E. A. Allen - "The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races"

Chamisso et. al. - "Peter Schlemihl etc."

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1572"

Edward Peple - "A Night Out"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Public Opinion

W >> Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion




The incidence of policy determines the relation between leader and
following. If those whom he needs in his plan are remote from the
place where the action takes place, if the results are hidden or
postponed, if the individual obligations are indirect or not yet due,
above all if assent is an exercise of some pleasurable emotion, the
leader is likely to have a free hand. Those programs are immediately
most popular, like prohibition among teetotalers, which do not at once
impinge upon the private habits of the followers. That is one great
reason why governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs. Most
of the frictions between two states involve a series of obscure and
long-winded contentions, occasionally on the frontier, but far more
often in regions about which school geographies have supplied no
precise ideas. In Czechoslovakia America is regarded as the Liberator;
in American newspaper paragraphs and musical comedy, in American
conversation by and large, it has never been finally settled whether
the country we liberated is Czechoslavia or Jugoslovakia.

In foreign affairs the incidence of policy is for a very long time
confined to an unseen environment. Nothing that happens out there is
felt to be wholly real. And so, because in the ante-bellum period,
nobody has to fight and nobody has to pay, governments go along
according to their lights without much reference to their people. In
local affairs the cost of a policy is more easily visible. And
therefore, all but the most exceptional leaders prefer policies in
which the costs are as far as possible indirect.

They do not like direct taxation. They do not like to pay as they go.
They like long term debts. They like to have the voters believe that
the foreigner will pay. They have always been compelled to calculate
prosperity in terms of the producer rather than in terms of the
consumer, because the incidence on the consumer is distributed over so
many trivial items. Labor leaders have always preferred an increase of
money wages to a decrease in prices. There has always been more
popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but
comparatively unimportant, than in the wastes of the industrial
system, which are huge but elusive. A legislature dealing with a
shortage of houses, such as exists when this is written, illustrates
this rule, first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses,
second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by
investigating the profiteering builders and working men. For a
constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while
a greedy landlord, or a profiteering plumber is visible and immediate.

But while people will readily believe that in an unimagined future and
in unseen places a certain policy will benefit them, the actual
working out of policy follows a different logic from their opinions. A
nation may be induced to believe that jacking up the freight rates
will make the railroads prosperous. But that belief will not make the
roads prosperous, if the impact of those rates on farmers and shippers
is such as to produce a commodity price beyond what the consumer can
pay. Whether the consumer will pay the price depends not upon whether
he nodded his head nine months previously at the proposal to raise
rates and save business, but on whether he now wants a new hat or a
new automobile enough to pay for them.

3

Leaders often pretend that they have merely uncovered a program which
existed in the minds of their public. When they believe it, they are
usually deceiving themselves. Programs do not invent themselves
synchronously in a multitude of minds. That is not because a multitude
of minds is necessarily inferior to that of the leaders, but because
thought is the function of an organism, and a mass is not an organism.

This fact is obscured because the mass is constantly exposed to
suggestion. It reads not the news, but the news with an aura of
suggestion about it, indicating the line of action to be taken. It
hears reports, not objective as the facts are, but already stereotyped
to a certain pattern of behavior. Thus the ostensible leader often
finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor. But if,
as in a laboratory, one could remove all suggestion and leading from
the experience of a multitude, one would, I think, find something like
this: A mass exposed to the same stimuli would develop responses that
could theoretically be charted in a polygon of error. There would be a
certain group that felt sufficiently alike to be classified together.
There would be variants of feeling at both ends. These classifications
would tend to harden as individuals in each of the classifications
made their reactions vocal. That is to say, when the vague feelings of
those who felt vaguely had been put into words, they would know more
definitely what they felt, and would then feel it more definitely.

Leaders in touch with popular feeling are quickly conscious of these
reactions. They know that high prices are pressing upon the mass, or
that certain classes of individuals are becoming unpopular, or that
feeling towards another nation is friendly or hostile. But, always
barring the effect of suggestion which is merely the assumption of
leadership by the reporter, there would be nothing in the feeling of
the mass that fatally determined the choice of any particular policy.
All that the feeling of the mass demands is that policy as it is
developed and exposed shall be, if not logically, then by analogy and
association, connected with the original feeling.

