RULERS
1
The practical effect of the monistic theories of society has been to
rationalize that vast concentrating of political and economic power in
the midst of which we live. Since society was supposed to have organic
purposes of its own, it came to seem quite reasonable that these
purposes should be made manifest to a people by laws and decisions from
a central point. Somebody had to have a purpose revealed to him which
could be treated as the common purpose; if it was to be accepted it had
to be enforced by command; if it was really to look like the national
purpose, it had to be handed down as a rule binding upon all. Thus men
could say with Goethe:
“And then a mighty work completed stands,
One mind suffices for a thousand hands.”[31]
In this fashion the eulogies of the Great Society have been made. Two
thousand years ago it was possible for whole civilizations as mature as
the Chinese and the Greco-Roman to coexist in total indifference to one
another. Today the food supplies, the raw materials, the manufactures,
the communications and the peace of the world constitute one great
system which cannot be thrown severely out of balance in any part
without disturbing the whole.
Looked at from the top, the system in its far-flung and intricate
adjustments has a certain grandeur. It might, as some hopeful persons
think, even ultimately mean the brotherhood of man since all men
living in advanced communities are now in quite obvious fashion
dependent upon one another. But the individual man cannot look at the
system steadily from the top or see it in its ultimate speculative
possibilities. For him it means in practice, along with the rise in
certain of his material standards of life, a nerve-wracking increase
of the incalculable forces that bear upon his fate. My neighbor in the
country who borrowed money to raise potatoes which he cannot sell for
cash looks at the bills from the village store asking for immediate
cash payments, and does not share the philosophic hopeful view of the
interdependence of the world. When unseen commission merchants in New
York City refuse his potatoes, the calamity is as dumfounding as a
drought or a plague of locusts.
The harvest in September of the planting in May is now determined not
only by wind and weather, which his religion has from time immemorial
justified, but by a tangle of distant human arrangements of which
only loose threads are in his hands. He may live more richly than his
ancestors; he may be wealthier and healthier and, for all he knows,
even happier. But he gambles with the behavior of unseen men in a
bewildering way. His relations with invisibly managed markets are
decisively important for him; his own foresight is not dependable. He
is a link in a chain that stretches beyond his horizon.
The rôle that salesmanship and speculation play is a measure of the
spread between the work men do and the results. To market the output
of Lancashire, says Dibblee,[32] “the merchants and warehousemen of
Manchester and Liverpool, not to mention the marketing organizations
in other Lancashire towns, have a greater capital employed than that
required in all the manufacturing industries of the cotton trade.” And,
according to Anderson’s calculations,[33] the grain received at Chicago
in 1915 was sold sixty-two times in futures, as well as an unknown
number of times in spot transactions. Where men produce for invisible
and uncertain markets “the initial plans of enterprisers”[34] cannot be
adequate. The adjustments, often very crude and costly, are effected by
salesmanship and speculation.
Under these conditions neither the discipline of the craftsman who
controls his process from beginning to end nor the virtues of thrift,
economy and work are a complete guide to a successful career. Defoe in
his _Complete English Tradesman_[35] could say that “trade is not a
ball where people appear in masque and act a part to make sport ... but
is a plain, visible scene of honest life ... supported by prudence and
frugality” ... and so “prudent management and frugality will increase
any fortune to any degree.” Benjamin Franklin might opine that “he that
gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary expenses
excepted) will certainly become rich, if that Being who governs
the world, to whom all should look for a blessing on their honest
endeavors, doth not in His wise providence, otherwise determine.” Young
men were until quite recently exhorted in the very words of Defoe and
Franklin, though Franklin’s rather canny allowance for the whims of
the Almighty was not always included. But of late the gospel of success
contains less about frugality and more about visions and the message
of business. This new gospel, beneath all its highfalutin cant, points
dimly though excitedly to the truth that for business success a man
must project his mind over an invisible environment.
This need has bred an imperious tendency to organization on a large
scale. To defend themselves against the economic powers of darkness,
against great monopolies or a devastating competition, the farmers set
up great centralized selling agencies. Business men form great trade
associations. Everybody organizes, until the number of committees and
their paid secretaries cannot be computed. The tendency is pervasive.
