Robert M. Hutchins

Joseph P Lyford

[An interview conducted in 1962. Reprinted from The Center Magazine,
January-February 1986]

Joseph P. Lyford: Since we are going to discuss democracy, the first problem is to agree on some satisfactory definition of the word. Democracy has a number of meanings. It was the political system of the Athenian city-states in which every citizen was a member of the ruling assembly and had an equal vote. Democracy is also used to describe the British parliamentary system and the American system of representative government. Democracy is a word like winter. Winter does not mean the same thing to a Jamaican that it does to a New Englander or an Eskimo. What limits are you going to place on the word democracy in this discussion?

Robert M. Hutchins: The limits suggested by your remarks are not limits that I would accept. I do not think that the method of voting is a criterion for democracy, though I should certainly say that unless there were some way in which each member of the community could register his opinion on important political matters the situation was not one that could be described as democratic. The formal political procedures employed in the society are not the -determining factor as to whether the society is democratic or not. What is determining is this: Every citizen must feel that he is taking part in important political decisions that affect his life.

A democratic community is a self-governing community. Every member of the community must have a part in his government. The real test of democracy is the extent to which everybody in the society is involved in effective political discussion.

This leads me to say that I think the whole object of a political community is to help the members of the community to learn how to govern themselves. From this point of view a political community is essentially an educational enterprise, it is hard to say that any community has ever successfully learned the complete lesson of self-government. We can see, however, that certain communities have made greater progress in mastering the lessons than others.

A political community, since it is one in which effective political discussion is the aim, is one in which the members through this discussion learn ultimately, it is hoped, how to govern themselves. The political apparatus - that is, the methods of selecting candidates, the methods of voting - is less important than, for example, the educational system and the media of mass communications. An educational system that does not educate, a system of mass communications that does not communicate, mean that (he society is one in which effective discussion cannot take place. As a result of the educational system the people are not up to understanding the issues. As a result of the media of mass communications they have no way of getting the information that is necessary to pass on any current problems.

If you start then, as I do. with the idea that a political community is a community learning together to govern itself, and if you say that the ideal political community is a democratic community, what you mean is that a democracy is one in which all the citizens are effectively and actively engaged in the discussion by which political questions are determined.

Lyford: You have based the ideal political community on a foundation of education, on the ability of the citizen to obtain information about his government and to communicate to his government. You have frequently criticized our mass media and our educational system as being insufficient for these tasks which would be placed upon them in your ideal community. Does this mean that you feel that at the present time our own democracy is not actually functioning as a political community?

Hutchins: This is my belief. I do not think that the American democracy is functioning as a political community for the reasons that you indicate, and for one or two others that I may mention later.

If the educational system is one like that of the United States, in which the object is not education but accommodation and vocational certification, if the media of mass communications are not a means by which the people may understand their public affairs but arc media of entertainment, then it must follow that the educational process that I regard as identical with democracy cannot take place. The American educational system and the American media of communications, far from assisting to give us an effective democracy, are among the most important factors making our democracy ineffective and, it may be, ultimately hopeless.

We also have to contend with one or two other factors. In the last fifty years we have developed an enormous bureaucracy. I do not regard bureaucracy as inherently evil. I think it is an indispensable element in any large organization; I do not sec how you run a large organization unless the next man down the line knows what the first man up the line is supposed to do and unless the first man does it, so that as the papers pass down the assembly line they pass in the proper order.

But bureaucracy to the extent to which it takes over the essential political functions of government is something that must be very largely unintelligible to the citizen. It is an esoteric matter. If it functions insulated from the discussion that ought to go on, if what it does is unintelligible to the citizen, and if the citizen has no means of communicating with the bureaucracy, the whole prospect of democracy becomes that much less realizable.

The technological situation is another aspect of the same thing. In fact, bureaucracy may be regarded as the invasion of politics by technology. To the extent to which all governmental operations are esoteric and all important matters with which government deals are available only to technicians or specialists or comprehensible by them, to that extent the citizen, unless there is an admirable educational system and perfect media of mass communication, is unlikely to be able to engage in intelligent discussion of die most important political issues. One might say, then, that the question is whether a political community is possible, or whether politics is possible. If the major activities of modern states are comprehensible only to specialists and technicians, how can it be thought that the effective discussion of these issues is open to the general public?

Lyford: I detect some difference between your views about the bureaucracy and that of the French writer Bertrand de Jouvenel. Mr. de Jouvenel maintains that democracy today is an ideological illusion. He seems to feel that "professional government" or a bureaucracy by its very nature makes the achievement of the sort of democracy that you speak of impossible. Do you feel that Mr. de Jouvenel exaggerates? I take it that you do, that you feel that the existence of a bureaucracy does not necessarily mean that democracy becomes a fantasy.

