Walter Lippmanns The Public Philosophy :: The Public Philosophy

Walter Lippmanns The human beings PhilosophyWalter Lippmann begins his The Public Philosophy by expressing his concern for the state of the Western Lib timel Democracies. The West, he writes, suffers from a disorder from within. This disorder has its roots in the long ease between 1812 and 1914, and was further exascurbated by the great population increase of that era and the coinciding industrial revolution. The latter changed the nature of armed struggle, which in childs play intensified the democratic malady. The situation Lippmann describes is the paralysis of governments, the inability of the state to take out difficult and unpopular decisions.This paralysis is the product of both the long quietness and the great war. The period extending from Waterloo to 1914 lulled the West into believing that the age of Mans aggression had passed. Because the fleshy decisions of taxation, prohibition, and war were not often faced in these years, the Jacobin concept of the zing of weak government was instilled in the West. When the first world war did fall out about, the West was unable to deal efficaciously with its costs. The new technologies spawned by the industrial revolution, as well as the greater populations involved, had made war immeasurably more costly than in the past. Consequently, the executive aspects of Western governments were forced to democratize the appropriation of men and money by handing their power to the exercise assemblies. The assemblies withal were forced to cede their power to the People, who channeled them to media powers and party leaders. The result was Disastrous and revolutionary. The democracies became incapacitated to wage war for rational ends or to make a ease which would be enforced.Lippmann holds that the major malfunction of the West is this acquisition of executive and representative powers by the masses. This is a fundamental distortion of the rights of the governed. Lippmann contends that the People have only if two natural rights to decide whether or not to by governed, and to conduct who shall govern them. This breakdown of the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and the blasting decline of Western society. Why then, cannot a mass govern effectively?