The Phantom Public

From the best selling author of A Preface to Politics, Public Opinion, and Liberty and the News! The Phantom Public was Lippman’s most towering achievement influencing political thought for decades to come. In it Lippman posits that the public exists merely as an illusion, myth, and inevitably a phantom; that the common man cannot be expected to know enough about events entirely beyond their control to cast an informed and meaningful vote.

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 —Carl Bybee

Lippmann’s most powerfully argued and revealing books. In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory. —Ronald Steel