A Revery Entertained by the Intellectual Class: Dewey and Lippmann Revisted

AI Log Reviews Superbloom, Part Two

This is part two of my review essay about Nicolas Carr’s Superbloom. Part One is here.

Superbloom is largely concerned with developments in communication technology over the last twenty years, and, as I argued in part one, is strengthened by its engagement with earlier ideas, particularly those of the often overlooked Charles Horton Cooley, who coined the term social media in 1897.

That makes it rather unfair for me to pick the nits off Carr’s discussion of the exchange of ideas between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann in the 1920s, which Carr treats with far more understanding than most writers. Yet, he frames their ideas with the oft-repeated but too-simple story of Lippmann as a clear-eyed democratic realist and Dewey as a dreamer of democratic ideals. In fact, these two thinkers argued that technocracy isn’t just anti-democratic; it is impossible to implement. I’ve indulged in footnotes and links more than usual for readers who want to learn more.

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The notion that intelligence is a personal endowment or personal attainment is the great conceit of the intellectual class, as that of the commercial class is that wealth is something which they personally have wrought and possess.

—John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 1927.

Dewey, Lippmann, and their Publics

In Part One of this essay, I said that among Superbloom’s many contributions to the current discourse about technology is its highlighting the social ideas of Charles Horton Cooley. Carr credits Cooley for anticipating the insights of later media studies scholars like Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, and points out that Cooley’s optimism about the power of technology to bring people together blinded him to the ways the social media of his time frustrated democratic political and social movements. Carr turns to the Lippmann-Dewey Debate to discuss two writers who did think carefully and critically about the problems social media creates for democracy.

Carr’s presentation of this set piece of American intellectual history rightly understands John Dewey as extending Walter Lippmann’s insights from Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925) about the challenges mass media present for democratic politics. The Public and Its Problems (1927) agrees with Lippmann's insights about the mass media’s social effects, and shows Dewey was just as troubled by what those effects mean for democracy. Yet, for the past three decades, philosophers and pundits have followed media scholar James Carey's framework of a debate, focusing on the one place where Dewey departs from Lippmann. In so doing, they squeeze Dewey into the role of optimistic advocate for democratic ideals, and portray Lippmann as a realist advocate for the exercise of technocratic power. Carr follows this unfortunate tendency, ending his chapter “The Democratic Fallacy” with this characterization: “Dewey told us what we want to hear. Lippmann told us what we need to hear.” ¹

This gets it exactly backward.

Lippmann argues that because the democratic masses are not capable of the necessary wisdom and intelligence for self-government, elites should exercise political power, sometimes using anti-democratic means. Dewey agrees with Lippmann’s premise about the masses, but not his solution. In the spirit of Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst form of government “except for all those others that have been tried,” Dewey believes that our only hope, inadequate as it is to the current moment, is to develop the wisdom and intelligence of the masses through democratic education. This can only happen if scientists and policymakers align their interests with the unwise and politically incapable masses, and engage with them to understand and develop the public interest.

In Liberty and the News (1920), which is available from Princeton University Press, and The Good Society (1938), which is sadly out of print, Walter Lippmann is far closer to Dewey’s position than he is in Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).

The problem with Dewey’s answer is not that he tells us what we want to hear. Dewey is as skeptical as Lippmann about the prospects of democracy in an age of social media. The problem with Dewey is that he tells us readers of books—intellectuals, social scientists, and policy makers—what we don’t want to hear: that we are not to be trusted, that “rule by those intellectually qualified, by expert intellectuals” is a seductive impossibility.

Dewey’s critique of what he calls “this revival of the Platonic notion that philosophers should be kings” is far more than a moral objection or a cynical attack on intellectual self-regard. Cynics, Dewey writes, might call this technocratic rule

a revery entertained by the intellectual class in compensation for an impotence consequent upon the divorce of theory and practice, upon the remoteness of specialized science from the affairs of life: the gulf bridged not by the intellectuals but by inventors and engineers hired by the captains of industry.

Indeed, cynics say exactly that, then and now, pointing out that in their eagerness to earn status among their peers by doing narrow, statistically complex research about small questions, academic intellectuals have left the masses to the offerings of inventors and engineers who make pretty toys, and oligarchic captains who build great wealth commercializing these products. Today, the offerings of giant technology companies and their owners’ prognostications distract our attention from serious things and, worse, as Carr makes clear, they build public communication platforms that place conflict at the center of social life.²

But Dewey was no cynic, and this criticism of experts wielding power does not address the actual problem with intellectuals acting as shepherds to control what Lippmann calls “the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.” The real problem, as Dewey argues, is that technocratic solutions do not accomplish anything and may strengthen the position of oligarchs.