Hutchins: Your diagnosis of Mr. de Jouvenel is correct. He believes that professional government is the only kind of government that a modern state can now have. He believes that professional government can promote social democracy, that is, the general welfare, but he does not believe that it can be made politically democratic. Professional government is in the nature of the case technical and esoteric. He calls it the vertebrate structure of government.

In reading de Jouvenel, one gets the impression from time to time that he thinks of the elected officers, the political officers, as puppets or as conducting some sort of show. The actual business of government goes on behind them in the obscurity of the bureaucracy, and Mr. de Jouvenel feels that this bureaucracy is impervious to any currents from the outside. I regard this as an inaccurate picture of the actual situation. The bureaucracy, at least in the United States, is very much interfered with at all points by the political officers and even a good deal by individual members of the electorate. The cry that goes up in the Washington bureaucracy is, for goodness' sake, keep these Congressmen off my neck.

I think it is true that England and France, where the bureaucracy, the civil servants, have a longer tradition than they have in the United States, have achieved a greater independence of politics and political officers and of the electorate than the bureaucracy in the United States. It may be that as time goes on and a similar tradition develops in this country the bureaucracy will achieve a similar independence. Nevertheless, if the political community can learn together and if it must have a bureaucracy in order to operate, the question becomes: How is the bureaucracy to be integrated in the political discussions that take place and how is the bureaucracy to be controlled?

I believe that the bureaucracy could be integrated if we had a better educational system, if we had better media of mass communication, and if we would recognize the existence of the problem and then apply ourselves to it, the problem of getting through to the bureaucracy the results of the political discussions conducted by the public. In any event, it seems far too early in the United States to say that there is no way of making the wishes of the people, resulting from their intelligent discussion of political problems, effective against the apparatus of the bureaucracy.

Lyford: I wonder if there is one particular example of a bureaucracy today that we could cite as giving us a rather unpleasant view of the future as far as democracy is concerned if the tendency is allowed to continue. I am thinking of the military in our government. President Elsenhower in his farewell address made several ominous references to the danger of allowing the military establishment in this country, abetted perhaps by the industrial military establishment, to gain too much ascendancy over public policy and to become too free from the control of public policy. Does this represent an exception to your feeling that our bureaucracies are still pretty much in the control of the political officers?

Hutchins: It illustrates the point that we have been discussing up to now. Suppose that the media of mass communication were really on their toes. They would have no difficulty in bringing the military to book. Only The Nation as far as I know - or The New Republic, perhaps - has tried to do this in any consistent way, and their circulations are remarkably and unfortunately small. But suppose that any one of the wire services or any major newspaper in the United States, or any group of them, really went after the relationship of the military to the public policies of this country - I do not believe that there would be any difficulty in bringing the military to book.

The constitutional provisions are clear. The tradition of this country about the supremacy of the civilian power over the military power is clear. I am sure that the general attitude of the people would be most unfriendly to the assumption of autocratic or arbitrary or comprehensive power on the part of the military. The Secretary of Defense has encountered no really serious opposition to the efforts that he has made, some of them quite significant, to bring the military under civilian control. In short, the predominance of the military results from the apathy and ignorance of the people. The people are ignorant because they are uninformed. I think they are apathetic because they are uninformed. If the media were really on their job, this phenomenon that we see and to which President Eisenhower referred could not long exist.

Lyford: It is generally accepted that technology threatens our democratic system in various ways. We are told that it won't be long before most of the important decisions on military and foreign policy, budgets, etc. will be made by computers that nobody elected or by scientific experts who never appeared on anybody's ballot. Isn't this the same as saying that the more we learn about the universe, the less we as individuals can do to control our own lives? I don't like to think that science always has to be the enemy of democracy. Doesn't technology hold promises as well as threats for the future of democracy?

Hutchins: I am all for science. I think it should be completely untrammeled. Technology is another thing. The applications of science should remain under the enlightened control of the community, and it must be admitted that from two points of view this is probably not the case at the present time.

In the first place, the applications of technology are esoteric. Nobody knows about the operations of a nuclear weapon except people who are very sophisticated. In the second place, technology has apparently a kind of self-perpetuating or self-extending quality. We do things because we can do them and not because we want to do them.

Technology offers a means of escape from drudgery. All the ambitions that Adam and Eve could have cherished are to be realized now in the technological universe. The problem is what we are going to work at if the technicians and their machines do all the work. There is the tremendous vision before us of mankind released from labor and able to devote himself to whatever higher ambitions he might entertain, and at the same time the vision of a self-perpetuating, self-extending, automatic technological system developing and swallowing man. So far, there is no evidence that he can control this system.

