orthodox democrat." In a complex industrial society, government had to be carried on by officials who were expected to "conceive a common interest." In their attempt to stretch their minds "beyond the limits of immediate experience," these officials would be guided either by public opinion or by expert knowledge. There was no escape from this choice.

Public opinion was unreliable, according to Lippmann, because it could be united only by an appeal to slogans and "symbolic pictures." In a society ruled by public opinion, government became the art of "manipulation"—the "manufacture of consent." "Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.... Everything is on the plane of assertion and propaganda." Lippmann's analysis rested on the epistemological distinction between truth and mere opinion, enshrined in the dominant tradition of modern philosophy. The pragmatic philosophers had attempted to demolish this distinction, most recently in Dewey's Quest for Certainty; but Lippmann, though professing indebtedness to James and Dewey, paid no attention to their argument that even scientific knowledge is colored by "expectations," as Lippmann put it, and that science cannot be distinguished from opinion on the grounds that it puts an end to doubt. Truth, as Lippmann conceived it, grew out of disinterested scientific inquiry; everything else was ideology (though he did not use that word, not yet in general circulation). The scope of public debate, accordingly, had to be severely restricted. At best, public debate was a disagreeable necessity—not the very essence of democracy, as Brownson or Bourne would have argued, but its "primary defect," which arose only because "exact knowledge," unfortunately, was in limited supply. Ideally public debate would not take place at all; decisions would be based on scientific "standards of measurement" alone. Science cut through "entangling stereotypes and slogans," the "threads of memory and emotion" that kept the "responsible administrator" tied up in knots. Like Edmund Burke, Lippmann distrusted memory as an important source of conflict and disagreement. He proposed to counter its influence, however, not with custom but with "organized intelligence."

Even Lippmann's opponents conceded the force of his argument. If he was right, it was time to bid a definitive farewell to virtue—that is, to the

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