We have had, if I remember correctly, National Smile Week. At any rate
we have had Nebraska which discovered that if you wish to prohibit
liquor in Nebraska you must prohibit it everywhere. Nebraska cannot
live by itself alone, being too weak to control an international
traffic. We have had the socialist who was convinced that socialism
can maintain itself only on a socialist planet. We have had Secretary
Hughes who was convinced that capitalism could exist only on a
capitalist planet. We have had all the imperialists who could not live
unless they advanced the backward races. And we have had the Ku Klux
Klansmen who were persuaded that if you organized and sold hate on a
country-wide scale there would be lots more hate than there was before.
We have had the Germans before 1914 who were told they had to choose
between “world power or downfall,” and the French for some years after
1919 who could not be “secure” in Europe unless every one else was
insecure. We have had all conceivable manifestations of the impulse
to seek stability in an incalculable environment by standardizing for
one’s own apparent convenience all those who form the context of one’s
activity.
It has entailed perpetual effort to bring more and more men under the
same law and custom, and then, of course, to assume control of the
lawmaking and law-enforcing machinery in this larger area. The effect
has been to concentrate decision in central governments, in distant
executive offices, in caucuses and in steering committees. Whether
this concentration of power is good or bad, permanent or passing, this
at least is certain. The men who make the decisions at these central
points are remote from the men they govern and the facts with which
they deal. Even if they conscientiously regard themselves as agents or
trustees, it is a pure fiction to say that they are carrying out the
will of the people. They may govern the people wisely. They are not
governing with the active consultation of the people. They can at best
lay down policy wholesale in response to electorates which judge and
act upon only a detail of the result. For the governors see a kind of
whole which obscures the infinite varieties of particular interests;
their vices are abstraction and generalization which appear in politics
as legalism and bureaucracy. The governed, on the contrary, see vivid
aspects of a whole which they can rarely imagine, and their prevailing
vice is to mistake a local prejudice for a universal truth.
The widening distance between the centers where decisions are taken
and the places where the main work of the world is done has undermined
the discipline of public opinion upon which all the earlier theorists
relied.[36] A century ago the model of popular government was the
self-sufficing township in which the voters’ opinions were formed and
corrected by talk with their neighbors. They might entertain queer
opinions about witches and spirits and foreign peoples and other
worlds. But about the village itself the facts were not radically in
dispute, and nothing was likely to happen that the elders could not
with a little ingenuity bring under a well-known precedent of their
common law.
But under absentee government these checks upon opinion are lacking.
The consequences are often so remote and long delayed that error is not
promptly disclosed. The conditioning factors are distant; they do not
count vividly in our judgments. The reality is inaccessible; the bounds
of subjective opinion are wide. In the interdependent world, desire,
rather than custom or objective law, tends to become the criterion of
men’s conduct. They formulate their demands at large for “security” at
the expense of every one else’s safety, for “morality” at the expense
of other men’s tastes and comfort, for the fulfillment of a national
destiny that consists in taking what you want when you want it. The
lengthening of the interval between conduct and experience, between
cause and effect, has nurtured a cult of self-expression in which each
thinker thinks about his own thoughts and has subtle feelings about
his feelings. That he does not in consequence deeply affect the course
of affairs is not surprising.
2
The centralizing tendencies of the Great Society have not been accepted
without protest, and the case against them has been stated again and
again.[37] Without local institutions, said de Tocqueville, a nation
may give itself a free government, but it does not possess the spirit
of liberty. To concentrate power at one point is to facilitate the
seizure of power. “What are you going to do?” Arthur Young asked some
provincials at the time of the French Revolution. “We do not know,”
they replied; “we must see what Paris is going to do.” Local interests
handled from a distant central point are roughly handled by busy and
inattentive men. And in the meantime the local training and the local
winnowing of political talent are neglected. The overburdened central
authority expands into a vast hierarchy of bureaucrats and clerks
manipulating immense stacks of paper, always dealing with symbols on
paper, rarely with things or with people. The genius of centralization
reached its climax in the famous boast of a French minister of
education, who said: It is three o’clock; all the pupils in the third
grade throughout France are now composing a Latin verse.
There is no need to labor the point. The more centralization the less
can the people concerned be consulted and give conscious assent. The
more extensive the rule laid down the less account it can take of fact
and special circumstance. The more it conflicts with local experience,
the more distant its source and wholesale its character, the less
easily enforceable it is. General rules will tend to violate particular
needs. Distantly imposed rules usually lack the sanction of consent.