If the masses are as intellectually irredeemable as its premise implies, they at all events have both too many desires and too much power to permit rule by experts to obtain. The very ignorance, bias, frivolity, jealousy, instability, which are alleged to incapacitate them from share in political affairs, unfit them still more for passive submission to rule by intellectuals. Rule by an economic class may be disguised from the masses; rule by experts could not be covered up. It could be made to work only if the intellectuals became the willing tools of big economic interests. Otherwise they would have to ally themselves with the masses, and that implies, once more, a share in government by the latter.

Dewey’s Answer

This is Dewey’s answer: social science and policy making aligned with the interests of the public is democracy’s only possible future. Intellectuals who speak for or about the people or groups of people as abstractions or write “studies show” analyses that merely support their policy preferences are flailing. They risk irrelevance or, worse, unintentionally becoming the tools of the anti-democratic economic interests they think they are opposing.

“Rule by an economic class may be disguised from the masses; rule by experts could not be covered up” is Dewey’s one-sentence summary of where he differs from Lippmann. In the 1930s, Lippmann came to agree with him.³

Focusing on their books misses the fact that Dewey and Lippmann shared a critical view of technocratic social scientists. Lippmann was so dismayed by the arrogance and misleading claims of intelligence experts that he wrote a series of essays in 1922, published in The New Republic, attacking IQ tests just as they were being introduced to the public as a tool to cull the “mentally deficient” from the herd. Dewey joined Lippmann in this attack, and the two of them presented a united front against academic experts promoting policy frameworks based on Galtonian social science.

Lewis Terman, who put the “Stanford” in the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, answered with an essay of his own, but came off so arrogant that colleagues urged him not to continue the exchange. The efforts of Lippmann, Dewey, and others did not stop the use of IQ testing by policymakers and courts, but they gave voice to opposing views and helped raise doubts that eventually blunted the reach of the eugenics movement. Lippmann’s exchange with Terman was an actual debate, one that, as Tom Arnold-Forster says, “reveals a broader range of ideas about the politics of expert authority in a modern democratic society.”⁴

The differences between Dewey and Lippmann, and there are many, are of emphasis. For Lippmann, liberalism is paramount. When democracy threatens individual freedom, he argues for taking anti-democratic measures. For Dewey, democracy is the priority, and, for him, the fact that the masses act unwisely changes nothing. He believes democracy is a way of life to be realized, not simply a means for making political decisions. Progress toward that way of life would create a society that respects individual liberty and reforms political institutions from the bottom up. Developing a democratic culture is a long-term project, and is by no means certain to succeed.

I was unable to locate information about this photo of Dewey, but a similar photo appears on this webpage of the Center for Dewey Studies.

Creating a democratic culture was not a vague aspiration for Dewey. He does not say much about schooling in The Public and Its Problems because when it was published, Dewey was already famous for arguing that school is where democratic social change must begin. Those unsympathetic to or unaware of Dewey’s ideas lump him in with the worst aspects of progressive reform, missing the extent to which he was a critic of the technocratic social science and the romantic child-centered idealism that underpinned so much of the educational reform efforts during his long life.

Dewey never abandoned what the women teachers of the Chicago Laboratory School, his wife Alice among them, taught him in the 1890s. He turned these lessons into books about schooling in a democratic society that brought him to the public’s attention. As he moved from Chicago to New York to become one of the best-known public intellectuals in the world, he remained committed to the idea that the school, which he calls “an embryonic community,” is where democratic culture begins.

Dewey’s essay “Politics as Education,” a short piece published in The New Republic in 1924, was written as he began grappling with Lippmann’s analysis of problems of democratic government in an age of mass media.⁵ It is pessimistic about the state of politics and schooling, but Dewey concludes on a hopeful note, one that makes clear that his loyalties and faith are with teachers and not expert reformers. His view is that if our systems of schooling reorient around developing critical intelligence and a broad, participatory understanding of the scientific method, and if “teachers become sufficiently courageous and emancipated to insist that education means the creation of a discriminating mind,” then schooling could become the democratic means to an improved end.

When this happens schools will be the dangerous outposts of a humane civilization. But they will also begin to be supremely interesting
places. For it will then have come about that education and
politics are one and the same thing because politics will have to be in
fact what it now pretends to be, the intelligent management of
social affairs.

Don’t misread “intelligent management of social affairs” as technocratic systems of schooling. Dewey means embryonic communities embedded in local communities that cultivate the social intelligence of the public. His hope that schooling would soon create conditions for a growing democratic culture was fading by the time he read Lippmann’s Public Opinion, but he did not abandon public schools as the long-term means to achieving democratic ends.

