Public interest lost?

When the editors of Dædalus invited me, along with several others, to write an essay on the subject of the public interest, I will admit I had some qualms. For many years I edited a journal with Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol by that very name, and so it was not wholly unfamiliar terrain. Yet what would be the result, I wondered, of asking intellectuals, of all people, to write on the subject–and in particular of asking them whether the thing even exists? Was that not inviting the fox to guard the henhouse? To the average American the idea of the public interest is, I suspect, perfectly sensible; and I also suspect that without such a notion politicians and government officials would find it difficult to perform their jobs. But what could the public interest possibly mean to an intellectual? If he even bothers to think about the idea it is probably to debunk it. What good would come from only more such debunking? Perhaps, though, I am being unfair to my fellow intellectuals. We live, after all, in uncertain and perilous times, times in which older, long-forgotten ideals may once again seem pressingly relevant. And so perhaps the editors of Dædalus were right to call for a reconsideration of this invaluable ideal.

However that may be, we need to begin from where we left off. The public interest as an ideal last received a full airing among scholars in the 1950s and 1960s. I will turn my attention first to this earlier discussion: I will try to capture the flavor of this debate while suggesting what may have gone wrong. It will be the burden of my argument that for all the rigor of their analysis, intellectuals are in fact ill-equipped to understand the public interest–in contrast to America’s leading statesmen who live and breathe it.

Thus I will next cast my eye further back in time to consider the reflections of James Madison and Abraham Lincoln on the public interest. The question of the public interest in America surely begins in some sense with Madison’s formulation of it; but notwithstanding the vaunted reputation of his analysis as presented in The Federalist, No. 10, Madison arguably failed to offer an adequate conception, which is why I will turn next to Abraham Lincoln. It seems to me that Lincoln provided the Archimedean point for all thinking about the public interest in America, and that our current notions of it pale beside his more robust understanding.

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