I believe that it is possible to control technology. Why not? It is a human product. The decision to engage in a certain line of technological work is a human decision. We can decide not to make certain machines, not to throw certain people out of work, not to have the urban sprawl that we have. But this requires a degree of intelligence and a degree of information and a degree of fortitude that are very difficult to muster in our present culture.

Our culture is one in which new technological records are made every day. People who have no participation in making these records stand by and applaud, even though they do not understand either the machinery or the significance of the records. If you can get somewhere faster, even though there is no reason why you should get there, if you have a new way of communicating, even though you have nothing to say - these are supposed to be tremendous accomplishments. We indulge in them, as I have indicated, not because we need them, not because we even want them, but just because we can do them. We have been brought up to believe that whatever we can do ought to be done, without any regard to its consequences.

The great problem of the immediate future is discovering the methods by which technology can be controlled. I am sure that it can be, but I am not at all sure that it will be, because it takes a very determined society, a very enlightened society. What it takes more than anything else is a society that knows what it wants. If the society has deluded itself into thinking that what it wants is the maximum of technology, the maximum of technological advance, the maximum number of gadgets, then I do not see any way in which that kind of society can bring technology under control.

Lyford: This raises another question. Dr. M. Stanley Livingston of M.I.T. and Harvard some time ago discussed what he felt the role of the scientist was in helping to instruct the political community. He was not speaking of the engineer, the man who invents the gadget or knows how to press the buttons, but of the men engaged in pure research, who have the minds to understand the impact of some of their discoveries upon human civilization. He felt that our society today has a very adolescent attitude about scientists and what their role is. We think that their job is simply to produce gadgets rather than to help instruct the community. What do you think the function of this type of scientist should be?

Hutchins: In the first place, the contradiction between the humanities and the sciences, which has been built up by people like C. R Snow and others, seems to me totally unfounded and to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the liberal arts.

A liberal education should include quite as adequate a knowledge of science as a knowledge of literature or history or language. Science ought to be a part of the education of every human being. The notion that if you advance the study of science you are in some way defeating the legitimate purposes of liberal education is ridiculous.

If you advance the knowledge of science for the purpose of making a man a technician or a scientist, you are open to another kind of charge. You are open to the charge that you do not understand the purposes of liberal education. But if you seek to exclude or minimize science as a part of education, you are open to a similar charge, namely that you do not understand what liberal education is.

Every citizen of the United States ought to understand science. He ought to understand it not because he is to be a scientist or an engineer but because he is to be a citizen and he ought to understand the world in which he lives.

The responsibility of the scientist, therefore, is to be educated himself, to instruct other people about science, to help other people to understand in what sense science is a liberating discipline. My own view is that the scientist has exactly the same responsibility that any other teacher has. The trouble with the educational lobbies of the United States - I'm afraid that is what they are - is not that they are not representative of the whole educational spectrum. They are. The trouble is that they are lobbies. The scientists are lobbying for the scientists, the engineers for the engineers, and then the people in the humanities say, you mustn't forget us; we've got to get our cut in the total educational appropriations as well.

This is, of course, an absurd situation. The object of educators ought to be to get the people a good education. But one of the unfortunate results of the extreme specialization of education in the United States today is that there is nobody who is concerned with education as a whole. The historians want to promote history, the scientists want to promote science, the linguists want to promote language. But who is there that is saying, let us get ourselves the kind of education that Americans ought to have.

Lyford: In a recent talk you said, "Law and government must be invoked if the common good is to be achieved." This is the sort of statement that seems guaranteed to frighten large numbers of citizens, many of whom seem to equate the invoking of government or law with socialism and interference with the freedom and the private affairs of individuals. Perhaps you would like to explain what you had in mind.

Hutchins: Anybody who is frightened by this statement doesn't understand it. The object is to achieve the common good. The assumption of those frightened by the statement would have to be that the common good could be achieved by accident, or else by the invisible hand that Adam Smith invented, or by some kind of combination of circumstances over which nobody would have any control.

It is not possible to believe any longer, as Mandeville said, that private vices produce public virtues and that each man by seeking his own good or his own ill, as he wished, would contribute to the public prosperity. Mandeville's idea seemed to be that if you wasted your substance in riotous living, this supported a lot of waiters, cooks, and bartenders. This was a public virtue even though you might be guilty of a private vice.