Dewey is pessimistic because he saw more clearly than Cooley that the liquefaction of the social medium is a liquefaction of the social bonds that connect people to their local community. His diagnosis in the 1920s speaks to the ways social media has “invaded and largely destroyed” the “self-centered locality.” Unlike many social scientists of his day and ours, Dewey is uncertain about cause and effect when it comes to how this process changes our social experience.

No one knows how much of the frothy excitement of life, of mania for motion, of fretful discontent, of need for artificial stimulation, is the expression of frantic search for something to fill the void caused by the loosening of the bonds which hold persons together in immediate community of experience.

Does social media draw our attention because we have lost connections to others? Or does social media cause the dissolution? Social science is good at measuring the correlations we notice, but assumptions about cause turns experts into augurs. The incentives of the attention economy encourage prognostication and confident prediction. Headlines and “studies show” best-sellers confirm the worst, while the complexities go unexamined. When each side of every debate has the science on its side, when everyone’s pet theory to improve schooling is evidence-based, then it all becomes something of a joke.

No silver linings

The case for eliminating connected devices at school is strong enough based on common sense alone. More charts will not change the calculus for policymakers or make bans any easier to enforce. And even if schools are free of personal devices, school systems spend a huge portion of their shrinking budgets on equipping every classroom with the latest digital technology and new software, whether teachers want them or not.

Attempting to make schools the dangerous and interesting outposts of a democratic culture feels inadequate to the size and scale of today’s pressing public problems. Yet, if we take democratic education to mean more than efficiently managed mass schooling, Dewey’s answer is the best we have. That answer requires redirecting “the forces which have effected uniform standardization, mobility, and remote invisible relationships” so that they “flow back into local life, keeping it flexible, preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past, and furnishing it with the elements of a variegated and many-hued experience.” Then, Dewey says, “organization may cease to be taken as an end in itself.”⁶

The recent pandemic hit big school systems hard. Families and students are choosing alternatives to big systems, and voters are supporting Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) and other unregulated versions of school voucher programs. Although we will no longer have reliable national numbers about school enrollment, it seems clear that this shift in public education funding and declining public school attendance will be at the center of politics in the coming decade. Working to make microschools the incremental, small-scale means for democratic social change runs smack into an ascendant political movement directing public funding away from big systems of schooling. That movement, shaped by a coordinated network of billionaires and right-wing operatives, has turned the idea of microschools like the one Alice Dewey managed in Chicago into a hot potato on the left as some defend the ideals of a common system of schooling and others seek to build small sanctuaries of learning for students who are too often its victims.⁷

The reading and math wars, so beloved of experts and pundits, seem almost quaint today as education researchers are laid off and national data programs are defunded. The destruction of long-standing programs to gather and analyze information about schooling will hobble attempts to improve our systems of education at the national level. But perhaps that is not the tragedy it seems. The legacies of No Child Left Behind and the Common Core provide little support for another wave of national reform. Perhaps, the result of the current chaos will be to invigorate the laboratories of democracy.

There is no silver lining in the tornado ripping through our federal agencies and universities, but whatever emerges afterward should aim for something better when it comes to supporting public schools. Let’s reduce the incentives for social scientists to play the game of applying complex statistical methods to small datasets and stop paying consultants and technology companies to optimize what historian David Tyack called “the one best system.” Instead, experts and oligarchs should turn their attention toward furnishing teachers “with the elements of a variegated and many-hued experience” and help strengthen our resolve against over-capitalized technology companies desperately trying to make Anna Julia Cooper’s dark joke come true:

I wonder that a robot has not been invented to make the assignments, give the objective tests, mark the scores and—chloroform all teachers who dared bring original thought to the specific problems and needs of their pupils.

Public school teachers bring original thought to their classrooms every day, and yet they spend their time and energy on being a counter-friction to machinery imposed upon their work by well-meaning but narrow-minded experts and managers with the best of intentions. The promise that creating new systems out of large AI models will free up teachers’ time, letting machines perform meaningless bureaucratic work while teachers teach, is the same mirage offered by those selling previous versions of personalized teaching machines. More elaborate machinery will not solve the problems of public education. Given what’s been happening lately, the prospects for resisting are grim.

One thing we can count on is that the future will be stranger than we can imagine. Here is a short science-fiction story about a utopia built by kindergarten teachers after society collapses.

Click here to read the whole thing. And please support Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by buying A City on Mars and other books!

