The Phantom Public

The Phantom Public is a book published in 1925 by journalist Walter Lippmann in which he expresses his lack of faith in the democratic system by arguing that the public exists merely as an illusion, myth, and inevitably a phantom. As Carl Bybee wrote, "For Lippmann the public was a theoretical fiction and government was primarily an administrative problem to be solved as efficiently as possible, so that people could get on with their own individualistic pursuits" (48).

The Phantom Public was published in 1925 following Lippmann's experiences observing the manipulation of public opinion during World War I and the rise of fascism in Benito Mussolini's Italy. It followed his better-known work Public Opinion (1922) and moves further toward disillusionment with democratic politics. The book provoked a response from philosopher John Dewey, who argued in The Public and its Problems (1927) that the public was not a phantom but merely "in eclipse" and that robust democratic politics are possible. Today, the exchange between Lippmann and Dewey continues to be important for the critique of contemporary journalism, and press critics such as New York University's Jay Rosen invoke it to support moves toward civic journalism.

Lippmann’s book is a forceful critique of what he takes to be mistaken conceptions of "the public" found in democratic theory like that it is made up of sovereign and omnicompetent citizens (21); "the people" are a sort of superindividual with one will and one mind (160) or an "organism with an organic unity of which the individual is a cell" (147); the public directs the course of events (77); it is a knowable body with fixed membership (110); it embodies cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested intuition (168-9); and it is a dispenser of law or morals (106). Lippmann counters that the public is none of those things but a "mere phantom," an abstraction (77) embedded in a "false philosophy" (200) that depends on a "mystical notion of Society" (147). Democratic theories, he argues, vaguely assert that the public can act competently to direct public affairs and that the functioning of government is the will of the people, but Lippmann dismisses such notions of the capacities of the public as a fiction.