The Myth of the Informed Citizen

What "Public Opinion" Still Teaches Us About Democracy

Walter Lippmann begins Public Opinion (1922) with a parable:

There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies.

The islanders lived in one world while believing themselves to be in another. For six weeks, their “picture of reality” was completely out of sync with reality itself. This is the problem Lippmann sets out to analyze: political understanding is always mediated. None of us encounters “the world” directly. Instead, we act on simplified, reconstructed models that we carry in our heads.

This post will be a little unusual. Instead of developing an argument of my own, I want to give a snapshot of Public Opinion by sharing extended passages from the chapters I found most striking, along with some reflections on them. The style may feel slower and more quotation-heavy than usual, but my aim is to let Lippmann’s voice come through and to highlight why the book still matters. Reading Public Opinion today, it is hard not to feel that Lippmann anticipated our present. He described a democracy shaped by stereotypes, misinformation, and the illusion of competence long before those terms became everyday worries. The book does not simply illuminate the 1920s; it sheds light on why our politics looks the way it does now.

I focus on what I take to be the five most important chapters of the book’s twenty-eight. These are the chapters from which I learned the most, and they still feel strikingly relevant today. (If you want to read even more about Lippmann’s political epistemology, I recommend

Dan Williams

’s excellent posts here and here.)

Before diving into Lippmann’s book, a few words about the author. Lippmann (1889–1974) was one of the most influential American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. He co-founded The New Republic in 1914, advised multiple U.S. presidents, won two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism, and is often credited with popularizing the term “Cold War.” He was a fascinating figure who moved between journalism, philosophy, and politics; he was also a skeptic about democracy’s ability to function without expert guidance. If you want to learn more about his extraordinary life, I highly recommend Ronald Steel’s biography Walter Lippmann and the American Century.

With that, let’s turn to the first of five chapters I want to highlight.

Chapter 1: The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads

The first chapter lays the groundwork for everything that follows. It is Lippmann’s diagnosis of why political opinion so often misfires. We do not respond to reality itself, but to the “pictures in our heads.”

This is the islanders’ mistake, but also ours. We treat our mental models as if they were the world itself. And because everyone does this, Lippmann argues, the furies of politics and war are fueled not by direct confrontation with facts but by clashes of imagined realities:

“We can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.”

Our knowledge of the world, he stresses, is always indirect:

“Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live… whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.”

Once we adopt a picture, we act as if it were reality itself. And while we easily spot the “ludicrous pictures” of past generations, Lippmann warns that our own are no less vulnerable to distortion.

This leads to his central concept:

“In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment.”

Between us and reality lies an intervening layer of representations, images, simplifications, and stereotypes. These pseudo-environments mediate all political judgment, and once mistaken for reality, they can be just as consequential in action as the world itself.

To illustrate, Lippmann borrows a figure from Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street:

“Miss Sherwin of Gopher Prairie is aware that a war is raging in France and tries to conceive it. She has never been to France, and certainly she has never been along what is now the battlefront. Pictures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is impossible for her to imagine three million men… and so if she is to think about the war, she fastens upon Joffre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a personal duel.”

This captures the predicament of ordinary citizens. Faced with distant and complex events, we reduce them to familiar, personalized images. We collapse the vast and complex into the small and familiar, replacing ungraspable facts with vivid fictions.

Lippmann’s point is not that we are deluded, but that simplification is unavoidable:

“For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations…To traverse the world men must have maps of the world.”

Maps are indispensable, but they are necessarily incomplete. And the way we imagine the world determines our political efforts and emotions, even if not the ultimate results:

“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort, their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results.”

Political reality, Lippmann insists, is always “out of reach, out of sight, out of mind”:

“The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined… Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.”

But the construction of these pictures is vulnerable to both external and internal sources of error — a point later developed by Bernard Williams in Truth and Truthfulness.

“The chief factors which limit their access to the facts… are the artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives. The analysis then turns from these more or less external limitations to the question of how this trickle of messages from the outside is affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct the play of our attention, and our vision itself.”