So when a new policy is to be launched, there is a preliminary bid for
community of feeling, as in Mark Antony's speech to the followers of
Brutus. [Footnote: Excellently analyzed in Martin, _The Behavior of
Crowds,_ pp. 130-132,] In the first phase, the leader vocalizes the
prevalent opinion of the mass. He identifies himself with the familiar
attitudes of his audience, sometimes by telling a good story,
sometimes by brandishing his patriotism, often by pinching a
grievance. Finding that he is trustworthy, the multitude milling
hither and thither may turn in towards him. He will then be expected
to set forth a plan of campaign. But he will not find that plan in the
slogans which convey the feelings of the mass. It will not even always
be indicated by them. Where the incidence of policy is remote, all
that is essential is that the program shall be verbally and
emotionally connected at the start with what has become vocal in the
multitude. Trusted men in a familiar role subscribing to the accepted
symbols can go a very long way on their own initiative without
explaining the substance of their programs.

But wise leaders are not content to do that. Provided they think
publicity will not strengthen opposition too much, and that debate
will not delay action too long, they seek a certain measure of
consent. They take, if not the whole mass, then the subordinates of
the hierarchy sufficiently into their confidence to prepare them for
what might happen, and to make them feel that they have freely willed
the result. But however sincere the leader may be, there is always,
when the facts are very complicated, a certain amount of illusion in
these consultations. For it is impossible that all the contingencies
shall be as vivid to the whole public as they are to the more
experienced and the more imaginative. A fairly large percentage are
bound to agree without having taken the time, or without possessing
the background, for appreciating the choices which the leader presents
to them. No one, however, can ask for more. And only theorists do. If
we have had our day in court, if what we had to say was heard, and
then if what is done comes out well, most of us do not stop to
consider how much our opinion affected the business in hand.

And therefore, if the established powers are sensitive and
well-informed, if they are visibly trying to meet popular feeling, and
actually removing some of the causes of dissatisfaction, no matter how
slowly they proceed, provided they are seen to be proceeding, they
have little to fear. It takes stupendous and persistent blundering,
plus almost infinite tactlessness, to start a revolution from below.
Palace revolutions, interdepartmental revolutions, are a different
matter. So, too, is demagogy. That stops at relieving the tension by
expressing the feeling. But the statesman knows that such relief is
temporary, and if indulged too often, unsanitary. He, therefore, sees
to it that he arouses no feeling which he cannot sluice into a program
that deals with the facts to which the feelings refer.

But all leaders are not statesmen, all leaders hate to resign, and
most leaders find it hard to believe that bad as things are, the other
fellow would not make them worse. They do not passively wait for the
public to feel the incidence of policy, because the incidence of that
discovery is generally upon their own heads. They are, therefore,
intermittently engaged in mending their fences and consolidating their
position.

The mending of fences consists in offering an occasional scapegoat, in
redressing a minor grievance affecting a powerful individual or
faction, rearranging certain jobs, placating a group of people who
want an arsenal in their home town, or a law to stop somebody's vices.
Study the daily activity of any public official who depends on
election and you can enlarge this list. There are Congressmen elected
year after year who never think of dissipating their energy on public
affairs. They prefer to do a little service for a lot of people on a
lot of little subjects, rather than to engage in trying to do a big
service out there in the void. But the number of people to whom any
organization can be a successful valet is limited, and shrewd
politicians take care to attend either the influential, or somebody so
blatantly uninfluential that to pay any attention to him is a mark of
sensational magnanimity. The far greater number who cannot be held by
favors, the anonymous multitude, receive propaganda.

The established leaders of any organization have great natural
advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information.
The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the
important conferences. They met the important people. They have
responsibility. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention
and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great
deal of control over the access to the facts. Every official is in
some degree a censor. And since no one can suppress information,
either by concealing it or forgetting to mention it, without some
notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some
degree a propagandist. Strategically placed, and compelled often to
choose even at the best between the equally cogent though conflicting
ideals of safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the
official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts,
in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know.

4

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no
one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is
certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and
the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the
process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which
was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it
has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic,
because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And
so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern
means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner.
A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any
shifting of economic power.

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs,
persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of
popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences,
but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to
create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every
political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in
the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our
thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example,
to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge
needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from
the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to
self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It
has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience,
or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world
beyond our reach.




PART VI

THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY

"I confess that in America I saw more than America;
I sought the image of democracy itself."

Alexis de Tocqueville.

