racy, which even Mr. Lippmann's treatment has not purged." He did not deny the vigor of Lippmann's "relentless and realistic analysis"—"per— haps the most effective indictment of democracy ... ever penned." He tried to sidestep the indictment, however, by disavowing the notion of the "omnicompetent citizen"—the "man of straw" against which so much of Lippmann's argument was directed.

Lippmann's strictures, Dewey claimed, applied only to a nineteenth‐ century notion of democracy that had been "nullified by the course of events." The old individualism—the source of the fiction of the "omnicompetent citizen"—rested on a "false psychology" that exaggerated individuals' self-sufficiency and their "intelligent and calculated regard for their own good." The discovery that "crudely intelligized emotion" and "habit" played a larger part in human conduct than rational self‐ interest invalidated individualism, not democracy. It was not enlightened self-interest, however, that qualified ordinary men and women to manage their own affairs, according to Dewey; it was their access to a common fund of knowledge, the product of "association," "communication," "tradition," and of "tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned." In the twentieth century, this socially generated knowledge took a rigorously scientific form, but that did not mean that only experts and "insiders," as Lippmann argued, were in a position to understand or make use of it. Government by experts was not only undesirable but "impossible." "In the degree to which they become a specialized class, they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve." An understanding of these needs could be acquired only in the course of "debate, discussion and persuasion"—the "improvement of the methods and conditions" of which therefore became the central challenge confronting twentieth-century democrats.

These arguments, outlined in two long reviews of Lippmann's work and elaborated in The Public and Its Problems (1927) and Individualism Old and New (1930), did not meet the central issue raised by the rise of mass communications—the same issue that was raised, in another form, by the rise of mass production. Just as the consolidation of industry undermined workers' control of production, so the consolidation of communications deprived the public of an "articulate voice" in public affairs, as Dewey himself appeared to admit. Criticism of individualism, to which Dewey devoted so much of his energy in the twenties and thirties, did not ad

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