Being less suited to the needs of men, and more external to their
minds, they rest on force rather than on custom and on reason.
A centralized society dominated by the fiction that the governors are
the spokesmen of a common will tends not only to degrade initiative
in the individual but to reduce to insignificance the play of public
opinion. For when the action of a whole people is concentrated, the
public is so vast that even the crude objective judgments it might
make on specific issues cease to be practicable. The tests indicated
in preceding chapters by which a public might judge the workability
of a rule or the soundness of a new proposal have little value when
the public runs into millions and the issues are hopelessly entangled
with each other. It is idle under such circumstances to talk about
democracy, or about the refinement of public opinion. With such
monstrous complications the public can do little more than at intervals
to align itself heavily for or against the régime in power, and for
the rest to bear with its works, obeying meekly or evading, as seems
most convenient. For, in practice, the organic theory of society means
a concentration of power; that is, the way the notion of one purpose
is actually embodied in affairs. And this in turn means that men must
either accept frustration of their own purposes or contrive somehow to
frustrate that declared purpose of that central power which pretends it
is the purpose of all.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] _Faust_, Part II, Act v, scene 3.
[32] Dibblee, _The Laws of Supply and Demand_, cited by B. M. Anderson,
Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 259.
[33] B. M. Anderson, Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 251.
[34] _Ibid._
[35] _Cf._ Werner Lombart, _The Quintessence of Capitalism_, Chapter
VII.
[36] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XVI and XVII.
[37] In a convenient form by J. Charles Brun, _Le Régionalisme_, pp.
13 _et seq._ _Cf._ also Walter Thompson, _Federal Centralization_,
Chapter XIX.
Chapter XVI
THE REALMS OF DISORDER
1
Yet the practice of centralization and the philosophy which personifies
society have acquired a great hold upon men. The dangers are well
known. If, nevertheless, the practice and the theory persist, it cannot
be merely because men have been led astray by false doctrine.
If you examine the difficulties enumerated by the sponsors of great
centralizing measures, such as national prohibition, the national child
labor amendment, federal control of education or the nationalization of
railroads, they are reducible, I think, to one dominating idea: that it
is necessary to extend the area of control over all the factors in a
problem or the problem will be insoluble anywhere.
It was to this idea that Mr. Lloyd George appealed when he faced his
critics at the end of his administration. While his words are the words
of a skilful debater, the idea behind them might almost be called the
supreme motive of all the imperial and centralizing tendencies of the
Great Society:
“Lord Grey sought to make peace in the Balkans. He made peace. That
peace did not stand the jolting of the train that carried it from
London to the Balkans. It fell to pieces before it ever reached
Sofia. That was not his fault. The plan was good. The intentions were
excellent. _But there were factors there which he could not control._
He tried to prevent the Turks from entering the war against us, a most
important matter. German diplomacy was too strong for him. He tried to
prevent Bulgaria from entering the war against us. There again German
diplomacy defeated us. Well, now I have never taunted Lord Grey with
that. I do not taunt him now, but what I say is that when you get
into the realm of foreign affairs there are things I will not say you
cannot visualize, because you do, but there are factors you cannot
influence.”[38]
Mr. Lloyd George might have said the same of domestic affairs. There,
too, factors abound which you cannot influence. And as empires expand
to protect their frontiers, and then expand further to protect the
protections to their frontiers, so central governments have been led
step by step to take one interest after another under their control.
2
For the democracies are haunted by this dilemma: they are frustrated
unless in the laying down of rules there is a large measure of assent;
yet they seem unable to find solutions of their greatest problems
except through centralized governing by means of extensive rules which
necessarily ignore the principle of assent. The problems that vex
democracy seem to be unmanageable by democratic methods.
In supreme crises the dilemma is presented absolutely. Possibly a
war can be fought for democracy; it cannot be fought democratically.
Possibly a sudden revolution may be made to advance democracy; but the
revolution itself will be conducted by a dictatorship. Democracy may
be defended against its enemies but it will be defended by a committee
of safety. The history of the wars and revolutions since 1914 is
ample evidence on this point. In the presence of danger, where swift
and concerted action is required, the methods of democracy cannot be
employed.