CHAPTER 16. THE SELF-CENTERED MAN
" 17. THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY
" 18. THE ROLE OF FORCE, PATRONAGE AND PRIVILEGE
" 19. THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM: GUILD SOCIALISM
" 20. A NEW IMAGE




CHAPTER XVI

THE SELF-CENTERED MAN

I

SINCE Public Opinion is supposed to be the prime mover in democracies,
one might reasonably expect to find a vast literature. One does not
find it. There are excellent books on government and parties, that is,
on the machinery which in theory registers public opinions after they
are formed. But on the sources from which these public opinions arise,
on the processes by which they are derived, there is relatively
little. The existence of a force called Public Opinion is in the main
taken for granted, and American political writers have been most
interested either in finding out how to make government express the
common will, or in how to prevent the common will from subverting the
purposes for which they believe the government exists. According to
their traditions they have wished either to tame opinion or to obey
it. Thus the editor of a notable series of text-books writes that "the
most difficult and the most momentous question of government (is) how
to transmit the force of individual opinion into public
action." [Footnote: Albert Bushnell Hart in the Introductory note to A.
Lawrence Lowell's _Public Opinion and Popular Government. _]

But surely there is a still more momentous question, the question of
how to validate our private versions of the political scene. There is,
as I shall try to indicate further on, the prospect of radical
improvement by the development of principles already in operation. But
this development will depend on how well we learn to use knowledge of
the way opinions are put together to watch over our own opinions when
they are being put together. For casual opinion, being the product of
partial contact, of tradition, and personal interests, cannot in the
nature of things take kindly to a method of political thought which is
based on exact record, measurement, analysis and comparison. Just
those qualities of the mind which determine what shall seem
interesting, important, familiar, personal, and dramatic, are the
qualities which in the first instance realistic opinion frustrates.
Therefore, unless there is in the community at large a growing
conviction that prejudice and intuition are not enough, the working
out of realistic opinion, which takes time, money, labor, conscious
effort, patience, and equanimity, will not find enough support. That
conviction grows as self-criticism increases, and makes us conscious
of buncombe, contemptuous of ourselves when we employ it, and on guard
to detect it. Without an ingrained habit of analyzing opinion when we
read, talk, and decide, most of us would hardly suspect the need of
better ideas, nor be interested in them when they appear, nor be able
to prevent the new technic of political intelligence from being
manipulated.

Yet democracies, if we are to judge by the oldest and most powerful of
them, have made a mystery out of public opinion. There have been
skilled organizers of opinion who understood the mystery well enough
to create majorities on election day. But these organizers have been
regarded by political science as low fellows or as "problems," not as
possessors of the most effective knowledge there was on how to create
and operate public opinion. The tendency of the people who have voiced
the ideas of democracy, even when they have not managed its action,
the tendency of students, orators, editors, has been to look upon
Public Opinion as men in other societies looked upon the uncanny
forces to which they ascribed the last word in the direction of
events.

For in almost every political theory there is an inscrutable element
which in the heyday of that theory goes unexamined. Behind the
appearances there is a Fate, there are Guardian Spirits, or Mandates
to a Chosen People, a Divine Monarchy, a Vice-Regent of Heaven, or a
Class of the Better Born. The more obvious angels, demons, and kings
are gone out of democratic thinking, but the need for believing that
there are reserve powers of guidance persists. It persisted for those
thinkers of the Eighteenth Century who designed the matrix of
democracy. They had a pale god, but warm hearts, and in the doctrine
of popular sovereignty they found the answer to their need of an
infallible origin for the new social order. There was the mystery, and
only enemies of the people touched it with profane and curious hands.

2

They did not remove the veil because they were practical politicians
in a bitter and uncertain struggle. They had themselves felt the
aspiration of democracy, which is ever so much deeper, more intimate
and more important than any theory of government. They were engaged,
as against the prejudice of ages, in the assertion of human dignity.
What possessed them was not whether John Smith had sound views on any
public question, but that John Smith, scion of a stock that had always
been considered inferior, would now bend his knee to no other man. It
was this spectacle that made it bliss "in that dawn to be alive." But
every analyst seems to degrade that dignity, to deny that all men are
reasonable all the time, or educated, or informed, to note that people
are fooled, that they do not always know their own interests, and that
all men are not equally fitted to govern.

The critics were about as welcome as a small boy with a drum. Every
one of these observations on the fallibility of man was being
exploited ad nauseam. Had democrats admitted there was truth in any of
the aristocratic arguments they would have opened a breach in the
defenses. And so just as Aristotle had to insist that the slave was a
slave by nature, the democrats had to insist that the free man was a
legislator and administrator by nature. They could not stop to explain
that a human soul might not yet have, or indeed might never have, this
technical equipment, and that nevertheless it had an inalienable right
not to be used as the unwilling instrument of other men. The superior
people were still too strong and too unscrupulous to have refrained
from capitalizing so candid a statement.

