“A Deaf Spectator in the Back
Row”
John Dewey
“They are different ways of
construing life.”
(Political Science 110EB)
Essays
• HARD COPY due in class, Thursday, May 3
• 5-7 pages
• Prompts posted at course website:
adamgomez.wordpress.com/teaching/poli110
EB
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Essays
• 1. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln describes American
democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the
people.” Lippmann describes such thinking as “a false ideal.” (p. 29)
Is Lippmann’s argument regarding the roles of the citizen and the
public persuasive? Why or why not? Respond with reference to at
least two authors in addition to Lippmann.
• 2. Agree, disagree, or modify the following statement. Respond
with reference to at least two authors in addition to Lippmann.
– Among the authors assigned in the course so far, only Lippmann
dismisses ‘monist’ concepts of society as false, saying that there is no
such thing as a unified society or public. Nonetheless, conflict within
the United States features centrally in the thinking of many of the
other authors. In this way, they provide unambiguous support for
Lippmann’s position.
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Essays
• 3. Agree, disagree, or modify the following
statement.
– While they each approach the question of how the
state ought to respond to economic changes from
different starting points, Bryan, Roosevelt, and Debs
are in broad agreement on what needs to be done.
• 4. Agree, disagree, or modify the following
statement.
– Whatever their other differences, Lincoln, Douglass,
and Roosevelt fundamentally agree on what America
is and what it means to be an American.
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Essays
• 5. What are the fundamental differences
between the thought of Lippmann and
Dewey? What would the consequences of
these differences be if their ideas were put
into practice?
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Essays
• Your paper must have:
• A thesis statement
• One to three sentences, in the first paragraph
• Clearer is better. Thesis should be argumentative:
– “In this paper I will discuss the causes of the Civil War.” -- NOT
a thesis statement.
– “Slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War.” -Acceptable.
– “The primary cause of the Civil War was slavery, which
produced economic, political, and moral conflicts between
North and South that ultimately could not be resolved by
peaceful means.” -- Better.
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Essays
• Double spaced
• Page numbers
• 5 page minimum, less will count against grade
• Paragraphs.
– Seriously, you have to have paragraphs.
• Also, no swearing or text abbreviations.
– For heaven’s sake, people.
• Citations
– Ok to cite lecture. Refer to it by lecture number
– Best to show you’ve done the reading by citing parts of text not quoted in
lecture
– MUST cite & quote the texts appropriate to your chosen prompt.
• Use embedded citations, like this (Lippmann, 119) or (Stephens, Cornerstone
Speech).
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Essays
• Standard margins, font size, line spacing, etc.
– Your grader was an undergraduate once, he knows
about Courier New and big margins.
• While grammar is not a major element in your
grades, it does matter.
– If your I don’t understand what you’re saying, I don’t
understand what you’re saying.
• Papers MUST be submitted to turnitin.com
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Lippmann
• “A false ideal of democracy can only lead 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 roar of a bewildered herd.” (145)
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• “The necessity for an ‘undivided mass’ makes men put truth in the
second place.
– I do not wish to claim that the necessity is often a real one.”
• “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.”
– “We are most reluctant to admit that there is room in the world for
different and more or less separate purposes.”
• This “monistic theory” leads to a situation in which “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.” (149-151)
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• “To this confusion this confusion liberalism has with
the kindest intentions profited greatly. Its main insight
was into the prejudices of the individual”
– Interest
– Passions
– Limited epistemological perspective
• “It was an amazing an unsettling revelation, and
liberalism never quite knew what to do with it.”
– Persuaded of the idea that it was illegitimate to recognize
difference within society, “liberals refused to write
different 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.” (152-156)
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• “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.”
– “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.” (156-158)
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• “The liberals have misunderstood the nature of the public to which
they appealed.”
– It’s only those people concerned, not all of humanity
• “His appeal to this cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested intuition
in everybody which was equivalent to an appeal to nobody.”
– Who, exactly, is the “human”?
• Other political philosophies have 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.”
– “It is the individuals who act, not society [...] It is their relations with
each other which 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.” (158-162)
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• “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.”
– If society is a single entity, why should it not speak with one
voice?
– As society grows more complex, the impulse to expand
administration and control larger numbers of variable from a
central point grows
– “This need has bred an imperious tendency to organization on a
large scale” in all interest groups
• “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.” (163-170)
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• The effect has been to concentrate decision in central
offices, remote from the governed and the conditions of
their lives
– Politics & economics
– “Whether this concentration of power is good or bad,
permanent or passing, this at least is certain.”
• “Even if they conscientiously regard themselves as agents
or trustees, it is 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.”
– This widening difference has eroded the discipline of public
opinion which earlier democratic theorists relied
– Tocqueville & the township (170-173)
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• Lippmann’s theory regards citizens as “agents of special
purpose, 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.”