This list feels strikingly contemporary: censorship, limited attention, motivated reasoning, and oversimplification. It is exactly this mix of external constraints and internal predispositions that makes political judgment both necessary and treacherous. Hence Lippmann’s conclusion: democracy cannot rely on the fiction that every citizen must have a competent opinion on every issue. Instead, political judgment must be mediated by expertise:

“Representative government… cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.”

For Lippmann, the democratic ideal of fully informed citizens is simply impossible given the scale of modern politics. Instead, the health of democracy depends on institutions that can translate the unseen world into trustworthy pictures that citizens and politicians can act upon.

In short, Chapter 1 introduces Lippmann’s central thesis: politics is conducted not in direct engagement with reality, but through pictures of reality that are inevitably partial, distorted, and simplified. Understanding this gap between world and picture is the first step in diagnosing the failures of public opinion and the challenges of democracy.

Chapter 6: Stereotypes

In Chapter 6, Lippmann turns to the idea of stereotypes, offering one of the most enduring contributions of Public Opinion. Stereotypes are not simply prejudices or distortions. They are the unavoidable filters through which human beings perceive and make sense of the world.

He begins with the fact of our limited perspectives:

“Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth’s surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few intimately. Of any public event that has wide effects we see at best only a phase and an aspect. This is as true of the eminent insiders who draft treaties, make laws, and issue orders, as it is of those who have treaties framed for them, laws promulgated to them, orders given at them. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe.”

Even “insiders” such as presidents, generals, and lawmakers only see fragments. Their judgments, like ours, must be pieced together from secondhand reports and imagination.

Nor can we expect eyewitnesses to deliver unmediated truth:

“Yet even the eyewitness does not bring back a naive picture of the scene. For experience seems to show that he himself brings something to the scene which later he takes away from it, that oftener than not what he imagines to be the account of an event is really a transfiguration of it.”

Modern psychology has confirmed this repeatedly: memory is reconstructive, not reproductive. Hastorf and Cantril’s famous 1954 study “They Saw a Game” showed that Princeton and Dartmouth students literally “saw” two different football games; and more recently, Dan Kahan’s “They Saw a Protest” demonstrated that political priors shape how people perceive the same event. Lippmann’s point anticipates all of this: there is no purely neutral view.

The lesson is that perception follows preconception:

“For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”

This insight — that order is imposed on chaos — reveals the necessity of stereotypes. We inherit cultural categories, and we see reality already framed through them.

Lippmann discusses and experiment that dramatizes the point:

“At a Congress of Psychology in Göttingen an interesting experiment was made with a crowd of presumably trained observers… [A clown bursts into the hall pursued by a Black man with a revolver, a fight ensues, a shot is fired, then both run out. The scene lasted twenty seconds.] The President asked those present to write immediately a report since there was sure to be a judicial inquiry. Forty reports were sent in. Only one had less than 20% of mistakes in regard to the principal facts; fourteen had 20% to 40% of mistakes; twelve from 40% to 50%; thirteen more than 50%. Moreover in twenty-four accounts 10% of the details were pure inventions… Briefly a quarter of the accounts were false… Thus out of forty trained observers writing a responsible account of a scene that had just happened before their eyes, more than a majority saw a scene that had not taken place.”

Even trained observers imposed stereotypes on the event. Many filled gaps with imagined details, or misremembered what was staged. The experiment illustrates how stereotypes operate even under controlled conditions: what people “see” is shaped by prior expectations.

The political consequences are clear:

“If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds through which they have filtered it.”

Political understanding requires reconstructing not just the facts available to others, but the stereotyped frames through which those facts were interpreted. Only then can we evaluate their actions fairly.

Why, then, rely so heavily on stereotypes? Because they are cognitively economical:

“There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question.”

Pressing the point further, Lippmann notes that stereotypes are not just efficient; they are stabilizing. They provide us with a sense of home, belonging, and intelligibility.

“The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves… We feel at home there. We fit in… No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe.”

This explains why challenges to entrenched categories — about race, gender, nation, or ideology — feel existential. To question stereotypes is to question the very order of the world in which one has learned to live.