So the early democrats insisted that a reasoned righteousness welled
up spontaneously out of the mass of men. All of them hoped that it
would, many of them believed that it did, although the cleverest, like
Thomas Jefferson, had all sorts of private reservations. But one thing
was certain: if public opinion did not come forth spontaneously,
nobody in that age believed it would come forth at all. For in one
fundamental respect the political science on which democracy was based
was the same science that Aristotle formulated. It was the same
science for democrat and aristocrat, royalist and republican, in that
its major premise assumed the art of government to be a natural
endowment. Men differed radically when they tried to name the men so
endowed; but they agreed in thinking that the greatest question of all
was to find those in whom political wisdom was innate. Royalists were
sure that kings were born to govern. Alexander Hamilton thought that
while "there are strong minds in every walk of life... the
representative body, with too few exceptions to have any influence on
the spirit of the government, will be composed of landholders,
merchants, and men of the learned professions." [Footnote: _The
Federalist_, Nos. 35, 36. _Cf_. comment by Henry Jones Ford in
his _Rise and Growth of American Politics_. Ch. V.] Jefferson
thought the political faculties were deposited by God in farmers and
planters, and sometimes spoke as if they were found in all the people.
[Footnote: See below p. 268.] The main premise was the same: to govern
was an instinct that appeared, according to your social preferences,
in one man or a chosen few, in all males, or only in males who were
white and twenty-one, perhaps even in all men and all women.

In deciding who was most fit to govern, knowledge of the world was
taken for granted. The aristocrat believed that those who dealt with
large affairs possessed the instinct, the democrats asserted that all
men possessed the instinct and could therefore deal with large
affairs. It was no part of political science in either case to think
out how knowledge of the world could be brought to the ruler. If you
were for the people you did not try to work out the question of how to
keep the voter informed. By the age of twenty-one he had his political
faculties. What counted was a good heart, a reasoning mind, a balanced
judgment. These would ripen with age, but it was not necessary to
consider how to inform the heart and feed the reason. Men took in
their facts as they took in their breath.

3

But the facts men could come to possess in this effortless way were
limited. They could know the customs and more obvious character of the
place where they lived and worked. But the outer world they had to
conceive, and they did not conceive it instinctively, nor absorb
trustworthy knowledge of it just by living. Therefore, the only
environment in which spontaneous politics were possible was one
confined within the range of the ruler's direct and certain knowledge.
There is no escaping this conclusion, wherever you found government on
the natural range of men's faculties. "If," as Aristotle said,
[Footnote: _Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. 4.] "the citizens of a state
are to judge and distribute offices according to merit, then they must
know each other's characters; where they do not possess this
knowledge, both the election to offices and the decision of law suits
will go wrong."

Obviously this maxim was binding upon every school of political
thought. But it presented peculiar difficulties to the democrats.
Those who believed in class government could fairly claim that in the
court of the king, or in the country houses of the gentry, men did
know each other's characters, and as long as the rest of mankind was
passive, the only characters one needed to know were the characters of
men in the ruling class. But the democrats, who wanted to raise the
dignity of all men, were immediately involved by the immense size and
confusion of their ruling class--the male electorate. Their science
told them that politics was an instinct, and that the instinct worked
in a limited environment. Their hopes bade them insist that all men in
a very large environment could govern. In this deadly conflict between
their ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without
much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of God.

The paradox was too great, the stakes too big, their ideal too
precious for critical examination. They could not show how a citizen
of Boston was to stay in Boston and conceive the views of a Virginian,
how a Virginian in Virginia could have real opinions about the
government at Washington, how Congressmen in Washington could have
opinions about China or Mexico. For in that day it was not possible
for many men to have an unseen environment brought into the field of
their judgment. There had been some advances, to be sure, since
Aristotle. There were a few newspapers, and there were books, better
roads perhaps, and better ships. But there was no great advance, and
the political assumptions of the Eighteenth Century had essentially to
be those that had prevailed in political science for two thousand
years. The pioneer democrats did not possess the material for
resolving the conflict between the known range of man's attention and
their illimitable faith in his dignity.

Their assumptions antedated not only the modern newspaper, the
world-wide press services, photography and moving pictures, but, what
is really more significant, they antedated measurement and record,
quantitative and comparative analysis, the canons of evidence, and the
ability of psychological analysis to correct and discount the
prejudices of the witness. I do not mean to say that our records are
satisfactory, our analysis unbiased, our measurements sound. I do mean
to say that the key inventions have been made for bringing the unseen
world into the field of judgment. They had not been made in the time
of Aristotle, and they were not yet important enough to be visible for
political theory in the age of Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Thomas
Jefferson. In a later chapter I think we shall see that even in the
latest theory of human reconstruction, that of the English Guild
Socialists, all the deeper premises have been taken over from this
older system of political thought.