That is understandable enough. But how is it that the democratic method
should be abandoned so commonly in more leisurely and less catastrophic
times? Why in time of peace should people provoke that centralization
of power which deprives them of control over the use of that power?
Is it not a probable answer to say that in the presence of certain
issues, even in time of peace, the dangers have seemed sufficiently
menacing to cause people to seek remedies, regardless of method, by the
shortest and easiest way at hand?
It could be demonstrated, I think, that the issues which have seemed
so overwhelming were of two kinds: those which turned on the national
defense or the public safety and those which turned on the power of
modern capitalism. Where the relations of a people to armed enemies are
in question or where the relations of employee, customer or farmer to
large industry are in question the need for solutions has outweighed
all interest in the democratic method.
In the issues engendered by the rise of the national state and the
development of large scale industries are to be found the essentially
new problems of the modern world. For the solution of these problems
there are few precedents. There is no established body of custom and
law. The field of international affairs and the field of industrial
relations are the two great centers of anarchy in society. It is a
pervasive anarchy. Out of the national state with its terrifying
military force, and out of great industry with all its elaborate
economic compulsion, the threat against personal security always rises.
To offset it somehow, to check it and thwart it, seemed more important
than any finical regard for the principle of assent.
And so to meet the menace of the national state, its neighbors sought
to form themselves into more powerful national states; to tame the
power of capitalism they supported the growth of vast bureaucracies.
Against powers that were dangerous and uncontrolled they set up powers,
nominally their own, which were just as vast and just as uncontrolled.
3
But only for precarious intervals has security been attained by
these vast balances of power. From 1870 to 1914 the world was held
in equilibrium. It was upset, and the world has not yet found a new
order. The balances of power within the nations are no less unsteady.
For neither in industry nor in international affairs has it yet been
possible to hold any balance long enough to fix it by rule and give it
an institutional form. Power has been checked by power here and there
and now and then but power has not been adjusted to power and the terms
of the adjustment settled and accepted.
The attempt to bring power under control by offsetting it with power
was sound enough in intention. The conflicting purposes of men cannot
be held under pacific control unless the tendency of all power to
become arbitrary is checked by other force. All the machinery of
conference, of peaceful negotiation, of law and the rule of reason is
workable in large affairs only where the power of the negotiators is
neutralized one against the other. It may be neutralized because the
parties are in fact equally powerful. It may be neutralized because the
weaker has invisible allies among the other powers of the world, or in
domestic affairs among other interests in society. But before there can
be law there must be order, and an order is an arrangement of power.
The worst that can be said of the nationalists and collectivists is
that they attempted to establish balances of power which could not
endure. The pluralist at least would say that the end they sought must
be attained differently, that in place of vast wholesale balances of
power it is necessary to create many detailed balances of power. The
people as a whole supporting a centralized government cannot tame
capitalism as a whole. For the powers which are summed up in the term
capitalism are many. They bear separately upon different groups of
people. The nation as a unit does not encounter them all, and cannot
deal with them all. It is to the different groups of people concerned
that we must look for the power which shall offset the arbitrary power
that bears upon them. The reduction of capitalism to workable law is
no matter of striking at it wholesale by general enactments. It is a
matter of defeating its arbitrary power in detail, in every factory,
in every office, in every market, and of turning the whole network of
relations under which industry operates from the dominion of arbitrary
forces into those of settled rules.
And so it is in the anarchy among nations. If all the acts of a citizen
are to be treated as organically the actions of that nation, a stable
balance of power is impossible. Here also it is necessary to break down
the fiction of identity, to insist that the quarrel of one business man
with another is their quarrel, and not the nation’s, a quarrel in which
each is entitled to a vindication of his right to fair adjudication but
not to patriotic advocacy of his cause. It is only by this dissociation
of private interests that the mass of disputes across frontiers can
gradually be brought under an orderly process. For a large part,
perhaps the greatest part, of the disputes between nations is an
accumulated mass of undetermined disputes between their nationals. If
these essentially private disputes could be handled, without patriotic
fervor and without confusing an oil prospector with the nation as a
whole, with governments acting as friends of the court and not as
advocates for a client, the balance of power between governments would
be easier to maintain. It would not be subject to constant assault from
within each nation by an everlasting propaganda of suspicion by private
interests seeking national support. And if only the balance of power
between governments could be stabilized long enough to establish a line
of precedents for international conference, a longer peace might result.