Lippmann closes the chapter by referencing William James:

“It is, as he puts it, a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut.”

Stereotypes, then, are not flaws of cognition. They are constitutive tools of perception, sense-making, and political life. Without them, the world would be unmanageable. With them, the world is intelligible, but only through the distorting lens of categories inherited from our culture and anchored in our identities.

In summary, Chapter 6 explains why stereotypes are both indispensable and dangerous. They allow us to cope with complexity, but they also predispose us to error, misunderstanding, and resistance to novelty.

Chapter 9: Codes and Their Enemies

Chapter 9 develops Lippmann’s analysis of stereotypes by focusing on the “codes” that govern how we see the world. These codes — organized patterns of stereotypes — not only shape what we notice, but also determine how we judge it. They structure public opinion in ways that make genuine disagreement nearly inescapable.

Lippmann begins by contrasting the generalist with the specialist:

“Where to the ignoramus all things look alike, and life is just one thing after another, to the specialist things are highly individual.”

The lesson is that trained habits of attention reveal distinctions invisible to others. But in politics, very few can ever be genuine specialists:

“But in our public opinions few can be expert… Those who are expert are so on only a few topics.”

This means that for most of us, most of the time, public affairs are understood not through expertise but through cultural codes and inherited stereotypes.

“We do not see what our eyes are not accustomed to take into account. Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.”

This is the heart of Lippmann’s argument: our “philosophy” (as he calls it below) not only guides what we think, but what we actually see. In today’s terms, we might say that confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are not just after-the-fact distortions. They operate at the very level of perception.

He explains that these codes are infused with judgment:

“This philosophy is a more or less organized series of images for describing the unseen world. But not only for describing it. For judging it as well. And, therefore, the stereotypes are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope… we do not study a man and judge him to be bad. We see a bad man. We see a dewy morn, a blushing maiden, a sainted priest, a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree bohemian, a lazy Hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile Irishman, a greedy Jew, a 100% American. In the workaday world that is often the real judgment, long in advance of the evidence, and it contains within itself the conclusion which the evidence is pretty certain to confirm. Neither justice, nor mercy, nor truth, enter into such a judgment, for the judgment has preceded the evidence.”

Here Lippmann describes how stereotypes collapse description and evaluation into one. We don’t observe neutrally, then decide; we see and judge all at once. This explains why partisan opponents so often seem not just wrong but bad. The coding is moralized from the start.

This leads to one of his most important claims:

“[The] pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them. That is why, with the best will in the world, the news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy; why a capitalist sees one set of facts, and certain aspects of human nature, literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist pattern of stereotypes. ‘There are no classes in America,’ writes an American editor. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,’ says the Communist Manifesto. If you have the editor's pattern in your mind, you will see vividly the facts that confirm it, vaguely and ineffectively those that contradict. If you have the communist pattern, you will not only look for different things, but you will see with a totally different emphasis what you and the editor happen to see in common.”

This is as true today as it was in 1922. Think of debates over climate change, immigration, or inequality. Conservatives and progressives don’t merely draw different conclusions from the same facts — they literally perceive different sets of facts, illuminated by different codes. Each side sees the other as perverse or dishonest, when in reality they inhabit different perceptual worlds.

And this carries moral stakes:

“And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous… It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent... For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a ‘question,’ they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a ‘fact.’”

This remains one of the deepest insights of Public Opinion. Disagreement is fiercest when it concerns “facts,” because to admit that others might see different facts undermines the stability of our own worldview. This explains contemporary battles over “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Each side sees the other not as interpreting facts differently, but as denying facts altogether — and therefore as irrational, corrupt, or even dangerous.

As Lippmann concludes:

“For the opponent presents himself as the man who says, evil be thou my good. He is an annoyance who does not fit into the scheme of things.”

In contemporary politics, we can see this dynamic in the way Democrats and Republicans regard each other as existential threats, or in Britain, the way Leavers and Remainers came to view each other during Brexit. The opponent is not simply someone with a different view, but someone who undermines the very order of reality as one understands it.