The rock and the margins

Thinking about the long history of social media helps correct the tendency to imagine that digital technology is the sole cause of the public problems facing us today. The liquefying effects of the railroad, telegraph, telephone, and cheap mechanical printing were as devastating to those alive in 1900 as the transformations wrought by digital networked devices that so occupy our attention today. And now, as we enter a new phase of the digital age with transformer-based large AI models, we feel as though our social selves are drowning in the flood, that we live at the moment of maximum liquefaction.

Superbloom ends by finding hope in a rock, specifically, Samuel Johnson’s famous kick of a rock refuting George Berkeley’s idealism. Carr calls that rock “an emblem of stability, solidity, resistance”; it reminds us of the material world as experienced by our human bodies. He urges us to think about “what separates the human animal from the AI machine.” Yet, when we distinguish the machine from the human, we draw not a line of separation, but a two-way arrow. Every communication technology is an expression of human intelligence. Dewey put it this way: “The level of action fixed by embodied intelligence is always the important thing.” Dewey means embodied both in the material self and in society as a whole.

The moral perfectionism offered by Thoreau and Carr and the reconstruction of the social self offered by Cooley and Dewey offer a basis for restoring solid ground. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey argued that democracy is not just material and social; it offers all the “elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race,” and that our task is to “make it explicit and militant.” Carr hints at this potential when he tentatively offers the word salvation in his conclusion.

I take his use of salvation in the spirit of William James, who understood it as social and material, as well as spiritual: “You may interpret the word 'salvation' in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and distributive, or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please.” Climacteric means a major turning point or critical stage, which describes where we are today when it comes to social media—especially the latest social media, large, transformer-based, AI models—and their relation to schooling.

The feeling that we are living in climacteric times has existed as long as social media have existed, which is to say, for all of written history, and very likely before. Carr and Dewey point us in a similar direction to meet the challenges of our moving present. In Carr’s rendering, salvation lies in individuals making “personal, willful acts of excommunication” that create movements “not outside of society but at society’s margin, not beyond the reach of the informational flow but beyond the reach of its liquefying force.” The school could be just such a place, where small groups work together at the margins to grow the embryos of a democratic future.

Recall Cooley’s metaphor about the “thick, inelastic liquid” transmitting large waves, which bear “countless wavelets and ripples.” Surfing those wavelets and ripples on social media makes them seem larger and more powerful than they are. We can always stand on solid ground, joining with what Cooley called our primary group, and dive together into the slow, molasses waves. Stand again, look into the eyes of our companions, listen to what they say, and answer in our own voices.

Dewey concludes The Public and Its Problems with a meditation on Emerson’s image from Self-Reliance: “We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity.” Dewey argues that each of us has access to this persistent and transformative power.

There is no limit to the liberal expansion and confirmation of limited personal intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another in the communications of the local community. That and that only gives reality to public opinion.

As delightful and addictive as small screens and AI chatbots appear to be at the moment, we can put them aside and use the oldest communication tool at our disposal, the original technology of human connection, the spoken word. School is the obvious place to organize our immense social intelligence. Many schools and teachers already start each day by severing connections to the distracting digital networks so that students can develop their intelligence in communion with others. This work is slow, difficult, and it loses value as it gets scaled and standardized.

I believe the moral perfectionism Thoreau and Carr offer is essential to democratic culture, but that Dewey shows us how to bring that culture into being. He urges us to look beyond individual self-perfection and join our work with those immediately around us. Our salvation, understood as a direction of travel toward a better culture, is to be found in the explicit and militant work of creating democracy through teaching and learning together. That work would be easier if experts and oligarchs joined teachers and students in the attempt to make schools supremely interesting places.

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I am working on an essay about Charles Sanders Peirce, who, like his contemporaries Charles Cooley and John Dewey, offers ideas to help understand twenty-first-century technology. Subscribe to receive that essay and others directly in your email inbox.

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1. To be fair, Carr brings Dewey back later in the book to describe the “void caused by the loosening of bonds which hold persons together in immediate community of experience.” He does not mistake Dewey for an optimist so much as miss the extent to which The Public and Its Problems corrects Lippmann’s briefly held delusion about the potential for experts to control social change in liberal democratic societies.

2. Dewey is not saying that the Galtonian methods of surveys, measurement, and rankings are worthless. He wrote a positive review of Galton’s Natural Inheritance (1889) just after it was published, focusing on Galton’s innovative statistical methods. Dewey’s point here is that when academic social science divorces theory from practice, it gets subsumed by the narrow interests of the scientists themselves.

Even if Galtonian methods can escape their associations with pseudoscientific racism (it has not so far), the best such methods can do, by themselves, is show that social questions are complicated and that we need more data, always more data. At their worst, such methods fuel the ongoing obsession with IQ as a measure of social worth and the revival of eugenics, now turning into well-funded commercial enterprises.

