Realizing the public interest: reflections on an elusive goal

Daedalus, Fall 2007 by Glazer, Nathan

One would think that having edited for thirty years a journal titled The Public Interest, I should be clear on what the public interest is, how to determine it, and perhaps how to implement it. But after reading hundreds of articles by scholars, journalists, and public figures who have tried, in one area of public policy after another, to define the policies that would truly promote the public interest, I am only left in greater uncertainty as to how to define it.

Nonetheless, the language to express the public interest, as against all the 'special interests," is available. No one has done it better than Walter Lippman, when he wrote : "The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently." (Change 'men' to 'men and women' to account for social changes, and changes in rhetoric, since this statement was published in 1955, and written probably earlier than that.)

Or, in a somewhat more expanded effort by Charles Frankel in 1962 : "The ideal of the public interest calls on men, despite their egoism, to set their preferences side by side with the preferences of others, and to examine them all with the same disinterestedness and impartiality. It asks them to seek as tolerable and comprehensive a compromise among those interests as is possible. And it reminds them that every decision they make is a limited one, that some interests may have been overlooked, that something better may be possible."1

This kind of understanding of the public interest is certainly what Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol had in mind when they founded The Public Interest in 1963. It was a time when there were high prospects for the social sciences as a guide to policy, domestic and possibly even foreign, and when it was hoped that rationality and disinterest would play a larger role in politics and policymaking than ideology, passion, individual power-seeking, and narrow self- and group interest would. These permanent features of the human condition could not be transcended, but at least what would be best, for most of us, could be determined and in any situation of conflict set forth as something for which we should aim. In 1971, John Rawls published a more systematic and rigorous effort to define the public interest, with great influence on political philosophy. A Theory of Justice provoked hundreds, if not thousands, of articles trying to define the public interest. And other earlier systematic efforts, such as Jeremy Bentham's, were available.

But defining the public interest was not so easy in practice, when one considered specific policies. For example, in the early years of The Public Interest, two great urban domestic enterprises were in process, both spurred by national policies providing hundreds of billions of dollars, and both at first glance, or even at second or third, well qualified to be pronounced policies in pursuit of the public interest. One was a project to build the system of high-speed freeways that would provide easier access from one place to another and enable more rapid commuting to jobs in cities and suburbs.

The second was a program to clear away decrepit housing and other facilities in central cities. These buildings had been constructed at a time when housing had to be close to jobs, and when industrial and business enterprises were concentrated in cities to take advantage of rail access. The aim was to replace these obsolete areas, as they were then thought of, with modern urban environments embracing housing, services, work, and cultural and educational facilities. Much of the new building was to provide housing for moderate-income groups. What could be more in the public interest than such enterprises? Moreover, both had wide support in democratically elected legislatures at all levels - national, state, and local - another way of defining the public interest.

But both were also under attack, not least in The Public Interest, for their more immediate as well as their secondary and long-range effects. The construction of freeways, when they entered cities, and urban renewal both required the clearance of land. This land often contained houses in which people had lived, perhaps for decades ; and longestablished businesses that provided livings for families, and jobs and services for nearby dwellers. How were their interests to be taken into account when one pursued the larger public interest?

There were legal and political mechanisms for doing this : money for relocation, the power of eminent domain to condemn and take property, a mechanism for valuing it. Indeed, to demonstrate the rationality and good sense of such projects, techniques for cost-benefit analysis - with which the public authorities could determine when the 'benefits' of a new enterprise exceeded and made worthwhile the 'costs' required, public and private - were coming into effect and being adopted with great enthusiasm (as well as required by federal legislation). It was a heady moment for such analyses, which were growing ever more technically advanced in pace with new computer capabilities. But how could one value the cost of leaving a home to which one had become attached, a neighborhood in which one had grown up, or a business that had sustained one's parents and one's family? Were these losses a matter that had to be counted when one considered the public interest?