THE NATURE OF NEWS
" XXIV. NEWS, TRUTH, AND A CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XXI
THE BUYING PUBLIC
1
THE idea that men have to go forth and study the world in order to
govern it, has played a very minor part in political thought. It could
figure very little, because the machinery for reporting the world in
any way useful to government made comparatively little progress from
the time of Aristotle to the age in which the premises of democracy
were established.
Therefore, if you had asked a pioneer democrat where the information
was to come from on which the will of the people was to be based, he
would have been puzzled by the question. It would have seemed a little
as if you had asked him where his life or his soul came from. The will
of the people, he almost always assumed, exists at all times; the duty
of political science was to work out the inventions of the ballot and
representative government. If they were properly worked out and
applied under the right conditions, such as exist in the
self-contained village or the self-contained shop, the mechanism would
somehow overcome the brevity of attention which Aristotle had
observed, and the narrowness of its range, which the theory of a
self-contained community tacitly acknowledged. We have seen how even
at this late date the guild socialists are transfixed by the notion
that if only you can build on the right unit of voting and
representation, an intricate cooperative commonwealth is possible.
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