4
These in roughest outline are some of the conclusions, as they
appear to me, of the attempt to bring the theory of democracy into
somewhat truer alignment with the nature of public opinion. I have
conceived public opinion to be, not the voice of God, nor the voice
of society, but the voice of the interested spectators of action. I
have, therefore, supposed that the opinions of the spectators must be
essentially different from those of the actors, and that the kind of
action they were capable of taking was essentially different too. It
has seemed to me that the public had a function and must have methods
of its own in controversies, qualitatively different from those of
the executive men; that it was a dangerous confusion to believe that
private purposes were a mere emanation of some common purpose.
This conception of society seems to me truer and more workable than
that which endows public opinion with pantheistic powers. It does not
assume that men in action have universal purposes; they are denied
the fraudulent support of the fiction that they are the agents of a
common purpose. They are regarded as the agents of special purposes,
without pretense and without embarrassment. They must live in a world
with men who have other special purposes. The adjustments which must
be made are society, and the best society is the one in which men have
purposes which they can realize with the least frustration. When men
take a position in respect to the purposes of others they are acting as
a public. And the end of their acting in this rôle is to promote the
conditions under which special purposes can be composed.
It is a theory which puts its trust chiefly in the individuals directly
concerned. They initiate, they administer, they settle. It would
subject them to the least possible interference from ignorant and
meddlesome outsiders, for in this theory the public intervenes only
when there is a crisis of maladjustment, and then not to deal with the
substance of the problem but to neutralize the arbitrary force which
prevents adjustment. It is a theory which economizes the attention of
men as members of the public, and asks them to do as little as possible
in matters where they can do nothing very well. It confines the effort
of men, when they are a public, to a part they might fulfill, to a
part which corresponds to their own greatest interest in any social
disturbance; that is, to an intervention which may help to allay the
disturbance, and thus allow them to return to their own affairs.
For it is the pursuit of their special affairs that they are most
interested in. It is by the private labors of individuals that life is
enhanced. I set no great store on what can be done by public opinion
and the action of masses.
5
I have no legislative program to offer, no new institutions to
propose. There are, I believe, immense confusions in the current
theory of democracy which frustrate and pervert its action. I have
attacked certain of the confusions with no conviction except that a
false philosophy tends to stereotype thought against the lessons of
experience. I do not know what the lessons will be when we have learned
to think of public opinion as it is, and not as the fictitious power
we have assumed it to be. It is enough if with Bentham we know that
“the perplexity of ambiguous discourse ... distracts and eludes the
apprehension, stimulates and inflames the passions.”
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Speech at Manchester, October 14, 1922.
INDEX
Absentee rulers defined, 173–186
Action, public, defined, 73–74
Agencies defined, 125–142;
fact-finding, 45
Agent, public not, 169
Agents and bystanders defined, 40–53
Anarchy, 161
Anderson, Jr., B. M., 176
Arbitrary force, neutralization of, 63–74
Aristotle, 77–80
Assent, defined, 117–123, 129, 189
Bacon, Francis, 162
Balkans, 188
Behavior, 55, 68–69;
reasonable, defined, 145
Bentham, Jeremy, 200
Bergson, Henri, 32–33
Birth control, its relation to food supply, 87–88
Bismarck, Prince von, 14, 169
Brun, J. Charles, 183
Bryan, William Jennings, 36
Bryce, James, 18–19
Bulgaria, 188
Business, new gospel of, 178
Bystanders and agents defined, 40–53
Capitalism, 37, 179, 191, 192, 194, 195
Carr-Saunders, A. M., 87
Cassel, Gustav, 92, 94
Cats, mice and clover, 31–32
Cavour, Count di, 169
Centralization of government. _See_ Government
Change, unnoticeable, 88
Chanticleer, 15
Chicago mayoral election, 17
Chinese and Greco-Roman civilizations, 174
Citizen, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 38, 39, 40,
45, 46, 52, 148, 195
Citizenship, 151
Civic duty, derision for, 15, 146, 151
Civil rights, 58
Civilization, 174
Clover, cats and mice, 31–32
Competence, 150
Conduct, 182
Conformity, test of, defined, 123–124
Conscience, 28
Contracts, social, 40, 95–106;
defined, 101–102, 104–105
Control, 55
Controversy, 77
Coöperation, 99
Corruption, 71, 72
Criteria of reform defined, 125–142
Criticism, 123
Crises, 67
Crisis, public opinion reserve force in, 69
Dante, 169
Darwin, Charles, 31, 32
Debate, public value of, defined, 110–114
Defective rule defined, 115–124
Defoe, Daniel, 177
Delbrück, Hans, 60
Democracy, 24, 35–37, 71, 146–151, 155, 189, 190, 197–200
Democratic theory, 14, 61, 147
Democrats, 59
Derision of citizens, 15
Descartes, 81
Dibblee, G. B., 176
Dictatorship, 190
Disenchanted man defined, 20
“Disorder, idea of,” 32–33;
realms of, defined, 187–200
Dogma of assent, 117
Duties and rights. _See_ Rights and duties.
