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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Phantom Public

The Phantom Public

Lippmann, Walter

Paperback

Medical ReferenceGeneral SociologyUnited States Politics

ISBN10: 1684227097
ISBN13: 9781684227099
Publisher: Martino Fine Books
Published: Jun 7 2022
Pages: 198
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

2022 Reprint of the 1925 Edition. Lippmann's The Phantom Public expresses the author's 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. Lippmann posits that society is made up of two types of people: agents and bystanders (also referred to as insiders and outsiders). The agent is someone who can act executively on the basis of his own opinions to address the substance of an issue, and the bystander is the public, merely a spectator of action. Only those familiar enough with the substance of a problem are able to then analyze it and propose solutions, to take executive action. Most of the time the public is just a deaf spectator in the back row because, for the most part, individuals are more interested in their private affairs and their individual relations than in those matters that govern society, the public questions about which they know very little. Remains an interesting discussion to this day.

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