Adam Smith's idea seemed to be that every man by seeking his own interests contributed to the common good because he was led as by an invisible hand to do so. Nobody has ever understood how the invisible hand worked or where it came from, and we have certainly learned since 1776, when The Wealth of Nations was published, that reliance on the invisible hand or on the transformation of private vices into public virtues did not produce the common good.

We are left with the problem of how we produce it. Well, the anarchists had an idea, Kropotkin had an idea. He said, let's get rid of government because we know that government is not going to produce the common good, and let's rely on a multitude of voluntary associations that will in some mysterious way produce the common good. This, of course, is simply the extension of the doctrine of the invisible hand from individuals to associations. In one case you have individuals colliding. In the second case you have associations colliding. The mystery remains.

Now, the fright that you attribute to people about my remark results, I think, from a failure to understand either government or law. I have already attempted to show that it results from a failure to understand the alternatives to government and law, but I think it also involves a failure to understand government and law themselves.

If government is the expression of power, and if law is simply the expression of governmental power, then the critics of this statement would be entirely justified. Arbitrary power exercised in terms of what the exercisers of the power think is the common good is no better than the invisible hand applied to individuals or to associations. In fact, if I had to choose between arbitrary power and the invisible hand, I would take the invisible hand every time if only because it is invisible.

But this is not the view that I entertain of government and law. I believe that government is indispensable, contrary to Kropotkin and the anarchists, and I believe that law is the expression of reason and not the expression of arbitrary power. I take violent opposition to the jurisprudence prevalent in most of the law schools of this country, and in England as well, that the law is what the courts will do or that law is the command of the sovereign.

Law has to be judged in terms of its contribution to the common good. Law, therefore, is good or bad in terms of whether or not it makes that contribution. Government is the essential means by which the political community moves toward the common good. If any particular government or any particular law or any particular legal system does not contribute to the common good, then what should be done is to find out why the government and the law do not contribute to the common good; and the government and the law should be changed.

Lyford: Let's switch to a somewhat different aspect of our political community. It seems to me that one major deficiency is that we have become a nation of standpatters, that we want things to remain the way they are, that we get nervous and irritated whenever Negroes or foreigners joggle us with rude demands for equality and for more of the good things of the world. Almost everybody in the country seems to be trying to stand in the middle of the road, except the Communists and the John Birchers, who are irrelevant and psychopathic. I think the lack of real ideological contention among our people shows a lack of vitality. Don't we need to be jabbed a bit on our fat flanks? Don't we need some students who might riot over something besides tomorrow's game with Ohio State?

Hutchins: When Howard Brubaker was writing a column in The New Yorker about twenty-five years ago called "Of All Things," he said: "I see in the papers that the Cuban students are conducting a revolution. It must be a great consolation to us to know that our students are curled up with a copy of Kipling's 'If'."

What I am trying to say is that there is nothing new about this. The American educational system in the last fifty years has been a system whereby young people are fitted into the environment. The great universities of our country are what might be called success schools. The reason you go to one of them is that you want to learn how to get ahead, or that your parents would like to have you get ahead. They want to give you a leg up the social or vocational ladder.

When this is the atmosphere of the institution, and when this is the aim of the people who go there, it is hard to see how anyone could be stimulated to take a critical view of the society. I believe that the purpose of the university is to be a center of independent criticism; But I do not know of any university that fulfills this role at the present time in the United States. I would say, therefore, that in my opinion there is not a true university in the United States today. We have already established that there is not a true medium of mass communication in the United States today.

In addition to these defects there is another. That is the perfectly obvious fact, to which you referred, that we have got about everything we want; almost everybody in this country has got almost everything he wants. He might like more of the same - another car, another television set. But he probably has at least one car and one television set and he can get along with them until he finds it possible to acquire more. In these circumstances any change, or at least any important change, is one that he must regard with extreme disfavor. Thomas Jefferson is an interesting man to read these days. He said that it was a great gratification to him to see other nations struggling to emerge from tyranny. He was sure, he said, that they were led to do this by our example, and he hoped that they would always be grateful to us for stimulating them to fight their way out from under foreign rulers.

At the present time, of course, the United States is aligned with every imperialistic or quasi-imperialistic power that is left in the world. The United States is aligned with the status quo everywhere in the world. The business of providing an example for revolution, of stimulating revolution, has shifted to another country. We are suffering from all the handicaps and disorders that have characterized affluent societies from the beginning of time, and we are without those established institutions of criticism which might save us. If you consider the history of England at the time of the reform bills, you will note that there were people and groups that were able to bring pressure on all the political parties so that every major reform measure was passed by the Tories.

We are without those critical forces, and the question is whether an affluent society without any effective, powerful, continuing agencies of criticism within it can survive.