• “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 not great store
on what can be done by public opinion and the action
of masses.” (188-189)
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John Dewey
• 1859-1952
• Political & educational
theorist
• “Pragmatism”
• Education & human
malleability
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Philosophy & Democracy
• Philosophical differences are “differences in standpoint,
outlook and ideal. They manifest not diversities of
intellectual emphasis so much as incompatibilities of
temperament and expectation. They are different ways of
construing life.”
– “The philosophies embodied not colorless intellectual readings
of reality, but men’s most passionate desires and hopes, their
basic beliefs about the sort of life to be lived.
• They started not from science, not from ascertained
knowledge, but from moral convictions and the best
intellectual methods of their day to give form to what was
essentially an attitude of will [...] and the wish to persuade
other men that this was a wise way of living.” (38-39)
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• “Institutions customs of life, breed certain systematized
predilections and aversions. The wise man reads historic
philosophies to detect in them intellectual formulations of
men’s habitual purposes and cultivated wants, not to gain
insight into the ultimate nature of things or information
about the nature of reality.”
– When women write philosophy, it will be different than that
made by men
– We are what our context makes us, as are our notions of truth
• All philosophy is an effort to persuade made using the best
methods of argument & evidence available
– It is not just about knowledge. Given infinite knowledge, the
individual would “ask himself, what of it? What is it all about?
What does it all mean?” (40-41)
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Two Ideas of Liberty
• “One of them says that freedom is action in accord with the
consciousness of fixed law; that men are free when they are
rational, and they are rational when they recognize and consciously
conform to the necessities which the universe exemplified.”
– Becomes “an apologetic for the established order”, committed to a
“metaphysics of aristocracy” of those able to apprehend the fixed
truth
• “A philosophy animated, be it consciously or unconsciously, by the
strivings of men to achieve democracy will construe liberty as
meaning a universe in which there is real uncertainty and
contingency, a world which is not all in, and never will be, a world
which is in some respect incomplete and in the making, and which
in these respects may be made this way or that according as men
judge, prize, love and labor.”
– This philosophy will be scientific in the sense of experimental (43-45)
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• “The men who questioned the divine right of kings did so in the
name of another absolute. The voice of the people was
mythologzed into the voice of God.”
– But while the monarch may be remote enough for such a
mythologizing, the people are too near
• “Hence democracy has ranked for the most part as an intellectual
anomaly, lacking philosophical basis and logical coherency, but
upon the whole to be accepted because somehow or other it works
better than other schemes and seems to develop a more kindly and
humane set of social institutions.”
– Equality and individualism, created by democracy, compel the
recognition of “a world in which an existence must be reckoned with
on its own account, not as something capable of equation with and
transformation into something else.” (46)
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• “The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a
society, but it is no community.”
– Former societies were both, face-to-face communities governed by
settled customs and authorities
• How has a society which suborns the individual to powers far from
his or her life generated the philosophy of individualism?
– Industrialization provided “a release of human potentialities
previously dormant” as economic individuation disrupted
communities while liberating individuals
– This individuation unsettled traditional rules & regulations, which now
seemed irrationally stifling of economic activity, and democracy
emerged as one way of replacing them with new rules in a way
compatible with the new prevailing ethic
• A public opinion that changes and affects its own governance (180181)
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• Nonetheless, these policies & practices intended to liberate the
individual have had unintended consequences
– “Instead of the independent, self-moved individuals contemplated by
the theory, we have standardized interchangeable units.”
• People associate not out of volition, but due to confluence of vast
historical & economic forces, which produce concentrations of
economic power that inevitable reach out to control the state
– “The same forces which have brought the forms of democratic
government, general suffrage, executives and legislators chosen by
majority vote, have also brought about conditions which halt the
social and humane ideals that demand the utilization of gov’t as the
instrumentality of an inclusive and fraternally associated public.” (18283)
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• Education in the scientific method can train public opinion
– “Differences of opinion in the sense of differences of judgment as to the
course of which it is best to follow, the policy which it is best to try out, will
still exist.
• But opinion in the sense of beliefs formed and held in the absence of
evidence will be reduced in quantity and importance. No longer will views
generated in view of special situations be frozen into absolute standards
and masquerade as eternal truths”
– An educated public opinion, trained to evaluate & experiment
• “Popular government is educative as other modes of political regulation
are not. It forces a recognition that there are common interests, even
though the recognition of what they are is confused; and the need it
enforces of discussion and publicity brings about some clarification of
what they are.”
– “Popular gov’t has at least created public spirit even if it its success in
informing that spirit has not been great.” (186-87)
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• “Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as foolish as its critics charge
it with being. But it is never merely majority rule.”
– “The means by which a majority comes to be a majority is the more
important thing.”
• “The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the
methods & conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That
is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this
improvement depends essentially upon freeing and perfecting the
processes of inquiry and of dissemination of conclusions.”
– “It is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill
to carry on the needed investigations; what is required is that they
have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by
others upon common concerns.”
• “Capacities are limited by the objects and tools at hand.” (187-188)
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