Economic problem defined, 92–94.
Education, 22–23, 24, 27;
public, defined, 146–147, 148–151, 169
Election, defined, 56, 60, 61
Elections, defined, 127–130
England, 59, 86
Enterprise, Macaulay on, 49–50
Enterprisers, 176
Environment, 14, 78, 79, 179
Erickson, E. M., 16
Eugenics, 34–35
Evasion of law, 123
Evils of democracy, 35–36, 37, 173–186
Evolution, 81–84
Executive action, 144
Expectations, 33
Exploiters, 166
Fable of professor, 28
Food supply, 86–87
Franklin, Benjamin, 177–178
French security, 179
French Revolution, 59, 183
Frugality, 177
Function, government, defined, 70–73;
relation to competency, 150
German diplomacy, 188
Germans, 179
Goethe, 173
Gosnell, Harvey Foote, 17
Government, vii, 14, 41, 50, 61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 73, 126, 173–186,
194;
defined, 77, 126;
function defined, 70–73
Grant, Madison, 22
Great Society, 43, 79, 98, 174, 183, 188–189
Greco-Roman and Chinese civilizations, 174
Grey, Lord, vii, 188
Guedalla, Philip, 14
Gun elevation, 91
Hamilton, Alexander, vii, 169
Hegel, 98
Hegelian mystery, 47
Hertzen, Alexander, 20
Hughes, Charles Evans, 179
Human values defined, 95–97
“Idea of disorder,” 32–33
Ideal, 20, 22, 39, 63, 68, 155
Idealization, 57
Ideals, 14
Ideas, 47, 48
Imperial Party, 169
Initiative and referendum, 19
Innovation, 116
Inquiry, test of, defined, 130–135
Intelligence, 69, 135
Jefferson, Thomas, 159
Justice, 67
Keynes, J. M., 157–158
Knowledge, 30
Ku Klux Klan, 179
Lancashire goods, 176
Laski, Harold J., 161
Latin America, 61
Latin verse, 184
Law, 69, 100, 108, 115, 116, 123, 124, 191–192, 193
Laws, 69, 71;
assent to, defined, 117–122, 123, 124;
defective, defined, 125–142, 136;
test of, defined, 138
Leaders, 19
League of Nations, 133
Lenin, 169
Liberal defined, 162
Liberalism defined, 162–172
Liberals, 162, 166
Liberties of men defined, 55
Liberty, spirit of, 187
Lloyd George, David, 157–158, 188–189
Lombart, Werner, 177
Lowell, Lawrence A., 19
Macaulay, Lord, 49–50
Macgowan, Kenneth, 163
Majority, 19;
rule defined, 57–58, 60
Malthus, T. R., 85–87
Man, disenchanted, 13–21
Manchester, Lloyd George at, 188–189
Mayoral election in Chicago, 17
Merriam, Charles Edward, 17–18
Methods of public men, 159
Mice, cats and clover, 31–32
Michelet, Simon, 16
Michels, Robert, 19, 22–23
Minorities, 58
Monistic theory, 161, 173
Monodrama, 163–165
Moral code, 29–30, 35, 74
Moral codes, 30
Moralists, 28
Morality, 100
Morrow, Dwight, 59–60
Morse, Prof., 59–60
Napoleon III., 14
National defense, problem defined, 90–91
Nationals, 196
Nationalism, 65
Neutralization of arbitrary force, 67–74
Neutralized power, 193
Newspapers, 13
Nonvoting, 17–18
Officials, government, 72
Ogburn, W. F., 89, 100
Omnicompetency of citizens, 21, 39
One and Many problem, 171
Opinion, 48, 52, 56, 61
Opinion, public. _See_ Public opinion
Opinions defined, 44–49, 162, 197
Opposition parties, 20
Party government, 59–60
Party in power, 126
Party system, 130
Parties, political, 127
Partisanship, 34
Pawlow, Ivan Petrovich, 30
People, 19, 36, 41;
Macaulay on, 50, 61, 62, 68, 69, 71, 180, 181, 191, 194
People’s will defined, 72
Physical force in South, 61
Plato, 169
Pluralistic theory defined, 151, 161, 194
Political capacity, 78