In summary, Chapter 9 reveals how stereotypes crystallize into “codes” that govern political vision. These codes are not simply interpretations layered on top of facts; they determine what counts as a fact in the first place.

Chapter 17: The Self-Contained Community

Lippmann’s analysis of stereotypes comes to a head in Chapter 17, where he describes how democracy developed within the confines of a self-contained, relatively simple community. The ideals of self-government, he argues, were forged in settings where the environment was small, visible, and comprehensible. When extended to the complexities of modern politics, these ideals became myths.

He begins with the democratic impulse to withdraw from the “unseen environment”:

“The democrat… feared foreign trade because trade involves foreign connections; he distrusted manufactures because they produced big cities and collected crowds… His slogans reveal his prejudice. He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination, Independence… Within protected boundaries the aim has been to achieve self-sufficiency and avoid entanglement.”

Here Lippmann highlights democracy’s parochial origins. Democratic ideals like “self-determination” and “independence” made sense in communities that were small, bounded, and self-sufficient. But these ideals resisted entanglement with wider, unseen environments (e.g. international trade, foreign policy, global war) precisely the arenas where haphazard judgments would later prove most dangerous.

Within such communities, the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen seemed plausible:

“The doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes true in the rural township. Everybody in a village sooner or later tries his hand at everything the village does… There was no serious trouble with the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen until the democratic stereotype was universally applied, so that men looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.”

In the village, people really did know one another and participate in most affairs. There, the idea of a citizen who could competently weigh in on every public matter was not a myth but a workable reality. The problem arose when this democratic stereotype, forged in the township, was exported wholesale to the scale of the nation-state or international politics. What worked in the village could not work for modern democracy.

Lippmann notes how this stereotype extended to assumptions about public spirit:

“Not only was the individual citizen fitted to deal with all public affairs, but he was consistently public-spirited and endowed with unflagging interest. He was public-spirited enough in the township, where he knew everybody and was interested in everybody's business. The idea of enough for the township turned easily into the idea of enough for any purpose.”

The intimacy of village life fostered civic-mindedness: one cared about others because one knew them. But that sense of interest and responsibility was projected onto larger publics, where it no longer applied. The assumption that citizens would remain endlessly engaged and altruistic across vast, impersonal systems was an illusion.

In reality, most people’s horizons remained parochial:

“These pictures came to them well stereotyped by their parents and teachers, and were little corrected by their own experience. Only a few men had affairs that took them across state lines. Even fewer had reason to go abroad. Most voters lived their whole lives in one environment, and with nothing but a few feeble newspapers, some pamphlets, political speeches, their religious training, and rumor to go on...”

The result was that democratic citizens, who were equipped only with inherited stereotypes and limited information, had to imagine vast unseen environments with very little correction from direct experience. Public opinion in a modern nation could not resemble the intimate deliberation of a New England township; it was instead the product of stereotypes sustained by newspapers, speeches, and rumor.

The relevance to contemporary politics is clear. Democratic ideals often still presuppose a self-contained community in which citizens can deliberate as equals on common concerns. But in a globalized world, where issues are distant, technical, and interdependent, this ideal is untenable. Today, citizens form opinions about climate change, international trade, or military interventions largely through mediated information, just as Lippmann described a century ago.

In short, Chapter 17 shows that democratic ideals were forged in small, self-contained communities where citizens really could be competent, engaged, and self-sufficient. But once transplanted into the vast and unseen environments of modern life, those ideals became stereotypes: comforting but misleading pictures of democracy. Lippmann argues that this mismatch between democratic myth and political reality lies at the heart of our difficulties in making public opinion effective.

Chapter 26: Intelligence Work

The book’s final section moves from diagnosis to reform. If public opinion is built on pseudo-environments, how can democracy survive? Lippmann’s answer is that the unseen environment must be investigated, organized, and reported systematically by experts. Only through “intelligence work” can representative government overcome the distortions of stereotypes and partial perspectives.

At the heart of this proposal is the principle of separating fact-gathering from decision-making.

