Public interest lost?

Daedalus, Fall 2007 by Wolfson, Adam

When the editors of Doedalus invited me, along with several others, to write an essay on the subject of the public interest, I will admit I had some qualms. For many years I edited a journal with Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol by that very name, and so it was not wholly unfamiliar terrain. Yet what would be the result, I wondered, of asking intellectuals, of all people, to write on the subject - and in particular of asking them whether the thing even exists ? Was that not inviting the fox to guard the henhouse? To the average American the idea of the public interest is, I suspect, perfectly sensible; and I also suspect that without such a notion politicians and government officials would find it difficult to perform their jobs. But what could the public interest possibly mean to an intellectual? If he even bothers to think about the idea it is probably to debunk it. What good would come from only more such debunking? Perhaps, though, I am being unfair to my fellow intellectuals. We live, after all, in uncertain and perilous times, times in which older, long-forgotten ideals may once again seem pressingly relevant. And so perhaps the editors of Doedalus were right to call for a reconsideration of this invaluable ideal.

However that may be, we need to begin from where we left off. The public interest as an ideal last received a full airing among scholars in the 1950s and 1960s. I will turn my attention first to this earlier discussion: I will try to capture the flavor of this debate while suggesting what may have gone wrong. It will be the burden of my argument that for all the rigor of their analysis, intellectuals are in fact ill-equipped to understand the public interest - in contrast to America's leading statesmen who live and breathe it.

Thus I will next cast my eye further back in time to consider the reflections of James Madison and Abraham Lincoln on the public interest. The question of the public interest in America surely begins in some sense with Madison's formulation of it ; but notwithstanding the vaunted reputation of his analysis as presented in The Federalist, No. 10, Madison arguably failed to offer an adequate conception, which is why I will turn next to Abraham Lincoln. It seems to me that Lincoln provided the Archimedean point for all thinking about the public interest in America, and that our current notions of it pale beside his more robust understanding.

When the subject of the public interest last received the close scrutiny of our intellectuals, in the 1950s and 1960s, it did not fare so well. Many of the leading lights of the day weighed in on the question, including Harold Lasswell, Herbert Storing, Brian Barry, Anthony Downs, Charles Frankel, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Edward Banfield, and Robert Dahl. Numerous scholarly books were published on the subject, under such titles as The Public Interest and Individual Interests (Virginia Held), The Public Interest: A Critique of the Theory of a Political Concept (Glendon Schubert), The Public Interest: An Essay Concerning the Normative Discourse of Politics (Richard Flathman), and Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (John A. W. Gunn). The subject also became the focus of collaborative scholarly efforts. In 1959 the philosophers Wayne A. R. Leys and Charner Perry, after receiving written input from, among others, Horace Kallen, Richard McKeon, Joseph Cropsey, Peter Drucker, and Frank Knight, put together a scholarly monograph, titled Philosophy and the Public Interest, that sought to clarify the concept. A few years later, NOMOS, edited by Carl J. Friedrich, dedicated a volume of essays to the meaning of the public interest.

What especially preoccupied the scholars of this era was the question of definition : how to demarcate and classify the various theories of the public interest. These various definitions need not detain us here except to take note of how schematic and abstract many of them were. Edward Banfield came up with five differing conceptions - two unitary ones ("organismic" and "communalist") and three individualistic ones ("utilitarian," "quasi-utilitarian," and "qualified individualistic")1; Frank Sorauf also came up with five - "commonly-held value," "the wise or superior interest," "moral imperative," "a balance of interest," and "undefined"2; Glendon Schubert with three - "rationalist," "idealist," and "realist"3; and Virginia Held with three as well - "preponderance theories," "common interest theories," and "unitary conceptions."4

Beyond the attempt at classification, the intellectuals of these decades grappled with the more fundamental question of whether such a thing as the public interest even existed. On this question both sides were argued, but looking back it does seem that the predominant view was that the public interest was at most a noble lie, one that was, however, no longer needed. Some of a more skeptical bent found the problem to be in the fact that the public interest could not be known ; others in that it could be known to be a sham. Anthony Downs seemed to speak for many when he wrote in 1962 that "it soon becomes apparent that no general agreement exists about whether the term has any meaning at all, or, if it has, what the meaning is, which specific actions are in the public interest and which are not, and how to distinguish between them."5 Or, as Robert Dahl wrote in a letter to Leys and Perry in the preparation of their monograph : "There is little philosophical mileage to be gained from using the term at all."6 The assessment of Frank Sorauf seemed to capture the general tenor of sentiment: "The term is too burdened with multiple meanings for valuable use as a tool of political analysis," and is anyway nothing but a "myth."7