John Dewey originally published The Public and Its Problems in 1927. The release of a new edition in 1946 added a subtitle—An Essay in Political Enquiry—as well as the addition of an introduction to the original’s short preface. That preface asserts that the book grew out of series of lectures delivered by Dewey in January, 2916. Although not necessarily comprehensively so, in many ways the book is a direct response to ideas and concepts critical of democracy forwarded by Walter Lippmann in two books, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).
Lippmann is highly critical of one of the fundamental expectations of democracy: that the public is informed enough to play a role in the real world governance of its guiding theoretical principles. Public Opinion introduced the phrase “manufacture of consent” which has since become a significant area of concern for how the public becomes an active agency in the carrying out of democratic ideals within a representative government. Ultimately, he argues that as a system dependent upon representatives voted into office to carry out the ideologies of the majority who voted them into office is fundamentally flawed because the processing of information which voters used to arrive at those ideological beliefs are far too subject to manipulation of opinion.
The Public and Its Problems targets Lippmann’s somewhat elitist—though not entirely unfounded or ungrounded—proposition that daily democratic practices are better served by a small minority of experts than the will of the majority since that majority cannot be trusted to even apprehend they are being manipulated, much less seek alternative answers. Dewey’s response is a broadly targeted refutation primarily rejecting Lippmann’s arguments as falsely existing as a priori components of the process. In other words, Dewey does reject the idea that the public is highly susceptible to propaganda and forming unsound ideological prejudices based on misleading information. Rather, his response over the course of much of the book is that this is not what might be termed a pre-existing terminal condition.
Dewey strongly counters democratic governance is based on participation of the public and that Lippmann’s pessimistic views only applies to those examples in which participation is limited precisely to that one role that Lippmann suggests the public should be expected to play: showing up at the voting booth. When voters are actively engaged in the entire process of transforming theory into practice, the representatives whom they elected when they show up to vote will necessarily the one they may have been unwittingly directed to vote for by expert manipulation.
Both Lippmann’s books outlining his arguments and Dewey’s calculated response consistently been engaged in the study of political science since publication precisely because the conditions to which democracy can be manipulated have only intensified over the intervening decades.
