Emil Lederer, Public Opinion (1937)

Emil Lederer’s edited-volume essay examines public opinion as both the medium of democratic life and a field in which democracy must defend itself. Its central claim is that freedom of expression cannot preserve a free society through governmental noninterference alone. It requires institutions that form responsible citizens, safeguards against manipulative propaganda, and an active public commitment to democratic principles. The essay moves from the social formation of opinion to the inadequacy of indiscriminate tolerance, then considers protective measures and the ethical dangers of democratic self-defense.

Lederer begins by connecting free public opinion with the existence of the individual as an independent political person. Dictatorships recognize the power of ideas: police, armies, bureaucracies, and material interests cannot secure their rule without control over communication. Their apparently unified public opinion is therefore an imposed imprint rather than a living process. Democracies, conversely, risk depending on police protection while neglecting the public spirit needed to resist their destruction. Lederer invokes Justice Holmes’s defense of free exchange but locates that exchange within a broader account of social institutions:

Public opinion is the reflection of the nation's spiritual life.

This “spiritual life” is neither an autonomous realm of ideas nor a mere reflection of economic arrangements. Institutions integrate ideas with circumstances; they endure through the capacity of ideas to shape conditions or adapt to them. Public opinion belongs to this interdependent social whole. Families, schools, associations, literature, discussion, and everyday experience all participate in its formation. Newspapers articulate that process but do not exhaust it.

Citizens are not born, they are made.

The sentence places education and social participation at the foundation of political freedom. Citizens learn—or fail to learn—to see society as changeable and to exercise judgment. Although voting reduces complex opinions to a definite choice, majority decisions need not extinguish their underlying diversity. Democratic administration can accommodate different views, while continuing discussion permits the prevailing opinion to change. Flexibility thus means a synthesis of perspectives rather than merely a weak compromise; its importance lies in preventing political judgments from hardening into permanent dogmas.

The essay’s decisive turn concerns movements that exploit democratic freedom to abolish it. Older debates balanced governmental authority against opposition and distinguished public criticism from violations of personal rights. Lederer argues that these questions now confront a different danger:

It is no longer a question of what infringements on freedom will constitute an undue limitation, but a question of what uses of freedom will bring about its eventual destruction.

Unrestricted discussion can educate citizens and strengthen their resistance to dangerous doctrines. Yet freedom becomes merely negative when those under attack remain passive. Democracy is an active political order and way of life, not simply machinery for registering votes or an arena equally available to every prospective regime. Its historical struggle against tyranny supplies a substantive commitment that cannot be abandoned in the name of abstract tolerance. Lederer accordingly distinguishes opposition within democracy, such as disagreement over tariffs or social security, from movements seeking to eliminate democratic institutions themselves.

He also challenges the assumption that intellectual competition naturally selects the most deserving ideas. Such confidence presupposes rules and conditions that propaganda can undermine:

Actually there is no free competition when some of the competing ideas are favored with all the material resources of special interests, and when propaganda for them makes use of misrepresentation and demagoguery to arouse ungovernable emotions.

The conceptual move is from formal opportunity to the conditions that make opportunity meaningful. Unequal resources, deception, and emotional manipulation invalidate the reassuring image of ideas competing on their merits. Lederer proposes stronger enforcement against deliberate falsehoods and personal vilification, citing the murders of Rathenau and Erzberger as consequences of nationalist press attacks. He acknowledges the limits of this remedy: truthful statements can also deceive, and interpretation cannot be regulated simply by checking facts. Disclosure of political movements’ finances and propaganda origins would nevertheless help citizens evaluate claims to spontaneous popular or moral authority.

Legal safeguards remain secondary to strengthening public opinion itself. Citizens must understand the state as their own and connect rights with responsibility for defending freedom. Shorter working hours, adult education, newspapers, radio, cinema, and theater offer opportunities to cultivate this understanding. Democratic institutions must use these channels because their opponents certainly will. Public education here is not an ornamental supplement to politics but a condition of democracy’s continued existence.

Lederer nevertheless allows that forceful measures may become necessary. Armed, uniformed organizations demanding allegiance to leaders against the state challenge sovereign authority; exceptional circumstances might also justify censorship, party dissolution, or restrictions on association. These possibilities expose the essay’s central ethical difficulty:

And, closely connected with this, is the danger that suppression once resorted to will corrupt its wielders and that the democratic leaders themselves will aim at a dictatorship in the name of freedom.

No universal formula separates legitimate self-defense from oppression. Leaders must act as trustees of public liberty, while an alert citizenry must resist their overreach. The conclusion returns to the erosion of common democratic commitments after the World War. Democracy presupposes responsibility, self-control, mutual adaptation, and acceptance of majority rule, including evolutionary change in property relations. Lederer treats these assumptions as no less defensible than authoritarian alternatives. The essay’s enduring problem is therefore how to defend freedom actively without converting its defense into domination: public opinion must sustain the democratic conception of human capacity, not leave its opponents unchallenged.