Abstract

We propose a reconsideration of John Dewey’s criticisms of Walter Lippmann’s ideas taking as guiding theme the arguments put forward in the successive reviews that Dewey wrote on Lippmann’s works. We maintain that the ideas that Dewey launched in these reviews pointed in a direction that became more explicit in the 1930s, when Dewey responded with socialist discourse to a Lippmann who appealed to something more that the authority of trained experts to counteract the drifts of democracy. According to our view, the debate they held not only revealed two visions of the relationship between democracy and popular will, but also two discrepant conceptions about the economic bases of an open society and the necessary conditions for freedom exercise.