3. In the 1930s, Lippmann was a critic of the technocracy movement, which presented rational rule by engineers and social scientists as the answer to democratic chaos. The Good Society (1937) is where Lippmann admits, without naming him, that Dewey had it right, saying that a technocratic social order “is as complete a delusion as perpetual motion.” Here is the full passage.

I began by thinking that while it might be difficult to find planners and managers who were wise and disinterested enough, the ideal might eventually be realized by a well-trained ruling class. But I have finally come to see that such a social order is not even theoretically conceivable; that the vision, when analyzed carefully, turns out to be not merely difficult of administration but devoid of any meaning whatever; that it is as complete a delusion as perpetual motion. I realized at last that a directed society must be bellicose and poor. If it is not both bellicose and poor, it cannot be directed. I realized then that a prosperous and peaceable society must be free. If it is not free, it cannot be prosperous and peaceable.

The book itself is a fascinating attempt to reconcile Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, “whose critique of planned economy has brought a new understanding of the whole problem of collectivism,” to John Maynard Keynes, “who has done so much to demonstrate to the free peoples that the modern economy can be regulated without dictatorship.” Given how much of our current discourse about political economy is oriented around Hayek vs. Keynes, it is unfortunate that Lippmann’s writing on the topic is out of print. Just as his brief advocacy for rule by experts has made Lippmann a signpost for twentieth-century technocracy, his brief engagement with von Mises and Hayek has cast him into the role of a neoliberal. In fact, Lippmann took his economic ideas more from Keynes.

4. I recommend Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (2025). See also, The Problematic Public: Lippmann, Dewey, and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century (2023), which uses “the debate about the debate” as a backdrop for discussing the relevance of both thinkers today.

For recent examples of the debate construction in action, see Jeffrey Friedman’s Power without Knowledge (2019) and Dan Williams’s essays about Lippmann and Dewey on Conspicuous Cognition.

The “Lippmann-Dewey debate” is not a historical artifact so much as a philosophical thought experiment inspired by a narrow reading of three books in the 1920s. It is a meme about the tension between naive democratic ideals and technocratic expertise that strips away the context of Dewey and Lippmann’s exchange of ideas, especially their shared work against eugenics, fascism, and communism, as those global movements were attracting many American intellectuals.

To borrow a term from Kevin Munger writing at

Never Met a Science

, I wonder about the antimeme of the Lippmann-Dewey debate. What is it that we can’t understand when we talk about democracy and technocracy in terms of this debate that didn’t happen?

Perhaps the antimeme is Dewey’s democratic radicalism expressed in Liberalism and Social Action and Individualism Old and New. Or, maybe it is Lippmann’s radical defense of liberalism in The Good Society. I know many people laugh at the idea of a radical liberal democrat. Yet, their writing in the 1930s expresses ideas “that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance.” That is Munger quoting Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

5. Unfortunately, The New Republic does not have this particular essay by Dewey available in its online archive of Dewey’s writing, but the essays collected there will give you a taste of his writing for a general audience. “Politics and Education” is available in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899-1924. Volume 15: 1923-1924, Essays.

6. “The prospects of the reconstruction of face-to-face communities,” Dewey says, are beyond the scope of The Public and Its Problems, but he is clear that in this direction, hope lies. Dewey titles the final chapter “The Problem of Method” because he offers nothing in the way of concrete steps for this reconstruction, no way to find “the method of resolution.” Instead, he ends the book by sketching “the intellectual antecedents of such a method.”

In John Dewey and American Democracy, Robert Westbrook is hard on Dewey for this dodge. Still, this is the best account of Lippmann’s influence on Dewey’s thinking I know, and the best biography of Dewey, period. It is worth noting that Dewey informs the work of many academic political scientists and philosophers writing today, most notably Danielle Allen and Henry Farrell.

7. In The Privateers (2024), Josh Cowen tells the story of how right-wing politics have shaped educational policy since Brown v. Board of Education. As he puts it in the book’s subtitle, “billionaires created a culture war and sold school vouchers” as educational freedom. Cowen shows that this has been a disaster for students in voucher-funded schools, at least when their learning measures are compared to traditional public schools.

This anti-democratic politics of public school reform illustrates what Dewey called rule by an economic class that is disguised from the masses. Those on the left working to reconstruct democratic schooling through small, independent schools face a politics determined to turn public school funding into a choice between continuing the bureaucratic excesses of the “one best system” or kleptocratic enrichment schemes for already wealthy entrepreneurs.