THE QUEST FOR A PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

2017 ◽  
pp. 211-236
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
American Political Thought

scholarly journals DEMOCRACY AND EXPERTISE IN THE LIPPMANN–TERMAN CONTROVERSY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 561-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOM ARNOLD-FORSTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Intelligence Testing ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Lippmann ◽  
And Control

Historians often interpret American political thought in the early twentieth century through an opposition between the technocratic power of expertise and the deliberative promise of democracy, respectively represented by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. This article explores Lippmann's concurrent controversy with Lewis Terman about intelligence testing, in which Dewey also intervened. It argues that the Lippmann–Terman controversy dramatized and developed a range of ideas about the politics of expertise in a democracy, which centered on explaining how democratic citizens might engage with and control the authority of experts. It concludes by examining the controversy's influence on democratic theory.

Universal Suffrage as Decolonization

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
KEVIN DUONG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The Voice

This essay reconstructs an important but forgotten dream of twentieth-century political thought: universal suffrage as decolonization. The dream emerged from efforts by Black Atlantic radicals to conscript universal suffrage into wider movements for racial self-expression and cultural revolution. Its proponents believed a mass franchise could enunciate the voice of colonial peoples inside imperial institutions and transform the global order. Recuperating this insurrectionary conception of the ballot reveals how radicals plotted universal suffrage and decolonization as a single historical process. It also places decolonization’s fate in a surprising light: it may have been the century’s greatest act of disenfranchisement. As dependent territories became nation-states, they lost their voice in metropolitan assemblies whose affairs affected them long after independence.

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