Political evils, agents against, 169
Political leaders, 19, 22
Political system changes, 84–85
Political talent neglected, 184
Political theories defined, 22–39
Politicians, 41
Politics, truth in, 157–158
Policy, public, 57
Population, problem of, defined, 85–87
Power, arbitrary, 74;
balance of, defined, 192–196;
of public opinion, 70
Principles of public opinion, 143
Problem, nature of, 81–94, 130;
of One and Many, 171
Problems of citizen defined, 13–16, 25, 26, 34, 64, 72, 81–94, 125,
129, 131, 140, 141, 187
Professor, fable of, 28
Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, 133
Public, 42;
powers defined, 49–52, 54–62;
relation to public affairs defined, 63–66, 67, 68, 77, 103, 105,
106, 107, 108;
debate, value of, defined, 110–114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122,
124, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145;
education defined, 146–151, 155, 156, 157, 159;
in any situation defined, 168, 169;
dangers to, defined, 189–191, 193, 197, 198
Public affairs, 13–21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 55, 56,
64, 69, 189
Public judgment, 115
Public life, candor in, 157
Public men, methods of, 159
Public office, education for, 151
Public opinion, 44, 48, 52, 53, 55;
and public affairs, 55–56, 65;
defined 65–70, 71, 72, 73, 74;
function of, defined, 74, 79;
principles of, 143;
tests of, defined, 144–145, 147, 151, 181, 197–200
Publicity, 43
Publics, random, 79
Question Aristotle asked, 77–80
Questions, two, 107
Realms of disorder, 187–200
Reason, 69
Reform Bill, 50
Reform, criteria of, 125–142
Reform, 129;
test of, defined, 135–138
Reformer, 129, 130
Registered voters, 19
Revivalists, 22
Revolution, 59, 61, 136, 190
Revolution, French, 59, 183
Rights, 100
Rights and duties defined, 100–107
Rousseau, J. J., 98
Rule, 68–69;
defective, defined, 115–124
Rules. _See_ Laws
Rules of society, 117
Rulers, absentee, defined, 173–186
Santayana, George, 95
Schlesinger, A. M., 16
School, 14
Self-government, 19
Settlements, 120
Shaw, G. Bernard, 59
Smith, Logan Pearsall, 15–16, 26
Social contracts defined, 95–106
Socialism, theory of, defined, 37–38, 39, 65
Socialists, 156
Society, 28, 30, 31, 32, 42, 45, 71, 73, 79, 88, 98, 103, 106, 134;
functions defined, 155–161;
defined, 155–172, 176, 183
Socrates, 30
Sovereign people, 18–19
Sovereignty, 14
Standards, 30, 143
Statesmanship defined, 155–161
Steffen, Gustaf F., 19
Stoddard, Lothrop, 22
Submission, 162
Supply and demand, 92
System, economic, 94;
prevailing, 100;
of rights and duties, 100
Teachers, 27
Theory, citizen reigns in, 14
Thomson, J. Arthur, 31
Times (London), 50
Tocqueville, de, 183
Trade, 177
Truth, 67
Turks, 188
Tyranny, 70–71
Unattainable ideal, 22–39
United States government, 61
Validity of laws, 108
Value is measurement, 96
Value of public debate defined, 110–114
Values, human, defined, 95–97
Virtue, 30, 57
Voice of public opinion defined, 197
Vote, 36, 55, 56
Voter, 19, 36, 146
Voters, 16–17, 18–19, 41
Voting, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59
War, 90, 190
Williams, John Sharp, 159
Wirt, William, 159
Woman suffrage, 60
Work, 173
World, 29
“World power or downfall,” 179
Yevreynoff, 163–164
Young, Arthur, 183