The Phantom Public quotes

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.

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.

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.

… 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 …

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.:

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.

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:

… “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 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.

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?

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;

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.

… “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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

These conclusions are sharply at variance with the accepted theory of popular government. That theory rests upon the belief that there is a public which directs the course of events.

I hold that this public is a mere phantom.

It is an abstraction. The public in respect to a railroad strike may be the farmers whom the railroad serves; the public in respect to an agricultural tariff may include the very railroad men who were on strike.

They must be signs which will tell the members of a public where they can best align themselves so as to promote the solution. In short, they must be guides to reasonable action for the use of uninformed people.

The environment is complex. Man’s political capacity is simple.

Can a bridge be built between them? The question has haunted political science ever since Aristotle first formulated it in the great seventh book of his Politics.

The environment is complex. Man’s political capacity is simple.

Can a bridge be built between them?

The question has haunted political science ever since Aristotle first formulated it in the great seventh book of his Politics. He answered it by saying that the community must be kept simple and small enough to suit the faculties of its citizens.

Things multiply, they grow, they learn, they age, they wear out and they die at different rates. An individual, his companions, his implements, his institutions, his creeds, his needs, his means of satisfaction, evolve unevenly, and endure unevenly.

Events do not concur harmoniously in time.

Some hurry, some straggle, some push and some drag. The ranks have always to be reformed.

Things multiply, they grow, they learn, they age, they wear out and they die at different rates. An individual, his companions, his implements, his institutions, his creeds, his needs, his means of satisfaction, evolve unevenly, and endure unevenly. Events do not concur harmoniously in time.

Some hurry, some straggle, some push and some drag.

The ranks have always to be reformed.

… of evolution and progress, which the nineteenth century found so reassuring, there would appear to be innumerable systems of evolution, variously affecting each other, some linked, some in collision, but each in some fundamental aspect moving at its own pace and on its own terms.

The disharmonies of this uneven evolution are the problems of mankind.

Suppose a man who knew nothing of the history of the nineteenth century were shown the tables compiled in the Statistical Abstract of the United States for the period from 1800 to 1918:

For all we can tell we may be the size of a mosquito one moment in the sight of God, and of an elephant the next; we cannot tell if mosquitoes and elephants and chairs and planets change in proportion.

Change is significant only in relation to something else.

The change which constitutes a problem is an altered relationship between two dependent variables.[21] Thus the automobile is a problem in the city not because there are so many automobiles but because there are too many for the width of the streets, too many for …

In an absolutely static society there would be no problems.

A problem is the result of change.

But not of the change in any self-contained element. Change would be unnoticeable unless we could measure it against some other element which did not change at the same pace.

But the solutions of most social problems are not so neat as this; everything does not fit perfectly as in the solution of a puzzle.

The conflicting interests merely find a way of giving a little and taking a little, and of existing together without too much bad blood.

They still remain separate interests. The men involved still think differently. They have no union of mind or purpose. But they travel their own ways without collision, and even with some reliance at times upon the others’ help.

It follows that the public interest in a controversy cannot turn upon the specific issue. On what, then, does it turn? In what phase of the controversy can the public successfully interest itself?

Only when somebody objects does the public know there is a problem; when nobody any longer objects there is a solution.

For the public, then, any rule is right which is agreeable to all concerned. It follows that the public interest in a problem is limited to this:

How shall he recognize the reformer? If he is to answer those questions at all, he must be able to answer them quickly and without real understanding of the problem. Is it possible for him to do that?

Can he act intelligently but in ignorance?

I think this apparently paradoxical thing can be done in some such way as the next four chapters describe.

It would be futile to do so, because we may take it as certain that men will act to benefit themselves whenever they think they conveniently can.

A political theory based on the expectation of self-denial and sacrifice by the run of men in any community would not be worth considering.

Nor is it at all evident that the work of the world could be done unless men followed their private interest and contributed to affairs that direct inner knowledge which they thus obtain.

Moreover, the adjustments are likely to be much more real if they are made from fully conscious and thoroughly explored special points of view.

Thus the genius of any illuminating public discussion is not to obscure and censor private interest but to help it to sail and to make it sail under its own colors.

The true public, in my definition of that term, has to purge itself of the self-interested groups who become confused with it.

It will break down because the true public will not stay mobilized very long for anything, and when it demobilizes the private interest which was falsely exalted will find its privileges unmanageable.

It will be like a man placed on Jack Dempsey’s chest by six policemen, and then left there after the policemen have gone home to dinner.

It will be like France placed by the Allies upon a prostrate Germany and then left there after the Allies have departed from Europe.

He will not be able, we may assume, to judge the merits of the arguments. But if he does insist upon full freedom of discussion, the advocates are very likely to expose one another.

Open debate may lead to no conclusion and throw no light whatever on the problem or its answer, but it will tend to betray the partisan and the advocate.

And if it has identified them for the true public, debate will have served its main purpose.

Widespread criticism, therefore, has a significance beyond its intellectual value. It is almost always a symptom on the surface that the rule is unstable.

When a rule is broken not occasionally but very often the rule is defective.

It simply does not define the conduct which normally may be expected of men who live under it. It may sound noble. But it does not work. It does not adjust relations. It does not actually organize society.

When a rule is broken not occasionally but very often the rule is defective. It simply does not define the conduct which normally may be expected of men who live under it.

It may sound noble. But it does not work.

It does not adjust relations. It does not actually organize society.

Where the facts are most obscure, where precedents are lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade everything, the public in all its unfitness is compelled to make its most important decisions.

The hardest problems are those which institutions cannot handle. They are the public’s problems.

The one test which the members of a public can apply in these circumstances is to note which party to the dispute is least willing to submit its whole claim to inquiry and to abide by the result.

For not all problems are soluble in the present state of human knowledge. Many which may be soluble are not soluble with any force the public can exert. Some time alone will cure, and some are the fate of man.

It is not essential, therefore, always to do something.

It follows that the proper limits of intervention by the public in affairs are determined by its capacity to make judgments. These limits may be extended as new and better criteria are formulated, or as men become more expert through practice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.