“If the Secretary is worth his salt, the very last thing he will tolerate in his experts is the suspicion that they have a ‘policy.’”

“The power of the expert depends upon separating himself from those who make the decisions, upon not caring, in his expert self, what decision is made. The man who, like the ambassador, takes a line, and meddles with the decision, is soon discounted… For when he begins to care too much, he begins to see what he wishes to see.”

Expertise, in Lippmann’s vision, depends on neutrality. The expert must not be identified with a particular “side.” If fact-finders adopt policies, they lose their distinctive value: instead of counteracting prejudice, they become part of it. This principle has obvious resonance today, when the independence of journalism, science, and statistical agencies is constantly under political pressure.

Lippmann insists that the only safeguard is institutional:

“The only institutional safeguard is to separate as absolutely as it is possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which investigates.”

Decision-makers should rely on facts, but the fact-finders must be insulated from the pressures of execution and advocacy. This echoes his broader theme: democracy collapses when the same people are expected both to interpret reality and to act on it, since wishful thinking inevitably corrupts perception.

He imagines how such intelligence work might be organized:

“Each Department should be able to call on its own intelligence bureau to assemble the facts in a way suited to the diplomatic problem up for decision.”

“The central agency would, thus, have in it the makings of a national university. The staff could be recruited there for the bureaus from among college graduates.”

Lippmann envisions a centralized, quasi-academic intelligence service that is staffed by researchers trained to gather, classify, and analyze data in ways neutral to policy. This anticipates the later growth of institutions like the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, or even today’s independent think tanks. It is a call for the professionalization of political knowledge.

Lippmann insists that the entire future of democracy depends on this point:

“If the analysis of public opinion and of the democratic theories in relation to the modern environment is sound in principle, then I do not see how one can escape the conclusion that such intelligence work is the clue to betterment… The number of social phenomena which are now recorded is small, the instruments of analysis are very crude, the concepts often vague and uncriticized. But enough has been done to demonstrate, I think, that unseen environments can be reported effectively, that they can be reported to divergent groups of people in a way which is neutral to their prejudice, and capable of overcoming their subjectivism.”

In other words: despite the limitations of early twentieth-century data and methods, Lippmann saw the promise of systematic social science to reduce the gap between pseudo-environments and reality. He believed the central problem of democracy was not participation but information.

This leads to his final, optimistic note:

“If that is true, then in working out the intelligence principle men will find the way to overcome the central difficulty of self-government, the difficulty of dealing with an unseen reality.”

For Lippmann, the promise of democracy lies in narrowing the gap between the conceived environment (the picture in our heads) and the effective environment (the world itself). Intelligence work, if institutionalized and protected, could make politics less haphazard and more responsive to reality.

In short, Chapter 26 offers Lippmann’s constructive proposal. Democracy cannot rely on citizens to be omnicompetent, nor on the news to bridge the gap between perception and reality. It must cultivate institutionalized intelligence work — expert, neutral, and systematic reporting of the unseen world. Only then can public opinion be tethered more closely to reality, and self-government stand a chance against the distortions of stereotype and prejudice.

Conclusion

Lippmann’s Public Opinion reads today like a field guide to our own political dysfunctions. A century before Twitter wars and algorithmic echo chambers, he diagnosed the same forces: the way perception is filtered through stereotypes, the way facts dissolve into rival codes, the way democratic myths outlive the conditions that made them plausible.

The book is compelling not just for its diagnosis but for its bluntness about democracy itself. Lippmann insists that ordinary citizens cannot master the scale of modern politics. That is a difficult truth, and one that much democratic theory still tries to avoid. His answer was “intelligence work,” institutions of expertise meant to bridge the gap between perception and reality. The idea is still provocative. Can experts ever remain neutral, or will they always be open to capture and suspicion? And can a democracy that hands so much authority to experts still be a democracy at all?

We may doubt Lippmann’s solution, but his question is harder to escape. If public opinion is built on pictures of reality that are partial and distorted, how can democracy stay connected to the world as it really is? Until we face that problem, our politics will remain trapped in pseudo-environments.