Lyford: Certainly the contrast is very great between the center party in this country, which is all parties, and the position of the center party in such countries as France, Italy, England, where they are always harassed and forced to be on their toes in order to survive between organized right-wing and left-wing movements. Is there any way in which we could stimulate the kind of political activity that might joggle the complacency and dead-centerism that seems to pervade our whole political system?

Hutchins: In order to be politically active, I suppose one must feel that what one does will have some effect. The fact that both political parties in this country are now under the management of huge bureaucracies and that these bureaucracies are impenetrable to the ordinary man means that the ordinary man feels that there is nothing for him to do. His only avenue into politics is through the parties, and if the parties are as I have described them, what can he do about it?

Hannah Arendt has commented on this in a very effective way, it seems to me. She points out that men no longer act; they behave. The citizen now is an object of propaganda, a statistic, a consumer to be reached by advertising and to be brainwashed by advertising. He is a bio-mechanical link in the technological process. The individual as an actor on the public stage of the community is almost totally isappearing.

This has produced what you see now in France. The citizen is a private person. Privacy is a great thing and I'm all for it, but you can carry it to the point at which the citizen ceases. An individual is a private person, but a citizen is by definition a public person; he is a part of his political community. With the advent of de Gaullism in France the individual almost ceases to have this character, or has far less of it than he had before.

One of our colleagues in the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has predicted that the course of events will be that we will all have a house in the country, we will all have a house in town, we will all have boats and cars, and we will take refuge in these impedimenta, hide ourselves from public view, and invent a kind of neo-Bohemian, highly developed private way of life without worrying about the political community at all.

I believe that it is indispensable to revive the political community in the United States. The difficulties of doing it in the face of the educational situation, the mass media situation, the technological situation, the bureaucratic situation, and the cold war, which casts a pall over everything - these difficulties are enormous.

Lyford: There is one important element in American society that would not fall within this category of self-satisfaction in abundance. William Worthy, the Negro journalist, has said that the white people keep talking about the American society's being affluent and complacent but ignore the fact that the American Negro has very different attitudes, a very different economic position, and a very different and dissatisfied view of his society. How do you feel that the Negro in America fits into your picture of the political community?

Hutchins: The Negro in America is not a part of the American society. This is the greatest single crime that the American people have ever committed, and one of the greatest crimes that any people has ever committed. The American Negro is discriminated against in every conceivable way. His housing is execrable. His compensation is lower for the same work. He is regarded as socially undesirable. This is a tremendous source of permanent disharmony in the United States. But the American Negro is not influential enough to do anything to affect the general policies of the United States even with regard to himself, and he has developed, quite naturally, such a narrow view of what he wants that he is not effective in changing the mores of the people. What the American Negro says in effect is, I want what you have. What he ought to be saying is, you shouldn't want what you have.

Lyford: We have concentrated most of the time here on the problems of the survival of democratic processes and institutions in our society. And we have been noting some of the signs of hope and some of the signs of decay. The question of what causes the breakdown of a civilization is one that concerned Arnold Toynbee in his Study of History. He says that the breakdowns do not occur through acts of God - that is, fires, floods, earthquakes - or through the vain repetitions of senseless laws of nature, or because of failures in industrial or artistic techniques, or by homicidal assaults from alien adversaries. He concludes, "We have been led by the logical process of exhaustion to return a verdict of suicide." What do you think he means by that?

Hutchins: I think he means that our fate is in our own hands, and that history shows that the fate of other civilizations was in the hands of those who were living then. There was nothing inevitable about the decay of civilizations that have decayed in the past, and if our civilization decays it will be our own fault. We have a responsibility.

Lyford: I assume that the vigor with which you criticize the defects in our political process is founded on some hope that our situation can be improved. Do you have faith in the survival of the free society in spite of its difficulties today? If you have faith, on what do you base it?

Hutchins: I have hope and faith, and so has the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The Center is committed to constitutional democracy. Its reasons lie in the nature of man. Man is a political animal. It is unjust to deprive him of his political life.

Man is a learning animal. As Aristotle said in the first line of the Metaphysics, all men by nature desire to know. It is unjust to deprive man of a chance to learn and to learn through the political community.

The task of those who are committed to political democracy is to discover how democracy can work in a technical, bureaucratic society in which all problems appear to be beyond the reach, to say nothing of the grasp, of the citizen. The task calls for more than haphazard thoughts and random discussions and the dusting off of ancient but irrelevant slogans. It requires a prodigious effort of the best minds everywhere to restore the dialogue that is the basis of the political community. Above all the effort calls for faith that, whatever the defects of our society, self-government can and must endure because it is the only form of rule consistent with the nature of man.