The phantom public

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.”